HOW AMERICA WENT TO WAR
Woodrow Wilson, Life and Letters. Vol. VI, 1915-1917. By Ray Stannard Baker. (Heinemann. 21s.) ON January 1st, 1917, less than five weeks before the United States broke off diplomatic relations with Germany, a young man named Franklin D. Roosevelt, then Assistant-Secretary to the Navy, sent to President Wilson an unpublished memo- randum by President Monroe, written apparently in 1814, emphasising the difficulty of keeping America isolated from European conflicts. The Assistant-Secretary to the Navy thought it relevant to the situation in 1917 ; he is not likely, as President .of the United States, to have forgotten its lesson in 1938. It is impossible, indeed, to read the story of how Wilson took his country into war without being struck per- petually by the resemblance between the situation he had to face and that confronting, in a form less acute, his Democratic successor at the White House today. Mr. Ray Stannard Baker's sixth volume has more than a merely historical interest.
The story of how the man who was re-elected President in November, 1916, on the slogan " He Kept Us Out of War," called in February, 1917, for a breach of diplomatic relations with Germany, and in April for declaration of a state of war with Germany, has been told a dozen times by writers sympa- thetic or hostile to Wilson, or severely dispassionate. No one has charged the President with inconsistency. Actually it was not he but Germany who made war inevitable. For Woodrow Wilson it was always " a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war," but in the last analysis every- thing America stood for was at stake, and " God helping her she can do no other." What Mr. Baker brings out, as it has never, I think, been quite brought out before, is the intensity of the President's struggle against the inevitable, and some of the reasons for it. The indecision, even after Germany's declaration of unlimited submarine warfare, even after the publication of the Zimmermann Note inviting Mexico to join Germany and receive Texas and other States of the Union as payment, was carried to the last minute of the eleventh hour, in the face of ceaseless pressure from friends like House, and colleagues like Lansing, and fierce demands from political opponents like Lodge and Roosevelt. It was not the indecision of cowardice, or of a mind swayed by rival counsels—no one to whom Wilson paid much heed hung back from war except Bryan—it was the agonised reluctance of a man who lived for Liberalism and knew what happens to Liberalism in every war. Mr. Baker shows that decisively, and it is due to Wilson's memory that he should. Late in 1916 the President has grown convinced that the War is before all things a contest between autocracy and democracy. A few weeks later he is revealed as almost passionately anxious to keep America out of war because " so long as we remained out there was a prepon- derance of neutrality, but if we joined the Allies the world would be off the peace basis and on to the war basis "; it would mean that Germany would be so badly beaten that there would be a dictated peace. But above all Wilson saw crystal clear, what the country learned through bitter experience, that " when a war got going it was just a war, and there weren't two kinds of it. It required illiberalism at home to reinforce the men at the front. . . . Once lead this people into war,' he said, and they'll forget there was ever such a thing as tolerance.' " He was no false prophet, but Germany left America no choice.
All that is of capital importance historically, but the gist of it, of course, was familiar already. It is on secondary points that Mr. Baker's detailed record is most valuable. The workings of Wilson's mind were often strange, and it is charac- teristic that, with all his indecision over entering the War, up to the hour before the end " the President had not con- sulted with his Cabinet ; he usually delayed such action until he was nearing a decision himself." He had, of course, consulted continuously with House, and had perforce to listen to the urgent pleas of Lansing, but Mr. Baker, after all allowance for his obvious mistrust of House, does provide solid grounds for doubting whether the little colonel's advice was always sound. He was violently pro-Ally, at a time when Wilson was trying to maintain not only neutrality but neutral-mindedness, and when, too—as it is well to be reminded—in the President's view, " our relations with England are more strained than with Germany." Page, in London, was of course more pro-Ally still, but it is a strange revelation of Wil.,on's conception o the
possibilities that he should seriously consider warning Grey that " Page no longer represents the feeling or the point of view of the United States "—this while Page was ostensibly representing Wilson himself. The same sort of naïveté i. revealed in the President's revolutionary plan for gettine over the problem of the November-March interregnum in the event of his being defeated by Mr. Hughes in 1916 ;. he would at once appoint his victorious opponent Secretary of State, he himself and the Vice-President would resign their offices, and thereupon, under the Constitution, the Secretaf‘ of State would succeed automatically to the Presidency. Tht. electorate, by returning Mr. Wilson, made resort to that expedient unnecessary—perhaps fortunately, though Mr. Baker remarks with force that there could be no better tribute to the President than the fact that the Republicans felt their strongest candidate would be a liberal-minded moderate like Mr. Hughes, whose policy at the White House would be almost identical with Mr. Wilson's.
Mr. Baker on Wilson bids fair to rival in volume Nicolay and Hay on Lincoln, for we have three crowded and eventful years to get through yet. His admiration for the President is un- concealed, and it means that the best interpretation is always put on words and actions that are susceptible of more than one. But it means, too, that Mr. Baker is able to understand Wilson's mind and motives as a less sympathetic biographer hardly could. The gain is greater than the loss.
WILSON HAams.
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