Citation Needed - The Zimmerman Telegram

Episode Date: May 12, 2021

The Zimmermann Telegram (or Zimmermann Note or Zimmerman Cable) was a secret diplomatic communication issued from the German Foreign Office in January 1917 that proposed a military alliance between Germany and Mexico if the United States entered World War I against Germany. Mexico would recover Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. The telegram was intercepted and decoded by British intelligence. Our theme song was written and performed by Anna Bosnick. If you’d like to support the show on a per episode basis, you can find our Patreon page here.  Be sure to check our website for more details.

But Syrax won't kill Zub0, right? So, Snoke is like, you have betrayed the Linquay. Wait, I thought Zub0 was the Linquay. Yeah, see, this is elder Zub0, so no. This is so stupid. I haven't even gotten to the time travel yet. So, if this is stupid, I'm gonna hate the whole thing.

There he is! Get him, get him! Ow, ow, he's so cute for me. Why did you say that mean stuff about us? Yeah, I'm really like 14% meaner than you usually are. Yeah, 14%. What are you guys talking about? The telegrams?

Yeah, do you like super mean about it? Way mean. Yeah, sorry, that's actually on me. Sorry, that's on you, Eli. Yeah, this week's episode is about the Zimmerman Telegram. So I thought, you know, to get us in the spirit, I sent everyone a mean telegram from Noah. Just, you know, get everyone in the war entering spirit.

Oh, no, I'm sorry. I'm sorry about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess, honestly, we should have suspected when he spelled it, ignorinous, that he was alive. Yeah, I actually thought it might have been wordplay, but now it makes no sense. No, I didn't do wordplay. Oh, hey guys. Sorry, I'm late. Traffic have been wordplay, but now it makes no sense. I'm too wordplay. Oh, hey guys, sorry, I'm late traffic from the server of Nightmare. Tom, quick, before you do anything,

Eli sent the telegram as pre-show synanigan, so it was not Noah. Oh, that wasn't you? No, not Noah. Huh, well, I guess Eli's been sending me mean telegrams like every week or so for Two years in anticipation of this episode. Oh, no, no, no, no, the other ones were from me. I Got it. Okay, but why a telegram know I like to yell at the guy who writes them down

I'm sure. Citations needed. Podcast where we choose a subject. We have a single article about it on Wikipedia. 10-Ware experts. Because this is the internet. And that's how it works now. I'm Heath and I'll be hosting stop. And I'm joined by a singing telegram quartet

that refuses to go to the barber shop. No, Tom C. Seleneelai. How's everyone doing? Hello. Hello. Hello. No. So hello. Hello. Hello. No, so close. No, you're gonna do right?

dominant seven. No, seemed like that was where we got there. We did a pretty good job. I believe we did. I jumped in auto to a Nessiesel. Just like the club. No, no, no, no, I can't I can't really refuse to do any audio editing on that. I'm not even gonna sink it. I can't ignore it. I can't ignore it. I can't ignore it. I can't ignore it. I can't ignore it. I can't ignore it. I can't ignore it. I can't ignore it.

I can't ignore it. I can't ignore it. I can't ignore it. I can't ignore it. I can't ignore it. I can't ignore it. I can't ignore it. I can't ignore it.

I can't ignore it. I can't ignore it. I can't ignore it. I can't ignore it. I can't ignore it. I can't ignore it. I can't ignore it. I can't ignore it.

I can't ignore it. I can't ignore it. I can't ignore it. I can't ignore it. I can't ignore it. Igram. All right. This is Bob Dylan stop. I like old time and messages stop. The weird topic, weird. Anyway, let's hear it. What was Bob Dylan's name? It's Robert Zimmerman.

What was the Zimmerman Telegram? Were you forbidden to reference music after 1995 by some kind of a genius anymore? Okay, whatever. Bob Dylan has a 90 self-in-al album that won Grammys line and also as references are all pre 1970. Yeah. You want to know the prize in 2016 just keep up.

So the Zimmerman Telegram was a coded communication from the German foreign office that got intercepted by the British in January of 1917 and then more or less directly led to the then technically neutral United States entering World War I on the Allied side. I mean, there were obviously other factors, but in terms of galvanizing US public opinion, I don't know that there's anything more significant. This is actually a story I've kind of wanted to cover

on this show ever since we started it, but it's all full of nuance and backstory. And I know you guys hate nuance and backstory. No nuance, this is 2021. nuance got ratioed on Twitter. That's true. That's true. So the telegram itself of course.

