Our Part in the Great War

SECTION II
WHY SOME AMERICANS ARE NEUTRAL

I
NEUTRALITY: AN INTERPRETATION OF THE MIDDLE WEST

"The great interior region bounded east by the Alleghanies, north by the British Dominions, west by the Rocky Mountains, and south by the line along which the culture of corn and cotton meets … will have fifty millions of people within fifty years, if not prevented by any political folly or mistake. It contains more than one-third of the country owned by the United States – certainly more than one million of square miles. A glance at the map shows that, territorially speaking, it is the great body of the republic. The other parts are but marginal borders to it."

(Lincoln's Message to Congress, Dec. 1, 1862.)

The war and the election together have revealed a growing separation between the ideas of the East and those of the West. This separation is largely the fault of the East, which prefers to do its thinking in terms of its own industrial welfare. The life of the West is a healthier life. There is better balance between industry and agriculture, more recognition of the value of social equality, more open-mindedness to new ideas, greater readiness to put them into practice. The East has been slow to recognize this moral leadership of the newer country. It has greeted the men and their ideas with caustic humor and sometimes with an almost malignant bitterness. This has not weakened the men nor crushed their ideas, but it has lessened good will. It has led the West to distrust a policy which has the endorsement of the East.

The German Kaiser said to a distinguished Frenchman whom I know:

"America once divided between North and South. It would not be impossible now to separate America, the East from the West."

It is time for the East to waken itself from its selfish sleep, and bend its mind to an understanding of the American community. In the matter of foreign policy, it is wiser than the Middle West, but in order to make its ideas prevail it will have to work by sympathetic coöperation. It will have to prove that its notion of foreign policy is not based on self-interest, but is a wise program for the American nation.

I have shown that a section of America of the Civil War traditions is intensely Pro-Ally, and has proved it in speech and action. The new America, spreading out over the immense areas of the Middle West, is neutral. It is neutral because it does not know the facts. I am sometimes told in Europe that it is the chink of our money that has made my country deaf. But our neutral people are our earnest Middle Westerners, hard-working and humanitarian. The Middle West has not given money, and it is warm-hearted. It has not taken sides, and it is honest. This neutrality is in part the result of the Allied methods of conducting the war. In England and France, there has been an unconscious disregard of neutral opinion, an indifference in the treatment of its representatives, an unwillingness to use the methods of a democracy in appealing to a democracy. A Government report, issued by a belligerent power, has little effect on a community three thousand miles away. But the first-hand accounts, sent by its own writers, who are known to be accurate and impartial, have wide effect. It is unfortunate that through the first two years of the war, more news was given to American journalists by Germany than by England and France.

There is need that some one should speak the truth about the foreign policy of the Allies. For that foreign policy has been a failure in its effect on neutrals. The successful prosecution of a war involves three relationships:

(1) The enemy.

(2) The Allies.

(3) The Neutrals.

The first two relationships have long been realized. The third – that of relationship toward neutrals – has never been realized. It is not fully realized to-day. The failure to realize it led America and England into the fight of 1812. It led to the Mason and Slidell case between England and America in the Civil War. The importance of winning neutral good will and public opinion is not, even to-day, included in the forefront of the national effort. It is still spoken of as a minor matter of giving "penny-a-liner" journalists "interviews." England has steered her way through diplomatic difficulties with neutral governments. But that is only one-half the actual problem of a foreign policy. The other half is to win the public opinion of the neutral people, because there is no such thing finally as neutrality.² Public opinion turns either Pro or Anti, in the end. At present about thirty per cent of American public opinion is Pro-Ally. Ten per cent is anti-British, ten per cent anti-Russian, ten per cent Pro-German, and forty per cent neutral. The final weight will rest in whichever cause wins the forty per cent neutral element. That element is contained in the Middle West. The failure in dealing with America has been the failure to see that we needed facts, if we were to come to a decision. Our only way of getting facts is through the representatives whom we send over.

A clear proof that the cause of the Allies has not touched America except on the Atlantic Seaboard lies in the exact number of men from the Eastern Universities who have come across to help France, as compared with the number from the Middle Western institutions of learning. For instance, in the American Field Ambulance Service Harvard has 98 men, Princeton, 28, Yale 27, Columbia 9, Dartmouth 8. These are Eastern institutions. From the Middle West, with the exception of the University of Michigan, which has sent several, there is occasionally one man from a college. The official report up to the beginning of 1916 shows not a man from what many consider the leading University of America, the State University of Wisconsin, and less than six from the entire Middle West. There is no need of elaborating the point. The Middle West has not been allowed to know the facts.

