Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him Part 21

It is to be remembered also that when failure and corruption were charged against the Aircraft Board, the man appointed by the President to conduct the highly important investigation was Charles E. Hughes.

Three a.s.sistant Secretaries of War were appointed by Mr. Baker--Mr.

Benedict Crowell, a Cleveland contractor; Doctor F. E. Keppel, dean of Columbia University, and Emmet J. Scott, formerly Booker Washington's secretary--and all three were Republicans. Mr. E. R. Stettinius of the J. P. Morgan firm and a Republican was made special a.s.sistant to the Secretary of War and placed in charge of supplies, a duty that he had been discharging for the Allies. Maj. Gen. George W. Goethals, after his unfortunate experience in shipbuilding, was given a second chance and put in the War Department as an a.s.sistant Chief of staff. The Chief of Staff himself, Gen. Peyton C. March, was a Republican no less definite and regular than General Goethals. Mr. Samuel McRoberts, president of the National City Bank and one of the pillars of the Republican party, was brought to Washington as chief of the procurement section in the Ordnance Section, with the rank of brigadier-general, Maj. Gen. E. H. Crowder was appointed Provost- Marshal-General, although his Republicanism was well known, and no objection of any kind was made when General Crowder put Charles B.

Warren, the Republican National Committeeman from Michigan, in charge of appeal cases, a position of rare power.

The Emergency Fleet Corporation was virtually turned over to Republicans under Charles M. Schwab and Charles Piez. Mr. Vance McCormick, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, was made chairman of the War Trade Board, but of the eight members the following five were Republicans: Albert Strauss of New York, Alonzo E.

Taylor of Pennsylvania, John Beaver White, of New York, Frank C.

Munson of New York, and Clarence M. Woolley of Chicago.

The same conditions obtained in the Red Cross. A very eminent Republican, Mr. H. P. Davison, was put in supreme authority, and on the Red Cross War Council were placed ex-President Taft; Mr. Charles D. Norton, Mr. Taft's secretary while President; and Mr. Cornelius N.

Bliss, former treasurer of the Republican National Committee. Not only was Mr. Taft thus honoured, but upon the creation of a National War Labour Board the ex-President was made its chairman and virtually empowered to act as the administration's representative in its contact with industry.

Mr. Frank A. Vanderlip, a Republican of iron regularity, was placed in charge of the War Savings Stamps Campaign, and when Mr. McAdoo had occasion to name a.s.sistant Secretaries of the Treasury he selected Prof. L. S. Rowe of the University of Pennsylvania and Mr. H. C.

Leffingwell of New York.

Harry A. Garfield, son of the Republican President, was made Fuel Administrator, and Mr. Herbert Hoover, now a candidate for President, on a platform, of unadulterated Republicanism, was nominated as head of the Food Administration.

The Council of National Defense was an organization of high importance and one of tremendous influence from a partisan standpoint, yet its executive body was divided as follows: Republicans--Howard E. Coffin, Julius Rosenwald, Dr. Hollis G.o.dfrey, Dr. Franklin Martin, Walter S.

Gifford, Director; Democrats--Daniel Willard and Bernard M. Baruch; Independent--Samuel Gompers.

No sooner had the war begun than the preliminary war work of the President began to bear fruit.

Within a month from the declaration of war the traditional policy of the nation was reversed, by the enactment of the Selective Service Act. A vast machinery of registration was created that ran without a hitch, and on June 5th more than 10,000,000 men were registered quickly and efficiently.

Thirty-two encampments--virtual cities, since each had to house 40,000 men--were built in ninety days from the driving of the first nail, complete in every munic.i.p.al detail, a feat declared impossible, and which will stand for all time as a building miracle.

In June, scarcely two months after the President's appearance before Congress, General Pershing and his staff reached France, and on July 3rd the last of four groups of transports landed American fighting men in the home of La Fayette and Rochambeau. On October 10th our soldiers went on the firing-line.

Training camps for officers started in June, and in August there were graduated 27,341 successful aspirants, ready to a.s.sume the tasks of leadership.

In a notable speech, confidential in character, the President on the 8th day of April, 1918, addressed the foreign correspondents at the White House concerning "our resolutions" and "actions in the war." The speech was as follows:

I am very glad to have this opportunity to meet you. Some of you I have met before, but not all. In what I am going to say I would prefer that you take it in this way, as for the private information of your minds and not for transmission to anybody, because I just want, if I may, in a few words to create a background for you which may be serviceable to you. I speak in confidence.

