We Tried to Enforce Peace
I
ANY survivor of a band of explorers for a worthy purpose, — let us say the discovery of a northwest passage, — however unsuccessful in itself, is under some obligation, when years later the undertaking is revived, to give to the successors the benefit of the earlier experience. And this is true even if those recollections relate, in the main, to the obstacles encountered, to the magnitude and the nature of the preparations required, and to the conditions essential for success. After a vigorous effort for reform in New York City, many years ago, someone remarked that one could always trust to a spontaneous movement in such cases, whereupon Theodore Roosevelt, who had taken an active part in it, retorted that the spontaneity had involved an enormous amount of work. So it is always. In a democracy public opinion, whether partisan or otherwise, rarely arises unprovoked, but is usually the result of labor thoughtfully and vigorously applied. For that reason it may not be ill-timed, now that people are considering measures designed to prevent a recurrence of war, to recall a previous venture of a similar kind, illstarred, but earnest and to some extent misunderstood, and indeed overestimated, at the present day.
Six years ago the Atlantic printed a Phi Beta Kappa oration in which I tried to explain how and why the League of Nations was becoming moribund. In fact, as we can see today, it began to plot its own destruction as soon as it was organized; and plotted it so thoroughly that its progressive loss of prestige became inevitable. There is no use in harping on that chord again; and yet, in this day of growing panaceas about world plans to follow peace, it may not be out of place for one of the few survivors of the effort to prepare public opinion in this country for such a League to point out some of the difficulties that had to be overcome, the labor involved, and the good fortune that made the task possible, although in fact unsuccessful.
Probably none of the members of the League to Enforce Peace take pride in the organization — because it was a failure: first, in the effort to get this country to join the League of Nations; and, second, by the inability of that body to prevent war. And yet I have never known more hard work done by prominent citizens, for a nonpartisan public object, with greater disinterestedness and less desire for political recognition. I am not proposing to tell the story of the League to Enforce Peace. That is being done by Professor Ruhl J. Bartlett, and will, no doubt, be published next autumn; but I think it may not be without value to point out the situation at the time, the means employed to create public opinion, and the limited results achieved.
The magnitude of the task undertaken by the League to Enforce Peace seems not to be appreciated today, when a dozen or a score of leading citizens get together, discuss how, after hostilities cease, the world shall be reorganized to prevent war, pass resolutions, and believe that they have made a serious advance towards inducing the nations to undertake risks repugnant to them all; and, save under grave stress, especially to large ones, on which the responsibility for decisive action must chiefly rest. During a war, men are ready to give up much of their national independence for the sake of escaping the disaster of defeat, but, when they have overcome, the desire to manage their own affairs returns. The cry becomes insistent: ’Why should we send our young men to be slaughtered in someone else’s quarrel?’ At the present day, when patriotism is lauded as the highest of virtues, above all other moral qualities, it is especially hard to make the mass of the people look far enough ahead to see the value of surrendering a certain amount of selfdetermination for the purpose of preventing aggressive war; and yet that was precisely the task of the League to Enforce Peace — for when it started this country had not entered the war.
The first thing to do was to have a single sufficiently definite plan on which practically all people desiring to prevent future war could unite. That the League to Enforce Peace substantially achieved for this country. There were similar bodies in other nations, several of them older than ours, whose plans were in general similar to our own, and with whom we corresponded; but we made no attempt to form a joint plan, knowing that no plan so formed would, after the peace, be adopted as a whole, and that our function was to persuade Americans of the value of some kind of international organization based upon the principle of a threat of overwhelming power to prevent aggressive war. Other bodies in this country met and discussed, but without formulating anything definite, with the result that the League to Enforce Peace obtained a virtual monopoly of the attempt to urge a plan for the prevention of war. Otherwise it would have been much more difficult, if not impossible, to produce a marked effect upon public opinion in this country.
