The History Book Club discussion

Adamson Act

The Adamson Act (“Act”) was the first U.S federal legislation that regulated the hours of workers in private companies. The Act established an eight-hour workday, with additional pay for overtime work, for employees engaged in operation of trains for interstate railway carriers. This Act was passed in 1916 to avoid an anticipated calamity of general strike by certain bodies of organized railroad employees. This Act was repealed in 1996. It was formerly codified at 45 USCS §§ 65 and 66.
(Source: http://definitions.uslegal.com/a/adam...)

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adamson_Act
http://www.loc.gov/rr/news/topics/eig...
by K. Austin Kerr (no photo)
by Arthur S. Link (no photo)
(no image) Railroads and Regulation, 1877-1916 by Gabriel Kolko (no photo)

1916 Presidential Election Results



The United States presidential election of 1916 was the 33rd quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 7, 1916. Incumbent President Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic candidate, was pitted against Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes, the Republican candidate. After a hard-fought contest, Wilson defeated Hughes by nearly 600,000 votes in the popular vote and secured a narrow Electoral College margin by winning several swing states by razor-thin margins. As a result, Wilson became the first Democratic president since Andrew Jackson to be elected to two consecutive terms of office.
(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_S...)

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http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/showel...
(no image) The Presidential Election of 1916 by S. D. Lovell (no photo)
(no image) Wilson, Vol. 5: Campaigns for Progressivism and Peace, 1916-1917 by Arthur S. Link (no photo)

Bernard Baruch



Bernard Mannes Baruch (1870-1965) was often referred to as the "elder statesman" because through three wars the presidents of our country called upon him for his advice and expertise.

Baruch was born on August 19, 1870, the second of four sons of Belle and Simon Baruch. His father was a field surgeon for the Confederate Army during the Civil War. In 1881, the Baruchs moved to New York City, where his father continued his medical career as a general physician specializing in appendicitis and hydrotherapy.

Bernard and his brothers went to the public schools in New York City. He was quite active in sports at the College of the City of New York. It was during a collegiate baseball game that he injured an ear, which impaired his hearing. After graduating from college, he went through many jobs until he accumulated enough money to buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. His financial acumen made him a millionaire at the age of 30.

Baruch was a devoted member of the Democratic Party and contributed generously to it. When Woodrow Wilson became president, Baruch was a frequent visitor to the White House. During World War I, President Wilson appointed him to the Advisory Commission to the Council of National Defense. Accepting the appointment, Baruch resigned his positions with industry, liquidated his holdings and sold his seat on the Stock Exchange. He bought millions of dollars of Liberty Bonds.

Baruch played an active role on many government commissions. After the war, he went with President Wilson to the Versailles peace conference. He also played active roles in the administrations of Presidents Harding and Hoover, and was a member of the "Brain Trust" in President Roosevelt's "New Deal." In the early 1930s, Baruch urged the stockpiling of rubber and tin, which are necessary items for war. Baruch anticipated that the United States would be involved in World War II and constantly urged our government to build up the armed forces.

During World War II, Baruch was involved in many committees for the war effort. He did his best thinking sitting in the parks of Washington, D.C., and New York City. He could always be seen with other people discussing affairs of the government on a park bench, which became his trademark. During the Korean War, Baruch called for an expansion of the Voice of America to counteract the enemy propaganda.
(Source: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/j...)

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http://www.trumanlibrary.org/hoover/b...
http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/library/al...
& (no image) The Public Years & (no image) A Philosophy For Our Time by Bernard M. Baruch
by James Grant (no photo)
by Daniel Alef (no photo)
by Margaret L. Coit (no photo)
by Jordan A. Schwarz (no photo)
(no image) Bernard Baruch, Portrait of a Citizen by William Lindsay White (no photo)

Unrestricted Submarine Warfare



On February 1, 1917, the lethal threat of the German U-boat submarine raises its head again, as Germany returns to the policy of unrestricted submarine warfare it had previously suspended in response to pressure from the United States and other neutral countries.

Unrestricted submarine warfare was first introduced in World War I in early 1915, when Germany declared the area around the British Isles a war zone, in which all merchant ships, including those from neutral countries, would be attacked by the German navy. A string of attacks on merchant ships followed, culminating in the sinking of the British ship Lusitania by a German U-boat on May 7, 1915. Although the Lusitania was a British ship and it was carrying a supply of munitions—Germany used these two facts to justify the attack—it was principally a passenger ship, and the 1,201 people who drowned in its sinking included 128 Americans. The incident prompted U.S. President Woodrow Wilson to send a strongly worded note to the German government demanding an end to German attacks against unarmed merchant ships. By September 1915, the German government had imposed such strict constraints on the operation of the nation's submarines that the German navy was persuaded to suspend U-boat warfare altogether.

German navy commanders, however, were ultimately not prepared to accept this degree of passivity, and continued to push for a more aggressive use of the submarine, convincing first the army and eventually the government, most importantly Kaiser Wilhelm, that the U-boat was an essential component of German war strategy. Planning to remain on the defensive on the Western Front in 1917, the supreme army command endorsed the navy's opinion that unrestricted U-boat warfare against the British at sea could result in a German victory by the fall of 1917. In a joint audience with the kaiser on January 8, 1917, army and naval leaders presented their arguments to Wilhelm, who supported them in spite of the opposition of the German chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, who was not at the meeting. Though he feared antagonizing the U.S., Bethmann Hollweg accepted the kaiser's decision, pressured as he was by the armed forces and the hungry and frustrated German public, which was angered by the continuing Allied naval blockade and which supported aggressive action towards Germany's enemies.

On January 31, 1917, Bethmann Hollweg went before the German Reichstag government and made the announcement that unrestricted submarine warfare would resume the next day, February 1. The destructive designs of our opponents cannot be expressed more strongly. We have been challenged to fight to the end. We accept the challenge. We stake everything, and we shall be victorious.
(Source: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-hi...)

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http://www.firstworldwar.com/source/u...
http://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Germ...
by Malcolm Llewellyn-jones (no photo)
by Gordon Williamson (no photo)
by R.H. Gibson (no photo)
by Henry Newbolt
by Georg-Gunther von Forstner (no photo)

Wilson's 1916 Annual Message, Part One

GENTLEMEN OF THE CONGRESS:

In fulfilling at this time the duty laid upon me by the Constitution of communicating to you from time to time information of the state of the Union and recommending to your consideration such legislative measures as may be judged necessary and expedient, I shall continue the practice, which I hope has been acceptable to you, of leaving to the reports of the several heads of the executive departments the elaboration of the detailed needs of the public service and confine myself to those matters of more general public policy with which it seems necessary and feasible to deal at the present session of the Congress.

I realize the limitations of time under which you will necessarily act at this session and shall make my suggestions as few as possible; but there were some things left undone at the last session which there will now be time to complete and which it seems necessary in the interest of the public to do at once.

In the first place, it seems to me imperatively necessary that the earliest possible consideration and action should be accorded the remaining measures of the program of settlement and regulation which I had occasion to recommend to you at the close of your last session in view of the public dangers disclosed by the unaccommodated difficulties which then existed, and which still unhappily continue to exist, between the railroads of the country and their locomotive engineers, conductors and trainmen.

I then recommended:

First, immediate provision for the enlargement and administrative reorganization of the Interstate Commerce Commission along the lines embodied in the bill recently passed by the House of Representatives and now awaiting action by the Senate; in order that the Commission may be enabled to deal with the many great and various duties now devolving upon it with a promptness and thoroughness which are, with its present constitution and means of action, practically impossible.

Second, the establishment of an eight-hour day as the legal basis alike of work and wages in the employment of all railway employes who are actually engaged in the work of operating trains in interstate transportation.

Third, the authorization of the appointment by the President of a small body of men to observe actual results in experience of the adoption of the eight-hour day in railway transportation alike for the men and for the railroads.

Fourth, explicit approval by the Congress of the consideration by the Interstate Commerce Commission of an increase of freight rates to meet such additional expenditures by the railroads as may have been rendered necessary by the adoption of the eight-hour day and which have not been offset by administrative readjustments and economies, should the facts disclosed justify the increase.

Fifth, an amendment of the existing Federal statute which provides for the mediation, conciliation and arbitration of such controversies as the present by adding to it a provision that, in case the methods of accommodation now provided for should fail, a full public investigation of the merits of every such dispute shall be instituted and completed before a strike or lockout may lawfully be attempted.

And, sixth, the lodgment in the hands of the Executive of the power, in case of military necessity, to take control of such portions and such rolling stock of the railways of the country as may be required for military use and to operate them for military purposes, with authority to draft into the military service of the United States such train crews and administrative officials as the circumstances require for their safe and efficient use.

The second and third of these recommendations the Congress immediately acted on: it established the eight-hour day as the legal basis of work and wages in train service and it authorized the appointment of a commission to observe and report upon the practical results, deeming these the measures most immediately needed; but it postponed action upon the other suggestions until an opportunity should be offered for a more deliberate consideration of them.

The fourth recommendation I do not deem it necessary to renew. The power of the Interstate Commerce Commission to grant an increase of rates on the ground referred to is indisputably clear and a recommendation by the Congress with regard to such a matter might seem to draw in question the scope of the commission's authority or its inclination to do justice when there is no reason to doubt either.

The other suggestions-the increase in the Interstate Commerce Commission's membership and in its facilities for performing its manifold duties; the provision for full public investigation and assessment of industrial disputes, and the grant to the Executive of the power to control and operate the railways when necessary in time of war or other like public necessity-I now very earnestly renew.

The necessity for such legislation is manifest and pressing. Those who have entrusted us with the responsibility and duty of serving and safeguarding them in such matters would find it hard, I believe, to excuse a failure to act upon these grave matters or any unnecessary postponement of action upon them.

Not only does the Interstate Commerce Commission now find it practically impossible, with its present membership and organization, to perform its great functions promptly and thoroughly, but it is not unlikely that it may presently be found advisable to add to its duties still others equally heavy and exacting. It must first be perfected as an administrative instrument.

The country cannot and should not consent to remain any longer exposed to profound industrial disturbances for lack of additional means of arbitration and conciliation which the Congress can easily and promptly supply.

And all will agree that there must be no doubt as to the power of the Executive to make immediate and uninterrupted use of the railroads for the concentration of the military forces of the nation wherever they are needed and whenever they are needed.

This is a program of regulation, prevention and administrative efficiency which argues its own case in the mere statement of it. With regard to one of its items, the increase in the efficiency of the Interstate Commerce Commission, the House of Representatives has already acted; its action needs only the concurrence of the Senate.

I would hesitate to recommend, and I dare say the Congress would hesitate to act upon the suggestion should I make it, that any man in any I occupation should be obliged by law to continue in an employment which he desired to leave.

To pass a law which forbade or prevented the individual workman to leave his work before receiving the approval of society in doing so would be to adopt a new principle into our jurisprudence, which I take it for granted we are not prepared to introduce.

But the proposal that the operation of the railways of the country shall not be stopped or interrupted by the concerted action of organized bodies of men until a public investigation shall have been instituted, which shall make the whole question at issue plain for the judgment of the opinion of the nation, is not to propose any such principle.

It is based upon the very different principle that the concerted action of powerful bodies of men shall not be permitted to stop the industrial processes of the nation, at any rate before the nation shall have had an opportunity to acquaint itself with the merits of the case as between employe and employer, time to form its opinion upon an impartial statement of the merits, and opportunity to consider all practicable means of conciliation or arbitration.

I can see nothing in that proposition but the justifiable safeguarding by society of the necessary processes of its very life. There is nothing arbitrary or unjust in it unless it be arbitrarily and unjustly done. It can and should be done with a full and scrupulous regard for the interests and liberties of all concerned as well as for the permanent interests of society itself.

Three matters of capital importance await the action of the Senate which have already been acted upon by the House of Representatives; the bill which seeks to extend greater freedom of combination to those engaged in promoting the foreign commerce of the country than is now thought by some to be legal under the terms of the laws against monopoly; the bill amending the present organic law of Porto Rico; and the bill proposing a more thorough and systematic regulation of the expenditure of money in elections, commonly called the Corrupt Practices Act.

I need not labor my advice that these measures be enacted into law. Their urgency lies in the manifest circumstances which render their adoption at this time not only opportune but necessary. Even delay would seriously jeopard the interests of the country and of the Government.

Immediate passage of the bill to regulate the expenditure of money in elections may seem to be less necessary than the immediate enactment of the other measures to which I refer, because at least two years will elapse before another election in which Federal offices are to be filled; but it would greatly relieve the public mind if this important matter were dealt with while the circumstances and the dangers to the public morals of the present method of obtaining and spending campaign funds stand clear under recent observation, and the methods of expenditure can be frankly studied in the light of present experience; and a delay would have the further very serious disadvantage of postponing action until another election was at hand and some special object connected with it might be thought to be in the mind of those who urged it. Action can be taken now with facts for guidance and without suspicion of partisan purpose.

I shall not argue at length the desirability of giving a freer hand in the matter of combined and concerted effort to those who shall undertake the essential enterprise of building up our export trade. That enterprise will presently, will immediately assume, has indeed already assumed a magnitude unprecedented in our experience. We have not the necessary instrumentalities for its prosecution; it is deemed to be doubtful whether they could be created upon an adequate scale under our present laws.

We should clear away all legal obstacles and create a basis of undoubted law for it which will give freedom without permitting unregulated license. The thing must be done now, because the opportunity is here and may escape us if we hesitate or delay.

The argument for the proposed amendments of the organic law of Porto Rico is brief and conclusive. The present laws governing the island and regulating the rights and privileges of its people are not just. We have created expectations of extended privilege which we have not satisfied. There is uneasiness among the people of the island and even a suspicious doubt with regard to our intentions concerning them which the adoption of the pending measure would happily remove. We do not doubt what we wish to do in any essential particular. We ought to do it at once.

At the last session of the Congress a bill was passed by the Senate which provides for the promotion of vocational and industrial education, which is of vital importance to the whole country because it concerns a matter, too long neglected, upon which the thorough industrial preparation of the country for the critical years of economic development immediately ahead of us in very large measure depends.
(Source: http://millercenter.org/president/spe...)

Wilson's 1916 Annual Message, Part Two

May I not urge its early and favorable consideration by the House of Representatives and its early enactment into law? It contains plans which affect all interests and all parts of the country, and I am sure that there is no legislation now pending before the Congress whose passage the country awaits with more thoughtful approval or greater impatience to see a great and admirable thing set in the way of being done.

There are other matters already advanced to the stage of conference between the two houses of which it is not necessary that I should speak. Some practicable basis of agreement concerning them will no doubt be found an action taken upon them.

Inasmuch as this is, gentlemen , probably the last occasion I shall have to address the Sixty-fourth Congress, I hope that you will permit me to say with what genuine pleasure and satisfaction I have co-operated with you in the many measures of constructive policy with which you have enriched the legislative annals of the country. It has been a privilege to labor in such company. I take the liberty of congratulating you upon the completion of a record of rare serviceableness and distinction.
(Source: http://millercenter.org/president/spe...)

Wilson's 1916 Peace Note

To bring peace to the world and to avert the possibility of American participation, Wilson appealed to the belligerents on 18 December 1916 to disclose the terms upon which they would agree to end the fighting. The Germans refused to divulge their terms. The Allies—emboldened by Lansing's assurances, made secretly to the French and British ambassadors, that Wilson was pro-Ally—announced terms that could be achieved only by complete defeat of the Central Powers. Undaunted, Wilson opened secret negotiations with the German government. He was, he told Berlin, prepared to be an independent and impartial mediator, and he could force the Allies to the peace table because they were now totally dependent upon American credit and supplies. While he waited for a reply from Berlin, Wilson went before the Senate on 22 January 1917 to describe the kind of a peace settlement that the United States was prepared to work for and support. It had to be a "peace without victory," he said, one without indemnities and annexations. Above all, it had to be based upon a league of nations to preserve peace.
(Source: http://www.presidentprofiles.com/Gran...)

