Mr. Wilson's War by John Dos Passos
A couple of weeks before Rintelen stepped into the British trap, Dr. Heinrich Albert, commercial attaché of the German Embassy, a privy counsellor and a gentleman of great prestige in Germany, was indiscreet enough to forget his briefcase on an elevated train in New York.
Secretary McAdoo’s treasury agents had been interested in Dr. Albert for some time. Besides being commercial attaché he had an office on lower Broadway with vast bank accounts, where no visible business was transacted. Dr. Albert’s briefcase came into McAdoo’s hands through a series of happy accidents.
Two secretservice agents were dogging the footsteps of George Sylvester Viereck, editor of The Fatherland who was suspected, it turned out, rightly, of being in the pay of the German Government. Following him one Saturday afternoon from the offices of the Hamburg-Amerika Line to the Rector Street station of the Sixth Avenue El, they noticed that he was being very deferential to a large germaniclooking gentleman carrying a heavily stuffed briefcase who accompanied him.
One of the agents followed Mr. Viereck when he left the train at Twentythird Street, the other, Frank Burke by name, stayed aboard to watch the stout gentleman, whom he’d now decided must be the portentous Dr. Albert.
Dr. Albert, who was reading a paper, almost missed his stop at Fiftieth Street and jumping up shouted to the guard to hold the train. In his excitement he left his briefcase on the seat.
Frank Burke just had time to snatch it up and make away with it before Dr. Albert came storming back into the car. After a chase Burke managed to elude the stout German and get the briefcase into the hands of William J. Flynn, the head of the Secret Service. “A glance at the contents of the bag,” he noted in his report, “though much of it was in German, satisfied me that I’d done a good Saturday’s work.”
The documents in Dr. Albert’s briefcase dealt with the subsidizing of newspapers and motion pictures and lecture tours, with the bribing of labor leaders to foment strikes in munitions plants and to agitate for an arms embargo. (“I am morally convinced,” McAdoo noted when he described the incident in his memoirs, “that the British were doing the same thing, but we had no documentary proof.”) With Teutonic thoroughness every detail was set down of the measures being taken to get control of the Wright Airplane Company, to rig the cotton market, to corner chlorine and to purchase munitions to keep them away from the Allies.
Flynn immediately jumped on the Bar Harbor express to take the mass of material up to Secretary McAdoo who was at North Haven, Maine, with his family. McAdoo drove over to Cornish to show the President the documents.
Wilson told him to get Lansing’s and Colonel House’s advice as to whether they should be published. The three of them, House, Lansing and McAdoo, decided to give copies to Frank Cobb who, promising to release no inkling of their origin, started publishing them in the World as a great scoop on August 15. It was generally believed that British Intelligence furnished the documents.
House as usual gave his opinion to the President in writing: “It may … even lead us to war, but I think the publication should go ahead. It will strengthen your hands enormously and will weaken such agitators as Mr. Bryan …”
Personal Diplomacy
Every new disclosure of German intrigue deepened House’s conviction that the United States would be drawn into the war on the side of the Allies. He wanted American involvement to come about in such a way that the United States could dictate the terms of the peace that had to follow.
In his talks with Sir Edward Grey in London, he had already broached the idea of an alliance of nations to keep the peace. But first the war had to be brought to an end. To dictate a rational peace in a world where only force was respected the United States had to have at least a potential army. Josephus Daniels, with the help of the Navy League and other powerful congressional lobbies, was doing a good job building up the fleet. The army was Saturday’s child.
In his letters to the President, House was trying, through suggestions phrased with oleaginous tact, to bring his friend around to an understanding of the need for preparedness. Wilson still shied off from the word. Preparedness had taken an evil connotation in his mind because Theodore Roosevelt, whom he was coming to consider his archenemy, was calling for it in every speech he made.
Early in August the retired Chief of Staff called on Colonel House in Manchester. Major General Leonard Wood was a New Englander who had gone into the army from the Harvard Medical School. A vigorous broadshouldered man, full of enthusiasm for frontier life, he found while serving in the campaign against Geronimo that he was more interested in soldiering than in doctoring. It was Wood who helped T.R. organize the Rough Riders and who was in command at San Juan Hill. As military governor of Cuba he backed Walter Reed in his investigation of the causes of yellow fever. In the Philippines he helped pacify the Moros.
Wood was the living examplar of the New Nationalism. No more given to keeping his opinions to himself than his friend T.R., his army career proved stormy. Taft appointed him to the newly instituted post of Chief of Staff. Now he was organizing officers training camps to prepare for the war he was sure would come. Since the Democratic administration furnished him with no funds, the students paid their own way. He wanted House to convince the President that the regular army should immediately be raised to full strength. He was talking up universal military service on the Swiss model.
The immediate aim of his visit was to urge House to argue the President into letting him go to the western front for a while as an observer. He promised to do it without publicity. He pointed out that American officers had no idea of how the war was actually being fought.
House couldn’t have agreed with the general more wholeheartedly. He passed on Wood’s suggestions to Wilson at Cornish but got no reply. Perhaps it was enough for the President that Wood was a friend of T.R.’s.
