Graveyard Parade

By last week the efforts of the Senate Munitions Investigation Committee to excite the nation about J. P. Morgan & Co.'s part in drawing it into the War (TIME, Jan. 20) had come to such a pass that Chairman Nye felt obliged to apologize to newsmen for the dullness of his show. Bent on convincing the public that Allied trade and not German submarines had made the U. S. take up arms in 1917, the Committee abruptly switched from Business to Government history. Banker Morgan and his partners were left lolling on the sidelines while a parade of distinguished ghosts marched by the Committee table. One by one the following leaders of 1914-17 were summoned from their graves, were made to testify through their letters, diaries, memoirs, memoranda, were charged in effect as follows:

Woodrow Wilson, President of the U. S. : He lied to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

William Jennings Bryan, first Wilson Secretary of State: His ban on foreign loans might have kept the U. S. out of war. When his neutrality views were over ruled by his President and Cabinet colleagues, he quit.

Robert Lansing, second Wilson Secretary of State : He might have stopped the German submarine attacks which he said brought the U. S. into the War. Instead he knuckled under to the Allies.

Walter Hines Page, U. S. Ambassador to Britain: He enlisted in the British cause on Aug. 4. 1914. Thereafter, despite his superiors' protests, he took Britain's part in its disputes with his country, did his best to drag his country into war at Britain's side.

Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, British Ambassador to the U. S.: He cajoled, intrigued, did much to make the U. S. hate, fear and finally fight Germany.

Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary: He bluffed the U. S. into dropping a proposal which might have kept it out of war.

William Joel Stone of Missouri, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: He saw that Wilson and Lansing were siding with Britain against Germany, fought hard to restore the balance of neutrality. When Secretary Lansing privately argued that loss of life (German submarines) merited more drastic treatment than loss of property (British blockade). Stone pointed out that German babies were dying because Britain would not allow the U. S. to send them condensed milk.

Submarines. With a great stack of documents drawn chiefly from the secret files of the State Department at his elbow, Senator Bennett Champ Clark of Missouri set out to destroy the submarine theory of U. S. entry into the war by proving that only the pro-Ally bias of President Wilson and Secretary Lansing kept them from eliminating that irritant early in the war. In 1915 Great Britain and the U. S. demanded that German submarines cease surprise attacks on merchant ships, conform to the international law of visit & search. On Jan. 2. 1916 Secretary Lansing addressed to President Wilson a "personal and private" letter. Excerpt: "The chief difficulty with the situation seems to me to lie in this: If some merchant vessels carry arms and others do not, how can a submarine determine this fact without exposing itself to great risk of being sunk? Unless the Entente Allies positively agree not to arm any of their merchant vessels and notify the Central Powers to that effect, is there not strong reason why a submarine should not warn a vessel before launching an attack? "You will recall the case of the Baralong, where a German submarine was bombarding a vessel from which the crew had escaped in boats when a tramp steamer approached flying the American flag. The submarine remained on the surface and awaited the steamer, which on nearing the submarine lowered the American flag, hoisted the British colors, and with a gun mounted on the stern (a defensive armament, according to our early definition) opened fire and sank the German vessel, killing all the crew."

Secretary Lansing proposed that the U. S. reverse its stand, urge the Allies to disarm their merchant vessels in return for a German promise to visit & search. Eight days later President Wilson approved the plan as "reasonable and thorouhgly worth trying." Secretary Lansing drafted a letter to British Ambassador Spring-Rice, sent it to the President with another note :

"My first inclination was to send letters to the German Ambassador and the Austrian Charge, but two reasons prevented: First, I was convinced that the German and Austrian Governments would assent to the proposal . . . and second, if Germany and Austria acceded promptly to the suggestion, any demur by Great Britain, France, Italy or Belgium would, if it became known . . . arouse adverse criticism in the Press of this country and excite resentment against the Entente powers, which seems to be increasing from day to day."

Accordingly, the proposition was submitted secretly to the Allies, got a prompt, flat rejection from Foreign Secretary Grey. Aggrieved, Secretary Lansing wrote to the President: "It seems to me that the British Government expected us to denounce submarine warfare as inhuman and to deny the right to use submarines in at tacking commercial vessels; and that these statements by Sir Edward Grey evidence his great disappointment that we have failed to be the instrument to save Britishcommerce from attack by Germany. . . ." By April, Allied rejection of the U. S. proposal was unanimous and had been docilely accepted by Secretary Lansing and President Wilson. Years later Sir Edward Grey, a Viscount, retired to feeding wild ducks on his Northumberland estate, was to write in his memoirs that the Allies, utterly dependent on the U. S. for supplies, would have had to accept any terms on which the U. S. insisted.

With the Allied rejections in his pocket, Secretary Lansing put up a stern, uncompromising front when Germany's Ambassador Count Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff called at his office one day late in April 1916. A stenographer set down their conversation verbatim. Excerpts:

Lansing: Submarine warfare should stop against commercial vessels, unless visit & search is observed.

Bernstorff: That, of course, is impossible. Germany cannot abandon submarine warfare. No government could come out and say: "We give up the use of submarines." They would have to resign. . . .

Lansing: I do not know how your Government can modify submarine warfare and make it effective and at the same time obey the law and the dictates of humanity.

Bernstorff: Humanity! Of course, War is never humane.

Lansing: "Humanity" is a relative expression when used with "war," but the whole tendency in the growth of international law in regard to warfare in the past 125 years has been to relieve non-combatants of needless suffering.

Bernstorff: Of course, I think it would be an ideal state of affairs, but our enemies violate all the rules and you insist on their being applied to Germany.

Lansing: One deals with life; the other with property. . . .

Bernstorff: Then I am to understand that you do not recognize the law of retaliation?

Lansing: We do not recognize retaliation when it affects the rights of commerce.

Trade. Three months later President Wilson, outraged by British interference with U. S. commerce and by the British "blacklist" of U. S. firms accused of dealing with the Central Powers, wrote to his most intimate friend & adviser, Col. Edward Mandell House: "I am, I must admit, about at the end of my patience with Great Britain and the Allies. . . . I am seriously considering asking Congress to authorize me to prohibit loans and restrict exportations to the Allies. It is becoming clear to me that there lies latent in this policy the wish to prevent our merchants getting a foothold in markets which Great Britain has hitherto controlled and all but dominated."

On Sept. 7, 1916 Congress authorized President Wilson to retaliate against the Allies. The President promptly asked his Secretary of Commerce, William C. Redfield, to report on the most practicable procedure. Secretary Redfield reported about a fortnight before the 1916 election: Interference with its Allied trade would mean economic ruin for the U. S. The plan was dropped.

Falsifier. When Senator Clark had dismissed his ghostly witnesses, Chairman Nye spoke up with a historical point of his own. The Committee had learned from "the highest possible sources," said he, that immediately after the U. S. entered the War, President Wilson and Secretary Lansing were informed by Arthur J. Balfour, Sir Edward Grey's successor as Foreign Secretary, of the secret treaties in which the Allies had agreed to divide up conquered territories after winning the War. Later the President and Secretary of State had declared that they knew nothing about these treaties until they arrived at the Peace Conference. Senator Nye's shocking conclusion: "The President and Secretary Lansing falsified concerning this matter. . . ."

Apparently startled, Senator Clark muttered that he was "not familiar'' with the matter. In a moment he recovered himself, rallied to his colleague's support. Quickly he rattled off passages from Mr. Balfour's memoirs, from Colonel House's diary, from a letter written by Britain's Wartime Prime Minister David Lloyd George--all indicating that on his visit to the U. S. in the spring of 1917 Secretary Balfour had told President Wilson and Secretary Lansing all about the secret treaties. Furthermore, declared Senator Clark, Secretary Balfour had left with the State Department "a comprehensive memorandum" concerning the treaties. Then the Missouri Senator drew out the record of a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Aug. 19, 1919, once more let the Wartime leaders speak their parts:

Senator Borah: When did the secret treaties . . . first come to your knowledge? Was that after you had reached Paris?

