John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

As the wife of a tradesman her existence was not recognized by the ladies and gentlemen unsullied by toil who were written up in the newspapers as the capital city’s social leaders. She gave out that social life bored her. The marriage was childless. She devoted herself to her husband’s business interests, and when he died untimely, she took a hand in the management of the jewelry store.

After the first black crepe period of mourning was over Mrs. Galt discovered that purple was becoming. The broad picture hats of the period brought out her dark hair and flashing eyes and fine teeth. She surrounded herself with Virginia relatives and kept a certain air of mystery about her. She was pointed out as one of the most beautiful women in Washington.

Edith Galt needed a husband as badly as Woodrow Wilson needed a wife. She shared his southern prejudices. She was a good listener with that knack possessed by many women of her peculiar upbringing of appearing more knowledgeable than she really was. She was good company. She had a certain stylish dash. She bought her clothes at Worth’s in Paris and liked to wear an orchid pinned on her left shoulder.

Before long the President was sending her flowers daily and passing on state documents for her comments. His attentions to Mrs. Galt left little time for the usual affectionate epistles to Colonel House.

“I never worry when I don’t hear from you,” House wrote the President. “No human agency can make me doubt your friendship and affection. I always understand your motives.”

The Houses had hardly settled in their Manchester home before a stream of callers started. First it was Attorney General Gregory who described the scene of Bryan’s resignation and brought the colonel up to date on the cabinet gossip. The next day it was Spring Rice.

Wartime strains were telling on Sir Cecil. He was worried about his family and friends in England exposed to bombings from the air. He knew enough to see through the optimistic communiqués published in the British and American press. He knew that the Gallipoli expedition, which was to have opened up the Black Sea for the Russians and blocked off the Central Powers from the Middle East, was a costly failure; that Italy’s entrance into the war was not bringing the hoped for advantages; that the Russians were on the run in Poland; that the Allied offensives on the western front were proving to be an inconclusive butchery of brave men by the tens of thousands. His health was poor and he felt a peevish irritability that occasionally showed itself in public tantrums.

Secretary Lansing, who disliked Sir Cecil, described him about this time in his private notes, as looking and acting like “a foreign office clerk” with his small pointed gray beard, his pepper and salt sack suits baggy at the knees, and his pockets always bulging with documents. Known as an intimate of T.R.’s old Washington circle, the President suspected him of being in cahoots with the Republican opposition.

House found him wellinformed. Though he disparaged his effectiveness as a diplomat, as a man he enjoyed talking to him. This time he raked Sir Cecil over the coals a little for having allowed himself to be heard to complain that the President was pro-German. He knew better. He was as bad as Jusserand. “I advised him,” wrote the colonel, “in the future to say nothing upon the subject or to maintain that the President was observing strict neutrality.”

The next day von Bernstorff appeared in Manchester. The natty Prussian with the kaiserlike mustaches, who was already boasting to his superiors how easy it was “to hold off” Colonel House, couldn’t have been more cordial. Unfriendly observers noticed something unpleasant about the writhing of von Bernstorff’s full lips under his mustache when he desired to be particularly ingratiating. Von Bernstorff talked sympathetically about the treaties of 1785 and 1799 between the United States and Prussia, and the possibility of getting the U-boats to conform to the rules therein laid down for cruiser warfare. Germany would suspend her submarine blockade if the British allowed Germany to import food. The count claimed to envisage a possible peace settlement, with Germany evacuating Belgium and northern France on a basis of no indemnities, no reparations. House observed in his notes that he talked like a neutral: “If he’s not sincere, he’s the most consummate actor I’ve ever met.”

The German ambassador had reason to be in high spirits. Germany was winning the war. American opinion, which he felt he had some part in forming, was building up against the munitions trade.

The German ambassador spent as much time at the Ritz Carleton in New York, which was his propaganda headquarters, as at the Embassy in Washington. The campaign for an embargo on arms shipments was eliciting support. William Jennings Bryan, thrilling great crowds with his demand for an immediate negotiated peace to be enforced by an embargo on arms to the belligerents, was unwittingly helping the German cause. Ample funds were available to subsidize German and Hungarian daily newspapers and weeklies in the various slavic languages of the Hapsburg Empire. In spite of all Spring Rice could do, the very vocal Irish populations scattered over the country refused to be convinced that Britain would not default on her promise of home rule for Erin.

Outside of the east coast, peace sentiment was overwhelming. The Republicans had inaugurated their League to Enforce Peace on June 17 at Independence Hall in Philadelphia with many notables in attendance and ex-President Taft ponderous and benign in the chair. Taft aroused more applause when he talked about peace than when he talked about enforcement.

Von Bernstorff’s mission was to keep America neutral. He was looking forward to success with a reasonable amount of confidence, until, a few days after his talk with Colonel House, the whole fabric of German propaganda began blowing up in his face.

Nineteen fifteen was a year of bomb scares. Persons who confessed to being anarchists were caught attempting to explode what the newspapers described as an infernal machine in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. A bomb went off in the new Bronx courthouse. A mansion belonging to Andrew Carnegie was damaged by a similar explosion. Now on July 3 readers of the morning papers the country over read with amazement and horror that the afternoon before a bomb had shattered a reception room in the Senate wing of the Capitol at Washington.

That same morning Spring Rice breakfasted with the J. P. Morgans at Glen Cove, their Long Island place, where he was spending the weekend. Jack Morgan, as his friends called him, since old J. Pierpont Morgan’s death the year before the war broke out, was chief ruler of the financial empire of the Morgan banks. Brought up in England, English in tastes and sympathies, he became the kingpin of the Franco-British wartrade in the United States.

The British ambassador was quietly chatting with Mr. and Mrs. Morgan over the coffee and newspapers when he heard the butler shouting “in a most fearful voice” to Mr. Morgan to go upstairs.

The party went scuttling about the upper floors looking for a fire. On their way back down the front stairs they ran into the butler being backed up step by step by a thinfaced man with a revolver in each hand. “So you are Mr. Morgan,” the assassin said, raising his pistols. As the man reached the upper hall Morgan and his wife both jumped at him. A powerful heavyset man like his father, Jack Morgan pinned the man to the floor. As he fell the man discharged both pistols. By this time the butler had found some firetongs and started beating the man over the head with them. Other servants came with ropes and trussed him up.