Biggest to say that are assholes that I'm wondering just in the first place and whatever that is. They say nuance is good, not that, not when they do that. I'm doing a different thing. Talking about the non-oted new on to feel swore i said that

new on to nuance that the telegram itself of course is pretty simple it's a proposal to mexico of a military alliance should the u.s. and are the war uh... basically it's germany saying hey if the u.s. joins the british you're on our side and will pay you to keep them busy on their own continent. In exchange, once the war is over, you get to have Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. And that's pretty straightforward.

But to really understand it, we need to dive into like just a very quick back story on British cryptography, Woodrow Wilson, Mexican US relations, Japan's US relations, but Mexican relations to Monroe, Dodgers, Subway,, the Monroe Diochra and Subway, the military strategy, and the first two and a half years of World War I. Roosevelt, Coralist. If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, the first thing you have to do is create the universe. After that, exactly.

Yeah, fine. Cecil gets it. But if at any time, Noah, I hear about fucking a trust inquiry, you're going to need all the allies you can get Man, I really hope that somehow I tried believe me. I tried Um, so let's start with the code itself horseback then we didn't have any of these fancy satellites and cell phones We had one fancy satellite, but only in a pedantic way that the point is

Communication was still very wired. You know, radio was a thing, but by 1917, we were still years away from the first commercial broadcast. So if you wanted to communicate between continents, you had to send your message through underwater cables, which is a phenomenally awesome feat of engineering, especially for the time, but also a very prone one, right? Because it's way too big for you to really do it in the secret. Everybody kind of notices the gigantic cable you have just trailing out into the ocean and cutting

them is way easier than repairing it. Same with 50% of all marriages. That's certainly a lot cheaper. In the long run, yeah, have you amortized it? Yeah. In what may actually have been their first act of war against Germany, the UK, the country with the vastly superior navy, just went out and snipped all the Germany's cables. I think there's more to it than that obviously, but they cut all the cables and it was clear even before the shooting started, of course, that this was going to be a war that was one by whoever could rustle up the most allies, right? So like obviously depriving their enemy of easy ways to get their message out to potential allies was a pretty basic first step.

Germans are land down cables. The British Navy's just sitting there. Hey, you guys almost done. Whenever you're all these chairs there for my garden. It's an ocean garden. Landrock gave her scissors.

Let me know when you're done. Now, of course, nobody wanted Germany to be entirely cut off from communication. Right. After all, if a Kaiser says I surrender in the woods and there's nobody around here, it doesn't really happen. What's more, at least one of the trans... Thank you. What's more, at least one of the transcontinental cables that Germany uses was American owned

and the British were desperately trying to avoid pissing off the Americans. So they left that one untouched with a tacit understanding that the US wouldn't allow Germany to use it to send coded messages. To do so, in fact, would be a violation of neutrality according to international law. But it turned out Woodrow Wilson was the kind of guy that didn't give a whole bunch of shits about international law. If he thought he was more correct than it, so ultimately he did allow Germany to send coded messages through their cable. Okay, it seems like a lot to keep track of though.

Like with somebody color coding, all the fucking cables down there, like some diver 300 feet underwater, batting off sharks. Okay, now, don't cut the red, white, and blue wire. That's the real one. Oh, that's it. It exploded. How did it explode?

That doesn't even make sense. That's it. They all look the same down here. It's not. The light doesn't penetrate. So, all right. So despite his violation of the clearly recognized agreed upon rules of neutrality, Britain didn't make a big fuss about Woodrow Wilson bending those rules. And now his administration probably thought that was because they didn't fucking know about it. Right? It's not like he made a public declaration that he was bending the rules in Germany's favor, but Britain actually did know because it turned out that they'd been tapping the American cables since basically day one of the war to listen in on those bottlenecked

German communication. British intelligence is so awesome, especially when it comes to code breaking and speaking of which they weren't making a big fuss about it because it turned out they'd pretty much already broken all of the German diplomatic codes and the false confidence that Wilson's allowance afforded them was a fucking gold mine for British intelligence. Okay, just promise you won't use pig Latin on the cable. I don't even know what pig Latin is in British intelligence.

