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their country above the interest of their party leader.

An editorial in "The New York Times" of September 10, headed "Peace or War," is an illustration of the effort that is being made in some circles to influence "the man in the street" against the Senate by specious arguments. The "Times" editorial writer draws a logical conclusion from his premises, but the premises are false. Is it necessary to assume that the League of Nations covenant is an integral part of the treaty of peace with Germany, and that reservations in our acceptance of the covenant entail negotiating a new treaty with Germany? Germany has no part in the covenant of the League of Nations. One searches in vain throughout the Treaty of Versailles to find a single phrase relating to Germany that would have to be modified or altered if the United States makes reservations concerning America's entrance into the league. As the treaty is framed, the League of Nations does not regard Germany either now or in the future. Is it necessary to assume that our allies will refuse to accept whatever reservations we see fit to make in the League of Nations covenant, thus putting the treaty back again into the melting-pot? None who has been with the treaty-makers from the beginning, as I have been, believes this. The truth is that the League of Nations covenant was inserted in the Treaty of Versailles because President Wilson insisted upon it and made it America's one unalterable demand. We wanted no colonies, no material advantages. If our allies would yield and give us the covenant in the treaty, they could divide up the world as they pleased, violating every principle of the covenant before it was born. Public opinion in France and Italy and Belgium and in the secondary European states is decidedly against the League of Nations. The few voices that wanted a League of Nations in January have virtually all been silent since June.

Moreover, it does not follow that advocates of reservations in the League of Nations covenant, as it is set forth in the Treaty of Versailles, are opponents of the League of Nations idea,

or that they unreasonably expect the building of Rome in a day. The yearning of the world for a new international order, which will tend to make wars less frequent and diminish the burden of armaments, is as unmistakable as the yearning for the reëstablishment of peace; but the conception is so tremendous and so revolutionary that we must make haste slowly. All who participated in the work of the conference of Paris were bitterly disappointed, and I know many in high places who are frankly pessimistic. The struggle for peace, following the struggle for victory, was too much for them. They confess that they are not the men to lead the world in new paths. And they rightly attribute the failure of the conference of Paris to the atmosphere of intense hatred, of fear, of suspicion, and, above all, of the realization of a victory beyond their wildest dreams. Premier Clemenceau, before the conference opened, took issue with President Wilson and the "internationalists" of France and other Allied countries, when he said to the Chamber of Deputies that he was going into the conference to get as much for France as he could, with a maximum and minimum program as a basis of bargaining. However imbued with idealism and internationalism we Americans may be, it would be folly for us to enter blindly and unreservedly under these conditions a League of Nations which is simply a coalition of victorious powers, presided over by diplomats of the old school.

Let us support the Senate in its determination to accompany the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles with reservations in clear language that will preserve our independence of action in international affairs. It is not to be feared that these reservations will be rejected by our allies or our late enemies. They will not delay the reestablishment of peace. On the other hand we shall be in a better position to continue our championship of American principles and to fulfil the high mission of the United States to bring together the nations of the world into an international organization to prevent wars and reduce armaments.

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The Clash of Color

The Negro in American Democracy

By GLENN FRANK

[This is one of a series of articles Mr. Frank is contributing to THE CENTURY on post-war problems. This article presents the facts that lay back of the recent race riots, and without prejudice or rant offers certain suggestions regarding inter-race relations in the future.-THE EDITOR.]

T

HE war has left no end of aftermath as a legacy to American statesmanship. This aftermath in part comprises new problems, but in the main represents simply an intensification and fresh reference of certain old problems with which we dallied' rather than dealt before the war. I have referred in earlier papers to the fact that the political idealism of our diplomacy has shown a disconcerting tendency to filter down into the social and economic areas of our national life. It was so easy for the facile idealism of war-days to bandy about that strangely elusive idea of self-determination and to hawk the merits of democracy to the ends of the earth. But the preachers of these doctrines did more than stimulate morale with their phrases. They set the mind of the planet at work thinking out the full implications of these phrases, and the phrases have refused to stay tethered to politics alone. The mass mind has shown a penchant for analogy. When the German throne fell, the crash set many non-political thrones tottering. The crusade for political democracy has stirred to life a crusade for industrial democracy. Self-determination has become a class slogan no less than a watchword for oppressed nationalities. short, the partisans of problems long unsolved have found a new vocabulary in the phrases of our war-time diplomacy. This has meant a psychological factor of no mean moment in the intensification of certain social and industrial isues. Many of the sleeping lions of pre-war days are now on prowl, and

In

they roar familiar phrases to which we give indiscriminate assent during the

war.

sues.

