WHY DID HE DO IT?
But Washington was not to parallel Paris. The uproar caused by M.
Briand’s speech died away in an amazingly short time—so far as
Washington was concerned. The violence and indiscretions of the press to
which so much of the disturbance on the other side of the Atlantic was
due was not followed up. Those that had been responsible were all of
them, I think, a little ashamed, though Mr. Wells obstinately came back
once or twice to tell what he thought of the French. Explanations
quieted the Italians. M. Briand had never used the offensive word
attributed to him, it had been but a mistake of the cables—and a serious
mistake, it should be said, too, of the journalist that had cabled it
without verification. On all sides lectures were read to the
correspondents. Go on this way and they could easily wreck the whole
thing. Go on this way and peace never at any time could be made in the
world. Any effort of man could be easily upset if passionate judgments
and unconfirmed suspicions were to be sent broadcast through the
newspapers. People believe what they read, unhappily, and have little or
no way of verifying. There was much of this reproving talk going on and
some of those who handled it most vigorously belonged to the Washington
press. It had its effect at once.
Then, too, it was hard to be continuously violent and suspicious in
Washington. The lovely days, the wide streets, the freedom from the
turmoil of business and industry, the very absence of exciting night
life—all tended to calm the spirit. How different from Paris in 1919!
There one lived in a city encircled by vast hospitals where thousands
upon thousands of shattered men tossed on their beds of pain. Soldiers
of all nations swarmed everywhere. In many streets of the city the shops
were still sealed up. On all sides one found great staring gaps—the
wounds of the city made by the shells of Big Bertha or the nightly
visits of airplanes. Everywhere you went you saw still the signs
“_Abri_” (shelter), vividly recalling the long years in which no man
safely went out without knowing that there was a refuge near by. The
streets at night were still dark, and those within still tightened their
shutters and drew close their curtains, unable to believe that light was
no longer a danger.
You rode in battered taxicabs over streets that were rough from long
inattention. In every house you entered the marks of war still remained.
Nothing had been mended or repaired in Paris for five years. A heating
apparatus out of order, it stayed out of order. A window broken, it
stayed broken. A hinge off, it stayed off. Carpets and furniture went
uncleaned. And in the homes of the rich where there had been beautiful
pictures, empty frames hung on the wall, the canvas having been cut out
and sent to some place of safety. There was no color. All Paris was in
black. Even in the windows of the shops you saw nothing but black. Your
dressmaker and milliner had no heart to work in colors, it still to them
was bad taste. It was only the influx and the demand of the visiting
foreigners, who multiplied as the Conference went on, that brought back
colors to the shop windows.
What a contrast to all this was Washington in the fall of 1921, with its
gayety and lavishness, its incessant round of lunches and teas and
dinners, its over-weighted tables, unbelievable in their abundance to
the visiting strangers, so long—and still—on stricter rations. You could
not be tragic long in Washington.
Then there was Mr. Hughes’ steady hand. He laughed daily at his press
conferences at the insinuations and solemnity of the questioning press
correspondents. Everything was going on swimmingly, he asserted.
“Excellent progress.” The naval committee was at work, the Far Eastern
committee had begun its sessions, the agenda would be followed step by
step, but one thing at a time would be attempted; when they had finished
what they were at now they would take up the next step, and not before.
It was certainly steadying, if not exciting. It gave confidence, if not
headlines. All of this quieted the storm, but it was left to the
President of the United States to sweep it entirely from the Conference
sky, though whether he did it intentionally or accidentally is still, I
think, an unanswered question.
Why did President Harding, without warning, inject an Association of
Nations into the Conference on the Limitation of Armament, on the last
day of its second week of life? The Conference had a definite agenda.
Mr. Hughes, its chairman, was following it with the rigor of a good
schoolmaster. That agenda made no mention of a conference, association
or league of nations. So far as it was concerned, the world war is made
up of nine nations. And here came the President of the United States and
casually announced that before the work was completed it should include
an association of all the nations of the earth.
Why did he do it? Did he want to divert public attention from the
dangerous irritations of the moment? We do not yet know enough of the
workings of Mr. Harding’s mind to be able to say whether he would, like
Napoleon III, gild a dome when there was squally public weather. All we
do really know about the President, so far, is his genuinely beneficent
intent. Is he canny enough to know that the public is as easily diverted
as a child and capable of attempting the trick when things are getting a
bit out of hand?
Whether this is true or not, he certainly put an end to the ticklish
situation in which the Conference found itself in Thanksgiving week.
Everybody fell to discussing the proposition. Was the Conference really
to end up in an Association of Nations? Did this mean that the United
States would suggest to the delegates gathered at the Conference—all of
them members of the League of Nations—that they scrap that institution?
There had been much speculation in Geneva before the Washington
Conference was called as to whether the intention was to force the
League out of existence. So great was the anxiety of more than one
European country to be in any congregation in which the United States
figured, that it was pretty generally agreed that if such a proposition
should be made it would be assented to. Was this Mr. Harding’s first
feeler then toward substituting something of his own for the League? But
this was only a speculation. Nobody could get from any official source
any confirmation that Mr. Harding had anything definite in mind. And yet
they were not unwilling to accept the notion that he had inadvertently
thrown out so important a suggestion.
