America Goes to War

TWENTY-ONE years after the United States entered the World War we have a book on the causes of that entry which at many points approaches finality. Everyone knows how controversial the subject has become. At the one extreme are radical writers who attribute our participation to the influence of munitions makers, international bankers, and paid propagandists; at the other pole are those who declare that we went in to vindicate the highest principles of international law. Dr. Tansill has spent ten years of labor on the subject, and has searched far more widely and deeply for evidence than any previous student. The result is the most thorough, most expert, and most convincing of all the studies of our neutrality and its abandonment.

Convincing of what? Not of any sweeping central thesis, for Dr. Tansill is too wary and too just to propound one. But it is convincing upon a number of vexatious questions raised by the events of 1914-1917. The author agrees with Dr. Charles Seymour that the immediate cause of our entry into the conflict was the German submarine warfare. His studies in German archives help make him quite convincing upon that point. The Germans realized that renewed use of the submarine meant war; they deliberately chose it. Dr. Tansill holds again that American financial and business interests had no immediate influence whatever on our decision to enter the war. There exists ‘not the slightest evidence,’ he writes, that during the crucial four months preceding the entry Wilson paid any heed whatever to the views of bankers or big business. As a matter of fact, the Morgans stood to lose their agency for the British Government by our declaration of war, while munitions makers had profited enormously from neutrality. On this lack of immediate economic pressure he is again quite convincing.

But there is another side of the shield. As for the German decision to reëmploy the submarine, Dr. Tansill holds that it would never have come if the United States had adopted policies in 19151916 which stuck closer to a true neutrality. As for the rôle of economic interests, he undertakes to prove that, while they had no direct influence on Wilson’s final decision, they exerted a tremendous indirect influence by creating a situation in which that decision became unescapable. And for these contentions he offers an array of new facts that will stagger many doubters.

Dr. Tansill’s long but interesting book is studded with pungent new quotations from the private papers of statesmen and diplomatists. In treating personalities, Dr. Tansill is always interesting if not always perfectly fair. Colonel House is the villain of the piece, and his portrait is somewhat unnecessarily blackened. Bryan is the hero, and his naïvete on many subjects is not sufficiently indicated. President Wilson seldom makes any direct appearance in these pages. When he does, he is credited with sincerity and high ability; but many readers will refuse to accept the picture of him as a mere tool, a pupil, of House’s.

Perhaps the greatest single defect of the volume, as of most of its predecessors in the field, is the want of a proper treatment of public opinion in the United States in 1914-1917. That went through various phases, and it was always a great moulding agency — far greater than a casual reader of this book would guess. Nor would a casual reader give due weight to the purely idealistic elements in Wilson’s and House’s actions — elements that reflected one important side of the American character. But, when all is said, this is an admirable volume, and absolutely indispensable to an understanding of three critical years in our history.

ALLAN NEVINS