Mr. Wilson's War by John Dos Passos
The argument over poor Thrasher brought the differences of opinion inside the administration to a boil. Lansing called the sinking “an atrocious act of lawlessness” and wanted vigorous action. Bryan put forth the theory that Americans travelling on belligerent ships in wartime did so at their own risk.
Wilson was of two minds. In every speech he made he was campaigning for “neutrality in thought and deed.” Having convinced even Bryan that the export of arms and ammunition was consistent with neutrality, the President tended to Lansing’s view on the need for a firm protest to Berlin on Thrasher’s death. Bryan was profoundly disturbed.
He wanted every dispute with the belligerents put up for arbitration. “Nearly nine months have passed,” he wrote the President, who preferred mulling over the arguments in writing rather than coping with them during the hasty give and take of cabinet meetings, “… and after the expenditure of ten billion dollars and the sacrifice of several millions of the flower of Europe the war is at a draw. Surely the most sanguinary ought to be satisfied with the slaughter. I submit that it is this nation’s right and duty to make, not a secret, but an open appeal for the acceptance of mediation … As the greatest Christian nation we should act—we cannot avoid the responsibility.”
Arbitration: the principle was so clear to him he could not understand the President’s hesitations. “Mary, what does the President mean?” he asked his wife in agony of mind. “Why can’t he see that by keeping open the way for mediation and arbitration, he has an opportunity to do the greatest work a man can do? I cannot understand his attitude.”
The Lusitania
The German authorities were encouraged by American resentment against the British to step up their submarine war. While the President and Secretary Bryan were arguing over whether the Thrasher case was a fit subject for arbitration, news of new outrages poured in. A German airplane attempted to bomb the American ship Cushing, and the tanker Gulflight out of Port Arthur, Texas, was sunk without warning by a submarine in the Irish Sea. The skipper died of a heart attack and two sailors, who jumped overboard in fright, were drowned.
May 1, the same day that the Gulflight was sunk, there appeared in the newspapers of eastern seaboard cities an advertisement signed by the Imperial German Embassy warning prospective passengers against travelling through the warzone on British or Allied ships. The Lusitania was sailing from New York with an unusually large passenger list. Of the many passengers warned by anonymous telegrams and by strangers who whispered to them on the street, only one man, a clergyman from Bennington, Vermont, changed his passage to the American liner New York.
In London on May 7 submarines were on everybody’s mind. Driving out to Kew on a flowery May morning Colonel House talked about the submarine war with Sir Edward Grey. “We spoke,” he wrote in his diary, “of the probability of an ocean liner being sunk and I told him … a flame of indignation would sweep across America.” Later in the day at a private audience with King George at Buckingham Palace their talk revolved around the same subject. “Suppose,” said His Royal Highness, “they should sink the Lusitania with American passengers aboard?”
At lunchtime the same day, the Lusitania, steaming slowly on the straight course for Liverpool, as if there were no submarines in the world, was hit by a single torpedo fired by the U-20, Kapitan-lieutenant Walter Schwieger in command. In spite of watertight compartments the Lusitania rolled over and sank in eighteen minutes. Of the passengers and crew seven hundred and sixtyone were rescued and eleven hundred and fiftythree drowned, among them a hundred and fourteen American citizens including women and children.
May 9 Colonel House sent the President a cable: “I believe an immediate demand should be made upon Germany for assurance that this shall not happen again … America has come to the parting of the ways.”
“We shall be at war within a month,” he told Ambassador Page.
Before any reply came from the President, House stepped out on a London street one morning and read a newspaper headline advertized by a sandwichman: WILSON: TOO PROUD TO FIGHT.
The Lusitania Fury
In Washington, the President had just returned from a pleasant trip to Williamstown, Massachusetts, for the christening of his first grandson, Francis Woodrow Sayre, when he received the news. The cable was handed to him as he came out from a cabinet meeting.
In the face of the explosion of indignation in the newspapers that followed Wilson gritted his jaw. He had Lansing examine the manifest of the Lusitania and discovered the cargo was mostly food but included four thousand two hundred cases of cartridges and one thousand two hundred and fiftynine cases of unloaded steel shrapnel shells. The impression at the State Department was that the ship was armed. Secretary Bryan’s opinion was that “England,” as he put it to his wife, “has been using our citizens to protect her ammunition.”
Wilson’s secretary, Tumulty, although as anti-British as a professional Irishman could be, was profoundly shocked by the horror of drowning innocent noncombatants. He could not understand the President’s grim detachment. He let the President know that his coolness surprised him. “ ‘I suppose you think I am cold and indifferent,’ ” Tumulty quoted him as replying, “ ‘and a little less than human, but, my dear fellow you are mistaken, for I have spent many sleepless hours thinking about this tragedy. It has hung over me like a terrible nightmare.’ … I had never seen him more serious and careworn,” added Tumulty.