Wilson remained the man of words. He was working long hours at his solitary typewriter trying to find just the right words that would convince the Germans on the one hand and the British on the other that they must bind themselves to respect neutral rights at sea. Considerations of power politics failed to hold his attention. On problems of action he liked to have his mind made up for him. But how could he trust any other man’s judgement? He was getting a somewhat petulant attitude towards all his various advisers and passing on the carbons of their reports on White House flimsy to Mrs. Galt with derogatory remarks pencilled in the margins.
Only Edith Galt thoroughly understood his lonely dedication to doing the right thing. He had already told his daughters of their approaching engagement. The daughters approved.
While the President was taking Mrs. Galt and the ladies of the family on summer automobile rides to show them his favorite views over the New Hampshire lakes, he was letting Colonel House bear the brunt of a new tangled dispute with Great Britain over cotton. The President was making no bones of the fact that as soon as he extorted a satisfactory agreement from the Germans on the Lusitania sinking he was going to turn his attention to the highhanded conduct of the British blockade.
During Sir Edward Grey’s much needed vacation, watching his birds and enjoying the North Country dialect of his farmhands at Falloden, Asquith’s coalition cabinet decided that, come what might, they had to take cotton off the free list. The British were detaining more neutral ships than ever. They had already seized two hundred thousand bales of American cotton consigned to Rotterdam; but, to avoid bringing the issue to a head, were paying for them at prevailing market rates.
The South, where so many good Democrats lived, was in an uproar again at the prospect of cotton being declared contraband. Lansing was issuing preliminary warnings through Ambassador Page. It was up to House, who had won the British Foreign Minister’s private esteem, directly and working through Spring Rice, to convince the British that only by generous treatment of the cotton interests could they avoid agitation in Congress for that embargo on the export of munitions which the German propagandists were working so hard to obtain.
House put the dilemma clearly in two cables, coming as authorized by the President, to Sir Horace Plunkett in mid July. He frightened Spring Rice with the picture of an aroused South shouting for an embargo.
The British Cabinet saw reason and put into effect what became known as the Crawford plan, since it was finally formulated by Sir Richard Crawford, their embassy’s commercial adviser, with the advice of prominent cotton brokers and of the governor of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. The British Treasury would send agents into the exchanges in Liverpool, New York and New Orleans to support the price of cotton. The United States Government would submit, at least tacitly, to cotton’s being declared absolute contraband. It might cost the British twenty million pounds, but it would be a fair price to pay to stave off the arms embargo.
House and Spring Rice conferred almost daily. Officially the President was supposed to be in the dark on these negotiations, but practically he gave his approval of each step through the confidential colonel.
As soon as von Bernstorff got wind of the Crawford plan he rushed into the State Department with a German offer to buy three million bales at the market price if the United States would guarantee their transport to Germany. Blockade was outbidding blockade in the cotton exchanges. The cotton interests began to take heart. Wilson, in high righteousness, denounced the German plan as an attempt to bribe the American people.
The British had barely reached a happy solution of the cotton imbroglio before a new crisis began to loom. The pound sterling that had ruled world finance for a hundred years was in trouble. The British were running out of credit.
McAdoo, who saw at once that American war prosperity depended on Allied credit to finance the munitions trade, was trying to talk the President into reversal of his earlier attitude, assumed under Bryan’s influence, that the financing of warloans would be an unneutral act.
While McAdoo, to whom as a moneyhungry southerner the soaring stockmarket, high wages, boom prices for cotton and wheat were the chief consideration, worked in Washington, J. P. Morgan wrestled with the financial community in New York, which still harbored many neutral and even pro-German elements. Little by little regulations against discounting Allied paper through the Federal Reserve banks were relaxed.
The German submarine command gave the pro-Allied bankers a hand by sinking on August 19, just as their foreign office seemed about to talk turkey on the Lusitania protests, the British liner Arabic, of fifteen thousand tons, outward bound out of Liverpool for New York. There were fortyfour casualties, and two Americans among the killed. The news threw the President into an agony of indecision. “I greatly need your advice what to do in view of the sinking of the Arabic,” Wilson wrote House.
“The President has put it up to me and I have not flinched in my advice,” House noted proudly in his diary. “… No citizen of the United States realizes better than I the horrors of this war, and no one would go further to avoid it, but there is a limit to all things. Our people do not want war,” he wrote the President, “but even less do they want you to recede from the position you have taken … Your first note on the Lusitania made you not only the first citizen of America but the first citizen of the world. If by any word or act you should hurt our pride of nationality you would lose your commanding position overnight.”
The President didn’t like the last sentence. “All this is true, only too true,” he scribbled on the copy he sent Mrs. Galt. “I wish he had not put in the sentence I have marked in the margin. It is not how I will stand that I am thinking, but of what it is right to do. You see he does not advise,” Wilson added pettishly. “He puts it up to me.”
The colonel was advising him all right. Indeed the President found an ingenious way to follow the colonel’s advice without committing himself too far. He inspired a news report: if the facts of the sinking of the Arabic proved to be what they seemed to be from the first accounts, the United States Government would break off diplomatic relations with Germany. The result was headlines in the press and the immediate collapse, in Wilhelmstrasse at least, of German obduracy.