I was rendered a little uneasy by what Mr. Lloyd George was quoted as having said the other day that the Americans have a great surprise in store for Germany. I don't know in what sense he meant that, but there is no surprise in store. I want you to know the sequence of resolves and of actions concerning our part in the war. Some time ago it was proposed to us that we, if I may use the expression feed our men into the French and English armies in any unit that might be ready-- companies or regiments or brigades--and not wait to train and coordinate the larger units of our armies before putting them into action. My instinctive judgment in the face of that proposition was that the American people would feel a very much more ardent interest in the war if their men were fighting under their own flag and under their own general officers, but at that time, which was some months ago, I instructed General Pershing that he had full authority whenever any exigency that made such a thing necessary should occur to put the men in any units or in any numbers or in any way that was necessary-- just as he is doing. What I wanted you to know was that that was not a new action, that General Pershing was fully instructed about that all along.

Then, similarly with regard to the impression that we are now going to rush troops to Europe. Of course, you cannot rush any faster than there is means of rushing and, what I have said recently is what I have said all along, that we are getting men over there just as fast as we can get them ready and as quickly as we can find the ships to transport them. We are doing that now and we have been doing it all along. Let me point out some of the circ.u.mstances: Our first programme was to send over ninety thousand men a month, but for several months we were sending over only thirty thousand--one third of the programme.

Why? Not because we didn't have the men ready, not even because we didn't have the means of transportation, but because--and there is no criticism of the French Government involved in this--because the ports a.s.signed to us for landing couldn't take care of the supplies we had to send over. We had to send materials and engineers, and workmen, even, over to build the docks and the piers that would be adequate to handle the number of men we sent over, because this was happening: We began with the ninety-thousand programme and the result was that cargo ships that we needed were lying in those ports for several weeks together without being unloaded, as there was no means of unloading them. It was bad economy and bad practice from every point of view to have those ships lying there during a period when they could have made two or three voyages. There is still this difficulty which I am afraid there is no means of overcoming rapidly, that the railroad communication between those ports and the front is inadequate to handle very large bodies of men. You may notice that General Pershing recommended that Christmas boxes should not be sent to the men. That sounded like a pretty hard piece of advice, but if you could go to those ports and see those Christmas boxes which are still there, you would know why he didn't want them sent. There was no means of getting them to the front. Vast acc.u.mulations of these gifts were piled up there with no means of storing them adequately even.

I just wanted to create for you this picture, that the channels have been inevitably choked. Now we believe that, inasmuch as the impediments on the other side are being largely removed, we can go ahead with the original programme and add to it in proportion as the British can spare us the tonnage, and they are going to spare us the tonnage for the purpose. And with the extra tonnage which the British are going to spare us we will send our men, not to France but to Great Britain, and from there they will go to the front through the channel ports. You see that makes a new line where the means of handling them are already established and where they are more abundant than they are at the French ports. Now, I want to say again that none of this involves the least criticism of the French authorities, because I think they have done their very best in every respect, but they couldn't make ports out of hand, they couldn't build new facilities suddenly, and their man power was being drawn on in very much larger proportion than our man power. Therefore, it was perfectly proper that we should send men over there and send materials to make the means of handling the troops and the cargoes more expeditiously.

I want you gentlemen to realize that there was no wave-like motion in this thing so far as our purpose and preparation are concerned. We have met with delays, of course, in production, some of which might have been avoided and ought to have been avoided, and which are being slowly corrected, but apart from that the motive power has been back of this thing all the time. It has been the means of action that has oscillated, it has been sometimes greater and sometimes less than was necessary for the programme.

I for my own part don't like the idea of having surprises. I would like the people to be surprised if we didn't do our duty, but not surprised that we did do it. Of course, I don't mean that Mr. Lloyd George meant that we would surprise everybody by doing our duty, but I don't just know how to interpret his idea of it, because I have said the same thing to the British representatives all along as I informally expressed it to Lord Reading, that we had been and always would be doing our d.a.m.nedest, and there could not be a more definite American expression of purpose than that.

As to another matter (I am just giving you things to think about and not things to say, if you will be kind enough to take it that way).