We don't know what that is, but don't. All right. So, yeah, speaking of which, that brings us around to room 40. That's the term the British admiralty used for their cryptanalysis department during the First World War. Now, the group didn't actually occupy a room numbered 40 and hadn't in years, but even when they moved into a bigger facility in a newer building, they managed to retain the name room 40.

So anyway, they get this telegram along with a batch of other communications and they said about decoding it. What they find is a telegram from German foreign minister Arthur Zimmerman to his Mexican ambassador. So here it is in its entire. Okay. We're going to have to vote on this. I say we make Noah read this in an old timey voice and say, stop after every period. Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. That has to be done. Yes. I guess.

Okay. Quote. We intend to begin. Start. We intend to begin on the 1st of February unrestricted submarine warfare stop. We shall endeavor in spite of this to give the United States to America neutral. Stop. In the event of this not succeeding, we make Mexico a proposal of alliance of the following bases. Make war together, make peace

together. Generous financial support and an understanding on our part that Mexico just to reconquer the lost territories and Texas to Mexico and Arizona. Stop. The settlement to detail is left to you. Stop. You will inform the president of the above most secretly as soon as the outbreak of war with the United States of America is certain and add the suggestion that he should on his own initiative invite Japan to immediate adherence and at the same time mediate between Japan and ourselves stop. Please call the president's attention to the fact that the ruthless employment of our submarines now offers the prospect of compelling England in a few months to make peace signed the same thing, stop. And well done. Well done. Well done. Did they say pause for commas when they were defeated?

You're gonna make them do it again. Yeah. Yeah. There was a colon in there that I met. Yeah, I didn't know what it was. The colon was the last fucking art. Semipods. Semipods.

No, so it would be hard to overstate what a big deal this is in terms of British war aims. Okay. So by now, the first world war has been going on for two and a half years and most of those years have been spent in this barbaric stalemate that was costing thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of lives a day. And the sides were so thoroughly entrenched at this point that it was virtually impossible that one of them was going to break through the enemy lines.

So this had become a war of attrition. That meant that the only way to swing the balance of the war would be to get a whole bunch of more shit than the other side and the only still neutral country with enough shit to matter in that sense really was the US. Both sides knew that if the US entered the war A, it'd be entering on the allied side and B, it would be entering on the allied side and B, it would mean an allied victory. I don't know Noah.

I learned in history class that we came in and we saved everyone with our grit and our food scraps. The telegram mentioned the thread of our grit and our boot scraps. Probably said something about that. There was a second telegram actually. Roughly. No con. So, you know, here are the British cryptographers have a decoded message that would

enrage the US public and very possibly incite them to war. In 164 words, Zimmerman had provided something that could very easily have met the difference between winning and losing, but they had two major problems still. The first was how they got it, and the second was how they knew what they had. Yeah, that's the STD dilemma right there. Yeah, and then the real bitch is Britain's then got a call. Everyone had fucked recently in a 1917. That's a lot of, yeah. I fucked you. Stop. All right. So problem number one is that the whole goal here is to make America mad at Germany, but if you make a mad at England at the same time, you're no longer working towards your goal.

And this was all possible, of course, because the British were spying on the American cable. They weren't just spying on the German stuff, right? So if they just rush over to the US Embassy with it, it's going to sound an awful lot like, man, you're never going to believe when I came across when I was reading your mail. Okay. If the British Navy is running the show in the Atlantic, I feel like you just snip the Mexico to Germany cable

and just like reroute it to a US cable at that point. Right? And then everybody starts doing the same thing. You get this like fun Shakespeare, sitcom, Latin American situation. Sergeant, why are you dressed like a princess? It's for spying, sir. Spying.

Alright. Alright, so but the second problem is actually way stickier. The actual telegram that they had is of course encoded. Now, they know the code so they can see what it says, but if this telegram is meant to do a job, it can't just be something that passes from British intelligence to American intelligence and, oh, we'll be very like, discrete with your sources, it has to go to the American public. So how do you give it to them without telling Germany that you've broken their fucking code?

And even if you're willing to admit that, what if Germany just lies and says, that's not what that code means? Right, room 40 is relied on a code book that they got from a double agent, not some brilliant cryptographic deduction, and they can't actually just try it out. The code book to prove their point without A, getting their double agent killed, and B, opening themselves up to the obvious German rebuttal

of, we've never seen that code book before. What the fuck, you talking about? I've never seen that. What before. What the fuck is that? I don't know. Yeah. What are they going to say? We wrote to Mexico for a Weibos ranchero recipe. And that would make sense though, man.