On September 1, von Bernstorff appeared, all smiles, in Secretary Lansing’s office at the State Department. His Foreign Office he announced cheerily, was about to yield. Lansing insisted on a written statement. An hour later von Bernstorff was back with the assurance in the form of a letter: “Liners will not be sunk by our submarines without warning and without safety of the lives of noncombatants provided that the liners do not try to escape or offer resistance.”
The President and Mrs. Galt were happy indeed. The White House desk was buried under letters and telegrams congratulating the President. Editorial writers hailed the German assurance as the diplomatic triumph of the age.
The Colonel’s Misgivings
In the uneasy days that preceded the President’s victory in the argument over the Arabic it may have occurred to him that he’d been neglecting the confidential colonel. The newspapers, as happened every August when news was thin, were full of speculation on the possibility of a break between Wilson and his “silent partner.”
On August 31 the President wrote House:
“My dearest friend,
Of course you have known how to interpret the silly malicious lies that the papers have been recently publishing about a disagreement between you and me, but I cannot deny myself the pleasure of sending you just a line of deep affection to tell you how they have distressed me.”
Eager as he was to keep the country out of war Wilson was coming around to House’s way of thinking. On September 3 he gave to the press letters which he had written six weeks before to Secretary of War Garrison and to Secretary of the Navy Daniels instructing them to put their staffs to work on plans for “adequate national defense” for presentation to the Congress which would convene in December.
He had at last convinced himself that the country must be ready for eventualities in case German assurances on their use of the submarine turned out not to be in good faith. At this point, though House felt that von Bernstorff was doing his best, there was a growing suspicion among the President’s advisers that the German Admiralty would not honor the Arabic pledge. Smoldering suspicions were fanned by new revelations of intrigue.
While the Dutch liner Rotterdam was calling at Falmouth at the end of August, in searching the cabin of an American correspondent named Archibold, who was known to be a propagandist for the Central Powers, agents of British Intelligence found that he was carrying, under the protection of his U. S. citizenship, diplomatic correspondence for the Hapsburg foreign office. Copies were immediately transmitted to Ambassador Page who cabled the highlights to the President.
Dr. Dumba was boasting of his campaign to foment strikes among workers in armament plants through his agents who financed a large part of the foreign language press. In a personal letter to Fritz von Papen’s wife, which the Austrian had allowed to be included with his own dispatches, the German military attaché in Washington let himself go: “I always say to these idiotic Yankees that they had better hold their tongues.”
British propagandists lost no time in spreading excerpts from these dispatches through the nation’s press. The President, Secretary Lansing and Colonel House agreed on the course to be taken. A cable went off to Vienna demanding Dr. Dumba’s immediate recall.
Dr. Dumba had a nasty scene with Lansing, who could be crusty when he was on his high horse; but his parting with the confidential colonel, who had assumed the position of father confessor to the whole diplomatic corps, could hardly have been more cordial. “As to the unfortunate incident which is the cause of my departure,” Dumba wrote House, “I was certainly wrong because I made the mistake of being found out.”
In September, Colonel and Mrs. House stopped for a few days at Roslyn with their daughter and her husband on their way into New York, where they had taken a new apartment on East Fiftythird Street. Entertaining the President, even privately, was a taxing business. Woodrow Wilson, like Haroun al Raschid, was fond
House was worried. A new Mrs. Wilson offered a real challenge to his influence. He had reason to fear that she would not be so understanding of his usefulness to the President as was her beloved predecessor. He had been suggesting that the best way of countering newspaper gossip about a break between himself and Wilson was for them to be seen together more often. On September 24 he allowed the reporters to catch him calling at the White House.
There was reason for the colonel’s misgivings. When Edith Wilson published My Memoir it came out that she was already suspicious of the President’s advisers. She attributed the publication of certain malicious rumors about the President’s relations with his Bermuda friend, Mrs. Peck, to an intrigue by House and McAdoo to break up her romance.
House’s papers, to the contrary, show him to have been anxious to assure his dear friend of his approval of the match. There had been disagreement among the President’s intimates as to whether his early remarriage would hurt him or help him in the campaign for re-election coming up in 1916. House wrote that he had made a tactful canvass of political friends and that the decision was that remarriage would not hurt the President politically. More important, because the opinion of the ladies counted heavily in these matters, was that House’s wife Loulie agreed with them.
“I have a plan,” added the confidential colonel, “by which you may be able to see each other as much as you wish without anybody being the wiser.”
On October 7 the New York Times appeared with the headline:
PRESIDENT TO WED MRS NORMAN GALT INTIMATE FRIEND OF HIS DAUGHTERS ALSO COMES OUT FOR WOMAN’S SUFFRAGE.
The same day the President again took a public stand in favor of preparedness.
When questioned by the newspapermen Mrs. Galt couldn’t have been more tactful: she hedged on woman’s suffrage. She was whispering to her closest friends that she halfhoped Woodrow would be defeated for re-election; she wanted to marry the man not the President.