Part 1 (2/2)

Certain large political principles stand out in Wilson's writings and career as Governor and President. Of these the most striking, perhaps, is his conviction that the President of the United States must be something more than a mere executive superintendent. The entire responsibility for the administration of government, he believed, should rest upon the President, and in order to meet that responsibility, he must keep the reins of control in his own hands. In his first essays and in his later writings Wilson expressed his disgust with the system of congressional committees which threw enormous power into the hands of irresponsible professional politicians, and called for a President who would break that system and exercise greater directive authority. For a time he seemed, under the influence of Bagehot, to have believed in the feasibility of introducing something like the parliamentary system into the government of the United States. To the last he regarded the President as a sort of Prime Minister, at the head of his party in the Legislature and able to count absolutely upon its loyalty. More than this, he believed that the President should take a large share of responsibility for the legislative programme and ought to push this programme through by all means at his disposal. Such a creed appeared in his early writings and was largely carried into operation during his administration. We find him bringing all possible pressure upon the New Jersey Legislature in order to redeem his campaign pledges. When elected President, he went directly to Congress with his message, instead of sending it to be read. Time and again he intervened to forward his special legislative interests by direct influence.

Both in his writings and in his actions Wilson has always advocated government by party. Theoretically and in practice he has been opposed to coalition government, for, in his belief, it divides responsibility.

Although by no means an advocate of the old-type spoils system, rewards for party service seem to him essential. Curiously enough, while insisting that the President is the leader of his party like a Prime Minister, he has also described him, with an apparent lack of logic, as the leader of the country. Because Wilson has thus confused party and people, it is easy to understand why he has at times claimed to represent the nation when, in reality, he was merely representing partisan views.

Such an att.i.tude is naturally irritating to the Opposition and explains something of the virulence that characterized the attacks made upon him in 1918 and later.

Wilson's political sentiments are tinged by a constant and intense interest in the common man. More than once he has insisted that it was more important to know what was said by the fireside than what was said in the council chamber. His strongest political weapon, he believes, has been the appeal over the heads of politicians to public opinion. His dislike of cliques and his strong prejudice against anything that savors of special privilege shone clear in his attack upon the Princeton club system, and the same light has not infrequently dazzled his vision as President. Thus, while by no means a radical, he instinctively turned to the support of labor in its struggles with capital because of the abuse of its privilege by capital in the past and regardless of more recent abuse of its power by labor. Similarly at the Peace Conference his sympathies were naturally with every weak state and every minority group.

Such tendencies may have been strengthened by the intensity of his religious convictions. There have been few men holding high office in recent times so deeply and constantly affected by Christian faith as Woodrow Wilson. The son of a clergyman and subjected during his early years to the most lively and devout sort of Presbyterianism, he preserved in his own family circle, in later years, a similar atmosphere. Nor was his conviction of the immanence and spiritual guidance of the Deity ever divorced from his professional and public life. We can discover in his presidential speeches many indications of his belief that the duties he had undertaken were laid upon him by G.o.d and that he might not deviate from what seemed to him the straight and appointed path. There is something reminiscent of Calvin in the stern and unswerving determination not to compromise for the sake of ephemeral advantage. This aspect of Wilson has been caught by a British critic, J. M. Keynes, who describes the President as a Nonconformist minister, whose thought and temperament were essentially theological, not intellectual, ”with all the strength and weakness of that manner of thought, feeling, and expression.” The observation is exact, although it does not in itself completely explain Wilson. Certainly nothing could be more characteristic of the President than the text of a Baccalaureate sermon which he preached at Princeton in 1907: ”And be ye not conformed to this world.” He believed with intensity that each individual must set up for himself a moral standard, which he must rigidly maintain regardless of the opinions of the community.

Entirely natural, therefore, is the emphasis which he has placed, whether as President of Princeton or of the United States, upon moral rather than material virtues. This, indeed, has been the essence of his political idealism. Such an emphasis has been for him at once a source of political strength and of weakness. The moralist unquestionably secures wide popular support; but he also wearies his audience, and many a voter has turned from Wilson in the spirit that led the Athenian to vote for the ostracism of Aristides, because he was tired of hearing him called ”the Just.” Whatever the immediate political effects, the country owes to Wilson a debt, which historians will doubtless acknowledge, for his insistence that morality must go hand in hand with public policy, that as with individuals, so with governments, true greatness is won by service rather than by acquisition, by sacrifice rather than by aggression.

Wilson and Treitschke are at opposite poles.

