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MAURICE T. W
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My dear Sir:-
We send you herewith Woodro
the War, "Americanism."
A few years ago, our hearts
with the great events of th
now nearly forgotten the im
to, and those that occurred
in the War.
Please accept this token; i
feeling of esteem, and we t
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It was our intention to sen
but due to the income tax r
CERTIFIED PUBLIC
ACCOUNTANTS
NSHENK & CO.
ys and Counsellors
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Wilson's Speeches on
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Lst that you will have occas-
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[you this book last month,
;h we were unable to do so.
ery truly yours,
MAURICE T. WEINSHENK & CO,
AMERICANISM
WOODROW WILSON'S SPEECHES ON THE WAR
lit.
AMERICANISM
Woodrow Wilson's Speeches on
the War Why He Made Them
and What They Have Done
The President's Principal Utterances in the
first year of war; with notes, comments and
war dates, giving them their historical setting,
significance and consequences, and with brief
quotations from earlier speeches and papers.
Compiled, Edited and Annotated
BY
OLIVER MARBLE GALE
CHICAGO
THE BALDWIN SYNDICATE
PUBLISHERS
Copyrighted, 1918, by The Baldwin Syndicate
The Baldwin Syndicate
Chicago
FOREWORD
One of the most interesting and significant facts noted in
glancing back over the course of the war is this: The Central
Powers have been getting worse all the time in their political
morality, and the Allies have been getting better.
The issue between them is now perfectly clear. The Central
Powers are seen to be fighting for the glory and success of every-
thing that is hateful to humanity. The Allies know that they
themselves are fighting to make the world a fit place to live in.
The issue was not so clear at first. It was only as the Allies
came to realize the unbelievable evil that Germany stood for that
their own purposes were purified and they were consecrated to
winning the war for the sake of all humanity.
No one, perhaps, has done so much to bring out the real issue
as Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States. His calm,
clear, steady, eloquent statements of Allied war aims and peace
purposes, expressing the ideals which lay in the hearts of free men
and women everywhere, have made him the world's accepted
leader in the war for world democracy.
The addresses, speeches and statements that have changed the
face of history, brought him this leadership, and flung a peace-
loving nation into the most hideous war of history with joyous,
seflless devotion, are printed again in this little book, available
to all. They are accompanied by notes, international comments,
and a chronology of military and political war events, to bring
out their setting, their significence and their consequences.
Extracts are included from public statements made by Mr.
Wilson before the beginning of the war and during the years before
our entrance into it. These reveal the essential democracy of the
President, and the unfoldment of the new Americanism.
Possibly nothing could recall the course of the war and our
own attitude towards it so clearly as reading in retrospect these
words of Woodrow Wilson.
The book is brought down to include the President's speech
of September 27, 1918, delivered in New York at the opening
of the Fourth Liberty Loan campaign.
October i, 1918. OLIVER MARBLE GALE.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
DEVELOPMENT
BEFORE WAR Seed Thoughts of World Democracy and Peace 7
NEUTRALITY First Interpretation of America's World Role 9
PREPAREDNESS The Dawn of a Fuller Understanding of the War.. 12
INTERVENTION The First Steps Into a World Place 18
"MUST THIS WAR PROCEED ?" Peace Note to the Powers, Decem-
ber 18, 1U16 18
"A PEACE WORTH PRESERVING" Address to Congress on Essential
Terms of Peace; First Statement of America's World Stand "The
Peace Without Victory" Speech, January 22, 1917 22
SUSPENSION 30
"NO ALTERNATIVE" Address to Congress Announcing Severing of
Diplomatic Relations with Germany, February 3, 1917 30
"WE MUST ARM OUR SHIPS"-Address to Congress Asking Power to
Arm Merchant Ships. The Armed Neutrality Address, February 26,
1917 32
THE TESTING TIME
PARTICIPATION 36
"THIS IS WAR" Address to Congress Asking That Germany Be De-
clared at War With the United States. The "Make the World
Safe for Democracy" Speech, April 2, 1917 36
"SPEAK, ACT AND SERVE TOGETHER"-An Appeal to the People
for Unity and Support, April 16, 1917 46
"LISTS OF HONOR" Proclamation of the First Draft, May 18, 1917.. 51
"WE MUST NOT WEAKEN NOW" Message to Russia, May 20, 1917. 52
"A NEW GLORY FOR OUR FLAG" Flag Day Address at Baltimore,
June 14, 1917 55
"WE MUST LEAVE SELFISHNESS OUT" An Appeal to Business
Men, July 11, 1917 02
"PEACE IS IMPOSSIBLE NOW"-The Reply to the Pope, August 27,
1917 67
A MESSAGE TO THE NATIONAL ARMY-September 3, 1917 71
THANKSGIVING PROCLAMATION November 7, 1917 73
"LABOR MUST BE FREE" Address to American Federation of Labor
Convention at Buffalo, November 12, 1917 75
"WIN THE WAR" Address to Congress, December 4, 1917 83
"A PLATFORM OF WORLD PEACE" Address to Congress, January 8,
1918 (Containing the "Fourteen Peace Planks") 95
"ONLY ONE PEACE POSSIBLE" Address to Congress Answering a
Peace Offensive, February 11, 1918 (Containing the "Four Points") 103
"FORCE TO THE UTMOST" The Baltimore Address of April 0, 191S.. Ill
"TROOPS WITHOUT LIMIT" Red Cross Address in New York,
May 20, liils 117
"WE MUST TRUST EACH OTHER"-Talk to Visiting Mexican Edi-
tors, June 7, 1918 120
"WE SEEK THE REIGN OF LAW"-The Fourth of July Address at
Mount V'ernon, Stating Four Peace Terms 12.1
"IMPARTIAL JUSTICE IS THE PRICE OF PEACE"-League of Na-
tions Address, Opening 4th Liberty Loan Drive, Embodying Five
Essentials to a League, New York City, Sept. 27, 1918 13u
DEVELOPMENT
(BRIEF QUOTATIONS FROM EARLIER PRESIDENTIAL PAPERS, AND
UP TO THE TIME OF AMERICA'S ENTRANCE INTO THE WORLD WAR,
SHOWING PRESIDENT WILSON'S FUNDAMENTAL DEMOCRACY, AND
THE DEVELOPMENTS IN HIS THOUGHT UPON QUESTIONS OF NEU-
TRALITY, PREPAREDNESS AND THE WORLD MEANING OF THE WAR.
WlTH DATES OF LEADING RELATED EVENTS.)
BEFORE WAR.
NOVEMBER 4, 1912 WOODROW WILSON ELECTED PRESIDENT.
MARCH 4, 1913 WOODROW WILSON INAUGURATED.
(In his inaugural address, President Wilson sketched out the
social and economic program which he conceived the Democratic
party had been called into power to carry out. The concluding
paragraphs of his inaugural, here quoted, give a high light on his
conception of the obligation and opportunity at hand.)
The Nation has been deeply stirred, stirred by a solemn
passion, stirred by the knowledge of wrong, of ideals lost, of
government too often debauched and made an instrument of evil.
The feelings with which we face this new age of right and oppor-
tunity sweep across our heartstrings like some air out of God's
own presence, where justice and mercy are reconciled and the
judge and the brother are one. We know our task to be no mere
task of politics but a task which shall search us through and
through whether we be able to understand our time and the need
of our people, whether we be indeed their spokesmen and inter-
preters, whether we have the pure heart to comprehend and the
rectified will to choose our high course of action.
This is not a day of triumph; it is a day of dedication.
Here muster, not the forces of party, but the forces of humanity.
Men's hearts wait upon us; men's lives hang in the balance; men's
hopes call upon us to say what we will do. Who shall live up
to the great trust? Who dares fail to try? I summon all honest
men, all patriotic, all forward-looking men, to my side. God
helping me, I will not fail them, if they will but counsel and
sustain me.
AMERICANISM
APRIL 8, 1913 PRESIDENT WILSON DELIVERS A SPECIAL MESSAGE
ON TARIFF REVISION.
(President ff'ilson addressed Congress In person. No other
president since John Adams had done this. It has since become a
common practice witli him. An extract illustrates the President's
attitude toward this subject of tariff.)
. . . we have built up a set of privileges and exemptions
from competition behind which it was easy by any, even the
crudest, forms of combination to organize monopoly. . . We
must abolish everything that bears even the semblance of privi-
lege or of any kind of artificial advantage.
MAY 26, 1913 PRESIDENT WILSON ISSUES A PUBLIC WARNING
AGAINST LOBBYISTS.
(Certain interests rcere attempting unduly to influence tariff
legislation. The President exposed them and invoked public opinion.
Lobbying stopped.)
I think that the public ought to know the extraordinary
exertions being made by the lobby in Washington to gain recog-
nition for certain alterations of the Tariff Bill. Great bodies of
astute men seek to create an artificial opinion and to overcome
the interests of the public for their private profit. . . Only
public opinion can check and destroy it.
JULY 4, 1913 (THIRTEEN MONTHS BEFORE THE WAR.) PRESI-
DENT WlLSON ADDRESSES A REUNION OF G. A. R. AND CON-
FEDERATE VETERANS AT GETTYSBURG, PA.
Here is a great people, great with every force that has ever
beaten in the lifeblood of mankind. And it is secure. There is
no one within its borders, there is no power among the nations
of the earth, to make it afraid.
OCTOBER 27, 1913 PRESIDENT WILSON ADDTSSES SOUTH CRN:
COMMERCIAL CONGRESS AT MOBILE, ALABAMA.
(Delegates ti'ere present from South and Central American
countries. President li'ilson made occasion to reassure them of
our just friendship. Mistrust of us began to disappear after this
address. The theme of it is yii'en here.)
Human rights, national integrity, and opportunity as against
material interests that, ladies and gentlemen, is the issre which
we now have to face.
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
DECEMBER 2, 1913 (EIGHT MONTHS BEFORE THE WAR.) CON-
GRESS CONVENES, AND PRESIDENT WILSON DELIVERS HIS FIRST
ANNUAL MESSAGE.
The country, I am thankful to say, is at peace with all the
world, and many happy manifestations multiply about us of a
growing cordiality and .sense of community of interest among the
nations, foreshadowing an age of settled peace and good will.
JUNE 28, 1914 ARCHDUKE FRANCIS FERDINAND OF AUSTRIA
ASSASSINATED AT SERAJEVO, BOSNIA.
AUGUST 1. 1914 WORLD WAR BEGINS,- GERMANS ENTER
BELGIUM.
AUGUST 4, 1914 ENGLAND ENTERS WAR.
NEUTRALITY.
AUGUST 19, 1914 THE PRESIDENT PROCLAIMS THE NEUTRAL-
ITY OF THE UNITED STATES, AND ASKS CITIZENS TO RESPECT
IT IN WORD, DEED AND THOUGHT.
(The doctrine of America's destiny as the trustee of peace
is first advanced in this neutrality proclamation.)
I suppose that every thoughtful man in America has asked
himself, during these last Toubled weeks, what influence the
European War may exert upon the United States. This great
country of ours should show herself in this time of peculiar trial
a Nation fit beyond others to exhibit the fine poise of undisturbed
judgment, the dignity of self-control, the efficiency of dispassionate
action.
AUGUST 20. 1914 GERMANS ENTER BRUSSELS.
AUGUST 26, 1914 GERMANS DESTROY LOUVAIN.
SEPTEMBER 2, 1914 RUSSIANS CAPTURE LEMBERC.
SEPTEMBER 2, 1914 FRENCH GOVERNMENT LEAVES PARIS;
GERMANS STILL SWEEP ON.
SEPTEMBER 6, 1914 ALLIES TURN- THE GERMANS BACK AT
THE MARNE.
9
AMERICANISM
SEPTEMBER 18, 1914 GERMANS BOMBARD RHEIMS CATHE-
DRAL.
DECEMBER 8, 1914 PRESIDENT WILSON ADDRESSES CONGRESS
NEWLY CONVENED.
(Another enunciation of the President's doctrine of neutralit\
is found in this address.}
We are at peace with all the world. No one . . . can
say that there is reason to fear that from any quarter our independ-
ence or the integrity of our territory is threatened. . . We
mean to live our own lives as we will ; but we mean also to let live.
We are, indeed, a true friend to all the nations of the world. . .
We are the champions of peace and of concord.
DECEMBER 9, 1914 FRENCH GOVERNMENT RETURNS TO PARIS.
FEBRUARY 12, 1915 GERMANS BEGIN TO WIN ix EAST
PRUSSIA.
FEBRUARY 19, 1915 BRITISH AND FRENCH FLEETS BOMBARD
THE DARDANELLES FORTS.
MARCH 10, 1915 BATTLE OF NEUVE CHAPPELLE BEGINS.
MARCH 22, 1915 RUSSIANS CAPTURE PRZEMYSL.
APRIL 20, 1915 PRESIDENT WILSON ADDRESSES THE ASSOCIATED
PRESS, NEW YORK CITY.
(A neutrality pronouncement. Some Americans ivere not con-
vinced.)
My interest in the neutrality of the United States is not the
petty desire to keep out of trouble. . . But I am interested in
neutrality because there is something so much greater to do than
fight; there is a distinction waiting for this nation that no nation
has ever yet got. That is the distinction of absolute self-control
and self-mastery. . . We are trustees for what I venture to
say is the greatest heritage that any nation ever had, the love
of justice and righteousness and human liberty.
MAY 2, 1915 GERMANS TURN BACK THE RUSSIAN TIDE IN
EAST GALICIA.
10
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
MAY 7, 1915 LUSITANIA TORPEDOED.
(Immense excitement followed. Demands for war at once
were loud and insistent.)
MAY 10, 1915 PRESIDENT WILSON ADDRESSES A GROUP OF
NEWLY NATURALIZED CITIZENS AT PHILADELPHIA.
(This speech contained a phrase which provoked much scorn.)
There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight. There
is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need
to convince others by force that it is right.
MAY 13, 1915 PRESIDENT WILSON SENDS FIRST LUSITANIA
NOTE.
. . . it (the United States) must hold the Imperial German
Government to a strict accountability. . .
FIRST LUSITANIA NOTE.
MAY 23, 1915 ITALY GOES TO WAR.
JULY 9, 1915 PRESIDENT WILSON SENDS A SECOND NOTE ON
THE LUSITANIA CASE.
(Germany's reply set up the defense that the Lusitania had
been armed. The second note placed the issue on broader grounds.)
The Government of the United States is contending for
. . , the rights of humanity, which every Government honors
itself in respecting. . .
JULY 21, 1915 PRESIDENT WILSON DISPATCHES ANOTHER NOTE
TO GERMANY.
(The President's third note obtained a promise from Ger-
many to sink no more ships without warning.)
Friendship itself prompts it to say to the Imperial Govern-
ment that repetition by the commanders of German naval vessels
of acts of contravention of those rights must be regarded by the
Government of the United States, when they affect American citi-
zens, as deliberately unfriendly.
AUGUST 4, 1915 GERMANS, CONTINUALLY VICTORIOUS IN THE
EAST, OCCUPY WARSAW.
AUGUST 6, 1915 BRITISH LAND AT GALLIPOLI.
11
AMERICANISM
SEPTEMBER 8, 1915 RUSSIANS STOP GERMANS.
SEPTEMBER 20, 1915 TEUTONS TURN ON SERBIA.
SEPTEMBER 25-30, 1915 BATTLE OF CHAMPAGNE.
OCTOBER 9-10, 1915 AUSTRO-GERMANS CAPTURE BELGRADE.
OCTOBER 11, 1915 PRESIDENT WILSON ADDRESSES THE DAUGH-
TERS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, AT WASHINGTON.
(The President again expounded the doctrine of American neu-
trality. There was a growing tendency to defer to his patience
and trust to his judgment.)
. . . We stand apart, unembroiled, conscious of our own
principles, conscious of what we hope and purpose. . . Neu-
trality is a negative word. It is a word that does not express what
America ought to feel. . . We are not trying to keep out of
trouble; we are trying to preserve the foundations upon which
peace can be rebuilt.
OCTOBER 12, 1915 EDITH CAVELL, AN ENGLISH NURSE,
EXECUTED AS A SPY BY THE GERMANS AT BRUSSELS.
NOVEMBER, 1915 ANOTHER WINTER IN THE TRENCHES
CERTAIN.
NOVEMBER 7, 1915 ITALIAN LINER ANCONA SUNK.
PREPAREDNESS
NOVEMBER 11, 1915 PRESIDENT WILSON ADDRESSES THE MAN-
HATTAN CLUB, NEW YORK. CITY.
(President H 7 ilson was awakening to the deeper meanings of
the World War. This address contains his first public utterance
upon the subject of preparedness.)
. . . we believe, we passionately believe, in the right of every
people to choose their own allegiance and be free of masters
altogether.
The mission of America in the world is essentially a
mission of peace and good will among men.
Within a year we have witnessed what we did not believe
possible, a great European conflict involving many of the greatest
12
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
nations of the world. The influences of a great war are every-
where in the air. . .
No thoughtful man feels any panic haste in this matter. The
country is not threatened from any quarter.
. . . Speak in terms of deepest solemnity of the urgency
and necessity of preparing ourselves.
DECEMBER 7, 1915 CONGRESS CONVENES.
(President Wilson went before Congress and asked for the
greatest navy in the world, and laid down plans for a citizen army,)
Since I last had the privilege of addressing you on the state
of the Union the war of nations on the other side of the sea
. . . has extended its threatening and sinister scope until it
has swept within its flame some portion of every quarter of the
globe, not excepting our own hemisphere. . .
We have stood apart, studiously neutral ... it was neces-
sary, if a universal catastrophe was to be avoided, that a limit
should be set to the sweep of destructive war and that some part
of the great family of nations should keep the processes of peace
alive.
. . . But we do believe in a body of free citizens ready and
sufficient to take care of themselves and of the governments which
they have set up to serve them.
DECEMBER 30, 1915 LINER PERSIA TORPEDOED IN THE MEDI-
TERRANIAN.
JANUARY 1, 1916 ALLIES ARE UNABLE TO PROGRESS AGAINST
THE CENTRAL POWERS. THE WESTERN FRONT is A DEAD-
LOCK. RUSSIA IS HELD FIRM. AuSTRO-GERMANS ARE OVER-
RUNNING SERBIA AND MONTENEGRO. THE COSTLY FAILURE
AT GALLIPOLI is BECOMING APPARENT. SUBMARINES ARE VERY
DESTRUCTIVE. A DARK DAY FOR FREE MEN.
JANUARY 9, 1916 BRITISH EVACUATE GALLIPOLI PENINSULA.
JANUARY 13, 1916 CAPITAL OF MONTENEGRO CAPTURED.
JANUARY 23, 1916 CAPITAL OF ALBANIA CAPTURED.
JANUARY 27 - FEBRUARY 3, 1916 PREPAREDNESS SPEECHES.
(Six weeks after his preparedness appeal to Congress, Presi-
dent Wilson made a tour of the Middle West to line up the
13
AMERICANISM
country for preparedness. Extracts from these speeches show a
growing comprehension of the German threat.)
If there is one passion more deep-seated in the hearts of our
fellow countrymen than another, it is the passion for peace. . .
But, gentlemen, there is something that the American people
love better than they love peace. . . They are ready at any
time to fight for the vindication of their character and of their
honor. . . We cannot surrender our convictions.
We live in a world which we did not make, which we cannot
alter, which we cannot think into a different condition from that
which actually exists.
. . . more than a year ago ... I said that this ques-
tion of military preparedness was not a pressing question. But
more than a year has gone by since then and I would be ashamed
if I had not learned something in fourteen months. The minute
I stop changing my mind with the change of all the circumstances
of the world, I will be a back number.
I cannot tell you what the international relations of this
country will be tomorrow, and I use the word literally. . .
(NEW YORK CITY.)
The world is on fire, and there is tinder everywhere.
It amazes me to hear men speak as if America stood alone
in the world and could follow her own life as she pleased. We
are in the midst of a world that we did not make and cannot
alter; ... I must tell you that the dangers are infinite and
constant. . . new circumstances have arisen which make it
absolutely necessary that this country should prepare herself. . .
(PlTTSBURG, P.\.)
let me tell you very solemnly you cannot afford to
postpone this thing. I do not know what a single day may bring
forth.
. . . no man in the United States knows what a single
week or a single day or a single hour may bring forth.
(CLEVELAND, OHIO)
. . . there may at any moment come a time when I can-
not preserve both the honor and the peace of the United States.
(MILWAUKEE, Wis.)
My fellow citizens, you may be called upon any day to stand
behind me to maintain the honor of the United States.
(DES MOINES, IA.)
There may come a time I pray God it may never come, but
it may, in spite of everything we do, come upon us, and come of
a sudden when I shall have to ask: "I have had my say; who
stands back of me?" (KANSAS CITY, Mo.)
14
VVOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
FEBRUARY 22, 1916 GERMAN CROWN PRINCE BEGINS VER-
DUN ATTACK.
(This was the most violent and dangerous offensive since the
first German onrush. There were anxious weeks before it was
finally stopped.)
MARCH 18-30, 1916 RUSSIANS RECOVER OFFENSIVE IN RIGA
REGION.
MARCH 24, 1916 SUSSEX, CHANNEL PASSENGER STEAMER, TOR-
PEDOED WITH GREAT Loss OF LIFE.
APRIL 18, 1916 PRESIDENT WILSON SENDS A NOTE TO GER-
MANY UPON THE SUSSEX SINKING.
( The President, reminding Germany of her evil record, takes
a firm stand.)
Again and again the Imperial Government has given its solemn
assurances to the Government of the United States that at least
passenger ships would not be thus dealt with, and yet it has
repeatedly permitted its undersea commanders to disregard those
assurances with entire impunity.
The Government of the United States has been very patient.
If it is still the purpose of the Imperial Government to prose-
cute relentless and indiscriminate warfare against vessels of com-
merce by the use of submarines without regard to what the Gov-
ernment of the United States must consider the sacred and indis-
putable rules of international law and the universally recognized
dictates of humanity, the Government of the United States is at
last forced to the conclusion that there is but one course it can
pursue. Unless the Imperial Government should now immediately
declare and effect an abandonment of its present methods of sub-
marine warfare against passenger and freight-carrying vessels,
the Government of the United States can have no choice but to
sever diplomatic relations with the German Empire altogether.
This action the Government of the United States contemplates
\vith the greatest reluctance but feels constrained to take in behalf
of humanity and the rights of neutral nations.
APRIL 19, 1916 SPECIAL MESSAGE TO CONGRESS ON THE SUSSEX
SINKING.
(The President at once informed Congress of the stand he
had taken in the Sussex matter.)
. . . But we cannot forget that we are in some sort and
by the force of circumstances the responsible spokesman of the
15
AMERICANISM
rights of humanity, and that we cannot remain silent while those
rights seem in process of being swept utterly away in the mael-
strom of this terrible war.
APRIL 24, 1916 EASTER INSURRECTION IN DUBLIN.
MAY 4, 1916 GERMANY AGAIN PROMISES TO AMEND HER
METHOD OF SUBMARINE WARFARE.
MAY 8. 1916 NOTE DISPATCHED TO GERMANY, ACKNOWLEDGING
GERMANY'S ASSURANCES.
(This was the final submarine note, closing the discussion.
All now depended upon Germany.)
. . . Accepting the Imperial Government's declaration of
its abandonment of the policy which has so seriously menaced the
good relations between the two countries, the Government of the
United States will rely upon a scrupulous execution henceforth of
the now altered policy of the Imperial Government.
MAY 15, 1916 AUSTRIANS BEGIN STRONG OFFENSIVE AGAINST
ITALIANS IN THE TRENTINO.
MAY 27, 1916 ADDRESS BEFORE THE LEAGUE TO ENFORCE
PEACE, WASHINGTON.
(Tills address is prophetic of the statements of America's
war aims, subsequently repeated many times, and now the Allied
object of the war.)
We believe these fundamental things: First, that every people-
has a right to choose the sovereignty under which they shall live.
Like other nations, we have ourselves no doubt once and again
offended against that principle when for a little while controlled
by selfish passion, as our franker historians have been honorable
enough to admit; but it has become more and more our rule of
life and action. Second, that the small states of the world have
a right to enjoy the same respect for their sovereignty and for their
territorial integrity that great and powerful nations expect and
insist upon. And, third, that the world has a right to be free
from every disturbance of its pence that has its origin in aggres-
sion and disregard of the rights of peoples and nations.
MAY 30, 1916 REMNANT 01 SERBIAN ARMY JOINS ALLIES AT
SALONIK.I.
16
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
MAY 31, 1916 GERMAN MAIN FLEET COMES OUT AND is DE-
FEATED OFF JUTLAND, GIVING THE ALLIES UNCHALLENGED
COMMAND OF THE SEA, SAVE FOR SUBMARINES.
JUNE 5, 1916 LORD KITCHENER LOST WITH CRUISER HAMP-
SHIRE.
JUNE 6, 1916 ITALIANS STOP AUSTRIANS IN TRENTINO.
JULY 1, 1916 GREAT ALLIED SOMME OFFENSIVE BEGINS.
JULY 9, 1916 SUBMARINE DEUTSCHLAND ARRIVES IN AMERICA
ON ITS FIRST VOYAGE.
AUGUST 9, 1916 ITALIANS TAKE GORITZ.
AUGUST 28, 1916 ROUMANIA ENTERS THE WAR.
(One of the greatest tragedies of the war. Roumania, under
pressure and promise from Russia and urged by the Allies, feeling
that the tide had safely turned against Germany, took a fatal step.
She was quickly crushed.)
SEPTEMBER 28. 1916 VENIZELOS, GREEK STATESMAN AND
PROGRESSIVE, SWINGS GREECE INTO LINE WITH THE ALLIES.
OCTOBER 13, 1916 ITALIANS WIN VICTORY ON CARSO
PLATEAU.
DECEMBER 12, 1916 GERMANY PROPOSES PEACE NEGOTIA-
TIONS.
(Germany felt that it would be a good time to end the war.
She was in possession of Belgium and most of the Balkans, and
held a slice of France. The Allied offensive on the Western
front, the vigorous and brilliant French recovery at Verdun, and
Italian activity against the Austrians had shown the High Cnm-
mand that, as affairs stood, they could not win by arms alone
without a high cost. So an attempt was made to bring about a
peace which would postpone the war until Germany could gather
herself together to begin again. This was the first, but not the
last, of the "Peace Offensives," as they have come to be called.
Many times since then she has tried to pull victory out of the fire
hy psychological processes. In these attempts she has had plenty
17
AMERICANISM
of assistance in enemy nations, some of it deliberate and sinister,
but most of it the mistaken infatuation of pacifists, so called, and of
the carelessly ignorant. This present attempt took the form of a
suggestion that delegates from the belligerent countries meet at a
neutral point and discuss possible terms of peace.)
INTERVENTION.
DECEMBER 18, 1916 PRESIDENT WILSON SENDS A NOTE TO
THE BELLIGERENTS ASKING THEM TO STATE TERMS "UPON
WHICH THE WAR MIGHT BE CONCLUDED."
(President Wilson's prestige was at a low ebb, in Europe
at least, after the sending of this note. The Allies resented a sug-
gestion that they abandon the war ivhile Germany was still un-
punished and unrepentant. (Germany had just overrun Roumania
and was holding firm in France and Belgium.} It ivas especially un-
fortunate, coming so closely after Germany's attempts to secure the
spoils of outlaivery by a premature and patched up peace. What
was regarded as a suggestion in the note that the Allied war aims
and purposes were no better than Germany's gave added offense.
At home opinion ivas confused and divided. It is now believed by
many that the note was sent because the administration realized that
America was on the brink of war and the President did not wish it
to be said afterward that he had neglected any step which might
honorably have averted it. Germany, answering vaguely, proposed
again a meeting of delegates. The Allies, replying through France,
doubted whether the time had come ivhen a peace of lasting benefit
to Europe could be secured. The Allies' terms, hoivever, were
given in a broad way, involving restoration, reparation, rehabilita-
tion and guarantees.)
"MUST THIS WAR PROCEED?"
A NOTE TO THE BELLIGERENTS ASKING FOR A DEFINITE STATE-
MENT OF PEACE TERMS.
(Abridged)
The President suggests that an early occasion be sought to
call out from all the nations now at war such an avowal of their
respective views as to the terms upon which the war might be
concluded and the arrangements which would be deemed satis-
factory as a guaranty against its renewal or the kindling of any
similar conflict in the future as would make it possible frankly
to compare them.
He takes the liberty of calling attention to the fact that the
18
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
objects, which the statesmen of the belligerents on both sides have
in mind in this war, are virtually the same, as stated in general
terms to their own people and to the world. Each side desires
to make the rights and privileges of weak peoples and small
States as secure against aggression or denial in the future as the
rights and privileges of the great and powerful States now at
war. Each wishes itself to be made secure in the future, along
with all other nations and peoples, against the recurrence of wars
like this and against aggression or selfish interference of any kind.
Each would be jealous of the formation of any more rival leagues
to preserve an uncertain balance of power amid multiplying sus-
picions; but each is ready to consider the formation of a league
of nations to insure peace and justice throughout the world. Be-
fore that final step can be taken, however, each deems it necessary
first to settle the issues of the present war upon terms which will
certainly safeguard the independence, the territorial integrity, and
the political and commercial freedom of the nations involved.
The President therefore feels altogether justified in suggest-
ing an immediate opportunity for a comparison of views as to the
terms which must precede those ultimate arrangements for the
peace of the world, which all desire and in which the neutral
nations as well as those at war are ready to play their full responsi-
ble part. // the contest must continue to proceed toward undefined
ends by slow attrition until the one group of belligerents or the
other is exhausted; if million after million of human lives must
continue to be offered up until on the one side or the other there
are no more to offer; if resentments must be kindled that can never
cool and despairs engendered from which there can be no recovery,
hopes of peace and of the willing concert of free peoples will be
rendered vain and idle.
THE OBJECTS HAVE NEVER BEEN STATED.
The life of the entire world has been profoundly affected.
Every part of the great family of mankind has felt the burden
and terror of this unprecedented contest of arms. No nation in
the civilized world can be said in truth to stand outside its influence
or to be safe against its disturbing effects. And yet the concrete
objects for which it is being waged have never been definitively
stated.
The leaders of the several belligerents have, as has been said,
stated those objects in general terms. But, stated in general
terms, they seem the same on both sides. Never yet have the
authoritative spokesmen of either side avoived the precise objects
which would, if attained, satisfy them and their people that the
19
AMERICANISM
war had been fought out. The world has been left to conjecture
what definitive results, what actual exchange of guaranties, what
political or territorial changes or readjustments, what stage of
military success, even, would bring the war to an end.
It may be that peace is nearer than we know; that the terms
which the belligerents on the one side and on the other would
deem it necessary to insist upon are not so irreconcilable as some
have feared; that an interchange of views would clear the way
at least for conference and make the permanent concord of the
nations a hope of the immediate future, a concert of nations
immediately practicable.
The President is not proposing peace; he is not even offering
mediation. He is merely proposing that soundings be taken in order
that we may learn, the neutral nations with the belligerent, how
near the haven of peace may be for which all mankind longs with
an intense and increasing longing. He believes that the spirit in
which he speaks and the objects which he seeks will be understood
by all concerned, and he confidently hopes for a response which
will bring a new light into the affairs of the world.
COMMENTS ox PEACE NOTE.
Senator IVeeks: "Ill-timed and unwise."
Senator Stone: "A very timely proffer. ... It is the begin-
ning of the end."
Prof. Ellery C. Stou'ell, Nac-Yorkcr Slaats-Zeitung : "The
President has chosen the psychological moment."
Van Bernstorff: "Now I am positive there will be a r^cacc
conference."
Ne-n' York Tribune: "Now American influence for real peace.
for just peace, is abolished."
Neiv York Jf'orld: "It cannot be ignored, and the powers
must go further than any European statesmen have yet gone in
defining the objects of the war and the terms of peace."
Tagllsche Rundschau (Germany] : "President Wilson is actu-
ated by vanishing profits on the one hand and the fear of sub-
marine warfare on the other hand."
Clemenceau in L'Hornme Enchaine: "The moral side of the
war has escaped President Wilson. . . He believes himself just
when he speaks to all in the same terms."
Gustave Herve in / ictoin-: ''President Wilson has delivered
us full in the chest the greatest blow, the most dangerous since
Charleroi."
