LETTERS
Old Lesson
As I recently helped my mom and dad pack and move from their home of the past 40 years, I opened an old suitcase filled with family treasures. Among the graduation announcements, birth and death notices, and numerous brown and fading photos was a newspaper article from the Feb. 19, 1914, edition of the Cleveland Leader.
I found it fascinating and chilling, given today’s world.
The article described a St. Ignatius alumni dinner that my grandfather attended. The program was about toll collections at the Panama Canal.
The group had decided to send a resolution to the president and the Ohio congressional delegation urging support for repealing a bill giving preference to U.S. ships on toll collection through the canal, because it was angering Europe. (Never mind that U.S. taxpayers paid for the canal after the French company that started it went bankrupt.)
I was struck by the newspaper’s description of the speech that night by a Mr. John H. Clarke: “The movement toward international peace was urged by Mr. Clarke, who spoke on ‘International Peace and Harmony.'”
“At present, he said, when the United States needed the friendship of nearly every nation of Europe, she found herself isolated and estranged. The action of the United States in discriminating against foreign powers in the Panama Canal, he said, was responsible.
Our lack of respect for the Hay-Pauncefote treaty earned us the distrust of European countries with whom at the present time, 26 treaties are pending.”
The subhead to the article was, “Banqueters Want Burton and Pomerene to Support Wilson’s Advocacy of Bill’s Repeal in Interest of World Peace.”
The treaty was repealed but six months later, World War I began in Europe. So much for world peace. Ironically, on the back of the article was an advertisement by Cunnard for passage on the ship Lusitania, which was sunk by the Germans the following year.
Clarke was a progressive Democrat who twice entered unsuccessful contests for the U.S. Senate. At the time of the speech, he was President Wilson’s appointee to the federal district court for the Northern District of Ohio.
I don’t understand why, given the history of the last century and beyond, some people still think peace can be achieved by putting our head in the sand and not protecting our own interests.
We can’t expect to be thanked for taking care of ourselves, and it comes with horrible sacrifice, but world peace doesn’t come without the power of a strong nation behind it.
Meg Waters
Waters & Faubel
Lake Forest
PR Firms
In her Aug. 9 “Contract Crackdown” story, Jennifer Bellantonio did an excellent job delving into a subject that rarely sees the light of day: the enormous discontent that many clients feel toward the public relations industry by paying big sums to firms and getting little in return.
She might also have written about how firms often sign up because of a tantalizing pitch from the top people at the PR firm, only to be assigned an executive to handle their account scarcely out of college and too inexperienced to get much accomplished.
That is why, I will say, in modesty, small firms such as ours have thrived, giving personal attention to each client by senior practitioners only.
Though the larger PR firms now say they are reforming, CEOs should be concerned that they will return right back to their old ways once the economy improves.
Paul Knopick
E & E; Communications
Laguna Hills
