friends interested and active in the undertaking—most important of these
Albert Thomas, who from the start was one of the vital influences in the
Conference. Then my old friend Seignobos was actively interested.
Shotwell in his “At the Paris Peace Conference” describes him as “a
little old man, talking fast and furiously, very well satisfied with our
labor business, which he seems to hold in higher regard than we do.”
Seignobos did hold it in high regard, hoped much for its future. I
suspect he too was glad to find something in the complicated peace
negotiations he could put his hands on, see through.
One of the most unexpected of my experiences in these days was the
revival of past episodes in my life. The friends I had known so well in
Paris back in the nineties, such as had escaped death or disability,
were constantly turning up in important positions. Most influential
among them all was the Englishman Wickham Steed, now the editor of the
London _Times_, a person who ranked with ambassadors, but who was good
enough to take notice of his old Latin Quarter friends.
Another of my intimates of those days was Charles Borgeaud, who had come
up from Geneva with the Swiss plan for a confederation of nations, a
sound and excellent document, which I suppose was filed away with the
multitudes of plans which flooded the Conference in those days. I was so
excited by seeing about me so many of these old acquaintances and
friends that I attempted to get them together for lunch one
day—Seignobos, Madame Marillier, Steed, Louis Lapique, all that I could
put my hands on. The result gave me a melancholy sense of what
twenty-five years can do, particularly a twenty-five years ending in
such a catastrophe as they had all been going through, to take the edge
off once keen friendships.
A more satisfactory revival of past and gone associations came from
meeting numbers of former professional friends who were filling one or
another post. Here were William Allen White and Auguste Jaccaci; here
was Ray Stannard Baker, the head of the American press delegation, one
of the few Americans having an easy entree to the President himself,
conducting his difficult post with fine judgment and an absolute
fairness which silenced the tongues of some of the most bumptious and
political-minded correspondents.
“How can you bully so straight a chap as Ray Baker?” a correspondent
anxious for a special privilege said disconsolately in my hearing one
day.
There were hours when it seemed like a gathering in the office of the
old _American Magazine_, so natural and intimate it was.
But these hours were not very many. My business was to furnish at least
an article a month for the _Red Cross Magazine_ and to follow the
progress of the efforts to bring about a peace settlement including a
league of nations. There were days when it seemed to me an inexplicable
confusion, a bedlam; but, as a matter of fact, as the days went on I
became satisfied by studying the communiqués, following the press
conferences, reading the reliable English and French papers and the
daily digests of what the papers of the United States were saying
(posted at our press quarters), that a practical plan for international
cooperation was taking form and that gradually more and more of the
delegates of the thirty-one nations represented were consenting to it.
To get something they would all sign seemed to me creative statesmanship
of the highest order. For each of these nations had problems of its own,
political, economic, social, religious, which must be considered before
its representative dared sign. Thirty-one varieties of folks back home
sat at that peace table, and they all had to be heard. In final analysis
it was the failure patiently to listen to the political objections
coming from the United States and trying openly to meet them which kept
us out of the largest and soundest joint attempt the world had ever
seen, to put an end to war. For that is what I believed the Covenant of
the League of Nations to be when I heard the final draft read and
adopted at the Plenary Session of the Conference on April 28.
But no one could have studied the truly august assembly adopting the
Covenant without realizing the threats to its future in its make-up.
They lay in the certainty of a few that the problem was solved—there
would be no more wars. President Wilson, the noblest and the most
distinguished figure of them all, seemed to believe it. But there were
men putting down their names who did not believe it, who sneered as they
signed; and still more dangerous were the stolid ones who accepted
without knowing what it meant. Clemenceau had told his people what the
Covenant meant—“sacrifices,” sacrifice for all; he was the only man at
the Peace Conference whom I heard use the word, and yet the key to the
peace of the world is sacrifice, sacrifice of the strong to meet the
needs and urges of the weak. If the League of Nations, led as it has
been by the great satisfied nations, had grappled with that truth at the
start, it is possible we should not now be seeing signatories take up
war to satisfy their needs and urges.
