One hundred years ago today – on May 7 1915 – a German U-boat torpedo sank the British passenger liner Lusitania, taking the lives of 1,195 people, including 123 Americans.
For many in the United States this act solidified the belief that Germany was a brutal, degenerate monarchy. Public opinion was not yet ready to go to war, but many Americans began to speak out for entering the conflict on the Allies' side.
By any measure, the torpedoing of the Lusitania was abhorrent.
But there is a story behind the story, as our research for a book on World War I propaganda shows, and that story provides one of our earliest examples of the effective – and ineffective – deployment of a weapon that was as new in World War I as submarine warfare: government propaganda.
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