Wilson on the sinking of the Lusitania

The British chronology of the war records under 9 May 1915 that the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, set out in a speech his country’s policy on the sinking of the Lusitania. The speech in question, however, was given by Wilson a day later, on the evening of 10 May, in Philadelphia. The President spent the days between the disaster and this address in seclusion, while Americans waited impatiently for his words.

Silence in the White House

News of the torpedoing of the liner reached Washington on the afternoon of 7 May. The first reports sounded reassuring, but it soon became clear that more than a thousand people had died, including more than a hundred Americans. A week earlier the Germans had torpedoed the American tanker Gulflight, and in March a United States citizen had died in the sinking of the Falaba. This time, however, the scale of the tragedy was beyond comparison.

Wilson issued no statement. On 8 May his secretary Joseph Tumulty told the press only that the President felt the gravity of the situation to the utmost and was considering “very earnestly but very calmly” the right course of action, and that the nation expected him to act with deliberation as well as with firmness. Over the weekend of 8–9 May Wilson avoided public appearances and conversations with journalists. The newspapers wrote of a President “shaken, in seclusion”.

Meanwhile many Americans demanded a tough response. Former President Theodore Roosevelt called the sinking of the Lusitania piracy, and murder on a scale the pirates of old had never known. Within the administration itself, the Counselor of the State Department, Robert Lansing, argued for a firm protest, while the Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, a pacifist, warned against steps that might drag the country into war.

“Too proud to fight”

On Monday 10 May Wilson spoke in Convention Hall in Philadelphia to about 4,000 immigrants who had just received American citizenship. The address had been planned earlier and dealt with Americanism and the loyalty of the new citizens. The President did not mention the Lusitania once, but all his listeners related his words to the events of three days before. Wilson said that the example of America must be a special example, of peace, not because it would not fight, but because peace was the healing and elevating influence of the world. And he added: “There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight. There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.”

The words “too proud to fight” at once became famous. Supporters of neutrality welcomed them with relief, but for the President’s critics, with Roosevelt at their head, they were proof of weakness and cowardice. The next day Wilson explained to journalists that he had been thinking only of the people he was addressing, and that his words were not an announcement of policy towards Germany.

The first note

Washington’s real answer took diplomatic form. On 11 May the cabinet unanimously approved a draft note prepared by Wilson, and on 13 May Bryan sent it to Berlin. In it the United States government listed the attacks on the Falaba, the Cushing, the Gulflight and the Lusitania, recalled that it would hold Germany to “strict accountability” for violating the rights of Americans, and demanded that such attacks be disavowed and reparation made. It was the first of three notes on the Lusitania sent by the summer of 1915. Bryan, considering the second of them too sharp, resigned in June. Wilson kept the country neutral for almost two more years, and the words about being “too proud to fight” stuck to him for a long time.