I risked my popularity with the American people in making speeches like that. I could have got easy applause by calling upon the old god of vengeance against the Germans for at that time in the United States there was less forgiveness than in England for all the evil and suffering caused by Germany, less tolerance of “pacifists,” as much brutality in the average mob. But though I aroused some suspicion, some hostility, on the whole American audiences listened to my argument with wonderful enthusiasm and generosity.
I saw a distinct change of opinion after my first visit (I am not pretending that I had anything to do with it), in favor of closer friendship with Great Britain, and economic co-operation with Europe. In every city to which I went I found at least two or three thousand people according to the size of my place of lecture, quickly and ardently responsive to the idea that America and Great Britain, acting together, might lift the world out of its ruined state and lead civilization to a higher plane. In city clubs, women’s clubs, private dinner parties, drawing-room meetings, I found great numbers of people desperately anxious about the responsibility of the United States toward European nations, eager to do the right thing though doubtful what to do, poignantly desirous of getting some lead higher than that of self-interest (though not conflicting with it), and with a generous warm-hearted sympathy for the British folk. Doubtless these groups were insignificant in numbers to the mass of citizens with whom I never came in touch, among whom there was an old strain of suspicion and hostility to England, and all sorts of currents of prejudice, ill will, hatred, even, among Irish, German, and foreign stocks, in addition to the narrow nationalism, the vulgar selfishness of many others. That is true, but the people I met, and to whom I lectured, were the intelligentsia, the leaders of social life, and business life, the wives, mothers, and daughters of the “leading citizens,” the arbiters and, to some extent, the creators of public opinion. Their hopes, ideals, visions, must, sooner or later, be reflected in national tendencies and acts. Only blind observers would now say that the United States has not revealed in recent acts and influence that broadening of outlook which I perceived at work below the surface in 1921, and did something, perhaps—not much—to help, by a simple and truthful report of facts from this side of the world.
In the United States I had, strange as it may seem, a certain authority as an economic expert! This may surprise my intimate friends, and most of all my wife, who knows that I have never been able to count my change, that I have not as much head for figures as a new-born lamb, and that I have never succeeded in making out a list of expenses for journalistic work without gross errors which have put me abominably out of pocket. Yet many of the greatest financiers in the United States—men like the brothers Warburg, and Mr. Mitchell of the National City Bank—invited me to address them on the economic situation in Europe, and agreed with my arguments and conclusions. I remember one dinner at which I expounded my views on that subject to no less than sixty of the leading financial experts in New York, afterward being subjected to a fire of questions which, to my own amazement, I was able to answer. The truth is, as I quickly perceived, that a few very simple laws underlie the whole complicated system of international trade and finance. As long as one held on to those laws, which I did, like grim death, one could not go wrong in one’s analysis of the European situation, and all facts and figures adjusted themselves to these elementary principles.
Money, for example, is only a symbol for the reality of values behind it—in grain, cattle, mineral wealth, labor and credit.
When paper money is issued in advance of a nation’s real values, it is merely a promissory note on future industry and production.
France, Germany, and most European nations were issuing vast quantities of these promissory notes which were not supported, for the most part, by actual wealth.
The prosperity of a country like Germany increased the prosperity of all other countries. Its poverty would lead to less prosperity in all other countries.
Commercial prosperity depends upon the interchange of goods between one country and another, and not upon the possession of money tokens. And so on.
By keeping these facts firmly in my mind, I was able to keep a straight line of common sense in the wild labyrinth of our European problems. But I had also seen the actual life and conditions of many countries of Europe, and could tell what I had seen in a simple, straight way to the business men of the United States. It was what they wanted to know, beyond all other things, and I think they believed my accounts more than those of more important men, because I was not a Government official, or propagandist, but a simple reporter, without an ax to grind, and an eyewitness of the conditions I described.
Among the men who asked me to tell them a few things they wanted to know, or the things they knew (better than I did) but wanted to discuss, was Mr. Herbert Hoover, for whom I have the deepest admiration and respect, like all who have met him. He came into my room at the Lotus Club one day, unannounced except for a tap at the door by his friend and assistant, Barr Baker. I had just returned from a journey, and my room was littered with shirts, socks, collars, and the contents of my bags. He paid no heed to all that but sat back in an arm chair and after some questions, talked gravely of world affairs. I need not record here that conversation I had with him—the gist of it is in my book of American impressions, “People of Destiny,” but I was glad and proud to sit in the presence of a man—so simple, so frank, so utterly truthful—who organized the greatest work of rescue for suffering humanity ever achieved in the history of the world—the American Relief Administration. But for that work, many millions of men, women, and children in the nations most stricken by war would have died of starvation, and Europe would have been swept from end to end by the scourge of pestilence which follows famine.