Peacemakers—Blessed and Otherwise / Observations, Reflections and Irritations at an International Conference

by Ida M. Tarbell

Then there was Mr. Hughes’ steady hand. He laughed daily at his press conferences at the insinuations and solemnity of the questioning press correspondents. Everything was going on swimmingly, he asserted. “Excellent progress.” The naval committee was at work, the Far Eastern committee had begun its sessions, the agenda would be followed step by step, but one thing at a time would be attempted; when they had finished what they were at now they would take up the next step, and not before. It was certainly steadying, if not exciting. It gave confidence, if not headlines. All of this quieted the storm, but it was left to the President of the United States to sweep it entirely from the Conference sky, though whether he did it intentionally or accidentally is still, I think, an unanswered question.

Why did President Harding, without warning, inject an Association of Nations into the Conference on the Limitation of Armament, on the last day of its second week of life? The Conference had a definite agenda. Mr. Hughes, its chairman, was following it with the rigor of a good schoolmaster. That agenda made no mention of a conference, association or league of nations. So far as it was concerned, the world war is made up of nine nations. And here came the President of the United States and casually announced that before the work was completed it should include an association of all the nations of the earth.

Why did he do it? Did he want to divert public attention from the dangerous irritations of the moment? We do not yet know enough of the workings of Mr. Harding’s mind to be able to say whether he would, like Napoleon III, gild a dome when there was squally public weather. All we do really know about the President, so far, is his genuinely beneficent intent. Is he canny enough to know that the public is as easily diverted as a child and capable of attempting the trick when things are getting a bit out of hand?

Whether this is true or not, he certainly put an end to the ticklish situation in which the Conference found itself in Thanksgiving week. Everybody fell to discussing the proposition. Was the Conference really to end up in an Association of Nations? Did this mean that the United States would suggest to the delegates gathered at the Conference—all of them members of the League of Nations—that they scrap that institution? There had been much speculation in Geneva before the Washington Conference was called as to whether the intention was to force the League out of existence. So great was the anxiety of more than one European country to be in any congregation in which the United States figured, that it was pretty generally agreed that if such a proposition should be made it would be assented to. Was this Mr. Harding’s first feeler then toward substituting something of his own for the League? But this was only a speculation. Nobody could get from any official source any confirmation that Mr. Harding had anything definite in mind. And yet they were not unwilling to accept the notion that he had inadvertently thrown out so important a suggestion.

There were those who had an unamiable explanation. We are all human, they said. We must remember that this has ceased to be Mr. Harding’s conference. His fine sentiments on Armistice Day on the opening of the Conference had been greeted with loud acclaim the world over. But after he had opened the Conference he left the hall. Secretary Hughes appeared, and it was Secretary Hughes who stirred the world. From that time on, the Secretary had been the one man quoted. We have had great secretaries—Mr. Root, for instance, who never allowed his shadow to fall across that of the President of the United States. When Mr. Roosevelt was President, Mr. Root prepared some very remarkable state papers, but they always began “The President instructs me to say.” Mr. Hughes has been speaking for himself. It is quite possible, said these interpreters, that the President thinks the time has come to let the public know that, after all, it is he who occupies the White House.

I am quite sure that if this had been true, we should have had other evidence of it as time went on, but none came. Mr. Harding knew well enough that a successful Conference was in the long run his triumph. He knew well enough that the only man who could give him this success was Secretary Hughes. Possibly the wisest thing that Mr. Harding has yet done as President has been to let the members of his cabinet do their own work. Jealousy is not, I am sure, an explanation of Mr. Harding’s sudden introduction of an Association of Nations into the Conference on the Limitation of Armament. Was it to be found in M. Briand’s speech?

M. Briand did not convince his audience, as we have seen. That is, he did not bring it to the point at which he was aiming. But one thing that he did do was to bring into sharp relief the fact that land and naval armaments cannot be handled separately. They dovetail in the game of war, are mutually defensive and offensive; to cut the navy of a nation whose main defense is ships, without considering the relation of that cut to the size of the armies of those nations in which armies are the chief defense, is to leave an unbalanced situation.

A second realization went along with this, and that was that the scrapping and cutting by nine nations must be done with an eye to the actual or potential naval armaments of the other forty-five or so nations of the earth. Senator Schanzer had already suggested this in his speech made on November 15, accepting in principle for Italy the naval program. “I think it rather difficult,” he said, “to separate the question of Italian and French naval armament limitation from the general question of naval armaments of the world.”

M. Briand’s speech made one realize how France and Italy must consider possible continental alliances of powers that were not represented at this Conference; must consider a possible Russian crusade to convert the world by force to its gospel. And if France and Italy must, or thought they must, secure themselves against these possibilities, could England weaken herself disproportionately? When you began to consider the question of armament in terms of the world and not simply of nine nations, you could not if you were candid find any peaceful solution but by bringing everybody in—Germany, Turkey, Russia. Now it may be, though we do not know Mr. Harding well enough yet to say, that the logic of the experiences that the Conference had been through up to date laid hold of him and he said it like a man—“there is but one way out, and that is by One Big Union.”

Of course there is another explanation of why he did it and I rather think it may be the true one, after all. The President may have been hearing from the country. One thing that we do know about him is that he is a man who with almost religious care listens to the voices that come up to him from the people. And it was no secret that a multitude of them, strong and weak, had been calling to him in the weeks preceding—“conference,” “association,” “league,” “some method of carrying on in which everybody can join,” “in no other way can we hope for permanent peace.” It may be that Mr. Harding had heard so much of this that he felt he must reply. And if this was true, he did wisely.