After drawing their war zone around the British Isles, the Germans concentrated their U-boats on British cargo ships, but four Americans were killed in other attacks—one on a British passenger ship, three others on an American oil tanker. Wilson saw at once that the submarine had driven the American ship of state into the narrows. The U.S. government could either warn its citizens away from the ships of nations at war, or it could enforce the right of neutrals to travel on any ship. Putting human safety first, Bryan championed the warning. He was overruled by Wilson and Lansing, both of whom maintained that any concession would merely invite more attacks. Negotiations between the German embassy and the State Department over the small incidents were civil, but Washington and London began to wonder what would happen if a German submarine sank the Lusitania.
Largest, sleekest, most sumptuous ship of the Cunard Line, the Lusitania was a favorite of upper-class Americans, a source of pride to Englishmen, and a galling reminder to Germans that several of their own splendid liners were stranded in the United States. In February, when Germany warned the world of the risks of crossing its new war zone around Britain, Wilson asked Ambassador Gerard to inform the German government that the United States would hold Germany to a “strict accountability” for violations of the rights that Americans enjoyed as neutrals. To Lansing, “strict accountability” meant that the German government would have to compensate Americans for lives and property destroyed by the German navy, apologize, and give assurances that such acts would not be repeated. Wilson tried to make Bryan understand that the phrase carried a threat. “We have been doing a great deal of protesting,” Wilson said, “and ‘vigorous’ protests are apt to be regarded as logically leading to action.” Which raised two more questions: What would provoke the United States to act? And once provoked, what would it do?
Wilson was in no haste to decide. In a speech on April 20, he argued that American neutrality was not motivated by indifference or self-interest but by “sympathy for mankind.” Neutrality appealed to him, he said, “because there is something so much greater to do than fight; there is a distinction waiting for this nation that no nation has ever got. That is the distinction of absolute self-control and self-mastery.”
The words of the self-mastered man in the White House filled Ambassador Bernstorff with alarm. It seemed to him that the United States was counting too heavily on neutral rights. True, the rights were enshrined in international law, but the belligerents in this war were breaking the law whenever it threatened their success. The violations that had begun with the invasion of Belgium would eventually include the systematic starvation of civilians, the use of poison gas, and a host of other practices declared inhumane in the Hague conventions drawn up before the war.
Bernstorff had no worries about the safety of the big Cunarders, which could easily outrun the U-boats. His fears centered on workaday freighters and old steamers not built for speed. But when he tried to persuade the State Department to issue a warning to American travelers, he ran up against Lansing’s insistence that citizens of neutral countries were free to sail on any ship they chose. Taking matters into his own hands, Bernstorff bought advertising space in several newspapers to remind Americans of the hazard in the war zone around Britain. His notice, signed by the Imperial German Embassy and dated April 22, first appeared in print on Saturday, May 1, which, quite by coincidence, was the day the Lusitania left New York for Liverpool.
The Lusitania’s captain, William T. Turner, appreciated the risks. He was the one who had raised the American flag and raced east across the Irish Channel in February, when House was aboard. Turner had made several crossings since, and when his new passengers mentioned the German warning in the papers, Turner easily restored their serenity. The Royal Navy was on patrol and would alert him by wireless if any U-boats were spotted near the Lusitania’s course, and submarines poked along at nine knots an hour underwater, eighteen on the surface. The Lusitania, which cruised at twenty-one knots, could do at least twenty-three.
The Times of London derided Bernstorff’s warning as an attempt to scare Americans away from British liners and guessed that it had been inspired by failure of the Germans’ submarine campaign: so far, 99.7 percent of the 16,190 merchant ships going to and from the British Isles had eluded the U-boats.
Five days into its voyage, the Lusitania’s wireless received word that submarines had been spotted near Fastnet Rock off the southern tip of the Irish coast. Captain Turner steered wide of Fastnet and ordered the lifeboats stocked and swung out. The next afternoon, at 2:10, two lookouts spotted a streak of white racing toward the ship’s starboard side. Their shouts of warning were instantaneous but too late.