These doubts weighed heavily upon me as I left the Plenary Session. But
in the group of exultant Americans who that day saw the world made over
I had no desire to voice them. There was only one of my friends to whom
I could confide my fears—that was Auguste Jaccaci, a doubting Thomas
with profound faith in some things (I never quite made out what): beauty
and a directing God, I think. The night after the signing of the
Covenant, Jac and I sat long in troubled silence over our coffee and
_petit verre_, for neither of us could believe that the signing of a
paper by however many nations could in itself bring immediate peace to
the world.
Still I believed with all my heart in the attempt. My business now as a
journalist and a lecturer, I told myself, was to explain the intent of
the Covenant, what it set out to do, also to warn that it must be given
time to work out its salvation.
Before leaving America for the Peace Conference I had signed a contract
to go for ten weeks of the summer of 1919 on a Chautauqua circuit in the
Northwest. By this time I had an understanding with my sponsors that I
should be allowed to talk on what I had seen and heard at the Peace
Conference. I now hurried home to fill that contract. I had hardly
landed before I realized how bitter was the political attack on the
Covenant. Would audiences in the Northwest listen to its defense?
But I did not allow this worry to intrude itself into my lecturing. In
fact it was not in me to worry, once on the road, for I quickly
discovered I was making what would probably be the most interesting trip
of my life. And so it turned out. The country was incredibly exciting
and of endless variety. I joined a circuit already ten weeks old in
northern Utah. We skirted the Great Salt Lake and traveled from one
Mormon settlement to another. It amuses me now to remember how surprised
I was to discover that Mormons were like Gentiles, that I at once felt
towards them exactly as I did towards different religious sects at home.
True, the attempt of taxi drivers, hotel clerks, baggagemen, to convert
me when they caught me idle in their vicinity was a bit disconcerting at
first, but I soon began to expect it and to find interest in their
arguments.
After Utah came the lava country of southern Idaho along the Snake
River. We climbed over the mountains into Oregon, went down the
Columbia, over to the sea, up the coast to Portland, Tacoma, Seattle. We
were in the Yakima apple country and in the berry fields of Puyallup,
and everywhere in cherry orchards, such cherries as I had never
imagined.
For a week we junketed around Vancouver Sound in primitive little
steamers. We pitched our tents in lumber towns built on stilts, crossed
fire-devastated mountains into the Coeur d’Alene region of northern
Idaho, where one still heard reverberations of the labor struggles which
had so agitated us on _McClure’s_ and the _American_. Then Montana—miles
of plateaus and plains, the air thick with smoke, the earth sprinkled
with ashes, for the mountains were on fire.
This magnificent and varied country carried with it a varied and
compelling human story. Each new town turned up some bit of human
tragedy or comedy. These people were pioneers, or pioneers once removed.
They knew all the dangers, the hardships, the defeats, and conquests of
pioneering. Their talk was of what they or their fathers had lived and
seen. Whatever it had been, their hope was unquenchable. Every town we
entered was the finest in the Northwest, the finest even when you knew
that shifting trade and industry was cutting the very feet out from
under it.
This was the land of Borah, but never in all those ten weeks, talking on
the League of Nations, did I receive from press or individuals anything
but respectful hearing. I was the first person who had come into their
territory from the Peace Conference, and they wanted to hear all I had
to give. They would do their own appraising.
As the days went by, I sensed a growing bewilderment at the fight
against the League. These people had listened for years to people they
honored urging some form of international union against war. They had
heard Dr. Jordan and Jane Addams preaching a national council for the
prevention of war, President Taft advocating a league to enforce peace.
In many of the towns there had been chapters of these societies.
