The Confessions Of A Reformer
Frederic C. Howe
[Part 10 of 11]
CHAPTER 30 / WOODROW WILSON AT PARIS
When Woodrow Wilson landed in France he was hailed as a Messiah.
His presence would bring in the millennium. ...Men even expected a
new economic order. They dimly hoped for deliverance from war, a
deliverance that was to come through the great American emancipator,
Woodrow Wilson. For a time Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and Orlando
were apprehensive of this veneration; it was whispered that Wilson
might appeal to the people, and the people might repudiate their
rulers. He might continue to talk to the world as he had talked from
Washington; might refuse to confer, to barter, to sit in secret
sessions.[p.307]
...He had only the scantiest knowledge of Europe, of the men whom
he had to meet. He professed to be ignorant of the secret treaties
that confounded his pledges. The Peace Conference was to be a
personal affair; he hoped that it would be largely personal to him
and Mr. Arthur Balfour. It was to be guided by his Magna Carta, the
lineal issue of other great Anglo-Saxon charters, beginning with the
barons at Runnymede and ending with Thomas Jefferson. Men had
conquered with the pen as well as with the sword. He would bring
liberty to a distracted world by the pen. He would bring it
alone.[pp.307-308]
England fed this isolated grandeur. And England knew Woodrow
Wilson better than did we. She knew him as she knows so many things
that no other country thinks it worth while to know. She had studied
his written words; had penetrated into his hidden psychology. She
knew his strength and his weakness. England had sent Mr. Arthur
Balfour to Washington to win him to the war. Mr. Balfour was the
statesman-philosopher, the model of President Wilson's university
aristocrat. He best represented the England that Mr. Wilson knew
from Waiter Bagehot. The England he had written about, the mother of
America. The Balfour family had always been a family of rulers. They
had no interest in trade. They knew nothing of the vulgarity of
practical politics. Other British emissaries had been picked with
the same insight. And England bowed to the Messianic Wilson; she
accepted him on his own measure of himself. The King received him
with sovereign honors at Buckingham Palace. Peers, commoners, people
claimed him as their own. The press sanctioned his idealism as the
idealism of English peoples. They seemed to accept his leadership of
the world.[p.308]
While England swelled this Messianic vision, France pricked it.
The Paris press was cynical; under government direction it sneered.
Daily editorials questioned the President's vision of himself.
Clemenceau said: "God gave us Ten Commandments -- we have
not followed them; but Wilson has given us Fourteen."
...[p.308]
The secret treaties were now brought forward; plans for the
distribution of the spoils, for the dismemberment of Germany, the
destruction of middle Europe. Mr. Wilson professed to have no
knowledge of the secret treaties, which confounded all his pledges,
although they had been printed in America. He was indifferent, if
not irritated, over imperialism, and was wholly unprepared for
criticism and attack from sources from which he had least expected
it. Neither France nor England felt gratitude; rather they felt
resentment that we had not come in earlier. We had made money from
their necessities. That, too, could not be forgotten. Among his
confreres he inexperienced colonial, to be confused, outwitted,
played on; now a savior of the world, now an obstructionist to
speedy peace, now an ingrate to the sufferings of England and
France. That it was primarily their war, not ours; that we had come
in because of appeals for help; that we had abandoned our traditions
and made our own sacrifices, was a point of view to which they were
impervious. That we had made these sacrifices because we sincerely
believed that they too wanted an end of war, received no
credence.[pp.309-310]
The President's Fourteen Points had no supporters. England would
not even consider his freedom of the seas; command of the seas was
protection to her empire. She would not renounce conquest. Conquest
was a word she did not know. Her empire was a trust, a sacred
burden, which could not be discussed. She had seized her winnings by
war in Africa, in Mesopotamia, in the islands of the sea. She had
gained control of the raw materials of the earth. She would hold
them as her spoils. They were not open to disposition by the Peace
Conference.[p.310]
France would draw a cordon about Germany -- Poland,
Czechoslovakia, the Baltic States, and the Balkans. Austro-Hungary
would be dismembered and new countries created. France needed
allies, more enemies of Germany. Italy would have the Adriatic;
Greece demanded Smyrna, part of Turkey. Japan would have Shantung;
she had taken it herself from Germany.
The President was unable to cope with the men about him, who used
every device to confuse, to cheat him. He did not trust his
advisers. He could not possibly know the significance of what was
being proposed, of decisions made, of the things he concurred in. He
wanted approval, but was met with a sneer; he reached out for
support, but found deceit.
And when he had delivered his sermon he had exhausted his armor.
When he abandoned one principle he abandoned all.[p.310]
As the discussions wore on he became fearful of disorder, of
revolutions that were everywhere impending. Russia had gone Red,
also Hungary. Germany was filled with revolution. There were
communist uprisings in Berlin, Munich, Duesseldorf. Italian workmen
were threatening to seize the factories. Everywhere in Central
Europe the peasants were seizing the land. Ireland was in a ferment,
so were India and Egypt. There was even revolutionary talk in
England. The world must be stabilized quickly, or all Europe might
go Red. Wilson had made gestures to Russia before leaving America.
He repeated them on arriving in France; but Russia was a red ogre to
France, the enemy of civilization to the Paris press. His fears were
constantly played on. There was but one security, and that was in
the old order, the old rulers. A stable France would help Europe. A
French cordon between Germany and Russia would stem the revolution,
President Wilson was always restive on things economic, on subjects
of which he was not himself a master. His economic pictures were
those of the early days of the American republic, days of more equal
opportunity. That was his vision of the new freedom. Europe did not
want the ballot; she wanted food. The revolutionary movement was
coming from the submerged classes. Their leaders said that his state
must be wholly destroyed.[p.311]
For the first time in his political life Woodrow Wilson was
compelled to do battle with equals, who knew every detail of what
was being discussed, but of which he had only the superficial
information provided on a sheet of paper. He had expected an
afternoon tea; he found a duel. He expected to dictate; he descended
to barter.[pp.311-312]
Conflict disclosed his loneliness, his fearfulness, his hatred of
men who challenged his power. Conflict disclosed the Wilson who had
bewildered liberals while he was President; who turned on old
friends, who hated Cabot Lodge, who excoriated imperialism, and
seized Haiti and Santo Domingo and sent battleships to Vera Cruz. It
disclosed the Wilson who sanctioned the hate propaganda, the Wilson
who imprisoned men who quoted him against himself. When he himself
was subjected to a personal test, he abandoned the ideals he had
held before America.[p.312]
...the League of Nations, which issued like the Treaty of
Versailles, was a league of conquest rather than a covenant of
freedom. It was an international sanction of servitude to make
permanent the conquests of the war. Like the Treaty of Versailles,
it provided a moral approval of economic and imperialistic
exploitation. It was this that was offered President Wilson in
exchange for his ideals; it was this that was urged upon America,
for with America sanctioning the league there was no great power
left to sympathize with or assist the aspirations of subject
peoples.[pp.313-314]
Mankind needs evangelism as well as achieving statesmanship. Had
Wilson remained the evangelist he might have broken Clemenceau and
Lloyd George. But he chose political power. As the politician he
failed. But his words carrying promise of a new dispensation fell on
soil that had been made ready by the pledges of the war and the
common sufferings of peoples. And the winged words of the President
ripened these aspirations into revolution in Ireland, in Egypt, in
Mesopotamia, in Africa, in India. As an evangelist he achieved what
he possibly least wanted to achieve. He helped to free Ireland. He
heartened the Egyptians, the Arabs, and the Indians. He set aflame
fires that are slowly driving the white men from other people's
countries. It was as an evangelist that President Wilson realized
his reveries of himself. As an evangelist he takes his place among
the great men of history.[p.314]
At home many of his constructive measures were sacrificed to stop
criticism. He gave way on important sections of the federal reserve
system, against the advice of men whom he should have trusted, and
in so doing converted it into a private rather than a public agency.