These facts stand boldly out in the recent race-riot-dramatizations of our American negro problem, a capital illustration of the tendency to apply our diplomatic slogans to domestic isOne periodical heads its review of the race riots with the caption "Our Own 'Subject Race' Rebels," and suggests the irony of a race riot at President Wilson's door in Washington so soon after his return from pleading the rights of subject races in Europe. A cartoonist parodies Rodin's "The Thinker" by sketching the pensive figure of a muscular black man about whose feet lie parchments with titles that are a study in satirical contrasts, "American Democracy for the World" and "Black Men in the World War" lying next to "American Lynch Law." Negro publicists, with singular unanimity, find in the ideals of the war a fresh basis for race appeals, touched here and there with a menacing passion.

Local race riots have never been isolated and unrelated happenings. Two years ago the clash of color in East St. Louis was not just an East St. Louis affair. It was only a local bursting of a storm that had been brewing the country over for more than a generation. The lines of its causes ran into other years and into all parts of the North and South. Wherever white and black have met in serious labor competition, as section hands in the South, as domestics in the East, or as mechanics in the West or North, race tension has been the result. It was

impossible to assess the issues at East St. Louis by a merely local study. It was part and parcel of our distinctly national negro problem, of the settling of which we have never made even a pretense. Then as always we did our best to hush the hubbub for the moment, straightway proceeding to bury our heads in the sand and to maintain an out-of-sight-out-of-mind attitude toward the problem until the red orgies of Washington and Chicago again brought us to attention.

Now less than ever can we treat these race riots as local issues. They are interknit with the whole complex of post-war passions, prejudices, aspirations and tendencies. The occasions for race riots are superficial and easily determined; the causes of race riots lie deeper. It is these less obvious causes that must be determined and dealt with if we are to do more than bridge over recurrent crises. It is suicidal fool'splay merely to drive the passions of a situation underground, there to gather fresh strength for an even more serious outbreak later. Here is a point at which we must refuse to fall victim to our fatal facility for opportunism. Here is a clear test case of American ability to take the long view, and wrestle with the fundamentals of a national issue.

The daily and weekly press have made unnecessary more than a brief reminder of the details of the recent riots. Washington and Chicago at the moment of my writing are the most dramatic points in the situation, but they are only part of a general situation that has been for months growing tenser. Birmingham and Memphis trembled upon the verge of a race clash earlier in the year. Connecticut, Georgia, Texas, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania have had to reckon with tense local situations. The attempt on the part of many newspapers to explain these outbreaks solely on the basis of a colored "crime wave" is of course dismissed by all students of the situation either as superficial analysis or as deliberate distortion of facts. Several weekly periodicals have justly corrected these hasty conclusions by reference to the records of the Wash

on

ington police department. These records, it is asserted, show that the alleged "crime wave" in that city comprised four assaults upon women June twenty-fifth, twenty-eighth and thirtieth, and on July eighteenth. Three of these four crimes were probably committed by one person, who was already under arrest when the clash came. In addition to these assaults, three similar offenses were committed in contiguous Maryland on July fifth, twenty-first, and twenty-second by a mulatto.

The Chicago situation aptly illustrates the course a race riot takes. The situation was packed with inflammable material. An incident provided the torch. A bathing-beach was the Sarajevo of the conflict. Certain parts of the shore were by tacit understanding, not by segragation ordinance, for the use of negroes. On the Sunday afternoon of July twenty-seventh a negro youth aboard a raft floated across the custom-created line that separated the colored from the white sections of the beach. Crowds of blacks were on one side of the line, crowds of whites on the other. With an accurately aimed rock a white man knocked the negro youth from the raft. Negroes who attempted to rescue the negro youth were prevented by white interference. The negro youth was drowned. This white interference with his attempted rescue precipitated the riot. Reliable information indicates that a white patrolman, later suspended by the chief of police, refused negro requests for the arrest of the negro youth's assailant. The assailant was, however, captured by negroes, and other officers arrested him. He was charged with murder, and released under fifty-thousand dollar bail. The first blood drawn was that of a negro who was shot by a negro officer for having fired at a white officer. The rioting spread from the "black belt" into the four smaller negro colonies, blood being shed even in the crowded loop district. The negroes quite generally assert that the white policemen as a body did their duty against serious odds.

The details of the week of rioting are the usual details and are not vital to

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