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(no image) Official Statements of War Aims and Peace Proposals: December 1916 to November 1918 by James Brown Scott (no photo)

Wilson's "A World League of Peace" Speech (January 22, 1917), Part One

Gentlemen of the Senate:

On the eighteenth of December last I addressed an identic note to the governments of the nations now at war requesting them to state, more definitely than they had yet been stated by either group of belligerents, the terms upon which they would deem it possible to make peace. I spoke on behalf of humanity and of the rights of all neutral nations like our own, many of whose most vital interests the war puts in constant jeopardy.

The Central Powers united in a reply which stated merely that they were ready to meet their antagonists in conference to discuss terms of peace.

The Entente Powers have replied much more definitely and have stated, in general terms, indeed, but with sufficient definiteness to imply details, the arrangements, guarantees, and acts of reparation which they deem to be the indispensable conditions of a satisfactory settlement.

We are that much nearer a definite discussion of the peace which shall end the present war. We are that much nearer the discussion of the international concert which must thereafter hold the world at peace.

In every discussion of the peace that must end this war it is taken for granted that that peace must be followed by some definite concert of power which will make it virtually impossible that any such catastrophe should ever overwhelm us again. Every lover of mankind, every sane and thoughtful man must take that for granted.

I have sought this opportunity to address you because I thought that I owed it to you, as the council associated with me in the final determination of our international obligations, to disclose to you without reserve the thought and purpose that have been taking form in my mind in regard to the duty of our Government in the days to come when it will be necessary to lay afresh and upon a new plan the foundations of peace among the nations.

It is inconceivable that the people of the United States should play no part in that great enterprise. To take part in such a service will be the opportunity for which they have sought to prepare themselves by the very principles and purposes of their polity and the approved practices of their Government ever since the days when they set up a new nation in the high and honorable hope that it might in all that it was and did show mankind the way to liberty.

They cannot in honor withhold the service to which they are now about to be challenged. They do not wish to withhold it. But they owe it to themselves and to the other nations of the world to state the conditions under which they will feel free to render it. That service is nothing less than this, to add their authority and their power to the authority and force of other nations to guarantee peace and justice throughout the world. Such a settlement cannot now be long postponed. It is right that before it comes this Government should frankly formulate the conditions upon which it would feel justified in asking our people to approve its formal and solemn adherence to a League for Peace. I am here to attempt to state those conditions.

The present war must first be ended; but we owe it to candor and to a just regard for the opinion of mankind to say that, so far as our participation in guarantees of future peace is concerned, it makes a great deal of difference in what way and upon what terms it is ended. The treaties and agreements which bring it to an end must embody terms which will create a peace that is worth guaranteeing and preserving, a peace that will win the approval of mankind, not merely a peace that will serve the several interests and immediate aims of the nations engaged.

We shall have no voice in determining what those terms shall be, but we shall, I feel sure, have a voice in determining whether they shall be made lasting or not by the guarantees of a universal covenant; and our judgment upon what is fundamental and essential as a condition precedent to permanency should be spoken now, not afterwards when it may be too late.

No covenant of cooperative peace that does not include the peoples of the New World can suffice to keep the future safe against war; and yet there is only one sort of peace that the peoples of America could join in guaranteeing.

The elements of that peace must be elements that engage the confidence and satisfy the principles of the American governments, elements consistent with their political faith and with the practical convictions which the peoples of America have once for all embraced and undertaken to defend.

I do not mean to say that any American government would throw any obstacle in the way of any terms of peace the governments now at war might agree upon, or seek to upset them when made, whatever they might be. I only take it for granted that mere terms of peace between the belligerents will not satisfy even the belligerents themselves.

Mere agreements may not make peace secure. It will be absolutely necessary that a force be created as a guarantor of the permanency of the settlement so much greater than the force of any nation now engaged or any alliance hitherto formed or projected that no nation, no probable combination of nations could face or withstand it.

If the peace presently to be made is to endure, it must be a peace made secure by the organized major force of mankind.

The terms of the immediate peace agreed upon will determine whether it is a peace for which such a guarantee can be secured. The question upon which the whole future peace and policy of the world depends is this:

Is the present war a struggle for a just and secure peace, or only for a new balance of power? If it be only a struggle for a new balance of power, who will guarantee, who can guarantee, the stable equilibrium of the new arrangement?

Only a tranquil Europe can be a stable Europe. There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace.

Fortunately we have received very explicit assurances on this point. The statesmen of both of the groups of nations now arrayed against one another have said, in terms that could not be misinterpreted, that it was no part of the purpose they had in mind to crush their antagonists. But the implications of these assurances may not be equally clear to all?may not be the same on both sides of the water. I think it will be serviceable if I attempt to set forth what we understand them to be.

They imply, first of all, that it must be a peace without victory. It is not pleasant to say this. I beg that I may be permitted to put my own interpretation upon it and that it may be understood that no other interpretation was in my thought.

I am seeking only to face realities and to face them without soft concealments. Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor's terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand.

Only a peace between equals can last. Only a peace the very principle of which is equality and a common participation in a common benefit. The right state of mind, the right feeling between nations, is as necessary for a lasting peace as is the just settlement of vexed questions of territory or of racial and national allegiance.

The equality of nations upon which peace must be founded if it is to last must be an equality of rights; the guarantees exchanged must neither recognize nor imply a difference between big nations and small, between those that are powerful and those that are weak.

Right must be based upon the common strength, not upon the individual strength, of the nations upon whose concert peace will depend.

Equality of territory or of resources there of course cannot be; nor any other sort of equality not gained in the ordinary peaceful and legitimate development of the peoples themselves. But no one asks or expects anything more than an equality of rights. Mankind is looking now for freedom of life, not for equipoises of power.

And there is a deeper thing involved than even equality of right among organized nations. No peace can last, or ought to last, which does not recognize and accept the principle that governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that no right anywhere exists to hand peoples about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were property.

I take it for granted, for instance, if I may venture upon a single example, that statesmen everywhere are agreed that there should be a united, independent, and autonomous Poland, and that henceforth inviolable security of life, of worship, and of industrial and social development should be guaranteed to all peoples who have lived hitherto under the power of governments devoted to a faith and purpose hostile to their own.

I speak of this, not because of any desire to exalt an abstract political principle which has always been held very dear by those who have sought to build up liberty in America, but for the same reason that I have spoken of the other conditions of peace which seem to me clearly indispensable,?because I wish frankly to uncover realities.

Any peace which does not recognize and accept this principle will inevitably be upset. It will not rest upon the affections or the convictions of mankind. The ferment of spirit of whole populations will fight subtly and constantly against it, and all the world will sympathize. The world can be at peace only if its life is stable, and there can be no stability where the will is in rebellion, where there is not tranquillity of spirit and a sense of justice, of freedom, and of right.

So far as practicable, moreover, every great people now struggling towards a full development of its resources and of its powers should be assured a direct outlet to the great highways of the sea. Where this cannot be done by the cession of territory, it can no doubt be done by the neutralization of direct rights of way under the general guarantee which will assure the peace itself. With a right comity of arrangement no nation need be shut away from free access to the open paths of the world's commerce.

And the paths of the sea must alike in law and in fact be free. The freedom of the seas is the sine qua non of peace, equality, and cooperation.

No doubt a somewhat radical reconsideration of many of the rules of international practice hitherto thought to be established may be necessary in order to make the seas indeed free and common in practically all circumstances for the use of mankind, but the motive for such changes is convincing and compelling. There can be no trust or intimacy between the peoples of the world without them.

The free, constant, unthreatened intercourse of nations is an essential part of the process of peace and of development. It need not be difficult either to define or to secure the freedom of the seas if the governments of the world sincerely desire to come to an agreement concerning it.

It is a problem closely connected with the limitation of naval armaments and the cooperation of the navies of the world in keeping the seas at once free and safe. And the question of limiting naval armaments opens the wider and perhaps more difficult question of the limitation of armies and of all programs of military preparation.

Difficult and delicate as these questions are, they must be faced with the utmost candor and decided in a spirit of real accommodation if peace is to come with healing in its wings, and come to stay. Peace cannot be had without concession and sacrifice. There can be no sense of safety and equality among the nations if great preponderating armaments are henceforth to continue here and there to be built up and maintained.
(Source: http://millercenter.org/president/spe...)

Wilson's "A World League of Peace" Speech (January 22, 1917), Part Two

The statesmen of the world must plan for peace and nations must adjust and accommodate their policy to it as they have planned for war and made ready for pitiless contest and rivalry. The question of armaments, whether on land or sea, is the most immediately and intensely practical question connected with the future fortunes of nations and of mankind.

I have spoken upon these great matters without reserve and with the utmost explicitness because it has seemed to me to be necessary if the world's yearning desire for peace was anywhere to find free voice and utterance. Perhaps I am the only person in high authority amongst all the peoples of the world who is at liberty to speak and hold nothing back.

I am speaking as an individual, and yet I am speaking also, of course, as the responsible head of a great government, and I feel confident that I have said what the people of the United States would wish me to say. May I not add that I hope and believe that I am in effect speaking for liberals and friends of humanity in every nation and of every program of liberty?

I would fain believe that I am speaking for the silent mass of mankind everywhere who have as yet had no place or opportunity to speak their real hearts out concerning the death and ruin they see to have come already upon the persons and the homes they hold most dear.

And in holding out the expectation that the people and Government of the United States will join the other civilized nations of the world in guaranteeing the permanence of peace upon such terms as I have named I speak with the greater boldness and confidence because it is clear to every man who can think that there is in this promise no breach in either our traditions or our policy as a nation, but a fulfilment, rather, of all that we have professed or striven for.

I am proposing, as it were, that the nations should with one accord adopt the doctrine of President Monroe as the doctrine of the world: that no nation should seek to extend its polity over any other nation or people, but that every people should be left free to determine its own polity, its own way of development, unhindered, unthreatened, unafraid, the little along with the great and powerful.

I am proposing that all nations henceforth avoid entangling alliances which would draw them into competitions of power, catch them in a net of intrigue and selfish rivalry, and disturb their own affairs with influences intruded from without. There is no entangling alliance in a concert of power. When all unite to act in the same sense and with the same purpose all act in the common interest and are free to live their own lives under a common protection.

I am proposing government by the consent of the governed; that freedom of the seas which in international conference after conference representatives of the United States have urged with the eloquence of those who are the convinced disciples of liberty; and that moderation of armaments which makes of armies and navies a power for order merely, not an instrument of aggression or of selfish violence.

These are American principles, American policies. We could stand for no others. And they are also the principles and policies of forward looking men and women everywhere, of every modern nation, of every enlightened community. They are the principles of mankind and must prevail.
(Source: http://millercenter.org/president/spe...)

John Maynard Keynes



John Maynard Keynes was born on 5 June 1883 in Cambridge into a well-to-do academic family. His father was an economist and a philosopher, his mother became the town's first female mayor. He excelled academically at Eton as well as Cambridge University, where he studied mathematics. He also became friends with members of the Bloomsbury group of intellectuals and artists.

After graduating, Keynes went to work in the India Office, and simultaneously managed to work on a dissertation - often during office hours - which earned him a fellowship at King's College. In 1908, he quit the civil service and returned to Cambridge. Following the outbreak of World War One, Keynes joined the treasury, and in the wake of the Versailles peace treaty, he published 'The Economic Consequences of the Peace' in which he criticised the exorbitant war reparations demanded from a defeated Germany and prophetically predicted that it would foster a desire for revenge among Germans. This best-selling book made him world famous.

During the inter-war years, Keynes amassed a considerable personal fortune from the financial markets and, as bursar of King's College, greatly improved the college's financial position. He became a prominent arts patron and board member of a number of companies. In 1926, he married Lydia Lopokova, a Russian ballerina.

Keynes' best-known work, 'The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money', was published in 1936, and became a benchmark for future economic thought. It also secured his position as Britain's most influential economist, and with the advent of World War Two, he again worked for the treasury. In 1942, he was made a member of the house of lords.

During the war years, Keynes played a decisive role in the negotiations that were to shape the post-war international economic order. In 1944, he led the British delegation to the Bretton Woods conference in the United States. At the conference he played a significant part in the planning of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. He died on 21 April 1946.
(Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic...)

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by John Maynard Keynes
by Dudley Dillard (no photo)
by Robert Skidelsky

Monroe Doctrine



In his December 2, 1823, address to Congress, President James Monroe articulated United States' policy on the new political order developing in the rest of the Americas and the role of Europe in the Western Hemisphere.

The statement, known as the Monroe Doctrine, was little noted by the Great Powers of Europe, but eventually became a longstanding tenet of U.S. foreign policy. Monroe and his Secretary of State John Quincy Adams drew upon a foundation of American diplomatic ideals such as disentanglement from European affairs and defense of neutral rights as expressed in Washington's Farewell Address and Madison's stated rationale for waging the War of 1812. The three main concepts of the doctrine--separate spheres of influence for the Americas and Europe, non-colonization, and non-intervention--were designed to signify a clear break between the New World and the autocratic realm of Europe. Monroe's administration forewarned the imperial European powers against interfering in the affairs of the newly independent Latin American states or potential United States territories. While Americans generally objected to European colonies in the New World, they also desired to increase United States influence and trading ties throughout the region to their south. European mercantilism posed the greatest obstacle to economic expansion. In particular, Americans feared that Spain and France might reassert colonialism over the Latin American peoples who had just overthrown European rule. Signs that Russia was expanding its presence southward from Alaska toward the Oregon Territory were also disconcerting.

For their part, the British also had a strong interest in ensuring the demise of Spanish colonialism, with all the trade restrictions mercantilism imposed. Earlier in 1823 British Foreign Minister George Canning suggested to Americans that two nations issue a joint declaration to deter any other power from intervening in Central and South America. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, however, vigorously opposed cooperation with Great Britain, contending that a statement of bilateral nature could limit United States expansion in the future. He also argued that the British were not committed to recognizing the Latin American republics and must have had imperial motivations themselves.
(Source: http://history.state.gov/milestones/1...)

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by Jay Sexton (no photo)
by Gaddis Smith (no photo)
by Edward J. Renehan Jr. (no photo)
by Armin Rappaport (no photo)
(no image)The Monroe Doctrine: Its Modern Significance by Donald Marquand Dozer (no photo)

Zimmermann Telegram



FROM 2nd from London # 5747.

“We intend to begin on the first of February unrestricted submarine warfare. We shall endeavor in spite of this to keep the United States of America neutral. In the event of this not succeeding, we make Mexico a proposal or alliance on the following basis: make war together, make peace together, generous financial support and an understanding on our part that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The settlement in detail is left to you. You will inform the President of the above most secretly as soon as the outbreak of war with the United States of America is certain and add the suggestion that he should, on his own initiative, invite Japan to immediate adherence and at the same time mediate between Japan and ourselves. Please call the President’s attention to the fact that the ruthless employment of our submarines now offers the prospect of compelling England in a few months to make peace.”
Signed, ZIMMERMANN.
(Source: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/4938/)

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by Barbara W. Tuchman
by Thomas Boghardt (no photo)
by William Friedman (no photo)

Wilson's February 3, 1917 Speech

Gentlemen of the Congress:

The Imperial German Government on the thirty-first of January announced to this Government and to the governments of the other neutral nations that on and after the first day of February, the present month, it would adopt a policy with regard to the use of submarines against all shipping seeking to pass through certain designated areas of the high seas to which it is clearly my duty to call your attention.

