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Oswald Garrison Willard, "Philander C. Knox-Dark Horse," 1920.

FOR a good many years now," wrote a Washington correspondent in 1908, "the demand for Philander Chase Knox has greatly exceeded the visible available supply. Mr. Knox is five feet five inches high and shares with Elihu Root the distinction of being our most highly finished domestic product. The incoming, like the outgoing, Secretary of State has made a specialty of brains. The thing Mr. Knox does best is to accomplish what he sets out to do. It has become a habit." Since 1901 Mr. Knox has been Attorney General in the Cabinets of McKinley and Roosevelt, Secretary of State under Mr. Taft, and twice Senator from Pennsylvania. During that time he has twice declined appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States and refused the Governorship of Pennsylvania. Just now Senator Penrose has put him into the running for the Republican nomination for the Presidency. The bulk of the press dismisses it as an impossible suggestion, and yet the idea persists, notably in Washington, so that the question arises whether there will not be a demand at Chicago for all the visible supply of Knox to lead the Republicans to a triumphant success.

Cautiously enough, the reason for considering Senator Knox seriously is that he does appeal to both wings of the Republican Party'. Because of his earlier record he ought to be anathema to the progressives, this "sawed-off cherub" as Mr. Roosevelt once dubbed him. But he has been fighting with the Irreconcilables in the battle over the treaty; as The Nation has already pointed out, he was the first Senator, after Mr. Moses, to denounce the Peace Treaty itself–the Treaty aside from the Covenant–and the pained comments which appeared in the conventional newspapers in our large cities showed how clearly they felt that he had been guilty of that terrible sin of being a traitor to his class and to his kind. It was, they admitted, beyond their comprehension that one so orthodox should actually be speaking up for the Hun. A pacifist might have done so or some miserable Socialist-but Philander Knox? Why, it was incredible....

The truth is that as one's mind runs back over Mr. Knox's career, it is plain that there are two sides to him, that he has alternately appealed to conservatives and progressives. He was and for a long time had been of Andrew Carnegie's counsel when he took office, and Mr. Carnegie testified that he urged William McKinley to make Mr. Knox his Attorney General at the same time that he put Mr. Reed, Mr. Knox's law partner, into the directorate of the United States Steel Corporation. But if Mr. Carnegie, or anybody else, expected that that would make things comfortable for big business, he experienced some sad shocks. When President Roosevelt asked Mr. Knox if the elder J. Pierpont Morgan could not be omitted from the list of the defendants to the Government's suit against the Northern Securities Company, Mr. Knox replied: "Well, Mr. President, if you direct me to leave his name out, I will do so but I want to say plainly that in that case I will not sign my name to the bill. I do not propose to have the lawyers of the country laugh at me." Mr. Morgan became one of the defendants, and Mr. Knox signed the bill. During this same episode, this corporation lawyer, whose practice was said to net him $350,000 a year before he entered public life, had the nerve to tell the firm of Morgan over the telephone that "the stock ticker did not tick in the Department of Justice." Previously, in 1891, he had shocked his corporation clients by a speech in which he boldly asserted the then new and revolutionary doctrine that the Government has the right and power to control great combinations of capital; and when he entered Mr. McKinley's Cabinet he warned the President that he would make it his business to test the value of the Sherman Anti-trust Act, which he felt was constantly violated. This from a man who, according to James J. Hill, had "cleaned up $600,000 in the organization of the Steel Trust"!

The historian of Mr. Roosevelt's Administration will not have an easy task to assay how much of the credit for the Roosevelt corporation policies belongs to Mr. Knox: It is certain that Attorney General Knox's Pittsburgh speech of 1902 ushered in a new era in the relations of the Government and the large corporations, which was bitterly resisted at the time by the latter. The Northern Securities case was started and won. The Beef Trust prosecutions were begun and the first moves made against Standard Oil. It was because he was particularly the agent of Roosevelt that his nomination as President was urgent by a number of newspapers in 1908. It may then be asked now how effective this anti-trust campaign really was. Not only have the dissolution of the Standard Oil and other trusts failed to check abuses, but in the latest railroad legislation we are moving directly in the opposite direction from the Northern Securities decision. By many it has now been recognized that our economic evils call for much more radical remedies than the Sherman Anti-Trust Law. None the less, Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Knox are still entitled to great credit for a course which, at the time, called for much personal and political courage. It is related that Mr. Roosevelt was once asked why he took a man who had had so much to do with organizing the trusts to control them. His reply was that he thought that Mr. Knox was just the man to do so because of his knowledge of them and their methods and the laws governing their incorporation.

