Germany, Austria, Turkey, and Russia, as at present constituted, are to
have the say-so about America’s future destiny, we ought to be against
it. They would treat any agreement with us as a scrap of paper wherever
it suited their interests, and we ought to realize this fact. Moreover,
we already belong to a _de facto_ league of nations which is a going
concern. Let us stand by our allies before entering into a league with
our enemies. Therefore, let us at once declare war on Turkey. Any such
league is of value only if all its members are willing to make war
on the same offenders, and the culpable failure of our Government to
make war on Turkey and Bulgaria makes it absurd and hypocritical for
us to promise to enter such a league in the future until this failure
is confessed and atoned for. And let us at once send Major-General
Wood and fifty thousand men to aid the Czecho-Slovaks in Siberia and
establish our front well to the west of the Ural Mountains.
Again, the talk of merely giving autonomy to the subject races of
Austria amounts to betrayal of the Czecho-Slovaks, the Jugo-Slavs,
the Italians, and the Rumanians. The first should be given their
independence and the other three united to the nations with which they
really belong. Moreover, it is a betrayal of civilization to leave the
Turk in Europe and fail to free the Armenians and the other subject
races of Turkey.
Again, let us define what is meant by abolishing secret diplomacy. If
it means that the Administration is to renounce the system of secret
and furtive diplomacy which it now perseveres in concerning what has
happened in Mexico, Haiti, and San Domingo, I heartily agree; but I
do not see why it needs an international mandate before it tells our
people the truth in these matters. Moreover, before it undertakes a
fresh agreement, let it explain why for two years it kept secret from
our people the full knowledge it had of Germany’s conduct and attitude
toward us, including all the matters set forth in Ambassador Gerard’s
books. The American Nation has never seen such secret diplomacy
practiced by its Government as it has seen during the last five years.
It is evident, before these fourteen points are accepted as the basis
for peace discussion, they should be stated in such straightforward
language that we may understand what they mean. The prime necessities
at present are simplicity of language and the squaring of deeds with
words. The thing we do not need is adroit and supple rhetoric which can
be interpreted to mean anything or nothing.
PERMANENT PREPAREDNESS AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS
OCTOBER 15, 1918
The vital military need of this country as regards its future
international relations is the immediate adoption of the policy of
permanent preparedness based on universal training. This is its prime
duty from the standpoint of American nationalism and patriotism. Then,
as an addition or supplement to, but under no conditions as substitute
for, the policy of permanent preparedness, we can afford cautiously to
enter into and try out the policy of a league of nations. There is no
difficulty whatever in prattling cheerfully about such a league or in
winning applause by rhetoric concerning it prior to the effort to make
it work in practice; but there will be much difficulty in making it
work at all when any serious strain comes, and it will prove entirely
unworkable if the effort is made to unload upon it, in the name of
internationalism, duties which in the present state of the world will
be efficiently performed by the free nations only if they perform them
as national duties.
In a recent adverse, but courteous and friendly article on my attitude
in this matter which appeared in a great daily paper, the following
language was used: “The colonel is letting himself be bothered,
irritated, and sidetracked by fools. There is no way of preventing
a fool from saying that he is in favor of the league of nations.
The American people will be making up their minds about the league
of nations and about permanent preparedness. They will be told by
certain sorts of pacifists that if they accept the league they can
safely reject preparedness. They will be told that the two ideas are
opposites.”
The “certain sort of pacifist” who has made this statement to the
people of the United States is the President of the United States in
the now famous “fourteen points” which he enunciated last January. He
advocated as one part of his plan the league or association of nations,
as he has elsewhere advocated it, and he advocated as another part of
his plan “the guarantees that national armaments will be reduced to the
lowest point consistent with domestic safety.” Unless this language was
used with intent to deceive, domestic safety must mean merely freedom
from riot, and the President’s proposal is that America’s national
preparedness be limited to a police force to prevent domestic disorder.
Therefore, the President has told the American people that if they
accept the league they can safely reject preparedness.
The President may change his mind, and I sincerely hope he will do so.
Until he does so it is the duty of every sincere American patriot to
lay far more emphasis on the onerous and indispensable duty of national
preparedness than on the wholly untested scheme of a league of nations,
which the President has presented as an alternative. I heartily favor
true internationalism as an addition to, but never as substitute for, a
fervid and intensely patriotic nationalism. I will gladly back any wise
and honest effort to create a league of nations, but only on condition
that it is treated as an addition to, and not as a substitute for, the
full preparedness of our own strength for our own defense.
HIGH-SOUNDING PHRASES OF MUDDY MEANING
OCTOBER 17, 1918
A keen observer of what is now happening in the world writes me that
there is very grave danger that this country will be cheated out of the
right kind of peace if our people remain fatuously content to accept
high-sounding phrases of muddy meaning, instead of clear-cut and
truthful statements of just what we demand and just what we intend to
do.
