The Sleeping Giant: American Domestic and Foreign Policy, 1914-1915

The Sleeping Giant: American Domestic and Foreign Policy, 1914-1915

America may not have been a participant in the Great War, but it was also hardly a nation at rest. Above all, America was not at nation at peace with itself. Over the war’s duration, the internal fissures in American society burst to the surface; President Bryan was either a man haplessly forced to confront the demons of the 20th century or a demagogue who had called them forth for his own purposes. The nation either stood at risk of losing its position of power and influence in the world by virtue of Bryan’s terminal weakness, or it was about to lose its democratic traditions as shadowy interests compelled it to join the descent into rank darwinist blood-letting.

In the American cultural imaginary, the nation was destined to be a peaceful one: the bourgeois virtues of bourgeois mass democracy were cultivated on the family farm and the market square, in the thrum of commerce and the steady toil of work. War, when it came, was to be waged in defense of the homeland and with a spirit of comradeship and sacrifice. It was to serve a national purpose beyond the drive for acquisition or the pursuit of glory. This, at least, was the line of Bryan, and the failure of Bryan’s enemies to ever decisively shatter Bryan’s hold on the nation must be attributed in part to their failure to fully channel and embody America’s own national mythology.

Although America did not enter 1914 with anxieties of war and civilizational suicide, these thoughts haunted Bryan. The stresses of Bryan’s first years in office had led him to turn increasingly to his evangelical faith. He foresaw a cataclysmic war that would engulf Europe, and his speeches at the out-set of the Albanian crisis warning of this potentiality led many of his supporters to see him as a prophet as well as an ordinary politician. The high melodrama of his oratory had a deeply polarizing effect on the national mood: one either bought the diagnosis along with the prescription or rejected them both as mere demagoguery. Bryan was either a visionary or a crackpot; he could not be both.

The beginning of 1914 saw several scandals rock the Bryan administration. Firstly, the roll-out of the Unemployment and Old Age Relief Act was something of a disaster. The Bryan administration had intentionally avoided the prospect of a national identification system, fearing that the government intrusion into private life such a move would represent might become a pretext for tyranny in the hands of a Republican president. Consequently, a great many individuals had trouble collecting the benefits that were assigned to them, while others were able to collect the same benefits many times in a single week. The bureaucratic imbroglio that resulted paralyzed the Department of Labor, which was tasked with dispensing the benefits.

Eventually, Bryan was forced to quickly pass an additional law creating a national ID system, with each citizen assigned a “UPN”, or “Unemployment-Pension Number”, that they needed to present in order to collect benefits. Despite the initial confusion, the program itself was enormously popular, with one prominent Democratic newspaper quipping that “We would rather a man who wishes to help us but has some problems figuring out how to lend a hand then one determined to ignore our plight altogether”. As the system for dispensing the benefits was slowly stream-lined, elderly poverty began to drastically decline. The economic stimulus provided by increased spending on food and housing tightened the labor market, driving up wages and helping Bryan solidify his support among Northern laborers.

The second scandal involved the “Mexican issue”. Here, Bryan really had stuck his foot in it by funding Pancho Villa against the counsel of many of his advisors. When war broke out between the forces of Villa and Zapatista and the constitutionalists, Bryan eventually agreed to withdraw funding from Villa, leading to a bloody civil war that the administration felt itself unable to resolve. The damage to American business interests in the area was still negligible in in 1914, but there were growing reports suggesting that the fiasco in Mexico was due to mismanagement from Bryan himself.

Finally, there was the controversy attending Bryan’s attempted resolution of the Colorado Coalfield War. After sending federal troops to the area, Bryan tasked the head of the Department of Labor, William B. Wilson, with drafting an agreement between the unions and the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. Rockefeller rebuffed the overtures of the miner’s unions and the department of labor, leading Bryan to call for “emergency arbitration” to enforce a somewhat milder version of the agreement. Rockefeller sued, bringing the case to the Supreme Court, which ruled that Bryan’s attempt to impose a “unilateral agreement” between the miners’ and Colorado Fuel and Iron constituted a “unconstitutional infringement on property rights”. In the coming months, there were several attempts by Bryan’s administration to forward legislation to Congress that would circumvent the courts’ ruling, but it was stalled by Congressional Leadership out of fears that the legislation itself would be struck down by the courts.

In any event, the outbreak of war in Europe would soon refocus the nation’s attention away from all three scandals. Three days after the outbreak of the European war, William Jennings Bryan addressed Congress, giving one of the most famous political speeches in American history. The last paragraph of this speech, in which Bryan suggested that America would ensure free commerce “by force, if necessary” raised anxieties in the new British cabinet about an potential American attempt to interfere with the planned British blockade. Even if America did not attempt to directly ship supplies to the Central Powers, its economic pull could conceivably throw a major span in the works of Britain’s attempts to control the amount of trade that neutrals like the Netherlands and Switzerland conducted with Germany.

