Idling in Italy Part 12

So far as I know, no one has characterized President Wilson's mentality as "painful imbecility," as Stanton characterized Lincoln a few months before the latter appointed him secretary of war.

He has been accused of not surrounding himself with the ablest men of his party or of the country, in the conduct of the affairs of the nation during the period when the country was emerging from the position of aloofness from world politics which it had maintained from the time Was.h.i.+ngton warned of the danger of "entangling foreign alliances." But it does not convince me that a man is not competent to do the job that the President has given him because his training has been as a stockbroker and his activities on the bear side of the market. That is not the kind of training that one would give his son whom he wished to see become a statesman, but it occurs to me that the task entrusted to him may be one which a statesman is not best fitted to handle. It may be a job that a man with the mentality and training and moral possessions that he selected could do better than any one else.

What earnest of superior constructive, intellectual powers has any public man in the United States displayed that justifies self-const.i.tuted critics in saying that the men selected by President Wilson are not their peers? It is universally admitted that President Wilson has a more masterful and comprehensive grasp of politics in America, using that word in its conventional, every-day sense and meaning, particularly a familiarity with bosses and the "machine," than any President ever had. No one denies his statesmans.h.i.+p. He is, therefore, a competent judge of who was best fitted to do the work which it was necessary to do in order that the programme which he formulated for the benefit of humanity might be executed, and particularly that the yoke might be lifted from the necks of the oppressed nations and that another world calamity in the shape of war might be avoided. His choice of aides and representatives was not acceptable to men who put party interests before public interests, who are willing to sacrifice world weal for worldly advancement, and who lash themselves into a frenzied state by repet.i.tion of the admonitions of Was.h.i.+ngton or Monroe. It does not detract from the glory of the father of his country, or from the l.u.s.tre of great interpreters of national law, to say that the principles that they enunciated and the practices that they initiated centuries ago are not necessarily those that should guide us now. It would be just as legitimate to say that physicians should follow the teachings of Hippocrates or Galen, because the one was the father of medicine and the other its greatest expositor, as it would to say that we must follow slavishly the teachings of Was.h.i.+ngton and Monroe.

That the American Peace Commission did not contain men of the mental caliber of Mr. Root or Mr. Lodge, that the reservoirs of expert knowledge were not drained and taken to Paris, that our Commission as a whole was less sophisticated, less perceptive and apperceptive, than that of Great Britain, let us say, is to be regretted, just as we regret the effects of some fallacious judgment or specious decision of our youth. There were ways of offsetting them, however, and in this particular instance Congress was the way. The President did not go beyond his prerogative in selecting the Peace Commission. The public elected him to make these selections, as well as to do other things. If the people do not want that such selection should be his privilege and power, they have only to say it at the polls. The Eighteenth Amendment was not difficult of accomplishment. Perhaps time will show that Mr. Wilson "guessed right" oftener in the selection of his cabinet than any predecessor.

Mr. Josephus Daniels was the target of scorn and the b.u.t.t of ridicule from the time he went into the cabinet until he began to make preparations for war, but the rumor has reached me that his efforts were fairly satisfactory to the hypercritical American public. The President's critics are jealous of the prodigious powers which an unauthorized representative of the government has in the affairs of the country, and they do not understand why, if he is the paragon of virtue that his position seems to indicate he is, the President did not put him on the commission. But again I say the President knows his limitations and the public has only recently discovered them. He may short-circuit some of them by means of Colonel House. He may find him "great in counsel and mighty in work," or he may have habituated himself to buy only gold that he has tried in the fire himself. It is his privilege and no one can gainsay it.

He is silent and ungetatable. Silence has been considered a sign of strength in man since the days of Hammurabi, and the greater the man the more solitary he is. If Mr. Wilson were twice as great, even Mr. Tumulty would not be allowed to see him!

Wilson has been accused of pilfering his idea of the League of Nations from the Duc de Sully and from the Abbe of Saint Pierre. Enemies animated by malice and fired by envy have striven to show that the famous fourteen statements or principles were his only by the right of possession or enunciation; that he resurrected the doctrines of Mazzini, dressed them up and paraded them as his own. It would be difficult to be patient with such critics if one did not know the history of epoch-making events in the world's progress. In truth, the public is resentful that it was not consulted. It is umbraged that it was not allowed to make suggestions. It is spiteful because it was treated with contempt. The public manifested the same quality of spleen toward Lincoln, only the quant.i.ty was greater. In brief, the public professes not to have any confidence in Mr. Wilson's wisdom, and this in face of the fact that up to date he has displayed more wisdom than all the Solons in America combined, and I can say this the more unprejudicedly as a Republican than I could if I were a member of the party that elected Mr. Wilson.