President Wilson: Yes, the whole series of understandings were disclosed to me for the first time then.

Senator Borah: Then we had no knowledge of these secret treaties, so far as our Government was concerned, until you reached Paris?

President Wilson: Not unless there was information in the State Department of which I knew nothing.

Senator Johnson, to Secretary Lansing: Did either of these gentlemen [Balfour and Viviani] while here communicate to you any secret treaties that had been executed for the disposition of territory after the war?

Secretary Lansing: Neither of them.

Old v. Young. What relevance this disclosure had to the problem of U. S. neutrality was not explained. But its effect was to jerk the Senate investigators roughly back to the present, make their probings a red-hot Senatorial issue. Abruptly revealed was the sharp cleavage between elder statesmen who had known War politics at first hand and younger men who had looked on from the outside. Hitherto the elders had kept silent while the youthful crusaders monopolized front pages with a revision of U. S. history which made those elders out to have been deplorable bunglers, duped by propaganda or impelled by greed. But when ardent young Senator Nye called the Wartime President of the U. S. a liar, the pent-up wrath of Woodrow Wilson's onetime associates burst forth in dancing fury.

In the Senate, Texas' Tom Connally, who heard President Wilson's War message as a fledgling Representative, reared up and roared: "Some checker-playing, beer-drinking back room of some low house is the only place fit for the kind of language which the Senator from North Dakota puts into the record about a dead man, a great man, a good man. and a man who, when alive, had the courage to meet his enemies face to face. . . . This committee . . . comes back like a ghoul, a historical ghoul, to desecrate the sacred resting place of the honored dead."

Jeering at the Nye Committee's findings, Senator Connally cried: "It has discovered that some international woman of the streets, lurking at the corner of an alley, enticed Uncle Sam down the alley and got him into the war."

Informed that the Committee had only $400 of its $125,000 appropriation left, Senator Connally promised that he "and some other Senators" would try to see that it got not another dollar. When he had finished his tirade, Senator McAdoo, President Wilson's onetime son-in-law and Wartime Secretary of the Treasury, rushed up to pump his hand.

Next day lean, keen Chairman Nye uprose defiantly in the Senate, dismissed the Connally attack as "gutter English," repeated and documented his charge against Wilson and Lansing, cried: "I am wholly unashamed of my course."

While he spoke, word sped through the Capitol that Virginia's whip-tongued Carter Glass, third Wilson Secretary of the Treasury, would rise to answer him. When the frail, 78-year-old Virginian pulled himself to his feet, face pale and drawn, eyes flashing, the Senate galleries were packed and every seat on the Democratic side was filled.

"If it were permissible in the Senate," Senator Glass growled out of the corner of his mouth, "to say that any man who would asperse the integrity and veracity of Woodrow Wilson is a coward, if it were permissible to say that his charge is not only malicious but positively mendacious, that I would be glad to say. ... I resent it ... as an infamous libel. . . ."

Senator Glass's harsh, tired, old voice took on volume, rasped with anger, shook with emotion as he went on. He pounded his desk with clenched fist until his knuckles bled. "It now would be appropriate," snarled he, "for the Senator from North Dakota to offer for the consideration of the Senate a resolution of apology to Germany for our declaration of war. From time to time it has been suggested in the newspapers that the members of this committee were going to present to the country shocking revelations. It remained until day before yesterday to present anything of a shocking nature; and that was the unspeakable accusation against a dead President--dirt-daubing the sepulchre of Woodrow Wilson.

". . . Oh, the miserable demagogy, the miserable and mendacious suggestion, that the House of Morgan altered the neutrality course of Woodrow Wilson! ... I will never vote another dollar to anybody or any committee any one of whose members is so insensible to every consideration of decency as to stand on the Senate floor and bitterly assail two dead men who are honored by this entire nation. . . ."

To many an observer last week it seemed likely that the passions loosed by an irrelevant fighting word about a dead President had not only killed the Committee's chance of continuing its investigation, but also might sidetrack indefinitely Senate action on a permanent U. S. neutralitv bill.

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