Let me remind the Congress that on the eighteenth of April last, in view of the sinking on the twenty-fourth of March of the cross-Channel passenger steamer Sussex by a German submarine, without summons or warning, and the consequent loss of the lives of several citizens of the United States who were passengers aboard her, this Government addressed a note to the Imperial German Government in which it made the following declaration:

"If it is still the purpose of the Imperial Government to prosecute relentless and indiscriminate warfare against vessels of commerce by the use of submarines without regard to what the Government of the United States must consider the sacred and indisputable rules of international law and the universally recognized dictates of humanity, the Government of the United States is at last forced to the conclusion that there is but one course it can pursue. Unless the Imperial Government should now immediately declare and effect an abandonment of its present methods of submarine warfare against passenger and freight-carrying vessels, the Government of the United States can have no choice but to sever diplomatic relations with the German Empire altogether."

In reply to this declaration the Imperial German Government gave this Government the following assurance:

"The German Government is prepared to do its utmost to confine the operations of war for the rest of its duration to the fighting forces of the belligerents, thereby also insuring the freedom of the seas, a principle upon which the German Government believes, now as before, to be in agreement with the Government of the United States.

"The German Government, guided by this idea, notifies the Government of the United States that the German naval forces have received the following orders:

In accordance with the general principles of visit and search and destruction of merchant vessels recognized by international law, such vessels, both within and without the area declared as naval war zone, shall not be sunk without warning and without saving human lives, unless these ships attempt to escape or offer resistance.

"But," it added, "neutrals cannot expect that Germany, forced to fight for her existence, shall, for the sake of neutral interest, restrict the use of an effective weapon if her enemy is permitted to continue to apply at will methods of warfare violating the rules of international law. Such a demand would be incompatible with the character of neutrality, and the German Government is convinced that the Government of the United States does not think of making such a demand, knowing that the Government of the United States has repeatedly declared that it is determined to restore the principle of the freedom of the seas, from whatever quarter it has been violated."

To this the Government of the United States replied on the eighth of May, accepting, of course, the assurances given, but adding,

"The Government of the United States feels it necessary to state that it takes it for granted that the Imperial German Government does not intend to imply that the maintenance of its newly announced policy is in any way contingent upon the course or result of diplomatic negotiations between the Government of the United States and any other belligerent Government, notwithstanding the fact that certain passages in the Imperial Government's note of the fourth instant might appear to be susceptible of that construction. In order, however, to avoid any possible misunderstanding, the Government of the United States notifies the Imperial Government that it cannot for a moment entertain, much less discuss, a suggestion that respect by German naval authorities for the rights of citizens of the United States upon the high seas should in any way or in the slightest degree be made contingent upon the conduct of any other Government affecting the rights of neutrals and non-combatants. Responsibility in such matters is single, not joint; absolute, not relative."

To this note of the eighth of May the Imperial German Government made no reply.

On the thirty-first of January, the Wednesday of the present week, the German Ambassador handed to the Secretary of State, along with a formal note, a memorandum which contains the following statement:

"The Imperial Government, therefore, does not doubt that the Government of the United States will understand the situation thus forced upon Germany by the Entente-Allies' brutal methods of war and by their determination to destroy the Central Powers, and that the Government of the United States will further realize that the now openly disclosed intentions of the Entente-Allies give back to Germany the freedom of action which she reserved in her note addressed to the Government of the United States on May 4, 1916.

"Under these circumstances Germany will meet the illegal measures of her enemies by forcibly preventing after February 1, 1917, in a zone around Great Britain, France, Italy, and in the Eastern Mediterranean all navigation, that of neutrals included, from and to England and from and to France, etc., etc. All ships met within the zone will be sunk."

I think that you will agree with me that, in view of this declaration, which suddenly and without prior intimation of any kind deliberately withdraws the solemn assurance given in the Imperial Government's note of the fourth of May, 1916, this Government has no alternative consistent with the dignity and honor of the United States but to take the course which, in its note of the eighteenth of April, 1916, it announced that it would take in the event that the German Government did not declare and effect an abandonment of the methods of submarine warfare which it was then employing and to which it now purposes again to resort.

I have, therefore, directed the Secretary of State to announce to His Excellency the German Ambassador that all diplomatic relations between the United States and the German Empire are severed, and that the American Ambassador at Berlin will immediately be withdrawn; and, in accordance with this decision, to hand to His Excellency his passports.

Notwithstanding this unexpected action of the German Government, this sudden and deeply deplorable renunciation of its assurances, given this Government at one of the most critical moments of tension in the relations of the two governments, I refuse to believe that it is the intention of the German authorities to do in fact what they have warned us they will feel at liberty to do. I cannot bring myself to believe that they will indeed pay no regard to the ancient friendship between their people and our own or to the solemn obligations which have been exchanged between them and destroy American ships and take the lives of American citizens in the willful prosecution of the ruthless naval program they have announced their intention to adopt.

Only actual overt acts on their part can make me believe it even now.

If this inveterate confidence on my part in the sobriety and prudent foresight of their purpose should unhappily prove unfounded; if American ships and American lives should in fact be sacrificed by their naval commanders in heedless contravention of the just and reasonable understandings of international law and the obvious dictates of humanity, I shall take the liberty of coming again before the Congress, to ask that authority be given me to use any means that may be necessary for the protection of our seamen and our people in the prosecution of their peaceful and legitimate errands on the high seas. I can do nothing less. I take it for granted that all neutral governments will take the same course.

We do not desire any hostile conflict with the Imperial German Government. We are the sincere friends of the German people and earnestly desire to remain at peace with the Government which speaks for them. We shall not believe that they are hostile to us unless and until we are obliged to believe it; and we purpose nothing more than the reasonable defense of the undoubted rights of our people. We wish to serve no selfish ends. We seek merely to stand true alike in thought and in action to the immemorial principles of our people which I sought to express in my address to the Senate only two weeks ago,—seek merely to vindicate our right to liberty and justice and an unmolested life. These are the bases of peace, not war. God grant we may not be challenged to defend them by acts of wilful injustice on the part of the Government of Germany!
(Source: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/ind...)

Wilson's Second Inaugural Address

My Fellow Citizens:

The four years which have elapsed since last I stood in this place have been crowded with counsel and action of the most vital interest and consequence. Perhaps no equal period in our history has been so fruitful of important reforms in our economic and industrial life or so full of significant changes in the spirit and purpose of our political action. We have sought very thoughtfully to set our house in order, correct the grosser errors and abuses of our industrial life, liberate and quicken the processes of our national genius and energy, and lift our politics to a broader view of the people's essential interests.

It is a record of singular variety and singular distinction. But I shall not attempt to review it. It speaks for itself and will be of increasing influence as the years go by. This is not the time for retrospect. It is time rather to speak our thoughts and purposes concerning the present and the immediate future.

Although we have centered counsel and action with such unusual concentration and success upon the great problems of domestic legislation to which we addressed ourselves four years ago, other matters have more and more forced themselves upon our attention-- matters lying outside our own life as a nation and over which we had no control, but which, despite our wish to keep free of them, have drawn us more and more irresistibly into their own current and influence.

It has been impossible to avoid them. They have affected the life of the whole world. They have shaken men everywhere with a passion and an apprehension they never knew before. It has been hard to preserve calm counsel while the thought of our own people swayed this way and that under their influence. We are a composite and cosmopolitan people. We are of the blood of all the nations that are at war. The currents of our thoughts as well as the currents of our trade run quick at all seasons back and forth between us and them. The war inevitably set its mark from the first alike upon our minds, our industries, our commerce, our politics and our social action. To be indifferent to it, or independent of it, was out of the question.

And yet all the while we have been conscious that we were not part of it. In that consciousness, despite many divisions, we have drawn closer together. We have been deeply wronged upon the seas, but we have not wished to wrong or injure in return; have retained throughout the consciousness of standing in some sort apart, intent upon an interest that transcended the immediate issues of the war itself.

As some of the injuries done us have become intolerable we have still been clear that we wished nothing for ourselves that we were not ready to demand for all mankind--fair dealing, justice, the freedom to live and to be at ease against organized wrong.

It is in this spirit and with this thought that we have grown more and more aware, more and more certain that the part we wished to play was the part of those who mean to vindicate and fortify peace. We have been obliged to arm ourselves to make good our claim to a certain minimum of right and of freedom of action. We stand firm in armed neutrality since it seems that in no other way we can demonstrate what it is we insist upon and cannot forget. We may even be drawn on, by circumstances, not by our own purpose or desire, to a more active assertion of our rights as we see them and a more immediate association with the great struggle itself. But nothing will alter our thought or our purpose. They are too clear to be obscured. They are too deeply rooted in the principles of our national life to be altered. We desire neither conquest nor advantage. We wish nothing that can be had only at the cost of another people. We always professed unselfish purpose and we covet the opportunity to prove our professions are sincere.

There are many things still to be done at home, to clarify our own politics and add new vitality to the industrial processes of our own life, and we shall do them as time and opportunity serve, but we realize that the greatest things that remain to be done must be done with the whole world for stage and in cooperation with the wide and universal forces of mankind, and we are making our spirits ready for those things.

We are provincials no longer. The tragic events of the thirty months of vital turmoil through which we have just passed have made us citizens of the world. There can be no turning back. Our own fortunes as a nation are involved whether we would have it so or not.

And yet we are not the less Americans on that account. We shall be the more American if we but remain true to the principles in which we have been bred. They are not the principles of a province or of a single continent. We have known and boasted all along that they were the principles of a liberated mankind. These, therefore, are the things we shall stand for, whether in war or in peace:

That all nations are equally interested in the peace of the world and in the political stability of free peoples, and equally responsible for their maintenance; that the essential principle of peace is the actual equality of nations in all matters of right or privilege; that peace cannot securely or justly rest upon an armed balance of power; that governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the governed and that no other powers should be supported by the common thought, purpose or power of the family of nations; that the seas should be equally free and safe for the use of all peoples, under rules set up by common agreement and consent, and that, so far as practicable, they should be accessible to all upon equal terms; that national armaments shall be limited to the necessities of national order and domestic safety; that the community of interest and of power upon which peace must henceforth depend imposes upon each nation the duty of seeing to it that all influences proceeding from its own citizens meant to encourage or assist revolution in other states should be sternly and effectually suppressed and prevented.

I need not argue these principles to you, my fellow countrymen; they are your own part and parcel of your own thinking and your own motives in affairs. They spring up native amongst us. Upon this as a platform of purpose and of action we can stand together. And it is imperative that we should stand together. We are being forged into a new unity amidst the fires that now blaze throughout the world. In their ardent heat we shall, in God's Providence, let us hope, be purged of faction and division, purified of the errant humors of party and of private interest, and shall stand forth in the days to come with a new dignity of national pride and spirit. Let each man see to it that the dedication is in his own heart, the high purpose of the nation in his own mind, ruler of his own will and desire.

I stand here and have taken the high and solemn oath to which you have been audience because the people of the United States have chosen me for this august delegation of power and have by their gracious judgment named me their leader in affairs.

I know now what the task means. I realize to the full the responsibility which it involves. I pray God I may be given the wisdom and the prudence to do my duty in the true spirit of this great people. I am their servant and can succeed only as they sustain and guide me by their confidence and their counsel. The thing I shall count upon, the thing without which neither counsel nor action will avail, is the unity of America--an America united in feeling, in purpose and in its vision of duty, of opportunity and of service.

We are to beware of all men who would turn the tasks and the necessities of the nation to their own private profit or use them for the building up of private power.

United alike in the conception of our duty and in the high resolve to perform it in the face of all men, let us dedicate ourselves to the great task to which we must now set our hand. For myself I beg your tolerance, your countenance and your united aid.

The shadows that now lie dark upon our path will soon be dispelled, and we shall walk with the light all about us if we be but true to ourselves--to ourselves as we have wished to be known in the counsels of the world and in the thought of all those who love liberty and justice and the right exalted.
(Source: http://millercenter.org/president/spe...)

Russian Revolution (February 1917)



In September 1915, Nicholas II assumed supreme command of the Russian Army fighting on the Eastern Front. This linked him to the country's military failures and during 1917 there was a strong decline support for his government.

The country's incompetent and corrupt system could not supply the necessary equipment to enable the Russian Army to fight a modern war. By 1917 over 1,300,000 men had been killed in battle, 4,200,000 wounded and 2,417,000 had been captured by the enemy.

In January 1917, General Krimov, returned from the Eastern Front and sought a meeting with Michael Rodzianko, President of the Duma. Krimov told Rodzianko that the officers and men no longer had faith in Nicholas II and the army was willing to support the Duma if it took control of the government of Russia. Rodzianko was unwilling to take action but he did telegraph the Tsar warning that Russia was approaching breaking point. He also criticised the impact that his wife Alexandra Fyodorovna was having on the situation and told him that "you must find a way to remove the Empress from politics".

The First World War had a disastrous impact on the Russian econimy. Food was in short supply and this led to rising prices. By January 1917 the price of commodities in Petrograd had increased six-fold. In an attempt to increase their wages, industrial workers went on strike and in Petrograd people took to the street demanding food. On 11th February, 1917, a large crowd marched through the streets of Petrograd breaking shop windows and shouting anti-war slogans.

The situation deteoriated on 22nd February when the owners of the Putilov Iron Works locked out its workforce after they demanded higher wages. Led by Bolshevik agitators, the 20,000 workers took to the streets. The army was ordered to disperse the demonstrations but they were unwilling to do this and in some cases the soldiers joined the protestors in demanding an end to the war.

Other workers joined the demonstrations and by 27th February an estimated 200,000 workers were on strike. Nicholas II, who was at Army Headquarters in Mogilev, ordered the commander of the Petrograd garrison to suppress "all the disorders on the streets of the capital". The following day troops fired on demonstrators in different parts of the city. Others refused to obey the order and the Pavlovsk regiment mutinied. Others regiments followed and soldiers joined the striking workers in the streets.

On 26th February Nicholas II ordered the Duma to close down. Members refused and they continued to meet and discuss what they should do. Michael Rodzianko, President of the Duma, sent a telegram to the Tsar suggesting that he appoint a new government led by someone who had the confidence of the people. When the Tsar did not reply, the Duma nominated a Provisional Government headed by Prince George Lvov.

The High Command of the Russian Army now feared a violent revolution and on 28th February suggested that Nicholas II should abdicate in favour of a more popular member of the royal family. Attempts were now made to persuade Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich to accept the throne. He refused and on the 1st March, 1917, the Tsar abdicated leaving the Provisional Government in control of the country.
(Source: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/...)

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http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/201...
by Richard Pipes (no photo)
by Sheila Fitzpatrick
by Robert Service
by Rex A. Wade (no photo)
by Orlando Figes
(no image) The Russian Provisional Government 1917: Documents by Robert P. Browder (no photo)

Cloture Rule

Woodrow Wilson considered himself an expert on Congress—the subject of his 1884 doctoral dissertation. When he became president in 1913, he announced his plans to be a legislator-in-chief and requested that the President’s Room in the Capitol be made ready for his weekly consultations with committee chairmen. For a few months, Wilson kept to that plan. Soon, however, traditional legislative-executive branch antagonisms began to tarnish his optimism. After passing major tariff, trade, and banking legislation in the first two years of his administration, Congress slowed its pace.

By 1915, the Senate had become a breeding ground for filibusters. In the final weeks of the Congress that ended on March 4, one administration measure related to the war in Europe tied the Senate up for 33 days and blocked passage of three major appropriations bills. Two years later, as pressure increased for American entry into that war, a 23-day, end-of-session filibuster against the president’s proposal to arm merchant ships also failed, taking with it much other essential legislation. For the previous 40 years, efforts in the Senate to pass a debate-limiting rule had come to nothing. Now, in the wartime crisis environment, President Wilson lost his patience.

Decades earlier, he had written in his doctoral dissertation, “It is the proper duty of a representative body to look diligently into every affair of government and to talk much about what it sees.” On March 4, 1917, as the 64th Congress expired without completing its work, Wilson held a decidedly different view. Calling the situation unparalleled, he stormed that the “Senate of the United States is the only legislative body in the world which cannot act when its majority is ready for action. A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible.” The Senate, he demanded, must adopt a cloture rule.