They were hungry at that time. Is somebody worried that they're going to be like, okay, I know they're bombing us and choking our teenagers with mustard gas. But they wouldn't lie to us too. Not for Germans. Well, the British were also, they might not have had used mustard mustard gas, but they wouldn't lie to us too. That's the Germans. Well, the British were also, they might not have had used mustard gas, but they were also killing a lot of teenagers.

So, but here's British intelligence literally holding in their head a weapon that could win them the war and they have no fucking idea how they're going to use it. And America eventually learned that you just make an apocalypse bomb and that strategy is way simpler. It's just like really obviously you do with that. But I like that England is trying to win a war with like a deep finesse in bridge right here. Before we get to that, we're going to take so much for taking the meeting.

Happy to be here, Prime Minister British person. How can I help? Uh, I was wondering, would you be interested in a quick game of shirats? Uh, what now? You know the party game, a bit of valley, who? Prime Minister, I don't leave Mr. President to show me very, very fun. Fine, fine, fucking Brits.

Okay, okay. Six words. Eating. Eating, eating, eating a tube? Tube. Six words. Eating. Eating. Eating. Eating a tube? Tube. Tube hungry. Never mind, never mind.

Next word. Small word. The uh... A is... Is is. Is. Something is walking. Running.

Going. Going. Tube eater is going, small word, he is to, to, to, to, tube eater is going to stab punch tiger. Seriously, tiger? You know how to talk. Don't talk, okay? We're playing a game. Attack, attack, attack.

Someone's going to attack me. Fantastic. You got it, Mr. Attack. Attack. Attack. Attack. Someone's going to attack me. Fantastic! You got it, Mr. President. Nice. I knew I would. Anyway, so what's the news with Mexico here at Any Word? No.

Nothing. No. None. Too bad. Okay. Well, you want to watch Birth of a Nation again? No. No, I don't.

I love that movie so good. I know you do. Yeah, costuming. When we left off, England was thinking about leaving a wet printout of a telegram on the steps of the White House and a flaming bag of shit and diving into the bushes after the round of war. What is next? Certainly. Certainly considered. Okay.

So by the end of 1916, both sides in World War I can see a clear path to victory. On the Allied side, the British had a pretty effective naval blockade that had been keeping damn near everything out of German harbors re like that technically they have to let humanitarian stuff through like food and medicine and shit but they're just as likely to be like I don't know like you can shoot those potatoes at us and confiscate that shit to yeah well and that one kid with a can of aquanet and the pvc pipe ruined it for every the Aquinette and the PVC pipe ruined it forever. So, right. Exactly. All tubers are out now. And at this point, the German people were damn near starving.

So England figures, they just need to stay the course and pretty soon, Germany's people are going to demand an end of the war if we're nothing but a meal that doesn't involve a boiled fucking turn up. Woo. Good thing they weren't fighting the Irish, am I right? Yeah. It'd be a real Holocaust. So oddly enough, the German path to victory was basically the same.

So the Russian government was on the brink of collapse already. The Russian revolution was literally a couple of months away by the end of 1916. So they really just needed to worry about England. And England was only able to stay in the war at this point because the u s was bending the shit out of the definition of neutrality and supplying all kind of raw materials and money uh... that you know the kind of shit that that uh... england needed to keep feeding the front so now england has the bigger navy above the water but what a germany's biggest advantages here is that they have some really kick ass submarines

and they've got a lot of the motherfuckers. I googled this hoping that I could find like a World War I submarine would look like a barrel with a snorkel on it. But it looks like modern submarines. You know, they had kick ass submarines. They're nuclear powered. So speaking of exactly that, the Brits actually had submarines as well. They just weren't as good or as plentiful as the German you boats. And also, it didn't really matter.

I bet it mattered to the guys who were in the not as good summary. Well, I mean, I, I'm 61. Oh, we're the single one. That's all they're all stinky actually. So, um, no, but the thing is, is that you don't actually really need submarines when you have the larger surface navy. Right? Through most of the war, the submarines had turned out to be a non-factor on both sides, but there was a faction within the German government that still thought that they were the key to victory, so long as the German leadership was willing to use them right, and using them

right meant killing the fuck out of a lot of civilian. Okay, it's an invisible missile silo underwater. What's the white hat function of that? I'm actually wondering what they're doing. That's faction. So okay, but see, like in a perfect world, the submarines would be able to just take out military ships and ships with military supplies.