On our circuit there was a superintendent who reminded me every time we
met that back in the 1890’s he had spent practically all his patrimony
going about the Northwest preaching a league of nations. It irked him,
he said, that I should be receiving money for talking what he
twenty-five years before had talked without price, purely for love of
the cause. And no wonder!
With such a background, was it strange that many people in the Northwest
should have been puzzled that the Congress of the United States was
seemingly more and more determined that we should not join this first
attempt of the civilized world to find substitutes for war in
international quarrels?
Seeking reasons for this refusal, I felt the one which had most weight
with people was the guarantee that France was asking from England and
the United States to come to her aid in case of unprovoked attack by
Germany, that is, a guarantee which was to remain in force until the
League of Nations was a going concern.
I found that most people were against this. They wouldn’t run the risk
of having to help France again. I was for granting the guarantee
provisionally and for a limited period. I believed such a guarantee
would quiet what I felt to be one of the real dangers of the after-war
situation, the near hysteria of France. Americans proud of their
generous part in saving France from what looked to them like calculated
annihilation said: “Why these hysterics? The War is over. The nations
are going to enforce peace. The devastated region is to be restored at
Germany’s expense. Forget it.”
How could America understand the years of horror France had just
suffered, the devastation of centuries of loving labor, the wiping out
of three and a half million of her best youth? And most serious of all
perhaps, how could America realize what France so clearly realized, that
the Great War was but the latest expression of centuries of
determination on the part of Central Europe to reach the sea? It must
have an ocean front even if this could be obtained only by crossing the
dead body of France.
I had spent some hours at Châlons-sur-Marne just before I returned.
Nobody in that town was so alive to me as Attila. Fifteen hundred
years before, he had led the forces of Central Europe so far and had
been stopped; but Central Europe had come back again and again, driven
by the urge for the sea. Again and again France had saved herself, but
she knew now she could never do it without the help of those who
believed her culture one of the earth’s great possessions. She must
have guarantees. But how could the United States understand that
centuries of experience were behind France’s fear? They had not met
Attila at Châlons-sur-Marne—I had.
All of this I talked in more or less detail until in midsummer my lips
were closed for two weeks by William Jennings Bryan. Mr. Bryan for many
years had been the brightest star of the Chautauqua platform. The
management of the circuit liked to introduce him for whatever time he
could give and they afford. It meant that the regular performer must
either step down or divide his period. The evening was the proper hour
for Mr. Bryan, for only then could the men come. Now I spoke in the
evening. “Cut your time to forty minutes, and go on a half-hour
earlier,” were my instructions. I, of course, obeyed.
Now Mr. Bryan was presenting a two-hour discussion of what he considered
the ideal political Democratic platform at that moment. In his planks he
included joining the League of Nations but turning down the guarantees
to France. At our first joint appearance he rose to condemn guarantees
an hour after I had pleaded for them. When he was told of the conflict
of opinion he at once looked me up, and in effect told me that I must
not present views opposed to his on a platform where he was speaking. He
in no way tried to influence my opinion, only to shut it off. I insisted
that it was good for the audience to hear both sides. “The audience came
to hear me,” said Mr. Bryan; “it is important they know my views.” He
did not want them confused as they might be, he said, if I began the
evening by airing mine.
Of course Mr. Bryan did not say, “You are of no political importance,
and I am of a great deal,” but that was what he meant. It was quite
true, and I bowed for the time being to the demands of politics, but
only for the moment. The two weeks over, I began again to talk
guarantees with more interest on the part of my audience because of what
Mr. Bryan had been saying and also, I suspect, less agreement.
By the time the circuit ended, the League was in a bad way in Congress.
A bitter partisan war had broken out and Woodrow Wilson ill, his Scotch
stubbornness the harder because of his illness, would not budge an inch.
It was a sickening thing to watch. The only consolation was that the
rest of the world wanted peace enough to make the sacrifices and run the
risks a League undoubtedly demanded.
Wilson’s enemies gloated: he was beaten, stripped of his glory; the
world would forget him, was already forgetting him. They were wrong.