Because my wife told her friends in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the facts of the war, three men have come four thousand miles to help France. One is Robert Toms, General Manager of the Marion Water Works, one is Dr. Cogswell, a successful physician, one is Verne Marshall, Editor of the Cedar Rapids Gazette. Each man of the three is a successful worker, and gave up his job. These three men are as significant as the 98 college boys from Harvard.

What took place in that little Iowa group will take place throughout the whole vast Middle Western territory, when the Allies are willing to use the only methods that avail in a modern democracy – namely, the use of public opinion, publicity, and the periodicals, – by granting facilities for information to the representatives of a democracy when they come desiring to know the truth. Constantly, one is met in London and Paris when seeking information on German atrocities, German frightfulness, German methods:

"But surely your people know all that."

How can they know it? Our newspaper men have rarely been permitted access to the facts by the Allies. But to every phase of the war they have been personally conducted by the German General Staff. It has been as much as our liberty was worth, and once or twice almost as much as our life was worth, to endeavor to build up the Pro-Ally case, so constant have been the obstacles placed in our way. Much of the interesting war news, most of the arresting interviews, have come from the German side. The German General Staff has shown an understanding of American psychology, a flexibility in handling public opinion. The best "stories" have often come out of Germany, given to American correspondents. Their public men and their officers, including Generals, have unbent, and stated their case. An American writer, going to Germany, has received every aid in gathering his material. A writer, with the Allies, is constantly harassed. This is a novel experience to any American journalist whose status at home is equal to that of the public and professional men, whose work he makes known and aids. My own belief for the first twenty-two months of work in obtaining information and passing it on to my countrymen was that such effort in their behalf was not desired by France and England, that their officials and public men would be better pleased if we ceased to annoy them. I was thoroughly discouraged by the experience, so slight was the official interest over here in having America know the truth.

This foreign policy, which dickers with the State Department, but neglects the people, is a survival of the Tory tradition. One of the ablest interpreters of that tradition calls such a foreign policy – "the preference for negotiating with governments rather than with peoples." But the foreign policy of the United States is created by public opinion. Negotiation with the State Department leaves the people, who are the creators of policy, cold and neutral, or heated and hostile, because uninformed. If the Allied Governments had released facts to the representatives of American public opinion, our foreign policy of the last two years might have been more firm and enlightened, instead of hesitant and cloudy. As a people we have made no moral contribution to the present struggle, because in part we did not have the fact-basis and the intellectual material on which to work.

If a democracy, like England, is too proud to present its case to a sister democracy, then at that point it is not a democracy. If it gives as excuse (and this is the excuse which officials give) that the military will not tolerate propaganda, then the Allies are more dominated by their military than Germany. Of course the real reason is neither of these. The real reason is that England and France are unaware of the situation in our Middle West.

The Middle West is a hard-working, idealistic, "uncommercialized" body of citizens, who create our national policy. It has some of the best universities in America – places of democratic education, reaching every group of citizen in the State, and profoundly influential on State policy. Such Universities as the State Universities of Wisconsin and Michigan are closely related to the life of their community, whereas Yale University could not carry a local election in New Haven. What the late Professor Sumner (of Yale) thought, was of little weight at the Capitol House at Hartford, Conn. What John R. Commons (Professor at the State University of Wisconsin) thinks, has become State law. The Middle West has put into execution commission government in over 200 of its cities, the first great move in the overthrow of municipal graft. It practices city-planning. Many of its towns are models. Our sane radical movements in the direction of equality are Middle-Western movements. To curse this section as money-grubbing, uninspired, and to praise the Harvard-Boston Brahmins, the Princeton-Philadelphia Tories, and the Yale-New York financial barons, as the hope of our country, is to twist values. Both elements are excellent and necessary. Out of their chemical compounding will come the America of the future. The leaders of the Middle West are Brand Whitlock, Bryan, La Follette, Herbert Quick, Henry Ford, Booth Tarkington, Edward Ross, John R. Commons, William Allen White, The Mayos, Orville Wright. Not all of them are of first-rate mentality. But they are honest, and their mistakes are the mistakes of an idealism unrelated to life as it is. The best of them have a vision for our country that is not faintly perceived by the East. Their political ideal is Abraham Lincoln. Walt Whitman expressed what they are trying to make of our people. The stories of O. Henry describe this type of new American.

