Europe Explodes in War 613Huerta hold free elections as the price of American
mediation in the continuing civil war. Huerta refused.
The tense situation exploded in April 1914, when a
small party of American sailors was arrested in the
port of Tampico, Mexico. Wilson used the affair as an
excuse to send troops into Mexico.
The invasion took place at Veracruz, where
Winfield Scott had launched the assault on Mexico
City in 1847. Instead of surrendering the city, the
Mexicans resisted tenaciously, suffering 400 casualties
before falling back. This bloodshed caused dismay
throughout Latin America. Huerta, hard-pressed by
Mexican opponents, fled from power.
Wilson now made a monumental blunder. He
threw his support to Francisco “Pancho” Villa, one of
Huerta’s generals. But Villa was little more than an
ambitious bandit whose only objective was personal
power. In October 1915, realizing his error, Wilson
abandoned Villa and backed another Mexican rebel,
who drove Villa to the northern border of Mexico. In
1916 Villa stopped a train in northern Mexico and
killed sixteen American passengers in cold blood.
Then he crossed into New Mexico and burned the
town of Columbus, killing nineteen.
Having learned the perils of intervening in
Mexican politics, Wilson would have preferred to
bear even this assault in silence; but public opinion
forced him to send American troops under General
John J. Pershing across the border in pursuit of Villa.
Villa proved impossible to catch. Cleverly he drew
Pershing deeper and deeper into Mexico, which chal-
lenged Mexican sovereignty. Several clashes occurred
between Pershing’s men and Mexican regulars, and
for a brief period in June 1916 war seemed imminent.
Wilson now acted bravely and wisely. Early in 1917 he
recalled Pershing’s force, leaving the Mexicans to
work out their own destiny.
Missionary diplomacy in Mexico had produced
mixed, but in the long run beneficial, results. His
bungling bred anti-Americanism in Mexico; but his
opposition to Huerta strengthened the real revolu-
tionaries, enabling the constitutionalists to consoli-
date power.
Europe Explodes in War
On June 28, 1914, in the Austro-Hungarian provin-
cial capital of Sarajevo, Gavrilo Princip, a young stu-
dent, assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir
to the imperial throne. Princip was a member of the
Black Hand, a Serbian terrorist organization. He was
seeking to further the cause of Serbian nationalism.
Instead his rash act precipitated a general European
war. Within little more than a month, following a
complex series of diplomatic challenges and responses,
two great coalitions, the Central Powers (chiefly
Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Ottoman Turkey)
and the Allied Powers(chiefly Great Britain, France,
and Russia), were locked in a brutal struggle that
brought one era in world history to a close and inau-
gurated another.
The outbreak of this Great War caught Americans
psychologically unprepared; few understood its signif-
icance. President Wilson promptly issued a proclama-
tion of neutrality and asked the nation to be
“impartial in thought.” Of course, not even the presi-
dent had the superhuman self-control that this
request called for, but the almost unanimous reaction
of Americans, aside from dismay, was that the conflict
did not concern them.
The United States had good reason to remain
neutral. Over a third of its 92 million inhabitants were
either European-born or the children of European
immigrants. Sentimental ties bound them to the lands
of their ancestors. American involvement would cre-
ate new internal stresses in a society already strained
by the task of assimilating so many diverse groups.
War was also an affront to the prevailing progressive
spirit, which assumed that human beings were reason-
able, high-minded, and capable of settling disputes
peaceably. Along with the traditional American fear of
entanglement in European affairs, these were ample
reasons for remaining aloof.
Although most Americans hoped to keep out
of the war, nearly everyone was partial to one side
or the other. People of German or Austrian
descent, about 8 million in number, and the
nation’s 4.5 million Irish Americans, motivated
chiefly by hatred of the British, sympathized with
the Central Powers. The majority of the people,
however, influenced by bonds of language and cul-
ture, preferred an Allied victory, and when the
Germans launched a mighty assault across neutral
Belgium in an effort to outflank the French armies,
many Americans were outraged.
As the war progressed, the Allies—especially
Britain—cleverly exploited American prejudices by
publishing exaggerated tales of German atrocities
against Belgian civilians. A supposedly impartial study
of these charges by the widely respected James Bryce,
author of The American Commonwealth, portrayed
the Germans as ruthless barbarians. The Germans also
conducted a propaganda campaign in the United
States, but they labored under severe handicaps and
won few converts.The outbreak of WWIat
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