by Richard van Pelt, WWI Correspondent

Among the headlines in the Capital Journal were reports on the President’s Jackson Day speech in Indianapolis:

PRESIDENT TELLS POLICY IN REGARD TO EUROPEAN WAR
Says Greatest Duty of Nation Is To Itself

Indianapolis, Ind., Jan. 8. – President Woodrow Wilson was accorded a remarkable demonstration in Tomlinson’s hall here this afternoon when he appeared as the principal speaker at the Jackson day celebration. Five thousand persons were packed inside the flag-draped hall.

“I advise you” President Wilson told his hearers, “to keep your moral power dry. If there are republicans present I hope they will feel the compelling influence of Jackson day.

“Andrew Jackson was a fighting man, and only men who will fight are worth while. The trouble with the republicans is that they have not had a new idea for 30 years. They have had leaders in that time who suggested ideas, but nothing was done. I do not speak with disrespect of the republican party, for I respect the past. This party is still the cover for those who are afraid. They take their advice from old men and are afraid of young men who have something up their sleeves.

“I got tired of staying in Washington and saying secret things. I wanted to say what I think. Politics no longer depends upon the regulars of either party.

“The country is guided in its policy by independent voters.”

The president said about one third of the republicans are progressives and that two thirds of the democrats are progressives. He branded himself as an “animated conservative.”

“The democratic party,” he continued, “is the only party that has carried out what the real progressives want. The present congress has carried out the wishes of the people who do not desire wrongly.”

One of the major acts of Congress and the Wilson administration was the enactment and implementation of the federal reserve system.

“I have asked business en if this is not the first January they have to felt a money stringency. They say it did. The reason is that the federal reserve board has emancipated credits. These things were done for the great and for the small.

“The democratic party is still on trial. It must prove that it will not succumb to the enemies of these things.”

The president solemnly warned any man who endeavored to break democratic achievements that he would be in an unenviable position. He praised the co-operation of his colleagues, and said the present congress was the greatest on record since the civil war. He declared these were extraordinary times and “that half the world was on fire and the world was looking to us to serve in the time of need.”

The president encourages the passage of a government ship purchase bill. The difficulty of business to ship goods because of war-related ocean rates was as example of governing, not from ideology, but from the necessity of solving a problem:

Pleading for the passage of the government ship purchase bill, the president said the country’s merchants and farmers could not profit because of extortionate ocean rates.

“Republicans – self-styled friends of business – are trying to balk the bill,” continued the president. “Who commissioned them – a minority – to do this? They are trying to half the bill when humanity is suffering and needs relief.”

The president charged that the minority proposed talking the bill to death. He said foes of the bill “were blind and most of them ignorant,” and that he could not speak of them in parliamentary language.

The president then spoke directly to independents and to business:

“I want all the independents to come into the democratic party,” the president continued, “where there is emotion and enthusiasm. I have a great enthusiasm for human liberty. I want to say a word in reference to American business, the president said:

“There is nothing the matter with American business except its state of mind. All the nation needs is to believe in the future, and it can believe in it with the democratic party. It has seemed for a time that we were the enemies of business. But the enmity has been only corrective. Business needed the suggestions and corrected the evils.

From the front page of the Statesman is a report on the arrival of food relief to Belgium:

YANKEE BREAD AMERICANIZING THE BELGIANS
But for United States, Nation Would Starve, Declares M. Verinex

“If the United States had not come to our aid, it would have meant starvation for most of us,” said Alfred Nerinex, provisional burgomaster of Louvain, to the Associated Press today. “We re willing to work, but we cannot when the doors are closed to imports. It is no fault of ours if we starve. Feed us now and we shall pay you back in industry when the war is over.

“We are paying back now in gratitude for the lives America has saved – gratitude which will endure as proof that human affection is stronger than any treaty alliance.”

Americans responded. How they responded and how they viewed their response required the ability to do so without passing judgment. Americans were urged to steer clear of any discussion of blame. Viewing the conflict as a disaster served to obscure the politically divisive issue of human agency. Viewing the war as a disaster helped to foster and encourage a moral obligation to come to the aid of those in need.

Contrast America’s response then with our response to the humanitarian disaster along our border with Mexico in 2014; the contrast stands as an example of what happens when politically divisive finger pointing dominates the discussion:

The politics of handling the wave of immigrants has grown toxic . . .

Some of the opposition has also bordered on the extreme. A few of the protesters who marched against a proposed shelter in Vassar, Mich., on Monday were armed with semiautomatic rifles and handguns. In Virginia, an effort to house the children at the shuttered campus of Saint Paul’s College in Lawrenceville caused such an uproar that federal officials pulled out, even though a five-month lease had been signed. Someone spray-painted anti-immigrant graffiti on a brick wall at a former Army Reserve facility in Westminster, Md., that was being considered as a shelter site.

The Capital Journal reported on the plight of animals in the war zones:

Of all the animals that suffer by war, the horse, naturally, claims our first thought. But, fleeing in terror from their homes in all of the cities and towns devastated by this war, men and women have had to abandon in the majority of cases their dogs and cats and caged birds. Thousands of the former are reported by eye-witnesses as wandering about in an exhausted and starving condition. None but the sad actors in this tragedy of despair can realize what war is.

In the forest of Galicia and Austria, it is said, may be heard many wounded and riderless horses neighing pitifully through the long nights for death or their masters. Many of these are those wonderful horses of the Cossacks, trained to a docility and showing unintelligence so great as to make them almost a living part of the intrepid rider.

It has been said that this was to be largely a motor war and the motor has been used to an extent scarcely comprehended by those not on the field, but the motor has been useless at a multitude of points where the horse alone could meet the emergency. Mr. Stephen Black writes from Rotterdam,in the Animals’ Guardian, “In the great decision the horse will be a deciding factor nearly as important as man.”