On March 8, 1917, in a specially called session of the 65th Congress, the Senate agreed to a rule that essentially preserved its tradition of unlimited debate. The rule required a two-thirds majority to end debate and permitted each member to speak for an additional hour after that before voting on final passage. Over the next 46 years, the Senate managed to invoke cloture on only five occasions.
(Source: http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/h...)

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Frank I. Cobb

Frank I. Cobb was an American journalist. He succeeded Joseph Pulitzer as editor of The New York World, owned by Joseph Pulitzer. Cobb became famous for his editorials in support of the policies of liberal Democrats such as Woodrow Wilson.
(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_I....)

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by Alan Axelrod (no photo)

Admiral William Sims



William S. Sims, born in 1858 in Ontario, Canada, was appointed to the Naval Academy in 1876 and graduated in 1880. Seventeen years of sea duty were followed by assignments as Naval Attaché to Paris, St. Petersburg, and Madrid. Sims next served as Inspector of Target Practice; and, under his supervision, the naval gunnery system increased the rapidity of hits 100 percent and the general effectiveness of fire 500 percent. He also served as Naval Aide to President Theodore Roosevelt for two and one-half years.

On 11 February 1917, Sims became President of the Naval War College. In March 1917, he was designated by the Secretary of the Navy as Representative of the Navy Department in London. With the entry of the United States into World War I in April, he was ordered to assume command of all American destroyers, tenders, and auxiliaries operating from British bases. In May, he was designated as Commander of United States Destroyers Operating from British Bases, with the rank of Vice Admiral; and, in June, his title was changed to Commander, United States Naval Forces Operating in European Waters. On 10 December 1917, he assumed additional duty as Naval Attaché, London, England. The North Sea Mine Barrage was laid under his direction.

Admiral Sims again became President of the Naval War College in April 1919 and served in that capacity until his retirement on 15 October 1922. He died at Boston, Mass., on 25 September 1936.
(Source: http://www.history.navy.mil/danfs/s13...)

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by Ballard C. Campbell (no photo)

Wilson's Declaration of War, Part One

Gentlemen of the Congress:

I have called the Congress into extraordinary session because there are serious, very serious, choices of policy to be made, and made immediately, which it was neither right nor constitutionally permissible that I should assume the responsibility of making.

On the 3d of February last I officially laid before you the extraordinary announcement of the Imperial German Government that on and after the 1st day of February it was its purpose to put aside all restraints of law or of humanity and use its submarines to sink every vessel that sought to approach either the ports of Great Britain and Ireland or the western coasts of Europe or any of the ports controlled by the enemies of Germany within the Mediterranean. That had seemed to be the object of the German submarine warfare earlier in the war, but since April of last year the Imperial Government had somewhat restrained the commanders of its undersea craft in conformity with its promise then given to us that passenger boats should not be sunk and that due warning would be given to all other vessels which its submarines might seek to destroy, when no resistance was offered or escape attempted, and care taken that their crews were given at least a fair chance to save their lives in their open boats. The precautions taken were meagre and haphazard enough, as was proved in distressing instance after instance in the progress of the cruel and unmanly business, but a certain degree of restraint was observed The new policy has swept every restriction aside. Vessels of every kind, whatever their flag, their character, their cargo, their destination, their errand, have been ruthlessly sent to the bottom without warning and without thought of help or mercy for those on board, the vessels of friendly neutrals along with those of belligerents. Even hospital ships and ships carrying relief to the sorely bereaved and stricken people of Belgium, though the latter were provided with safe-conduct through the proscribed areas by the German Government itself and were distinguished by unmistakable marks of identity, have been sunk with the same reckless lack of compassion or of principle.

I was for a little while unable to believe that such things would in fact be done by any government that had hitherto subscribed to the humane practices of civilized nations. International law had its origin in the at tempt to set up some law which would be respected and observed upon the seas, where no nation had right of dominion and where lay the free highways of the world. By painful stage after stage has that law been built up, with meagre enough results, indeed, after all was accomplished that could be accomplished, but always with a clear view, at least, of what the heart and conscience of mankind demanded. This minimum of right the German Government has swept aside under the plea of retaliation and necessity and because it had no weapons which it could use at sea except these which it is impossible to employ as it is employing them without throwing to the winds all scruples of humanity or of respect for the understandings that were supposed to underlie the intercourse of the world. I am not now thinking of the loss of property involved, immense and serious as that is, but only of the wanton and wholesale destruction of the lives of noncombatants, men, women, and children, engaged in pursuits which have always, even in the darkest periods of modern history, been deemed innocent and legitimate. Property can be paid for; the lives of peaceful and innocent people can not be. The present German submarine warfare against commerce is a warfare against mankind.

It is a war against all nations. American ships have been sunk, American lives taken, in ways which it has stirred us very deeply to learn of, but the ships and people of other neutral and friendly nations have been sunk and overwhelmed in the waters in the same way. There has been no discrimination. The challenge is to all mankind. Each nation must decide for itself how it will meet it. The choice we make for ourselves must be made with a moderation of counsel and a temperateness of judgment befitting our character and our motives as a nation. We must put excited feeling away. Our motive will not be revenge or the victorious assertion of the physical might of the nation, but only the vindication of right, of human right, of which we are only a single champion.

When I addressed the Congress on the 26th of February last, I thought that it would suffice to assert our neutral rights with arms, our right to use the seas against unlawful interference, our right to keep our people safe against unlawful violence. But armed neutrality, it now appears, is impracticable. Because submarines are in effect outlaws when used as the German submarines have been used against merchant shipping, it is impossible to defend ships against their attacks as the law of nations has assumed that merchantmen would defend themselves against privateers or cruisers, visible craft giving chase upon the open sea. It is common prudence in such circumstances, grim necessity indeed, to endeavour to destroy them before they have shown their own intention. They must be dealt with upon sight, if dealt with at all. The German Government denies the right of neutrals to use arms at all within the areas of the sea which it has proscribed, even in the defense of rights which no modern publicist has ever before questioned their right to defend. The intimation is conveyed that the armed guards which we have placed on our merchant ships will be treated as beyond the pale of law and subject to be dealt with as pirates would be. Armed neutrality is ineffectual enough at best; in such circumstances and in the face of such pretensions it is worse than ineffectual; it is likely only to produce what it was meant to prevent; it is practically certain to draw us into the war without either the rights or the effectiveness of belligerents. There is one choice we can not make, we are incapable of making: we will not choose the path of submission and suffer the most sacred rights of our nation and our people to be ignored or violated. The wrongs against which we now array ourselves are no common wrongs; they cut to the very roots of human life.

With a profound sense of the solemn and even tragical character of the step I am taking and of the grave responsibilities which it involves, but in unhesitating obedience to what I deem my constitutional duty, I advise that the Congress declare the recent course of the Imperial German Government to be in fact nothing less than war against the Government and people of the United States; that it formally accept the status of belligerent which has thus been thrust upon it, and that it take immediate steps not only to put the country in a more thorough state of defense but also to exert all its power and employ all its resources to bring the Government of the German Empire to terms and end the war.

What this will involve is clear. It will involve the utmost practicable cooperation in counsel and action with the governments now at war with Germany, and, as incident to that, the extension to those governments of the most liberal financial credits, in order that our resources may so far as possible be added to theirs. It will involve the organization and mobilization of all the material resources of the country to supply the materials of war and serve the incidental needs of the nation in the most abundant and yet the most economical and efficient way possible. It will involve the immediate full equipment of the Navy in all respects but particularly in supplying it with the best means of dealing with the enemy's submarines. It will involve the immediate addition to the armed forces of the United States already provided for by law in case of war at least 500,000 men, who should, in my opinion, be chosen upon the principle of universal liability to service, and also the authorization of subsequent additional increments of equal force so soon as they may be needed and can be handled in training. It will involve also, of course, the granting of adequate credits to the Government, sustained, I hope, so far as they can equitably be sustained by the present generation, by well conceived taxation....

While we do these things, these deeply momentous things, let us be very clear, and make very clear to all the world what our motives and our objects are. My own thought has not been driven from its habitual and normal course by the unhappy events of the last two months, and I do not believe that the thought of the nation has been altered or clouded by them I have exactly the same things in mind now that I had in mind when I addressed the Senate on the 22d of January last; the same that I had in mind when I addressed the Congress on the 3d of February and on the 26th of February. Our object now, as then, is to vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world as against selfish and autocratic power and to set up amongst the really free and self-governed peoples of the world such a concert of purpose and of action as will henceforth ensure the observance of those principles. Neutrality is no longer feasible or desirable where the peace of the world is involved and the freedom of its peoples, and the menace to that peace and freedom lies in the existence of autocratic governments backed by organized force which is controlled wholly by their will, not by the will of their people. We have seen the last of neutrality in such circumstances. We are at the beginning of an age in which it will be insisted that the same standards of conduct and of responsibility for wrong done shall be observed among nations and their governments that are observed among the individual citizens of civilized states.

We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no feeling towards them but one of sympathy and friendship. It was not upon their impulse that their Government acted in entering this war. It was not with their previous knowledge or approval. It was a war determined upon as wars used to be determined upon in the old, unhappy days when peoples were nowhere consulted by their rulers and wars were provoked and waged in the interest of dynasties or of little groups of ambitious men who were accustomed to use their fellow men as pawns and tools. Self-governed nations do not fill their neighbour states with spies or set the course of intrigue to bring about some critical posture of affairs which will give them an opportunity to strike and make conquest. Such designs can be successfully worked out only under cover and where no one has the right to ask questions. Cunningly contrived plans of deception or aggression, carried, it may be, from generation to generation, can be worked out and kept from the light only within the privacy of courts or behind the carefully guarded confidences of a narrow and privileged class. They are happily impossible where public opinion commands and insists upon full information concerning all the nation's affairs.

A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations. No autocratic government could be trusted to keep faith within it or observe its covenants. It must be a league of honour, a partnership of opinion. Intrigue would eat its vitals away; the plottings of inner circles who could plan what they would and render account to no one would be a corruption seated at its very heart. Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honour steady to a common end and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of their own.
(Source: http://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Wils...)

Wilson's Declaration of War, Part Two



Does not every American feel that assurance has been added to our hope for the future peace of the world by the wonderful and heartening things that have been happening within the last few weeks in Russia? Russia was known by those who knew it best to have been always in fact democratic at heart, in all the vital habits of her thought, in all the intimate relationships of her people that spoke their natural instinct, their habitual attitude towards life. The autocracy that crowned the summit of her political structure, long as it had stood and terrible as was the reality of its power, was not in fact Russian in origin, character, or purpose; and now it has been shaken off and the great, generous Russian people have been added in all their naive majesty and might to the forces that are fighting for freedom in the world, for justice, and for peace. Here is a fit partner for a league of honour.

One of the things that has served to convince us that the Prussian autocracy was not and could never be our friend is that from the very outset of the present war it has filled our unsuspecting communities and even our offices of government with spies and set criminal intrigues everywhere afoot against our national unity of counsel, our peace within and without our industries and our commerce. Indeed it is now evident that its spies were here even before the war began; and it is unhappily not a matter of conjecture but a fact proved in our courts of justice that the intrigues which have more than once come perilously near to disturbing the peace and dislocating the industries of the country have been carried on at the instigation, with the support, and even under the personal direction of official agents of the Imperial Government accredited to the Government of the United States. Even in checking these things and trying to extirpate them we have sought to put the most generous interpretation possible upon them because we knew that their source lay, not in any hostile feeling or purpose of the German people towards us (who were, no doubt, as ignorant of them as we ourselves were), but only in the selfish designs of a Government that did what it pleased and told its people nothing. But they have played their part in serving to convince us at last that that Government entertains no real friendship for us and means to act against our peace and security at its convenience. That it means to stir up enemies against us at our very doors the intercepted [Zimmermann] note to the German Minister at Mexico City is eloquent evidence.

We are accepting this challenge of hostile purpose because we know that in such a government, following such methods, we can never have a friend; and that in the presence of its organized power, always lying in wait to accomplish we know not what purpose, there can be no assured security for the democratic governments of the world. We are now about to accept gage of battle with this natural foe to liberty and shall, if necessary, spend the whole force of the nation to check and nullify its pretensions and its power. We are glad, now that we see the facts with no veil of false pretence about them, to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included: for the rights of nations great and small and the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of obedience. The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as secure as the faith and the freedom of nations can make them.

Just because we fight without rancour and without selfish object, seeking nothing for ourselves but what we shall wish to share with all free peoples, we shall, I feel confident, conduct our operations as belligerents without passion and ourselves observe with proud punctilio the principles of right and of fair play we profess to be fighting for.

I have said nothing of the governments allied with the Imperial Government of Germany because they have not made war upon us or challenged us to defend our right and our honour. The Austro-Hungarian Government has, indeed, avowed its unqualified endorsement and acceptance of the reckless and lawless submarine warfare adopted now without disguise by the Imperial German Government, and it has therefore not been possible for this Government to receive Count Tarnowski, the Ambassador recently accredited to this Government by the Imperial and Royal Government of Austria-Hungary; but that Government has not actually engaged in warfare against citizens of the United States on the seas, and I take the liberty, for the present at least, of postponing a discussion of our relations with the authorities at Vienna. We enter this war only where we are clearly forced into it because there are no other means of defending our rights.

It will be all the easier for us to conduct ourselves as belligerents in a high spirit of right and fairness because we act without animus, not in enmity towards a people or with the desire to bring any injury or disadvantage upon them, but only in armed opposition to an irresponsible government which has thrown aside all considerations of humanity and of right and is running amuck. We are, let me say again, the sincere friends of the German people, and shall desire nothing so much as the early reestablishment of intimate relations of mutual advantage between us -- however hard it may be for them, for the time being, to believe that this is spoken from our hearts. We have borne with their present government through all these bitter months because of that friendship -- exercising a patience and forbearance which would otherwise have been impossible. We shall, happily, still have an opportunity to prove that friendship in our daily attitude and actions towards the millions of men and women of German birth and native sympathy, who live amongst us and share our life, and we shall be proud to prove it towards all who are in fact loyal to their neighbours and to the Government in the hour of test. They are, most of them, as true and loyal Americans as if they had never known any other fealty or allegiance. They will be prompt to stand with us in rebuking and restraining the few who may be of a different mind and purpose. If there should be disloyalty, it will be dealt with with a firm hand of stern repression; but, if it lifts its head at all, it will lift it only here and there and without countenance except from a lawless and malignant few.

It is a distressing and oppressive duty, gentlemen of the Congress, which I have performed in thus addressing you. There are, it may be, many months of fiery trial and sacrifice ahead of us. It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts -- for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free. To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other.
(Source: http://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Wils...)

Jeannette Rankin



Jeannette Rankin was the first woman to serve in the U.S. Congress — and one of the first women in the world to be elected to a major legislative body — at a time when women could not even vote in most states in the United States. A lifelong pacifist, she voted against U.S. entry into both World War I and World War II, becoming the only member of Congress to do so. She also led a resistance movement against U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

Becomes suffragist
Rankin was born near Missoula, Montana, on June 11, 1880, the eldest of seven children. Her father, John Rankin, was a successful rancher and lumber merchant and her mother, Olive Pickering Rankin, was a schoolteacher. After attending public schools in Missoula, she graduated from the University of Montana in 1902 with a degree in biology. She briefly taught in country schools before serving an apprenticeship as a seamstress and supporting herself by taking in sewing. When Rankin's father died in 1904 she assumed responsibility for her five sisters and her brother Wellington, with whom she became particularly close and who later served as her political adviser.

