The Secretary’s Resignation

Seen from above, Washington was a small city laid out along its grand avenues, a capital of marble and limestone softened by summer green. Along the axis from the Capitol to the White House, the work of a neutral republic confronted a crisis. The separate urgencies of foreign embassies, the movement of cables and dispatches through government buildings, and the vigil of reporters all marked a quiet surface. The city was small. The stakes were not.

From that height, Washington looked as it always looked in June. But the surface stillness of a town built on procedure and deliberation concealed a government seized by a question that had become unavoidable. The European war had begun in August 1914. Wilson had declared American neutrality and asked the public to remain impartial in thought as well as in action, neutral in fact as well as in name. Ten months later, more than a thousand people lay dead off the coast of Ireland, and the neutrality the President had invoked was buckling under a single torpedo.

William Jennings Bryan sat at his desk in the State Department during the first week of June 1915, holding the German reply to the second American note. The reply had arrived in Washington in the opening days of the month. It refused what the second note had demanded. It did not disavow the sinking. It offered no reparations. It restated the claim that the Lusitania had carried contraband munitions and that the ship had been directed to ram enemy submarines, in violation of the established rules of naval engagement. Wilson had read the reply, set it on his desk, and turned to the question of what must follow. The Secretary of State who had signed both prior communications to Berlin now faced the prospect of signing a third, and the strain was visible in the document before him and in the principles he had held throughout his public life.

Of the 159 American citizens aboard the Lusitania, over a hundred had lost their lives. The Nation had called the sinking a deed for which a Hun would blush, a Turk be ashamed, and a Barbary pirate apologize. The outrage was not confined to editorial pages. German-American businesses faced boycotts in cities across the country. Count von Bernstorff, the German ambassador, received death threats. American newspapers printed the names and photographs of the dead alongside the embassy notice that had appeared in New York newspapers on the morning of the Lusitania’s departure, next to the Cunard sailing advertisement. The juxtaposition was devastating. It implied premeditation. It implied defiance. The German government had warned American citizens not to board a British liner and then killed them when they did.

The public fury was real and it was massive. But it was not uniform. A significant current of American opinion, particularly in the Midwest and among German-American communities, questioned whether the Lusitania had been an innocent passenger vessel. Rumors of munitions in the cargo had circulated since the first day, and the German reply had given them official sanction. There were Americans who asked why their fellow citizens had been traveling on a belligerent nation’s ship in a war zone. There were Americans who believed that Wilson’s insistence on the right of citizens to travel on belligerent vessels was less a defense of principle than a defense of commerce. And there was one American, in a position of considerable authority, who had been making exactly that argument inside the Cabinet.

Bryan was fifty-five years old, three times the Democratic candidate for President, a former congressman from Nebraska, a Presbyterian, a teetotaler, a pacifist by conviction. He was the only member of Wilson’s Cabinet who had argued from the first day that the Lusitania crisis required not firmer language but a different policy entirely.

His position was consistent and it was on the record. After the sinking, Bryan had argued that Wilson should prohibit American citizens from traveling on belligerent ships. The proper American response, in his view, was not to demand that Germany abandon submarine warfare but to remove American citizens from the theater of war, to make them unavailable as targets. He believed that Wilson had placed the defense of American trade rights above neutrality, and that this ordering of priorities would lead to war.

The German reply on his desk had hardened Wilson’s position, not softened it. The President read the refusal to disavow as an affront. The renewed claims about munitions and ramming orders he read as propaganda designed to shift blame onto the victim. A third note would be sent, one that would leave no ambiguity about American resolve.

Bryan read the same document differently. The reply signaled that Germany would not yield under pressure, and that further pressure would close off the possibility of negotiation. A third note, written in the tone Wilson intended, would present Germany with an ultimatum. An ultimatum, if enforced, meant war.

The disagreement between the President and his Secretary of State was not personal. It was structural. Wilson believed that the United States possessed rights as a neutral that no belligerent could override, and that those rights included the right of American citizens to travel on the high seas without being torpedoed. Bryan believed that the exercise of those rights, in a war zone, by citizens traveling on belligerent vessels, was provocation dressed as principle. The two positions could be reconciled in ordinary times. They could not be reconciled after the Lusitania.

The man who connected these two positions, who tried to bridge them, who carried messages between the White House and the State Department, who advised Wilson on tone and Bryan on substance, was Edward M. House. Known universally as Colonel House, he was the President’s confidant. He held no official position, no office in the government, no authority to issue orders or sign documents. But Wilson’s ear was, in the American system of 1915, the instrument through which foreign policy was shaped, and House possessed it.

House had been in London when the Lusitania went down, meeting with British officials including Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, discussing the possibility of American mediation to end the war. The news reached him on the evening of 7 May. He wrote in his diary that he was stunned, that the event would change everything. He returned to Washington and began advising Wilson toward a posture that Bryan could not accept.