Very different is the situation now, when the most diverse plans are eagerly put forward and discussed, from that of consolidating all democratic countries into a single nation, through every kaleidoscopic variety of federation, to plans directly contrary for placating the aggressive nations by supplying them with the means of aggression. However divergent, they are debated seriously by competent people, while much of the public regards them as did the lawyer years ago who said that all propositions of law were equally defensible and equally likely to be right. People seem to think that devising some new variant is adding to the wealth of expedients from which a choice may be made, whereas it is reducing the chance of agreement upon any effective policy. In a library the gift of every new commentary, in a museum of natural history the addition of every strange skeleton or stuffed skin, is an enrichment; but that is not so where the object is to reach agreement upon one definite plan for common action.
It may be argued that open discussion is the way to reach agreement, but that is not always true. If the deliberations of the jury were open to the public they would rarely agree on a verdict. The art of agreement on difficult matters lies in the ability to express provisional views without committing people by publicity until the matter has been so far threshed out that — partly by persuasion, partly by concession in detail for a common end — a consensus of opinion can be reached. Of course among dishonest men seeking selfish ends such methods are capable of abuse; but the people working here for permanent peace on earth arc neither dishonest nor selfish, and their object should be to reach unity of plan that will command general respect, and have some chance of popular adoption.
II
After a preliminary dinner in New York, where the plan was discussed and agreed upon, a large meeting to launch it was held in Philadelphia on June 17, 1915, with Mr. Taft in the chair. The gathering was, of course, strictly nonpartisan; but without the enthusiasm, the devotion, and the reputation of Mr. Taft it is very doubtful whether the League would ever have attained a strong hold on public attention. At that meeting a committee was appointed to draft the project, and from it came the name — not unimportant — of ‘ League to Enforce Peace.’ It was terse, direct, expressed exactly the object in view, and it was provocative. Although there were, both in the committee and in the hall, pacifists who disagreed wholly with the use of force, they presented no alternative plan and did not organize an opposition. In fact it was sometimes said that the League had put the fist in pacifist. The essence of the League Plan is contained in the following articles, then adopted:
Article 1. All justiciable questions arising between the signatory powers, not settled by negotiation, shall, subject to the limitations of treaties, be submitted to a judicial tribunal for hearing and judgment, both upon the merits and upon any issue as to its jurisdiction of the question.
Article 2. All other questions arising between the signatories, and not settled by negotiation, shall be submitted to a Council of Conciliation for hearing, consideration and recommendation.
Article 3. The signatory powers shall jointly use forthwith both their economic and military forces against any one of their number that goes to war or commits acts of hostility against another of the signatories before any question arising shall be submitted as provided in the foregoing.
Article 4. Conferences between the signatory powers shall be held from time to time to formulate and codify rules of international law, which, unless some signatory shall signify its dissent within a stated period, shall thereafter govern in the decisions of the judicial tribunal mentioned in Article 1.
Thus it was intended to be universal; to act like the hue and cry, automatically, without deliberation or command, and therefore to involve a diminution of independent action but not of sovereignty; and at the same time to give an intending aggressor no one with whom he could negotiate to prevent the application of Article 3. Later more formal plans were adopted, but these would lead us far afield from our object, which is how the society did its work, not the specific methods it suggested.
On the train coming back from the meeting one of the participants remarked that we now had a program and needed only publicity, which we could get if Mr. Bryan would advocate it — or, the answer came, oppose it; and this he did within a few days. That was a piece of good luck coming just at the right time, drawing attention to the movement as it was getting under way.
Another piece of luck came a year later at a dinner in Washington, where both President Wilson and Senator Lodge spoke in favor of the League. That had a triple advantage. It gave an official sanction to the idea: it discouraged any possible attempt to get up a rival plan, and for the time at least made it clear to everyone that the movement was so thoroughly nonpartisan that anyone might support it without damage to his political affiliations. But political approval was not the only object of that meeting at Washington; for, to influence the public, organization was needed on a large scale, covering the principal centres of population, with branches for correspondence throughout the country — in short, for the type of thing first, I believe, elaborated in England by Richard Cobden for his anti-corn-law league. For this purpose widely diffused energy and large amounts of money were required; and, obviously. Washington was the place to call together a great nation-wide meeting, and solicit from those who came both direct gifts and pledges to raise funds in their different communities. Many people felt strongly the horrors of modern weapons long before this country entered the war, and were very generous to an organization — and the only one — that proposed a definite plan for preventing it: a plan, moreover, approved by such high political authorities as the President, an ex-President, and the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.
