Mr. Wilson's War

Chapter 6 THE FREEDOM OF THE SEAS

THE shattering of the forty years of peace so often acclaimed as the heyday of European civilization was at first hardly believable. Americans had for generations held devoutly to the creed that progress was inevitable. How to reconcile progress with these monstrous crimes? What was the use of Christianity if after twenty centuries it had not taught men better? Many a man’s faith in God was shaken.

Americans in those years particularly, when almost a third of the population was of European origin, were a people of refugees, brought up in revulsion against the Old World’s wrongs; but during the sunny years of the century’s first decade, the educated classes had been inventing a nostalgic geography of civilized and cultured Europe where existence was conducted on a higher plane than the grubby materialism of American business.

Travel in Europe, particularly for the wife and children, was one of the rewards of success: Paris, the crossroads of civilization, city of boulevards and the Eiffel Tower, magnet of American artists and millionaires, was where good Americans went when they died.

Culture was only to be had on the old continent. The Rhineland, Heidelberg, Göttingen, Munich, Bayreuth were hives of the world’s scholarship and the world’s music. Kensington, the English lakes, the Cotswolds were redolent with the fame of the great Victorians. Rome and Florence, with their domes and colonnades and towers and their dark cypress gardens, were cities of refuge for men of letters fleeing the yammer of moneymaking.

To Europeans too the peace had seemed unbreakable. While rich Americans dreamed of Europe poor Europeans dreamed of America. In those peaceful years each could try for the fulfillment of his hopes. While the British Navy assured peace on the seas, the European order overflowed the globe. With time and money a man could travel anywhere, except for a few blank spots where the natives were unruly, or the dominions of the Czar and the Turk where passports were required, secure in life and property, without any official’s by your leave. The poorest cobbler in Przemysl or Omsk only needed the price of a steerage passage to Ellis Island to try his luck in the Promised Land.

“If you didn’t know the world before the war,” old men told their sons, “you’ve never known what it is to live.”

During that last July of the old order only the most sophisticated students of European affairs had any inkling of the rancors and hatreds and murderous lusts fermenting behind those picturesque façades. Realization of the extent of the calamity came slowly. The assassination of the archduke was shrugged off as a continuation of the Balkan disturbances that had been relegated for years to the back pages. When the Czar’s armies were mobilized in the name of Slavic brotherhood it could be explained away as a measure to distract the downtrodden Russians from the manifold wrongs and oppressions they lived under. But when the Kaiser answered by alerting his generals and the French called their citizens to the tricolor it was plain that Europe had gone raving mad.

In extras and fourinch headlines Americans read breathless: BELGIUM INVADED. When England declared war on Germany it seemed that every ruling group had made the decision that now was the time to settle old scores. No war could last on such a scale, the wellinformed told one another; one short summer campaign and the nations would see the folly of mutual suicide and start negotiating peace.

It was with a certain grim satisfaction that Americans watched the bestlaid plans of the general staffs go awry. Although the French, true to their military dogma of toujours l’offensif, did just what the deceased von Schlieffen had planned for them to do by pushing up into Lorraine, the enormous flanking sweep of German armies through the northern plains of Flanders and of France, which the great strategist had imagined, failed to win the promised “victory in eight weeks.”

General von Moltke, the lesser nephew of the von Moltke who had broken the Second Empire at Sedan, allowed himself to be distracted by the defense of Antwerp and by the Czar’s “steamroller” advance into East Prussia. He allowed armies which were supposed to make his extreme right flank invincible to be detached for service in the East.

With the first roar of the German guns against the Belgian fortresses the French Chamber of Deputies virtually abdicated its powers. One third of the membership was called to the colors. Northern France was turned over to military government. Paul Painlevé and his cabinet pinned all their hopes on General Joseph Jacques Césaire Joffre, who had been dredged up out of obscurity by the Radical Socialists, largely because he was the best general they could find who had the right politics. He was a republican and a Freemason. Already known as Papa Joffre, he was a florid bespectacled stout man of fiftynine with the air of a bon bourgeois which appealed to the anticlerical voters of the French left. The son of a cooper in the eastern Pyrenees, his army career had been distinctly humdrum. His only distinction was having, as a young officer, successfully conducted a small expedition against Timbuctoo. He was reputed to know about railroads and fortifications. His first contribution to the strategy of the war was his conviction that the German offensive was a colossal feint and should be countered by an attack in the direction of Metz.

Joffre’s offensive came to grief at Morhange, but the very speed of the German advance, once resistance was beaten down along the Meuse, wrecked the Schlieffen plan. Armies lost contact with their supply and with each other. Instead of enveloping Paris they drove east along the Marne and gave the brilliant military governor of the city, General Gallieni, the chance to hurry Maunoury’s troops out, some of them in Paris taxicabs, to attack the German flank. In spite of the sluggishness of the French command under Joffre and the inadequacy of the British expeditionary force, which landed under the navy’s protection, without the loss of a man to be sure, but only in time to join in the general retreat, the Germans were beaten back in five days to the line of the Aisne. Winter found both armies digging entrenchments which no general staff had planned.

In the East the Russian masses poured triumphantly into East Prussia only to be trapped by the Germans under von Hindenburg in the region of the Mazurian Lakes. They were butchered there by the tens of thousands in a battle which the Germans named Tannenberg after an engagement the Teutonic Knights fought centuries before. Romanoff prestige never recovered from the blow, even though to the south, against the Austrians, their armies were tolerably successful.

Meanwhile the Austrians three times invaded Serbia and three times were driven back to the Danube. The Austro-Hungarian empire was already showing signs of the strains and stresses which were to destroy it. The Serbs successfully routed the invaders but their country was left a ruin where typhus ruled.

The war along the western front, from neutral Switzerland to the sea, became a business of trenches, deep shelters, barbed wire, mining and countermining. Instruments of oldtime siege warfare like the hand grenade and the mortar were reinvented. With the increased use of machine-guns the odds turned in favor of defense. This wasn’t war as it had been taught in the military schools.

Vast advances and retreats left homeless populations, fleeing from burnedout towns and villages, a prey to starvation and pestilence. Densely settled regions in Belgium and northern France were left a ruin. The summer months of 1914 saw the prosperous European order turn into all the abominations of the Apocalypse. Every newspaper reader had his eyes stuffed daily with horrors. There was created in the American mind an anguished new geography of massacre. Unfamiliar names in small letters on the map were outlined in blood. The refugee became the symbol of the age.

Through all the anguish of his wife’s last illness, Woodrow Wilson went on, with haggard face and firmset jaw, meeting the problems that poured across his desk. The cool promptness of his decisions amazed the people around him.

The first thing he had to face was the threat of a panic on Wall Street.

The United States was still a debtor country. Europeans held something like two and a half billion dollars in American stocks and bonds. They held paper for some four hundred and fifty million dollars worth of obligations due or about to come due during the balance of the year.

In that crazy last week of July, when European banks and exchanges were closing their doors, Europeans began to sell their dollar holdings. In spite of large shipments of gold to Europe, the franc rose from 19^⅓ cents to 23^½ cents and the pound from $4.89 to $7.00. Thursday, July 30, the stock market had its worst day since the panic of 1907. Early Friday the news came over the Atlantic cable that the London Stock Exchange had suspended operations. Brokers’ offices were stacked high with selling orders for overseas customers.

That same morning J. P. Morgan, Jr. telephoned Secretary of the Treasury McAdoo before officehours at his home to tell him the governors were meeting to decide whether or not to close the New York exchange. What was his advice? “If you really want my judgment,” his wife Eleanor heard McAdoo answer in a firm tone, “it is to close the exchange.”

Sunday morning, when the newsboys were yelling “Belgium Invaded” through the rainwet streets, Mac, as he was known to the Wilson family, went early to his office at the Treasury, while Eleanor rushed to the White House to be near her dying mother. President Woodward of the Hanover National, who had been appointed one of the directors of the Federal Reserve Bank which was scheduled to open in the fall, called McAdoo from New York. The Clearing House Committee was in session and wanted his advice. McAdoo suggested that they come to Washington, but was told there wasn’t time. They expected a run on their banks when they opened for business Monday morning. They needed millions in extra currency if they were to hold off a disastrous panic. McAdoo said he would have to consult the President.

All Woodrow Wilson knew about finance was what he had learned during his campaign for the enactment of the Federal Reserve Act. He had confidence in his soninlaw’s financial acumen. He told him by all means to go to New York immediately. The Secretary had already taken the initiative by shipping fifty million dollars of the new currency he was authorized to use in emergencies to the subtreasury in New York. Taking Eleanor along to keep his spirits up he left on the afternoon train.

Having Mac in the family and in the administration was proving a real boon to the sorely beset man in the White House. McAdoo’s success with the Hudson tunnels had won him prestige among New York businessmen. They believed that his hunches were sound. A dourfaced sixfooter, his stringy mountaineer look had endeared him to the Wilsons. Ellen, whose shrewd feminine judgments the President had come to rely on more and more, had taken to him with real affection as a soninlaw.

He was the Wilsons’ kind of man. He came of similar Southern Presbyterian stock. His father, another very tall man, was a Tennessee lawyer who had fought in the Mexican War and served as attorney general of his state. When Tennessee, against the wishes of so many of her citizens, seceded from the Union, he took the Confederate side.

Mac’s boyhood was spent in Milledgeville, Georgia, in the ruined heartland of the Confederacy. As a Confederate officer his father was disfranchised and barred from the practice of law. There were seven children and no money. He tried farming and smalltown journalism. When his mother was paid fifty dollars for a novel she wrote about gentlefolk among the magnolias, Mac remembered that the money was spent in a single day buying shoes and clothes for the family.

When Mac’s father was offered fifteen hundred dollars a year to teach history and English at the University of Tennessee it seemed like opulence. It was a chance for the children to get some education. The elder McAdoos were cultivated people, full of a literary nostalgia that made it hard for them to fight their way in the harsh reconstruction world. When young William Gibbs went to bed, worn out with fights at school, and selling papers and doing odd jobs for storekeepers, he dreamed of money.

He started to study law as deputy clerk in the United States District Court in Chattanooga and reading nights with a friendly attorney. He was a hard worker with a mind fertile in expedients. By the time he was admitted to the bar at twentyone he had tried his hand at Democratic national politics and dabbled in various speculations and investments. He married a Georgia girl and immediately started to make money buying and selling Chattanooga real estate.

He risked his first twentyfive thousand in a project to apply electric power to the muledrawn streetcars of Knoxville. It was a little too soon for rapid transit. The company went into receivership and young McAdoo, who had accumulated mostly debts for his pains, went north to hang out his shingle in downtown New York.

It was a long hard struggle. When the lawbusiness was slack he sold bonds and securities. He studied railroad finance. He got the notion of bringing railroad trains into New York by tunnelling under the North River. One company had already gone broke, but a tunnel had been built halfway across about ten years before. He started promoting a company to finish that tunnel. He had a knack of convincing other men that his hunches were sound. By the time Woodrow Wilson became governor of New Jersey the tunnels were completed and profitable. William Gibbs McAdoo had become one of the great names of American enterprise.

Mac first met Woodrow Wilson when he went to Princeton to see his collegeboy son who was laid up with diphtheria at the infirmary. He was captivated by what he called Wilson’s Jeffersonian humanism.

Mac was a born promoter. There wasn’t much left to do in promoting the Hudson River tunnels so he took to promoting Woodrow Wilson. His promotion was so successful that he found himself promoting the United States Treasury.

In his autobiography McAdoo tells of pestering his father, when he was a tenyearold boy, to tell him exactly how many polecats Vera Cruz smelt like when the United States troops landed there in the Mexican War. His father had told him Vera Cruz smelt worse than a crowd of polecats. “Did it smell worse than a thousand million polecats?” “Listen son,” his father had said to him, “you have a bad habit of dealing with uncomfortably large figures.”

When as Secretary of the Treasury on August 2, 1914, he sat with his wife in the drawing room of the New York train, faced with a panic that might wreck half the banks in the country, Mac was jotting down on a yellow pad propped on his knees what his father would have called “uncomfortably large figures.”

Years afterwards Mrs. McAdoo remembered the haggard look of the financiers that met their train at the Pennsylvania Station. “I was startled by their white faces and trembling voices,” she wrote. “Could these be America’s great men?”

The Secretary of the Treasury was hustled over to the Vanderbilt Hotel where a group of bankers was anxiously awaiting him. McAdoo with his long stride and his selfassured somewhat rustic manner, exuded confidence. The news that fifty million dollars in fresh currency was already in New York quieted the bankers’ nerves, but they complained its use was restricted by the present law. New legislation was needed. No sooner said than done. By midnight McAdoo was back on the sleeper to Washington sketching out the necessary bill on his yellow scratchpad.

At breakfast he brought the President up to date. At his news conference that morning Wilson took the reporters into his confidence with the friendly reasoning man to man tone he could assume when he needed to: “It is extremely necessary … that you should be extremely careful not to add in any way to the excitement … So far as we are concerned there is no cause … America is absolutely prepared to meet the financial situation and to straighten everything out without any material difficulty. The only thing that can possibly prevent it is unreasonable apprehension and excitement … I know from … the Secretary of the Treasury … that there is no cause for alarm. There is cause for getting busy and doing the thing in the right way …”

While Woodrow Wilson transmitted soothing balm to the press of the nation McAdoo hurried to the Capitol to confer with the chairman of the Senate committee on banking. Senator Owen of Oklahoma was a member of the team that had put over the Federal Reserve Act. He understood immediately that what was needed was stopgap legislation to tide over until the reserve system was operating. The Treasury must be authorized to increase the amount of emergency currency issued under the Aldrich-Vreeland Act. Congress, under his direction, “did the thing in the right way” so expeditiously that the bill went through both houses and was at the White House ready for signature on the following day.

The run on the banks stopped immediately. There were few extraordinary withdrawals and only five small bank failures.

The next job was to staunch the drain on gold. The chief New York banks had already made an agreement among themselves to ship no more out. Later in the week McAdoo called a meeting of international bankers and exporters at the Treasury. A nationwide gold pool was established to meet obligations as they fell due. The amount was oversubscribed right there.

The mere gesture had the effect of reducing the drain. Only some hundred million dollars’ worth of gold bullion left the country.

Already war orders were coming in. By fall the exchange situation had reversed itself completely, and American bankers were talking about extending credits to the English and the French. In January 1915 the gold pool went out of business for lack of customers.

A few months before the bankers had been viewing national control of the moneymarket with all sorts of apprehensions. Now they were calling for the help of the federal reserve system before its organization was complete. Meanwhile, American victims of the breakdown of European banking were sending out desperate appeals for help. Congressmen, state governors, cabinet members were bombarded with cables. Stranded American travellers swarmed around every embassy and consulate in Europe. They couldn’t cash their letters of credit. They couldn’t change their money. In London the hotels wouldn’t give change for a five pound note for fear of having to give up gold currency. At the same time hotel-keepers and restaurants were demanding immediate cash payment for everything.

On Monday August 3 after the President had spent the first part of his day quieting the panicky financiers in New York, he shut himself up in his office with Secretary Bryan to decide what to do to help the frightened tourists. They decided to allow embassies to countersign travellers’ checks and letters of credit and to urge representatives abroad to use their own judgment in affording what relief they could. Within a couple of days Congress responded by appropriating several million dollars. Before the end of the week the warships Tennessee and North Carolina were steaming for Europe laden with currency for the relief of stranded citizens.

Casting about for shipping to bring Americans home from the zones of war the President and Secretary Bryan came up against the fact that the United States had no merchant marine. Of around five and a half million tons under American registry the great bulk operated on inland waterways or in the coastwise trade. Only fifteen ships flew the American flag on transatlantic or transpacific routes and of those all but six were passenger liners with little cargo capacity.

The United States was one of the great exporting nations, though still mostly of raw materials, but her exports were customarily carried on foreign bottoms.

Right away grain from recordbreaking harvests of wheat and barley and oats began to pile up at the railheads and in the warehouses. Wharves became glutted with products that could find no outlet. Democratic congressmen began to prophesy immediate ruin for the South, which was still in the straightjacket of a onecrop economy, if some way couldn’t be found to market the cotton crop which promised to be enormous.

The economic structure of the southeastern states was based on credit. When a man planted an acre of cotton he borrowed the money for the seed and fertilizer and often for food for himself and his mule, and cash to pay the pickers, from his broker; in the fall the broker took the cotton and sold it and paid the farmer the balance. The broker financed the operation by borrowing from the bank and so on up into the financial hierarchy. The sudden extinction of a market for cotton meant that the whole house of cards would come tumbling down.

A man didn’t have to be a financial genius to see that something had to be done. The President and his advisers were southerners. They felt tenderness for the cottongrower. Immediately Secretary McAdoo began to make currency available to southern banks and to cast around for some way of inducing private financiers to form a syndicate to advance loans on the freshly harvested crop. His aim was to establish a floor under cotton prices.

Republicans in Congress bristled, particularly the New Englanders. The textile manufacturers felt they were being cheated of an opportunity to buy cotton cheap. The opposition, which in the first daze of the European calamity had been tamely accepting Wilson’s leadership, began to harden.

Both sides agreed that, if the American economy were not to strangle in its own productiveness, vessels had to be found to replace the German and Austrian shipping immobilized in neutral ports and the Allied shipping deflected to military uses. But how? The problem kept McAdoo awake nights. “One morning at dawn,” he wrote, “I was lying in bed thinking about the matter when it occurred to me I might as well write out a tentative draft of the shipping bill which would embody the idea of a government owned corporation.” He was thinking of Theodore Roosevelt’s purchase of the Panama Steamship Company which was still being managed by the War Department. Wilson and McAdoo had privately agreed to buy the idle German ships and operate them under the American flag.

At the thought of the government in the shipping business the New York financiers raised a storm. Shipowners’ lobbyists arrived in Washington on every train. Rank socialism was the cry.

