US protests against the blacklist

On 26 January 1916 the United States ambassador in London, Walter Hines Page, handed the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, a note concerning the act which a month earlier had allowed the British to draw up a blacklist of firms in neutral countries connected with the enemy. This was not yet a formal protest. Washington merely reserved the right to protest should the act strike at American trade, and expressed its concerns. The British chronology of the war calls this step an informal protest.

An act the Americans did not know about

The State Department learned of the act from a newspaper. On 12 January the New York “World” wrote about a new British law which forbade residents of Britain to trade with persons of enemy origin or connected with the enemy, even outside enemy territory. On 17 January Secretary of State Robert Lansing asked Page for the text of the act. The ambassador replied on 19 January that the act had not yet been published in the official “London Gazette” nor communicated to the embassy by the British government. Officials of the new Foreign Trade Department of the Foreign Office, which was to enforce it, told him unofficially that the aim was “to destroy German trade wherever found”. They also assured him that at most a dozen or so firms from the United States would be put on the list.

The content of the note

On 25 January Lansing instructed Page to present the government’s position to Grey. The State Department considered that the act carried with it the possibility of undue interference with American trade, if such interference was not already taking place. It was widely felt in the United States, and the government shared this view, that the act had been drafted without due regard for the right of persons living in the United States, whether American citizens or subjects of states at war with Britain, to trade with people in belligerent countries. The American government expressed its own “grave apprehensions” and those of Congress and of American merchants. It reserved the right to protest against the application of the act in so far as it affected the trade of the United States, and to question the legality of such restrictions. Page delivered the note the next day.

Washington’s step was part of a wider dispute. For months the Americans had been complaining about the British detention of ships and cargoes and the censorship of mail, while London answered their notes with long delays. At the same time pressure was growing in Britain to tighten the blockade. Newspapers such as the “Morning Post”, in an article “The Farce of the Blockade” of 18 January, listed how many American goods were reaching Germany through neutral countries.

London’s reply

Grey replied on 16 February. The note was signed on his behalf by Laming Worthington-Evans of the Foreign Trade Department. The British explained that the act brought their rules closer to the French ones, which since the beginning of the war had taken into account a merchant’s nationality and not only his place of residence. They stressed that it was a purely domestic law, imposing prohibitions only on persons subject to British authority. They recognised the right of residents of the United States to trade lawfully with anyone, but did not accept that this right limited the right of other governments to decide on the trade of their own citizens. They promised to act with the greatest possible regard for the interests of neutrals.

The first blacklist, officially called the Statutory List, appeared at the end of February 1916. The dispute flared up in earnest in the summer, when the British put several dozen American firms on it. On 26 July 1916 the United States lodged a formal protest.