A clear analysis of our Middle West is contained in the second of Monsieur Emile Hovelaque's articles in recent issues of the Revue de Paris. In that he shows how distance and isolation have operated to give our country, particularly the land-bound heart of it, a feeling of security, a sense of being unrelated to human events elsewhere on the planet. He shows how the break of the immigrant with his Old World has left his inner life emptied of the old retrospects, cut off from the ancestral roots. That vacancy the new man in the new world filled with formula, with vague pieces of idealism about brotherhood. He believed his experiment had cleared human nature of its hates. He believed that ideals no longer had to be fought for. Phrases became a substitute for the ancient warfare against the enemies of the race. And all the time he was busy with his new continent. Results, action, machinery, became his entire outer life. The Puritan strain in him, a religion of dealing very directly with life immediately at hand, drove him yet the harder to tackle his own patch of soil, and then on to a fresh field in another town in another State: work, but work unrelated to a national life – least of all was it related to an international ideal.

And he let Europe go its own gait, till finally it has become a dim dream, and just now a very evil dream. But of concern in its bickerings he feels none. So to-day he refuses to see a right and a wrong in the European War. He confuses the criminal and the victim. He regards the Uhlan and the Gerbéviller peasant as brothers. Why don't they cease their quarrel, and live as we live?

That, in brief, is a digest of Hovelaque's searching analysis of our national soul at this crisis. We have not understood the war. We are not going to see it unless we are aided. If we do not see it, the future of the democratic experiment on this earth is imperiled. The friends of France and England lie out yonder on the prairies. The Allies have much to teach them, and much to learn from them. But to effect the exchange, England and France must be willing to speak to them through the voices they know – not alone through "Voix Americaines" of James Beck, and Elihu Root and Whitney Warren and President Lowell and Mr. Choate. England must speak to them through Collier's Weekly and the Saturday Evening Post and the newspaper syndicates. There is only one way of reaching American public opinion – the newspapers and periodicals. No other agency avails. England must recognize the function of the correspondent in the modern democracy. Through him come the facts and impressions on which the people make up its mind. He supplies public opinion with the material out of which to build policy. For our failure to understand the war, France and England must share the blame with America. We should have been ready enough to alter our indifference and ignorance into understanding, if only our writers had been aided to gain information.

But the Western Allies have little knowledge of American public opinion, and small desire to win it. They have sent some of our best men over in disgust to the enemy lines. Any one, coming on such a quest as I have been on, that of proving German methods from first-hand witness, is regarded by the Allies as partly a nuisance and partly misguided. If any public criticism is ever made of my country's attitude by the French or English, we, that have sought to serve the Allies, will be obliged to come forward and tell our experience: – namely, that it has been most difficult to obtain facts for America, as the Allies have seen fit to disregard her public opinion, and scorn the methods and channels of reaching that public opinion.

II
SOCIAL WORKERS AND THE WAR

I found in Belgium the evidences of a German spy system, carried out systematically through a period of years. I saw widespread atrocities committed on peasant non-combatants by order of German officers. I saw German troops burn peasants' houses. I saw dying men, women and a child, who had been bayonetted by German soldiers as they were being used as a screen for advancing troops. What I had seen was reported to Lord Bryce by the young man with me, and the testimony appears in the Bryce report. I saw a ravaged city, 1,100 houses burned house by house, and sprinkled among the gutted houses a hundred houses undamaged, with German script on their door, saying, "Nicht verbrennen. Gute leute wohnen hier."

With witnesses and with photographs I had reinforced my observation, so that I should not overstate or alter in making my report at home. Opposed to this machine of treachery and cruelty, I had seen an uprising of the people of three nations, men hating war and therefore enlisted in this righteous war to preserve values more precious than the individual life. With a bitter and a costly experience, I had won my conviction that there were two wars on the western front.

When I returned from a year in the war zone, five months of which was spent at the front, I looked forward to finding a constructive program, hammered out by the social work group, which would interpret the struggle and give our nation a call to action. I looked to social workers because I have long believed and continue to believe that social workers are the finest group of persons in our American community. They seem to me in our vanguard because of a sane intelligence, touched with ethical purpose.

It was a disappointment to find them scattered and negative, many of them anti-war, some of them members of the Woman's Peace Party, some even opposing the sending of ammunition to the Allies.

Few elements in the war were more perplexing than the failure of our idealists to make their thinking worthy of the sudden and immense crisis which challenged them. Absence of moral leadership in America was as conspicuous as the presence of inexhaustible stores of moral heroism in Europe.

The very experts who have prepared accurate reports on social conditions are failing to inform themselves of the facts of this war. I have found social workers who have not studied the Bryce report, and who are unaware of the German diaries and German letters, specifying atrocities, citing "military necessity," and revealing a mental condition that makes "continuous mediation" as grim a piece of futility as it would be if applied to a maniac in the nursery about to brain a child.

I heard the head of a famous institution, a member of the Woman's Peace Party, tell what promise of the future it gave when a German woman crossed the platform at The Hague and shook hands with a Belgian woman. There is something unworthy in citing that incident as answering the situation in Belgium, where at this hour that German woman's countrymen are holding the little nation in subjection, and impoverishing it by severe taxation, after betraying it for many years, and then burning its homes and killing its peasants. An active unrepentant murderer is not the same as a naughty child, whom you cajole into a conference of good-will. A pleasant passage of social amenity does not obliterate the destruction of a nation. Such haphazard treatment of a vast tragedy reveals that our people are not living at the same deep level as the young men I have known in Flanders, who are dying to defend the helpless and to preserve justice.

I was asked by a secretary of the Woman's Peace Party to speak at Carnegie Hall to a mass meeting of pacifists. When I told her I should speak of the wrong done to Belgium which I had witnessed, and should state that the war must go on to a righteous finish, she withdrew her invitation, saying she was sorry the women couldn't listen to my stories. She said that her experience as a lawyer had shown her that punishment never accomplished anything, and the driving out of the Germans by military measures was punishment.

I have known social workers to aid girl strikers in making their demands effective. Have the social workers as a unit denounced the continuing injustice to Belgium? Protests, made by the Belgian government to Washington, of cruelties, of undue taxation, of systematic steam-roller crushing, were allowed to be filed in silence, so that these protests that cover more than twelve months of outrage are to-day unknown to the general public, and have not availed to mitigate one item of the evil. One was astonished by the sudden hush that had fallen on the altruistic group, so sensitive to corporate wrong-doing, so alert in defense of exploited children and women. Why the overnight change from sharp intolerance of successful injustice?

I find that our philanthropists are held by a theory. The theory is in two parts. One is that war is the worst of all evils. The other is that war can be willed out of existence. They believe that another way out can be found, by some sort of mutual understanding, continuous mediation, and overlooking of definite and hideous wrongs committed by a combatant, wrongs that date back many years, so that out of long-continued treachery the atrocity sprang, like flame out of dung.

They refuse to see a right and a wrong in this war. It is not to them as other struggles in life, as the struggle between the forces of decency and the vice trust with its army of owners, pimps, cadets and disorderly hotel keepers. They have let their minds slip into a confusion between right and wrong, a blurring of distinctions as sharp and fundamental as the distinction between chastity and licentiousness, between military necessity and human rights, between a living wage and sweatshop labor. In their socialized pity, they have lost the consciousness of sin.

I found a ready answer to the charges of hideous practice by the army of invasion – the answer, that war is always like that. But it is too easy to dismiss all these outrages as "war." That is akin to the easy generalizations of prohibition fanatics, of pseudo-Marxian Socialists, of Anarchists, of vegetarians, of Christian Scientists, and of many other sincere persons who overstate, who like to focus what is complex into a one-word statement. "Do away with drink at one stroke, and you have abolished unhappy marriages." "All modern business is bad." "Government is the worst of all evils." "Meat-eating leads to murder."

Just as men-of-the-world theories on the inevitability of prostitution, with its "lost" girls, had to give way to the presence of facts on the commercialized traffic, so the pacifist position on the present war is untenable when confronted with the honeycombing of Belgium with spies through long years and with the state of mind and the resultant acts of infamy recorded by Germans in their letters and diaries. There is an incurable romanticism in the literature of the pacifists that is offensive to men in a tragic struggle. Let me quote two sentences from a peace pamphlet issued by friends of mine who are among the best-known social workers in the United States:

"It (war) has found a world of friends and neighbors, and substituted a world of outlanders and aliens and enemies."

This is a quaint picture of the ante-bellum situation in Belgium, when the country was undermined with German clerks, superintendents, commercial travelers, summer residents, who were extracting information and forwarding it to Berlin, buying up peasants for spies and building villas with concrete foundations for big guns. "Friends and neighbors" is a rhetorical flourish that hurts when applied to German officers riding into towns as conquerors where for years they had been entertained as social guests.