At the same time another of McAdoo’s bills was having smooth sailing. Nobody cried “socialism” when he suggested the formation of a Bureau of War Risk Insurance in the Treasury. The professional underwriters were scared to death of war risk insurance. Let the government take the loss. McAdoo’s war risk insurance agency surprised everybody when its affairs were wound up at the end of the war, by showing seventeen million dollars of profit.

McAdoo’s shipping bill furnished the first battleground between Wilson’s progressive Democrats and the Republican opposition which the Schoolmaster in Politics was soon to be excoriating as the forces of darkness.

Investors were in a fever over the profits to be made owning ships. Tramp steamers were clearing their cost in a single voyage. Oceangoing freighters were bringing in clear profits of from three to five times the money invested in them. As soon as the measure was introduced in the House, Republican papers described the government’s entrance into the shipping field as a menace to private enterprise. One of the Morgans called at the Treasury and lectured the Secretary on the hazards and difficulties of transatlantic shipping in wartime. He wanted no government interference. “As for being a menace,” wrote McAdoo, “I could not see that the government’s ships would menace anything but the absurdly high rates of private shipping concerns.”

The bill passed the House against vigorous opposition. In the Senate it was stalled by the Republican minority led by two of T.R.’s old associates from the imperial era of the “tennis cabinet,” Elihu Root, the learned New York corporation lawyer, who had been Roosevelt’s Secretary of State after John Hay’s death, and Henry Cabot Lodge.

Senator Lodge of Massachusetts held the powerful position of chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs. Since the very considerable Republican gains in the House and Senate in the fall elections in 1914 he had become a leader of conservative Republican opposition to the Democratic administration’s legislative program.

Lodge was partisan to the marrow. He came of the purest codfish aristocracy. His father was a Boston shipowner and his mother was a Cabot. He had been a friend of T.R.’s since, as a rising historian, an associate of Henry Adams on the North American Review, he’d been interested in the young New Yorker’s project for a naval history of the War of 1812. They had shared a romantic navalism and all sorts of literary enthusiasms since Harvard College days, even while they differed politically. Lodge swallowed part of the New Nationalism but he looked on the New Freedom with a bilious eye.

When the Democrats, in spite of the loss of several southern conservatives who voted with the Republicans, were able to marshal enough voices to pass the measure with the help of three Republican progressives from the Middle West, the Republican minority, ably marshalled by Lodge and Root, talked it to death in one of the longest and bitterest filibusters yet recorded. The Sixtythird Congress adjourned March 4, 1915, without the shipping bill’s being brought to a vote in the Senate. The Administration introduced it again in the next Congress.

The chief objection voiced by the two scholarly conservatives was that if the government bought the German ships and Great Britain did not recognize the transfer of registry, there would be immediate danger of war with the Allies. Lodge seems to have convinced himself, furthermore, that the bill would legalize a gigantic deal by which McAdoo, working through Kuhn, Loeb and Co., would buy up idle German shipping at great personal profit. In their speeches they both decried government in business as state socialism and the end of individual liberty.

McAdoo claimed to be merely motivated by the practical consideration of reducing the cost for American shippers. He used to say that the Republican filibuster cost the American people a cool billion dollars. He insisted that he believed in private enterprise “as a theory, but economic theories, I have observed, often fail in practice. Private initiative becomes extremely timid in times of peril and uncertainty … Shipowners were making so much money … that they were satisfied … More ships would mean lower freight rates and less profit … When the bill was first introduced, ships might have been bought or constructed at the cost of about forty dollars a ton. But when the measure was finally enacted, eighteen months later, they were selling at prices that ranged from one hundred and fifty to three hundred dollars a ton.”

The President was grimly stimulated by the opposition of the “entrenched interests.” It was the Princeton quads all over again. He never could understand how reasonable men could honestly disagree with him.

In a speech in Indianapolis during the congressional campaign that fall he violently attacked the leaders of the Republican filibuster: “These gentlemen are now seeking to defy the nation and prevent the release of American products to the suffering world which needs them more than it ever needed them before.” His violence shocked his supporters.

Writing to his friend, Mrs. Toy, who had remonstrated with him, he apologized a little ruefully for letting himself be carried away by the “psychology of the stump” but added to his own defense: “I think you cannot know to what lengths men like Root and Lodge are going, who I once thought had consciences and I now know have none … We are fighting as a matter of fact the most formidable (covert) lobby that has stood against us yet in anything we have attempted; and we shall see the fight to a finish.”

William Jennings Bryan, who sat dreaming of peace in ducktails and crash suits under the high dark ceilings of the old War and State Building, couldn’t for the life of him understand why Wilson and McAdoo wouldn’t allow a clause to be inserted in their shipping bill ruling out the purchase of ships from the belligerents. He assured the President that this would satisfy the southern conservatives who shared the misgivings of Lodge and Root about government operation of Austrian and German ships. Never strong on practical details it did not occur to him that these were the only ships to be had.

For two years he had loyally squandered his personal influence in behalf of every administration measure but his heart wasn’t in the shipping bill. As a practicing Christian he observed the letter of the Ten Commandments. War was murder. He couldn’t quite convince himself that war trade wasn’t complicity with murderers.

He believed passionately in neutrality. His first thought was for a sort of Jeffersonian embargo on any dealings with the warring nations. In the early weeks of the war he almost managed to convince President Wilson that American bankers must not be allowed to make loans to the belligerents. Money was the worst kind of contraband. Personally, as a private man, he was in favor of cutting off the shipping of munitions. Impractical as he was he had to recognize that the economic wellbeing of the country depended on exports.

Though the American people, in spite of widespread indignation at the German violation of Belgian neutrality, were as anxious to keep out of the war as their Secretary of State was, the geography of the conflict early forced them into an undeclared and somewhat unwilling partnership with Great Britain and France. Britannia ruled the waves. While armies fought to a stalemate along the Aisne, the British Navy swept German commerce off the seas and bottled up the German fleet behind the fortified island of Heligoland. An Order in Council of August 20 established a blockade of Germany and Austria modelled on the blockade which a hundred years before had brought Napoleon to his ruin. Neutral ships were intercepted and escorted into British ports to be inspected for contraband of war even if they were bound for neutral countries. Contraband was just about any class of goods the British authorities decided might give aid and comfort to the enemy.

Secretary Bryan, with the President’s fervent backing, at first tried to enforce the old American theory of freedom of the seas. Early in the war he dispatched notes to all the belligerents asking them to conform to the Declaration of London. This was a set of rules affirming the rights of neutral shipping in wartime drawn up by an international conference in the winter of 1908 and 1909. Unfortunately the Declaration of London had not been ratified either by Great Britain or the United States.

These rules would have greatly benefited the neutral nations and would have made impossible the starving out of Germany which was developing as the basic British strategy of the war.

The British showed no interest in giving up any of the advantages which came to them from their mastery of the ocean. There followed a prolonged wrangle between the State Department and the Foreign Office, kept somewhat within bounds by the terms of Bryan’s arbitration treaty. The British pressed for as much blockade as they could get without completely alienating American sympathies, and the United States pressed for as much freedom of the seas as could be had without playing too much into the hands of the Central Powers.

Bryan was often absent from his desk. He had accepted the office with the understanding that he would lecture for part of the year. He must be allowed to make his living. His position in Washington as second fiddle to the President fed his rather innocent vanity and enabled him to entrench himself in the party leadership by finding jobs for deserving Democrats, but his heart was on the Chautauqua circuit. He loved money and he loved applause. When hostile newspapers blamed him for such undignified behavior as lecturing for money he struck back: “Mingling with the multitude is not a cause for reproach … The forum is not below the level of official life. It is not stepping down to go from the desk to the platform.”

Happier stirring the hearts of the plain people than knitting his brows over problems each more insoluble than the last that kept appearing on his desk he left the day to day paper work to his counsellor, Robert Lansing, who acted as Secretary of State when he was away. Lansing was a rather solemn, steelyhaired upstate New Yorker, now in his early fifties. His old associates from Amherst College days and from the Watertown bar still addressed him affectionately as Duke. He had made himself a career in international law and married into diplomacy by his union with the daughter of John W. Foster, the respected Secretary of State under Benjamin Harrison. Lansing reported directly to the President.

The President’s chief adviser, private negotiator, and, particularly since Mrs. Wilson’s death, most intimate friend, was Colonel House. House and Lansing were often at cross purposes, and House and Bryan, although outwardly on terms of backslapping friendship, almost always so. Since Bryan’s mind was fixed on the sonorous generalities, decisions, even on small details, were up to the already overtaxed President.

House’s relation to Wilson was that of a star reporter to his city editor. House did the legwork. In Washington and New York he gloried in a modest omnipresence. He was on fair terms with the sceptical Jusserand, the squarebearded professorial diplomat who represented the French. He was cosy with the German ambassador, dressy Count von Bernstorff. He was even more at home with Sir Cecil Spring Rice, the old Washington hand, whom Sir Edward Grey had sent over to take the place of the prodigious Bryce.

War trade with Europe grew from week to week. After the stunning effects of the first blow wore off American businessmen began to discover that the war was a bonanza. The Europeans had to have American products regardless of cost. Meatpacking and coppermining boomed. The price of wheat rose. War was lamentable but what an opportunity to make money!

The British were devising their own rules of contraband. American shippers had no problem with goods destined to England and France. Exports destined for Germany, mostly through neutral ports, were even more profitable, but neutral ships suffered under detentions, delays, seizures and from the arbitrary behavior of British prize courts.

A stream of protests and complaints found its way to the President’s desk. Woodrow Wilson, like most literate Americans, was prejudiced in favor of the British by the whole course of his education, but he had freedom of the seas in his blood. He smarted personally under the indignities suffered by American shipping. In private he made no bones of his exasperation.

“While we were discussing the seizure of vessels by Great Britain,” House jotted in his diary one day in late August 1914, “he read a page from his history of the American people telling how during Madison’s administration the War of 1812 was started in exactly the same way as this controversy is opening up … The President said: ‘Madison and I are the only two Princeton men that have become President. The circumstances of the War of 1812 now run parallel. I sincerely hope they will not go further.’ ”

House hurried over to the British Embassy with the tale, and added that Lansing was preparing a stiff note of protest.

Spring Rice described the conversation in a somewhat peevish tone to Sir Edward Grey: “I had suspected for some time that something was up among the lawyers in the State Department, but I could extract no hint of what was intended. The only indication was a rather unfriendly atmosphere.” (Spring Rice and Lansing never did get along.) He retailed House’s account of the President’s state of mind. “He then told me he happened to be sitting with the President when a large package was brought in from the State Department. The President was very tired and did not want to look at it; he was told it was to go off by mail the next morning. He read it and to his astonishment it was a sort of ultimatum … which really would have convulsed the world if it had got out … The two men were astonished, the more so as the Secretary of State had been away for some time, tired with his exertions in procuring peace treaties, and was at that moment at a distant watering place with his wife. The President said that the document though signed, could not go at once … The President was very much impressed by the gravity of the question because it touches the pockets and the prejudices of so many of the people. It happens to be just the sort of question which takes the popular fancy and also enlists the monied people as well.”

Spring Rice then passed on Wilson’s remark about the War of 1812. For the ambassador’s benefit House had quoted him as adding, “I hope I shall be wiser.”

Sir Edward Grey professed sympathy and understanding of the President’s position. The Lansing note was sent to London after considerable editing by House and Spring Rice, who put their heads together over it in private. The Foreign Office promised a new Order in Council and at the same time soothed the sensibilities of the southern Democrats — and possibly of Colonel House himself as a Texan — by somewhat illogically allowing cotton, which as an ingredient of most of the explosives in use was certainly a contraband item, to be shipped direct to Germany. During the fall of 1914 and the winter of 1915 a million and threequarters bales of Southern cotton were unloaded at Hamburg and Bremerhaven.

The new Order in Council, in spite of a few conciliatory expressions, laid out a longer list of contraband items than the first one. The State Department grumbled but acquiesced. Freedom of the seas was temporarily shelved.

The controversy between Washington and Westminster would have been carried to greater lengths if the Germans, who all along were showing a characteristic knack for putting themselves in a bad light, had not decided that their safety lay in the submarine.

As soon as it became apparent that the German high seas fleet was no match for the Royal Navy, submarine construction was stepped up to fever pitch. The Germans entered the war with about twenty gasoline-burning coast defense submarines of about five hundred tons each and a few new diesels. The diesel motor immediately proved its superiority. The Germans started building diesel submarines of a thousand to two thousand tons. Many of the Kaiser’s advisers were still unconvinced of their usefulness.

The torpedoing of H.M.S. Pathfinder on September 5 and two weeks later the sinking by a single U-boat of the three old British cruisers, Aboukir, Hogue and Cressy, on patrol off the coast of Holland, with the loss of fourteen hundred trained men, gave a fillip to submarine enthusiasts among German officialdom.

The British answered by a raid on Heligoland Bight which wrecked three light cruisers and a destroyer and cost the Germans a thousand lives and much damage to the fleet. Both sides went to work to increase their minefields. The British declared the whole North Sea a warzone only to be navigated by neutrals on courses laid down by the Admiralty.

By this time Admiral von Tirpitz, who headed the German naval office, was convinced that the use of submarines as commerce destroyers could turn the tables on the British blockade. In November he tipped his hand by crying out in an interview with Karl von Wiegand of the United Press: “America has not raised her voice in protest … against England’s closing of the North Sea to neutral shipping. What will America say if Germany declares submarine war on all the enemy’s merchant ships? England wants to starve us. We can play the same game. We can bottle her up and torpedo every English or allies’ ship which nears any harbor in Great Britain.”

The German fleet was showing dash and bravado, but at sea it was hopelessly outnumbered. Its heavy cruisers brought the war home to the islanders by shelling Scarborough and Hartlepool and killing a hundred or more helpless civilians on England’s North Sea coast. In the South Pacific von Spee seriously mauled a British formation. By December the Royal Navy had manifested its lumbering superiority by knocking off the few German cruisers on the rampage in outoftheway oceans and by sinking, in a battle off the Falkland Islands, von Spee’s dangerous little squadron. In German governing circles the advocates of the U-boat carried the day.

The year 1914 ended in a stalemate slightly favorable to the Allies. Britain cleared the seas and began a leisurely takeover of the German colonies. The Germans had neither been able to master the French in the West nor the Russians in the East.

Turkey’s entrance into the war on the side of the Central Powers cut off Russia from the munitions she had to have to keep her armies in the field, but the advantage to the Germans of the Turkish alliance was largely offset by the fact that the stubborn Serbs still occupied a long stretch of the railroad to Constantinople, that German expansionists dreamed of as the first leg of the Baghdad-Bahn which was to link them with the oil and the markets of the Middle East.

In the Far East Bryan’s State Department failed to induce the British and their Japanese allies to preserve the status quo. Japan was moving in on the German “leased territory” of Kiaochow and establishing herself as a power in Chinese affairs. There as elsewhere Germany lost far more than she had gained.

Chapter 7 NEUTRALITY IN THOUGHT AND DEED

EVER since the Battle of the Marne, Bryan had been trying to induce the belligerents to cry quits. A remark dropped by von Bernstorff at dinner with some New York bankers gave the Secretary hope that an offer of mediation might be acceptable to the Kaiser. “Even a failure to agree will not rob an attempt at mediation of all its advantages,” Bryan wrote eagerly to his ambassadors in Paris and London, “because the different nations would be able to explain their attitude, their reasons for continuing the war, the end to be hoped for and the terms upon which peace is possible. This would locate responsibility for the continuation of the war and help mould public opinion.”

The last thing any of the warring governments wanted was to locate responsibility. In the face of the overwhelming pacifism of American public opinion none of them wanted to be charged with willfully prolonging the war. But none of them wanted to make the first move towards negotiations. Each hoped to win a better bargaining position from some coming move on the chessboard of battle.

Spring Rice, who kept carefully in touch with what was being said and thought in the middlewest, went so far as to write Bryan in early October: “It may be that some people at first spoke lightly of your idea. No one who has studied the diplomatic history of the events leading to the present disastrous war can ever speak lightly of your idea again. For it is abundantly manifest that even one week’s enforced delay would probably have saved the peace of the world.”

In theory broadminded men among all the ruling circles in Europe were still in favor of Bryanstyle arbitration, but practice was another matter.

House made an effort to get Spring Rice, Jusserand and von Bernstorff together in one of the private confidential chats he had such a flair for. He was afraid Bryan’s loud mouth would spoil his game.

“The President,” he confided in his diary, “said that he, Mr. Bryan, did not know that he, the President, was working for peace wholly through me, and he was afraid to mention this fact for fear it would offend him.”

House’s suggestion of mediation seems to have been taken seriously at least by the civilians among the Kaiser’s advisers. So much so that he received a personal letter from Arthur Zimmermann at the Foreign Office.

“The war has been forced upon us by our enemies,” Zimmermann wrote; “and they are carrying it on by summoning all the forces at their disposal, including Japanese and other colored races. This makes it impossible for us to take the first step … it seems to me worth while seeing how the land lies in the other camp.”

House rushed to Washington with the letter. Wilson agreed with him that it offered a basis for negotiation. House must go to Europe to see what he could do. The situation was embarrassing because Secretary Bryan had been making it clear that he felt he was the man to go to Europe to stop the war.

His methods were oratory on the stump and daily publicity through the newspapers. By public discussion he would make the misguided belligerents see reason.

It was largely because Bryan had been so preoccupied with stump speaking during the fall campaign — which hadn’t turned out too successfully for the Democrats — that he’d let the mediation negotiations get out of his hands. He couldn’t help showing a certain pique on discovering that the supple colonel had taken the business into his own back room. In the end he generously acquiesced. So long as he was in the cabinet his attitude was: “The President knows best.”

The President decided to send House abroad on the pretext of investigating war relief. “Our single object is to be serviceable,” he wrote in a private letter House carried to show to Sir Edward Grey and to Zimmermann, “if we may, in bringing about the preliminary willingness to parley which must be the first step towards discussing and determining the conditions of peace.”

