Promise to the Dead

(See front cover)

Ever since the last disarmament conference two years ago peace-lovers throughout the world have looked forward hopefully to this week at Geneva. There at last the League of Nations in a major world conference was to come to grips with the explosive question of armies and their limitation. Thirteen years ago the League of Nations Covenant solemnly promised a reduction of armament in the name of peace. According to most of the greatest orators of Europe, it was a promise made to 8,000,000 slaughtered men, mostly young.* Since 1921 the League, with one preparatory commission after another, has been almost continuously mulling and stewing over this matter, trying to devise a method of carrying out the solemn promise at Versailles. Its conference to which 59 powers, large and small, sent representatives, was to be a climax of its endeavors.

A prime tenet in President Hoover's international credo is, as all the world now knows, limitation, of armaments. He has hammered relentlessly away at the thesis that Armies now overburden the world, that the quickest way out of the Depression is to reduce war forces and the taxes which support them. Though the U. S. has no sizeable army to cut (138,000 officers & men), the President consented to join the Geneva Conference in the earnest hope that the U. S. could somehow help other great powers agree to limit their soldiery. For U. S. participation he asked Congress for $450,000 as expense money. To represent the country he appointed a delegation of five: Charles Gates Dawes, Ambassador to Great Britain, Hugh Simons Gibson, Ambassador to Belgium, Norman Hezekiah Davis, onetime Under Secretary of State. Claude Augustus Swanson, Senator from Virginia, and Mary Emma Woolley. president of Mount Holyoke College. They were called "the best practical pacifists available." Mr. Dawes resigned as a delegate to become president of Reconstruction Finance Corp. and President Hoover replaced him with Secretary of State Stimson as chairman of the delegation.

Flowers & Farewell-- With Messrs. Gibson and Davis already in Europe, Delegates Woolley and Swanson sailed from New York fortnight ago on the President Harding. A troop of advisers, technical experts, aides and clerks accompanied them. Also, several peace organizations sent along unofficial delegates of their own. Peace petitions were signed and loaded aboard. When the ship sailed Aviatrix Ruth Nichols flew round the masts clad in a purple leather jacket, went aboard at Quarantine and presented Delegate Woolley with two large bunches of spring flowers. The Federal Council of Churches gave the delegates its blessing and called for a nation-wide Day of Prayer in their behalf.

As delegates Swanson and Woolley met their two colleagues at Geneva last week, a swarm of nearly 1,000 delegates and representatives of other nations were also converging on League headquarters. Foreign Minister Dino Grandi headed the Italian delegation. Andre Tardieu led the Frenchmen. Chairman of the whole Conference was sober "Uncle Arthur" Henderson of Britain. Hopeful and variously important personages crammed every hotel room in Geneva which had erected a special building for the Conference and presented it to the League.

"Most Important Crisis." Eight months ago the Study Conference on Disarmament announced: "The approaching Disarmament Conference marks the most important crisis in world history since Versailles." But the world, unfortunately, has had other things to think about. Japan is at China's throat (see p. 18). Secretary Stimson announced that it was unlikely that he would be able to go to Geneva at all. The House cut the U. S. delegation's appropriation from $450,000 to $390,000, and the senate to $300,000. Few Congressmen favored a larger investment in a conference starting under such poor auspices.

Only eight days before the Conference was to meet word went round that Sir James Eric Drummond was retiring as Secretary General of the League of Nations. For twelve years bald, precise Sir Eric has almost been the League itself. During the Versailles Peace Conference when the machinery of the League was being organized. President Wilson looked about for someone to head its permanent organization. It was decided that no outstanding statesman could take the post lest his domination stir up a thousand unnecessary racial and national jealousies. They found the man they were looking for in Balfour's secretary. He was efficient, understanding, tactful. Years have shown how wise his selection was. The idea of a disarmament conference without the soothing influence of Sir Eric was more than its organizers could face. They begged, cajoled, and finally won a promise that his resignation need not go into effect before the end of the Conference.

Quitter Japan? Biggest puncture to the Conference hopes came from the little yellow men who made up the delegation from Japan. The regular Council of the League was also meeting in Geneva last week. China forced it to act under Article XV of the League Covenant which provides for the publication of the facts in any dispute between League members and recommendations by the Council for its settlement. Japan agreed unofficially to an investigation but this was followed almost immediately by a veiled threat from Tokyo that Japan was about ready to quit the League entirely, would do so if the League became too meddlesome.