In 1908 Rankin left Montana to study at the New York School of Philanthropy in New York City. After practicing as a social worker in Seattle, Washington, and finding she did not like her new profession, she enrolled at the University of Washington. At that time the women's suffrage movement (the campaign for women's right to vote) was gaining momentum throughout the country, and Rankin joined the state suffrage organization. For five years she actively campaigned for the cause in Washington, California, Ohio, and Montana. Eventually she served as legislative secretary of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and her efforts in Montana resulted in women winning the right to vote in 1914.

Elected to Congress
Having gained experience in social reform, Rankin decided to pursue a political career. In 1916 she ran successfully for a seat in the U.S. Congress on a progressive Republican platform that called for national women's suffrage, child protection laws, and prohibition, among other issues. Upon being elected she achieved several distinctions: although she was a Republican, she was voted into office in a Democratic state; she was the first woman ever to serve in either chamber of Congress; and she won her seat in spite of the fact that most women in the United States could not even vote. When Rankin went to Washington, D.C., her colleagues on Capitol Hill expected the congresswoman from Montana to be riding a horse and toting a six-shooter. Immediately putting such expectations to rest, Rankin revealed herself to be widely traveled, well educated, and highly sophisticated. She was also a pacifist — a fact that would have great significance as she embarked on her political career.
Takes stand against war

Four days after Rankin took her seat in Congress she was caught up in a debate about whether the United States should declare war against Germany. When she ran for Congress there had been little talk of war, although her constituents knew she was a pacifist and the general mood was isolationist, in that most Americans wanted the country to stay out of other countries' affairs. By 1917 the mood had shifted as President Woodrow Wilson ended diplomatic relations with Germany and American merchant ships were sunk by German battleships. Wilson called a special session of Congress in April 6, 1917, and the Senate passed a resolution to go to war. When the issue went before the House of Representatives, Rankin became one of 56 members of Congress who voted against declaring war on Germany.

Conscience damages career
Rankin's brother Wellington had urged her to vote for war, but she replied that sentiment in Montana was against U.S. involvement. She later released a statement in which she explained her position: "I knew that we were asked to vote for a commercial war, that none of the idealistic hopes would be carried out, and I was aware of the falseness of much of the propaganda. It was easy to stand against the pressure of the militarists, but very difficult to go against the friends and dear ones who felt that I was making a needless sacrifice by voting against the war, since my vote would not be a decisive one.... I said I would listen to those who wanted war and would not vote until the last opportunity and if I could see any reason for going to war I would change it." After the second roll call Rankin voted "No." Although 55 male members of the Senate and House had also opposed going to war, Rankin's vote received the most attention. According to some unverified reports, she had acted "just like a woman" and cried as she cast her vote. Amid calls for her resignation, several suffragist groups in New York even canceled her speaking engagements.

In the true spirit of democracy, once war had been declared Rankin promoted Liberty Bonds, which were sold to support the war effort, and she voted for the draft. However, she voted against the Espionage Act, which targeted foreign residents of the United States and suppressed dissent. During the remainder of her term she continued her advocacy of women's rights by introducing the first bill that would have given women citizenship independent from their husbands, and she supported government sponsorship of prenatal and child-care education for women. In 1918 Rankin unsuccessfully sought the Republic nomination for the Senate, then ran as an independent and lost that campaign as well. The following year she joined Jane Addams (see biography) as a delegate to the Second International Congress of Women.

Wins second term
For the next two decades Rankin worked in Washington, D.C., as a lobbyist for various groups, including the Women's Peace Union and the National Council for the Prevention of War. During that time she also established a residence in Athens, Georgia, and founded the Georgia Peace Society.

In 1940 Rankin again ran successfully for a House seat, this time on an anti-war platform. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan on December 7, 1941, she was the only member of Congress to vote against declaration of war against Japan. Once again her stand caused a furor, and this time it put an end to her political career. She did not run for reelection, choosing instead to work for social reform, founding a women's "cooperative homestead" in Georgia. Drawn to the work of Indian pacifist Mohandas Gandhi, she traveled to India seven times between 1946 and 1971. Rankin returned to the national debate in the 1960s when, alarmed by the hostilities in Indochina, she urged women to organize in protest. On January 15, 1968, she led more than 5,000 women who called themselves the Jeannette Rankin Brigade to Capitol Hill to demonstrate their opposition to U.S. involvement in Vietnam. She was 88 years old. Rankin considered campaigning for a third congressional term, but her health began to fail. She died on May 18, 1973, in Carmel, New York. In 1985 a bronze statue of Rankin was placed in the U.S. Capitol.
(Source: http://www.gale.cengage.com/free_reso...)

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(no image) Jeannette Rankin, First Lady in Congress: A Biography by Hannah Josephson (no photo)

George Creel



George Creel was born in Layfayette County, Missouri, on 1st December, 1876. He worked as a reporter for the Kansas City World (1894-99) before starting his own newspaper, the Kansas City Independent in 1899.

Creel also worked for the Denver Post before being appointed as Police Commissioner of Denver by mayor, Henry J. Arnold. in 1912 Creel brought in several reforms, including banning police officers from using clubs and nightsticks. He also brought in measures to bring an end to prostitution in the city. Arnold became concerned by the speed of reforms and when Creel accused city policemen of public drunkenness, he was dismissed from office.

Creel now went to work for the Rocky Mountain News but in 1917 President Woodrow Wilson appointed him head of the United States Committee on Public Information. He also organized a team of 18,000 public speakers in favour of the First World War. Employing techniques used by the British War Propaganda Bureau, he encouraged artists to create thousands of paintings, posters, cartoons, and sculptures promoting the war. It has been claimed that Creel's organisation distributed 60 million pamphlets, booklets and leaflets.

Creel described his propaganda campaign in his book, How We Advertised America (1920). "Our effort was educational and informative throughout, for we had such confidence in our case as to feel that no other argument was needed than the simple, straightforward presentation of facts."

An active member of the Democratic Party, he served on the San Francisco Regional Labor Board. In 1934 he took on Frank Merriam, of the Republican Party and Upton Sinclair of the Socialist Party in the battle to be Governor of California. Merriam won the election and in 1935 President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him as chairman of the National Advisory Board of the Works Progress Administration.

After the Second World War Creel became a committed right-winger and worked with Joseph McCarthy in his campaign to remove liberals and socialists from positions of influence.

George Creel, who was the author of fifteen books, died in San Francisco on 2nd October, 1953.
(Source: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/...)

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by David M. Kennedy (no photo)

Committee on Public Information



The United States Committee on Public Information, also known as the Creel Committee, was an agency headed by progressive journalist George Creel during World War I. The committee directed the government’s propaganda effort, encouraging public support for the war through pro-war films and publications and the recruitment of volunteer patriotic speakers.
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by Thomas J. Fleming
by William J. Breen (no photo)

Liberty Bond (Loan)



A Liberty Bond was a war bond that was sold in the United States to support the allied cause in World War I. Subscribing to the bonds became a symbol of patriotic duty in the United States and introduced the idea of financial securities to many citizens for the first time. The Act of Congress which authorized the Liberty Bonds is still used today as the authority under which all U.S. Treasury bonds are issued.
(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_...)

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by Milton Friedman
(no image) Crowded Years by William G. McAdoo (no photo)

War Industries Board



A committee created before World War I whose task was to help mobilize the American economy for possible war. It began in 1916 as the Council on National Defense, a cabinet committee created by Congress. The committee functioned chaotically at first as a loose grouping of over 100 subcommittees, headed by various industrial executives who refused to work with each other, let alone the military. Wilson re-created it as the War Industries Board in the winter of 1917-18, but the Board did not become effective until prominent financier Bernard Baruch was appointed by the president to head the committee on March 4, 1918. Baruch delegated work efficiently and cajoled some measure of unified action between disparate groups of industry and the army. By Armistice Day, one quarter of industrial manufacturing had been converted to military use. The policies of the War Industries Board provided a template for the New Deal and the mobilization for World War II.
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by Bernard M. Baruch
by Paul A.C. Koistinen (no photo)
(no image) How America Went To War The Giant Hand; Our Mobilization And Control Of Industry And Natural Resources, 1917-1918 by Benedict Crowell (no photo)
(no image) The War Industries Board by Robert Cuff (no photo)
(no image) Industrial America in the World War: The Strategy Behind the Line, 1917-1918 by Georges Clemenceau (no photo)

Joseph Joffre



Joseph Joffre was born in Rivesaltes, France, in 1852. He studied at the Ecole Polytechnique, but his studies were disturbed by the Franco-Prussian War, in which he participated. Once the war was over he finished his studies. He was then appointed as an officer in the French Army. He served in Formosa (Taiwan) and Indo China, later he would serve in Madagascar. In 1910 he joined the French Supreme War Council. In 1911 he was named the French Chief of the General Staff.

When war broke out in 1914, Joffre became the Commander in Chief of the French Armies. He devised a plan known as Plan XVII, in which he expected the Germans to attack through Lorraine, he would launch his own attack from the Ardennes and Luxembourg. However the German Schlieffen Plan did not intend for an attack through Lorraine, but rather through neutral Belgium, in an outflanking move that would close around the French Forces and capture Paris quickly. When Joffre launched his offensive, it was repulsed by the germans and the French Armies and their British allies started falling back. Thanks to Joffre's cool reaction to the situation he avoided a panic and was able to reorganize his forces in order to repulse the German offensive. He organized a new army that participated in the First Battle of the Marne, which was a resounding success for the French against the German forces. The German plan of quickly capturing Paris and encircling the French armies had been crushed, and the two belligerents had settled in for a long war, with very little initiative left.

The First Battle of the Marne proved to be the high point of Joffre's career, his future campaigns resulted in massive failures and the cost of life was devastating. These failures include the offensives in Champagne, Somme and Artois. Joffre tried to justify his actions but in 1916 he was replaced and appointed to a background role in the French war effort. He died in Paris, in 1931.
(Source: http://www.worlddiplomacy.org/Countri...)

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Rene Viviani



Rene Viviani was born at Algeria on 8th November, 1863. He worked as a lawyer in Algiers before moving to France where he specialized in defending the rights of socialists and trade union workers.

In 1893 Viviani was elected to the Chamber of Deputies. Along with Jean Jaurés and Aristide Briand he was involved in the establishment of the French Socialist Party. In 1904 he helped form the left-wing newspaper, L'Humanité.

Viviani and Aristide Briand left the party in order to serve in the government established by Georges Clemenceau in October 1906. Viviani served as minister of labour and Briand as minister of public instruction and worship. Viviani remained in the cabinet when Briand became prime minister and did not leave office until November 1910.

Viviani returned to power in December 1913 as minister of education. The following year the French president, Raymond Poincare appointed Viviani as prime minister and minister of foreign affairs. His attempts to establish political control over the military high command during the First World War ended in failure and he was unable to persuade Joseph Joffre, chief of general staff in the French Army, to allow government inspections of the Western Front.

Viviani resigned as prime minister in October 1915, after being criticized for a munitions shortage. However, he continued in the government as minister of justice.

After the war Viviani was the French representative of the League of Nations. Rene Viviani died in Le Plessis-Robinson on 7th September, 1925.
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Enoch Crowder



Enoch Herbert Crowder was born 11 April 1859 in Edinburg, Grundy County, Missouri, the son of John Herbert and Mary C. Weller Crowder. In 1877, he entered West Point, graduating in 1881. His career began with several tours of duty in the western plains. While participating in the Geronimo and Sitting Bull campaigns, Crowder spent his spare time studying the Army legal system and after teaching military science at the University of Missouri, he joined the Judge Advocate General Corps in 1895.

The Spanish-American War drew Crowder to the Philippines. There he served in several capacities, including that of Justice of the Philippine Supreme Court. Not long after his return to the United States, he was assigned to Manchuria as an observer with the Japanese Army in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905). In 1906, Crowder followed American troops to Cuba in the second intervention. He served as Cuban Secretary of State and Justice, established the Advisory Law Commission, and helped revise and update the legal and electoral codes.

Upon the return of self-government to Cuba, Crowder resumed his duties in the Judge Advocate General Corps. In 1910, he returned to Latin America as a delegate to the 4th Pan American Conference. With its close, he and other delegates visited numerous Latin American countries as representatives of the United States. The trip concluded Crowder’s first foray into Latin American politics.

The following decade (1910-1920) proved one of the most eventful in Crowder’s life. He became Judge Advocate General in 1911. Before World War I he expanded the Judge Advocate General Office and instituted military penal reforms. He also directed a revision of the Articles of War and substantially updated the courts-martial system, bringing it more in line with existing civil procedures.

Shortly after American entry into World War I, the Selective Service Act, which Crowder devised, became law. Crowder was detailed as Provost Marshal General and administered the act in that capacity. After the war he wrote The Spirit of Selective Service, in which he set forth the principles of the draft and argued for their application to a variety of post-war problems.

The close of the war also brought problems with military justice. In 1919, Crowder took up his former position as Judge Advocate General and soon became involved in a controversy with his wartime successor in that post, Samuel T. Ansell, who charged that Crowder’s courts-martial system was unduly harsh and not in harmony with the tenets of the civil judicial system.

In 1919, Crowder again went to Cuba as an advisor to the government. His efforts resulted in the passage of a new electoral code. When collapsed sugar prices brought economic and political chaos, President Woodrow Wilson appointed Crowder as his personal representative to solve election disputes. In 1923, Crowder became the first American ambassador to Cuba, and served until 1927. During his tenure in Cuba, he worked to eliminate corruption and to promote investment and trade opportunities with the United States.

Upon retirement from public life, Crowder took up a private law practice consisting largely of consultant services to Midwestern construction and utility companies and to sugar interests. Hit hard financially by the depression and in increasingly poor health, Crowder retired altogether in 1930 and died in 1932.
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(no image) Cuba and International Relations: A Historical Study in American Diplomacy by James M. Callahan (no photo)
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by Thomas F. O'Brien (no photo)

Espionage Act of 1917

On June 15, 1917, some two months after America's formal entrance into World War I against Germany, the United States Congress passes the Espionage Act.

Enforced largely by A. Mitchell Palmer, the United States attorney general under President Woodrow Wilson, the Espionage Act essentially made it a crime for any person to convey information intended to interfere with the U.S. armed forces prosecution of the war effort or to promote the success of the country's enemies. Anyone found guilty of such acts would be subject to a fine of $10,000 and a prison sentence of 20 years.

The Espionage Act was reinforced by the Sedition Act of the following year, which imposed similarly harsh penalties on anyone found guilty of making false statements that interfered with the prosecution of the war; insulting or abusing the U.S. government, the flag, the Constitution or the military; agitating against the production of necessary war materials; or advocating, teaching or defending any of these acts. Both pieces of legislation were aimed at socialists, pacifists and other anti-war activists during World War I and were used to punishing effect in the years immediately following the war, during a period characterized by the fear of communist influence and communist infiltration into American society that became known as the first Red Scare (a second would occur later, during the 1940s and 1950s, associated largely with Senator Joseph McCarthy). Palmer–a former pacifist whose views on civil rights radically changed once he assumed the attorney general's office during the Red Scare–and his right-hand man, J. Edgar Hoover, liberally employed the Espionage and Sedition Acts to persecute left-wing political figures.

One of the most famous activists arrested during this period, labor leader Eugene V. Debs, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for a speech he made in 1918 in Canton, Ohio, criticizing the Espionage Act. Debs appealed the decision, and the case eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where the court upheld his conviction. Though Debs' sentence was commuted in 1921 when the Sedition Act was repealed by Congress, major portions of the Espionage Act remain part of United States law to the present day.
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(no image) Civil Liberties In Wartime: Legislative Histories Of The Espionage Act Of 1917 And The Sedition Act Of 1918 by William H. Manz (no photo)
(no image) The Red Scare and the American Left 1918-1920: Wilson, Palmer and the Breaking of American Socialism by Nick Shepley (no photo)
(no image) Civil Liberties In Wartime: Legislative Histories Of The Espionage Act Of 1917 And The Sedition Act Of 1918 by William H. Manz (no photo)
by William H. Rehnquist
by Geoffrey R. Stone

Thomas E. Watson



Thomas E. Watson is perhaps best known to Georgians today by his imposing statue near the steps of the Georgia capitol.

