Celebrating 1916 — Walter H. Page

This is the latest in an occasional series of posts about the 1916 presidential election in which incumbent Democrat Woodrow Wilson narrowly defeated Republican Charles Evans Hughes, a Glens Falls native.

Walter H. Page, U.S. ambassador to Britain during World War I, quietly urged President Woodrow Wilson in 1916 to take a more aggressive role, at least economically, in ending the war in Europe, according to Page’s memorandums and letters to close friends collected and edited by Burton J. Hendricks and published in 1927 by Garden City Publishing Co.

“Until steamships and telegraphs brought the nations all close together, of course we could enjoy our isolation. We can’t do so any other longer,” Page wrote May 29, 1916 to book publisher Frank N. Doubleday.

Page, a former newspaper editor and publisher, wrote to his son on May 22, 1916 that he was frustrated that Wilson was not more vocal about the war.

“It’s hard for me to judge at this distance just how far the President has led and just how far he has waited and been pushed along,” Page wrote.

One could be too vocal, on the other hand.

“While T.R. was in the White House he was surely an active fellow. He called us to exercise ourselves every morning. He bawled ‘Patriotism’ loudly. We surely thought we were awake or did we only look upon him and his antics as only a good show?”

Page was more emphatic in a memorandum written later in 1916.

“And the people, sitting on the comfortable seats of neutrality upon which the President has pushed them back, are grateful for Peace, not having taken the trouble to think out what Peace has cost us and cost the world — except so many as have felt the uncomfortable stirrings of the national conscience.”

The Democratic campaign slogan in 1916 was, “He kept us out of war!”

Hughes said the United States should be ready to enter the war, if necessary, and criticized the Wilson administration for a lack of military preparedness.

Wilson summoned Page to Washington in July 1916 to discuss the war as the presidential campaign was heating up.

“An early peace is all that can prevent the Germans from driving us at least into this war,” Page wrote in a memorandum at the time.

Page wrote that Wilson was preoccupied with the railroad workers strike and did not make sufficient time to discuss foreign policy.

“I find at this date the greatest tangle and uncertainty of political opinion that I have ever observed in our country,” Page wrote in a memorandum, about a month before the election. “If he (Wilson) be defeated he will owe his defeat to the loss of confidence in his leadership on this great subject.”

Page said Hughes, likewise, did not have a “clear-cut” war strategy.

“Yet he (Hughes) will command the support of many patriotic men merely as a lack of confidence in the President.”

Click here to read the most recent previous post in the series.