Abstract
On May 7, 1915, the British Ambassador to the United States wrote privately to Lord Bryce assessing American newspaper sentiment toward Great Britain and the possibility of Anglo-American conflict. Despite attacks “in most of the papers” Spring-Rice felt that the general tone of the press had recently improved. “Of course,” he added, “an explosion may take place at any moment on account of some incident which touches American sentiment. If it does, I think the government will do all it can to delay action in order to insure peace and prevent another Maine incident from plunging the country into war.”1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
U.S. Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1915,Supplement (Washington, 1928), 393–96. Hereafter cited as For. Rel., 1915.
The Evening Telegram, May 31, 1915; The World,May 31, 1915; The Journal of Commerce,May 31, 1915; The New York Herald, May 31, 1915; The Evening Sun, May 31, 1913.
U.S. Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, the Lansing Papers, 1914–1920 (2 vols., Washington, 1939–40), II, 11.
Johann H. von Bernstorff, My Three Years in America (New York, 1920), 14445; Robert Lansing, War Memoirs of Robert Lansing (Indianapolis, 1935), 48.
Charles Seymour, ed., The Intimate Papers of Colonel House (2 vols., Boston, 1926), II, 19. House was not only thinking in terms of politics. He expressed the opinion that war with Germany could result from a feeling in Berlin that the unprepared condition of the United States rendered her negligible as a foe.
The New York Times, September 4, 1915.
Privately, Wilson wrote a New York editor: “I’ll value your articles on national defense. We won’t go too far in policy.” Woodrow Wilson to Oswald Garrison Villard, September 7, 1915, The Papers of Oswald Garrison Villard, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
For varying explanations of Wilson’s change of policy, see Alex M. Arnett, Claude Kitchen and the Wilson War Policies (Boston, 1937), 49–55; Harley Notter, The Origins of the Foreign Policy of Woodrow Wilson (Baltimore, 1937), 431–32.
Ford’s plan was to sail to Europe, pick up peace delegates at various ports and establish at the Hague a court for peace proposals. En route, they would bombard the trenches on the Western front with wireless messages from the Oscar II. These would urge the soldiers to “strike” for peace and throw away their weapons. The story is told ably in Louis P. Lochnes, America’s Don Quixote (London, 1924) and more recently and objectively in Burnet Hershey, The Odyssey of Henry Ford and the Great Peace Ship (New York, 1967). Lochner was a leader of the peace group; Hershey in 1915 was a reporter for the Eagle.
New York Evening Journal, December 4, 1915; The Evening Telegram, December 4, 1915; The Evening Sun, December 4, 1915; New York Press, December 5, 1915.
The Evening Mail, December 5, 1915.
Mutt designed a coat of arms for the group consisting of a symbolic squirrel, row of spark plugs, a monkey wrench and a nut, “on a field of yellow denoting courage.” New York American, December 30, 1915.
Other members of the Commission were Harold Cox, editor of the Edinburgh Review, H. A. L. Fisher, historian, Sir Edward Clarke, Sir Frederick Pollack, Sir Alfred Hopkinson, and Sir Kenelm E. Digby, all eminent in English law.
Great Britain, Report of the Committee on Alleged German Outrages (London, 1915), 61.
Burton J. Hendrick, The Life and Letters of Walter Hines Page (3 vols., Garden City, New York, 1922–35), II, 78–80.
Armin Rappaport, The British Press and Wilsonian Neutrality (Stanford, California, 1951), 72–75.
Arthur Hebert to James Bryce, September 5, 1915, The Papers of James, Viscount Bryce, Bodleian Library, Oxford.
The following is based on U.S. Senate, 66th Cong., 1st Sess., Subcommittee on the Judiciary, Brewing and Liquor Interests and German and Bolshevik Propaganda (Senate Doc., 62), (3 vols., Washington, 1919), I, iii-xxiii, 11–14, 1454, 1577, 1649–50.
German purchase was kept secret by having Dr. Heinrich Albert transfer the funds to Hayes, Lendheim, Lyon and Company, the legal representatives of the German government in the United States; this firm passed the money to Reinskorf, Lyon and Company, which served as intermediary and provided funds as needed to the holding company, the S.S. McClure Newspaper Corporation.
The “clever” British propagandists were not able to purchase a daily American newspaper anywhere in the country, let alone in New York.
As odd as it may seem, Dumba, in his memoirs, states that he selected Archibald as dispatch bearer because he was known as a “clever conjurer, who readily produced eggs and coins from the noses and ears of his friends, and as easily caused them to disappear again.” Constantin T. Dumba, Memoirs of a Diplomat (Boston, 1932), 260.
Another good survey appears in The World, November 19, 1915.
Fay, an officer in the Austro-Hungarian reserve, was picked up in a woods on the New Jersey side of the Hudson, designing a bomb that would be attached to the rudders of American ships carrying munitions. He confessed and implicated Papen and Boy-Ed.
The New York Herald, August 17, 1915; New York Press, December 15, 1915; The Evening Telegram, August 20, 1915; The Evening Sun, August 17, 1915.
Villard, it might be noted, was a pacifist and of German extraction. After the Post editorially condemned Germany for her role in the outbreak of the war, Villard confided that he was getting a “flood of letters from relatives and dear friends asking me how the son of my father could be such a traitor to Germany ” Oswald G. Villard to Rollo Ogden, September 10, 1914, The Papers of Oswald G. Villard, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1972 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
O’Keefe, K.J. (1972). At the Crossroads, May 1915–December 1915. In: A Thousand Deadlines. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7608-6_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7608-6_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-017-0056-6
Online ISBN: 978-94-015-7608-6
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive