Time travel blogging: a fundi for peace

Williams Jennings Bryan (1860-1925) is remembered for the escapade which he concluded just before he died, his defense of the fundamentalist anti-evolution cause in the "Scopes Monkey Trial" in Tennessee. But he first became famous as the leader of the Populist Party who was also the Democratic nominee for President in 1896. The Populists were a "third party" that achieved some real clout.

He served as Woodrow Wilson's first Secretary of State. Bryan resigned in 1915 over his concern that Wilson's policies were leaning too heavily toward involvement in the European war. I just came across a quotation from Sir Cecil Spring Rice, British Ambassador to the US, from a letter he wrote in November of 1914, when the war was still in its early months:

Bryan spoke to me about peace as he always does. He sighs for the Nobel Prize, and besides that he is a really convinced peaceman. He has just given me a sword beaten into a ploughshare six inches long to serve as a paperweight. It is adorned with quotations from Isaiah and himself. No one doubts his sincerity, but that is rather embarrassing for us at the present moment, because he is always at us with peace propositions. This time, he said he could not understand why we could not say what we were fighting for. The nation which continued war had as much responsibility as the country which began it. The United States was the one great Power which was outside the struggle and it was their duty to do what they could to put an end to it. -I felt rather cross and said that the United States were signatories to the Hague Convention, which had been grossly violated again and again without one word from the principal neutral nation. They [the US] were now out of court. They had done nothing to prevent the crime, and now they must not prevent the punishment. —He [Bryan] said that all the Powers concerned had been disappointed in their ambitions. Germany had not taken Paris. France had not retaken Alsace, England had not cleared the seas of the German Nary. The last month had made no appreciable difference in the relative positions of the armies, and there was now no prospect of an issue satisfactory to any Power. Why should they not make peace now, if they had to make peace a year hence after another year's fruitless struggle. It would be far wiser if each said what it was fighting for and asked the United States to help them in arriving at a peaceful conclusion. (my emphasis)

Is anyone likely to say about today's Christian fundamentalist leaders like James Dobson, Pat Robertson or Maverick McCain's soulmate John Hagee that one of them was "a really convinced peaceman"? The idea is just laughable.

It's also a dramatic image, the cynical and worldly British diplomat sniffing about how "cross" he was at the foolishness of this rube who couldn't "understand why we could not say what we were fighting for". Also at the impertinence of this backwoods hick who challenged him with the notion, "Why should they not make peace now, if they had to make peace a year hence after another year's fruitless struggle."

By any sane measure that I can conceive, if those royalist fools in Europe had decided at that time to end their war, they would have avoided years of needless slaughter, which at the end had as its principal result setting the stage for the next World War. It left the Russian, Austrian, German and Ottoman Empires as wreckage in its wake. Much of the trouble in the Middle East today can be traced to the noble office of British and French imperialists trying to carve up the former Ottoman lands to their liking. At least the British had since enough after years of pointless colonial war in Iraq during the 1920s to call it a day and leave.

Psa-aah, he expects us to say what were fighting for. What a silly man! That Sir Cecil sounds like a man after John McCain's own "maverick" heart.

(Spring Rice quote from "Why We Went To War" by Newton Baker Foreign Affairs Oct 1936)

Tags: first world war, william jennings bryan