Election of 1916 and the League of Nations Covenant.—Save for artificially engendered belligerency, owing its inspiration to a subtle propaganda conducted through a portion of the press known to be under the direct influence of Lord Northcliffe, there was no demand for war with Germany among the people in general over the various issues that had arisen. The McLemore resolution in the House was defeated through the direct intervention of the administration under whip and spur. It requested the President to warn American citizens to refrain from traveling on armed ships of any and all powers then or in the future at war.

In the Senate the Gore resolution declaring “that the sinking by a German submarine without notice or warning of an armed merchant vessel of her public enemy, resulting in the death of a citizen of the United States, would constitute a just cause of war between the United States and the German Empire” was laid on the table by a vote of 68to14. It had been designed by Senator Gore to put the issue squarely up to the Senate. Senator Stone in the Senate said, referring to the original Gore resolution warning American citizens to keep off armed merchant vessels: “The President is firmly opposed to the idea embodied in the Gore resolution. He is not only opposed to Congress passing a law relating to this subject, but he is opposed to any form of official warning to American citizens to keep off so-called armed merchantmen. If I could have my way I would take some definite step to save this country from becoming embroiled in this European war through the recklessness of foolhardy men.”

A few days before, the Senator, chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, had returned from an interview with the President which had convinced him even then that war was impending.

In various parts of the country test votes of whole communities showed an overwhelming sentiment in favor of peace. W.J. Bryan had resigned as Secretary of State because “the issue involved is of such moment that to remain a member of the Cabinet would be as unfair to you (the President) as it would be to the cause which is nearest my heart, namely, the prevention of war.”

Perhaps the best indication whether the war was popular or not is that supplied by the number of volunteers who offered themselves for service from April1, 1917, to April6, 1918, in eleven eastern States, as follows:

The number of enlistments in the remaining States was in proportion.

The President had been elected because “he kept us out of the war.” In his nominating speech ex-Governor Glynn of New York assured the country that, if elected, Mr.Wilson would keep us out of war. It became the campaign slogan. The Democratic National Committee published full-page advertisements in the daily press. On November4, 1916, it printed in all the papers a full-page display with a cartoon under the caption, “Mr.Hughes Would Name a Strong Cabinet,” showing a council of ten Roosevelts in Rough Rider attire, with slouched hats and spurs, and in every possible attitude of vociferous belligerency, intended to show the kind of cabinet that Mr. Hughes would select. In heavy type these lines appeared: “You Are Working—Not Fighting!” “Alive and Happy—Not Cannon Fodder!” “Wilson and Peace With Honor or Hughes With Roosevelt and War?” “The Lesson is Plain: If You Want War Vote for Hughes; If You Want Peace With Honor Vote for Wilson and Continued Prosperity. It Is up to You and Your Conscience!”

It latterly became known that though Hughes had repeatedly declared himself clearly on the issues in the course of his campaign speeches his remarks on this subject were not reported. All reference to the European situation and his views thereon were suppressed.

The city of Milwaukee gave Wilson 6,000 majority over Hughes. He carried the assured Republican State of Ohio on the issue that he would keep us out of the war and the decisive vote was given by California under the belief that with Wilson peace would be assured.

The defeat of Hughes secondarily must be attributed to Colonel Roosevelt. The latter’s personality fell like an ominous shadow across the path of the Republican candidate. Roosevelt was satisfied with nothing short of immediate war, and, nominally fighting Wilson, was in effect making the election of Hughes impossible. Repeatedly proven to have lost his power of influencing political results in his own State of New York, in New England and other sections, he still was able to decree the defeat of the candidate of his own party by inspiring popular fear of his future sway over him.

In Washington it was known that preparations for war with Germany were long under way. Secretary McAdoo, the President’s son-in-law, was understood to have entered into a secret arrangement with Brazil, during his visit there, for the seizure of German ships when the hour to strike should have arrived. The administration in1916, months before the election, passed through Congress appropriations for military purposes larger than those provided in the German budget for1914, the year of the war:

The national election occurred in November, 1916. Three months later, early in February, 1917, Count Bernstorff, the German ambassador, was handed his passports and relations with Germany were broken off. The announcement came like a bolt out of a clear sky. The President was not to be inaugurated until March4 following. Within a month of his formal inauguration he announced that we were in a state of war with the imperial German government.

