John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

Bryce had retired with his aim still unachieved, and T.R.’s old friend Cecil Spring Rice was slated to replace him. Meanwhile Colonel House brought Foreign Minister Grey’s private secretary Sir William Tyrrell to call on the President at the White House.

“We all spoke with the utmost candor and without diplomatic gloss,” House noted in his diary. “If some of the veteran diplomats could have heard us they would have fallen in a faint,” the Britisher confided to House after they left the executive office.

The British washed their hands of Huerta. From that moment on the Mexican problem was in Uncle Sam’s lap.

Bryan was only too glad to leave the day to day administration of foreign affairs to the President. As Secretary of State he felt that his historic function was to negotiate arbitration treaties. He was convinced he had found an infallible remedy for war.

Back in 1905 in an article in The Commoner he had suggested that all the differences between nations should be submitted to a court of arbitration. If nations could agree to a year’s cooling off period while some sort of neutral factfinding commission investigated their causes of friction, declarations of war would be postponed long enough to let hot tempers cool.

He explained his plan more in detail in an address to the Interparliamentary Union in London in the summer of 1906. James Bryce called it “certainly splendid.” The English press reported the project with enthusiasm. Arbitration was officially endorsed by the Interparliamentary Union and by the Liberal government. Bryan’s evangel appealed to the nonconformist conscience then in the ascendant in Britain. Great hopes were raised.

After Roosevelt failed to induce the Senate to ratify his arbitration treaties, Bryan, who was drumming up his plan before Chautauquas and at peace conferences all over the country, urged Taft to try again. At a meeting with Taft and Elihu Root he convinced them that his plan was practical and that it would find popular backing in Great Britain and at least in the smaller European countries. Taft’s arbitration treaties met the same fate as T.R.’s.

As soon as Bryan was installed as Secretary of State he went to work. He used all his skill in political manoeuvering and all his powers of persuasion. Before he accepted the office he showed a sample treaty to Woodrow Wilson for his approval. One of his first acts was to call together the entire diplomatic corps and ask them to submit his proposals to their governments.

The warmth of his dedication to the cause of peace melted the icy scepticism of the professional diplomats. Using the arts of compromise and cajolement he had acquired working with platform committees at many a party convention he allowed the treaties to be worded to suit the individual prejudices of the various governments. While trying to save the spirit he conceded the letter. Starting with San Salvador and the Netherlands he negotiated a first batch of eighteen arbitration treaties, and took them in person to the Senate. Germany was one of the few countries that refused.

Bryan had a knack with politicians, and especially with senators. “I remained in the office of the Clerk of the Senate two days while the treaties were being discussed, answering questions as they arose,” he wrote. While the treaties were being drafted he had taken the precaution of consulting the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs in advance on every provision. Where the two previous Republican administrations had failed, Bryan, by his conciliatory manner and his personal prestige with Democratic politicians, blarneyed the Senate into ratification.

Bryan’s chest swelled with pride under his piqué vest. For years he had been throwing all the organ notes of his voice into his favorite oration, which he called “the Prince of Peace.”

At the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Ghent that ended the War of 1812, his optimism rose to the point where he dared exclaim: “We know of no cause today that cannot better be settled by reason than by war. I believe there will be no war while I am Secretary of State … I hope we have seen the last great war.”

At the formal signing of a large batch of the treaties, amid the whir of motion picture cameras and the jostling of journalists, a lifesized oil painting was unveiled of Mr. Bryan with an arbitration treaty in his hand.

The Secretary had induced his friend Secretary of the Navy Daniels to have a set of paperweights made for him from some old steel swords at the Navy Yard. They were cast in the form of a plowshare and engraved with two quotations: one the soothing words Mr. Bryan himself used when the Japanese ambassador complained about the treatment of his nationals in California: “Nothing is final between friends”; and the other the more familiar phrase from Isaiah about beating swords into plowshares. These he distributed to the signatory diplomats as mementos of the occasion.

WHILE Bryan was happily signing arbitration treaties and assuring Chautauquas and summer conferences that the triumph of peace was at hand, more wary observers of the international scene were expressing misgivings. A few months after the inauguration of Wilson’s administration, T.R.’s friend Spring Rice — then representing the British in Stockholm — wrote Henry Adams asking for his impressions of “the professor’s victory.” He went on to describe the mounting tension in Europe.

In a sort of code used by the intimates of Henry Adams’ and John Hay’s twin houses on Lafayette Square the spirit of militarism was in those days called “The Red Man.” “Isn’t it curious,” Spring Rice wrote Uncle Henry, as he called him, “that we are all supposing ourselves to be standing on the edge of the most terrific disaster (for Europe) which has ever taken place. Even the hardened dip. looks a little solemn when the subject is alluded to at dinner. The appearance of the Red Man in a particularly realistic manner, in the middle of the cocked hats and laced coats, had had rather a calming effect”—he was talking about the latest outbreak of war in the Balkans, which he feared might be the beginning of something worse—“We shall have some red spots on our white kid gloves. But this isn’t yet the real thing. Austria may have given the order which may lead Europe to a several-years’ war”—he was referring to Austrian efforts to keep the southern Slavic nations from getting a port on the Adriatic—“but it is singular to think how tremendous are the calamities that may be brought about at any moment by one slight act, based on what look to you the meanest motives. As a matter of fact it is a peoples’ question, the struggle for existence between races; and this struggle has been going on for ages and perhaps the moment for the decisive struggle has come.”

The Red Man was indeed at large. In Mexico and in the Balkans armed bands fought and murdered and raped and burned. While the armies of civilized Europe marched and countermarched in more and more realistic manoeuvers, the “hardened dips” of the foreign chancelleries cooperated with Bryan and his aides in the State Department as they would humor some child’s game. Perhaps it eased their consciences a little to mutter little prayers for peace at a time when every move they made on the chessboard of power politics brought war nearer.

Woodrow Wilson, sitting long hours at his solitary typewriter upstairs in the White House, was conducting the relations of the United States with the Mexican revolutionists in such a way as to keep the diplomats thoroughly puzzled.

At the end of January 1914 Spring Rice, who was just settling down at the British Embassy in Washington, described the situation in a letter to Sir Edward Grey’s secretary: