Transcript
The Last Groups
January 17, 1917
London, January 1917. In Room 40 of the Admiralty, the British are reading Germany's mail.
Tonight's letter is from Berlin. The men breaking it are a publisher and a Presbyterian minister.
It's from the German foreign secretary, Arthur Zimmermann. Germany will sink ships without warning. And it mentions Mexico.
Arthur Zimmermann …Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.
Germany's codebook had no word for Arizona. It had to be spelled out, syllable by syllable.
Two months earlier, Americans had re-elected Woodrow Wilson on a slogan. He kept us out of war.
How did a country that stayed out of Europe's wars end up in the biggest one yet, and then refuse the peace its own president wrote?
So how did a country that stayed out of Europe's wars end up in the biggest one yet, and then refuse the peace its own president wrote?
Impartial in Thought
1914–1915
A gunman shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Alliances did the rest. Within six weeks, the Allied Powers and the Central Powers were at war.
Wilson's wife Ellen died on August 6. Thirteen days later, he asked the country for neutrality.
Woodrow Wilson We must be impartial in thought as well as in action…
George Washington 'Tis our true policy to steer clear of permanent Alliances, with any portion of the foreign world.
The oldest rule in American foreign policy.
In the war's first days, a British ship cut Germany's undersea cables. After that, most war news reached America through London.
Britain's navy blockaded Germany. So American trade flowed to one side.
Trade with the Allies nearly quadrupled. With Germany, it all but vanished. Banks lent the Allies over two billion dollars. Germany got twenty-seven million dollars.
William Jennings Bryan Money is the worst of all contrabands because it commands everything else.
Wilson agreed, at first. By 1915, the loans were flowing.
Over thirty percent of Americans were immigrants or their children. Many German and Irish Americans hoped Britain would lose.
Theodore Roosevelt There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism.
Wilson demanded freedom of the seas from both navies. Only one of them could kill you.
Eighteen Minutes
1915–1916
Germany answered Britain's blockade with a new weapon, the U-boat. In February 1915, it declared the waters around Britain a war zone.
On May 1, the German embassy ran a warning in New York papers. In some, it sat beside the Lusitania's sailing notice.
May 7, 1915. A calm sea, eleven nautical miles off the Irish coast. The Lusitania was nearly home. One torpedo.
The ship sank in eighteen minutes. 1,198 people died. 128 of them were Americans.
Germany said the ship carried rifle ammunition. It did: over four million rounds. Americans saw a liner full of civilians.
Woodrow Wilson There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight.
He never named the ship. Roosevelt was disgusted.
Wilson warned Germany of "strict accountability." Bryan, his Secretary of State, quit over it. So Wilson was too soft for Roosevelt and too tough for Bryan.
In March 1916, a U-boat torpedoed the ferry Sussex, wounding Americans. Wilson threatened to break relations. Germany pledged to stop sinking merchant ships without warning.
That March, Pancho Villa raided Columbus, New Mexico. Pershing chased him for eleven months and never caught him. Mexico remembered Veracruz, and the land lost in 1848.
Wilson, once against a bigger army, now toured the country demanding one. In June, Congress raised the army toward 175,000. Backers called it preparedness.
Democrats ran on "He kept us out of war." Wilson carried California by fewer than 4,000 votes, and the election with it. The slogan lasted five months.
Safe for Democracy
January–April 1917
Woodrow Wilson …it must be a peace without victory.
Wilson asked Europe to end the war as equals. A victor's peace, he warned, would leave a sting.
Germany's commanders had already made their bet: starve Britain in five months, before America could matter. On February 1, the U-boat war began. Two days later, Wilson broke relations.
So Hall had a problem. Showing Washington the telegram meant admitting he'd been reading Washington's mail.
Hall's agents in Mexico City found a second copy at the telegraph office. Now Britain could say it found the telegram in Mexico, and hide its tap on the cable.
It offered Mexico an alliance, and Texas, New Mexico and Arizona back. Washington released it. On March 1, papers everywhere printed it.
Plenty of Americans called it a British forgery. Then, on March 3, Zimmermann told reporters it was real.
Arthur Zimmermann I cannot deny it. It is true.
On March 15, Russia's tsar gave up his throne. Now the Allies had no tsar, and Wilson could call this a fight for democracy.
U-boats sank three American ships in three days. On the rainy night of April 2, Wilson asked Congress for war.
Woodrow Wilson The world must be made safe for democracy.
Not for land or payment. For democracy, and a break with a century of staying out of Europe's wars.
The Senate voted 82 to 6. The House voted 373 to 50.
Jeannette Rankin I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war. I vote no.
That afternoon, Wilson signed. The United States was at war. Its army had about 200,000 men. Germany's had millions.
Lafayette, We Are Here
1917–1918
Here's a photograph from near the end of this story. Before you know anything about it, think of three things you'd need to find out.
Congress passed a draft. By the war's end, 24 million men had registered for it.
The Navy herded merchant ships into escorted convoys, and the sinkings fell.
Pershing usually gets the credit for this line. It was one of his colonels.
Col. Charles E. Stanton Lafayette, we are here.
Britain and France wanted Americans fed into their own tired divisions. Pershing insisted on an American army.
With one exception. The Army would not put Black combat regiments beside white ones. So it lent four of them to France.
