The Lion's Pride Lion's Pride Volume 12 (Spring 2019) | Page 33

by which the Germans justified the Lusitania as an acceptable target. On
May 7 th , 1915, U20 torpedoed the Lusitania, and while over 2,000
passengers and crew were fleeing for the lifeboats, a second internal
explosion quickly sank the liner. Over 1,000 people died in the tragedy,
128 of which were Americans (Wood et al., 2002). The sinking of the
Lusitania remains one of the most infamous controversies of the Great
War, with many unexplained mysteries and deliberate obfuscations by
the British, American, and German governments. Regardless of the true
facts behind the sinking or which country was to “blame,” American
public opinion was primarily outraged and more favorable to an
interventionist foreign policy than ever before.
Still, it took another two years for the United States to declare war. A
number of factors were in play; according to Rodney Carlisle (2009) in
Sovereignty at Sea, at least ten other incidents of US merchant ships
were torpedoed by U-Boats within that time frame (p. xiv). The sinking
of these ships may have been a mundane but more likely reason to
declare a casus belli (act that provokes or justifies war), as compared to
the inhumane sinking of the Lusitania. Woodrow Wilson was attempting
to stay out of the war and even ran for reelection on the slogan “He kept
us out the war,” according to Peck (2018), but his high-flying idealism
was a major pull to get involved as well (p. 59). In his war message to
Congress on April 2 nd , 1917, on the vote to declare war against
Germany, he referred more vaguely to German violations of American