Watching from the deck of Unterseeboot-20, which had fired the torpedo, Lieutenant Commander Walther Schwieger saw two explosions, walls of flame, and immense clouds of black smoke. In no time the ship listed heavily to starboard, the bow went under, and Schwieger guessed that the whole of it would be gone within minutes. He imagined the chaos on deck as he watched several lifeboats land bow first and capsize. Schwieger took his submarine down, and at 2:30 p.m., when the Lusitania slipped beneath the waves, Unterseeboot-20 was churning away from the scene.
The American embassy in London learned of the disaster at four o’clock. The first report said that no lives had been lost, so Page’s household staff carried on with preparations for the day’s big event, a dinner in honor of Colonel House. By the time the ambassador left his desk, he knew that the death toll exceeded a thousand.
In Washington, where it was lunchtime when Page’s workday ended, a reporter intercepted Bryan at a hotel to share a bare-bones bulletin: the Lusitania had been lost to a torpedo. A White House secretary gave the same news to Wilson, who canceled a round of golf to wait for more news. When none came, the president took a long automobile ride to try to calm his nerves. He learned the dimensions of the tragedy at eight o’clock, just after he returned. Shaken, he went to his study for a few minutes, then stole out of the White House for a long walk alone in the rain.
Bryan, coming home from a dinner party, wondered aloud to his wife if the Lusitania had been carrying munitions. The idea that England might be using noncombatants as a shield sickened him, and he instantly recognized that the presence of ammunition would give Germany a justification for sinking a passenger ship. He soon learned that the manifest filed with the collector of the Port of New York showed 4,200 cases of bullets and 1,250 cases of shrapnel in the ship’s hold.
The day after the disaster, Page cabled Washington to say that Britain’s senior officials were refraining from public comment but privately saying that the United States must declare war or lose the respect of the civilized world. If the United States joined the Allies, the Allies would soon triumph, and the United States would play a leading part in reorganizing the world, Page said. But if Washington turned the other cheek, “the United States will have no voice or influence in settling the war or in what follows for a long time to come.” House filed a nearly identical brief and urged Wilson to act soon.
Wilson ignored them and nearly everyone else. Cabinet members who wanted to see him were turned away. The White House made no comment on the Lusitania for more than twenty-four hours, and the first word, which came from Tumulty, said only that the president keenly felt the gravity of the situation and was considering “very earnestly, but very calmly, the right course of action to pursue.”
When Tumulty tried to talk to Wilson about the news from Queenstown, Ireland, where the dead were being buried in mass graves, Wilson could not bear it. If he were to stop and think about them, he said, “I should see red in everything, and I am afraid that when I am called upon to act . . . I could not be just to anyone.” The catastrophe hung over him like a nightmare, he said. He could not sleep, nor could he fathom how a nation calling itself civilized could perpetrate such a horror. Wilson understood that the country wanted immediate action, but as he told Tumulty, he had to weigh all the facts, because whatever he did he could not undo.
Ambassador Spring Rice studied American reactions and canvassed his Washington sources for clues to Wilson’s thinking. There were 128 Americans among the 1,198 victims. The Eastern press was demanding retribution while the Wilson administration seemed to be waiting for tempers to cool. Spring Rice presumed that the weakness of the U.S. Army ruled out a declaration of war, but he feared that another Lusitania might force the issue whether the United States was ready or not. And that would be hard on the Allies, he wrote Grey. “As our main interest is to preserve United States as base of supplies I hope language of our press will be very guarded.”
Bernstorff maintained a facade of composure while frantically working to stave off the expected U.S. declaration of war. On Monday, May 10, he visited Bryan and expressed his regret at the loss of so many American lives. Bryan, whose cooling-off treaties were never far from his mind, lamented that Germany had refused to sign one. It would have given the two nations a year to settle the Lusitania question, Bryan said. Reporting the conversation to Berlin, Bernstorff urged his government to make a move toward some kind of negotiation.