During his academic career Wilson seems to have displayed little interest in foreign affairs, and his knowledge of European politics, although sufficient for him to produce an admirable handbook on governments, including foreign as well as our own, was probably not profound. During his first year in the White House, he was typical of the Democratic party, which then approved the political isolation of the United States, abhorred the kind of commercial imperialism summed up in the phrase ”dollar diplomacy,” and apparently believed that the essence of foreign policy was to keep one's own hands clean. The development of Wilson from this parochial point of view to one which centers his whole being upon a policy of unselfish international service, forms, to a large extent, the main thread of the narrative which follows.

CHAPTER II

NEUTRALITY

Despite the wars and rumors of wars in Europe after 1910, few Americans perceived the gathering of the clouds, and probably not one in ten thousand felt more than an ordinary thrill of interest on the morning of June 29, 1914, when they read that the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria had been a.s.sa.s.sinated. Nor, a month later, when it became obvious that the resulting crisis was to precipitate another war in the Balkans, did most Americans realize that the world was hovering on the brink of momentous events. Not even when the most dire forebodings were realized and the great powers of Europe were drawn into the quarrel, could America appreciate its significance. Crowds gazed upon the bulletin boards and tried to picture the steady advance of German field-gray through the streets of Liege, asked their neighbors what were these French 75's, and endeavored to locate Mons and Verdun on inadequate maps. Interest could not be more intense, but it was the interest of the moving-picture devotee. Even the romantic voyage of the _Kronprinzessin Cecilie_ with her cargo of gold, seeking to elude the roving British cruisers, seemed merely theatrical. It was a tremendous show and we were the spectators.

Only the closing of the Stock Exchange lent an air of reality to the crisis.

It was true that the Spanish War had made of the United States a world power, but so firmly rooted in American minds was the principle of complete political isolation from European affairs that the typical citizen could not imagine any cataclysm on the other side of the Atlantic so engrossing as to engage the active partic.i.p.ation of his country. The whole course of American history had deepened the general feeling of aloofness from Europe and heightened the effect of the advice given by the first President when he warned the country to avoid entangling alliances. In the early nineteenth century the United States was a country apart, for in the days when there was neither steams.h.i.+p nor telegraph the Atlantic in truth separated the New World from the Old.

After the close of the ”second war of independence,” in 1815, the possibility of foreign complications seemed remote. The attention of the young nation was directed to domestic concerns, to the building up of manufactures, to the extension of the frontiers westward. The American nation turned its back to the Atlantic. There was a steady and welcome stream of immigrants from Europe, but there was little speculation or interest as to its headwaters.

Governmental relations with European states were disturbed at times by crises of greater or less importance. The proximity of the United States to and interest in Cuba compelled the Government to recognize the political existence of Spain; a French army was ordered out of Mexico when it was felt to be a menace; the presence of immigrant Irish in large numbers always gave a note of uncertainty to the national att.i.tude towards Great Britain. The export of cotton from the Southern States created industrial relations of such importance with Great Britain that, during the Civil War, after the establishment of the blockade on the Confederate coast, wisdom and forbearance were needed on both sides to prevent the breaking out of armed conflict. But during the last third of the century, which was marked in this country by an extraordinary industrial evolution and an increased interest in domestic administrative issues, the att.i.tude of the United States towards Europe, except during the brief Venezuelan crisis and the war with Spain, was generally characterized by the indifference which is the natural outcome of geographical separation.

In diplomatic language American foreign policy, so far as Europe was concerned, was based upon the principle of ”non-intervention.” The right to manage their affairs in their own way without interference was conceded to European Governments and a reciprocal att.i.tude was expected of them.

The American Government followed strictly the purpose of not partic.i.p.ating in any political arrangements made between European states regarding European issues. Early in the life of the nation Jefferson had correlated the double aspect of this policy: ”Our first and fundamental maxim,” he said, ”should be never to entangle ourselves in the broils of Europe; our second, never to suffer Europe to intermeddle with cis-Atlantic affairs.”

The influence of John Quincy Adams crystallized this double policy in the Monroe Doctrine, which, as compensation for denying to European states the right to intervene in American politics, sacrificed the generous sympathies of many Americans, among them President Monroe himself, with the republican movements across the Atlantic. With the continued and increasing importance of the Monroe Doctrine as a principle of national policy, the natural and reciprocal aspect of that doctrine, implying political isolation from Europe, became more deeply imbedded in the national consciousness.

There was, it is true, another aspect to American foreign policy besides the European, namely, that concerning the Pacific and the Far East, which, as diplomatic historians have pointed out, does not seem to have been affected by the tradition of isolation. Since the day when the western frontier was pushed to the Golden Gate, the United States has taken an active interest in problems of the Pacific. Alaska was purchased from Russia. An American seaman was the first to open the trade of j.a.pan to the outside world and thus precipitated the great revolution which has touched every aspect of Far Eastern questions. American traders watched carefully the commercial development of Oriental ports, in which Americans have played an active role. In China and in the maintenance of the open door especially, has America taken the keenest interest. It is a matter of pride that American policy, always of a purely commercial and peaceful nature, showed itself less aggressive than that of some European states.

