Woodrow Wilson and World War I
KENDRICK A. CLEMENTS
University of South Carolina
The United States declared war on Germany and entered World War I on April 6,
1917, but the crucial decision that led inexorably to that moment had been made two years
earlier. In demanding that German submarines obey traditional rules of surface warfare, the
Wilson administration turned over to the Germans the choice between war and peace. That
policy was less the result of rational analysis of a particular challenge to American interests
than the outcome of complex interactions among assumptions and personalities in the months
between August 1914 and February 1915.
On February 4, 1915, the Imperial German government announced the establishment of a war zone in the waters surrounding the British Isles.1 In that zone, German
submarines would sink Allied ships on sight, and because the Allies frequently used
neutral flags to disguise their ships, the Germans warned that neutral ships might also
be in danger and would be wise to avoid the zone. The announcement was a direct challenge to the Allies’ economic lifeline, but it was scarcely less a threat to neutrals like the
United States, for whom trade with the Allies had become an economic necessity.
Considering how important were the American interests that German submarine
warfare jeopardized, it might be expected that the United States government would have
given the proclamation its fullest and most careful consideration before responding. But
that was not the case. For a number of reasons, American leaders were unable to see the
implications of the German announcement and to react appropriately to the challenge.
Although the technology represented by the submarine had revolutionized warfare, the
United States answered the German announcement by demanding that German submarines obey rules that had been developed in the 18th century to govern the behavior
of sailing ships. In responding as they did, they surrendered to Germany the ability to
1. The proclamation is enclosed in Ambassador Johann von Bernstorff to Secretary of State William
Jennings Bryan, February 7, 1915, in U.S. Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the
United States, 1915, Supplement [hereafter FRUS] (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1928),
95-97.
Kendrick A. Clements is professor of history at the University of South Carolina. His most recent book (coauthored with Eric A. Cheezum) is Woodrow Wilson, in the American Presidents Reference Series published by
Congressional Quarterly Press in 2003.
Presidential Studies Quarterly 34, no. 1 (March)
© 2004 Center for the Study of the Presidency
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decide whether and when the United States would enter the war. Unless the Germans
gave up submarine warfare completely, the choice of war or peace lay in the hands of
every submarine commander peering through his periscope at a dimly seen silhouette
on the horizon.
Little evidence was ever found to support the contention of isolationists in the
1930s that bankers and munitions makers maneuvered the United States into the war,
but there can be little doubt that economic and emotional ties to the Allies made a suspension of trade with Britain and France unlikely, no matter what the risks.2 Those same
ties also made it virtually certain that if the United States entered the war, it would do
so on the Allied side. Yet it is wrong to believe that because American leaders were
sympathetic toward the Allies, they deliberately led the country into war. As Arthur
Link pointed out, the evidence is strong that “Wilson tried sincerely to pursue policies
of rigid neutrality toward the Entente Allies,” that he “was not influenced by considerations of immediate national security,” and that “he believed that American interests, to
say nothing of the interests of mankind, would be best protected by a negotiated peace
without victory.” In the end, Link concludes, Wilson’s decision for war was the result of
his conviction that there was no other means available to protect American rights on the
high seas, and his belief that the war was in its final stages and could be brought to a
speedier end by American participation.3
The weakness of Link’s argument is that it accepts too easily Wilson’s contention
that there was no other way to protect American interests than to go to war. As John A.
Thompson has pointed out in a recent biography of Wilson, however, there was an alternative, one that the generation of the 1930s found perfectly acceptable: the surrender of
the right of American ships to pass through the war zone.4 Considering that the United
States had few merchant vessels of its own when the war began, and that the British controlled the seas until early 1917, a “cash and carry” policy such as that legislated by Congress in the mid-1930s would have curtailed American trade with the Allies very little
and might have made it politically feasible to issue a warning to Americans that they
would travel in the war zone at their own risk. Such a policy was in fact considered in
the spring of 1915, but only after the government had declared that it would insist on
the right of Americans and their ships to travel anywhere on the high seas without regard
to the conditions of war. By then, it was too late.
The problem with the American policy toward submarine warfare that was set in
February 1915 was not that it was necessarily wrong, but that it was determined almost
casually, without careful analysis either of its implications or of any alternatives. Histo2. Walter Millis argued in 1935 that American economic ties to the Allies led the Germans to adopt
submarine warfare and also disposed the United States to adopt a strongly anti-submarine stance in order
to protect its trade. See “Will We Stay Out of the Next War? How We Entered the Last One,” New Republic 83 ( July 31, 1935): 323-27. For a modern argument that economics and emotion together led the United
States into the war, see John W. Coogan, The End of Neutrality: The United States, Britain, and Maritime Rights,
1899-1915 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981).
3. Arthur S. Link, Wilson: Campaigns for Progressivism and Peace, 1916-1917 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), viii-ix.
4. John A. Thompson, Woodrow Wilson (London: Longman for Pearson Education, 2002), 108-09.
For the 1930s, see Wayne S. Cole, Senator Gerald P. Nye and American Foreign Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962), 9-11.
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rians have been too ready to take Wilson at his word when he declared in April 1917
that there was no alternative to war and thus have not looked carefully enough at the
combination of people and events that contributed to the February 1915 policy
declaration.
Whether or not Wilson ever actually said, on the eve of his inauguration, that it
would be “an irony of fate” if his administration had to focus on foreign issues, it was
certainly true that he had thought very little about foreign policy, either as a scholar or
as a presidential candidate.5 His attention was fixed firmly on domestic reform, and his
advisers, including Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, concurred with that priority. By the late summer of 1914, when World War I began in Europe, the last major
element of Wilson’s “New Freedom” program, antitrust legislation, was nearing passage
in Congress. Until that was complete, administration leaders had little interest in events
outside the United States.
The only one of Wilson’s advisers whose focus was not almost exclusively domestic was Colonel Edward M. House. Unburdened by a position in the administration,
House recognized far sooner than most Americans how dangerous the European situation was becoming, and in the spring of 1914 he went to Europe to explore the possibility of promoting an Anglo-German accommodation on naval armaments. Wilson paid
little attention to House’s effort, writing at one point in response to a report from House
about a meeting with British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey that he hoped the
colonel was “getting a lot of fun and pleasure out of these things.” A few days later he
sent vague “congratulations” for the way House was “serving the country we love and
the peace of the world.”6
Perhaps Wilson would have taken House’s efforts more seriously had one of House’s
more important reports not been lost in a mix-up, but it is not likely.7 Europe’s controversies seemed very distant from America in the summer of 1914, and Wilson’s attention was fully occupied not only by the progress of his program in Congress, but by the
rapidly deteriorating health of his wife. On August 4, two days before her death, he sent
an offer to the European capitals “to act in the interest of European peace” in any way
he could, but the offer was hardly more than pro forma. His personal attitude, as well as
that of the nation, was more accurately expressed by the proclamation of neutrality he
issued the same day.8
Ellen Wilson’s death plunged the president into a depression in which he could
barely function and from which he was slow to recover. “How hard, how desperately
5. Quoted in Ray Stannard Baker, Woodrow Wilson: Life and Letters, vol. 4 (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, Page & Co., 1927-1939), 55.
6. Wilson to House, June 26, July 9, 1914, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Arthur S. Link et al., eds.,
vol. 30 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966-1994), May 6-September 5, 1914 (1979), 214, 264
[hereafter cited as PWW].