In the months that followed the final collapse of the League as far as
the United States was concerned, I was much in Washington; and nothing I
saw was more moving than the continual quiet popular tributes to Woodrow
Wilson. On holidays and Sundays groups were always standing before his
home, watching for a glimpse of him. Let him enter a theater and the
house rose to cheer, while crowds waited outside in rain and cold to see
him come out—cheer him as he passed.
On November 11, 1921, the body of America’s Unknown Soldier was carried
from the Capitol where it had lain in state to its grave in Arlington—a
perfect ceremony of its kind. The bier was followed by all we had of
official greatness at that moment: President Harding and his Cabinet,
the Supreme Court, the House, the Senate, officers of the Army and Navy,
and General Foch our guest of honor. At the end, following all this
greatness but not of it, came a carriage. As the packed ranks between
which the procession had passed in silence saw its occupants, Woodrow
Wilson and Mrs. Wilson, a muffled cry of love and gratitude broke out,
and that cry followed that carriage to the very doorway of their home.
It was to be so until he died. He was the man they could not forget.
They will not forget him in the future. He is the first leader in the
history of society who has treated the ancient dream of a peaceful world
as something more than wishful thinking, the first who was willing to
stake all in drawing the nations of the world together in an effort to
make that “just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations”
for which Abraham Lincoln pleaded.
In Paris in 1919 Woodrow Wilson actually persuaded the leaders of the
majority of the earth’s nations to help him build and set up a machine
for such a peace. The complaint is that it has not done all it
attempted. But how can any person who knows anything of man’s past
efforts to create machinery for the betterment of his life suppose that
this, the most ambitious international undertaking ever made, would from
the start run without friction or breakdown, would never need
overhauling, even rebuilding?
That is not in the nature of things. The League has lived for eighteen
years now. Its weaknesses have developed with experience, so has its
usefulness. Its services to the world have been innumerable if not
spectacular. If its failures have been spectacular, they have not
destroyed the structure; rather they have demonstrated certain points at
which it must be rebuilt.
The world will not forget the man who led in this effort to achieve
enduring peace. That is what I was saying in those bitter days and have
been saying in all the melancholy ones since.
18
GAMBLING WITH SECURITY
My ten weeks of daily talking on the Peace Conference and the Covenant
of the League of Nations ended the War for me. Also, it forced me to
consider anew the problem of security. It was nearly four years now
since I had put an end to it by severing my connection with _The
American Magazine_. But the years had been so full of the War, the
scramble to do something that somebody thought was needful, and at the
same time to keep the pot boiling, that I had not realized what had
happened. It meant for me, as I now saw, the end of an economic era.
I sat down to take stock. Here I was sixty-three with only a small
accumulation of material goods. I must work to live and satisfy my
obligations. To be sure I had my little home in Connecticut which in the
fifteen years since I had acquired it had not only grown increasingly
dear to me; it had also taken on an importance which I had not foreseen.
It had become the family home. Here my mother had come to pass the last
summers before her death in 1917; here my niece Esther had been married
under the Oaks; here my niece Clara and her husband Tristram Tupper,
battered by war service, had come in 1919 to live in our little guest
house. Here Tris had written his first successful magazine story. Here
their two children passed their first years. Near by, my sister had
built herself a studio to become her home. A hundred associations gave
the place a meaning and dignity which I had never expected to feel in
any home of my own, something that only comes when a place has been
hallowed by the joys and sorrows of family life.
I had carried out my original intention of never letting it become a
financial burden; so, adrift as I now was, I not only could afford my
home but felt that it was the strongest factor in my scheme of security,
for here I knew I could retire and raise all the food I needed if free
lancing petered out.
I was quite clear about the work I wanted to do. It was to continue
writing and speaking on the few subjects on which I felt strongly, and
of which I knew a little. These subjects had made a pattern in my mind.
