John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

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.

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 making the wheels go round.

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.

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.

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.