7. House wrote about a promising meeting with Sir Edward Grey on June 26 but erroneously
destroyed the letter without sending it, thinking he was merely tearing up a rough draft. He did not discover his mistake and send the letter until July 4, by which time the assassination of the Austrian archduke
had triggered general European mobilization. See House to Wilson, June 26, 1914, and July 4, 1914, ibid.,
214-15, 255-56.
8. FRUS, 1914, Supplement (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1928), 42, 547-51.
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hard” it was to go on with his duties, he wrote to a friend. In November, a few days
after midterm congressional elections returned the Democrats to power with reduced
majorities, he declared privately that he had lost his interest in politics and had no desire
to run for a second term.9 Depression weighed him down throughout the autumn of
1914 and into early 1915. Then, after he met a charming widow, Edith Bolling Galt,
and began to fall in love, another less serious form of distraction began to affect him. If
in the one case he was too paralyzed by grief to think clearly about foreign policy, in the
other he may have been inclined in the euphoria of new love to be too optimistic.
House’s lament that during the autumn of 1914 Wilson seemed to be “singularly
lacking in appreciation of the importance of this European crisis . . .” was confirmed by
Ray Stannard Baker, later Wilson’s first major biographer. Baker paid a call on the president at the White House on September 17 and found him almost wholly preoccupied
with domestic issues. The president’s attitude, he observed, mirrored that of the American public, which he described as “not only uninformed, but largely uninterested” about
the situation in Europe.10 The Literary Digest, which polled 367 newspaper editors in
November on their papers’ attitudes toward the war, found them in favor of neutrality
by a two to one margin, while an article in Current Opinion argued that the war had actually made politicians less rather than more likely to debate foreign policy during the
congressional campaign.11 Secretary of State Bryan, whose position if not his inclination
made him responsible for foreign policy, spent part of September on vacation in North
Carolina and most of October out of touch with the State Department while he campaigned for Democratic congressional candidates. His absences illustrated the prevailing
belief in the administration and the country that there were no major issues arising from
the war that needed the attention of policymakers.
With Bryan away and Wilson distracted, control over American policy toward the
belligerents fell largely into the hands of the Counselor of the State Department, Robert
Lansing. A slender, dignified, graying man of 50, Lansing brought long experience in
international law to the department when he joined it in March 1914. Physically and
temperamentally he presented a striking contrast to Secretary Bryan, and although he
was nominally a Democrat, his conservative outlook would probably have prevented his
appointment except for House’s sponsorship. By temperament Lansing was a realist, and
by experience he was accustomed to seeking practical accommodations of conflicts.
Twenty years of involvement in negotiating settlements of conflicts with Great Britain
had given him confidence that most disagreements could be compromised as well as a
strong admiration for the English, but his Anglophilia was tempered with a caution that
British Ambassador Cecil Arthur Spring Rice characterized as “the lawyer’s instinct to
make good his case.” Although studious, thoughtful, and well informed, Lansing was
9. Wilson to Mary Hulbert, August 23, 1914, PWW 30: 437; and same to same, November 8,
1914, PWW 31, September 6-December 31, 1914 (1979), 280.
10. House Diary, Vol. 5, September 28, October 22, 1914, pp. 182, 202, in the Edward M. House
Papers, Yale University Library, New Haven, CT; and Baker, 5: 197-98, 21.
11. “American Sympathies in the War,” Literary Digest 49 (November 14, 1914): 939-41, 974-78;
and “The Wilson Administration in Its First Trial at the Polls,” Current Opinion 57 (November 1914): 30508.
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neither imaginative nor daring. In the state department he was the ideal man to
implement standard policies but not one to quickly grasp unprecedented situations and
respond creatively to them.12
In Bryan’s absence, Lansing became the policymaker during the autumn of 1914
on a series of minor but cumulatively important issues. Treating each as separate from
the others and failing to consider their collective impact on American policy, Lansing
sought practical accommodations of what he viewed as technical problems. Because all
of the issues had to do with Anglo-American relations, his compromises gradually moved
the United States from impartial neutrality toward a position that slightly favored the
Allies—or at least one that the Germans perceived as pro-Allied. German frustration
mounted throughout the autumn, but they had no means by which to either bribe or
threaten the Americans into changes in policy.
The first of these issues arose in August 1914, when the British protested that the
Germans were using radio stations in the United States to send messages to their warships. The Germans responded that because the British had cut the transatlantic cables,
they had no other secure way to send diplomatic messages between Berlin and Washington. Lansing arranged to have the two high-powered radio stations being used by the
Germans taken over by the Navy and drew up a set of regulations under which both sets
of belligerents would be allowed to use them if they provided the Navy Department
with copies of their messages.13 The compromise seemed fair to both sides, but because
the British and French could use the cables and therefore did not need to reveal their
messages to the American government, it actually subtly favored the Allies.
A second issue also arose in August, when the British announced they intended to
arm merchant vessels for self-defense. The Germans protested that armed merchant
vessels became, in effect, warships, and as such should not be permitted to remain in
American neutral ports for more than 24 hours. The British responded that the vessels
were not really warships because their armament was purely defensive. Lansing accepted
the British argument, asking only that they keep armed vessels out of American ports
as much as possible or stow weapons in the hold when ships were in port.14 As with the
radio stations, the apparent compromise favored the Allies.
A third issue had to do with the Declaration of London, a set of rules governing
the rights and duties of neutrals in time of war that had been drafted at an international
conference in 1909.15 From the standpoint of neutrals and small-navy nations like
Germany, the declaration was advantageous because it established a “free list” of prod12. Sir Cecil Arthur Spring Rice, The Letters and Friendships of Sir Cecil Spring Rice: A Record, vol. 2
(London: Constable, 1929), 238; and Daniel M. Smith, “Robert Lansing,” in An Uncertain Tradition: American Secretaries of State in the Twentieth Century, Norman A. Graebner, ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961),
101-27.
13. See FRUS, 1914, Supplement, 667-81.
14. Ibid., 598, 604-14. The noted expert on international law (and Lansing’s predecessor as Counselor of the State Department), John Bassett Moore, believed that Lansing had misread the precedents
and that an armed merchant ship did in fact become a warship, but Moore pointed out that no one in the
American government really considered the full implications of the issue until the late spring of 1915. See
The Collected Papers of John Bassett Moore (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1944), 128-29.
15. FRUS, 1909 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1914), 320-33.
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ucts (including raw cotton) that could not be seized by a belligerent as contraband in
time of war and because it set strict standards for blockade. The United States Senate
consented to the declaration in 1912, but British delays led Presidents Taft and Wilson
to withhold ratification. On August 6, 1914, Wilson approved Lansing’s draft of a
message to the belligerents asking if they would apply the declaration for the duration
of the war. The Germans quickly accepted, but on August 26 the British responded that
they would agree only with some additions and modifications to the contraband rules.