20
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
London Observer: "A memorable mistake has been made at
the White House. That mistake jeopardizes all the beneficient
possibilities of the role which might have been and may still be
reserved for the American President at a later stage."
L'Intransigeant : "This act will disarrange the sly maneuver
our adversary is seeking to accomplish at this time. . . He will
not be able to escape the request of the American question."
Montreal Star: "He has failed to see the moral issue."
Toronto Globe: "The prevalent tone of the European press
is one of polite ridicule."
DECEMBER 19, 1916 LLOYD GEORGE MAKES FIRST SPEECH AS
NEW PREMIER.
(He repudiated the German peace proposals, asserting Eng-
land was making war with its new cabinet, not peace.)
JANUARY 6-7, 1917 ALLIED WAR CONFERENCE AT ROME.
JANUARY 10, 1917 FRANCE REPLIES, FOR THE ALLIES, TO
PRESIDENT WILSON'S NOTE.
JANUARY 18, 1917 ENGLAND REPLIES, THROUGH ARTHUR
J. BALFOUR, FOREIGN SECRETARY.
(Mr. Balfour's reply, supplemental to that of France, sug-
gested a league of nations to prevent hostilities in the future.}
JANUARY 22, 1917 PRESIDENT WILSON ADDRESSES CONGRESS
ON TERMS OF PEACE.
(President Wilson announced to the world a basis for peace
and the only basis upon which the United States could join with
other nations to take part in keeping the world henceforth at peace.
It was the first statement of the principles which are now accepted
as the basis of the Allied Peace Platform. This address u-as
cordially received everywhere. It did much to clarify and express
Allied thinking upon the war, and to prepare American thought for
ivhat must now have seemed inevitable in the near future our
entrance into the war; although many politicians and journalists
called it a Eutopian dream, and many felt it ivas another case of
impudent intrusion. This was the famous "Peace without Vic-
tory" address a phrase angrily misunderstood at the time. On
the whole, the address reinstated President Wilson in European
regard, and proved the first step toward that impersonal and dis-
interested world leadership which is now accorded him.)
21
AMERICANISM
"A PEACE WORTH PRESERVING."
ADDRESS TO THE SENATE ON ESSENTIAL TERMS OF PEACE IN
EUROPE.
(Complete )
Gentlemen of the Senate:
On the eighteenth of December last I addressed an identic
note to the governments of the nations now at war requesting
them to state, more definitely than they had yet been stated by
either group of belligerents, the terms upon which they would
deem it possible to make peace. I spoke on behalf of humanity
and of the rights of all neutral nations like our own, many of
whose vital interests the war puts in constant jeopardy. The
Central Powers united in a reply which stated merely that they
were ready to meet their antagonists in conference to discuss terms
of peace. The Entente Powers have replied much more definitely
and have stated, in general terms, indeed, but with sufficient
definiteness to imply details, the arrangements, guarantees, and
acts of reparation which they deem to be the indispensable condi-
tions of a satisfactory settlement. We are that much nearer a
definite discussion of the peace which shall end the present war.
We are that much nearer the discussion of the international con-
cert which must thereafter hold the world at peace. In every
discussion of the peace that must end this war it is taken for
granted that that peace must be followed by some definite concert
of power which will make it virtually impossible that any such
catastrophe should ever overwhelm us again. Every lover of man-
kind, every sane and thoughtful man must take that for granted.
I have sought this opportunity to address you because I
thought that I owed it to you, as the council associated with me in
the final determination of our international obligations, to disclose
to you without reserve the thought and purpose that have been
taking form in my mind in regard to the duty of our Govern-
ment in the days to come when it will be necessary to lay afresh
and upon a new plan the foundations of peace among the nations.
AMERICA'S PART IN PEACE.
It is inconceivable that the people of the United States should
play no part in that great enterprise. To take part in such a
service will be the opportunity for which they have sought to pre-
pare themselves by the very principles and purposes of their polity
and the approved practices of their Government ever since the
days when they set up a new nation in the high and honourable
hope that it might in all that it was and did show mankind the
22
VVOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
way to liberty. They cannot in honour withold the service to
which they are now about to be challenged. They do not wish to
withhold it. But they owe it to themselves and to the other
nations of the world to state the conditions under which they will
feel free to render it.
That service is nothing less than this, to add their authority
and their power to the authority and force of other nations to
guarantee peace and justice throughout the world. Such a settle-
ment cannot now be long postponed. It is right that before it
comes this Government should frankly formulate the conditions
upon which it would feel justified in asking our people to approve
its formal and solemn adherence to a League for Peace. I am
here to attempt to state those conditions.
The present war must first be ended; but we owe it to candor
and to a just regard for the opinion of mankind to say that, so far
as our participation in guarantees of future peace is concerned,
it makes a great deal of difference in what way and upon what
terms it is ended. The treaties and agreements which bring it
to an end must embody terms which will create a peace that
is worth guaranteeing and preserving, a peace that will win the
approval of mankind, not merely a peace that will serve the
several interests and immediate aims of the nations engaged.
We shall have no voice in determining what those terms shall
be, but we shall, I feel sure, have a voice in determining whether
they shall be made lasting or not by the guarantees of a uni-
versal covenant, and our judgment upon what is fundamental and
essential as a condition precedent to permanency should be spoken
now, not afterwards when it may be too late.
No covenant of cooperative peace that does not include the
peoples of the New World can suffice to keep the future safe
against war; and yet there is only one sort of peace that the
peoples of America could join in guaranteeing. The elements of
that peace must be elements that engage the confidence and satisfy
the principles of the American governments, elements consistent
with their political faith and with the practical convictions which
the peoples of America have once for all embraced and under-
taken to defend.
No NATION MAY CAST DOWN PEACE
I do not mean to say that any American government would
throw any obstacle in the way of any terms of peace the govern-
ments now at war might agree upon, or seek to upset them when
made, whatever they might be. I only take it for granted that
mere terms of peace between belligerents will not satisfy even
23
AMERICANISM
the belligerents themselves. Mere agreements may not make peace
secure. It will be absolutely necessary that a force be created as
a guarantor of the permanency of the settlement so much greater
than the force of any nation now engaged or any alliance hitherto
formed or projected that no nation, no probable combination of
nations, could face or withstand it. If the peace presently to be
made is to endure, it must be a peace made secure by the organ-
ized major force of mankind.
The terms of immediate peace agreed upon will determine
whether it is a peace for which such a guarantee can be secured.
The question upon which the whole future peace and policy of
the world depends is this: Is the present war a struggle for a
just and secure peace, or only for a new balance of power? If
it be only a struggle for a new balance of power, who will guar-
antee, who can guarantee, the stable equilibrium of the new
arrangement? Only a tranquil Europe can be a stable Europe.
There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power;
not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace.
Fortunately we have received very explicit assurances on this
point. The statesmen of both the groups of nations now arrayed
against one another have said, in terms that could not be misin-
terpreted, that it was no part of the purpose they had in mind
to crush their antagonists. But the implications of these assur-
ances may not be equally clear to all may not be the same on
both sides of the water. I think it will be serviceable if I attempt
to set forth what we understand them to be.
"PEACE WITHOUT VICTORY."
They imply, first of all, that it must be a peace without vic-
tory. It is not pleasant to say this. 1 beg that I may be per-
mitted to put my own interpretation upon it and that it may be
understood that no other interpretation was in my thought. I
am only seeking to face realities and to face them without soft
concealments. Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser,
a victor's terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be ac-
cepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice,
and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which
terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon
quicksand. Only a peace between equals can last. Only a peace
the very principle of which is equality and a common participation
in a common benefit. The right state of mind, the right feeling
between nations, is as necessary for a lasting peace as is the just
settlement of vexed questions of territory or of racial and national
allegiance.
24
WOODROW WILSON 7 AND THE WAR
The equality of nations upon which peace must be founded
if it is to last must be an equality of rights; the guarantees ex-
changed must neither recognize nor imply a difference between
big nations and small, between those that are powerful and those
that are weak. Right must be based upon the common strength,
not upon the individual strength, of the nations upon whose con-
cert peace will depend. Equality of territory or of resources there
of course cannot be; nor any other sort of equality not gained in
the ordinary peaceful and legitimate development of the peoples
themselves. But no one asks or expects anything more than an
equality of rights. Mankind is looking now for freedom of life,
not for the equipoises of power.
A DEMOCRATIC PEACE.
And there is a deeper thing involved than even equality of
right among organized nations. No peace can last, or ought to
last, which does not recognize and accept the principle that gov-
ernments derive all their just powers from the consent of the
governed, and that no right anywhere exists to hand peoples about
from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were property. I take
it for granted, for instance, if I may venture upon a single exam-
ple, that statesmen everywhere are agreed that there should be
a united, independent, and autonomous Poland, and that hence-
forth inviolable security of life, of worship, and of industrial and
social development should be guaranteed to all peoples who have
lived hitherto under the poiver of governments devoted to a faith
and purpose hostile to their own.
I speak of this, not because of any desire to exalt an abstract
political principle which has always been held very dear by those
who have sought to build up liberty in America, but for the same
reason that I have spoken of the other conditions of peace which
seem to me clearly indispensable because I wish frankly to un-
cover realities. Any peace which does not recognize and accept
this principle will be inevitably upset. It ivill not rest upon the
affections or the convictions of mankind. The ferment of spirit
of whole populations will fight subtly and constantly against it,
and all the vvorld will sympathize. The world can be at peace
only if its life is stable, and there can be no stability where the
ivill is in rebellion, where there is not tranquility of spirit and a
sense of justice, of freedom, and of right.
SOME ESSENTIAL FEATURES OF PEACE.
So far as practicable, moreover, every great people now strug-
gling towards a full development of its resources and of its powers
25
AMERICANISM
should be assured a direct outlet to the great highways of the
sea. Where this cannot be done by the cession of territory, it
can be done by the neutralization of direct rights of way under
the general guarantee which will assure the peace itself. With
a right comity of arrangement no nation need be shut away from
free access to the open paths of the world's commerce.
And the paths of the sea must alike in law and in fact be
free. The freedom of the seas is the sine qua non of peace, equal-
ity, and cooperation. No doubt a somewhat radical reconsider-
ation of many of the rules of international practice hitherto
thought to be established may be necessary in order to make the
seas indeed free and common in practically all circumstances for
the use of mankind, but the motive for such changes is convincing
and compelling. There can be no trust or intimacy between the
peoples of the world without them. The free, constant, unthreat-
ened intercourse of nations is an essential part of the process of
peace and development. It need not be difficult either to define
or to secure the freedom of the seas if the governments of the
world sincerely desire to come to an agreement concerning it.
It is a problem closely connected with the limitation of naval
armaments and the cooperation of the navies of the world in
keeping the seas at once free and safe. And the question of lim-
iting naval armaments opens the wider and perhaps more difficult
question of the limitation of armies and of all programmes of
military preparation. Difficult and delicate as these questions are,
they must be faced with the utmost candor and decided in a spirit
of real accommodation if peace is to come with healing in its
wings, and come to stay. Peace cannot be had without concession
and sacrifice. There can be no sense of safety and equality among
the nations if great preponderating armaments are henceforth to
continue here and there to be built up and maintained. The states-
men of the world must plan for peace and nations must adjust
and accommodate their policy to it as they have planned for war
and made ready for pitiless contest and rivalry. The question
of armaments, whether on land or sea, is the most immediately
and intensely practical question connected with the future fortunes
of nations and of mankind.
I SPEAK FOR ALL FRIENDS OF HUMANITY.
I have spoken upon these great matters without reserve and
with the utmost explicitness because it has seemed to me to be
necessary if the world's yearning desire for peace was anywhere
to find free voice and utterance. Perhaps I am the only person
in high authority amongst all the peoples of the world who is
26
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
at liberty to speak and hold nothing back. I am speaking as an
individual, and yet I am speaking, also, of course, as the respon-
sible head of a great government, and I feel confident that I have
said what the people of the United States would wish me to say.
May I not add that I hope and believe that I am in effect speak-
ing for liberals and friends of humanity in every nation and of
every programme of liberty? I would fain believe that I am
speaking for the silent mass of mankind everywhere who have
as yet had no place or opportunity to speak their real hearts out
concerning the death and ruin they see to have come already upon
the persons and the homes they hold most dear.
And in holding out the expectation that the people and Gov-
ernment of the United States will join the other civilized nations
of the world in guaranteeing the permanence of peace upon such
terms as I have named I speak with the greater boldness and
confidence because it is clear to every man who can think that
there is in this promise no breach in either our traditions or our
policy as a nation, but a fulfilment, rather, of all that we have
professed or striven for.
THE MONROE DOCTRINE OF THE WORLD.
I am proposing, as it were, that the nations should with one
accord adopt the doctrine of President Monroe as the doctrine
of the world: that no nation should seek to extend its polity over
any other nation or people, but that every people should be left
free to determine its own policy, its own way of development,
unhindered, unthreatened, unafraid, the little along with the great
and powerful.
I am proposing that all nations henceforth avoid entangling
alliances which would draw them into competitions of power;
catch them in a net of intrigue and selfish rivalry, and disturb
their own affairs with influences intruded from without. There
is no entangling alliance in a concert of power. When all unite
to act in the same sense and with the same purpose all act in the
common interest and are free to live their own lives under a com-
mon protection.
I am proposing government by the consent of the governed;
that freedom of the seas which in international conference after
conference representatives of the United States have urged with
the eloquence of those who are the convinced disciples of liberty;
and that moderation of armaments which makes of armies and
navies a power for order merely, not an instrument of aggression
or of selfish violence.
27
AMERICANISM
These are American principles, American policies. We could
stand for no others. And they are also the principles and policies
of forward-looking men and women everywhere, of every modern
nation, of every enlightened community. They are the principles
of mankind and must prevail.
COMMENTS ox ADDRESS ox ESSENTIAL PEACE TERMS.
New York Times: "By one bold stroke President Wilson
removes the obstacles to world peace guaranteed by the world."
New York World: "Our own belief is that President Wilson
has enunciated the broad principles of liberty and justice upon
which alone a durable peace is possible."
Washington Post: "It constitutes a shining ideal, seemingly
unattainable when passions rule the world, but embodying, never-
theless, the hopes of nations, large and small."
Cleveland Plain Dealer: "President Wilson has already ex-
erted a great influence promotive of peace. His strongest card
he played before the Senate Monday."
Philadelphia Public Ledger: "President Wilson's address to
the Senate was inspired by lofty idealism, and voiced the aspiration
of the whole world for a lasting peace, founded on justice and
liberty."
Indianapolis Star: "Nobody knows whither this bold and puz-
zling step may lead."
St. Louis Globe-Democrat: "It is either a monumental mis-
take or an act that will fill a flaming page in history."
Toronto Globe: "President Wilson has not aided the cause
of peace in Europe by intervention at this stage."
Providence Journal: "Mr. Wilson beckons the suffering na-
tions of the world toward him with his schoolmaster's cane, and
delivers a prize oration on the millennium, while the civilization
and the liberty of the world are battling for life in the shambles
of a hundred bloody fields."
New York Herald: "When President Wilson emerges from
the dreamland of his fancy and essays to deal with the cold hard
facts of a situation which finds great nations grappling for a
righteous peace, he shows that a proper realization of the senti-
ments impelling those people to sacrifice their all for liberty has
no more found its way into the secluded cloisters of the White
House than has a real understanding of the sentiments of the
American people."
28
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
Boston Transcript: "He seems to have been forced by the
flash of events to the solemn conclusion that he is the keeper of
the conscience of the world not only, but also the exclusive if not
the ordained moral spokesman of mankind."
London Times: The Times refers to "the high and daring
character of his pacifist ideals together with the prudence and
caution of his policy. ..." It asserts that "his project is noth-
ing less ambitious, less splendid than the establishment of a per-
petual and universal reign of peace." Continuing it says: "The
Times believes that President Wilson is the first statesman who
has proposed as a practical policy what has been the 'dream of
many thinkers for a great number of centuries.' "
London Chronicle: "The extreme elevation of the moral tone
. . . will command the unqualified respect of those forward-
looking, liberty-loving elements of all nations to which he frankly
makes his appeals."
Manchester Guardian: "It is a splendid policy, nobly ex-
pressed. How will it be received? By people everywhere we can-
not doubt joyfully and with clear perception . . . The mass of
the nation will do well to see that their rulers render them every
possible favor and support."
London Globe: "We must at your bidding lay down our arms
and dream with you your foolish drearr. of peace."
L'Humanite: "The most incomparably splendid historic mon-
ument that has been given to the world since our immortal Decla-
ration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens."
L 'Information: "It will find a profound echo in the soul of
France."
Le Figaro: "His message will prove a violent shock to the
horrible theory of Pan-Germanism."
Gustave Herve in Victoire: "What a pity it is this masterly
page of social philosophy is marred and almost disfigured by those
three little words: 'Peace without victory.' "
Echo de Paris: "This declaration moves in the serene domain
of theories."
Le Journal: "President Wilson is haunted with the fixed idea
of inaugurating the golden age of universal brotherhood."
JANUARY 26, 1917 RUSSIAN FOREIGN OFFICE ANNOUNCES
THAT PRESIDENT WILSON'S SPEECH ON ESSENTIAL PEACI-:
TERMS "HAS MADE A MOST FAVORABLE IMPRESSION UPON
THE RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT/'
29
AMERICANISM
JANUARY 31, 1917 GERMANY ANNOUNCES RUTHLESS U-BOAT
WARFARE, TO BEGIN THE FOLLOWING DAY.
SUSPENSION.
FEBRUARY 3, 1917 DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS WITH GERMANY
BROKEN.
FEBRUARY 3, 1917 U. S. S. HOUSATONIC SUNK.
FEBRUARY 3, 1917 PRESIDENT WILSON ADDRESSES CONGRESS.
(7/z this address President Wilson stated that diplomatic re-
lations had been broken off, and told why. He still professed to
maintain hope that Germany would respect American rights. This
was the first "German People" speech, suggesting the doctrine,
noiv abandoned by all but a few pacifists, doubtless, that the Ger-
man people ivere driven to war by an autocracy which left them
no other choice, and that they would accept an opportunity to
escape from their masters if a friendly hand should make it pos-
sible. It ivas not then so fully comprehensible that the only hand
the Germans can understand, as yet, is the hand of force their
own kind of a hand.}
"NO ALTERNATIVE."
ADDRESS ANNOUNCING THE SEVERANCE OF DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS.
(Abridged]
Gentlemen of the Congress:
The Imperial German Government on the thirty-first of Jan-
uary announced to this Government and to the governments of the
other neutral nations that on and after the first day of February,
the present month, it would adopt a policy with regard to the
use of submarines against all shipping seeking to pass through cer-
tain designated areas of the high seas to which it is clearly my
duty to call your attention.
(Here the President presents a summary of the submarine
case against Germany, quoting from notes and records.)
I think that you will agree with me that, in view of this dec-
laration, which suddenly and without prior intimation of any kind
deliberately withdraws the solemn assurance given in the Imperial
Government's note of the fourth of May, 1916, this Government
has no alternative consistent with the dignity and honor of the
United States but to take the course which, in its note of the
30
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
18th of April, 1916, it announced that it would take in the event
that the German Government did not declare and effect an aban-
donment of the methods of submarine warfare which it was then
employing and to which it now purposes again to resort.
RELATIONS SEVERED.
I have, therefore, directed the Secretary of State to announce
to His Excellency the German Ambassador that all diplomatic
relations between the United States and the German Empire are
severed, and that the American Ambassador at Berlin will imme-
diately be withdrawn; and, in accordance with this decision,
to hand to His Excellency his passports.
Notwithstanding this unexpected action of the German Gov-
ernment, this sudden and deeply deplorable renunciation of its
assurances, given this Government at one of the most critical mo-
ments of tension in the relations of the two governments, / refuse
to believe that It is the intention of the German authorities to do
in fact what they have warned us they will feel at liberty to do.
I cannot bring myself to believe that they will indeed pay no re-
gard to the ancient friendship between their people and our own
or to the solemn obligations which have been exchanged between
them and destroy American ships and take the lives of American
citizens in the wilful prosecution of the ruthless naval programme
they have announced their intention to adopt. Only actual overt
acts on their part CAN MAKE ME BELIEVE IT EVEN NOW.
If this inveterate confidence on my part in the sobriety and
prudent foresight of their purpose should unhappily prove un-
founded ; if American ships and American lives should in fact be
sacrificed by their naval commanders in heedless contravention of
the just and reasonable understandings of international law and
the obvious dictates of humanity, I shall take the liberty of coming
again before the Congress, to ask that authority be given me to
use any means that may be necessary for the protection of our
seamen and our people in the prosecution of their peaceful and
legitimate errands on the high seas. I can do nothing less. 1
take it for granted that all neutral governments will take the
same course.
FRIENDS OF THE GERMAN PEOPLE.
l r /e do not desire any hostile conflict with the German Impe-
rial Government. We are the sincere friends of the German
people and earnestly desire to remain at peace ivith the Govern-
ment which speaks for them. We shall not believe that they are
hostile to us unless and until we are obliged to believe it; and we
31
AMERICANISM
purpose nothing more than the reasonable defense of the undoubted
rights of our people. We wish to serve no selfish ends. We seek
merely to stand true alike in thought and in action to the immemo-
rial principles of our people which 1 sought to express in my
address to the Senate only two weeks ago, seek merely to vindi-
cate our right to liberty and justice and an unmolested life.
These are the bases of peace, not war. God grant we may not
be challenged to defend them by acts of wilful injustice on the
part of the Government of Germany!
FEBRUARY 17, 1917 FIRST WEEK'S SUBMARINE TOLL 58 VES-
SELS SUNK, OF WHICH 21 WERE NEUTRAL.
FEBRUARY 26. 1917 BRITISH ADVANCE IN ASIA-MINOR; CAP-
TURE KUT-EL-AMARA.
FEBRUARY 26, 1917 PRESIDENT WILSON ADDRESSES CONGRESS.
( This is known as The Armed Neutrality Address. Presi-
dent Wilson asked Congress for authority to arm merchant ves-
sels. He had now given up hope of a change in Germany's U-boat
policy. Americans, including women and children, had been lost
in the ruthless warfare. Ambassador Gerard had been held as
hostage in Berlin, but finally permitted to go to Switzerland.
Meanwhile American shipping had stagnated because owners were
unwilling to risk unarmed ships in the U-boat danger zone. This
request for power to arm ships met with the resistance of "the
little group of ivilful men" in the Senate. AH this time clamor
for war grew. People were becoming impatient witli the Presi-
dent's patience: while he evidently was carefully exhausting every
possibility of averting war not so much to escape it, as to make
all the world see that, when it should come, it was inevitable.}
"WE MUST ARM OUR SHIPS."
ARMED NEUTRALITY ADDRESS DELIVERED TO THE CONGRESS FEB-
RUARY 3, 1917.
(Abridged)
. . . it must be admitted that there have been certain
additional indications and expressions of purpose on the part of
the German press 'and the German authorities which have increased
rather than lessened the impression that, if our ships and our
people are spared, it will be because of fortunate circumstances
or because the commanders of the German submarines which they
32
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
may happen to encounter exercise an unexpected discretion and
restraint rather than because of the instructions under which these
commanders are acting. It would be foolish to deny that the
situation is fraught with the gravest possibilities and dangers. No
thoughtful man can fail to see that the necessity for definite action
may come at any time, if we are in fact, and not in word merely,
to defend our elementary rights as a neutral nation. It would be
most imprudent to be unprepared.
ARMED NEUTRALITY.
No one doubts what it is our duty to do. We must defend
our commerce and the lives of our people in the midst of the
present trying circumstances, with discretion but with clear and
steadfast purpose. Only the method and the extent remain to
be chosen, upon the occasion, if occasion should indeed arise. Since
it has unhappily proved impossible to safeguard our neutral rights
by diplomatic means against the unwarranted infringements they
are suffering at the hands of Germany, there may be no recourse
but to armed neutrality, which we shall know how to maintain
and for which there is abundant American precedent.
It is devoutly to be hoped that it will not be necessary to put
armed force anywhere into action. The American people do not
desire it, and our desire is not different from theirs. I am sure
that they will understand the spirit in which I am now acting, the
purpose I hold nearest my heart and would wish to exhibit in
everything I do. I am anxious that the people of the nations at
war also should understand and not mistrust us. I hope that I
need give no further proofs and assurances than I have already
given throughout nearly three years of anxious patience that I
am the friend of peace and mean to preserve it for America so
long as I am able. I am not now proposing or contemplating war
or any steps that need lead to it. I merely request that you will
accord me by your own vote and definite bestowal the means and
the authority to safeguard in practice the right of a great people
who are at peace and who are desirous of exercising none but the
rights of peace to follow the pursuits of peace in quietness and good
will rights recognized time out of mind by all the civilized nations
of the world. No course of my choosing or of theirs will lead
to war. War can only come by the wilful acts and aggressions
of others.
You will understand why I can make no definite proposals
or forecasts of action now and must ask for your supporting
authority in the most general terms. I request that you will
authorize me to supply our merchant ships with defensive arms.
33
AMERICANISM
should that become necessary, and with the means of using them,
and to employ any other instrumentalities or methods that may
be necessary and adequate to protect our ships and our people
in their legitimate and peaceful pursuits on the seas.
THE RIGHTS OF HUMANITY ARE AT STAKE.
I have spoken of our commerce and of the legitimate errands
of our people on the seas, but you will not be misled as to my
main thought, the thought that lies beneath these phrases and
gives them dignity and weight. It is not of material interests
merely that we are thinking. It is, rather, of fundamental human
rights, chief of all the rights of life itself. I am thinking, not
only of the rights of Americans to go and come about their proper
business by way of the sea, but also of something much deeper,
much more fundamental than that. I am thinking of those rights
of humanity without which there is no civilization. My theme
is of those great principles of compassion and of protection which
mankind has sought to throw about human lives, the lives of
non-combatants, the lives of men icho are peacefully at work
'lee pin ff the industrial processes of the world quick and vital, the
lives of women and children and of those who supply the labor
which ministers to their sustenance. We arc speaking of no
selfish material rights but of rights which our hearts support and
whose foundation is that righteous passion for justice upon which
all law, all structures alike of family, of state, and of mankind
must rest, as upon the ultimate base of our existence and our
liberty. I cannot imagine any man with American principles at
heart hesitating to defend these things.
FEBRUARY 28, 1917 ASSOCIATED PRESS PUBLISHES Vox ZIM-
MERMANN NOTE TO THE GERMAN AMBASSADOR IN MEXICO,
PROPOSING THAT MEXICO AND JAPAN UNITE WITH GERMANY
AGAINST THE UNITED STATES, MEXICO TO BE REWARDED WITH
NEW MEXICO, TEXAS AND ARIZONA.
MARCH 3, 1917 ALLIED SPRING OFFENSIVE BEGINS ON WEST-
ERN FRONT WITH ADVANCE OF BRITISH NEAR BAPAUME.
MARCH 4, 1917 PRESIDENT WILSON ISSUES A STATEMENT RE-
BUKING CERTAIN SENATORS.
(A bill introduced in response to the President's address,
giving him the authority lie had requested to arm ships, luas
blocked in the Senate, and failed to get through before the session
34
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
came to a close, March 3. President Wilson immediately called
a special session, to convene April 2, and issued a statement rebuk-
ing those who had opposed defensive measures.)
A little group of wilful men, representing no opinion but
their own, have rendered the great government of the United
States helpless and contemptible.
MARCH 4, 1917 PRESIDENT WILSON INAUGURATED QUIETLY,
THE DAY BEING SUNDAY.
(In his second inaugural, delivered the next day, President
Wilson pointed out that the world-war was compelling the United
States to take part in world affairs. . . "We are provincials no
longer. . . Events . . . have made us citizens of the
world" and restated essential terms of peace and international
comity.)
MARCH 10, 1917 PRESIDENT WILSON ORDERS MERCHANT SHIPS
TO ARM, FINDING SUFFICIENT AUTHORITY IN HIS GENERAL
POWERS.
MARCH 11, 1917 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION BEGINS IN FOOD RIOTS.
MARCH 11, 1917 BRITISH CAPTURE BAGDAD.
MARCH 13, 1917 GERMAN LINES ox THE WESTERN FRONT
BEGIN TO FEEL THE PRESSURE OF THE ALLIED SPRING OFFEN-
SIVE, THE GERMANS RETIRING FROM WEST OF BAPAUME.
MARCH 15, 1917 CZAR NICHOLAS ABDICATES THE RUSSIAN
THRONE.
MARCH 17, 1917 BRITISH CAPTURE BAPAUME; FRENCH TAKE
ROYE AND LASSIGNY.
MARCH 18, 1917 GERMANS MAKE GREAT "STRATEGIC RETREAT/'
RETIRING ON 85-MILE FRONT, ABANDONING PERONNE,
CHAULNES, NESLE AND NOYON. ALLIES ADVANCE LINE,
ARRAS TO SOISSONS, TO DEPTH OF 12 MILES AND RETAKE 60
VILLAGES.
(This retreat was accompanied by a wanton, -vicious destruc-
tion beyond comparison with anything in history.)
35
AMERICANISM
THE TESTING TIME
APRIL 2, 1917 CONGRESS ASSEMBLES IN SPECIAL SESSION.
PARTICIPATION.
APRIL 2, 1917 PRESIDENT WILSON MAKES HIS FAMOUS WAR
ADDRESS TO CONGRESS.
(Congress had assembled on this day in special session called
by the President. Fall elections had left the Democrats without
a majority in the House, but independents gave them control. In
the evening President Wilson unexpectedly appeared and quietly
asked the Congress to declare Germany's course ivar against the
United States. Hope ivas now abandoned. Germany stood revealed
This was Wilson's first war speech; the first of the long
series of lucid, trenchant indictments of Germany, pitilessly just,
u'hich have united the thought and purpose of the nation and re-
enforced the determination of the Allies to destroy autocracy.
It was received with acclaim throughout the Allied u'orld, both
because of the entrance of a great and just neutral nation into war,
and because of the high moral tone which Woodrow Wilson's
statement gave to this entrance. This is the "Make the World
Safe for Democracy" speech a famous and unique battle-cry
of nations.}
"THIS IS WAR."
PRESIDENT WILSON'S WAR ADDRESS, DELIVERED TO THE CONGRESS
APRIL 2, 1917.
(Complete )
Gentlemen of the Congress:
I have called the Congress into extraordinary session because
there are serious, very serious, choices of policy to he made, and
made immediately, which it was neither right nor constitutionally
permissible that I should assume the responsibility of making.
On the third of February last I officially laid before you the
extraordinary announcement of the Imperial German Government
that on and after the first day of February it was its purpose to
put aside all restraints of law or of humanity and use its sub-
marines to sink every vessel that sought to approach either the
ports of Great Britain and Ireland or the western coasts of
Europe or any of the ports controlled by the enemies of Germany
36
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
within the Mediterranean. That had seemed to be the object of
the German submarine warfare earlier in the war, but since
April of last year the Imperial Government had somewhat re-
strained the commanders of its undersea craft in conformity with
its promise then given to us that passenger boats should not be
sunk and that due warning would be given to all other vessels
which its submarines might seek to destroy, when no resistance
was offered or escape attempted, and care taken that their crews
were given at least a fair chance to save their lives in their open
boats. The precautions taken were meager and haphazard enough,
as was proved in distressing instance after instance in the progress
of the cruel and unmanly business, but a certain degree of re-
straint was observed. The new policy has swept every restriction
aside. Vessels of every kind, whatever their flag, their character,
their cargo, their destination, their errand, have been ruthlessly
sent to the bottom without warning and without thought of help
or mercy for those on board, the vessels of friendly neutrals along
ivith those of belligerents. Even hospital ships and ships carrying
relief to the sorely bereaved and stricken people of Belgium,
though the latter were provided with safe conduct through the
proscribed areas by the German Government itself and were dis-
tinguished by unmistakable marks of identity, have been sunk u'itti
the same reckless lack of compassion or of principle.
A WARFARE AGAINST MANKIND.
I was for a little while unable to believe that such things
would in fact be done by any government that hitherto subscribed
to the humane practices of civilized nations. International law
had its origin in the attempt to set up some law which would be
respected and observed upon the seas, where no nation had right
of dominion and where lay the free highways of the world. By
painful stage after stage has that law been built up, with meager
enough results, indeed, after all was accomplished that could be
accomplished, but always with a clear view, at least, of what
the heart and conscience of mankind demanded. This minimum
of right the German Government has swept aside under the plea
of retaliation and necessity and because it had no weapons which
it could use at sea except these which it is impossible to employ
as it is employing them without throwing to the winds all scruples
of humanity or of respect for the understandings that were sup-
posed to underlie the intercourse of the world. I am not now
thinking of the loss of property involved, immense and serious as
that is, but only of the wanton and wholesale destruction of the
lives of non-combatants, men, women, and children, engaged in
37
AMERICANISM
pursuits which have always, even in the darkest periods of modern
history, been deemed innocent and legitimate. Property can be
paid for; the lives of peaceful and innocent people cannot be. The
present German submarine warfare against commerce is a war-
fare against mankind.
It is a war against all nations. American ships have been
sunk, American lives taken, in ways which it has stirred us very
deeply to learn of, but the ships and people of other neutral and
friendly nations have been sunk and overwhelmed in the waters in
the same way. There has been no discrimination. The challenge
is to all mankind. Each nation must decide for itself how it will
meet it. The choice we make for ourselves must be made with a
moderation of counsel and a temperateness of judgment befitting
our character and our motives as a nation. We must put excited
feeling away. Our motive will not be revenge or the victorious
assertion of the physical might of the nation, but only the vindica-
tion of right, of human right, of which we are only a single
champion.
ARMED NEUTRALITY is NOT EXOUGH.
When I addressed the Congress on the twenty-sixth of Febru-
ary last I thought that it would suffice to assert our neutral rights
with arms, our right to use the seas against unlawful interference,
our right to keep our people safe against unlawful violence. But
armed neutrality, it now appears, is impracticable. Because sub-
marines are in effect outlaws when used as the German sub-
marines have been used against merchant shipping, it is impossible
to defend ships against their attacks as the law of nations has
assumed that merchantmen would defend themselves against
privateers or cruisers, visible craft giving chase upon the open
sea. It is common prudence in such circumstances, grim neces-
sity indeed, to endeavor to destroy them before they have shown
their own intention. They must be dealt with upon sight, if dealt
with at all. The German Government denies the right of neutrals
to use arms at all within the areas of the sea which it has pro-
scribed, even in the defense of rights which no modern publicist
has ever before questioned their right to defend. The intimation
is conveyed that the armed guards which we have placed on our
merchant ships will be treated as beyond the pale of law and
subject to be dealt with as pirates would be. Armed neutrality
is ineffectual enough at best; in such circumstances and in the
face of such pretensions it is worse than ineffectual ; it is likely
only to produce what it was meant to prevent; it is practicallv
certain to draw us into the war without either the rights
or the effectiveness of belligerents. There is one choice we cannot
38
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
make, we are incapable of making: we will not choose the path
of submission and suffer the most sacred rights of our nation and
our people to be ignored or violated. The wrongs against which
we now array ourselves are no common wrongs: they cut to the
very roots of human life.
LET Us ACCEPT THE CHALLENGE TO WAR.
With a profound sense of the solemn and even tragical charac-
ter of the step I am taking and of the grave responsibilities which
it involves, but in unhesitating obedience to what I deem my con-
stitutional duty, I advise that the Congress declare the recent
course of the Imperial German Government to be in fact nothing
less than war against the government and people of the United
States; that it formally accept the status of belligerent which has
thus been thrust upon it; and that it take immediate steps not only
to put the country in a more thorough state of defense but also to
exert all its power and employ all its resources to bring the Gov-
ernment of the German Empire to terms and end the war.
What this will involve is clear. It will involve the utmost
practicable cooperation in counsel and action with the govern-
ments now at war with Germany, and, as incident to that, the
extension to those governments of the most liberal financial
credits, in order that our resources may so far as possible be
added to theirs. It will involve the organization and mobilization
of all the material resources of the country to supply the materials
of war and serve the incidental needs of the nation in the most
abundant and yet the most economical and efficient way possible.
It will involve the immediate full equipment of the navy in all
respects but particularly in supplying it with the best means of
dealing with the enemy's submarines. It will involve the immediate
addition to the armed forces of the United States already provided
for by law in case of war at least five hundred thousand men,
who should, in my opinion, be chosen upon the principle of uni-
versal liability to service, and also the authorization of subsequent
additional increments of equal force so soon as they may be
needed and can be handled in training. It will involve also, of
course, the granting of adequate credits to the Government, sus-
tained, I hope, so far as they can equitably be sustained by the
present generation, by well conceived taxation.
I say sustained so far as may be equitable by taxation because
it seems to me that it would be most unwise to base the credits
which will now be necessary entirely on money borrowed. It is
our duty, I most respectfully urge, to protect our people so far
as we may against the very serious hardships and evils which
39
AMERICANISM
would be likely to arise out of the inflation which would be pro-
duced by vast loans.
In carrying out the measures by which these things are to be
accomplished we should keep constantly in mind the wisdom of
interfering as little as possible in our own preparation and in the
equipment of our own military forces with the duty, for it will
be a very practical duty, of supplying the nations already at war
with Germany with the materials which they can obtain only from
us or by our assistance. They are in the field and we should help
them in every way to be effective there.
I shall take the liberty of suggesting, through the several
executive departments of the government, for the consideration
of your committees, measures for the accomplishment of the
several objects I have mentioned. I hope that it will be your
pleasure to deal with them as having been framed after very care-
ful thought by the branch of the Government upon which the
responsibility of conducting the war safeguarding the nation will
most directly fall.
LET Us MAKE OUR OBJECTS CLEAR.
While we do these things, these deeply momentous things, let
us be very clear, and make very clear to all the world what our
motives and our objects are. My own thought has not been
driven from its habitual and normal course by the unhappy events
of the last two months, and I do not believe that the thought of
the nation has been altered or clouded by them. I have exactly
the same things in mind now that I had in mind when I addressed
the Senate on the twenty-second of January last; the same that 1
had in mind when I addressed the Congress on the third of Febru-
ary and on the twenty-sixth of February. Our object now, as
then, is to vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life
of the world as against selfish and autocratic power and to set up
amongst the really free and self-governed peoples of the world
such a concert of purpose and of action as tuill henceforth ensure
the observance of those principles. Neutrality is no longer feasible
or desirable where the peace of the w'orld is involved and the
freedom of its peoples, and the menace to that peace and freedom
lies in the existence of autocratic governments backed by organ-
ized force which is controlled wholly by their icill, not by the will
of their people. If e nave seen the last of neutrality in such
circumstances. I!'e are at the beginning of an age in which it
will be insisted that the same standards of conduct and responsibil-
ity for w'rong done shall be observed among nations and their
40
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
governments that are observed among the individual citizens of
civilized states.
We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no
feeling towards them but one of sympathy and friendship. It
was not upon their impulse that their government acted in enter-
ing this war. It was not with their previous knowledge or ap-
proval. It was a war determined upon as wars used to be deter-
mined upon in the old, unhappy days when peoples were nowhere
consulted by their rulers and wars were provoked and waged in
the interest of dynasties or of little groups of ambitious men who
were accustomed to use their fellow men as pawns and tools.
Self-governed nations do not fill their neighbor states with spies
or set the course of intrigue to bring about some critical posture
of affairs which will give them an opportunity to strike and make
conquest. Such designs can be successfully worked out only under
cover and where no one has the right to ask questions. Cunningly
contrived plans of deception or aggression, carried, it may be, from
generation to generation, can be worked out and kept from the
light only within the privacy of courts or behind carefully guarded
confidences of a narrow and privileged class. They are happily
impossible where public opinion commands and insists upon full
information concerning all the nation's affairs.
AUTOCRACY CANNOT BE TRUSTED.
A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except
by a partnership of democratic nations. No autocratic govern-
ment could be trusted to keep faith within it or observe its cove-
nants. It must be a league of honor, a partnership of opinion.
Intrigue would eat its vitals away; the plottings of inner circles
who could plan what they would and render account to no one
would be a corruption seated at its very heart. Only free peoples
can hold their purpose and their honor steady to a common end
and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of
their o\vn.
Does not every American feel that assurance has been added
to our hope for the future peace of the world by the wonderful
and heartening things that have been happening within the last
few weeks in Russia? Russia was known by those who knew it
best to have been always in fact democratic at heart, in all the
vital habits of her thought, in all the intimate relationships of her
people that spoke their natural instinct, their habitual attitude
towards life. The autocracy that crowned the summit of her
political structure, long as it had stood and terrible as was the
reality of its power, was not in fact Russian in origin, character,
41
AMERICANISM
or purpose; and now it has been shaken off and the great, gener-
ous Russian people have been added in all their naive majesty and
might to the forces that are fighting for freedom in the world,
for justice, and for peace. Here is a fit partner for a League of
Honor.
One of the things that has served to convince us that the
Prussian autocracy was not and could never be our friend is that
from the very outset of the present war it has filled our unsus-
pecting communities and even our offices of government with spies
and set criminal intrigues everywhere afoot against our national
unity of counsel, our peace within and without, our industries
and our commerce. Indeed it is now evident that its spies were
here even before the war began; and it is unhappily not a matter
of conjecture but a fact proved in our courts of justice that the
intrigues which have more than once come perilously near to
disturbing the peace and dislocating the industries of the country
have been carried on at the instigation, with the support, and
even under the personal direction of official agents of the Imperial
Government accredited to the Government of the United States.
Even in checking these things and trying to extirpate them we
have sought to put the most generous interpretation possible upon
them because we knew that their source lay, not in any hostile
feeling or purpose of the German people towards us (who were,
no doubt, as ignorant of them as we ourselves were), but only
in the selfish designs of a Government that did what it pleased
and told its people nothing. But they have played their part in
serving to convince us at last that that Government entertains
no real friendship for us and means to act against our peace and
security at its convenience. That it means to stir up enemies
against us at our very doors the intercepted note to the German
Minister at Mexico City is eloquent evidence.
MAKE THE WORLD SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY.
We are accepting this challenge of hostile purpose because we
know that in such a government, following such methods, we can
never have a friend; and that in the presence of its organized
power, always lying in ivait to accomplish we kno^v not what
purpose, there can be no assured security for the democratic gov-
ernments of the world. We are now about to accept a gauge of
battle u'ith this natural foe to liberty and shall, if necessary, spend
the ivhole force of the nation to check and nullify its pretensions
and its power, ITe are glad, now that ice see the facts with no
veil of false pretense about them, to fight thus for the ultimate
f>eace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the (?</-
42
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
man peoples included: for the rights of nations great and small
and the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life
and of obedience. The world must be made safe for democracy.
Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political
liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no con-
quest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no
material compensation for the sacrifices we shall cheerfully make.
We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We
shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as secure
as the faith and the freedom of nations can make them.
Just because we fight without rancour and without selfish
object, seeking nothing for ourselves but what we shall wish to
share with all free peoples, we shall, I feel confident, conduct our
operations as belligerents without passion and ourselves observe
with proud punctilio the principles of right and fair play we
profess to be fighting for.
AN IRRESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT RUNNING AMUCK.
I have said nothing of the governments allied with the Im-
perial Government of Germany because they have not made war
upon us or challenged us to defend our right and our honor. The
Austro-Hungarian Government has, indeed, avowed its unqualified
endorsement and acceptance of the reckless and lawless submarine
warfare adopted now without disguise by the Imperial German
Government, and it has therefore not been possible for this Gov-
ernment to receive Count Tarnowski, the Ambassador recently
accredited to this Government by the Imperial and Royal Gov-
ernment of Austria-Hungary; but that Government has not
actually engaged in warfare against citizens of the United States
on the seas, and I take the liberty, for the present at least, of
postponing a discussion of our relations with the authorities at
Vienna. We enter this war only where we are clearly forced
into it because there are no other means of defending our rights.
// will be all the easier for us to conduct ourselves as bel-
ligerents in a high spirit of right and fairness because we act
without animus, not in enmity towards a people or with the
desire to bring any injury or disadvantage upon them, but only
armed opposition to an irresponsible government which has thrown
aside all considerations of humanity and of right and is running
amuck. We are, let me say again, the sincere friends of the
German people, and shall desire nothing so much as the early re-
establishment of intimate relations of mutual advantage between
us, however hard it may be for them, for the time being, to
believe that this is spoken from our hearts. We have borne with
43
AMERICANISM
their present government through all these bitter months because
of that friendship, exercising a patience and forbearance which
would otherwise have been impossible. We shall, happily, still
have an opportunity to prove that friendship in our daily attitude
and actions towards the millions of men and women of German
birth and native sympathy who live amongst us and share our
life, and we shall be proud to prove it towards all who are in
fact loyal to their neighbors and to the Government in the hour
of test. They are, most of them, as true and loyal Americans
as if they had never known any other fealty or allegiance. They
will be prompt to stand with us in rebuking and restraining the
few who may be of a different mind and purpose. If there should
be disloyalty, it will be dealt with with a firm hand of stern
repression; but, if it lifts its head at all, it will lift it only here and
there and without countenance except from a lawless and malig-
nant few.
WE FIGHT TO FREE THE WORLD.
It is a distressing and oppressive duty, Gentlemen of the
Congress, which 1 have performed in thus addressing you. There
are, it may be, many months of fiery trial and sacrifice ahead of
us. It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into
war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization
itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious
than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have
always carried nearest our hearts, for democracy, for the right
of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own
governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a
universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as
shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world
at last free. To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our
fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have,
with the pride of those who know that the day has come ivhen
America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the
principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which
.\-/ic has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other.
COMMENTS ON THE WAR ADDRESS.
New York Sun: "The voice of the Nation."
Theodore Roosevelt: "The President's message . . . will
rank among the great state papers of which Americans in future
will be proud."
President Poincare to Wilson: "Eloquent interpreter of out-
raged right and menaced civilization."
44
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
Lloyd George: "The glowing phrases of the President's
noble deliverance illumine the horizon and make clearer than ever
the goal we are striving to reach."
Wilfrid Laurier: "One of the most important contributions
since Lincoln's time to the literature of freedom and democracy."
M. Ribot of France: "Gives the war its true character for
the whole world to understand."
Chicago Evening Post: "Rarely has the soul of America been
interpreted to America, rarely has it been translated into action
with greater force, with finer statesmanship, with simpler nobility,
than in this mesage of final American revolt against the natural
foe of liberty.' "
Literary Digest: "Worked a miracle of crystallization and
unification in American sentiment."
Figaro: "The whole world realizes the deeper meaning of
the war of 1914."
Paris Matin: "The nobility and grandeur of this action are
heightened by the sublimity and the simplicity with which this pur-
pose is expressed by the illustrious head of this great democracy.
If the world had the slightest doubt as to the profound meaning
of the war the message of the President of the United States
would forever dissipate all obscurity."
Petit Journal: "It brings a moral power greater than all
these." (Credit, resources, fleet, etc.)
Journal: "A moral condemnation of Germany. It is her ban-
ishment from the ranks of the nations. . ."
Petit Parisian: "Her recognized and positive disinterestedness
accentuates and makes clear the character of the war."
Manchester Guardian: "Our greatest victory since the war
began."
London Daily News: "An appeal as noble and as moving
as any ever addressed to the sons of men; the authentic voice of
humanity, stating the issue. We hard pressed nations . . . can-
not but feel the moral uplifting and precious moral endorsement
of forces inspired by such an ideal. Because he has
declared a new and indisputable gospel in the governance of men,
President Wilson's speech has echoed in our hearts like no other
utterance in these days."
London Evening Star: "It sounds the knell of autocracy."
Pall Mall Gazette: "A crusade more than worthy of its best
traditions."
45
AMERICANISM
London Times: "An event which is certain to influence their
destinies on both sides of the Atlantic for generations to
come." . . .
"We doubt if in all history a great community has ever been
summoned to war on grounds so largely ideal. . ." "President
Wilson proves his faith in the profound idealism of the American
people."
Russeklya Ryetels: "The most important feature of the de-
velopment in Washington is the profound moral significance of
the entry of the United States into the war."
Cologne Folks Zeltung: "The gravest insult ever offered to
Germany."
Frankfurter Zeitung: "President Wilson's artiiicial human-
ty."
Lokal Anzeiyer: "Deed of a stubborn fanatic."
APRIL 4, 1917 SENATE ADOPTS WAR RESOLUTION.
APRIL 6, 1917 HOUSE ADOPTS WAR RESOLUTION.
APRIL 6, 1917 PRESIDENT WILSON ISSUES WAR PROCLAMATION.
APRIL 16, 1917 THE PRESIDENT ISSUES A PROCLAMATION TO
HIS FELLOW-COUNTRYMEN ON WAYS TO SERVE THE NATION
DURING THE WAR.
(This appeal laid a foundation for other appeals, demands
rind exactions which were to come food and fuel regulations, the
selective draft, Industrial control, Red Cross drives, etc. Not
once has the American people whined or winced.)
"SPEAK, ACT AND SERVE TOGETHER."
Ax APPEAL TO THE PEOPLE.
( Complete}
My Fellow Countrymen:
The entrance of our own beloved country into the grim and
terrible war for democracy and human rights which has shaken
the world creates so many problems of national life and action
which call for immediate consideration and settlement that 1 hope
you will permit me to address to you a few words of earnest
counsel and appeal with regard to them.
We are rapidly putting our navy upon an efficient war footing
and are about to create and equip a great army, but these are the
46
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
simplest parts of the great task to which we have addressed our-
selves. There is not a single selfish element, so far as I can see,
in the cause we are fighting for. We are fighting for what we
believe and wish to be the rights of mankind and for the future
peace and security of the world. To do this great thing worthily
and successfully we must devote ourselves to the service without
regard to profit or material advantage and with an energy and
intelligence that will rise to the level of the enterprise itself. We
must realize to the full how great the task is and how many
things, how many kinds and elements of capacity and service and
self-sacrifice, it involves.
These, then, are the things we must do, and do well, besides
fighting, the things without which mere fighting would be fruit-
less:
We must supply abundant food for ourselves and for our
armies and our seamen not only, but also for a large part of the
nations with whom we have now made common cause, in whose
support and by whose sides we shall be fighting;
We must supply ships by the hundreds out of our shipyards to
carry to the other side of the sea, submarines or no submarines,
what will every day be needed there, and abundant materials out
of our fields and our mines and our factories with which not only
to clothe and equip our own forces on land and sea but also to
clothe and support our people for w r hom the gallant fellows under
arms can no longer work, to help clothe and equip the armies
with which we are cooperating in Europe, and to keep the looms
and manufactories there in raw material; coal to keep the fires
going in ships at sea and in the furnaces of hundreds of factories
across the sea; steel out of which to make arms and ammunition
both here and there; rails for worn-out railways back of the
fighting fronts; locomotives and rolling stock to take the place of
those every day going to pieces; mules, horses, cattle for labor
and for military service; everything with which the people of
England and France and Italy and Russia have usually supplied
themselves but cannot now afford the men, the materials, or the
machinery to make.
THE GREAT SERVICE ARMY.
It is evident to every thinking man that our industries, on
the farms, in the shipyards, in the mines, in the factories, must
be made more prolific and more efficient than ever and that they
must be more economically managed and better adapted to the
particular requirements of our task than they have been; and
what I want to say is that the men and women who devote their
47
AMERICANISM
thought and their energy to these things will be serving the
country and conducting the right for peace and freedom just as
truly and just as effectively as the men on the battlefield or in
the trenches. The industrial forces of the country, men and
women alike, will be a great national, a great international, Serv-
ice Army, a notable and honored host engaged in the service of
the nation and the world, the efficient friends and saviors of free
men everywhere. Thousands, nay, hundreds of thousands, of men
otherwise liable to military service will of right and of necessity
be excused from that service and assigned to the fundamental,
sustaining work of the fields and factories and mines, and they
will be as much part of the great patriotic forces of the nation
as the men under fire.
I take the liberty, therefore, of addressing this word to the
farmers of the country and to all who work on the farms: The
supreme need of our own nation and of the nations with which
we are cooperating is an abundance of supplies, and especially of
foodstuffs. The importance of an adequate food supply, especially
for the present year, is superlative. Without abundant food, alike
for the armies and the peoples now at war, the whole great enter-
prise upon which we have embarked will break down and fail.
The world's food reserves are low. Not only during the present
emergency but for some time after peace shall have come both
our own people and a large proportion of the people of Europe
must rely upon the harvests in America. Upon the farmers of
this country, therefore, in large measure, rests the fate of the
war and the fate of the nations. May the nation not count upon
them to omit no step that will increase the production of their
land or that will bring about the most effectual cooperation in the
sale and distribution of their products? The time is short. It is
of the most imperative importance that everything possible be done
and done immediately to make sure of large harvests. I call upon
young men and old alike and upon the able-bodied boys of the
land to accept and act upon this duty to turn in hosts to the
farms and make certain that no pains and no labor is lacking in
this great matter.
I particularly appeal to the farmers of the South to plant
abundant foodstuffs as well as cotton. They can show their
patriotism in no better or more convincing way than by resisting
the great temptation of the present price of cotton and helping,
helping upon a great scale, to feed the nation and the peoples
everywhere who are fighting for their liberties and for our own.
The variety of their crops will be the visible measure of their
comprehension of their national duty.
48
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
The Government of the United States and the governments
of the several States stand ready to cooperate. They will do
everything possible to assist the farmers in securing an adequate
supply of seed, an adequate force of laborers when they are most
needed, at harvest time, and the means of expediting shipments of
fertilizers and farm machinery, as well as of the crops themselves
when harvested. The course of trade shall be as unhampered as
it is possible to make it and there shall be no unwarranted manipu-
lation of the nation's food supply by those who handle it on its
way to the consumer. This is our opportunity to demonstrate the
efficiency of a great democracy and we shall not fall short of it!
SERVICE UNSELFISH AND SINCERE
This let me say to the middlemen of every sort, whether they
are handling our foodstuffs or our raw materials of manufacture
or the products of our mills and factories: The eyes of the
country will be especially upon you. This is your opportunity for
signal service, efficient and disinterested. The country expects you,
as it expects all others, to forego unusual profits, to organize and
expedite shipments of supplies of every kind, but especially of
food, with an eye to the service you are rendering and in the
spirit of those who enlist in the ranks, for their people, not for
themselves. I shall confidently expect you to deserve and win the
confidence of people of every sort and station.
To the men who run the railways of the country, whether
they be managers or operative employees, let me say that the rail-
ways are the arteries of the nation's life and that upon them rests
the immense responsibility of seeing to it that those arteries suffer
no obstruction of any kind, no inefficiency or slackened power. To
the merchant let me suggest the motto, "Small profits and quick
service"; and to the shipbuilder the thought that the life of the
war depends upon him. The food and the war supplies must be
carried across the seas no matter how many ships are sent to the
bottom. The places of those that go down must be supplied and
supplied at once. To the miner let me say that he stands where
the farmer does: the work of the world waits on him. If he
slackens or fails, armies and statesmen are helpless. He also is
enlisted in the great Service Army. The manufacturer does not
need to be told, I hope, that the nation looks to him to speed and
perfect every process ; and I want only to remind his employees
that their service is absolutely indispensable and is counted on by
every man who loves the country and its liberties.
Let me suggest, also, that everyone who creates or cultivates
a garden helps, and helps greatly, to solve the problem of the
49
AMERICANISM
feeding of the nations; and that every housewife who practices
strict economy puts herself in the ranks of those who serve the
nation. This is the time for America to correct her unpardonable
fault of wastefulness and extravagance. Let every man and
every woman assume the duty of careful, provident use and
expenditure as a duty, a dictate of patriotism which no one can
now expect ever to be excused or forgiven for ignoring.
In the hope that this statement of the needs of the nation
and of the world in this hour of supreme crisis may stimulate
those to whom it comes and remind all who need reminder of the
solemn duties of a time such as the world has never seen before,
I beg that all editors and publishers everywhere will give as
prominent publication and as wide circulation as possible to this
appeal. I venture to suggest, also, to all advertising agencies that
they would perhaps render a very substantial and timely service
to the country if they would give it widespread repetition. And I
hope that clergymen will not think the theme of it an unworthy
or inappropriate subject of comment and homily from their pulpits.
The supreme test of the nation has come. We must all speak,
act, and serve together ! WOODROW WILSON.
MAY 4, 1917 U. S. DESTROYERS JOIN BRITISH NAVAL FORCES
in WAR ZONE.
MAY 6, 1917 FRENCH WIN SUCCESS ON CHEMIN DBS DAMES.
MAY 13, 1917 ITALIANS TAKE OFFENSIVE ON ISONZO FRONT.
(This was the offensive which finally threatened Trieste, and
which was broken up only by a successful campaign of peace and
defeatist propaganda among the Italian soldiers, carried on both
from their front and rear, and followed by a sudden heavy attack
in force by German and Austrian troops.)
MAY 17, 1917 KERENSKY BECOMES RUSSIAN MINISTER OF WAR.
MAY 18, 1917 SELECTIVE DRAFT ACT PASSED.
MAY 18, 1917 PRESIDENT WILSON PROCLAIMS THE SELECTIVE
DRAFT.
(President Wilson had pressed for a draft for our armies as
the most democratic means of raising one. This view was opposed
by many who luanted at least a trial made of the volunteer plan.
SO
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
President Wilson's views finally prevailed. In his proclamation of
the Draft Act, specifying the details of registration, the President
makes clear the democratic doctrine of a universal service draft,
emphasizing the idea of "selection." The people caught the spirit
of the draft, supporting it not only with loyalty, but with an
understanding so clear that it was deemed an honor, rather than
a reproach, to be drafted.)
"LISTS OF HONOR"
THE DRAFT PROCLAMATION.
(Abridged)
The Power against which we are arrayed has sought to impose
its will upon the world by force. To this end it has increased
armament until it has changed the face of war. In the sense in
which we have been wont to think of armies, there are no armies
in this struggle, there are entire nations armed. Thus, the men
who remain to till the soil and man the factories are no less a
part of the army that is France than the men beneath the battle
flags. It must be so with us. It is not an army that we must
shape and train for war; it is a nation.
ONE FRONT AGAINST A COMMON FOJE.
To this end our people must draw close in one compact front
against a common foe. But this cannot be if each man pursues a
private purpose. All must pursue one purpose. A nation needs
all men; but it needs each man, not in the field that will most
pleasure him, but in the endeavor that will best serve the common
good. Thus, though a sharpshooter pleases to operate a trip-
hammer for the forging of great guns and an expert machinist
desires to march with the flag, the nation is being served only when
the sharpshooter marches and the machinist remains at his levers.
The whole nation must be a team, in which each man shall
play the part for which he is best fitted. To this end, Congress
has provided that the nation shall be organized for war by selec-
tion; that each man shall be classified for service in the place to
which it shall best serve the general good to call him.
A NATION VOLUNTEERS IN MASS.
The significance of this cannot be overstated. It is a new
thing in our history and a landmark in our progress. It is a new
manner of accepting and vitalizing our duty to give ourselves with
thoughtful devotion to the common purpose of us all. // is in no
51
AMERICANISM
sense a conscription of the unwilling; it is, rather, selection from
a nation which has volunteered in mass. It is no more a choosing
of those who shall march with the colors than it is a selection of
those who shall serve an equally necessary and devoted purpose in
the industries that lie behind the battle line.
The day here named is the time upon which all shall present
themselves for assignment to their tasks. It is for that reason
destined to be remembered as one of the most conspicuous moments
in our history. It is nothing less than the day upon which the
manhood of the country shall step forward in one solid rank in
defense of the ideals to which this nation is consecrated. It is
important to those ideals no less than to the pride of this genera-
tion in manifesting its devotion to them, that there be no gaps in
the ranks.
LISTS OF HONOR.
It is essential that the day be approached in thoughtful appre-
hension of its significance, and that we accord to it the honor and
the meaning that it deserves. Our industrial need prescribes that
it be not made a technical holiday, but the stern sacrifice that is
before us urges that it be carried in all our hearts as a great day
of patriotic devotion and obligation, when the duty shall lie upon
every man, whether he is himself to be registered or not, to see
to it that the name of every male person of the designated ages is
written .on these lists of honor.
MAY 2b, 1917 PRESIDENT WILSON SENDS A MESSAGE TO RUSSIA.
(Russia was in an uproar, bemused with liberty. Suspicious
of all government, the people, now in control, were not too secure
in their minds concerning the Allied purposes in the war. Partly
to free them from their suspicions, partly to be of practical assist-
ance, if possible, President ff'ilson sent a mission to Russia, headed
by Elihu Root. The message, sent ahead of the mission, is here
reprinted.}
"WE MUST NOT WEAKEN NOW."
A MESSAGE To RUSSIA.
(Complete}
-In view of the approaching visit of the American delegation
to Russia to express the deep friendship of the American people
for the people of Russia and to discuss the best and most practical
means of cooperation between the two peoples in carrying the
present struggle for the freedom of all peoples to a successful
52
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
consummation, it seems opportune and appropriate that I should
state again, in the light of this new partnership, the objects the
United States has had in mind in entering the war. Those objects
have been very much beclouded during the past few weeks by mis-
taken and misleading statements, and the issues at stake are too
momentous, too tremendous, too significant for the whole human
race to permit any misinterpretations or misunderstandings, how-
ever slight, to remain uncorrected for a moment.
The war has begun to go against Germany, and in their
desperate desire to escape the inevitable ultimate defeat, those who
are in authority in Germany are using every possible instrumental-
ity, are making use even of the influence of groups and parties
among their own subjects to whom they have never been just or
fair or even tolerant, to promote a propaganda on both sides of
the sea which will preserve for them their influence at home and
their power abroad, to the undoing of the very men they are
using.
THE NET OF GERMAN INTRIGUE.
The position of America in this war is so clearly avowed that
no man can be excused for mistaking it. She seeks no material
profit or aggrandizement of any kind. She is fighting for no
advantage or selfish object of her own, but for the liberation of
peoples everywhere from the aggressions of ^autocratic force. The
ruling classes in Germany have begun of late to profess a like
liberality and justice of purpose, but only to preserve the power
they have set up in Germany and the selfish advantages which
they have wrongly gained for themselves and their private projects
of power all the w r ay from Berlin to Bagdad and beyond. Gov-
ernment after Government has by their influence, without open
conquest of its territory, been linked together in a net of intrigue
directed against nothing less than the peace and liberty of the
world. The meshes of that intrigue must be broken, but cannot
be broken unless wrongs already done are undone; and adequate
measures must be taken to prevent it from ever again being re-
woven or repaired.
Of course, the Imperial Government and those whom it is
using for their own undoing are seeking to obtain pledges that the
war will end in the restoration of the status quo ante. It was the
status quo ante out of which this iniquitous war issued forth, the
power of the Imperial German Government within the Empire
and its widespread domination and influence outside of that Em-
pire. That status must be altered in such fashion as to prevent
any such hideous thing from ever happening again.
53
AMERICANISM
ALL PEOPLES MUST HE FREE.
We are fighting for the liberty, the self-government, and the
undictated development of all peoples, and every feature of the
settlement that concludes this war must be conceived and executed
for that purpose. Wrongs must first be righted, and then adequate
safeguards must be created to prevent their being committed again.
We ought not to consider remedies merely because they have a
pleasing and sonorous sound. Practical questions can be settled
only by practical means. Phrases will not accomplish the result.
Effective readjustments will; and whatever readjustments are
necessary must be made.
But they must follow a principle, and that principle is plain.
A r o people must be forced under sovereignty under which it
does not wish to live. No territory must change hands except for
the purpose of securing those who inhabit it a fair chance of life
and liberty. No indemnities must be insisted on except those that
constitute payments for manifest ivrongs done. No readjustments
of power must be made except such as ivill tend to secure the
future peace of the W'orld and the future w-elfare and happiness of
its peoples.
And then the free peoples of the world must draw together in
some common covenant, some genuine and practical cooperation
that will in effect combine their force to secure peace and justice
in the dealings of nations with one another. The brotherhood of
mankind must no longer be a fair but empty phrase; it must be
given a structure of force and reality. The nations must realize
their common life and effect a workable partnership to secure
that life against the aggressions of autocratic and self-pleasing
power.
For these things we can afford to pour out our blood and
treasure. For these are the things we have always professed to
desire, and unless we pour out blood and treasure now and succeed,
we may never be able to unite or show conquering force again in
the great cause of human liberty. The day has come to conquer or
submit. If the forces of autocracy can divide us they will over-
come us; if we stand together, victory is certain and the liberty
which victory will secure. We can afford then to be generous, but
we cannot afford then or now to be weak or to omit any single
guarantee of justice and security.
WOODROW WILSON.
JL'NE 1, 1917 MORE DISORDER ix RUSSIA. SUSPICION OF AL-
LIED AIMS C.ROWS.
54
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
JUNE 6, 1917 REGISTRATION DAY UNDER THE SELECTIVE
DRAFT ACT.
(Nearly 10,000,000 men registered.)
JUNE 8, 1917 GENERAL PERSHING REACHES ENGLAND.
JUNE 12, 1917 ESPIONAGE BILL PASSED.
JUNE 13, 1917 GENERAL PERSHING REACHES FRANCE.
JUNE 14, 1917 FLAG DAY; PRESIDENT WILSON DELIVERS AN
ADDRESS.
(President If ilson made Flag Day the occasion of an address
to the American people and to the world which revealed, more
definitely than any of its predecessors, the German threat upon
civilization. In tliis address President Wilson spoke categorically
of the German plan of world domination, and told how far they
had already progressed in consummating the "Berlin to Bagdad"
phase of their strangle-hold. The country had been at war barely
a month. This address helped to consolidate sentiment and spur
endeavor. It is considered by many his finest effort from a literary
point of vieiv. )
"A NEW GLORY FOR OUR FLAG."
THE FLAG DAY ADDRESS DELIVERED AT BALTIMORE, JUNE 14,
1917.
(Complete )
My Fellow Citizens :
We meet to celebrate Flag Day because this flag which we
honor and under which we serve is the emblem of our unity, our
power, our thought and purpose as a nation. It has no other
character than that which we give it from generation to genera-
tion. The choices are ours. It floats in majestic silence above
the hosts that execute those choices, whether in peace or in war.
And yet, though silent, it speaks to us speaks to us of the past,
of the men and women who went before us and of the records
they wrote upon it. We celebrate the day of its birth; and from
its birth until now it has witnessed a great history, has floated on
high the symbol of great events, of a great plan of life worked
out by a great people. We are about to carry it into battle, to
lift it where it will draw the fire of our enemies. We are about
to bid thousands, hundreds of thousands, it may be millions, of
55
AMERICANISM
our men, the young, the strong, the capable men of the nation,
to go forth and die beneath it on fields of blood far away for
what? For some unaccustomed thing? For something for which
it has never sought the fire before? American armies were never
before sent across the seas. Why are they sent now? For some
new purpose, for which this great flag has never been carried
before, or for some old, familiar, heroic purpose for which it has
seen men, its own men, die on every battlefield upon which
Americans have borne arms since the Revolution ?
These are questions which must be answered. We are
Americans. We in turn serve America, and can serve her
with no private purpose. We must use her flag as she has always
used it. We are accountable at the bar of history and must plead
in utter frankness what purpose it is we seek to serve.
GERMANY FORCED Us TO WAR.
It is plain enough how we were forced into the war. The
extraordinary insults and aggressions of the Imperial German
Government left us no self-respecting choice but to take up arms
in defense of our rights as a free people and of our honor as a
sovereign government. The military masters of Germany denied
us the right to be neutral. They filled our unsuspecting com-
munities with vicious spies and conspirators and sought to corrupt
the opinion of our people in their own behalf. When they found
that they could not do that, their agents diligently spread sedition
amongst us and sought to draw our own people from their
allegiance and some of those agents were men connected with
the official Embassy of the Germany Government itself here in
our own capital. They sought by violence to destroy our indus-
tries and arrest our commerce. They tried to incite Mexico to
take up arms against us and to draw Japan into a hostile alliance
with her and that, not by indirection, but by direct suggestion
from the Foreign Office in Berlin. They impudently denied us the
use of the high seas and repeatedly executed their threat that they
would send to their death any of our people who ventured to
approach the coasts of Europe. And many of our own people
were corrupted. Men began to look upon their own neighbors
with suspicion and to wonder in their hot resentment and surprise
whether there was any community in which hostile intrigue did
not lurk. What great nation in such circumstances would not
have taken up arms? Much as we had desired peace, it was
denied us, and not of our own choice. This flag under which we
serve would have been dishonored had we withheld our hand.
56
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
But that is only part of the story. We know now as clearly
as we knew before we were ourselves engaged that we are not
the enemies of the German people and that they are not our ene-
mies. They did not originate or desire this hideous war or wish
that we should be drawn into it; and we are vaguely conscious
that we are fighting their cause, as they will some day see it, as
well as our own. They are themselves in the grip of the same
sinister power that has now at last stretched its ugly talons out
and drawn blood from us. The whole world is at war because
the whole world is in the grip of that power and is trying out the
great battle which shall determine whether it is to be brought
under its mastery or fling itself free.
GERMANY PLOTTED TO MASTER THE WORLD.
The war was begun by the military masters of Germany,
who proved to be also the masters of Austria-Hungary. These
men have never regarded nations as peoples, men, women and
children of like blood and frame as themselves, for whom govern-
ments existed and in whom governments had their life. They
have regarded them merely as serviceable organizations which they
could by force or intrigue bend or corrupt to their own purpose.
They have regarded the smaller states, in particular, and the
peoples who could be overwhelmed by force, as their natural tools
and instruments of domination. Their purpose has long been
avowed. The statesmen of other nations, to whom that purpose
was incredible, paid little attention; regarded what German pro-
fessors expounded in their classrooms and German writers set
forth to the world as the goal of German policy as rather the
dream of minds detached from practical affairs, as preposterous
private conceptions of German destiny, than as the actual plans
of responsible rulers; but the rulers of Germany themselves knew
all the while what concrete plans, what well advanced intrigues
lay back of what the professors and the writers were saying, and
were glad to go forward unmolested, filling the thrones of Balkan
states with German princes, putting German officers at the service
of Turkey to drill her armies and make interest with her govern-
ment, developing plans of sedition and rebellion in India and
Egypt, setting their fires in Persia. The demands made by Aus-
tria upon Servia were a mere single step in a plan which com-
passed Europe and Asia, from Berlin to Bagdad. They hoped
those demands might not arouse Europe, but they meant to press
them whether they did or not, for they thought themselves ready
for the final issue of arms.
57
AMERICANISM
"BERLIN TO BAGDAD/'
Their plan was to throw a broad belt of German military
power and control across the very center of Europe and beyond
the Mediterranean into the heart of Asia; and Austria-Hungary
was to be as much their tool and pawn as Servia or Bulgaria or
Turkey or the ponderous states of the East. Austria-Hungary,
indeed, was to become part of the central German Empire, ab-
sorbed and dominated by the same forces and influences that had
originally cemented the German states themselves. The dream
had its heart at Berlin. It could have had a heart nowhere else!
It rejected the idea of solidarity of race entirely. The choice of
peoples played no part in it at all. It contemplated binding
together racial and political units which could be kept together
only by force Czechs, Magyars, Croats, Serbs, Roumanians,
Turks, Armenians the proud states of Bohemia and Hungary,
the stout little commonwealths of the Balkans, the indomitable
Turks, the subtle peoples of the East. These peoples did not wish
to be united. They ardently desired to direct their own affairs,
would be satisfied only by undisputed independence. They could
be kept quiet only by the presence or the constant threat of armed
men. They would live under a common power only by sheer
compulsion and await the day of revolution. But the German
military statesmen had reckoned with all that and were ready to
deal with it in their own way.
And they have actually carried the greater part of that amaz-
ing plan into execution! Look how things stand. Austria is at
their mercy. It has acted, not upon its own initiative or upon the
choice of its own people, but at Berlin's dictation ever since the
war began. Its people now desire peace, but cannot have it until
leave is granted from Berlin. The so-called Central Powers are
in fact but a single Power. Servia is at its mercy, should its
hands be for a moment freed. Bulgaria has consented to its will,
and Roumania is overrun. The Turkish armies, which Germans
trained, are serving Germany, certainly not themselves, and the
guns of German warships lying in the harbor at Constantinople
remind Turkish statesmen every day that they have no choice hut
to take their orders from Berlin. From Hamburg to the Persian
Gulf the net is spread.
THEY SEEK A PEACE TO PRESERVE THEIR SPOILS.
Is it not easy to understand the eagerness for peace that has
been manifested from Berlin ever since the snare was set and
sprung? Peace, peace, peace has been the talk of her Foreign
Office for now a year and more ; not peace upon her own initiative,
58
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
but upon the initiative of the nations over which she now deems
herself to hold the advantage. A little of the talk has been public,
but most of it has been private. Through all sorts of channels
it has come to me, and in all sorts of guises, but never with the
terms disclosed which the German Government would be willing
to accept. That government has other valuable pawns in its
hands besides those I have mentioned. It still holds a valuable
part of France, though with slowly relaxing grasp, and practically
the whole of Belgium. Its armies press close upon Russia and
overrun Poland at their will. It cannot go further; it dare not
go back. It wishes to close its bargain before it is too late and it
has little left to offer for the pound of flesh it will demand.
The military masters under whom Germany is bleeding see
very clearly to what point Fate has brought them. If they fall
back or are forced back an inch, their power both abroad and at
home will fall to pieces like a house of cards. It is their power
at home they are thinking about now more than their power
abroad. It is that power which is trembling under their very
feet; and deep fear has entered their hearts. They have but one
chance to perpetuate their military power or even their controlling
political influence. If they can secure peace now with the immense
advantages still in their hands which they have up to this point
apparently gained, they will have justified themselves before the
German people; they will have gained by force what they prom-
ised to gain by it: an immense expansion of German power, an
immense enlargement of German industrial and commercial oppor-
tunities. Their prestige will be secure, and with their prestige
their political power. If they fail, their people will thrust them
aside ; a government accountable to the people themselves will be
set up in Germany as it has been in England, in the United States,
in France, and in all the great countries of the modern time except
Germany. If they succeed they are safe and Germany and the
world are undone; if they fail Germany is saved and the world
will be at peace. If they succeed, America will fall within the
menace. We and all the rest of the world must remain armed,
as they will remain, and must make ready for the next step in
their aggression; if they fail, the world may unite for peace and
Germany may be of the union.
BEWARE OF SUCH A PEACE!
Do you not now understand the new intrigue, the intrigue for
peace, and why the masters of Germany do not hesitate to use
any agency that promises to effect their purpose, the deceit of the
nations? Their present particular aim is to deceive all those who
59
AMERICANISM
throughout the world stand for the rights of peoples and the self-
government of nations; for they see what immense strength the
forces of justice and of liberalism are gathering out of this war.
They are employing liberals in their enterprise. They are using
men, in Germany and without, as their spokesmen whom they have
hitherto despised and oppressed, using them for their own destruc-
tion socialists, the leaders of labor, the thinkers they have hitherto
sought to silence. Let them once succeed and these men, now their
tools, will be ground to powder beneath the weight of the great
military empire they will have set up; the revolutionists in Russia
will be cut off from all succor or cooperation in western Europe
and a counter revolution fostered and supported; Germany her-
self will lose her chance of freedom; and all Europe will arm for
the next, the final struggle.
The sinister intrigue is being no less actively conducted in
this country than in Russia and in every country in Europe to
which the agents and dupes of the Imperial German Government
can get access. That government has many spokesmen here, in
places high and low. They have learned discretion. They keep
within the law. It is opinion they utter now, not sedition. They
proclaim the liberal purposes of their masters; declare this a
foreign war which can touch America with no danger to either
her lands or her institutions; set England at the center of the
stage and talk of her ambition to assert economic dominion
throughout the world; appeal to our ancient tradition of isolation
in the politics of the nations; and seek to undermine the govern-
ment with false professions of loyalty to its principles.
No PEACE UNTIL THE WORLD Is FREE.
But they will make no headway. The false betray themselves
always in every accent. It is only friends and partisans of the
German Government whom we have already identified who utter
these thinly disguised loyalties. The facts are patent to all the
world, and nowhere are they more plainly seen than in the United
States, where we are accustomed to deal with facts and not with
sophistries; and the great fact that stands out above all the rest
is that this is a People's War, a war for freedom and justice
and self-government amongst all the nations of the world, a war
to make the world safe for the peoples who live upon it and
have made it their own, the German peoples themselves included;
and that with us rests the choice to break through all these
hypocrisies and patent cheats and masks of brute force and help
set the world free, or else stand aside and let it be dominated a
long age through by sheer weight of arms and the arbitrary
60
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
choices of self-constituted masters, by the nation which can main-
tain the biggest armies and the most irresistible armaments 2
power to which the world has afforded no parellel and in the face
of which political freedom must wither and perish.
For us there is but one choice. We have made it. Woe be to
the man or group of men that seeks to stand in our way in this
day of high resolution when every principle we hold dearest is
to be vindicated and made secure for the salvation of the nations.
We are ready to plead at the bar of history, and our flag shall
wear a new luster. Once more we shall make good with our
lives and fortunes the great faith to which we were born, and a
new glory shall shine in the face of our people.
JUNE 20, 1917 ITALIANS EXTEND THEIR OFFENSIVE TO THE
TRENTINO.
JUNE 25, 1917 ANOTHER GERMAN PEACE OFFENSIVE BEGINS.
JUNE 27, 1917 BRITISH HOUSE OF LORDS ENDORSES LEAGUE-
OF-NATIONS IDEA.
JUNE 30, 1917 IT BECOMES KNOWN THAT U. S. TROOPS HAVE
BEEN ARRIVING SAFELY IN FRANCE DURING THE MONTH.
JULY 1, 1917 RUSSIAN ARMY LED BY KERENSKY BEGINS OF-
FENSIVE.
JULY 11, 1917 THE PRESIDENT APPEALS TO BUSINESS MEN.
(The purpose of this speech ivas to lift up the thoughts of
business men toward their part of the work in hand. It was
clearly seen that the entire nation must be organized for victory.
The fixing of prices had bee* determined upon, as a war measure.
This speech asked the cooperation of business men in such a step.
Business men had already been called to Washington in advisory
capacities from all over the country; many of them of the first
prominence in commercial and industrial affairs. It is doubtful
whether any other war had been so free from a tendency to
predatory activities on the part of those in a position to take
selfish advantage of circumstances, or whether public opinion had
ever been more intolerant of profiteering.}
61
AMERICANISM
"WE MUST LEAVE SELFISHNESS OUT."
f AN APPEAL TO BUSINESS MEN.
( Complete}
My Fellow-Countrymen :
The Government is about to attempt to determine the prices
at which it will ask you henceforth to furnish various supplies
which are necessary for the prosecution of the war, and various
materials which will be needed in the industries by which the
war must be sustained.
We shall, of course, try to determine them justly and to
the best advantage of the nation as a whole. But justice is
easier to speak of than to arrive at, and there are some considera-
tions which I hope we shall keep steadily in mind while this par-
ticular problem of justice is being worked out.
I therefore take the liberty of stating very candidly my own
view of the situation and of the principles which should guide
both the Government and the mine-owners and manufacturers
of the country in this difficult matter.
JUST PRICES AND PROFITS.
A just price must, of course, be paid for everything the
Government buys. By a just price I mean a price which will
sustain the industries concerned in a high state of efficiency, pro-
vide a living for those who conduct them, enable them to pay
good wages, and make possible the expansions of their enterprises
which will from time to time become necessary as the stupendous
undertakings of this great war develop.
We could not wisely or reasonably do less than pay such
prices. They are necessary for the maintenance and development
of industry; and the maintenance and development of industry are
necessary for the great task we have in hand.
But I trust that we shall not surround the matter with a
mist of sentiment. Facts are our masters now. We ought not
to put the acceptance of such prices on the ground of patriotism.
Patriotism has nothing to do with profits in a case like this.
Patriotism and profits ought never in the present circumstances
to be mentioned together.
It is perfectly proper to discuss profits as a matter of busi-
ness, with a view to maintaining the integrity of capital and the
efficiency of labor in these tragical months, when the liberty of
free men everywhere and of industry itself trembles In the bal-
ance, but it would be absurd to discuss them as a motive for
helping to serve and save our country.
62
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
PATRIOTISM LEAVES PROFITS OUT.
Patriotism leaves profits out of the question. In these dayf
of our supreme trial, when we are sending hundreds of thou-
sands of our young men across the seas to serve a great cause, no
true man who stays behind to work for them and sustain them
by his labor will ask himself what he is personally going to make
out of that labor.
No true patriot will permit himself to take toll of their hero-
ism in money or seek to grow rich by the shedding of their blood.
He will give as freely and with as unstinted self-sacrifice as they.
When they are giving their lives, will he not at least give his
money ?
I hear it insisted that more than a just price, more than a
price that will sustain our industries, must be paid; that it is
necessary to pay very liberal and unusual profits in order to
"stimulate production," that nothing but pecuniary rewards will
do rewards paid in money, not in the mere liberation of the
world.
I take it for granted that those who argue thus do not stop
to think what that means. Do they mean that you must be paid,
must be bribed, to make your contribution, a contribution that
costs you neither a drop of blood, nor a tear, when the whole
world is in travail and men everywhere depend upon and call to
you to bring them out of bondage and make the world a fit place
to live in again amidst peace and justice?
WHO WILL DRIVE BARGAINS Now?
Do they mean that you will exact a price, drive a bargain,
with the men who are enduring the agony of this war on the
battlefield, in the trenches, amid the lurking dangers of the sea,
or with the bereaved women and pitiful children, before you will
come forward to do your duty and give some part of your life,
in easy, peaceful fashion, for the things we are fighting for, the
things we have pledged our fortunes, our lives, our sacred honor,
to vindicate and defend liberty and justice and fair dealing and
the peace of nations?
Of course you will not. It is inconceivable. Your patriot-
ism is of the same self-denying stuff as the patriotism of the men
dead or maimed on the fields of France, or else it is no patriot-
ism at all. Let us never speak, then, of profits and of patriotism
in the same sentence, but face facts and meet them. Let us do
sound business, but not in the midst of a mist.
Many a grievous burden of taxation will be laid on this
Nation, in this treneration and in the next, to pay for this war;
63
AMERICANISM
let us see to it that for every dollar that is taken from the
people's pockets it shall be possible to obtain a dollar's worth of
the sound stuffs they need.
SELFISHNESS HELPS GERMANY.
Let us for a moment turn to the ship-owners of the United
States and the other ocean carriers whose example they have
followed, and ask them if they realize what obstacles, what
almost insuperable obstacles, they have been putting in the way
of the successful prosecution of this war by the ocean freights
they have been exacting.
They are doing everything that high freight charges can
do to make the war a failure, to make it impossible. I do not
say that they realize this or intend it.
The thing has happened naturally enough, because the com-
mercial processes which we are content to see operate in ordinary-
times have without sufficient thought been continued into a period
where they have no proper place. I am not questioning motives.
I am merely stating a fact, and stating it in order that attention
may be fixed upon it.
The fact is that those who have fixed war freight rates have
taken the most effective means in their power to defeat the
armies engaged against Germany. When they realize this we
may, I take it for granted, count upon them to reconsider the
whole matter. It is high time. Their extra hazards are covered
by war-risk insurance.
THE NATION EXPECTS YOUR ASSISTANCE.
I know, and you know, what response to this great challenge
of duty and of opportunity the Nation will expect of you: and
I know what response you will make. Those who do not respond,
who do not respond in the spirit of those who have gone to give
their lives for us on bloody fields far away, may safely be left
to be dealt with by opinion and the law for the law must, of
course, command those things.
I am dealing with the matter thus publicly and frankly, not
because I have any doubt or fear as to the result, but only in
order that, in all our thinking and in all our dealings with one
another we may move in a perfectly clear air of mutual under-
standing.
And there is something more that we must add to our think-
ing. The public is now as much part of the Government as the
Army and Navy themselves. The whole people, in all their
activities, arc now mobilized and in service for the accomplish-
64
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
ment of the Nation's task in this war. It is in such circumstances
impossible justly to distinguish between industrial purchases made
by the Government and industries. And it is just as much our
duty to sustain the industries of the country, all the industries
that contribute to its life, as it is to sustain our forces in the field
and on the sea. We must make the prices to the public the same
as the prices to the Government.
PRICES ARE VITAL Now.
Prices mean the same thing everywhere now. They mean
the efficiency or the inefficiency of the Nation, whether it is the
Government that pays them or not. They mean victory or defeat.
They mean that America will win her place once for all among
the foremost free Nations of the world, or that she will sink to
defeat and become a second-rate Power alike in thought and
action. This is a day for her reckoning, and every man among
us must personally face that reckoning along with her.
The case needs no arguing. I assume that I am only ex-
pressing 5'our own thoughts what must be in the mind of every
true man when he faces the tragedy and the solemn glory of the
present war, for the emancipation of mankind. I summon you to
a great duty, a great privilege, a shining dignity and distinction.
I shall expect every man who is not a slacker to be at my
side throughout this great enterprise. In it no man can win
honor who thinks of himself.
JULY 12, 1917 RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE AGAINST LEMBERG, LEAD
BY KERENSKY IN PERSON, PROGRESSES.
JULY 19, 1917 REICHSTAG ADOPTS PEACE RESOLUTIONS.
(These resolutions expressed the desire of the German
people for a peace of lasting conciliation without forced acquisi-
tion of territory "no annexation, no indemnities." German diplo-
mats contrived to have this cry taken up later by the Bolsheviki,
and certain pacifists also adopted it.)
JULY 19, 1917 RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE SLACKS UP IN DISORDER.
JULY 20, 1917 KERENSKY MADE RUSSIAN PREMIER.
JULY 22, 1917 RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE BREAKS DOWN THROUGH
LACK OF DISCIPLINE AND MUTINY SPREADS AMONGST THE
TROOPS.
65
AMERICANISM
JULY 24, 1917 EDWARD N. HURLEY PUT IN CHARGE OF SHIP-
BUILDING.
JULY 29, 1917 GERMANY IN ANOTHER PEACE OFFENSIVE.
(Dr. Michaelis, German Chancellor, seizing upon the Reich-
stag peace resolutions of "no annexations, no idemnities," main-
tained that the refusal of the Allies to accept this formula at once
as a basis for peace negotiations convicted them of hypocrisy and
proved that they had not renounced conquest as their object in
war. Count Czernin, Austrian Foreign Minister, contended that
Peace would be reached by negotiation sooner or later, and that
any delay in bringing the war to an end was therefor due to Eng-
land's determination to destroy the Central Powers.)
JULY 31, 1917 FRENCH AND BRITISH SMASH THE GERMAN-
LINES IN BELGIUM ON A FRONT OF 25 MILES, FROM DIXMUDE
TO WARNETON.
AUGUST 8, 1917 FOOD CONTROL BILL PASSES.
AUGUST 10, 1917 PRESIDENT GIVES MR. HOOVER CONTROL OF
FOOD.
AUGUST 15, 1917 THE POPE SENDS A PEACE NOTE TO ALL
BELLIGERENTS.
(In his appeal to belligerents, the Pope suggested disarma-
ment, withdrawal from occupied territories, restitution of Ger-
man colonies, settlement of territorial and political questions in
a conciliatory spirit, and a general condonation.)
AUGUST 23, 1917 RUSSIANS EVACUATE RIGA.
AUGUST 23, 1917 CANADIANS ADVANCE SOUTH OF LENS.
AUGUST 27. 1917 PRESIDENT WILSON REPLIES TO THE POPE'S
PEACE PROPOSALS.
(The proposal for peace negotiations, corning from such a
quarter, proved embarrassing to the Allies. The burden of reply-
ing was left to President (Wilson. His answer to the suggestion,
though courteous and respectful, left little unsaid that bore upon
the question of destroying the poiver for evil existing in German
autocracy. His reference to "selfish and exclusive economic leagues"
was construed as a repudiation of an understanding reached by
66
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
France and England, at the Paris Conference, concerning an eco-
nomic war to be waged on Germany after the conclusion of hostili-
ties, and lead to a retirement from that plan. America and Allied
Europe rallied behind the calm, firm, forceful assertion of principle
contained in the reply, which proved final to the peace suggestion.}
"PEACE IS IMPOSSIBLE NOW."
THE REPLY TO THE POPE.
(Complete)
To His Holiness Benedictus XV, Pope:
In acknowledgment of the communication of your Holiness
to the belligerent peoples, dated August 1, 1917, the President of
the United States requests me to transmit the following reply:
Every heart that has not been blinded and hardened by this
terrible war must be touched by this moving appeal of his Holi-
ness the Pope, must feel the dignity and force of the humane
and generous motives which prompted it, and must fervently wish
that we might take the path of peace he so persuasively points
out. But it would be folly to take it if it does not in fact lead
to the goal he proposes. Our response must be based upon the
stern facts, and upon nothing else. It is not a mere cessation of
arms he desires; it is a stable and enduring peace. This agony
must not be gone through with again, and it must be a matter
of very sober judgment what will insure us against it.
His Holiness in substance proposes that we return to the
status quo ante-bellum and that there be a general condonation,
disarmament, and a concert of nations based upon an acceptance
of the principle of arbitration; that by a similar concert freedom
of the seas be established; and that the territorial claims of
France and Italy, the perplexing problems of the Balkan States,
and the restitution of Poland be left to such conciliatory adjust-
ments as may be possible in the new temper of such a peace, due
regard being paid to the aspirations of the peoples whose political
fortunes and affiliations will be involved.
WE DEAL WITH A SECRET AND SINISTER POWER.
It is manifest that no part of this program can be successfully
carried out unless the restitution of the status quo ante furnishes
a firm and satisfactory basis for it. The object of this war is
to deliver the free peoples of the world from the menace and
the actual power of a vast military establishment, controlled by
an irresponsible Government, which, having secretly planned to
dominate the world, proceeded to carry the plan out without
67
AMERICANISM
regard either to the sacred obligations of treaty or the long-
established practices and long-cherished principles of international
action and honor; which chose its own time for the \var; deliv-
ered its blow fiercely and suddenly; stopped at no barrier, either
of law or of mercy; swept a whole continent within the tide of
blood not the blood of soldiers only, but the blood of innocent
women and children also and of the helpless poor; and now
stands balked, but not defeated, the enemy of four-fifths of the
world.
This power is not the German people. It is the ruthless
master of the German people. It is no business of ours how
that great people came under its control or submitted with tem-
porary zest to the domination of its purpose; but it is our business
to see to it that the history of the rest of the world is no longer
left to its handling.
To deal with such a power by way of peace upon the plan
proposed by his Holiness the Pope would, so far as we can see,
involve a recuperation of its strength and a renewal of its policy;
would make it necessary to create a permanent hostile combina-
tion of nations against the German people, who are its instru-
ments; and would result in abandoning the new-born Russia to
the intrigue, the manifold subtle interference, and the certain
counter-revolution which would be attempted by all the malign
influences to which the German Government has of late accus-
tomed the world.
Can peace be based upon a restitution of its power or upon
any word of honor it could pledge in a treaty of settlement and
accommodation ?
PEACE MUST REST ox RIGHTS.
Responsible statesmen must now everywhere see, if they never
saw before, that no peace can rest securely upon political or
economic restrictions meant to benefit some nations and cripple
or embarrass others, upon vindictive action of any sort, or any
kind of revenge or deliberate injury. The American people have
suffered intolerable wrongs at the hands of the Imperial German
Government, but they desire no reprisal upon the German people,
who have themselves suffered all things in this war, which they
did not choose. They believe that peace should rest upon the
rights of peoples, not the rights of Governments the rights of
peoples, great or small, weak or powerful their equal right to
freedom and security and self-government and to a participation
upon fair terms in the economic opportunities of the world, the
German people, of course, included, if they will accept equality
and not seek domination.
68
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
The test, therefore, of every plan of peace is this: Is it based
upon the faith of all the peoples involved, or merely upon the
word of an ambitious and intriguing Government, on the one
hand, and a group of free peoples, on the other? This is a test
which goes to the root of the matter; and it is the test which must
be applied.
The purposes of the United States in this war are known to
the whole world to every people to whom the truth has been
permitted to come. They do not need to be stated again. We
seek no material advantage of any kind. We believe that the
intolerable wrongs done in this war by the furious and brutal
power of the Imperial German Government ought to be repaired,
but not at the expense of the sovereignty of any people rather
a vindication of the sovereignty both of those that are weak and
of those that are strong. Punitive damages, the dismemberment
of empires, the establishment of selfish and exclusive economic
leagues, we deem inexpedient, and in the end worse than futile,
no proper basis for a peace of any kind, least of all for an endur-
ing peace. That must be based upon justice and fairness and the
common rights of mankind.
GERMANY'S RULERS CANNOT BE TRUSTED.
We cannot take the word of the present rulers of Germany
as a guarantee of anything that is to endure unless explicitly sup-
ported by such conclusive evidence of the will and purpose of the
German people themselves as the other peoples of the world would
be justified in accepting. If'ithout such guarantees treaties of
settlement, agreements for disarmament, covenants to set up arbi-
tration in the place of force, territorial adjustments, reconstitu-
tions of small nations, if made with the German Government, no,
man, no nation, could now depend on.
We must await some new evidence of the purposes of the
great peoples of the Central Powers. God grant it may be given
soon and in a way to restore the confidence of all peoples every-
where in the faith of nations and the possibility of a covenanted
peace. ROBERT LANSING,
Secretary of State of the United States of America.
COMMENTS ON THE REPLY TO THE POPE.
London Daily Mail: "President Wilson's reply has the spirit
and point of view the world has learned during the last six
months to look for in all his utterances on the war."
London Times: "The answer of a practical statesman to the
peace dreams of the Vatican."
69
AMERICANISM
Daily Telegraph: "It comes like an invigorating wind to
blow away the cobwebs which pacifism and its dupes have been
spinning about the central things in this great quarrel."
Morning Post: "Reveals a man who has his eye fixed on
realities and his mind resolved unflinchingly on a great purpose.
At the end of three years of unspeakable strain and anxiety it
is an inestimable service to the Allies to find such leadership as
this strong, clear-sighted, inflexible inspiring new courage and
faith, shaming the faint-hearted and silencing the disaffected."
New York World: "That President Wilson . . . spoke
for all the Allied Governments admits of no doubt, but what is
more important he spoke for the people of all the Allied Govern-
ments."
New York Post: "In his outline of peace terms, Mr. Wilson
takes the lead."
New York Globe: "President Wilson . . . has satisfied
the conscience of the world that stands steadfast for war until
real peace is possible."
New York Tribune: "The final word of western civilization
to that system of barbarism which dominates and controls the
German Empire. . . Mr. Wilson has demolished every edifice
of peace founded upon the idea of preserving any portion of the
German purpose and the German idea."
Evening Standard: "Mr. Wilson puts into plain English what
our statesmen clothe in roundabout and unimpressive language."
Philadelphia Enquirer: "It ought to clear the atmosphere
not only in the United States but in Europe."
New York Herald: "In language that will ring round the
world . . . speaking for the people of all nations."
Boston Post: "He shows in his most crystalline and effective
fashion how futile and evanescent any peace would be backed only
by the faith of the Hohenzollerns."
AUGUST 30, 1917 FRENCH BREAK GERMAN LINES NORTH OF
VERDUX, ON A FRONT OF 11 MILES.
SEPTEMBER 3, 1917 PRESIDENT WILSON SENDS A MESSAGE TO
THE NATIONAL ARMY.
(The first group (687,000) of the army selected by lot from
the 10,000,000 registered June 5th, began to move toward their
training stations two days later. The care taken of the army,
and the high mental tone of the soldiers, are new in warfare.}
70
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
A MESSAGE TO THE NATIONAL ARMY.
To the Soldiers of the National Army:
You are undertaking a great duty. The heart of the whole
country is with you.
Everything that you do will be watched with the deepest
interest and with the deepest solicitude, not only by those who
are near and dear to you, but the whole nation besides. For this
great war draws us all together, makes us all comrades and
brothers, as all true Americans felt themselves to be when we
first made good our national independence.
The eyes of all the world will be on you, because you are in
some special sense the soldiers of freedom. Let it be your pride,
therefore, to show all men everywhere not only what good sol-
diers you are, but also what good men you are, keeping yourselves
fit and straight in everything and pure and clean through and
through.
Let us set for ourselves a standard so high that it will be a
glory to live up to it, and then let us live up to it and add a new
laurel to the crown of America.
My affectionate confidence goes with you in every battle and
every test. God keep and guide you ! WOODROW WILSON.
SEPTEMBER 8, 1917 SECRETARY LANSING EXPOSES COUNT
LUXBURG.
(Count Luxburg, German Minister at the Argentine, had
used the Swedish Foreign Office to advise his Government about
sinking Argentine ships. He recommended that they be sunk with-
out trace "spurlos versenkt." This "spurlos versenkt" note,
among others, fell into the State Department's hands and was
published, creating a neiv disgust with German methods.}
SEPTEMBER 8, 1917 ENGLAND ADOPTS PRESIDENT WILSON'S
REPLY TO THE POPE.
SEPTEMBER 12, 1917 THE PRESIDENT APPOINTS A PERSONAL
COMMISSION TO INVESTIGATE LABOR RESTLESSNESS AND REPORT.
SEPTEMBER 15, 1917 RUSSIA PROCLAIMED A REPUBLIC.
SEPTEMBER 21, 1917 STATE DEPARTMENT EXPOSES VON
BERNSTORFF, FORMER GERMAN AMBASSADOR TO THE U. S.
(A letter was made public showing that von Bernstorff in-
tended and expected to corrupt Congress in favor of Germany,
71
AMERICANISM
and had a fund on hand for that purpose. These, and similar
fruits of the United States Secret Service activities, were released
from time to time in ansu'er to gestures of virtue and injured
innocence being made in Germany. }
OCTOBER 9, 1917 BRITISH TAKE POELCAPELLE.
OCTOBER 16, 1917100,000 AMERICAN SOLDIERS REPORTED
SAFE IN FRANCE.
OCTOBER 23, 1917 FRENCH, IN A SMASH, TAKE MALMAISON
FORT, ON THE AISNE.
OCTOBER 29, 1917 ITALIAN DEBACLE ON ISONZO FRONT.
( This was traced definitely to German and other propa-
ganda.}
OCTOBER 30, 1917 VON HERTLING SUCCEEDS DR. MICHMEI.IS
AS GERMAN CHANCELLOR.
(Each change in this office brought added political power to
the Junkers, the Pan-German Prussian militarists, intent on carry-
ing through their first grim plans of conquest and exploitation.}
NOVEMBER 1, 1917 BRITISH AND FRENCH REINFORCEMENTS
REACH ITALIAN LINES.
NOVEMBER 1, 1917 BRITISH TAKE BEERSHEBA.
NOVEMBER 1, 1917 KERENSKY GROWS IMPATIENT WITH AL-
LIES.
(Kerensky, with his hands full of Russian troubles, teas try-
ing to get the Allies to make a definite statement of war aims
which would quiet the suspicion of the seething Russian masses
concerning their Allies. This the Allies were reluctant to do, be-
cause of the existence of understandings amongst themselves which
collided with the Russian formula of "no annexations, no indemni-
ties" and in a sense with President Wilson's announced platform
for Allied Peace.}
NOVEMBER 3. 1917 FIRST FIGHT OF AMERICAN SOLDIERS IN
FRANCE.
NOVEMBER 6, 1917 CANADIANS TAKE PASSCHKXDAELE.
72
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
N 7 OVEMBER 7, 1917 THE PRESIDENT ISSUES THE ANNUAL
THANKSGIVING PROCLAMATION.
THE THANKSGIVING PROCLAMATION.
It has long been the honored custom of our people to turn in
the fruitful autumn of the year in praise and thanksgiving to
Almighty God for His many blessings and mercies to us as a
nation. That custom we can follow now even in the midst of
the tragedy of a world shaken by war and immeasurable disaster,
in the midst of sorrow and great peril, because even amidst the
darkness that has gathered about us we can see the great blessings
God has bestowed upon us, blessings that are better than mere
peace of mind and prosperity of enterprise.
We have been given the opportunity to serve mankind as we
once served ourselves in the great day of our Declaration of
Independence, by taking up arms against a tyranny that threatened
to master and debase men everywhere and joining with other free
peoples in demanding for all the nations of the world what we
then demanded and obtained for ourselves. In this day of the
revelation of our duty not only to defend our own rights as a
nation but to defend also the rights of free men throughout the
world, there has been vouchsafed us in full and inspiring measure
the resolution and spirit of united action. We have been brought
to one mind and purpose. A new vigor of common counsel anc
common action has been revealed in us. We should especially
thank God that in such circumstances, in the midst of the greatest
enterprise the spirits of men have ever entered upon, we have,
if we but observe a reasonable and practicable economy, abundance
\vith which to supply the needs of those associated with us as well
as our own. A new light shines about us. The great duties of a
new day awaken a new and greater national spirit in us. Wy
shall never again be divided or wonder what stuff we are made o, .
And while we render thanks for these things let us pray
Almighty God that in all humbleness of spirit we may look always
to Him for guidance; that we may be kept constant in the spirit
and purpose of service; that by His grace our minds may be
directed and our hands strengthened; and that in His good time
liberty and security and peace and the comradeship of a common
justice may be vouchsafed all the nations of the earth.
Wherefore, I, Woodrow Wilson, President of the United
States of America, do hereby designate Thursday, the twenty-
ninth day of November next, as a day of thanksgiving and prayer,
and invite the people throughout the land to cease upon that day
from their ordinary occupations and in their several homes and
7.1
AMERICANISM
places of worship to render thanks to God, the great ruler of all
nations. . WOODROW WILSON.
NOVEMBER 7, 1917 AMERICAN COMMISSIONERS, WITH COLO-
NEL HOUSE, REACH ENGLAND FOR ALLIED WAR CONFER-
ENCE IN PARIS.
NOVEMBER 7, 1917 BOLSHEVIKI GAINING CONTROL OF RUS-
SIAN AFFAIRS IN PETROGRAD.
(Trotsky and Lenine, "internationals," one of them helped
back to Russia by Germany herself, beguiled the earnest, naive
Russians with a cry of immediate peace and free land. Their
leadership was accepted by the Bolsheviki the "maximalists," or
those asking the maximum in the way of radical reforms.}
NOVEMBER 9, 1917 BOLSHEVIKI WIN Moscow. KERENSKY
TOTTERING, AND RUSSIA MOVING SWIFTLY TOWARD ANARCHY
IN GOVERNMENT.
(How much of this breakdown of order was due to the propa-
ganda of German agents, and how much to ingenuous enthusiasms
among a simple people newly free, can never be fully knoivn. Many
students of statesmanship believe that a little more frankness and
Patience on the part of the Allies, and an earlier blowing away of
the mists that ivere hanging over Allied war aims, ivould have
saved Russia from what seemed to the Allied people at the time
an ungrateful, treacherous betrayal, deserving to be permitted to
punish itself. This -view came to be held in the press to some
extent. President Wilson subsequently appears not to have lost
hope at any time, and not to have completely lost the confidence
of the Russian people.)
NOVEMBER 10, 1917 ITALIANS, STIFFENED BY FRENCH AND
ENGLISH TROOPS, STAND ON THE PIAVE, SAVING VENICE.
NOVEMBER 10, 1917 LENINE AND TROTZKY, BOLSHEVIKI,
BECOME SUPREME IN RUSSIA.
NOVEMBER 12, 1917 LLOYD GEORGE DEMANDS ALLIED UNITY
IN POLICY, PROGRAM, PLAN AND EXECUTION.
NOVEMBER 12, 1917 PRESIDENT WILSON GOES TO BUFFALO
AND ADDRESSES THE AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR.
(President Wilson had recognized Labor from the first.
Samuel Gompers, President of the Federation of Labor, was
working closely with him on labor problems involved in organizing
74
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
the nation for war. In this address President Wilson points out
the just obligations and duties of labor, as well as its rights and
privileges. He showed labor its own interest in winning the war
by drawing a picture of the German idea and its effect upon every
form of freedom.)
"LABOR MUST BE FREE."
AN ADDRESS TO THE FEDERATION OF LABOR AT BUFFALO.
(Complete)
Mr. President, Delegates of the American Federation of Labor,
Ladies and Gentlemen:
I esteem it a great privilege and a real honor to be thus ad-
mitted to your public counsels. When your executive committee
paid me the compliment of inviting me here, I gladly accepted the
invitation because it seems to me that this, above all other times
in our history, is the time for common counsel, for the drawing
together not only of the energies but of the minds of the Nation.
I thought that it was a welcome opportunity for disclosing to you
some of the thoughts that have been gathering in my mind during
the last momentous months.
I am introduced to you as the President of the United States,
and yet I would be pleased if you would put the thought of office
into the background and regard me as one of your fellow citizens
who has come here to speak, not the words of authority, but the
words of counsel; the words which men should speak to one
another who wish to be frank in a moment more critical perhaps
than the history of the world has ever yet known; a moment
ivhen it is every man's duty to forget himself, to forget his own
interests, to fill himself with the nobility of a great national and
world conception, and act upon a new platform elevated above
the ordinary affairs of life and lifted to where men have views of
the long destiny of mankind. I think that in order to realize just
what this moment of counsel is it is very desirable that we should
remind ourselves just how this war came about and just what it
is for. You can explain most wars very simply, but the explana-
tion of this is not so simple. Its roots run deep into all the
obscure soils of history, and in my view this is the last decisive
issue between the old principles of power and the new principles
of freedom.
CAUSES OF THE WAR.
The war was started by Germany. Her authorities deny that
they started it, but I am willing to let the statement I have just
made await the verdict of history. And the thing that needs to
75
AMERICANISM
be explained is why Germany started the war. Remember what
the position of Germany in the world was as enviable a position
as any nation has ever occupied. The whole world stood at
admiration of her wonderful intellectual and material achieve-
ments. All the intellectual men of the world went to school to
her. As a university man I have been surrounded by men trained
in Germany, men who had resorted to Germany because nowhere
else could they get such thorough and searching training, particu-
larly in the principles of science and the principles that underlie
modern material achievement. Her men of science had made her
industries perhaps the most competent industries of the world, and
the label "Made in Germany" was a guarantee of good work-
manship and of sound material. She had access to a'l the markets
of the world, and every other who traded in those markets feared
Germany because of rnr effective and almost irresistible competi-
tion. She had a "place in the sun."
Why was she not satisfied? What more did she want? There
was nothing in the world of peace that she did not already have and
have in abundance. We boast of the extraordinary pace of American
advancement. We show with pride the statistics of the increase
of our industries and of the population of our cities. Well, those
statistics did not match the recent statistics of Germany. Her
old cities took on youth, grew faster than any American cities ever
grew. Her old industries opened their eyes and saw a new world
and went out for its conquest. And yet the authorities of Ger-
many were not satisfied. You have one part of the answer to the
question why she was not satisfied in her methods of competition.
There is no important industry in Germany upon which the Gov-
ernment has not laid its hands, to direct it and, when necessity
arose, control it; and you have only to ask why any man whom
you meet who is familiar with the conditions that prevailed before
the war in the matter of national competition to find out the
methods of competition which the German manufacturer and ex-
porters used under the patronage and support of the Government
of Germany. You will find that they were the same sorts of
competition that we have tried to prevent by law within our own
borders. If they could not sell their goods cheaper than we could
sell ours at a profit to themselves they could get a subsidy from
the Government which made it possible to sell them cheaper any-
how, and the conditions of competition were thus controlled in
large measure by the German Government itself.
PLANS FOR WORLD MASTERY.
But that did not satisfy the German Government. All the
while there was lying behind its thought in its dreams of the
76
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
future a political control which would enable it in the long run
to dominate the labor and the industry of the world. They were
not content with success by superior achievement ; they wanted
success by authority. I suppose very few of you have thought
much about the Berlin-to-Bagdad Railway. The Berlin-Bagdad
Railway was constructed in order to run the threat of force down
the flank of the industrial undertakings of half a dozen other
countries; so that when German competition came in it would not
be resisted too far, because there was always the possibility of
getting German armies into the heart of that country quicker than
any other armies could be got there.
Look at the map of Europe now! Germany in thrusting upon
us again and again the discussion of peace talks about what?
Talks about Belgium; talks about northern France; talks about
Alsace-Lorraine. Well, those are deeply interesting subjects to
us and to them, but they are not talking about the heart of the
matter. Take the map and look at it. Germany has absolute
control of Austria-Hungary, practical control of the Balkan States,
control of Turkey, control of Asia Minor. I saw a map in which
the whole thing was printed in appropriate black the other day,
and the black stretched all the way from Hamburg to Bagdad
the bulk of German power inserted into the heart of the world.
If she can keep that, she can keep all that her dreams contemplated
when the war began. If she can keep that, her power can disturb
the world as long as she keeps it, always provided, for I feel bound
to put this proviso in always provided the present influences that
control the German Government continue to control it. / believe
that the spirit of freedom can get into the hearts of the Germans
and find as fine a welcome there as it can find in any oilier hearts,
but the spirit of freedom does not suit the plans of the Pan-
Germans. Power cannot be used with concentrated force against
free people if it is used by free people.
You know how many intimations come to us from one of the
central powers that it is more anxious for peace than the chief
central power, and you know that it means that the people in that
central power know that if the war ends as it stands they will in
effect themselves be vassals of Germany, notwithstanding that
their populations are compounded of all the peoples of that part
of the world, and notwithstanding the fact that they do not wish
in their pride and proper spirit of nationality to be so absorbed
and dominated. Germany is determined that the political power
of the world shall belong to her. There have been such ambitions
before. They have been in part realized, but never before have
those ambitions been based upon so exact and precise and scientific
a plan of domination.
77
AMERICANISM
THE WAY TO PEACE: WAR!
May I not say that it is amazing to me that any group of
persons should be so ill-informed as to suppose, as some groups
in Russia apparently suppose, that any reforms planned in the
interest of the people can live in the presence of a Germany
powerful enough to undermine or overthrow them by intrigue or
force? Any body of free men that compounds with the present
German Government is compounding for its own destruction*
But that is not the whole of the story. Any man in America or
anywhere else that supposes that the free industry and enterprise
of the world can continue if the Pan-German plan is achieved and
German power fastened upon the world is as fatuous as the
dreamers in Russia. If 7 hat I am opposed to is not the feeling of
the pacifists, but their stupidity. My heart is with them, but my
mind has a contempt for them. I want peace, but I know hoiu
to get it, and they do not.
You will notice that I sent a friend of mine, Col. House, to
Europe, who is as great a lover of peace as any man in the world,
but I didn't send him on a peace mission yet. I sent him to take
part in a conference as to how the war was to be won, and he
knows, as I know, that that is the way to get peace if you want
it for more than a few minutes.
All of this is a preface to the conference that I have referred
to with regard to what we are going to do. If we are true friends
of freedom of our own or anybody else's, we will see that the
power of this country and the productivity of this country is
raised to its absolute maximum, and that absolutely nobody is
allowed to stand in the way of it. When I say that nobody is
allowed to stand in the way I do not mean that they shall be
prevented by the power of the Government but by the power of
the American spirit. Our duty, if we are to do this great thing
and show America to be what we believe her to be the greatest
hope and energy of the world is to stand together night and day
until the job is finished.
No ONE MUST INTERRUPT.
While we are fighting for freedom we must see among other
things, that labor is free, and that means a number of interesting
things. It means not only that we must do what we have declared
our purpose to do, see that the conditions of labor are not ren-
dered more onerous by the war but also that we shall see to it
that the instrumentalities by which the conditions of labor are
improved are not blocked or checked. That we must do. That
has been the matter about which I have taken pleasure in con-
78
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
ferring from time to time with your president, Mr. Gompers;
and if I may be permitted to do so, I want to express my admira-
tion of his patriotic courage, his large vision, and his statesman-
like sense of what has to be done. I like to lay my mind alongside
of a mind that knows how to pull in harness. The horses that
kick over the traces will have to be put in corral.
Now, to stand together means that nobody must interrupt the
processes of our energy if the interruption can possibly be avoided
without the absolute invasion of freedom. To put it concretely,
that means this: Nobody has a right to stop the processes of
labor until all the methods of conciliation and settlement have
been exhausted. And I might as well say right here that I am
not talking to you alone. You sometimes stop the courses of
labor, but there are others who do the same, and I believe that
I am speaking from my own experience not only, but from the
experience of others when I say that you are reasonable in a
larger number of cases than the capitalists. I am not saying these
things to them personally yet, because I have not had a chance,
but they have to be said, not in any spirit of criticism, but in
order to clear the atmosphere and come down to business.
Everybody on both sides has now got to transact business, and a
settlement is never impossible when both sides want to do the
square and right thing.
Moreover, a settlement is always hard to avoid when the parties
can be brought face to face. I can differ from a man much more
radically when he is not in the room than I can when he is in
the room, because then the awkward thing is he can come back
at me and answer what I say. It is always dangerous for a man
to have the floor entirely to himself. Therefore, we must insist
in every instance that the parties come into each other's presence
and there discuss the issues between them and not separately in
places which have no communication with each other. I always
like to remind myself of a delightful saying of an Englishman of
the past generation, Charles Lamb. He stuttered a little bit, and
once when he was with a group of friends he spoke very harshly
of some man who was not present. One of his friends said:
"Why, Charles, I didn't know that you knew so-and-so."
"O-o-oh," he said, "I-I d-d-don't; I-I can't h-h-hate a m-m-man
I-I know." There is a great deal of human nature, of very
pleasant human nature, in the saying. It is hard to hate a man
you know. I may admit, parenthetically, that there are some
politicians whose methods I do not at all believe in, but they arc
jolly good fellows, and if they only would not talk the wrong kind
of politics, I would love to be with them.
79
AMERICANISM
WE MUST SHOW THAT WE CAN GOVERN OURSELVES
So it is all along the line, in serious matters and things less
serious. We are all of the same clay and spirit, and we can get
together if we desire to get together. Therefore, my counsel to
you is this: Let us show ourselves Americans by showing that we
do not want to go off in separate camps or groups by ourselves,
but that we want to cooperate with all other classes and all other
groups in the common enterprise which is to release the spirits of
the world from bondage. I would be willing to set that up as
the final test of an American. That is the meaning of democracy.
I have been very much distressed, my fellow citizens, by some of
the things that have happened recently. The mob spirit is dis-
playing itself here and there in this country. I have no sympathy
with what some men are saying, but I have no sympathy with the
men who take their punishment into their own hands; and I want
to say to every man who does join such a mob that I do not
recognize him as worthy of the free institutions of the United
States. There are some organizations in this country whose object
is anarchy and the destruction of law, but I would not meet their
efforts by making myself partner in destroying the la\v. I despise
and hate their purposes as much as any man, but 1 respect the
ancient processes of justice; and I would be too proud not to see
them done justice, however wrong they are.
So I want to utter my earnest protest against any manifesta-
tion of the spirit of lawlessness anywhere or in any cause. Why,
gentlemen, look what it means. We claim to be the greatest
democratic people in the world, and democracy means first of all
that we can govern ourselves. If our men have not self-control,
then they are not capable of that great thing which we call demo-
cratic government. A man who takes the law into his own hands
is not the right man to cooperate in any formation or develop-
ment of law and institutions, and some of the processes by which
the struggle between capital and labor is carried on are processes
that come very near to taking the law into your own hands. I
do not mean for a moment to compare it with what I have just
been speaking of, but 1 want you to see that they are mere grada-
tions in this manifestation of the unwillingness to cooperate, and
that the fundamental lesson of the whole situation is that we must
yield to and obey common counsel. Not all of the instrumentali-
ties for this are at hand. I am hopeful that in the very near
future new instrumentalities may be organized by which we can
see to it that various things that are now going on ought not to
go on. There are various processes of the dilution of labor and
the unnecessary substitution of labor and the bidding in distant
80
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
markets and unfairly upsetting the whole competition of labor
which ought not to go on. I mean now on the part of employers,
and we must interject into this some instrumentality of coopera-
tion by which the fair thing will be done all around. I am hope-
ful that some such instrumentalities may be devised, but whether
they are or not, we must use those that we have and upon every
occasion where it is necessary have such an instrumentality orig-
inated upon that occasion.
"I AM WITH You IF You ARE WITH ME."
So, my fellow citizens, the reason I came away from Wash-
ington is that I sometimes get lonely down there. There are so
many people in Washington who know things that are not so,
and there are so few people who know anything about what the
people of the United States are thinking about. I have to come
away and get reminded of the rest of the country. I have to
come away and talk to men who are up against the real thing, and
say to them, "I am with you if you are with me." And the only
test of being with me is not to think about me personally at all,
but merely to think of me as the expression for the time being
of the power and dignity and hope of the United States.
COMMENTS ox THE LABOR ADDRESS.
New York World: "Again has the President proved himself
the great spokesman and interpreter of modern democracy."
Labor Union Record, Seattle: "If the President can bring
the other fellow the rest of the way, he can count on our united
support."
Duluth Labor World: "Organized labor will go the limit to
prevent strikes. Union men know the priceless value of liberty.
It is a crime akin to treason to call a strike at this
crucial hour, without giving the Government an opportunity to
adjust the grievances complained of by conciliation."
National Labor Journal: "The roadbed is rough, but labor
trusts the engineer."
NOVEMBER 14, 1917 PREMIER KERENSKY A FUGITIVE FROM
THE BOLSHEVIKI.
(Russian reign of terror in the name of democracy, began
under the leadership of Lenine and Trotsky.)
NOVEMBER 15, 1917 CLEMENCEAU, "THE TIGER," BECOMES
PREMIER OF FRANCE.
(He had been bitterly assailing the government for its conduct
of the ii'ar, and especially for its failure to root out and destroy
81
AMERICANISM
"defeatism" and treason, which had been widely exposed. Men
then prominent in French affairs have since been brought to trial.
Some of them have been executed, some banished. These things
show the subtle currents and treacherous undertows against which
Allied leaders and statesmen have had to guard themselves and
their people from the first; secret and sinister workings of evil
perverting many ignorant victims. Clernenceau, taking hold of
France, flung her into the conflict with new vigor, new enthusiasm,
new courage and determination, and soon cleaned out the worst
nests.}
NOVEMBER 20, 1917 SUCCESSFUL BRITISH ATTACK AT CAM-
BRIA; FIRST EXTENSIVE USE OF "TANKS."
NOVEMBER 23, 1917 RUSSIANS BEGIN DEMOBILIZING THE
ARMY.
NOVEMBER 28, 1917 TROTSKY BEGINS PUBLISHING SECRET
TREATIES FROM RUSSIAN ARCHIVES.
NOVEMBER 30, 1917 GERMANS NEUTRALIZE CAMBRAI VIC-
TORY.
NOVEMBER 30, 1917 "RAINBOW DIVISION," FIRST UNITED
STATES NATIONAL GUARD CONTINGENT, ARRIVES SAFELY IN
FRANCE.
DECEMBER 2, 1917 RUSSIAN BOLSHEVIST, UNDER TROTSKY
AND LENINE, OPEN TRUCE NEGOTIATIONS WITH GERMANY.
DECEMBER 4, 1917 CONGRESS MEETS; PRESIDENT WILSON-
DELIVERS HIS ANNUAL MESSAGE.
(By this time President Wilson was generally regarded as
the leader of the world's war thoughts and peace principles, as press
clippings show. This address is another ringing call for all the
resources of the nation to help put doicn this frightful thing that
ii'as destroying the world. Germany must be left without further
power for harm, or denied intercourse witJi the nations. All
peoples, including her present vassals, must be freed from Prussian
military and commercial autocracy, but without interference in
their internal affairs. President Wilson asked for a declaration of
a State of War with Austria. Congress soon passed such a reso-
lution.}
82
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
"WIN THE WAR!"
ADDRESS TO CONGRESS, DECEMBER 4, 1917.
(Complete}
Gentlemen of the Congress:
Eight months have elapsed since I last had the honor of ad-
dressing you. They have been months crowded with events of
immense and grave significance for us. I shall not undertake to
retail or even to summarize those events. The practical particu-
lars of the part we have played in them will be laid before you
in the reports of the executive departments. I shall discuss only
our present outlook upon these vast affairs, our present duties,
and the immediate means of accomplishing the objects we shall
hold always in view.
I shall not go back to debate the causes of the war. The
intolerable wrongs done and planned against us by the sinister
masters of Germany have long since become too grossly obvious
and odious to every true American to need to be rehearsed. But
I shall ask you to consider again and with a very grave scrutiny
our objectives and the measures by which we mean to attain them;
for the purpose of discussion here in this place is action, and our
action must move straight toward definite ends. Our object is,
of course, to win the war; and we shall not slacken or suffer our-
selves to be diverted until it is won. But it is worth while asking
and answering the question, When shall we consider the war
won?
WHEN Is THE WAR WON?
From one point of view it is not necessary to broach this
fundamental matter. I do not doubt that the American people
know what the war is about and what sort of an outcome they
will regard as a realization of their purpose in it. As a Nation
we are united in spirit and intention. I pay little heed to those
who tell me otherwise. I hear the voices of dissent who does
not? I hear the criticism and the clamor of the noisily thought-
less and troublesome. I also see men here and there fling them-
selves in impotent disloyalty against the calm, indomitable poiver
of the Nation. I hear men debate peace who understand neither
its nature nor the way in which we may attain it ivith uplifted
eyes and unbroken spirits. But I know that none of these speak
for the Nation. They do not touch the heart of anything. They
may safely be left to strut their uneasy hour and be forgotten.
But from another point of view I believe that it is necessary
to say plainly what we here at the seat of action consider the
83
AMERICANISM
war to be for and what part we mean to play in the settlement
of its searching issues. We are the spokesmen of the American
people and they have a right to know whether their purpose is
ours. They desire peace by the overcoming of evil, by the defeat
once for all of the sinister forces that interrupt peace and render
it impossible, and they wish to know how closely our thought runs
ivith theirs and zvhat action we propose. They are impatient with
those who desire peace by any sort of compromise deeply and
indignantly impatient but they will be equally impatient with us
if we do not make it plain to them what our objectives are and
what we are planning for in seeking to make conquest of peace
by arms.
GERMAN POWER MUST BE CRUSHED.
I believe that I speak for them when I say two things: First,
that this intolerable Thing of which the masters of Germany have
shown us the ugly face, this menace of combined intrigue and
force which we now see so clearly as the German power, a Thing
U'ithout conscience or honor or capacity for covenanted peace,
?nust be crushed, and if it be not utterly brought to an end, at
least shut out from the friendly intercourse of the nations; and,
second, that when this Thing and its power are indeed defeated
and the time comes that we can discuss peace when the German
people have spokesmen whose word we can believe and when those
spokesmen are ready in the name of their people to accept the
common judgment of the nations as to what shall henceforth be
the bases of law and of covenant for the life of the world we
shall be willing and glad to pay the full price for peace, and pay
it ungrudgingly. We know what that price will be. It will be
full, impartial justice justice done at every point and to every
nation that the final settlement must affect our enemies as well
as our friends.
You catch, with me, the voices of humanity that are in the
air. They grow daily more audible, more articulate, more per-
suasive, and the} r come from the hearts of men everywhere. They
insist that the war shall not end in vindictive action of any kind;
that no nation or peoples shall be robbed or punished because the
irresponsible rulers of a single country have themselves done deep
and abominable wrong. It is this thought that has been expressed
in the formula "No annexations, no contributions, no punitive
indemnities." Just because this crude formula expresses the in-
stinctive judgment as to right of plain men everywhere it has
been made diligent use of by the masters of German intrigue to
lead the people of Russia astray and the people of every other
country their agents could reach, in order that a premature peace
84
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
might be brought about before autocracy has been taught its final
and convincing lesson, and the people of the world put in control
of their own destinies.
But the fact that a wrong use has been made of a just idea
is no reason why a right use should not be made of it. It ought
to be brought under the patronage of its real friends. Let it be
said again that autocracy must first be shown the utter futility
of its claims to power or leadership in the modern world. It is
impossible to apply any standard of justice so long as such forces
are unchecked and undefeated as the present masters of Germany
command. Not until that has been done can Right be set up as
arbiter and peacemaker among the nations. But when that has
been done as, God willing, it assuredly will be we shall at last
be free to do an unprecedented thing, and this is the time to avow
our purpose to do it. We shall be free to base peace on gener-
osity and justice, to the exclusion of all selfish claims to advan-
tage even on the part of the victors.
A PEACE OF DELIVERANCE.
Let there be no misunderstanding. Our present and imme-
diate task is to win the war, and nothing shall turn us aside from
it until it is accomplished. Every power and resource we possess,
whether of men, of money, or materials, is being devoted and will
continue to be devoted to that purpose until it is achieved. Those
who desire to bring peace about before that purpose is achieved
1 counsel to carry their advice elsewhere. We will not entertain
it. We shall regard the war as won only when the German
people say to us, through properly accredited representatives, that
they are ready to agree to a settlement based upon justice and
the reparation of the wrongs their rulers have done. They have
done a wrong to Belgium which must be repaired. They have
established a power over other lands and peoples than their own
over the great Empire of Austria-Hungary, over hitherto free
Balkan states, over Turkey, and within Asia which must be re-
linquished.
Germany's success by skill, by industry, by knowledge, by
enterprise, we did not grudge or oppose, but admired, rather. She
had built up for herself a real empire of trade and influence,
secured by the peace of the world. We were content to abide the
rivalries of manufacture, science, and commerce that were involved
for us in her success and stand or fall as we had or did not have
the brains and the initiative to surpass her. But at the moment
when she had conspicuously won her triumphs of peace she threw
them away to establish in their stead what the world will no
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AMERICANISM
longer permit to be established, military and political domination
by arms by which to oust where she could not excel the rivals she
most feared and hated. The peace we make must remedy that
wrong. It must deliver the once fair lands and happy peoples
of Belgium and northern France from the Prussian conquest and
the Prussian menace, but it must also deliver the peoples of
Austria-Hungary, the peoples of the Balkans, and the peoples of
Turkey, alike in Europe and in Asia, from the impudent and alien
dominion of the Prussian military and commercial autocracy.
No INTERNAL MEDDLING
We owe it, however, to ourselves to say that we do not wish
in any way to impair or to rearrange the Austro-Hungarian Em-
pire. It is no affair of ours what they do with their own life,
either industrially or politically. We do not purpose or desire
to dictate to them in any way. We only desire to see that their
affairs are left in their own hands, in all matters, great or small.
We shall hope to secure for the people of the Balkan peninsula
and for the people of the Turkish Empire the right and oppor-
tunity to make their own lives safe, their own fortunes secure
ngainst oppression or injustice and from the dictation of foreign
courts or parties.
And our attitude and purpose with regard to Germany her-
self are of a like kind. We intend no wrong against the German
Empire, no interference with her internal affairs. We should
deem either the one or the other absolutely unjustifiable, abso-
lutely contrary to the principles we have professed to live by and
to hold most sacred throughout our life as a nation.
The people of Germany are being told by the men whom
they now permit to deceive them and to act as their masters that
they are fighting for the very life and existence of their Empire,
a war of desperate self-defense against deliberate aggression.
Nothing could be more grossly or wantonly false, and we must
seek by the utmost openness and candor as to our real aims to
convince them of its falseness. We are in fact fighting for their
emancipation from fear, along with our own from the fear as
well as from the fact of unjust attack by neighbors or rivals or
schemers after world empire. No one is threatening the exist-
ence or the independence or the peaceful enterprise of the German
Empire.
The worst that can happen to the detriment of the German
people is this, that if they should still, after the war is over,
continue to be obliged to live under ambitious and intriguing
masters interested to disturb the peace of the world, men or classes
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
of men whom the other peoples of the world could not trust, it
might be impossible to admit them to the partnership of nations
which must henceforth guarantee the world's peace. That part-
nership must be a partnership of peoples, not a mere partnership
of governments. It might be impossible, also, in such untoward
circumstances, to admit Germany to the free economic intercourse
which must inevitably spring out of the other partnerships of a
real peace. But there would be no aggression in that; and such
a situation, inevitable because of distrust, would in the very nature
of things sooner or later cure itself, by processes which would
assuredly set in.
No RETALIATING WRONGS.
The wrongs, the very deep wrongs, committed in this war
will have to be righted. That of course. But they cannot and
must not be righted by the commission of similar wrongs against
Germany and her allies. The world will not permit the commis-
sion of similar wrongs as a means of reparation and settlement.
Statesmen must by this time have learned that the opinion of the
world is everywhere wide awake and fully comprehends the issues
involved. No representative of any self-governed nation will dare
disregard it by attempting any such covenants of selfishness and
compromise as were entered into at the Congress of Vienna. The
thought of- the plain people here and everywhere throughout
the world, the people who enjoy no privilege and have very simple
and unsophisticated standards of right and wrong, is the air all
governments must henceforth breathe if they would live. It is
in the full disclosing light of that thought that all policies must
be conceived and executed in this midday hour of the world's life.
German rulers have been able to upset the peace of the world
only because the German people were not suffered under their
tutelage to share the comradeship of the other peoples of the world
either in thought or in purpose. They were allowed to have no
opinion of their own which might be set up as a rule of conduct
for those who exercised authority over them. But the congress
that concludes this war will feel the full strength of the tides
that run now in the hearts and consciences of free men everywhere.
Its conclusions will run with those tides.
TRUTH MUST BE UTTERED; RIGHT MUST BE DONE.
All these things have been true from the very beginning of
this stupendous war; and I cannot help thinking that if they had
been made plain at the very outset the sympathy and enthusiasm
of the Russian people might have been once for all enlisted on the
side of the allies, suspicion and distrust swept away, and a real
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AMERICANISM
and lasting union of purpose effected. Had they believed these
things at the very moment of their revolution and had they been
confirmed in that belief since, the sad reverses which have recently
marked the progress of their affairs toward an ordered and stable
government of free men might have been avoided. The Russian
people have been poisoned by the very same falsehoods that have
kept the German people in the dark, and the poison has been ad-
ministered by the very same hands. The only possible antidote
is the truth. It cannot be uttered too plainly or too often.
From every point of view, therefore, it has seemed to be my
duty to speak these declarations of purpose, to add these specific
interpretations to what I took the liberty of saying to the Senate
in January. Our entrance into the war has not altered our atti-
tude toward the settlement that must come when it is over. When
I said in January that the nations of the world were entitled not
only to free pathways upon the sea, but also to assured and
unmolested access to those pathways, I was thinking, and I am
thinking now, not of the smaller and weaker nations alone, which
need our countenance and support, but also of the great and pow-
erful nations, and of our present enemies as well as our present
associates in the war. I was thinking, and am thinking now, of
Austria herself, among the rest, as well as of Serbia and of
Poland. Justice and equality of right can be had only at a great
price. We are seeking permanent, not temporary, foundations for
the peace of the world and must seek them candidly and fearlessly.
As always, the right will prove to be the expedient.
What shall we do, then, to push this great war of freedom
and justice to its righteous conclusion? We must clear away with
a thorough hand all impediments to success, and we must make
every adjustment of law that will facilitate the full and free use
of our whole capacity and force as a fighting unit.
DECLARE A STATE OF WAR WITH AUSTRIA.
One very embarrassing obstacle that stands in our way is that
we are at war with Germany, but not with her allies. I there-
fore very earnestly recommend that the Congress immediately
declare the United States in a state of war with Austria-Hungary.
Does it seem strange to you that this should be the conclusion of
the argument I have just addressed to you? It is not. It is, in
fact, the inevitable logic of what I have said. Austria-Hungary
is for the time being not her own mistress, but simply the vassal
of the German Government. We must face the facts as they
are and act upon them without sentiment in this stern business.
The Government of Austria-Hungary is not acting upon its own
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WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
initiative or in response to the wishes and feelings of its own
peoples, but as the instrument of another nation. We must meet
its force with our own and regard the Central Powers as but
one. The war can be successfully conducted in no other way.
The same logic would lead also to a declaration of war against
Turkey and Bulgaria. They also are the tools of Germany. But
they are mere tools, and do not yet stand in the direct path of
our necessary action. We shall go wherever the necessities of
this war carry us, but it seems to me that we should go only
where immediate and practical considerations lead us and not heed
any others.
The financial and military measures which must be adopted
will suggest themselves as the war and its undertakings develop,
but I will take the liberty of proposing to you certain other acts
of legislation which seem to me to be needed for the support of
the war and for the release of our whole force and energy.
OTHER THINGS To Do.
It will be necessary to extend in certain particulars the legis-
lation of the last session with regard to alien enemies; and also
necessary, I believe, to create a very definite and particular con-
trol over the entrance and departure of all persons into and from
the United States.
Legislation should be enacted defining as a criminal offense
every willful violation of the presidential proclamation relating
to alien enemies promulgated under section 4067 of the Revised
Statutes and providing appropriate punishment; and women as
well as men should be included under the terms of the acts placing
restraints upon alien enemies. It is likely that as time goes on
many alien enemies will be willing to be fed and housed at the
expense of the Government in the detention camps, and it would
be the purpose of the legislation I have suggested to confine offen-
ders among them in penitentiaries and other similar institutions
where they could be made to work as other criminals do.
Recent experience has convinced me that the Congress must
go further in authorizing the Government to set limits to prices.
The law of supply and demand. I am sorry to say, has been re-
placed by the law of unrestrained selfishness. While we have
eliminated profiteering in several branches of industry it still runs
impudently rampant in others. The farmers, for example, complain
with a great deal of justice that, while the regulation of food
prices restricts their incomes, no restraints are placed upon the
prices of most of the things they must themselves purchase; and
similar inequities obtain on all sides.
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AMERICANISM
It is imperatively necessary that the consideration of the full
use of the water power of the country, and also the consideration
of the systematic and yet economical development of such of the
natural resources of the country as are still under the control
of the Federal Government, should be immediately resumed and
affirmatively and constructively dealt with at the earliest possible
moment. The pressing need of such legislation is daily becoming
more obvious.
The legislation proposed at the last session with regard to
regulated combinations among our exporters, in order to provide
for our foreign trade a more effective organization and method
of cooperation, ought by all means to be completed at this session.
And I beg that the members of the House of Representatives
will permit me to express the opinion that it will be impossible
to deal in any but a very wasteful and extravagant fashion with
the enormous appropriations of the public moneys which must con-
tinue to be made, if the war is to be properly sustained, unless
the House will consent to its former practice of initiating and
preparing all appropriation bills through a single committee, in
order that responsibility may be centered, expenditures standard-
ized and made uniform, and waste and duplication as much as
possible avoided.
Additional legislation may also become necessary before the
present Congress again adjourns in order to effect the most effi-
cient co-ordination and operation of the railway and other trans-
portation systems of the country; but to that I shall, if circum-
stances should demand, call the attention of the Congress upon
another occasion.
If I have overlooked anything that ought to be done for the
more effective conduct of the war, your own counsels will supply
the omission. What I am perfectly clear about is that in the
present session of the Congress our whole attention and energy
should be concentrated on the vigorous, rapid, and successful prose-
cution of the great task of winning the war.
No SELFISH AMBITION ix WAR.
We can do this with all the greater zeal and enthusiasm
because we know that for us this is a war of high principle, de-
based by no selfish ambition of conquest or spoliation; because
we know, and all the world knows, that we have been forced
into it to save the very institutions we live under from corruption
and destruction. The purposes of the Central Powers strike
straight at the very heart of everything ti'e believe in; their meth-
ods of warfare outrage every principle of humanity and knightly
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WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
honor; their intrigue has corrupted the very thought and spirit
of many of our people; their sinister and secret diplomacy has
sought to take our very territory away from us and disrupt the
Union of the States. Our safety would be at an end, our honor
forever sullied and brought into contempt were we to permit their
triumph. They are striking at the very existence of democracy
and liberty.
It is because it is for us a war of high, disinterested purpose,
in which all the free peoples of the world are banded together for
the vindication of right, a war for the preservation of our nation
and of all that it has held dear of principle and of purpose, that we
feel ourselves doubly constrained to propose for its outcome only
that which is righteous and of irreproachable intention, for our foes
as well as for our friends. The cause being just and holy, the set-
tlement must be of like motive and quality. For this we can fight,
but for nothing less noble or less worthy of our traditions. For
this cause we entered the war and for this cause will we battle
until the last gun is fired.
I have spoken plainly because this seems to me the time when
it is most necessary to speak plainly, in order that all the world
may know that even in the heat and ardor of the struggle and when
our whole thought is of carrying the war through to its end we
have not forgotten any ideal or principle for which the name of
America has been held in honor among the nations and for which
it has been our glory to contend in the great generations that went
before us. A supreme moment of history has come. The eyes of
the people have been opened and they see. The hand of God is
laid upon the nations. He will show them favor, I devoutly believe,
only if they rise to clear heights of His own justice and mercy.
COMMENTS, FIFTH ANNUAL MESSAGE TO CONGRESS,
DECEMBER 4, 1917.
Theodore Roosevelt: "The heart of the American people will
answer a devout 'Amen !' "
New York Evening Post: "The Allies are content to acquiesce
in the President's intellectual and moral leadership."
If'asliington Herald: "The President answered the people
. he has paused long enough to give thought to just those
things which have bothered you and me."
Chicago Herald: "His central thought was of the larger, the
international, the more permanent aspects of the war."
Philadelphia Public Ledger: "It is one of the most notable
state papers in our generation."
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AMERICANISM
Louisville Courier-Journal: "As President Wilson stood be-
fore Congress he voiced the calm, indomitable power of the nation
in words and in a spirit which finds an invincible response in every
American heart and in every democratic brain throughout all the
world that has called a halt on Kaiserdom. Truly, this man seems
to have been raised up to lead us in this supreme crisis."
St. Louis Republic: "Sweeps away all the sophistries of the
professional peacemaker."
Cleveland Plain Dealer: "Emphasizes anew his character as
an international leader."
The Christian Science Monitor: "The President's message to
Congress is one of those sane, statesmanlike and serene pronounce-
ments which not only the United States, but the whole body of the
Allies, have come to look to him for."
Boston Globe: "The people of the Entente countries will rec-
ognize the spokesman of their aspirations and exert great pressure
on any reluctant leaders."
Boston Post: "The war will be ended the sooner by reason
of it."
Boston Advertiser: "Peace terms on which the American
people will stand pat. They fulfill the expectations of liberals the
world over."
New York World: "A ringing note of leadership to all the
nations. ... A great war message and a great peace message."
London Daily Mail: "Whenever he speaks it is as though
America, with its 100,000.000 people, blew a blast on a single
trumpet."
London Evening Standard: "We have always thought that a
great opportunity was missed by the European Allies when they
failed to adopt heartily and without qualification the high aims set
forth by the President, which will appeal to the best elements in
every country and may possibly evoke some response even in Ger-
many. If the Wilson policy had been accepted as that of all the
Allies and blazoned forth in a joint declaration, there would have
been less chance of that audacious and mendacious misrepresenta-
tion of which we see the vast results in Russia. The frank ac-
ceptance of the principles enunciated by all the governments and
the peoples warring against Germany would contribute largely
to their success in arms."
London Daily News: "If the President could have said earlier
what he said today, and if in Britain and France and Italy the
responsible leaders of these nations had made his language their
own, Russia might today be driving the German armies from her
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WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
borders. . . . Another example of comprehension by which he
clarified fundamental issues of the war. ... It would be affecta-
tion to pretend that the speech echoes the declaration of Allied
statesmen. His vision comprehends the world; theirs only half."
London Times: "President Wilson has restated the Allies'
purpose with uncompromising force."
London Globe: "President Wilson's addresses come as a
purifying breeze from the new world to the old."
Pall Mall Gazette: "The most direct appeal to a practical
handling of the muddle of the eastern question yet made by any
Allied statesman."
DECEMBER 10, 1917 BRITISH CAPTURE JERUSALEM.
DECEMBER 14, 1917 LLOYD GEORGE ENDORSES PRESIDENT
WILSON'S ADDRESS TO CONGRESS.
DECEMBER 16, 1917 BOLSHEVIKI SIGN TRUCE OF 28 DAYS
WITH GERMANY.
DECEMBER 18. 1917 PROHIBITION AMENDMENT PASSES CON-
GRESS AND GOES TO THE STATES FOR RATIFICATION.
DECEMBER 20, 1917 LLOYD GEORGE STATES BRITISH PEACE
TERMS IN HOUSE OF COMMONS.
DECEMBER 23, 1917 GERMANY AND RUSSIA OPEN PEACE
NEGOTIATIONS AT BREST-LITOVSK.
DECEMBER 23, 1917 BETHLEHEM CAPTURED BY BRITISH.
DECEMBER 25, 1917 ANOTHER GERMAN PEACE OFFENSIVE,
LAUNCHED FROM BREST-LITOVSK.
(Germany, counting upon ivar-weariness amongst the Allied
people, and knowing that the suggestions of peace had crept abroad
through numerous channels from Brest-Litovsk, considered the
time propitious for another attempt to gain by psychology what
she had not been able to gain by arms. Her political spokesmen
proposed, therefore, for all of Russia's allies, a peace without
annexation or indemnity, and restoration of political independence
to all nations suffering the loss of it through the war. Germany
meanwhile had been busy at the conference making everything
ready to despoil Russia of vast territory. The German device
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AMERICANISM
for doing this was typical. Picking out figureheads as ostensible
representatives of various Russian provinces, she insolently and
cynically asserted upon the authority of these dummy representa-
tives that such provinces desired autonomy from Russia, under
German protection, and that they were entitled to it under the
Wilson doctrine of self-determination, or the right of every people
to determine for themselves how they should be ruled!}
DECEMBER 25, 1917 ANOTHER GERMAN PEACE OFFENSIVE
LAUNCHED FROM BREST-LlTOVSK.
DECEMBER 26, 1917 THE GOVERNMENT TAKES OVER THE
RAILROADS.
(President Wilson proclaimed all railroads under Government
control, with William G. McAdoo as Director-General.}
JANUARY 3, 1918 GERMAN DEMANDS OBSTRUCT PEACE NEGO-
TIATIONS WITH THE BOLSHEVIKI.
JANUARY 3, 1918 GERMANY BREAKS TRUCE AGREEMENT BY
REFUSING TO WITHDRAW TROOPS FROM RUSSIAN SOIL.
JANUARY 5, 1918 LLOYD GEORGE RESTATES BRITISH WAR AIMS.
(This was England's counter to the latest peace offensive. The
British Premier insisted upon restoration and reparation, but de-
nied an intention of destroying the Central Empires as political
states.}
JANUARY 8, 1918 PRESIDENT WILSON RESTATES WAR AIMS.
( This was President Wilson's answer to the Brest-Litovsk
peace offensive. Germany had again shown her intriguing, hypo-
critical duplicity in the negotiations for a separate peace with
Russia. President Wilson found in the situation another occa-
sion offering an opportunity to announce to the world, in terms not
to be misinterpreted or misunderstood, the Allied war aims. Three
days before, Lloyd George had made a similar announcement, less
definite and lurid, but so much to the same purpose that no sug-
gestion of a lack of unity could creep in. In this speech President
Wilson lays down categorically a definite peace platform of 14
planks.}
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WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
"A PLATFORM OF WORLD PEACE."
PRESIDENT WILSON'S ADDRESS TO CONGRESS, STATING THE WAR
AIMS AND PEACE TERMS OF THE UNITED STATES.
(Complete]
Gentlemen of the Congress:
Once more, as repeatedly before, the spokesmen of the Central
Empires have indicated their desire to discuss the objects of the
war and the possible basis of a general peace. Parleys have been
in progress at Brest-Litovsk between Russian representatives and
representatives of the Central Powers to which the attention of all
the belligerents has been invited for the purpose of ascertaining
whether it may be possible to extend these parleys into a general
conference with regard to terms of peace and settlement.
The Russian representatives presented not only a perfectly
definite statement of the principles upon which they would be will-
ing to conclude peace but also an equally definite program of the
concrete application of those principles. The representatives of
the Central Powers, on their part, presented an outline of settle-
ment which, if much less definite, seemed susceptible of liberal
interpretation until their specific program of practical terms was
added. That program proposed no concessions at all either to the
sovereignty of Russia or to the preferences of the populations with
whose fortunes it dealt, but meant, in a word, that the Central
Empires were to keep every foot of territory their armed forces
had occupied every province, every city, every point of vantage
as a permanent addition to their territories and their power.
WHOSE WAS THE GERMAN VOICE WE HEARD?
It is a reasonable conjecture that the general principles of
settlement which they at first suggested originated with the more
liberal statesmen of Germany and Austria, the men who have begun
to feel the force of their own people's thought and purpose, while
the concrete terms of actual settlement came from the military
leaders who have no thought but to keep w r hat they have got. The
negotiations have been broken off. The Russian representatives
were sincere and in earnest. They cannot entertain such proposals
of conquest and domination.
The whole incident is full of significance. It is also full of per-
plexity. With whom are the Russian representatives dealing? For
whom are the representatives of the Central Empires speaking?
Are they speaking for the majorities of their respective parliaments
or for the minority parties, that military and imperialistic minority
which has so far dominated their whole policy and controlled the
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AMERICANISM
affairs of Turkey and of the Balkan states which have felt obliged
to become their associates in this war?
The Russian representatives have insisted, very justly, very
wisely, and in the true spirit of modern democracy, that the con-
ferences they have been holding with the Teutonic and Turkish
statesmen should be held within open, not closed, doors, and all the
world has been audience, as was desired. To whom have we been
listening, then? To those who speak the spirit and intention of
the resolutions of the German Reichstag of the 9th of July last,
the spirit and intention of Liberal leaders and parties of Germany,
or to those who resist and defy that spirit and intention and insist
upon conquest and subjugation? Or are we listening, in fact, to
both, unreconciled and in open and hopeless contradiction? These
are very serious and pregnant questions. Upon the answer to them
depends the peace of the world.
GERMANY CHALLENGES Us TO STATE OUR AIMS.
But, whatever the results of the parleys at Brest-Litovsk,
whatever the confusions of counsel and of purpose in the utter-
ances of the spokesmen of the Central Empires, they have again
attempted to acquaint the world with their objects in the war and
have again challenged their adversaries to say what their objects
are and what sort of settlement they would deem just and satis-
factory. There is no good reason why that challenge should not
be responded to, and responded to with the utmost candor. We
did not wait for it. Not once, but again and again, we have laid
our whole thought and purpose before the world, not in general
terms only, but each time with sufficient definition to make it clear
what sort of definite terms of settlement must necessarily spring
out of them. Within the last week Mr. Lloyd George has spoken
with admirable candor and in admirable spirit for the people and
Government of Great Britain.
There is no confusion of counsel among the adversaries of
the Central Powers, no uncertainty of principle, no vagueness of
detail. The only secrecy of counsel, the only lack of fearless
frankness, the only failure to make definite statement of the objects
of the war, lies u'ith Germany and her allies. The issues of life
and death hang upon these definitions. No statesman who has
the least conception of his responsibility ought for a moment to
permit himself to continue this tragical and appalling outpouring
of blood and treasure unless he is sure beyond a peradventure that
the objects of the vital sacrifice are part and parcel of the very
life of Society and that the people for whom he speaks think them
right and imperative as he does.
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WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
THE VOICE OF RUSSIA CALLS.
There is, moreover, a voice calling for these definitions of
principle and of purpose which is, it sems to me, more thrilling
and more compelling than any of the many moving voices with
which the troubled' air of the world is filled. It is the voice of
the Russian people. They are prostrate and all but helpless, it
would seem, before the grim power of Germany, which has
hitherto known no relenting and no pity. Their power, appar-
ently, is shattered. And yet their soul is not subservient. They
will not yield either in principle or in action. Their conception
of what is right, of what is humane and honorable for them to
accept, has been stated with a frankness, a largeness of view, a
generosity of spirit, and a universal human sympathy which must
challenge the admiration of every friend of mankind; and they
have refused to compound their ideals or desert others that they
themselves may be safe.
They call to us to say what it is that we desire, in what, if
in anything, our purpose and our spirit differ from theirs; and I
believe that the people of the United States would wish me to
respond, with utter simplicity and frankness. Whether their pres-
ent leaders believe it or not, it is our heartfelt desire and hope
that some way may be opened whereby we may be privileged to
assist the people of Russia to attain their utmost hope of liberty
and ordered peace.
It will be our wish and purpose that the processes of peace,
when they are begun, shall be absolutely open and that they shall
involve and permit henceforth no secret understandings of any 1
kind. The day of conquest and aggrandizement is gone by; so
is also the day of secret covenants entered into in the interest of
particular governments and likely at some unlooked-for moment
to upset the peace of the world. It is this happy fact, now clear
to the view of every public man whose thoughts do not still linger
in an age that is dead and gone, which makes it possible for every
nation whose purposes are consistent with justice and the peace
of the world to avow now or at any other time the objects it has
in view.
HERE Is WHAT WE ARE FIGHTING FOR.
We entered this war because violations of right had occurred
which touched us to the quick and made the life of our own
people impossible unless they were corrected and the world made
secure once for all against their recurrence.
What ive demand in tins war, therefore, is nothing peculiar
to ourselves. It is that the world be made fit and safe to live in;
and particularly that it be made safe for every peace-loving nation
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AMERICANISM
which, like our own, wishes to live its own life, determine its own
institutions, be assured of justice and fair dealing by the other
peoples of the world as against force and selfish aggression.
All the peoples of the world are in effect partners in this
interest, and for our own part we see very clearly that unless
justice be done to others it will not be done to us. The program
of the world's peace, therefore, is our program ; and that program,
the only possible program, as we see it, is this:
1. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which
there shall be no private international understandings of any kind
but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public
view.
2. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, outside ter-
ritorial waters, alike in peace and in war, except as the seas may
be closed in whole or in part by international action for the en-
forcement of international covenants.
3. The removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers
and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions among
all the nations consenting to the peace and associating themselves
for its maintenance.
4. Adequate guarantees given and taken that national arma-
ments will be reduced to the lowest points consistent with domestic
safety.
5. A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment
of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the prin-
ciple that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the
interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with
the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be deter-
mined.
6. The evacuation of all Russian territory and such a settle-
ment of all questions affecting Russia as will secure the best and
freest cooperation of the other nations of the world in obtaining
for her an unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity for the
independent determination of her own political development and
national policy and assure her of a sincere welcome into the
society of free nations under institutions of her own choosing;
and, more than a welcome, assistance also of every kind that she
may need and may herself desire. The treatment accorded Russia
by her sister nations in the months to come will be the acid test
of their good will, of their comprehension of her needs as distin-
guished from their own interests, and of their intelligent and
unselfish sympathy.
7. Belgium, the whole world will agree, must be evacuated
and restored, without any attempt to limit the sovereignty which
she enjoys in common with all other free nations. No other single
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
act will serve as this will serve to restore confidence among the
nations in the laws which they have themselves set and determined
for the government of their relations with one another. Without
this healing act the whole structure and validity of international
law is forever impaired.
8. All French territory should be freed and the invaded por-
tions restored, and the wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871
in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, which has unsettled the peace
of the world for nearly fifty years, should be righted, in order
that peace may once more be made secure in the interest of all.
9. A readjustment of the frontiers of Italy should be effected
along clearly recognizable lines of nationality.
10. The peoples of Austria-Hungary, whose place among the
nations we wish to see safeguarded and assured, should be ac-
corded the freest opportunity of autonomous development.
11. Rumania, Serbia, and Montenegro should be evacuated;
occupied territories restored; Serbia accorded free and secure
access to the sea; and the relations of the several Balkan states
to one another determined by friendly counsel along historically
established lines of allegiance and nationality; and international
guarantees of the political and economic independence and terri-
torial integrity of the several Balkan states should be entered
into.
12. The Turkish portions of the present Ottoman Empire
should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities
which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted
security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of auton-
omous development, and the Dardanelles should be permanently
opened as a free passage to the ships and commerce of all nations
under international guarantees.
13. An independent Polish state should be erected which
should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish
populations, which should be assured a free and secure access to
the sea, and whose political and economic independence and terri-
torial integrity should be guaranteed by international covenant.
14. A general association of nations must be formed under
specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees
of political independence and territorial integrity to great and
small states alike.
In regard to these essential rectifications of wrong and asser-
tions of right we feel ourselves to be intimate partners of all the
governments and peoples associated together against the imperial-
ists. We cannot be separated in interest or divided in purpose.
We stand together until the end.
99
AMERICANISM
For such arrangements and covenants we are willing to fight
and to continue to fight until they are achieved; but only because
we wish the right to prevail and desire a just and stable peace
such as can be secured only by removing the chief provocations to
war, which this program does remove.
A PROGRAM BASED ON PRINCIPLE.
We have no jealousy of German greatness, and there is noth-
ing in this program that impairs it. We grudge her no achieve-
ment or distinction of learning or of pacific enterprise such as
have made her record very bright and very enviable. We do not
wish to injure her or to block in any way her legitimate influence
or power. We do not wish to fight her either with arms or with
hostile arrangements of trade if she is willing to associate herself
with us and the other peace-loving nations of the world in cove-
nants of justice and law and fair dealing.
We wish her only to accept a place of equality among the
peoples of the world, the new world in which we now live,-
instead of a place of mastery.
Neither do we presume to suggest to her any alteration or
modification of her institutions. But it is necessary, we must
frankly say, and necessary as a preliminary to any intelligent
dealings with her on our part, that we should know whom her
spokesmen speak for when they speak to us, whether for the
Reichstag majority or for the military party and the men whose
creed is imperial domination.
We have spoken now, surely, in terms too concrete to admit
of any further doubt or question. An evident principle runs
through the whole program I have outlined. It is the principle
of justice to all peoples and nationalities, and their right to live
on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another, whether
they be strong or weak.
Unless this principle be made its foundation no part of the
structure of international justice can stand. The people of the
United States could act upon no other principle; and to the vindi-
cation of this principle they are ready to devote their lives, their
honor, and everything that they possess. The moral climax of this
the culminating and final war for human liberty has come, and
they are ready to put their own strength, their own highest pur-
poses, their own integrity and devotion to the test.
COMMENTS ox THE PRESIDENT'S PEACE PLATFORM.
Theodore Roosevelt: "A reassertion of our duty to stand
with the Allies to the end and fight until we have won a com-
plete victory."
100
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
Maximilian Harden: "The key to the temple of world
peace is in the hands of President Wilson."
Morris Hillquit: "A full and true expression of the aspi-
rations of all democratic movements of this war. The next move
is up to Germany."
Scott Nearing of the People's Council: "The President has
put into perfect English the splendid economic and social ideals
of the New Russia."
New York Tribune: "Mr. Wilson's address to Congress
will live as one of the great documents in American history and
one of the permanent contributions of America to world liberty.
. . . He has established an ideal of international policy through-
out the civilized world. Today, as never before, the whole
nation marches with the President, certain alike of the leader and
the cause. In a very deep sense Mr. Wilson's words constitute a
second Emancipation Proclamation."
New York World: "The most definite and comprehensive
statement of peace terms yet made by any responsible head of
any government."
New York Sun: "The President ties up in complete soli-
darity our cause and that of the European Powers which are
fighting the Teutons."
New York Stoats Zeitung: "He speaks without restraint
for all the world. ..."
Chicago Tribune: "An unescapable challenge to the Gov-
ernments of the Central Powers, and, what is perhaps more
important, to the conscience of their people."
London Daily News: "President Wilson states the issue
with unanswerable truth. ... It is whether the world is to be
governed by the German General Staff."
A London Paper: "The Magna Charta of future peace."
JANUARY 9, 1918 REPORTS PUBLISHED THAT CROWDS ix GER-
MAN CITIES MARCH DEMANDING PEACE.
(Doubtless permitted by the German Bureau of Enemy
Psychology in Berlin as a part of the peace offensive. Germans
dn not, as a rule, march unless permitted to; and no news leaves
Germany that is not intended for outside consumption.}
JANUARY 14, 1918 RUSSO-GERMAN ARMISTICE EXTENDED TO
FEBRUARY 18.
101
AMERICANISM
JANUARY 18, 1918 STRIKES AND RIOTS REPORTED THROUGH-
OUT AUSTRIA-HUNGARY.
JANUARY 19, 1918 RUSSIAN CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY BROKEN
UP BY BOLSHEVIKI, WHO HAD FAILED TO GAIN CONTROL OF
IT IN THE ELECTION.
JANUARY 24, 1918 VON HERTLINC, GERMAN CHANCELLOR,
AND COUNT CZERNIN, AUSTRIAN FokEIGN MINISTER, REPLY
TO LLOYD GEORGE AND PRESIDENT WILSON.
(These leaders, answering the Brest-Litovsk peace offensive,
had reiterated the Allied icar aims and peace terms. Fan Hertling
denied every principle of them, assuming Germany's most aggres-
sive and insolent attitude toward u'orld affairs. Czernin, seem-
ing to accept President Wilson's platform in principle, made over-
tures for a direct exchange of ideas betiveen Austria and the
United States.)
JANUARY 26, 1918 GERMAN SOCIALISTS, INDIGNANT OVER
GERMAN CONDUCT OF BREST-LITOVSK NEGOTIATIONS WITH
THE BOLSHEVIKI, WARN THE GERMAN GOVERNMENT.
JANUARY 29, 1918 GERMANY KNOWN TO BE TRANSFERRING
TROOPS FROM RUSSIAN FRONT TO WESTERN FRONT, CON-
TRARY TO TERMS OF THE TRUCE AGREEMENT.
(Another "scrap of paper" incident. Germany's intention, of
course, in the successful Russian peace offensive rcas to relieve her-
self from pressure on the east in order to free these troops to
bring a decision in the W est, and to obtain possession of the Rus-
sian resources by deceit U'hen they could not be gained by arms.
The entire device u'as detected from the first by Allied statesmen,
most of the Allied people, and some of the Allied press.}
FEBRUARY 4, 1918 GERMANY DEFINITELY CONCENTRATING
FOR HUGE SPRING OFFENSIVE IN THE WEST.
(Tlie High Command promised, and possibly hoped, that tJih
ivould be the final drive of the U'ar.)
FEBRUARY 7, 1918 BOLSHEVIKI REFUSE GERMAN DEMANDS
FOR IMMEDIATE PEACE.
FEBRUARY 9, 1918 THE UKRAINE SIGNS A PEACF WITH
GERMANY.
(A Teuton intrigue, ivhich deceived the people of the Ukraine,
at the time. Germany subsequently found the Ukraire hot
handling.)
102
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
FEBRUARY 10, 1918 RUSSIANS BREAK OFF PEACE NEGOTIA-
TIONS AT BREST-LITOVSK.
(Germany's terms were intolerable. Every concession led
to heavier demands.)
FEBRUARY 11, 1918 BOLSHEVIKI DECLARE WAR AT AN END,
AND DISBAND ARMY.
(This proved a conclusive experiment in non-resistance; its
consequences convinced even some pacifists that war may be expe-
dient.)
FEBRUARY 11, 1918 PRESIDENT WILSON ADDRESSES CON-
GRESS, ANSWERING FURTHER GERMAN PEACE OFFENSIVES.
(The simultaneous utterances of the two great Anglo-Saxon
leaders, Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson, a month before,
had stirred up a Teutonic turmoil. Germany and Austria re-
plied simultaneously within two weeks; von Hertling for Ger-
many with evasion and subterfuge; Count Czernin, for Austria,
in a tone apparently so conciliatory that some hope was enter-
tained that this exchange of views might lead to something, until
it became apparent that Count Czernin was merely playing a
deep part in the Teutonic game, in which nothing can be trusted.
President Wilson, seizing upon the hope, endeavored to drive
in a wedge between Germany and her ally, in the following
address, delivered before Congress.)
"ONLY ONE PEACE POSSIBLE."
PRESIDENT WILSON'S ADDRESS TO CONGRESS, ANALYZING GER-
MAN AND AUSTRIAN PEACE UTTERANCES.
(Complete)
Gentlemen of the Congress:
On the eighth of January I had the honor of addressing
you on the objects of the war as our people conceive them. The
Prime Minister of Great Britain had spoken in similar terms
on the fifth of January. To these addresses the German Chan-
cellor replied on the twenty-fourth and Count Czernin, for
Austria, on the same day. It is gratifying to have our desire
so promptly realized that all exchanges of view on this great
matter should be made in the hearing of all the world.
Count Czernin's reply, which is directed chiefly to my own
address of the eighth of January, is uttered in a very friendly
tone. He finds in my statement a sufficiently encouraging ap-
103
AMERICANISM
proach to the views of his own Government to justify him in
believing that it furnishes a basis for a more detailed discussion
of purposes by the two Governments. He is represented to
have intimated that the views he was expressing had been com-
municated to me beforehand and that I was aware of them at
the time he was uttering them; but in this I am sure he was
misunderstood. I had received no intimation of what he in-
tended to say. There was, of course, no reason why he should
communicate privately with me. I am quite content to be one
of his public audience.
