in this country who are not straight-out Americans and nothing else.
It just as emphatically means to stand by every good American of
German blood exactly as much as by every other good American. In
every loyalty organization a special effort should be made to see
that in the leadership and in the ranks the Americans of German
blood come in on precisely the same basis as every one else. And the
straight-out Americans, in whole or in part of German blood, should
themselves insist on this, not as a favor which they request, but
as a right which they demand, a right predicated on their fervid
and militant Americanism. I wish we could see such an organization
formed, an uncompromisingly straight-out American organization,
including Americans of all our different blood strains, but with as
large a proportion of Americans in whole or in part of German blood as
possible, and then let this organization take the lead in aggressively
loyal Americanism, in the demand to fight this war with all speed
and efficiency, until it is crowned by the peace of complete victory
and in the purpose to make this peace mark the glorious rebirth, the
purification and the giant growth of the American spirit--the spirit of
an intense and unified American nationalism.
We Americans must be loyal first to our own Nation and to our own
national ideals, and we must develop to the utmost the virile hardihood
of body, mind, and soul without which there can be no real greatness.
And our devotion to America shall in part show itself in the unswerving
effort to make this great democratic Republic both strong for
self-defense and strong for wise and brotherly help to other nations,
to make it both the leader and the servant of all mankind.
THE GERMAN HORROR
MAY 2, 1918
The Hague conferences laid down a number of rules which the signatory
powers, including Germany, agreed to observe in order to mitigate the
horrors of war. Germany has with equal cynicism and brutality violated
every one of these rules. She has waged war as it was waged in the Dark
Ages. She has shown revolting cruelty toward soldiers and especially
toward non-combatants, including women and children.
At this moment a great cannon is bombarding Paris. Not a soldier
has been killed by it; it has not in the smallest degree affected
France’s military power, nor was it intended to do so. It was intended
to terrorize the French civilian population by the destruction of
churches, hospitals, and private buildings and the murder of women and
children. On Good Friday one of the shells wrecked a church and killed
a number of the little choir boys and a number of women who were at
prayer. Among the killed were three American women whom I knew, who
were abroad working for our soldiers. An American friend who saw the
horror writes me:
Evidently the Germans do not worry over the fact that their shells
descend on women and children kneeling in prayer on a Good Friday,
before the crucifix.
Another American friend, a Red Cross woman, writes:
One shell burst in a maternity hospital, killing a nurse, a young
mother, and a little baby. Several other mothers and new-born babies
were injured.
The Zeppelins and airplanes are continually bombarding undefended
English and French cities and have killed women and children by the
hundreds. The submarines have waged war with callous mercilessness.
Their crews have continually practiced torture on the prisoners they
have taken. They leave women and children to drown. They shoot into the
lifeboats. At this moment Americans are dying from the poison gas which
the Germans, in contemptuous defiance of The Hague rules, have made
an ordinary weapon of war. I have just been talking with an American
soldier absolutely trustworthy, who himself saw the body of a Canadian
whom the Germans had just crucified.
Every violation of the laws of war has been practiced by Germany. By
her outrages on humanity she has made herself an outlaw among nations,
and unless she pays heavily for her crimes, the whole world will be
in danger. It is Germany, and only Germany, who is responsible for
the hideous atrocities that have marked this war, atrocities which
all civilized men outside of Germany believed to have been eliminated
forever from civilized warfare. Germany has habitually and as a matter
of policy practiced the torture of men, the rape of women, and the
killing of children.
It was deeply to our discredit that during the shameful years of our
neutrality we refused to protest against these hideous atrocities. Now
at last this Nation has awakened and has gone to war against the enemy
of America and of mankind. Let our people now keep steadily in mind
just what kind of a foe we are fighting and just what kind of infamy
that foe is habitually practicing. Then let us resolve that, come what
may, we will fight this war through to a finish until the authors of
this hideous infamy have paid in full and have been punished as they
deserve. For in no other way can a peace worth having be obtained.
SEDITION, A FREE PRESS, AND PERSONAL RULE
MAY 7, 1918
The legislation now being enacted by Congress should deal drastically
with sedition. It should also guarantee the right of the press and
people to speak the truth freely of all their public servants,
including the President, and to criticize them in the severest terms of
truth whenever they come short in their public duty. Finally, Congress
should grant the Executive the amplest powers to act as an executive
and should hold him to stern accountability for failure so to act, but
it should itself do the actual lawmaking and should clearly define the
lines and limits of action and should retain and use the fullest powers
of investigation into and supervision over such action. Sedition is a
form of treason. It is an offense against the country, not against the
President. At this time to oppose the draft or sending our armies to
Europe, to uphold Germany, to attack our allies, to oppose raising the
money necessary to carry on the war are at least forms of sedition,
while to act as a German spy or to encourage German spies to use
money or intrigue in the corrupt service of Germany, to tamper with
our war manufactures and to encourage our soldiers to desert or to
fail in their duty, and all similar actions are forms of undoubtedly
illegal sedition. For some of these offenses death should be summarily
inflicted. For all the punishment should be severe.