That set off a heated debate in Washington. State Department Solicitor Cone Johnson
drafted a sharp protest against British policy, but House and Lansing believed that the
differences between the British position and the declaration were not sufficiently important to risk a breach. In private conversations with Ambassador Spring Rice, the two
men urged the British to accept the substance of the Declaration of London in order to
prevent the growth of hostility in the United States. On September 28 Lansing sent to
London a message that, while contending that “the terms of the Declaration of London
represent the limit to which this Government could go with the approbation and support
of its people,” stressed America’s “earnest wish to avoid every cause of irritation and controversy” between the two governments and assured the British of “the earnest spirit of
friendship” that motivated the American government. It was not difficult for the British
to read between the lines of this message, taken in context with House and Lansing’s
conversations with Spring Rice, and to conclude that the Americans would not really
insist on the declaration. Although thereafter Lansing sent repeated requests to London
for full adherence to the declaration, on October 20 he recommended to the president
dropping it and standing instead on traditional neutral rights. Two days later, the State
Department offered that arrangement officially to the British.16 Lansing was satisfied that
despite the abandonment of the American demand, the British would “abide closely by
the provisions of the Declaration of London,” but viewed from Berlin, the arrangement,
like others of the same period, looked like a sacrifice of neutrality on the altar of
commerce.17
A fourth issue on which Lansing compromised in Bryan’s absence was the so-called
“loan ban.” Bryan had long believed that modern war was so expensive that nations could
only sustain it by borrowing abroad. Accordingly, when the war began, Bryan seized an
early opportunity to issue, with the president’s approval, a statement admitting the legality of private loans but expressing the opinion that they would be “inconsistent with the
true spirit of neutrality.”18 The Germans, recognizing it would be easier for the Allies
than the Central Powers to borrow money in the United States, were pleased at what
16. FRUS, 1914, Supplement, 216-33 (Lansing’s September 28 message is on pp. 232-33), 248-58;
and Lansing to Wilson, October 20, 1914, FRUS, The Lansing Papers, 1914-1920, vol. 1 (Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 1939), 255-56.
17. Memorandum, September 18, 1914, Robert Lansing Papers, vol. 4, Manuscripts Division, Library
of Congress. Arthur Link points out correctly that the United States had no right to insist on the Declaration of London, but that is not exactly the issue. Arthur S. Link, Wilson: The Struggle for Neutrality, 19141915 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 126-27.
18. The Secretary of State to J.P. Morgan and Company, August 15, 1914, FRUS, 1914, Supplement,
580. For Bryan’s earlier advocacy of this principle, see American Peace Congress, Proceedings of the National
Arbitration and Peace Congress, New York, April 14th to 17th, 1907 (New York: American Peace Congress,
1907), 313; and The Commoner 7 (April 26, 1907), 4-5.
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came to be referred to erroneously as a “loan ban,” but economic reality soon eroded it.19
When the war began, the American economy, already in recession, was thrown into chaos.
The stock market closed from July 31 to November 28, and export markets virtually
disappeared, at least for the short term. The South, with a bumper crop of cotton that
had been mostly destined for export, was devastated as cotton prices plummeted from
13.5 cents a pound to 6 or 7 cents. The government, still dependent for nearly 40 percent
of its revenue on the tariff, faced a $60-100 million deficit unless trade could be restored
quickly.20 It was not surprising, therefore, that when Wilson was asked about loans at a
news conference on October 15, he replied, off the record, that in his opinion private
loans “stand in the same case as anything else.” The next day an article in The New York
Times cited “a high authoritative quarter” as having indicated that money was a legal
export, and Wilson’s explanation a few days later that the government had never claimed
to have legal authority to prevent loans hardly altered the impression that the loan ban
was weakening.21 On the evening of October 23 Wilson and Lansing met at the White
House and agreed that, although the ban on public loans should continue, “bank credits”
to belligerent governments were essential to facilitate trade.22 The change in policy was
not announced officially until late March of 1915, but by that time the British and
French in particular had negotiated extensive credit arrangements that enabled them to
finance their purchases in the United States, and the American economy was well on its
way to recovery.23 Lansing, who never had much enthusiasm for the loan ban, saw the
new policy as neutral because it applied equally to both sides, but its effect was unneutral because only the Allies needed to purchase large quantities of American products
and had the ships with which to transport their purchases to Europe. In order to protect
American markets, a policy that had favored the Central Powers over the Allies was unintentionally converted into one that favored the Allies over the Central Powers.
No one in the State Department—and certainly not the frequently absent Bryan—
intended the policies developed during the autumn of 1914 to favor the Allies over the
Central Powers. The goal was always impartial neutrality, but piecemeal handling of
problems, and pressure to expand foreign markets for American goods during an election year when the economy was in recession led to a series of decisions that, in practice, redefined policy in ways that biased it in favor of the biggest customers, the British
and French. Not surprisingly, Germans and their sympathizers in the United States
regarded this process with deep suspicion.
From the German point of view, however, American actions were unimportant in
comparison to the one thing the United States refused to do: ban the sale of arms. The
idea of an arms embargo had long been discussed by members of the pre-war peace
movement, and when war began, rumors circulated that the American government
19. Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, My Three Years in America (New York: Scribner, 1920), 40.
20. Link, Wilson: Struggle for Neutrality, 74-104.
21. PWW 31: 152; and The New York Times, October 16, 1914, p. 1, and Oct. 20, 1914, p. 5.
22. Memorandum by Lansing, October 23, 1914, PWW 31: 219-20.
23. Notice to the press, March 31, 1915, FRUS, 1915, Supplement, 820. In September 1915, the
administration formally lifted the ban on loans as well as credits. Richard W. Van Alstyne, “Private American Loans to the Allies, 1914-1916,” Pacific Historical Review 2 ( June 1933): 188-92.
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might adopt such a policy. Progressive Republican Congressman Horace Towner of Iowa
proposed an embargo on August 28, and other representatives and senators soon joined
him, but by that time the State Department had already announced that export of contraband (including weapons and munitions) was legal under the neutrality laws and the
president’s neutrality proclamation.24 There is no evidence that anyone in the White
House or the State Department, including Secretary Bryan, seriously considered the idea
of an embargo, either as a desirable policy in itself, or as a tool with which to exert pressure on the belligerents.
Although initial proposals for an arms embargo came from supporters of the peace
movement and isolationists, German- and Irish-Americans soon took it up. In midSeptember, the State Department privately informed Ambassador Johann von Bernstorff
and a German-American group that it would not endorse an embargo, and on October
15 the department issued an official circular affirming its position.25 As American neutrality policy evolved during the autumn, however, those who saw the administration’s
policy as increasingly pro-Allied turned more and more to the arms embargo as the only
method of redressing the balance and putting pressure on the Allies to respect American rights. On the first of December, 16,000 German- and Irish-Americans met in
Chicago to form the German-Irish Central Legislative Committee for the Furtherance of
American Neutrality, with the express intention of lobbying for an arms embargo, and
on December 7, Congressmen Richard Bartholdt and Henry Vollmer introduced arms
embargo bills in the House; a few days later Gilbert Hitchcock did the same in the
Senate.26
Hearings on the various arms embargo bills were held in the House and Senate at
the end of December and the beginning of January. With the backing of peace groups,
midwestern and southern isolationists, and German- and Irish-Americans, it began to
look as if the legislation might pass. At the request of the president, Senator William J.
Stone, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, invited Secretary Bryan to
comment on the arms embargo issue, and on January 20, 1915, in a public letter, Bryan
argued that, unlike the loan ban, an arms embargo “would not operate equally upon the
nations at war” and would therefore be unneutral.27 Armed with Bryan’s letter, Chairman Henry D. Flood of the House Foreign Relations Committee was able to get the legislation tabled. Although the arms embargo issue did not disappear after January 1915,
worsening relations with Germany after that point made it improbable that any policy
that seemed to favor the Central Powers would be approved.
24. Merle Curti, Peace or War: The American Struggle, 1636-1936 (New York: Norton, 1936), 231-32;
and Bryan to Secretary of the Treasury William G. McAdoo, August 7, 1914, FRUS, 1914, Supplement, 571
(a printed circular saying the same thing was issued by the State Department on Aug. 15).
