THE AMERICAN EAGLE CHANGES HIS PERCH
The shrieks of the American eagle have been joyous sounds to American
ears since 1776, when we discovered his capacity to render our hymn of
freedom. Heretofore our national bird has been in best voice on his
native soil. When brought to Europe by statesman or hero, by citizen or
delegate, it was found that certain conditions there impaired his
vocality and the flap of his wings. Suddenly in 1918 all this changed.
Conditions were not only favorable--they were ideal. Perched upon a
parapet of Guildhall, sitting majestically on the Eiffel Tower, alight
on the campanile that crowns the Capitoline Hill, his shrieks conveyed a
message to the people of Europe whose ears have awaited it longingly for
centuries, and the flapping of his wings created a current that
stimulated and energized them. Floating majestically through the
empyrean, he was to those human beings, weary of war, of tyranny, and of
privilege, what the dove was to the occupants of the ark--the emblem of
salvation. Nothing could then convince the peoples of Italy that this
harbinger of hope had not been liberated by Woodrow Wilson. I cannot
believe that the American eagle has permanently forsaken the United
States of America. I anticipate hearing there again the familiar scream.
One tolerates him better at home than in Europe, but I must accord the
bird great sapiency in having selected the autumn of 1918 to give the
European people the opportunity to judge of the quality and quantity of
his vocal production.
It is a platitude to say that no prophet or potentate, no king or
conqueror was ever greeted with such spontaneous, whole-hearted, genuine
enthusiasm as President Wilson was greeted in Italy, and, if I may judge
from newspaper accounts, the reception which was offered him there was
not unlike that which he received in England and France. He went to
Italy when its people were incensed by the conduct of the newly fledged
Jugoslavs, and when the press was in the throes of inflammatory polemics
over the fate of the Treaty of London. It was widely known in Italy that
President Wilson was not in sympathy with the Sonninian alleged
imperialistic policies and that he was fully in sympathy with the
Jugoslav aspirations. Nevertheless, the Italians, from royalty to
peasant, welcomed him with a spontaneity and warmth, an enthusiasm and
whole-heartedness, a genuineness and devotion that was as moving as
anything I ever witnessed. The hour of his arrival in Rome was not
definitely known until shortly before he arrived. But despite this
hundreds of people remained in the street all night, and thousands of
them gathered there before sunrise in order that they might not miss the
opportunity of looking upon him whom they firmly believed to be the
apostle of liberty and freedom, the herald of light and brotherly love.
It was not curiosity alone that prompted them to this effort and
sacrifice of comfort. Curiosity undoubtedly entered into it, but the
potent reason for the outpouring that took place that memorable January
was that their presence might convey to our President an expression of
their esteem and an earnest of their appreciation of his efforts.
No American, though he had the heart of a frog and the emotional caliber
of a lizard, could suppress the succession of thrills that mounted from
his bowels to his brain on seeing with what dignity, suavity, and
self-respecting composure their Chief Magistrate comported himself as he
was transported through the Via Nazionale, seated beside the most
democratic and beloved king in the world. Though the American spectator
had spent his time impregnating with venom darts which he believed he
would gladly drive into the President, he had to admit that there was a
man who more than satisfied all of Kipling's "Ifs." When he encountered
him later in the Palazzo del Drago acting as host at the table of his
country's charming ambassadress, or at Montecitorio, where he told the
Solons of Italy of his country's hopes, ideals, aspirations, and
willingness, or in less solemn moments on the Capitoline, when he
received the honorary citizenship of Rome, he knew that his first
impressions were founded in verity and he lent a willing ear to the
screech of the American eagle which revealed itself throughout the
entire Italian press. Every city of Italy clamored for a visit, and
though he spent but a few minutes in Genoa and a few hours in Milan, the
outpouring of the people to welcome him was no less remarkable than it
was in Rome. The tribute which Europe gave Mr. Wilson seemed to depress
many of his countrymen on the other side of the Atlantic. It is an
extraordinary thing that while Europe rocked with his fame America
reeked with his infamy.
After having lived two years in Italy I found many things about the
Italians difficult to understand. After having lived fifty years in the
United States of America I find some things about the Americans beyond
comprehension. Nothing is so enigmatic as their attitude toward Woodrow
Wilson, the man who was accorded higher esteem in Europe than was ever
vouchsafed mortal man, and who gave and has since given earnest of such
accord. From the day he decided to represent our country in the Peace
Conference the papers and magazines began to contain the material from
which could readily be formulated a new hymn of hate. What was the
genesis of this display? What was the cause of this distrust? From
whence did this venom emanate? How could a man whose life was a mirror
of integrity, whose ideals were of the loftiest, and who attempted to
conform his conduct to them excite such contempt? Why should the only
statesman who had revealed the ability to formulate a plan which, put in
operation, led to cessation of hostilities, who was the leader in
formulating the terms of peace, and who insisted, and had his insistence
allowed, that it should incorporate a covenant whose enforcement would
make for perpetual peace, be hated and distrusted, vilified and
traduced, thwarted and misrepresented by so many of his countrymen? What
had he done, by commission or omission, that such treatment should be
accorded him? I propose to attempt to answer these questions and thus to
suggest why he has been a failure as President. I know the replies
usually given to these questions by his depreciators and defamers. "His
nature is so imperious and his temper so tyrannical that he cannot
co-operate with others; he neither solicits advice nor heeds counsel; he
selects his coadjutors, aides, and advisers from those whom he knows he
can dominate; the passport to his favor is flattery, and intimacy with
him is maintained only by the cement of agreement; he neither made
preparation for war when there was ample time for doing so nor did he
wage war until months after repeated _casus belli_; he is hypocritical
in having sought and accomplished election under the slogan 'He kept us
out of war,' and immediately on being elected he 'thrust' the country
into war; he was 'too proud to fight' in 1916, but keen to fight in
1917; he has hebrewphilia and popophobia; he is a socialist masquerading
as a liberal; he is a Bolshevik beneath the mask of a radical. In brief,
he is temperamentally unfit to be President of the United States;
intellectually and morally unfit to represent its people; and withal so
completely under the dominion of an insatiate ambition to be the
greatest man the world has ever known that every kindly human feeling
has been crowded from him."
Intelligent, educated men who have never seen him, who know little of
his career save that he was president of Princeton University and
governor of the State of New Jersey and twice President of the United
States, elected by the Democratic party, hate him as if he were a bitter
personal enemy, malign him as if he had injured their reputation for
honesty and probity, calumniate him as though he were a man without
character, depreciate him as though his career were barren of signal
accomplishment, and distrust his motives and procedures as though he had
once, or many times, betrayed them. Men who are unable to give the
smallest specificity to their dislike of him feel that they add to their
stature by detracting from his accomplishments and defaming him. Not one
of them with whom I have talked has been able to state the facts of his
disagreement and rupture with the trustees of Princeton University. My
understanding was that he insisted that the university should submit to
certain reforms that would make it democratic in reality as well as in
name, and that would enhance its pedagogical usefulness, and that there
should not be a privileged class in the university, viz., members of
exclusive clubs whose portals were opened by money. He maintained that
his training as an educator, his experience as an administrator, his
accomplishment as a student of history and as an interpreter of events,
his experience with men, entitled him to a judgment concerning the needs
of such an institution that should be given a hearing, and he contended
that his recommendations, rather than those of trustees whose training
had been largely in the world of affairs, be put in operation and at
least be given a trial. He had the courage to jeopardize his very bread
and butter, and that of his family, at a time in his life when his
physical forces had reached their zenith rather than sacrifice what he
believed to be a principle. The men who were permitted to take Woodrow
Wilson's measure in that contest had no more idea of his stature than if
they were blind. They would have laughed to scorn the idea that five
years later the people of the United States would select him for their
president. It was in this episode that his repute not to be able to do
team-work with his equals and his inferiors originated. Time has shown
that it isn't only a question of being able to do team-work, he cannot
do his best work in an atmosphere of friction and dissent. It is as
impossible for him to yield a position which he has taken, and which we
will assume he believes to be right, as it is impossible for the magnet
to yield the needle that it has attracted; therefore he adopts the only
course for him--he doesn't enter contests, save golf with his physician.
