The Wilsonian Persuasion in American Foreign Policy By Matthew C ...

“The example of America must be a special example of peace,” he said in a Philadelphia speech, “because peace is the healing and elevating influence of the world and strife is not.”²⁰

Colonel House was sent on another peacemaking mission to Europe, advancing Wilson’s idea of an international conference to negotiate peace, and “a league of nations to secure each nation against aggression.”²¹ That effort, too, was rebuffed on all sides. In addition, the Germans were already persuaded that nothing they could do, short of direct attack, would provoke the United States to get involved. United States pacifism was regarded as weakness. Wilson’s Ambassador in Berlin wrote, “The people here are firmly convinced that [Americans] can be slapped, insulted, and murdered with absolute impunity.”

On March 24, 1916, the cross-channel liner Sussex was torpedoed and sunk, killing fifty civilians, Americans among them. Wilson’s advisors, some of whom feared a growing negative public perception, as Colonel House wrote in his diary, “that he talks boldly, but acts weakly,” urged decisive action. Robert Lansing, who replaced Bryan as Secretary of State, recommended cutting off diplomatic relations with Germany. Ambassador Page advocated war. “Thoughtful men here agree that a German-American break would end the war quickly,” he wrote.²² Colonel House, too, supported an aggressive response.

On April 18, President Wilson sent a note to the German Ambassador, warning that “The Government of the United States has been very patient. It now owes it to a just regard for its own rights to say to the Imperial Government. Unless the Imperial Government should now immediately declare and effect an abandonment of its present methods of submarine warfare against passenger and freight-carrying vessels, the Government of the United States can have no choice but to sever diplomatic relations.”

Confronted with the real possibility of imminent war with America, on May 1, Germany balked. The Imperial Government had concluded that, although the abandonment of unrestricted submarine warfare would impair Germany in the fight on the Western Front, the danger of the United States entering the war was even more threatening.