But the Government insisted upon the recognition of American interest in every Far Eastern issue that might be raised, and was ready to intervene with those of Europe in moments of crisis or danger.

A fairly clear-cut distinction might thus be made between American pretensions in the different parts of the world. In the Americas the nation claimed that sort of preeminence which was implied by the Monroe Doctrine, a preeminence which as regards the Latin-American states north of the Orinoco many felt must be actively enforced, in view of special interests in the Caribbean. In the Far East the United States claimed an equality of status with the European powers. In the rest of the world, Europe, Africa, the Levant, the traditional American policy of abstention held good absolutely, at least until the close of the century.

The war with Spain affected American foreign policy vitally. The holding of the Philippines, even if it were to prove merely temporary, created new relations with all the great powers, of Europe as of Asia; American Caribbean interests were strengthened; and the victory over a European power, even one of a second cla.s.s in material strength, necessarily altered the traditional att.i.tude of the nation towards the other states of Europe and theirs towards it. This change was stimulated by the close attention which American merchants and bankers began to give to European combinations and policies, particularly to the exploitation of thinly populated districts by European states. Even before the Spanish War a keen-sighted student of foreign affairs, Richard Olney, had declared that the American people could not a.s.sume an att.i.tude of indifference towards European politics and that the hegemony of a single continental state would be disastrous to their prosperity if not to their safety. Conversely Europeans began to watch America with greater care. The victory over Spain was resented and the fear of American commercial development began to spread. The Kaiser had even talked of a continental customs union to meet American compet.i.tion. On the other hand, Great Britain, which had displayed a benevolent att.i.tude during the Spanish War and whose admiral at Manila had perhaps blocked German interference, showed an increasing desire for a close understanding. The friends.h.i.+p of the United States, itself once a British dependency, for the British colonies was natural and American interests in the Far East had much in common with those of Great Britain.

External evidence of the new place of the United States in the world might be found in the position taken by Roosevelt as peacemaker between Russia and j.a.pan, and, more significantly, in the role played by the American representative, Henry White, at the Conference of Algeciras in 1906. Not merely did the American Government consent to discuss matters essentially European in character, but its att.i.tude proved almost decisive in the settlement then drafted. It is true that the Senate, in approving that settlement, refused to a.s.sume responsibility for its maintenance and reiterated its adherence to traditional policy. But those who watched developments with intelligent eyes must have agreed with Roosevelt when he said: ”We have no choice, we people of the United States, as to whether we shall play a great part in the affairs of the world. That has been decided for us by fate, by the march of events.” Yet it may be questioned whether the average American, during the first decade of the twentieth century, realized the change that had come over relations with Europe. The majority of citizens certainly felt that anything happening east of the Atlantic was none of their business, just as everything that occurred in the Americas was entirely outside the scope of European interference.

There is little to show that Woodrow Wilson, at the time when he entered upon his duties as President, was one of the few Americans who fully appreciated the new international position of the United States and its consequences, even had there been no war. The Democratic platform of 1912 hardly mentioned foreign policy, and Wilson's Inaugural contained no reference to anything except domestic matters. Certain problems inherited from the previous Administration forced upon the President, however, the formulation, if not of a policy, at least of an att.i.tude. The questions of the Panama Ca.n.a.l tolls and j.a.panese immigration, the Mexican situation, the Philippines, general relations with Latin-America, all demanded attention. In each case Wilson displayed a willingness to sacrifice, a desire to avoid stressing the material strength of the United States, an anxiety to compromise, which matched in spirit the finest traditions of American foreign policy, which has generally been marked by high ideals.

Many of his countrymen, possibly without adequate study or command of the facts, supposed that Wilson was inspired less by positive ideals than by the belief that no problem of a foreign nature was worth a quarrel. People liked the principle contained in the sentence: ”We can afford to exercise the self-restraint of a really great nation which realizes its own strength and scorns to misuse it.” But they also wondered whether the pa.s.sivity of the Government did not in part proceed from the fact that the President could not make up his mind what he wanted to do. They looked upon his handling of the Mexican situation as clear evidence of a lack of policy. Nevertheless the country as a whole, without expressing enthusiasm for Wilson's att.i.tude, was obviously pleased by his attempts to avoid foreign entanglements, and in the early summer of 1914 the eyes of the nation were focused upon domestic issues.

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