If men would work out this pattern I felt that they would go a long way
towards ending the world’s quarrels, quieting its confusions. First and
most important were the privileges they had snatched. I wanted to see
them all gradually scrapped, cost what it might economically. They were
a threat to honest men, to sound industry, to peaceful international
life.
I wanted to help spread the knowledge of all the intelligent efforts
within and without industry and government, to put an end to militancy,
replace it with actual understanding. And then I wanted to do my part
towards making the world acquainted with the man who I believed had best
shown how to carry out a program of cooperation based on consideration
of others—that was Abraham Lincoln.
There was a man, I told myself, who took the time to understand a thing
before he spoke. He knew that hurry, acting before you were reasonably
sure, almost invariably makes a mess of even the best intentions. He
wanted to know what he was about before he acted, also he wanted all
those upon whom he must depend for results to know what he was about and
why. Whatever he did, he did without malice, taking into account men’s
limitations, not asking more from any one than he could give. More than
anybody I had studied he applied in public affairs Frederick Taylor’s
rules for achievement of which I have spoken above. The more people who
knew about Lincoln, the more chance democracy had to destroy its two
chief enemies, privilege and militancy. I proposed to take every chance
I had to talk about him.
[Illustration:
© _Jessie Tarbox Beals_
_Posing as a gardener, 1925_
]
This was the program on which I was so set that I was willing to follow
it even if it did take away from me the comforts of a regular salary.
Giving up the salary troubled me less than finding myself without the
regular professional contacts which I had so enjoyed for twenty years,
and on which I found, now I was free, that I had come to depend more
than I would have believed.
Not belonging to an editorial group meant that when I dropped my pen at
lunch time I no longer could join a half-dozen office mates full of
gossip of what the morning had brought: the last Tarkington manuscript;
something of Willa Cather’s; a letter from Kipling; that new person from
Louisville, George Madden Martin, with a real creation, Emmy Lou; that
new person from Wisconsin, Edna Ferber, with a bona fide human being in
hand, Emma McChesney; or it might be Dunne’s last “Dooley,” or Baker’s
last adventure in “Contentment,” or gossip from the last man in
Washington, perhaps direct from the White House, and always surely from
our liberal friends in Congress. This was the stuff of our lunch-table
talk. We gloated or mourned, and our eyes were always on what was coming
rather than what had been.
I no longer had an office next door to these friends. My study had
become my workshop. Now I must pay my own secretary’s bill, my own
telephone calls, buy my own stationery. I gasped when I found what these
extras amounted to. Freedom, I saw, was going to be expensive as well as
lonesome.
However, for nineteen years I have kept to my decision. How little I
have contributed to my program in these nineteen years! The chief piece
of writing I planned to do I have never finished. That was bringing “The
History of the Standard Oil Company” up to date. I had dropped the story
in 1904, but the dissolution of the company in 1911 left me with the
melancholy conviction that sooner or later I should have to estimate the
trial and put down how the new set-up was working. I talked two or three
times with George Wickersham, the Attorney General who brought the suit,
and he always cautioned me not to hurry, to let the decision have a
chance to work out. I think we decided that about ten years would do it.
But the War put a different face on oil. It suddenly became a matter for
government control. It was no longer a private business. It was life and
death for the Allies. Oil was as necessary to them, Clemenceau wrote to
Wilson, as the blood of men. Everything that rolled or sailed or flew
must have it. The great struggle of the nations with navies, England at
the head, to command oil at its source, followed the War. The earth was
ransacked for it in a terrific predatory hunt. In this effort of the
nations to command oil supplies great names arose challenging that of
Rockefeller—Sir Henri Deterding, Marcus Samuel, William Knox D’Arcy. The
Standard Oil Company no longer ruled the oil world. There were the Royal
Dutch and the Shell making up finally the Royal Dutch Shell; there was
the Anglo-Persian. All of the dramatic and frequently tragic goings-on
had to settle down into something like orderly procedure before the
history I had in mind could be written.