John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

At the State Department Lansing sought the Secretary out and begged him not to resign, but Bryan had become suspicious of Lansing’s sincerity in his regard. He drove to the White House for an hour’s quiet talk with the President. The President was convinced the Lusitania note was right The Secretary was convinced it was wrong. Bryan became agitated. His hands shook so that when he tried to pour himself out a glass of water he spilt it on the table.

“Colonel House,” he said, “has been Secretary of State, not I, and I have never had your full confidence.”

He went back to his office and wrote out his resignation. The President accepted it immediately.

At the cabinet meeting next day the President announced that Mr. Bryan had resigned but suggested he be asked to attend anyway. Throughout the meeting Bryan, his face white and haggard, sat back in his chair as his habit was when he was disturbed, with his eyes closed.

After the President had retired Bryan asked the members of the cabinet to lunch with him. In a private dining room at the University Club he told the five men who went along that he felt a second note meant war. He said he knew the President wanted to avoid war as much as he did. “I believe I can do more on the outside to prevent war than I can on the inside. I think I can help the President more on the outside.”

“You are the most sincere Christian I know,” blurted out cheerful plump Secretary of the Interior Lane. Tears glistened in his eye.

Bryan broke down. “I go out into the dark,” he said huskily. “The President has the prestige and power on his side.” Then he added, “I have many friends who would die for me.”

The scene remained so vivid to several of the men present that they described it at some length in their memoirs.

COLONEL House sailed home convinced that war with Germany was inevitable. He told his friend and T.R.’s, the half-Americanized instigator of the Irish cooperative movement, Sir Horace Plunkett, who was at this stage his liaison man with the Asquith government, that he was going home to persuade the President “not to conduct a milk and water war, but to put all the strength, all the virility, all the energy of our nation into it so that Europe might remember for a century what it meant to provoke a peaceful nation into war.”

Before House left London, Plunkett arranged for him to visit some members of the new coalition cabinet Asquith was organizing in an effort to meet public criticism of the lag in the supply of shells for the artillery in France. He had talks with the Chancellor of the Exchequer; with Lloyd George, the oratorical Welsh leader of the radical wing of the Liberal Party, who was applying his great energies to the Ministry of Munitions; and with Arthur Balfour, the philosopher of conservatism, now First Lord of the Admiralty. They were all delighted by his belligerent views.

The life of Mr. Wilson’s confidential colonel seemed so precious to the Allied cause that the Admiralty furnished the St. Paul with a convoy through the danger zone.

House was pleased by the two destroyers but regretted that they made themselves conspicuous by steaming right alongside the American liner. “Much as I appreciate this attention,” he wrote in his diary, “I have many misgivings as to what the American press may say, and also whether it might not lessen my influence as intermediary of the President.”

The destroyers threw the American press into a hubbub of speculation. Hearst’s New York American referred to mysterious dispatches Colonel House was bringing home with him. The dispatches were mostly in the confidential colonel’s head.

When Dudley Field Malone, whom House had helped obtain the appointment of Collector of the Port of New York, came out on the revenue cutter to meet him off Ambrose Lightship, his news was that the colonel would be the next Secretary of State. A smile creased the small jaw under the neatly clipped mustache. House shook his narrow head. He could be more useful doing what he was doing, he told Malone, in a tone that resounded with untold secrets. When the reporters met him at the dock he confused them thoroughly. “I did not talk peace,” he said, “that was not my mission.”

Colonel and Mrs. House stopped off to see their daughter and her family on Long Island and then repaired to their summer place at Manchester, Massachusetts. Sir Cecil Spring Rice had a house at Prides Crossing nearby. The upstate North Shore village became the center for many portentous comings and going.

The President and his confidential colonel were communicating only by letter and telephone during this period. It was understood that Colonel House must never be asked to Washington during the hot weather. Now Wilson let him know that, much as he wanted to press the hand of his affectionate friend, for fear of comment in the newspapers he thought it wiser not to call on him on his way to Cornish. He had taken for the summer the ample mansion which the American author Winston Churchill built himself out of the earnings of his novels, in New Hampshire, on the edge of the White Mountains. Margaret Wilson who was working hard on her singing in preparation for a concert tour in the fall, and Helen Bones and several other of the relatives who hovered about the President in hopes of relieving his widower’s solitude, were already there. The President planned a full two weeks vacation from the nagging decisions and the sultry heat of the executive office.

The President was holding House at arm’s length for a while. Perhaps he was waiting for the influence of Sir Edward Grey to wear off. He had decided not to appoint Walter Hines Page whom House seems to have then favored for Secretary of State. The President thought his old publisher friend too much under the influence of the beguiling English and appointed Lansing instead. Wilson was determined to keep foreign affairs in his own hands and he felt that Lansing had just the right training in the language of international law to give legal underpinning to his own ideas.

He was still fond of the colonel but he didn’t need the company of a confidential crony as much as he’d needed it during the past winter. He had acquired a new crony of a much more attractive sort.

The President was in love with a Washington widow.

It was the congenial Dr. Grayson who first met Mrs. Galt, at the Mount Kineo House on Moosehead Lake in the summer of 1914, while he was courting a younger friend of hers, a Virginia girl named Altrude Gordon, whom he was later to marry. Mrs. Galt favored the match. The doctor found her charming and introduced her to Eleanor McAdoo and to Helen Bones. The ladies struck up a friendship, and one fine March day, after a walk in Rock Creek Park, Helen Bones invited Mrs. Galt to tea at the White House. Dr. Grayson and President Wilson happened to come back from golf just as the ladies were beginning their tea. The President invited himself to the party and became unusually animated and amusing.

Edith Bolling Galt was born and raised in Wytheville, Virginia. Her father was a rural judge of some standing, who served on the board of visitors of the University. She was seventh in a family of five boys and four girls. Like so many southern families in the postbellum period the Bollings made up for their lack of this world’s goods by enlarging abundantly on the family’s past glories. The Bollings traced their ancestry to Pocahontas.

It was considered quite a comedown when beautiful buxom vivacious Edith Bolling consented to marry a tradesman. Norman Galt was a very nice man and welloff, but he ran a retail jewelry business in Washington. The business did have a most fashionable clientele. With that complete confidence in her own brilliance, intelligence, charm, attractiveness to the male which characterized her generation of southern belles, Mrs. Galt held her head high.