I rather doubt that having a President Bryan would have butterflied away the ZT. It was drafted be-
cause Germany was resuming unrestricted submarine warfare. They did that because they had to
break the all-too effective British blockade of Germany, which by 1916 IOTL was slowly but surely
strangling Germany(it caused an estimated 750,000 German civilian deaths, a figure, historian
Robert Leckie pointed out, which even if cut in half is still "fifty times greater than the number of
people who lost their lives on Allied ships as a result of Germany's submarine warfare."*) Had the
German navy won Jutland than the surface fleet could have smashed said blockade; but of course
it didn't, leaving the submarine Germany's only option. Besides, they also gambled that the USW
would knock Britan out of the war before American aid could be of much help(which almost happened in 1917 IOTL). Finally, an alliance with Mexico, the Germans actually thought, would tie up America & keep it from intervening(& it was also the kind of plan which appealed to the rash,
impulsive Wilhelm II- in fact wasn't he the one who dreamed it up?)
A final point. While Wilson was certainly not, like WJB, a pacifist, neither was he(@ least until the
U.S. was actually in the war)a warmonger either. It took him, after all, two-and-a-half years to
actually enter the war on the Allied side. Before then he never did anything like Lend-lease. In-
stead he issued protests(leading Theodore Roosevelt to sneer he'd lost track of the latest note's
serial number: "I am inclined to think it is No. 11,765, Series B."**) In short WW moved to war
slowly & with great reluctance. One historian- Charles Tansill- would declare in 1938 that "In
the long list of American chief executives there is no one who was a more sincere pacifist than the
one who led us into war in April, 1917."#. While this is probably going too far, I think that in
some ways @ least, WJB & WW were quite similar- & that in an ATL with a President Bryan,
events would have unfolded similarly to how they did IOTL.
*- Robert Leckie, THE WARS OF AMERICA, Vol. II, Bantam Paperbacks, 1969, p. 92.
**- Quoted. in Henry F. Pringle, THEODORE ROOSEVELT, p. 409 of the 1956, Harvest Paperback edition.
#- Quoted in Richard Hofstader, THE AMERICAN POLITICAL TRADITION, p. 338 of the 1973 Vin-
tage, paperback edition.