Mr. Wilson's War

by John Dos Passos

  Through The Commoner and constant lecturing on the Chautauqua platform he remained in touch with the aspirations of the mass of the American people. From the response of his audiences he gathered that next to fair play in the economy their most ardent desire was for international peace.

  The peerless leader was now assured of an income. The Bryans built themselves a new home named Fairview on a hill overlooking the state capitol. Mrs. Bryan desired the broadening influence of travel. After a couple of short peeks into Mexico and Havana, Bryan made an article writing arrangement with Hearst that paid for a nine weeks European tour.

  The Bryans, as uninformed about foreign lands as any of Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad, visited the British Isles, France, Germany and Italy and even Russia. Everywhere he was received as a great American. The Pope gave him an audience, and he was allowed to compliment Czar Nicholas to his face on the establishment of the international court at The Hague.

  The high point of the trip was his visit to Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana. The venerable old Russian noble-in-peasant’s-clothing held forth on non-resistance and the power of love. Though Bryan followed Christ’s teachings literally indeed, he seems to have taken the doctrine of “turn the other cheek” with a grain of salt.

  “Not long ago,” wrote Tolstoy soon after, “I read … that my recognition of the principle of nonresistance is a sad and partly comical error, which, taking into consideration my old age, and some of my deserts, one may pass with condescending silence. Just such an attitude … I met in my conversation with the remarkably clever and progressive American, Bryan.” Tolstoy had found more cleverness than Christianity in his visitor. “Bryan certainly does talk a lot,” he added.

  Bryan regarded the interview with Tolstoy as one of the great moments of his life. His enthusiasm for nonresistance grew with the telling. “I am satisfied,” he wrote in The Commoner of the author of War and Peace, “that, notwithstanding his great intellect, his colossal strength lies in his heart more than in his mind … Love is the dominant note in Count Tolstoy’s philosophy … It is his shield and sword. He is a deeply religious man.”

  Later in a lecture on peace by arbitration, trying to put the thing in practical terms for his audience, he used Tolstoy as an example: “There he stands proclaiming to the world that he believes that love is a better protection than force; that he thinks a man will suffer less by refusing to use violence than if he used it. And what is the result? He is the only man in Russia that the czar with all his army dare not lay his hand on … I believe that this nation could stand before the world today and tell the world it did not believe in war … that it had no disputes it was not willing to submit to the judgment of the world. If this nation did that, it not only would not be attacked by any other nation on earth, but it would become the supreme power in the world.”

  After he had come reluctantly to the support of Judge Parker in the 1904 campaign, Bryan used his Tolstoyan convictions to belabor the Rough Rider from Sagamore Hill. “This is an exalting of the doctrine of brute force,” he said of T.R.’s New Nationalism, “it darkens the hopes of the race … It is a turning backward to the age of violence. More than that it is nothing less than a challenge to the Christian Civilization of the world.”

  In the years that followed peace and social justice were The Commoner’s chief themes. Peace was the theme the silver tongue wove into the resonant orations that thrilled farmers and their families, seated on the hard chairs of Chautauqua tents; and small business men and schoolteachers and working people in crowded halls in the middlewest. Barred from high office by the vicissitudes of home politics the peerless leader aspired to become peacemaker to the world.

  The Big Stick

  Theodore Roosevelt won handily in the election of 1904. He regarded his victory as a mandate from the American people to continue in the role which he had been playing with so much zest. The United States was too small a stage. With McKinley he believed that “no nation can longer be indifferent to any other.” He was the first American President to exercise a personal influence in the international drama.

  Though an admirer of Admiral Mahan and an enthusiast for a powerful navy, and almost as fond as the Kaiser was of appearing in a military uniform and talking of “the fighting edge,” T.R. used his influence as President pretty successfully for world peace. He had an able assistant in his Secretary of State.

  Querulous and whimsical old John Hay, who started public life as Abraham Lincoln’s private secretary, had given his country, under various administrations, a lifetime of discriminating public service of a sort unusual in America. Though one of the Americans most drenched in Europe of his generation, he never forgot that, like Mark Twain, he spent his boyhood in a Mississippi rivertown. He wrote graceful verse. The worshipful life of Lincoln he and Nicolay worked on for many years did much to enshrine the figure of the brooding emancipator in the mind of the nation. He wrote a novel on industrial strife and, from a diplomatic post in Madrid, travel sketches of a charm to rival Irving’s. McKinley brought him back from the Court of St. James to head the State Department.

  John Hay and Henry Adams from their twin Richardson houses on Lafayette Square presided over the cultivated literary society of the national capital, which in T.R.’s day included, for once, the White House. Now in his late sixties Hay was an ailing, crotchety, disinterested and wise old man. Relying on his great experience in practical diplomacy T.R. steered the country through a period of competition and intrigue among European powers that kept the world on tenterhooks.

  The victory over Spain, however much it distressed anti-imperialists in the United States, enhanced American prestige abroad. The President’s unique combination of athletics with statesmanship, together with his literary flair, made his grinning countenance with the buck teeth and the eyeglasses loom large in the European chancelleries. Here was an American politician at home in the world of books and ideas, which meant culture and refinement and status to European statesmen. His flamboyant costumes, the frontier pose, the impudence with which he led members of his “tennis cabinet” and unsuspecting visitors on breakneck hikes through Rock Creek Park, his endless stream of amusing conversation at the dinnertable, his knack for launching pat phrases which became the catchwords of the era, gave a special quality to his personality. As dissimilar Europeans as James Bryce and Kaiser Wilhelm found T.R. irresistibly attractive.

  The diplomatic corps respected the professional skill with which he conducted his policy of “walk softly and carry a big stick.” After he had averted possible warfare by inducing the Germans and the British to arbitrate their quarrel over the collection of debts from the Castro who was then dictator of Venezuela, T.R. was admitted to their international club by the world’s potentates.

  When they made their moves on the chessboard of power such highbinders as the Kaiser and Czar Nicholas and the imperialists of the Third French Republic could no longer disregard the United States.

  The Panamanian Revolution

  Even the somewhat scandalous methods by which T.R. made possible the building of the Panama Canal caused more amusement than protest. The need for an isthmian canal had been dramatized for Americans by the length of time it took the battleship Oregon, plowing at full steam round South America and through the Straits of Magellan, to join the Pacific fleet in 1898. Opinion was about evenly divided on the merits of a canal through Panama and a canal through Nicaragua. Interested parties buzzed like scavenger flies about both projects.

  For a century the isthmus had been the stamping ground for freebooters and adventurers. Ever since the failure of the French company its debentures had been the playthings of speculators and bluesky operators on the Paris Bourse. T.R. plunged in where other statesmen had feared to tread. To his death he considered the canal his greatest achievement.

  Through John Hay he secured from the British a revision of the fiftyyearold Clayton-Bulwer treaty according to which any such canal was to have been built jointly. Having made the decisi
on to continue the French project in Panama, he induced Congress to put up forty million dollars to pay off the investors in the old company. He looked on with amused approval when Monsieur Bunau-Varilla, de Lesseps’ chief aide,—who’d spent his life promoting the Panama route and was thick with various adventurers on the isthmus—, and a Mr. Nelson Cromwell of New York, representing a group of densely anonymous American investors, took their plot from an O. Henry short story, and backed a cast of comic opera characters in the establishment of an independent Republic of Panama.

  The revolution was carried out in a rain of gold. When the Colombian authorities sent troops to prevent the secession of the freedom mad Panamanians, the colonel in charge received a handsome retainer. A couple of American warships were ordered to stand by to see that nobody played it rough. The United States Government thoughtfully paid for the transport of the pacified colonel’s troops back to Cartagena on one of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company’s liners. A Colombian general and an admiral each received whopping sums. Even the enlisted men got fifty dollars a head.

  Amid the popular rejoicings that resulted from the distribution of this flood of baksheesh, the republic was proclaimed in November of 1903. An American officer was so indiscreet as to be seen hoisting the new Panamanian flag up a flagpole. When one of the sudden tropical downpours typical of the climate drove the demonstrators indoors, the founders of the new republic expressed their patriotic enthusiasm by pouring bottle after bottle of champagne over the head of defecting Colombian General Huertas, who now became commander of the Panamanian Army. Next day Monsieur Bunau-Varilla, with a cable appointing him Minister of the Republic of Panama in his pocket, called on John Hay. A few days later Washington recognized Panama as independent and sovereign.

  “The haste with which the government at Washington acted was regrettable,” wrote one student of diplomatic protocol from the serenity of the Cosmos Club twenty years later. “President Roosevelt apparently could not be restrained.”

  “If I had followed traditional, conservative methods I should have submitted a dignified state paper of probably two hundred pages to the Congress and the debate would have been going on yet,” T.R. blurted out to a California audience, “but I took the Canal Zone and let Congress debate, and while the debate goes on the canal does also.”

  The Peace of Portsmouth

  T.R. was nothing of a pacifist, but he worked hard to stave off wars. In his first administration he took up the cause of the arbitration treaties which had received such a setback when the Senate failed to ratify the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty under McKinley. He proved his good faith by submitting to The Hague court a complicated dispute with Mexico over the disposition of the funds of the ancient California missions.

  Arbitration won a victory in Europe with the signature of the treaty between Britain and France in 1903. The following year President Roosevelt through his State Department suggested a fresh meeting of the powers at The Hague.

  Taking the Anglo-French agreement as a model he signed arbitration treaties with France, Germany, Portugal and Switzerland, and was promoting negotiations with Great Britain, Italy, Mexico, Russia, Japan and a number of other countries when the Senate dropped a monkeywrench in the works by insisting that no arbitration should go through without specific senatorial approval in each case.

  “I think that this amendment makes the treaties shams,” T.R. wrote his good friend Senator Lodge, the stickler for senatorial privilege who had proposed the amendment, “and my present impression is that we had better abandon the whole business rather than give the impression of trickiness and insincerity which would be produced by solemnly promulgating a sham.”

  The outbreak of war in the Far East made it necessary to postpone the second Hague conference to a more propitious time.

  Russia and Japan had been bickering over which of them should exploit Manchuria and bring the blessings of civilization to what was then called the hermit kingdom of Korea. When negotiations broke down in the winter of 1904 Japanese Admiral Togo made an unannounced attack on the Russian ships anchored at Port Arthur.

  From then on the Japanese held the offensive. They crossed the Yalu River in the face of entrenched Russian positions. They outfought the Russians on land and sea, and knocked out the eastern section of their navy.

  Early in the following year, the Russian Baltic fleet, which had distinguished itself by mistaking some British trawlers off Dogger Bank for enemy torpedoboats, and letting fly a salvo that killed a number of peaceful fishermen and added to the unpopularity of the czarist government among the Western nations, arrived in Japanese waters. Togo’s crack squadrons promptly swept the Baltic fleet off the map.

  The Russians were driven back into Siberia but the war cost the Japanese lives and money that they could ill afford. Both sides were ready to negotiate a peace.

  President Roosevelt, who was already dabbling in mediation between clashing European imperialisms in North Africa, let it be known to the German ambassador that he would favor an arrangement that would give Korea to Japan, and neutralize Manchuria (under German management) in return for a German engagement to respect the “open door” policy in China and not to meddle in the Philippines or other islands in the Pacific, which since the annexation of Hawaii had become necessarily an American sphere.

  When the Imperial Foreign Minister forwarded this report to the Kaiser he added a note: “The President is a great admirer of Your Majesty and would like to rule the world hand in hand with Your Majesty, regarding himself as something in the nature of an American counterpart of Your Majesty.” Kaiser Wilhelm, who was not without humor in those days, scrawled in the margin: “One must not divide the hide of a bear before he has been shot.”

  From this seed sprang suggestions to Czar Nicholas in one direction and to the Mikado’s foreign office in the other, that President Roosevelt would be just the man to mediate between them. A few days after the Battle of the Sea of Japan destroyed Russian seapower it was announced that plenipotentiaries were on their way to Washington.

  John Hay, already very ill, who had been in Europe trying to recoup his health at one of the spas that were considered so restorative, wrote T.R. “… the big news was of your success in bringing Russia and Japan into conference. It was a great stroke of that good luck which belongs to those who ‘know how’ and are not afraid.”

  John Hay died the first of July. His death dealt a fatal blow to the curious little Washington circle which had grown up round Lafayette Square. T.R. felt it keenly. Hay was replaced in the State Department by Elihu Root, a dignified New York lawyer who was already one of the elders of the Republican Party.

  Throughout Hay’s last illness T.R. had been conducting arbitration in his own way. When Washington got too hot for the negotiators, who had gone into a deadlock on the question of indemnities and of Sakhalin Island, T.R. suggested that the seabreezes would refresh them at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. For two months the beautiful old New England seaport was the center of all the power politics of the world. T.R. watched the proceedings from Sagamore Hill, cajoling, advising, remonstrating, until in early September Russia and Japan came to the agreement that ended the war.

  Roosevelt the Arbitrator

  Immediately the President put his enhanced prestige to work to try to unravel the tangle of discords between the French, the British and the Germans over spheres of influence in North Africa. If they did nothing more the negotiations at Algeciras postponed the showdown in Europe for a number of years.

  His efforts in that direction came to a head in his proposal for limitation of armaments to the second Hague conference sponsored again by Czar Nicholas in 1907. Campbell-Bannerman, a convinced anti-imperialist, was Prime Minister in England. Andrew Carnegie had hopes of inducing Sir Edward Grey, who was already Foreign Minister, to back T.R.’s plan.

  T.R. understood the difficulties he was facing. “I do not want this new Liberal government with which in so many matters I have such hearty sympathy, to go to any mau
dlin extremes at The Hague conference,” he wrote Whitelaw Reid, U. S. ambassador in London. “It is eminently wise and proper that we should take real steps in advance towards the policy of minimizing the chances of war among civilized people … but we must not grow sentimental and commit some Jefferson-Bryan-like piece of idiotic folly such as would be entailed if the free people that have free governments put themselves at a hopeless disadvantage compared with military despotisms and military barbarisms.”

  The proposals put forth at The Hague proved no panacea, but they bettered the peacemaking machinery. T.R.’s faith in arbitration, at least between nations of similar background, continued a modest growth. After he’d left the presidency he wrote Admiral Mahan, “I am prepared to say … I think the time has come when the United States and the British Empire can agree to a universal arbitration treaty … and that no question can arise between them that cannot be settled in judicial fashion.”

  This first decade of the century was a period of great hopes. Progressiveminded men looked forward to a golden age of peace. As civilization became established throughout the world, democratic institutions as they had developed in America and in Great Britain and her dominions would serve as a model for other nations. People were beginning to speak of the twentieth as the Anglo-Saxon century.

  In foreign affairs T.R. did his best to avoid what he called shams, while he sought the peaceful solution in his own peculiar way. When the Japanese seemed to be allowing their victory over the Russians to go to their heads a little, he walked softly with them. At the same time he sent his new white fleet around the world to show off its gunpower and practice its marksmanship on a goodwill tour.