Under criticism he sanctioned railway legislation and rate increases
that he would not have considered in the early days of his
administration. When assailed by the press and by special interests,
he sought to re-establish himself by giving way. When his advice to
the people in the congressional elections of 1918 was ignored and a
Republican Congress returned, he seemed eager to punish the public
for its acts. It was then that special interests were permitted to
take possession of the government; the Department of Justice became
ruthless in its activities, and privileged business became most
arrogant in its power. When his pride was affronted he was likely to
retaliate blindly, even on his friends. He broke with devoted
supporters, Colonel House and Mr. Tumulty, over breaches of this
kind that involved no personal disloyalty. He broke with Secretary
Lansing as he did with Secretary Lane. Even the assumption of power
by an adviser was treated as personal disloyalty.[p.315]
President Wilson's political life could almost be written about
his supersensitiveness. It is one of the most dangerous qualities a
public man can have; it leads to the sacrifice of the public, to
retaliations, to inability to co-operate. This is especially true
when it arises from a sense of insecurity. Then it is that men
create fictions of themselves, that they only half believe. It is
their half-belief that makes them so sensitive.[p.315]
When President Wilson returned to America the people were ready to
accept his failures and understand the cause. It was his assertion
that he had brought back the peace he had promised that turned the
tide. The people did not believe what he said. They heckled him in
his meetings. They forced him to see himself. It was then that his
strength gave way, his health broke. He lost his vision of himself
when he discovered that it was no longer held by others. The
pinnacle from which he fell was within himself. That was the tragedy
of the Peace Messiah.
President Wilson remains one of the world's great men. He saw life
in great principles; he knew what the distracted world needed. His
phrases won permanent victories; they inspired peoples; possibly
they won the war. He left humanity better for what he said; he
enriched it by the unsullied idealism of his messages. He missed
being one of the world's great heroes by choosing to be something
other than what he was. He would not remain what his instinctive
self would have chosen to remain, a maker of ideals by which other
peoples should chart their course.[p.316]
CHAPTER 31 / UNLEARNING
I had been unlearning a great part of my life, sometimes with
pleasure, sometimes with pain. The process had begun at Johns
Hopkins, where I lost my Meadville moralities. At Cleveland my
university categories of good people and bad people
had been challenged; Tom Johnson gave me a picture of economic
freedom that displaced the confusion T had gotten from books; with
him I had seen the unrealities of the Constitution and of the
political machinery with which we were compelled to work. The war
had changed an abiding faith in the state into questionings of it.
Ellis Island had disclosed hysterias, hatreds, passions of which
democracy was capable; Washington had revealed the willingness of
men to make profit from the sufferings of the people.
There remained the leader, Woodrow Wilson; he kept the fires of my
faith burning. And at Paris I had lost him.
The fairly good, comfortable world, with its respectabilities and
illusions, that I had cherished all the way from Meadville, had
begun to crumble. Paris made some things clear.
The scholar was not leading. He did not know what it was all
about.
The liberal could not save the world. He wanted to patch.
Facts were of little value. Paris had all the facts in the world.
Van-loads of facts. Tons of experts' reports -- an army of
experts.[p.317]
Men did not believe in the truth. They lied quite frankly. Sacred
pledges were scraps of paper. Men smiled at America's morality. All
Paris enjoyed Clemenceau's reference to America's "tin Jesus."[pp.317-318]
There were realists in Paris; these facts that I had painfully
discovered were the A B C of their political philosophy. Like
scientists they saw through unrealities. They gave me keys that
unlocked mysteries; clews that explained things that I had only half
understood. I began to see the political world in which I had lived
as an astronomer sees the universe, as the microscopist sees the
atom. It was one. There was cause and effect; the problem was to
find the universal cause. There was disease; the problem was to find
the universal cure.
And thinking things through I began to see similarities,
parallels, universal conditions. The scholar had failed at home as
he had failed abroad. Facts were of little value; morality did not
guide men. In America, as in Europe, there was conquest, plunder.
Plunder was the universal object of men who made war on the city, on
the state, on the nation, as it was the object in international
wars. Conquest meant war; plunder meant force. The weapons men used
were inconsequential.
The Great War was one kind of war; the struggles in Cleveland, San
Francisco, Toledo, Ohio, Wisconsin were another kind of war. I had
followed these wars as a magazine writer, had used war terms, but
only as metaphors. Now I saw they described realities. Men made war
on people of their own blood as they made war on other peoples. They
made war with corruption as they made war with machine guns.
Democracy had been violated at home as it had been violated in
Belgium. War had many disguises, many weapons; ballots or bullets,
press propaganda or poison-gas, but it was always war. There was one
class in the counting-room, another in the trenches. In America men
made war to obtain wealth that they did not create; to enjoy
privileges they could only enjoy through war on the political
state.[pp.318-319]
In Europe men had so bent the state to private ends that the World
War had come as a consequence. To realists at Paris it was a
collision of economic forces. Paris admitted that the war was
economic; French generals in the occupied territory spoke to me of
its economic cause as though it were a truism. Guilt would have to
be restated. It was not personal, it was impersonal and economic.
Wars were made back home. They could only be ended back home. The
world was ruled by an exploiting class that ruled in the interest of
the things it owned. Tories and liberals, landlords and capitalists,
all looked upon the political state as did the spoils man; it was a
thing to give them private gain.
Existing governments could not end war. They were ruled by men who
wanted things that made for war. The League of Nations could do
little. It represented the states ruled for privileges. The League
of Nations could not rise higher than its source. It was like the
good government movements of America, the Municipal Association in
Cleveland. They wanted to cure corruption without getting rid of the
cause of corruption, as men in Paris wanted to get rid of war
without giving up its causes. They would not recognize that
corruption at home came from franchises, just as war abroad came
from conquest. My class either would not or could not see beyond its
own interests. It had failed at home; it had failed abroad.
America could not aid the world toward permanent peace. Our
alleged ideals did not operate at home, they could not operate
abroad. Our State Department was thinking in terms of oil in
Mesopotamia, of oil in Mexico, of gold and railroads in Haiti and
Santo Domingo. The press did not talk of putting Europe to work, it
talked in bankers' terms of loans, interest, getting our money back.
We could not send representatives of the American people to Geneva;
we could only send the kind of men we put in the Cabinet at home.
Righteousness meant getting off the backs of people; it meant
extending to backward nations the same liberties we enjoyed at home.
Until we, ourselves, were ready for renunciation we would not ask
other peoples to begin the process. To end war we must begin at the
cause; we must begin at home.
Facing realities about the world, I began to face myself. I began
to take stock of what I was, as opposed to what I thought I was. And
I began to understand why I had never thought things through before.
One thing was quite clear. I had never been a pioneer. Authority had
always been necessary to me. ...At Johns Hopkins, my professors. I
had always had a leader and a herd. I had abandoned one authority
for another -- in that, as I look back over my life, there had been
original movement of my mind. But I had been a lieutenant, not a
leader. I had courage to follow. At Ellis Island I had found it hard
to stand alone.[pp.320-321]
And at bottom I was a moralist; not a realist, not a scientist. My
education had halted when in contact with certain authorities. I had
not learned to pursue the truth to its ultimate. I had not gotten
rid of the old classifications established in my youth. ...At Johns
Hopkins I learned that democracy needed to be saved; I was
pleasantly convinced that these people, of whom I was one, would
save it. Johns Hopkins gave, in part, voice and dignity to
preconceptions I had brought from home. Tom Johnson had roundly
disposed of my "good" people. When I asked him to separate
himself from politicians and line up with the Chamber of Commerce
and the Municipal Association, he had said to me: "The good
people, as you term them, can't support me. This fight cuts too
deep. It touches too many interests, banks, business, preachers,
doctors, lawyers, clubs, newspapers. They have to be on one side.
And it isn't my side. They will be against me. The only people who
can be for me are the poor people and the politicians, who will have
to follow the poor when the people get started."[p.321]
In New York I stayed with it. I enjoyed membership in clubs,
social contacts incident to my work as director of the People's
Institute. It was good form to be a liberal; it involved no
sacrifices. Indeed, it gave distinction. I never lost my feeling of
being one of the elect, of helping to keep America true to the
ideals of the fathers. I believed that the things I wanted would
come about in time; that they would be brought about by liberals --
liberals as represented by the New York Nation, the New Republic,
the insurgent group in Congress. I was confident that peace
societies would end war. I believed in discussion; in the writing of
books and magazine articles in making speeches. We liberals had the
truth. If we talked it enough and wrote it enough, it would
undoubtedly prevail. By eloquence and reason abuses would be ended;
the state would be cleaned up. I believed in the mind and in facts.
Facts were a Rock of Gibraltar. We had them -- facts about
government ownership, about free trade about land.[p.322]
Aside from a few young men, I could not remember a person of
prominence in the ten years' war in Cleveland who had been converted
from his class by intellectual appeals. It had been a war of
classes. Municipal ownership, the single tax, free trade had no more
supporters in the clubs and among respectable people than they had
twenty years before. There were certainly fewer believers in free
trade, for in my youth the colleges had been filled with men who had
taught free trade; the New York Nation had a large free-trade
following. It was a mark of intellectual distinction to belong to
the free-trade group.[pp.322-323]
I had built my life life first around conventional morality, then
about the mind. Conventional morals did not prevent men from making
war, from corrupting the state, from destroying democracy. There
were as many different kinds of morals as there were groups that
held them. ...[p.323]
And the mind had failed as completely as morals. Men did not think
when social problems were involved. They did not use the mind. It
refused to work against economic interest. This was so obviously
true that I wondered it had not been stated. The mind worked with
wonderful precision in the production of wealth, in the making of
machines, in the realm of science, in all those fields where men
were achieving their own lives and instincts. But when logic,
evidence, convincing facts pointed one way and individual or class
interest pointed another the mind closed itself to reason and
refused to function. The world had not been saved by morality.
Apparently it had little to hope for from the human
mind.[pp.323-324]
But I made one reconciling discovery: my dreams -- the things I
wanted -- were still alive under the ruins of most of what I had
thought. I had wanted, since Johns Hopkins, to change things.
Freedom seemed to me the law of life, and the single tax the most
nearly perfect expression of it that had been given to the world. I
would have accepted a lot of evil to get free trade, to end private
ownership of the railways, to bring in the single tax. I had no
liking for Socialism; did not want to see struggle, initiative
banished from the world. I liked these things and wanted rather to
see them released, wanted every one to enter the race on equal
terms, with no favoritism, no handicap; no advantages due to birth
or ownership. I wanted a world of equal opportunity.
I wanted, too, an orderly world -- a world that had the
distinction that aristocracy gave; all of the personal distinction
of individualism, and all of the wealth that human ingenuity could
create, dispensed as its creators desired. I had no fear of great
wealth, provided it was the creation of man, of his brain no less
than his hands. I had no fear of freedom; rather I liked it, but I
wanted the freedom to be open to all, wanted the color, the variety,
the waste of a world that produced in abundance and spent as
abundantly as it produced.[p.324]
I still wanted all this. But I had been wrong about the way to get
it. My own class did not want such a world. And there was but one
other class -- the workers -- those who produced wealth by hand or
brain. Would labor want to end this universal war, would labor want
a universal peace, would labor want the kind of world I had long
wanted, a world of equal opportunity, a world in which the wealth
created would be enjoyed by those that created it? It seemed to me
that labor would want these things. Labor could not serve privilege,
as privilege could only be enjoyed by the few. By necessity labor
would serve freedom, democracy, equal opportunity for
all.[pp.324-325]
My faith in the "goodness" of my class died hard, but
its death did not leave me insolvent. My ideals were still undimmed;
I had found a class whose interests ran hand in hand with the things
I desired. And once the blinders were off, it seemed that my
distrust of people not of my own class had little foundation. There
were new leaders with vision and confidence. The movement seemed
historically inevitable. Political power had been in continuous
drift from the few to the many for a hundred years; first from the
king to the nobility, then from the nobility to the landed
aristocracy; from the landed aristocracy the drift continued to the
commercial classes. The next step was the last and it could not be
stopped. Labor had to make its own fight, it had to use its own
power; the place for the liberal was in labor's ranks.
At fifty I saw myself as I saw the political state. I had lost the
illusions I had spent a lifetime in hoarding. I had lost illusions
of myself. Much of my intellectual capital had flown. Drafts on my
mind came back indorsed: "No funds." But I was still not
bankrupt. The new truth that a free world would only come through
labor was forced on me. I did not seek it; did not welcome it. But
it crowded into mind and demanded tenancy as the old occupants gave
notice to leave.[p.325]