One thing is certain: Mr. Knox was not afraid to talk back to his impetuous superior. Mr. Roosevelt once said in Mr. Knox's presence that the Attorney General could give a complete criticism of Gibbon's "Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire" in three hundred words. Quick as a flash came this retort from Mr. Knox "And of recent Presidential messages in less!" In the middle of the Panama theft which Mr. Knox subsequently defended on the ground that the "interests of the world imposed upon this Government an imperative mandate to build the Canal the Attorney General was asked by Mr. Roosevelt for his advice. "I am sorry that you have asked for my opinion," replied Mr. Knox, "because, up to the present time, the proceedings have been free from any taint of law!" Later on, during the Progressive campaign of 1912, Mr. Knox naturally stood by Mr. Taft and said of his former chief Mr. Roosevelt, that he would be defeated "unless the Republican Party has become the plaything of one man prompted by his whims, his imperious ambitions, his vanities, and mysterious antipathies." On October 2, 1904, Mr. Knox had taken a very different view. Then he was defending him and found that Mr. Roosevelt was one "endowed by the Creator" with "high mental and temperamental qualifications for his great office," "a peculiarly fit public servant," who had achieved "lasting benefits to the nation and to humanity."

When Mr. Knox retired from the Cabinet in June, 1904, by appointment of the then Governor of Pennsylvania to take the place made vacant by the death of Senator Quay, it was declared by the Pittsburgh Times that it cost three corporation magnates $500,000 to have him appointed. They wanted him out of the Cabinet because he was too effective against the trusts, and so they took up notes to that amount held by the estate of the then recently deceased Henry W. Oliver, of Pittsburgh, against the managers of the State machine. The Pittsburgh Times was careful to state that Knox had no knowledge whatever of this transaction. It was charged that the money was put up by A. J. Cassatt, John D. Archbold, and Henry C. Frick; and James J. Hill had no hesitation in declaring that "Knox was made Senator of Pennsylvania by the eastern railroads." But here again, Mr. Knox must have disappointed those who backed him, because he was the leader in the Railroad Rate Bill fight of 1906, being the author of the Senate bill to bring the railroads completely under the control of the Interstate Commerce Commission in the matter of fixing rates, with, however, the right of a court review.

Since international affairs are almost the most pressing which confront the United States today, Mr. Knox's career as Secretary of State becomes of especia1 importance if there is even a faint possibility of his being the Republican candidate. He is primarily the author of what is called "Dollar Diplomacy;" and he is proud of it. Indeed, he wrote an article for the Saturday Evening Post of March 9, 1912, defending his course and explaining exactly what the Department of State under his guidance sought to accomplish. It had, he said, "found opportunity to advance the commercial interests of the American people in foreign markets, to encourage the use of our abundant means in assisting less forward countries to develop their resources and to advance reforms necessary to national stability and progress in regions aspiring toward a higher civilization." The promotion of American commerce he felt to be "one of the first duties of American diplomacy" and he was very happy to point out that, with an export trade at that time of over two billions of dollars, the total cost of the Department of State and of all of our foreign representatives in 1911 was only $1,760,000. But he defended his policy from the charge of pure materialism by declaring that he had prevented or terminated a war between Ecuador and Peru, a war between Haiti and Santo Domingo, one in Honduras, and had headed off wars in Costa Rica and Nicaragua. More than that, he took just pride in asserting that:

In a regime styled dollar diplomacy, an American President has taken the world's greatest step toward universal peace through the French and British arbitration treaties. During the same period, through our new treaty with Japan, the so-called Japanese immigration question, at one time so troublesome and by many declared impossible of solution, has been settled permanently and satisfactorily. There have been more resorts to arbitration and more peaceful settlement of just claims and more brushing away of misunderstandings that seem to have occurred in any other corresponding period.

While the Japanese immigration question has not been settled, as Mr. Knox thought, and his intervention in Santo Domingo was wholly unsuccessful, it is not to be questioned that he had much to be proud of. The man who brought about our dangerous and improper financial intervention in Honduras and Nicaragua did, none the less, sign the great arbitration pacts with France and England–had there been one with Germany history might have been very different. It was Secretary Knox who preceded these treaties with a circular note to all the great powers asking them to set up and support an international court of arbitral justice at The Hague, to have jurisdiction of practically all questions arising between countries. He believed that the establishment of this court would reduce armaments, and he was bold enough to believe, with many pacifists, that its decrees and decisions would be carried into effect merely by the force of the enlightened public opinion of the world. He felt that the court would speedily build up a code of raw applicable to all cases by its own decisions based upon the fundamental principles of international law and equity. It is important to bear this in mind now, because Senator Knox has not been merely destructive in his opposition to the wicked treaty of Versailles, but has had some such plan as this in mind throughout his opposition to the treaty. He wants to build an international court today as much as ever; he believes in international justice, and he wants war outlawed now and not a hundred years hence. His was a noble conception in 1910. What would not the Central Powers give now to have such another chance to safeguard the world against the horror which will forever stand charged against them.

