Blockade

President Wilson's policy during the first six months of the war was
one of impartiality and neutrality. The first diplomatic
representative in Washington to question the sincerity of the executive
was Dr. Constantine Dumba, the exiled Austro-Hungarian Ambassador, who
was sent to the United States because he was not a noble, and,
therefore, better able to understand and interpret American ways! He
asked me one day whether I thought Wilson was neutral. He said he had
been told the President was pro-English. He believed, he said, that
everything the President had done so far showed he sympathised with the
Entente. While we were talking I recalled what the President's
stenographer, Charles L. Swem, said one day when we were going to New
York with the President.

"I am present at every conference the President holds," he stated. "I
take all his dictation. I think he is the most neutral man in America.
I have never heard him express an opinion one way or the other, and if
he had I would surely know of it."

I told Dr. Dumba this story, which interested him, and he made no
comments.

As I was at the White House nearly every day I had an opportunity to
learn what the President would say to callers and friends, although I
was seldom privileged to use the information. Even now I do not recall
a single statement which ever gave me the impression that the President
sided with one group of belligerents.

The President's sincerity and firm desire for neutrality was emphasised
in his appeal to "My Countrymen."

"The people of the United States," he said, "are drawn from many
nations, and chiefly from the nations now at war. It is natural and
inevitable that there should be the utmost variety of sympathy and
desire among them with regard to the issues and circumstances of the
conflict. Some will wish one nation, others another, to succeed in the
momentous struggle. It will be easy to excite passion and difficult to
allay it. Those responsible for exciting it will assume a heavy
responsibility, responsibility for no less a thing than that the people
of the United States, whose love of their country and whose loyalty to
the government should unite them as Americans all, bound in honour and
affection to think first of her and her interests, may be divided in
camps of hostile opinion, hot against each other, involved in the war
itself in impulse and opinion, if not in action.

"My thought is of America. I a