Mr. Wilson is disliked for emotional, not intellectual, reasons. Although he has probably done more to engrave the graving upon the stone that will remove the iniquity of the land than any man who has ever lived, "we don't like" him. There must be some good reason for this other than envy, jealousy, and resentment, and I propose to inquire for these reasons in Mr. Wilson's emotional make-up.

Whether I "like" Mr. Wilson or not does not enter into it. I never knew Pascal or Voltaire or Benjamin Franklin, and still I am sure I could make a statement of their qualities and possessions that would elicit commendation from one who had known them. As a matter of fact, personal contact with men from whose activities the world dates epochs is not conducive to personal liking. I cannot fancy liking Rousseau. I am sure I should not have liked Voltaire. I can even understand why Lincoln was despised and scoffed at by his contemporaries. I am one of those who believe Mr. Wilson is a great man, but I am not concerned to convince others of it. I am concerned alone to explain why he is not beloved of the people.

The esteem or disesteem in which Mr. Wilson is held in this country is due to his personality, and this does not seem to me to be enigmatic. He has the mind of a Jove but the heart of a batrachian. It is to the former that he owed his rise, it is the latter that conditioned his fall. If we were not satisfied to have such a man sail our s.h.i.+p of state in smooth as well as in turbulent seas, in calm and in tornado, we had opportunity to drop him from the bridge gracefully in 1916. Although his possessions and deficits were not so universally known then as now, still they were generally recognized and widely discussed. Instead of dropping our pilot we re-elected him. This could only be construed by him as approval of his conduct. When he continued to display his inherent qualities he excited our ire. We called him names and neither forgave nor wished to forgive him.

Perhaps no one has ever had the opportunity to fix his position so indestructibly at the apogee of human accomplishment by permitting himself kindly indulgences or what is commonly called human feelings as Woodrow Wilson had. If when Roosevelt sought to raise a regiment or division to take to France the President had been sympathetic to the project and had wiped out with a stroke of the pen the obvious difficulties that stood in the way of such project, it would have thrilled the people of this country of every color, or every complexion, political and somatic, as nothing else could possibly do. It would not have taken from his prestige as commander-in-chief of the army one jot or t.i.ttle, nor would it have interfered in the smallest way with the disciplinary unity which is the vital spark of the army.

If he had said of General Leonard Wood, "Father, forgive him, for he kneweth not that which he did," and had the emotional exaltation which every one has when he forgives an enemy, and given him a command to which his past performances ent.i.tled him, a few soreheads and soulless pygmies wearing the uniform of the United States Army and their congressional wire-pullers might have resented it, but the people by and large would have said: "Our President is a big man: he is magnanimous, he is a man who walks in the pathway of the Lord, he forgives his enemies." General Wood would have received the recompense for having prepared the way for the selective draft that he deserved, for even though he did it in a tactless and tasteless way, he made a contribution of incalculable value to the victory of our arms. Had he sent for the chairman of the committee on foreign affairs and conferred with him on the selection of the Peace Conference personnel, had he shown some signs of deference to that committee, had he discussed with them his peace plan proposals and taken note of their suggestions, modifying his proposals in accordance with their convictions when to do so did not yield a fundamental point, we should not have been on the horns of the dilemma we were for a year following the President's last return from Paris, and the world would have been spared discomfiture-yea, even agony.

Mr. Wilson knows the rules of the game, but he does not know how to play fair. He knows that contests and strife elicit his most deforming qualities-intolerance, arrogance, and emotional sterility; hence he hedges himself about in every possible way to avoid them. He knows that the sure way for him is to play the game alone.

