by Richard van Pelt, WWI Correspondent

The news from the Daily Capital Journal for 8 June, 1915 began with the report of the resignation of William Jennings Bryan as Secretary of State:

BRYAN RESIGNS FROM CABINET WHEN VIEWS ARE NOT ACCEPTED

Washington, June 8 – Secretary of State Bryan has resigned. This became known late today following stormy scenes immediately preceding a cabinet session during which President Wilson’s rejoiner to Germany was discussed. Bryan disagreed with the president and other members of the cabinet as to the position the United States should take. He insisted upon moderation against the president’s firm decision to reiterate that the United States expected its rights under international law to be respected.

PRESIDENT AND BRYAN CLASH OVER CONTEXT OF NOTE TO GERMANY
Wilson Stands for “Excuse Proof” Reply to Kaiser While Secretary of State Would Leave Loophole to Continue Further Negotiations – Bryan Formulates Substitute Reply Which Evidently Is Rejected By Cabinet In Favor of President’s Note – Bryan Must Bow to Chief or Resign.

To summarize, the Lusitania was a British liner, sunk by a German submarine on 7 May, 1915. Over one hundred Americans on board lost their lives. Germany insisted at the time that the ship was carrying munitions, which she was, though the nature and the amount is open to question. It has also been argued that the ship was armed. In its design, conversion was possible, as the ship’s construction was subsidized by the Admiralty. Wilson’s insistence on a strongly worded condemnation of the sinking led to Bryan’s resignation.

It was not unusual for passenger liner construction to be subsidized by governments. Their construction was a collaboration and partnership between owners of the liners and the Admiralty, or naval ministry. The SS United States, now rusting at a pier in South Philadelphia, was largely funded by the Department of Defense:

The ship, which on its maiden voyage in July 1952 set the record of three days, 10 hours and 40 minutes for an eastbound crossing of the Atlantic at an average speed of 44 miles per hour, was built for speed because it was meant to be a troop carrier if needed. The Pentagon paid two-thirds of its $78 million construction cost.

The central argument in the President’s protest is a moral argument asserting the freedom of passengers on the high seas not to become what we today refer to as “collateral damage:”

But the sinking of passenger ships involves principles of humanity which throw into the background any special circumstances of detail that may be thought to affect the cases, principles which lift it, as the Imperial German Government will no doubt be quick to recognize and acknowledge, out of the class of ordinary subjects of diplomatic discussion or of international controversy.

Whatever be the other facts regarding the Lusitania, the principal fact is that a great steamer, primarily and chiefly a conveyance for passengers, and carrying more than a thousand souls who had no part or lot in the conduct of the war, was torpedoed and sunk without so much as a challenge or a warning, and that men, women, and children were sent to their death in circumstances unparalleled in modern warfare.

The fact that more than one hundred American citizens were among those who perished made it the duty of the Government of the United States to speak of these things and once more, with solemn emphasis, to call the attention of the Imperial German Government to the grave responsibility which the Government of the United States conceives that it has incurred in this tragic occurrence, and to the indisputable principle upon which that responsibility rests.

The Government of the United States is contending for something much greater than mere rights of property or privileges of commerce. It is contending for nothing less high and sacred than the rights of humanity, which every Government honours itself in respecting and which no Government is justified in resigning on behalf of those under its care and authority.

Only her actual resistance to capture or refusal to stop when ordered to do so for the purpose of visit could have afforded the commander of the submarine any justification for so much as putting the lives of those on board the ship in jeopardy. This principle the Government of the United States understands the explicit instructions issued on August 3, 1914, by the Imperial German Admiralty to its commanders at sea to have recognized and embodied, as do the naval codes of all other nations, and upon it every traveller and seaman had a right to depend.

It is upon this principle of humanity as well as upon the law founded upon this principle that the United States must stand.

President Wilson would later issue a third protest, stronger, and more in the form of an ultimatum.

A headline describes the indescribability of enduring an artillery barrage:

HUMAN MIND CANNOT CONCEIVE IMMENSITY OF GREAT STRUGGLE
Countless Tons of Shells Screaming of Devastation, Thousands of Men Writhing In Agonies of Death and Needless Waste of Peaceful villages Compose An awful Panorama Never To Be Forgotten

Technology has the effect of dissolving boundaries. The technology brought to bear on the battlefields of the Western Front defied the comprehension of all but a few observers. Extension of technology as a tool of military and foreign policy in the prosecution of war aims stretched and broke the moral foundations underlying the rules of war. It was too easy to use gas, too easy to employ the capacities of the industrial age in throwing millions of rounds of high explosives into a narrow strip some several hundred miles in length, and too easy to use the inherent stealth of the submarine to bring one’s enemy to heel. More than once, readers in Salem have been told that where technology exists, it will be used without regard to any ethical or moral standards.