“We are both of the same mind,” House quoted the President as telling him in their final interview before he left for New York to board Britain’s queen of the seas, the fast fourstack liner Lusitania. The details of the negotiations were left entirely to the colonel.

The President insisted on driving him to the Union Station in his own car: “The President’s eyes were moist when he said his last words of farewell,” House wrote in his diary. “He said ‘Your unselfish and intelligent friendship has meant much to me’ … He declared I was the only one in all the world to whom he could open his entire mind. I asked if he remembered the first day we met, some three and a half years ago. He replied ‘Yes, but we had known each other always, and merely came in touch then, for our purposes and thoughts were as one’ … He got out of the car and walked through the station and to the ticket office and then to the train itself, refusing to leave until I had entered the car.”

As drenched in noble sentiments as any pair of Knights of the Round Table the two cronies parted. The colonel wrote from New York in an exalted vein. “Goodbye dear friend and may God sustain you in all your noble undertakings … You are the bravest wisest leader, the gentlest and most gallant gentleman and the truest friend in all the world.”

The trip was stormy. “Just after passing the Banks,” House entered in his diary, “a gale came shrieking down from Labrador and it looked as if we might perish. I have never witnessed so great a storm at sea … the Lusitania, big as she was, tossed about like a cork in the rapids. This afternoon as we approached the Irish coast the American flag was raised. It created much excitement.”

Next day he entered an explanation: “Captain Dow had been greatly alarmed the night before … He expected to be torpedoed and that was the reason for raising the American flag. I can see many possible complications arising from this incident. Every newspaper in London has asked me about it, but, fortunately, I was not an eye-witness to it and have been able to say I only knew it from hearsay.”

House found the London of the winter of 1915 so different from the London he’d known before that it might have been in another world. The stolid British were under siege. They had laughed off the Zeppelin bombings as a futile gesture of German frightfulness; they were treating as a victory the action off Dogger Bank where the British fleet took considerable punishment stopping a sudden new raid by German heavy cruisers, but the tight little island no longer felt safe from invasion.

On February 4, a couple of days before House landed in Liverpool, the German Admiralty, with twentyfour modern U-boats in commission, announced a submarine blockade of the British Isles: any Allied merchantman found in British waters would be sunk without warning. It was undoubtedly a radio report of that threat that caused the skipper of the Lusitania to break out the Stars and Stripes.

House was struck by the grim mood he found. England was settling down to war as a way of life. His kindly friend, Walter Hines Page at the Embassy, was subtly imbued with the war spirit. House, a man extremely sensitive to such influences, no sooner saw Sir Edward Grey than he blurted out to him that he had no intention of pushing the question of peace, not right now, “for in my opinion it could not be brought about before the middle of May or the first of June. I could see the necessity for the Allies to try out their new armies in the spring …”

The Foreign Office was all in a tizzy about how to deal with Mr. Wilson’s confidential colonel. Even the humblest clerk knew that the Foreign Secretary was busy night and day tempting the Italians, the Greeks and the Romanians into the war on the Allied side with promises of hunks of Austrian, Hungarian and Turkish territory, and that the American Secretary of State’s formula for peace on the basis of the status quo ante was thoroughly unwelcome.

Astonished at Colonel House’s sweet reasonableness Sir Edward Grey wrote enthusiastically: “I found combined in him a rare degree of the qualities of wisdom and sympathy. In the stress of war it was at once a relief, a delight, an advantage to be able to talk to him freely … He had a way of saying ‘I know it’ in a tone and manner that carried conviction both of his sympathy with and understanding of what was said to him.”

From London, House travelled to Paris, where he found the French icily preoccupied with their own ideas, and then through Switzerland to Berlin. He arrived in a March snowstorm. The civilians in the German administration were as cordial as before. They pointed out, however, the rising bitterness among the German people against American persistence in selling munitions to the Allies, while acquiescing in the blockade which was starving German women and children. House chummed up the waters by calling for inclusion of freedom of the seas in the eventual peace terms. “I have sown this thought of the Freedom of the Seas very widely since I have been here,” he wrote the President, “and I think I can already see the results … I think I can show England that, in the long run … it is as much to her interest as it is to that of the other nations of the earth.”

Back in Paris, he found the French, as usual, harder to talk to than the British and the Germans. The French politicians were obsessed with the idea that the President was privately pro-German. “I find your purpose badly misunderstood,” House wrote him. For Secretary Bryan whom he made a point of soothing with vague communications, he summed up his mission, “Everybody seems to want peace but nobody is willing to concede enough to get it.”

From Paris he returned to London where he found British ruling circles more warlike than ever. The very word “Peace” was getting a pro-German sound to their ears. Page gave vent to the pervading mood: “Peace talk … is yet mere moonshine — House has been to Berlin from London, thence to Paris, thence back to London again — from Nowhere (as far as peace is concerned) to Nowhere again.”

The colonel remained optimistic. He seems to have taken it for granted that the expedition in preparation against the Dardanelles would knock Turkey out of the war, that the Balkan nations and Italy would come in on the Allied side and that then the Germans would be willing to negotiate. The English politicians he talked to gave him no inkling, if they knew it themselves, of the effectiveness of the U-boat war on shipping. In February and March a hundred and thirty thousand tons of Allied shipping was sunk.

Meanwhile in Washington discussions were going on continuously between the President, Secretary Bryan and Counsellor Lansing on how to preserve American neutrality. They were in agreement on the note to Great Britain protesting against the misuse of the American flag and on the note to Germany declaring that the German Government would be held strictly accountable for damage to American property and loss of American lives from submarines. Bryan was urging the President to use this opportunity to demand that both governments call off their blockades. He had been encouraged by von Bernstorff and by a note from the Foreign Office. He saw cancelling the two blockades as a first step towards inducing the belligerents to accept the Declaration of London.

The Secretary’s hopes received a setback when, in spite of soothing phrases from the Foreign Office, the British in the middle of March announced a total embargo on trade with Germany. This last order in council resulted in an outburst of popular indignation in the United States led by the Hearst press. Powerful lobbies for cotton and copper were aroused. The German propaganda machine was encouraged to step up its agitation for an embargo on the shipment of munitions of war. In this the Irish societies in the east and good Bryan Democrats in the middlewest sympathized vigorously with the German-American bunds. Sentiment against war profits was growing. A steel company operating what was known as The Golden Rule Plant in St. Louis was one of a number of manufacturers to announce that they would sell no war materials whatsoever.

The President wrote House a sharp letter urging him to bring home to Sir Edward Grey the state of sentiment in America. Secretary of the Interior Lane wrote him too: “Notwithstanding all the insults of Germany, he (the President) is determined to endure to the limit … And the English are not behaving very well … We have been very meek and mild under their use of the ocean as a tollroad … You would be interested, I think in hearing some of the discussion around the Cabinet table. There isn’t a man in the Cabinet who has a drop of German blood in his veins, I guess. Two of us were born under the British flag. I have two cousins in the British army and Mrs. Lane has three. The most of us are Scotch in our ancestry, and yet each day we meet we boil over somewhat, at the foolish manner in which England acts. Can it be that she is trying to hamper our trade?… If Congress were in session we would be actively debating an embargo resolution today.” The people had more confidence in than love for the President he went on to say. Then he added: “I am growing more and more in my admiration for Bryan each day. He is too good a Christian to run a naughty world and he doesn’t hate hard enough, but he certainly is a noble and highminded man, and loyal to the President to the last hair.”

Before American indignation had a chance to build up a proper head of steam against the British, the exploits of the U-boats turned the popular fury against the Germans. Although the German U-boat commanders were instructed to spare neutral ships, mistakes were inevitable. On March 28 an American mining engineer named Leon C. Thrasher, bound for a job in South Africa, was drowned when the British liner Falaba was sunk by a German submarine.

The argument over poor Thrasher brought the differences of opinion inside the administration to a boil. Lansing called the sinking “an atrocious act of lawlessness” and wanted vigorous action. Bryan put forth the theory that Americans travelling on belligerent ships in wartime did so at their own risk.

Wilson was of two minds. In every speech he made he was campaigning for “neutrality in thought and deed.” Having convinced even Bryan that the export of arms and ammunition was consistent with neutrality, the President tended to Lansing’s view on the need for a firm protest to Berlin on Thrasher’s death. Bryan was profoundly disturbed.

He wanted every dispute with the belligerents put up for arbitration. “Nearly nine months have passed,” he wrote the President, who preferred mulling over the arguments in writing rather than coping with them during the hasty give and take of cabinet meetings, “… and after the expenditure of ten billion dollars and the sacrifice of several millions of the flower of Europe the war is at a draw. Surely the most sanguinary ought to be satisfied with the slaughter. I submit that it is this nation’s right and duty to make, not a secret, but an open appeal for the acceptance of mediation … As the greatest Christian nation we should act — we cannot avoid the responsibility.”

Arbitration: the principle was so clear to him he could not understand the President’s hesitations. “Mary, what does the President mean?” he asked his wife in agony of mind. “Why can’t he see that by keeping open the way for mediation and arbitration, he has an opportunity to do the greatest work a man can do? I cannot understand his attitude.”

The German authorities were encouraged by American resentment against the British to step up their submarine war. While the President and Secretary Bryan were arguing over whether the Thrasher case was a fit subject for arbitration, news of new outrages poured in. A German airplane attempted to bomb the American ship Cushing, and the tanker Gulflight out of Port Arthur, Texas, was sunk without warning by a submarine in the Irish Sea. The skipper died of a heart attack and two sailors, who jumped overboard in fright, were drowned.

May 1, the same day that the Gulflight was sunk, there appeared in the newspapers of eastern seaboard cities an advertisement signed by the Imperial German Embassy warning prospective passengers against travelling through the warzone on British or Allied ships. The Lusitania was sailing from New York with an unusually large passenger list. Of the many passengers warned by anonymous telegrams and by strangers who whispered to them on the street, only one man, a clergyman from Bennington, Vermont, changed his passage to the American liner New York.

In London on May 7 submarines were on everybody’s mind. Driving out to Kew on a flowery May morning Colonel House talked about the submarine war with Sir Edward Grey. “We spoke,” he wrote in his diary, “of the probability of an ocean liner being sunk and I told him … a flame of indignation would sweep across America.” Later in the day at a private audience with King George at Buckingham Palace their talk revolved around the same subject. “Suppose,” said His Royal Highness, “they should sink the Lusitania with American passengers aboard?”

At lunchtime the same day, the Lusitania, steaming slowly on the straight course for Liverpool, as if there were no submarines in the world, was hit by a single torpedo fired by the U-20, Kapitan-lieutenant Walter Schwieger in command. In spite of watertight compartments the Lusitania rolled over and sank in eighteen minutes. Of the passengers and crew seven hundred and sixtyone were rescued and eleven hundred and fiftythree drowned, among them a hundred and fourteen American citizens including women and children.

May 9 Colonel House sent the President a cable: “I believe an immediate demand should be made upon Germany for assurance that this shall not happen again … America has come to the parting of the ways.”

“We shall be at war within a month,” he told Ambassador Page.

Before any reply came from the President, House stepped out on a London street one morning and read a newspaper headline advertized by a sandwichman: WILSON: TOO PROUD TO FIGHT.

In Washington, the President had just returned from a pleasant trip to Williamstown, Massachusetts, for the christening of his first grandson, Francis Woodrow Sayre, when he received the news. The cable was handed to him as he came out from a cabinet meeting.

In the face of the explosion of indignation in the newspapers that followed Wilson gritted his jaw. He had Lansing examine the manifest of the Lusitania and discovered the cargo was mostly food but included four thousand two hundred cases of cartridges and one thousand two hundred and fiftynine cases of unloaded steel shrapnel shells. The impression at the State Department was that the ship was armed. Secretary Bryan’s opinion was that “England,” as he put it to his wife, “has been using our citizens to protect her ammunition.”

Wilson’s secretary, Tumulty, although as anti-British as a professional Irishman could be, was profoundly shocked by the horror of drowning innocent noncombatants. He could not understand the President’s grim detachment. He let the President know that his coolness surprised him. “ ‘I suppose you think I am cold and indifferent,’ ” Tumulty quoted him as replying, “ ‘and a little less than human, but, my dear fellow you are mistaken, for I have spent many sleepless hours thinking about this tragedy. It has hung over me like a terrible nightmare.’ … I had never seen him more serious and careworn,” added Tumulty.

In public, in the face of denunciations from Theodore Roosevelt, who was beating the wardrums now in every speech, Wilson was determined to continue on his neutral course. Addressing a group of recently naturalized citizens in Philadelphia on May 10, he told them: “The example of America must be the example not only of peace because it will not fight, but of peace because peace is the healing and elevating influence of the world and strife is not. There is such a thing as being too proud to fight.”

The words “too proud to fight” sounded fine in Secretary Bryan’s ears, but to the growing horde of pro-Allied partisans, outraged almost to madness by new tales of German brutality in the daily press, they had a hollow sound. To the British they seemed the denial of every decent feeling.

It was an accident that the Bryce report was published five days after the sinking of the Lusitania, but a most timely one. All that winter Viscount Bryce had been acting as chairman of a committee appointed by Prime Minister Asquith to sift the truth out of allegations by the Belgians of unnecessary atrocities by the German troops occupying their unhappy country. The public had been made receptive to a gruesome diet by the wave of horror that swept through the Allied nations after the first gas attacks during the fighting at Ypres in April. Propaganda agencies were filling the newspapers with stories of enemy frightfulness. The Germans were Huns; they had crucified a Canadian officer, they cut the breasts off women; the Kaiser had personally instructed his troops to crucify Belgian babies on the doors of barns.

The wildest tale, later admitted to have been a hoax, was of the German corpse factories. General Charteris, a British intelligence officer in France, snipped off the caption of a German photograph of dead horses being taken to a rendering plant and pasted it on a photograph of a train-load of human corpses being removed from the front for burial. The German explanation that the word kadaveren in their language only referred to animal corpses made no impression on the Allied press.

Soberminded Americans had so far been a little leery of British and French atrocity stories. German treatment of the Belgians was brutal enough, in all conscience; there was no doubt about the German burning of Dinant and Louvain and the shooting of indiscriminate masses of civilian hostages; but, after reading the appendix to the Bryce report, opinion-moulders in newspaper offices and rectories and colleges were ready to believe anything. Viscount Bryce had a worldwide eminence that matched that of almost any living Englishman. Literate Americans revered him as a god. Whatever he put his name to must be true.

The fact that the evidence was collected not by the eminent members of the committee but by “thirty barristers” working anonymously, that the witnesses were not sworn, and that their names were not given, and that no effort was made to make an on the spot check of atrocity stories through neutral investigators, made scant impression at the time. The columns of American newspapers were filled for weeks with accounts of the hideous brutalities of the German soldiery.

For the British it was a propaganda victory. The sufferings of the brave Belgians quite drowned out pleas for neutral rights coming from levelheaded professionals in the State Department.

Against this background of mounting hysteria Bryan manfully held his ground for arbitration, mediation and peaceful solutions. Lansing, who now had the President’s ear, rebuffed his suggestion that ships carrying war munitions be forbidden to carry passengers. Bryan wanted Americans at least to be warned against travelling on belligerent ships, and for some means to be found to put off dangerous issues for arbitration after the war was over. He admitted the need to protest to Germany, but he asked for a simultaneous protest to England against Allied treatment of neutral shipping, to show Germany “that we are defending our rights against aggression from both sides.”

Lansing’s draft of a severe note to Berlin telling the Germans they would be held to “strict accountability” for the loss of American lives became, in spite of Bryan’s protests, the basis for the document the President wrote out on his own typewriter, as usual all alone in his study. At the last moment Bryan induced Wilson to prepare a statement to the press to be issued at the same time, emphasizing the ancient friendship between the American and German peoples, and suggesting again the postponement until peacetime of conflicts that could not be settled by diplomatic means.

When Tumulty saw Secretary Bryan’s press release the excitable Irishman had a fit. He alerted several members of the cabinet and pointed out to his boss that taking the sting out of the note this way would only encourage the Germans to sink more ships. The President, who had confidence in his secretary’s popular touch, was convinced. Most of the cabinet members whom Wilson consulted agreed. When Tumulty joined Secretary of War Garrison for lunch at the Shoreham after his bout with the President he was still pale and shaking. “I’ve just had the worst half hour of my life,” he said. Garrison told him he ought to have a medal of honor for his good work.

By this time President Wilson had decided that the country demanded a stiff protest even at the risk of breaking off relations with Germany. Bryan was not convinced. Not a man to keep his ideas to himself, in an expansive moment he assured Dr. Dumba, the Austro-Hungarian ambassador, that the United States had no intention of going to war, but only wanted a German assurance that ruthless submarine warfare would stop.

Dumba, a bald, stooping, mustachioed figure, whom Lansing found to be “the most adroit and at the same time the most untrustworthy of the diplomatic representatives of the Central Powers,” immediately transmitted these soothing words to his government via the German radio station in Berlin.

There U. S. Ambassador Gerard was dramatizing the importance of the Lusitania note by making sleepingcar reservations for his wife and himself to Switzerland. Zimmermann, who had been given a copy of the radiogram before it was forwarded to Vienna, read it out triumphantly to Gerard as a proof that President Wilson’s Lusitania note was merely for home consumption. Gerard cabled the news to House. House cabled the President and the fat was in the fire.

Secretary Bryan called in Dumba to his office. Dumba admitted that the language of his message had been misconstrued, and Bryan issued a repudiation of the whole interview to the press. The Peacemaker was editorially tarred and feathered by the eastern newspapers.

Meanwhile in Berlin the advocates of ruthless submarine warfare were quoting Bryan’s words as proof that no amount of frightfulness would bring the United States into the war. As a result the German foreign office dispatched a highly unsatisfactory reply to the American note. House in London, who had been working for just the sort of mutual abatement of the two blockades that Bryan wanted as the first step towards a mediated settlement, gave up his mission in despair. He returned home, accompanied as usual by his wife and his secretary, Miss Denton, who coded and decoded his private messages. This time House’s little group sailed on the St. Paul of the American Line.