The coincidence of the Lusitania’s departure and the German embassy’s warning was too much for Ambassador Gerard, who assumed that Bernstorff had known of the plan for the attack and had “frankly, boldly, defiantly, and impudently” advertised it to the world. The available evidence suggests otherwise. For one thing, it is not clear that there was a plan to sink the Lusitania. The German admiralty’s written orders to submarine commanders made no mention of passenger ships, an omission that might well have been deliberate, as it would allow Germany to claim that it had no plans to target ocean liners while leaving U-boat commanders free to attack. Bernstorff regarded the attack as a monumental blunder; American anger over the incident instantly destroyed all hope that Germany might win the propaganda war in the United States. Finally, two of the victims had been sons of Bernstorff’s friends, and he had sent each of them off with a letter of introduction. Had he written the letters with foreknowledge of the Lusitania’s fate, he told an acquaintance, he would deserve to be hanged from the nearest lamppost.
From Berlin, Gerard forwarded a Foreign Office statement expressing sympathy for the American lives lost but placing the blame squarely on the British—for the blockade that had driven Germany to unleash the submarine and for their heedlessness in carrying passengers and munitions on the same ship. Privately, German officials reacted with emotions ranging from revulsion and disbelief to pride and cold resignation. As one wrote, “the scene of war is no golf links, the ships of the belligerent powers no pleasure palaces. The sinking of the Lusitania was for us a military necessity.”
• • •
Wilson emerged briefly on Sunday, May 9, for a round of golf meant to assure the country that war was not imminent. On Monday he kept a long-scheduled date to address several thousand newly naturalized citizens in Philadelphia. Jimmie Starling, a Secret Service agent seated behind the president, could see that he was uncharacteristically nervous—squirming, rocking on his heels, unable to keep his hands still. It seemed to Starling that Wilson relaxed once he realized that the crowd was with him, but what happened next suggests that the president was still rattled. “There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight,” Wilson said. “There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.” Wilson understood the gaffe as soon as he made it. “Too Proud to Fight” would be a page-one headline across the country.
Wilson often paraphrased himself, and “too proud to fight” was a slight variation on “there is something so much greater to do than fight,” words he had used in a speech a few weeks earlier. There had been no criticism then. But with the sinking of the Lusitania, American indifference to the slaughter in Europe gave way to fear, and if most Americans did not want to go to war, neither did they want their president to take the blow with only a whimper.
The uproar over “too proud to fight” was cut off on May 13 by the dispatch of an official note to Germany. Drafted by Wilson and revised in consultation with Bryan and Lansing, the note cast the Lusitania’s destruction as the culmination of a series of German attacks on Americans at sea, events that he said the United States had observed “with growing concern, distress and amazement.” After a nod to Germany’s generally enlightened policies in the area of international rights, Wilson said he hoped that the German government would honor freedom of the seas. He acknowledged that Germany had resorted to extraordinary measures because of the British blockade but, he said, the submarine war zone violated neutral rights and the United States would continue holding Germany to “a strict accountability for any infringement.”
Turning to his demands, Wilson said that the United States expected more than reparations and regrets. It also wanted Germany to disavow its attacks on neutral citizens and to take measures to prevent recurrences. The note closed with an unmistakable if somewhat circuitous threat: Germany should not expect the U.S. government “to omit any word or any act necessary” to protect the rights of the United States and its citizens.
From London, House and Page cabled their congratulations, and Page added that he had heard nothing but praise and gratitude for the note. In Berlin, Gerard presented the note to the foreign minister, Gottlieb von Jagow, who laughed at the mention of freedom of the seas. Gerard returned to his embassy certain that Germany’s contempt would force the United States into the war.
