Zimmerman Telegram Text Published a Century Ago
Portrait
In February 27, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson went in front of Congress regarding the Zimmerman Telegram. The British intercepted it earlier in the year; they later passed this information on to the United States. The above Wikipedia photo is a copy of the raw message sent to the German ambassador in Mexico.
The proposal?
That if Mexico joined the war on Germany’s side, and if Germany won, Mexico would regain Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.
If victorious in the conflict, Germany also promised to restore to Mexico the lost territories of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.
The Germans were aware of the Mexican Expedition and the back-and-forth conflict along the US Mexican border. The United States deployed an expeditionary force into Mexico to go after Francisco “Pancho” Villa and his militia.
Given what happened in the previous century, and that Mexico was embroiled in a revolution during that same time period, they were in no condition to join on Germany’s side. They risked an even bigger loss.
Those that didn’t want us to enter World War I dismissed the Zimmerman Telegram as something made up. It was published publicly in March 1, 1917. The United States joined the United Kingdom, France, and Russia against the Germans on April 6, 1917.
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/zimmermann-telegram-published-in-united-states
Category: Historical
This article has nothing to do with justice for Trayvon.
That’s another funny. You’re getting good at this.
THANKYOU, THANKYOUVERYMUCH
OMG! Took me a minute to get that one… Nice!
No wonder the wetbacks keep trying to sneak in. Someone must have told them about it.
“…Those that didn’t want us to enter World War I dismissed the Zimmerman Telegram as something made up. It was published publicly in March 1, 1917….”
The disbelief of the skeptics were undercut and destroyed when German Foreign Minister Zimmerman himself stated in an interview with an American journalist on 03 Mar 17 that the telegram was genuine.
Zimmerman believed he had to tell the truth because his personal honor as a diplomat was at stake, even if telling the truth would ultimately bring the USA into the war.
This was a mere hundred years ago; how times have changed regarding such concepts as honor, veracity, truthfulness, etc.
“on 03 Mar 17”
You got me good with that one.
100 years later and we still can’t trust those fucking Mexicans….apparently we never learn our lessons.
Now if we’d only fight the drug war like we sought Mr. Villa….just send troops to kill the cartel owners and their families in their homes…instead of pretending to fight the drug war by arresting a bunch of junkies….
I believe Mr. Clancy had a plan for that.
We’ll never stop the drug trade if we don’t figure out a way to kill demand. No demand, the cartels go away broke. As long as demand is here, someone will figure out a way to supply it. Biggest mistake in the war on drugs is not addressing that one salient fact.
“figure out a way to kill demand”
That would be like trying to kill the demand for sex. Besides, when you kill demand the supply rises. EC-101.
It is a tough problem.
Been a while since I took Econ but seems to me if you kill demand surplus supply temporarily rises but falls as suppliers scale back.
Killing demand is difficult but drugs are not an essential genetic urge like sex. In simple terms, you make the penalty so disproportional to the thrill that eventually folks realize that it doesn’t make sense. As an extreme example – look at the countries with death penalties for drug dealing – their drug problems are far lower than ours. There are always idiots who think they won’t get caught… but you don’t see large segments of their populace agitating for decriminalization, either.
Bleeding-hearts in this country will never let that happen.
It’s funny about history or at least the way it’s taught and evolves.
When I was in grade school in the 60s we were taught that the sinking of the RMS Lusitania (7 May 1915) was the main cause of the US entering “The Great War”. I didn’t even hear about the Zimmerman Telegram until I was going thru AIT for an MI MOS in 72.
Granddad was a WWI vet (350th Inf Reg, 88th Division) who served in France. I was fortunate enough to inherit the WWI history books he bought after returning from the war. From the books printed very shortly after war, the Zimmerman Telegram was a HUGE deal when it was published and WAS arguably the straw that broke the camel’s back as far as the US entering that war.
On a side note it was proven about a decade ago that the Lusitania was indeed carrying munitions destined for England making it a legitimate target of war.
I took a History WW II course in college and the first two months or so we spent on WWI. That’s the first I heard of the telegram, I believe.
When I was in high school, we spent so much time in the Colonial period and Civil War that it was mid-May before we got to the 20th century, so basically we got a week on WW1 and a week on WW2.