That speech I made on Sat.u.r.day I hope was correctly understood. We are fighting, as I understand it, for justice to everybody and are ready to stop just as soon as justice to everybody is everybody's programme.

I have the same opinion privately about, I will not say the policy, but the methods of the German Government that some gentlemen have who see red all the time, but that is not a proper part of my thought. My thought is that if the German Government insist that the thing shall be settled unjustly, that is to say by force, then of course we accept that and will settle it by force. Whenever we see sincere symptoms of their desire to settle it by justice, we will not only accept their suggestions but we will be glad and eager to accept them, as I said in my speech. I would be ashamed to use the knock-down and drag-out language; that is not the language of liberty, that is the language of braggadocio. For my part, I have no desire to march triumphantly into Berlin. If they oblige us to march triumphantly into Berlin, then we will do it if it takes twenty years. But the world will come to its senses some day, no matter how mad some parts of it may be now, and this is my feeling, that we ought when the thing is over to be able to look back upon a course which had no element in it which we need be ashamed of. So it is so difficult in any kind of a speech, this kind or any other, to express two things that seem to be going in opposite directions that I wasn't sure that I had succeeded in expressing them on Sat.u.r.day--the sincere willingness to discuss peace whenever the proposals are themselves sincere and yet at the same time the determination never to discuss it until the basis laid down for the discussion is justice. By that I mean justice to everybody. n.o.body has the right to get anything out of this war, because we are fighting for peace if we mean what we say, for permanent peace. No injustice furnishes a basis for permanent peace. If you leave a rankling sense of injustice anywhere, it will not only produce a running sore presently which will result in trouble and probably war, but it ought to produce war somewhere. The sore ought to run. It is not susceptible to being healed except by remedying the injustice. Therefore, I for my part wouldn't want to see a peace which was based upon compelling any people, great or small, to live under conditions which it didn't willingly accept.

If I were just a sheer Machiavelli and didn't have any heart but had brains, I would say: "If you mean what you say and are fighting for permanent peace, then there is only one way to get it, whether you like justice or not." It is the only conceivable intellectual basis for it, because this is not like the time, years ago, of the Congress of Vienna. Peoples were then not willing, but so speechless and unorganized and without the means of self-expression, that the governments could sit on their necks indefinitely. They didn't know how to prevent it. But they are wide awake now and n.o.body is going to sit comfortably on the neck of any people, big or little, and the more uncomfortable he is who tries it, the more I am personally pleased. So that I am in the position in my mind of trying to work out a purely scientific proposition: "What will stay put?"

A peace is not going to be permanent until that principle is accepted by everybody, that, given a political unit, every people has the right to determine its own life. That, gentlemen, is all I have to say to you, but it is the real inside of my mind, and it is the real key to the present foreign policy of the United States which for the time being is in my keeping. I hope it will be useful to you, as it is welcome to me to have this occasion of telling you what I really think and what I understand we are really doing.

CHAPTER x.x.xI

THE PEN IS MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD

During this time the President was constantly on guard at the Executive offices, never for a moment out of touch with the situation. He was the intimate a.s.sociate of the men who were his co-labourers on the various boards that had been set up to prosecute the work of the war. He seemed to know what was going on in every phase. His evenings were given to examination of the long dispatches that came from diplomatic and consular representatives of America at the various capitals of Europe, apprising him of the developments of the great war.

One of the most effective measures for weakening the enemy was the method of attacking the Central Powers from within by propaganda designed to incite the ma.s.ses to rebellion and to drive wedges between Germany and Austria. As George Creel says, "The projectile force of the President's idealism, its full military value may be measured by the fact that between April 6 and December 8, 1917, sixteen States, great and small, declared war against Germany, or severed diplomatic relations with her. From the very first the Allies accepted the President as their spokesman." It was under the influence of Woodrow Wilson's clear vision and magic power of statement that the true significance of the war became clear. At first it had seemed a war of nations, and the belligerents had eagerly published official doc.u.ments, Red Books, White Books, Yellow Books, and so forth, through all the colours of the spectrum, to show who had "started the war." The question of who began it became after a while quite secondary to the question of the fundamental principles at stake in the contest which was no longer a national conflict, but a world war, waged to the death between two irreconcilable views of the relationship of government to individuals, the autocratic view on the one hand, on the other the democratic. It was one man who brought the fundamental principle of the division into the clear light. A contemporary writer has said that the magical effect of Woodrow Wilson's utterances on all the Allies was due, not to his rhetoric but to his sublime gift of seeing and stating a profound truth after which others had been only groping. That is the prophet's power, to voice the latent, inarticulate aspirations of the mult.i.tude. Proof of the value of the President's method of attacking the Central Powers from within by propaganda was disclosed in General Ludendorff's and Von Tirpitz's revelations. In Ludendorff's opinion, the President's note to Germany had forced the Central Empires to yield to the President. Ludendorff says:

