I apologize for taking so long to come out with this update! Expect updates on the Russian revolution, military developments, and the home front and politics in the other main warring powers (Austria, France, Britain, Germany) before we move into 1918.
From the Chapter “The Time of Troubles” in Modern American History: A New Synthesis, Gar Alperovitz
The time of troubles is narrowly used to refer to the period between 1917-1920, during the second Bryan administration and the brief Wilson presidency. More colloquially, however, it designates the roughly eight years from the beginning of Bryan’s re-election campaign in 1916 to the series of informal agreements that ended the revolutionary turmoil in Europe and brought a temporary halt to the proxy conflicts between the British-American and German-Russian blocs. Here, we will employ the term in the narrow sense, to refer to the extraordinary four years from 1917-1920, which witnessed the implosion of the Democratic Party as a national political force, a rise in illiberal paramilitary activity, and the abdication by an American President of that most sacred duty, to protect and defend American lives.
Yet it is impossible to properly understand the position of William Jennings Bryan, the first Democrat to win the presidency since Grover Cleveland, without addressing some of the accomplishments of his first term. Although often haphazardly implemented, the wide suite of social reforms he pushed through won him a crucial base of supporters in the industrial north. Despite his often fiery rhetoric, the legislation passed from 1912-1916 helped improve the position of workers without threatening the freedom of action of most businesses. Perhaps most importantly, he presided over one of the largest economic booms in American history, spurred on by the English and German demand for American imports. This won him the grudging support of many prominent businessmen such as Carnegie and Ford.
The 1916 presidential campaign pitted Bryan against a popular Republican who embraced most of his domestic policies. As many have remarked, this campaign reflected poorly on both Bryan and Roosevelt, who seemed to have a tendency for bringing out the worst in each other. Though Bryan’s credibility and reputation was permanently harmed by the campaign, the solid victory he secured alarmed many in the business community, who worried about Bryan running for an unprecedented third term. When Bryan pointedly refused to rule out such a run, instead announcing his intention to permanently break the stranglehold of money on American politics, the battle lines were set.
Bryan encountered roadblocks almost immediately. The introduction of new legislation was stalled by speaker Champ Clark’s proposal that congress sit in recess until the new candidates were sworn in. This was a significantly more republican class, though in any event, global events preempted domestic political maneuvering. In February, British Prime Minister Andrew Bonar Law met with Bryan and Carnegie, informing them that Britain would no longer abide by the terms of the Alexandria Accords. Britain hoped that carve-outs exempting American imports from raised British tariffs and negotiations to maintain at least some of the compromises made in the previous year would be sufficient to sway Bryan.
As Bryan saw it, Britain had already agreed to abide by the 1909 London Declaration. Though he was perfectly content to rescind some of the concessions Britain was forced into in the previous years, he would not tolerate British warships confiscating grain and foodstuffs from American merchants. Bryan’s stubbornness on this matter likely cost America some fairly generous trade terms that would have softened the blow of British defiance.
The British themselves did not wish for a “hard break” with America. Bonar Law feared that doing so would imperil the unity of his government; the liberals had only agreed to exit the Alexandria Accords if it was done with American permission. In this, Bonar Law was prescient: the coming year saw both the British and American governments rocked by internal dissension and dysfunction, though in both cases, this was not solely due to the failure of the Alexandria talks. The economic effects of the break would take longer to fully materialize, though there was a slowdown in American domestic growth and a decline in British standards of living as the flow of trade between the two countries began constricting. The decline in American exports likely is most attributable, however, to executive decisions taken by the Bryan Government and the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare. To these we now turn.
Stung and humiliated by the British withdrawal from the accords, Bryan instructed private financiers to stop lending to the British until American goods could freely traverse the Atlantic. This request was promptly ignored, leading Bryan to table his domestic policy agenda to introduce a bill affording the president more executive power to regulate private financing of belligerent powers.
Southern, traditionally anglophilic segregationist democrats banded together with northern business republicans to reject the bill. This cross-partisan coalition would be the crucial oppositional bloc to Bryan’s foreign policy in the coming years, and would begin to slowly drive a wedge between the northern, progressive wing of the democratic party and its southern, segregationist one. On a smaller scale, the same seemed to be occurring in the republican party: eighteen house republicans, almost all from heavily Irish, German, and Jewish districts, voted to give Bryan the power to limit private war financing. This was dwarfed by the fifty-seven southern democrats who voted against the measure.