The recent action of President Wilson in connection with Germany
has shown the imperative need of our people informing themselves of
his announced purpose and keeping track of what he does toward the
achievement of this purpose. Therefore, we should insist upon the
purpose being stated in understandable fashion and being adhered to
after it has been stated. This isn’t the President’s war. It is the
people’s war. The peace will not be a satisfactory peace unless it
is the people’s peace. As a people we have no right to permit the
President to commit us to that of which we do not approve or to that
which, after honest effort, we are unable to understand.
President Wilson’s first communication to the German Government, if
words mean anything, meant an effort to treat on the basis of his
so-called “fourteen points.” The German Government answered that it
accepted these fourteen points and approved of them. This made them
public property, and it behooves the Americans to examine them. I
believe that such an examination will show the American people that
their meaning is so muddy that we should insist upon their being
clearly defined before we in any way accept them as ours. When the
peace terms come to be reduced to action, we cannot afford to accept
empty competitive rhetoric for straightforward plain dealing.
As regards some of the points, either the meaning is so muddy as to
be wholly incomprehensible or else the proposals are very treacherous.
The fourth article, for example, proposes guarantees for the reduction
of national armaments to the lowest point consistent with domestic
safety. If this article means anything, it means that this Nation, for
instance, is only to keep whatever armed forces are necessary to police
the country in the event of domestic disturbance. Now, let our people
face what this really implies. It is a proposal that we give up our
navy, which, of course, cannot be used for such police purposes, and
that we give up all of our army that could be used against a foreign
foe. And according to point fourteen of his address to Congress of
January 8 last, and according to point three in his speech of September
27 last, this lack of armament on our part is to be supplied by mutual
guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity within
the league of nations covering the world.
Now, such guarantees are precisely and exactly the scraps of paper to
which the German Chancellor likened them when his Government tore up
those affecting Belgium. The proposal of President Wilson is that this
country shall put itself in the position of Belgium; shall trust to
guarantees precisely such as those to which Belgium trusted four and
one quarter years ago, and he also proposes, as far as his meaning can
be made out at all, that the very powers that treated these guarantees
as scraps of paper in the case of Belgium shall be among the powers to
whose guarantee we are to trust to the exclusion of all preparation
for our own self-defense. All nations are to be asked to render
themselves helpless with fatuous indifference to the obvious fact that
every weak-minded nation which accepted and acted in the proposal would
be at the mercy of every ruthless and efficient nation that chose to
treat the proposal as a scrap of paper.
I gravely doubt whether a more silly or more mischievous plan was ever
seriously proposed by the ruler of a great nation. Yet, this is exactly
the plan to which President Wilson, by his correspondence with Germany,
has sought definitely to commit the United States. If his words do not
mean exactly what is above set forth, then their meaning is so muddy
that no two disinterested outsiders would be warranted in interpreting
them the same way.
There is small cause for wonder that Germany eagerly accepted and
made her own President Wilson’s fourteen points to which he, without
any warrant whatever, seemed to commit this Nation. Incidentally I
may add that Mr. Wilson has at different times enunciated at least as
many other points, some of them contradictory to the fourteen which he
enumerated in January last. The outburst of popular indignation led by
such men as Senators Lodge, Poindexter, and Thomas, which forced him
to repudiate the negotiations which he had begun with Germany, should
be supplemented by a resolute insistence upon the duty of the American
public to inform itself as to what it wishes in the peace before the
President, without authority, commits it to any peace proposal, and
above all to peace proposals which may mean anything or nothing.
Secretary McAdoo, with fine family loyalty, announced that the
acceptance by Germany of the fourteen points would have meant Germany’s
unconditional surrender. He might as well have said that the acceptance
of disunion and the perpetuation of slavery in 1864 would have meant
a surrender by the Confederate states. Not only Germany, but every
pacifist and pro-German here at home, hailed the fourteen points as
representing what they desired. I recently spoke to a body of loyal
Americans of German descent on behalf of the Liberty Loan. A member of
their organization who was not a straight American, but a hyphenated
American, and who did not venture to do more than sign himself
as “German-American,” wrote me that in view of my repudiation of
President Wilson’s so-called fourteen points he could not, as a loyal
German-American, do otherwise than condemn me. The individual himself
is doubtless as unimportant as the anonymous letter writer usually
is, but there is a real significance in his endorsement of President
Wilson’s fourteen points in view of his calling himself so emphatically
not a straight-out American, but a German-American. Evidently his
loyalty is to Germanism and not to Americanism, and this German loyalty
of his made him back the President’s fourteen points, which Germany had
so gladly accepted.
The American people should insist that these fourteen points and any
other points are stated in clear-cut language, and that there be a full
understanding of just what is meant by them and a full knowledge of how
far the American people approve of them before any foreign power is
permitted to think that they represent America’s position at the peace
council.
