John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

For the period from 1900 to 1910 (and the two decades before) Theodore Roosevelt’s letters make fine reading. T.R. improves with acquaintance. Though the history of the first decade of the twentieth century in the United States is still unwritten, you can gather some of its elements from such personal narratives of the time as Lincoln Steffens’ and Max Eastman’s autobiographies, and from biographies like Robert La Follette’s life by his wife and daughter, Pusey’s work on Hughes, Pringle’s lives of Theodore Roosevelt and Taft, and Hermann Hagedorn’s Leonard Wood.

It was the era of the two-volume life. The chief value of the “life and letters” type of biography lies in the accompanying documents. A blight infests the whole literature: the authors and editors shamelessly expunged from the record any items or expressions which they fancied might reflect adversely on their heroes. Their writing tends towards the bland in-expressiveness of a retouched cabinet photograph.

It was in some ways a golden age of American journalism. Much of the newspaper reporting was excellent. Magazines like McClure’s and Everybody’s are readable today. Lyman Abbott’s Outlook from week to week gives you the picture of the aspirations and obsessions of the “better element.”

For Woodrow Wilson, the early volumes of Ray Stannard Baker’s Life and Letters offer copious documentation. Baker was a heroworshipper and careless about dates and details, but he had access to an immense amount of material when it was still fresh; and, on the whole, up to the difficult years of the presidency, handled it well. Perhaps Professor Arthur S. Link’s careful volumes on Wilson, of which three have already appeared, will prove the necessary corrective.

Among family narratives Eleanor Wilson McAdoo’s The Woodrow Wilsons , Margaret Elliott’s My Aunt Louisa and Woodrow Wilson and Stockton Axson’s Private Life are all essential.

James Kerney’s The Political Education of Woodrow Wilson is probably the most revealing book written about him by a contemporary. The editor of the Trenton Evening Times wrote freshly and with rare candor.

Tumulty’s and McAdoo’s books, though both gentlemen leave out more than they put in, are useable; as are David F. Houston’s Eight Years with Wilson’s Cabinet and Franklin K. Lane’s letters.

Among manuscript sources I struck paydirt in Robert Lansing’s diaries at the Library of Congress and, for wartime Britain, in the Walter Hines Page papers at Harvard. Outside of the vast aggregation of Wilson papers at the Library of Congress, and the Bryan papers and the other collections under the care of the Division of Manuscripts there, the supreme source of information on Wilson’s waging of peace and war is to be found in his confidential colonel’s day to day comments preserved in the Edward M. House papers at Yale.

On Colonel House himself there is Arthur Howden Smith’s Mr. House of Texas and a somewhat sensation-mongering work, not without its insights, by George Sylvester Vierick called The Strangest Friendship in History.

W. F. McComb’s Making Woodrow Wilson President , R. E. Annin’s Woodrow Wilson, A Character Study and Wilson the Unknown , by someone writing under the name of Wells Wells, offer, if taken with the proper grains of salt, valuable sidelights.

For the shooting side of the war John J. Pershing’s My Experiences in the World War remains surprisingly good. I don’t know whether the general wrote it all himself or not, but it shows the impress of his character in every line. Admiral Sims’ book is good. Robert Lee Bullard’s Personalities and Reminiscences of the War is the frank report of a combat officer. Harbord’s Leaves from a War Diary , William Mitchell’s Memories of World War I and Charles G. Dawes’ A Journal of the Great War deal with things actually experienced.

There is shelf after shelf of combat narratives, many of them either spiced or expurgated for publication. These works are best read in connection with the records of command posts and divisional and corps headquarters which are to be found in the publications of the American Battle Monuments Commission.

The regimental and divisional histories range from Creel-style journalism to sober recitals of facts in the good military tradition. The History of the Second Division is irreplaceable for its quotations from soldiers’ diaries.

The Russian imbroglio is excellently covered by George F. Kennan’s two volumes on Soviet American Relations 1917–20. Raymond Robins’ farsighted appraisal of Lenin’s government can be found in William Hard’s Raymond Robins’ Own Story. Edgar Sisson’s 100 Red Days is not without interest as a document of the time. R. H. Bruce Lockhart’s British Agent makes good reading, as of course does John Reed’s account of the coup d’état. General William S. Graves wrote a useful book: America’s Siberian Adventure ; and three lieutenants named Moore, Mead and Jahns collaborated in The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki in Northern Russia , privately published in Detroit by what they called “The Polar Bear Press,” which constitutes one of the few original American sources for that campaign. The Murmansk and Archangel story has recently been well recapitulated by E. M. Halliday in The Ignorant Armies.

The best account of the Peace Conference remains, for my money, Harold Nicolson’s Peacemaking. James T. Shotwell’s published diary comes a close second. Winston Churchill’s Aftermath is enlivening in connection with R. S. Baker’s Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement , which the eminent statesman excoriates in good Churchillian style. John Maynard Keynes’ enumeration of Wilson’s faults and weaknesses in The Economic Consequences of the Peace is historical vituperation in the grand manner.

Edith Bolling Wilson’s My Memoir throws, with a cogency perhaps unintended, the pathetic light of feminine egotism and affection on the tragic figure of her husband, as he went about performing, with the ritual determinism of a hero of Sophocles, act after act to bring about his own destruction.

The last phase is well described by Thomas A. Bailey in Woodrow Wilson and the Lost Peace and Woodrow Wilson and the Great Betrayal. The record of the final ironical twist to the tragic drama is to be found in Stephen Bonsal’s Unfinished Business where Bonsal tells of the near success of his mission from Colonel House to Senator Lodge, which might, had Mrs. Wilson not stood in the way, have opened up the possibility of a compromise on the Covenant.

I want to thank Mr. Mearns and his assistants of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress for their help in making available the Wilson, Lansing, and Bliss papers and other sections of the vast hoard of material under their jurisdiction. Colonel E. G. Bliss has given me permission to use two short quotations from his father, General Bliss’s letters. Excerpts from the Walter Hines Page papers are quoted by permission of the Harvard College Library. Mrs. Richard Fell is allowing me to quote a paragraph from her uncle’s diary on deposit at the University of Virginia. I want to thank Professor Seymour and his assistant Mr. Gotlieb, for their unfailing hospitality and to acknowledge the permission given me by the Yale University Library to study and utilize unpublished papers in the Edward M. House collection. I owe many thanks, as often before, to the Peabody and Enoch Pratt Libraries in Baltimore.