The First Note from Washington

Seen from above, the city lay under a pale spring haze, its long boulevards radiating from the Capitol like spokes of a wheel. The Potomac moved dark and sluggish past the wharves, and lampposts glowed along Pennsylvania Avenue as the last clerks walked home. On the second floor of a narrow, cream-colored building beside the White House grounds, a lamp burned in an office. Inside, a man sat at his desk with a draft of a diplomatic note he was not certain he should sign, a document that would soon become another weapon in the war of records, much like the one just produced by the court in the Westminster Hotel.

The document before him was already in its third revision. The first had been written by Robert Lansing, the State Department’s Counselor, a man whose legal mind moved with the precision of a draftsman’s compass and who had been arguing since the day of the sinking that the United States must demand an explanation from Berlin. The second revision had come from President Woodrow Wilson himself, who had taken Lansing’s draft and sharpened its language, giving it the force of a moral argument rather than a legal brief. The third, the version now on Bryan’s desk, was a compromise between the two men’s instincts, and it bore the marks of that compromise in every paragraph.

The note cited not only the Lusitania but three other ships: the Falaba, sunk by a U-boat in March with the loss of one American life; the Cushing, attacked by aircraft; and the Gulflight, torpedoed on 1 May with two Americans among her dead. It set forward the principle that American citizens retained the right to book passage on merchant vessels regardless of the flag those vessels flew. The doctrine of strict accountability, for any harm done to American lives, was reaffirmed. The language was stern, even stern for a diplomatic communication. But it was not an ultimatum. It contained no deadline, no threat of severed relations, no hint of military consequence. It demanded recognition of principles and a disavowal of the act, but it left the precise terms of any German response to a future the note itself did not define.

Bryan read it again. He had been arguing, in the days since the sinking, that the United States must be evenhanded. If Germany had violated international law by torpedoing a passenger liner without warning, Britain had violated international law too, by mounting a blockade that interdicted foodstuffs destined for civilian populations, a blockade that, in Bryan’s view, had provoked the German submarine campaign in the first place. The United States, he believed, should try to persuade the British to abandon their interdiction of foodstuffs and limit their mine-laying operations at the same time as the Germans were persuaded to curtail their submarine campaign. He also suggested that the US government issue an explicit warning against US citizens travelling on any belligerent ships, and ban contraband from being carried on passenger vessels. This argument had not prevailed.

Wilson had listened to it, and had set it aside. The President’s conviction was that the sinking of the Lusitania was not a question of reciprocal grievance but a question of principle: the right of a neutral citizen to travel the open seas on a passenger vessel, regardless of the flag she flew or the war her nation of registry had chosen to fight. Wilson’s legalistic idealism, the same instinct that had produced his diplomatic notes during the earlier submarine crisis in February, saw the Lusitania not as an incident in a war between great powers but as a test of whether international law itself would survive the new technologies of destruction. The torpedo, fired without warning, had killed 1, 198 people. Among them were 128 Americans. The note on Bryan’s desk was meant to say that this could not stand.

But the note’s stern language, however carefully modulated, troubled the Secretary of State in ways he could not resolve by editing. Berlin might read it as a provocation rather than a protest. The possibility of mediation, the role Bryan had envisioned for himself and for the United States since the war’s outbreak, the role of the honest broker who stood above the carnage and offered to bring the belligerents to a table, might close before it could be opened. And if Germany refused to disavow the sinking, the note would commit the United States to a course of action that could end only in war.

The tension was not abstract. It sat in the room with him. Bryan had been Wilson’s Secretary of State since 1913, appointed as much for his political following among the progressive and pacifist wings of the Democratic Party as for his diplomatic experience, which was thin. He had run three times for the presidency and lost three times, and he had accepted the State Department as a consolation and a platform.

He believed in the arbitration of disputes between nations with the same fervor he had once brought to the free coinage of silver. He had negotiated treaties with thirty nations, treaties that provided for investigation of disputes before any declaration of war, and he saw the Lusitania crisis as the precise situation those treaties were designed to manage. Give the investigation time. Let the passions cool. Do not send a note that reads as though it was drafted for the purpose of being refused.

Wilson saw it differently. The Lusitania had been a passenger liner, carrying civilians, sunk without warning by a vessel that had never surfaced, never offered the passengers a chance to take to the boats, never observed the procedures that international law required of warships stopping merchant vessels. The German embassy had published a warning in New York newspapers on the morning of the Lusitania’s departure, placing advertisements that told Americans they sailed at their own risk. But a warning, in Wilson’s view, did not absolve the attacker of the obligation to distinguish between combatant and noncombatant. A torpedo did not make that distinction. It could not.

