Tros Tyriusque mihi nullo discrimme agetur

NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW

MAY, 1920

MR. WILSON, PSYCHOLOGICALLY

BY JOSEPH COLLINS, M. D.

AFTER having lived two years in Italy I found many things about the Italians difficult to understand. After having lived fifty years in the United States of America I find some things about the Americans beyond comprehension.

Nothing is so enigmatic as their attitude toward Woodrow Wilson, the man who was accorded higher esteem in Europe than was ever vouchsafed mortal man, and who gave and has since given earnest of such accord. From the day he decided to represent our country in the Peace Conference the papers and magazines began to contain the material from which could readily be formulated a new Hymn of Hate. What was the genesis of this display? What was the cause of this distrust? From whence did this venom emanate? How could a man whose life was a mirror of integrity, whose ideals were of the loftiest and who conformed his conduct to them excite such contempt? Why should the only statesman who had revealed the ability to formulate a plan which, put in operation, led to cessation of hostilities, who was the leader in formulating the terms of peace, and who insisted, and had his insistence allowed, that it should incorporate a covenant whose enforcement would make for perpetual peace, be hated and distrusted, vilified and traduced, thwarted and misrepresented by so many of his countrymen? What had he done, by commission or omission, that such treatment should be accorded

Copyright, 1920, by North American Review Corporation. All Rights Reserved. VOL. CCXI.-NO. 774.

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him? I know the replies usually given to these questions by his depreciators and defamers. His nature is so imperious and his temper so tyrannical that he cannot cooperate with others; he neither solicits advice nor heeds counsel; he selects his coadjutors, aides and advisers from those whom he knows he can dominate; the passport to his favor is flattery, and intimacy with him is maintained only by the cement of agreement; he neither made preparation for war when there was ample time for doing so nor did he wage war until months after repeated provocations; he is hypocritical in having sought and accomplished election under the slogan " He kept us out of war," and, immediately on being elected, "thrusting" the country into war; he was "too proud to fight" in 1916 but keen to fight in 1917; he has hebrewphilia and popophobia; he is a Socialist masquerading as a Liberal; he is a Bolshevist beneath the mask of a Radical. In brief, he is temperamentally unfit to be President of the United States; intellectually and morally unfit to represent its people, and withal so completely under the dominion of an insatiate ambition to be the greatest man the world has ever known that every kindly feeling has been crowded from him.

Intelligent, educated men who have never seen him, who know little of his career save that he was president of Princeton University and Governor of the State of New Jersey and twice President of the United States elected by the Democratic Party, hate him as if he were a bitter, personal enemy, malign him as if he had injured their reputation for honesty and probity, calumniate him as though he were a man without character, and depreciate him as though his career were barren of signal accomplishment, and distrust his motives and procedures as though he had once, or many times, betrayed them. Men who are unable to give the smallest specificity to their dislike of him feel that they add to their stature by detracting from his accomplishments and defaming him.

Not one of them with whom I have talked has been able to state the facts of his disagreement and rupture with the trustees of Princeton University. My understanding was that he insisted that the University should submit to certain reforms that would make it democratic in reality as well as in name and that would enhance its pedagogical usefulness, and that there should not be a privileged class in the

University, viz.: members of exclusive clubs whose portals were opened by money. He maintained that his training as an educator, his experience as an administrator, his accomplishment as a student of history and as an interpreter of events, his experience with men, entitled him to a judgment concerning the needs of such an institution that should be given a hearing, and he contended that his recommendations, rather than those of trustees whose training had been largely in the world of affairs, be put in operation and at least be given a trial. He had the courage to jeopardize his very bread and butter, and that of his family, at a time in his life when his physical forces had reached their zenith rather than sacrifice what he believed to be a principle. The men who were permitted to take Woodrow Wilson's measure in that contest had no more idea of his stature than if they were blind. They would have laughed to scorn the idea that five years later the people of the United States would select him for their President. It was in this episode that his repute not to be able to do teamwork with his equals and his inferiors originated. Time has shown that it isn't a question at all of not being able to do teamwork. He cannot do his best work in an atmosphere of friction and dissent, and since it is as impossible for him to yield a position which he has taken, and which we shall assume he believes to be right, as it is impossible for the magnet to yield the needle that it has attracted, he adopts the wise course of not entering contests, save golf with his physician; and we must commend his judgment.