The pro-Allied press was in a fever against Bryan and his pacifism. The Republicans, in New England especially, now committed to intervention on the Allied side, poured out their scorn on the ineffectiveness of President Wilson’s stream of notes. Theodore Roosevelt called the Lusitania sinking an act of piracy and made it clear that if he’d been President none of this would have been allowed to happen.

Bryan’s position in the administration was becoming impossible. His pacifism and his arbitration treaties were the laughingstock of editorial writers. At a cabinet meeting called to discuss the German answer to the Lusitania note, which Frank Cobb described in the World as “the answer of an outlaw who assumes no obligation towards society,” the Secretary of State seemed, as Secretary of Agriculture Houston recalled it, “to be laboring under great strain, and sat back in his chair most of the time with his eyes closed.” Suddenly he snapped out, “You people are not neutral. You are taking sides.”

The President was nettled. With a cold flare in his gray eyes he said in the voice which he could make so icy, “Mr. Secretary, you have no right to make that statement. We are all honestly trying to be neutral against heavy difficulties.”

The Germans were claiming that they had a right to sink the Lusitania as an armed ship carrying munitions of war. Counsellor Lansing got up an elaborate brief refuting the German contentions point by point, but as Woodrow Wilson revised it, his chief theme became “the sinking of this passenger ship involves principles of humanity which throw into the background any special circumstances of detail.”

Wilson was seeing the drowned bodies of women and children washed up on the Irish coast. Bryan was sending him copious messages meanwhile begging for mention of arbitration and asking for a parallel note to England. To Wilson, as to most Americans, the quarrel with England, about the money value of goods and seized cargoes and the technicalities of contraband, was in a different category from the quarrel with Germany, which involved human lives. He wrote Secretary Bryan “with the warmest regard and with a very solemn and by no means self-confident sense of deep responsibility,” that he could not agree with him. Bryan decided he would have to resign.

It was a Saturday. Bryan went around to see McAdoo, whom he considered the member of the cabinet closest to the President. Perhaps he thought McAdoo might help him argue the President around to his point of view.

McAdoo set to work to talk Bryan out of the idea of resigning and right after lunch drove over to see Mrs. Bryan. Everybody had confidence in Mrs. Bryan’s level head. Mrs. Bryan came right out with it. Her husband felt that Colonel House’s opinions were given more weight than her husband’s. Lansing furnished the background. The President wrote all the state papers. The Secretary of State was playing the part of a figurehead.

Then she went on to tell of her husband’s sleepless nights, his agony of mind. McAdoo begged the Bryans to think it over for a day or two and suggested she take her husband out to the country for the weekend. The Bryans jumped at the suggestion and drove out to a friend’s house in Silver Spring. The magnolias were in bloom, mockingbirds sang through the moonlit June night but Bryan could get no repose. Sunday he took a long walk. That night Mrs. Bryan got a doctor to prescribe a sleeping powder. Monday morning he woke up refreshed but with his determination unshaken.

The Bryans were hardly back in their house on Calumet Place Monday morning, when McAdoo came in with fresh arguments. Bryan would be accused of having resigned to embarrass the Administration. His career would be ruined. “I believe you are right,” Bryan answered solemnly. “I think this will destroy me … it is merely the sacrifice one must not hesitate to make to serve his God and his country.”

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.

Chapter 8 THE LONELY MAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE

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.

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.

“I see that the thing to do is to close at once with the assassin and not let him put his hands out,” Spring Rice wrote Mrs. Henry Cabot Lodge, deprecating any assistance he’d been able to give; “Morgan was really a trump and so was she.”

Morgan, bleeding from a wound in the thigh and an abdominal wound that might have been fatal, walked stolidly to the telephone, called his office in New York and told them to send out the best physician they could find. Then he lay down on the bed.

It turned out that one bullet had merely creased the skin of his belly while the other had gone through a fleshy part of the thigh. He was on his feet in a few days.

The assailant on being taken to the Mineola jail gave his name as Frank Holt. He was identified as a Ph.D. who taught German at Cornell. He claimed he had not intended to kill Mr. Morgan but merely to hold his family as hostages until Morgan gave orders to suspend the shipment of munitions to Great Britain. On further questioning he boasted of having planted the bomb in the Capitol the day before. He refused all food, tried to slash his wrists and seemed in a state of complete nervous collapse. He was obviously a man of education and at times was quite coherent. Always he came back to his determination to stop the shipment of munitions.

Widening investigation turned up an extraordinary tale. The man was a German. His real name was Erich Muenther. An instructor in Germanic languages at Harvard, he had vanished a few years before from Cambridge with the dead body of his first wife, on being questioned by the police over her death from arsenic poisoning. Professor Hugo Muensterberg, the famous psychologist and stout defender of the German cause, admitted that he’d known Muenther and threw a hedge of scientific terminology about the proposition that Muenther had been mad all along.

The same day the newspapers printed the story of Holt’s past, they reported his suicide. In some unaccountable way he had been allowed to escape from his cell and was said to have killed himself plunging head first from the upper tier of cells above to the concrete floor below. The jailer’s first story was that he’d blown his head off by chewing on a percussion cap. Spring Rice claimed Muenther was murdered by an accomplice.

This news had hardly hit the headlines before a message came from Holt’s present wife in Texas warning the police that Holt had written her that he’d planted time bombs on a number of eastbound liners. Searches were carried out on several ships in vain, but sure enough, a few days later, there was a violent explosion on the Minnehaha of the Atlantic Transport Line bound for England with a cargo of munitions.

While these events were holding the front pages, a tale even more fantastic was being unfolded by Secretary Lansing and his assistants for the private ear of Woodrow Wilson, still happily vacationing at Cornish in a house full of adoring relatives with Mrs. Galt as house guest.

In early July Lansing received a letter from a young lady of his acquaintance who was spending the summer at a fashionable hotel at Kennebunkport, Maine, saying that she had information of vital importance which she didn’t dare put in writing. Lansing sent up his assistant Chandler Anderson who hurried back to Washington with her story.

An aristocratic young German who spoke perfect English and seemed thoroughly at home in the highest circles in England and America had lost his head so completely in his enthusiasm for the young lady’s charms that he had confessed to her that he was the secret German agent who had given the order for the sinking of the Lusitania.

The Department of Justice checked on the story and discovered that the gentleman was Franz Rintelen von Kliest, an intelligence officer on the staff of the German Admiralty, sent to America on a Swiss passport with many millions of dollars at his disposal to try to get the Welland Canal destroyed; to hire underworld characters to blow up munitions ships and piers; to stir up strikes against the loading of arms for the Allies and to finance a counterrevolution in Mexico by the ousted Huerta, who was lurking on the United States side of the Mexican border, against the Carranza government.

The story was corroborated again when British Intelligence lured Rintelen aboard a Europebound liner by a message in the supersecret German Admiralty code which the British had broken. They arrested him when they searched the ship off Dover.

A couple of weeks before Rintelen stepped into the British trap, Dr. Heinrich Albert, commercial attaché of the German Embassy, a privy counsellor and a gentleman of great prestige in Germany, was indiscreet enough to forget his briefcase on an elevated train in New York.

Secretary McAdoo’s treasury agents had been interested in Dr. Albert for some time. Besides being commercial attaché he had an office on lower Broadway with vast bank accounts, where no visible business was transacted. Dr. Albert’s briefcase came into McAdoo’s hands through a series of happy accidents.

Two secretservice agents were dogging the footsteps of George Sylvester Viereck, editor of The Fatherland who was suspected, it turned out, rightly, of being in the pay of the German Government. Following him one Saturday afternoon from the offices of the Hamburg-Amerika Line to the Rector Street station of the Sixth Avenue El, they noticed that he was being very deferential to a large germaniclooking gentleman carrying a heavily stuffed briefcase who accompanied him.

One of the agents followed Mr. Viereck when he left the train at Twentythird Street, the other, Frank Burke by name, stayed aboard to watch the stout gentleman, whom he’d now decided must be the portentous Dr. Albert.

Dr. Albert, who was reading a paper, almost missed his stop at Fiftieth Street and jumping up shouted to the guard to hold the train. In his excitement he left his briefcase on the seat.

Frank Burke just had time to snatch it up and make away with it before Dr. Albert came storming back into the car. After a chase Burke managed to elude the stout German and get the briefcase into the hands of William J. Flynn, the head of the Secret Service. “A glance at the contents of the bag,” he noted in his report, “though much of it was in German, satisfied me that I’d done a good Saturday’s work.”

The documents in Dr. Albert’s briefcase dealt with the subsidizing of newspapers and motion pictures and lecture tours, with the bribing of labor leaders to foment strikes in munitions plants and to agitate for an arms embargo. (“I am morally convinced,” McAdoo noted when he described the incident in his memoirs, “that the British were doing the same thing, but we had no documentary proof.”) With Teutonic thoroughness every detail was set down of the measures being taken to get control of the Wright Airplane Company, to rig the cotton market, to corner chlorine and to purchase munitions to keep them away from the Allies.

Flynn immediately jumped on the Bar Harbor express to take the mass of material up to Secretary McAdoo who was at North Haven, Maine, with his family. McAdoo drove over to Cornish to show the President the documents.

Wilson told him to get Lansing’s and Colonel House’s advice as to whether they should be published. The three of them, House, Lansing and McAdoo, decided to give copies to Frank Cobb who, promising to release no inkling of their origin, started publishing them in the World as a great scoop on August 15. It was generally believed that British Intelligence furnished the documents.

House as usual gave his opinion to the President in writing: “It may … even lead us to war, but I think the publication should go ahead. It will strengthen your hands enormously and will weaken such agitators as Mr. Bryan …”

Every new disclosure of German intrigue deepened House’s conviction that the United States would be drawn into the war on the side of the Allies. He wanted American involvement to come about in such a way that the United States could dictate the terms of the peace that had to follow.

In his talks with Sir Edward Grey in London, he had already broached the idea of an alliance of nations to keep the peace. But first the war had to be brought to an end. To dictate a rational peace in a world where only force was respected the United States had to have at least a potential army. Josephus Daniels, with the help of the Navy League and other powerful congressional lobbies, was doing a good job building up the fleet. The army was Saturday’s child.

In his letters to the President, House was trying, through suggestions phrased with oleaginous tact, to bring his friend around to an understanding of the need for preparedness. Wilson still shied off from the word. Preparedness had taken an evil connotation in his mind because Theodore Roosevelt, whom he was coming to consider his archenemy, was calling for it in every speech he made.

Early in August the retired Chief of Staff called on Colonel House in Manchester. Major General Leonard Wood was a New Englander who had gone into the army from the Harvard Medical School. A vigorous broadshouldered man, full of enthusiasm for frontier life, he found while serving in the campaign against Geronimo that he was more interested in soldiering than in doctoring. It was Wood who helped T.R. organize the Rough Riders and who was in command at San Juan Hill. As military governor of Cuba he backed Walter Reed in his investigation of the causes of yellow fever. In the Philippines he helped pacify the Moros.

Wood was the living examplar of the New Nationalism. No more given to keeping his opinions to himself than his friend T.R., his army career proved stormy. Taft appointed him to the newly instituted post of Chief of Staff. Now he was organizing officers training camps to prepare for the war he was sure would come. Since the Democratic administration furnished him with no funds, the students paid their own way. He wanted House to convince the President that the regular army should immediately be raised to full strength. He was talking up universal military service on the Swiss model.

The immediate aim of his visit was to urge House to argue the President into letting him go to the western front for a while as an observer. He promised to do it without publicity. He pointed out that American officers had no idea of how the war was actually being fought.

House couldn’t have agreed with the general more wholeheartedly. He passed on Wood’s suggestions to Wilson at Cornish but got no reply. Perhaps it was enough for the President that Wood was a friend of T.R.’s.

Wilson remained the man of words. He was working long hours at his solitary typewriter trying to find just the right words that would convince the Germans on the one hand and the British on the other that they must bind themselves to respect neutral rights at sea. Considerations of power politics failed to hold his attention. On problems of action he liked to have his mind made up for him. But how could he trust any other man’s judgement? He was getting a somewhat petulant attitude towards all his various advisers and passing on the carbons of their reports on White House flimsy to Mrs. Galt with derogatory remarks pencilled in the margins.

Only Edith Galt thoroughly understood his lonely dedication to doing the right thing. He had already told his daughters of their approaching engagement. The daughters approved.

While the President was taking Mrs. Galt and the ladies of the family on summer automobile rides to show them his favorite views over the New Hampshire lakes, he was letting Colonel House bear the brunt of a new tangled dispute with Great Britain over cotton. The President was making no bones of the fact that as soon as he extorted a satisfactory agreement from the Germans on the Lusitania sinking he was going to turn his attention to the highhanded conduct of the British blockade.

During Sir Edward Grey’s much needed vacation, watching his birds and enjoying the North Country dialect of his farmhands at Falloden, Asquith’s coalition cabinet decided that, come what might, they had to take cotton off the free list. The British were detaining more neutral ships than ever. They had already seized two hundred thousand bales of American cotton consigned to Rotterdam; but, to avoid bringing the issue to a head, were paying for them at prevailing market rates.

The South, where so many good Democrats lived, was in an uproar again at the prospect of cotton being declared contraband. Lansing was issuing preliminary warnings through Ambassador Page. It was up to House, who had won the British Foreign Minister’s private esteem, directly and working through Spring Rice, to convince the British that only by generous treatment of the cotton interests could they avoid agitation in Congress for that embargo on the export of munitions which the German propagandists were working so hard to obtain.

House put the dilemma clearly in two cables, coming as authorized by the President, to Sir Horace Plunkett in mid July. He frightened Spring Rice with the picture of an aroused South shouting for an embargo.

The British Cabinet saw reason and put into effect what became known as the Crawford plan, since it was finally formulated by Sir Richard Crawford, their embassy’s commercial adviser, with the advice of prominent cotton brokers and of the governor of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. The British Treasury would send agents into the exchanges in Liverpool, New York and New Orleans to support the price of cotton. The United States Government would submit, at least tacitly, to cotton’s being declared absolute contraband. It might cost the British twenty million pounds, but it would be a fair price to pay to stave off the arms embargo.

House and Spring Rice conferred almost daily. Officially the President was supposed to be in the dark on these negotiations, but practically he gave his approval of each step through the confidential colonel.

As soon as von Bernstorff got wind of the Crawford plan he rushed into the State Department with a German offer to buy three million bales at the market price if the United States would guarantee their transport to Germany. Blockade was outbidding blockade in the cotton exchanges. The cotton interests began to take heart. Wilson, in high righteousness, denounced the German plan as an attempt to bribe the American people.

The British had barely reached a happy solution of the cotton imbroglio before a new crisis began to loom. The pound sterling that had ruled world finance for a hundred years was in trouble. The British were running out of credit.

McAdoo, who saw at once that American war prosperity depended on Allied credit to finance the munitions trade, was trying to talk the President into reversal of his earlier attitude, assumed under Bryan’s influence, that the financing of warloans would be an unneutral act.

While McAdoo, to whom as a moneyhungry southerner the soaring stockmarket, high wages, boom prices for cotton and wheat were the chief consideration, worked in Washington, J. P. Morgan wrestled with the financial community in New York, which still harbored many neutral and even pro-German elements. Little by little regulations against discounting Allied paper through the Federal Reserve banks were relaxed.

The German submarine command gave the pro-Allied bankers a hand by sinking on August 19, just as their foreign office seemed about to talk turkey on the Lusitania protests, the British liner Arabic, of fifteen thousand tons, outward bound out of Liverpool for New York. There were fortyfour casualties, and two Americans among the killed. The news threw the President into an agony of indecision. “I greatly need your advice what to do in view of the sinking of the Arabic,” Wilson wrote House.

“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.

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.

Ambassador Page in London was cooperating loyally with Hoover’s relief work. It was at his table that Hoover and House first met. The colonel supported him from the beginning, but now House had let Hoover know that his project was in danger in America. A discharged and disgruntled associate was filling the lobbies of Congress with talk of Hoover’s highhanded negotiations with the warring governments. It was claimed that Belgian Relief was operating like a sovereign state. Senator Lodge was out for Hoover’s scalp and threatening prosecution under the Logan Act.

As soon as he arrived in America, House arranged for Hoover to see the President. Hoover found him completely sympathetic. The fact that Lodge was on Hoover’s trail was in his favor. The President publicly commended the work of the Belgian Relief Commission and helped select an advisory committee of prominent New Yorkers to raise funds.

When T.R. heard of Hoover’s difficulties he invited him to lunch at Oyster Bay and talked his ear off. “Mr. Roosevelt kept me all afternoon — making havoc of several appointments.” When Hoover told him of a frigid interview with Lodge in Boston, T.R. almost laughed himself sick. He said Lodge could see involvements in Europe under every bush. “I’ll hold his hand,” he said.

On this American trip, by which he assured the continuation of Belgian Relief, Hoover’s last interview, like his first, was with House. For the confidential colonel, he was becoming an important source of information on the realities of the war.

Hoover’s work carried him back and forth across the battlelines. He was one of the few Americans who could appreciate the blind unreasoning hate the brutalities of warfare aroused in both camps. The execution of Edith Cavell, an English nurse who helped smuggle Belgian and escaped British prisoners out of Brussels, had thrown the Allied peoples into a fresh paroxysm of anger. Yet House and the President persisted in thinking these warmad populations could be made to listen to reason. Hoover felt this hope was unrealistic, at least for the present. House urged Hoover to dissuade the Germans from any more Zeppelin bombings of London. Hoover had little that was encouraging to say along that line. As soon as he brought House up to date Hoover drove straight to the Holland America Line pier where he was catching the Rotterdam, sailing at noon.