25. Clifton J. Child, “German-American Attempts to Prevent the Exportation of Munitions of War,
1914-1915,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 25 (December 1938): 353; and FRUS, 1914, Supplement, 57374.
26. Carl V. Wittke, German-Americans and the World War (Columbus: Ohio State Archaeological and
Historical Society, 1936), 55-64; and Horace L. Brand, Chairman of the German-Irish Central Legislative
Committee for the Furtherance of American Neutrality, to William Gibbs McAdoo, December 9, 1914,
William Gibbs McAdoo Papers, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress.
27. Stone to Bryan, January 8, 1915, and Bryan to Stone, January 20, 1915, FRUS, 1914, Supplement, vi-xiv (the quoted line is on p. xii).
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The reasons for the administration’s adamant opposition to the arms embargo are
not obvious. Considering that the United States was in the midst of a serious controversy with Britain over neutral rights in December 1914 (a protest about British violations of American rights was sent on December 26), it might have been expected that
Wilson would have welcomed at least the threat of an embargo to pressure the British
into concessions. Ambassador Spring Rice was so worried about the possibility that he
sent a panicky cable to London speculating about whether it might be possible to respond
by threatening Wilson’s “cherished ambition” of mediating the conflict.28 He need not
have worried. Bryan dismissed the possibility of an embargo, arguing that a threat would
not be “effective in securing any understanding.”29 And in a letter to the banker Jacob
Schiff on December 8, Wilson disavowed any intention of supporting the proposal: “The
precedents of international law are so clear, the sales proceed from so many sources, and
my lack of power is so evident, that I have felt that I could do nothing else than leave
the matter to settle itself.”30 The argument was disingenuous. It was true that international law did not require a neutral to ban the sale of weapons, but neither did it forbid
it from doing so, just as international law neither prohibited nor required the imposition of a loan embargo. Paradoxically, Wilson rejected the arms embargo but insisted to
Schiff that his “duty was clear” to enforce the loan ban.
The most flattering explanation of the administration’s course on the arms embargo
was that advanced by Bryan: that an embargo would have unneutrally benefited one
side over the other.31 A more pragmatic explanation was offered by Colonel House, who
argued that American economic dependence on trade with the Allies had become too
heavy to risk cutting off an important part of it. “Our whole industrial and agricultural
population would cry out against it,” he declared.32 Two other arguments advanced by
Lansing may also have had a substantial influence. One was that “a neutral government
. . . cannot vary its rules or change its policy . . . during the progress of the war.”
Although erroneous, Lansing’s contention may have had weight with Wilson and Bryan,
who depended on his knowledge of international law. But almost certainly of more
importance was Lansing’s argument that the principal public advocate of the embargo,
Professor Hugo Münsterberg of Harvard, was “probably . . . a paid agent of the German
Government sent to the United States to create sentiment in favor of Germany” and “to
28. Ambassador Spring Rice to Sir Edward Grey, December 11, 1914, Letters . . . of Sir Cecil Spring
Rice, 2: 247.
29. Bryan to Wilson, March 1, 1915, PWW 32, January 1-April 16, 1915 (1980): 301.
30. PWW 31: 425. During the autumn of 1914 and the spring of 1915, Wilson several times compared the proposed arms embargo to Jefferson’s and Madison’s embargo prior to the War of 1812, which he
characterized as “more hurtful to us than to the countries against which they were aimed.” He was aware
that Madison was the only other Princeton graduate to have been president, and he certainly did not want
to provoke a conflict with Britain over trade restrictions, but it is hard to know how much possible analogies with the War of 1812 affected his course. See Wilson to William Bayard Hale, March 31, 1915, and
Robert Lansing to Joseph Tumulty, March 19, 1915, both in Wilson Papers, Series IV, Box 50, Manuscripts
Division, Library of Congress; Link, Wilson: Struggle for Neutrality, 114-16; and Baker, 5: 212-15.
31. Bryan reiterated the explanation after his resignation in a statement to the press: The New York
Times, June 12, 1915, pp. 1-2. The fact that the Senate bill was sponsored by Bryan’s old rival, Gilbert
Hitchcock, cannot be completely discounted as a factor in his attitude.
32. House to Wilson, July 22, 1915, PWW 34, July 21-September 30, 1915 (1980): 11-12. Biographer Ray Stannard Baker regarded this explanation as the most probable. See Baker, 5: 181.
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seek openly to create political opposition to the Government.”33 As Daniel Smith points
out, Lansing’s memorandum “concealed pro-Ally sentiments and economic interests
behind a legalistic facade,” and it contributed not only to the defeat of the arms embargo
proposal, but to the fostering of an atmosphere of suspicion and hostility toward
Germany within the administration that would bear bitter fruit in the near future.34
Equally ominously, in Germany a belief was growing that the Americans had become
the “most effective auxiliaries of the Entente” whose weapons would, if not stopped, have
an “immense, possibly decisive, significance to the fighting forces of our enemy. . . .”35
If the administration’s unwillingness to exploit the threat of an arms embargo was
mysterious, its failure to press mediation persistently and resolutely on the belligerents
was equally so. The president early recognized that both moral duty and national selfinterest made mediation desirable, but all too easily accepted arguments that the time
was not right for action, declined opportunities to work cooperatively with other powers,
and failed to impose any plan or structure on such American efforts as were undertaken.
On July 28, 1914, as initial mobilization was getting underway in Europe, the
American ambassador in Paris, Myron T. Herrick, sent an urgent cable recommending
an immediate American mediation offer. Whether such an initiative would have been
successful is open to debate, but former president Theodore Roosevelt, who had extensive knowledge of European conditions and experience in dealing with European leaders,
believed that firm intervention by the United States at that moment might have averted
war. Wilson, however, reacted cautiously, cabling House for advice on what to do and
sending a message to American ambassador Walter Hines Page in London asking whether
an offer of mediation would be welcome. House urged inaction for the present, and the
British, in the grip of war fever, replied that if they wanted the United States to help,
they would ask for it. Chastened, Wilson actually apologized to House for having acted
in even so limited a way without his friend’s approval.36 However much Wilson might
covet the role of world peacemaker, he lacked the experience and confidence to act boldly
in the absence of consensus among his major advisers.
And his advisers were divided. Bryan argued persistently that it was in America’s
interest as well as its moral duty to offer mediation and keep offering it, even if the
belligerents spurned American proposals.37 House and Lansing, on the other hand, con33. Robert Lansing, Memorandum for the President, November 19, 1914, PWW 31: 436, 433, 434.
34. Daniel M. Smith, “Robert Lansing and the Formulation of American Neutrality Policies, 19141915,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 43 (June 1956): 72.
35. Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, Reflections on the World War (London: Butterworth, 1920), 16465. Ambassador James Gerard in Germany repeatedly warned that the arms issue was producing hatred of
the United States. See, for example, FRUS, 1915, Supplement, 19, 104, 132, 138; and Charles Seymour, The
Intimate Papers of Colonel House Arranged as a Narrative, vol. 1 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1926-1928), 345,
411.
36. FRUS, 1914 Supplement, 18-20, 42-44; PWW 30: 343, 345; and Oscar King Davis, Released for
Publication: Some Inside Political History of Theodore Roosevelt and His Times, 1898-1915 (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1925), 438. Some support for Roosevelt’s argument came from Russia, which replied to Wilson’s
August 4 offer of good services that the offer came “too late” and “should have been made sooner.” FRUS,
1914 Supplement, 45.
37. Ibid., 56-57, 378; FRUS, Lansing Papers 1: 9; PWW 31: 45, 55, 60-61, 76-77, for example. For
Lansing, see Lansing to Allen M. Dulles, November 16, 1914, Lansing Papers, vol. 6.
