World War I and American Neutrality | The Great War
The Myth of Neutrality 

Richard Rubin, Writer: Part of American neutrality from the very beginning was that American companies were free to do business with any of the combatants, on paper. But Britain had the world’s strongest navy and they used it to tremendous effect against Germany, instituting a massive blockade, which meant that all American armaments that were sold overseas were sold to the allies. 

Jay Winter, Historian: Neutrality is almost always a fiction. In this case, the fiction was that the United States was neutral in word and deed. Nonsense. The United States tilted towards the allies from the very beginning. 

Narrator: When war broke out, the U.S. economy was in the midst of a recession and Americans lost no time selling everything they could to the Allies. A typical British division of 18,000 soldiers required a staggering nine million pounds of ammunition, fodder and food each month. There was a seemingly bottomless market for barrels of beef, tons of iron and steel, bushels of oats and wheat. American companies also sold Britain and France massive quantities of bullets, artillery shells, and high explosives. 

President Wilson turned a blind eye to this financial lifeline to the Allies.  

Jay Winter, Historian: The war turned the United States into a creditor power, not a debtor power, for the first time in its history. That’s a big argument. We’re in the war and we have an economic interest to make sure that the allies win it. 

Dan Carlin, Podcast Producer: It’s not just the fact that the U.S. is loaning money to the allies, but that they’re spending it in the U.S. for stuff so all of a sudden hiring picks up, manufacturing picks up. Americans were working again, and nobody wanted to cut that off. 

Richard Rubin, Writer: Our economic support for the allies started out at the very beginning of the war and quickly became a vicious cycle. Because we could only sell to the allies, they became our main market. Because the allies could only buy from us, they quickly became indebted to us. And so it was in our best interest to send them more armaments so that they could win the war. Great Britain during the war spent fully half of its war budget in the United States of America. 

Narrator: In response to what they saw as a hypocritical and blatantly one-sided neutrality policy, the National German American Alliance — which boasted more than 2 million members and chapters in 44 states — held mass demonstrations calling for an arms embargo. Former Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan was their featured speaker. The American Women’s League for Strict Neutrality collected over one million signatures — written on a scroll more than 15 miles long—  endorsing an “embargo on the things which kill.” While many of the nation’s leading magazines and newspapers clearly sided with the Allied cause, the German-American magazine The Fatherland promoted what it called “fair play for Germany and Austria-Hungary.” But the paper was fighting an uphill battle. In the first days of the war, the British had cut the transatlantic cables connecting America to the European continent. The only remaining cable was from London.  

Christopher Capozzola, Historian: Now this may not sound like much, but what it means is that all the news that Americans get about the European war is coming through Britain over British cables which means from the very beginning they’re getting one side of the story and so if there is one single event that the British do to guarantee that the Americans will not be really neutral, it’s that action.