His cabinet meetings are a farce, so say they who have never attended
one and who have never even spoken to a cabinet member. He selects
pygmies for his cabinet and for his aides in order that they may proffer
him no advice, resent no contradiction or protest indignities to their
offices. This in face of the fact that he and his cabinet and his aides
have conditioned the only miracle of modern times, namely, throwing a
whole country, millions of whose people were adverse to war, into a
bellicose state which was never before witnessed; conditioning and
transporting the men and material resources of that country across the
Atlantic and into the fighting lines at a crucial moment, at a time when
the backs of the Allies were against the wall, according to the
statements of their own authorized spokesmen; who succeeded in
engendering in the composite mind of the American people a determination
to win the war that was more potent than men or weapons; who impregnated
the composite soul of the Allies with a faith that the world would be an
acceptable abode for the common people once the enemy was crushed, that
transcended in its intensity the faith of the Christian martyrs; who
filled the heart of every statesman of the Allied nations with a hope
and belief that there was within him the masterful mind that would
conduct their legions to victory and salvation. If he and his pygmies
accomplished this, I am one who maintains they are myrmidons and giants.
But they didn't do it, his detractors say. The rejoinder to which is: "I
know, a little bird did it!"
If we had entered the war after the sinking of the _Lusitania_, when the
wise men of the West say we should have gone in, countless lives and
inestimable expenditures would have been spared. Where is the man in the
United States of America to-day who has revealed the Jove-like mind that
entitles him to make such sentient statement? When he is found, how can
he possibly know? What delivery of thought, idea, conception, execution
has he ever made that entitles him to be heard, not to say believed? How
can any one possibly know what would have been the result of our
entrance into the war at that time? If any one thing is responsible for
America's efficiency in the war, it is that it had the American people
fused into one man with one mind, determined to win the war. I am sure
that I encountered nothing in the United States in my travel from the
Atlantic to the Pacific and back again in the spring of 1916 that made
me believe that the people of our country wanted war, or that there
could be developed in them at that time a sentiment which would make for
such internal resistance of the people as they displayed in the spring
of 1917 and continued to display until November 11, 1918. I cannot speak
from personal knowledge, for I was not in the United States during the
year of its war efficiency, but I am told that there was never a whisper
of disloyalty or a syllable of disparagement of the President personally
during that time. But many of those who were silent then are strident
now. Their enforced silence has enhanced the carry-power of their
voices, and their clamor prevents the harmony that the world is seeking.
They not only defame Wilson, but they contend that the part we played in
the war has been overestimated. It has been, but not by us. It has been
evaluated by those whom it was our most sacred privilege to aid. They
neither minimize our efforts not underestimate our accomplishment. The
British know that they were steadfast; the French realize that they were
resolute; the Italians appreciate that they were brave. We know it, but
that does not prevent us from realizing the magnitude of the rôle we
played, and the man who was responsible for it is the man to whom the
world, save a political party in the United States, gives thanks and
expresses appreciation. His name is Woodrow Wilson. Americans do not
boast of the part they played in winning the war, but they do encourage
that which is far worse than boasting--lying about it, particularly when
the motive for such perversion of truth is deprecation of their Chief
Executive.