• • •
As secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan had been obliged to sign the note, but he did so with an uneasy conscience. Just before cabling Berlin, he had requested one more paragraph, an expression of the long friendship between the United States and Germany. Wilson and Lansing rejected the suggestion. The day after the note went off, Bryan asked Lansing to compose a notice warning passengers away from ships carrying munitions. Lansing observed that Americans would wonder why the government had not sounded the alarm earlier. Bryan took his plea to Wilson. Yes, people would ask the discomfiting question, Bryan said, but wasn’t that better than exposing American travelers to more attacks? Wilson stood firm.
It was not in the secretary of state’s nature to sabotage the president, but at a moment when Bryan seemed to want the impossible—a note that was milder but not weaker—he was an easy mark for the Austrian ambassador, Konstantin Dumba. On May 17, Dumba called on Bryan, ostensibly to offer his assistance in dealing with Berlin but really to fish for some sort of statement that could be made to serve the purposes of the Central Powers. When Bryan said that the United States did not desire war, Dumba spread the rumor that Wilson had written a strong note to Germany only to silence his bellicose American critics, particularly Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt had raced into print to accuse Germany of mass murder and to tell Americans that “we earn as a nation measureless scorn and contempt if we follow the lead of those who exalt peace above righteousness, if we heed the voices of those feeble folk who bleat to high heaven that there is peace when there is no peace. For many months our government has preserved between right and wrong a neutrality which would have excited the emulous admiration of Pontius Pilate—the archtypical neutral of all time.”
Dumba informed Vienna that Wilson’s stern note to Germany was not to be taken seriously. Vienna forwarded the message to Berlin, and it reached the Wilhelmstrasse just as Ambassador Gerard turned up at the German Foreign Office to tell Arthur Zimmermann that if Berlin failed to meet Washington’s demands, it would have to take the consequences. Zimmermann shared Dumba’s message and the astounded Gerard immediately reported the exchange to the State Department.
Bryan, who had been made to look like a disloyal fool, was incensed. Dumba, asked to explain himself, professed his innocence and mused that Zimmermann must have been pulling Gerard’s leg. Dumba extricated himself by agreeing to cable the German government about Zimmermann’s “misinterpretation,” a euphemism that allowed him to save Bryan’s face as well as his own.
• • •
Wilson did not wish he had taken a softer line, but as he waited for Germany’s reply, he gave House permission to revive a proposal the United States had made months before: an end to the British blockade on civilian foodstuffs for Germany in exchange for an end to the German submarine war on Britain. Grey seemed generally amenable, although he said that the British were unlikely to consider the proposal anytime soon; it would have to be taken up by the cabinet, which was in the midst of reorganizing.
House’s decision to press for the bargain sparked a quarrel with Page, who was sick of House’s interference in affairs that ought to be managed by the embassy. Page said that he and Grey were managing perfectly well by themselves. When House sputtered that Wilson wanted these matters handled unofficially, Page replied that nine-tenths of his work was carried out in that manner. Clearly upset, House tried to acquit himself in a letter to Wilson. “I am very careful not to openly transgress upon any of [Page’s] prerogatives, and Sir Edward understands this and aids me in every way possible,” he wrote. House had done himself in by confiding in so many British officials that word of his covert talks inevitably got back to Page.
Refusing to admit to any unhappiness about the disagreement, he told Wilson that he had come around to Page’s view. There was no doubt that neutrality had been the proper policy for the United States to take, House wrote Wilson, but the United States was now “bound up more or less in [the Allies’] success, and I do not think we should do anything that can possibly be avoided to alienate the good feeling that they now have for us. If we lose their goodwill we will not be able to figure at all in peace negotiations.” With that, House showed that he was not the devoted neutral the president expected him to be. It was a surprising confession, but it elicited an even more surprising reaction from Wilson—silence.
Berlin rejected Wilson’s proposal. “Germany in no need of food,” Gerard cabled after a meeting in the Wilhelmstrasse. House could scarcely believe it, and his skepticism was well founded. The German government denied reports of starvation when there was a need to boast of Germany’s self-sufficiency but insisted that civilians were starving when called upon to justify the submarine war. The truth was that food prices were soaring and bread rationing would soon go into effect. Soon after the war, the German National Health Office reported that the British blockade had starved 763,000 civilians to death.