To cross the Atlantic in those days was like moving to a different planet. Peace and war were two worlds. Only determined idealists like Jane Addams, the queenbee of Chicago settlement house workers, who had been presiding at a women’s peace congress at The Hague, came back hopeful. She and a number of other pacifist ladies pestered House all summer to induce the President to appoint delegates to join with other neutrals in a permanent commission seated at The Hague to keep on making peace proposals until one was accepted.

House told the ladies, tactfully of course, that they were misinformed. The President knew better than they did what the best methods were to promote peace.

The peace agitation would not down. Peace societies were proliferating over the country. Herbert Hoover’s old preceptor, David Starr Jordan of Stanford, who headed the American Peace Society, turned up in House’s study asking for an appointment with President Wilson to present the resolutions passed at a congress in San Francisco. A few days later it was David Starr Jordan’s secretary, a popeyed and voluble young man named Louis P. Lochner, who took up an hour of the colonel’s time to talk permanent mediation. With him was none other than Henry Ford.

Henry Ford was in his heyday. Model T’s were chugging along every dirt road in the country. Ford’s mass production had revolutionized transportation. He had turned the tables on the bankers and learned how to finance his own concerns. Ford’s five dollars a day had laid the foundation for the highwage economy. Millions were pouring in faster than he could find a use for them.

Ford’s formation was that of a rural mechanic. To the mind of a simple rural mechanic from the American middlewest war was plumb madness. Why couldn’t these crazy Europeans be made to see reason: give up murder and destruction and go to work. If they spent the billions they were throwing away into massacre and destruction on useful production they could make more money in a year than any of the odd lots of real estate they were fighting for was worth.

Lochner and an ardent Hungarian lady named Rosika Schwimmer had talked Ford into backing Jane Addams’ plan for permanent mediation. Suppose it cost a couple of million dollars to send a committee to Europe to end the war. How better could he advertise Tin Lizzie?

House complained in his notes that young Lochner wouldn’t let Mr. Ford get a word in edgewise: … “just as soon as I got him discussing his great industrial plant at Detroit and the plans for the uplift of his workmen, the young man would break in.… Ford I should judge is a mechanical genius … who may become a prey to all sorts of faddists who desire his money.” House found Ford’s ideas about peace “crude and unimportant.”

Instead of letting the confidential colonel dash cold water on Lochner’s scheme, which was to charter a steamship to take a peace commission to Europe, Ford brashly suggested that House come along. House couldn’t be induced to consider it. For fear German propagandists might get hold of the idea he immediately wrote Ambassador Gerard in Berlin disclaiming any connection with the peace pilgrims. “Of course there’s no need to tell you that the Government are not interested in it, either directly, indirectly, or otherwise.”

The Ford Peace Ship turned out a saturnalia for the press. The word peace was already as unfashionable among up to date people in America as it was in England. Wiseguy reporters found plenty to poke fun at.

The expedition consisted of eightythree delegates, including one state governor; the wellknown reformer and judge of the juvenile court in Denver, Ben Lindsey; Ben Huebsch the New York publisher, and the lovely suffragist Inez Millholland Boissevain. There was an assortment of clergymen, professionals of the peace associations and plain crackpots.

The secretarial staff amounted to fifty. Among them were publicitymen from the Ford organization instructed to watch over the Old Man. The press was represented by S. S. McClure, fiftyfour reporters and three movie photographers. Eighteen college students were invited along for the ride. A Western Union messengerboy named Jake stowed away and was allowed to join the technical staff. As the Oscar II was about to sail somebody let loose two squirrels on the deck.

Ford, a tonguetied man who spoke in bunches, aroused the sophisticated risibilities of the press a few days before he sailed by blurting out to his interviewers: “We’ll get the boys out of the trenches by Christmas … The main idea is to crush militarism and get the boys out of the trenches … War’s nothing but preparedness. No boy would ever kill a bird if he didn’t first have a slingshot or a gun.”

“Do you actually expect to get the boys out by Christmas?” a reporter tried to pin him down. Ford gave him his famous grin. “Well there’s New Year’s and Easter and the Fourth of July, isn’t there?”

Ford’s great disappointment came when his dear friend Thomas Edison refused to sail with him. Jane Addams pleaded illness. John Burroughs the naturalist, another of Ford’s cronies, came to see him off, his mane of white hair flowing in the breeze, but said he was too old to go.

William Jennings Bryan, who had at first seemed willing to go along, delivered a moving address instead on the Hoboken dock. He was still insisting he would join the delegation in Holland. He made a point of shaking every individual pilgrim by the hand. A pair of the pilgrims added to the gaiety of the scene by getting themselves married in the firstclass saloon before the ship sailed.

The crowd was immense. One of the Ford publicitymen, a bigmouth named Bingham, led pacifist cheers through a megaphone. “Get together all you friends of peace,” he’d shout.

He led cheers for Henry Ford, for Jane Addams, for Rosika Schwimmer, for Thomas Edison and for Judge Lindsey. As the final whistle blew Henry Ford was seen at the rail with an armful of red roses which he threw down one by one to his friends on the dock below. A man named Ledoux was so moved that he jumped overboard after the Oscar II left the pier and tried to swim after the ship.

The same day that the newspapers carried rollicking stories of Henry Ford’s Peace Pilgrims sailing out of New York on the “peace ark” they carried the news that Captain Boy-Ed the German naval attaché and Fritz von Papen were being recalled from Washington at the request of the United States Government. It was Wilson’s answer to the sinking in the Mediterranean, with heavy loss of life, of the passenger liner Ancona in disregard of the German pledges in the Arabic case.

The peculiarly brutal circumstances of the sinking of the Ancona, the shelling of the liner and its torpedoing before there was any opportunity to lower the boats, sent a shudder through the newspapers, but there was as yet little real war spirit. The President sensed a demand for a sterner stance. In his public speeches he was beginning to take the word “preparedness” away from the warhawks.

He had been particularly stung by some remarks T.R. made offhand to the reporters after delivering a speech to Leonard Wood’s amateur cadets at their Plattsburg camp. Asked about the administration slogan “We must stand by the President,” T.R. squeaked out: “The right of any President is only to demand public support because, if he does well, he serves the public well, and not merely because he is President.”

His next statement rankled so Wilson never forgave him; or Leonard Wood either, for having sponsored T.R.’s appearance: “To treat elocution as a substitute for action, to rely on highsounding words unbacked by deeds is proof of a mind that dwells only in the realm of shadow and of shame.”

Wilson’s answer came in an address before the Manhattan Club in New York: “We have it in mind to be prepared, but not for war, but only for defense.” The word “prepared” brought down the house.

At the same time preparedness meant something quite different to the President than it did to the pro-Allied fanatics who wanted the United States, by immediately backing up the French and British, to ensure Germany’s defeat. Wilson was turning over in his mind the prospects opened up by an intimation from Sir Edward Grey through his confidential colonel:

“… To me,” the British Foreign Secretary wrote, “the great object of securing the elimination of militarism and navalism is to get security for the future against aggressive war. How much are the United States prepared to do in this direction? Would the President propose that there should be a League of Nations binding themselves to side against any power which broke a treaty? I cannot say which governments would be prepared to accept such a proposal, but I am sure that the Government of the United States is the only government that could make it with effect.”

A tentative plan, gradually forming in discussion between Colonel House and the President, was to intervene on the side of the Allies, if, when the moment came, Germany refused to accept mediation. Thus without too much bloodshed, the Administration could force a negotiated peace on the basis of limitation of armaments, freedom of the seas, arbitration and the sanctity of treaties.

Colonel House, in the high style of his daydreams when he was writing Philip Dru, Administrator, was building for the President an image of himself as peacemaker to the world. “This is the part,” the colonel wrote him from New York on the very day of his farewell interview with Herbert Hoover, “I think you are destined to play in this world tragedy, and it is the noblest part that has ever come to a son of man. This country will follow you along such a path, no matter what the cost may be.”

House meanwhile had been trying for some sort of a commitment from Grey. All he could get out of Spring Rice was a stream of complaints about how American insistence on neutral rights was hurting the Allied cause. Sir Edward Grey’s last letters were so full of gloom over Allied failures in Gallipoli, Russian failures in the east and the rising butcher’s bill in the stalemated entrenchments in the west that he seemed to have forgotten the mirage of a League of Nations he’d been dangling under the colonel’s nose.

According to House, Page too was in a blue funk. All Page could write of was the growing unpopularity of Americans in England. The British seemed to be blaming every new fumble in their military strategy on the failure of the American public to get sufficiently aroused about German atrocities. Meanwhile von Bernstorff, in a panic since the dismissal of von Papen and Boy-Ed, was assuring House that the German Government would welcome a peace emissary from the President.

Like Noah from the Ark President Wilson decided to send out one more bird of peace from Washington. Maybe this time he’d come back with an olive branch.

The colonel went abroad as the President’s accredited though unofficial representative. His trip was paid for out of executive funds. House and his party carried their first passports. To keep tabs on travelling Americans who might be acting as agents for the belligerents the State Department was now demanding that American citizens carry passports abroad.

On December 28 fully equipped with diplomatic documents, Colonel and Mrs. House and the intrepid Miss Denton drove down to the Holland-America Line dock to tempt the wintry seas, by now dangerously infested with floating mines. Among the ship’s company was Brand Whitlock, the man of letters, ex-political reformer and mayor of Toledo who was the very emotional U. S. minister to Belgium (and a thorn in the flesh of brusque and businesslike Hoover), and Captain Boy-Ed, travelling home under a British safeconduct.

“When we reached the pier,” House noted in his diary (dutifully typed by Miss Denton), “there was the greatest array of newspapermen with cameras and moving-picture machines I have ever seen. There must have been fifty of them ranged up to do execution. I was perfectly pleasant, acceding to their demands, and posing for them something like five minutes … Before leaving the pier, the General Manager of the Holland-America Line had our things moved from the cabin we had engaged to the cabin-de-luxe, consisting of a sitting-room, two bedrooms and two baths.”

Copious reports of what Colonel House had said and not said appeared in the papers next morning. No, the colonel was definitely not going to transmit the President’s orders to his ambassadors abroad. He had no instructions to work for mediation, nothing to say about peace. He would make no demands on the British or on the Germans. No that wasn’t what the President had in mind. Under a cloud of denials the colonel retired to his deluxe cabin as the ship’s siren started booming. An enterprising journalist added to the confusion by printing a composite picture showing Boy-Ed, Minister Whitlock and Colonel House engaged in what seemed to be friendly conversation.

Ten days before House and his party sailed for Falmouth, the President and Mrs. Galt were married in Washington. They were married at eight o’clock in the evening at Mrs. Galt’s narrow brick house on Twentieth Street.

It was a cold day, gusty after rain. Only members of both families were present, but that made up a group of forty or fifty. Mrs. Galt wore a black velvet gown. The ceremony was performed by their two favorite ministers under a bower of maidenhair fern studded with orchids, which had been constructed by the gardeners from the White House conservatory in Mrs. Galt’s livingroom. Pyramids of American beauty roses virtually filled the small house.

After cutting the cake, while their families were eating supper, the President and Mrs. Wilson slipped out into a waiting car with drawn curtains and were hurried to a small platform between Washington and Alexandria. There a private car awaited them attached to the train which would take them to the Homestead at Hot Springs, Virginia. Meanwhile the White House limousine with the presidential seal, also with curtains drawn, left ostentatiously in another direction to be followed by car after car full of reporters and photographers.

The little ruse arranged by Tumulty and Ike Hoover was completely successful. Except for a few secretservice men to watch over them, the President and his bride were able to embark unobserved on their honeymoon train.

They would not be unobserved for long. Nor would they want to be. “No matter how accustomed one grows,” wrote Edith Wilson in My Memoir, “to the deference paid the great office of the Presidency, it never ceases to be a thrilling experience to have all traffic stopped, the way cleared, and hear acclaims from thousands of throats.”

Chapter 9 INTERMEDIARY TO THE PRESIDENT

THE Woodrow Wilsons returned to Washington after a little chilly golf and some wintry mountain walks around the Hot Springs, very much refreshed. With the family life which was the prime necessity of his existence re-established under the new Mrs. Wilson’s firm management, he could turn all his energies to getting himself re-elected for a second term.

It was not going to be easy. The prospects for the Democrats in 1916 were far from good. The Republican tide which made itself felt in the congressional elections of 1914 was still running strong.

Outside of banking and industrial circles immersed in the munitions trade, and a few eastern college professors and publicists already hypnotized by the British propaganda deftly piped in through New York by Sir Gilbert Parker’s opinionmoulders at Wellington House, the country was for peace at almost any price.

The American people still thrilled to the terms of President Wilson’s address in Indianapolis early in the preceding winter: “Look abroad upon a troubled world,” he told his audience. “Among all the great powers of the world only America saving her powers for her own people … Do you not think it likely that the world will one day turn to America and say: ‘You were right and we were wrong. You kept your heads when we lost ours.’ ”

Under the flattering stimulus of House’s proddings and insinuations, Wilson was beginning to see himself, like House’s own Philip Dru, as the leader to whom a sick world would turn; not for his own glory, he would tell himself when he prayed on his knees by his bedside night and morning in the stillness and agony of selfappraisal, but because it was a duty ordained by the living God to serve mankind.

To lead the world, he had to go on leading the United States. To lead the United States he had to be elected for a second term.

As the year 1916 got underweigh the American people could look into their future with a certain complacency. The period of low wages and unemployment which fed the fanatical hatreds of anarchists and I.W.W.’s was turning to boom. Wartime industries paid the highest wages ever. Cotton prices were good. Wheat was high. The stock market was optimistic. Shipping, meatpacking, steel flourished. Gold imports for 1915 reached an alltime crest of four hundred and eleven million dollars. The favorable trade balance was estimated at nineteen billions as against eleven billions in 1914. The risks of wartime trade were great but so were the profits. New York was eclipsing London as the center of world finance.

Looking across the seas towards Europe, Americans could see everywhere “the deep-wrought destruction of economic resources, of life and of hope” which Wilson described in his Indianapolis address.

The war was going badly for the Allies. Not all the censors’ scissors clipping bad news out of the mail, nor the rosy veils the propagandists managed to drape over the military communiqués, could disguise the fact that on the western front the British had lost half a million men and the French nearer two million, with the gain of only an occasional thousand yards of shellpocked mud on the Flanders front.

It was costing the Germans somewhat less in blood and munitions to defend their entrenchments across northern France and Belgium, while the bulk of their forces slaughtered the Russians and captured prisoners by the hundreds of thousands in the east.

Virtually all Poland was German territory. Along the Danube the Germans and Austrians, with the help of the Bulgarians, who had come into the war on the German side just at the moment when the Allied diplomats thought they had them tied up in an agreement to come in on the Allied side, had destroyed the Serbian Army. British ships were picking up its pitiful remnants in the Adriatic ports and carrying them to Corfu to refit The Italians weren’t doing much more than hold their own along the Isonzo.

The dream of Mittel-Europa had come true. The Germans dominated a great belt of territory, rich in raw materials, from Warsaw and Vienna clear through to Constantinople and the Near East.

Meanwhile the British scored their one success by the efficient way they evacuated the beaten Allied troops from impossible positions on the Gallipoli Peninsula.

Their forces in Salonika, while they managed to keep neutral King Constantine quiet in Greece, were suffering as great losses from malaria as from the bullets of the Turks.

Further east General Townsend’s expedition, intended to keep the oil of Mesopotamia out of German hands, was badly knocked about amid the ruins of ancient Ctesiphon and driven back to the barely defensible mud huts of Kut-el-Amara.

On the seas Britain ruled to be sure. The short range German fleet was still cooped up in the fortified harbors back of Heligoland. An enormous shipbuilding program was keeping the Allies supplied with fresh bottoms, but the loss of an average of two hundred and fifty thousand tons a month to the U-boats was hard for even the sanguine English to laugh off.

“Our armies had everywhere been either checked or beaten and they needed to be reorganized before any new effort could be demanded of them,” was Joffre’s summing up of the year.

On the parade grounds of the United Kingdom Lord Kitchener was training the finest batch of young recruits his drillsergeants had ever seen, in the military methods that had built the empire during the nineteenth century. At the War Office they hoped great things would come from the substitution of the silent lowland Scot, Sir Douglas Haig, for the voluble Sir John French as British commander in the field.

In France they were calling beardless young new classes to the colors.

In Germany the junkers were working Russian prisoners on their estates while Prussian farmboys learned the goosestep. Next spring would bring victory. “The year 1915 had opened gloomily,” wrote an Austrian historian, “but it ended with a spectacle of military success on a scale such as Europe had not seen even in Napoleon’s time.”

For two months House haunted the European chancelleries. In London he was lunched and dined by the members of Asquith’s cabinet. In Paris he penetrated for the first time the closed circle of French politicians by ingratiating himself with the then Premier, Aristide Briand, a man of considerable intellect but of a disenchanted indolence that ruined his career.

During his stay in Berlin, the confidential colonel remained under Ambassador Gerard’s wing at the Embassy for fear of finding himself at the same table with Admiral von Tirpitz, whom he considered the fountainhead of frightfulness on the high seas. From Bethmann-Hollweg down, the civilians in the imperial government put on their best drawingroom manners when they called on Colonel House. At this point, so far as they could without changing their plans, all the European leaders wanted to make a good impression on President Wilson’s representative.

By letter and cable, using, with Miss Denton’s help, the private code House and Wilson had worked out for themselves to avoid the leaks to the press through the State Department that had been so bothersome during Bryan’s regime, the colonel kept in touch with the White House. The President and the new Mrs. Wilson laboriously decoded his messages, all by themselves upstairs in the President’s study.

“I am trying to impress upon both England and France,” House wrote from Paris by diplomatic pouch, “the precariousness of the situation and the gamble that a continuance of the war involves.”

His talking point with the French was that Russia might be forced into a separate peace which would allow the Germans to throw all their forces into a breakthrough on the western front. For the first time the French were beginning to admit, under the hush of the profoundest secrecy, that peace might not be a treasonable word. The French press treated the colonel’s silences with respect; he was the sphinx in the slouch hat.

