Washington, January, 1922

Thanks to information received from the Honorable Carter Glass, Secretary of the Treasury under the War President, I am able to say that, unlike many who sponsored Armenia at the Peace Conference, Mr. Wilson, at least, stood by his guns. It was our misfortune and not his fault that later these guns did not carry the heavy metal they fired in 1918, when the Fourteen Points promised to a distracted world a new freedom.

An hour or two before leaving for the San Francisco Democratic National Convention (1920) Mr. Glass, who was also mentioned as a candidate for the Democratic nomination, an honor which he sought to avoid, called at the White House to ascertain the President’s wishes and hopes as to the party’s standard-bearer. Right out of the box the President said: “The nomination of Cox would be a joke.”—“To which I fervently assented,” comments Glass.

As Glass was leaving, the President said, handing him a slip of paper, “I wish you would get this into the platform.” On the train, the senator from Virginia told me, “I read the paper and found it to be a declaration for an Armenian mandate to be assumed by the United States.” Written by the President himself on his typewriter and initialed, “W. W.,” the suggested plank read:

“We hold it to be the Christian duty and privilege of our Government to assume the responsible guardianship of Armenia, which now needs only the advice and assurance of a powerful friend to establish her complete independence and to give her distracted people the opportunities for peaceful happiness which they have vainly sought for through so many dark years of suffering and hideous distress.”

This was hardly a clarion note, but when it came back from the drafting committee, largely through the opposition of Senator Walsh of Montana, it sounded like the squeak of a penny whistle. As placed in the platform, the President’s resolution reads:

“We express our deep and earnest sympathy for the unfortunate people of Armenia, and we believe that our Government, consistent with its Constitution and principles, should render every possible and proper aid to them in their efforts to establish and maintain a government of their own.”

After a bitter struggle in the committee Glass secured the approval of the Treaty and the Covenant that is written in the party platform; but, as he admits, the opposition to the President’s original Armenia policy was overwhelming.