Abstract
In late 1914 and early 1915, Congress deliberated over legislation that could disrupt Anglo-American relations. Many Americans believed that selling weapons to the Allies was an unneutral act and members of the House and Senate presented bills to stop the munitions trade in the hope of forcing a quick end to the war. Wilson opposed the munitions bills. He concluded that according to international law the United States had the right to sell weapons and ammunition to the warring parties and feared that if passed, the legislation could harm his administration’s renewed effort to initiate mediation. Congress was also discussing the shipping bill. The legislation faced major opposition on Capitol Hill because many Americans believed that it would lead to excessive government interference in US trade.
All must confess failure … now when the cup of sorrow is overflowing … it would seem to be this nation’s duty as the leading exponent of Christianity and as the foremost advocate of world-wide peace, to approach the warring nations again and earnestly urge them to consent to a conference.
—Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan to Wilson, December 1, 19141
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Notes
Bryan to Wilson, December 1, 1914, Arthur S. Link, ed., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 31: 378–79.
House to Wilson (with enclosures), December 27, 1914, ibid., 31: 540–41. Link suggests it was received around December 15; Patrick Devlin, Too Proud to Fight: Woodrow Wilson’s Neutrality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975, c1974), 245–46.
As quoted in Arthur Link, Wilson: The Struggle for Neutrality, 1914–1915 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 209.
Ibid.; Charles Seymour, ed., The Intimate Papers of Colonel House: Behind the Political Curtain, 1912–1915 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1926), December 17, 1914, 1: 340–41.
David M. Esposito, The Legacy of Woodrow Wilson: American War Aims in World War I (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), 20;
Lady A. G. Lennox, ed., The Diary of Lord Bertie of Thame 1914–1918 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1924), 81–82.
Grey to Spring-Rice, December 19, 1914, FO 800 / 84; Grey to Spring-Rice, December 20, 1914, ibid.; Hew Strachan, Financing the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 188;
Roberta A Dayer, “Strange Bedfellows: J. P. Morgan and Co. Whitehall, and the Wilson Administration during World War I,” Business History, Vol. 18, No. 2 (1976), 128;
Kathleen Burk, “The Treasury: From Impotence to Power,” in Kathleen Burk, ed. War and the State: The Transformation of the British Government, 1914–1919 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1982), 89–90.
Clifton J. Child, “German-American Attempts to Prevent the Exportation of Munitions of War, 1914–1915,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. 25, No. 3 (December 1938), 352.
Frederick C. Luebke, Bonds of Loyalty: German-Americans and World War I (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974), 98; Child, “German-American Attempts to Prevent the Exportation of Munitions of War, 1914–1915,” 355.
Justus D. Doenecke, Nothing Less than War: A New History of America’s Entry into World War I (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2011), 53–54; Atlanta Journal-Constitution, December 16, 1914, 11.
Ernest R. May, The World War and American Isolation, 1914–1917 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 47–50; Spring-Rice to Grey, December 11, 1914, FO 372 / 584, National Archives, Kew, UK.
Bryan to Wilson (with enclosure), January 19, 1915, A Link, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 32: 91–93; On November 8, 1861, Captain Charles Wilkes of the USS San Jacinto stopped the neutral British merchant vessel the Trent after it left Havana, Cuba in order to remove two Confederate emissaries. Declaring the ministers, John Slidell and James Mason, “the embodiment of dispatches,” Wilkes essentially considered the men contraband and placed them in custody. The captain’s actions were unprecedented in maritime law. The affair provoked many people in Britain to demand a declaration of war on the Union. Ultimately, the crisis was resolved because the Palmerston government wanted to remain neutral and Washington released the two Confederate diplomats. For an in-depth discussion of the Trent affair see Howard Jones, Blue and Gray Diplomacy: A History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 83–111.
Diary of Chandler Parsons Anderson, January 9, 1915, ibid., 32: 44–50; C.M. Mason “Anglo-American Relations: Mediation and ‘Permanent Peace,”’ in F. H. Hinsley, ed., British Foreign Policy under Sir Edward Grey (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 467.
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© 2013 M. Ryan Floyd
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Floyd, M.R. (2013). “As a Friend to All of Them”. In: Abandoning American Neutrality. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137334121_5
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