| February 4 |  |
Editor says, what if Woodrow Wilson's pro-British sympathies caused the US to become unnecesarily involved in the Great War? Please note that the opinions expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect the views of the author(s).
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In 1915, with Great Britain characteristically violating recognised treaty agreements upon the high seas and generally acting with impunity in direct contravention of international law, the Kaiser's Government retaliated by declaring the English Channel to be a war zone.
Liable to DestructionBecause First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill (pictured) had issued instructions to the Royal Navy to mine the North Sea and also impose a "right of search" upon merchant ships carrying cargo to German Ports. Not only was Churchill seeking to starve the Central Powers into submission, he was also intent upon embroiling the United States in a war with Germany.
Recognising this danger, his counterpart the US Secretary of the Navy William Jennings Bryan issued an alert that British vessels were "liable to destruction", cautioning American civilians sailing into the war zone that they were travelling "on ships of Great Britain and her allies do so at their own risk". The warning was prescient because less than six weeks later, German submarine captain Georg-Günther Freiherr von Forstner of the Kaiserliche Marine fired a torpedo from the SM-U28 which sunk a West African steamship, the RMS Falaba.
Intense media scrutiny and public pressure mounted, demanding an American response after the sinking of the Falaba, which was widely and inaccurately reported as nothing short of a massacre of innocent civilians without warning. In fact, one hundred and four people were killed, including one American passenger - Leon Chester Thrasher, a 31-year-old mining engineer from Massachusetts.
Despite the cynical British attempts to maximise the impact of their propoganda, an investigation by the US Government soon determined that the German captain had given the Falaba three warnings, and only opened fire when a British warship appeared on the horizon. The Chief Magistrate John Bassett Moore would later note in his diary that "what most decisively risked the involvement of the United States in the recent war would have been the assertion of a right to protect belligerent ships on which Americans saw fit to travel and the treatment of armed belligerent merchantmen as peaceful vessels. Both assumptions were contrary to reason, and no other neutral advanced them".
Entry posted by Todayinah Editor
© The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History by Thomas E. Woods (2004)Story Tags
Permalinks: Post, Day. Browse Thread: Alternate Nations Source: Conservative Colloquium Labels: World War 1, Great War, America, Great Britain, Germany. Editor says, John Basset Moore was a distinguished professor of international law at Columbia University who later served on the International Court of Justice. He and other legal scholars argued that President Woodrow Wilson persistently refused to see the relation between the British irregularities and the German submarine warfare as the crux of American involvement. In this post we again imagine a reduced role for the Head of State, a quasi-legal interpreter of the US Constitution.
~ Suggestion is that the death of Leon Chester Thrasher reinforces WJ Bryan's warning and there are no (or perhaps much fewer) American passengers onboard the Lusitania.
~ This might have had interesting results. Postulating a German government with a better idea of how to do PR in neutral countries, and/or a UK slightly less ept at it, and you could have a situation where the US stays out of the war. The thought of WJ Bryan as SecNav gives me the cold shudders, though...he was a pacifist, at least most of the time.
~ In our history, Britain's policy toward neutral shipping ran the real risk of pushing the U.S. to support Germany outright against its "hereditary enemy." In World War I, some people were still alive who remembered Britain's playing footsie with the Confederacy sixty years earlier.
It didn't happen, chiefly due to the influence on President Wilson of pro-British advisers andbusiness interests. But there were millions of German-immigrant Americans who resented the tilt toward Britain on principle and felt (rightly, in my opinion) that its behavior indicated a belief that the U.S. had no right not to support the "mother country."
~ This could have made an already nasty war that much nastier.
~ Considering that it was the goal of the Wilson government to get us into Europe's war, I really find nothing really 'altered' here. Whatever scenerio you run, the Beltway establishment still supresses or spins different anything negative against Britain and France to the allied advantage while doing likewise to do so against the Germans. Ironically if Teddy Roosevelt's crowd were in charge, not much would be different.
~ How does any of this change the 1917 financial problem? UK was bankrupt. A UK bankruptcy takes down the House of Morgan and the DuPont corporate group. They in turn take down much of the US economy.
~ Is there any evidence that such considerations influenced Wilson's decision to go to war? After all, Morgans had supported Hughes in 1916, and the President owed it nothing.
Nor is there much evidence of American awareness of Britain's financial straits. In May 1917, well after the declaration of war, we had to send Balfour over with, in effect, a begging bowl, to persuade a sceptical US Treasury that things really were as urgent as we claimed. Wilson did not go to war to rescue Britain. In April 1017 he was as yet unaware that it needed resuing.
~ Sorry. That's April 1917 of course.
~ There were many reasons why the US went to war with Germany. The Zimmerman letter was a factor, as was the invasion of neutral Belgium. If Germany had been more subtle at times, it would have been possible to delay US entry into the war for at least another six months. A year might have ensured Germany victory.
~ Britian was violating international laws on the high seas and no one cared. Sort of defeats the argument for world government and world justice right there.
~ Might take the Kaiser's offer of a treaty in 1916 a little more seriously.
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