He is an idealist and theorist. He is the kind of idealist who destroyed
the Democratic machine in the State of New Jersey, which had been the
synonym for corruption in politics for a generation; the kind of
idealist who put through the Underwood Tariff Bill, which at one stroke
did more to strangle the unnatural mother of privilege than any measure
in the past twenty years; the kind of idealist who, when the transport
system of the entire country threatened to be hopelessly paralyzed by
reason of the determination of the railway magnates to refuse the
demands of locomotive engineers that their working-day should consist of
eight hours, sent for representatives of the plutocrats and the
proletariats and told what they were to do and when they were to do it,
and the whole civilized world approved. He is the idealist who has done
more to make our government a republican government representative of
the people and not of party bosses than any one in the memory of man. He
is the idealist who is a scholar, a thinker, a statesman, a creator, an
administrator, and a man of vision. More than that, he is an efficiency
expert in the realm of world-ordering. It is to our inestimable
misfortune that his personality has successfully obstacled his projects.
His secretary of war is a failure; his secretary of state is a
figurehead; his secretary of finance is his family, and so on _ad
nauseam_.
I am not a competent judge whether Mr. Baker has been a good secretary
of war or not, but I am sure that he is not so unfit as Simon Cameron
was. No one has said of him: "Cameron is utterly ignorant and regardless
of the course of things and probable result. Selfish and openly
discourteous to the President. Obnoxious to the country. Incapable
either of organizing details or conceiving and executing general plans"
(Nicolay). President Wilson has never had to say of any of his cabinet
what Lincoln said of Seward: "The point and pith of the senators'
complaint was that they charged him, Seward, if not with infidelity,
with indifference, with want of earnestness in the war, with want of
sympathy with the country, and especially with a too great ascendancy
and control of the President and measures of administration. While they
seemed to believe in my honesty, they also appeared to think that when I
had in me any good purpose or intention Seward tried to suck it out of
me unperceived."
So far as I know, no one has characterized President Wilson's mentality
as "painful imbecility," as Stanton characterized Lincoln a few months
before the latter appointed him secretary of war.
He has been accused of not surrounding himself with the ablest men of
his party or of the country, in the conduct of the affairs of the nation
during the period when the country was emerging from the position of
aloofness from world politics which it had maintained from the time
Washington warned of the danger of "entangling foreign alliances." But
it does not convince me that a man is not competent to do the job that
the President has given him because his training has been as a
stockbroker and his activities on the bear side of the market. That is
not the kind of training that one would give his son whom he wished to
see become a statesman, but it occurs to me that the task entrusted to
him may be one which a statesman is not best fitted to handle. It may be
a job that a man with the mentality and training and moral possessions
that he selected could do better than any one else.
What earnest of superior constructive, intellectual powers has any
public man in the United States displayed that justifies
self-constituted critics in saying that the men selected by President
Wilson are not their peers? It is universally admitted that President
Wilson has a more masterful and comprehensive grasp of politics in
America, using that word in its conventional, every-day sense and
meaning, particularly a familiarity with bosses and the "machine," than
any President ever had. No one denies his statesmanship. He is,
therefore, a competent judge of who was best fitted to do the work which
it was necessary to do in order that the programme which he formulated
for the benefit of humanity might be executed, and particularly that the
yoke might be lifted from the necks of the oppressed nations and that
another world calamity in the shape of war might be avoided. His choice
of aides and representatives was not acceptable to men who put party
interests before public interests, who are willing to sacrifice world
weal for worldly advancement, and who lash themselves into a frenzied
state by repetition of the admonitions of Washington or Monroe. It does
not detract from the glory of the father of his country, or from the
lustre of great interpreters of national law, to say that the principles
that they enunciated and the practices that they initiated centuries ago
are not necessarily those that should guide us now. It would be just as
legitimate to say that physicians should follow the teachings of
Hippocrates or Galen, because the one was the father of medicine and the
other its greatest expositor, as it would to say that we must follow
slavishly the teachings of Washington and Monroe.
That the American Peace Commission did not contain men of the mental
caliber of Mr. Root or Mr. Lodge, that the reservoirs of expert
knowledge were not drained and taken to Paris, that our Commission as a
whole was less sophisticated, less perceptive and apperceptive, than
that of Great Britain, let us say, is to be regretted, just as we regret
the effects of some fallacious judgment or specious decision of our
youth. There were ways of offsetting them, however, and in this
particular instance Congress was the way. The President did not go
beyond his prerogative in selecting the Peace Commission. The public
elected him to make these selections, as well as to do other things. If
the people do not want that such selection should be his privilege and
power, they have only to say it at the polls. The Eighteenth Amendment
was not difficult of accomplishment. Perhaps time will show that Mr.