There were those who had an unamiable explanation. We are all human,
they said. We must remember that this has ceased to be Mr. Harding’s
conference. His fine sentiments on Armistice Day on the opening of the
Conference had been greeted with loud acclaim the world over. But after
he had opened the Conference he left the hall. Secretary Hughes
appeared, and it was Secretary Hughes who stirred the world. From that
time on, the Secretary had been the one man quoted. We have had great
secretaries—Mr. Root, for instance, who never allowed his shadow to fall
across that of the President of the United States. When Mr. Roosevelt
was President, Mr. Root prepared some very remarkable state papers, but
they always began “The President instructs me to say.” Mr. Hughes has
been speaking for himself. It is quite possible, said these
interpreters, that the President thinks the time has come to let the
public know that, after all, it is he who occupies the White House.
I am quite sure that if this had been true, we should have had other
evidence of it as time went on, but none came. Mr. Harding knew well
enough that a successful Conference was in the long run his triumph. He
knew well enough that the only man who could give him this success was
Secretary Hughes. Possibly the wisest thing that Mr. Harding has yet
done as President has been to let the members of his cabinet do their
own work. Jealousy is not, I am sure, an explanation of Mr. Harding’s
sudden introduction of an Association of Nations into the Conference on
the Limitation of Armament. Was it to be found in M. Briand’s speech?
M. Briand did not convince his audience, as we have seen. That is, he
did not bring it to the point at which he was aiming. But one thing that
he did do was to bring into sharp relief the fact that land and naval
armaments cannot be handled separately. They dovetail in the game of
war, are mutually defensive and offensive; to cut the navy of a nation
whose main defense is ships, without considering the relation of that
cut to the size of the armies of those nations in which armies are the
chief defense, is to leave an unbalanced situation.
A second realization went along with this, and that was that the
scrapping and cutting by nine nations must be done with an eye to the
actual or potential naval armaments of the other forty-five or so
nations of the earth. Senator Schanzer had already suggested this in his
speech made on November 15, accepting in principle for Italy the naval
program. “I think it rather difficult,” he said, “to separate the
question of Italian and French naval armament limitation from the
general question of naval armaments of the world.”
M. Briand’s speech made one realize how France and Italy must consider
possible continental alliances of powers that were not represented at
this Conference; must consider a possible Russian crusade to convert the
world by force to its gospel. And if France and Italy must, or thought
they must, secure themselves against these possibilities, could England
weaken herself disproportionately? When you began to consider the
question of armament in terms of the world and not simply of nine
nations, you could not if you were candid find any peaceful solution but
by bringing everybody in—Germany, Turkey, Russia. Now it may be, though
we do not know Mr. Harding well enough yet to say, that the logic of the
experiences that the Conference had been through up to date laid hold of
him and he said it like a man—“there is but one way out, and that is by
One Big Union.”
Of course there is another explanation of why he did it and I rather
think it may be the true one, after all. The President may have been
hearing from the country. One thing that we do know about him is that he
is a man who with almost religious care listens to the voices that come
up to him from the people. And it was no secret that a multitude of
them, strong and weak, had been calling to him in the weeks
preceding—“conference,” “association,” “league,” “some method of
carrying on in which everybody can join,” “in no other way can we hope
for permanent peace.” It may be that Mr. Harding had heard so much of
this that he felt he must reply. And if this was true, he did wisely.
We may lay it down as one of the great facts of the present
international state of mind, that the world is intent on some sort of an
association of nations. It is not set, so far as one can determine, on
any particular covenant, though of course there is one to which some
fifty nations of the world have subscribed and in which for some two
years now they have been doing increasingly practical work in adjusting
difficulties between nations. The very fact that the League of Nations
lives—the divers ways in which its adventures in world unionism come to
us—only makes the idea of association stronger in the minds of the
peoples of the earth.
The Conference might limit armaments, naval and land, in the nine
nations that were here gathered. It might make settlements of the Far
Eastern questions, but there still would remain the rest of the world.
It is a part of things. The world is one. It has come to a consciousness
of its oneness. Nothing can dull that consciousness, stop the
determination to realize it. Not Mr. Borah, not Mr. Lodge. Somehow we
have got to learn to come together and stay together. Walt Whitman once
said of Abraham Lincoln’s passion for the Union that unionism had become
“a new virtue” with him,—a virtue like honesty, goodness, truthfulness.
There is no manner of doubt that in the minds of this world unionism is
coming to be regarded as a virtue; that the demand for its realization
as the only road to world peace is becoming more and more universal.
Mr. Harding may have seen this. He may have gone over in his mind the
steps that in the last twenty-five years—not to go back farther—the
world has taken toward this—the steps at the Hague, the various peace
conferences, the greatest of all experiments now making at Geneva—and he
may have seen that he could no longer deny the demand of this people
that he take another step toward the realization of this great hope.
Whatever the reason, however, of his unexpected suggestion, it served
the excellent purpose of turning the mind of the public to the fact that
however complete the work of the Conference might be there would still
be more to do if the world was to remain at peace.
In the meantime the Conference itself was going steadily ahead.
Everybody seemed cheerful. Everybody was cheerful. If the Conference had
rocked on its base for a moment, it had come back to its position; and
it was obvious enough, too, from all that one heard and saw, that there
was going soon to be something definite and important to announce as a
result of the work that was going on.