Mr. Wilson's War

by John Dos Passos

  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.

  Mrs. Galt

  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 Colonel’s Callers

  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 kn
ew 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.

  The Year of the Bombs

  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.

  D
r. Albert’s Briefcase

  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.