Mr. Wilson's War by John Dos Passos
A similar agitation for peace was stirring the Catholic Church. The Reichstag resolution of July 17 was sponsored by the German Catholic Center party. This was followed on the first day of August by an appeal from Pope Benedict XV to the belligerents to negotiate a peace without victory, on approximately the terms laid down in Woodrow Wilson’s speeches before America’s entrance into the war. Associated with the Pope’s appeal, at least in the minds of Wilson’s advisers at the State Department, was the attempt by Count Czernin, the Austrian foreign minister, to use the new Emperor Charles’ brotherinlaw Prince Sixtus of Bourbon, then serving in the Belgian Army, as his private gobetween in preliminary conversations between the French, the Germans and the Italians. Wilson’s first thought was that he was too busy waging war to pay any more attention to the Pope’s appeal than he did to the mistaken exhortations of the socialists.
On August 17 Colonel House wrote from Magnolia begging him to reconsider:
“Dear Governor,
“I am so impressed with the importance of the situation that I am troubling you again … I believe that you have an opportunity to take the peace negotiations out of the hands of the Pope and hold them in your own. Governmental Germany realizes that no one excepting you is in a position to enforce peace terms. The Allies must succumb to your judgment and Germany is not much better off. Badly as the Allied cause is going, Germany is in a worse condition. It is a race now of endurance with Germany as likely to go under first as any of the Entente Powers.
“Germany and Austria are a seething mass of discontent. The Russian Revolution has shown the people their power and it has put the fear of God into the hearts of the Imperialists … A statement from you setting forth the real issues would have an enormous effect and would probably bring about such an upheaval in Germany as we desire … You can make a statement that will not only be the undoing of autocratic Germany, but one that will strengthen the hands of the Russian liberals in their purpose to mould their country into a mighty republic.
“I pray that you may not lose this great opportunity.
“Affectionately yours,
“E. M. House.”
The President’s reply was to mail House the text of a note, prepared with the usual agonizing care and typed as usual on his own typewriter. The gist of it was that although he refused to believe that the word of the present German Government could be trusted, he hoped to help negotiate with some eventual German Government which really represented the German people, an equitable peace.
“The object of this war,” Wilson wrote, “is to deliver the free peoples of the world from the menace and the actual power of a vast military establishment controlled by an irresponsible government.” The enemy was not the German people but their “ruthless masters.”
The night after House received the President’s rough draft he confided to his diary that this had been one of the busiest and most important days of the summer. “I did not receive it until twelve o’clock and … I succeeded in reading, digesting and answering it in time to mail on the Fedderal Express.” With one of his portentous looks he turned his packet of typescript over to the Boston postmaster, who had providentially come to call. The postmaster, much flattered, promised to convey it to Washington in a special pouch, or if necessary to take it there himself. House noted that the man “would have been even more impressed had he known that he had in his possession what at the moment was the most interesting document in the world.”
President Wilson’s reply to Pope Benedict was published by the State Department on August 29. In America it effectively cut the ground out from under such “wilful” senators as Borah and La Follette and the Socialist agitators who were risking jail under the Espionage Act by demanding a clear statement of war aims. Furthermore it reassured German-American opinion, which though muffled was still influential, that German-Americans who backed the President in his war against the Kaiser’s generals were not fighting the German people. It was the beginning of the politics of the wedge.
The Inquiry
After the note was spread over the press House wrote the President, amid a torrent of praise: “You have again written a declaration of human liberty,” and signed his letter “your devoted.” Wilson had written him: “I think of you every day with the deepest affection.”
They had not seen each other for several months and the newspapermen were coming up with their usual summer crop of stories about a break between them. House joked the reporters about these stories. Weren’t they rather late this year? They usually came at midsummer along with the seaserpents.
The President’s next letter to House was written from the Mayflower. The Wilsons and a group of Mrs. Wilson’s relations were spending a weekend anchored out in Hampton Roads to escape what the President was beginning to call the madness of Washington. The following week he promised House he would get away for a longer time. “Do not be alarmed about my health. I need rest, and am growing daily more conscious that I do: but I am fit and all right. All join,” he added significantly, “in affectionate messages.”
In the same letter he made an important suggestion. It was following a train of thought that House had been gently urging all summer. The time had come, he suggested, to prepare American peace terms. He knew that the British and French had their preparations already made in case the war should come to a sudden end. “What would you think,” he wrote House, “of quietly gathering a group of men about you to assist you to do this? I could, of course, pay all the bills out of the money now at my command. Under your guidance these assistants could collate all the definite material available and you could make up the memorandum by which you should be guided.”
House went to work with enthusiasm. He asked his brotherinlaw, Sidney Mezes, who was president of the College of the City of New York, to head up an organization which came to be known as The Inquiry. Glib young Walter Lippmann of The New Republic was made secretary. The eminent Dr. Isaiah Bowman of the American Geographical Society gave the researchers working space in the society’s rooms in New York and put his mapmaking facilities at their disposal.
