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CHAPTER X

THE UNITED STATES ENTERS THE WAR

THE reelection of Wilson weakened his power. For, while he was serving his first term and looking forward to a second nomination, the recalcitrant elements of the Democratic party were constrained to support his measures and defend his "radical" pronouncements. His reëlection released all those groups in the party that fed upon the husks of reaction and he must seek to fill the vacancies in his own party ranks by recruits from the Republican forces. But here again his recent success, the almost unprecedented plurality of 580,000 votes, frightened the leaders and the common-folk alike of the opposition. There was a new leader in the country, a second Lincoln, Jackson, or Jefferson; and it was every Republican's duty to resist and discredit the new man. It would be fatal to the party of industrialism if the prestige of Wilson were permitted to rise to higher levels. Everything conspired to hamper the President at the very moment he was contemplating his change of front with reference to the great war.1

Nothing shows this better than the treatment of the President's bills in Congress in December and January of 1916-17. He wished the Adamson Law of the preceding September completed so that the Government might, in the event of war, both prevent strikes and take command

'There is now and ever has been a deep-set sectionalism in the United States which gives to political parties a character distinctly American.

of the railroads. Congress refused for a long time to grant these logical and wise requests. Labour leaders, including Mr. Gompers, made violent protests against his proposals. Acting upon the patent evidence of the recent election, Wilson urged a corrupt practices act which would have remedied the ills of the over-use of money in national cam/paigns. Although it was plainly in the interest of the Democratic party that such a bill should become law the leaders of that party did not endeavour to force the reform through Congress. They were then in majority on safe margins. Once again the President pressed the Senate to ratify the treaty with Colombia, negotiated three years before, whereby the people of the United States were to make honourable amends to those of Colombia for the seizure of Panama by President Roosevelt in 1903. Although the Democrats sustained their leader fairly well in this, the Senate refused for a third time to accept the President's work. It was, however, the constitutional provision that treaties must be ratified by two thirds of the Senate which caused his defeat in this highly important item of his international policy.

General Wood, supported by practically all the army influence in Washington, by the Roosevelt and the Taft Republicans in the East, by the National Security and the National Defence leagues, and especially by the larger city newspapers, urged every day upon the Government the adoption of the universal military service scheme which the President had declined to accept a year before on the urgent advice of Secretary Garrison. Now the Senate Military Committee headed by Mr. Chamberlain, Democrat and in

1" American Yearbook," 1917, p. 2.

The Flood report of 1912 upon the so-called Panama revolution makes unpleasant reading for any fair-minded American.

fluential leader of the party in the far Northwest, held hearings in February, 1917, introduced a military service measure which was contrary to the views of both the Secretary of War and the President. It was a plan to which all the greater industrial leaders of the country and the reactionary elements of the East were contributing the utmost of their influence and power. Everything that could be done to overbear Wilson and his followers was done and with the aid of a considerable number of his own party.

What gave a sharper point to the sectional reminiscences of the last campaign was a statement of Representative Kitchin of North Carolina to a group of recalcitrant Southerners, when the emergency revenue bill was discussed in the Democratic caucus, that the North would have to pay the cost of the preparedness for which New York cried so loud. He meant that the income tax would fall upon the wealthy industrial states more heavily than upon the agrarian states of the South, which was a true statement and which represented a just policy. Yet in the temper of the times a great outery was made against Wilson and his so-called sectional party. Kitchin was cartooned as a master "pork" politician draining the enterprising industries of the North of their resources in order to benefit the Sith." It looked as if Congress were getting away from the President. The time had come for Wilson to relent a little in his career of reforming business, for if he meant to go to war with Germany, as it was plain that he must do, the industrial leadership of the whole country would need to be conciliated. His bank reform, the Adamson Law, and most of the other measures of his first four years in office had been aimed at redressing the wrongs of the agrarian and labour elements of the

The Literary Digest of February 10, 1917, gives the cartoons and the press comment from various sections of the North.

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nation. He had defeated the earlier preparedness movements in which the industrial states had been interested; he meant to defeat, on the eve of war, the Chamberlain-WoodRoosevelt military bill. Was there anything he could do for "business"? Could Wilson do anything which "business" would consider as honestly intended in its favour?

His one crumb of satisfaction was offered in the so-called Webb Law which he now made an Administration measure. In February, 1915, in an address before the United States Chamber of Commerce, he proposed to the industrial groups of the country a scheme somewhat like the former German cartel system. He said: "There are governments which, as you know, distinctly encourage the formation of great combinations in each particular field of commerce in order to maintain selling agencies and to extend long credits, and to use and maintain the machinery which is necessary for the extension of business; and American merchants feel that they are at a very considerable disadvantage in contending against that. I want to be shown this: how such a combination can be made and conducted in a way which will not close it against the use of everybody who wants to use it. . . . I want to know how these coöperative methods can be adopted for the benefit of everybody and I say frankly if I can be shown that, I am for them."

Wilson felt that there was an element of national selfishness in the urgent demands of business men for the immediate expansion of American trade in foreign lands in the midst of a war such as that then waging in Europe. He said that he did not like to take advantage of the war to win from England and

'This bill was designed to set up a permanent conscription policy at a time when excitement and the actual needs of a war, soon to begin, would seem to justify it. Wilson would resort to conscription only for the immediate emergency. The others wished conscription as a perma nent policy.

G. M. Harper, "President Wilson's Addresses," 143-45.

France their markets in the great world. Every day business men and their newspaper spokesmen were declaring that the British navy alone protected them against the aggressions of Germany; they were demanding universal military service in the United States as a means of protection. against possible invasions. Yet they were organizing banks in South America and China in order to facilitate the commercial capture of those markets, in which England had such a vital interest. And already American business in those lands had doubled and trebled during the war.1 Must the people and the Government of the United States, in such a crisis, engage in an attempt still further to win and finally control commerce in fields where America's friends would inevitably lose?

At the very time the President was making the Webb bill an Administration measure, a foreign trade convention, under the leadership of Alba H. Johnson, president of the Baldwin Locomotive Works, and James A. Farrell, president of the United States Steel Corporation, was discussing at Pittsburg the urgent need of a more aggressive foreign trade policy and asking Congress to pass the Webb bill. The President was indeed treading close to dangerous ground. Perhaps he hoped to allay some of the bitter feeling against him and to win to his war programme some of the support of business men.

The Webb bill became a law, however, only after much prodding on his part and against the votes of a good many senators who doubted the meaning of Greek gifts, and who, therefore, delayed the passage of the measure until April, 1918. The chief feature of this concession to "business"

"American Yearbook," 1917, p. 509.

"The Literary Digest, February 10, 1917. At the same time George Harvey was attacking the President for his supineness in such matters in his North American Review.