CHAPTER IV THE LUSITANIA THE Lusitania was torpedoed by a German submarine on the 7th of May, 1915, and many American citizens, non-combatants, women and children, were savagely and cruelly drowned. The country was horrified, and at that moment the popular feeling was such that if the President, after demanding immediate reparation and apology to be promptly given, had boldly declared that the time had come when the rights and safety of American citizens were so endangered that it was our duty to go to war, he would have had behind him the enthusiastic support of the whole American people. He would have had it with more enthusiasm and fervor at that moment, I firmly believe, than he did when we finally went to war in 1917, because in the interval he had paltered with the issues raised by Germany through her attacks upon our shipping and her violation of our rights, and had so confused the whole question that the mind of the people generally was not so clear upon our duty and the necessity of action as it was .immediately after the sinking of the Lusitania. He made a speech in Philadelphia on May 10, 1915, three days after the destruction of the ship, in which he used the phrase, "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." Mr. Wilson was given to making phrases and they were not always fortunate. This was probably the most unfortunate phrase that he ever coined. He discovered at once by the expression of feeling all over the country that, although he was usually very shrewd in gauging popular feeling, he had made, by his "too proud to fight," a rather ghastly mistake. It was not the moment for fine words or false idealism. That phrase of "too proud to fight" and his subsequent correspondence in regard to the Lusitania incident, which evaded the issue and clouded it with words, destroyed my confidence in him because he had shown himself destitute of the strength, patriotism, courage and unselfishness which were so sorely needed at that precise moment in any man who was called upon to stand at the head of the American nation. The phrase "too proud to fight," uttered at such a moment, shocked me, as it did many others, and I never again recovered confidence in Mr. Wilson's ability to deal with the most perilous situation which had ever confronted the United States in its relations with the other nations of the earth. In 1916 a controversy arose due to a speech I made at Brockton, and I give a brief account of it here because it completes what I have to say about the destruction of the Lusitania. The summer of 1916 was of course occupied with the Presidential election. The Republican Party made an admirable nomination, taking as their candidate Mr. Justice Hughes, then on the Supreme Court bench. Mr. Wilson made his contest on the cry: "He kept us out of war," and on that noble principle he succeeded in carrying the country, although the vote was very close. During that campaign, a question came up in regard to the Lusitania and the correspondence which followed it. I had received information from a trustworthy source-in fact, from two entirely separate witnessesthat weak as Mr. Wilson's notes in regard to the Lusitania were, he had intended to go further and was considering an additional note or cablegram which would have removed all danger of our going to war with Germany, there really was none at that moment,-but which would have put us in a lamentable position. The strong opposition of Mr. Garrison, then Secretary of War, and others as I afterwards learned stopped the sending of this note. I think it important, in my own interest, to give an account of that controversy. I fully expected that after the campaign I should be assailed for having made the attack, and I therefore prepared a very careful statement of the whole question so as to be ready for the assault, but the attack never came. It then seemed to me evident that the subject was one which the President did not care to pursue. I now give the statement which I had prepared at the time, and which is entirely contemporary: On October 25th, 1916, I received the following letter from Honorable Grafton D. Cushing, who had been Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives and Lieutenant Governor of the Commonwealth, who has been a friend of mine for many years and in whom I have absolute confidence: "Dear Senator Lodge: "October 24, 1916. Dr. Charles H. Bailey of Tufts Medical School came in to see me today to give me the substance of conversations which he had with Breckinridge, the Assistant Secretary of War, on a trip across the continent. The facts may be perfectly well known to you but I have asked Dr. Bailey to put them in typewritten form and I am sending them on to you in case there is any use to be made of them. Dr. Bailey is evidently a perfectly reliable man and if you care to question him further he will be very glad to call on you. Yours very truly, Dr. Bailey's letter which he enclosed was a clear and explicit account of a conversation which he had with Mr. Breckinridge, former Assistant Secretary of War under the present [Wilson] administration, The letter interested me very much because it showed that the note of May 13th, commonly known as the "strict accountability" note, was never intended seriously; that at the time it was sent it did not mean what it purported to mean on its face. The note of June 9th and subsequent events had conclusively shown that the note of May 13th meant nothing. The only new point in Dr. Bailey's report of Mr. Breckinridge's conversation was that the "strict accountability" note of May 13th meant nothing and was intended to mean nothing at the moment when it was written and sent. I added nothing else to what all the world already knew. In a speech at Brockton on October 26th I alluded to the statement by Dr. Bailey, without mentioning names, merely to illustrate the character of the Administration's management of our foreign relations in connection with the destruction of American lives on the Lusitania. What I said attracted some attention in the press and I felt that it was necessary for me to give my authority for my statements. I communicated with Dr. Bailey, who told me that I was entirely at liberty to use his letter and who confirmed all that was said in the letter, in the strongest way. I made the following speech at Somerville on October 28th: "As a concrete instance both of the indifference of this Administration to the rights of Americans to be protected in their lives when lawfully beyond the borders of the United States, and of the paltering way in which this question has been dealt with, I need only cite some recent events. "On the 7th of May, 1915, the Lusitania was destroyed by a submarine and the lives of more than 100 American citizens, lawfully on board, were sacrificed. On May 10th, the President, speaking at Philadelphia, made the famous remark about the nation being "too proud to fight." This statement was not well received by the country and the Administration made haste to disclaim it. On the 13th of May the President wrote a note to Germany, in which occurred the following passage: "This Government has already taken occasion to inform the Imperial German Government that it cannot admit the adoption of such measures or such a warning of danger to operate as in any degree an abbreviation of the rights of American shipmasters or of American citizens bound on lawful errands as passengers on merchant ships of belligerent nationality; and that it must hold the Imperial German Government to a strict accountability for any infringement of those rights, intentional or incidental.' The concluding paragraph of the note was as follows: "The Imperial German Government will not expect the Government of the United States to omit any word or any act necessary to the performance of its sacred duty of maintaining the rights of the United States and its citizens and of safeguarding their free exercise and enjoyment.' "The note thus framed was agreed to by the cabinet and in this form it was sent. On the 8th of June Mr. Bryan resigned from the cabinet and on the 9th of June the second note to Germany concerning the operation of submarines was sent. The second note sounded a retreat from the very strong language used in the first note. “In the meantime it became publicly known that the Austrian Ambassador had sent word to Berlin that the first note really meant nothing but was intended merely to satisfy public opinion, and that he had this information from the Secretary of State, Mr. Bryan. It is not necessary to discuss the propriety of Mr. Bryan's action in making such a statement to the representative of a foreign power; but that it was true has been shown in the process of time by the fact that Germany was not held to a 'strict accountability' and that no disavowal, no apology for the destruction of American lives on the |