“And take the Council’s aims themselves. Suppose you succeed in stopping the manufacture of munitions—what will happen to labour? Two years ago, our boys were walking the streets, begging for a job. To-day, every man of them has work, and wages are going up. War work has done that. Do you want to stop the opportunity of labour to make a living?”
But Gompers’s eloquence left Buchanan cold. In the face of his pleadings and advice, Buchanan accepted $2,700 from Martin in the following six weeks. He saved his face at the last minute by resigning the presidency of Labour’s National Peace Council the day before the convention met.
The convention met in Washington on July 31st, at the New Willard Hotel. Its members were impressed, as it was intended that they and the country in general should be impressed, by the sonorous voice and important presence of Hannis Taylor, former American Minister to Spain and author of text books on constitutional and international law, such as “The Origin and Growth of the English Constitution” and “International Public Law.” He made an opening address in which, from his heights of knowledge, he solemnly declared that munitions shipments were in violation of international law. His address was largely devoted to assurances to his hearers that he was an authority on such matters and that they could take his opinion as disposing of the legal aspect of this question. Mr. Taylor was there to lend distinction to the gathering, and he left no doubts in their minds that he thought he was doing it.
But when the delegates got down to business, there was trouble. The farmer delegates became suspicious—they had vague fears of the source of the money that was paying the bills; they did not like the company they found themselves in. They first declined to bind their constituents to the resolutions that were offered: then they left the convention.
On the second day, the labour delegates became equally restless. Buchanan had withdrawn. The delegates who used the opportunity of being in Washington to call on Mr. Gompers came away from his office with heavy hearts. Returning to the Willard, they saw the machinery being manipulated by the discredited Martin and Schulteis. “What have these fellows got to do with us?” they asked one another. And then they asked “these fellows” quite bluntly, “Who’s putting up the money for this show?” Martin, backed to the wall of the Willard bar by their insistent demand for an answer, replied with an evasive, “What difference does it make?” And when they shouted that it made a profane lot of difference, he answered defiantly that it was all right “even if it’s German money.”
That finished the labour delegates. They, too, went home.
But the ringleaders had put out a resounding resolution calling for an embargo on munitions. And though the convention had fizzed out, it had done an enormous lot of harm. Thousands of labouring men and farmers had been indoctrinated with a specious pacifism that was reflected later in the attempts to evade the Conscription Act when we entered the war. The Government to-day is contending with the moral antagonisms aroused in certain sections of the country by the orators and writers of Labour’s National Peace Council.
In this moral infection, the work of Hannis Taylor played an important part. He wrote legal opinions for the Council, declaring that the traffic in munitions was unconstitutional. He received $700 for this work. These opinions were printed and distributed broadcast, and did much harm. More recently, Taylor was counsel for Robert Cox, the Missouri draft registrant who sued to restrain General Leonard Wood from sending him with his regiment to France. On his behalf, Hannis Taylor contended that the Conscription Act was unconstitutional, asserting that the only power of Congress to call out troops was under the militia clause of the Constitution which reads: “To execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions.” This meant, so Taylor contended, that no citizen could be sent, against his will, outside the United States to fight its battles.
This absurd doctrine, which would force us to fight this war on our own soil instead of allowing us to defend ourselves in Europe against German aggression, was promptly punctured by the Supreme Court of the United States. In his brief before that Court Hannis Taylor used language so violent that the counsel for the Government asked that it be expunged from the record. Taylor in his brief accused the President of being a “dictator,” of seizing powers “in open defiance of the judgments” of the Supreme Court, and of demanding “such an aggregation of powers as no monarch ever wielded in any constitutional government that ever existed.”
The decision of the Supreme Court, affirming the Government’s right to draft its citizens for service overseas, was delivered by Chief Justice White. That stern old veteran of the Lost Cause in our Civil War, speaking with the aloofness and dignity of that august Court, in measured terms expressed an opinion of Mr. Hannis Taylor that is worth repeating. He said: