Woodrow Wilson : Life and Letters, 1914-1915. By Ray Stannard
Baker. (Heinemann. 15s.) The Neutrality President WREN President Wilson's second `Lusitania' Note, which caused Mr. Bryan's resignation of the Secretaryship of State
in June 1915, was published, warm approval of it was expressed by "a young man named Franklin D. Roosevelt, then Assistant- Secretary of the Navy." Today Franklin Roosevelt is at grips with the same neutrality problem that racked Woodrow Wilson for two years and a half—from the first day of war in August 1914 to the breach of diplomatic relations between the United States and Germany in February 1916. President Roosevelt's task is by comparison simplicity itself. The present war is imperilling no American lives and doing little or no damage to American trade. The Great War began by throwing the export trade of the United States into devastating con- fusion, and before it had been in progress eighteen months— when the period of neutrality had still a year to run—the roll of American citizens killed by German torpedoes was mounting steadily every week.
Round no part of Woodrow Wilson's public career has con- troversy gathered thicker than his handling of the negotiations
with the European belligerents during the neutrality period. The importance of what he did and refrained from doing is not fully appreciated even now. Mr. Ray Stannard Baker is not exaggerating by a syllable when he says that " the war was decided not so much by American battalions on the French front in 1918 as by the President's decisions during the period of neutrality in 1914 and 1915, which involved the disposition. of indispensable supplies of American goods and money.". That is. indisputably true. No one was more con- scious of it than Sir Edward Grey. America, he said long after, had only to declare an embargo on the export of muni- tions as a reply to our interference with her ships, and Germany would inevitably have been victorious. And, of course, an embargo might well have been declared. Mr. Ray Stannard Baker, writing in 1935, evidently thinks it should have been. Every, German and, Irish element in the United States was clamorous for it. But Wilson never wavered. With Lansing to fortify him on points of international law, he declared roundly that " any interference with the right of belligerents to hay arms here would be construed as an unneutral act." Germany was as free to buy them as Britain or France ; if she could not come and fetch them, while Britain and France could, that was not America's affair. So Wilson insisted on America's doing precisely what Mr. Roosevelt is about to prevent her from doing. And the Allies won the War in consequence.
Wilson wanted them to win it. His sympathies were inevitably and instinctively pro-British and they grew steadily more so, though he struggled ceaselessly, for the first year and a half at least, to preserve a genuine neutrality of mind as well as of conduct. The men around him pulled him different ways. Page in London, and House moving between Washington and Europe, were in effect perpetual pleaders for the Allied cause. Bryan, while Secretary of State, and still more after his resignation, was constantly putting the German ease. Even after the torpedoing of the Lusitania' he held that both the account against Britain for interference with American trade and the account against Germany for the destruction of American lives should be left for settlement till after the War was over. Wilson, for all his passion for keeping his country out of war, was never ready to go that length, and in the end he took a united nation into the conflict.
Mr. Baker constantly contrasts Bryan and House. His references to House are usually derogatory (" we find Bryan suggesting many of the things that Wilson was to say and do after two years of futile negotiation by House ") and sometimes unfair. To say, for example, that House's pro- posal for a peace in which every nation in Europe would guarantee the territorial integrity of every other nation was unoriginal, because a fortnight earlier Bryan (" in a letter which House had no doubt seen ") had suggested " that nations shall enter into an agreement to respect present boundaries," is to ignore the fundamental difference (it is the whole issue between the League and Italy today) between " guaranteeing " and merely " agreeing to respect."
As between House and Bryan Mr. Stannard Baker is for.
Bryan every time. In that it is legitimate to agree or disagree with him, and his opinions on such a point raise no question of the fidelity of his portrait of the President. With a mass of documents public and private at his disposal, he has drawn an unquestionably authentic picture of Mr. Wilson through the critical neutrality years. About the fundamentals of Wilson's policy there can be no doubt. He stated them again and again. He wanted to keep his country out of war, and he wanted his country, as the greatest neutral, to be the determining factor in the framing
of the peace. " We are the mediating nation of the world,'' he said in April, 1915, and he never abandoned the aspiration
till Germany forced him to. And he looked far ahead. Mr. Baker prints, I think for the first time, what must be the earliest American draft—probably the earliest draft of any - for a League of Nations. It is from Wilson's own pen, and he wrote it in August, 1914, almost on the morrow of his wife's death. Its four points deserve to be quoted in &dens° :
" (I) No nation shall over again be permitted to acquire an inch of land by conquest.
(2) There must be a recognition of the reality of equal rights between small nations and groat.
(3) Munitions of war must hereafter be manufactured entirely by the nations and not by private enterprise.
(4) There must be an association of the nations, all bound together for the protection of the integrity of each, so that any one nation breaking from this bond will bring upon herself war, that is to say, punishment, automatically."
Mr. William Archer once wrote a little book on Woodrow Wilson called The Peace President. There is justification for the description. But Mr. Ray Stannard Baker's pages show something a little different—a neutrality President striving in vain to remain a peace President. The war President, in a later volume, will be something very different again, but he will be understood much the better for Mr. Baker's revealing picture of his motives and emotions in the days of neutrality, " these days," as he put it himself, " that try men's souls.", WILSON HARRIS.
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