WOODROW WILSON | Woodrow Wilson confides to a pacifist supporter that the involvement of allied nations in World War I constrains him from publicly speaking for peace

Property from the Collection of Elsie and Philip Sang

WOODROW WILSON

TYPED LETTER SIGNED ("WOODROW WILSON") AS TWENTY-EIGHTH PRESIDENT, TO MRS. FRANK F. WILLIAMS OF BUFFALO, NEW YORK, EXPLAINING WHY HE CANNOT PUBLICLY CALL FOR PEACE

One page (8 7/8 x 6 7/8 in.; 223 x 175 mm) on a bifolium of blue-embossed White House letterhead, Washington, 28 January 1915, headed "Private and Confidential," with original typed envelope; creased at folds.

Mrs. Frank F. (Ruth Churchyard) Williams was a member of the Executive Committee of the Buffalo Peace and Arbitration Society, founded in 1909 in sympathy with the pacifist American Peace Society. (Mrs. Williams was also reported, in Woman's Who's Who in American 1914−1915, to serve on the Executive Committee of Fitch Crèche, the first daycare center for the children of working women in the United States, and to favor woman suffrage.) Sensing in President Wilson a person receptive to her own beliefs, Mrs. Williams evidently asked Wilson to issue a statement condemning war and calling for world peace. Wilson here acknowledges Mrs. Williams's letter, but explains—in a letter marked "Private and Confidential"—that he is unable to do what she asks. 

"I need not say to you that my heart is in every movement that exalts and promotes peace, but just at the present moment a strange sort of compulsion is laid upon me by circumstances to say nothing in public. The stress of the war is such upon the nations who are engaged in it that they are all singularly sensitive to the implications of anything that anyone connected with our government may say, and so I am in the very interest of peace itself for the present debarred from public expressions of what my heart is full of.

"I am sure that you will understand and sympathize.

"I need not say that, of course, my whole heart goes out to any movement of universal prayer for peace."