Aaron's Difficulties

Twenty-one years ago this week Woodrow Wilson signed the resolution of Congress declaring that a State of War had been "thrust upon the United States'' by the German Government. For ten of the intervening years a conscientious, 47-year-old, Texas-born scholar, Dr. Charles Callan Tansill, onetime lecturer in diplomatic history at Johns Hopkins University, has been trying to find out what happened before that document was signed--what happened to U. S. finance, the munitions industry, and public opinion; to Wilson, Bryan, Lansing and the miscellaneous group of pacifists and practical politicians who made up Wilson's Cabinet; to the German Admiralty, to international law, even to the hoary traditions of diplomatic usage. On the 21st anniversary of U. S. entry into the War he published his findings. Called by Historian Henry Steele Commager the most thorough and dispassionate book on the subject that has appeared, America Goes to War* is a volume of 731 closely-printed pages, with controversial footnotes swarming like bees around the bottom of most pages, is at once a history and a primer of diplomacy.

One of the British code names for Wilson was "Aaron." When Anglo-American relations were strained, British publicists wired Colonel House that they would acquaint British leaders with Aaron's difficulties at home. At the outbreak of the War Aaron's difficulties were certainly immense, and Dr. Tansill's book gives the impression that Colonel House was not the least of them. Proud of his part in drawing up the Federal Reserve Act, House became an amateur financial expert, with the "comfortable conviction that his knowledge . . . was adequate to meet the emergency." In the chaotic situation that developed in international finance in 1915, when Allied orders were keeping U. S. factories humming, but when the Administration's disapproval of loans to belligerents threatened a crisis, Wilson listened to House, but did not call in Treasury experts to advise him. Wilson and Bryan, says Dr. Tansill, were gulled by Wall Street, approving measures that ran counter to their policy of neutrality in general, until the U. S. was bound to the Allied cause by the firmest of economic ties. Nevertheless, he clears Wall Street of the charge of dragging the U. S. into the War. The pressure of Wilson's intimate advisers and the failure of Germany to cooperate in Wilson's peace program were the immediate causes.

Before its entry into the War, the U. S. took a series of staggering diplomatic defeats, beginning with British scrapping of the Declaration of London (which denned contraband of war) and continuing through Wilson's attempts at mediation in 1917. Integrating these setbacks with shifts in German foreign policy (and with the squabbles in the German High Command that led to the unrestricted use of submarines), Dr. Tansill shows one group of Presidential advisers (Lansing and House) rising steadily; Bryan as steadily losing influence. After Bryan resigned, President Wilson seemed to drift for a time, listening to advisers like Lansing who frankly wanted war, then abruptly threw off his apathy and for the hundred days before he delivered his war message "was really neutral in his attitude towards the belligerents." Even at the Cabinet meeting on the day relations with Germany were broken off, he spoke confusedly about avoiding war to keep "the white race or part of it strong to meet the yellow race." At that time Secretary of Labor Wilson was pacifist; Burleson (Postmaster General), Baker (War), Daniels (Navy) were cautious; and only Secretaries Lansing (State), Redfield (Commerce), McAdoo (Treasury) and Houston (Agriculture) wanted prompt action against Germany. But the tide was running so fast that two months later even Secretary of Labor Wilson, who had been phlegmatically pacifist, raised his hand for War, and the President, deeply impressed by the unanimous opinion, hurried to write his War message with House at his elbow.

*Little, Brown ($5).

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