by Roland Perry
He graduated in 1901, and his ambition and adventurous spirit helped him accept a job in China in the Imperial Maritime Customs Service on a respectable $750 a year. The organization was an arrogant colonial set-up that collected China’s customs revenues and remained independent of Chinese control. The position served Willard by allowing him to demonstrate his linguistic gifts, learning Mandarin. The Customs Service also showed him bureaucracy of any kind was not for him. He jumped at an opportunity in 1904 to become a Reuters and Associated Press correspondent in the Russo-Japanese War. Five years after leaving Bordentown Academy, he was back on a militaristic track.
He was sent first to Tokyo. His diary claimed a torment of choice between admitted selfish ambition and artistic idealism. Willard desired to make his name in high places and money along the way. He could not see himself as the penniless bohemian. Willard knew that there was “too much ambition in my cosmos to let the schemer be driven out by my better nature, hence much tribulation and many an unhappy hour, and uneasy time, for I am not true to myself.”1
This mild agony and self-effacement did not cloud his move up the ladder to the choking altitude he aspired to reach. He was, usefully, proJapanese as they strove to take Manchuria and Korea. In Tokyo Willard found himself socializing with Edwin V. Morgan, 40, scion of the wealthy upstate New York family. Describing the handsome correspondent, sixteen years his junior, Morgan noted that Willard was “tall, slim, with reddish-brown hair, of unusual frankness and charm of manner, perfectly at ease.”
At the end of the Russo-Japanese War, Morgan hired him as his private secretary with the rank of vice-consul at Seoul. Young Willard was now on an escalator rather than a ladder. This led him for the first time into the company of a social circle that excited him; the visiting Alice Roosevelt (daughter of Theodore) and the diminutive E. H. Harriman and his family were among them. Harriman may or may not have been in the robber baron class, but he certainly played with the new toys and inventions of their kind of business, especially trains. His $70 million fortune came from controlling the Union Pacific Railroad and the Pacific Mail steamship line spanning the Pacific. He dazzled Willard by airing his ambition to create a round-the-world transportation system. Harriman wanted to hook up the Trans-Siberian Railway (from which he would lease rights) with a steamship line from the Baltic to New York.
Willard found Harriman’s beautiful, bright, and pampered daughter Mary very much to his liking. Even the most guileless of young men could have seen the advantages of marrying into such a family. However, there was no rush; indeed, to have pushed would have been folly. He could hardly have kept her in the luxury to which she had become accustomed, at least not yet.
When Japan demonstrated it was running Korea rather than giving it independence, the place for a legation was Tokyo, not Seoul, which was closed. Willard, now 25, was offered a job with Morgan in Cuba. He took it, despite his love for Asia.
In the summer of 1906, he received a summons to Washington from President Roosevelt, who had heard good things of the young man from both his daughter Alice and especially Harriman. Known as the “Little Giant of Wall Street,” Harriman needed someone in place in China to complete his dream of that global transport network. Who better than bright-eyed and brilliant Willard, who spoke Chinese and who made it clear that he wished to be fluent in the language of big business. He was posted as consul to Manchuria in the thriving industrial city of Mukden, the once-Tartar capital 500 miles northeast of Beijing. He made a success of it despite his tendency to fits of depression when his work became a matter of persistence and determination. He would often consider bailing out for a more lucrative position. Yet he stayed based in Mukden. Harriman even urged for his appointment as minister to China, but it was impractical. He was only 27 years old. Such a posting would have caused rebellion among the old guard at the U.S. State Department, who relied on seniority for advancement rather than ability.
While Harriman looked for a promotion for Willard in his work, he demoted him in his private life by preventing his marriage to Mary. The reasons boiled down to the fact that Willard didn’t have the right pedigree or wealth. Coupled with that was Harriman’s need for Willard to be in place in China and to concentrate on the job. Marriage into the family might have made the manipulation of Willard’s talents in China more difficult.
