Welcome to the deep dive. I am so glad you could
join us today because we are looking at a historical
moment that proves just how quickly your entire
world can just turn upside down. Oh, absolutely.
Let's set the stage for you. The year is 1914.
Europe has just become completely engulfed in
World War One. And the United States is fiercely,
I mean, stubbornly determined to stay completely
out of it. Right. We are talking strict official
neutrality, yet. Fast forward just three short
years and America dives headfirst into what was
up to that point, the bloodiest conflict in human
history. It really is a staggering turnaround
when you map out the timeline, that shift from
isolationism to global intervention. It changed
the balance of power forever. And the mechanics
of how it happened are far more intricate than
just, you know, a single inciting incident. Yeah.
And today we are pulling all our information
from a comprehensive Wikipedia historical account
of the American entry into World War One. The
mission of this deep dive is to unpack the complex,
honestly surprising web of secret telegrams,
massive economic entanglements, and the shifting
public opinion that dragged a very reluctant
nation into a global conflict. And as a roadmap
for you listening, we aren't just going to be
reciting dates or listing off battlefield tactics.
Oh, definitely not. We are going to explore the
underlying why behind this massive shift. We'll
be looking at the economic ties that secretly
bound the U .S. to the allied powers, the terrifying
introduction of brand new submarine technology,
the intense domestic political divides here at
home and some dramatic espionage that quite literally
changed the course of history. OK, let's unpack
this, because on paper, the United was completely
neutral. But looking at the numbers from the
source, the reality was a massive domestic economic
boom entirely fueled by the war in Europe. US
exports to Europe absolutely skyrocketed. They
went from $824 million in 1913 to a staggering
$2 .25 billion in 1917. How does a country maintain
neutrality while simultaneously becoming the
primary supply line for one side of a war? Well,
it's a precarious balancing act. And the sheer
scale of the financial entanglement is hard to
overstate. You had major financial institutions
essentially acting as the engine for the Allied
war effort. Like who? J .P. Morgan's New York
office is a prime example. Starting in 1914,
they became the primary financial agent for the
British government and later did the exact same
thing for France. They were issuing massive loans
to these governments. Wow. And on the industrial
side, companies like Bethlehem Steel took incredible
advantage of the overseas demand. By the end
of the war, Bethlehem Steel had produced 60 percent
of all US weaponry and 40 percent of the artillery
shells used by Britain and France. That is wild.
We're talking about one point one billion pounds
of steel for shells alone. That feels like a
massive conflict of interest. To put that in
perspective for you listening, imagine trying
to stay out of a street fight while simultaneously
selling brass knuckles to one of the fighters.
Or imagine a bank realizing its biggest borrower
is suddenly on the verge of bankruptcy. Right?
They panic. Suddenly, that bank has a vested
interest in doing whatever it takes to keep that
borrower afloat. Because if the borrower goes
under, the bank loses everything. It really highlights
how intertwined global economies already were
over a century ago. But surely someone in the
government saw the danger of tethering the U
.S. economy to an allied victory. Oh, they absolutely
did. The U .S. Secretary of State at the time,
William Jennings Bryan, he saw the writing on
the wall. Back in August 1914, he actually wanted
to ban loans to warring nations entirely. Really?
Yeah. His argument was incredibly pragmatic.
He said, refusing to loan money to any belligerent
would naturally force the war to end faster simply
because the warring nations would run out of
funds to keep fighting. I mean, that makes perfect
logical sense. Why didn't President Wilson just
agree and sign that into policy? Initially, Wilson
actually leaned toward Brian's perspective, but
the sheer economic pressure and the pushback
from U .S. business interests were just overwhelming.
Furthermore, the allied governments presented
a compelling legal argument. France pointed out
that if it was perfectly legal under international
law to buy American goods, it should be equally
legal to take out lines of credit to purchase
those goods. Ultimately, the economic momentum
was too strong to halt. So the money kept flowing.
Exactly. The loans continued, the exports flowed,
and the U .S. economy became quietly, irrevocably
tethered to the survival of Britain and France.
Here's where it gets really interesting, though.
Because while all this American money and steel
is crossing the Atlantic, the actual war on the
water is completely changing the rules of naval
engagement. Britain is using its massive Royal
Navy to blockade Germany. They are patrolling
the North Sea, stopping ships and preventing
food and war supplies from getting through. And
this blockade is devastating. By the winter of
1916 to 1917, it causes a period of severe starvation
in central Europe known as the Turnip Winter.
