Senator McCumber: “Would our moral conviction of the unrighteousness of the German war have brought us into this war if Germany had not committed any acts against us without the League of Nations, as we had no League of Nations at that time?”
The President: “I hope it would eventually, Senator, as things developed.”
Senator McCumber: “Do you think if Germany had committed no act of war or no act of injustice against our citizens that we would have got into the war?”
The President: “I do think so.”
Senator McCumber: “You think we would have gotten in anyway?”
The President: “I do.”
The Republican leader in the House of Representatives, Representative Mann, in 1916 had declared “Wilson is determined to plunge us into war with Germany.” Three years later the admission thatwe would have been in the war even “if Germany had committed no act of war or no act of injustice against our citizens” came from the White House, and Senators stood appalled at the revelation.
The President’s frank admission that the administration would have drifted into war regardless of what Germany had done or might do, is strangely in accord with statements contained in the great historic work on the World War by the former French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hanotaux, who writes:
Just before the Battle of the Marne, when the spirits of many of the leading politicians in France were so depressed that they were urging an immediate peace with Germany, three American ambassadors presented themselves to the government—the then functioning ambassador, his predecessor and his successor—and implored the government not to give up, promising that America would join in the war.
“At present there are but 50,000 influential persons in America who want it to enter the war, but in a short time there will be a hundred million.”