Back in London, House dined with Asquith, Grey, Balfour and Lloyd George at Lord Reading’s. “The conversation,” he noted, “was general while dinner was being served … When the butler withdrew there was a general discussion of the war, the mistakes that had been made, and possible remedies.”

The colonel dropped a private bomb by suggesting that the Germans were getting ready to attack Verdun. (His intelligence was good: a week later the German barrage began along the Meuse which heralded the most desperate fighting so far in the history of war.) “My theory is,” House remarked in his diary, “that the Germans are still at their highest point of efficiency, and if they could strike a decisive blow, break through and capture either Paris or Calais, it might conceivably end the war.”

This was what he told the British Cabinet. “… My whole idea in leading the conversation in this direction was to make them feel less hopeful and to show them as I have often tried to do, what a terrible gamble they are taking in not invoking our intervention.”

“It was 10:30,” House went on, “before we got down to the real purpose of the meeting. Lloyd George began … I interrupted him … and said: … ‘Sir Edward and I in our conference this morning thought it would be impossible to have a peace conference at Washington, and I have promised that the President will come to The Hague if invited, and remain as long as necessary.’

“… It was now twelve o’clock, and the Prime Minister made a move to go. While the conference was not conclusive, there was at least a common agreement reached in regard to the essential feature; that is, the President should, at some time to be later agreed upon, call a halt and demand a conference. I did not expect to go beyond that, and I was quite content.”

House was in his heyday. He was so content that he allowed Laszló, a fashionable portraitpainter, to do a halflength oil of him, wearing the noncommittal smile under his mustache that delighted the London reporters, and the gray felt hat that so intrigued the French. Sir Edward Grey went so far as to incorporate the gist of their conversations in a memorandum.

The battle for Verdun had already lasted five days when Colonel and Mrs. House and Miss Denton sailed for New York by the Dutch line. The British cabinet thought the contents of House’s briefcase so valuable that they sent along a secretservice agent from Scotland Yard, entered on the passenger list as his valet, especially to guard it.

The colonel’s silences so impressed the reporters who swarmed aboard when the ship reached New York that even the Republican Tribune wrote: “House managed to be both elusive and significant … His glance showed that his silence covered a great deal of humor. He succeeded so well in the difficult task of being both taciturn and agreeable that he was even popular with the newspaper reporters when he told them nothing. Clearly one of the shrewdest of men.”

As soon as Colonel House arrived in Washington the President and the new Mrs. Wilson took him out for an automobile ride. “During this time I outlined every detail of my mission.” On the way back the White House car dropped him off at the State Department, where he gave Lansing an hour to bring him up to date.

Next day the President confirmed the tentative agreement with Sir Edward Grey. He himself worded a cable for House to send. “After some discussion the President took down in shorthand what he thought was the sense of our opinion,” wrote House, “and then went to his typewriter and typed it off.” The President authorized House to say he agreed with Sir Edward Grey’s memorandum of his talks with Colonel House. He preferred to insert in one line the word “probably.” “… If such a conference met, it would secure peace on terms not unfavorable to the Allies; and if it failed to secure peace, the United States would probably,” insisted the President, “leave the conference as a belligerent on the side of the Allies, if Germany was unreasonable …”

The colonel felt thoroughly justified. He had been telling the French and British governments that “the lower the fortunes of the Allies ebbed, the closer the United States would stand by them.” Talking to his dear friend in the White House, he repeated what he’d written him from Europe: the time for mediation was not far off. “I am as sure as I ever am of anything that by the end of the summer you can intervene.”

Feeling that he had accomplished his mission, House took the train back to New York. There he had his cable to Sir Edward Grey coded in the private Foreign Office code and transmitted to England. Writing his memoirs years later Lloyd George insisted that it was Wilson’s insertion of the word “probably” that ruined House’s scheme for mediation.

The President was leaving his project for the re-establishment of peace in Europe in the hands of his confidential colonel. He had other anxieties than the coming election. In Congress and in the newspapers he was beset with criticism by Bryan’s pacifists on the one hand and by Roosevelt’s interventionists on the other. Mexico was a thorn in the flesh.

The Woodrow Wilsons had hardly unpacked their bags at the White House before the Mexican imbroglio, which had seemed laid to rest by the mediation of the A.B.C. powers and the constitutionalist success in destroying Villa’s army near Saltillo the September before, exploded into the headlines. Mexican guerrillas, presumably on Villa’s orders, took sixteen American mining men, who were travelling under a safe conduct from Carranza, off a train near Chihuahua, stripped them and robbed them and shot them dead.

A roar for immediate intervention went up from Republicans and Roosevelt supporters, and even from a good many Democrats. The President kept the State Department busy sending notes of protest to Carranza.

At the same time Wilson was engaged in a speaking tour, talking up cautious preparedness to enthusiastic audiences through the middlewest where the pacifist spirit was strongest. The plain people made him feel that they believed in him. Letters poured into the White House commending his moderation. “You are keeping us out of war, Mr. President. We believe in you.”

He had been trying to convince his Secretary of War, Lindley Garrison, that the Administration could not move faster towards military preparations than the people moved, but Garrison saw things differently. He underlined his stand for immediate universal military service by sending in his resignation. Assistant Secretary Breckenridge resigned with him.

A few days later, Ida Tarbell, who had been writing laudatory articles about the New Freedom in the large circulation magazines, was invited to dinner at the White House. She remarked to the President that it was an anxious time. “No one can tell how anxious it is,” answered the President in a taut voice. “I never go to bed without realizing that I may be called up by news that will mean that we are at war. Before tomorrow morning we may be at war.”

The President’s words proved only too prophetic when, a few days later, the “Red Man” struck close to home. Before dawn on March 9, Villa led several hundred mounted men on a raid on the U. S. Army post, several miles inside the border at Columbus, New Mexico.

Villa had been in a fury against gringos since the Administration allowed carranzista troops he was fighting to cross United States territory by train. After a series of defeats he had to do something to restore his prestige among the revolutionary armies.

His attack was carefully planned. American officers were pinned down in their houses by snipers. While the guard under the officer of the day was fighting off one bunch of Mexicans another detachment attacked from the rear. The obsolete American machineguns jammed. Their gunners were killed. Villa held the town for an hour, looting and burning stores and shooting at anything that moved, before he was driven off and pursued (against strict War Department orders) into Mexico by two troops of the 13th Cavalry.

Eight soldiers and eight civilians were killed in Columbus, and a number wounded. The army reported finding sixty dead Mexicans in the streets of the gutted town.

What to do about Villa’s raid was the first problem that met Wilson’s new Secretary of War when he turned up at his office to be sworn in. Looking about for a loyal Democrat to put in Garrison’s place Wilson picked a man after his own heart. Newton D. Baker was a progressive reformer and a Wilson man from long before Baltimore. He was reputed to be an ardent pacifist.

He came from a prominent West Virginia family. Though most of his people were Union, his father fought for the Confederacy but lived to tell his son he was glad the North had won. Dr. Baker was a popular physician and had a large circle of friends in Martinsburg where the Bakers were first settlers. Hearing one of Huxley’s lectures in the early days of Johns Hopkins he decided that that was where he wanted his boy to go to college. In Baltimore young Newton roomed in the same boarding house with Woodrow Wilson, then an instructor in history and government. He kept a little of the student to professor attitude towards Wilson all his life.

Baker studied law and was settling to a comfortable practice in Martinsburg when he was invited to a job in the Post Office Department in Washington by a friend of his father’s who was Postmaster General under Grover Cleveland.

Caught up in the progressive movement he went to the city of Cleveland as solicitor for Tom Johnson’s reform administration. When Johnson died Baker succeeded him as mayor. Wilson was so pleased with the able support Baker gave him in his presidential campaign in Ohio and at the Baltimore convention, that, in 1913, the Schoolmaster in Politics offered his pupil a cabinet post. Baker preferred to remain as mayor of Cleveland to install the municipal electric plant which had been his promise to the voters.

When, eventually convinced he must serve the Administration, he turned up at the Secretary’s office in the old War State and Navy Building to take his oath, he was still, at fortyseven, a neat trim boyish little man. He disarmed craggy old General Hugh Scott, the Chief of Staff who was acting Secretary, by telling him, “I am an innocent. I don’t know anything about this job. You must treat me as a father would his son.”

Planning an expedition against Mexican bandits was indeed a far cry from reforming the administration of a middlewestern city. In spite of his reputation as a humanitarian of the somewhat mollycoddle type, Baker had no qualms about convincing the President that Villa must be punished. The first decision to be made was the choice of a commander. The ranking general officer, Major General Funston, would remain in command of the entire border. The old military heads around the War Department with one accord told the new Secretary that Brigadier General Pershing was the man.

John Joseph Pershing was raised in a hard school. He was born the year before the Civil War began in a railroad boarding house near LaClede, Missouri. His father was section foreman at the time on the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad. During the war the elder Pershing did well for himself as regimental sutler with the 18th Missouri Infantry. With the proceeds he started a general store which he lost in the panic of 1873. After that he travelled as a salesman for a readymade clothing concern and engaged in all sorts of not too successful speculations. He was a man of some standing in his community, nonetheless; was president of the school board and a charter member of the LaClede Methodist Church. He believed the children should work for their education.

Jack Pershing’s first ambition was the law. At seventeen he started earning a little money teaching a Negro grade school, to pay his way through the state teachers college. All his life he had a way with Negroes. A silent hardworking dour sort of lad he planned to earn his living by teaching until he could save up enough to study law.

When the local congressman, who, as a greenbacker and a Baptist, believed in equality of opportunity, announced he would give his West Point appointment to the boy who passed the best examination, Jack Pershing jumped at the chance of a free education. He studied hard. When he came out on top over eighteen competitors he still felt he was unprepared to enter the academy and eked out his scanty funds to study for a year at a military school at Highland Falls on the Hudson. He was almost twentytwo before he entered West Point as a plebe.

Though far from brilliant in his studies, Jack Pershing was known for his good riding, his inflexible deportment and his erect stance. His final year he was senior captain of the cadet corps. After graduation he served against the Apaches and the Sioux.

When the plains Indians were quieted the army took advantage of Lieutenant Pershing’s training as a teacher by sending him to instruct in military science at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, where his family had finally settled and where, as usual, his father was prominent in the affairs of the Methodist Church and of the Y.M.C.A. Pershing fulfilled his old ambition by completing his law course there.

Later he taught tactics at West Point. During the Spanish War he served in Cuba with the Negro 10th Cavalry and was breveted a captain for gallantry at Santiago. He came back from Cuba with the nickname of “Black Jack.”

During the first Roosevelt administration Pershing, now a major, helped put down the Moro insurrection on Mindanao. He was one of the few American officers who learned the Moro language. T.R. was so delighted by the crisp style of his reports he recalled him to work on the General Staff.

Pershing’s army career had been all hard sledding. He’d had no time for women. During his stay in Washington at the age of fortyfive he wooed and married the daughter of Senator Warren. This marriage to the daughter of an influential congressman who had been governor of Wyoming in territorial days and was now chairman of the Senate committee on military affairs, did Major Pershing’s career no harm. Soon after he was sent as attaché to observe the strategy of the Russo-Japanese War. President Roosevelt jumped him over eight hundred odd names to make him a brigadier general.

Returned to the Philippines as governor of Moro Province, he was recalled, when the Mexican troubles began, to take command on the border. Since service there was expected to be of short duration Mrs. Pershing and the children remained in the residence that had been allotted them in the Presidio at San Francisco. On August 27, 1915, the general was called to the telephone in El Paso to be told that his wife and three small daughters had burned to death in the fire that swept the military post. His baby son, Warren, was saved by a maid.

Pershing had always been a silent grimfaced man. After that he was more silent and grimmer. His hair from grizzled became gray.

For an ambitious meticulous soldier there was little solace to be got from the Mexican campaign. Of all the assignments an American general ever had the pursuit of Villa was the most heartbreaking.

The population was sullenly hostile. There was the problem of transport. The expedition penetrated two hundred and fifty miles into the desert state of Chihuahua without being allowed the use of the railroad. The old army muletrains were too slow. Trucks had to be hired and bought. Their maintenance had to be improvised.

There was the problem of intelligence. As the expedition penetrated deeper into the country, villistas and carranzistas joined to excoriate the gringo. Although the constitutionalists were glad to see Villa’s forces scattered they wouldn’t lift a finger to help the Americans.

Wherever they went the Americans were met with treachery and deceit. It had been thought that airplane reconnaissance would be useful in tracking down armed bands. The few airplanes the army had proved incapable of anything more arduous than exhibition flights at a county fair.

At the War Department, however, Secretary Baker, whose appointment had been greeted with dismay in regular army circles, was showing a capacity for quick decisions. His speed in dictating wore out the army stenographers. The military discovered with relief that he was shaking off his humanitarian inhibitions. Get the job done was his motto. When the Quartermaster Corps claimed that there was no appropriation for motor trucks he said buy them anyway. “Mine is the responsibility.”

Pershing failed to catch Villa, but his embarrassingly futile marches and countermarches proved a valuable training school for the regular army. The problem of supplying ten thousand men in hostile country taught the War Department and Newton D. Baker things they had never dreamed of about procurement and logistics.

While American troopers were sweating out their lives trailing false rumors through the scorched deserts of northern Mexico, where every nopal hid a skulking rifleman, the President was knitting his brows over the freshly puzzling behavior of the Germans. Though von Tirpitz’s resignation and von Bernstorff’s protestations to Colonel House seemed to proclaim a new reasonableness, the imperial government’s announcement in early March that it would treat armed merchantmen as ships of war held threatening possibilities.

The Allies were discovering that an agile gun crew could do considerable damage to a submarine that surfaced to give warning. They were trapping the submarines with innocentappearing freighters that turned out to be heavily armed. In America the peace organizations were echoing Bryan’s demand that Americans be prohibited from travelling on armed merchantmen. The argument had reached a hysterical pitch when the newspapers, the morning of March 25 carried news of the Sussex disaster.

The Sussex was a Calais-Dover ferry with women and children on board and was known to be unarmed. An explosion blew the bow off the ship right under the white cliffs of Albion. There were eightyodd casualties. It was taken for granted that Americans were among the dead, though it turned out later that there were none. The State Department was in a rage. Lansing wanted to give von Bernstorff his passport right away.

Though Colonel House was indulging in one of his bouts of illhealth he hurried to Washington with advice. He agreed with the Secretary of State. He found the President preoccupied and evasive. “From the way he looked at me,” he confided to his diary, “I am inclined to believe that he intends making excuses for not acting promptly in the new submarine crisis … He does not seem to realize that one of the main points of criticism against him is that he talks boldly, but acts weakly.”

The argument about what to do about the Sussex went on for weeks. The President listened to Lansing and to Counsellor Polk. He called in Baker and other members of the cabinet, separately and collectively. House’s advice was considered so important that the confidential colonel took up his residence at the White House for a while.

At last the State Department transmitted a note, of which the final version was as usual painfully typed out by the President himself on his own solitary typewriter, curtly warning the German Government that unless their submarines gave up attacking unarmed merchant ships the United States would break off relations.

Largely at von Bernstorff’s insistence the German foreign office replied that their government would “do its utmost to confine the operations of war for the rest of its duration to the fighting forces of the belligerents.” They went on to demand that, in return, the United States bring pressure on Britain to restore freedom to the seas. Wilson accepted the first part and ignored the rest. The Germans were outdebated. They clumsily accepted responsibility for the Sussex attack and offered to pay an indemnity for any American losses. The result, for the American press at least, was another diplomatic victory for the President.

Chapter 10 HE KEPT US OUT OF WAR

THE Sussex correspondence brought forth new outbursts from Theodore Roosevelt. In preparation for the conventions of the Bull Moose and Republican parties slated for early June in Chicago, T.R., refreshed by a trip to the West Indies which had improved the chronic bronchitis that his bullet wound had left him with, was on the rampage in the middle-west. Dorcas was willin’. Too astute a politician to have any real hope of the nomination, he couldn’t help being affected by his friends’ plans for Chicago. The inner circle of Bull Moose was hoping to bring about a stalemate in the Republican convention to be followed by a dramatic merging of the two conventions with T.R. acclaimed as the only man who could heal the schism and defeat Woodrow Wilson. It would take a miracle but miracles could happen.

The project filled T.R. with the old zest. At breakfasttime at the Planters Hotel in St. Louis he jumped on a couch in the crowded lobby and in an impromptu speech attacked hyphenated Americans. There were no English-Americans or Irish-Americans or German-Americans, he shouted in his squeaky voice while his arms flailed the air. There were only Americans.

At the City Club he leapt on the speaker’s table and accused President Wilson, who had come around to advocating preparedness and military training for those who wanted it, of using weasel words, words that had the content sucked out of them, the way a weasel sucks the yolk out of an egg. “Teddy oh Teddy, there’s nobody like you,” somebody chanted in the audience.

St Louis was a center of German vereins and German beer and had a truculent Irish population, to boot, infuriated by Britain’s bloody suppression of the Easter rebellion, but the throng at the City Club cheered T.R. to the rafters. He returned to Sagamore Hill hoping against hope.

A couple of days later the news of the sea battle off Denmark pushed local politics off the front pages. GERMANS ACCLAIM JUTLAND VICTORY BUT ENGLAND IS CALM announced the New York Times.

The losses were enormous on both sides and the decision was doubtful. When propaganda exaggerations were sifted out it became known fairly accurately that the British lost three heavy cruisers, five light cruisers and eight destroyers: a total of one hundred twelve thousand tons with six thousand eight hundred men killed and wounded, while the Germans lost a firstclass battleship, a new heavy cruiser, three light cruisers, and five destroyers: sixty thousand tons and three thousand men. The German armor plate and artillery and particularly their armorpiercing shells proved superior, but their fleet, badly battered, limped back into its protected anchorage.