The central office of the League was in New York, where eventually it occupied the entire twenty-third floor of the Bush Terminal Sales Building; and in October 1916 it was incorporated under the laws of New Jersey. Throughout its active work Mr. Taft was its president, and many men prominent in the political, intellectual, and economic life of the nation served as vice presidents, while the active controlling body was the Executive Committee. The hardest-worked member was the secretary, Mr. William H. Short, who kept the procedure and the records straight, but he, like many of the other members, is now unfortunately dead. Several other committees dealt with such matters as finances, home organizations, correspondence with foreign societies, field work, membership, information and publications.
The League intended to have a branch in every state, an organization in every county, and a local body in every considerable community; and, while this was far from being carried out, there were at the peak of its activity substantial organizations in about thirty states, and county ones in about six hundred counties. By 1916 the whole nation was divided into five districts, in each of them a salaried secretary whose duty it was to organize the state branches and assist the local ones. Later the organization was more closely centred in New York, but for a time the office was retained at Chicago; and during the fight, for the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles a bureau was set up at Washington under Mr. Talcott Williams. At the height of its activity in 1919, the League employed as assistant secretaries, clerks, and stenographers one hundred and ten people.
Almost all the money for the League to Enforce Peace came from private subscriptions, procured at dinners held for the purpose, by appeals made through the mails, or by personal efforts of active leaders. The largest single gift was from Mr. Edward A. Filene of $25,000; there were also two of $10,000 each; about fifteen of $5000; and over one hundred and thirty of $1000. At least eight thousand people contributed, the total amount raised and expended being $874,431.94. As there was no fee for admission, the lists of members have not been preserved, but the estimate at the time was about three hundred thousand.
In 1918 the League organized a series of large congresses for which the speakers traveled eight thousand miles, visiting thirty-two states, and speaking at one hundred and seventy meetings. And again in 1919 it arranged another series of meetings to urge ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, one group of speakers traveling across the northern tier of states to Portland and back from San Francisco by the Union Pacific, making addresses at every large city each way. In fact the number of possible speakers on the list of the bureau was over thirty thousand, though how many of them were actually called upon it is impossible to tell.
It is unnecessary to say that the writer has long ago forgotten most of these figures, and that he is indebted for them to Professor Ruhl J. Bartlett, who has just been taking them from the records; but he retails them to show the nature and size of the labors of the League, and that the movement was carefully planned and carried on.
III
By the time of the Armistice, the League to Enforce Peace had certainly produced a notable impression upon the public, but it is easy in retrospect to exaggerate it, and its members did not do this at the time. They well knew that they could do nothing to give effect to the plan without the action of the President when the war was over. Therefore when, before a meeting to be held in Philadelphia in the spring of 1918, the Executive Committee proposed to offer a detailed plan for a League of Nations, and President Wilson at a conference in the White House asked that it be not done, the Executive Committee yielded. They were wholly powerless if he chose to let the matter drop; they could not go to the Peace Conference in Paris or elsewhere if he did not send them (which he did not); they could not have induced Congress to pass a resolution urging the President to advocate such a League upon the Allies: to attempt to do so might well have disgusted the President with a plan toward which he seemed at that time to be lukewarm. In short, their only function was to use such influence as was possible on him, and to prepare the country to support him if he succeeded in getting the delegates of other nations to agree to a League of this kind. That they had probably prepared the country to do.
There is today an impression among many people that much more had been accomplished; that the people as a whole were distinctly in favor of joining the League. To me that seems an exaggeration, due partly to the very fact that there was no organized opposition to the plan, which is a very different thing from universal approval. No doubt members of the Committee of the Senate realized that there was a strong feeling in favor of joining the League of Nations, a feeling shared by many of the Republican Senators themselves and to be respected by all. There was, in fact, a desire to join it on the part of many, perhaps most, educated men, but the people at large were indifferent and not wholly displeased when the question was finally shelved after President Harding’s election.