Germany is being strangled and they decide they
have to retaliate with a terrifying new piece
of technology, the U -boat or submarine. What's
fascinating here is the clash between old naval
traditions and this new technological reality.
For a long time, naval warfare operated under
an established international framework called
cruiser rules. Right, the gentleman's rules of
war. Exactly. Under these rules, if a warship
encountered an unarmed merchant vessel, it was
required to surface, issue a warning, and allow
the civilian crew to safely evacuate into lifeboats
before sinking the ship. But German submarines
were a completely different breed of vessel.
Because they were incredibly vulnerable when
they weren't underwater. Right. Spot on. Early
submarines were slow and extremely fragile on
the surface. If a U -boat surfaced to give a
polite warning, a merchant ship could simply
ram it, or a hidden deck gun could destroy the
submarine in seconds. Oh, wow. So the German
military high command argued that these old gentlemanly
rules of naval warfare shouldn't apply to this
new stealth -based weapon. They argued that necessity
dictated they begin torpedoing ships without
warning. Which brings us to May 7th, 1915. An
event that completely shocked the American public.
A German U -boat torpedoes a massive British
ocean liner called the RMS Lusitania off the
coast of Ireland. Horrific tragedy. The ship
sinks rapidly and 11 ,199 civilians die. Out
of those casualties, 128 are American citizens.
I have to imagine the pressure on President Wilson
to declare war right then and there was immense.
The public outrage was palpable. The sudden destruction
of an unarmed passenger ship, coupled with earlier
reports of German military atrocities in Belgium,
really turned the baseline of American public
opinion hostile toward Germany. So what did Wilson
do? Well, he walked a very tight diplomatic rope.
He didn't ask for a declaration of war. Instead,
he issued a severe warning demanding that Germany
be held to stripped accountability for the loss
of American lives. Strict accountability. That
sounds like a very carefully chosen phrase. It
was. The phrase was drafted by a State Department
official named Robert Lansing. It was designed
to sound incredibly firm without committing the
U .S. to immediate military action. A political
tightrope. Exactly. But over time, that phrase
morphed into a diplomatic doctrine that eventually
laid the groundwork to justify the use of military
force. And it actually worked, temporarily. Fearing
American intervention, Berlin backed down for
a while and ordered its submarines to avoid targeting
passengerships. But even with the anger, over
the Lusitania. We have to look at the domestic
reality. We often look back at history and assume
these major global events had unanimous patriotic
support from day one. But the U .S. was incredibly
divided. People were not eager to send their
sons to die in trenches. Wilson even won re -election
in 1916 on the slogan, He Kept Us Out of War.
That is a crucial piece of the puzzle. When you
break down the demographics, you see a multitude
of conflicting perspectives across the country.
And to be clear, we are just examining the historical
realities of these groups as reported in our
source, not endorsing any specific political
stance. Right. Just reporting what the source
says. Exactly. For instance, if you look at the
rural south, there was intense antiwar sentiment
among poor white farmers. They looked at the
massive profits being made by northern industrialists
and Wall Street bankers. And they warned each
other that this year came conflict was going
to be a rich man's war, a poor man's fight. And
the United States also had massive immigrant
communities whose views were heavily influenced
by their homelands. How did they react? They
were deeply fractured. German Americans strongly
pushed for strict U .S. neutrality, largely because
they understandably feared the domestic mistreatment
they might face if the U .S. went to war against
their former homeland, which is completely understandable.
And that was a valid fear as widespread discrimination
was already occurring in places like Canada.
Then you had Irish Americans who are arguably
the most effective domestic opponents of the
war. Many of them were fiercely anti -British
because of Britain's ongoing rule over Ireland
and the adamant oppose the U .S. doing anything
that might bolster the British Empire. I found
the Jewish -American perspective highlighted
in the source to be a really fascinating shift
specifically regarding who the Allied powers
were. It is a profound historical pivot. Initially,
many Jewish Americans heavily opposed the U .S.
entering the war on the side of the Allies. The
primary reason was the Russian Empire, which
was fighting alongside Britain and France. Because
of the Tsar? Yes. The Russian Tsar's government
had a horrific history of endorsing violent,
state -sanctioned riots against Jewish communities
known as pogroms. For many Jewish immigrants
who had fled that exact persecution, supporting
the Tsar was a moral impossibility. But that
changed. dramatically in early 1917. The February
Revolution overthrew the Tsar and briefly transformed
Russia into a republic. Once the Tsar was gone,
the primary left -wing opposition to the war
in major cities like New York largely collapsed.
