By Theodore Roosevelt, ex-President of the United States,
and
George L. von Meyer, ex-Secretary of the Navy.
It was ascertained in Washington on June 1, 1915, that the
Atlantic battleship fleet would remain in Atlantic Ocean
waters indefinitely. The plan to send the fleet through the
canal in July for participation in the Panama-Pacific
Exposition at San Francisco had been abandoned, and Admiral
Fletcher's ships would not cross the Isthmus this year. The
decision to hold the fleet in Atlantic waters is predicated
on two principle factors. These are: First, there
undoubtedly will be another great slide in Culebra Cut in
the Panama Canal some time this Summer, and it would be
considered highly undesirable to have the fleet on the
Pacific Coast with such a slide interposed between Admiral
Fletcher's vessels and the Atlantic waters. Second, the
general situation of American foreign affairs growing out of
relations with Germany is such that it is considered unwise
to send the fleet to the west coast and leave the Atlantic
Coast unguarded. This is the extent, at present, of national
preparation against war.
The Peace and Preparation Conference, called in the name of
the National Security League to discuss the military needs
of the nation, began on the evening of June 14, 1915, with
the opening to the public of the Army and Navy Exhibit in
the Hotel Astor, where there were to be seen numerous
placards which gave in figures and words information as to
the situation of the United States so far as military
preparedness is concerned.
General Luke E. Wright of Memphis, who was Secretary of War
the latter part of the second Roosevelt Administration, was
among the visitors to the conference, and said he was in
thorough sympathy with the aims of the National Security
League. In his opinion the American first line of defense,
to be immediately available for service, should be at least
300,000 men.
An audience composed of nearly as many women as men heard in
Carnegie Hall, on the evening of June 15, the arguments of
Alton B. Parker, Dr. Lyman Abbott, Henry L. Stimson,
ex-Secretary of War; Charles J. Bonaparte, ex-Attorney
General, and Jacob M. Dickinson, ex-Secretary of War,
advocating immediate increases in the army and navy as the
best safeguard against war. Ex-Judge Parker, who was
Chairman of the meeting, struck the keynote of the
conference in these words:
"We want to arouse the people of the United States from the
Atlantic to the Pacific, to the end that they shall let
Congress know that they have made up their minds to spend a
little of that $187,000,000,000 of which we boast in order
that our wives and our children and our grandchildren shall
not be visited with the calamity which has befallen
Belgium."
Two features of the conference were the reading of a letter
to Hudson Maxim from ex-President Theodore Roosevelt and a
speech on naval unpreparedness by George von L. Meyer,
ex-Secretary of the Navy. The speech is reproduced below in
part, and the letter from Mr. Roosevelt in full, together
with the resolution of the conference.