The La Follettes of Wisconsin by Bernard A. Weisberger

Author:Bernard A. Weisberger [Bernard A. Weisberger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press

“History will hold us accountable”

The small peace movement in the United States was a loose alliance of organizations well supplied with eloquent progressive leaders—people like Jane Addams, Frederic Howe, Florence Kelley, John Haynes Holmes, Rabbi Stephen Wise, and Belle La Follette—but lacking the political clout embodied in a significant number of elected supporters. True, many congressmen routinely praised the virtues of peace and scolded the “militarism” of other countries. But few risked their political necks by criticizing the institution of war itself or by taking a leading part in trying to end the carnage in Europe. Bob was one of the few exceptions.

He wanted to get the United States, as the strongest nonbelligerent power, to work actively for a settlement of the war. It could do so either by offering its own good offices or calling a conference of neutral nations that would encourage the warring governments to state their conflicting aims, and would then propose and negotiate compromises—a kind of ad hoc, temporary international peacemaking body. The flaw in the conception was that rulers had become the prisoners of their own rhetoric. Like the new machines of war, mass propaganda was carrying the conflict to levels of unmanageable intensity. Each side had saturated its own people with the argument that the struggle was between good and evil, national safety or national extinction. Neither, therefore, could comfortably haggle in public about concrete objectives. It would look like calculating how many lives they were willing to spend for spoils. The odds against negotiation were prohibitive.

All the same, in the short session of Congress that began in the winter of 1914–1915, La Follette made his first try at a peace policy. On February 8, 1915, he introduced a resolution that called for the United States to sponsor a convocation of neutrals to offer mediation and to make long-range proposals for limiting the scope and destructiveness of war itself. Possible examples might be arms limitation, controls on the export of armaments, neutralization of some trade routes and safeguards for neutral rights, and the establishment of a permanent international judicial body to which quarreling countries could refer disputes.

La Follette claimed neither originality nor novelty for any of these ideas, and at least one version of the international court—the Hague Tribunal—had been in existence, for the most part impotently, since 1899. The time was not ripe, as Bob undoubtedly knew, and the resolution was buried in the Foreign Relations Committee until the adjournment date of March 4. One chance to put peacemaking on the agenda had gone by.8

At the State Department, meanwhile, Secretary Bryan was trying to nudge both the British and the Germans toward a greater commitment to freedom of the seas by abandoning their more offensive practices. Having successfully negotiated a number of international arbitration treaties in his two years, he still had hopes of reversing the juggernaut. But the clock was running against his efforts as well as La Follette’s as the spring fighting began in earnest. First came the sinking of a British ship on which an American was killed, and then of a United States–owned tanker.

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