Wilson "guessed right" oftener in the selection of his cabinet than any
predecessor.
Mr. Josephus Daniels was the target of scorn and the butt of ridicule
from the time he went into the cabinet until he began to make
preparations for war, but the rumor has reached me that his efforts were
fairly satisfactory to the hypercritical American public. The
President's critics are jealous of the prodigious powers which an
unauthorized representative of the government has in the affairs of the
country, and they do not understand why, if he is the paragon of virtue
that his position seems to indicate he is, the President did not put him
on the commission. But again I say the President knows his limitations
and the public has only recently discovered them. He may short-circuit
some of them by means of Colonel House. He may find him "great in
counsel and mighty in work," or he may have habituated himself to buy
only gold that he has tried in the fire himself. It is his privilege and
no one can gainsay it.
He is silent and ungetatable. Silence has been considered a sign of
strength in man since the days of Hammurabi, and the greater the man the
more solitary he is. If Mr. Wilson were twice as great, even Mr. Tumulty
would not be allowed to see him!
Wilson has been accused of pilfering his idea of the League of Nations
from the Duc de Sully and from the Abbé of Saint Pierre. Enemies
animated by malice and fired by envy have striven to show that the
famous fourteen statements or principles were his only by the right of
possession or enunciation; that he resurrected the doctrines of Mazzini,
dressed them up and paraded them as his own. It would be difficult to be
patient with such critics if one did not know the history of
epoch-making events in the world's progress. In truth, the public is
resentful that it was not consulted. It is umbraged that it was not
allowed to make suggestions. It is spiteful because it was treated with
contempt. The public manifested the same quality of spleen toward
Lincoln, only the quantity was greater. In brief, the public professes
not to have any confidence in Mr. Wilson's wisdom, and this in face of
the fact that up to date he has displayed more wisdom than all the
Solons in America combined, and I can say this the more unprejudicedly
as a Republican than I could if I were a member of the party that
elected Mr. Wilson.
Mr. Wilson is disliked for emotional, not intellectual, reasons.
Although he has probably done more to engrave the graving upon the stone
that will remove the iniquity of the land than any man who has ever
lived, "we don't like" him. There must be some good reason for this
other than envy, jealousy, and resentment, and I propose to inquire for
these reasons in Mr. Wilson's emotional make-up.
Whether I "like" Mr. Wilson or not does not enter into it. I never knew
Pascal or Voltaire or Benjamin Franklin, and still I am sure I could
make a statement of their qualities and possessions that would elicit
commendation from one who had known them. As a matter of fact, personal
contact with men from whose activities the world dates epochs is not
conducive to personal liking. I cannot fancy liking Rousseau. I am sure
I should not have liked Voltaire. I can even understand why Lincoln was
despised and scoffed at by his contemporaries. I am one of those who
believe Mr. Wilson is a great man, but I am not concerned to convince
others of it. I am concerned alone to explain why he is not beloved of
the people.
The esteem or disesteem in which Mr. Wilson is held in this country is
due to his personality, and this does not seem to me to be enigmatic. He
has the mind of a Jove but the heart of a batrachian. It is to the
former that he owed his rise, it is the latter that conditioned his
fall. If we were not satisfied to have such a man sail our ship of state
in smooth as well as in turbulent seas, in calm and in tornado, we had
opportunity to drop him from the bridge gracefully in 1916. Although his
possessions and deficits were not so universally known then as now,
still they were generally recognized and widely discussed. Instead of
dropping our pilot we re-elected him. This could only be construed by
him as approval of his conduct. When he continued to display his
inherent qualities he excited our ire. We called him names and neither
forgave nor wished to forgive him.