The aim of The Inquiry, so Dr. Mezes wrote the President, would be to collect information 1. “about Europe’s suppressed, oppressed and backward peoples,” 2. about international business, 3. about international law, 4. to analyze what serious proposals could be uncovered for an organization to insure peace, 5. to make suggestions as to the restoration of war damage in France and Belgium.
In answer the President immediately called for a further investigation of the needs of the larger states such as Russia, Germany and Austria, for access to the sea and to raw materials. “Of course,” he wrote, “what we are seeking is a basis that will be fair to all and which will nowhere plant the seeds of such jealousy and discontent and restraint of development as would certainly breed future wars.”
Wilson wanted facts he could trust. He knew something of England at first hand but he was only dimly aware of the particulars of the tangled ambitions, congenital hatreds, and crass conflicts of interest that he knew would confront him when the time came to straighten out continental Europe and put its congeries of peoples on the path to freedom and democracy and peace. He wanted The Inquiry to give him facts to base his theory on.
Although everybody connected with the enterprise was enjoined to secrecy, the newspapers got wind of it. The New York Times ran a headline: AMERICA TO SPEAK IN HER OWN VOICE AT THE PEACE TABLE.
The President was indignant. “I think you newspaper men can have no conception of what fire you are playing with when you discuss peace now at all,” he wrote David Lawrence, pointing out that Germany had achieved the hegemony of middle Europe from Hamburg to Baghdad and would be at a great advantage should negotiations start from that basis. “It is my stern and serious judgment that the whole matter ought to be let alone.” As a result the operations of Colonel House’s inquirers were swathed in as much secrecy as if they had been working on a high explosive or a new poison gas.
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On September 9 House noted in his diary: “Around seven o’clock the Navy Yard of Boston called me over the telephone to say they had a wireless stating that the Mayflower would be in Gloucester Harbor at two o’clock. Loulie and I went over to meet the boat, boarded it, met the President and Mrs. Wilson, and motored along the shore for two hours or more. We stopped first at our cottage and then went over to Mrs. T. Jefferson Coolidge’s house to look at her prints, china etc., which have been inherited from Thomas Jefferson.” As they motored around the shore drive Wilson described himself as “a democrat like Jefferson with aristocratic tastes.”
Next morning the President played nine holes of golf and lunched with Colonel and Mrs. House. “Once or twice during the conversation,” House noted, “I threw the President off his line of thought by interpolations, and he found it difficult to return to his subject. He smiled plaintively and said ‘You see I am getting tired. This is the way it indicates itself.’ ”
The Mayflower steamed back around Cape Anne and into Massachusetts Bay. Passing through the Cape Cod canal the presidential party seated on deck watched the great groups of people gathered along the banks to cheer him. Schoolchildren waved little flags and sang. The President was much moved. Edith drank in the adulation of the distant crowds. Her husband was at the peak of his personal popularity. Every day there came, in the mail she often helped him cope with, photographs of babies and scrawled letters from the proud parents explaining that their latest had been named Woodrow or Wilson.
After a short visit to the Sayre family on Nantucket to see the grandchildren, where they were greeted again by cheers and the piping songs of schoolchildren let out of class for the occasion, the Mayflower conveyed President and Mrs. Wilson and their friends and relatives smoothly through the Sound, around the humming manywindowed promontory of Manhattan and came to anchor opposite Grant’s Tomb in the North River. The Wilsons went to the Belasco Theatre that night to see a popular comedy called Polly with a Past. As soon as the President was recognized the entire audience rose and cheered vociferously.
Next morning they called on Admiral and Mrs. Grayson at the St. Regis and attended divine services at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. Edith Wilson’s mother and sister went on board with them for Sunday dinner, and so did the discreetly smiling Colonel House.
House was braving the September heat to meet the Marquess of Reading, Chief Justice of England, the son of an East End fruit merchant, risen by brains and tact and skill in the law to the Privy Council, who had just arrived in New York. Reading was one of the Liberals closest to Lloyd George, and after much correspondence with House and North-cliffe, the Prime Minister had picked him as the man most likely to get along with Baruch of the War Industries Board in coordinating the war effort and in bringing home to the Americans the dreadful urgency of the situation the Allies faced on the western front as the result of the Russian collapse. Then too he had to arrange a fresh credit. The British were out of funds again.
Before the meal was served on the Mayflower the colonel managed to buttonhole the President long enough to show him a letter from Lloyd George to House which Reading had brought, suggesting that Wilson send a personal representative to join in the councils of the Allies and that that representative should be House himself. Wilson held the suggestion at arm’s length, and they rejoined the party waiting to sit down at table.
