Abstract
By mid-1915, the paradox created by Wilson’s pragmatic and idealistic goals was clearly evident. The president was becoming more focused on his country’s economic bonds with Great Britain, which complicated his effort to be a fair mediator. Anglo-American trade relations made Britain very important to US economic health and helped to provoke the submarine crisis with Germany. When U-boat attacks resulted in the death of American citizens, they challenged Wilson’s sense of morality and further shaped his negative perception of Germany. The submarine cordon created a diplomatic quandary. Wilson wanted to remain neutral yet demonstrate that “strict accountability” was not just mere rhetoric. Disagreements over the correct approach to the crisis caused a major shake-up in Wilson’s administration culminating with Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan’s decision to resign from his post. Additionally Colonel Edward House’s mission to Europe was not having the effect that the president hoped. The belligerents’ aversion to peace talks would play a critical role in solidifying Wilson’s and House’s conviction that Germany was the major barrier to peace talks. Collectively, the intertwining of his ideological outlook and economic interests affected the president’s approach to the war and became the catalyst for Wilson’s eventual decision to abandon US neutrality.
They seem to think that all this Government has to do is stiffen its back and peremptorily demand respect for the rights of its citizens, and that the belligerent governments, though they may fume and bluster, will submit rather than have an open breach with the United States.
—State Department Counselor Robert Lansing, May 3, 19151
Prudence is an impertinent intruder this week, and Wisdom intolerable!
—Wilson to Edith Galt, May 8, 19152
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Notes
Wilson to Edith Boiling Galt, May 8, 1915, Arthur S. Link, ed., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 33: 128–29. Italics added by Wilson.
Ibid.; Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy, “Convention Relating to the Status of Enemy Merchant Ships at the Outbreak of Hostilities (Hague 6); October 18, 1907,” accessed August 2012, www.avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hague06.asp; See also: Natalino Ronzitti, ed. The Law of Naval Warfare: A Commentary on the Relevant Agreements and Documents (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1988), 353–54.
Three letters from Bryan, April 19, 1915, Arthur S. Link, ed., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 33: 28–29.
Howard Jones, Crucible of Power: A History of American Foreign Relations from 1897, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), 72; New York Times, May 8, 1915,6.
House to Wilson, May 9, 1914, Seymour, Intimate Papers of Colonel House, 1: 433–34; House to Wilson, May 11, 1915, Link, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 33: 158–59; Armin Rappaport, The British Press and Wilsonian Neutrality (Gloucester, Massachusetts: Stanford University Press, 1965), 34; Glasgow Herald, May 10, 1915 as cited in Rappaport, The British Press and Wilsonian Neutrality, 35. 31.
Joseph P. Tumulty, Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page, 1921), 232.
Gerard to Bryan, May 10, 1915 (received May 11, 1915, 1: 10 p.m.), FRUS: 1915. Supplement, The World War, 389; Paul G. Halpern, A Naval History of the First World War (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1995), 298.
H. C. Peterson, Propaganda for War: The Campaign against American Neutrality, 1914–1917 (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1939), 38;
James Morgan Read, Atrocity Propaganda, 1914–1919 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1941), 204–5, 211–15;
Trevor Wilson, The Myriad Faces of War: Britain and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986), 184–85. While the Bryce Report was probably the apex of British propaganda sent to the United States, there seems to have been limited discussion about the Bryce Report in the White House. The Bryce Report did not seem to influence Wilson’s conversations with the Department of State or Col. House during the much more pressing submarine crisis. Additionally, as discussed in previous chapters, the administration had already agreed that the time for protesting against the German treatment of Belgian civilians had passed and that new protests could endanger the peace process. Therefore, while it may have bolstered the British population and pro-Allied Americans, it did not seem play a significant role in Wilson’s policies. In July 1918, Assistant Secretary of Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt confirmed the lack of popular support when he sat down with King George V and expressed that Americans doubted the report’s claims.
Thomas Fleming, The Illusions of Victory: America in World War I (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 255.
Arthur Link, Wilson: The Struggle for Neutrality, 1914–1915 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 385–89.
Spring-Rice to Grey, April 20, 1915 (received on May 5), Stevenson, ed., British Documents on Foreign Affairs: Reports and Papers from the Foreign Office Confidential Print. Part 2, From the First to the Second World War. Series H. The First World War, 1914–1918, Volume 5, Blockade and Economic Warfare, 1: August 1914—July 1915, 145–46; Stephen Broadberry and Mark Harrison, eds., The Economics of World War I (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 12.
Henry Asquith, the Earl of Oxford, and Asquith, KG, Memories and Reflections, 1852–1927 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1928), 2: 90.
Arthur Marwick, The Deluge: British Society and the First World War (London: Bodley Head, 1965), 56–58. At the beginning of the war, Secretary of State for War Lord Kitchener convinced Asquith’s cabinet to drastically increase the size of the British ground forces and by the spring of 1915 the number of men available to work in munitions factories had dropped by one-third.
See David French’s chapter “The Rise and Fall of ‘Business as Usual,’” in Kathleen Burk, ed., War and the State: The Transformation of the British Government, 1914–1919 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1982), 21.
Chris Wrigley, “The Ministry of Munitions: an Innovatory Department,” in Kathleen Burk, ed., War and the State, 38; David Lloyd George, War Memoirs of David Lloyd George, 1914–1915 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1933), 115.
Lloyd George, War Memoirs of David Lloyd George, 1914–1915, 175–79; Peter Roland, David Lloyd George: A Biography (New York: MacmiHan, 1976), 307.
For more on the failure of the Royal Navy attack on the Turkish defenses see Jeffrey D. Wallin, By Ships Alone: Churchill and the Dardanelles (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 1981), 161–95; Halpern, A Naval History of World War I, 111–16;
Hew Strachan, The First World War (London: Viking Penguin, 2004), 115–23;
Paolo E. Colette, Sea Power in the Atlantic and Mediterranean in World War I (London: University Press of America, 1989), 19–23.
Morning Post, May 12, 1915, as cited in Peter Fraser, “British War Policy and the Crisis of Liberalism in May 1915,” The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 54, No. 1 (March 1982), 9.
John Turner, British Politics and the Great War: Coalition and Conflict, 1915–1918 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 61.
Turner, British Politics and the Great War, 120–22; Wilson, The Myriad Faces of War, 192–94; R. J. Q. Adams, Arms and the Wizard: Lloyd George and the Ministry of Munitions, 1915–1916 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1978), 28;
Samuel J. Hurwitz, State Intervention in Great Britain: A Study of Economic Control and Social Response, 1914–1919 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), 154–55.
Charles Seymour, ed., The Intimate Papers of Colonel House: Behind the Political Curtain, 1912–1915 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1926), 1: 424–26.
Von Jagow to Gerard, May 28, 1915, James Brown Scott, ed., Diplomatic Correspondence between the United States and Germany, 1914–1917 (Oxford University Press, 1918), 47–50.
Bryan to Wilson, June 3, 1915, ibid., 33: 321–26; In April 1914, several USN sailors were arrested in Tampico, Mexico when they went ashore to locate fuel for the USS Dolphin, stationed near the city, during the Mexican Revolution. The Wilson administration used the affair to justify an eight-month long occupation of Vera Cruz, Mexico’s main port on the Gulf of Mexico, to force Mexican President Victoriano Huerta from power. In preparing for the occupation, the State Department advised Americans living in Tampico to leave because of the threat of reprisal by the Mexican people. Robert S. Quirk, An Affair of Honor: Woodrow Wilson and the Occupation of Vera Cruz, Mexico (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962), 20–22.
Mary Baird Bryan and William Jennings Bryan, The Memoirs of William Jennings Bryan (Chicago, IL: John C. Winston, 1925), 419–24. Mary Bryan added the italics to emphasize her husband’s distress.
Kendrick A. Clements, The Presidency of Woodrow Wilson (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992), 126; Mary Baird Bryan and William Jennings Bryan, The Memoirs of William Jennings Bryan, 422–24;
August Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson (New York; Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1991), 366–68.
Paolo E. Coletta, William Jennings Bryan: 2. Progressive Politician and Moral Statesman, 1909–1915 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969), 311; House diary entry, June 24, 1915, Edward M. House Diary, Alderman Library, University of Virginia.
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© 2013 M. Ryan Floyd
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Floyd, M.R. (2013). “The Palliations of Piracy”. In: Abandoning American Neutrality. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137334121_7
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