The British were at sea again in two days. It was a virtual victory, the London papers said; the Germans suffered a greater relative loss. In America Jutland proved a sobering blow to German and Allied supporters alike.

The grim news, indicating that no conclusion to the European war could be expected in the foreseeable future, was swallowed up in the indigenous distractions of the presidential campaign.

The first week in June Chicago hummed like a beehive. The hotels were crowded with Republican and Bull Moose delegates. The Loop resounded with the brass bands of a “preparedness” parade that filled the streets for eleven consecutive hours. Ten thousand women tramped through the rain in behalf of woman’s suffrage.

The same morning that the Republican convention came to order in the Coliseum with Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio in the chair, the Progressive Party, with less bunting, but more shouting, started proceedings in the Auditorium. The Bull Moose leaders, deep in private negotiations with a committee appointed by the Republican regulars, wanted to keep their excitable delegates from blowing the lid off and nominating Roosevelt prematurely. At the first mention of his name they cheered for ninetythree minutes. T.R. heard the roaring over his private wire to Sagamore Hill. In spite of the enthusiasm of the crowd he already knew in his heart that this time there would be no miracle.

In March he had cabled from Trinidad to the New York Evening Mail, “It would be a mistake to nominate me unless the country has in its mood something of the heroic, unless it feels not only like devoting itself to ideals, but to the purpose measurably to realize these ideals in action.”

No one knew better than T.R. that by coming out flatfootedly for a war program he had alienated great segments of his supporters. The reformers who had responded to his leadership in earlier campaigns now had very different ideas about how to “realize their ideals in action.” The rural and western Progressives, led by La Follette in Wisconsin and Hiram Johnson in California, were either outright pacifists or sceptical of any headlong involvement in European quarrels. Only the wellconnected Bull Moosers from the financial and industrial centers in the east were for war on the side of the Allies, and they were hard to distinguish from the elements who were working for the nomination of Charles Evans Hughes on the Republican ticket.

Hughes was sincerely reluctant to allow his name to be placed before the Republican convention. He was so conscientious about keeping the Supreme Court out of politics he had even given up voting. Chief Justice White, a frank and garrulous old man in feeble health, had been telling Hughes he would retire soon and that he expected him to be his successor. President Wilson, whose daughters were on friendly terms with the young people of the Hughes family, made it quite clear that if Hughes kept out of the presidential race, and if Wilson were re-elected, he would be the next Chief Justice.

Ex-President Taft’s letters played a large part in convincing Hughes that it was his moral duty to run. It was to Taft that Hughes was beholden for his appointment to the supreme bench. Taft knew that Hughes was a conscientious party man in much the same spirit as he was a conscientious member of the Baptist church.

“… The Democratic party,” Taft wrote him, “is what it has always shown itself to be — the organized incapacity of the country. I am no partisan but I cannot escape this conclusion. The Republican party was split in two in 1912. The great body of Progressives have enrolled themselves again in the party. To retain them however and to win over the others, we must have a candidate who will … stimulate the enthusiasm of both elements and give them confidence in victory … Mr. Roosevelt is thundering. He is a genius. In certain ways he commands my admiration more than he ever did for his genius … But I cannot think it is on the cards for him to win.”

Taft insisted that after his first disappointment T.R. would have to come out in support of Hughes: “… he has put himself in a position which makes it absolutely necessary for him to support you if you are nominated.”

Taft was not alone. From all segments among the Republicans came earnest pleas that shook Hughes’ determination to continue the aloof and carefree life which he so much enjoyed. All the political augurs echoed Taft’s statement: “You will certainly be elected if you accept the nomination.”

Mrs. Hughes, who never concealed her conviction that her husband was a man of destiny, said she wanted to see him President. Hughes felt his resolution slipping, but he knew what the presidency might mean. “When you see me in my coffin,” he told Mrs. Hughes with some bitterness, “remember that I didn’t want to take this burden.”

Voting started on the third day of the conventions. Hughes, who had no personal organization, no throwaways, no badges, no banners, rolled up 253^½ votes on the first ballot against Roosevelt’s 65 among the old guard Republicans at the Coliseum. At the Auditorium the Progressive managers wore themselves out trying to stave off a premature nomination. The “peace committees” trying to reach an agreement behind the scenes were at a deadlock.

When the conventions adjourned the night of June 9 with Hughes still 170 votes short, the Justice, who had been in his study keeping up the pretence of working on his Supreme Court cases, said rather snappishly to his wife, “That settles it. I shall not be nominated. I’m going to bed.”

Next day the regular Republicans put his nomination through. Hughes resigned from the Supreme Court with a note Woodrow Wilson felt was unnecessarily curt, and accepted. The Progressives in desperation nominated Roosevelt.

From the end of his private wire at Sagamore Hill T.R. stalled. He wouldn’t say yes and he wouldn’t say no. He made his refusal of the nomination conditional on the acceptance by Hughes of certain principles.

The convention heard his evasions with “anger, derision and groans.” The New Nationalism falling in ruins about them, Roosevelt’s reformers and conservationists and social workers left Chicago in a bitter mood. Many of them, like Mark Twain’s lawyerfriend Bainbridge Colby, eventually supported President Wilson. Bull Moose was dead.

The Democrats meanwhile were assembling for their convention in St. Louis. Woodrow Wilson had been taking a leaf out of T.R.’s book and attacking hyphenated Americans. The national committee planned to make Americanism the keynote of the campaign. Words and music of all the patriotic songs were furnished to the convention bands. Arrangements were made to wave Old Glory at every opportunity. To the amazement of the backroom leadership their delegates rose to quite different bait.

The Honorable Martin H. Glynn, onetime governor of New York, delivered the keynote address. He had planned to open with an apology for the concessions Woodrow Wilson was forced to make to keep the peace and then to bring the audience to its feet with the eagle screaming for the red, white and blue. He enumerated some ticklish situations, involving American lives and American property, under Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Van Buren, Franklin Pierce …

“When Grant was President a Spanish commander in cold blood shot the captain of the Virginius, thirtysix of the crew and sixteen of the passengers … But we didn’t go to war. Grant settled our troubles by negotiation as the President of the United States is trying to do today.”

To Glynn’s surprise the crowd cheered. Every time he tried to lay aside his list of precedents for peace by arbitration there were shouts of “Give us more.” Glynn warmed to his task. He brought up crisis after crisis. “What did we do?” people roared. “We didn’t go to war,” their voices echoed.

William Jennings Bryan, sitting in the press gallery, was so moved he burst into tears. When he was invited to the platform at the opening of the night session he got almost as much applause as Woodrow Wilson’s name when it was first mentioned. Like a good party man he eulogized the President. In spite of their differences about ways and means, their aims were the same. The President had kept the peace.

Ollie James of Kentucky was permanent chairman. Senator James was a large loud man. A reporter from the New York Times described him as having “the face of a prizefighter, the body of an oak and the voice of a pipe organ.” He opened up with “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God.”

The words were met with a wild scream of excitement.

He described the long lonely struggle of the man in the White House to keep America neutral and to restore peace to the warring nations of Europe. “If that be evil and vacillating may God prosper it and teach it to the rulers of the world.”

“The delegates did not rise to their feet,” wrote the Times reporter, “they leaped. ‘Keep it up Ollie, keep it up,’ they shouted.”

The senator described the President’s victory in the Sussex case: “Without orphaning a single American child, without widowing a single American mother, without firing a single gun or shedding a drop of blood, he wrung from the most militant spirit that ever brooded above a battlefield the concession of American demands and American rights.”

“Repeat,” the crowd shouted.

Ollie James boomed out the sentence again. They made him repeat it a second time. Then they cheered for twentyone minutes which was one minute more than they had given Woodrow Wilson’s name.

Late that night Wilson’s nomination, which was a foregone conclusion, was carried with but a single dissenting vote. When the platform was put together next day someone, no one ever remembered who, inserted the phrase that became the keynote of the campaign: “He kept us out of war.”

While the Democrats were shouting for peace in St. Louis events in the world were taking a more and more warlike turn. Earl Kitchener, the British war leader, went down on the Hampshire that hit a mine off the Orkneys. The German armies were pressing, with men and metal, on the fortresses of the Verdun salient, where the French were defending their positions with desperate courage. The British were preparing to take the pressure off Verdun by squandering the recruits Kitchener’s drillmasters had trained in a reckless offensive on the Somme.

In Mexico, Carranza, egged on, it was whispered, by German agitators, was trying to unite all factions in a holy war against the gringo. Daily he called on Pershing to take his troops off the sacred soil of the Mexican republic.

Attacks on Americans, from Mazatlán to the Gulf of Mexico, became so threatening that the President instructed the state governors to call out the militia. On June 22 a group of Negro troopers from Pershing’s 10th Cavalry was ambushed at Carrizal by carranzista forces. The Mexican general who laid the trap was killed. Three American officers were dead or missing and twentythree troopers and a Mormon scout were captured and taken to Chihuahua.

Daily notes passed back and forth between Washington and Mexico City. The National Guard, now enlisted under federal orders, started taking up positions on the border. Peace societies and South American diplomats offered their good offices. On June 29 Carranza backed down and telegraphed his people in Chihuahua to turn loose the captured Americans. The twentyfour men were placed on a train for El Paso.

A couple of days later, while the news of the petering out of the Verdun offensive was encouraging Allied supporters, German prestige in America received a great boost with the appearance in the Chesapeake of a German merchant submarine. The Deutschland, loaded with dyes, had crossed the Atlantic unarmed and unscathed in spite of the British blockade.

Wilson’s campaign made a slow start. The President’s health was bothering him. Daily problems tied him to his desk in the White House. Vance McCormick, retired mayor of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and like Newton D. Baker a grassroots reformer from the progressive wing of the party, took the place of the petulant McCombs as campaign manager. Wilson described him glowingly as a steam engine in boots, but he had trouble finding campaign contributors. Betting in New York was still two to one on Hughes.

Henry Morgenthau, the wealthy real estate promoter and financier who had been the leading Wilson man in moneyed circles ever since a speech of Wilson’s had set tears streaming down his face years before, was back on leave from his embassy to Turkey to serve as treasurer; but, in spite of the help of Bernard Baruch who was rising like a new comet on the Wall Street sky, he was having tough going. Men of means favored Hughes.

Josephus Daniels used to tell an amusing tale in later years of how he was called in as a friend of Edison’s and Henry Ford’s to try to induce these gentlemen to part with some folding money. Both men were invited to lunch at Vance McCormick’s suite at the Biltmore in New York. No alcoholic beverages were served, but, when McCormick and Daniels tried to edge up to the topic of campaign contributions, the two great mechanical innovators became exceedingly skittish.

There was a gas and electric chandelier above the table with large groundglass globes. Henry Ford suddenly cried out to Edison, “I’ll bet you anything you want to bet that I can kick that globe off that chandelier.”

Though only the first course had been served, the table was pushed aside and Edison began limbering up his legs in the middle of the room. Daniels’ story was that the electrical wizard made the highest kick he’d ever seen and smashed the globe to smithereens. Ford missed by a fraction of an inch.

Through the rest of the lunch Edison was busy crowing over Ford: “You are a younger man than I but I can outkick you.”

It wasn’t till the arrival of the icecream that McCormick could get his guests’ attention back to the needs of the Democratic campaign. All his pretty speeches about the President’s great work for peace were of no avail. Ford was a little leery of the word since the razzing he’d taken over the fiasco of his “peace ark” the winter before. “All this campaign spending is the bunk,” he said. “I wouldn’t give a dollar to any campaign committee.”

In the end he was induced to run a series of newspaper advertisements which kept Ford products in the public eye at the same time as they gave reasons why people should vote for Woodrow Wilson. All McCormick got out of Edison was a catchy statement: “They say Wilson has blundered. Perhaps he has but I notice he usually blunders forward.”

One reason why money was shy was Wilson’s appointment of a Louisvilleborn Boston lawyer named Louis D. Brandeis to the Supreme Court. Brandeis, a scholarly product of the Harvard Law School, had made his career in the harrying of monopolies and trusts in the interests of the consumer. Bigness was his bugaboo. He was the knight errant of the small man. Conservatives looked with suspicion upon his glittering pronouncements. Even Taft, broadminded as he was, considered his appointment “the worst possible,” and every conservative voice in the country was raised against him in the bitter battle for approval of his appointment in the Senate.

Another reason was the La Follette Act establishing improved working conditions for American seamen, and greatly increasing the cost of operating merchantships under the American flag, which business blamed the President for conniving at. A third was the amendment to the Clayton Act exempting laborunions from the antitrust laws. A fourth was the Adamson Law establishing an eight hour day and arbitration procedures for railroad labor. To most of the business community the eight hour day was still a red flag to a bull.

The Adamson Act was passed as an emergency measure in the muggy dogdays of a summer session of Congress to stave off a strike of railroad workers which threatened to involve four hundred thousand men and all the important railroads in the country. A general strike had been brewing for months against working conditions and low wages. It was part of labor’s demand for a share in war profits.

At a time when the railroads offered the only means of transport, outside of the inland waterways, for food and fuel and necessities, a prolonged stoppage was a terrible prospect. The President grew gray and haggard haggling with committees from the brotherhoods and from management, while he tried to induce both sides to arbitrate their differences.

The union leaders refused to be convinced. “I was shocked to find a peculiar stiffness and hardness about these men. When I pictured to them the distress of our people in case this strike became a reality, they sat unmoved and apparently indifferent,” he told Tumulty. “I am at the end of my tether.”

Disgusted with the union leaders he tried to reason with the railroad executives. A committee from various railroad managements was assembled in the heavily curtained Blue Room in the White House. After they had been sitting for some time in sullen obscurity on rows of little gold chairs, a curtain was pulled open at the end of the room and the President appeared freshfaced and eager in his white suit in the stream of sunlight that poured through the long windows behind him.

“I have not summoned you to Washington as President of the United States to confer with me on this matter,” he said, in what Tumulty considered one of the most moving appeals he ever made, “for I have no power to do so. I have invited you merely as a fellow-citizen to discuss this great and critical situation. Frankly, I say to you that if I had the power as President I would say to you that this strike is unthinkable and must not be permitted to happen … A nation-wide strike at this time would mean absolute famine and starvation for the people of America … They will not quietly submit to a strike that will keep these things of life away from them. The rich will not suffer in case these great arteries of trade and commerce are temporarily abandoned, for they can provide themselves against the horror of famine and the distress of this critical situation. It is the poor unfortunate men, and their wives and children, who will suffer and die. I cannot speak to you without a show of emotion, for, my friends, beneath the surface in America there is a baneful seething which may express itself in radical action, the consequences of which no man can foresee …”

He stepped forward and continued in his most confidential, man to man manner. “The Allies are fighting our battle, the battle of civilization, across the way. They cannot ‘carry on’ without supplies and means of sustenance which the railroads of America bring to them … Who knows, gentlemen, but by tomorrow a situation will arise where it will be found necessary for us to get into the midst of this bloody thing?… I know that the things I ask you to do may be disagreeable and inconvenient, but I am not asking you to make a bloody sacrifice. Our boys may be called upon any minute to make that sacrifice for us.”

“What the hell does he mean?” one railroad director asked another when the President left the room.

“I suppose he means it’s up to us to settle the strike.”

Neither side made a move to settle, so Wilson appealed to his Democratic supporters in Congress, and with extraordinary speed a bill was drafted by Representative Adamson of Georgia giving the railroad workers their eight hour day and setting up machinery for the arbitration of grievances. The Adamson Law went through Congress like lightning and was upheld a few months later by the Supreme Court.

As perplexities and crises piled up on his desk Woodrow Wilson retired more and more into isolation. He conferred less frequently with his cabinet officers. Everything had to be sent in to him in writing. Mrs. Wilson was with him constantly. Together they pored over pardons, bills before Congress, over the texts of projected notes or the first drafts of speeches and statements.

Dr. Grayson, preaching fresh air and exercise as preventive medicine, urged a little horseback riding. He insisted on the daily golf at the Kirkside Club. Mrs. Wilson took up the game to keep her husband company. There were never enough hours in the day. Often they got up at five, and worked through, except for the family meals and necessary public appointments, until eleven or twelve at night.

Walter Hines Page, called home for consultation from England, arrived in Washington on a steaming August day when the railroad crisis was at its hottest. House and the President had long agreed that Page needed a spell at home in America to get the London warfever out of his system. The ambassador, remembering his long almost affectionate association with Wilson over the years, arrived bubbling with phrases he hoped would make the President see the English point of view. He was primed for a long heart to heart talk. He was bursting with a private message from Sir Edward Grey.

“The President was very courteous to me, in his way,” Page wrote in his journal. “He invited me to luncheon the day after I arrived. President; Mrs. Wilson, Miss Bones, Tom Bolling, his brotherinlaw, and I … not a word about England. Not a word about a foreign policy or foreign relations. He explained that the threatened railroad strike engaged his whole mind.”

It was agreed that Page should take a few days rest and come back when the President had time to listen to him.

Two weeks later Page was again invited to lunch at the White House. He found his old friend redeyed from having been up all night working over a special message he was to deliver to Congress that afternoon. Wilson had just come from his appeal to the railroad executives. There was no time for a word on European affairs. Page found himself talking to the ladies of the family, reinforced by some extra cousins from New Orleans. Mr. Sharpe, the ambassador to Paris, who was there on the same sort of errand, got no chance either to put in a word about European politics.

After hurrying through luncheon the party was bundled off to the Capitol to hear the President address both houses to ask for immediate passage of the Adamson bill. Page didn’t even have a chance to bid his old friend goodby.

“There’s no social sense at the White House,” Page wrote in his disgruntlement. “The President has at his table family connections only … It is very hard to understand why so intellectual a man doesn’t have notable men about him. It is the college professor’s village habit I dare say … Mr. Wilson shuts out the world and lives too much alone, feeding only on knowledge and subjects he has already acquired and not getting new views and fresh suggestions from men and women.”