The influence was quiet and it was persistent. House believed that Germany had committed an act of piracy. The United States must respond with a firmness that left no room for misinterpretation. In conversations recorded in his own memoranda, he told Wilson that the American people demanded a response matching their outrage, that anything less would be read in Berlin, in London, in Paris as weakness.

Wilson listened. The notes that emerged from the State Department in the weeks after the sinking bore Wilson’s conviction and Bryan’s signature. The first demanded that Germany take steps to prevent a recurrence. The second, dispatched on 28 May, demanded that Germany disavow the act and offer reparations. The language was Wilson’s. The signature was Bryan’s. The gap between the two was the space in which the resignation took shape.

Before the second note was sent, Bryan had told Wilson that its tone was too stern. A note written in that register would be read in Berlin as a demand for capitulation, not a basis for negotiation. If the United States insisted on the right of Americans to travel on belligerent ships through war zones, it was effectively demanding that Germany abandon submarine warfare. Germany would not do so under threat. The proper course was to negotiate, to use the crisis as an opening for mediation rather than a cause for confrontation.

Wilson had listened. He had not agreed. The United States could not negotiate the principle that American citizens had a right to travel safely on the high seas. To negotiate that principle was to abandon it. To warn Americans off belligerent ships was to concede that a belligerent could dictate the conditions of American travel. Wilson saw this as a surrender of sovereignty. Bryan saw it as a surrender of common sense.

The German reply arrived. It confirmed Bryan’s prediction that Berlin would not yield. It also confirmed Wilson’s conviction that yielding was not the point. The United States was not asking Germany to yield. It was telling Germany what the rules were. If Germany would not accept those rules, the consequences would follow.

Bryan read the reply. Wilson would send a third note. The third note would be firmer still. He could not sign it.

On 8 June 1915, Bryan went to the White House. He carried a letter. It was brief. It stated that he, William Jennings Bryan, Secretary of State of the United States, hereby resigned his office, to take effect upon the appointment of his successor. The letter did not explain the resignation at length. It did not need to. Wilson and Bryan had been arguing for weeks. The letter was the end of the argument, not the beginning.

Wilson accepted the resignation immediately, without attempting to change Bryan’s mind. A brief acceptance expressed regret and appreciation for Bryan’s service. He did not ask Bryan to stay.

The speed of the acceptance was noted. Bryan had expected, perhaps, that Wilson would ask him to reconsider. The President had already decided that the third note would be sent, and that it would be sent over the signature of a Secretary of State who agreed with it. Bryan’s departure was not a casualty of the crisis. It was a condition of its next phase.

Robert Lansing, the Counselor of the State Department, the second-ranking official, was appointed to replace Bryan. Lansing was a lawyer, a specialist in international law, a man whose instincts on the Lusitania question ran closer to Wilson’s than to Bryan’s. The third note would carry his signature. The correspondence that followed would carry his signature. It would do so without the reservations that Bryan had carried into every meeting and every draft.

The resignation was made public on 9 June. The news broke across the country in the afternoon editions. The political response was immediate and it was divided. Bryan’s supporters, pacifists, anti-interventionists, German-Americans, and a substantial portion of the Democratic Party’s populist wing, saw the resignation as a principled stand against a march toward war. Bryan was the last man in the Cabinet who would say what Wilson did not want to hear. They were right about that.

Bryan’s critics, and there were many, in the press and in the government, saw the resignation as evidence that he was unequal to the crisis. A Secretary of State who believed the solution was to keep Americans off British ships was a Secretary of State who had accepted the German framing of the problem. Bryan’s pacifism was not a virtue in a confrontation with a power that had torpedoed a passenger liner. They were right about that too.

The truth was that both men were acting on principle, and the principles were incompatible. Wilson believed that the United States must defend the rights of neutrals on the high seas. Bryan believed that the United States must avoid being drawn into a European war. The Lusitania had made those two beliefs mutually exclusive. The torpedo that Walther Schwieger had fired from U-20 on 7 May 1915, killing 1, 199 people, had not only sunk a ship. It had detonated inside the American government, blowing apart the coalition that had kept the United States neutral.

Bryan left Washington. He returned to Florida, where he had a home, and then to Nebraska. He continued to speak publicly against the drift toward war. He wrote and lectured, arguing that the United States should remain neutral, should not lend money to belligerents, should not allow American citizens to travel on belligerent vessels. The administration he had left ignored him. The people who had always heard him, the farmers, the populists, the midwesterners whose suspicion of European entanglements was older than the war itself, continued to listen.

The Cabinet that Bryan left was not the Cabinet he had joined. With his departure, the balance of opinion within Wilson’s government shifted. The voices arguing for firmness, House, Lansing, Secretary of War Lindley Garrison, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, had lost their most effective counterweight. Bryan had been the only man in the Cabinet with the political standing to tell Wilson that the course was wrong. A three-time presidential candidate, the leader of the Democratic Party’s populist wing, he had delivered the Nebraska delegation and the midwestern support that had helped elect Wilson in 1912. When Bryan spoke, he spoke with the weight of a constituency that Wilson could not afford to ignore. When he left, that constituency lost its voice in the Cabinet.