Right? That would be the goal in a humane war, whatever the hell that means. But unlike the British blockade, submarines can't board the ship and see what it's carrying and find all those dangerous potatoes. Right? Like if they tried to board the ship, they lose the advantage they have of being a submarine. And since ships carrying war materials don't have the decency to scroll that visibly along their hull, the only way to effectively blockade somebody with submarines is to just shoot down everything

you come across. This is a strategy that history is euthamized as unrestricted submarine warfare. You somehow just described the war on drugs with submarines. So for years now, some German commanders had been pushing for this strategy, the unrestricted submarine warfare, and it got more and more popular, the more civilians felt the effects of the British blockade, and the more the trenches calcified along the western front. Like, at a certain point, every idea that hadn't been tried yet got more and more popular as the war dragged on, but this one actually had the possibility to be a game changer. Okay. Again, so the rule up until now allowed for the slow starvation of civilians, but not,

like, blowing up their sea merchants. That one was that's right. Right. No, it's just a question of speed. Well, no, they had to let them have the potatoes unless they were war potatoes, you see? So, now, but of course, this whole thing has a downside. Obviously, like what unrestricted submarine warfare meant in practice was torpedoing American cargo ships and passenger ships for that matter. Not that a lot of Americans were like, you know, vacationing in, you know, time for anything. The right for a day. Yeah, right, right.

No, but it meant killing Americans civilians occasionally by the hundreds and that meant potentially awakening the sleeping giant that could turn the tide of the fucking war and basically every German diplomat and war planner that knew anything at all about America or American culture or American industrial power warned that this was a terrible fucking idea But eventually all the good ideas got used up. So the only thing left is the terrible ideas and ultimately the Kaiser agreed to torpedo any ship with the temerity to exist in the North Atlantic. Okay, with all that industrial power that we had

in the U.S., why didn't we just make submarines with it? Like we didn't have enough time to collect bricks, wool, and pour and grain, and we roll badly just make fucking submarines. Well, he, the America has had the robber on our space. Pretty much since we started. Is that a good tan? Well, it wouldn't, yeah, it's a good tan.

I've been told this point. The main thing standing between America and war was a bitchyly, truckulent president in the form of Woodrow Wilson. So, I wanna be super clear on this, Woodrow Wilson is shit. Fuck, Woodrow Wilson. Oh, he's the fucking worst.

He's only not the worst because it's presidents and that has Andrew Jackson and fucking Donald Trump in it, but he's the fucking, he's off. For decades, history treated him like he was some cross between Gandhi and word Jesus. So it makes emphasizing his shittiness all the more important because he was fucking sh**. He warned Jesus is the name of my rush government like that. Oh, it's great. It's so good.

No, and speak honestly, Jesus and Gandhi are kind of shit too, but that's the only scope of the session. The point is that the point is that Wilson is often portrayed as this stalwart for peace that held back the forces of war as long as anyone could have, David. And that might have been the case, honestly, but it was more out of a naive paternalism and epic levels of self-regard than any high-minded ideals. He was all the way convinced that everybody just needed to shut up and listen to his completely unworkable plan that was filled with non-starters for both sides and just agreed to end the

war on a perpetual timeout where everybody says they're sorry like they mean it. It's a lot harder to tell the downstairs neighbors to knock at the fuck off when you don't have any nudes to back. Oh right. Yeah, with masking tape right down the middle Europe nobody listens That is so close to his idea. Yeah Wilson's famous If you don't cut it out, I'm turning this tank around Topped by the one time he threatened to give Britain and Germany something to cry about