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stantly advised caution and delay. In fact, House and Lansing’s outlook was shaped as
much by a wish to do nothing that might put England and France in a weak position
as by superior knowledge of the people and situation, but House’s friendship with Wilson
and his experience in Europe gave him a decisive advantage with the president. Although
Bryan was never petty about House’s role, the colonel plainly felt himself in competition with the secretary for control of foreign policy, and Bryan’s ardent enthusiasm for
mediation may thus have subtly inclined House to denigrate its prospects.38
Further complicating the situation was Wilson’s personal determination not to
share the limelight with anyone else (except, perhaps, House). During the autumn of
1914 proposals for joint mediation efforts arrived in Washington from several Latin
American nations, the Swiss, the Pan-American Union, American pacifists, and various
others.39 All were either ignored or politely rejected with some variation of the formula
that the time was not opportune. Not until mid-December, when House received a
private letter from the German Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs, Arthur Zimmermann,
suggesting for the first time a serious interest in a compromise peace, did House and
Wilson decide the moment had arrived for a new peace effort. At a White House meeting
on December 16 House and Wilson agreed the colonel would go to Europe to follow up
Zimmermann’s initiative.40
The Zimmermann letter provided a solid basis for a diplomatic initiative, but
although neither House nor Wilson could have known it, time was running out rapidly.
The same military stalemate in France that led Zimmermann to send the letter also
spurred German naval authorities to recommend a major submarine attack on British
trade that would have fatal consequences for German-American relations and for House’s
mission. Had the president boldly embraced Bryan’s earlier advice about constantly
pressing mediation, the chances of success would have been low, but mechanisms for
moving quickly on the German initiative might have been in place, and in any event,
the side that refused would have borne the blame for prolonging the war. Insofar as world
opinion counted under the circumstances, it might have been mobilized on the side of
peace.41
The German decision to establish a submarine blockade of the British Isles was
reached in the first days of February 1915 and announced officially on February 4, to
take effect on the 18th. Ambassador James Gerard in Berlin cabled a hint of the new
policy on February 2, but his message giving the text of the German announcement,
38. House Diary, December 3, 1914, PWW 31: 384-87. From the outset, House warned Wilson
against letting Bryan play any role in peacemaking, urging Wilson on August 1 not to let the secretary
“make any overtures to any of the powers involved” because the Europeans regarded him “as purely visionary. . . .” PWW 30: 327. For a perceptive analysis of the House-Bryan rivalry in regard to mediation, see
Link, Wilson: Struggle for Neutrality, 200-03.
39. Merle E. Curti, Bryan and World Peace (Northampton, MA: Smith College Studies in History, no.
16, 1931), 187-91; and Baker, 5: 294-300.
40. Link, Wilson: Struggle for Neutrality, 210-11; PWW 31: 468-69. Privately, House admitted that
one of his goals in the spring 1915 trip was “to set the Pope and the King [of Spain] aside as peace makers
to that W.W. may have a clear field. . . .” House Diary, April 19, 1915, vol. 6, p. 104, House Papers.
41. For a similar argument, see Baker, 300-01. This, of course, was an argument Wilson made in
December 1916.
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which was sent the evening of February 4, did not arrive until the night of February 5.42
By that time, the proclamation had been reported in the newspapers, and the cabinet
discussed it briefly during its weekly meeting. Neither the press nor members of the
administration seemed at first to take the matter very seriously. The New York Times dismissed it as a “paper blockade.” Lansing, however, warned Wilson that the situation was
“most delicate” and needed to be “handled with extreme care.”43
Lansing’s warning was borne out the next day when Bryan met with Ambassador
von Bernstorff. When von Bernstorff delivered an oral warning that American ships
might be at risk in the war zone, Bryan was “at first incredulous” and suggested the
Germans must be bluffing, but later in the day when he gave an interview to a Swiss
journalist, it was obvious that he was seriously worried.44 In fact, as Walter Millis pointed
out in the 1930s, the timing of the German announcement was terrible—too late to
prevent the Americans from modifying their neutrality in ways that maximized trade
with the Allies, and too soon for the Germans, with their limited number of submarines,
to actually cut off access to the British Isles.45 Bryan was not far wrong in suggesting
that the German policy was little more than a bluff, though in the absence of reliable
intelligence information, the Americans had to take the threat seriously.
In any event, it was obvious that some sort of response was called for. On February 6, Lansing sent to the White House the draft of a note to Germany declaring that
the United States would hold the German government to “a strict accountability” for
any injury to Americans or damage to American property resulting from submarine
attacks. Wilson read the draft carefully and made a number of changes in its wording,
but he neither altered nor questioned Lansing’s “strict accountability” phrase, though
what it might mean or how it could be enforced was not spelled out in the draft or any
accompanying documents.46
Unfortunately, no contemporary records exist to reveal exactly what Wilson and
Lansing were thinking at this crucial moment. Three months later, in a private memorandum, Lansing wrote that technological change had made traditional rules of warfare
obsolete, observed that the belligerents really believed that violations of neutral rights
were essential to their own survival, and opined that because retaliation would lead to
war, the only way to handle violations was to defer them for postwar settlement. Because
all war was inherently immoral, he added a few weeks later, atrocities committed by
belligerents could only be judged by relative, not absolute standards.47 But none of
that insight into the revolutionary implications of submarine warfare was evident in
42. FRUS, 1915 Supplement, 93-94.
43. E. David Cronon, ed., The Cabinet Diaries of Josephus Daniels, 1913-1921 (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1963), 97; “Germany’s Submarine Blockade of England,” Literary Digest 50 (February 13,
1915): 304; “English and German Treatment of Neutral Flags,” ibid. (February 20, 1915): 357-60; and
Lansing to Wilson, February 5, 1915, PWW 32: 193.
44. von Bernstorff, My Three Years, 131-32; and “Interview with a Swiss Journalist,” February 5,
1915, William Jennings Bryan Papers, Box 30, Folder 1915 February, Manuscripts Division, Library of
Congress.
45. Millis, 324.
46. PWW 32: 194-95.
47. Robert Lansing, May 3 and 25, 1915, Lansing Papers, Personal Memoranda, Box 2.
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Lansing’s first reaction to the German declaration, which implacably asserted traditional
neutral rights and suggested the Germans give up the principal advantage of their new
weapon.
Considering the importance of the policy under consideration, it seems incredible
that Wilson did not think it necessary to discuss the situation with the cabinet, with
House, or with Secretary Bryan, who was temporarily out of town for a speaking engagement. There was, after all, no great urgency about deciding on a policy, because the
German war zone would not go into effect until February 18. That Wilson felt free to
decide so momentous a question without advice and consultation reveals an enormous
flaw in the presidential policymaking process.
Perhaps, to be charitable, further discussion might have taken place, except that a
new message from the Germans cast a different light on the situation. On February 7,
the German government sent a lengthy memorandum that justified the new policy on
the grounds that the British had repeatedly violated the principles of neutral rights laid
down in the Declaration of London and emphasized that their intention was to attack
Allied, not neutral, ships. Lansing’s reaction was that the memorandum was “a strong
presentation of the German case and removes some of the objectionable features of the
declaration.” He suggested that it made “the advisability of a sharp protest, or of any
protest at all, open to question.”48
Nevertheless, on February 10, the “strict accountability” note was sent, despite
Lansing’s doubts and a warning by Bryan and Secretary of War Lindley M. Garrison at
a cabinet meeting on February 9 that the note might lead to war. The only clue to the
reasons for Wilson’s decision to go ahead is in a cryptic comment he made at a press conference on the 9th. The German war zone, he said, “isn’t even a paper blockade. It is a
warning. It is interpreted by them as being a warning as to danger existing in that zone.