The British inquiry had concluded its public sessions in London, but the verdict was already clear well before the formal findings were issued. Lord Mersey, the Wreck Commissioner, had heard the testimony of Captain Turner, of Cunard’s representatives, of the surviving crew. He had heard the Admiralty’s evidence regarding the instructions sent to Turner, instructions that had been vague, contradictory, and in one critical respect wrong, directing the ship toward a course that brought her directly into the patrol zone of U-20. But the inquiry’s purpose, from the Admiralty’s standpoint, was to establish German guilt, not British negligence. The testimony about the Admiralty’s own conduct, the signals not sent, the escort not provided, the intelligence from Room 40 about U-20’s position that never reached the Lusitania’s bridge, was heard in private session, and the private sessions would not be published.

The distinction between the public and private sessions was the distinction between what the British government wanted the world to know and what it wanted to keep for itself. The public record would show that the Lusitania had been sunk by a German torpedo, that the ship had carried no munitions of a kind that would justify her destruction, and that Captain Turner, whatever his errors of navigation, had not been negligent in a way that shifted responsibility from the attacker to the attacked. The private record would show the gaps. The Admiralty’s failure to provide Turner with the specific intelligence about U-20’s position that it possessed. The ambiguous orders that had sent the ship into danger without telling her where the danger was.

For Washington, the British inquiry’s emerging verdict was the essential predicate. The note on Bryan’s desk did not cite the inquiry directly, as it was drafted before Mersey’s findings were published, but it rested on the same foundation of fact that the inquiry was establishing. The Lusitania had been a noncombatant vessel. She had been attacked without warning. The attack had killed Americans. These were the claims that the State Department’s note would put before the German government, and they were claims that the British judicial process had been structured, from its opening session, to validate.

The counter-argument was already in the field. The German Foreign Office, under State Secretary Gottlieb von Jagow, had begun to construct its defense even before the American note arrived. Von Jagow alleged that the Lusitania had been instructed to ram submarines, a practice that would have placed her outside the protections afforded to peaceful merchant shipping under the rules governing naval engagement. He further alleged that she had transported munitions and Allied military personnel on earlier crossings. Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the architect of the German Navy, stated that it was sad that many Americans had died in what he called wanton recklessness, a phrase that placed the responsibility on the ship’s owners and the passengers themselves, not on the submarine that had fired the torpedo.

These arguments would appear in the German reply, but they were already circulating in the diplomatic traffic between Berlin and Washington in the days before the note was sent. Bryan knew of them. He had read the cables.

The German ambassador in Washington, Johann von Bernstorff, had told him that Germany considered the Lusitania a legitimate military target, a vessel carrying contraband through a declared war zone, sailing under the flag of a belligerent power. Bryan did not accept this argument, but he understood its logic.

The British blockade was starving German civilians. The submarine was the only weapon Germany possessed that could strike at British commerce. The Lusitania flew the British flag and sailed for a British port. She carried, in her hold, 4, 200 cases of rifle cartridges, a fact that the manifest confirmed and that Cunard did not deny, though the company and the British government insisted the cargo was legal and did not justify the ship’s destruction.

This was the complexity that Bryan wanted the note to acknowledge, and that Wilson’s version of the note refused to acknowledge. The President’s draft treated the sinking as a straightforward act of unlawful violence against noncombatants. Bryan wanted it to acknowledge, at least implicitly, that the United States understood the context of the blockade, the war zone, the cargo. He did not want to excuse the sinking. He wanted to frame it as the consequence of a cycle of escalation in which both belligerents had played a part, and in which the United States, if it wished to remain neutral, must address both.

He lost the argument. The note went forward in Wilson’s language, not Bryan’s.

On 13 May, the document was finalized and transmitted to the American ambassador in Berlin, James W. Gerard, with instructions to deliver it to the German Foreign Office. Gerard received it by cable and prepared the formal presentation. The note, as delivered, contained the key passages that Wilson and Lansing had crafted. It set forward the principle that American citizens retained the right to book passage on merchant vessels regardless of the flag those vessels flew. The doctrine of strict accountability was reaffirmed. The Falaba, the Cushing, and the Gulflight were cited alongside the Lusitania, building a pattern of attacks on American interests and lives. Germany was demanded to recognize these principles and take steps to prevent their further violation.

