Grenville S. MacFarland to Woodrow Wilson

I appreciate very much the courtesy of your reply of the 16th to my note of the 12th, concerning the attitude of the Postmaster General toward the newspapers and his interpretation of the power given him under the Espionage and Trading-with-the-Enemy Acts.

I wrote to you not so much to get present action from you as to give you a friendly outsider's point of view and to warn you of the danger that the taste of the blood of the helpless little newspapers by the Postmaster General or his subordinates might beget a dangerous appetite for that sort of thing. I have no doubt that this Administration is freer from the influence of Wall Street and profiteering than any administration since the Civil War, and, perhaps, since any earlier period. I have no doubt of the national disinterestedness of this war. But if the Postmaster General may say that no newspaper may criticize the righteousness of the war, or the disinterestedness of our present government then, if ever a profiteering cabal in power may be waging a rapacious war, when the honor and even the security of the country may depend upon the power of telling the people the truth, the precedent now set might become a serious breach in one of democracy's great bulwarks. Remember the faculty of our forefathers which Burke described as most extraordinary. "Here they anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle. They augur misgovernment at a distance; and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze."Your political fortunes illustrate more than the career of any other public man, even Lincoln's, the impotency of newspaper attacks when they seek to stir a majority of the American people against the truth. I do not believe that any man was ever so abused from within and without his party, by religious extremists, by the pro-Germans and the pro-Allies, who would deprive Great Britain and France of the right to buy our ammunition on which their control of the sea gave to them. To use modern miliyary expressions, they subjected you to a direct fire, a cross fire and to an enfilading fire, and they dug mines under your feet. When they exhausted every form of attack tolderated in the public press and platform, they circulated cowardly, underground stories. It was a stream of abuse directed against one man probably never equalled before in American history. Like the Persian missles at Thermopylae, this storm of abuse seemed actually to shut out the sun from you. If there is any one man in the world whose public career reveals the saving grace of free speech, it is yours.

Those who want this war to go on until Germany is crushed, no matter how her people democratize and what pledges she is willing to give of repentence and future good behavior, are now in control of nearly all the newspapers and instruments of unofficial terrorism. While you prosecute the war you will have all the help of this sort that you need, and probably more than is good. The Government, without reference to the question of principle, can afford to keep out of the pack which is baying on the heels of the poor little papers and the few men today who are opposing the Government in the rightful prosecution of this war. Most of this abuse came from the very men who today are the most intolerant of any peace that may come before the German people are so far extinguished that they never can contribute anything to our civilization, for that is what making, by force, one country secure from the commercial rivalry of another, means. It is the age old cassus belli, Censeo, Carthagenem delendam.Mr. President, I do not expect you to answer this letter. I did not expect you to answer my letter of August 12th. I quite appreciate that in your position you ought to keep all the doors open, for what may be truly and wisely said today may be untrue or unwise tomorrow. Again I wish to assure you that so far as I know my own mind, I am entirely disinterested in this matter. When you have prosecuted this war to a successful conclusion within the ideals of your reply to the Pope, and have given us public ownership of the railroads and telephone and telegraph companies, you will have made democracy safer both at home and abroad, and will take your place beside Lincoln. How I wish I could make you see, as I think I do, the danger to our democratic republic of the continued private control of our public service corporations.

Hon. Woodrow Wilson,
The White House,
Washington, DC