On May 29, still waiting for the German answer to his note, Wilson and Bernstorff met secretly at the White House, and Bernstorff informed Berlin that Wilson was again entertaining the idea of mediation. The president wanted to build a coalition of neutrals which would demand that the belligerents begin peace talks, Bernstorff explained. If the belligerents refused, the neutrals would stop supplying them with food and munitions.
Did Wilson truly believe that the Allies or the Central Powers would bow to a coalition of neutrals? Or that the neutrals would agree to sacrifice their trade, which had grown ever more lucrative despite the disruptions caused by the war? Bernstorff declined to speculate about the neutrals but was certain the belligerents were in no mood for mediation. He advised Berlin to do nothing and “let the odium of rejection fall on England.”
• • •
The German reply to Wilson’s note reached Washington on May 31. Granting none of the U.S. demands, it summarized the minor incidents before the Lusitania and noted the status of each case, Germany’s previous expressions of regret, and a willingness to make financial amends. Germany pointed out that it had already extended its sympathy for American lives lost in the attack on the Lusitania and wished now to call attention to certain overlooked aspects of the case. The Lusitania had been transporting ammunition and was armed and staffed with expert gunners. It was also carrying Canadian troops headed for the Western Front. And submarine commanders could not be expected to abide by the old rule requiring that a ship be visited and searched before it was destroyed, because the British Admiralty had ordered merchant ships to take one of two actions when faced with a U-boat on the surface: ram or flee.
In fact, the Lusitania was not armed, it had no gunners, and there were no Canadian soldiers aboard. There was indeed an order to ram or flee, but as Lansing observed, a submarine would be long gone before a liner could maneuver into position for a good swat. There was no denying the thousands of cases of bullets and shrapnel, however, and it was difficult to refute Germany’s argument that it was acting in self-defense whenever it destroyed enemy munitions. Germany blamed the disaster on the Cunard Line, for carrying ammunition and passengers on the same ship. The German government asked the United States to examine the facts, reply, and give Germany the opportunity to make a final statement.
Wilson typed out his reply before he went to bed and took it with him to the next cabinet meeting. Bryan, who came in a bit late, was still smarting from the embarrassment inflicted by Ambassador Dumba, still heavy of heart about the sternness of Wilson’s first note, and afraid that Wilson would adopt an even more rigid stance. He took his customary seat next to Wilson, leaned back, and closed his eyes. No one in the room considered Germany’s reply satisfactory, but when it became apparent that the cabinet favored a stiff answer, Bryan hotly demanded a simultaneous protest to England for its unending confiscations of American cargo. Several members objected on the grounds that nuisances to trade were trivial beside the tragedy of the Lusitania. Bryan remarked that the cabinet seemed to favor the Allies. Wilson upbraided him for doubting his colleagues’ commitment to neutrality. Bryan did not retreat and told Wilson after the meeting that he thought he should resign. Wilson asked him to stay on and help avert a war, then followed up with a note asking Bryan how he would answer the Germans.
Bryan replied in writing, arguing once more that the U.S. government ought to warn Americans not to travel on the ships of nations at war. He begged Wilson to propose arbitration and to press Congress for a ban on transporting ammunition on passenger ships. He also asked Wilson to protest the practice in a note to Britain—before communicating with Germany. Otherwise the communiqué to Berlin might lead to war, he said. “This may be our last chance to speak for peace.”
Wilson let Bryan know that his arguments had not carried, and Bryan went home to tell his wife that he had decided to resign. She began to cry and could not stop. Bryan fled the room, then fled the house and walked over to the home of Secretary McAdoo. As the son-in-law of the president, McAdoo enjoyed an intimacy with Wilson that no other cabinet member would ever achieve, and Bryan hoped that McAdoo could help him figure out how to resign without embarrassing the administration. Bryan poured out his woes. He had not slept well for two months. He worried constantly about war. He was hurt by Wilson’s rejection of his ideas, upset by his clashes with the cabinet. And as a pacifist, he said, he could not in good conscience sign the note that Wilson proposed to send.