It is not a blockade.”49 Wilson’s denial that the Germans had established a blockade, and
his insistence on referring to it as simply a warning, suggest that he may have seen their
proclamation as a bluff that could be called by a resolute American response. Considering the doubts and outright opposition among his advisers, it is both difficult to see any
other reason for his decision and hard to understand his taking so great a risk so apparently casually.
Newspaper editorials in the United States unanimously praised the “strict accountability” note but also voiced criticism of British interference with American shipping
and misuse of neutral flags to disguise their ships. In Germany, the note, far from leading
the German government to back down, stirred patriotism and inspired grandiose declarations that submarines could win the war even if the Americans joined the Allies. The
official German reply, however, which was dated February 16, employed a conciliatory
tone and emphasized that Germany had no intention of deliberately attacking neutral
ships. Moreover, it was preceded by a message from Gerard in Berlin hinting that the
48. FRUS, 1915 Supplement, 95-97; and Lansing to Wilson, February 7, 1915, PWW 32: 195-96.
49. For the note, see FRUS, 1915 Supplement, 98-100; memorandum by Garrison, February 9, 1915;
and transcript of press conference, February 9, 1915, both in PWW 32: 207, 201.
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“German proclamation will be withdrawn if England will adopt Declaration of London
or allow food to enter for German civil population.”50
For Bryan, who was terrified that German submarine warfare would create “a disaster
over there which will inflame public opinion,” Gerard’s message brought a ray of hope.
On February 16, Bryan and the president drafted a message to Ambassador Page in London
inquiring whether the British might be receptive to an arrangement that would lift the
German submarine blockade in return for the British permitting food to enter Germany.51
In fact, neither the British nor the Germans were very interested in the proposed
modus vivendi. The British had actually welcomed the German war zone announcement
because it gave them an excuse to further tighten restrictions on trade going to Germany,
though they preferred not to antagonize the United States if that could be avoided. The
Germans were eager to try out submarine warfare but reluctantly agreed to accept the
proposed arrangement, provided raw materials could be exempted from seizure as well
as food.52
On February 20, the State Department forwarded the outline of a proposed modus
vivendi and received vague but friendly responses from both London and Berlin. Page
warned, however, that there was strong sentiment in England for a tightening of the
blockade to prevent anything from entering Germany, and on March 1 the British
announced that the indiscriminate nature of German submarine warfare would compel
them to cut off all trade to Germany. The same day, the Germans replied that they would
accept the modus vivendi only if the United States compelled the British to stop disguising their ships with neutral flags, and if they permitted raw materials as well as food
to pass through the blockade. A new British Order-in-Council, issued on March 11,
announced that no ship would be allowed to proceed to any German port.53 With the
announcement vanished the last hope for the modus vivendi.
The questions no one had thought to ask in the hours before the over-hasty dispatch of the “strict accountability” note, or in the month and a half everyone’s attention
and hopes were focused on the modus vivendi, now became urgent. What, exactly, did
“strict accountability” mean? How would it be enforced? Under what circumstances
would it be applicable? The German submarines taking station around the British Isles
would soon bring new urgency to those questions.
On March 30, after considerable discussion between the White House and the State
Department, a long, technical note of protest against the British Order-in-Council was
50. “Will ‘War Zone’ Measures Drag the United States into the European Conflict?” Current Opinion
58 (March 1915): 152-57; Link, Wilson: Struggle for Neutrality, 326-31; and FRUS, 1915 Supplement, 11215, 102.
51. Bryan to Wilson, February 15, 1915, PWW 32: 235-36; FRUS, 1915 Supplement, 107. Lansing
observed shrewdly that if the Germans were really in a position to cut off all trade to Britain, they would
gain more by doing so than by securing access to imports of food. On that basis, he concluded that the
Germans could not carry out their threat, and thus their offer was probably serious. See his memorandum,
February 16, 1915, FRUS, Lansing Papers 1: 361.
52. Link, Wilson: Struggle for Neutrality, 332-36. Ambassador Gerard reported that the German military insisted on including the demand for the free admission of raw materials in order to make sure the
British would reject the modus vivendi, and Page wrote that the British feared acceptance of the arrangement
would obligate them to accept American mediation. FRUS, 1915 Supplement, 132, 134.
53. PWW 32: 260-62; FRUS, 1915 Supplement, 119-20, 122, 123, 127-28, 129-30, 143-45.
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sent to London. The note, which was based on a draft written personally by Wilson,
accepted Bryan’s repeated pleas to balance the protest to Germany with one to Britain
but rejected his contention that the British blockade was as serious a violation of
American rights as the German one and deserved an equally strong protest. Instead, it
continued the autumn’s practice of seeking compromises and accommodations with the
British that did not challenge their basic policy.54
In effect, argues Arthur Link, Wilson’s position was that the United States accepted
both the British and German blockades, but that it would hold both nations to “strict
accountability” for violations of American rights.55 Perhaps so, but that was not the way
it looked to the Germans, who saw American policy toward the British as accommodating, and that toward Germany as intransigent. Lansing, who had concluded back in
mid-February that Germany had quite a lot to gain and little to lose from war with the
United States, sent his pessimistic conclusions to Bryan on April 2. Two days later,
Ambassador von Bernstorff lodged a strong protest against American acceptance of the
British blockade and again urged the adoption of an arms embargo.56
In the midst of this confused debate over American policy, disaster struck. On
March 28, a German submarine sank the British steamer Falaba, killing an American
passenger, Leon C. Thrasher. The Falaba sinking was the first direct challenge to the
“strict accountability” doctrine, and it set off for the first time an intense debate within
the administration about how American rights could and should be protected. Lansing
assumed that a protest was inevitable, but pointed out that because the Falaba was a
British ship, a protest must assert that submarine attacks on belligerent as well as neutral
vessels was illegal, a very substantial expansion of the original American position. Bryan
forwarded Lansing’s memorandum to the president, adding his own suggestion that an
American who took passage on a British ship in the war zone, knowing the risks, was
placing his government in an untenable position.57
Wilson agreed that the circumstances were complex but argued that no one should
be diverted from the central issue: that an American had been killed by an illegal German
act. Nevertheless, he admitted that an old problem, the British practice of arming merchant ships, might justify a submarine commander in assuming that all merchant ships
were armed and thus in attacking without warning.58 The reality, with which the American leaders were for the first time confronted, was that they had placed themselves in
an impossible situation. Having declared, without qualification, that German submarine
commanders must safeguard the lives of passengers and crews aboard merchant vessels
in the war zone, the United States might be dragged into war by the act of one
54. Bryan to Wilson, March 3, 22, 23, 29, 1915, PWW 32: 311-12, 409-13, 421-22, 453-54. The
March 30 note is in FRUS, 1915 Supplement, 152-56.
55. Link, Wilson: Struggle for Neutrality, 348.
56. FRUS, 1915 Supplement, 157-58; and Lansing to Bryan, April 2, 1915, FRUS, Lansing Papers 1:
366-68. von Bernstorff had no instruction from Berlin to make this protest, but he accurately represented
German opinion. The State Department responded—politely but firmly—that American policy toward the
British blockade was none of Germany’s business. While technically correct, that answer did not improve
German-American relations. See ibid., 160-62.