The events that followed were marked by a complete surrender of Congress and the domination of the Executive over the Legislative branch of our government. The President was invested with dictatorial powers; political traditions and the time-honored admonitions of the founders of the government were disregarded and overruled. A Cabinet order had already decreed that American citizens forswearing their allegiance in order to serve in the British army were not to lose their standing as American citizens. Now armies of conscripts were made ready to be sent a distance of 3,000 miles to fight for the safeguarding of democracy in Europe and to protect us from an invasion, possible only by ships which were subsequently pronounced by the Secretary of the Navy to be restricted by their bunker capacity to operations in European waters.

A sudden mad fury seized the people, following a visit of Lord Northcliffe, marked by numerous conferences with publishers during a trip West. The press became unanimous, with the exception of the Hearst papers, on the question that Germany must be crushed. During the floating of the $500,000,000 loan to England and France pending our neutrality, full page advertisements had been generously distributed to papers throughout the country by the Morgan banking interests. In mining regions, in steel-producing sections, in great industrial centers, in cities having large packing interests or sugar refineries, local interests prevailed to influence sentiment for war as a means of profit and prosperity. Public opinion was soon rendered so completely unfit for sober reflection by the continued propaganda directed from Wall Street and British and French publicity centers in this country that a wave of hate against people of German descent swept everything before it. The Germans were not wanted, and papers like the New York “Sun” declared that Germans were not human beings in the same sense as other members of the family.

Yet, shortly prior to the election, a member of the Cabinet and others in the confidence of the administration had come to New York to confer with those whom they regarded authorized to speak for the German element to prevail upon them to influence the so-called German vote in favor of the Democratic candidate, and in one case, at least, a post of honor was tentatively promised to one such spokesman by an agent direct from the highest source.

The crowning event of the raging spirit of repression was the passage of the Overman bill creating the Espionage act, considered elsewhere, under which every liberal paper was tampered with in one form or another, and public assembly, the right of petition, freedom of speech and the press became a memory.

A vigorous reaction against the President set in during the fall of1918. Down to that period he had practically had a free hand in dealing with the conduct of the war and with the European situation. There had been a protest by Senators against the disregard shown that body by the President in the initial negotiations at Paris, but so completely had the Executive dominated the high legislative body, his treaty-making partner, that the protest took the discreet form of a round-robin, which in turn was not only disregarded, but characterized as a presumption to hamper the action of the President.

The November election of 1918 was coming on. The President in Paris issued an appeal to the voters to elect a Democratic Congress to strengthen his hands. Diplomatically, steps were inaugurated to insure the end of the war by the voluntary abdication of the Kaiser in time to influence the elections with the news of a crushing victory over Germany. The name of Minister Nelson Morris at Stockholm, Sweden, as also the name of Senator James Hamilton Lewis of Illinois, was brought into connection with rumors of negotiations looking to the surrender of Germany on the basis of the Fourteen Points in time to enable the news to be flashed to America on the eve of the election as the crowning achievement of the President. But the psychological moment passed. The elections occurred on November7, the German debacle four days later.

Although it was well understood that a victory was at hand, the Republicans swept the country. The great Democratic majorities were reversed, not only in the House, but in the Senate. The Republican leaders interpreted the result as an endorsement of their party, but it was really a popular vote of protest that could find no channel of expression other than the Republican party because of its opposition to the administration on party policies, though in accord with it on many of the radically oppressive measures of domestic policy in the prosecution of the war.

With the Republicans in control of both branches of Congress, the President’s dominating influence began to wane rapidly. When it began to be apparent that his visit to Europe, where he had been hailed by millions as the Moses of the New Freedom, was marked by one concession on his part after another to the superior statescraft of Premiers Lloyd George and Clemenceau and that his famous Fourteen Points had been reduced one by one to zero, the magic slogan, “Stand by the President,” was forgotten. Some one said that on his way to Utopia he had met two practical politicians.