In public, in the face of denunciations from Theodore Roosevelt, who was beating the wardrums now in every speech, Wilson was determined to continue on his neutral course. Addressing a group of recently naturalized citizens in Philadelphia on May 10, he told them: “The example of America must be the example not only of peace because it will not fight, but of peace because peace is the healing and elevating influence of the world and strife is not. There is such a thing as being too proud to fight.”
The words “too proud to fight” sounded fine in Secretary Bryan’s ears, but to the growing horde of pro-Allied partisans, outraged almost to madness by new tales of German brutality in the daily press, they had a hollow sound. To the British they seemed the denial of every decent feeling.
The Bryce Report
It was an accident that the Bryce report was published five days after the sinking of the Lusitania, but a most timely one. All that winter Viscount Bryce had been acting as chairman of a committee appointed by Prime Minister Asquith to sift the truth out of allegations by the Belgians of unnecessary atrocities by the German troops occupying their unhappy country. The public had been made receptive to a gruesome diet by the wave of horror that swept through the Allied nations after the first gas attacks during the fighting at Ypres in April. Propaganda agencies were filling the newspapers with stories of enemy frightfulness. The Germans were Huns; they had crucified a Canadian officer, they cut the breasts off women; the Kaiser had personally instructed his troops to crucify Belgian babies on the doors of barns.
The wildest tale, later admitted to have been a hoax, was of the German corpse factories. General Charteris, a British intelligence officer in France, snipped off the caption of a German photograph of dead horses being taken to a rendering plant and pasted it on a photograph of a train-load of human corpses being removed from the front for burial. The German explanation that the word kadaveren in their language only referred to animal corpses made no impression on the Allied press.
Soberminded Americans had so far been a little leery of British and French atrocity stories. German treatment of the Belgians was brutal enough, in all conscience; there was no doubt about the German burning of Dinant and Louvain and the shooting of indiscriminate masses of civilian hostages; but, after reading the appendix to the Bryce report, opinion-moulders in newspaper offices and rectories and colleges were ready to believe anything. Viscount Bryce had a worldwide eminence that matched that of almost any living Englishman. Literate Americans revered him as a god. Whatever he put his name to must be true.
The fact
For the British it was a propaganda victory. The sufferings of the brave Belgians quite drowned out pleas for neutral rights coming from levelheaded professionals in the State Department.
Mr. Bryan’s Last Stand
Against this background of mounting hysteria Bryan manfully held his ground for arbitration, mediation and peaceful solutions. Lansing, who now had the President’s ear, rebuffed his suggestion that ships carrying war munitions be forbidden to carry passengers. Bryan wanted Americans at least to be warned against travelling on belligerent ships, and for some means to be found to put off dangerous issues for arbitration after the war was over. He admitted the need to protest to Germany, but he asked for a simultaneous protest to England against Allied treatment of neutral shipping, to show Germany “that we are defending our rights against aggression from both sides.”
Lansing’s draft of a severe note to Berlin telling the Germans they would be held to “strict accountability” for the loss of American lives became, in spite of Bryan’s protests, the basis for the document the President wrote out on his own typewriter, as usual all alone in his study. At the last moment Bryan induced Wilson to prepare a statement to the press to be issued at the same time, emphasizing the ancient friendship between the American and German peoples, and suggesting again the postponement until peacetime of conflicts that could not be settled by diplomatic means.
When Tumulty saw Secretary Bryan’s press release the excitable Irishman had a fit. He alerted several members of the cabinet and pointed out to his boss that taking the sting out of the note this way would only encourage the Germans to sink more ships. The President, who had confidence in his secretary’s popular touch, was convinced. Most of the cabinet members whom Wilson consulted agreed. When Tumulty joined Secretary of War Garrison for lunch at the Shoreham after his bout with the President he was still pale and shaking. “I’ve just had the worst half hour of my life,” he said. Garrison told him he ought to have a medal of honor for his good work.
By this time President Wilson had decided that the country demanded a stiff protest even at the risk of breaking off relations with Germany. Bryan was not convinced. Not a man to keep his ideas to himself, in an expansive moment he assured Dr. Dumba, the Austro-Hungarian ambassador, that the United States had no intention of going to war, but only wanted a German assurance that ruthless submarine warfare would stop.
Dumba, a bald, stooping, mustachioed figure, whom Lansing found to be “the most adroit and at the same time the most untrustworthy of the diplomatic representatives of the Central Powers,” immediately transmitted these soothing words to his government via the German radio station in Berlin.
There U. S. Ambassador Gerard was dramatizing the importance of the Lusitania note by making sleepingcar reservations for his wife and himself to Switzerland. Zimmermann, who had been given a copy of the radiogram before it was forwarded to Vienna, read it out triumphantly to Gerard as a proof that President Wilson’s Lusitania note was merely for home consumption. Gerard cabled the news to House. House cabled the President and the fat was in the fire.
Secretary Bryan called in Dumba to his office. Dumba admitted that the language of his message had been misconstrued, and Bryan issued a repudiation of the whole interview to the press. The Peacemaker was editorially tarred and feathered by the eastern newspapers.