In his answer to our second note, Wilson gave us nothing; he did not even tell us whether the Entente took its stand on the Fourteen Points. He demanded, however, the suspension of the submarine campaign, stigmatized our conduct of the war in the west as a violation of international law, and once again sought to meddle with intimate questions of our domestic politics.

Speaking again of the answer to one of the Wilson notes, Ludendorff says:

The answer to Wilson was dispatched on the 20th of October. The submarine campaign was abandoned. This concession to Wilson was the deepest blow to the army, and especially to the navy. The injury to the morale of the fleet must have been immeasurable. The Cabinet had thrown up the sponge.

On October 23rd, President Wilson sent the following peremptory message to the Germans:

It is evident that the German people have no means of commanding the acquiescence of the military authorities of the Empire in the popular will; that the purpose of the King of Prussia to control the policy of the Empire is still unimpaired. If the United States must deal with the military masters and monarchical authorities now, or if it is likely to have to deal with them later in regard to international obligations of the German Empire, it must demand not peace negotiations but surrender. Nothing can be gained by leaving this essential thing unsaid.

In discussing this and the other Wilson notes, Ludendorff says that they had dealt a vital blow at the heart of militaristic Germans and finally loosed the grip they held on the German people. This entire situation is best expressed in Ludendorff's own words:

On October 23rd or 24th Wilson's answer arrived. It was a strong answer to our cowardly note. This time he had made it quite clear that the armistice conditions must be such as to make it impossible for Germany to resume hostilities, and to give the powers allied against her unlimited power to settle themselves the details of the peace accepted by Germany. In my view, there could no longer be doubt in any mind that we must continue the fight. I felt quite confident that the people were still to be won over to this course.

On the evening of the 24th, shortly after leaving Spa for Berlin, there was brought to me the following proclamation already signed by the Field Marshal, which expressed the views prevailing at G. H. Q. on the third Wilson note. It appeared essential that G. H. Q. in its dealings with Berlin should take up a definite stand to the note in order to eliminate its ill effects on the army. The telegram to the Army ran thus:

"For the information of all troops: Wilson says in his answer that he is ready to propose to his allies that they should enter into armistice negotiations; but that the armistice must render Germany so defenseless that she cannot take up arms again. He will only negotiate with Germany for peace if she concedes all the demands of America's a.s.sociates as to the internal const.i.tutional arrangements of Germany; otherwise, there is no choice but unconditional surrender.

"_Wilson's answer is a demand for unconditional surrender._ It is thus unacceptable to us soldiers. It proves that our enemies'

desire for our destruction, which let loose the war in 1914, still exists undiminished. It proves, further, that our enemies use the phrase 'peace of justice' merely to deceive us and break our resistance. Wilson's answer can thus be nothing for us soldiers but a challenge to continue our resistance with all our strength.

"When our enemies know that no sacrifices will achieve the rupture of the German front, then they will be ready for a peace which will make the future of our country safe for the broad ma.s.ses of our people.

"At the front, October 24th, 10 P.M."

This proclamation which was signed by Field Marshal Von Hindenburg was later signed by Ludendorff. It resulted in the Kaiser's immediate orders for a special conference at which both of these officials were dismissed from the Imperial German army.

Von Tirpitz in his Memoirs laid stress on the effect of the Wilson submarine notes. Ludendorff declares in his book that the "Wilson propaganda" that found root in Berlin and finally grew there eventually convinced the German people that it was not they themselves, but the Government and militarism that the United States was warring against.

_This was the seed of dissension that ruined German morale at home._

_Tirpitz declared that the beginning of the end came when in answer to the President's_ Suss.e.x _note, "We showed the world that we were going down before America."_

Probably the most enlightening chapter of either book is that containing Tirpitz's contention that the influence of the Wilson submarine notes resulted in j.a.pan's stronger and more active alliance with the Allies. In this connection Von Tirpitz says: