Part 52

There were hours when it seemed like a gathering in the office of the old American Magazine, so natural and intimate it was.

But these hours were not very many. My business was to furnish at least an article a month for the Red Cross Magazine and to follow the progress of the efforts to bring about a peace settlement including a league of nations. There were days when it seemed to me an inexplicable confusion, a bedlam; but, as a matter of fact, as the days went on I became satisfied by studying the communiqués, following the press conferences, reading the reliable English and French papers and the daily digests of what the papers of the United States were saying (posted at our press quarters), that a practical plan for international cooperation was taking form and that gradually more and more of the delegates of the thirty-one nations represented were consenting to it. To get something they would all sign seemed to me creative statesmanship of the highest order. For each of these nations had problems of its own, political, economic, social, religious, which must be considered before its representative dared sign. Thirty-one varieties of folks back home sat at that peace table, and they all had to be heard. In final analysis it was the failure patiently to listen to the political objections coming from the United States and trying openly to meet them which kept us out of the largest and soundest joint attempt the world had ever seen, to put an end to war. For that is what I believed the Covenant of the League of Nations to be when I heard the final draft read and adopted at the Plenary Session of the Conference on April 28.

But no one could have studied the truly august assembly adopting the Covenant without realizing the threats to its future in its make-up. They lay in the certainty of a few that the problem was solved—there would be no more wars. President Wilson, the noblest and the most distinguished figure of them all, seemed to believe it. But there were men putting down their names who did not believe it, who sneered as they signed; and still more dangerous were the stolid ones who accepted without knowing what it meant. Clemenceau had told his people what the Covenant meant—“sacrifices,” sacrifice for all; he was the only man at the Peace Conference whom I heard use the word, and yet the key to the peace of the world is sacrifice, sacrifice of the strong to meet the needs and urges of the weak. If the League of Nations, led as it has been by the great satisfied nations, had grappled with that truth at the start, it is possible we should not now be seeing signatories take up war to satisfy their needs and urges.

These doubts weighed heavily upon me as I left the Plenary Session. But in the group of exultant Americans who that day saw the world made over I had no desire to voice them. There was only one of my friends to whom I could confide my fears—that was Auguste Jaccaci, a doubting Thomas with profound faith in some things (I never quite made out what): beauty and a directing God, I think. The night after the signing of the Covenant, Jac and I sat long in troubled silence over our coffee and petit verre, for neither of us could believe that the signing of a paper by however many nations could in itself bring immediate peace to the world.

Still I believed with all my heart in the attempt. My business now as a journalist and a lecturer, I told myself, was to explain the intent of the Covenant, what it set out to do, also to warn that it must be given time to work out its salvation.

Before leaving America for the Peace Conference I had signed a contract to go for ten weeks of the summer of 1919 on a Chautauqua circuit in the Northwest. By this time I had an understanding with my sponsors that I should be allowed to talk on what I had seen and heard at the Peace Conference. I now hurried home to fill that contract. I had hardly landed before I realized how bitter was the political attack on the Covenant. Would audiences in the Northwest listen to its defense?

But I did not allow this worry to intrude itself into my lecturing. In fact it was not in me to worry, once on the road, for I quickly discovered I was making what would probably be the most interesting trip of my life. And so it turned out. The country was incredibly exciting and of endless variety. I joined a circuit already ten weeks old in northern Utah. We skirted the Great Salt Lake and traveled from one Mormon settlement to another. It amuses me now to remember how surprised I was to discover that Mormons were like Gentiles, that I at once felt towards them exactly as I did towards different religious sects at home. True, the attempt of taxi drivers, hotel clerks, baggagemen, to convert me when they caught me idle in their vicinity was a bit disconcerting at first, but I soon began to expect it and to find interest in their arguments.

After Utah came the lava country of southern Idaho along the Snake River. We climbed over the mountains into Oregon, went down the Columbia, over to the sea, up the coast to Portland, Tacoma, Seattle. We were in the Yakima apple country and in the berry fields of Puyallup, and everywhere in cherry orchards, such cherries as I had never imagined.

For a week we junketed around Vancouver Sound in primitive little steamers. We pitched our tents in lumber towns built on stilts, crossed fire-devastated mountains into the Coeur d’Alene region of northern Idaho, where one still heard reverberations of the labor struggles which had so agitated us on McClure’s and the American. Then Montana—miles of plateaus and plains, the air thick with smoke, the earth sprinkled with ashes, for the mountains were on fire.

This magnificent and varied country carried with it a varied and compelling human story. Each new town turned up some bit of human tragedy or comedy. These people were pioneers, or pioneers once removed. They knew all the dangers, the hardships, the defeats, and conquests of pioneering. Their talk was of what they or their fathers had lived and seen. Whatever it had been, their hope was unquenchable. Every town we entered was the finest in the Northwest, the finest even when you knew that shifting trade and industry was cutting the very feet out from under it.

This was the land of Borah, but never in all those ten weeks, talking on the League of Nations, did I receive from press or individuals anything but respectful hearing. I was the first person who had come into their territory from the Peace Conference, and they wanted to hear all I had to give. They would do their own appraising.

As the days went by, I sensed a growing bewilderment at the fight against the League. These people had listened for years to people they honored urging some form of international union against war. They had heard Dr. Jordan and Jane Addams preaching a national council for the prevention of war, President Taft advocating a league to enforce peace. In many of the towns there had been chapters of these societies.

On our circuit there was a superintendent who reminded me every time we met that back in the 1890’s he had spent practically all his patrimony going about the Northwest preaching a league of nations. It irked him, he said, that I should be receiving money for talking what he twenty-five years before had talked without price, purely for love of the cause. And no wonder!

With such a background, was it strange that many people in the Northwest should have been puzzled that the Congress of the United States was seemingly more and more determined that we should not join this first attempt of the civilized world to find substitutes for war in international quarrels?

Seeking reasons for this refusal, I felt the one which had most weight with people was the guarantee that France was asking from England and the United States to come to her aid in case of unprovoked attack by Germany, that is, a guarantee which was to remain in force until the League of Nations was a going concern.

I found that most people were against this. They wouldn’t run the risk of having to help France again. I was for granting the guarantee provisionally and for a limited period. I believed such a guarantee would quiet what I felt to be one of the real dangers of the after-war situation, the near hysteria of France. Americans proud of their generous part in saving France from what looked to them like calculated annihilation said: “Why these hysterics? The War is over. The nations are going to enforce peace. The devastated region is to be restored at Germany’s expense. Forget it.”

How could America understand the years of horror France had just suffered, the devastation of centuries of loving labor, the wiping out of three and a half million of her best youth? And most serious of all perhaps, how could America realize what France so clearly realized, that the Great War was but the latest expression of centuries of determination on the part of Central Europe to reach the sea? It must have an ocean front even if this could be obtained only by crossing the dead body of France.

I had spent some hours at Châlons-sur-Marne just before I returned. Nobody in that town was so alive to me as Attila. Fifteen hundred years before, he had led the forces of Central Europe so far and had been stopped; but Central Europe had come back again and again, driven by the urge for the sea. Again and again France had saved herself, but she knew now she could never do it without the help of those who believed her culture one of the earth’s great possessions. She must have guarantees. But how could the United States understand that centuries of experience were behind France’s fear? They had not met Attila at Châlons-sur-Marne—I had.

All of this I talked in more or less detail until in midsummer my lips were closed for two weeks by William Jennings Bryan. Mr. Bryan for many years had been the brightest star of the Chautauqua platform. The management of the circuit liked to introduce him for whatever time he could give and they afford. It meant that the regular performer must either step down or divide his period. The evening was the proper hour for Mr. Bryan, for only then could the men come. Now I spoke in the evening. “Cut your time to forty minutes, and go on a half-hour earlier,” were my instructions. I, of course, obeyed.

Now Mr. Bryan was presenting a two-hour discussion of what he considered the ideal political Democratic platform at that moment. In his planks he included joining the League of Nations but turning down the guarantees to France. At our first joint appearance he rose to condemn guarantees an hour after I had pleaded for them. When he was told of the conflict of opinion he at once looked me up, and in effect told me that I must not present views opposed to his on a platform where he was speaking. He in no way tried to influence my opinion, only to shut it off. I insisted that it was good for the audience to hear both sides. “The audience came to hear me,” said Mr. Bryan; “it is important they know my views.” He did not want them confused as they might be, he said, if I began the evening by airing mine.

Of course Mr. Bryan did not say, “You are of no political importance, and I am of a great deal,” but that was what he meant. It was quite true, and I bowed for the time being to the demands of politics, but only for the moment. The two weeks over, I began again to talk guarantees with more interest on the part of my audience because of what Mr. Bryan had been saying and also, I suspect, less agreement.

By the time the circuit ended, the League was in a bad way in Congress. A bitter partisan war had broken out and Woodrow Wilson ill, his Scotch stubbornness the harder because of his illness, would not budge an inch. It was a sickening thing to watch. The only consolation was that the rest of the world wanted peace enough to make the sacrifices and run the risks a League undoubtedly demanded.

Wilson’s enemies gloated: he was beaten, stripped of his glory; the world would forget him, was already forgetting him. They were wrong.

In the months that followed the final collapse of the League as far as the United States was concerned, I was much in Washington; and nothing I saw was more moving than the continual quiet popular tributes to Woodrow Wilson. On holidays and Sundays groups were always standing before his home, watching for a glimpse of him. Let him enter a theater and the house rose to cheer, while crowds waited outside in rain and cold to see him come out—cheer him as he passed.

On November 11, 1921, the body of America’s Unknown Soldier was carried from the Capitol where it had lain in state to its grave in Arlington—a perfect ceremony of its kind. The bier was followed by all we had of official greatness at that moment: President Harding and his Cabinet, the Supreme Court, the House, the Senate, officers of the Army and Navy, and General Foch our guest of honor. At the end, following all this greatness but not of it, came a carriage. As the packed ranks between which the procession had passed in silence saw its occupants, Woodrow Wilson and Mrs. Wilson, a muffled cry of love and gratitude broke out, and that cry followed that carriage to the very doorway of their home. It was to be so until he died. He was the man they could not forget.

They will not forget him in the future. He is the first leader in the history of society who has treated the ancient dream of a peaceful world as something more than wishful thinking, the first who was willing to stake all in drawing the nations of the world together in an effort to make that “just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations” for which Abraham Lincoln pleaded.

In Paris in 1919 Woodrow Wilson actually persuaded the leaders of the majority of the earth’s nations to help him build and set up a machine for such a peace. The complaint is that it has not done all it attempted. But how can any person who knows anything of man’s past efforts to create machinery for the betterment of his life suppose that this, the most ambitious international undertaking ever made, would from the start run without friction or breakdown, would never need overhauling, even rebuilding?

That is not in the nature of things. The League has lived for eighteen years now. Its weaknesses have developed with experience, so has its usefulness. Its services to the world have been innumerable if not spectacular. If its failures have been spectacular, they have not destroyed the structure; rather they have demonstrated certain points at which it must be rebuilt.