Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him

by Joseph P. Tumulty

While President Wilson was giving his whole thought and effort to the solution of exacting domestic tasks, the European war broke upon him and thus turned his attention and study to the age-long and complicated political struggle between Germany, France, and England.

Fully conscious from the very beginning of the difficulties that lay in his path, he was aware of the eventualities the war now beginning might lead to. As a profound student of history he saw with a clear vision the necessity of neutrality and of America remaining disentangled in every way from the embroilments of Europe. To the people of the country it at first appeared that the war was one more in a long series of European quarrels and that we must play our part in the great conflict as mere spectators and strictly adhere to the American policy of traditional aloofness and isolation, which had been our immemorial custom and habit. Although we were bound to maintain a policy of isolation, Woodrow Wilson from the beginning foresaw its futility, and afterward gave expression to this conviction in a campaign speech in 1916, when he said:

This is the last war [meaning the World War] of its kind or of any kind that involves the world that the United States can keep out of. I say that because I believe that the business of neutrality is over; not because I want it to be over, but I mean this, that war now has such a scale that the position of neutrals sooner or later becomes intolerable.

He knew how difficult it would be to keep a people so variously constituted strictly neutral. No sooner was his proclamation of neutrality announced than the differences in points of view in racial stocks began to manifest themselves in language both intemperate and passionate, until his advice to his country "to be neutral in fact as well as in name" became a dead and spiritless thing.

I have often been asked if the policy of neutrality which the President announced, and which brought a fire of criticism upon him, represented his own personal feelings toward the European war, and whether if he had been a private citizen, he would have derided it as now his critics were engaged in doing.

As an intimate associate of Woodrow Wilson during the whole of the European war, and witnessing from day to day the play of his feelings, especially after the violation of the neutrality of Belgium, I am certain that had he been free to do so he would have yielded to the impulse of championing a cause that in his heart of hearts he felt involved the civilization of the world. But it was his devotion to the idea of trusteeship that held him in check, and the consciousness that in carrying out that trusteeship he had no right to permit his own passionate feelings to govern his public acts.

It would have been a dramatic adventure to accept Germany's assault on Belgium as a challenge to the humane interest of America, but the acceptance would have been only a gesture, for we were unable to transport armies to the theatre of war in time to check the outrage. Such action would have pleased some people in the East, but the President knew that this quixotic knight errantry would not appeal to the country at large, particularly the West, still strongly grounded in the Washingtonian tradition of non-interference in European quarrels.

Colonel Roosevelt himself, who subsequently attacked so strongly the "pusillanimity" of the Administration's course, said on September 23, 1914:

A deputation of Belgians has arrived in this country to invoke our assistance in the time of their dreadful need. What action our government can or will take I know not. It has been announced that no action can be taken that will interfere with our entire neutrality. It is certainly eminently desirable that we should remain entirely neutral and nothing but urgent need would warrant breaking our neutrality and taking sides one way or the other.

It was not the policy of a weakling or a timid man. It was the policy of a prudent leader and statesman, who was feeling his way amid dangers and who as an historian himself knew the difficulties of an imprudent or incautious move.