First reactions

On August 3, 1914, Charles Edward Russell was on board ship, bound for an international Socialist conference in Vienna, when a wireless message was received telling of the outbreak of war between France and Germany. “Deluge come at last,” he wrote in his diary. “No wonder we have no appetite at the captain's table.” As his note implies, Russell himself was distressed but not surprised by the news. Frequent visits to Germany had bred in him a lively apprehension of that country's militarism; in an article published in 1912 he warned that the German war party dreamed of seizing an Atlantic port from Holland or France, and a year later he “offered to two magazine editors an outline indication of the coming storm, including the invasion of Belgium,” only to be “laughed to scorn.”

This dismissive reaction was much more typical of American attitudes to international affairs in the pre-war years than Russell's alarmed pre-monitions. In common with the majority of their fellow countrymen, most of these progressive publicists had shared an outlook on world politics in which inattention was combined with optimism. Even Lippmann, who was to write so much on the subject over so many years, could “not remember taking any interest whatsoever in foreign affairs until after the outbreak of the First World War.” On his way at the time to the Alps for a walking holiday, Lippmann recalled “being astonished and rather annoyed when I went to the railroad station and found that the German border was closed because Belgium had had an ultimatum.”