His public life has been considered one of the most perplexing and controversial of all Georgia politicians. In his early years he was characterized as a liberal, especially for his time. In later years he emerged as a force for white supremacy and anti-Catholic rhetoric. He was elected to the Georgia General Assembly (1882), the U.S. House of Representatives (1890), and the U.S. Senate (1920), where he served for only a short time before his death. Nominated by the Populist Party as its vice presidential candidate in 1896, he achieved national recognition for his egalitarian, agrarian agenda. Although his terms of elective office were short, for more than thirty years his support was essential for many men running for public office in Georgia. In addition to his political achievements, Tom Watson was a practicing lawyer, publisher, and historian. He is remembered for being a voice for Populism and the disenfranchised, and later in life, as a southern demagogue and bigot.

Family and Education
Born on September 5, 1856, on a plantation in Columbia County (the area today is part of McDuffie County), Edward Thomas Watson (later Thomas Edward Watson) understood the culture of the antebellum South. He was the second of seven children of Ann Eliza Maddox and John Smith Watson, both descendants of Quakers. He grew up on his grandfather's plantation, near the town of Thomson. Watson's primary education consisted of course work at a small school in Thomson. In 1872 he entered Mercer University, but family finances allowed him to stay for only two years. The Watsons lost the family plantation in 1873 in the midst of the general economic collapse of the Reconstruction South. He began reading law while teaching school in Screven County and passed the Georgia bar in 1875. In 1877 he settled into a law practice in Thomson. The following year he married Georgia Durham, and they had three children, John Durham, Agnes, and Louise.

Rise to Prominence
Although Watson quickly became one of the foremost trial lawyers in Georgia, he was drawn to local politics. Early in his legal career Watson had been influenced by many of the leaders of the Confederacy, including his boyhood heroes Robert Toombs and Alexander Stephens. In an era in which northern influences for capitalism over agrarianism were challenging regional traditions, Watson emerged as a voice for the agrarian tradition. He appealed to Georgians as a defender of the old way of life when he was first elected to the state legislature, representing McDuffie County, in 1882. Watson discovered that the support of the black voting population was necessary to win. Once in office he supported the elimination of the state's convict lease system, favored taxes to support public education, and championed the needs of poor farmers and sharecroppers of both races.

Watson did not remain in the legislature for long, however; he chose to resign his seat before the end of the session. His writings indicate that he was dissatisfied with the slow pace of the lawmaking process and resentful of the growing influence of the "New South" as it moved away from the traditional agrarian economy toward more industrial sectors.

The Farmers' Alliance and Populism
As the New South emerged from the chaos of Reconstruction, so did discontent among farmers throughout the region. The Farmers' Alliance organized to voice this resentment, and it was within that organization that Watson became a powerful leader, although he never formally joined the alliance. Issues at the forefront of the Farmers' Alliance platform included the reclamation of large tracts of land granted to corporations, the abolition of national banks, an opposition to paper money, an end to speculation on farm commodities, and a decrease in taxes levied on low-income citizens. On this platform he campaigned and won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, representing Georgia's Tenth District, in 1890. In Congress he pushed for legislation to enact various Alliance goals, but he was successful only in instituting an experimental program of bringing free delivery of mail to rural areas.

The Farmers' Alliance itself was not well received by proponents of the New South. Atlanta Constitution managing editor Henry W. Grady and Georgia governor Alfred H. Colquitt opposed much of its platform. Watson presented the platform in terms of an idyllic pastoral country life contrasted with the evils of industrialization and urbanization. As these differences were publicized and his frustration with the indifference of Congress toward his legislative initiatives grew, Watson increasingly distanced himself from the mainstream of the Democratic Party.

In 1891 Watson refused to support the election of fellow Georgian Charles F. Crisp, a far more conservative Democrat than Watson, as Speaker of the House. By then, the Populist, or People's, Party had evolved as the political organization of the Farmers' Alliance, and Watson was nominated as its candidate for the speakership. Although he was widely criticized for abandoning the Democrats, he won a vast new following of farmers in Georgia and across the South. He also earned the support of many rural black voters in his 1892 bid for reelection to Congress through his condemnation of lynching and his protection of a black supporter from a lynch mob in the final days before the election. Nevertheless, he was narrowly defeated by his Democratic opponent, as he would be again in 1894, when there was substantial evidence of election fraud, and thereafter divisions increased between the Democrats and the Populists.

In 1896 the Democratic Party nominated William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska as its presidential candidate, and Arthur Sewall, a banker, as its vice presidential candidate. Some Populists backed Bryan and believed fusing the Populist and Democratic tickets could be successful. Watson balked at fusing the tickets, but delegates to the Populist convention (which Watson did not attend) eventually convinced him to agree to an awkward compromise. In the end Watson, who had been led to believe his name would appear on the ticket instead of Sewall's, was duped by the Democrats. The Republican candidate, William McKinley, won the election, and the Populist Party never recovered from the loss.

Watson temporarily withdrew from politics at this point and resumed his law practice in Thomson. Though he would reemerge to run for president as a Populist in 1904 and 1908, neither he nor the much-diminished party ever posed a serious threat to the Democrats or Republicans. Within Georgia, however, Watson continued to exert considerable political influence. In 1906 he helped Hoke Smith win the race for governor, and thereafter no serious candidate for governor could be considered without his endorsement.

Later Years
Soon after the turn of the century, Watson turned to writing at his newly acquired Hickory Hill estate on the outskirts of Thomson. He wrote a two-volume history of France (1899), followed by a novel, Bethany: A Story of the Old South (1904), and biographies of Napoleon (1902), Thomas Jefferson (1903), and Andrew Jackson (1912). Through his Jeffersonian Publishing Company, Watson also produced a magazine and a weekly newspaper that achieved widespread circulation throughout the South and in New York. Watson's Jeffersonian Magazine in particular became an outlet for lengthy editorials on anti-capitalistic political philosophies and for strong diatribes reflecting his increasing racial and religious bigotry.

Although Watson had long supported black enfranchisement in Georgia and throughout the South, he changed his stance by 1904. Resentful of Democratic manipulation and exploitation of black voters and strongly opposed to the increased visibility and influence of such leaders as W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, Watson endorsed the disenfranchisement of African American voters, and no longer defined Populism in racially inclusive terms. During his 1908 presidential bid he ran as a white supremacist and launched vehement diatribes in his magazine and newspaper against blacks.

Watson also launched an aggressive campaign against the Catholic Church. He took issue with the hierarchy of the church and railed against abuses by its leaders. He mistrusted the church's foreign missions and its historic political activities. The Catholic Church responded by putting pressure on businesses that advertised in Watson's publications, resulting in an effective boycott. In 1913, during the trial of Leo Frank, Watson's strong attacks on Frank and on the pervasive influence of Jewish and northern interests in the state heavily influenced sentiment against Frank, who was lynched by a mob in 1915.

Thomas E. Watson continued to speak of oppressed working people (farmers) who were opposed by capitalism (industrialists) long after those ideals inspired political support. Although he shunned Socialism and worked to maintain Populism's distinction from it, with the outbreak of World War I in Europe in 1914, Watson grew increasingly sympathetic to the insurgent Socialist Party in the United States, and supported its opposition to American entry into the European conflict. As a result of his Socialist association and his continued criticism of the war after American entry into it in 1917, the U.S. Post Office refused to deliver the publications in which his attacks were published, thus bringing them to an end. In 1918 he made a late bid for Congress but lost to Carl Vinson, who had been a strong supporter of American involvement in the war.

In 1920 Watson entered his final political race and achieved his first success in more than two decades when he ran for the U.S. Senate, defeating the incumbent senator, Hoke Smith. On September 26, 1922, in the second year of his six-year term, Watson died suddenly. Governor Thomas Hardwick appointed eighty-seven-year-old Rebecca Latimer Felton as a temporary replacement, until Walter F. George was elected to fill out the remainder of Watson's term.
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(no image) Thomas Jefferson by Thomas E. Watson (no photo)
(no image) The life and times of Andrew Jackson by Thomas E. Watson (no photo)
(no image)Bethany: A Story of the Old South by Thomas Edward Watson (no photo)
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Thorstein Veblen



U.S. economist. He grew up in Minnesota and earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University. Although he taught economics at the University of Chicago and other universities, he was unable to keep any position for long because of his unconventional ideas and the disorder in his personal life. In 1899 he published his classic work The Theory of the Leisure Class, which applied Darwin's evolutionary theories to the study of modern economic life, highlighting the competitive and predatory nature of the business world. With dry humour he identified the markers of American social class, and he coined the term conspicuous consumption to describe the display of wealth made by the upper class. His reputation was highest in the 1930s, when the Great Depression was seen as a vindication of his criticism of the business system.
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by Thorstein Veblen
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Max Eastman



Born in New York in 1883 to clergy parents and radicalized in his youth, Max Eastman first became an activist for women's issues and was an early supporter of the Left Opposition.

A prolific writer, Eastman gained a reputation as a fine journalist and in 1912 was asked to take over editorship of the left literary journal The Masses. Other writers to the cooperative magazine included his sister, Crystal Eastman, Floyd Dell, John Reed, Sherwood Anderson, Upton Sinclair, Amy Lowell and Louise Bryant. The journal moved further to the left under Eastman and took a strong stand against US involvement in WWI. As a result, in 1917, they lost mailing privileges and several of its editors were tried twice for violating the Espionage Act. The Masses was suppressed during the trials, but failing to get a conviction by the time the war ended, the government dropped its case. In 1918 Eastman joined with other radical writers to publish The Liberator, a magazine with similar intentions to The Masses, and remained with the publication until 1924, when it ran out of money and was taken over by the Communist Party. In 1922 he left the U.S. for a two year stay in the Soviet Union.

Eastman also authored several books including, Understanding Germany (1916), Journalism Versus Art (1916) The Sense of Humor (1921) Leon Trotsky: Portrait of a Youth (1925), Marx, Lenin and the Science of Revolution (1926), Artists in Uniform (1934) and also translated several of Trotsky's books. Though on the forefront of getting Trotskyist issues to America and a supporter of Trotskyist publications, he was a critic of dialectical and historical materialism and the idea of Marxist philosophy as a science.

In the 40's he became anti-communist and was a supporter of Joe McCarthy. He spent the last decades of his life writing for publications such as the Readers Digest and also wrote two volumes of autobiographical material, The Enjoyment of Living (1948) and Love and Revolution (1965). He died in 1969.
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(no image) Last Romantic - Life of Max Eastman by William L. O'Neill (no photo)
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(no image) Since Lenin Died by Max Eastman (no photo)
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(no image) Understanding Germany, the Only Way to End War, and Other Essays, Volume 20 by Max Eastman (no photo)

John Reed



For John Silas “Jack” Reed, the conservative, early twentieth-century city of Portland could never be “prepared to understand his dreams” of social revolution and change. Born in 1887, Reed grew up in a stately Portland mansion, attended the Portland Youth Academy and later, boarding school. Fascinated with the travels of his uncle and the unfamiliar habits of his family's Chinese servant Lee Sing, Reed's early writings were inspired by his desire to see the world.

Praised for his poetry and writing skills, Reed graduated from Harvard in 1910 and began a career in journalism in New York. He wrote predominantly for leftist magazines and was celebrated among Greenwich Village radicals. Reed first gained prominence when he covered the 1911 Mexican revolution alongside revolutionary Pancho Villa. The event inspired his romanticized chronicle, Insurgent Mexico. In 1915, Reed toured Eastern Europe reporting on the atrocities and injustices of World War I. He became especially captivated with Russia and its potential for revolution, writing that Russians “are perhaps the most interesting human beings that exist.”

Returning home in December 1915, Reed was lonely and tired of war, but on a visit to Portland he met Louise Bryant. In Bryant, Reed found his intellectual match. They married in 1916 and, after living for a time in New York City and Massachusetts, departed for Russia in 1917 to witness the revolution. Reed's 1919 book Ten Days That Shook the World was an account of the Bolshevik seizure of power. In 1920, Reed traveled back to the U.S. to coordinate a domestic Communist party. Upon his return to Russia he was imprisoned and held in solitary confinement in Finland. Later released, a sickly Reed reunited with Bryant in Russia, but was tragically stricken with typhus.

John Reed died in October 1920. The only American ever buried at the Kremlin, Reed's idealism, intellect, and spirit would inspire radicals to form John Reed Clubs across the United States.
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Walter Lippmann



[Walter Lippmann was] U.S. newspaper commentator and author. Educated at Harvard, he became an editor at the fledgling New Republic (191417). His thinking influenced Woodrow Wilson, and he took part in the negotiations that culminated in the Treaty of Versailles. After writing for and editing the reformist World, he moved to the New York Herald-Tribune, where he began his Today and Tomorrow column in 1931; eventually widely syndicated, it won two Pulitzer Prizes (1958, 1962), and Lippmann became one of the most respected political columnists in the world. His books include A Preface to Politics (1913); Public Opinion (1922), perhaps his most influential work; The Phantom Public (1925); and The Good Society (1937).
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by Walter Lippmann
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(no image) Walter Lippmann: Cosmopolitanism In The Century Of Total War by D. Steven Blum (no photo)

Herbert Croly



Herbert Croly, the son of two journalists, David Croly and Jane Cunningham, was born in New York, on 23rd January, 1869. After being educated at Harvard University he became the editor of the Architectural Record.

In 1909 Croly published, The Promise of American Life. In the book, Croly argued for a planned economy, increased spending on education and the creation of a society based on the "brotherhood of mankind". It has been claimed that this book influenced the political views of both Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

In 1914 Croly was asked by Willard Straight to become the first editor of the New Republic. The magazine was run by a small editorial board that included Croly's friend, Walter Lippmann. All outside contributions were submitted to the editorial board and had to be accepted by all members before it could appear in the magazine. Early contributors included Randolph Bourne, Amy Lowell, Henry Brailsford and H. G. Wells.

When it was first published on 7th November 1914, the New Republic had 32 pages, including self-cover, and contained no illustrations. Its first edition sold 875 copies but after a year the circulation reached 15,000. The New Republic became a strong supporter of Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive movement.

On the outbreak of the First World War, Croly argued for American neutrality. The New Republic published articles by British critics of the war such as Norman Angell and Harold Laski. However, after the sinking of the Lusitania, Croly urged American entry into war. After Woodrow Wilson declared war on Germany, the New Republic gave him its full support.

After the war Croly became much more critical of Woodrow Wilson and described the Versailles Treaty as "a peace of annihilation". He also disliked the League of Nations, an organisation that "would perpetuate rather than correct the evils of the treaty." Sales of the New Republic reached 43,000 during the First World War but declined during the 1920s.

Willard Straight died during the influenza epidemic in 1918 but Dorothy Straight continued to fund what had now become a loss-making venture. Croly continued to persuade some of the most prominent literary figures in the United States and Britain to write for the journal. This included Edmund Wilson, Waldo Frank, Jane Addams, Bertrand Russell, H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf and John Maynard Keynes.

Herbert Croly remained editor of the New Republic until his death on 17th May, 1930.
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Industrial Workers of the World

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The Industrial Workers of the World—also known as the IWW, or the Wobblies—is a radical Labor Union that had its beginnings in Chicago in 1905.