Perhaps no one has ever had the opportunity to fix his position so
indestructibly at the apogee of human accomplishment by permitting
himself kindly indulgences or what is commonly called human feelings as
Woodrow Wilson had. If when Roosevelt sought to raise a regiment or
division to take to France the President had been sympathetic to the
project and had wiped out with a stroke of the pen the obvious
difficulties that stood in the way of such project, it would have
thrilled the people of this country of every color, or every complexion,
political and somatic, as nothing else could possibly do. It would not
have taken from his prestige as commander-in-chief of the army one jot
or tittle, nor would it have interfered in the smallest way with the
disciplinary unity which is the vital spark of the army.
If he had said of General Leonard Wood, "Father, forgive him, for he
kneweth not that which he did," and had the emotional exaltation which
every one has when he forgives an enemy, and given him a command to
which his past performances entitled him, a few soreheads and soulless
pygmies wearing the uniform of the United States Army and their
congressional wire-pullers might have resented it, but the people by and
large would have said: "Our President is a big man: he is magnanimous,
he is a man who walks in the pathway of the Lord, he forgives his
enemies." General Wood would have received the recompense for having
prepared the way for the selective draft that he deserved, for even
though he did it in a tactless and tasteless way, he made a contribution
of incalculable value to the victory of our arms. Had he sent for the
chairman of the committee on foreign affairs and conferred with him on
the selection of the Peace Conference personnel, had he shown some signs
of deference to that committee, had he discussed with them his peace
plan proposals and taken note of their suggestions, modifying his
proposals in accordance with their convictions when to do so did not
yield a fundamental point, we should not have been on the horns of the
dilemma we were for a year following the President's last return from
Paris, and the world would have been spared discomfiture--yea, even
agony.
Mr. Wilson knows the rules of the game, but he does not know how to play
fair. He knows that contests and strife elicit his most deforming
qualities--intolerance, arrogance, and emotional sterility; hence he
hedges himself about in every possible way to avoid them. He knows that
the sure way for him is to play the game alone.
Woodrow Wilson does not love his fellow men. He loves them in the
abstract, but not in the flesh. He is concerned with their fate, their
destiny, their travail en masse, but the predicaments, perplexities, and
prostrations of the individual or groups of individuals make no appeal
to him. He does not refresh his soul by bathing it daily in the milk of
human kindness. He says with his lips that he loves his fellow men, but
there is no accompanying emotional glow, none of the somatic or
spiritual accompaniments which are the normal ancillæ of love's display.
Hence he does not respect their convictions when they are opposed to his
own, he does not value their counsels. His determination to put things
through in the way he has convinced himself they should be put through
is not susceptible to change from influences that originate without his
own mind. He has made many false steps, but none of them so conditioned
the fall from the exalted position the world had given to him as his
determination to go to Paris and represent this country at the Peace
Conference. If one may judge what the verdict of all the voters in this
country would have been, had the question of his going been submitted to
them, from the expressions of opinion of those one encounters in his
daily life, it would be no exaggeration to say that three-fourths of the
voters would say he should not have gone. I think I may say truthfully
that I never encountered a person who approved his decision. It is
possible that his entourage or cabinet and counsellors did not contain a
daring soul who volunteered such advice, but it is incredible that both
they and the President did not sense the judgment of their countrymen as
it was reflected in the newspapers. However, it is likely that he would
have gone had he known that the majority of the voters of this country
were opposed to it.
In contact with people he gives himself the air of listening with
deference and indeed of being beholden to judgment and opinion, but in
reality it is an artifice which he puts off when he returns to the
dispensing centre of the word and of the law just as he puts off his
gloves and his hat. Nothing is so illustrative of this unwillingness to
heed counsel emanating from authority and given wholly for his benefit
as his conduct toward his physician during the trip around the country
in September, 1919. The newspaper representatives who accompanied him
say that he had often severe and protracted headache, was frequently
nervous and irritable, sometimes dizzy, and always looked ill. These
symptoms, conjoined with the fact that for a long time he had high blood
pressure, were danger signals which no physician would dare neglect. It
is legitimate to infer that his physician apprised him and counselled
him accordingly. Despite it Mr. Wilson persisted, until nature exacted
the penalty and by so doing he jeopardized his own life and seriously
disordered the equilibrium of affairs of the country. Indeed, obstinacy
is one of his most maiming characteristics.