When McAdoo brought Wilson up to date, Wilson was unsurprised, but not entirely calm, and his first apprehensions were about his own prestige. Apart from Bryan, the cabinet was united, but what if Bryan’s departure were read as a sign that the administration, and perhaps the country, disapproved of the president’s management of the crisis?
Wilson consulted Tumulty and Secretary Houston of the Department of Agriculture, both of whom urged him to accept Bryan’s resignation. Tumulty pointed out that Bryan was not useful in the State Department, and Houston thought that the public would support the president, not the secretary of state.
Bryan resigned in a letter to Wilson that began and ended graciously but took a disconcerting twist in the middle. It fell to the president to speak for the nation, Bryan said, but it would be his duty as a private citizen to promote the cause nearest his heart, the prevention of war. In other words, as Wilson persevered in his effort to keep the United States out of the war by winning concessions from Germany, Bryan would be out proselytizing for peace with or without concessions.
Wilson replied that his feelings about the resignation went much deeper than regret. “I sincerely deplore it,” he said. “Our objects are the same and we ought to pursue them together. I yield to your desire only because I must and wish to bid you Godspeed in the parting.”
Despite his frequent exasperation with Bryan, Wilson was genuinely fond of him and saddened by their rift. But the break disturbed him less for personal reasons than for the effect it might have on the impasse with Germany. Bryan electrified the crowds who came to hear him, and if his peace crusade attracted a large following, Germany might conclude that it could ignore Wilson’s demands because the American people would not support him if he asked Congress for a declaration of war. In the days leading up to Bryan’s departure, Wilson was beset by punishing headaches, and on the morning of June 9, when the news of the resignation appeared in the papers, he told a friend that it was “always painful to feel that any thinking man of disinterested motive, who has been your comrade and confidant, has turned away from you and set his hand against you; and it is hard to be fair and not think that the motive is something sinister. But I shall wait to think about him and put things to be done in the foreground. I have been deserted before. The wound does not heal, with me, but neither does it cripple.”
Bryan was also wounded. To Josephus Daniels he remarked that instead of resigning he should have just told Wilson to give his desk to Colonel House. The sarcasm was out of character, as was his fleeting fantasy of taking revenge by writing a book, a notion he impulsively shared with Ambassador Jusserand. The two had run into each other just after Bryan’s last meeting with Wilson. The book would recount his experiences as secretary of state and argue for peace at any price, Bryan explained. Jusserand observed that such an argument made the victims of a war as culpable as the perpetrators. Bryan offered no rebuttal. To Paris, Jusserand wrote that if Bryan’s peace campaign succeeded, it would be a coup for the Germans, who “as we know all too well, are belligerents in Europe and pacifists in the United States.” Jusserand could scarcely believe that Bryan had resigned in the middle of a foreign crisis. No other secretary of state had ever done so, Jusserand said. But, he added, no other American secretary of state had ever possessed Bryan’s peculiar mix of “convictions and ignorance, mysticism and practicality, humanitarianism and puerility.”
Ambassador Spring Rice sent Mrs. Bryan a charming note saying that he would miss the secretary’s visits to the embassy and offering a cheerful apology for his ungovernable temper. “When I think how aggravating I have been,” he wrote, “I am simply appalled by Mr. Bryan’s good humor.” At the same time, Spring Rice warned the Foreign Office that Bryan’s return to the lecture circuit could hurt the Allies. As Spring Rice saw it, Bryan, now free to speak his mind, would “give a visible head to the ‘long-haired men and short-haired women’ who are agitating in this country for peace, prohibition, woman suffrage and the prohibition of the export of arms.”
The president and the Allied ambassadors fretted for naught. Bryan soon disappeared from the front pages, a fate he himself had foreseen. As he told friends on the day he resigned, “I go out into the dark. The president has the prestige and power on his side.”