“The President,” Page wrote his friend Laughlin in the State Department, after he’d cooled his heels at the New Willard for another couple of weeks, “dominates the whole show in a most extraordinary way. The men about him (and he sees them only on business) are very small fry, or worse — the narrowest twopenny lot I’ve ever come across. He has no real companions. Nobody talks to him freely and frankly …”

Page still hadn’t had a private talk. His explanations of why the British had cooled to House’s peace proposals were stale by now, but still he was determined to have his say. “I’m not going back to London,” he insisted, “till the President has said something to me or at least until I’ve said something to him … if he does not send for me, I’m going to his house and sit on his front steps till he comes out.”

Finally, after an insistent letter, Page received through Tumulty an invitation to “Shadow Lawn.” Shadow Lawn, near Long Branch, was the great rambling seaside summer mansion with wide verandahs and a cavernous living room, ornamented, like the lobby of a summer hotel, with a gilt piano and statuary, which Wilson was using as his headquarters because he had scruples about conducting a political campaign from the White House. After a family dinner the President listened to his old friend’s explanation of the deep rift he believed the President’s policies were producing between America and England.

Page tried in vain to interest Wilson in a medal the British had struck off to commemorate the Lusitania outrage and solemnly repeated his oral message from the British cabinet: the Germans were using the campaign for mediation for their own purposes: if the Germans proposed an armistice on the President’s terms, the British would refuse.

The President was polite but unimpressed. All he seemed interested in, Page noted rather naively in his diary, was ending the war.

Page left after breakfast next morning feeling that Wilson was completely out of touch with the thoughts and feelings of daily life. Their last handshake was final. The old confidence and friendship was gone. They never met again. “I think he is the loneliest man in the world,” Page told his son.

At Shadow Lawn Wilson at last found time to let himself be formally notified, in Senator Ollie James’ booming periods, of the Democratic nomination, and to make his speech of acceptance.

The partyworkers were uneasy. Tumulty was in the dumps. He saw Hughes running away with the woman’s suffrage issue and attacking the Adamson Law as submission to blackmail. The Republicans would get the German-American vote. Maine, on September 11, went even more solidly Republican than usual. Tumulty begged for more action. The President refused to be flustered. “The moment is not here,” he told his secretary soothingly. “Let them use up their ammunition and then we’ll turn our guns upon them.”

That September the President was preoccupied with a new private grief. His sister, Mrs. Howe, died. For a few days the Wilsons gave all their attention to her funeral at the old Wilson home in Columbia, South Carolina.

He got back to Shadow Lawn to find Tumulty and his friends in great distress. Judge Westcott, the devoted Wilson supporter who made the nominating speeches in both conventions, had been defeated in a New Jersey senatorial primary.

The President kept his confident attitude. “I believe that the independent vote,” he wrote his brother in Baltimore, “the vote of the people who aren’t talking and aren’t telling the politicians how they are going to vote, is going to play a bigger part in this election than it ever played in any previous election and that makes the result truly incalculable.”

Though the President refused to allow the photographers to take pictures of his and Mrs. Wilson’s private life, he allowed Tumulty to arrange press conferences. Trainsful of supporters trampled the grass at Shadow Lawn every Saturday afternoon. When one man asked Wilson what he thought of Hughes’ campaign he replied, “If you will give that gentleman enough rope he will hang himself.”

“Never murder a man who is committing suicide,” was how he put it to Bernard Baruch. “Clearly this misdirected gentleman is committing suicide slowly but surely.”

In October he did allow himself to be induced to tour the midwest, delivering speeches to enthusiastic crowds in Omaha and Indianapolis and Cincinnati. “He kept us out of war,” was the slogan of all the introductions by local politicians. The crowds were wild for it. Woodrow Wilson tried not to work it too hard. “I can’t keep the country out of war. They talk of me as if I were a god,” he said in private. “Any little German lieutenant can put us into the war at any time by a calculated outrage.”

This time Woodrow Wilson’s hunches sized up the political situation better than the calculations of the professionals. Hughes didn’t have his heart in the campaign. He found it hard to heckle the President over policies with which he basically agreed. His clumsy mishandling of his personal relations with Hiram Johnson lost him muchneeded Progressive votes in California. His speeches gave the impression of quibbling over details. People began to say “Oh he’s just a Wilson with whiskers.”

T.R.’s plumping for Hughes not only alienated the Progressives, but his wartalk produced many a Wilson vote. The crowds laughed and hooted when he jeered at “Nice Mr. Baker, he knits” and described Wilson as “kissing the bloodstained hand that slapped his face,” but working people and farmers made it clear that they were going to vote for the eight hour day and keeping out of war. When T.R.’s campaign train stopped at Gallup, New Mexico, he bounced out on the rear platform to greet a crowd of ranchers and section hands. Gallup had been a recruiting station for the Rough Riders and was strictly Roosevelt territory. The railroad workers waved pictures of Wilson under his nose. “I think the world of the colonel, but I love the President,” shouted a voice.

“I love no one too proud to fight,” T.R. snapped back.

“You’re a grand man,” came another voice, “but me for Woodrow Wilson.”

The final rally of the campaign was held as usual in Madison Square Garden. The national committee was planning it as the greatest ever.

“Final touches were given this afternoon,” noted House in his diary, “for November 1. I hope everything will work out as planned, though there is a danger it will not — for much will depend on luck, as matters are supposed to happen spontaneously which are really prepared far in advance. For instance, the head of the parade must be down at Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue at 8:30. At twenty minutes of nine the President must come out of the Waldorf Hotel and start for the Garden, stopping at Thirty-fourth Street and Madison Avenue for ten minutes to receive the cheers of the crowd and review the parade … Glynn is to commence his speech at the Garden at fifteen minutes of nine … The President must walk on the speaker’s platform just as it ends, in order to receive continuous applause for Heaven knows how many minutes.”

Next day the colonel found his affectionate friend suffering from campaign jitters: “The President arrived promptly at nine o’clock. McCormick and I met him and went with him to the Mayflower which is anchored in East River. We talked to him for an hour and a half and it was the most acrimonious debate I have had with him for a long while … He thought New York ‘rotten to the core’ and should be wiped off the map … He thought McCormick and I had New Yorkitis and that the campaign should be run from elsewhere. He was absolutely certain of the election without New York.

“I have heard the story so often from candidates that it makes me tired. They go about receiving adulation everywhere, hearing the people declare that they look upon them as their savior, until they begin to look upon themselves in that light.

“It is true we have organized wealth against us, and in such aggregate as never before. On the other hand we are pitting organized labor against it and the fight is not an unfair one. I feel it good sport to fight with the odds against us, for the United States is normally Republican.”

In the privacy of his diary House couldn’t help being a little scornful of Wilson’s peevishness: “The President reminds me of a boy whose mother tells him he has ridden long enough on his hobbyhorse and he must let little Charlie have a turn … His attitude is not unlike that of T.R. who has never forgiven the electorate for not continuing him directly in the White House.”

The President was undoubtedly edgy. He seemed to be blaming House and McCormick for the fact that the New York papers that morning ran sixteen columns of ads for Hughes to one and a half for his candidacy. “However before he left,” added House, “he put his arms around us both and expressed appreciation for what we were doing.”

That night the colonel walked around the streets. When he got home he made his entries in a more cheerful frame of mind. He had found “as much precision as could be expected in the circumstances … After the President had passed down the Avenue, I returned to the Garden to find it packed to the doors and the streets beyond. I merely looked in to hear the cheering and to find that everything was going as planned, and then left for home. All reports say it is the biggest demonstration of the kind ever given a President or a candidate for President in the city of New York.”

Election day, November 7, 1916, dawned mild and clear. The newspapers forecast a recordbreaking vote. Everywhere the voters lined up early at the polls.

Hughes voted in New York. The bearded former governor, still wrapped in some of the dignity of his recently doffed black robe, was photographed at 7 A.M. on the way to cast his vote in a small laundry on Eighth Avenue. His ballot was number 13. “This is a lucky omen,” he said to the reporters.

Later he attended a luncheon at the Harvard Club in honor of William R. Wilcox, the Republican National Chairman, who it was admitted later had made a hash of his campaign. Returning in midafternoon to Republican headquarters at the Hotel Astor, Mr. Hughes was told that the first precinct in the nation to register complete returns had given him a clear majority over President Wilson. It was New Ashford, Massachusetts. The figures were Hughes 16, Wilson 7. The candidate was reported to have expressed satisfaction over the Republican trend in New England.

At virtually the same moment, in the temporary executive offices in Asbury Park, New Jersey, Joe Tumulty was discovering a Democratic trend in the same figures. He was pointing out to reporters that several more Wilson votes had been cast in New Ashford than in 1912.

As the day wore on, Mr. Hughes, the public was told, was so gratified by growing Republican majorities, that he took Mrs. Hughes for a drive in the park before returning to what partyworkers were beginning to call the presidential suite for a late afternoon nap. He was completely fagged from the smiling and the travelling and the speaking and the waving and the handshaking. He was hoarse as a crow.

At Shadow Lawn the President shook himself out of bed at five that morning, stropped his razor on his old razorstrop and shaved; and after an early breakfast drove, with Mrs. Wilson on the seat beside him, over to Princeton to vote. Mrs. Wilson had to wait outside of the old firehouse while he voted; woman’s suffrage was not yet on the statute books in New Jersey. When he came out a group of students gave him the Princeton cheer.

Although he had spared himself as much as possible the campaign had tired him, too. Washington had been even hotter than usual. After the arduous summer, though public speaking usually refreshed him, the campaign speeches had been a punishing strain. Mrs. Wilson was worried about the blinding headaches he complained of.

After voting the President drove directly home to Shadow Lawn. There he sat at his desk keeping tally on a sheet of paper of the figures Tumulty reported over the telephone. The instructions were that he wasn’t to be bothered with scattering returns.

As always Wilson was trying to keep politics at arm’s length from the closed circle of his family life. In spite of all he could do there was a hush of expectation about the house. As they passed on the stairs, the ladies of the family exchanged comments on Woodrow’s composure in admiring whispers.

The day passed slowly. When there was nothing else to do the President could always while away the time signing documents. A host of papers, including every commission and every promotion in the army and navy, had to have the President’s personal signature. Sometimes it amounted to thousands of signatures in a single week. Signing papers filled every spare moment. Edith Wilson helped by arranging the papers neatly in a pile and handing them to him in an endless chain.

As the fine seaside afternoon wore on Joe Tumulty’s voice grew boyishly confident over the phone. Maybe the east was doubtful but the middlewest looked increasingly good. Colorado and Kansas were sure.

The shock came at dinnertime. Tumulty’s voice lost its resonance. Hughes would carry Illinois and New York.

Around nine that night the reporters broke into Tumulty’s office in Asbury Park to find him sitting with his son staring glumly out of the window. They brought in a bulletin for him to comment on. The New York World had conceded defeat. The World, edited by a personal friend, Frank Cobb, was Wilson’s most fervent supporter among eastern newspapers. Tumulty kept his dukes up with an optimistic pronouncement. “Wilson will win. The west has not yet been heard from.”

Tumulty’s heart was in his boots. As soon as he could get rid of the reporters he called Shadow Lawn.

The President had already heard the bad news from Grayson. “Well Tumulty, I guess we’ve been badly licked,” was all he would say.

Grayson had been trying to console him by prophesying a comeback like Grover Cleveland’s. Wilson replied with a favorite story about a Confederate veteran who reached home after Appomattox. He walked with a limp. He had his arm in a sling. His house and barns had been burned, his fences were down, his stock driven off, his family scattered. “I’m glad I fought,” he said, after surveying the ruins, “but I’m damned if I’ll ever love another country.”

In New York at the Hotel Astor Mr. Hughes was awakened from his afternoon nap with the news that he would be the next President. The Times searchlight was flashing a Republican victory. A skysign on the roof of the hotel spelled out HUGHES in electric bulbs. Marchers from the Union League Club appeared with a band in Times Square calling on Mr. Hughes to claim election. At Oyster Bay, Theodore Roosevelt was already declaring that the Republican victory was “a vindication of our national honor.”

Charles Evans Hughes was a careful man and a decorous man. There was a lot of rural upstate New York in his makeup. Against his own better judgement, he had allowed himself to be cajoled into resigning from the Supreme Court to run against Wilson. He wasn’t going any further out on that limb. He insisted that he would make no claims until the count was completed in California.

Meanwhile, over at the Biltmore, a victory banquet which had been arranged for the Democrats, with Henry Morgenthau at the head of the table, was falling flat. Colonel House refused to attend. “While I did not expect defeat”—House’s promise to Wilson of 230 electoral votes for sure left him needing only 35 more to be picked up in the heat of battle—“I did not wish to be at such a gathering without knowing whether the President was successful.” Morgenthau told House afterwards that “there never was such a morguelike entertainment in the annals of time.”

Instead of going to the Democratic banquet Colonel House walked around with Attorney General Gregory to the Bar Association Library to look up the federal statutes on the subject of the President’s resignation.

The outcome of the war in Europe seemed to teeter on a knife edge. The moment was too dangerous for an interregnum in Washington. Wilson had decided to resign at once if he failed in re-election.

The idea appealed to him as a political theorist as well as a practical politician. He was convinced that the American government must be made more responsive to the popular mandate, more like the English party government by a responsible ministry. He had talked it over many times with House. Resigning would turn defeat into a constitutionally constructive gesture.

So that nobody could say he was acting in a fit of pique, two days before the election he outlined his plan in a letter to Secretary of State Lansing.

“Again and again the question has arisen in my mind, What would it be my duty to do were Mr. Hughes to be elected? Four months would elapse before he could take charge of the affairs of the government, and during these four months I would be without such moral backing from the nation as would be necessary to steady and control our relations with other governments … Such a situation would be fraught with the gravest dangers … The course I have in mind is dependent upon the consent and cooperation of the Vice President; but if I could gain his consent to the plan I would ask your permission to invite Mr. Hughes to become Secretary of State and would then join the Vice President in resigning.”

As the law then ran, the Secretary of State would be next in succession to the presidency.

It was a gesture planned in the grand style. “It seems,” House wrote in his diary, “that during the uncertain hours of Tuesday night … both the President and Mrs. Wilson were cheered, as I was, by the thought of the dramatic dénouement we had in mind in the event of defeat.”

The letter, sealed with sealingwax and addressed in Woodrow Wilson’s own hand, with “most confidential” underlined on the envelope, was entrusted to Frank Polk, a crony of House’s who was counsellor at the State Department. He handed it to Secretary Lansing when they met at Democratic headquarters, where Lansing arrived on his way from voting at his home in Watertown, to the Balthasar’s feast, as Henry Morgenthau was calling it, at the Biltmore.

Wilson supporters went disconsolately to bed. SWEEPING VICTORY FOR HUGHES, read the headlines in their own New York World. Conservatives who distrusted theorists and innovators and pro-Ally fanatics in the eastern cities, turned in contentedly: the country was in good hands.

Colonel House was between the sheets by eleven. “I believe I can truthfully say I have not worried a moment,” he confided in his diary. “If I had I could not have stood the strain. It was not that I was altogether certain of the result, but I never permit myself to worry over matters about which I have no control.”

The colonel admitted that he woke at five. By daybreak he was hanging onto his bedside phone. The far west was going Democratic. He immediately called the despairing watchers at party headquarters and urged that they telephone the county chairmen of every doubtful state telling them to pay no attention to press reports that Hughes was elected. As soon as he decently could he had Attorney General Gregory up and worrying about federal measures to protect the ballotboxes wherever the vote was in doubt.

California was the crucial state; in southern California the vote was expected to be particularly close.

“I did not close my eyes all night,” Meredith Snyder, the reform Democrat who was mayor of Los Angeles told Josephus Daniels in reminiscent vein some years later, “until the result of the election was declared. Shortly after the polls closed I ordered that every ballotbox be sealed and stationed policemen in every booth with orders to shoot any man who should lay the weight of his hands on the ballotbox. With associates I went from booth to booth all night. We kept vigilant watch and a staunch Democrat was assigned as watcher in every booth. Nothing was left undone to see that there was no tampering. I knew that the fate of the Presidency in the next four years would be settled in those boxes, and I staked my life that the votes should be counted as cast.”

All over the country Democratic watchers and wardheelers were frightening each other out of a year’s growth with the tale of a mammoth Wall Street plot, financed by millionaires, to steal the election for the Republicans.

“We lost no State I had placed in the certainties,” Colonel House boasted to his diary. “I regard this with some degree of pride. The President was skeptical regarding the value of organization. I wonder whether he is now …”

On the morning of November 8, while Woodrow Wilson was shaving, his daughter Margaret knocked on the bathroom door with the news that the New York Times was about to run off an extra announcing that the election was in doubt. Wilson thought she was pulling his leg. “You tell that to the marines,” he called back through the door.

At Asbury Park, Tumulty had been comforted in his unhappy vigil by telephone calls from an unknown supporter who claimed to be calling from Republican headquarters. The Republicans were worried, the strange voice kept saying. “Don’t concede.”

To get some fresh air the President went out with Grayson for a few holes of golf. “How is your game today, Mr. President?” asked an acquaintance on the links. Wilson is quoted as having answered, with a wave of the hand, that Grayson had him three down, but he didn’t care, he was four states up over yesterday’s returns.

The Democratic column kept building on the tallysheets. Everything depended on the outcome of the close race in California. It wasn’t until November 10 that Vance McCormick dared wire his county chairmen to buy red fire and celebrate.

A telegram came into Shadow Lawn from Wilson’s runningmate. Vice President Thomas R. Marshall was a professional Hoosier, fond of classical quotations and pokerfaced statements in the crackerbarrel style: “T’is not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door,” he wired, “but t’is enough. T’will serve.”

A story went through the corridors of the Pulitzer Building that a reporter who tried to get into the Hughes suite early that morning for a statement was told, “The President can’t be disturbed.”

“Well when he wakes up tell him he’s no longer President,” replied the reporter. “Wilson’s re-elected.”