His message was false.
Prior to his reelection in November 1916, he foresaw that America would be in the war soon. Uncertain of an electoral victory, Wilson developed a contingency plan: should he lose the election, he’d appoint the president-elect to the office of Secretary of State, and then Wilson and his vice president would resign. The winner of the election would thus take office immediately, instead of waiting for an inauguration in March 1917.
Why did Wilson want this accelerated post-election timetable?
He was certain that the United States would be at war in 1917, and wanted a faster and smoother transition of power. Wilson secretly planned on being at war as a certainty. Publicly, he pledged to avoid U.S. involvement in the war.
Once Wilson had been inaugurated in March 1917 and had safely begun his second term, he rapidly moved forward with his plan for war. The Americans had expressed overwhelmingly their desire to remain at peace, so Wilson needed excuses and a propaganda campaign to persuade them to go to war.
Wilson argued that two factors necessitated a declaration of war against Germany: the German policy of unrestricted submarine warfare and the German efforts to encourage Mexico to declare war on the United States.
While these two factors appear at first glance to be reasonable, they exhibit weaknesses upon closer examination.
Germany had implemented a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare in 1915, paused the policy in 1916, and resumed in 1917. So 1917 was the second time that Germany carried out unrestricted submarine warfare. The first time, in 1915, Wilson did not see it as a cause for U.S. entry into the war. His stance in 1917 was inconsistent with his previous view that the U.S. should stay out of the war despite unrestricted submarine warfare.
In January 1917 the German government sent a telegram to its ambassador in Mexico with a message for the Mexican government. This message became known as the Zimmermann Telegram. Germany promised to fund a Mexican war against the United States, and at the end of that war, Mexico was to possess U.S. land. Wilson argued that Germany’s attempt to start a war between Mexico and the United States was a reason for the U.S. to declare war on Germany. The Zimmermann Telegram was not the first, and not the most significant, effort made by Germany to start a war between Mexico and the United States. In 1914, the Germans had sent a ship filled with weapons and ammunition for the Mexican government. In 1915, the Germans had given $12 million dollars to the Mexican government to fund military activity against the United States. The actions of the German government vis-a-vis Mexico in 1914 and 1915 were not seen by Wilson as reasons for declaring war, but in 1917 he presented the Zimmermann Telegram as a reason for war.
It is clear, then, that Wilson used submarine warfare and the Zimmermann Telegram as excuses for war. They were featured in his propaganda campaign. But what were the reasons for war?
Wilson had at least two reasons for declaring war.
First, the progressive movement in the U.S., of which Wilson was a part, saw the war as an opportunity: If the U.S. were a combatant, then the U.S. would be part of crafting peace treaties at the end of the war; these treaties would shape global diplomacy for years into the future. Wilson’s progressivism hoped to create new institutions and strengthen existing institutions in order to find peaceful solutions to diplomatic tensions and thereby avoid future wars. These institutions regulate relations and trade among nations; this was part of what was meant by the slogan, “Make the world safe for democracy.”
Second, the war would also be an opportunity for the government to argue that it needed extraordinary powers to intervene in the American economy and in society at large, because the war created an “emergency” situation. The progressive wing of the Democratic Party wanted these emergency powers to accelerate activities it had already begun. Some of these could be presented as part of the war effort, such as censorship of the press and the surveillance of individuals whose political loyalty was suspect. Other actions were clearly not related to the war, but carried out using emergency powers in spite of this: increasing racial segregation, reshaping educational institutions to conform to progressive ideas, rewriting housing policies, and generally regulating society. The draft was particularly appealing to the progressives, because it affirmed the government’s power to control the individual.
In addition to these two reasons, Wilson had a strong personal hatred for the Habsburg family, the ruling dynasty of Austria. One reason for this hatred was that Wilson saw the Habsburgs as opposed in some ways to his ideology: The Habsburg realm was a diverse, multiethnic territory; Wilson wanted a homogenous nation with one uniform culture. Other reasons for Wilson’s hatred toward the Habsburgs may be less rational and more emotional. Curiously, Wilson directed much less hate toward the Hohenzollerns, the ruling dynasty of Germany, even though the U.S. declared war on Germany.
Wilson was thus equipped with excuses which hid his reasons. After winning the November 1916 election with his campaign’s anti-war rhetoric, he promptly began to lobby energetically for the war.
Prior to winning reelection, he had been quite happy to profit from the war, as historians Allan Millett and Peter Maslowski write:
The American role in World War I derived its character less from strategic thinking in the United States than from the geopolitical notion that the future well-being of the United States depended upon the balance of power in Europe and the outcome of the war. Discarding the hallowed assumption that Europe’s affairs did not involve the United States and the security of the Western Hemisphere, the Wilson administration decided that the nation had a critical stake in an Allied victory. American involvement stemmed from economic self-interest as well as an emotional commitment to support “democracy” (France and Great Britain) against “autocracy” (Germany). After a brief economic dislocation when the war began in 1914, American bankers, farmers, industrialists, and producers of raw materials exploited British naval control of the Atlantic and Allied financial strength to make the war the biggest profit-making enterprise in the history of American exporting. Before American entry, the balance of trade, already favorable to the U.S., jumped by a factor of five; the Allies liquidated $2 billion of American assets and privately borrowed another $2.5 billion to pay for their purchases. In contrast, Germany secured only $45 million in American loans.
Because Wilson had spent the previous years proclaiming that he wanted to keep America out of the war, the U.S. military was not ready when war was declared in April 1917. By contrast, the U.S. industrial base was already partially on a war footing, because it had been producing and selling weapons, ammunition, and other war supplies to France and England.
The U.S. Navy had battleships and cruisers, but not enough destroyers. Shipping war materials and soldiers from America to Europe required destroyers to escort and protect the cargo ships. The task would be to build many destroyers quickly, as historian Russell Weigley notes:
For the kind of naval campaign in which it now found itself engaged, the United States also had built the wrong warships. The Navy should have had more destroyers. The Royal Navy had almost 300, but nearly 100 of them were busy screening the Grand Fleet. The United States had seventy, only forty-four of them relatively new oil-burning ships. It was not until early July, 1917, that as many as thirty-four American destroyers reached Queenstown to reinforce the British, and the rest of the American squadrons consisted mainly of the obsolescent types, which were retained in Western Hemisphere waters. Belatedly, battleship building was pushed aside for destroyers and smaller escort craft.
The role of the United States in WW1 was significant. Was it decisive? Responsible historians do not speculate about hypotheticals. There is no certainty in these counterfactuals, and great emphasis must be placed on the word ‘probably.’
If the United States hadn’t declared war, the war probably would have lasted significantly longer. Negotiations to end the war probably would have been more complex, because the two sides would probably have been of nearly equal strength. In reality, the Western Allies were significantly stronger after the United States declared war. It is not clear which side would have won if the U.S. had not entered the war.
The U.S. Army drafted more than four million young men in 1917. Approximately two million of them were transported to France, and approximately one million engaged in combat. Large numbers of American soldiers did not see combat until early 1918.
Aside from combat, U.S. Army engineers did significant work in laying railroad lines, building berths for ships, and setting up telephone systems.
The U.S. Navy was active, escorting convoys of ships across the Atlantic, and protecting those ships from submarine attacks.
The United States made a significant contribution to the war effort as it sold, and sometimes gave, war materials to its fellow Allies. The U.S. lent, and sometimes gave, vast sums of money to the Allies. Some of those loans were later forgiven.
In sum, the U.S. military influence on the course of the war began quite late in the course of the war, but its economic influence had been there from the beginning. The U.S. formally declared war, beginning its military participation, for reasons which were at the time not disclosed to the U.S. population.