It just shows how many complex moving parts there
were in the public consciousness. Mainstream
pacifism was huge in 1915. The hit song of the
year, a song that sold over 650 ,000 copies,
was literally titled, I Didn't Raise My Boy to
Be a Soldier. That really captures the mood.
It really does. You even had industrialist Henry
Ford chartering an entire ocean liner in 1915
called the Peace Ship. He filled it with peace
activists and sailed to Europe, hoping to personally
negotiate an end to the war. The press totally
mocked it, calling it a ship of fools. And it
accomplished nothing, but it demonstrates the
extraordinary lengths prominent figures were
going to, to promote peace. And while all this
pacifism and diplomatic maneuvering is happening
throughout 1915 and 1916, you have another vocal
group sounding the alarm about the actual state
of the U .S. military. This brings us to the
preparedness movement. The military numbers from
1916 are wild to think about. At that time, the
entire United States active duty army was only
about 100 ,000 men. To put that in perspective
for you, the army's fighting in Europe. The French,
the British, the Germans were sometimes losing
100 ,000 men in a single week of trench warfare.
It's staggering. The entire US military could
have been wiped out in a matter of days. The
proponents of the preparedness movement, led
by elite figures like former president Theodore
Roosevelt and General Leonard Wood, looked at
those cattle to figures and realized the U .S.
was hopelessly outgunned. They argued that the
U .S. needed to immediately build up its naval
and land forces if only for basic national defense.
So what do they do? They were so concerned that
they set up their own privately funded summer
training camps in places like Plattsburgh, New
York. They were training thousands of college
alumni to be military officers because the government
wasn't doing it. But I imagine setting up private
military camps caused a massive uproar among
the anti -war factions. Absolutely. The anti
-militarists, which included many liberal progressives
and Democrats in Congress, pushed back hard.
Their core argument was that building a massive
army would simply tempt the nation into using
it. They felt that warfare was usually driven
by hidden economic motivations, like the massive
profits of those munitions makers we discussed
earlier, and that building a giant war machine
would inevitably drag the U .S. into the European
conflict. Meanwhile, as everyone in Washington
is arguing about whether to build an army, the
war is quietly spilling over onto American soil
in the form of espionage. There is a detail from
the source that plays out exactly like a tense
scene from a spy movie happening right in the
middle of 1915. Tell me about Heinrich Albert.
This is one of those bizarre moments where a
tiny mistake changes history. It is July 1915.
Heinrich Albert is a German diplomatic attache,
but he is also secretly coordinating a massive
espionage ring. OK. He is riding the Sixth Avenue
elevated train in New York City. He gets momentarily
distracted. And when he rushes off the train
at a stop, he accidentally leaves his briefcase
on the seat. You're kidding. No. And sitting
near him is a US Secret Service agent named Frank
Burke, who had been tailing him. Burke simply
snatches the briefcase before the doors close.
That is an unbelievable intelligence coup. What
was inside? It was an absolute gold mine. The
Wilson administration leaked the contents to
the newspapers, and it was a bombshell. The briefcase
contained hard, undeniable proof of a massive
systematic German effort to finance sabotage
within the US, stir up labor strikes at munitions
plants, and even buy off American newspapers
to print pro -German propaganda. So it proved
everything people were afraid of. Yes. It validated
every paranoid fear Americans had that foreign
spies were operating right under their noses,
manipulating their economy and their safety.
If we connect this to the bigger picture, you
can see the pressure rapidly building. You have
economic ties pulling the U .S. toward the allies,
lingering outrage over submarine warfare, and
documented proof of foreign sabotage. It's a
powder cake. Exactly. This all culminates in
the 1916 presidential election, where Wilson
barely wins reelection, primarily on that campaign
slogan, he kept us out of war. The public was
desperate to maintain the illusion of safety,
but the true tipping point comes in the early
months of 1917. What forces that final shift?
The German military high command, led by figures
like Paul von Hindenburg and Eric Ludendorff,
decides to make a massive, fatal gamble. They
convince the Kaiser to resume unrestricted submarine
warfare. This meant their U -boats would sink
any ship, neutral or not, that was headed to
Britain. But they had to know that abandoning
strict accountability would absolutely force
the United States into the war. They fully acknowledged
it. But it was a calculated mathematical gamble.
They believed they could sink enough shipping
tonnage to starve Britain into surrendering within
six months. So it was a race against the clock.
Right. They bet the entire war on the assumption
that the tiny, unprepared U .S. military could
never draft, train, equip, and transport an army
across the Atlantic in time to save Britain.