The President attempts to mask with facial urbanity and a smile in
verbal contact with people, and with the subjunctive mood in written
contact, his third most deforming defect of character, namely, his
inability to enter into a contest of any sort in which there is strife
without revealing his obsession to win, his emotional frigidity, his
lack of love for his fellow men. These explain why he did not win out to
a larger degree in Paris, and why he did not win out with Congress. When
he attempts to play such game his artificed civility, cordiality,
amiability are so discordant with the real man that they become as
offensive as affectations of manner or speech always are, and instead of
placating the individual toward whom they are manifest, or facilitating
a modus vivendi, they offend and make rapport with him impossible.
Probably nothing would strike Mr. Wilson's intimates as so wholly untrue
as the statement that he is cruel, yet, nevertheless, I feel convinced
that there is much latent cruelty in his make-up, and that every now and
then he is powerless to inhibit it. He was undoubtedly wholly within his
rights in dismissing Mr. Lansing from his cabinet, but the way in which
he did it constitutes refinement of cruelty. He may have had a contempt
for him because he had not insisted on playing first fiddle in Mr.
Wilson's orchestra, the part for which he was engaged, but that did not
justify Mr. Wilson in flaying him publicly because he attempted to keep
the orchestra together and tuned up as it were during Mr. Wilson's
illness.
Selfishness is another conspicuous deforming trait of the President. He
is more selfish than cruel. Undoubtedly his friends can point to many
acts of generosity that deny the allegation. Some of the most selfish
people in the world give freely of their counsel, money, and time.
Selfishness and miserliness are not interchangeable terms. He is the
summation of selfishness because he puts his decisions and
determinations above those of any or all others. It matters not who the
others may be. Until some one comes forward to show that he has ever
been known to yield his judgments and positions to those of others I
must hold to this view. He is ungenerous of sentiment and unfair by
implication. Nothing better exemplifies his ungenerosity than his
refusal to appear before the Senate or a committee of them previous to
his return to Paris after his visit here and say to them that he had
determined to incorporate all their suggestions in the Treaty and in the
Covenant. He did incorporate them, but he did not give the Senate the
satisfaction of telling them that he was going to do so or that the
instrument would be improved by so doing. It has been said of him that
he is the shrewdest politician who has been in the presidential chair in
the memory of man. That is a euphemistic way of saying he knows mob
psychology and individual weakness, but his reputation in this respect
has been injured by his failure to be generous and gracious to Congress.
The receptive side of his nature is neither sensitive nor intuitive, nor
is his reactive side productive or creative. He is merely ratiocinative
and constructive, consciously excogitative and inventive. In other
words, he has talent, not genius. Genius does what it must, talent what
it can. The man of genius does that which no one else can do. His work
is the essential and unique expression of himself. He does it without
being aware how he does it. It is as much an integral part of him as the
pitch of his voice and his unconscious manner. He is conscious only of
the throes of productive travail; of the antecedents of his creation he
is ignorant. Many artists essay to paint their own portraits and many
succeed in portraying themselves spiritually and somatically as no one
else can. Mr. Wilson did with words for himself in describing Jefferson
Davis what artists do with pigments.
"What he did lack was wisdom in dealing with men, willingness to
take the judgment of others in critical matters of business, the
instinct which recognizes ability in others and trusts it to the
utmost to play its independent part. He too much loved to rule, had
too overweening confidence in himself, and took leave to act as if
he understood much better than those who were in actual command
what should be done in the field. He let prejudice and his own
wilful judgment dictate to him.... He sought to control too many
things with too feminine a jealousy of any rivalry in authority."
True, too true; but not nearly so true of Jefferson Davis as of Woodrow
Wilson. Posterity profited by the limitations of the former, and we are
paying and mankind will continue to pay for those of the latter.