GERMANY STILL WITHSTANDS JUST PRINCIPLES.
Count von Hertling's reply is, I must say, very vague and
very confusing. It is full of equivocal phrases and leads it is
not clear where. But it is certainly in a very different tone
from that of Count Czernin, and apparently of an opposite
purpose. It confirms, I am sorry to say, rather than removes,
the unfortunate impression made by what we had learned of
the conferences at Brest-Litovsk. His discussion and acceptance
of our general principles lead him to no practical conclusions.
He refuses to apply them to the substantive items which must
constitute the body of any final settlement. He is jealous of
international action and of international counsel. He accepts,
he says, the principle of public diplomacy, but he appears to
insist that it be confined, at any rate in this case, to generalities
and that the several particular questions upon whose settlement
must depend the acceptance of peace by the twenty-three states
now engaged in the war, must be discussed and settled, not in
general council, but severally by the nations most immediately
concerned by interest or neighborhood. He agrees that the seas
should be free, but looks askance at any limitation to that free-
dom by international action in the interest of the common order.
He would without reserve be glad to see economic barriers re-
moved between nation and nation, for that could in no way
impede the ambitions of the military party with whom he seems
constrained to keep on terms. Neither does he raise objection
to a limitation of armaments. That matter will be settled of
itself, he thinks, by the economic conditions which must follow
the war. But the German colonies, he demands, must be re-
turned without debate. He will discuss with no one but the
representatives of Russia what disposition shall be made of
the people and the lands of the Baltic provinces; with no one
but the Government of France the "conditions" under which
French territory shall be evacuated; and only with Austria what
104
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
shall be done with Poland. In the determination of all ques-
tions affecting the Balkan states he defers, as I understand him,
to Austria and Turkey; and with regard to the agreements to
be entered into concerning the non-Turkish peoples of the present
Ottoman Empire, to the Turkish authorities themselves. After
a settlement all around, effected in this fashion, by individual
barter and concession, he would have no objection, if I correctly
interpret his statement, to a league of nations which would under-
take to hold the new balance of power steady against external
disturbance.
No PEACE OF SHREDS AND PATCHES.
// must be evident to everyone who understands what this
war has wrought in the opinion and temper of the world that
no general peace, no peace worth the infinite sacrifices of these
years of tragical suffering, can possibly be arrived at in any such
fashion. The method the German Chancellor proposes is the
method of the Congress of Vienna. IV e cannot and will not
return to that. What is at stake now is the peace of the world.
What we are striving for is a new international order based
upon broad and universal principles of right and justice, no
mere peace of shreds and patches. Is it possible that Count von
Hertling does not see that, does not grasp it, is in fact living
in his thought in a world dead and gone? Has he utterly for-
gotten the Reichstag Resolutions of the nineteenth of July, or
does he deliberately ignore them? They spoke of the conditions
of a general peace, not of national aggrandizement or of arrange-
ments betii'een state and state. The peace of the ivorld depends
upon the just settlement of each of the several problems to which
I adverted in my recent address to the Congress. I, of course,
do not mean that the peace of the ivorld depends upon the accept-
ance of any particular set of suggestions as to the way in which
those problems are to be dealt with. I mean only that those
problems each and all affect the whole world; that unless they
are dealt with in a spirit of unselfish and unbiased justice, with
a view to the wishes, the natural connections, the racial aspira-
tions, the security, and the peace of mind of the peoples involved,
no permanent peace luill have been attained. They cannot be
discussed separately or in corners. None of them constitutes a
private or separate interest from which the opinion of the world
may be shut out. Whatever affects the peace affects mankind,
and nothing settled by military force, if settled wrong, is settled
at all. It will presently have to be reopened.
105
AMERICANISM
NATIONS SIT IN JUDGMENT.
Is Count von Hertling not aware that he is speaking in the
court of mankind, that all the awakened nations of the world
now sit in judgment on what every public man, of whatever
nation, may say on the issues of a conflict which has spread to
every region of the world? The Reichstag Resolutions of July
themselves frankly accepted the decisions of that court. There
shall be no annexations, no contributions, no punitive damages.
Peoples are not to be handed about from one sovereignty to
another by an international conference or an understanding be-
tween rivals and antagonists. National aspirations must be re-
spected; peoples may now be dominated and governed only by
their own consent. "Self-determination" is not a mere phrase.
It is an imperative principle of action, which statesmen will hence-
forth ignore at their peril. We cannot have general peace for
the asking, or by the mere arrangements of a peace conference.
It cannot be pieced together out of individual understandings
between powerful states. All the parties to this war must join
in the settlement of every issue anywhere involved in it; because
what we are seeking is a peace that we can all unite to guar-
antee and maintain and every item of it must be submitted to
the common judgment whether it be right and fair, an act of
justice rather than a bargain between sovereigns.
The United States has no desire to interfere in European
affairs or to act as arbiter in European territorial disputes. She
would disdain to take advantage of any internal weakness or
disorder to impose her own will upon another people. She is
quite ready to be shown that the settlements she has suggested are
not the best or the most enduring. They are only her own pro-
visional sketch of principles and of the way in which they should
be applied. But she entered this war because she was made a
partner whether she would or not, in the sufferings and indig-
nities inflicted by the military masters of Germany, against the
peace and security of mankind; and the conditions of peace will
touch her as nearly as they will touch any other nation to which
is entrusted a leading part in the maintenance of civilization.
She cannot see her way to peace until the causes of this war-
are removed, its renewal rendered as nearly as may be impossible.
PULL UP THE ROOTS OF WAR.
This war had its roots in the disregard of the rights of
small nations and of nationalities which lacked the union and
the force to make good their claim to determine their own alle-
giances and their own forms of political life. Covenants must
106
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
now be entered into which will render such things impossible
for the future; and those covenants must be backed by the united
force of all nations that love justice and are willing to main-
tain it at any cost. If territorial settlements and the political
relations of great populations which have not the organized
power to resist are to be determined by the contracts of the
powerful governments which consider themselves most directly
affected, as Count von Hertling proposes, why may not economic
questions also? It has come about in the altered world in which
we now find ourselves that justice and the rights of peoples affect
the whole field of international dealing as much as access to raw
materials and fair and equal conditions of trade. Count von
Hertling wants the essential bases of commercial and industrial
life to be safeguarded by common agreement and guarantee,
but he cannot expect that to be conceded him if the other matters
to be determined by the articles on peace are not handled in
the same way as items in the final accounting. He cannot ask
the benefit of common agreement in the one field without accord-
ing it in the other. I take it for granted that he sees that sepa-
rate and selfish compacts with regard to trade and the essential
materials of manufacture would afford no foundation for peace.
Neither, he may rest assured, will separate and selfish contracts
with regard to provinces and peoples.
COUNT CZERNIN SEEMS To SEE.
Count Czernin seems to see the fundamental elements of
peace with clear eyes and does not seek to obscure them. He
sees that an independent Poland, made up of all the indisputably
Polish peoples who lie contiguous to one another, is a matter
of European concern and must of course be conceded; that Bel-
gium must be evacuated and restored, no matter what sacrifices
and concessions that may involve; and that national aspirations
must be satisfied, even within his own Empire, in the common
interest of Europe and mankind. If he is silent about questions
which touch the interest and purpose of his allies more nearly
than they touch those of Austria only, it must of course be be-
cause he feels constrained, I suppose, to defer to Germany and
Turkey in the circumstances. Seeing and conceding, as he does,
the essential principles involved and the necessity of candidly
applying them, he naturally feels that Austria can respond to
the purpose of peace as expressed by the United States with less
embarrassment than could Germany. He would probably have
gone much farther had it not been for the embarrassments of
Austria's alliances and of her dependence upon Germany.
107
AMERICANISM
After all, the test of whether it is possible for either gov-
ernment to go any further in this comparison of views is simple
and obvious. The principles to be applied are these:
First, that each part of the final settlement must be based
upon the essential justice of that particular case and upon such
adjustments as are most likely to bring a peace that will be
permanent;
Second, that peoples and provinces are not to be bartered
about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were mere chat-
tels and pawns in a game, even the great game, now forever
discredited, of the balance of power; but that
Third, every territorial settlement involved in this war must
be made in the interest and for the benefit of the populations
concerned, and not as a part of any mere adjustment or com-
promise of claims amongst rival states; and
Fourth, that all well defined national aspirations shall be
accorded the utmost satisfaction that can be accorded them
without introducing new or perpetuating old elements of dis-
cord and antagonism that would be likely in time to break the
peace of Europe and consequently of the world.
A general peace erected upon such foundations can be dis-
cussed. Until such a peace can be secured we have no choice
but to go on. So far as we can judge, these principles that we
regard as fundamental are already everywhere accepted as im-
perative except among the spokesmen of the military and annex-
ationist party in Germany. If they have anywhere else been
rejected, the objectors have not been sufficiently numerous or
influential to make their voices audible. The tragical circum-
stance is that this one party in Germany is apparently willing
and able to send millions of men to their death to prevent what
all the world now sees to be just.
WE CANNOT TURN BACK.
I would not be a true spokesman of the people of the United
States if I did not say once more that we entered this war upon
no small occasion, and that we can never turn back from a course
chosen upon principle. Our resources are in part mobilized now.
and we shall not pause until they are mobilized in their entirety.
Our armies are rapidly going to the fighting front, and will go
more and more rapidly. Our whole strength will be put into
this war of emancipation, emancipation from the threat and
attempted mastery of selfish groups of autocratic rulers. what-
ever the difficulties and present partial delays, ll'e arc indom-
itable in our poii'er of independent action and can in no circum-
108
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
stance consent to live in a world governed by intrigue and force.
We believe that our own desire for a new international order
under which reason and justice and the common interests of
mankind shall prevail is the desire of enlightened men every-
where. Without that new order the world will be without
peace and human life will lack tolerable conditions of existence
and development. Having set our hand to the task of achieving
it, we shall not turn back.
I hope that it is not necessary for me to add that no word
of what I have said is intended as a threat. That is not the
temper of our people. I have spoken thus only that the whole
world may know the true spirit of America that men every-
where may know that our passion for justice and for self-gov-
ernment is no mere passion of words but a passion which, once
set in action, must be satisfied. The power of the United States
is a menace to no nation or people. It will never be used in
aggression or for the aggrandizement of any selfish interest of
our own. It springs out of freedom and is for the service of
freedom.
FEBRUARY 18, 1918 GERMANY RESUMES WAR ON RUSSIA.
(Perhaps one of the most colossal of Germany's many stupid
blunders. Nothing she had done so firmly consolidated against
her the thought of the free world. This action over a fallen foe,
which she had herself previously seduced into a state of physical,
mental and spiritual helplessness, startled from their dreams many
who had still built castles of peace out of the fatuous faith that
there was some moral foundation in Germany upon which to
build.}
FEBRUARY 19, 1918 BOLSHEVIKI ACCEPT GERMAN TERMS, BUT
DRIVE CONTINUES.
(Here brute force and treachery threw off the mask. Even
Germans squirmed at this; while Austria ivas understood to have
refused to take part in the game, as a mark of her disapproval.}
FEBRUARY 19, 1918 LLOYD GEORGE DEFENDS ALLIED UNI-
FIED CONTROL.
(This marked the final triumph in England of the policv
of unified control and direction, consistently supported by the
United States from the first. Lloyd George referred to Ameri-
can arguments as having "irresistible power and logic."}
109
AMERICANISM
FEBRUARY 24, 1918 BOLSHEVIKI GOVERNMENT ACCEPTS FOR
RUSSIA FURTHER GERMAN PEACE TERMS.
(These terms, imposed by bullying force, were much worse
than the first ones, surrendering to Germany under a German
"self-determination" pretext that the inhabitants desired the
change one-fourth of European Russia,)
FEBRUARY 25. 1918 VON HERTLING, FOR GERMANY, CON-
TINUES PEACE OFFENSIVE.
(Chancellor Von Hertling, while Germany was overrunning
Russia, overcome icith a "scrap of paper," informed the world in a
speech that he could "fundamentally agree" with President Wil-
son's peace terms, as expressed in the speech of February II.}
MARCH 11, 1918 PRESIDENT WILSON SENDS MESSAGE TO
RUSSIAN SOVIETS.
(He expressed sympathy and declared it to be America's in-
tention to help Russia maintain her existence and freedom.)
MARCH 11, 1918 AMERICAN TROOPS GO "OVER THE TOP" FOR
THE FIRST TIME.
MARCH 13, 1918 GERMANY FORCIBLY OCCUPIES ODESSA.
(She ratified her treaty of peace ivith the Ukraine by occu-
pying the capital with troops and beginning to strip the country
of supplies. Peasants hid, buried and destroyed grain to prevent
the Germans from getting it.)
MARCH 18, 1918 ALLIED NATIONS DENOUNCE GERMANY'S
POLITICAL ASSASSINATION OF RUSSIA AND REPUDIATE THE
PEACE TREATIES.
MARCH 21, 1918 GREATEST OFFENSIVE OF THE WAR LAUNCHED
BY GERMANS.
armies swollen by troops drawn from the Russian
front, the German High Command, after months of preparation,
special training of "shock troops" and diligent publicity in the
neutral and enemy press, launched the greatest offensive of the war
against the British army, with the general purpose of forcing a
favorable peace by a decision at arms before the arrival of help
from America. The objectives ivere either the channel ports or
Paris, as the battle might develop. The Germans succeeded in
110
\VOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
driving a deep, broad salient into the British lines, being stopped
only short of Amiens. The threat for an anxious week was critical,
but the Germans were finally held. This supreme effort was
enormously costly in men to the Germans, and gained no vital ob-
jectives. American troops were brigaded with English and French,
General Pershing offering all the soldiers he had to the Allied
Command.)
MARCH 28, 1918 GENERAL PERSHING OFFERS FRANCE ALL
THE AMERICAN SOLDIERS ON HAND.
MARCH 29, 1918 GENERAL FOCH MADE GENERALISSIMO, IN
SUPREME COMMAND OF ALL ALLIED ARMIES.
APRIL 4, 1918 GERMANS RENEW SUPREME OFFENSIVE.
(This time they struck at the junction of the French and
British armies at Amiens, gaining ground, but failing to break
through as they had purposed.)
APRIL 6, 1918 FIRST ANNIVERSARY OF AMERICA'S ENTRANCE
INTO THE WAR; PRESIDENT WILSON DELIVERS AN ADDRESS
AT BALTIMORE.
(Both Germany, through von Hertling, and Austria, through
Czernin, made welcoming gestures with one hand toward the prin-
ciples laid down in President Wilson's speech of February nth,
while with the other they were signing a treacherous peace with
Russia which wrested from her vast areas under hypocritical pre-
texts, subjected millions of people to the German world-will, and
cynically ignored every principle for which President Wilson so
clearly showed the Allies were sacrificing all. Whereupon Presi-
dent Wilson in an address in Baltimore launched at the Prussian
Autocracy possibly the most penetrating and crushing arraignment
any nation has ever suffered since the days of the prophets. The
peroration of this address, in which President Wilson, in the name
of the United States, accepts the German challenge of force,
seen in the Brest-Litovsk treaty, will doubtless be pronounced
one of the great passages of English speech.)
"FORCE TO THE UTMOST!"
PRESIDENT WILSON ACCEPTS GERMANY'S CHALLENGE.
(Complete)
Fellow Citizens:
This is the anniversary of our acceptance of Germany's chal-
lenge to fight for our right to live and be free, and for the sacred
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AMERICANISM
rights of free men everywhere. The Nation is awake. There
is no need to call to it. We know ivhat the war must cost, our
utmost sacrifice, the lives of our fittest men and, if need be, all
that we possess. The loan we are met to discuss is one of the
least parts of what we are called upon to give and to do, though
in itself imperative. The people of the whole country are alive
to the necessity of it, and are ready to lend to the utmost, even
where it involves a sharp skimping and daily sacrifice to lend
out of meagre earnings. They will look with reprobation and
contempt upon those who can and will not, upon those who de-
mand a higher rate of interest, upon those who think of it as
a mere commercial transaction. I have not come, therefore, to
urge the loan. I have come only to give you, if I can, a more
vivid conception of what it is for.
The reasons for this great war, the reason why it had to
come, the need to fight it through, and the issues that hang upon
its outcome, are more clearly disclosed now than ever before.
It is easy to see just what this particular loan means because
the Cause we are fighting for stands more sharply revealed than
at any previous crisis of the momentous struggle. The man who
knows least can now see plainly how the cause of Justice stands
and what the imperishable thing is he is asked to invest in. Men
in America may be more sure than they ever were before that
the cause is their own, and that, if it should be lost, their own
great Nation's place and mission in the world would be lost
with it.
OUR HANDS ARE CLEAN.
I call you to witness, my fellow countrymen, that at no
stage of this terrible business have I judged the purposes of Ger-
many intemperately. I should be ashamed in the presence of af-
fairs so grave, so fraught with the destinies of mankind through-
out all the world, to speak with truculence. to use the weak lan-
guage of hatred or vindictive purpose. We must judge as we
would be judged. I have sought to learn the objects Germany
has in this war from the mouths of her o\vn spokesmen, and to
deal as frankly with them as I wished them to deal with me. 1
have laid bare our own ideals, our own purposes, without re-
serve or doubtful phrase, and have asked them to say as plainly
what it is that they seek.
We have ourselves proposed no injustice, no aggression. We
are ready, whenever the final reckoning is made, to be just to
the German people, deal fairly with the German power, as with
all others. There can be no difference between peoples in the
final judgment, if it is indeed to be a righteous judgment. To
112
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
propose anything but justice, evenhanded and dispassionate jus-
tice, to Germany at any time, whatever the outcome of the war,
would be to renounce and dishonour our own cause. For we
ask nothing that we are not willing to accord.
It has been with this thought that I have sought to learn
from those who spoke for Germany whether it was justice or
dominion and the execution of their own will upon the other
nations of the world that the German leaders were seeking. They
have answered, answered in unmistakable terms. They have
avowed that it was not justice but dominion and the unhindered
execution of their own will.
Now GERMANY'S PURPOSES STAND NAKED.
The avowal has not come from Germany's statesmen. It
has come from her military leaders, who are her real rulers.
Her statesmen have said that they wished peace, and were ready
to discuss its terms whenever their opponents were willing to sit
down at the conference table with them. Her present Chancellor
has said in indefinite and uncertain terms, indeed, and in phrases
that often seem to deny their own meaning, but with as much
plainness as he thought prudent that he believed that peace
should be based upon the principles which we had declared would
be our own in the final settlement. At Brest-Litovsk her civil-
ian delegates spoke in similar terms; professed their desire to
conclude a fair peace and accord to the peoples with whose
fortunes they were dealing the right to choose their own alle-
giances. But action accompanied and followed the profession.
Their military masters, the men who act for Germany and exhibit
her purpose in execution, proclaimed a very different conclusion.
We can not mistake what they have done In Russia, in Finland,
in the Ukraine, in Roumania. The real test of their justice and
fair play has come. From this we may judge the rest. They are
enjoying in Russia a cheap triumph in which no brave or gallant
nation can long take pride. A great people, helpless by their
own act, lies for the time at their mercy. Their fair professions
are forgotten. They nowhere set up justice, but everywhere
impose their power and exploit everything for their own use
and aggrandizement; and the peoples of conquered provinces are
invited to be free under their dominion!
BEWARE OF THEM!
Are we not justified in believing that they would do the
same things at their western front if they were not there face
to face with armies whom even their countless divisions can not
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AMERICANISM
overcome? If, when they have felt their check to be final, they
should propose favorable and equitable terms with regard to
Belgium and France and Italy, could they blame us if we con-
cluded that they did so only to assure themselves of a free hand
in Russia and the East?
Their purpose is undoubtedly to make all the Slavic peoples,
all the free and ambitious nations of the Baltic peninsula, all
the lands that Turkey has dominated and misruled, subject to
their will and ambition and build upon that dominion an empire
of force upon which they fancy that they can then erect an
empire of gain and commercial supremacy an empire as hostile
to the Americas as to the Europe which it will overawe an
empire which will ultimately master Persia, India, and the
peoples of the Far East. In such a program our ideals, the
ideals of justice and humanity and liberty, the principle of the
free self-determination of nations upon which all the modern
world insists, can play no part. They are rejected for the ideals
of power, for the principle that the strong must rule the weak,
that trade must follow the flag, whether those to whom it is
taken welcome it or not, that the peoples of the world are to
be made subject to the patronage and overlordship of those who
have the power to enforce it.
That program once carried out, America and all who care
or dare to stand with her must arm and prepare themselves to
contest the mastery of the World, a mastery in which the rights
of common men, the rights of women and of all who are weak,
must for the time being be trodden under foot and disregarded,
and the old, age-long struggle for freedom and right begin again
at its beginning. Everything that America has lived for and
loved and grown great to vindicate and bring to a glorious realiza-
tion will have fallen in utter ruin and the gates of mercy once
more pitilessly shut upon mankind!
The thing is preposterous and impossible; and yet is not
that what the whole course and action of the German armies
has meant wherever they have moved ? I do not wish, even in
this moment of utter disillusionment, to judge harshly or unright-
eously. I judge only what the German arms have accomplished
with unpitying thoroughness throughout every fair region they
have touched.
THERE is ONE THING TO Do.
What, then, are we to do? For myself, I am ready, ready
still, ready even now, to discuss a fair and just and honest peace
at any time that it is sincerely purposed a peace in which the
strong and the weak shall fare alike. But the answer, when
114
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
I proposed such a peace, came from the German commanders
in Russia, and I cannot mistake the meaning of the answer.
I accept the challenge. I know that you accept it. All the
world shall know that you accept it. It shall appear in the utter
sacrifice and self-forgetfulness with which we shall give all that
we love and all that we have to redeem the world and make it
fit for free men like ourselves to live in. This now is the mean-
ing of all that we do. Let everything that we say, my fellow
countrymen, everything that we henceforth plan and accomplish,
ring true to this response till the majesty and might of our con-
certed power shall fill the thought and utterly defeat the force
of those who flout and misprize what we honour and hold dear.
Germany has once more said that force, and force alone, shall
decide whether Justice and peace shall reign in the affairs of
men, whether Right as America conceives it or Dominion as she
conceives it shall determine the destinies of mankind. There is,
therefore, but one response possible from us: Force, Force to the
utmost, Force without stint or limit, the righteous and triumph-
ant Force which shall make Right the laiv of the world, and cast
every selfish dominion down in the dust.
COMMENTS ON ANNIVERSARY SPEECH AT BALTIMORE.
Columbia State: "President Wilson is the living voice of this
war, as France is its living soul. With Wilson as the inspiration,
with Foch as the directing genius of the war, and with the un-
conquerable troops of all the Allies as the resistless enginery of
battle, victory is certain."
Figaro: "Finally Germany's character has been revealed
to President Wilson as that of a monster nation, existing only by
devouring others until it shall devour itself."
New York Evening Post: "Now the Teutonic peace propa-
ganda has killed itself, and Mr. Wilson once more rallies all
elements in this Country to the united support of the war by
showing the insincerity and the duplicity of the enemy's peace
overtures."
APRIL 9-10, 1918 GERMANS DRIVE AGAINST ARRAS.
("The Pillar of Arras" had held up the first German tide
in its s-ii'eep iou-ard the Channel Ports. Desperate fighting met
with a more desperate resistance. Reserves were brought up in
sufficient forces to hold.)
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AMERICANISM
APRIL 12, 1918 GENERAL HAIG ISSUES HIS FAMOUS "BACK. TO
THE WALL" ORDER OF THE DAY.
("With our backs to the wall . . . each one of us must fight
on to the end ..." He told his soldiers that the French were
on the way. They fought on; the French came, and the Germans
were held.)
MAY 11, 1918 PRESIDENT WILSON ISSUES A MEMORIAL DAY
PROCLAMATION.
MEMORIAL DAY PROCLAMATION.
A PROCLAMATION: Whereas, the Congress of the United
States on the second day of April last passed the following reso-
lution:
"Resolved by the Senate (the House of Representatives con-
curring), That it being a duty peculiarly incumbent in a time
of war humbly and devoutly to acknowledge our dependence on
Almighty God and to implore His aid and protection, the Presi-
dent of the United States be. and is hereby, respectfully requested
to recommend a day of public humiliation, prayer and fasting,
to be observed by the people of the United States with religious
solemnity and the offering of fervent supplications to Almighty
God for the safety and welfare of our cause. His blessings on
our arms, and a speedy restoration of an honorable and lasting
peace to the nations of the earth";
And whereas, it has always been the reverent habit of the
people of the United States to turn in humble appeal to Almighty
God for His guidance in the affairs of their common life;
Now, therefore, I, Wood row Wilson, President of the
United States of America, do hereby proclaim Thursday, the
30th of May, a day already freighted with sacred and stimulat-
ing memories, a day of public humiliation, prayer and fasting,
and do exhort my fellow-citizens of all faiths and creeds to
assemble on that day in their several places of worship and
there, as well as in their homes, to pray Almighty God that He-
may forgive our sins and shortcomings as a people and purify
our hearts to see and love the truth, to accept and defend all
things that are just and right, and to purpose only those righteous
acts and judgments which are in conformity with His will; be-
seeching Him that He will give victory for our Armies as they
fight for freedom, wisdom to those who take counsel on our
behalf in these days of dark struggle and perplexity and stead-
fastness to our people to make sacrifice to the utmost in support
of what is just and true, bringing us at last the peace in which
116
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
men's hearts can be at rest because it is founded upon mercy,
justice and good will.
In witness whereof I have hereunto set my hand and caused
the seal of the United States to be affixed.
Done in the District of Columbia, this llth day of May, in
the year of our Lord, 1918, and of the independence of the
United States the 142d. WOODROW WILSON.
MAY 20, 1918 PRESIDENT WILSON DELIVERS AN ADDRESS AT
NEW YORK LAUNCHING A RED CROSS DRIVE.
(Another splendid war utterance; another rallying cry, re-
sponded to throughout the nation. President Wilson asked the
nation for "troops without limit.'")
"TROOPS WITHOUT LIMIT."
PRESIDENT WILSON RESTATES WAR AIMS AND ASKS FOR MORE
SOLDIERS.
(Abridged}
Mr. Chairman and Fellow Countrymen: I should be very
sorry to think that Mr. Davison in any degree curtailed his
extraordinarily interesting speech for fear that he was postponing
mine, because I am sure you listened with the same intent and
intimate interest with which I listened to the extraordinary vivid
account he gave of the things which he had realized because he
had come in contact with them on the other side of the waters.
We compass them with our imagination; he compassed them
in his personal experience, and I am not come here tonight to
review for you the work of the Red Cross; I am not competent
to do so because I have not had the time or the opportunity to
follow it in detail. I have come here simply to say a few words
to you as to what it all seems to me to mean, and it means
a great deal.
There are two duties with which we are face to face. The
first duty is to win the war. And the second duty, that goes
hand in hand with it, is to win it greatly and worthily, show-
ing the real quality of our power not only, but the real quality
of our purpose and of ourselves. Of course, the first duty, the
duty that we must keep in the foreground of our thought until
it is accomplished, is to win the war.
No LIMIT TO TROOPS.
I have heard gentlemen recently say that we must get
5.000,000 men ready. Why limit it to 5,000,000? I have asked
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AMERICANISM
the Congress of the United States to name no limit because the
Congress intends, I am sure, as we all intend, that every ship
that can carry men or supplies shall go laden upon every voyage
with every man and every supply she can carry. And we are
not to be diverted from the grim purpose of winning the war by
any insincere approaches upon the subject of peace.
I can say with a clear conscience that I have tested their
intimations and have found them insincere. I now recognize
them for what they are, an opportunity to have a free hand,
particularly in the east, to carry out purposes of conquest and
exploitation.
Every proposal with regard to accommodation in the west
involves a reservation with regard to the east. Now, so far as
I am concerned. 1 intend to stand by Russia as well as France.
The helpless, the friendless, are the very ones that need
friends and succor, and if any man in Germany thinks we are
going to sacrifice anybody for our own sake, I tell them now they
are mistaken. For the glory of this war, my fellow citizens, so
far as we are concerned, is that it is, perhaps for the first time
in history, an unselfish war.
I should not be proud to fight for a selfish purpose, but I
can be proud to fight for mankind. If they wish peace, let them
come forward through accredited representatives and lay their
claims on the table. We have laid ours and they know what
they are.
THE TIES OF WAR.
But behind all this grim purpose, my friends, lies the oppor-
tunity to demonstrate not only force, which will be demonstrated
to the utmost, but the opportunity to demonstrate character,
and it is that opportunity that we have most conspicuously in
the work of the Red Cross. Not that our men in arms do not
represent our character, for they do, and it is a character which
those who see and realize, appreciate and admire; but their duty
is the duty of force. The duty of the Red Cross is the duty
of mercy and succor and friendship.
Have you formed a picture in your imagination of what this
war is doing for us and for the world? In my own mind I am
convinced that not a hundred years of peace could have knitted
this nation together as this single year of war has knitted it
together, and better even than that, if possible, it is knitting
the world together.
Look at the picture. In the center of the scene four nations
engaged against the world, and at every point of vantage, show-
ing that they are seeking selfish aggrandizement, and against
118
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
them 23 governments representing the greater part of the popu-
lation of the world, drawn together into a new sense of com-
munity of purpose, a new sense of community of interest, a new
sense of unity of life. . . .
Friendship is the only cement that will ever hold the world
together. And this intimate contact of the Red Cross with the
peoples who are suffering the terrors and deprivations of this war
is going to be one of the greatest instrumentalities of friendship
that the world ever knew, and the centre of the heart of it all, if
we sustain it properly, will be this land that we so dearly love. . . .
MAY 27, 1918 GERMANS LAUNCH ANOTHER DRIVE FROM
CHEMIN DES DAMES.
( This drive was aimed against the French, with the object
of striking through between Soissons and Rheims, reaching the
Marne and swinging down to Paris. It flowed over Soissons,
reached the Marne, but did not swing down to Paris, the pillar
at Rheims holding this time and threatening the flank of such a
movement, had it been attempted. Efforts to dislodge the French
from Rheims were futile and the offensive died away with the
Germans at the Marne for the second time in the war.}
JUNE 1, 1918 GERMANS REACH THE MARNE.
JUNE 7, 1918 PRESIDENT WILSON TALKS TO A GROUP OF MEXI-
CAN EDITORS VISITING THE UNITED STATES.
(This talk is perhaps one of the President's most important
utterances during the war. It throws a bright white light upon
his Mexican policy, at one time the object of violent criticism, as
a demonstration of the principles of international relationship and
responsibility upon which his statesmanship is founded. It
brings out the contrast between the Wilson and the Prussian
policy of winning nations. The United States had been feared
with varying degrees of distrust from the Rio Grande to Cape
Horn, for years. "Dollar diplomacy" was a more or less accurate
epithet applied to our foreign policy. Certain events of recent
years had not quieted the distrust or discredited the epithet. This
informal and intimate self-revelation will doubtless prove to have
been its death blow. The visiting Editors who heard it luere u'holly
convinced of the man's sincerity, earnestness and power. Publication
of this speech was withheld in the U.iited States until it appeared in
the Mexican papers.)
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AMERICANISM
"WE MUST TRUST EACH OTHER."
A TALK TO VISITING MEXICAN EDITORS, AT THE WHITE HOUSE,
JUNE 7, 1918.
Gentlemen: (Complete)
I have never received a group of men who were more welcome
than you are, because it has been one of my distresses during the
period of my Presidency that the Mexican people did not more
thoroughly understand the attitude of the United States toward
Mexico. I think I can assure you, and 1 hope you have had every
evidence of the truth of my assurance, that that attitude is one
of sincere friendship. And not merely the sort of friendship which
prompts one not to do his neighbor any harm, but the sort of
friendship which earnestly desires to do his neighbor service.