Woodrow Wilson does not love his fellow men. He loves them in the abstract, but not in the flesh. He is concerned with their fate, their destiny, their travail en ma.s.se, but the predicaments, perplexities, and prostrations of the individual or groups of individuals make no appeal to him. He does not refresh his soul by bathing it daily in the milk of human kindness. He says with his lips that he loves his fellow men, but there is no accompanying emotional glow, none of the somatic or spiritual accompaniments which are the normal ancillae of love's display. Hence he does not respect their convictions when they are opposed to his own, he does not value their counsels. His determination to put things through in the way he has convinced himself they should be put through is not susceptible to change from influences that originate without his own mind. He has made many false steps, but none of them so conditioned the fall from the exalted position the world had given to him as his determination to go to Paris and represent this country at the Peace Conference. If one may judge what the verdict of all the voters in this country would have been, had the question of his going been submitted to them, from the expressions of opinion of those one encounters in his daily life, it would be no exaggeration to say that three-fourths of the voters would say he should not have gone. I think I may say truthfully that I never encountered a person who approved his decision. It is possible that his entourage or cabinet and counsellors did not contain a daring soul who volunteered such advice, but it is incredible that both they and the President did not sense the judgment of their countrymen as it was reflected in the newspapers. However, it is likely that he would have gone had he known that the majority of the voters of this country were opposed to it.

In contact with people he gives himself the air of listening with deference and indeed of being beholden to judgment and opinion, but in reality it is an artifice which he puts off when he returns to the dispensing centre of the word and of the law just as he puts off his gloves and his hat. Nothing is so ill.u.s.trative of this unwillingness to heed counsel emanating from authority and given wholly for his benefit as his conduct toward his physician during the trip around the country in September, 1919. The newspaper representatives who accompanied him say that he had often severe and protracted headache, was frequently nervous and irritable, sometimes dizzy, and always looked ill. These symptoms, conjoined with the fact that for a long time he had high blood pressure, were danger signals which no physician would dare neglect. It is legitimate to infer that his physician apprised him and counselled him accordingly. Despite it Mr. Wilson persisted, until nature exacted the penalty and by so doing he jeopardized his own life and seriously disordered the equilibrium of affairs of the country. Indeed, obstinacy is one of his most maiming characteristics.

The President attempts to mask with facial urbanity and a smile in verbal contact with people, and with the subjunctive mood in written contact, his third most deforming defect of character, namely, his inability to enter into a contest of any sort in which there is strife without revealing his obsession to win, his emotional frigidity, his lack of love for his fellow men. These explain why he did not win out to a larger degree in Paris, and why he did not win out with Congress. When he attempts to play such game his artificed civility, cordiality, amiability are so discordant with the real man that they become as offensive as affectations of manner or speech always are, and instead of placating the individual toward whom they are manifest, or facilitating a modus vivendi, they offend and make rapport with him impossible.

Probably nothing would strike Mr. Wilson's intimates as so wholly untrue as the statement that he is cruel, yet, nevertheless, I feel convinced that there is much latent cruelty in his make-up, and that every now and then he is powerless to inhibit it. He was undoubtedly wholly within his rights in dismissing Mr. Lansing from his cabinet, but the way in which he did it const.i.tutes refinement of cruelty. He may have had a contempt for him because he had not insisted on playing first fiddle in Mr. Wilson's orchestra, the part for which he was engaged, but that did not justify Mr. Wilson in flaying him publicly because he attempted to keep the orchestra together and tuned up as it were during Mr. Wilson's illness.

Selfishness is another conspicuous deforming trait of the President. He is more selfish than cruel. Undoubtedly his friends can point to many acts of generosity that deny the allegation. Some of the most selfish people in the world give freely of their counsel, money, and time. Selfishness and miserliness are not interchangeable terms. He is the summation of selfishness because he puts his decisions and determinations above those of any or all others. It matters not who the others may be. Until some one comes forward to show that he has ever been known to yield his judgments and positions to those of others I must hold to this view. He is ungenerous of sentiment and unfair by implication. Nothing better exemplifies his ungenerosity than his refusal to appear before the Senate or a committee of them previous to his return to Paris after his visit here and say to them that he had determined to incorporate all their suggestions in the Treaty and in the Covenant. He did incorporate them, but he did not give the Senate the satisfaction of telling them that he was going to do so or that the instrument would be improved by so doing. It has been said of him that he is the shrewdest politician who has been in the presidential chair in the memory of man. That is a euphemistic way of saying he knows mob psychology and individual weakness, but his reputation in this respect has been injured by his failure to be generous and gracious to Congress.