So they announced this resumption of unrestricted
submarine warfare on January 31st, 1917. And
immediately they start sinking American merchant
ships. In March alone, U -boats sink the Vigilancia,
the city of Memphis, and the Illinois. American
sailors are actively dying in the Atlantic. But
as if that wasn't enough to push the country
over the edge, Germany also decides to reach
out to Mexico. Yes. This brings us to the infamous
Zimmerman Telegram, perhaps the most disastrous
diplomatic communication in modern history. Walk
us through how this unfolded. In January 1917,
the German foreign minister, Arthur Zimmerman,
sends a secret encoded telegram to the German
ambassador in Mexico. He knows Mexico still harbors
deep resentment over the vast territories they
lost to the U .S. in the 1840s. The Mexican -American
War. Exactly. So Zimmerman offers them a deal.
He says if the U .S. enters the war against Germany,
Mexico should ally with Germany and attack the
U .S. from the south. In return, Germany promises
to provide financial support and help Mexico
reclaim Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. But the
telegram never stays secret. No, it doesn't.
British intelligence operating out of a highly
secretive cryptography unit known as Room 40
intercepted the telegram and decoded it. Wow.
They actually sat on it for a few weeks trying
to figure out how to hand it over to the Americans
without revealing to the Germans that their codes
were broken. Eventually they shared it with the
Wilson administration and the White House released
it to the press on March 1st. Think about that
for a second. Imagine you are an American reading
the morning paper in 1917. First, you are reading
reports that German submarines are actively sinking
American ships in the Atlantic. And then right
next to it, you discover a secret, documented
plot by a foreign power to fund a literal invasion
of your own backyard. It's unthinkable. To carve
up the United States and give away Texas, New
Mexico, and Arizona, the outrage must have been
overwhelming. The isolationists in the Senate
who had been blocking military legislation suddenly
found their positions completely indefensible.
Exactly. However, President Wilson recognized
a deeper truth about the American psyche. Purely
military or economic arguments protecting trade
routes or reacting to a border threat still weren't
quite enough to permanently unite an entire deeply
divided country for a massive overseas war. He
needed something bigger. To mobilize a fractured
nation, he had to completely reframe the conflict.
It couldn't just be about revenge. It had to
be elevated to a moral imperative. So what does
this all mean? How does Wilson make that pivot?
It all comes to a head on April text, 1917. President
Wilson stands before a special joint session
of Congress and asks for a declaration of war.
But listen to how he frames the argument. He
specifically states, we have no selfish ends
to serve. Interesting. He doesn't ask for war
to conquer territory or to exact revenge for
the Lusitania or to protect J .P. Morgan's bank
loans. He tells Congress that the U .S. has a
moral responsibility to enter the fight, to wage
a war to end all wars, and most famously, to
make the world safe for democracy. That moral
framework was the final piece of the puzzle.
It appealed to that uniquely American sense of
idealism. It convinced the religious leaders
who had been preaching peace, the progressives
who feared militarism, and the general public
that this wasn't just another corrupt European
land grab. It was framed as a righteous crusade.
And it worked. The public was swayed, and just
four days later, on April 6, 1917, Congress officially
declared war on the German Empire. It is truly
a staggering transformation. Over the course
of this deep dive, you have seen a nation that
was fiercely divided, a nation singing, I didn't
raise my boy to be a soldier, get slowly but
inevitably pushed into a global conflict. Took
a perfect storm. It really did. The invisible
chains of massive economic loans, the horrifying
realities of a brand new maritime technology
that didn't play by the old rules, and intercepted
spy telegrams proposing an invasion of the American
Southwest. This raises an important question
though. When we look at this history, it reminds
us that navigating a barrage of propaganda, information
overload, and sudden technological shifts is
not uniquely a modern problem. Not at all. The
American public from 1914 to 1917 had to try
and make sense of their rapidly changing world
while being bombarded by competing narratives,
intense economic pressures and fear of the unknown.
They had to figure out what was real, what was
a genuine threat and what their moral obligation
was on a global stage, all while the ground shifted
beneath their feet. It's a lot to chew on. And
I want to leave you with one final thought to
mull over. Back in 1917, it was the unseen threats
that ultimately pulled America into a devastating
war. It was fragile submarines hiding silently
beneath the ocean waves. And it was secret, coded
telegrams crossing the globe entirely unseen
by the public until it was too late. Looking
at the world you live in today, what unseen digital
or cyber conflicts are currently swirling around
us in the background? And could those invisible
modern telegrams be quietly pulling us toward
a global entanglement without us even realizing
it? Thank you so much for joining us on this
Deep Dive.