The 369th, from Harlem, fought in French helmets with French rifles.
In May 1918, Privates Henry Johnson and Needham Roberts fought off a German raiding party. France gave both the Croix de Guerre.
The United States gave Johnson the Medal of Honor in 2015.
In March 1918, Russia's new Bolshevik government quit the war. Germany threw its freed-up armies at France and got within about fifty miles of Paris.
At Château-Thierry and Belleau Wood, Americans helped stop it.
By summer, about 10,000 a day. Germany had bet it could win before they came. It was losing the bet.
Number, Please
September–November 1918
On September 26, 1918, the American First Army attacked between the Meuse River and the Argonne Forest. It became the biggest battle in American history.
Hundreds of thousands of men. A few muddy roads. Rain.
At First Army headquarters in Souilly, women of the Army Signal Corps ran the telephone exchange. The soldiers called them the Hello Girls.
Operators had to speak French, and they worked within sound of the guns. When fire broke out, they had to be ordered out.
Grace Banker Number, please.
Compared with Europe's armies, Americans fought at full strength for only about six months. But they came when both sides were spent, and they kept coming. That tipped the balance.
Three days in, Erich Ludendorff, the general running Germany's war, told the Kaiser to ask for an armistice. Bulgaria was quitting, and British and Australian troops had broken the Hindenburg Line. The Americans weren't the only blow.
And Germany asked Wilson, not Britain or France. It wanted the peace of his Fourteen Points.
The Eleventh Hour
November 11, 1918
Germany's sailors mutinied. The Kaiser fled to Holland. In Foch's railway car, at about five that morning, Germany's delegates signed an armistice. It would take effect at eleven.
That left about six hours. Some commanders kept attacking until the end. Congress later asked why.
At 10:59, Private Henry Gunther of Baltimore charged a German machine gun.
His comrades said the gunners waved him back. He is usually counted as the last American killed in the war.
Near the Moselle River, an Army sound-ranging machine was recording the guns on film.
That strip is a photograph of sound. The famous “recording” of it online is a reconstruction, made in 2018.
About nine million soldiers died. France lost about 1.4 million. The United States lost about 116,000. More than half died outside combat, mostly of disease.
Fourteen Points
January 1918 – June 1919
In January 1918, Woodrow Wilson typed out America's war aims. There were fourteen. Open diplomacy. Freedom of the seas. Fewer weapons. Fair treatment of colonial peoples. A league of nations.
In December he sailed for France, the first president to visit Europe in office. Paris turned out by the hundreds of thousands. He brought no senators, and only one Republican.
Four men did most of the writing, in a private room: Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau and Orlando. France had lost 1.4 million soldiers. Clemenceau wanted Germany too weak to try again.
Clemenceau is said to have joked that God needed only ten commandments, and Wilson wanted fourteen. Nobody has found where he said it.
In April, Japan asked to write racial equality into the League's covenant. Eleven of seventeen delegates voted yes. Wilson, in the chair, ruled that it needed all of them.
A young man from French Indochina brought the delegations a petition asking France for equal rights in his own country. He signed it Nguyen Ai Quoc. Later he called himself Ho Chi Minh.
They signed on June 28, 1919, five years to the day after Sarajevo. The room was the Hall of Mirrors, where Germany's empire had been proclaimed in 1871.
One point came through Paris whole: the League. Wilson had traded almost everything else to keep it. Now two-thirds of the Senate had to agree.
Seven Votes Short
July 1919 – 1921
Wilson carried the treaty to the Senate himself. Last October he'd asked for a Democratic Congress. Voters elected a Republican Senate.
The new Foreign Relations chairman, Henry Cabot Lodge, had the whole treaty read aloud. It took two weeks, often to an empty room.
The fight was over Article X. Members promised to protect one another's borders. Lodge feared it could take America to war without Congress.
Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge The United States is the world's best hope, but if you fetter her in the interests and quarrels of other nations … you will destroy her power for good…
About sixteen Irreconcilables wanted no League at all. Lodge's larger group would accept one with reservations. He wrote fourteen.
Wilson wouldn't bargain. He took his case west by train.
Woodrow Wilson I can predict with absolute certainty that within another generation there will be another world war if the nations of the world do not concert the method by which to prevent it.
After a speech in Pueblo, Colorado, he collapsed. A week later, in the White House, a stroke paralyzed his left side.
For months almost no one saw him. Edith Wilson decided what reached him.
Wilson told Democrats to vote no on the treaty with Lodge's reservations. It failed. So did the treaty without them.
On March 19, 1920, the Senate voted one last time.
Seven votes short.
Wilson asked voters for a "solemn referendum" on the League. Warren Harding promised "normalcy" and won sixty percent of the vote.
The League met in Geneva without the United States.
December 1920 The Nobel Peace Prize for 1919 goes to Woodrow Wilson.
July 2, 1921 Congress declares the war with Germany over.
Now look again. February 17, 1919. The 369th comes home up Fifth Avenue, after 191 days under fire in French helmets.
That May, Du Bois printed a wartime memo telling French officers not to shake hands with Black soldiers. In the same issue, he wrote this.
W. E. B. Du Bois We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting.
W. E. B. Du Bois Make way for Democracy! We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why.
Wilson asked Americans to make the world safe for democracy. The men in this photograph had a place in mind to start.