Mr. Wilson's War by John Dos Passos
It was a period of money worries for the Wilsons. The governor’s salary was only ten thousand dollars. They had a few savings from Princeton days and occasional royalties from his books, but Mrs. Wilson had to pinch every penny.
The main business of the summer, which the Wilson family spent at the official residence at Sea Girt, was gaining control of the state Democratic committee. James R. Nugent, who by this time hated Wilson with a bitter personal hatred, was chairman. The report that Nugent on a champagne drunk at a nearby summer resort had publicly toasted the governor as an ingrate and a liar was seized on by Wilson supporters. They made it a pretext for forcing Nugent’s resignation. His successor was a Wilson man.
The immediate result was a split in the New Jersey Democracy which resulted in the loss of the legislature to the Republicans. Just as at Princeton Wilson lost interest in university affairs, when opinion began to turn against him after the first flush of enthusiasm for his setting everything to rights, so now the executive offices at Trenton began to lose their glamor. He was always away lecturing. The New York Sun, a Republican paper continually yapping at his heels, took to describing the governorship as Professor Wilson’s travelling fellowship.
He did press through a batch of laws, known to the newspapers as the Seven Sisters, which made New Jersey less the promised land for the incorporation of outofstate trusts and holding companies, but his lack of interest in the local problems of the people of his home state was becoming painfully evident.
His veto of the bill to force the railroads to start eliminating grade crossings came as a disappointment to supporters in both parties. Kerney told the story that when the bill was returned to the state senate with the veto message the senators found a letter to the governor from a railroad official which had slipped into the engrossed copy by mistake. The letter was couched in terms strangely similar to the terms of the veto message. Such was Woodrow Wilson’s prestige that the senators, although bitterly disappointed by the veto, returned the letter to Wilson instead of tipping off the newspapers, in order not to damage his prospects of the presidential nomination.
Woodrow Wilson was becoming the center of a political cult, but personally he remained a lonely man. His craving for love and admiration was insatiable. His home was full of doting female relatives but that was not enough. He missed his friendships among the Princeton faculty. No one had taken the place of Jack Hibben as a daily and approving companion since their bitter break in the row over the quadrangles. Then one day in late November, 1911, Governor Wilson paid a call, at the suggestion of his literary bureau, on a gentleman from Texas. He found, right in the world of politics where he most needed a crony, a sympathetic friend, who like himself had spent a lifetime cultivating the arts of power.
Chapter 3
THE SILENT PARTNER
EDWARD Mandell House was two years younger than Wilson. He was born and raised in Texas. His first memories were of living in a whitepillared redbrick mansion set among oleanders in an orange grove near the beach in Galveston. The roof was crowned with a cupola where his father, a trader and shipowner who had run away from England as a boy and fought the Mexicans with Sam Houston, spent a good deal of his time searching the horizon with a telescope for federal gunboats. T. W. House invested heavily in blockaderunners. Sometimes he lost, but when he won he deposited his winnings in gold with Baring Brothers in London. The end of the war found him a very wealthy man. In reconstruction times a man with gold sovereigns could buy almost as much of Texas as he wanted.
House liked to tell of those murderous days when he was one of a band of guntoting youths running wild in Houston. He told Arthur Howden Smith, who became his biographer, that he used to spend hours practicing the quick draw before the mirror. His mother died when he was twelve. The same year he suffered a severe concussion falling out of a swing onto his head. In later life he attributed to the brain fever and to the severe bouts of malaria that followed, his continued poor health and his inability to stand hot weather.
His father sent him north to a rundown school in Virginia and then to New Haven where it was hoped he might matriculate at Yale. There he made friends with another young scapegrace, the son of Oliver P. Morton, Republican senator from Indiana, who aspired to the Republican presidential nomination in 1876. The pair of them decided to tutor for Cornell instead of entering a preparatory school for Yale.
“Both Morton and I were more bent on mischief than books,” House wrote in his memoir, “and while the mischief was innocent it made us poor students. We were both filled to the brim with interest in politics and public affairs.”
House was an enthusiastic Democrat and Morton was an enthusiastic Republican but they were thick as thieves, nevertheless. During the convention in 1876 instead of studying at Cornell they hung around the telegraph office on Union Square in New York. When Rutherford B. Hayes was nominated instead of Morton’s dad they were equally disappointed. In the breathtaking suspense of the winter of the disputed election they dropped their studies completely and moved in with the Morton family at the Ebbitt House in Washington. As the Mortons were friends of the Grants, the boys had the run of the White House, and even managed to squeeze into the old Supreme Court Chamber in the Capitol for the sessions of the Electoral Commission which eventually awarded the election to Hayes, in spite of Tilden’s popular majority.
House used to speak of these bloodheating days as “an education in representative government.” It left him, so he said, with no ambition to hold office or taste for public speaking but with an insatiable appetite for the machinery of politics. “Yet I have been thought without ambition. That I think is not quite true. My ambition has been so great it has never seemed to me worth while to try to satisfy it.”
