862.00/387: Telegram
The Chargé in Denmark ( Grant-Smith ) to the Acting Secretary of State
[Received 11:47 p.m.]
3270. German press indicates that some progress has been made towards consolidation during the past week. Thus the meeting of the front soldiers delegates at Ems revealed a decided hostility toward Bolshevist experiments and support for the present Ebert-Haase administration. Furthermore the Bavarian Premier Eisner has been forced by public opinion to relinquish some of his more radical policies. Methodical efforts are being made to cope with the great problems of [Page 111] reconstruction. The bourgeois press is strong in its criticism but this is undoubtedly to a great extent due to the fear of severe measures against capital and the desire to start political agitation for the coming elections to the peace protocol. Reports of disorders are few but food conditions may at any time cause a change in this respect.
The reorganization of the political parties is progressing gradually. The “German Democratic Party” which was formed as a new party on a program favoring [“] republican form of government”, very sweeping social reform from a bourgeois standpoint, comprised the majority of the former Progressive Party and affiliated elements of the National Liberal Party and soon obtained the control of the Progressive Party organization. The National Liberals organized the “Democratic Peoples Party” which as the result of negotiations has now been amalgamated with the German democratic party under the exclusion of the most conservative wing of the former national liberal party which will evidently join the new conservative organization. Although several of the former party have been excluded from active participation in the leadership of the democratic party it still seems to contain too many nondemocratic elements ever to be a very effective organization.
The Catholics are strongly opposed to the measure of the new Prussian Minister [of] Worship and Education who is working for a quick separation of church and state as well as for school reforms abolishing certain forms of church supervision and compulsory religious instruction. This is the reason for the strong Catholic agitation for a Rhenish Westphalian Republic, where the Catholics would control the majority and could decide their own policies, as an autonomous state in German Confederation. Repeated [to] Paris for Colonel House.