The Tenure of Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan
The United States’ foreign policy has caused a lot of confusion around the world over the past several years.
President Donald Trump has withdrawn our country from the Paris Climate Accords and from the Iran Nuclear Deal. In addition, he has said we’re leaving the 1987 Reagan-era Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia. Some say we will eventually leave the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, a 2010 treaty with Russia signed by President Barack Obama. In 2002, President George W Bush withdrew from the 1972 Nixon-era anti-ballistic missile treaty. In 2018, Russian leader Vladimir Putin said Russia would develop new technologically advanced nuclear weapons as a response to Bush’s withdraw from the treaty.
By the look at our foreign policy of the last two decades, one could say our country likes leaving treaties and has little interest in establishing international law. However, this has historically not been the case. The tenure of Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan provides an important example.
William Jennings Bryan served as President Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State from 1913 to 1915. Before becoming the country’s top diplomat, he was a United States Congressman from Nebraska and ran from President on the Democratic ticket in 1896, 1900, and 1908. He lost to William McKinley in 1896 and 1900 and to William Howard Taft in 1908. Bryan was named Secretary of State due to his support for Wilson at the 1912 Democratic Convention.
His tenure as Secretary of State was defined by the use of diplomacy to defuse conflicts around the world. Bryan’s ideas were driven by his faith. He was a fundamentalist Christian who also a near pacifist. After his stint as Secretary of State, Bryan waged a war against Darwin’s theory of evolution and in 1925 served as a counsel for a prosecutor who was prosecuting a Tennessee school teacher who taught evolution in the classroom in violation of Tennessee’s law at the time.
As Secretary of State, Bryan pursued a series of bi-lateral treaties in which both parties promised to submit all disputes to an investigative tribunal. El Salvador was the first country to sign one of Bryan’s treaties and 29 other countries, including every other great power in Europe with the exception of Germany and Austria-Hungry, also agreed to sign the treaties.
After war broke out in Europe in 1915, Bryan advocated for neutrality between the Central Powers and the Triple Entente – the Russian Empire, France, the United Kingdom, and Ireland. In the beginning, Wilson took Bryan’s advice and attempted to stay out of the war. Throughout most of 1914, Bryan tried to bring an end of the war through mediation. However, the Central Powers and the Triple Entente were not interested in his overtures.
In the 1915 Thrasher Incident, a German U-boat sank a British passenger ship with an American onboard and the cause of neutrality was weakened in the American public. In May of 1915, 128 Americans died in the German sinking of the Lusitania. Bryan argued that the British blockade of Germany was as bad as the German U-boat campaign. When Wilson sent a letter of protest to the Germans, and refused to publically warn Americans not to travel of British ships, Bryan resigned as Secretary of State in the summer of 1915.
