* Editor’s Note: This post is part of a symposium commemorating the 100th anniversary of the United States’ entry into World War I. It is adapted from March 1917: On the Brink of War and Revolution.
At the end of February, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress for the authority to arm American merchant vessels, as a deterrent to the newly unleashed German U-boats. He was still hoping to keep the United States out of the European war, and proposed a posture of “armed neutrality” as a way to do so. On March 1, the House of Representatives passed the bill he wanted, but it stalled in the Senate.
Senators like to ask questions. Had anyone thought through what it meant to put guns on ships? Was it to be war without a declaration of war? Or, a warlike engagement? Could an American freighter even sink a submarine? The Royal Navy hadn’t had much luck so far. And what about the British blockade of Germany?
Senator Oscar Underwood of Alabama said the United States had entered “a twilight zone” between war and peace.
If the United States did nothing, American shipping across the Atlantic would most likely dwindle away to almost nothing. The nation would pull back to the safety of its own shores, going it alone, isolated from much of the world. If merchant ships were armed, on the other hand, and continued their sailings to Europe, that would be putting American citizens and American assets in harm’s way. There was no splitting the difference.
On March 2, a Friday, the Senate took up the bill. The 64th Congress had three days left before it expired. Senator William Stone, a Democrat from Missouri, joined with Senator Robert La Follette, a Republican from Wisconsin, to organize a filibuster. Though in the end he never had a chance to speak—the chair wouldn’t recognize him—“Fighting Bob” La Follette, with his huge head of angry hair, was recognized by everyone as the intellectual force behind the opposition to the bill.
In a long article that was later printed in the Congressional Record, La Follette offered the speech he would have given if he had had a chance. The arming of ships was sure to entangle America in the war, he wrote, but in a one-foot-in, one-foot-out sort of way. The British were just as bad as the Germans, and if they needed American supplies so desperately, let them use their own ships. The principal shipping company backing the bill, the American Line, was owned by British interests. It would essentially be British officials ordering American sailors to fire on German subs.
Germany, he argued, had not invaded the United States. There was no danger that it would invade the United States. America had no quarrel with Germany. Giving the president authority to arm ships as he saw fit would give him the authority to make war as he saw fit, destroying the legitimate war-making power of Congress. It would undermine the republic. And what, he asked in a dozen different ways, would it actually accomplish?
Congress, he said, was being stampeded into passing this bill in the hectic last days of its term, given no time to consider or consult on the issue.
“Shall we, to maintain the technical right of travel and the pursuit of commercial profits, hurl this country into the bottomless pit of the European horror?”
Again, he asked, for what? “For commercial advantage and fat profits beneficial to a limited number of our dollar-scarred patriots. …”
Here he was jabbing directly at Wilson. The one thing Wilson did not want to do was go to war over something as tawdry as commercial interests. Wilson believed that America had a calling, to bring peace to the world even if, as it now began to appear, that would mean imposing peace by force of arms.
La Follette received letters against war from all over the country:
“You will see the people will get wise to the jingo press soon, and you will see sentiment change.” J. A. Adamson, Denver.
A machinist in Cleveland, Frank Allen, applauded La Follette’s tactics. “The filibuster has always been used to the disadvantage of good legislation and in favor of the privileged,” he wrote. “It now has been used as a weapon against those whom formerly it has protected.”
From Chicago, J. M. Bronson wrote: “More than any other man you have educated the people to the idea that the only way to keep liberty is to have incessant vigilance. Your reward will be that proud consciousness.”
A telegram from Shenandoah, Iowa: “The laboring men do not want war we have nothing to sell but our lives the enemy is not in Germany but in Wall Street.” Jim Baugh.
On Saturday, March 3, Wilson promised that he would not take the United States into the war without getting a declaration from Congress first; La Follette and the others were unmoved. Wilson was feeling as moody and wretched as the early March weather. Finally, at about four-thirty that afternoon, his wife Edith couldn’t stand it any longer and dragged him out for a walk. They stopped in at the Corcoran Gallery, just across Pennsylvania Avenue, and the paintings helped him clear his mind.
On Sunday, time ran out on the bill, and it died.
That evening, Wilson denounced “the little group of willful men” who had “rendered the great Government of the United States helpless and contemptible.”
The leaders of the new Senate, elected the previous November but not yet sworn in, announced that they would consider a new rule, called cloture, allowing debate to be shut off if a large enough majority wished to do so, and end a filibuster such as the one against arming the ships. They were as good as their word, and the rule, though modified over the years, is still in force today.
Will Englund is an editor on the foreign desk of the Washington Post and the author of the just-released March 1917: On the Brink of War and Revolution. He will speak at the National Constitution Center on Wednesday, April 12 at 12 p.m. Learn more and get tickets.
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