"In rape and cruelty and rage, ancient brutishness trails at the heels of all armies."

That description is just when applied to the German army of invasion which practiced widespread murder on non-combatants. It is inaccurate, and therefore unjust, when applied to the Belgian, French and British armies. I have lived and worked as a member of the allied army for five months. It does not trail brutishness. It is fighting from high motive with honorable methods. It is unfortunate to overlay the profound reality of the war with a mental concept.

To summarize:

1. The social workers have failed to apply their high moral earnestness to this war. They have not accepted the war as a revelation of the human spirit in one of its supreme struggles between right and wrong. As the result their words have offended, as light words will always hurt men who are sacrificing property and ease and life itself for the sake of an ideal.

2. They have neglected to inform themselves of the facts of the war. As the result, they have made no positive program and taken no constructive action.

Let them deal with such facts as the German villa in the Belgian town where we lived – a villa that was a fortification with a deep concrete foundation for a heavy gun. I want them to face, as I had to face, the eighty-year-old peasant woman with a bayonet thrust through her thigh, and the twelve-year-old girl with her back cut open to the backbone by bayonets. Is it too much to ask that our social workers shall hold their peace in the presence of universal suffering and not mock noble sacrifice with tales of drugged soldiers? It was not the vinegar on hyssop that explains the deed on the cross. Is it too much to ask them to abstain from their peace parties and their anti-munitions campaigns?

We should listen to these leaders more readily if we had seen them risking their lives like the boys of the American Ambulance. To weigh sacrifice in detached phrases calls for an equal measure of service and a shared peril. If a few of our social workers had been wounded under fire, we should feel that their companions in the hazard were speaking from some such depth of experience as the peasants of Lorraine. But our idealists have not spoken from this initiation. Miss Addams is still puzzled and grieved by the response her words about drugged soldiers called out. Mr. Wilson is annoyed that his phrase of "too proud to fight" gave little pleasure to the mothers of dead boys.

With fuller knowledge our leaders will turn to and build us a program we can follow, a program of action that preserves the immutable distinction between right and wrong, that lends strength to those dying for the right. With such frank taking of sides, let me give two instances where definite results could be achieved. They are both highly supposititious cases. But they will serve.

Let us suppose, that at this moment the Russian government, under cover of the war, is harrying and suppressing the Russian revolutionary centers in Paris and London – the French and British governments remaining complacent to the act because of the present war alliance. If we had a staunch public opinion, resulting in a strong government policy at Washington which had decided there was a right and a wrong on the western front, and which had thrown the immense weight of its moral support to the defenders of Belgium, such a government would be in a position to make a friendly suggestion to France and England that "live and let live" for Russian liberalism would be appreciated.

Let us take another imaginative case. Suppose that, under cover of the war, Japan was tightening her hold on China, and gradually turning China into a subject state. If our government were on relations of powerful friendship with the Allies, it would be conceivable that England could be asked to hint gently that unseemly pressure from Tokyo was undesirable. The English fleet is a fact in the world of reality.

What is needed precisely is a foreign policy that will strengthen the tendencies toward world peace, based on justice. By our indecision and failure to take a stand, we have lessened our moral value to the world. It is weak thinking that advocates a policy and is too timid to use the instruments that will shape it. Because we want a restored Belgium and France and a world peace, we need statesmen who are effective in attaining these things. We need men who can suggest a diplomatic gain in the cause of justice that the nations will agree on, because of a government at Washington that carries weight with the diplomats who will bring it to pass. We want to see the friendship of France and England and Canada regained. We are letting all these things slip. There will come a day when it is too late to do anything except develop regrets. Why should not social workers declare themselves in time?

At a season of national gravity, when the future for fifty years may be determined inside of four years, we want those men for our leaders who can work results in the world of time and space, instead of dream liberations in the untroubled realms of moral consciousness.

Before we have an all-embracing internationalism, we must have a series of informal alliances, where the forces of modern democracy tend to range on one side, and the autocratic nations tend to range on the other side. There will be strange mixtures, of course, on both sides, even as there are in the present war. But the grand total will lean ever more and more to righteousness. Righteousness will prevail in spite of us, but how much fairer our lot if we are ranged with the "great allies – exultations, agonies, and love," and man's unconquerable will to freedom.