57. FRUS, 1915 Supplement, 358-60, 364; and FRUS, Lansing Papers 1: 356-66.
58. FRUS, Lansing Papers 1: 365-68.
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American who took the risk of traveling in the war zone on a British ship. No one except
Bryan was quite willing to put the matter in those stark terms, but a kind of unspoken
and embarrassed awareness of the situation contributed to a month’s delay in drafting a
protest in the Thrasher case. On April 28, Wilson wrote to Bryan that “perhaps it is not
necessary to make formal representations in the matter at all.”59
At the same time, however, the president also rejected Bryan’s recommendation
that the United States try to get away from the whole controversy over neutral rights
by launching a new peace initiative that would call on both sides to state their peace
terms. Wilson reminded the secretary gently that House was still in Europe ready to
accept any overtures. To issue a public call for peace terms at this time would, Wilson
suggested, “be futile and would probably be offensive.”60 The president’s decision meant
that there was no way to avoid coming to grips with the dangerous and controversial
issues involved in “strict accountability.”
In the meantime, the cases of the Wilhelmina and Dacia dramatized the difference
between American policies toward the two belligerents. In January 1915, the GermanAmerican owners of the Wilhelmina loaded it with a cargo of food for Germany and offered
to post bond that none of it would go to the army. Their goal was both to test the British
blockade and to dramatize the charge that British policy was starving civilians in
Germany. The Dacia offered an even more flagrant challenge to the British. Bought by
German-Americans from its German owners in January 1915, the ship was loaded with
cotton destined for Germany. Organizers of the voyage clearly hoped that the administration would support them, either because Wilson had been trying since the beginning
of the war to get Congress to authorize the purchase of belligerent-owned vessels for the
American carrying trade, or because the export of cotton was so important to the South
and thus to the Democratic Party. In both cases, the British government seized the ships
and their cargoes, finding legal pretexts for doing so which the American government
accepted.61 The willingness of the Americans to tolerate the British seizures of the
Wilhelmina and Dacia, while contemplating confrontation with Germany over the death
of one American aboard a British vessel, underlined the fact that Anglo-American disagreements were about threats to property while German-American conflicts were about
threats to life, but they also made it obvious that American policy toward submarine
warfare was still uncertain.
That uncertainty was deepened at the end of April and the beginning of May when
an American tanker, the Cushing, was damaged by bombs dropped from a German plane,
and another tanker, the Gulflight, was damaged by a torpedo attack. No one was injured
on the Cushing, but on the Gulflight two sailors drowned and the captain died of a heart
attack as an indirect result of the attack. Lansing argued that whereas the Falaba case
had been ambiguous, the new attacks showed deliberate German hostility and a belief
59. Lansing actually completed a draft of a sharp protest on April 5, but by the end of April the
president had still not approved it. Ibid., 369-71, 377-78, 380; and Baker, 5: 275.
60. Bryan to Wilson, April 23, 1915; and Wilson to Bryan, April 28, 1915, both in FRUS, Lansing
Papers 1: 378-80.
61. For detailed accounts of the Wilhelmina and Dacia cases, see Link, Wilson: Struggle for Neutrality,
179-90.
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that the United States would not dare to fight.62 Even Bryan now agreed that there was
no alternative to a strong protest, but he was greatly relieved when, at a cabinet meeting
on May 5, Wilson (who had cabled House for his advice) said that he believed final settlement of the incidents could be postponed until after the war. In addition, Wilson sent
through House an unofficial warning to the British that unless they loosened their blockade, Congress might force an arms embargo on the administration.63 The president’s willingness to continue diplomacy, and to play for the first time the arms embargo card,
created momentary hope that a way might be found around the impasse created by the
“strict accountability” policy.
At the same time, however, Lansing sounded a somber note of warning. In a May
5 memorandum for Bryan he wrote that he had been reviewing the February 10 “strict
accountability” note and, for the first time, had attached specific definitions to some of
its ambiguous language. “Strict accountability,” he wrote, could “only mean that the
German Government must make full reparation for the act of their naval force and must
also repudiate the act, apologize for it and give ample assurance that it will not be
repeated.” The “steps . . . necessary . . . to safeguard” American lives and property could only
mean that “force” would be used if diplomacy did not suffice.64 Under this interpretation, the February note, which had seemed only a straightforward assertion of America’s
rights at the time, now sounded far more dangerous. Perhaps for the first time, Bryan
and Wilson now began to realize fully what they had committed themselves to, and
where it might lead.
No one, however, had imagined the catastrophe that impended. On April 19, Bryan
raised a series of pointed questions in a letter to the president. “Why,” he asked, “do
Americans take the risk” of traveling on British ships despite repeated German warnings of the danger? “Why,” he added, should Americans “be shocked at the drowning
of a few people, if there is no objection to starving a nation?” He recommended strongly
that the government take steps to prevent the misuse of the American flag by the British
and keep Americans out of the war zone, or that it put pressure on the British to permit
food into Germany.65 When the Germans took matters into their own hands, however,
and on May 1, the day before the British passenger liner Lusitania was to sail for England,
published in the New York newspapers a warning to passengers about the risks of the
war zone, Bryan’s position was awkward. It was one thing for the American government
to issue such a warning (which it had not done), and another for Germany to do it. That,
in Lansing’s view, was an “insolent” claim that Americans should not exercise their legal
rights.66 Because the ship sailed on May 2 with all but one of its original passengers
aboard, the issue seemed moot.
Then, on May 7, came the horrifying news that the Lusitania had been torpedoed
off the coast of Ireland with heavy loss of life. As the lists of the dead grew on the 8th,
62. FRUS, 1915 Supplement, 378; and FRUS, Lansing Papers 1: 383-85.
63. Bryan to Wilson, May 5, 1915; Wilson to House, May 3, 5, 1915; and House to Wilson, May
5, 1915, all in PWW 33, April 17-July 21, 1915 (1980): 93, 105-08.
64. Bryan to Wilson, May 5, 1915, enclosing Lansing’s May 5 memorandum, ibid., 106-07.
65. FRUS, Lansing Papers 1: 11-12.
66. Bryan to Wilson, enclosing Lansing to Bryan, both May 1, 1915, PWW 33: 91-93.
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everyone in the administration realized that a crisis was at hand. From London, House
cabled Wilson that “America has come to the parting of the ways, when she must determine whether she stands for civilized or uncivilized warfare. Think we can no longer
remain neutral spectators.” Bryan, as alarmed by the prospect of war as House seemed
exhilarated, discovered that the Lusitania had carried 4,200 cases of rifle cartridges in its
hold and argued that permitting ships to carry both contraband and passengers was “like
putting women and children in front of an army.”67 But Lansing undermined this argument by pointing out that it was unlikely the German submarine commander could have
known about the munitions. The crucial fact, wrote Lansing, was that the sinking “violated the established rules of international law and the principles of humanity,” which
the United States had declared in the “strict accountability” note it would uphold.68
Wilson plainly agreed with Lansing. In a cabinet meeting on the morning of May
11, the president read aloud the draft of a note to Germany he had composed. It opened
with a review of the Falaba, Cushing, and Gulflight cases, and then focused on the loss of
American lives in the Lusitania sinking. In a somber but friendly tone it alluded to
Germany’s long support of neutral rights and expressed confidence that Germany’s desire
to deprive its enemies of supplies would not lead it to decide deliberately to infringe on
neutral rights. Yet, Wilson wrote, that seemed to be the inevitable result of submarine
warfare: “Submarines, we respectfully submit, cannot be used against merchantmen
without an inevitable violation of many sacred principles of justice and humanity.” The
United States, Wilson concluded, expected the German government to disavow the
sinking, “make reparation so far as reparation is possible for injuries which are without
measure,” and “take immediate steps to prevent the recurrence” of any such atrocity. The
American government, he warned, would not “omit any necessary representation or any
necessary act in sustaining the rights of its citizens. . . .”69
When the president concluded his reading, a grim discussion followed. The question was not whether a protest should be made—on that everyone agreed—but what
should be done next if Germany rejected the American position. Secretary of War Garrison thought the next step must be war, but others, including the president, disagreed.
