Wrathful Decade

On April 6, 1927, the tenth anniversary of U. S. entrance into the World War, there was a verbal furor in U. S. magazines--particularly in the monthly reviews prepared well in advance--on the failure of peace and the possibility of a new super-struggle. Asia, of course, was picked as the seat of the next world broil--with the brooding Balkans as an alternative. The World's Work, for example, devoted nearly its entire April issue to such subjects as: "Fever Spots in the World's Politics," "Where the Next World War will Start," "How We Shall Lose the Next War."

But no man in the nation had a. better reason to speak than the editor of the Nation (weekly), Oswald Garrison Villard, for whom pacifism is a supreme virtue.* To him, the U. S. participation in the World War was a crime--he said so at the time and had some of his writings barred from the U. S. mails--to him, the Versailles peace settlement was an atrocity; to him, the last ten years have been a mess--an inevitable mess, resulting from a noxious disease. Last week was clearly his week and he wrote with the wrath of a decade:

"Woodrow Wilson himself declared that the 'full price of peace' would be 'full, impartial justice-- justice done at every point and to every nation. . . .' What a mockery, what a still-born judgment!...

"In Europe the crass and cruel injustices of the peace treaty still cry to high Heaven for redress. In the Tyrol as in other states they curse the name of Wilson, the author of their misery. There is evidence that today the Germans are more popular in France than the Americans; that the acclaim which greeted our plunge into the War has turned to envy, bitterness and open revolt at what they call their bond-slavery to our Treasury. Everywhere in Europe the tide of hatred against America rises. Before he died Woodrow Wilson himself said: 'I would like to see Germany clean up France' -- adding, 'I would like to meet Jusserand and tell him that to his face.' . . . Only a man with superb indifference to truth and the realities can assert that the Americans who fell in France did not die in vain. ... In eleven European countries despots wipe their feet upon the prostrate bodies of Liberty and Democracy, though none but Mussolini dares to avow it and to boast of profaning the twin goddesses in be half of whom Woodrow Wilson summoned this country to war. . . .

"Ever since it has seemed as if America had lost its soul. There are voices heard in every direction, nothing clear and nothing definite; no leadership, no guidance, no appeal to our nobler selves. We lost the War and we are drunk by a prosperity which has made us so indifferent that, the gates being left unguarded, the domestic enemy has entered and taken every salient and every trench. What has the country gained at home?. . . The crassest of materialism reigns in Washington by grace of Woodrow Wilson's plunge into the War, and where materialism is there sits corruption. The Denbys, the Falls, the Daughertys, the Dohenys, now all condemned by one court or another, are some of the responses to the appeals for war, to the setting free of the passions that war spells. ...

"Politically the country lies dead. Between the parties there are no issues, no fundamental differences. . . . The one in power mocks our democracy and our humanity in Nicaragua, in Mexico, in China. Bullets, bullets, bullets--these are his threats, these his remedies. ...

"But why go on? The hands of time were turned back, not advanced by the War. . . . The streams of conscience and liberty can be dammed, not dried. They may shrink to rivulets. They will again be rivers . . . only if they will see the truth that there is no enemy to mankind like the sword. . . . By it will perish all liberty, all progress, humanity itself, if it be not forever sheathed."

*Other issues championed by Editor Villard, who is a gentleman in the quaintly literal sense of the word: tolerance and uplift of the Negro, free trade, women's suffrage, child labor laws, free speech. The journalistic tradition of which he is heir was originally voiced by his Abolitionist grandfather, William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the Liberator: "I am in earnest--I will not equivocate--I will not ex-cuse--I will not retreat a single inch-- AND I WILL BE HEARD!"