Publication of the Zimmermann Telegram

On the evening of 28 February 1917 the State Department in Washington handed a reporter of the Associated Press the text of a dispatch that the German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann had sent in January to the German minister in Mexico. The news made the morning editions. On Thursday 1 March almost all the major American dailies came out with banner headlines across the full width of the front page. “Germany seeks an alliance against us. Asks Japan and Mexico to join her”, wrote the “New York Times”. Americans read that Berlin, as it began unrestricted submarine warfare, had promised Mexico money and the recovery of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona if it entered the war against the United States, and that it had wanted to draw Japan in as well.

Five days in the White House

The British had known of the Zimmermann Telegram since mid-January, but passed it to the Americans only on 23 February, when the Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour handed it in London to Ambassador Walter Hines Page. Page’s dispatch reached Washington on the evening of 24 February. Secretary of State Robert Lansing was then on a short holiday, so his deputy Frank Polk took the text to President Woodrow Wilson. The date of this meeting is given variously: according to some historians it was still the evening of 24 February, according to others the following day. According to Lansing the president showed great indignation and wanted to publish the text at once, but on Polk’s advice decided to wait for the Secretary of State’s return. On 26 February Polk informed Colonel Edward Mandell House of the telegram, and he too advised immediate publication.

First it was necessary to check what the addressees of the German offer knew. On 26 February the State Department instructed the ambassador in Mexico, Henry Fletcher, to present the contents of the telegram to President Venustiano Carranza or the foreign minister and to suggest that Mexico issue some statement simultaneously with the publication. Carranza was in the state of Jalisco. The minister, Cándido Aguilar, gave assurances that he knew nothing of the German proposals and went straight to the telegraph office to get in touch with the president. The Japanese ambassador in Washington, with whom Polk spoke, was according to Polk’s note amused and considered the idea too absurd to be taken seriously. On 27 February Lansing instructed Page to convey to Balfour the president’s thanks for information “of inestimable value” and to assure him that its source would be carefully concealed.

The telegram in the service of a bill

The timing of the publication was decided by domestic politics. On 26 February Wilson asked Congress for authority to arm merchant ships, and in the Senate a group of opponents was threatening to drag out the debate until the end of the session on 4 March. On 28 February the president instructed Lansing to confer with other members of the cabinet on how to release the text and how to use it to have the strongest possible effect on the armed ship bill. Lansing showed the telegram to the Democratic senator Gilbert Hitchcock of Nebraska, who was managing the bill in the Senate, and in the evening the press received the text. That same evening Lansing informed Page that the telegram would be published the following day.

The State Department did not reveal where it had obtained the text. The public was led to believe that it had been obtained in Mexico, and there was no mention of British intelligence or Room 40. The government knew, however, that questions would be raised in Congress. On 1 March Lansing cabled London that some congressmen were trying to discredit the telegram by claiming that it had been supplied by one of the belligerents. He asked the British to allow someone from the embassy personally to decipher a copy of the dispatch that the Americans had found in the Washington telegraph office. The Department could then state that the text had been obtained by its own people.

First reactions

On 1 March a stormy debate broke out in the Senate. The Republican Henry Cabot Lodge tabled a resolution calling on the president to confirm the authenticity of the telegram, and the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, William J. Stone, asked whether the dispatch had not been passed to Washington by London in order to influence American policy. Other senators recalled that rumours of German intrigues in Mexico had been circulating for months and asked what there was to get excited about. That same day the president assured the Senate that the government had the text and had no doubt of its authenticity. In the evening the House of Representatives passed the armed ship bill by 403 votes to 13.

Some Americans regarded the telegram as a British provocation. George Sylvester Viereck, publisher of the pro-German weekly “The Fatherland”, wrote on 1 March that the letter was “unquestionably a brazen forgery planted by British agents”. The press magnate William Randolph Hearst also had doubts in private, although his newspapers were already calling on their readers on 2 March to prepare for war with Germany. The disputes over authenticity were ended by Zimmermann himself. On 3 March, at a press conference in Berlin, asked by an American journalist, he replied: “I cannot deny it. It is true.”

What the publication changed

For decades it was believed that the telegram broke the isolationist mood, especially in the Midwest and the South, and prepared Americans for war. That was already Lansing’s assessment on 4 March. More recent studies of the press, including those of the historian Thomas Boghardt, indicate that the impression was strong but short-lived. Newspapers that demanded a firm stance towards Germany had been doing so since the announcement of unrestricted submarine warfare, and most dailies opposed to the war did not change their minds. After a week hardly anyone was writing about the telegram. Nor did the publication help to get the bill through the Senate, where a dozen or so senators blocked it until the end of the session.

The telegram did, however, give Wilson and his ministers proof that Germany had been preparing for war with America since mid-January and was looking for allies against it on its own border. What is more, the Germans had sent it to Washington using American diplomatic channels, which Wilson had made available to them for peace talks. When in March submarines sank several American ships, the president no longer had to convince anyone that Berlin was an enemy. On 6 April 1917 the United States declared war on Germany.