The Administration has been gravely remiss in dealing with such acts.
Free speech, exercised both individually and through a free press, is
a necessity in any country where the people are themselves free. Our
Government is the servant of the people, whereas in Germany it is the
master of the people. This is because the American people are free and
the German are not free. The President is merely the most important
among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or
opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct
or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal,
able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore
it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell
the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary
to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right.
Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To
announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we
are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic
and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing
but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is
even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about
him than about any one else.
During the last year the Administration has shown itself anxious to
punish the newspapers which uphold the war, but which told the truth
about the Administration’s failure to conduct the war efficiently,
whereas it has failed to proceed against various powerful newspapers
which opposed the war or attacked our allies or directly or indirectly
aided Germany against this country, as these papers upheld the
Administration and defended the inefficiency. Therefore, no additional
power should be given the Administration to deal with papers for
criticizing the Administration. And, moreover, Congress should closely
scrutinize the way the Postmaster-General and Attorney-General have
already exercised discrimination between the papers they prosecuted and
the papers they failed to prosecute.
Congress should give the President full power for efficient executive
action. It should not abrogate its own power. It should define how he
is to reorganize the Administration. It should say how large an army we
are to have and not leave the decision to the amiable Secretary of War,
who has for two years shown such inefficiency. It should declare for an
army of five million men and inform the Secretary that it would give
him more the minute he asks for more.
THE DANGERS OF A PREMATURE PEACE
MAY 12, 1918
As now seems likely, if the great German drive fails, it is at least
possible that, directly or indirectly, the Germans will then start a
peace drive. In such case they will probably endeavor to make such
seeming concessions as to put a premium upon pacifist agitation
for peace in the free countries of the West against which they are
fighting. To yield to such peace proposals would be fraught with the
greatest danger to the Allies, and especially to our own country in the
future.
Let us never forget that no promise Germany makes can be trusted.
The _kultur_ developed under the Hohenzollerns rests upon shameless
treachery and duplicity no less than upon ruthless violence and
barbarity.
For example, there are strong indications that Germany may be prepared,
if she now fails on the western front, to abandon all that for which
she has fought on her western front, provided that in Middle Europe
and in the East there is no interference with her. In other words,
she would be prepared to give back Alsace and Lorraine to France, to
give Italian Austria to Italy, to give Luxemburg to Belgium, and to
let the Allies keep the colonies they have conquered, on condition
that her dominance in Russia and in the Balkans, her dominance of the
subject peoples of Austria through the Austrian Hapsburgs, and her
dominance of Western Asia through her vassal state, Turkey, should be
left undisturbed. To the average American, and probably to the average
Englishman and Frenchman, there is much that is alluring in such a
programme. It might be urged as a method of stopping the frightful
slaughter of war, while securing every purpose for which the free
peoples who still fight are fighting. Yet it would be infinitely better
that this war were carried on to the point of exhaustion than that we
yield to such terms.
Such terms would mean the definite establishment of Germany’s military
ascendancy on a scale never hitherto approached in the civilized world.
It would mean that perhaps within a dozen years, certainly within the
lifetime of the very men now fighting this war, this country and the
other free countries would have to choose between bowing their necks
to the German yoke or else going into another war under conditions far
more disadvantageous to them.
A premature and inconclusive peace now would spell ruin for the world,
just as in 1864 a premature and inconclusive peace would have spelled
ruin to the United States, and in the present instance the United
States would share the ruin of the rest of the free peoples of mankind.
On the face of it Germany would not become a giant empire. Just exactly
as on the face of it at present Germany, Austria, Turkey, and Bulgaria
call themselves simply four allied nations, standing on equal terms.
But in reality those four powers are merely Germany and her three
vassal states, whose military and economic and political powers are all
disposed of by the Hohenzollerns. A peace such as that above outlined
would leave these as really one huge empire. The population of these
four countries, plus the populations of Russian regions recently
annexed by Germany, is over two hundred millions. This population
would be directed and dominated by the able, powerful, and utterly
brutal and unscrupulous German governing class, which the very fact of
the peace would put in the saddle, and the huge empire thus dominated
and directed would become a greater menace to the free peoples than
anything known for the last thousand years.