His cabinet meetings are a farce, so say they who have never attended one and who have never even spoken to a cabinet member. He selects pygmies for his cabinet and for his aides in order that they may proffer him no advice, resent no contradiction or protest indignities to their offices. This in face of the fact that he and his cabinet and his aides have conditioned the only miracle of modern times, namely, throwing a whole country, millions of whose people were adverse to war, into a bellicose state which was never before witnessed; conditioning and transporting men and material resources of that country across the Atlantic and into the fighting lines at a crucial moment, at a time when the backs of the Allies were against the wall, according to the statements of their own authorized spokesmen; who succeeded in engendering in the composite mind of the American people

a determination to win the war that was more potent than men or weapons; who impregnated the composite soul of the Allies with a faith that the world would be an acceptable abode for the common people once the enemy was crushed that transcended in its intensity the faith of the Christian martyrs; who filled the heart of every statesman of the Allied nations with a hope and belief that there was within him the masterful mind that would conduct their

legions to victory and salvation. If he and his pygmies accomplished this, I am one who maintains they are myrmidons and giants. But they didn't do it, his detractors say. The rejoinder to which is, "I know, a little bird did it!

If we had entered the war after the sinking of the Lusitania when the wise men of the West say we should have gone in, countless lives and inestimable expenditures would have been spared. Where is the man in the United States of America today who has revealed the Jove-like mind that entitles him to make such sentient statement? When he is found, how can he possibly know? What delivery of thought, idea, conception, execution has he ever made that entitles him to be heard, not to say, believed? How can anyone possibly know what would have been the result of our entrance into the war at that time? If any one thing is responsible for America's efficiency in the war, it is that it had the American people fused into one man with one mind, determined to win the war. I am sure that I encountered nothing in the United States in my travel from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back again in the Spring of 1916 that made me believe that the people of our country wanted war, or that there could be developed in them at that time a sentiment which would make for such internal resistance of the people as they displayed in the Spring of 1917 and continued to display until November 11, 1918. I cannot speak from personal knowledge for I was not in the United States during the year of its war efficiency, but I am told that there was never a whisper of disloyalty or a syllable of disparagement of the President personally during that time. But many of those who were silent then are strident now. Their enforced silence has enhanced the carrying-power of their voices, and their clamor prevents the harmony that the world is seeking. They not only defame Wilson but they contend that the part we played in the war has been overestimated. It has been, but not by us.

It

has been evaluated by those whom it was our most sacred privilege to aid. They neither minimize our efforts nor underestimate our accomplishment. The British know that they were steadfast; the French realize that they were resolute; the Italians appreciate that they were brave. We know it, but that does not prevent us from realizing the magnitude of the rôle we played; and the man who was responsible for it is the man to whom the world, save a political party in the United States, gives thanks and expresses appreciation. His name is Woodrow Wilson. Americans do not boast of the part they played in winning the war, but they do encourage that which is far worse than boasting, lying about it, particularly when the motive for such perversion of truth is deprecation of their Chief Executive.

He is an idealist and a theorist. He is the kind of idealist who destroyed the Democratic machine in the State of New Jersey which had been the synonym for corruption in politics for a generation; the kind of idealist who put through the Underwood Tariff Bill which at one stroke did more to strangle the unnatural mother of privilege than any measure in the past twenty years; the kind of idealist who a few months ago when the transport system of the entire country threatened to be hopelessly paralyzed by reason of the determination of the railway magnates to refuse the demands of locomotive engineers that their working-day should consist of eight hours, sent for representatives of the plutocrats and the proletariat and told what they were to do and when they were to do it, and the whole civilized world approved. He is the idealist who has done more to make our Government a republican government representative of the people and not of the party bosses than anyone in the memory of man. He is the idealist who is a scholar, a thinker, a statesman, a creator, an administrator and a man of vision. More than that, he is an efficiency expert in the realm of world-ordering.

His Secretary of War is a failure; his Secretary of State is a figurehead; his Secretary of Finance is his family, and so on ad nauseam.

I am not a competent judge of whether Mr. Baker has been a good Secretary of War or not, but I am sure that he is not so unfit as Simon Cameron was. No one has said of him: "Cameron is utterly ignorant and regardless of the course of things and probable result. Selfish and openly