To add to the general air of impotence Britain's foremost advocate of disarmament, Viscount Cecil, was not even asked to go to the Conference at all. The president of the Conference, Arthur Henderson, is a man completely without authority at home. No longer Foreign Minister of Britain, he is not even a Member of Parliament. He is just plain Mr. Henderson and he refuses to resign the Conference Chairmanship which was given to him a year ago. He reached Geneva last week on the same train with Senator Swanson and the indefatigable Miss Woolley, looking tired, careworn, sick.

And Russia. Also in Geneva last week arrived a formidable Russian delegation headed by rotund, freckle-faced Maxim Maximovich Litvinov, Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs. Because the shadow of Russia's army (639,000 efficient men) falls fearfully over the face of Europe, Comrade Litvinov's presence and plans were of profound interest and concern to all other delegates. The Litvinov role, which the Commissar has played at several preparatory disarmament conferences, is to demand complete and absolute disarmament for all nations at once and .without strings. To this revolutionary proposition Capitalist diplomats answer, none too effectively, that Comrade Litvinov and the U. S. S. R. are insincere.

Comrade Litvinov has long been nursing an old grudge against Ambassador Gibson. Two years ago at one of the many preliminary conferences Ambassador Gibson heard Comrade Litvinov expounding the Soviet theory that the way to disarm is to disarm. The U. S. diplomat hastened to assure correspondents that such a scheme was not worthy of comment and probably presented in bad faith. Almost immediately thereafter Mr. Gibson presented a U. S. plan which paralleled the Litvinov plan almost exactly in two most important particulars: 1) reduction, not limitation, of armaments; 2) a mathematical formula to effect cuts. Comrade Litvinov's blunt, British wife drawled: "I should call Gibson a contemptible little bounder."

Most Trusted Diplomat-- If anyone could face the mounting obstacles to disarmament, it was the actual head of the U. S. delegation, Hugh Simons Gibson. A veteran of every peace and disarmament conference since 1925, he is President Hoover's most trusted diplomat. He has spent 23 of his 48 years in the service of the State Department without losing his sense of humor. When Ambassador Dawes described diplomacy as "easy on the head but Hell on the feet," Ambassador Gibson quipped back: "Well it depends which you use most."

Ambassador Gibson has worked long and hard with the League's commissions preparing for this week's Conference. He knows every nation's every argument against this or that form of limitation. Once he explained that disarmament discussions start with armies, switch to reserves, then take up food supplies and live stock, and finally lose themselves in a welter of extraneous details. He summed it up: "It's just a matter of hogs, fogs and bogs."

Ambassador Gibson was born in Los Angeles. He attributes his choice of a diplomatic career to the fact that he had infantile paralysis as a child, was considered too delicate to go to school and was privately tutored. Later he graduated from L'Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques in Paris, took a State Department examination and was first sent to Tegucigalpa, Honduras. In Havana he won a $500,000 claim for a U. S. citizen against the Cuban Government. A patriotic Cuban reporter by the name of Massa promptly knocked him senseless with a pair of brass knuckles. Never very strong, Hugh Gibson was transferred to Brussels to become Secretary of Legation under Minister Brand Whitlock. The State Department considered that the quiet of Belgium would give him a good rest. That was February 1914.

During the War he unsuccessfully intervened in behalf of British Nurse Edith Cavell. In 1918 he became Vice Chairman of the American Relief Committee under Herbert Hoover. There began a friendship which accounts for the fact that whenever he is in Washington Ambassador Gibson sleeps at the White House. With scant regard for the dignity of manufacturers, bankers, Senators and other U. S. Ambassadors, Ambassador Gibson is sent to take charge wherever a ticklish situation arises in Europe, has been Ambassador to Belgium since 1927. He is serious in his love for the Belgians. In 1922 he married Mile Ynes Marie Marcelle Reyntiens, daughter of one of King Albert's aides de camp.

*World War dead: Germany 1,773,700; Russia 1,700,000; France 1,357,800; Austro-Hungary 1,200,000; British Empire 908,371; Italy 650,000; U. S. 126,000; Belgium 13,716; Japan 300; other nations 808,428.

Killed, wounded or captured in battles: Verdun (1916) 1,140,552; the Somme (1916) 1,332,157; the Aisne (1917) 1,048,999--exclusive of U. S. troops.

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