Nothing did more to foment the notion of a conspiracy to bring the nation into the war than the new, “unholy alliance of Rockefeller and Dixie”. Bryan himself appeared to subscribe to the notion of a conspiracy, though he pointedly rejected some of its more lurid and extreme variations that would develop in the coming years. In any event, shortly after the bill was rejected, Bryan determined that he would go ahead with his domestic agenda and handed the treasury department the task of forcing Britain back to the table. For now, the only real change in American policy was an arms embargo on Britain and Germany alike, which naturally impacted the former far more than the latter.
The signature bill of 1917 was the ambitious Antitrust Reform and Enforcement Act. It represented a complete reworking of antitrust law. The Sherman antitrust act of 1890, which had been the most important piece of antitrust legislation to date, would be made obsolete by the new legislation. Compared to previous antitrust legislation, much broader powers of discretion were given for regulating and punishing price discrimination and preventing mergers which could lead to anticompetitive business activity. The bill would also create and empower an advisory board, appointed by the President with the consent of the Senate, to enforce its provisions.
Perhaps the most important of these was buried near the back of the bill, in section 12, which allowed for the FTC to “review all mergers and acquisitions of the past twenty-five years, beginning in 1892, and take action against those which clearly violated the bill’s merger provisions”. This clause quickly became the source of controversy. Opponents of the bill charged Bryan with attempting to apply retroactive justice, while its supporters claimed that the provision was necessary to compensate for the lax antitrust enforcement of Republican Presidents. Many republican congressmen pointed out that there were already provisions in place under which currently operating businesses could be prosecuted, though most of these were considerably more difficult to prove. Allowing the FTC to review the last twenty-five years of mergers and acquisitions would in effect give it carte blanche to reshape the American corporate landscape.
Republican resistance to the bill in the house prevented its quick passage. Meanwhile, the treasury department had been hard at work developing a plan to force Britain to renegotiate. On May 3rd, they presented Bryan with its basic out-line: use America’s enormous fiscal resources to buy up recently issued British bonds with shell companies, and then call them in for gold at an opportune moment. The pressure placed on British gold reserves would force them to suspend convertibility of currency into gold, crashing the value of the British pound vis-a-vis the dollar. In effect, the treasury department proposed that Bryan have the federal government finance Britain so that Britain would be forced to abide by the federal government’s terms. Bryan himself seemed to consider this a somewhat harebrained scheme, since any fiscal crisis in Britain would likely have immediate effects on American manufacturing and agriculture. Nonetheless, lacking other options, he reluctantly gave the green light for the treasury department to begin buying British bonds.
Meanwhile, events unfolding south of the border were threatening to erupt into another foreign policy crisis. Following the flight of Victoriano Heurta in 1914, a convention was called to attempt to reconcile the anti-huerta revolutionary forces. Villa, feeling emboldened by the capture of Mexico City, pressed for maximalist political goals; Carranza, believing that he still possessed a superior fighting force, refused to bend. Within weeks, Mexico City, held by Villa’s forces, fell under siege from a numerically superior army loyal to Carranza led by Alvaro Obregon. Nonetheless, this army was plagued by supply issues, and had to contend with Zapatista guerilla raids. After several attempts to march into Mexico City were halted, Obregon withdrew eastwards, in effect ending the attempt to win the civil war with a quick coup de grace.
As the forces of Villa, Zapata, and Carranza dug in, Bryan determined on a policy of neutrality, refusing to give recognition to any of the governments and banning arm shipments to all three. Villa and Zapata had come to something of a non-aggression pact, though they each still claimed full sovereignty over the territory they controlled, and lack of coordination between the two would frustrate attempts to drive into Carranza’s territory. In 1916, Obregon won a critical series of victories in Morelos, south of Mexico City, forcing Zapata to withdraw south and severing the links between his soldiers and those of Villa’s. Shortly after, he surrounded and seized Mexico City, prompting the Bryan administration to recognize his government.