An outgrowth of the Western Federation of Mines, the IWW was created by William D. Haywood, Eugene V. Debs, and Daniel DeLeon. Its membership was open to all workers, skilled or unskilled, with no restrictions as to race, occupation, ethnic background, or sex. The Wobblies opposed the principles of capitalism and advocated Socialism.They followed the tenets of syndicalism, a labor movement that evolved in Europe before World War I. The syndicalists sought to control industry through labor organizations. In their view the state represented oppression, which had to be replaced by the union as the essential element of society. To achieve their goals, the syndicalists advocated practices such as strikes and slowdowns.

The Wobblies adopted many of the ideologies of syndicalism and employed direct-action methods, such as propaganda, strikes, and boycotts. They rejected more peaceful means of achieving labor's goals, such as Arbitration and Collective Bargaining.

From 1906 to 1928, the IWW was responsible for 150 strikes, including a miners' strike in Goldfield, Nevada, from 1906 to 1907; a textile workers' strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912; a 1913 silk workers' strike in Paterson, New Jersey; and a miners' strike in Colorado from 1927 to 1928.

During World War I, the IWW began to lose much of its strength. Its members were against the military, and many were convicted of draft evasion, seditious activities, and Espionage.In addition, many members left the organization to join the Communist party. By 1930, the IWW was no longer regarded as an influential labor force. Nevertheless, it still exists today.

Despite its radicalism, the IWW was responsible for several gains for organized labor. It brought together skilled and unskilled workers into one union; it achieved better working conditions and a shorter work week in many areas of labor, particularly in the lumber field; and it set a structural example that would be followed by future labor unions.
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Battle of Caporetto



The Battle of Caporetto was one of the more decisive battles of World War One. The Italian Army suffered major losses at Caporetto in terms of prisoners taken and equipment lost.

The Italian Army had enjoyed a number of successes around the Isonzo area of north Italy. However, none of these victories had been decisive and they had also been costly in terms of manpower. The primary opponents in the Isonzo area had been Austro-Hungarian forces and after the Eleventh Battle of Isonzo, there was a general concern amongst Germany's senior military commanders that their allies here might falter leaving Germany facing a soft-underbelly on her southern front. The commander of the Austro-Hungarian forces in the Isonzo was Arz von Straussenberg. He asked Germany for more help and Germany's commanders felt it was prudent to support him.

Aerial observations meant that the Italian Army was aware that a build up of sorts was taking place, though the Italian commander, Cadorna, did not know the actual figures involved. The Germans had decided on a mass attack on a front near Caporetto. It was the weakest spot in the Italian front line. Overall, the Italians had a numerical advantage over the attacking Germans (by 41 divisions to 35) but around Caporetto, they were more thin on the ground.

The attack started on October 24th. Aided by mist, the German attack completely surprised the Italians. The German commander of the German force, Otto von Bulow, was surprised by the success of his initial attacks. Cadorna ordered the commander at Caporetto to man a defensive line. However, the commander, Capello, decided on the opposite. He adopted a policy of aggression against the enemy which proved very costly and unsuccessful.

By the end of the day, the Germans fighting near Caporetto had advanced 25 kilometres. Other German assaults away from the central attack at Caporetto were less successful and an Austro-Hungarian force made little impact on the southern flank of the attack. However, the success of the central thrust by the Germans had thrown the Italian Army into disarray. To counter it, the Italians would have had to withdraw men from the sectors that were doing reasonably well against other attacking German and Austro-Hungarian forces - thus handing the advantage to them and possibly initiating further German advances in other sectors.

Despite his earlier aggressive stance, Capello requested that his forces should be allowed to withdraw. This was not allowed by Cadorna who hoped that the Italian Army would be able to regroup and fight back. This was not to be. By October 30th, the Italian Army had been pushed back to the River Tagliamento. It took four days for them to cross it. However, it was at this point that the Germans and Austro-Hungarian forces became victims of their own success. Their forward movement had been so great that their supply lines had been stretched too far. The Germans were unable to launch a fresh attack against the retreating Italian Army and in what must have seemed like a lull in the fighting, the Italians were able to withdraw to the River Piave just under 20 miles north of Venice.

The Battle of Caporetto and the subsequent withdrawal, had a major impact on the Italian Army. The Italians lost 300,000 men - of these, about 270,000 were captured and held as prisoners. Nearly all artillery guns had been lost. Such was the state of the Italian Army after Caporetto, the Allies sent to the region eleven divisions - six French and five British. Both forces were assisted by air power. Ironically, the disaster at Caporetto brought the new government under Orlando and the Italian people closer together. Patriotism rallied the nation and previously popular anti-war sentiments were effectively squashed.
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Vladimir Lenin



Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov was born in Simbirsk on the Volga River on 22 April 1870 into a well-educated family. He excelled at school and went on to study law. At university, he was exposed to radical thinking, and his views were also influenced by the execution of his elder brother, a member of a revolutionary group.

Expelled from university for his radical policies, Lenin completed his law degree as an external student in 1891. He moved to St Petersburg and became a professional revolutionary. Like many of his contemporaries, he was arrested and exiled to Siberia, where he married Nadezhda Krupskaya. After his Siberian exile, Lenin - the pseudonym he adopted in 1901 - spent most of the subsequent decade and a half in western Europe, where he emerged as a prominent figure in the international revolutionary movement and became the leader of the 'Bolshevik' faction of the Russian Social Democratic Worker's Party.

In 1917, exhausted by World War One, Russia was ripe for change. Assisted by the Germans, who hoped that he would undermine the Russian war effort, Lenin returned home and started working against the provisional government that had overthrown the tsarist regime. He eventually led what was soon to be known as the October Revolution, but was effectively a coup d'etat. Almost three years of civil war followed. The Bolsheviks were victorious and assumed total control of the country. During this period of revolution, war and famine, Lenin demonstrated a chilling disregard for the sufferings of his fellow countrymen and mercilessly crushed any opposition.

Although Lenin was ruthless he was also pragmatic. When his efforts to transform the Russian economy to a socialist model stalled, he introduced the New Economic Policy, where a measure of private enterprise was again permitted, a policy that continued for several years after his death. In 1918, Lenin narrowly survived an assassination attempt, but was severely wounded. His long term health was affected, and in 1922 he suffered a stroke from which he never fully recovered. In his declining years, he worried about the bureaucratisation of the regime and also expressed concern over the increasing power of his eventual successor Joseph Stalin. Lenin died on 24 January 1924. His corpse was embalmed and placed in a mausoleum on Moscow's Red Square.
(Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic...)

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by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
by Robert Service
by Dmitri Volkogonov (no photo)
by Louis Fischer (no photo)
by Tony Cliff
by Christopher Hill (no photo)
by Christopher Read (no photo)

Francis E. Warren



WARREN, Francis Emroy, a Senator from Wyoming; born in Hinsdale, Berkshire County, Mass., June 20, 1844; attended the common schools and Hinsdale Academy; during the Civil War enlisted in the Forty-ninth Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, and served as a private and noncommissioned officer until he was mustered out of the service; received the Congressional Medal of Honor for gallantry on the battlefield at the siege of Port Hudson; later served as captain in the Massachusetts militia; engaged in farming and stock raising in Massachusetts; moved to Wyoming (then a part of the Territory of Dakota) in 1868; became interested in the real estate, mercantile, livestock, and lighting businesses in Cheyenne; member, Territorial senate 1873-1874, serving as president; member of the city council 1873-1874; treasurer of Wyoming 1876, 1879, 1882, 1884; member, Territorial senate 1884-1885; mayor of Cheyenne 1885; appointed Governor of the Territory of Wyoming by President Chester Arthur in February 1885 but was removed by President Grover Cleveland in November 1886; again appointed Governor by President Benjamin Harrison in March 1889 and served until elected to the position in 1890; elected as the first Governor of the State in September 1890, but resigned on November 24, 1890, having been elected Senator; elected as a Republican to the United States Senate on November 18, 1890; took oath of office in open session on December 1, 1890, and drew the lot for term ending March 3, 1893; served from November 24, 1890, until March 3, 1893; resumed agricultural pursuits and stock raising; again elected to the United States Senate in 1895; reelected in 1901, 1907, 1913, 1918 and 1924 and served from March 4, 1895, until his death; chairman, Committee on Irrigation and Reclamation of Arid Lands (Fifty-second, Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth Congresses), Committee on Claims (Fifty-sixth through Fifty-ninth Congresses), Committee on Irrigation (Fifty-ninth Congress), Committee on Military Affairs (Fifty-ninth through Sixty-first Congresses), Committee on Public Buildings and Grounds (Fifty-ninth Congress), Committee on Agriculture and Forestry (Sixty-first Congress), Committee on Appropriations (Sixty-second and Sixty-sixth through Seventy-first Congresses), Committee on Engrossed Bills (Sixty-third through Sixty-fifth Congresses); died in Washington, D.C., November 24, 1929; funeral services were held in the Chamber of the United States Senate; interment in Lakeview Cemetery, Cheyenne, Wyo.
(Source: http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/...)

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(no image) Senators of the United States: A Historical Bibliography, a Compilation of Works by and About Members of the United States Senate, 1789-1995 by Jo Anne McCormick Quatannens (no photo)

George Washington Geothals



George Washington Goethals was born in Brooklyn, New York, on June 29, 1858, the son of John and Marie Baron Goethals. He received his training as an officer in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He was appointed to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, from which he graduated in 1880. He was commissioned a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on June 12, 1880. In the eighties he served for four years as an instructor in civil and military engineering at the Military Academy. He was promoted to first lieutenant in 1882, and to captain on December 14, 1891. In 1884 he married Effie Rodman.

During the Spanish-American War he served as Chief of Engineers in the Volunteer Army, with the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He was later placed in charge of the Muscle Shoals canal construction on the Tennessee River and also built canals near Chattanooga, Tennessee and at Colbert Shoals, Alabama.

On March 4, 1907, Goethals was appointed by President Roosevelt Chairman and Chief Engineer of the Isthmian Canal Commission (I.C.C.). He served in that position until completion of Canal construction in 1914, following which he served as Governor of the Panama Canal until his resignation January 17, 1917.

As Chief Engineer of the I.C.C., Goethals faced many daunting tasks. Aside from the task of eliminating disease, Goethals was faced by many unique problems, any one which was a stupendous work in itself. The first of these was the cutting down to a much lower level several good sized mountains near the center of the Isthmus in order to minimize the elevation of the canal itself.

The second mightiest feat was the damming of the powerful and erratic Chagres River with the Gatun Dam and the formation of Gatun Lake. The third was the building of the huge concrete locks with filling and emptying systems and great steel gates with opening and closing devices. Many times the plans were changed, and the chief engineer himself spent many sleepless nights working out the complicated calculations. But finally the job was done, and in 1915 General Goethals received the thanks of U.S. Congress "for distinguished service in constructing the Panama Canal."

The name Goethals will be recorded in history as the man who accomplished one of the greatest feats of engineering and construction since the Egyptians completed the mighty pyramids - the construction of the Panama Canal.

From April to July 1917 Goethals served as General Manager of the Emergency Fleet Corporation, and on December 18, 1917, was recalled to active duty and appointed Acting Quartermaster General, U.S. Army. From 1918 to 1919 he was Chief, Division of Purchase, Storage and Traffic, U.S. Army. At his request, Goethals was relieved of active duty with the Army in March 1919.

From 1919 to 1928 Goethals was President of George W. Goethals and Company, a New York engineering firm and Advisor and Consulting Engineer to the Port Authority of New York.

Goethals died on January 21, 1928, in New York City. Many tributes have been paid to Goethals by distinguished persons. Of these, the following most represents consensus about the man and about his achievements.
(Source: http://www.pancanal.com/eng/history/b...)

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by Joseph Buchlin Bishop (no photo)
by Phyllis A. Zimmerman (no photo)
by Julie Greene (no photo)
by Jon T. Hoffman (no photo)
by David McCullough

Sir William Wiseman



Wiseman was a British intelligence agent and banker. He was a general partner at American investment bank Kuhn, Loeb & Co. from 1929 till 1960.

The grandson of Sir William Wiseman, 8th Baronet, a British naval officer, he received his education at Winchester College and Jesus College, Cambridge. As a businessman before the outbreak of World War I he was Chairman in London of Hendens Trust. From 1914 he served as a Lieutenant Colonel with the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry but, following injury, transferred to military intelligence. He was sent by Secret Intelligence Service director, Mansfield Smith-Cumming, to establish the agency's office in New York, 'Section V'. As the head of the British intelligence mission in the United States, Wiseman was extensively involved in the counter-intelligence against the Indian sedetionists and was ultimately responsible for leaking to New York Police, bypassing diplomatic channels, the details of a bomb plot that led to the uncovering of the Hindu Conspiracy.

He acted as a liaison between Woodrow Wilson and the British government. He and his associate General Julius Klein were closely associated with Special Advisor to Wilson Colonel Edward M. House. He met with Wilson on a regular basis and on one notable occasion in August 1918 spent a week’s vacation with the President and House.[2] Wiseman was also a mentor to spy chief William Stephenson.[3] After the war, was a participant in the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. He remained in the U.S. as an employee of Kuhn Loeb, becoming a partner in 1929.
(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Wil...)

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by Anne Cipriano Venzon (no photo)
(no image) British-American Relations, 1917-1918: The Role of Sir William Wiseman by Wilton B. Fowler (no photo)

Railroad War Board

In April 11, 1917, five days after Congress declared war on Germany, and the United States entered into World War I (1914–1918), the president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, Daniel Willard called a meeting of railroad executives in Washington, DC. The executives signed a resolution agreeing to support the war effort by running their lines in a coordinated manner to create a "continental railway system." The conference set up a five-person Railroad War Board to oversee the plan. The plan's objectives were to maximize use of all railroad potentials and speed up transport. Pools were organized; load weights were increased to utilize the full capacity of cars; the loading and unloading of freight were expedited. Shipping times of war-related goods (such as coal and iron) were speeded by prohibiting transport of non-related items during certain hours. Use of all in-service equipment was maximized and some passenger lines were eliminated in order to conserve coal.

The Railroad War Board and the companies it coordinated faced numerous obstacles in reaching their goals. One of them was a labor shortage that resulted from the draft: the passage of the Selective Service Act (May 1917) required men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty (later eighteen to forty-five) to register for military service. Some 70,000 of the draftees were rail workers. Shortages of equipment, parts, and capital also hampered the wartime effort. Nevertheless, the actions directed by the Railroad War Board and carried out by the railroads allowed carriers to operate as a unit. During World War I anti-trust laws were suspended because of the national emergency; corporations set aside their private interests to run a nationwide rail service in support of the fight for democracy.
(Source: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3...)

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(no image) Antitrust And Regulation During World War I And The Republican Era, 1917 1932 by Robert F. Himmelberg (no photo)

Fuel Administration

was a World War I-era agency of the Federal government of the United States established by Executive Order 2690 of August 23, 1917 pursuant to the Food and Fuel Control Act.

Even prior to a declaration of war by the United States, shortages of coal were experienced in the winter of 1916-17. To address concerns about a steady supply of fuel to support military and industrial operations and for use by consumers, in 1917 the Federal Fuel Administration was established and US President Woodrow Wilson appointed Harry A. Garfield to lead the agency. Garfield in turn selected local administrators for each state. Fuel committees were organized down to the county level.

The activities of the administration included setting and enforcing the prices of coal. The administration had broad powers to set the price of coal at various points (mine, dock) and the cost of transportation (by rail), and in regards to end use (home, factory, or business, etc.).
(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_...)

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by David M. Kennedy (no photo)

Harry Garfield



Harry Augustus Garfield was born on Oct. 11, 1863 in Hiram, Ohio. In 1880, his father, James A. Garfield, was elected president of the United States. Harry and his brother James were acccompanying their father to his Williams class reunion when President Garfield was shot at the Washington train station on July 2, 1881. The brothers entered Williams on Sept. 5, 1881, just two weeks before their father died.