Short-sighted people will say that this power would only menace Asia,
and therefore that we need feel no concern about it. There could be no
error greater or more lamentable. Twenty years hence by mere mass and
growth Germany would dominate the Western European powers that have now
fought her. This would mean that the United States would be left as her
victim.
In the first place, she would at once trample the Monroe Doctrine under
foot, and treat tropical and south temperate America as her fields for
exploitation, domination, and conquest. In the next place, she would
surely trample this country under foot and bleed us white, doing to us
on a gigantic scale what she has done to Belgium. If such a peace as is
above described were at this time made, the United States could by no
possibility escape the fate of Belgium and of the Russian territories
taken by Germany unless we ourselves became a powerful militarist state
with every democratic principle subordinated to the one necessity of
turning this Nation into a huge armed camp--I do not mean an armed
nation, as Switzerland is armed, and as I believe this country ought to
be armed. I mean a nation whose sons, every one of them, would have to
serve from three to five years in the army, and whose whole activities,
external and internal, would be conditioned by the one fact of the
necessity of making head, single-handed, against Germany.
I very strongly believe that never again should we be caught unprepared
as we have been caught unprepared this time. I believe that all our
young men should be trained to arms as the Swiss are trained. But I
would regard it as an unspeakable calamity for this Nation to have to
turn its whole energies into the kind of exaggerated militarism which
under such circumstances would alone avail for self-defense.
The military power of Germany must be brought low. The subject nations
of Austria, the Balkans, and Western Asia must be freed. We ought not
to refrain an hour longer from going to war with Turkey and Bulgaria.
They are part of Germany’s military strength. They represent some of
the most cruel tyrannies over subject peoples for which Germany stands.
It is idle for us to pretend sympathy with the Armenians unless we war
on Turkey, which, with Germany’s assent, has well-nigh crushed the
Armenians out of existence.
When President Wilson stated that this war was waged to make democracy
safe throughout the world, he properly and definitely committed the
American people to the principles above enunciated, and for the
American people to accept less than their President has thus announced
that he would insist upon would be unworthy. The President has also
said that “there is therefore but one response possible for us.
Force--force to the utmost--force without stint or limit--the righteous
and triumphant force which shall make right the law of the world and
cast every selfish dominion down in the dust.”
The American people must support President Wilson unflinchingly in
the stand to which he is thus committed and must resolutely refuse
to accept any other position. We must guard against any slackening of
effort. We must refuse to accept any premature peace or any peace other
than the peace of overwhelming victory.
We must secure such complete freedom for the peoples of Central Europe
and Western Asia as will shatter forever the threat of German world
domination. Our honorable obligations to our allies, our loyalty to our
own national principles, the need to protect our American neighbors,
the need to defend our own land and people, and our hopes for the peace
and happiness of our children’s children all forbid us to accept an
ignoble and inconclusive peace.
THE WAR SAVINGS CAMPAIGN
MAY 27, 1918
Of course the primary factor in deciding this war is and will be the
army. But there can be no great army in war to-day unless a great
nation stands back of it. The most important of all our needs is
immensely to strengthen the fighting line at the front. But it cannot
be permanently strengthened unless the whole Nation is organized back
of the front. We need increased production by all. We need thrift and
the avoidance of extravagance and of waste of money upon non-essentials
by all. We need the investment of our money in government securities by
all of us.
The Government, through the War Savings campaign, offers the
opportunity to every individual in the Nation to join in a great
national movement to secure these ends. The Treasury Department
proposes as a means to achieve these ends that all our people form
themselves into Thrift clubs or War Savings societies. This is the
people’s war. The responsibility for the Government rests on the people
as a whole. The army is the people’s army. It can be supported only
if the people invest in the securities of the Government. And this
investment by the people should be as nearly universal as possible.
All the men and the women and half the children of the land should
be active members of Uncle Sam’s team. The War Savings campaign
offers them the chance to be active members. This campaign means
the encouragement of thrift and production. But it means much more
than this. It also means to make our people realize their solidarity
and mutual interdependence and to make them understand that the
Government is really theirs. Therefore it is a movement for genuine
Americanization of all our people. It is a movement to fuse all our
different race stocks into one great unified nationality. It is
emphatically a movement for nationalism and patriotism.