It was likely this decision that provoked the series of raids by Pancho Villa into New Mexico, which were met by the end of the year with a punitive expedition led by John Pershing. Not only did this expedition have little success in actually locating Villa, but Bryan’s refusal to increase funding to the army and the haphazard nature of the expedition itself (few believed that Villa himself could be found, given the vast swathes of territory he controlled) led to disaster after they ventured a bit too far south into Chihuahua: the lead elements of the expedition were surrounded by a numerically superior force and either slaughtered or captured.
Averse to any sort of mobilization, Bryan instead began funneling arms to Carranza, while many Republicans called for a firmer response. Carranza, though perturbed by the violation of Mexican sovereignty, was not in a position to complain: his armies were still exhausted by the previous campaigns, and a resurgence of Zapata activity in the south had prevented a northern offensive. A sort of partnership was soon forged with Bryan: constitutionalist troops would avenge the deaths of American soldiers. Shortly after a meeting with Carnegie in Veracruz, the last American marines left the area, turning it over formally to Carranza’s government.
By 1917, a low level war was being waged on the southern border, with several national guard divisions deployed to protect border communities. In February, American battleships shelled several towns held by Villa along the Northeast coast of Mexico. The “Mexican debacle” put pressure on Bryan to authorize a more robust response, with many Republicans clamoring for a second punitive expedition or an outright intervention in the civil war. Bryan held firm, though he did give his consent to an ambitious expansion of the American Army in early 1917, which he had thus far refused to countenance despite the war in europe. His decision here, however, seemed to be motivated in large part by the desire to ensure that munitions production would continue even after a potential arms embargo against the British.
After a relatively quiet summer in which slow but real progress was made on the Antitrust act, global tensions once again burst onto American shores. This time, Bryan himself was at least partially to blame, for in late September, he instructed the treasury to begin the process of creating a run on gold in London. It is unclear why Bryan decided to engineer a fiscal crisis at this precise time; documents indicate that the german counteroffensives in the east had something to do with the decision, as did the perception that it might strengthen antiwar forces in Britain ahead of elections.
In the near-term, the plot achieved its desired effect. Britain’s gold reserves came under severe strain, and Britain was only able to maintain solvency with an additional bank holiday and the assistance of French largesse. Within a week, Britain itself formally requested a loan from the American government; knowing that this would come with strings, this was an invitation to negotiations. Bryan invited a British delegation to Washington, which re-assured the stock market, fearful that Britain might no longer be able to afford American imports and worried that an Entente loss in the war would mean a default on loans.
Then, in mid-October, the Germans resumed unrestricted submarine warfare. Within a week, two British ocean liners, each carrying over two hundred American citizens, were sunk. A wave of anti-German sentiment swept the nation, providing crucial ammunition for pro-entente senators and congressmen. Bryan initially attempted to resist this pressure. He condemned in the strongest terms the turn to unrestricted submarine warfare by the Germans, but also stressed that it was a reaction to the illegal British blockade. The state department issued a public memorandum instructing Americans to avoid boarding British ocean liners and any other boats that might pass through the English Channel or North Sea. However, many American citizens believed that Bryan’s response was not sufficiently bellicose. Outrage grew when it became clear that Bryan still intended to condition future British loans on a cessation of the British blockade.
“Assistance to our friends in Britain without conditions” became the slogan of the day. A majority of congressmen and senators publicly announced that they would not agree to sign onto any renewal of the Alexandria Accords, and declared that the loan to Britain should be issued “without conditions, stipulations, or strings”. Stymied by Congress, Bryan was forced to back down. Though he did not go through the process of issuing a formal loan to Britain, Bryan had the treasury department buy British bonds equivalent to two hundred percent of the value of those previously called-in, shoring up the pound and achieving the same effect that a formally issued loan would have. The British delegation, slated to visit Washington at the beginning of November, would remain in London.
This chain of events hardly resolved the tensions roiling the Anglo-American relationship, but they did allow for something of a detente. Bryan had effectively been outmaneuvered by southern democrats and private financiers with the help of a groundswell of anti-german public sentiment. America had, in practice, ceased being a neutral power, and had become pro-entente in deed if not in word.
For Bryan himself, this was hardly a salutary development. With the opposition emboldened, Bryan feared that congress would use its authority to try to take on increasing war-making powers and drag America into the war. This is precisely what occurred. In October, a bill was introduced in the Senate that would rescind Bryan’s arms embargo against Britain and appoint a supervisory body with powers to regulate trade. Although of dubious constitutionality, it was widely believed in the Bryan administration that the courts would stall ruling on the measure, allowing it to remain in place for the duration of the war.
