Obviously things would have been different if the crisis had not found two real Americans in command of the Embassy in the persons of Mr. and Mrs. Gerard. When the typical New Yorker whom President Wilson sent to Berlin less than a year previous was first presented to his compatriots at a little function at which it was my honor to preside, the man whom political detractors contemptuously referred to as "a Tammany Judge" made a "keynote speech," which he meant to be interpreted as his "policy" in Germany, as far as Americans were concerned. He said: "When the time comes for me to retire from Berlin, if you will call me the most American Ambassador who ever represented you in Germany, you can call me after that anything you please."
Two years--what years--have elapsed since "Jimmy" Gerard made public avowal of his conception of what United States diplomatic representatives abroad ought to be--Americans, first, last and all the time. As these lines are written German-American official relations seem on the verge of rupture and our embassy's remaining days in Berlin appear to be calculable in hours. Whether it shall turn out that the Arabic insult was after all swallowed as the Lusitania infamy was stomached, or whether Judge Gerard is finally recalled from Berlin as a protest extracted at length from the most patient, reluctant and long-suffering Government on record, he will richly have realized his ambition--to be "the most American Ambassador" ever accredited to the German court. In my time in Berlin I knew four American ambassadors. Each one was a credit to his nation. But "Jimmy" Gerard was "the most American," and I count that, in a citizen of the United States called to represent his country abroad, the superlative quality. The seductive atmosphere of a Court in which adulation was obsequiously practised, especially toward Americans, never turned the head of Judge Gerard or his wife. They had far more than the share of hobnobbing with Royalty which falls to the lot of diplomatic newcomers in Berlin. Princes and princesses came with unwonted freedom to Wilhelms Platz 7. They found the former Miss Daly, of Anaconda, Montana, being a natural young American woman, as much at ease in their gilded presence as she was the day before when presiding over the tempestuous deliberations of the American Woman's Club out on Prager Platz.
To me the Gerards, apart from their personal charm, unaffected dignity and joyous Americanism, always were psychologically interesting because they typified so splendidly that greatest of our national traits--adaptability. To be dropped into the vortex of European political life, with its gaping pitfalls and brilliant opportunities for mistakes, is not child's play even for the most experienced of men and women. France, for example, regarded no name in its diplomatic register less eminent than that of a Cambon fit to head its mission to Berlin. England kept at the Hohenzollern court the most gifted ambassador on the Foreign Office's active list--Sir Edward Goschen. Unthinking Americans, by which I mean those who underestimate our inherent capacity to land on our feet, may have had their misgivings when a mere Justice of the Supreme Court of the State of New York and the daughter of a Montana copper king were sent to represent America among professional diplomats of the highest European rank. But "Jimmy" and "Molly" Gerard made good. It is the American way, and because it is that, it is their way. As for the Ambassador, he has demonstrated, to my way of thinking, that a graduate course in the university of American politics is ideal training for diplomacy. Intelligence, tact, resourcefulness and courage, the rudiments of the diplomatic career, are qualities which surely nothing can develop in a man more thoroughly than the hurly-burly, rough-and-tumble, give-and-take of an American electioneering campaign. It is amid its storms and tribulations that a man learns to be something more than an inhabited dress-suit. It is there he acquires the art of being human. It is there that he comes to appreciate the priceless value of loyalty. United States Presidents do not err seriously when they hunt for ambassadors among men who have been through the preparatory school from which "Jimmy" Gerard holds a magnum cum laude.
My personal observations of Judge Gerard's ambassadorial methods are based for the most part on his career before the war. But he has not departed from them during the war. Bismarck laid it down as a maxim that an ambassador should not be "too popular" at the court to which he was accredited. From all one can gather, "Jimmy" Gerard has not laid himself open to that charge in Berlin since August, 1914. Nobody who knows him ever suspected for a moment that he would. Toadying is not in his lexicon, and aggressively pro-American ambassadors are condemned in advance to be disliked in Germany. They do not fit into the Teutonic diplomatic scheme. If they are inspired by such unconventional aspirations as those to which Judge Gerard gave utterance in his "keynote speech" to the American Luncheon Club of Berlin, it is morally certain that their usefulness--to Germany--is limited.
Mrs. Gerard.
The American Ambassador had been acting for Great Britain in the enemy's country barely thirty-six hours, when Sir Edward Goschen, Great Britain's retiring Ambassador in Berlin, in his official report on the knightly treatment accorded him and his staff during their last hours on German soil, wrote:
"I should also like to mention the great assistance rendered to us all by my American colleague, Mr. Gerard, and his staff. Undeterred by the hooting and hisses with which he was often greeted by the mob on entering and leaving the Embassy, His Excellency came repeatedly to see me, to ask how he could help us and to make arrangements for the safety of stranded British subjects. He extricated many of these from extremely difficult situations at some personal risk to himself and his calmness and savoir faire and his firmness in dealing with the Imperial authorities gave full assurance that the protection of British subjects and interests could not have been left in more efficient and able hands."
Nobody who ever knew "Jimmy" Gerard--that is the affectionate way in which old friends and even acquaintances of brief duration almost invariably speak of him--would expect him to be anything in the world except "undeterred" by the cowardly onslaughts of the Berlin barbarians. An expert swimmer, clever amateur boxer, crack shot, volunteer soldier and veteran of New York politics, "Jimmy" Gerard never knew the meaning of the word fear, and the unfailing courage with which he has "stood up" to the Kaiser's Government throughout the various crises of the war has been in full keeping with his virile temperament.
It is sometimes said that our diplomatic system, or such as it is, reduces American ambassadors and ministers to the status of messenger-boys, who have little to do but to carry back and forth between their offices and the foreign ministries to which they are accredited the communications and instructions which Washington sends them. There could, of course, be no more obtuse misconception. Berlin, the capital of Macht-politik, is particularly a capital in which everything depends on the manner in which a foreign Government's views are expressed or its wishes conveyed. It has not been my privilege to be behind the innocuous von Jagow's screen when "Jimmy" Gerard strolled across the Wilhelms Platz to the ramshackle old Auswärtiges Amt, to tell the German Government what Washington thought of this, that or the other of her recurring acts of lawlessness, but I vow that von Jagow has got to know Gerard for just what he is--an American from the top of his extraordinarily well-shaped head to the soles of his feet. The war has brought us many blessings. Among them we may count high the fact that at the capital of the enemy of all mankind we had, ready to speak up and to stand up for us, in gladness or vicissitude, a real man.