Roosevelt in the Kansas City Star: War-time Editorials

by Theodore Roosevelt

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.