Neither Mary nor Willard appeared shattered by the break. He was soon dancing attendance on Katherine Elkins in Washington, another daughter of immense wealth. Her father was coal and industrial mogul Stephen Benton Elkins, a Republican senator from West Virginia and a former secretary of war in the Harrison administration. Then there was one Dorothy Whitney with whom he dined and played tennis on Long Island at the banker Edwin Morgan’s.
In 1909, the State Department decided on so-called dollar diplomacy in China by encouraging private American bankers to take part in a $25 million loan to China, which the British, French, and Germans were then negotiating for the construction of the Hukuang railways. The New York bankers chosen—known as the American group—were managed by J. P. Morgan & Company and included Kuhn, Loeb & Company; the First National Bank; and the National City Bank.
They needed a representative in China. Willard was approached. At 29, he resigned from the State Department. He saw the possibilities if he could succeed in negotiating with the Chinese to accept the loan. It would be tough: the Chinese wanted the easiest terms. The European partners in the loan would push for harsh penalties from the Americans for their late entry.
As he faced his greatest challenge, Willard’s personality continued to impress everyone. He could be mixing with elderly bankers and diplomats one moment and then move to a group of young employees at the legation. He would pick up a guitar and entertain with improvised, amusing lines from literature.
It was this breadth of character and style that impressed Dorothy. If he had been all banker, she would have been uninterested. Coincidentally or otherwise, she arrived in Beijing on a world trip and was feted like a royal. One of those assigned to her was Willard. Their early delicate diary entries were noncommittal but agreeable about each other. For instance, Dorothy’s November 5, 1909, entry read: “Such gorgeous days. Mr. Straight took us this morning to the drum tower, which we climbed for the beautiful view.”2
On November 11, Willard sang and played guitar for her and wrote: “Record breaker. Beautiful day, lunch at Wan Chow Sze—ride along the Jade Canal afterwards. A little music then another fireside talk with DW.” It was gentile code for falling in love.
By the last night after a fortnight in each other’s company, November 13, Willard, who referred to her as “the Princess” in his diary, was out of code and transcribing his feelings: “It was hard not to ask her to stay on and live there (at the bankers’ compound). . . . Quiet dinner and a little choking at the throat, I think.”
A similarly smitten Dorothy noted: “Our last evening—it is so sad.”
Willard’s post-Dorothy entries showed him depressed and miserable without her. The romance blossomed in correspondence as he demonstrated his wit and literary skills. After six months, they met in Milan at the Hotel de Ville in May 1910. He proposed. She demurred and then rejected him. It created a dilemma for Willard, but he could not dwell on it, for he had to press forward with the Chinese loan. He took a train to Paris, where his task was to reach agreement with the Europeans, which he did. The letters between him and Dorothy continued despite the setback, and they began to cover the ground that had troubled her. He explained away Mary Harriman and fretted about Dorothy learning of his fleeting affection for Katherine Elkins. He didn’t wish to be seen as a gold-digger. Yet his chasing of only heiresses set him up to be branded this way by the inevitable relationship breakers in the chattering class of New York and Washington.
They contrived to meet, and her attraction to him strengthened. By late 1910 their love epistles were again peppered with coded words known only to them. During this time, Willard felt the pressures over the loan.
Although it was unsaid, his chances of marrying Dorothy were contingent on the Chinese signing. His standing would be immense for one so young—the elevation would overcome his outsider status in New York and lack of means.
Finally, on April 15, 1911, the Chinese signed the loan agreement. Willard’s self-confidence and prestige were boosted as never before. His success gave him the platform for his acceptability. He and Dorothy became engaged on July 20 and married on September 7 in a morning civil ceremony in Geneva, followed at noon by an Episcopal service. They later traveled by train across Siberia to Manchuria and China, arriving in Beijing on October 11, the day that the Sun Yat-sen rebellion broke out. The Straights endured the fall of the Manchu dynasty over the next few dangerous months, in which they were trapped during looting riots and attempts to burn Beijing. They were forced to stay inside the U.S. legation compound protected by marines.
