861.00/5243b: Telegram
The Acting Secretary of State to the Consul at Vladivostok (Caldwell)91
In a speech at Kansas City Saturday, September 6, urging the ratification of the Peace Treaty, the President made the following allusion to the situation in Russia and the character of the Bolshevik régime:
“My fellow citizens, it does not make any difference what kind of a minority governs you, if it is a minority. And the thing we must see to is that no minority anywhere masters the majority.
That is at the heart, my fellow citizens, of the tragical things that are happening in that great country which we long to help and can find no way that is effective to help—I mean the great realm of Russia. The men who now are measurably in control of the affairs of Russia represent nobody but themselves. They have again and again been challenged to call a constitutional convention. They have again and again been challenged to prove that they had some kind of a mandate, even from a single class of their fellow citizens. And they dared not attempt it; they have no mandate from anybody.
There are only thirty-four of them, I am told, and there were more than thirty-four men who used to control the destinies of Europe from Wilhelmstrasse. There is a closer monopoly of power in Petrograd and Moscow than there ever was in Berlin, and the thing that is intolerable is not that the Russian people are having their way but that another group of men more cruel than the Czar himself is controlling the destinies of that great people.
And I want to say here and now that I am against the control of any minority anywhere.”
Following passage, same topic, from speech delivered at Des Moines also on September 6:
“What happened in Russia was not a sudden and accidental thing. The people of Russia were maddened with the suppression of Czarism. When at last the chance came to throw off those chains, they threw them off at first, with hearts full of confidence and hope and then they found out that they had been again deceived. There was no assembly chosen to frame a constitution for them, or rather there was an assembly chosen to choose a constitution for them and it was suppressed and dispersed, and a little group of men just as selfish, just as ruthless, just as pitiless as the Czar himself assumed control and exercised their power, by terror and not by right.
And in other parts of Europe the poison spread. The poison of disorder, the poison of revolt, the poison of chaos. And do you honestly think, my fellow citizens, that none of that poison has got in the veins of this free people? Do you know that the world is all now one single whispering gallery. These antennae of the wireless telegraph are the symbols of our age.
All the impulses of mankind are thrown out upon the air and reach to the ends of the earth. With the tongue of the wireless and the tongue of the telegraph all the suggestions of disorder are spread through the world. And money coming from nobody knows where is deposited in capitals like Stockholm to be used for the propaganda of disorder and discontent and dissolution throughout the world, and men look you calmly in the face in America and say they are for that sort of revolution, when that sort of revolution means government by terror, government by force, not government by vote.
It is the negation of everything that is American, but it is spreading and so long as disorder continues, so long as the world is kept waiting for the answer of the kind of peace we are going to have and what kind of guarantees there are to be behind that peace, that poison will steadily spread, more and more rapidly until it may be that even this beloved land of ours will be distracted and distorted by it.”
Repeat to Harbin and Omsk.
- The same to the Commission to Negotiate Peace as no. 3071 (file no. 763.72119/6830c) to be repeated to Archangel, and to Constantinople for repetition to Vice Consul Burri at Ekaterinodar.↩