Edward J. Wheeler

One of those sturdy Americans who believed that the spirit rather than the letter of Washington’s advice to his countrymen regarding foreign affiliations should be regarded, was Edward Jewitt Wheeler. “Manifest destiny,” he asserted publicly in 1919, was pressing the United States into participation in the problems of European reconstruction. The truth of the assertion is unquestionably recognized by the White House and the State Department of 1923, even though the seeming confusion of judgment among the American people and the Tory stubbornness of the Senate still force our government to send “observers” and “eye-witnesses” to talk on equal terms with European plenipotentiaries at the conferences. Dr. Wheeler was for ten years managing editor of the Literary Digest, of which he was the founder, and for seventeen years thereafter editor of Current Opinion; an occupation which may well have broadened and cleared his outlook on contemporary history.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1923 Century Association Yearbook