I write to ask him to verify the details of this story; I ask him to be heroic, and let me tell the story, in the interest of the public welfare. He gives the permission, adding the following comment:
In this statement, you speak of only one detail—the last one. But the real story involves what amounted to a conspiracy against me in the two years preceding my retirement from the university. This consisted in so reporting lectures and statements that a very quiet and reasonable scholar came to be regarded as a “freak professor.” No one could stand up against this kind of attack and retain a position in a conventional university. I never could get to the bottom of it. It is a poor way to treat human material, but so be it.
Maybe you distrust the radicals; they are all “free lovers,” you say; they deserve their marital unhappiness, they deserve exposure and humiliation. Well, then, suppose I tell you about some respectable person? Suppose I tell you about the President of the United States, secure in the sanctity of the White House? Will that convince you?
You didn’t happen to know that the “Scandal Bureau” had prepared a story on Woodrow Wilson! The “interests,” which wanted war with Germany and Mexico, had a scandal all ready to spring on him toward the end of the 1916 campaign. They had the dynamite planted, the wires laid; all they had to do was to press the button. At the last moment their nerve failed them, they did not press the button. I was told why by a prominent Republican leader, who was present in the councils of the party when the final decision was made. This man pounded on the table and declared: “I’d have said I’d sooner vote for the devil than for Woodrow Wilson, but if you start a dirty story on the President of the United States, I’ll vote for Woodrow Wilson, and one or two million Americans will do likewise.”
Their nerve failed them; but some steps they had already taken, and you may trace their footprints if you are curious. There were dark hints in many newspapers, and if you saw the Washington correspondence of London papers during the fall of 1916, you found more than hints. For example, here is James Davenport Whelpley, a well-known journalist, writing in the “Fortnightly Review,” one of the most dignified of English monthlies:
Another issue has come to the fore in the American political campaign quite unusual in American politics.... With all the freedom that is given to the American Press, and with all the pernicious intrusion into private affairs that finds expression in the columns of American newspapers, it has been many years since the personality of a candidate has played any part in the publicity work of a campaign, no matter how great the temptation may have been to use material at hand. In reading American newspapers today, however, much can be gleaned from between the lines. Something seems to be struggling against precedent and unwritten rules for clear expression, and that something finds itself articulate in the communications of man to man.
And then Mr. Whelpley goes on to tell about “elections being won and lost at the last moment by psychological waves which have swept across the national mind, swamping on their way the political hopes of one or the other candidate.” So Mr. Whelpley is unable to predict the re-election of Woodrow Wilson!
More definite even than this, there was a story in “McClure’s Magazine,” which had already gone to press, and could not be recalled. “McClure’s,” now a tool of the “interests,” was conducting a raging campaign for “preparedness,” and Wilson stood in the way. The story was called “That Parkinson Affair,” by Sophie Kerr, and was published in the issue of September, 1916—just when the scandal was ready to be sprung. It is ostensibly a piece of fiction, but so transparent that no child could fail to recognize it. It is the vilest piece of innuendo in American political history, and remains on our library shelves as a monumental example of the depths to which our predatory interests have been willing to drag their “kept” magazines.
When the big magazines were bought up by the “interests,” we were solemnly assured that the purpose was to put an end to “scandal-mongering.” But now it appears that the purpose was not to lay the “muck-rake” on the shelf, but merely to turn it against the friends of human progress!