The language was forceful. But the force was carefully bounded. The note did not say what the United States would do if Germany refused. War was not threatened. No deadline was set. Diplomatic relations were not broken. It was, in the terminology of diplomacy, a démarche, a formal statement of position that demanded a response but did not predetermine what that response must be. Wilson had insisted on this framing. He believed that the United States must state its principles clearly and let the force of those principles do the work. An ultimatum that Germany might accept only under duress, or reject only out of pride, was precisely what he wished to avoid.

Bryan signed the note. He signed it because the President had asked him to, and because the office of Secretary of State required it. But he appended a private communication to Wilson, in which he reiterated his view that the note should have been accompanied by a parallel communication to the British government, urging modification of the blockade. The American people, he told the President, would not support a war fought over the right to sail on belligerent ships. The note, as written, might make such a war more likely rather than less.

Wilson read Bryan’s private communication. He did not change the note.

In Berlin, the document reached the German Foreign Office on 15 May. The initial reception was cool. Von Jagow read it with the careful attention of a diplomat who understood that the language of a note was not always the language of its intent. The force of the condemnation was clear to him. So was the absence of an ultimatum. Space had been left for negotiation, and von Jagow began to consider how Germany might occupy that space without conceding the principle that its submarine campaign was a legitimate response to the British blockade.

But the note also passed through other hands in Berlin. It reached the Kaiser, Wilhelm II, who read it with a different kind of attention. The margins of the American note, in the Kaiser’s hand, carried the words “Utterly impertinent” and “outrageous.” He wrote further that the document was the most insolent thing in tone and bearing that he had had to read since the Japanese note of the previous August. The comparison was to a diplomatic communication from Japan during the earlier stage of the war, when the Kaiser had felt himself similarly affronted by the tone of a power he considered presumptuous.

The Kaiser’s marginalia were not policy. They were the reactions of a man who read documents as personal affronts. But they reflected a current of opinion in the German high command that the American note was an intrusion into Germany’s conduct of a war it had not started and could not afford to lose.

The note had crossed the Atlantic in both directions. It had left Washington as a statement of principle, and it had arrived in Berlin as a provocation. The same words carried different meanings in different capitals. In Washington, the note was a measured assertion of American rights, carefully calibrated to avoid war. In Berlin, it was an attempt by a neutral power to dictate the terms of Germany’s naval warfare, issued at a moment when that warfare was the only lever Germany possessed against the British blockade.

The tension within the American cabinet, the tension between Bryan’s desire for evenhandedness and Wilson’s insistence on principle, was not resolved by the note’s dispatch. It was merely displaced into a future in which it would become acute. Bryan would remain in office for another six weeks, growing more isolated as the crisis deepened. He would oppose the second note, which Wilson would draft in June with even sharper language. He would oppose the third. And then, on 8 June, he would resign, telling Wilson that he could not sign notes that he believed were drawing the country toward a war he could not support.

But that lay ahead. On 15 May 1915, the note was in Berlin, and Berlin was composing its reply.

The German response would take weeks to formulate, and when it came, it would not disavow the sinking. Von Jagow had already argued in the diplomatic traffic that the Lusitania was a legitimate military target, a vessel carrying contraband, sailing under a belligerent flag, operating in a declared war zone. The British blockade would be identified as the originating cause of the submarine campaign. Expressions of regret for the loss of American lives would be offered, but the principle that the sinking had been wrong would not be conceded.

The diplomatic crisis had begun. The first note was a move in a game whose rules neither side had agreed upon and whose outcome neither side could predict. Wilson had staked the credibility of the United States on the proposition that a neutral citizen had the right to travel the seas on any ship that would carry him. Germany had staked its survival, as it understood that survival, on the proposition that a submarine could not fight a war it was forbidden to fight. The Lusitania lay at the bottom of the Atlantic, and the dead lay in the sheds at Queenstown, and the note that was meant to give their deaths meaning had been delivered to a government that was already composing the reasons why those deaths were not its fault.

The cable carrying the American note had crossed the Atlantic and reached Berlin, where the ambassador read its stern language and understood that he would have to deliver it to a government that had already begun to argue, in its own diplomatic traffic, that the sinking was justified. The same document that Bryan had hesitated to sign and Wilson had insisted on sending now sat in the hands of a man who would have to look von Jagow in the eye and present it as the official position of the United States. The ambassador knew, as Bryan knew, that the note’s force depended on a willingness to back it with consequences the note itself did not specify. He knew, as Wilson did not yet fully know, that Germany’s reply would test whether that force was real.