All that Tuesday, Wilson worked on a protest he planned to send to Germany about the Lusitania. Typing on his Hammond portable, he sought to find the right tone—firm and direct, but not bellicose. By Wednesday evening, he was done. He wrote to Edith, “I have just put the final touches on our note to Germany and now turn—with what joy!—to talk to you. I am sure you have been by my side all evening, for a strange sense of peace and love has been on me as I worked.”
Wilson sent the note over the objection of Secretary of State Bryan, who felt that to be truly fair and neutral, the United States should also send a protest to Britain, condemning its interference in trade. Wilson declined to do so. In his note he mentioned not just the Lusitania but also the Falaba and the death of Leon Thrasher, the bombing of the Cushing, and the attack on the Gulflight. Citing what he called “the sacred freedom of the seas,” he described how submarines, when used against merchant vessels, were by their nature weapons that violated “many sacred principles of justice and humanity.” He asked Germany to disavow the attacks, to make necessary reparations, and to take steps to ensure that such things did not happen in the future. But he was careful also to note the “special ties of friendship” that had long existed between America and Germany.
Wilson’s protest—the so-called First Lusitania Note—was the initial salvo in what would become a two-year war of paper, filled with U.S. protests and German replies, made against a backdrop of new attacks against neutral ships and revelations that German spies were at work in America. Wilson did all he could to keep America neutral in action and in spirit, but Secretary Bryan did not think he tried hard enough, and resigned on June 8, 1915. His resignation brought universal condemnation, with editors comparing him to Judas Iscariot and Benedict Arnold. The Goshen, Indiana, News-Times said, “The Kaiser has awarded the Iron Cross for less valuable service than that rendered by Mr. Bryan.” In a letter to Edith Galt, Wilson himself described Bryan as a “traitor.” He replaced him with the department’s number two man, Undersecretary Robert Lansing, who by this time had come to long for war.
Wilson had cause for cheer, however. In a letter dated June 29, 1915, Edith at last agreed to marry him. They wed on December 18, 1915, in a simple ceremony at the White House. Late that night the couple set out on their honeymoon, traveling by private railcar to Hot Springs, Virginia. They had chicken salad for a late supper. As the train pulled into the station early the next morning, Wilson’s Secret Service man Edmund Starling happened to look into the railcar’s sitting room and, as Starling later wrote, saw “a figure in top hat, tailcoat, and gray morning trousers, standing with his back to me, hands in his pockets, happily dancing a jig.”
As Starling watched, Wilson, still oblivious to his presence, clicked his heels in the air, and sang, “Oh, you beautiful doll! You great big beautiful doll!”
GERMANY’S U-BOAT campaign waxed and waned, in step with the rising and falling influence of factions within its government that favored and opposed submarine warfare against merchant ships. Kaiser Wilhelm himself expressed a certain repugnance for attacks on passenger liners. In February 1916, he told fleet commander Admiral Scheer, “Were I the Captain of a U-boat I would never torpedo a ship if I knew that women and children were aboard.” The next month, Germany’s most senior advocate of unrestricted warfare, State Secretary Alfred von Tirpitz, resigned, in frustration. This brought a sympathy note from an odd quarter—Britain’s former First Sea Lord, Jacky Fisher. “Dear Old Tirps,” he wrote. He urged Tirpitz to “cheer up” and told him, “You’re the one German sailor who understands War! Kill your enemy without being killed yourself. I don’t blame you for the submarine business. I’d have done the same myself, only our idiots in England wouldn’t believe it when I told ’em. Well! So long!”
He signed off with his usual closing, “Yours till hell freezes, Fisher.”
That June, 1916, the Kaiser issued an order forbidding attacks against all large passenger ships, even those that were obviously British. He went on to order so many restrictions on how and when U-boat commanders could attack ships that the German navy, in protest, suspended all operations against merchant vessels in British waters.
But the Lusitania remained a point of conflict. President Wilson’s protests failed to generate a response he deemed satisfactory—much to the delight of Britain’s director of naval intelligence, Blinker Hall, who argued that any delay in resolving the Lusitania situation was “advantageous to the Allied cause.”
Kapit?nleutnant Schwieger did his part to worsen relations between America and Germany. On September 4, 1915, in the midst of a patrol during which he sank ten steamships and one four-masted bark, he torpedoed the passenger liner Hesperian, killing thirty-two passengers and crew.