When peace was restored, they left Beijing via the Trans-Siberian railway in March 1912 to a send off by about eighty of the foreign elite in China.
The trip was arduous for Dorothy. She was pregnant.
2
BIRTH, DEATH, AND CIRCUMSTANCE
The Straights returned to the United States, and Willard, practically a stranger to New York society, took up a Wall Street position with J. P. Morgan on an increased salary of $20,000. They bought a Packard car, leased a five-story townhouse at 22 East 67th Street, and spent leisure time at the Whitney home in Old Westbury, Long Island. Willard could not keep up the lifestyle expected of the family on his respectable salary. He found himself in the position of William Whitney when expenses were subsidized by the $250,000 a year earned from the investment of Dorothy’s fortune, which had increased to more than $10 million.
Their first child, Whitney Willard, was born in November 1912. After three months of Dorothy’s attention, he was assigned to a governess for most of the day. It was similar to her own early days, except she made sure that her quality time with young Whitney was filled with attention and caressing, which she had lacked. The employment of an English nanny allowed the Straights to go as a couple to the theater and opera as before and to attend the usual rounds of tennis, polo, and golf.
While Willard worked, Dorothy took up her liberal enterprises with a vengeance. She stood up for women’s suffrage, the State Charities Aid, and the YWCA. If she wasn’t supporting a Democratic candidate somewhere, she was doing something for a committee to care for poor children and women of the district. At night, she might be at a book club reading, or listening to lectures at the Economics Club, which was taken up with novel ideas concerning socialism and the single tax. Then there were Women’s Trade Union meetings about the unemployed, as well as Bible classes. Dorothy was quietly, determinedly spiritual.
She was going far beyond the public obligations of the New York social set and into the realms of self-sacrifice in paying for the sins of the father. Yet while William Whitney’s failings may have been a subconscious motivation, she was of such a mind that even without them she would have taken the same path.
Two years after securing the loan for China, Willard saw his triumph collapse. The loan was delayed by the Chinese revolution, then thwarted by President Woodrow Wilson and the American Group of bankers itself. Wilson thought the loan “obnoxious” because it threatened China’s independence. The bankers fretted over the turbulent country’s capacity to repay loans. The blow caused Willard anguish, but, bursting with ideas, he moved on.
He was concerned with the United States’ direction, and he longed for it to be inspired with a long-term plan, particularly his. His schemes were similar to those of his friend and hero Theodore Roosevelt and to ideas honed by writer Herbert Croly. His book The Promise of American Life had bemoaned the lack of a blueprint for an American renaissance. Croly wanted the United States to move away from disorganized individualism to develop a sense of national purpose and good. Known for his honesty and idealism, he didn’t want the rampant big corporations broken up but rather made more accountable and beneficial to the whole population. Willard felt much the same way and was a patriot despite his liking for imperialist ways. He had enjoyed his elitist experience in China and wanted the United States to exploit it more benevolently than he thought the British had, or the Japanese or Russians would.
Willard was in accord with Croly’s thinking, even if they were coming from different directions. The writer was urging stronger leadership and national reform at home. Willard thought this would make the United States stronger abroad. He yearned to own a daily paper of influence but would settle, for the moment, for a magazine.
Dorothy was busy having their second child, Beatrice, early in August 1914, but she still made time to consider the dreams of others. The Straights, Croly, Judge Learned Hand, and Felix Frankfurter met at Westbury to discuss the birth of The New Republic. Dorothy subsidized the magazine, which began after the fall elections of 1914. Croly was appointed to the staff, and Roosevelt became contributing editor. Soon journalists Walter Lippmann and Walter Weyl were on board having weekly editorial meetings with the Straights. Willard and Roosevelt saw it as a vehicle for their muscular view of U.S. foreign policy and international corporate adventures. Croly viewed it as a radical journal for espousing his developing ideas for change in the United States. They were all, despite their personal ambitions, constructive in their ideas about their nation. A common denominator was a better, more socially responsible United States.