Wilson did not replace it. He moved forward without it.

The third note was drafted and sent. It demanded that Germany abandon submarine warfare against passenger and merchant vessels. It stated that the United States would regard any repetition of acts like the sinking of the Lusitania as an unfriendly act. The language was firm. The signature was Lansing’s. The tone was the tone that Bryan had warned against, the tone that he believed would lead to war.

Germany did not immediately break relations. It did not immediately declare war. In the months that followed, it offered a partial concession, an expression of regret for the loss of American lives coupled with a renewed insistence that the Lusitania had been a legitimate target. The crisis did not resolve. It paused. It settled into a condition of unresolved tension that would last until January 1917, when Germany announced the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, the policy that brought the United States into the war Bryan had spent his career trying to prevent.

The irony was not lost on anyone who watched the sequence. Bryan had resigned to protest a policy he believed would lead to war. The policy he protested did not lead to war, not immediately, not in the summer of 1915. What led to war was the policy Germany chose eighteen months later, the same policy that had produced the Lusitania sinking in the first place: unrestricted submarine warfare, the deliberate targeting of vessels in a declared war zone, the acceptance that passenger ships and merchant ships and neutral ships would be sunk without warning.

Bryan had been wrong about the timing. He had not been wrong about the direction.

The resignation removed the most powerful institutional brake on policies that aligned the United States ever closer with the Allied powers. The State Department, without Bryan, drafted notes in a register that Berlin read as belligerent. The Cabinet, without Bryan, discussed preparedness, military expansion, naval construction, the possibility that the United States might need to fight. Whether the United States would remain neutral was no longer the question. How long neutrality could be maintained, and at what cost, was.

Wilson did not want war in June 1915. He wanted Germany to respect American rights. He wanted the principle established that a belligerent could not torpedo a passenger liner and kill American citizens with impunity. Firmness would produce compliance, not conflict. He may have been right. Germany did moderate its submarine campaign in the months after the Lusitania crisis, not because of Wilson’s notes alone, but because the German Admiralty calculated that unrestricted submarine warfare, pursued at that moment, would bring the United States into the war before Germany was ready for it.

But the moderation was temporary. The calculation changed. The calculation that brought Germany back to unrestricted submarine warfare in January 1917 was the same calculation that had produced Schwieger’s torpedo off the Old Head of Kinsale: the belief that the submarine could starve Britain into submission before the United States could intervene. That belief was wrong. The United States did intervene. The path from intervention to war ran through the space that Bryan’s resignation had opened.

The Lusitania’s torpedo had struck deep, into the seabed off Ireland, into the diplomatic correspondence between Washington and Berlin, and into the Cabinet room of the Wilson administration. It had removed a Secretary of State. It had installed a successor more amenable to the President’s convictions. It had shifted the balance of American foreign policy toward the posture that Bryan had spent his career opposing.

In London, the British government watched the American crisis with careful attention. The Foreign Office, the Admiralty, and the War Cabinet all understood that the Lusitania sinking was a political weapon as much as a military operation. The 1, 199 dead included 128 Americans. The outrage in the United States was the most valuable strategic asset Britain possessed, more valuable than the munitions that had or had not been in the cargo, more valuable than the intelligence that Room 40 had or had not passed to the Admiralty. The British understood that if the United States could be kept outraged, the chances of American entry into the war increased. If the United States entered the war, the Allied position was transformed.

The British did not need to engineer American outrage. It existed. It was genuine. The dead were real. The German embassy’s warning had been real. The torpedo had been real. The eighteen minutes in which the Lusitania sank had been real. Britain needed only to let the facts speak, and to ensure that the facts continued to speak, through the inquiry now underway in London, through the testimony being taken, through the report that would be issued.

The Mersey Inquiry, sitting in Westminster, was examining the circumstances of the sinking. It was taking testimony from Captain Turner, from Cunard officials, from survivors, from naval officers. It would produce a report. That report would be read in Washington. It would be read by Lansing, who had replaced Bryan. It would be read by Wilson. It would be read by a government that had lost its chief advocate for peace and gained a Secretary of State who saw the crisis through a different lens.

Bryan’s desk in the State Department was cleared. His papers were packed. His successor sat down in the same chair, behind the same desk, and began the work of drafting the communications that Bryan had refused to sign. The cables moved. The notes went out. The machinery of American diplomacy continued, but it was now operating without the governor that Bryan had provided, without the voice that said, at every meeting, that the path of firmness was the path of war, and that the United States should choose differently.

With Bryan gone, the Wilson administration was stripped of its chief advocate for peace. The State Department that had argued for neutrality now argued for rights. The Cabinet that had contained a dissenting voice now contained none. The American government would read the British inquiry report when it came, the report on the sinking, the report on the dead, the report on the eighteen minutes, with no one left to ask whether the firmness that followed was wisdom or recklessness.