By raising question as to Lusitania being an “auxiliary armed cruiser,” and not of the “undefended merchantmen” class.
By accusing Cunard company of using American citizens to protect the “ammunition” carried by Lusitania, and of being guilty of their death.
The Chicago Herald more specifically pointed out the evasiveness of the German reply, claiming that it “fails wholly to meet the main points at issue, both the specific point of the slaughter of American citizens on the Lusitania and the general point of the impossibility of employing submarines in the destruction of commerce without disregarding rules of fairness, reason, justice and humanity—established principles of international law.”
EVASIVE AND INSINCERE
The Philadelphia Public Ledger also criticized it for ignoring altogether “the protest in the name of humanity against submarine warfare upon non-combatants,” and the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune laid bare the “absolute ignoring of the vital principles set forth in the Wilson letter,” adding that “there is a half contemptuous, albeit entirely courteous, suggestion of ‘Well, they are still dead; now, what do you propose to do about it?’”
No Use.
The German claim that the Lusitania was in effect a warship, with mounted guns, and carried ammunition and Canadian soldiers, was emphatically denied in a public statement by Dudley Field Malone, collector of the port of New York, and the New York World vehemently answered the German claim by declaring that “the Lusitania was a warship in the same way that Belgium was an aggressor against Germany; in the same way that the University of Louvain and Rheims Cathedral were ‘fortifications’; in the same way that various seaside resorts in England, raided by Germans, were ‘defended.’”