Actually that he did That's that's what ended the war. I should also point out by the way that Woodrow Wilson was a vicious, despicable, racist that set civil rights for African Americans back 50 years at least. It's not particularly relevant to the story, but anytime anyone ever brings up Woodrow Wilson, you should point that shit out. The mother fucker screened birth of a nation at the White House for fuck's sake. Okay. So it's not just pandemics that are back in Vogue in America after a hundred years. It's like 50 50 that Trump showed that at some point. Yeah. Right. Now, so okay. So Woodrow Wilson had campaigned on keeping America out of the war. And he was adamant about doing that. There are a lot of people now who think that that was all

a front and he was actually trying to manipulate the American people into war from the beginning. But that seems like a weird strategy, like making not doing what you want to do, the primary plank in your election campaign. I don't know. So I don't think we need to take that all too seriously. But there were definitely plenty of people in his cabinet that wanted to go to war. And while the popular interpretation is to call these folks war mongers, it's at least worth mentioning that this war was causing death on unprecedented scales. Nobody doubted that US involvement would end it quicker. So plunging the US into the war would definitely save lives overall, just not American lives. Right. Now, this is a shitty argument to be clear. That's a shitty

argument. You could use that to justify involvement in any war ever, basically. So I'm not bringing it up to excuse those folks so much as to explain them. Yeah, I'm guessing like the trolley problem for these guys. Not much of a problem. Right. Keep it going on schedule. Why are we even talking about this? If we hit these people and jump, can we jump them like dukes of hazard and land them on the tracks? They're not going to slow down the trouble. No matter what I do, the trolley comes down. Yeah, exactly. The problem is that dukes of hazard. Now, okay, so if anything in the universe though,

it's going to sway Wilson towards war. It's going to be this fucking telegram, okay? Because Woodrow Wilson suffers from the same problem that every man who believes himself to be perfectly logical suffers from. He isn't perfectly logical. But because he doesn't recognize that sometimes his emotions get the best of him,

there's no internal check on his emotions getting the best of him. So like everybody who thinks they're perfectly logical, they're less logical than the average person. He was in the middle of basically personally negotiating for peace with the Germans at the time this all happened. And during those negotiations, their send a message to Mexico suggested maybe we nab a couple of states while they're getting.

So clearly that's going to piss them up. What's more, they were doing it and coded messages that he personally allowed them to send on an American fucking cable. Okay, to be fair to Wilson. That is a lot for someone to take. It's like, okay, all right. Are you calling me fucking the wedding planner on our bed? The wedding planner is your mom.

You see, Matt. Are you mad? You see mad. Right. So that would have been plenty enough to Enrage him. And once Enrage, he'd be unable to back down because that's how Woodrow Wilson was. But to get there, you still have to give him the telegram without telling him how you got it. Just call yourself Sir Q S choir.

Put it on one chance. Call it a dance. Oh, splice it into birth of a nation maybe you know, Oh yeah. Yeah. So, okay. So step one, they invent a pretend

agent in Mexico and then just say that he got this telegram from a contact in the German embassy in Mexico, right? That takes care of the problem of personal if the Americans and letting them know that you're taping their international

communications. But it still doesn't solve the problem of howing off the Americans and letting them know that you're tapping their international communications. But it still doesn't solve the problem of how they make this public without letting the Germans know they've broken the diplomatic code. And this is one problem they ultimately can't really solve. But they figure that since this is a potentially war-winning reveal, it's actually worth taking that risk and burning that cup. It's weird that Germany wasn't ever changing out their code every once in a while. They were just like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no All right, so they passed along the telegram to Wilson, and as predicted, he completely loses his shit.

He's ready to go to war that minute, but his underlings remind him that the American people largely still support neutrality and his campaign slogan was basically, I sure as hell, I'm not gonna get us involved in World War I, so they leaked the telegram, and the fact that the White House is in possession of it to the associated press. Now, this part could have been super, super delicate because all Germany has to do is go, nah, uh, and the whole fucking thing

falls apart. Right. There's literally no way for America or the British to prove what the coded telegram said. Yeah. No, i think we're overstating the case for the american public's need for evidence a little bit uh... but no but it depends on what you're trying to convince them really tell them that a fucking vaccine is safe for it's a much they want uh... but but what's more if the american people find out it came from british intelligence

they're just gonna assume england was lying to try to trick us into joining the war on their side. So naturally, the Wilson administration had a bunch of half-ast defenses concocted for just such an occasion, but it turned out they didn't need any of them. Because in one of the dumbest diplomatic blunders in the history of fucking Earth, Zimmerman just admitted the shit was real and he's like, no, no, but that was if America went to war. I said, yeah, that's the vice-. I said, it's like being a cop. I said, yeah.

Is that not like being a cop? Okay, but like to be fair, our last president literally couldn't stop committing crimes on recorded audio. And this is his grandpa. He's murder. Fair. Fair. fair. Yeah.

