John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

Colonel House was assiduous in his attentions to the betrothed couple. The day after their engagement was announced he had them both to dinner at his New York apartment. This dinner was far from being conducted in the privacy customary to the colonel’s little affairs. After arriving on the Pennsylvania train in the afternoon the President and Mrs. Galt took a drive up and down Manhattan Island. Their car was followed by nine cars full of secretservice agents and newspapermen. Wherever they went they were cheered from the sidewalks. The photographers were given every opportunity.

The President’s party consisted of Mrs. Galt and her mother, Mrs. Bolling, both in wide dark hats, and Helen Bones and Dr. Grayson and Joe Tumulty. The ladies stayed at the St. Regis. The police had to make a lane for them as they entered and left the hotel.

They were joined at dinner by the colonel’s daughter and soninlaw Mr. and Mrs. Gordon Auchincloss. It was a festive occasion. Flowers and asparagus fern were everywhere. Reporters were previously given a glimpse of large framed portraits of Mr. Wilson and Mrs. Galt bowered in roses on a table in the colonel’s newly decorated library.

After dinner the colonel took his guests to the theatre. Though the President, who didn’t care for the serious drama but loved comedy, had already seen the play, he wanted Mrs. Galt to see Grumpy , which was the laughprovoking hit of that season, with Cyril Maude in the lead. When the party filed into their boxes the audience rose and applauded.

During the months of his engagement President Wilson became less accessible than ever. No matter how important their errands, few visitors got further than Tumulty’s office. Whenever he could spare an hour from his official correspondence he took Mrs. Galt out driving, always along the same roads. The White House chauffeur was restricted to an established series of drives. Number one, number two, number three. Each drive had to follow its customary track: the President hated change in his routine.

Days when he couldn’t see her he wrote her copious letters. Ike Hoover, the White House usher, remarked that the President was continually calling up the Library of Congress to check on the correct wording of some poem he wanted to quote. He had a direct telephone line installed between Mrs. Galt’s house on Twentieth Street and his private study.

It was during the summer and fall of the President’s courtship that a note of disillusion began to appear in House’s diary: “I am afraid the President’s characterization of himself as ‘a man with a onetrack mind is all too true … I say this regretfully because I have the profoundest admiration for his Judgement, his ability and his patriotism.” Or later: “… He dodges trouble. Let me put something to him that is disagreeable and I have great difficulty getting him to meet it.… The President, as I have often said,” House complained again, “is too casual and does the most important things sometimes without reflection.”

One result of the President’s absorption in his private life with his bride to be was that, more and more, people who needed to keep in touch with the Administration were taking their problems to Colonel House in New York. Early in November it was Herbert Hoover calling to say goodby before returning to his relief job in London.

Hoover was the engineer who formed the American Refugee Committee to help the Consulate and the Embassy in London finance stranded Americans during the first August days of the war. From this he was drawn into relief work for the Belgians, who were threatened with starvation by the German refusal to guarantee the subsistence of civilians after their invasion. He now found himself heading the hugest charity the world had ever seen.

Although British Naval Intelligence at one point suspected him of being a German spy, the story was reported by Ambassador Page in his letters to House and the President, that the British were so impressed by Hoover’s efficiency in handling Belgian Relief that they offered him citizenship and a place in the cabinet if he would join in their war effort. Hoover was said to have answered that as soon as he became a British subject he’d lose his Yankee drive.

A plumpfaced man with a hick curl to his hair and a California accent, he was still known in his early forties as young Hoover. He had packed a great deal of successful adventuring and prospecting into a few years. Coming from a family of impoverished Iowa Quakers, he was left an orphan at the age of eight and raised by an uncle in the Willamette Valley in Oregon. With a hundred and sixty dollars saved up working as officeboy in his uncle’s landoffice he enrolled in the new university being launched under the presidency of David Starr Jordan at Palo Alto. He put himself through the course in mining engineering by working summers as a geologist. In the geology laboratory he met Lou Henry whom he married a few years later. He showed his budding administrative ability by managing first the baseball team and then, senior year, the whole athletic program of Leland Stanford.

When he graduated as a mining engineer the best job he could get was pushing a car in a Nevada goldmine for two dollars a day, but it wasn’t long before he was working on the staff of one of the most brilliant engineers in San Francisco. At twentythree he was hired by a British firm as an expert in California methods to reorganize production in their mines in western Australia. At twentysix he was in China prospecting coal deposits for the same firm. As he was making twenty thousand a year he felt he was welloff enough to marry.

Lou Henry adopted the Quaker faith. The young couple had hardly been in China a year before they were besieged, with a small band of Europeans, in the neighborhood of Tientsin by Chinese troops during the Boxer uprising and barely escaped with their lives.

Hoover returned to London with such valuable information on the Chinese coal deposits that Berwick Moreing and Co. made him a partner. At thirtyfour he set up for himself, with offices in San Francisco, London, Paris and St. Petersburg, as a mining consultant, and administrator of ailing properties. His troubleshooting carried him to every raw new region of the globe.

The Hoovers already had as much money as they needed. They were raising their two boys on the Stanford campus. They had a house in London. Herbert Hoover had a certain scholarly bent in his own field. With the help of his wife, who was a good latinist, he made the first usable translation out of the Renaissance Latin of Agricola’s De Re Metallica. Being a Quaker he couldn’t keep from public service. As a trustee of Leland Stanford he was one of the mainsprings of the university.

The outbreak of the war caught him in London promoting the Panama Pacific Exposition to be held in California to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal. He threw all his talent for administration, first into getting Americans home, and then into the incredibly difficult task of feeding occupied Belgium. The food had to be bought, the food had to be shipped through warring blockades, the food had to be distributed in territory occupied by enemy troops. “I did not realize it at the time,” he wrote in his memoirs, “but on Monday August 3rd my engineering career was over forever. I was on the slippery road of public life.”

In the summer of 1915 he was back in America mending his fences. The relief was originally planned merely to tide the Belgians over the first winter. About thirtyfive million dollars of Belgian government funds was spent and fifteen million was raised by contributions from Belgians living abroad and from private sources in America and in the British Empire. But now there was no telling how long the war would last. The situation in Belgium and Northern France was worse than ever. The population was being trampled into the mud by the contending armies. Almost three million people were destitute. The original plan had been to sell food to those who could pay for it, but, as the economic paralysis continued, that became less and less feasible. Money, a great deal of money, must be raised in America.