Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [92]
Above all, the mass deportations, begun in 1916, of ultimately three hundred thousand Belgians to forced labor inside Germany aroused more anger than anything since the Lusitania. Whether or not because of sensitivity on the subject of slavery, Americans—at least of that day—found something peculiarly shocking about citizens of a white Western nation being carried off to forced labor. The revulsion, reported Von Haniel, “is general, deep-rooted and genuine.”
The sinking in May 1915 of the Cunard Line’s Lusitania, which carried, in addition to a full complement of non-combatant passengers, a part-cargo of small-arms ammunition, besides enhancing German “frightfulness,” had brought to a head the issue of submarine warfare. Regarded by the Germans as a munitions carrier using its non-combatant status as protection, the ship was sunk without warning; that is, without ordering passengers off in lifeboats before loosing the torpedo. Of the nearly 2,000 persons aboard, 1,195 were lost, including 124 Americans. In the previous week two American ships had been attacked with two American deaths.
Thus the rights of both neutrals and non-combatants were at stake. Tense and protracted negotiations followed in which Wilson’s almost impossible task was to force Germany to acknowledge these rights without the ultimate threat of war, which was the last thing he wanted. He had to pick his way along a narrow ridge between the precipice of war on one side and that of abdication of neutral rights, as advocated by his Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, on the other. Representing the pacifist position that no interest was worth defending at the risk of war, Bryan became spokesman of the demand that Americans be warned not to (or, as some insisted, forbidden to) travel on belligerent ships.
In this demand was crystalized a central issue that transcended the matter of American trade or neutral rights. The real issue was our position as a great power. The United States could not allow the U-boats to keep her nationals off the sea lanes without forfeiting the respect of other nations, the confidence of her own citizens, and her prestige before the world. She could not forbid her own people to exercise their rights, Wilson wrote to Senator Stone, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and a leading isolationist, “without conceding her own impotence as a nation.” This was the crux, the more so as to concede impotence now would undercut the ambition which the President already had in mind: to mediate the war and save the world from its own wickedness.
Wilson rejected the proposal to keep American citizens off belligerent ships as a gesture “both weak and futile” which, by revealing the United States posture to be one of “uneasiness and hedging,” would “weaken our whole position fatally.” Bryan, finding his insistent and reiterated advice as Secretary of State overridden, accordingly resigned to become thereafter a trumpeting voice of the pacifist wing. While his going relieved Washington’s diplomatic dinners from the temperance of grape juice, imposed by the Secretary’s edict, it hardly eased matters for Wilson, who had still to make good his stand against the submarine without going to war. The pressure of the dilemma brought forth those memorable words: “There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.… There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight.”
Although the speech aroused tirades of disgust by the interventionists at Wilson’s “poltroonery,” it reasserted the strength of the “sit-tight” sentiment in the nation which the Lusitania had so nearly dissipated.
Wilson, in note after note to Berlin, fencing, countering, reiterating, rejecting, ultimately won his point. After another