Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him

by Joseph P. Tumulty

The key-note speech delivered by Governor Glynn, contained this ringing defense of the President's policy of neutrality:

"This policy may not satisfy those who revel in destruction and find pleasure in despair. It may not satisfy the fire-eater or the swashbuckler but it does satisfy those who worship at the altar of the god of peace. It does satisfy the mothers of the land at whose hearth and fireside no jingoistic war has placed an empty chair. It does satisfy the daughters of the land from whom bluster and brag have sent no loving brother to the dissolution of the grave. It does satisfy the fathers of this land and the sons of this land who will fight for our flag, and die for our flag when Reason primes the rifle, when Honor draws the sword, when Justice breathes a blessing on the standards they uphold."

And Senator James in a masterly oration paid this splendid tribute to
Woodrow Wilson:

"Four years ago they sneeringly called Woodrow Wilson the school- teacher; then his classes were assembled within the narrow walls of Princeton College. They were the young men of America. To-day he is the world teacher, his class is made up of kings, kaisers, czars, princes, and potentates. The confines of the schoolroom circle the world. His subject is the protection of American life and American rights under international law. The saving of neutral life, the freedom of the seas, and without orphaning a single American child, without widowing a single American mother, without firing a single gun, without the shedding of a single drop of blood, he has wrung from the most militant spirit that ever brooded above a battlefield an acknowledgment of American rights and an agreement to American demands."

These eloquent utterances prepared the way for the great slogan of the 1916 campaign: "He kept us out of war."

The President himself never used that slogan, however. From the first declaration of hostilities in Europe he realized the precarious position of the United States and the possibility that, whether we would or not, we might be swept into the conflict. As early as August, 1914, he expressed his anxious apprehension that "something might occur on the high seas which would make our neutrality impossible." He emphatically believed at that time that America's neutrality would best serve the interests of the world; he respected the American tradition of noninterference in European quarrels; with his almost mystic ability to assess and understand the opinion of the people of the country at large he knew that the American people did not want war; in his comparative seclusion he read the mind of America clearer than did the "mixers" of the Pullman smoking compartments who mistook the clamour for intervention among certain classes along the north Atlantic seaboard for the voice of America at large; while the German rape of Belgium stirred his passionate indignation, he knew that there was no practical means by which the United States could stop it, that we could not immediately transport armies to the theatre of war, and that public opinion, especially in the West and South, was not prepared for active intervention; and in addition to all this he was genuinely, not merely professedly, a passionate lover of peace. But with all this he, realizing the magnitude of the war, had already glimpsed its wider significance, which caused him to say later that "this is the last war of its kind, or of any kind that involves the world, that the United States can keep out of. The business of neutrality is over." He saw that if the war should continue long, as it promised to do, our participation might be inevitable and the American tradition of isolation for ever destroyed by circumstances beyond human control. With patience mingled with firmness, he trod his difficult path, doing all he could to keep us from getting involved without sacrificing fundamental principles of human and national rights, but he neither believed nor pretended to believe that he could give guaranties for the future. Nor did any of those who were closest to him make rash promises. For instance, the Cabinet officers who actively participated in the campaign were careful to say in their speeches that he had done all that a president could honourably do to keep us out of war and that he could be depended upon to continue in the future the same course so long as it should prove humanly possible, for "peace" was not merely a word on his lips but a passion in his heart, but that neither he nor any other mortal could "look into the seeds of time" and say what would be and what would not be. The event was on the knees of the gods. Those who spoke with responsibility adhered strictly to the tense of the verb, the past tense: "kept." None rashly used, explicitly or by implication, the future tense: "will keep." In strictest truth they recited what had been, and, from their knowledge of the President's character and convictions, said that he would not be driven into war by the clamour of his critics, that he would refrain from hostility so long as it was humanly and honourably possible to refrain.

[Illustration:

THE WHITE HOUSE WASHINGTON

CORNISH, N. H.,
August 6, 1915

Dear Tumulty: