Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [284]
Ironically, on 5 February he had to slash his zigzag beneath the commission of Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., as a major of infantry in the Officers’ Reserve Corps. The President countersigned.
SIR CECIL SPRING RICE sent Arthur Balfour a cogent explanation as to why Wilson would have to resort to a draft to get a million men into uniform. “It is not immediately evident to an American citizen of German descent resident in Omaha, Nebraska, that he should shed his German blood because an American negro from New Orleans has been drowned on a British ship, carrying munitions to France.”
The ambassador did, all the same, see signs of domestic bellicosity spreading as U-boats continued to destroy neutral ships. A majority of the President’s cabinet now favored intervention. Wilson went back before Congress on the twenty-seventh to ask for authority to arm American merchantmen. He emphasized that he was not “proposing or contemplating war.” However, a great nation had a right and a duty to defend itself. The House Democratic leadership introduced a bill appropriating $1,000,000,000 for the purpose. As a result, the word billion began to creep into everyday speech, along with a new Wilsonism, armed neutrality.
Nothing in the President’s stately demeanor that day betrayed the fact that he was in possession of intelligence so explosive as to remove all doubt that he would soon be forced to ask for a declaration of war. British cryptographers had provided him with the decoded text of an incendiary telegram from Arthur Zimmermann to the German minister in Mexico. Wilson was waiting for a State Department retranslation of the decode, but some of the original, operative words leaped out bold and clear:
U BOOT KRIEG ZU BEGINNEN … AMERIKA … NEUTRAL … SCHLAGEN WIR MEXICO.… KRIEGFÜHRUNG … FINANZIELLE … MEXICO IN TEXAS … NEU-MEXICO … ARIZONA … JAPAN …
U-boat warfare had begun. Germany would try to keep America neutral. Contract an alliance with Mexico if unsuccessful. Declare joint war against the United States. Provide finances. Mexico could recover Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Japan might join in.…
On the face of it, the Zimmermann telegram looked delusional. Carranza was currently well-disposed toward the Wilson administration, and Japan was allied with Britain. However, if Britain collapsed (German submarines had sunk 536,000 deadweight tons of her shipping this month alone), who doubted that the Japanese would realign themselves?
Certainly not Theodore Roosevelt. He had never felt easy about “that polite, silent and inscrutable race of selfish and efficient fighting men.” Zimmermann’s plot jibed with the scenario he had tried to impress on President Taft in 1910 (“a war in which Mexico was backed by Japan or some other big powers”), and also with one he had sketched out in 1914, of Germany defeating Britain, then forming an alliance with Japan against the United States.
Wilson released the verified text of the telegram to the press overnight on 28 February. The sun rose next morning, Thursday, 1 March, on a nation shocked from its complacency. Everything the Colonel had been saying for two and a half years, at the cost of becoming a screechy-voiced scold, now sounded prophetic—as did the supporting chorus of his fellow interventionists. A new degree of neurosis attached to Texan memories of the Alamo, and to Californian dread of the Yellow Peril. Irish and German hyphenates clung to their sentimental notions of “home,” but no longer flaunted them.
With only four days to go before the end of the Sixty-fourth Congress, events accelerated toward decisive action, if not—yet—a declaration of war. The House at once passed the Armed Ships bill. It would have cleared the Senate, but for a last-minute filibuster by Robert La Follette. Wilson issued a statement blaming