John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

“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.”

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 outraged democracy. Civil war breaks out. Transformed into a general of Napoleonic scope, he defeats the army of capitalist privilege and marches on Washington.

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.”

It was becoming evident that the split between Roosevelt and Taft supporters amongst the Republicans was so irreconcilable that for the first time in years the man the Democrats were going to pick at their convention in June would have a real chance to be elected. Woodrow Wilson was beginning to understand that taking over the progressive platform would serve him even better in national politics than it had in New Jersey. The reformers of the South and West had a superstitious horror of Wall Street. To establish himself in the running against such dangerous radical contenders as Roosevelt and La Follette he had publicly to kick away the stool which had offered him his first foothold.

Colonel Harvey’s Harper’s Weekly , published by the old New York publishing house which the Morgans were known to control, was carrying at the head of its editorial column a rubric: “For President, Woodrow Wilson.” To the West that meant Wall Street’s blessing.