(See front cover and pictures, pp. 14 & 15)
Inquisitive young men, professional peace lovers, retired businessmen, pretty maidens, frumpy matrons, distinguished-looking Negroes, seedy individuals who frequent places of political excitement, occupied half the spacious floor of the barnlike Senate Caucus Room one morning last week. As representatives of the People, on neat rows of chairs, they sat silent and well-behaved, staring at the hurly-burly in the other half of the room.
There newshawks chattered at the extended press tables. Capitol policemen in uniform circulated through the moving throng, trying to maintain order. A little knot of elderly financiers from Manhattan stood by themselves like new arrivals to be introduced at a large reception. And everywhere cameramen swarmed, climbed over one another, mounted chairs & tables, formed a living pyramid above half a dozen Senators who sat, all but lost from sight, at a long table at the end of the room.
From camouflaged amplifiers high over-head a hollow voice suddenly began to croak: Senator Gerald P. Nye was saying that as soon as the witnesses had been sworn, cameramen would please retire. Three white-thatched witnesses stood up. The amplifiers carried the clunk-clunk-clunk of cameras along with the words of the oath. Flashlamps flickered like heat lightning.
"Mr. Morgan," began Senator Nye, "will you kindly state for the record what is your connection with J. P. Morgan & Co.?"
Thus the Senate Committee on Investigation of the Munitions Industry set out last week to prove, if possible, that the U. S. had gone to war in 1917 because Wall Street's international bankers needed U. S. troops in the field to secure repayment of their Allied loans.
New Thesis— One April afternoon in 1917 George W. Norris of Nebraska stood before the U. S. Senate and cried out: "We are going into war upon the command of gold. ... I would like to say to this war god, 'You shall not coin into gold the lifeblood of my brethren.' ... I feel that we are about to put the dollar sign upon the American flag." Senator Norris' words were not history. They were the judgment of a man upon contemporary events.
When the history of 1914-18 was written, it said plainly that the U. S. went to war because German submarines sank U. S. ships without warning, killing U. S. citizens. Over two years this reason was built up to such a point that President Wilson had only to mention it before Congress to procure a vote of 373-to-50 in the House of Representatives on the declaration of a State of War.