My own policy, the policy of my administration, toward
Mexico was at every point based upon this principle, that the
internal settlement of the affairs of Mexico was none of our
business; that we had no right to interfere with or to dictate to
Mexico in any particular with regard to her own affairs. Take
one aspect of our relations which at one time may have been
difficult for you to understand: When we sent troops into
Mexico, our sincere desire was nothing else than to assist you
to get rid of a man who was making the settlement of your
affairs for the time being impossible. We had no desire to use
our troops for any other purpose, and I was in hopes that by
assisting in that way and then immediately withdrawing I might
give substantial proof of the truth of the assurances that I had
given your Government through President Carranza.
And at the present time it distresses me to learn that certain
influences, which I assume to be German in their origin, are
trying to make a wrong impression throughout Mexico as to the
purposes of the United States, and not only a wrong impression,
but to give an absolutely untrue account of things that happen.
You know the distressing things that have been happening just
off our coasts. You know of the vessels that have been sunk.
I yesterday received a quotation from a paper in Guadalajara
which stated that thirteen of our battleships had been sunk off
the capes of the Chesapeake. You see how dreadful it is to have
people so radically misinformed. It was added that our Navy
Department was withholding the truth with regard to these sink-
ings. I have no doubt that the publisher of the paper published
that in perfect innocence without intending to convey wrong im-
pressions, but it is evident that allegations of that sort proceed
from those who wish to make trouble between Mexico and the
United States.
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WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
WE ONLY WANT TO HELP.
Now, gentlemen, for the time being, at any rate and I hope
it will not be a short time the influence of the United States is
somewhat pervasive in the affairs of the world, and I believe that
it is pervasive because the nations of the world which are less
powerful than some of the greatest nations are coming to believe
that our sincere desire is to do disinterested service. We are
the champions of those nations which have not had a military
standing which would enable them to compete with the strongest
nations in the world, and I look forward with pride to the time,
which I hope will soon come, when we can give substantial evi-
dence, not only that we do not want anything out of this war, but
that we would not accept anything out of it, that it is absolutely
a case of disinterested action. And if you will watch the attitude
of our people, you will see that nothing stirs them so deeply as
assurances that this war, so far as we are concerned, is for ideal-
istic objects. One of the difficulties that I experienced during the
first three years of the war the years when the United States
was not in the war was in getting the foreign offices of Euro-
pean nations to believe that the United States was seeking nothing
for herself, that her neutrality was not selfish, and that if she
came in, she would not come in to get anything substantial out
of the war, any material object, any territory, or trade, or any-
thing else of that sort. In some of the foreign offices there were
men who personally knew me and they believed, I hope, that I
was sincere in assuring them that our purposes were disinterested,
but the)^ thought that these assurances came from an academic
gentleman removed from the ordinary sources of information and
speaking the idealistic purposes of the cloister. They did not be-
lieve that I was speaking the real heart of the American people,
and I knew all along that I was. Now I believe that everybody
who comes into contact with the American people knows that I
am speaking their purposes.
The other night in New York, at the opening of the campaign
for funds for our Red Cross, I made an address. I had not
intended to refer to Russia, but I was speaking without notes
and in the course of what I said my own thought was led to
Russia, and I said that we meant to stand by Russia just as firmly
as we would stand by France or England or any other of the
allies. The audience to which I was speaking was not an audience
from which I would have expected an enthusiastic response to
that. It was rather too well dressed. It was not an audience,
in other words, made of the class of people whom you would sup-
pose to have the most intimate feeling for the sufferings of the
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AMERICANISM
ordinary man in Russia, but that audience jumped into the aisles,
the whole audience rose to its feet, and nothing that 1 had said
on that occasion aroused anything like the enthusiasm that that
single sentence aroused. Now, there is a sample, gentlemen. We
can not make anything out of Russia. We can not make anything
out of standing by Russia at this time the most remote of the
European nations, so far as we are concerned, the one with which
we have had the least connections in trade and advantage and yet
the people of the United States rose to that suggestion as to no
other that I made in that address. That is the heart of America,
and we are ready to show you by any act of friendship that you
may propose our real feelings toward Mexico.
WE HAVE No DESIGNS ON AMERICA.
Some of us, if I may say so privately, look back with regret
upon some of the more ancient relations that we have had with
Mexico long before our generation; and America, if I may so
express it, would now feel ashamed to take advantage of a neigh-
bor. So I hope that you can carry back to your homes something
better than the assurances of words. You have had contact with
our people. You know your own personal reception. You know
how gladly we have opened to you the doors of every establishment
that you wanted to see and have shown you just what we were
doing, and I hope you have gained the right impression as to why
we were doing it. We are doing it, gentlemen, so that the world
may never hereafter have to fear the only thing that any nation
has to dread, the unjust and selfish aggression of another nation.
Some time ago, as you probably all know, I proposed a sort of
Pan-American agreement. I had perceived that one of the diffi-
culties of our relationship with Latin America was this: The
famous Monroe doctrine was adopted without your consent, with-
out the consent of any of the Central or South American States.
If I may express it in terms that we so often use in this
country, we said, "We are going to be your big brother, whether
you want us to be or not." We did not ask whether it was agree-
able to you that we should be your big brother. We said we were
going to be. Now, that was all very well so far as protecting
you from aggression from the other side of the \vater was con-
cerned, but there was nothing in it that protected you from aggres-
sion from us, and I have repeatedly seen the uneasy feeling on the
part of representatives of the States of Central and South America
that our self-appointed protection might be for our own benefit
and our own interests and not for the interest of our neighbors.
So I said, very well, let us make an arrangement by which we
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WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
will give bond. Let us have a common guarantee, that all of us
will sign, of political independence and territorial integrity. Let
us agree that if any one of us, the United States included, violates
the political independence or the territorial integrity of any of the
others, all the others will jump on her. I pointed out to some
of the gentlemen who were less inclined to enter into this arrange-
men than others that that was in effect giving bonds on the part
of the United States, that we would enter into an arrangement
by which you would be protected from us.
WE SHOULD SHOW THE WAY TO THE WORLD.
Now, that is the kind of agreement that will have to be the
foundation of the future life of the nations of the world, gentle-
men. The whole family of nations will have to guarantee to each
nation that no nation shall violate its political independence or its
territorial integrity. That is the basis, the only conceivable basis,
for the future peace of the world, and I must admit that I was
ambitious to have the States of the two continents of America
show the way to the rest of the world as to how to make a basis
of peace. Peace can come only by trust. As long as there is
suspicion there is going to be misunderstanding, and as long as
there is misunderstanding there is going to be trouble. If you
can once get a situation of trust then you have got a situation of
permanent peace. Therefore, every one of us, it seems to me,
owes it as a patriotic duty to his own country to plant the seeds
of trust and of confidence instead of the seeds of suspicion and
variety of interest. That is the reason that I began by saying to
you that I have not had the pleasure of meeting a group of men
who were more welcome than you are, because you are our near
neighbors. Suspicion on your part or misunderstanding on your
part distresses us more than we would be distressed by similar
feelings on the part of those less near by.
When you reflect how wonderful a storehouse of treasure
Mexico is, you can see how her future must depend upon peace
and honor, so that nobody shall exploit her. It must depend upon
even r nation that has any relations with her, and the citizens of
any nation that has relations with her, keeping within the bounds
of honor and fair dealing and justice, because so soon as you can
admit your own capital and the capital of the world to the free
use of the resources of Mexico, it will be one of the most won-
derfully rich and prosperous countries in the world. And when
you have the foundations of established order, and the world has
come to its senses again, we shall, I hope, have the very best con-
nections that will assure us all a permanent cordiality and friend-
ship.
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AMERICANISM
COMMENT ON TALK TO THE MEXICAN EDITORS.
The visiting editors agreed that the President's frank speech
had done more to combat pro-Germanism and promote the inter-
ests of America in Mexico than has any diplomatic move since
the days of Diaz.
Manuel Caspo, Editor of La Vos de la Revolution, Merida.
Yucatan: "We have decided that your President is our friend,
and when we go back we shall be able to enlighten our people."
Mercurio, Santiago, Chile: ". . . will result in added
prestige to all the nations on the American continent."
New York Globe: "Not only a complete vindication of the
complicated and much misunderstood Mexican policy of the Ad-
ministration, but the foundation on which for all time Pan-
American peace can rise."
Detroit News: "His words represent the deepest and most
abiding intention of the people of the United States."
Neivark News: "To see the President's project in all the
fullness of its significance, it is necessary only to contrast it with
the proposal put forth at almost the same time by Vice-Chancellor
von Payer, of Germany, for a Mitteleuropa that would bring
Russia, Poland, Bulgaria and Turkey under the permanent polit-
ical and economic dominion of Germany and its vassal Austria.
The German plan is all for self; the Wilson plan is all for all.
Materialism and idealism sit facing one another."
London Daily Graphic: "Upon such altruism alone can an
enduring peace be founded."
The Dally News hails Mr. Wilson as "the architect of the
world's future."
JUNE 12, 1918 THE PRESIDENT WRITES A LETTER ON SUFFRAGE.
(President Wilson's record on Woman's Suffrage is an illus-
tration of his ability to let his opinions grow. Whilst subscribing
to it as an abstract principle, he was at first strongly inclined to
let the states settle the problem, pleading that he had no mandate
either from the people or the party to make a national issue of it.
Its deeper meanings, however, as a phase and aspect of the uni-
versal democracy for which the nation had entered the war, began
to find expression through him, until ice here see him advocating
nation-wide woman's suffrage as essential to icorld democracy.}
A LETTER ON SUFFRAGE TO MRS. CATT.
My Dear Mrs. Catt: May I not thank you for transmitting
to me the very interesting memorial addressed to be by the French
Union for Woman Suffrage under date of February first, last.
124
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
Since you have been kind enough to transmit this interesting
and impressive message to me, will you not be good enough to
convey to the subscribers this answer:
I have read your message with the deepest interest and I
welcome the opportunity to say that I agree without reservation
that the full and sincere democratic reconstruction of the world
for which we are striving and which we are determined to bring
about at any cost, will not have been completely or adequately
attained until women are admitted to the suffrage, and that only
by that action can the nations of the world realize for the benefit
of future generations the full ideal force of opinion or the full
humane forces of action.
The services of women during this supreme crisis of the
world's history have been of the most signal usefulness and dis-
tinction. The war could not have been fought without them, or
its sacrifices endured. It is high time that some part of our debt
of gratitude to them should be acknowledged and paid, and the
only acknowledgment they ask is their admission to the suffrage.
Can we justly refuse it? As for America, it is my earnest hope
that the Senate of the United States will give an unmistakable
answer to this question by passing the suffrage amendment to our
Federal Constitution before the end of this session.
Cordially and sincerely yours,
(Signed) WOODROW WILSOX.
JULY 4, 1918 PRESIDENT WILSON SPEAKS AT THE TOMB OF
WASHINGTON.
(President Wilson commits the nation to fight on until the
world is free. One of the most solemn, cosmic and moving of
all his utterances. Foreign representatives were present.)
"WE SEEK THE RE1GX OF LAW."
FOURTH OF JULY ADDRESS AT WASHINGTON'S TOMB.
(Complete )
Gentlemen of the diplomatic corps and my fellow citizens:
1 am happy to draw apart with you to this quiet place of old
counsel in order to speak a little of the meaning of this day of
our nation's independence. The place seems very still and remote.
It is as serene and untouched by hurry of the world as it was in
those great days long ago when General Washington was here
and held leisurely conference with the men who were to be
associated \vith him in the creation of a nation. From these gentle
125
AMERICANISM
slopes they looked out upon the world and saw it whole, saw it
with the light of the future upon it, saw it with modern eyes
that turned away from a past which men of liberated spirits
could no longer endure. It is for that reason that we cannot feel.
even here, in the immediate presence of this sacred tomb, that this
is a place of death. It was a place of achievement. A great
promise that was meant for all mankind was here given plan and
reality. The associations by which we are here surrounded are
the inspiring associations of that noble death which is only a glo-
rious consummation. From this green hillside we also ought to
be able to see with comprehending eyes the world that lies around
us and conceive anew the purpose that must set men free.
THEY, Too, SPOKE FOR ALL MANKIND.
It is significant significant of their own character and pur-
pose and of the influences they are setting afoot that Washing-
ton and his associates, like the barons at Runnymede, spoke and
acted, not for a class but for a people. It has been left for us
to see to it that it shall be understood that they spoke and acted,
not for a single people only but for all mankind. They were
thinking, not of themselves and of the material interests which
centered in the little group of landholders and merchants and
men of affairs with whom they were accustomed to act, in Vir-
ginia and the colonies to the north and south of here, but of a
people who wished to be done with classes and special interests
and the authority of men whom they had not themselves chosen
to rule over them. They entertained no private purpose, desired
no peculiar privilege. They were consciously planning that men
of every class should be free and America a place to which men
out of every nation might resort who wished to share with them
the rights and privileges of freemen. And we take our cue from
them do we not? We intend what they intended. We here in
America believe our participation in this present war to be only
the fruitage of what they planted. Our case differs from theirs
only in this, that it is our inestimable privilege to concert with
men out of every nation what shall make not only the liberties
of America secure but the liberties of every other people as well.
We are happy in the thought that we are permitted to do what
they would have done had they been in our place. There must
now be settled once for all what was settled for America in the
great age upon whose inspiration we drau today. This is surely
a fitting place from which calmly to look out upon our task, that
\ve may fortify our spirits for its accomplishment. And this is
the appropriate place from which to avow, alike to the friends who
126
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
look on and to the friends with whom we have had the happiness
to be associated in action, the faith and purposes with which we
act.
THE ISSUE Is CLEAR.
This, then, is our conception of the great struggle in which
we are engaged. The plot is written plain upon every scene and
every act of the supreme tragedy. On the one hand stand the
peoples of the world not only the peoples actually engaged, but
many others also who suffered under mastery but cannot act;
peoples of many races and every part of the world the peoples
of stricken Russia still, among the rest, though they are for the
moment unorganized and helpless. Opposed to them, masters of
many armies, stand an isolated, friendless group of governments
who speak no common purpose but only selfish ambitions of their
own by which none can profit but themselves, and whose peoples
are fuel in their hands; governments which fear their people and
yet are for the time their sovereign lords, making every choice
for them and disposing of their lives and fortunes as they will,
as well as of the lives and fortunes of every people who fall under
their power governments clothed with the strange trappings and
the primitive authority of an age that is altogether alien and hos-
tile to our own. The past and the present are in deadly grapple
and the peoples of the world are being done to death between
them.
THE SETTLEMENT MUST BE FINAL.
There can be but one issue. The settlement must be finaL
There can be no compromise. No half-way decision would be
-tolerable. No half-way decision is conceivable. These are thr
ends for which the associated peoples of the world are fightincr
and which must be conceded them before there can be peace:
1. The destruction of every arbitrary power anywhere that
can separately, secretly and of its single choice disturb the peace
of the world; or, if it cannot be presently destroyed, at the least
its reduction to virtual impotence.
2. The settlement of every question, whether of territory,
of sovereignty, of economic arrangement or of political relation-
ship upon the basis of the free acceptance of the settlement by the
people immediately concerned, and not upon the basis of the mate-
rial interest or advantage of any other nation or people which
may desire a different settlement for the sake of its own exterior
influence or mastery.
3. The consent of all nations to be governed in their con-
duct toward each other by the same principles of honor and of
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AMERICANISM
respect for the common law of civilized society that govern the
individual citizens of all modern states in their relations with one
another; to the end that all promises and covenants may be sa-
credly observed, no private plots or conspiracies hatched, no selfish
injuries wrought with impunity, and a mutual trust established
upon the handsome foundation of a mutual respect for right.
4. The establishment of an organization of peace which shall
make it certain that the combined power of free nations will check
every invasion of right and serve to make peace and justice the
more secure by affording a definite tribunal of opinion to which
all must submit and by which every international readjustment,
that cannot be amicably agreed upon by the peoples directly con-
cerned, shall be sanctioned.
WE SEEK. THE REIGN OF LAW.
These great objects can be put into a single sentence. What
we seek is the reign of law, based upon the consent of the gov-
erned and sustained by the organized opinion of mankind.
These great ends cannot be achieved by debating and seeking
to reconcile and accommodate what statesmen may wish, with their
projects for balances of power and national opportunity. They
can be realized only by the determination of what the thinking
peoples of the world desire, with their longing hope for justice
and for social freedom and opportunity.
I cannot but fancy that the air of this place carries the ac-
cents of such principles with a peculiar kindness. Here were
started forces which the great nation against which they were
primarily directed at first regarded as a revolt against its rightful
authority, but which it has long since seen to have been a step
in the liberation of its own peoples, as well as of the people of
the United States; and I stand here now to speak speak proudly
and with confident hope of the spread of this revolt, this liber-
ation, to the great stage of the world itself! The blinded rulers
of Prussia have roused forces they know little of forces which,
once roused, can never be crushed to earth again; for they have
at their heart an inspiration and a ourpose which are deathless
and of the very stuff of triumph!
JULY 15, 1918 GERMANS RESUME GENERAL OFFENSIVE, STRIK-
ING ON BOTH SIDES OF RHEIMS.
(An attempt on the part of the German Hiyh Command to
clear their left flank before striking at Paris from their position
astride the Marne.)
128
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
JULY 15, 1918 AMERICANS HOLD GERMANS AT CHATEAU
THIERRY AND CLEAR THE SOUTH BANK OF THE MARNE IN
THEIR SECTOR.
JULY 18, 1918 GEN. FOCH BEGINS COUNTER ATTACK ON THE
FLANKS OF THE GERMAN SALIENT BETWEEN SoiSSONS AND
RHEIMS.
( The definite turn in the tide of war began with this drive,
mercilessly maintained by Gen. Foch until Germany, broken and
terrified, asked for peace discussions, early in October.)
AUGUST 13, 1918 PRESIDENT WILSON ADDRESSES VISITING
ITALIAN JOURNALISTS.
"Gentlemen: We are not here in the service of Italy. We
are not here in the service of America. We are here in that great-
est of all services, the service which ennobles all who engage in it,
the service of mankind."
AUGUST 31, 1918 PRESIDENT WILSON SIGNS BILL FOR THE
SECOND SELECTIVE DRAFT INCLUDING MEN FROM 18 TO 45, AND
ISSUES A PROCLAMATION.
SEPTEMBER 6, 1918 FOOD ADMINISTRATION DECREES THAT ALL
BREWERIES MUST CLOSE DECEMBER 1ST.
SEPTEMBER 12, 1918 THE FIRST AMERICAN ARMY WIPES
OUT THE ST. MlHIEL SALIENT.
SEPTEMBER 15, 1918 NEW GERMAN PEACE OFFENSIVE AUS-
TRIA ASKS FOR AN INFORMAL, SECRET DISCUSSION.
SEPTEMBER 16, 1918 PRESIDENT WILSON DESTROYS THE
LATEST PEACE OFFENSIVE IN 68 WORDS.
REPLY TO AUSTRIA
"The Government of the United States feels that there is only
one reply which it can make to the suggestion of the Imperial Aus-
tro-Hungarian Government. It has repeatedly, and with entire
candor, stated the terms upon which the United States would con-
sider peace, and can and will entertain no proposal for a conference
upon a matter concerning which it has made its position and pur-
pose so plain."
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AMERICANISM
SEPTEMBER 16, 1918 OFFENSIVE BEGINS AGAINST BULGARIA.
SEPTEMBER 18-25, 1918 BRITISH UNDER GEN. ALLENBY
SWEEP PALESTINE OF TURKS, CAPTURING TWO ARMIES TOTAL-
ING 40,000.
SEPTEMBER 27, 1918 BULGARIA SUES FOR PEACE.
SEPTEMBER 27, 1918 FOURTH LIBERTY LOAN DRIVE FOR
$6,000,000,000 INAUGURATED THROUGHOUT THE COUNTRY.
PRESIDENT WILSON DELIVERS AN ADDRESS IN NEW YORK CITY.
(A restatement of war issues and a more definite laying down
of a foundation for a League of Nations. He asks five search-
ing questions and submits five essentials to a league. In many re-
spects his most memorable and momentous utterance up to this
time.)
"IMPARTIAL JUSTICE IS THE PRICE OF PEACE."
ADDRESS DELIVERED IN NEW YORK AT THE OPENING OF THE
FOURTH LIBERTY LOAN DRIVE.
(Complete)
My Fellow Citizens:
I am not here to promote the loan. That will be done, ably
and enthusiastically done, by the hundreds of thousands of loyal
and tireless men and women who have undertaken to present it to
you and our fellow citizens throughout the country; and I have not
the least doubt of their complete success; for 1 know their spirit
and the spirit of the country. My confidence is confirmed, too,
by the thoughtful and experienced co-operation of the bankers here
and everywhere, who are lending their invaluable aid and guidance.
I have come, rather, to seek an opportunity to present to you some
thoughts which I trust will serve to give you in perhaps fuller
measure than before, a vivid sense of the great issues involved,
in order that you may appreciate and accept, with added enthu-
siasm, the grave significance of the duty of supporting the govern-
ment by your men and your means to the utmost point of sacri-
fice and self-denial. No man or woman who has really taken in
what this w T ar means can hesitate to give to the very limit of what
they have; and it is my mission here tonight to try to make it
clear once more what the war really means. You will need no
other stimulation or reminder of your duty.
130
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
"A PEOPLES' WAR."
At every turn of the war we gain a fresh consciousness of
what we mean to accomplish by it. When our hope and expectation
are most excited, we think more definitely than before of the issues
that hang upon it and of the purposes which must be realized by
means of it. For it has positive and well-defined purposes which
we did not determine, and which we cannot alter. No statesman
or assembly created them; no statesman or assembly can alter
them. They have arisen out of the very nature and circumstances
of the war. The most that statesmen or assemblies can do is to
carry them out or be false to them. They were, perhaps, not
clear at the outset; but they are clear now. The war has lasted
long enough to draw the whole world into it. The common will
of mankind has been substituted for the particular purposes of
individual states. Individual statesmen may have started the con-
flict, but neither they nor their opponents can stop it as they please.
It has become a peoples' war, and peoples of all sorts and races,
of every degree of power and variety of fortune, are involved in
its sweeping processes of change and settlement. We came into
it when its character had become fully defined and it was plain
that no nation could stand apart or be indifferent to its outcome.
Its challenge drove to the heart of everything we cared for and
lived for. The voice of the war had become clear and gripped our
hearts. Our brothers from many lands, as well as our own mur-
dered dead under the sea, were calling to us, and we responded,
fiercely and of course.
SOME PENETRATING QUESTIONS.
The air was clear about us. We saw things in their full, con-
vincing proportions as they were; and we have seen them with
steady eyes and unchanging comprehension ever since. We ac-
cepted the issues of the war as facts, not as any group of men
either here or elsewhere had defined them, and we can accept no
outcome which does not squarely meet and settle them. Those
issues are these:
Shall the military power of any nation or group of nations
he suffered to determine the fortunes of peoples over whom they
have no right to rule except the rule of force?
Shall strong nations be free to wrong weak nations and make
them subject to their purpose and interest?
Shall peoples be ruled and dominated, even in their own inter-
nal affairs, by arbitrary and irresponsible force, or by their own
will and choice?
131
AMERICANISM
Shall there be a common standard of right and privilege for
all peoples and nations, or shall the strong do as they will and the
weak suffer without redress?
Shall the assertion of right be haphazard and by casual alli-
ance, or shall there be a common concert to oblige the observance
of common rights?
No man, no group of men, chose these to be the issues of the
struggle. They are the issues of it; and they must be settled by
no arrangement or compromise or adjustment of interests, but
definitely and once for all and with a full and unequivocal accep-
tance of the principle that the interest of the weakest is as sacred
as the interest of the strongest.
This is what we mean when we speak of a permanent peace,
if we speak sincerely, intelligently, and with a real knowledge and
comprehension of the matter we deal with.
"No BARGAINS, NO COMPROMISES, POSSIBLE, WITH OUR FOES
OR WITH OURSELVES."
We are all agreed that there can be no peace obtained by any
kind of bargain or compromise with the governments of the Central
Empires, because we have dealt with them already and have seen
them deal with other governments that were parties to this strug-
gle, at Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest. They observe no covenants,
accept no law but force and their own interest. We cannot "come
to terms" with them. They have made it impossible. The Ger-
man people must, by this time, be fully aware that we cannot
accept the word of those who forced this war upon us. We do
not think the same thoughts or speak the same language of agree-
ment.
It is of capital importance that we should also be explicitly
agreed that no peace shall be obtained by any kind of compromise
or abatement of the principles we have avowed as the principles
for which we are fighting. There should exist no doubt about it.
I am, therefore, going to take the liberty of speaking with the
utmost frankness about the practical implications that are involved
in it.
If it be in deed and in truth the common object of the gov-
ernments associated against Germany, and of the nations whom
they govern, as I believe it to be, to achieve, by the coming settle-
ments, a secure and lasting peace, it will be necessary that all who
sit down at the peace table shall come ready and willing to pay
the price, the only price, that tvill procure it; and ready and will-
ing, also, to create, in some virile fashion, the only instrumentality
by which it can be made certain that the agreements of the peace
iv ill be honored and fulfilled.
132
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
"IMPARTIAL JUSTICE is THE PRICE OF PEACE/'
The price is impartial justice in every item of the settlement,
no matter whose interest is crossed; and not only impartial justice,
but also the satisfaction of the several peoples whose fortunes are
dealt with. That indispensable instrumentality is a league of na-
tions formed under covenants that will be efficacious. Without
such an instrumentality, by which the peace of the world can be
guaranteed, peace will rest, in part, upon the word of outlaws
and only upon that word. For Germany will have to redeem
her character, not by what happens at the peace table, but by what
follows.
And, as I see it, the constitution of that League of Nations
and the clear definition of its objects must be a part, is in a sense
the most essential part, of the peace settlement itself. It cannot
be formed now. If formed now, it would be merely a new alli-
ance confined to the nations associated against a common enemy.
It is not likely that it could be formed after the setlement. It is
necessary to guarantee the peace; and the peace cannot be guar-
anteed as an afterthought. The reason, to speak in plain terms
again, why it must be guaranteed, is that there will be parties
to the peace whose promises have proved untrustworthy, and means
must be found in connection with the peace settlement itself to
remove that source of insecurity. It would be folly to leave the
guarantee to the subsequent voluntary action of the governments
we have seen destroy Russia and deceive Rumania.
But these general terms do not disclose the whole matter.
Some details are needed to make them sound less like a thesis and
more like a practical problem. These, then, are some of the par-
ticulars, and I state them with the greater confidence because I
can state them authoritatively as representing this government's
interpretation of its own duty with regard to peace:
BASIS FOR A LEAGUE OF NATIONS.
First, the impartial justice meted out must involve no dis-
crimination between those to whom we wish to be just and those
to whom we do not wish to be just. It must be a justice that
plays no favorites and knows no standard but the equal rights of
the several peoples concerned;
Second, no special or separate interest of any single nation
or any group of nations can be made the basis of any part of the
settlement which is not consistent with the common interest of all ;
Third, there can be no leagues or alliances or special cove-
nants and understandings within the general and common family
of the League of Nations;
133
AMERICANISM
Fourth, and more specifically, there can be no special, selfish
economic combinations within the league and no employment of
any form of economic boycott or exclusion except as the power
of economic penalty by exclusion from the markets of the world
may be vested in the League of Nations itself as a means of dis-
cipline and control.
Fifth, all international agreements and treaties of every kind
must be made known in their entirety to the rest of the world.
Special alliances and economic rivalries and hostilities have
been the prolific source, in the modern world, of the plans and
passions that produce war. It would be an insincere as well as
an insecure peace that did not exclude them in definite and bind-
ing terms.
"No 'ENTANGLING ALLIANCES/"
The confidence with which I venture to speak for our people
in these matters does not spring from our traditions, merely, and
the well-known principles of international action which we have
always professed and followed. In the same sentence in which
I say that the United States will enter into no special arrange-
ments or understandings with particular nations, let me say also
that the United States is prepared to assume its full share of
responsibility for the maintenance of the common covenants and
understandings upon which peace must henceforth rest. We still
read Washington's immortal warning against "entangling alliances,"
with full comprehension and an answering purpose. But only special
and limited alliances entangle; and we recognize and accept the
duty of a new day in which we are permitted to hope for a general
alliance which will avoid entanglements and clear the air of the
world for common understandings and the maintenance of common
rights.
I have made this analysis of the international situation which
the war has created, not, of course, because I doubted whether
the leaders of the great nations and peoples with whom we are
associated were of the same mind and entertained a like purpose,
but because the air, every now and again, gets darkened by mists
and groundless doubtings and mischievous perversions of counsel,
and it is necessary, once and again, to sweep all the irresponsible
talk about peace intrigues and weakening morale and doubtful
purpose on the part of those in authority utterly, and if need be
unceremoniously, aside, and say things in the plainest words that
can be found, even when it is only to say over again what has
been said before, quite as plainly, if in less unvarnished terms.
134
WOODROW WILSON AND THE WAR
No MAN FORMED THE ISSUES OF THIS WAR.
As I have said, neither I nor any other man in governmental
authority, created or gave form to the issues of this war. I have
simply responded to them with such vision as I could command.
But I have responded gladly and with a resolution that has grown
warmer and more confident as the issues have grown clearer and
clearer. It is now plain that they are issues which no man can
pervert unless it be wilfully. I am bound to fight for them, and
happy to fight for them, as time and circumstances have revealed
them to me as to all the world. Our enthusiasm for them grows
more and more irresistible as they stand out in more and more
vivid and unmistakable outline.
And the forces that fight for them draw into closer and closer
array, organize their millions into more and more unconquerable
might, as they become more and more distinct to the thought and
purpose of the peoples engaged. It is the peculiarity of this great
war that while statesmen have seemed to cast about for definitions
of their purpose, and have sometimes seemed to shift their ground
and their point of view, the thought of the mass of men, whom
statesmen are supposed to instruct and lead, has grown more and
more unclouded, more and more certain of what it is that they
are fighting for. National purposes have fallen more and more
into the background and the common purpose of enlightened man-
kind has taken their place. The counsels of plain men have be-
come, on all hands, more simple and straightforward and more
unified than the counsels of sophisticated men of affairs, who still
retain the impression that they are playing a game of power and
playing for high stakes. That is why I have said that this is a
people's war, not a statesman's. Statesmen must follow the clari-
fied common thought or be broken.
I took that to be the significance of the fact that assemblies
and associations of many kinds made up of plain workaday people
have demanded, almost every time they came together, and are still
demanding that the leaders of their governments declare to them
plainly what it is, exactly what it is, that they were seeking in
this war, and what they think the items of the final settlement
should be. They are not yet satisfied with what they have been
told. They still seem to fear that they are getting what they
ask for only in statesmen's terms only in the terms of territorial
arrangements and divisions of power, and not in terms of broad-
visioned justice and mercy and peace and the satisfaction of those
deep-seated longings of oppressed and distracted men and women
and enslaved peoples that seem to them the only things worth
fighting a war for that engulfs the world. Perhaps statesmen
135
AMERICANISM
have not always recognized this changed aspect of the whole world
of policy and action. Perhaps they have not always spoken in
direct reply to the questions asked because they did not know
how searching these questions were and what sort of answers they
demanded.
BUT MEN MUST STATE THE ISSUES.
But I, for one, am glad to attempt the answer again and again,
in the hope that I may make it clearer and clearer that my one
thought is to satisfy those who struggle in the ranks and are, per-
haps above all others, entitled to a reply whose meaning no one
can have any excuse for misunderstanding, if he understands the
language in which it is spoken or can get someone to translate it
correctly into his own. And I believe that the leaders of the gov-
ernments with which we are associated will speak, as they have
occasion, as plainly as I have tried to speak. I hope that they will
feel free to say whether they think that I am in any degree mis-
taken in my interpretation of the issues involved or in my purpose
with regard to the means by which a satisfactory settlement of
these isues may be obtained. Unity of purpose and of counsel are
as imperatively necessary in this war as was unity of command
in the battle field; and with perfect unity of purpose and counsel
will come assurance of complete victory.
It can be had in no other way. "Peace drives" can be effec-
tively neutralized and silenced only by showing that every victory
of the nations associated against Germany brings the nations nearer
the sort of peace which will bring security and reassurance to all
peoples and make the recurrence of another such struggle of piti-
less force and bloodshed forever impossible, and that nothing else
can. Germany is constantly intimating the "terms" she will accept;
and always finds that the world does not want terms. It wishes
the final triumph of justice and fair dealing.
136
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