Meanwhile in Berlin the advocates of ruthless submarine warfare were quoting Bryan’s words as proof that no amount of frightfulness would bring the United States into the war. As a result the German foreign office dispatched a highly unsatisfactory reply to the American note. House in London, who had been working for just the sort of mutual abatement of the two blockades that Bryan wanted as the first step towards a mediated settlement, gave up his mission in despair. He returned home, accompanied as usual by his wife and his secretary, Miss Denton, who coded and decoded his private messages. This time House’s little group sailed on the St. Paul of the American Line.
The pro-Allied press was in a fever against Bryan and his pacifism. The Republicans, in New England especially, now committed to intervention on the Allied side, poured out their scorn on the ineffectiveness of President Wilson’s stream of notes. Theodore Roosevelt called the Lusitania sinking an act of piracy and made it clear that if he’d been President none of this would have been allowed to happen.
The Peacemaker Resigns
Bryan’s position in the administration was becoming impossible. His pacifism and his arbitration treaties were the laughingstock of editorial writers. At a cabinet meeting called to discuss the German answer to the Lusitania note, which Frank Cobb described in the World as “the answer of an outlaw who assumes no obligation towards society,” the Secretary of State seemed, as Secretary of Agriculture Houston recalled it, “to be laboring under great strain, and sat back in his chair most of the time with his eyes closed.” Suddenly he snapped out, “You people are not neutral. You are taking sides.”
The President was nettled. With a cold flare in his gray eyes he said in the voice which he could make so icy, “Mr. Secretary, you have no right to make that statement. We are all honestly trying to be neutral against heavy difficulties.”
The Germans were claiming that they had a right to sink the Lusitania as an armed ship carrying munitions of war. Counsellor Lansing got up an elaborate brief refuting the German contentions point by point, but as Woodrow Wilson revised it, his chief theme became “the sinking of this passenger ship involves principles of humanity which throw into the background any special circumstances of detail.”
Wilson was seeing the drowned bodies of women and children washed up on the Irish coast. Bryan was sending him copious messages meanwhile begging for mention of arbitration and asking for a parallel note to England. To Wilson, as to most Americans, the quarrel with England, about the money value of goods and seized cargoes and the technicalities of contraband, was in a different category from the quarrel with Germany, which involved human lives. He wrote Secretary Bryan “with the warmest regard and with a very solemn and by no means self-confident sense of deep responsibility,” that he could not agree with him. Bryan decided he would have to resign.
It was a Saturday. Bryan went around to see McAdoo, whom he considered the member of the cabinet closest to the President. Perhaps he thought McAdoo might help him argue the President around to his point of view.
McAdoo set to work to talk Bryan out of the idea of resigning and right after lunch drove over to see Mrs. Bryan. Everybody had confidence in Mrs. Bryan’s level head. Mrs. Bryan came right out with it. Her husband felt that Colonel House’s opinions were given more weight than her husband’s. Lansing furnished the background. The President wrote all the state papers. The Secretary of State was playing the part of a figurehead.
Then she went on to tell of her husband’s sleepless nights, his agony of mind. McAdoo begged the Bryans to think it over for a day or two and suggested she take her husband out to the country for the weekend. The Bryans jumped at the suggestion and drove out to a friend’s house in Silver Spring. The magnolias were in bloom, mockingbirds sang through the moonlit June night but Bryan could get no repose. Sunday he took a long walk. That night Mrs. Bryan got a doctor to prescribe a sleeping powder. Monday morning he woke up refreshed but with his determination unshaken.
The Bryans were hardly back in their house on Calumet Place Monday morning, when McAdoo came in with fresh arguments. Bryan would be accused of having resigned to embarrass the Administration. His career would be ruined. “I believe you are right,” Bryan answered solemnly. “I think this will
At the State Department Lansing sought the Secretary out and begged him not to resign, but Bryan had become suspicious of Lansing’s sincerity in his regard. He drove to the White House for an hour’s quiet talk with the President. The President was convinced the Lusitania note was right The Secretary was convinced it was wrong. Bryan became agitated. His hands shook so that when he tried to pour himself out a glass of water he spilt it on the table.
“Colonel House,” he said, “has been Secretary of State, not I, and I have never had your full confidence.”
He went back to his office and wrote out his resignation. The President accepted it immediately.
At the cabinet meeting next day the President announced that Mr. Bryan had resigned but suggested he be asked to attend anyway. Throughout the meeting Bryan, his face white and haggard, sat back in his chair as his habit was when he was disturbed, with his eyes closed.
After the President had retired Bryan asked the members of the cabinet to lunch with him. In a private dining room at the University Club he told the five men who went along that he felt a second note meant war. He said he knew the President wanted to avoid war as much as he did. “I believe I can do more on the outside to prevent war than I can on the inside. I think I can help the President more on the outside.”
“You are the most sincere Christian I know,” blurted out cheerful plump Secretary of the Interior Lane. Tears glistened in his eye.