humanitarian. As Ambassador Page observed in a memorandum dated February 9,1916:
H o u s e arrived from Berlin-Havre-Paris full of the idea of American intervention. First his plan was that he and I and a group of the British Cabinet (Grey, Asquith, Lloyd George, Reading, etc.) should at once work out a minimum programme of peace—the least that the Allies would accept,
On the surface it is a paradox that Wilson, who had always been a pacifist, should now enter into a secret agreement with foreign powers to involve the United States in a war which she could easily avoid. The key that unlocks this mystery is the fact that Wilson also was an internationalist. One of the strongest bonds between House and himself was their common dream of a world government. They both recognized that the American people would never accept such a concept unless there were extenuating circumstances. They reasoned that a long and bloody war was probably the only event that could condition the American mind to accept the loss of national sovereignty, especially if it were packaged with the promise of putting an end to all wars in the future. Wilson knew, also, that, if the United States came into the war early enough to make a real difference on the battlefield and if large amounts of American dollars could be loaned to the Allied powers, he would be in a position after the war to dictate the terms of peace. He wrote to Colonel House:
'England and France have not the same views with regard to peace as we have by any means. When the war is over, we can force them 1. Quoted by Viereck, pp. 112-13.
SINK THE LUSITANIA!
243
to our way of thinking, because by that time they will among other things be financially in our hands.'1 And so Wilson tolerated the agony of mixed emotions as he plotted for war as a necessary evil to bring about what he perceived as the ultimate good of world government.
With the arrival of 1917, the President was planting hints of both war and world government in almost every public utterance. In a typical statement made in March of that year, he said: '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.'2
It was about this same time that Wilson called together the Democratic leaders of Congress to a special breakfast meeting at the White House. He told them that, in spite of public sentiment, there were many sound reasons for the country to enter the war and he asked them to help him sell this plan to Congress and the voters.
Harry Elmer Barnes tells us:
These men were opposed to war and, hence, rejected his proposals somewhat heatedly. Wilson knew that it was a poor time to split the party just before an election, so he dropped the matter at once and, with Col. House, mapped out a pacifist platform for the coming campaign. Governor Martin Glynn of New York and Senator Ollie James of Kentucky were sent to the St. Louis convention to make keynote speeches, which were based on the slogan: 'He kept us out of war!'... Before he had been inaugurated a second time, the Germans played directly into his hands by announcing the resumption of submarine warfare.... It was fortunate for Britain and the bankers that the G e r m a n s m a d e this t i m e l y b l u n d e r , a s G r e a t Britain h a d overdrawn her American credit by some $450,000,000 and the bankers were having trouble in floating more large private loans. It was necessary now to pass on the burden of financing the Entente to the Federal Treasury.
1- Quoted by Ferrell, p. 88.
2- Ferrell, p. 12.
3. Harry Elmer Barnes,
244
THE CREATURE FROM JEKYLL ISLAND
SELLING WAR TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
Through secret agreements and trickery, America had been
committed to war, but the political and monetary scientists realized that something still had to be done to change public sentiment. How could that be accomplished?
Wall Street control over important segments of the media was considerable. George Wheeler tells us: 'Around this time the Morgan firm was choosing the top executives for the old and troubled Harper & Brothers publishing house.... In the newspaper field, Pierpont Morgan at this period was in effective control of the New York
On February 9,1917, Representative Callaway from Texas took the floor of Congress and provided further insight. He said: In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interests, and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press..
They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers.... An agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers.2
Charles S. Mellen of the New Haven Railroad testified before Congress that his Morgan-owned railroad had more than one-thousand New England newspapers on the payroll, costing about $400,000 annually. The railroad also held almost a half-million dollars in bonds issued by the Boston
