Robert Lansing becomes Secretary of State

On 24 June 1915 Robert Lansing took office as Secretary of State, that is, foreign minister of the United States. President Woodrow Wilson had appointed him the day before. As Congress was not in session, it was a recess appointment. The Senate confirmed it only in December. Lansing, until then Counselor of the State Department, had been running it in an acting capacity since 9 June, the day on which William Jennings Bryan left office.

Bryan’s resignation

Bryan, three times the Democratic candidate for president and a pacifist, had differed with Wilson over policy towards Germany since the start of the war. After the sinking of the Lusitania he still signed the first note of protest of 13 May. But when the Germans, in their reply of 28 May, evaded responsibility, claiming among other things that the liner had been armed and was carrying troops, Wilson prepared a second, firm note. Bryan believed it might lead to war. He wanted the United States to propose to Germany that the dispute be examined by an international commission, as provided for in the conciliation treaties concluded on his initiative, to warn citizens against travelling on ships of the belligerent powers, and to protest just as firmly against the British blockade.

Wilson did not agree. On 8 June, as the cabinet was giving final approval to the text of the note, Bryan resigned. In his letter to the President he wrote that he could not sign the note without violating his duty to his country and to the cause closest to his heart, the prevention of war. Wilson accepted the resignation “with deep regret”. Most American newspapers greeted Bryan’s departure with relief, while the German-American press praised him for his fidelity to principle.

On 9 June Wilson authorised Lansing to act as Secretary of State for not more than 30 days. On the same day Lansing signed and sent to the ambassador in Berlin the second Lusitania note. In it the US government rejected the German claims that the ship had been armed, had carried troops or had been an auxiliary vessel of the Royal Navy, invoked the principles of humanity and demanded assurances that Germany would respect American lives and American ships.

An international lawyer

Lansing was 50. Born in 1864 in Watertown, New York, he graduated from Amherst College and for many years practised law in his home town. He specialised in international law. He was one of the US counsel in the Bering Sea fur-seal arbitration of 1892–1893, before the tribunal that in 1903 settled the Alaska boundary, and in the North Atlantic fisheries arbitration at The Hague in 1909–1910. He was a co-founder of the American Society of International Law. His father-in-law was John W. Foster, Secretary of State under President Benjamin Harrison, and his wife’s nephew was the young John Foster Dulles.

He became Counselor of the State Department in April 1914. During Bryan’s absences he stood in for him several times, among others in the autumn of 1914, when he conducted the dispute with London over the law of naval warfare. As the department’s lawyer he drafted many notes on questions of neutrality and in the spring of 1915 argued for a tougher line towards Germany than his superior.

Wilson’s choice

Unlike Bryan, Lansing had no political following. According to Wilson’s biographer Arthur Link, that was precisely what counted in his favour. The President’s adviser Edward House advised choosing someone who did not have “too many ideas of his own”, and Wilson intended in practice to direct foreign policy himself. He valued Lansing as an expert in law and diplomatic procedure, but treated him more as an executor than as a partner.

The new Secretary of State was more distrustful of Germany than his predecessor. Years later he wrote that after the sinking of the Lusitania he had come to the conviction that the United States would ultimately become an ally of Great Britain. For the time being, however, it was Wilson who set the tone, and the country remained neutral. Lansing headed the State Department until February 1920, through the period of the United States’ entry into the war and the peace conference in Paris.