On August 8th, the British Ambassador Cecil Spring Rice met with Andrew Carnegie and William Jennings Bryan, agreeing to open an on-going line of communication about British blockade policy. On August 10th, Bryan and Carnegie met privately, where they agreed to adopt the 1909 London Declaration concerning the Laws of Naval War as the basis of American policy toward the British blockade. On August 14th, in a largely symbolic move, the Senate and house of representatives ratified on a (mostly) party-line vote the 1909 London Declaration.

On August 19th, the British reclassified food as absolute contraband, allowing it to be captured and seized even if it was shipped on neutral ships through neutral ports. Bryan angrily berated the British ambassador for around an hour over this, but no further action was taken. Two weeks later, Britain announced that the entirety of the North Sea was a war zone, and began mining it. On September 15th, British declared that conditional contraband, which included food, forage and grain, gold and silver, harnesses, and horseshoes, could be seized if the ultimate destination of the cargo was an enemy belligerent, even if it was shipped on neutral boats to neutral ports. This was a clear violation of the London declaration, which only allowed for the seizure of conditional contraband if it was directly bound for an enemy port. In effect, it erased the distinction between absolute and conditional contraband, which was meant to allow neutrals to ship a variety of goods to neutral ports regardless of their ultimate destination.

On September 16th, Bryan met with Andrew Carnegie, Josephus Daniels (the Secretary of the Navy), and Franklin D. Roosevelt, (Assistant Secretary of the Navy). He canvassed options for responding to the blatant violation of the London declaration. The notion of sending several ships filled with grain to the Netherlands, escorted by American destroyers, was briefly mooted, but the lack of bases for the ships, Bryan’s aversion to a potential conflict with Britain, and British naval superiority led to the plan being scuttled. More promising was the notion of a limited trade war to force Britain to back down. Bryan was wary, however, of starting such a trade war before the mid-terms: scaling back American grain and manufactured foodstuff exports to England would harm many key farming constituencies. In the end, it was decided to post-pone any response besides a harsh public condemnation of British policy until after the mid-terms.

In late December, there were several high profile cases of American merchant vessels being seized and their contents confiscated without compensation. Bryan called in Cecil Rice, suggesting that America may decide to draw down grain exports to England in the event of further seizures of American goods. A somewhat hare-brained scheme to reduce American food exports to England by “2% for each vessel carrying conditional contraband illegally seized” provoked genuine panic and a furious debate in the British Cabinet, with David Lloyd George and most of the Liberals arguing for the need to conciliate with America. In January, the British seizure of American vessels began to ebb, and next month, David Lloyd George and Edward Grey headed to Washington to try to hammer out a deal with Carnegie and Bryan.

They were aided greatly by the inane German decision to begin a campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare in the English Channel, which provoked equally fierce denunciations from Bryan. The Germans appeared to believe that, with the Americans now feuding with the British, there was little chance they would take real action against the submarine attacks. Instead, the Germans unwittingly hastened the conclusion of the Alexandria Agreements, which substantially reduced the simmering tensions between America and Britain. In return for sharp limits on the amount of conditional contraband that could flow into Dutch ports and a promise from Bryan to not interfere with private American financing of the British war effort, Britain agreed to abide by the terms of the London Declaration vis-a-vis American shipping. Despite Bryan’s lofty, idealistic pronouncements, the agreement was one which served American interests: the freedom of the seas would not be protected for other neutrals. The British were mildly concerned that the deal had to be renewed within a year, especially since Bryan had announced an ambitious new naval program intended to build up the American fleet to rival Britain’s. Nonetheless, they were relieved to have resolved the diplomatic crisis.

It was now Germany which was on the receiving end of Bryan’s ire. After several American merchant ships were sunk by U-boats, Bryan exchanged several notes with the German foreign Gottlieb von Jagow, threatening to declare an official embargo on Germany and “coordinate policy more closely…with the British, who we have already found amenable to diplomatic overtures.” Bryan had actually earned a good deal of leverage and respect in Germany from the negotiations with the British; it was widely felt that America was attempting to stay neutral in the war, and more pacific elements of the German government managed to force Tirpitz to return to a more conventional submarine campaign.

On the domestic policy front, 1915 was a year of great successes for Bryan after the legislative gridlock of 1914. This had a great deal to do with the midterms, which convinced the rank and file activists, party bosses, and congressmen of the Democratic Party that Bryan was a ticket to lasting political strength. In a year that many newspapers predicted would see Democratic losses in the Senate and House, the Democratic Party picked up seven Senate seats and lost only eighteen House races, keeping their large majority in the lower chamber.

The Senate victories gave the Democrats a filibuster-proof majority, and the party’s enthusiasm propelled the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act, creating a minimum wage, a bureau of workplace regulation, an 8-hour work-day for 25% of workers, and mandated over-time pay. Riding high on the wave of enthusiasm, Bryan endorsed women’s suffrage later that year, announced an initiative to root out “party corruption”, and declared the coming end of “American imperialism” in the Philippines, energizing his opposition and creating a new host of enemies. The sinking of several additional American merchant ships by German u-boats at the end of the year and several incidents of violence against American servicemen in Manila led to renewed charges of weakness, and Bryan’s dithering response to both emboldened his presumptive Republican opponent, Theodore Roosevelt. 1916 would feature one of the longest and most vicious presidential campaigns in American history.