AN AMERICAN PEACE _VERSUS_ A RUBBER-STAMP PEACE
OCTOBER 22, 1918
In Wallace’s Farmer, a journal devoted to the interests of the farmer,
and also to the interests of every good American citizen, but which has
no concern with partisan politics, there is a strong editorial against
our acceptance of a peace on the terms of the famous fourteen points
laid down by President Wilson in his message of January last. It reads
in part as follows:
Of course, Germany would like to make peace on the terms laid down
by President Wilson in his speech of January 8, for it would allow
Germany to escape the just penalty of her crimes and restore her to
her condition before the war.
On the other hand, the leading Socialist paper of New York
enthusiastically champions the fourteen points, especially those
demanding a league of nations, freedom of the seas according to
the German party, and the removal of all economic barriers. This
championship is natural, for the Socialists, like the I.W.W. of this
country, who have been bitterly pro-German and anti-American, and
like the worst Russian Bolsheviks, have steadily worked in Germany’s
interests; and like all its professional internationalists they hate
the liberty-loving nations so bitterly that they are eagerly working
for peace satisfactory to the German autocracy. All such persons,
so far as they are not merely silly, seek their own profit in the
destruction of civilization, and they would hail an inconclusive peace,
which would mean the triumph of militarism, rather than see the free
nations triumphant over both militarism and anarchy.
But in his last note to Austria, President Wilson himself flatly
repudiates one of his fourteen points--that relating to autonomy for
the Czecho-Slovaks and Jugo-Slavs under the Austro-Hungarian yoke. He
announces that he has changed his position because facts have changed,
but in reality the facts have not changed in even the smallest degree
between January and October so far as these two nationalities are
concerned. Many persons, including myself, had then been demanding for
over a year this complete independence. Nothing whatever has changed in
the situation except Mr. Wilson’s mind, and obviously this has changed
merely because the American people have gradually waked up and have
forced him in this matter to take a course diametrically opposed to
the one he had been advocating, precisely as a week ago an aroused and
indignant public opinion forced him to absolutely reverse the course
of negotiation on which he entered with Germany. The popular feeling
would have been inarticulate and helpless if it had not received
expression from various patriotic public servants and private citizens
and from those fearless newspapers, which, at the risk of grave
financial disaster, have ventured when the crisis was serious to defy
the sinister efforts of the Administration to do away with the freedom
of the press. Senators Lodge, Poindexter, and Thomas and Congressman
Fess are examples of the public servants, and Professor Hobbs, of the
University of Michigan, and Professor Thayer, of Harvard, are examples
of private citizens who have well served the people of the United
States in this crisis.
Of course, the entire cuckoo or rubber-stamp tribe of politicians
tumbled over themselves in the effort to assure the President that no
matter what somersault he turned they would flop with equal quickness,
and that their responsibility was solely to him and not to the people
of the United States or to the cause of right and of fearlessness
and of honorable dealing. Senator Lewis, of Illinois, introduced a
resolution stating that “the United States Senate approves whatever
course may be taken by the President in dealing with the German
Imperial Government and the Austrian Imperial Government and endorses
and approves whatever methods he may employ.” Senator Lewis is, in
private life, an amiable and kindly gentleman, but the above resolution
is a somewhat abject announcement that in public life he aspires only
to be a rubber stamp. If such position is proper, then there is no
need of Senators or Congressmen, and our people should merely send
written proxies to Washington and should otherwise copy the example
of those big private corporations which are controlled by one man
according to his own will and for his own benefit.
I do not believe that the American people will accept a view which
is both so abject and so profoundly unpatriotic. This is the war of
the American people and the peace which concludes it should be the
peace imposed by the American people. Therefore, they should send to
Washington public servants who will be self-respecting Americans and
not rubber stamps.
UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER
OCTOBER 26, 1918
When the American people speak for unconditional surrender, it means
that Germany must accept whatever terms the United States and its
allies think necessary in order to right the dreadful wrongs that have
been committed and to safeguard the world for at least a generation
to come from another attempt by Germany to secure world dominion.
Unconditional surrender is the reverse of a negotiated peace. The
interchange of notes, which has been going on between our Government
and the Governments of Germany and Austria during the last three weeks,
means, of course, if persisted in, a negotiated peace. It is the
abandonment of force and the substitution of negotiation. This fact
should be clearly and truthfully stated by our leaders, so that the
American people may decide with their eyes open which course they will
follow.
Those of us who believe in unconditional surrender regard Germany’s
behavior during the last five years as having made her the outlaw among
nations. In private life sensible men and women do not negotiate with
an outlaw or grow sentimental about him, or ask for a peace with him
on terms of equality if he will give up his booty. Still less do they
propose to make a league with him for the future, and on the strength
of this league to abolish the sheriff and take the constable. On the
contrary, they expect the law officers to take him by force and to
have him tried and punished. They do not punish him out of revenge,
but because all intelligent persons know punishment to be necessary in
order to stop certain kinds of criminals from wrongdoing and to save
the community from such wrongdoing.
