John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

“The President has put it up to me and I have not flinched in my advice,” House noted proudly in his diary. “… No citizen of the United States realizes better than I the horrors of this war, and no one would go further to avoid it, but there is a limit to all things. Our people do not want war,” he wrote the President, “but even less do they want you to recede from the position you have taken … Your first note on the Lusitania made you not only the first citizen of America but the first citizen of the world. If by any word or act you should hurt our pride of nationality you would lose your commanding position overnight.”

The President didn’t like the last sentence. “All this is true, only too true,” he scribbled on the copy he sent Mrs. Galt. “I wish he had not put in the sentence I have marked in the margin. It is not how I will stand that I am thinking, but of what it is right to do. You see he does not advise,” Wilson added pettishly. “He puts it up to me.”

The colonel was advising him all right. Indeed the President found an ingenious way to follow the colonel’s advice without committing himself too far. He inspired a news report: if the facts of the sinking of the Arabic proved to be what they seemed to be from the first accounts, the United States Government would break off diplomatic relations with Germany. The result was headlines in the press and the immediate collapse, in Wilhelmstrasse at least, of German obduracy.

On September 1, von Bernstorff appeared, all smiles, in Secretary Lansing’s office at the State Department. His Foreign Office he announced cheerily, was about to yield. Lansing insisted on a written statement. An hour later von Bernstorff was back with the assurance in the form of a letter: “Liners will not be sunk by our submarines without warning and without safety of the lives of noncombatants provided that the liners do not try to escape or offer resistance.”

The President and Mrs. Galt were happy indeed. The White House desk was buried under letters and telegrams congratulating the President. Editorial writers hailed the German assurance as the diplomatic triumph of the age.

In the uneasy days that preceded the President’s victory in the argument over the Arabic it may have occurred to him that he’d been neglecting the confidential colonel. The newspapers, as happened every August when news was thin, were full of speculation on the possibility of a break between Wilson and his “silent partner.”

On August 31 the President wrote House:

“My dearest friend,

Of course you have known how to interpret the silly malicious lies that the papers have been recently publishing about a disagreement between you and me, but I cannot deny myself the pleasure of sending you just a line of deep affection to tell you how they have distressed me.”

Eager as he was to keep the country out of war Wilson was coming around to House’s way of thinking. On September 3 he gave to the press letters which he had written six weeks before to Secretary of War Garrison and to Secretary of the Navy Daniels instructing them to put their staffs to work on plans for “adequate national defense” for presentation to the Congress which would convene in December.

He had at last convinced himself that the country must be ready for eventualities in case German assurances on their use of the submarine turned out not to be in good faith. At this point, though House felt that von Bernstorff was doing his best, there was a growing suspicion among the President’s advisers that the German Admiralty would not honor the Arabic pledge. Smoldering suspicions were fanned by new revelations of intrigue.

While the Dutch liner Rotterdam was calling at Falmouth at the end of August, in searching the cabin of an American correspondent named Archibold, who was known to be a propagandist for the Central Powers, agents of British Intelligence found that he was carrying, under the protection of his U. S. citizenship, diplomatic correspondence for the Hapsburg foreign office. Copies were immediately transmitted to Ambassador Page who cabled the highlights to the President.

Dr. Dumba was boasting of his campaign to foment strikes among workers in armament plants through his agents who financed a large part of the foreign language press. In a personal letter to Fritz von Papen’s wife, which the Austrian had allowed to be included with his own dispatches, the German military attaché in Washington let himself go: “I always say to these idiotic Yankees that they had better hold their tongues.”

British propagandists lost no time in spreading excerpts from these dispatches through the nation’s press. The President, Secretary Lansing and Colonel House agreed on the course to be taken. A cable went off to Vienna demanding Dr. Dumba’s immediate recall.

Dr. Dumba had a nasty scene with Lansing, who could be crusty when he was on his high horse; but his parting with the confidential colonel, who had assumed the position of father confessor to the whole diplomatic corps, could hardly have been more cordial. “As to the unfortunate incident which is the cause of my departure,” Dumba wrote House, “I was certainly wrong because I made the mistake of being found out.”

In September, Colonel and Mrs. House stopped for a few days at Roslyn with their daughter and her husband on their way into New York, where they had taken a new apartment on East Fiftythird Street. Entertaining the President, even privately, was a taxing business. Woodrow Wilson, like Haroun al Raschid, was fond of dropping in on his friends without notice.

House was worried. A new Mrs. Wilson offered a real challenge to his influence. He had reason to fear that she would not be so understanding of his usefulness to the President as was her beloved predecessor. He had been suggesting that the best way of countering newspaper gossip about a break between himself and Wilson was for them to be seen together more often. On September 24 he allowed the reporters to catch him calling at the White House.

There was reason for the colonel’s misgivings. When Edith Wilson published My Memoir it came out that she was already suspicious of the President’s advisers. She attributed the publication of certain malicious rumors about the President’s relations with his Bermuda friend, Mrs. Peck, to an intrigue by House and McAdoo to break up her romance.

House’s papers, to the contrary, show him to have been anxious to assure his dear friend of his approval of the match. There had been disagreement among the President’s intimates as to whether his early remarriage would hurt him or help him in the campaign for re-election coming up in 1916. House wrote that he had made a tactful canvass of political friends and that the decision was that remarriage would not hurt the President politically. More important, because the opinion of the ladies counted heavily in these matters, was that House’s wife Loulie agreed with them.

“I have a plan,” added the confidential colonel, “by which you may be able to see each other as much as you wish without anybody being the wiser.”

On October 7 the New York Times appeared with the headline:

PRESIDENT TO WED MRS NORMAN GALT INTIMATE FRIEND OF HIS DAUGHTERS ALSO COMES OUT FOR WOMAN’S SUFFRAGE.

The same day the President again took a public stand in favor of preparedness.

When questioned by the newspapermen Mrs. Galt couldn’t have been more tactful: she hedged on woman’s suffrage. She was whispering to her closest friends that she halfhoped Woodrow would be defeated for re-election; she wanted to marry the man not the President.

At the White House an extra force of clerks had to be taken on to handle the congratulatory mail.