When his father, whom he adored, suffered a stroke a couple of years later, he went home to Houston to nurse him. Meanwhile he read up on American government. Back at Cornell he had eagerly studied de Tocqueville. After his father’s death he pitched in with his brothers to help manage the widespread holdings the elder House had left to his children.
When at twentythree young House married Miss Loulie Hunter of Hunter, Texas, he felt himself well enough off to take a year’s honeymoon in Europe with his bride.
Advising and Helping
Back home in the early eighties he found himself in the thick of a new generation growing up in Texas on the heels of the empirebuilders. His father, a humane man who had manumitted his slaves as fast as they learned a trade, taught him to admire character and initiative more than money and social position. It came natural to him to side with the people against the magnates.
When his friend James S. Hogg became governor House joined in his campaign to free Texas politics from the domination of railroad and financial interests. House used to say he considered Hogg the greatest Texan after Sam Houston. It was Governor Culberson who made House a colonel on his staff. House used to tell in his deadpan way how much his colored coachman enjoyed wearing the uniform.
House devoted three years of his life to promoting the Trinity and Brazos Valley Railroad on capital furnished by Thomas Jefferson Coolidge of Boston. He used to boast that this was one honest railroad, honestly financed and honestly built.
After that he seems to have felt he was as well off as he wanted to be. He and his wife built themselves a fine house with broad verandas in Austin, where they lived lavishly, and entertained out of state visitors. They interested themselves in the university. They were friendly with the professors. Their home was the center of the intellectual life of Austin. Without ever running for office himself the colonel became the guide and philosopher of several generations of Texas politicians.
“So in politics,” he wrote, “I began at the top rather than at the bottom, and I have been doing since that day pretty much what I am doing now; that is advising and helping wherever I might.” In Austin if you wanted to accomplish some reform Colonel House was the man to see. He never wanted anything for himself. His pleasure was in
When Joseph D. Sayers became governor House was consulted on every detail of the administration. “I lay upon a large lounge in our living room, for I was in anything but good health, and gave my opinion as to the best man for each office … I had long made it a rule not to visit and it was understood that if anyone desired to see me it must be at my home. I did this not only to conserve my strength but because it enabled me to work under more favorable conditions … Those days and those guests are among the pleasantest recollections of my life.”
Bryan’s freesilver campaign in 1896 failed, but it taught House, who was beginning to fancy himself as a political weatherprophet, how much talent and how many resentments could be marshalled in behalf of a Democratic revival. He became interested in trying out on the national stage the techniques of behind the scenes manipulation he had developed at home.
His appetite for national politics was heightened by the appearance of the Bryan family in Austin one winter during McKinley’s first administration. House and ex-governor Hogg arranged for the Bryans to rent a house adjoining theirs. House started spinning his webs, hoping that Bryan would fall under his influence as easily as his Texas friends. “I found Mrs. Bryan very amenable” he wrote, “but Mr. Bryan was as impracticable as ever … I believe he feels his ideas are God-given.” Bryan, he said, was the most opinionated man he’d ever met.
The Confidential Colonel
House was convinced he couldn’t stand the Texas summers. Heat prostrated him. He took to spending more and more time in the North or in European spas. Going and coming to and from Europe in the spring and fall he and his wife would stay several weeks in New York. He began to cultivate the more respectable Democratic politicians. He was spoken of as searching, like Diogenes with his lantern, for a Democrat who could be elected President.
Colonel House was described in those days as a slight grayish almost mousily quiet man with high cheekbones and a receding chin. There was something pebblelike about the opaque blue of his eyes. He wore a close-clipped colorless mustache. His speech was meticulous with a slight Texas drawl. A good listener, he had a way of punctuating a visitor’s outpourings with exclamations of “True, true.”
People remarked on his soundless tread when he came into a room. In conversation he was master of the meaningful silence. He continuously wore the air of having just left a conference where men of importance had been concerned with transcendant events. The impression he gave was that he knew more than he let on. At the same time he was incurably confidential. “Just between you and me and the angels” was a favorite expression.
Talk at the Gotham
The meeting between Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House had not gone unprepared. Wilson had for some months been in communication with friends of the colonel’s in Texas. That October he delivered an address at the state fair in Dallas which set the forwardlooking politicians to discussing him favorably. His friend Harvey urged him to get in touch with House. Congressman Burleson of Texas wrote describing House as “a good politician, a wise counselor, able and unselfish … I think he can help you.”
A couple of letters were exchanged on questions of party regularity and it was arranged, through the young men of the literary bureau, that Governor Wilson would take it upon himself to call on Colonel House.
It was a great day in both men’s lives.
“He came alone to the Gotham promptly at four and we talked for an hour,” House noted portentously in his diary. “From that first meeting I have been in as close touch with Woodrow Wilson as with any man I have ever known.”