Between thirty and forty millions of our people to-day own Liberty
bonds or War Savings Stamps. All of us who come in this class have an
increased sense of loyalty and responsibility to the Government. The
Treasury Department has offered through the War Savings plan a great
opportunity for the entire Nation to group itself into War Savings
societies or Thrift clubs and thus be of immediate and direct service
to the Government. Neither through government programme and traditions
nor through the habits of the people were we in any way prepared for
this struggle. We were a spendthrift Nation. One of the roads to
national unity and national force in this war is through thrift, using
the word to include both increased production in every field and also
the conservation of those things which are so desperately needed for
the winning of the war. The conscientious thrifty man to-day will
conserve food as requested by the Food Administration. He will conserve
fuel as requested by the Fuel Administration. And he will conserve to
the best of his ability the labor and materials which the Government
needs by not using his money for purchasing any of the non-essentials
and thereby using up materials and labor needed by the Government. He
will, by purchasing government securities, entrust the spending of his
money to the Government in order to speed up the war and to secure the
peace of overwhelming victory.
Let all of us join in this movement. The success of the War Savings
campaign means an immense addition to our war strength. It also means
the first step in economic preparedness for what is to come after the
war. We must never return to our haphazard spendthrift ways. Thrift
should be made a national habit as part of our social and industrial
readjustment.
We are just finishing our Red Cross campaign. Now let us put through
the War Savings campaign.
ANTI-BOLSHEVISM
JUNE 5, 1918
On the whole the worst fate that can befall any country is to fall
into the hands of the Bolsheviki. Therefore, we should visit with
heavy condemnation the Romanoffs of politics and industry who, by
Bourbon-like inability to see or refusal to face the future, make ready
the way for Bolshevism. Utter ruin will befall this country if it
falls into the hands of Haywoods and Townleys and of the politicians
who truckle to them, but the surest way to secure their temporary
and disastrous triumph is to refuse to make every effort, in sane,
good-tempered, resolute fashion, to deal with the problems which affect
unfavorably the welfare of the farmer and the working-man.
Mere stolid inaction, mere refusal to acknowledge the existence of
trouble and duty to remedy it amounts to playing into the hands of the
worst and most evil agitators. Such an attitude on the part of our
political leaders is almost as bad as the failure to act with instant
readiness and full strength against disorder or as the time-serving
cowardice which bows to and flatters the leaders of disorder. What is
needed is unhesitating and thoroughgoing condemnation of, and action
against, the anarchists and inciters to sedition and to class envy and
hatred, and at the same time genuine and radical effort to secure for
the farmer and the working-man and for every one else the square deal
in actual fact. Neither attitude is enough by itself; the two must go
together if results of lasting worth are to be secured.
The leaders in such movements as the I.W.W. include a large proportion
of men whose activities are criminal, and who, as regards civilization
and all that makes life worth living for decent, hard-working men and
women, stand merely as human beasts of prey. But very many of these
fellows are not bad men at all, but merely unfortunates who turn to
an evil organization because no good organization offers them relief
or concerns itself with their welfare. I am not speaking of theory;
I am speaking of fact. I know of cases in connection with the forest
service where government officials, by acting on behalf of maltreated
crews of lumber companies and by seeing that they got justice and fair
treatment, turned them into zealous, right-feeling, public-spirited
citizens, who, for instance, worked hard and disinterestedly in putting
out forest fires.
It is idle to say that no governmental action is needed on behalf of
farmers and wage-workers. Unquestionably such action will merely do
harm unless at the same time the interests and permanent welfare of
the business men of the country, great and small, are considered. But
the action itself is necessary. It should be based on the theory that
so far as possible the work of betterment, alike as regards farmers,
working-men, and business men, take the form of coöperation among
themselves, with the maximum amount of individual and collective
private effort, and the minimum necessary amount of governmental
control and encouragement. It is not possible to state empirically in
advance just how far this governmental control and encouragement shall
go. This must be determined by actual experience in settling what is
necessary in each individual set of cases. The best result will always
come where the organization of private citizens is not limited to any
one class, but include farmers, working-men, business men; just as is
true of one such great organization in the State of Iowa; just as is
true of a smaller but successful organization in and around the city
of Springfield, Massachusetts; just as is preëminently true of many
of the state councils of defense. There must be sincere purpose to
push forward and remedy wrong; but there must likewise be firm refusal
to submit to the leadership of either the criminal fringe or the
lunatic fringe. Class hatred is a mighty poor substitute for American
brotherhood. If we are wise we will proceed by evolution and not
revolution. But Bourbon refusal to move forward at all merely invites
revolution.
GENERAL WOOD
JUNE 15, 1918
Senator Hiram Johnson has rendered many notable services to the public,
and among them is his recent speech concerning the cruel injustice
with which Major-General Leonard Wood has been treated and the very
grave damage thereby done the army and the Allied cause at this
critical moment of the war.