Bryan soon found his position was not nearly as desperate as he feared. Shortly after the introduction of the bill, he began touring the country and denouncing “The headlong and thoughtless rush to armageddon”. The speeches electrified an already burgeoning anti-war movement that had been picking up steam in response to the bill. In Chicago, a crowd of some 50,000 German-Americans, socialists, and pacifists came to hear Bryan speak, and later that week an antiwar rally in Central Park, Manhattan was attended by over 175,000 individuals. Labor Unions, strengthened by the legislation passed in Bryan’s first term, began a series of strikes against the “war bill”. Bryan called on the rallies and activism to continue until “The united voice of this great nation shall strike down for all time the great conspiracy to sacrifice the lives of our young for the rapacity of the war profiteer”. A bill was introduced, almost entirely symbolic, to allow for “volunteer brigades” to be formed and equipped to aid the English war effort; Bryan invited the “newspaper editorialists, financiers, and congressmen agitating for war to enlist themselves if they so desire war”. Theodore Roosevelt, in a move that astounded many and yet genuinely surprised few, promptly did so after being permitted by the British government to enlist as a officer in an artillery unit.
On November 23rd, while speaking at a rally in Philadelphia, Bryan was struck by two bullets. One lodged itself in his shoulder and was removed fairly quickly; the other, in his lower back, could not be excised as easily. The shooter, a Mr. Harold Benson*, was a resident of the city and registered Republican. The following day, as news of both the assassination attempt and Bryan’s recovery began to circulate around the nation, crowds gathered in most major cities. Placards wished Bryan good health, urged congress to keep the nation out of the war, and called for the trial of prominent wall street bankers. A rumor circulated that the assassin was in the employ of Vice President Woodrow Wilson, who only two weeks ago had been the subject of a scandal when it was revealed that his views were considerably more pro-war than Bryan’s.
In the face of mass protest, enough Congressmen and Senators withdrew their support of the bill to put it under the two-thirds threshold required to survive the President’s veto. It was quietly withdrawn for the time being, giving Bryan his first large, public victory in some time. Polls taken shortly after the wave of protests revealed that majorities of Americans still opposed intervention in the war, even if a similar majority still felt that Bryan had been much too lenient on Germany.
Who were the individuals that composed the new mass antiwar movement? In the north, they were a mix of ethnic whites, trade unionists, and the religiously devout. Irish-Americans, outraged by the harsh repression of the April 1917 rising, overwhelmingly opposed American entry into the war. German-Americans had a similarly cohesive opposition which stretched class lines, with yeoman farmers, agricultural workers, urban laborers, small businessmen, and the upper classes unified against American intervention. Jewish-Americans tended to be pro-German due to an instinctive Russophobia, though this was tempered somewhat by the republican revolution in Russia. Nonetheless, they remained mostly opposed to American entry into the war.
Trade unionists and evangelical protestants also figured prominently in the antiwar movement. With their politically literate membership and capacity for organization, unions were frequently at the cutting edge of antiwar action. By contrast, although most religious leaders were opposed to entering the war, they played a comparatively smaller political role in fomenting political activism. Instead, it would be individual methodists, quakers, and baptists who initiated protest marches.
In the old south, matters were considerably murkier. A large share of the southern elite favored either pro-British neutrality or outright American entry into the war, but there remained a class of populist politicians who sided with Bryan, represented most clearly by James Vardaman and William J. Stone. A great deal of antiwar sentiment existed among the white rural poor. Yet this sentiment did not materialize into the kind of mass protest that roiled northern cities, leading many at the time to attribute a terminal anglophilia to the entire south.
While most of the protestors returned to their ordinary lives following the brief spurt of political activism, a sizable minority chose to organize themselves into ad hoc “Antiwar Leagues”. Composed overwhelmingly of young Irish and German-American men, these formations were likely intended originally to simply be a means of speedily coordinating protest if the need arose for it once again. However, they soon adopted broader and more nebulous goals; already in December 1917, there are accounts of them intimidating Republican party functionaries and targeting local “British agents”.
Compared to the years which would follow in its wake, 1917 was merely a prelude of things to come. Yet already the essential lineaments of the times of trouble can be observed in it, a grim foreboding of what was to come.
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