Years later, talking to Arthur Howden Smith, he described that first interview:
“We talked and talked. We knew each other for congenial souls from the very beginning … We exchanged our ideas about the democracies of the world, contrasted the European democracies with the United States, discussed where they differed, which was best in some respects and which in others … I remember we were very urbane. Each gave the other the chance to have his say … The hour flew away. It seemed no time when it was over.”
Wilson was engaged to confer with a California Democrat and had to leave when the hour was up. They arranged to dine together a couple of days later. After a few more ardent meetings at the Gotham, House remembered having remarked to Wilson one day as he was about to leave, “Governor, isn’t it strange that two men who never knew each other before, should think so much alike?”
Woodrow Wilson answered, “My dear fellow, we have known each other all our lives.”
This pair of middleaged politicians, family men both, were as excited about each other as two schoolgirls developing a crush.
Here was a man, House confided to Senator Culberson “one can advise with some degree of satisfaction.” “He is not the biggest man I ever met,” he wrote Sidney Mezes, his brotherinlaw who taught government at the University of Texas, “but he is one of the pleasantest, and I would rather play with him than any prospective candidate I have seen … From what I have heard I was afraid that he had to have his hats made to order: but I saw not the slightest evidence of it … Never before have I found both the man and the opportunity.”
To Ameliorate the Condition
House was ill a great deal that fall and winter. From his bed he kept in touch by letter and telephone with all the political skirmishing preliminary to next June’s Democratic convention. At the same time he was engaged in putting down on paper a fantasy in the style of Bellamy’s Looking Backward, which does a great deal to explain the remark in his memoir: “My ambition has been so great it has never seemed to me worth while to try to satisfy it.”
This fantasy, a daydream remarkably boyish to be the work of a man of fifty, was eventually published, anonymously of course, by Ben Huebsch under the title of Philip Dru, Administrator.
A quotation from Mazzini on the title page expressed the political creed House was hoping to put into effect, by advice and cajolement, during the Democratic administration to come:
“No war of classes, no hostility to existing wealth, no wanton or unjust violation of the rights of property, but a constant disposition to ameliorate the condition of the classes least favored by fortune.”
The dedication restated the theme in his own words: “To the unhappy many [he must have remembered Stendhal’s ‘happy few’] who have lived and died lacking opportunity, because, in the starting, the worldwide social structure was wrongly begun.”
It is a rather awkward story, set ten years forward in the nineteentwenties, of a civil war between progressive and reactionary forces in the United States. The hero is a lithe young West Pointer named Philip Dru whose army career is cut short by a case of heat prostration contracted while riding out in the Mexican desert with a highly imaginary young lady named Gloria. During his convalescence the hero lives over a hardware store on the lower East Side of New York and absorbs the mystique of the coming European revolution from a Jewish idealist who escaped from Polish pogroms to take refuge in America. Meanwhile Gloria, who has taken up settlement house work, tells him of a Senator Selwyn’s conspiracy, backed by a fund raised by a thousand multimillionaires, to take over the United States Government in the interest of the rich.
Senator Selwyn bears a more than accidental resemblance to Senator Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island who, as sponsor of the Payne-Aldrich Tariff so hated in the south and west, was the bugbear good Democrats and Progressives used to frighten naughty children with. Senator Aldrich, able, ruthless, and thoroughly convinced of the Godgiven right of the moneymen to rule, led the standpat forces which had taken over Taft’s indecisive administration. In the story, House, as a science fiction touch, has his Senator Selwyn imprudently dictate his conspiratorial plans into a dictaphone. Dru, who has become a journalist for the muckraking press, gets hold of the guilty cylinder and forms a committee to fight for freedom and right. With Gloria raising money from the Pinchots and Walter Perkinses among the millionaires, Philip Dru becomes the leader of ou
Wearing Dru’s fictional cloak, House simplifies the legal code and repeals unnecessary laws. He institutes a graduated income tax. He borrows a land tax on unimproved land from Henry George. He centralizes government administration, takes the currency out of the hands of the bankers, regulates public utilities and bans holding companies.
For the benefit of the workingman he sets up state employment agencies, old age insurance, workingmen’s compensation for accidents. Labor is to be represented in management and to share in the profits of industry.
He institutes cooperative financing and marketing for the farmer.
He rewrites the Constitution. The President with a ten year term becomes a mere head of state but an Executive is chosen by the House of Representatives and is responsible to the House. Party government in the English style. Senators are elected for life subject to recall every five years.
Having reformed the government to Colonel House’s satisfaction the hero resigns his powers and fades away in a rosy haze with the beautiful Gloria.
The few intimate friends House allowed to see the manuscript were impressed. In a naïve way it expressed the hopes and frustrations of a good many reformers disheartened by the slow working of the progressive panaceas. Sidney Mezes urged him to rewrite the book as a serious exposition of his ideas. E. S. Martin, who edited Life, in those days a New York counterpart of the London Punch, offered to help in revamping the story. “I had no time, however, for such diversions,” wrote House. “I was so much more interested in the campaign than I was in the book … that I turned it over to the publisher as it was.”