One of the very great advantages, by the way, of the Knox arbitration treaties is their substitution of clearly and accurately defined jurisdiction in place of the vague and indefinite terms of the then existing pacts. Mr. Knox insists that under these treaties neither the honor nor vital interests of the United. States can be imperiled unless we assert them against another nation's rights. Yet he put our financier's into the Central American countries, partly as a result of which our naval guns dominate the political life and subordinate the liberties of Santo Domingo, Haiti, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Honduras. In several of these countries, our "big business" is gobbling lands and natural resources in a way to store up trouble for generations to come both in America and in those lands. Yet the thought behind Mr. Knox's activities was this, to quote him exactly: "If this Government can help to upbuild its neighbors and promote the thought that the capital of the more advanced nations of the world would be better employed in "assisting the peaceful development of those more backward than in financing wars, it is such a deviation from traditions as the American people will approve." He has never been able to realize that more than half the trouble in the world today is due to this invasion of the backward countries of the earth by dollar diplomacy, and that with the dollar inevitably comes corruption, the theft of government from the backward people, and the subjecting of them to the control of foreign conquerors–conquerors either by the dollar or the sword and usually by both. Santo Domingo is the clearest illustration of this. We went in to help and to aid in the administration of the customs. We have wound up by pulling down the government, and enforcing our rule throughout the country contrary to the wishes of the people, with no more moral right to do so than the Germans had the day they crossed the Belgian boundary.

So we have the contradictory in Mr. Knox again. As he was the author of the arbitration treaties and as he urged the international court which the world must and shall have, and then made American capitalists masters in Central America, so he tried to induce Russia and Japan to neutralize the Manchurian Railway, and then turned around and joined the Six-Power group for the financial exploitation–and aid–of China. President Wilson promptly took us out of the Six Power group declaring how odd it sounds that there should be "no entangling foreign alliances even in respect to arrangements for supervising the financial compacts of weaker governments... the responsibility of the United States in the Six-Power group is obnoxious to the principles upon which this Government rests." (That master of inconsistencies, Mr. Wilson, is at this very moment joining the Four-Power group to do the very thing for China which Mr. Knox proposed and the President denounced in the above language.) Mr. Knox was always friendly to the Japanese and the Chinese. A group of reporters once asked him whether he favored a war with Japan. "I do favor it," he replied, "provided, however, that there are no soldiers on either side except newspaper reporters." He is emphatically an enlightened imperialist in a day in which all imperialists should be forever taboo. The London Times once remarked that there was a marked conflict "between the American people's high ideals of humanitarianism and justice, their ready response to any noble cause, their almost quixotic impulses of altruism and the inevitable result in practical politics of their vigorous nationalism and ambitions of expansion." Under the false liberal, Woodrow Wilson, it is precisely this conflict of aims and impulses which has got the United States into such trouble both abroad and in the Caribbean. Sometimes one asks whether, until we reach the day of the square deal in international relations, we should not be better off in the hands of an honest imperialist than of a dishonest liberal. At any rate, if Senator Knox becomes President, it is perfectly plain what kind of a foreign policy we may look for from him–a combination of high idealism and of commercial invasion of other people's lands, of financial exploitation of the backward in the honest belief of a Pizarro, or a Cortez, or a Clive that thus the will of the Lord is best served.

He is an interesting figure, this Mr. Knox, with his extraordinarily calm and controlled, almost mask-like countenance. His dark eyes are at times cold and piercing. Dressed to the part he would seem the perfect type of political cardinal of the days when the world1y guidance of Italy was as much a. part of the Vatican's activities as the spiritual. Mr. Creelman once described him as having a "passionless mind...uninspired by moral emotion; a just and loyal man but coldly averse to civic crusades." But Senator Knox has not been without a just passion of indignation against the treaty during the past year, against its impracticality, its dangers, its hypocrisies, its positive wrongs. Once more he has broken with his old corporation and financial associates. Once more he has been willing to jeopardize his own political future. Not as a matter of impulse, of course. Mr. Knox is not impulsive. His mind works clearly, logically, and analytically. Thus his recent speech on the state of peace in support of his resolution is extraordinarily compact, lucid, and clear, with the logical arrangement of the trained lawyer. The minds of these able lawyers like Knox and Root work similarly. They are "highly finished domestic products"-but usually they serve the interests of some rather than the interests of all.

With Mr. Knox thus explained by his record, is it not plain that if Borah and Johnson and their irreconcilably progressive associates and followers are to name a Republican candidate other than Johnson, Senator Knox might easily be more palatable a dose than General Wood, the utterly dull and unenlightened, or Nicholas Murray Butler, or Governor Lowden, or Senator Harding? The latter, how ever much they might appeal to the Old Guard, could get none of the votes that have sent Johnson to the front in the pre-convention fight. Mr. Knox might get many and, as Senator Penrose's statement proves, the Old Guard is still willing to take Knox even if he has kicked over the traces; even if he did turn "trust-buster" when it was supposed that he would stay hitched.

Of course, it is finally to be pointed out, that on all the great social issues, on the vital questions of labor and capital, Mr. Knox has either not expressed himself at all or voted with the standpatters. If he has a program for domestic social reform, or a plan for our economic regeneration, the world is as yet ignorant of it. In that he is but on a par with all the other candidates–more or less. Nor has he made any fight for our gravely jeopardized personal liberties or the Constitution which is daily spat upon by the constituted authorities sworn to honor and respect and enforce it.



Credit: Oswald Garrison Willard, "Philander C. Knox-Dark Horse," The Nation, May 22, 1920.
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