American Sympathy with France
The majority of Americans undoubtedly were in favour of the occupation of the Ruhr. They regarded Germany as a fraudulent debtor. They believed in the “strong hand.” They had no patience, or very little, with the British view, which seemed weak and sentimental. Only the German-Americans, the Pacifists and the Socialists, with here and there bankers and business men and “intellectuals,” believed that France was not giving Germany a fair chance, was thrusting Europe back into the mud and was violating the spirit of the League of Nations. This view changed a little, though imperceptibly, when France had entered the Ruhr and had failed to extract anything solid from that nation. Even the warmest sympathisers with the French point of view became a little tired of Poincaré’s “No, no,” to all arguments on behalf of compromise, and of his nationalistic utterances. American opinion, still hostile to Germany in the mass—more intolerant of German character, and more convinced of her exclusive war guilt than the British people who had suffered so hideously—swung away from the Poincaré policy, at least to the point of belief that the occupation of the Ruhr was no solution of the problem but only a method of enforcing a solution that had still to be found; and time was short. Germany’s policy of inflation, that colossal fraud, had collapsed. Her money was waste paper, her credit gone, her capacity to pay indemnities extinguished—for a time. Some international scheme, divorced from politics, conducted on strict business lines, must get at the real facts and impose a settlement, or Europe as well as Germany would go down in chaos, not without repercussion in the United States.