Members of the League to Enforce Peace, who had traveled across the country urging before large and favorable audiences the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations, later tried to get the measure through the Senate by a vain effort to bring the President and the moderate Republicans together. It seems now, as it did to them at that time, that the differences between the plan for the League as adopted in Paris and as changed by the reservations reported by the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations were not very important and might with good will be reconciled. Rut with the utmost efforts it proved impossible to mediate, or indeed to bring the President and the Republicans, who were in favor of slight amendments, together for a conference. Each side professed willingness to meet if requested by the other, but flatly refused to permit the initiative to be taken on its behalf. What more could have been done is hard to see, especially since, after the question became involved in party politics, the League to Enforce Peace became less unanimous than it had been while it was conducting its wholly nonpartisan popular campaigns. Everyone knows how the Versailles Treaty, with the League, failed to be accepted in the United States Senate, and no comment thereon is needed.
It may be observed, however, as throwing light on how far the people really wanted our country to join the League of Nations, that if the desire had been as widely diffused as many men seem to think, it would have proved more enduring than it did: whereas, save for the thirty-one Republicans, and some not very active groups, it faded rather rapidly from public consciousness. Many clergymen, indeed, took up the idea, preaching for some years upon it; and that is a very noteworthy fact, because their sermons caused not a ripple on the sea of politics. Could that have been so if at the time of the rejection of the Treaty there had been great popular indignation or disappointment? Nor were the members of the League to Enforce Peace under any illusion themselves. They struggled, indeed, until President Harding, after seeking their support, definitely repudiated them; and then they knew the game was up, and the chance of this country’s entering the League of Nations closed so far as anyone could foresee.
The question has often been discussed whether the League of Nations would have had a different history, would have been more of a success, had the United States joined it. This is a question of hypothetics — said to be the most interesting and useless of all subjects — the discussion of those things that might have happened but never did: a peculiarly good field for wishful thinking, but an insecure foundation to build future structures upon. It is in the nature of ‘If you had a brother, would he like cheese?’ — where anyone’s guess on the subject may be as good as that of anyone else. My own guess is that under the actual conditions the participation of the United States would not have made any substantial difference.
The obstacle in the earlier years of the League, when it started on the wrong track, was not that without America it was not powerful enough to overcome any aggressor, but that it preferred negotiation to threat, consultation to intimidation — very naturally and under ordinary conditions very properly, no doubt. Now would the presence of a representative of this country have affected that attitude? Suppose President Wilson had at the last minute swung his Democratic followers to vote for the Treaty with the reservations proposed by the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations; the Treaty, including the League, would then have been ratified by far more than the two-thirds required, and we should have been a member thereof. Yet it is hard for me to imagine President Harding urging our delegates to insist upon the principle of immediate and rigorous use of sanctions against the desires of England and France. In fact, there was at that time a tendency to believe — erroneously, as it proved — that a general expression of opinion would be sufficient to restrain an aggressor, a faith not without its repercussions on this side of the Atlantic. The readiness of the autocratic or, as they regard themselves, the ‘Have Not’ powers to resort to violence was not then understood.
Moreover our later Republican Presidents, Coolidge and Hoover, although wanting to act with the League, treated it as many respectable citizens did their bootleggers, in a surreptitious way. They took great pains to disavow too close an official relation with it, claiming that they were merely consulting informally about our own interests. This they did because they were convinced that the general opinion of our people was against active membership in the League; and who shall say that they were wrong?
An explorer who fails to reach the object of his quest is serving the purpose intended and helping those who may be more fortunate if he gives an account of his expedition, of the obstacles encountered, the preparation and equipment needed. Indeed he neglects his duty if ho does not do so when another enterprise is about to set forth. Therefore these words are written not to discourage efforts to frame a plan for the prevention of future war, but to help them by the results of earlier experience. If the League to Enforce Peace, which failed, can have paved the way for better results by some successor which will learn from its labors, it will not have worked in vain.