Meanwhile, war broke out in Europe, with Imperial Germany declaring its intentions against Russia, then France. Straight could hear those distant drums. They had first beat for him at military college, then in the Russo-Japanese conflict, and more recently in the Chinese revolution. He was dissatisfied with his lot at the House of Morgan and bored with international banking. He had his club, polo, golf, tennis, politics, and the new magazine, which he was not supposed to attempt to influence, although he tried, particularly over policy concerning the United States’ preparedness for war. The machinations of dealing with other people’s money was no fun compared to the rest of his activities.
Dorothy, who kept control of the purse strings, would not indulge his craving for a newspaper. She urged him to stick with the Morgan job. She liked its security, and she knew her man to be impatient and lacking in perseverance.
The last straw at Morgan for Willard came when he spent much time speaking to business groups about the trade opportunities presented by the war. He and Dorothy had entertained the heads of the Anglo-French commission at Westbury when they visited the United States. Willard had created the market by working hard at inspiring both the sellers and buyers to deal. Then he found himself left out of the bank’s plans to furnish the Allies with money to continue their purchases from the groups he had encouraged.
Willard resigned September 18, 1915, soon after the Straights had moved into their newly built Georgian red brick at Fifth Avenue and 94th Street. He announced he would study international law at Columbia. Inside three months of beginning law, he again proved his incapacity to stay the course and accepted the position of third vice-president to the new American International Corporation, beginning early in 1916.
Willard was still at AIC on September 1, 1916, when Dorothy gave birth to their third child, Michael Whitney, the biggest arrival at nearly 10 pounds. The new arrival inspired his father to paint a serene seascape the next day during a contented period in the short life of the Straight family.
Six months later Willard changed course yet again. After failing to land a State Department job in Washington, he was commissioned into the army as a major in the adjutant general’s reserve corps and assigned to Governor’s Island, just fifteen minutes by boat from lower Manhattan. The lure of the military had snared Willard after several flirtations. He left the AIC while keeping a few financial projects going and attempted to pull strings for a position on the General Staff. When sent to Europe, he again failed to get himself frontline duty in command of a battalion or on the staff of a
division. In France he had the unglamorous post in charge of the War Risk Insurance Bureau for the U.S. Army. Yet it carried responsibility. He arranged for countless U.S. servicemen to insure their lives in an operation that would have rivaled the biggest insurance company.
Dorothy was uneasy about his rush to the military and the subsequent distance between them. Typically in times of stress, she increased her activity by joining the Mayor’s Committee on National Defense and the Red Cross. She worked in a YMCA canteen, continued to push for the suffragettes, and made time for the New School for Social Research. She made herself far busier than Willard. When the Insurance Bureau work was completed, he wandered around the U.S. military in Paris as a sort of itinerant staff officer. It left him low. He summoned the spirit to write to Dorothy, whom he delighted in calling “Miss Chairman of all things,” telling her to inform each of their boys:
Always to get his foundations solid—before he started to climb—and to— by constant practice and the most consistent effort—train himself to have his bowels move each morning as soon as he is dressed. You’ve no idea what these things mean. . . . From the latter I am suffering constantly— and it’s only a question of training. As to the former—that has been my great handicap in life. I’ve always been finding myself in places more important than I was really competent to hold. I’ve never had the foundation for the jobs I’ve had—except perhaps the political foundation for the Chinese loans business—and for my job in the State Department.1
After the war, Willard, still in Paris, supported President Wilson in his push for a League of Nations and managed to get on the staff of the president’s chief assistant—Colonel House—at the Peace Conference. Willard was involved in final negotiations when he contracted influenza. It developed into pneumonia. He died on December 1, 1918, at age 38, leaving Dorothy a widow at 31.