We ought to treat Germany in precisely this manner. It is a sad
and dreadful thing to have to face some months or a year or so of
additional bloodshed, but it is a much worse thing to quit now and
have the children now growing up obliged to do the job all over again,
with ten times as much bloodshed and suffering, when their turn comes.
The surest way to secure a peace as lasting as that which followed the
downfall of Napoleon is to overthrow the Prussianized Germany of the
Hohenzollerns as Napoleon was overthrown. If we enter into a league
of peace with Germany and her vassal allies, we must expect them to
treat the arrangement as a scrap of paper whenever it becomes to their
interest to do so.
WHAT ARE THE FOURTEEN POINTS?
OCTOBER 30, 1918
The European nations have been told that the fourteen points enumerated
in President Wilson’s message of January last are to be the basis of
peace. It is, therefore, possible that Americans may like to know what
they are. It is even possible that they may like to guess what they
mean, although I am not certain that such guessing is permitted by the
Postmaster-General and the Attorney-General under the new theory of
making democracy safe for all kinds of peoples abroad who have never
heard of it by interpreting democracy at home as meaning that it is
unlawful for the people to express any except favorable opinions of
the way in which the public servants of the people transact the public
business.
The first point forbids “all private international understandings of
any kind,” and says there must be “open covenants of peace, openly
arrived at,” and announces that “diplomacy shall always proceed
frankly in the public view.” The President has recently waged war on
Haiti and San Domingo and rendered democracy within these two small
former republics not merely unsafe, but non-existent. He has kept
all that he has done in the matter absolutely secret. If he means
what he says, he will at once announce what open covenant of peace he
has openly arrived at with these two little republics, which he has
deprived of their right of self-determination. He will also announce
what public international understanding, if any, he now has with these
two republics, whose soil he is at present occupying with the armed
forces of the United States and hundreds of whose citizens have been
killed by these armed forces. If he has no such public understanding,
he will tell us why, and whether he has any private international
understanding, or whether he invaded and conquered them and deprived
them of the right of self-determination without any attempt to reach
any understanding, either private or public.
Moreover, he has just sent abroad on a diplomatic mission Mr. House,
of Texas. Mr. House is not in the public service of the Nation, but he
is in the private service of Mr. Wilson. He is usually called Colonel
House. In his official or semi-official biography, published in an
ardently admiring New York paper, it is explained that he was once
appointed colonel on a governor’s staff, but carried his dislike of
military ostentation to the point of giving his uniform to a negro
servant to wear on social occasions. This attitude of respect for the
uniform makes the President feel that he is peculiarly fit to negotiate
on behalf of our fighting men abroad for whom the uniform is sacred.
Associated with him is an editor of the New York World, which paper
has recently been busy in denouncing as foolish the demand made by so
many Americans for unconditional surrender by Germany.
I do not doubt that these two gentlemen possess charming social
attributes and much private worth, but as they are sent over on a
diplomatic mission, presumably vitally affecting the whole country, and
as their instructions and purposes are shrouded in profound mystery,
it seems permissible to ask President Wilson why in this particular
instance diplomacy does not “proceed frankly in the public view”?
This first one of the fourteen points offers such an illuminating
opportunity to test promise as to the future by performance in the
present that I have considered it at some length. The other thirteen
points and the subsequent points laid down as further requirements for
peace I shall briefly take up in another article.
FURTHER CONSIDERATION OF THE FOURTEEN POINTS
OCTOBER 30, 1918
The second in the fourteen points deals with freedom of the seas. It
makes no distinction between freeing the seas from murder like that
continually practiced by Germany and freeing them from blockade of
contraband merchandise, which is the practice of a right universally
enjoyed by belligerents, and at this moment practiced by the United
States. Either this proposal is meaningless or it is a mischievous
concession to Germany.
The third point promises free trade among all the nations, unless
the words are designedly used to conceal President Wilson’s true
meaning. This would deny to our country the right to make a tariff
to protect its citizens, and especially its working-men, against
Germany or China or any other country. Apparently this is desired on
the ground that the incidental domestic disaster to this country will
prevent other countries from feeling hostile to us. The supposition is
foolish. England practiced free trade and yet Germany hated England
particularly, and Turkey practiced free trade without deserving or
obtaining friendship from any one except those who desired to exploit
her.
The fourth point provides that this Nation, like every other, is to
reduce its armaments to the lowest limit consistent with domestic
safety. Either this is language deliberately used to deceive or else it
means that we are to scrap our army and navy and prevent riot by means
of a national constabulary, like the state constabulary of New York or
Pennsylvania.