The modern newspaper through its intensive, minute and zealous
activities in searching out, presenting and interpreting each day the
news of the entire world, is tracing with unerring accuracy the true
and permanent picture of the present. This picture will endure as
undisputed history for all time.
Let us concede that the newspaper writer sometimes, in the passion of
the hour, goes far afield. It is equally true that no statement of
importance can thus be made that is not immediately challenged,
answered and reanswered until, through the fierce fires of controversy
the dross is burned away and the gold of established fact remains. Not
alone the fact stands out, but also the world's immediate reaction to
that fact, the psychology of the event and the man dominating the cause
and the effect.
The modern newspaper is the proving ground of history. To illustrate
let us suppose that our newspaper press, as we know it today, had
existed in Shakespeare's time. Would there now be any controversy over
the authorship of the world's greatest dramas?
Could the staff photographer of a Sunday supplement as efficient as one
of our present day corps have snapped Mohammed in his tent and a keen
reporter of today's type questioned him as to his facts and data, would
not all of us now be Mohammedans or Mohammed be forgot? Had such
newspapers as ours followed Washington to Valley Forge and gone with
him to meet Cornwallis, would the father of his country be most
intimately remembered through the cherry tree episode? Consider the
enlightenment which would have been thrown upon the pages of history
had a corps of modern newspaper correspondents reported the meeting of
John and the Barons at Runnymede or accompanied Columbus on his voyages
of discovery.
Would not even Lincoln be more vivid in our minds and what we really
know of him not so shrouded in anecdote and story?
In Washington's time America became a Nation. In Lincoln's time our
country was united and made one. In Wilson's time our Nation received
recognition as the greatest of the world powers. It remained, however,
for Wilson alone to reach the highest pinnacle of international
prominence in the face of the pitiless cross fires of today's newspaper
press. Yet this inquisition, often more than cruel, was not without its
constructive value, for it has searched out every fact and established
every truth beyond the successful attack of any future denial.
This little volume--the first perhaps of its kind concerning any man or
event--presents with no further word of its compilers a summary of
Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements--eight years of the
world's greatest history--taken entirely from the newspaper press.
It contains not one statement that has not been accurately weighed in
the critical scales of controversy. Its object is simply to present the
truth and have this truth early in the field so that the political
canard which was so shamelessly indulged in during the close of the
Wilson Administration may not be crystalized in the public mind and
cloud for a time the glorious luster of his name.
It shall be as Maximilian Harden, the keenest thinker of the defeated
Germans said: "Only one conqueror's work will endure--Wilson's
thought."