A year preceding men were arrested for failing to stand by the President, as treason to the institutions of the country; now the tide had turned, the rallying cry had lost its force. The country was witnessing the spectacle of its President stepping down from his pedestal to play the game of European politics in the secrecy of a closet, not with his equals, but with mere envoys of sovereign powers, guided by radically different interests from our own.

Thence on the President was at open war with the Senate, which had been kept in ignorance of the peace negotiations and discovered that a draft of the League of Nations covenant, including the treaty with Germany, had been in the hands of the Morgan banking group while the high treaty-making body of our government had been ignored in its demand for information.

A few courageous Senators, notably Reed of Missouri, Democrat, and Borah of Idaho and Johnson of California, Republicans, began to analyze the treaty, and showed that while Great Britain was accorded six votes the United States would have but one vote in the League, and that China had been ravaged by the ceding to Japan of the Shantung Peninsula as the price of her adherence to the League of Nations. Senator Knox directed attention to the ravagement of the German people by the terms of the treaty, and, though a conservative, evidenced the vision of a statesman and patriotic American.

The outlook for the treaty began to darken from day to day. The administration was still confident, and statements from the White House declared the treaty to redeem all of the Fourteen Points of the President’s peace program. But the constant assaults upon it by Senators Reed, Borah and Johnson in speeches in various parts of the country eventually aroused the administration to its danger.

A conference with the President was brought about at the White House in the summer of1919, at which the Chief Executive expressed himself ready to answer all questions, and a committee from the Senate waited upon him to submit a series of inquiries. It was in the course of this interview that the following colloquy occurred:

Senator McCumber: “Would our moral conviction of the unrighteousness of the German war have brought us into this war if Germany had not committed any acts against us without the League of Nations, as we had no League of Nations at that time?”

The President: “I hope it would eventually, Senator, as things developed.”

Senator McCumber: “Do you think if Germany had committed no act of war or no act of injustice against our citizens that we would have got into the war?”

The President: “I do think so.”

Senator McCumber: “You think we would have gotten in anyway?”

The President: “I do.”

The Republican leader in the House of Representatives, Representative Mann, in1916 had declared “Wilson is determined to plunge us into war with Germany.” Three years later the admission that we would have been in the war even “if Germany had committed no act of war or no act of injustice against our citizens” came from the White House, and Senators stood appalled at the revelation.

The President’s frank admission that the administration would have drifted into war regardless of what Germany had done or might do, is strangely in accord with statements contained in the great historic work on the World War by the former French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hanotaux, who writes:

The description makes it easy to identify the three diplomats who gave France this assurance; they were Robert Bacon, Roosevelt’s ambassador; Myron T.Herrick, Taft’s ambassador, and William G.Sharp, Wilson’s ambassador to Paris. This promise was given in September, 1914. There had then been no alleged outrages against American rights. The U-boat war had not been started. The Lusitania was not sunk until May, 1915. Obviously, then, the sinking of the Lusitania, the U-boat raids, and other alleged offenses, were mere pretexts of these “50,000 influential persons” in a propaganda to precipitate their hundred million fellow-citizens into the bloody European complication.

No compromise now seemed possible. The Senate was determined to take charge of the treaty, and the President prepared to appeal to the country by a series of speeches which carried him through the West as far as the Pacific Coast. During the trip he denounced the opposition Senators with strong invective, culminating in violent outbreaks of temper. But apparently his spell over the public mind, the seduction of his phrases, had been broken. Suddenly came the news of his physical breakdown, followed by his immediate return to Washington under the care of physicians, and a long period of confinement with the attendance of various specialists. Still he continued to direct the fight in the Senate for the ratification of the League of Nations and the treaty with Germany without the crossing of a “t” or the dotting of an“i.”

On November 19, 1919, the question came to a vote on a resolution of Senator Underwood, resulting in the defeat of the administration measure by a vote of 38for and 53against it. The only Republican voting with the administration was McCumber of North Dakota, seven Democrats voting against ratification with the Republicans. They were Gore of Oklahoma, Reed of Missouri, Shields of Tennessee, Smith of Georgia, Thomas of Colorado, Trammell of Florida and Walsh of Massachusetts.