I first read about the Zimmerman telegram in a old (pre-WWII, I think it was published in 1932) history book about the Great War that my Grandma had on a shelf when I was in junior high. Of course, I’ve been a history geek who reads and looks shit up pretty much all my life, so I was that weird kid who actually would read something like that at that age. Fast forward a few years to 11th Grade World History, and the teacher throws out the Lusitania narrative. I ask why, if that’s the single causative event, did we not enter the war for two more years? Teacher says, “Uh, well…um…” Then I brought this up, along with the fact that German spies were being arrested in East Coast cities. That history teacher wasn’t hugely fond of me. The same teacher also told us that the Little Big Horn was the deciding battle and only major event of the Frontier Indian Wars. I pointed out that it was the high-water mark for the Sioux and Northern Cheyenne, and that it didn’t mean dick to the Comanche, Apache, or dozens of other tribes that engaged the Army before or after 1876, and that Sioux resistance ended for good with the Wounded Knee Massacre 20+ years later. I also mentioned that there had previously been dozens of wars with tribes further south and east, some of them pretty big, like the Blackhawk War (in which Abraham Lincoln was an officer in a volunteer infantry regiment) and the Seminole War, and had he ever heard of a guy called Tecumseh? He also tried to push the “FDR knew” bullshit about Pearl Harbor. I brought up the USS Greer, USS Kearny, and USS Rueben James incidents (unprovoked acts of war by Nazi Germany) and USS Panay (unprovoked act of war by Japan) in response, pointing out that we didn’t need to make up any casus belli, just fully report those incidents instead of covering them up, never mind the fact that letting the enemy sucker-punch your main offensive force is pretty much the… Read more »
Get paid to teach it?
High school was where I learned that grownups, even teachers, don’t know nearly as much as they think they do. They still don’t.
I taught history for most of my teaching career. (I do a lot of other things, too … I hate having “down time.”) Whenever the topic of WWI came up, I made sure the Zimmerman Telegram was pointed out as the primary push for the U.S. into the war. I always couched my instruction of the first half of the 20th Century’s wars this way: Consider the parallels.
In 1916, Woodrow Wilson was running for re-election, promising to keep us out of the European war. Yet within a year, he was forced by circumstance to join the war anyway. The circumstance? The Zimmerman Telegram.
In 1940, Franklin Roosevelt was running for re-election, promising to keep us out of the European war. Yet within a year (or so), he was forced by circumstance to join the war anyway. The circumstance> Pearl Harbor.
I had some amazing students in the private school in which I taught. I miss them.
Am I the only one who thinks the date on that telegram is a strange coincidence?
That depends. What is it that strangely coincided, date-wise?
Strange date-wise, because Reuters this morning reports that all roads to Mosul are now held by US-led/trained Iraqi forces, trapping ISIS in whatever part of the city it holds.
There are still non-ISers surviving or fleeing as best they can, but the bombardment continues and now, the DoD is ramping up its budget, and SecDef Mattis has plans to defeat ISIS.
I don’t believe in coincidences. Too many strange things can’t be explained….
But whoever it was that said we need a plan for AFTER it’s over is right.
Huh?
Barbara Tuchman’s book on the matter is excellent. The idiot Wilson was allowing the Germans to use our wireless transmitter in England as a relay, because otherwise there was no way for them to have communication with the Western Hemisphere and the Brits kept their protests muted because it was more important for them to keep us more or less onside (plus they had cracked the kraut code and that was how they had possession of the Zimmerman note in the first place). Once they had the information, the Brits had to be careful about how to use it since, technically, it had been a gained by spying on our comms.
Tuchman’s book on the telegram was excellent, as was her Guns of August about World War I in general. A very good work about the Lusitania is the more recent Dead Wake by Eric Larson.
As a minor point, the Zimmerman cable as shown in the photo was in the form of five-figure coded traffic. The British weren’t working from a cold start in trying to crack the content; they apparently had available a couple of captured encryption keys to work with.
In “Guns of August” the whole chapter on the Goeben and Breslau fascinated me. Plus Tuchman had a wealth of knowledge about the subject-in one chapter she just tosses out an aside about how in this battle a young officer was wounded and so Lieutenant Charles de Gualle had to be evacuated to the rear. Nobody really comes out of that book looking good except maybe the Brits (and then only by comparison); the Germans were murderous, the French and Russians incompetent and the Turks corrupt (the more things change…).
So, can someone explain all of those damn phone numbers in the telegram?
Encrypted text.
Not phone numbers STOP? Really STOP Shit STOP I thought it was a two pager and we were only seeing one STOP Not phone numbers STOP Encryption you say STOP Shit again STOPP
They’re for different ethnic restaurants and “houses of ill repute”… you just got to figure out which is which.
05348 = Chinese restaurant in Acapulco (two star rating)
26674 = Rainbow Bar and Grill
10453 = Uncle Ricky’s Cantina (open 24 hours a day – no cover charge. Features Tucci Lucy and her trained Gila Monster).
Okay, I worked on that and I agree. 1=A, 2=b 3=C and so forth. The result?
ARGYT DRFOOY PKTUM JEET…Still not making sense to me. Is it is Mexican? That could be it.
I believe it’s pronounced “Messican.”
This stuff can make your brain hurt. The British seem to have had a knack for it. Probably from too much bad weather and having to drink warm beer. Something interesting is that the Zimmerman code wasn’t a simple letter-number substitution. Instead, each block of numbers apparently substituted for a specific word or phrase in a standard vocabulary. The count of characters in the word or phrase didn’t need to match the count in the block.
I like HMCS(FMF) ret’
s explanation the best. Makes sense. Of course, one error and a guy could wind up under a donkey.
You probably need to use 99999 for “Donkeys ist verboten!”
BE SURE TO DRINK YOUR OVALTINE
LOL!
+1 little orphan Annie secret decoder ring!