The receptive side of his nature is neither sensitive nor intuitive, nor is his reactive side productive or creative. He is merely ratiocinative and constructive, consciously excogitative and inventive. In other words, he has talent, not genius. Genius does what it must, talent what it can. The man of genius does that which no one else can do. His work is the essential and unique expression of himself. He does it without being aware how he does it. It is as much an integral part of him as the pitch of his voice and his unconscious manner. He is conscious only of the throes of productive travail; of the antecedents of his creation he is ignorant. Many artists essay to paint their own portraits and many succeed in portraying themselves spiritually and somatically as no one else can. Mr. Wilson did with words for himself in describing Jefferson Davis what artists do with pigments.

"What he did lack was wisdom in dealing with men, willingness to take the judgment of others in critical matters of business, the instinct which recognizes ability in others and trusts it to the utmost to play its independent part. He too much loved to rule, had too overweening confidence in himself, and took leave to act as if he understood much better than those who were in actual command what should be done in the field. He let prejudice and his own wilful judgment dictate to him.... He sought to control too many things with too feminine a jealousy of any rivalry in authority."

True, too true; but not nearly so true of Jefferson Davis as of Woodrow Wilson. Posterity profited by the limitations of the former, and we are paying and mankind will continue to pay for those of the latter.

Mr. Wilson is a brilliant, calculating, and vindictive man: brilliant in conception, calculating in motive, and vindictive in execution. From the time of his youth he instructed himself to great purpose. He has made a careful review and digest of the world's history and he has attempted to survey the tractless forests and untrodden deserts of the future. From the activities in the former fields he has evolved a plan which he believes will make the latter a favorable place for the human race to display its activities, and he has striven to put that plan into practice. He concedes that others have looked backward with as comprehensive an eye as his own; he grants that others have had visions of the future that are even more penetrating than his own; but he has the opportunity to try out his plan, and they have not, and he is unwilling to take them into partners.h.i.+p in the development of the claim that he has staked out. He cannot do it. It is one of his emotional limitations. Were he generous, kindly, and humble it would be difficult to find his like in the flesh or in history. He must be reconciled to the frowns of his contemporaries, the disparagements of his fellows, and the scorn of those who have been scorned by him. The world has always made the possessor of limitations pay the penalty. In his hour of hurt, if sensitiveness adequate to feel is still vouchsafed him, he may a.s.suage the pain with the knowledge that posterity will judge him by his intellectual possessions, not by his emotional deficit.

If we are not satisfied with his conduct as chief magistrate we must do one of two things. We must either curtail the powers of future presidents, or we must select presidents for their qualities of heart as well as mind. Perhaps future candidates for the presidency should be submitted to psychological tests to determine their intellectual and emotional coefficients. Those who do not measure up to a certain standard shall be eliminated.

One of the most unsurmountable obstacles to advancement of an officer in the army or navy is an annotation of his record by a superior officer as "temperamentally unfit." From the day that appears underneath his pedigree there is scarcely any power that can advance him. It may be that Woodrow Wilson has been "temperamentally unfit" to be President of the United States, but for any one to say that he has been intellectually unfit for that office is to utter an absurdity and an untruth. Had he been baptized in the waters of humility, had his parents or his pedagogues inoculated him with the vaccine of modesty, had he during the years of his spiritual growth come under the leavening influence of love of humanity, had he by taking thought been able to develop what are considered "human qualities,"-kindliness, sympathy, and reverence for others,-had he included in his matutinal prayers, "Let me accomplish, not by might, nor by power, but by spirit," had he had Lincoln's heart and his own brain, he would be, not one of the greatest men that America has produced, he might be the greatest. As it is, his emotional limitations have thwarted his career and dwarfed his spiritual stature. The American people speak of this as his fault. It is in reality his misfortune. We laugh at the child who cries when she finds that her doll, with outward appearance of pulchritude, is filled with sawdust, but we wail when we find our G.o.ds are only human, and we resent it when our humans err.

Woodrow Wilson is better liked by the people of the world to-day than any prophet or reformer the world has ever had. He has fewer enemies and fewer detractors. He should consider himself particularly fortunate, for he owes his life to it, that he lives in the twentieth century. It is only a century or two ago, in reality, that they gave up burning at the stake prophets and reformers, and it is only a few decades ago that they allowed them to remain in their native land or even to visit it. Critics and self-const.i.tuted judges of his conduct will continue to pour their vials of wrath upon his head and purge themselves of their contempt for him, but these are the fertilizers of his intellectual stature.

Woodrow Wilson has had meted out to him more considerate and respectful consideration than any man who originated stirring impulse that has led to world renovation. There is a choice between calumniation and crucifixion.