All right, so historians have been trying to figure out for a century now what the fuck Zimmerman was thinking. And as far as I can tell, the consensus now is that this stems from the spectacular arrogance of German culture at the time. Okay. So Germans had such high opinions of their own intelligence as compared to everybody else in the world that they never seriously Considered the idea that somebody was able to decode their messages. It's one two three one two

It's great. Yeah You know how many digits we use so Zimmerman assumed they had to have something more than just this code right So he figured that lie in about it was just gonna make him look bad later on when the entirety of their evidence came out. Right. Like if he said, nah, and then the Mexican president is like, no, you guys totally proposed that. He'd lose a lot of credibility. Let's just all sort of wistfully think about a time when lying made politicians look bad. Just stop for a second and all sigh. I remember that in my lifetime. So, no, no, no, but I read about it in the story books. So, another amazing consequence, by the way,

of that German arrogance as Heath has already hinted at, is that they never stopped using that pro-made code for the entire war. In fact, they kept sending messages back and forth between Mexico and Germany using that same code that were being intercepted by the British Trying to figure out how the fuck the Americans got all Okay, you know, I was just a can with a string jutting out the middle of one of their cables in the ocean some guys less than like Okay, we figured out they're coded. They just speak German

Pretty much got it there. All right. So American opinions in the war basically changed overnight when this telegram was confirmed. Newspapers that had supported neutrality the day before we're endorsing the war one after the other news of the telegram broke in early March. And America officially declared war on Germany on April 6th. And while there were plenty of reasons for America's about face, even Woodrow Wilson's hand-picked biographer

says that the Zimmerman Telegram was probably the most decisive. All right, Noah, if you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence, what would it be? Woodrow Wilson is a racist piece of bigoted shit. Okay. No, it's not. And are you ready for the quiz? Always.

All right, Noah. This by far is the most interesting story involving a telegram until a the next message on telegram that we get into war over or be that is almost certainly going to happen. Yeah, right. Trusted a pie run again in 2024. Yeah. So I'm going to happen. Yeah, right. Trusted with pie running again in 2024. Yeah, so I'm going to go with, hey, it's going to be a... That's the small sum. What's the worst thing a sailor could be diagnosed with on a World War I submarine? A, so narcolepsy.

C, mustard gastritis, or C sea. Marianas trench mouth. That's good. I'm going to go with secret answer D being on a world war one stuff. You are correct. You are correct. All right, no, the Zimmerman Telegram is a fascinating story. It involves spies, wars, and a chance to call Woodrow Wilson a racist piece of shit a bunch of times.

But that name is boring. What should we title this episode to get more clicks? A, Mexican milk that's monarch I'd like to fuck, it's caucyding. B, the secret German doctors don't want you to know. Also German politicians and generally Germany doesn't want you to see you won't believe what they found in Zimmerman's ear. And he me a califa said, what? Oh, I fear that this correct answer is secret answer.

He's something transphobic, but I don't want to say it. I'm going to go with me. I'm going to go with B. Oh, I mean, it to say it I'm gonna go with me. I'm gonna go with B It's me a Khalifa. I believe this is always yeah, yeah, all right Eli. You're the winner. You stumped him That's right, and that means I want Keith to do the next essay about me a Khalifa. Okay. Well Well, I'm a board. I'm a board. All right. I'm actually a big fan of follow her on Twitter.

All right, well, for Tom Noah's Cecil on Eli, I'm Heath. Thank you for hanging out with us today. We'll be back next week and by then, I apparently will be an expert on something else. Between now and then, you can hear Tom and Cecil on Cognitive Disnance, and you can hear Eli knowing myself on God-Off movies, skating atheists, skeptic rap, and D&D minus. Hey, that was was in the New York Times.

Was. Just really, what was in the New York Times? Awesome. D&D minus. Ah, ah, ah, ah. We're in the New York Times. Oh, yeah, yeah. And you don't know how to thank us.

If you have no idea, you just don't know how to thank us for all the work we do. The answer is money. We want money. Yep, we love you guys. Money for that, you can don't know how to thank us for all the work we do. The answer is money. We want money. We want money for that. You can make a per episode donation at patreon.com slash citation pod. And if you'd like to get in touch with us, listen to past episodes, connect with us on social media, take a look at the show notes, check out citation pod dot com.

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