Even a rupture of diplomatic relations, Wilson pointed out, did not necessarily lead to
war. Bryan pled for a strong protest to the British about their violations of neutral rights
to balance the note to Germany, again recommended prohibiting American travel on
belligerent vessels, and suggested issuing some sort of informal “tip” to the Germans
that the United States would not insist upon complete settlement of the dispute until
after the war. After lengthy discussion, the group agreed that Wilson’s note should go
forward. Nothing was decided about Bryan’s proposals.70
67. House to Wilson, May 9, 1915; and Bryan to Wilson, May 9, 1915, ibid., 134-35.
68. Bryan to Wilson, May 10, 1915, enclosing a memorandum and a letter from Lansing to Bryan,
both dated May 10, 1915, ibid., 142-45.
69. Ibid., 155-58.
70. Ibid., 155-58; New York World, May 12, 1915, pp. 1-2; William B. Wilson to Josephus Daniels,
March 10, 1924, Josephus Daniels Papers, Box 683, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress; and Link,
Wilson: Struggle for Neutrality, 384.
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Over the next several days, the last remaining uncertainties about American policy
were resolved. Lansing completed a final draft of the note to Germany, which was sent
off on May 13. He also drafted a statement warning Americans against traveling on belligerent vessels in the war zone, but pointed out that issuing it after the sinkings was
likely to open the administration to political attack. Wilson concurred with his objections, noting that after the Lusitania, the warning seemed redundant anyway. The president also vetoed Bryan and Lansing’s recommended protest to Great Britain, arguing
that it would be “so evident a case of uneasiness and hedging that I think it would
weaken our whole position fatally.” And Wilson decided not to issue an indirect “tip”
to the Germans indicating American willingness to defer final settlement of the Lusitania case, as Bryan had suggested.71 By May 20 Bryan’s arguments had been rejected at
every turn, and the course of the administration was set: “strict accountability” would
be upheld, even at the risk of war.
It would be nearly two years before every hope for compromise between Germany
and the United States would be exhausted, before the opposition to war among the American people was overcome, and before Congress would finally vote for war, but the die
was cast in the spring of 1915. By the time Bryan resigned from the State Department
on June 7, the only remaining question was, as Wilson put it, whether it would be possible to satisfy the country’s inconsistent desire for both “firmness and the avoidance of
war.”72 It turned out that it was not.
The issue here is not whether the ultimate American decision to go to war
was wise or unwise—that is a question for another time—but whether the process by
which that decision was reached was sound. On that issue there must be serious doubt.
Wilson and his advisers’ inexperience with foreign policy, their concentration on domestic rather than foreign issues, and even their pro-Allied biases were all inescapable results
of the political process that brought them to office, and these limitations in turn account
for the increasing pro-Allied tilt of American neutrality policy during the autumn of
1914.
By the end of 1914 and the beginning of 1915, German-American relations were
deteriorating in direct proportion to the development of closer economic links between
the United States and the Allies. None of this was deliberate, though pervasive proAllied bias in the administration undoubtedly contributed to the way American leaders
saw issues. Only Secretary of State Bryan was truly impartial in his attitude toward the
belligerents and advocated strong protests against British restrictions on American trade,
but his inexperience and frequent absences from Washington during the autumn made
him ineffective. For Wilson’s other advisers, maintaining access to Allied markets took
precedence over everything else.
One area where the American leaders might have been more active in the autumn
of 1914 was in the promotion of mediation. Unlikely though it was that the belliger71. The note is in FRUS, 1915 Supplement, 393-96. For Lansing’s draft of the British note and Wilson’s
rejection of it, the possible warning to Americans to avoid travel on belligerent ships, and the rise and fall
of the “tip” proposal, see FRUS, Lansing Papers1: 296-300, 400-07, 411.
72. Wilson to Melancthon Jacobus, July 20, 1915, PWW 33: 535.
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ents would have considered a negotiated peace, the deepening military stalemate and
horror at the human and economic costs of the war might have created an opening for
vigorous and creative American diplomacy. Instead, the caution of Wilson and his advisers (except Bryan), and the president’s own determination not to act in concert with any
other powers, prevented the launching of any significant initiative until early 1915, when
it was too late. The most effective lever the United States had to force the reluctant
British into serious negotiations prior to that time, the threat of an arms embargo, was
never used, for reasons that remain obscure.
The really critical moment in American policy came in February 1915, and the
failure was not one of commission but of omission. American leaders simply failed to
comprehend that the German submarine blockade around the British Isles required
something other than a by-the-book reaction. Until months later, no one warned about
the revolutionary nature of submarine warfare, pointed out that submarines could not
operate within traditional rules, or predicted future disasters. As a result, there was virtually no discussion within the administration about what policy the United States
should adopt. In the absence of policy debate, the State Department followed standard
operating procedure, producing a vague but impressive-sounding protest which Wilson
approved with little thought. Wilson, Bryan, and Lansing, the principals in the decision, were all intelligent men, but because there was no established procedure for developing and evaluating policy collectively, they followed routine and left the decision to
the president, who, by habit and temperament, liked to act alone. The result was the
declaration of a policy that no one had even attempted to define precisely and that committed the United States to unspecified actions to uphold it. In the popular cliché, the
administration painted itself into a corner.
The implications of “strict accountability” were not immediately obvious. Pursuit
of a modus vivendi that it was hoped might remove the submarine threat consumed a
crucial month, and it was not until the Falaba was sunk on March 28 that the real danger
became apparent. Even then, however, the ambiguity of the circumstances and the
possibility of finding tolerable means to reduce risk postponed German-American confrontation. Only after the sinking of the Lusitania did both the true danger and the
impossibility of ameliorating it become obvious to Secretary Bryan, if not to Wilson.
Bryan resigned, but the president and his other advisers would not lose hope of finding
a way out of the corner for almost two years.
No one in the administration deliberately chose policies in the spring of 1915 that
would lead to war with Germany, but no one really thought through the implications
of the policy that was selected either. Personal limitations, the effects of other actions
taken earlier, and the inertia of standard operating procedure all combined to commit
the United States to a policy of confrontation. Whether right or wrong, wise or unwise,
that course was the result of a flawed policymaking process that left the crucial decision for war or peace in the hands of one man, the president, unless he went out of his
way to bring together and solicit the opinions of advisers, as John Kennedy did in the
1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Unfortunately, however, neither in 1915 nor later did
observers realize this crucial defect in American decision-making processes. In 1908,
Wilson had written that “the initiative in foreign affairs, which the President possesses
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without any restriction whatever, is virtually the power to control them absolutely.”73
He believed that was a good thing, a desirable aspect of the presidency, because
he assumed that presidents would know and act in the national interest. His own experience in the White House, as well as that of his successors, calls that confidence into
question.
73. Constitutional Government in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908), 77.