The President returned to Washington by train so as to be at his desk Monday morning. A few days later Lord Reading called by appointment and presented another personal letter from Lloyd George, this time addressed to Wilson directly, urging with some vehemence that the President of the United States be represented at the next interallied conference.
In the first place the decisions made there would directly affect the American Army … “But another reason weighs still more strongly with me,” wrote the Prime Minister. “I believe that we are suffering today from the grooves and traditions that have grown up since the war … Independent minds, bringing fresh views … might be of immense value in helping us to free ourselves from the ruts of the past.” The wily Welshman ended with an encomium of the President’s public statements. “They have recalled to many the ideals with which they entered the war, and which it is easy to forget amid the horrors of the battlefield and the overtime and fatigue of the munitions shops. They have given to the bruised and battered peoples of Europe fresh courage to endure and fresh hope that with all their sufferings they are helping to bring into being a world in which freedom and democracy will be secure, and in which free nations will live together in unity and peace.”
The President’s desk was bombarded in the days that followed with similar requests from the French and the Italians. In early October he asked House to come to Washington to discuss them. House found the President still set against letting what he called “the center of gravity of the war” be transferred to Europe. At the same time he had come reluctantly to the conclusion that he must be represented at the next interallied meeting.
House was the only man he could trust to protect his liberty of action. House must head the delegation, which they now decided should be a fulldress affair, including General Bliss, the Chief of Staff, Admiral Benson, Chief of Naval Operations, and important figures in the administration who could discuss authoritatively the problems of finance and supply, and the allimportant embargo on German trade through neutral nations. Two cruisers and a destroyer would be furnished for transportation. All expenses would be paid through the State Department. As usual the colonel’s instructions were vague.
Without keeping a copy, or sending one over to the State Department for the record, the President wrote out for House what the colonel slyly called his letter of marque. It was a private letter endorsed to the premiers of Great Britain, France and Italy, whom Wilson addressed simply as “gentlemen.” He stated that he had “asked his friend Mr. Edward M. House, the bearer of this letter, to represent me in the general conferences presently to be held by the governments associated in war with the central powers or in any other conferences he may be invited and think it best to take part in.”
On second thought it was decided to ask Lansing to send formal notification of the dispatch of an American mission to the governments involved.
“I shall think of you and dear Mrs. Wilson constantly while I am away,” wrote House from New York where he was hastily assembling his delegation, “and I shall put forward the best that is in me to do the things you have intrusted to me …” He begged the President to take care of his health … “You are the one hope left to this torn and distracted world. Without your leadership God alone knows how long we will wander in the wilderness …”
“I hate to say good by,” the President answered. “It is an immense comfort to me to have you here for counsel and for friendship. But it is right that you should go. God bless and keep you both. My thoughts will follow you all the weeks through, and I hope it will be only weeks that will separate us.
“Mrs. Wilson,” he added significantly, “joins in all affectionate messages.”
Since the mission was turning out to be such a numerous affair, House felt he was entitled to take his family along. He appointed his soninlaw Gordon Auchincloss secretary to the commission. Loulie went as a matter of course, and the indispensable Miss Denton, who was so adept at the private code House and Wilson had worked out between them for their personal communications.
Sir William Wiseman was a very shrewd fellow. He had become an intimate of the House apartment on Fiftythird Street, where he found the richest field for the intelligence on American affairs it was his business to transmit back to Whitehall. Now he was taking every precaution to see that the Americans should be made comfortable when they arrived in the tight little isle: “House is very insistent on not having any public banquets or lunches,” he cabled. “He is not strong physically and has a perfect horror of public functions … May I remind you that Americans hate cold hou
House was privately quite aware that there was something incongruous in this sort of preparation for the comfort and convenience of the topdogs whose mismanagement had brought civilization to such a grievous pass, while the underdogs who were in no way to blame suffered and froze and died in the mud and misery of the trenches. One day amid the fluster and botheration of the commission’s preparations for departure he paused long enough to make a quaintly ruminative entry in his diary: “It is to be hoped that the people of all nations will some day notice that those in authority who are largely responsible for wars and those who fan public opinion to white heat, are seldom hurt. Where among the crowned heads of Europe do we find a fatality? Where among Cabinets and members of parliaments has the war caused a death? Where among the great editorial writers, politicians and public orators has one suffered death on the field of battle?”
The American mission proceeded by train to Halifax and was safely conveyed across the Atlantic, arriving in Plymouth on November 7.
In London they found long faces. House had no sooner digested the full story of Caporetto, with eight hundred thousand Italians killed, wounded or prisoner, when the news came of the collapse of Kerensky’s middleclass government and the seizure of power in Petrograd by Lenin’s Bolsheviks in the name of the workers and soldiers and peasants. One of their first public acts was to demand an armistice from the German High Command.