Mr. Wilson is a brilliant, calculating, and vindictive man: brilliant in
conception, calculating in motive, and vindictive in execution. From the
time of his youth he instructed himself to great purpose. He has made a
careful review and digest of the world's history and he has attempted to
survey the tractless forests and untrodden deserts of the future. From
the activities in the former fields he has evolved a plan which he
believes will make the latter a favorable place for the human race to
display its activities, and he has striven to put that plan into
practice. He concedes that others have looked backward with as
comprehensive an eye as his own; he grants that others have had visions
of the future that are even more penetrating than his own; but _he_ has
the opportunity to try out his plan, and _they_ have not, and he is
unwilling to take them into partnership in the development of the claim
that he has staked out. He cannot do it. It is one of his emotional
limitations. Were he generous, kindly, and humble it would be difficult
to find his like in the flesh or in history. He must be reconciled to
the frowns of his contemporaries, the disparagements of his fellows, and
the scorn of those who have been scorned by him. The world has always
made the possessor of limitations pay the penalty. In his hour of hurt,
if sensitiveness adequate to feel is still vouchsafed him, he may
assuage the pain with the knowledge that posterity will judge him by his
intellectual possessions, not by his emotional deficit.
If we are not satisfied with his conduct as chief magistrate we must do
one of two things. We must either curtail the powers of future
presidents, or we must select presidents for their qualities of heart as
well as mind. Perhaps future candidates for the presidency should be
submitted to psychological tests to determine their intellectual and
emotional coefficients. Those who do not measure up to a certain
standard shall be eliminated.
One of the most unsurmountable obstacles to advancement of an officer in
the army or navy is an annotation of his record by a superior officer as
"temperamentally unfit." From the day that appears underneath his
pedigree there is scarcely any power that can advance him. It may be
that Woodrow Wilson has been "temperamentally unfit" to be President of
the United States, but for any one to say that he has been
intellectually unfit for that office is to utter an absurdity and an
untruth. Had he been baptized in the waters of humility, had his parents
or his pedagogues inoculated him with the vaccine of modesty, had he
during the years of his spiritual growth come under the leavening
influence of love of humanity, had he by taking thought been able to
develop what are considered "human qualities,"--kindliness, sympathy,
and reverence for others,--had he included in his matutinal prayers,
"Let me accomplish, not by might, nor by power, but by spirit," had he
had Lincoln's heart and his own brain, he would be, not one of the
greatest men that America has produced, he might be the greatest. As it
is, his emotional limitations have thwarted his career and dwarfed his
spiritual stature. The American people speak of this as his fault. It is
in reality his misfortune. We laugh at the child who cries when she
finds that her doll, with outward appearance of pulchritude, is filled
with sawdust, but we wail when we find our gods are only human, and we
resent it when our humans err.
Woodrow Wilson is better liked by the people of the world to-day than
any prophet or reformer the world has ever had. He has fewer enemies and
fewer detractors. He should consider himself particularly fortunate, for
he owes his life to it, that he lives in the twentieth century. It is
only a century or two ago, in reality, that they gave up burning at the
stake prophets and reformers, and it is only a few decades ago that they
allowed them to remain in their native land or even to visit it. Critics
and self-constituted judges of his conduct will continue to pour their
vials of wrath upon his head and purge themselves of their contempt for
him, but these are the fertilizers of his intellectual stature.
Woodrow Wilson has had meted out to him more considerate and respectful
consideration than any man who originated stirring impulse that has led
to world renovation. There is a choice between calumniation and
crucifixion.
Transcriber's note
_Underscores_ have been used to indicate _italic_ fonts.
Minor printers errors have been corrected without comment. The
following words have been added where they seemed to be missing.
Added "about" to:
Then came two books about the outgrowth of the military life.
Added "by" to:
The next day I went to a midday banquet tendered by Melville E. Stone,
the general manager of the Associated Press, by the newspaper men of
Rome.