Rich Rostrom wrote in news:bac9489f-dbcf-41e8-
8ef7-67f0adac130d@r24g2000yqd.googlegroups.com:
> On Feb 7, 11:11 am, David Tenner wrote:
>
>> President Bryan will make plenty of mistakes and will be subject to plent
> y of
>> (sometimes justified) ridicule from the press. Still, as I note there,
> at
>> least Bryan did sense something very important about American public
>> opinion--which is that it definitely did not want to get into the war.
>
> Yabbut... ISTM that Bryan might well have
> put his foot in it in 1914. Bryan was AIUI
> an enthusiast for the liberation of Cuba.
>
> I don't suggest that he would get the U.S.
> into the war in 1914. But he might very well
> react extremely strongly to the . of
> Belgium. Having direct access to the reports
> of diplomats and others, he'll be more upset
> than the public at large, and won't know at
> the time that he's an outlier.
>
That definitely does not seem to have been the case in OTL. Here is Sir Cecil
Spring-Rice on November 13, 1914 to Sir Arthur Nicolson on what Bryan had
told Spring-Rice:
"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 paper-
weight. 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 were now out of court. They had
done nothing to prevent the crime, and now they must not prevent the
punishment. --
"He 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 navy. 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. --
"I asked him if he thought that under present circumstances Germany would
give up Belgium and compensate her for her suffering. If not, how could the
United States Government go on record as condoning a peace which would put
the seal on the most disgraceful act of tyranny and oppression committed in
modern times? I didn't believe there was a man in the country not a German or
a Jew who could advocate such a cause. --
"He got rather angry and said that if that was what we wanted, why did we not
say so. He added, *Who can tell who was really responsible for what had
happened in Belgium or whether the treaty wasn't only a pretext?'* [my
emphasis--DT] I reminded him that he was a great admirer of Gladstone, who
was like him, a great lover of peace, and that Gladstone had always
maintained that if we had gone to war for Belgium in 1870, we should have
gone to war for freedom and for public right and to save human happiness from
being invaded by a tyrannous and lawless power, and that in such a war as
that while the breath continued in his body he was ready to engage. This
rather surprised him as he had read in the newspapers that Gladstone had
always maintained that the Belgian Treaty was not binding."
http://www.gwpda.org/1914/bryrice.html
--
David Tenner
dtenner@ameritech.net |