At Williams, Garfield was a member of Alpha Delta Phi, the Philologian Society, Glee Club, church choir, and the Athenaeum writing staff. He graduated in 1885 and went on to study law at Columbia Law School, spending his second year reading law at All Soul's College in Oxford and the Inns Court in London.

Garfield returned to Ohio in 1888 to practice law with his brother in Cleveland. In the same year he married Belle Mason. They had four children: James in 1889, Mason in 1892, Lucretia in 1894, and Stanton in 1895. During these years, Garfield was professor of contracts at Western Reserve Law School and very active in the Cleveland community.

From 1900-1906 Garfield served as president of the National Consular Reorganization Committee, which worked to abolish political patronage in consular appointments. In 1903 Woodrow Wilson appointed him professor of politics at Princeton University.

In 1908 Garfield was inducted as the eighth president of Williams College. Garfield served as chairman of the Price Committee of the U.S. Food Administration in 1917 and took a leave of absence from 1917-1919 to serve as fuel administrator of the U.S. Fuel Administration, regulating the production, price, and distribution of coal during World War I. Garfield was presented with the Distinguished Service Medal in 1921.

Garfield oversaw the eleven-year life of the Institute of Politics at Williams from 1921-1932. He retired in June 1934 and embarked on a one-year round-the-world trip with Belle.

The Garfields returned to the U.S. in 1935, settling in Washington, D.C., where Garfield spent his time studying international problems. The Garfields continued to summer in Williamstown and Duxbury.

Garfield re-entered the national arena briefly in 1941, accepting an appointment to the War Department Defense Board, a 14-member board studying the Excess Profits Law during World War II. On Dec. 12, 1942, Garfield died of natural causes at the Williamstown Inn.
(Source: http://archives.williams.edu/presiden...)

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by Noah McCullough (no photo)

East St. Louis Race Riot (1917)



The East St. Louis Riot (May and July 1917) was an outbreak of labor and race-related violence that caused between 40 and 200 deaths and extensive property damage. East St. Louis, Illinois, is an industrial city on the east bank of the Mississippi River across from St. Louis, Missouri. It was the worst incidence of labor-related violence in 20th-century American history,[1] and one of the worst race riots in U.S. history. The local Chamber of Commerce called for the resignation of the police chief. At the end of the month, ten thousand people marched in silent protest in New York City over the riots.
(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_St....)

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by Harper Barnes (no photo)
by Elliott Rudwick (no photo)

Houston Riot (1917)



In the spring of 1917, shortly after the United States declared war on Germany, the War Department, taking advantage of the temperate climate and newly opened Houston Ship Channel, ordered two military installations built in Harris County—Camp Logan and Ellington Field.qqv The Illinois National Guard was to train at Camp Logan, located on the northwest outskirts of the city. To guard the construction site, on July 27, 1917, the army ordered the Third Battalion of the black Twenty-fourth United States Infantry to travel by train with seven white officers from the regimental encampment at Columbus, New Mexico, to Houston. From the outset, the black contingent faced racial discrimination when they received passes to go into the city. A majority of the men had been raised in the South and were familiar with segregation, but as army servicemen they expected equal treatment. Those individuals responsible for keeping order, especially the police, streetcar conductors, and public officials, viewed the presence of black soldiers as a threat to racial harmony. Many Houstonians thought that if the black soldiers were shown the same respect as white soldiers, black residents of the city might come to expect similar treatment. Black soldiers were willing to abide by the legal restrictions imposed by segregated practices, but they resented the manner in which the laws were enforced. They disliked having to stand in the rear of streetcars when vacant seats were available in the "white" section and resented the racial slurs hurled at them by white laborers at Camp Logan. Some police officers regularly harassed African Americans, both soldiers and civilians. Most black Houstonians concealed their hostility and endured the abuse, but a number of black soldiers openly expressed their resentment. The police recognized the plight of the enlisted men, but did little to alert civil authorities to the growing tensions. When they sought ways to keep the enlisted men at the camp, the blacks disliked this exchange of their freedom for racial peace.

On August 23, 1917, a riot erupted in Houston. Near noon, two policemen arrested a black soldier for interfering with their arrest of a black woman in the Fourth Ward. Early in the afternoon, when Cpl. Charles Baltimore, one of the twelve black military policemen with the battalion, inquired about the soldier's arrest, words were exchanged and the policeman hit Baltimore over the head. The MPs fled. The police fired at Baltimore three times, chased him into an unoccupied house, and took him to police headquarters. Though he was soon released, a rumor quickly reached Camp Logan that he had been shot and killed. A group of soldiers decided to march on the police station in the Fourth Ward and secure his release. If the police could assault a model soldier like Baltimore, they reasoned, none of them was safe from abuse. Maj. Kneeland S. Snow, battalion commander, initially discounted the news of impending trouble. Around 8 P.M. Sgt. Vida Henry of I Company confirmed the rumors, and Kneeland ordered the first sergeants to collect all rifles and search the camp for loose ammunition. During this process, a soldier suddenly screamed that a white mob was approaching the camp. Black soldiers rushed into the supply tents, grabbed rifles, and began firing wildly in the direction of supposed mob. The white officers found it impossible to restore order. Sergeant Henry led over 100 armed soldiers toward downtown Houston by way of Brunner Avenue and San Felipe Street and into the Fourth Ward. In their two-hour march on the city, the mutinous blacks killed fifteen whites, including four policemen, and seriously wounded twelve others, one of whom, a policeman, subsequently died. Four black soldiers also died. Two were accidentally shot by their own men, one in camp and the other on San Felipe Street. After they had killed Capt. Joseph Mattes of the Illinois National Guard, obviously mistaking him for a policeman, the blacks began quarreling over a course of action. After two hours, Henry advised the men to slip back into camp in the darkness—and shot himself in the head.

Early next morning, August 24, civil authorities imposed a curfew in Houston. On the twenty-fifth, the army hustled the Third Battalion aboard a train to Columbus, New Mexico. There, seven black mutineers agreed to testify against the others in exchange for clemency. Between November 1, 1917, and March 26, 1918, the army held three separate courts-martial in the chapel at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. The military tribunals indicted 118 enlisted men of I Company for participating in the mutiny and riot, and found 110 guilty. It was wartime, and the sentences were harsh. Nineteen mutinous soldiers were hanged and sixty-three received life sentences in federal prison. One was judged incompetent to stand trial. Two white officers faced courts-martial, but they were released. No white civilians were brought to trial. The Houston Riot of 1917 was one of the saddest chapters in the history of American race relations. It vividly illustrated the problems that the nation struggled with on the home front during wartime.
(Source: http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/on...)

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(no image) A Night of Violence: The Houston Riot of 1917 by Robert V. Haynes (no photo)
by Garna L. Christian (no photo)
by Bruce A. Glasrud (no photo)
by Evelyn Mundell (no photo)
by Ralph Wooster (no photo)

U.S. Food Administration



A few weeks after America entered World War I, a volunteer organization was established (May 4, 1917). It soon became apparent that the War required a much greater Federal effort to address the issues concerned with food production. Food shortages began to appear as prices were rising in 1917. President Wilson established the United States Food Administration (USFA) as an independent agency by President Wilson with Executive Order EO 2679-A (August 10, 1917). The President acted under the authority of the Food and Fuel Control Act (40 Stat. 276), August 10, 1917. The task assigned to the USFA was to regulate the supply, distribution, and conservation of foods. The USFA bought and sold grain and sugar and their products through two subsidiaries: the Food Administration Grain Corporation (U.S. Grain Corporation) and the U.S. Sugar Equalization Board, Inc.
(Source: http://histclo.com/essay/war/ww1/cou/...)

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by George H. Nash (no photo)
by Norman Bolotin (no photo)
(no image) History of the United States Food Administration, 1917-1919 by William Clinton Mullendore (no photo)

National Women's Party



Founded in 1913 as the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (CU), the National Woman’s Party (NWP) was instrumental in raising public awareness of the women’s suffrage campaign. Using a variety of tactics, the party successfully pressured President Woodrow Wilson, members of Congress, and state legislators to support passage of a 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing women nationwide the right to vote. In so doing, the NWP established a legacy defending the exercise of free speech, free assembly, and the right to dissent.

The NWP effectively commanded the attention of politicians and the public through its aggressive agitation, relentless lobbying, clever publicity stunts, and creative examples of civil disobedience and nonviolent confrontation. Its tactics were versatile and imaginative, drawing inspiration from a variety of sources–including the British suffrage campaign, the American labor movement, and the temperance, antislavery, and early women’s rights campaigns in the United States.

Traditional lobbying and petitioning were a mainstay of NWP members, but these activities were supplemented by other more public actions–including parades, pageants, street speaking, and demonstrations. The party eventually realized that it needed to escalate its pressure and adopt even more aggressive tactics. Most important among these was picketing the White House over many months, leading to the arrest and imprisonment of many suffragists.

The willingness of NWP pickets to be arrested, their campaign for recognition as political prisoners rather than as criminals, and their acts of civil disobedience in jail shocked the nation and brought attention and support to their cause. Through constant agitation, the NWP effectively compelled President Wilson to support a federal woman suffrage amendment. Similar pressure on national and state legislators led to the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920.
(Source: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collectio...)

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by Inez Haynes Irwin (no photo)
by Eleanor Flexner (no photo)
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by Doris Stevens (no photo)
(no image) Everyone Was Brave ;A History Of Feminism In America by William L. O'Neill (no photo)

The National American Woman Suffrage Association



In 1869, the women's suffrage movement split over the 15th Amendment, which granted the vote to black men, but not to women. Some women, like Lucy Stone, thought that any increase in the franchise was a step in the right direction; others, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony thought that an amendment allowing black men to vote without granting women's suffrage was dangerous. In 1890, with Reconstruction over, and the fight over the 15th Amendment long past, the two camps reconciled and founded the National American Women's Suffrage Association (NAWSA).

The founding of NAWSA marked an important step in the national fight for the right to vote, but most of the work was done on a local level. In the absence of an amendment to the national constitution, it was the states that controlled the "time, place, and manner" of elections, and that included whether or not women could participate. In addition, state legislatures would ultimately have to ratify any amendment that Congress passed. Starting with Wyoming, suffragists had a string of successes in the west, where the fight was made easier because of the absence of the social divisions present in the east.

By 1910, the battle for women's suffrage had become a mass movement, and in 1916, NAWSA found itself on the conservative side of the movement. Alice Paul, the founder of the rival National Women's Party (NWP), used confrontational methods based on the tactics of the British suffragists. The NWP demonstrated in front of the White House even as the country entered World War I, risking vilification at a time of increased jingoism. In contrast, NAWSA presented itself as patriotic, demanding democracy at home while the country was fighting for democracy abroad. By 1919, suffragists mobilized to win passage of the 19th Amendment.
(Source: http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/ww/nawsa.html)

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by Ellen Carol DuBois (no photo)
by Eleanor Flexner (no photo)
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by Suzanne O'Dea Schenken (no photo)

Elihu Root



Elihu Root (February 15, 1845-February 7, 1937), who became one of the most brilliant administrators in American history, was born in Clinton, New York, son of a professor of mathematics at Hamilton College. Perhaps it was inevitable that the father and Elihu's elder brother, who was also a mathematician, should be nicknamed «Cube» and «Square». At Hamilton College, Elihu was graduated first in his class in 1864 at the age of nineteen. He taught school for one year, was graduated from the Law School of New York University in 1867, founded a law firm after one year of practice, and by the age of thirty had established himself as a prominent lawyer specializing in corporate affairs. He became a wealthy man in the thirty or so years which he devoted to legal practice, acting as counsel to banks, railroads, and some of the great financiers of the day. His comprehensive grasp of legal principles, his formidable power of analysis, his creative genius in discovering solutions to problems, his disciplined attention to detail, and his skill in expression, whether written or oral, earned him recognition from his colleagues as the leader of the American bar.

Although he had participated in local Republican politics in New York, he was little known as a political figure when, in 1899, President McKinley invited him to become his secretary of war. Since the nation was just emerging from the Spanish-American War, it seemed an unlikely appointment. But President McKinley, with remarkable insight, said that he needed a lawyer in the post, not a military man, and Root accepted the call of what he called «the greatest of all our clients, the government of our country»1.

As secretary of war from 1899 to 1904, Root performed the services that moved Henry L. Stimson, himself a later secretary of war, to say that «no such intelligent, constructive, and vital force» had occupied that post in American history2. He reorganized the administrative system of the War Department, established new procedures for promotion, founded the War College, enlarged West Point, opened schools for special branches of the service, created a general staff, strengthened control over the National Guard, restored discipline within the department. He was most concerned, however, about the three dependencies acquired as a result of the war. He devised a plan for returning Cuba to the Cubans; wrote a democratic charter for the governance of the Philippines, designing it to insure free government, to protect local customs, and to bring eventual self-determination; and eliminated tariffs on Puerto Rican goods imported into the United States.

He returned to his private legal practice in 1904, but in 1905 at President Theodore Roosevelt's invitation, accepted the post of secretary of state. His record is impressive. He brought the consular service under Civil Service, thus removing it from the «spoils system»; maintained the «open door» policy in the Far East, a policy he had helped to formulate as secretary of war; negotiated the so-called «Gentlemen's Agreement» with Japan which dealt with emigration of Japanese to America; strengthened amicable relations with South America in 1906 during an unprecedented diplomatic tour; sponsored the Central American Peace Conference held in Washington in 1907 which resulted in the creation of the Central American Court of Justice, an international tribunal for the judicial settlement of disputes; negotiated some forty reciprocal arbitration treaties; along with Lord Bryce, resolved current American-Canadian problems and instituted the Permanent American-Canadian Joint High Commission for the settlement of future problems.

A United States senator from 1909 to 1915, Elihu Root took an active role in settling the North Atlantic fisheries dispute, in opposing a bill which would have exempted U.S. shipping from paying tolls to use the Panama Canal while levying charges against other nations' shipping, and in pressing for international arbitration.

In 1915 he declined candidacy for reelection to the Senate and even declined, at least publicly, nomination by the Republican Party for the presidency of the United States. Although seventy years of age, he continued to be active as an elder statesman. He opposed Woodrow Wilson's neutrality policy but supported him during the war; he accepted Wilson's appointment as ambassador extraordinary to head a special diplomatic mission to Russia in 1917; on the 1919 Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations he took a middle stance between Wilson on the one hand and the «irreconcilables» on the other; as a delegate to the Washington Naval Conference of 1921-1922, he took a leading role in drafting the Five-Power Treaty limiting naval armament.

Root dedicated a large portion of his life to the cause of international arbitration. He, more than any other, formulated the plan to create the Central American Court of Justice. In 1907 he instructed the American delegates to the Hague Conference to support the founding of a World Court; in 1920, at the request of the Council of the League of Nations, he served on a committee to devise plans for the Permanent Court of International Justice which was set up in 1921; in 1929 after intermittent discussion between the League and the United States concerning certain reservations the Senate had insisted upon in its 1926 ratification of the Protocol for U. S. participation in the court, Root, on his eighty-fourth birthday, left for Geneva where he convinced the delegates from fifty-five nations to accept a revised Protocol; he later appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to urge ratification, but the Senate failed to act at that time and eventually declined to ratify at all.

Root was the first president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and helped to found its European counterpart. He believed that international law, along with its accompanying machinery, represented mankind's best chance to achieve world peace, but like the hardheaded realist he was, he also believed that it would take much time, wisdom, patience, and toil to implement it effectively.
(Source: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prize...)

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elihu_Root
http://history.state.gov/departmenthi...
http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/...
http://www.nps.gov/thri/elihuroot.htm
http://millercenter.org/president/roo...
by Richard William Leopold (no photo)
by Elihu Root (no photo)
by Warren Zimmermann (no photo)
(no image) Elihu Root (2 Volumes) by Philip Caryl Jessup (no photo)