The World Remade

by G. J. Meyer

  Few Americans had any knowledge of, or saw much reason to interest themselves in, Europe’s power games. Viewed from Main Street, the diplomatic failures of July 1914 and the tragedy that ensued were just the Old World doing its old and decadent thing. Americans liked to think of themselves as above such nonsense, entitled to look down with disdain on kings and emperors, the struggle for global empire, and huge armies butchering each other over nobody exactly knew what.

  This was true even in Washington, half empty when the war began, drowsing under the weight of its brutal summer heat. It was true even of President Wilson, less because of any lack of interest in international relations (he had that same summer been pushing the United States to the verge of what would have been an utterly pointless war with Mexico) than because of a searing loss: his devoted wife Ellen died of kidney disease just one day after Britain’s entry into the war, leaving him in a state of grief that bordered on despair. It was certainly true of Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, who would show himself willing, over the next ten months, to destroy himself politically rather than accept the slow slide into a war that was, in his opinion, not worth fighting. It was true of most of America’s public men at a time when the State Department had a grand total of 157 employees in Washington. The country was near the end of an era during which, as former secretary of state Elihu Root sardonically observed, “international law was regarded as a rather antiquated branch of useless learning, diplomacy as a foolish mystery and the foreign service as a superfluous expense.” In 1893 Champ Clark, then a freshman congressman from Missouri but destined to serve as Speaker of the House of Representatives during the Great War, expressed the spirit of the time by proposing the elimination of the diplomatic service.

  Colonel Edward House

  He avoided the limelight, understanding that “men often destroy themselves by being too much in evidence.”

  Within the president’s tiny inner circle, however, there was one striking exception. This was Colonel Edward House, who, since first meeting New Jersey governor Woodrow Wilson, had forged a bond with him that could seem almost unnatural in its intensity. Small and frail, faintly mouselike in appearance thanks to protuberant ears and a receding chin, House was a wealthy Texan with a consuming interest in politics and public affairs. Having decided early in life that he had neither the physical presence nor the robust constitution needed for the pursuit of elective office (he was a bit of a hypochondriac, refusing to leave his New England summer retreat for the heat of Washington even in times of crisis), he set out to become a political professional of a kind more common today than a hundred years ago: a promoter of and adviser to more conspicuously ambitious men, content to work behind the scenes.

  At that he was extraordinarily successful, playing a key role in the election of four Texas governors and advising them in office. Early in the new century, in his midforties, he left Texas for New York, his goal now to become influential in the national Democratic Party. He was again successful, building such an impressive reputation that in 1911 Governor Wilson journeyed across the river from New Jersey to discuss his prospects in the following year’s presidential election. It is astonishing to read of the speed with which the two men became not only collaborators but best friends. The colonel became the first really close friend Wilson had had since breaking with a supposedly disloyal protégé in Princeton two years earlier. Wilson—especially after he won the White House in 1912—became the figure through whom the colonel could fulfill his dreams of becoming a player in national politics and even on the world stage.

  The new president offered the colonel any cabinet post except secretary of state, which had been promised to William Jennings Bryan. House, while managing to place several Texas friends in the cabinet, shrewdly said that he wanted nothing except to be of service in unofficial and unpaid ways. In doing so he kept himself free of administrative burdens and the sometimes petty quarrels of Wilson’s official family. And he satisfied the president that his devotion was utterly selfless.

  Long after his relationship with Wilson came to a frosty end, House told the man to whom he was entrusting his papers some of the secrets of his success. It was necessary never to disagree with Wilson on any subject about which he appeared to have made up his mind, House said; the president would reject not only the contrary opinion but the person who offered it, and the rejection could very well prove permanent. He recalled that Wilson had a bottomless hunger, an insatiable need, for unqualified praise; House learned to begin discussions of anything Wilson had drafted on a laudatory note “in order to strengthen the president’s confidence in himself which, strangely enough, [was] often lacking.” But the key to the innermost chambers of Wilson’s heart and mind, House said, was his craving for greatness. The way to get him to do something was to tell him that it would contribute to making him a towering historical figure. House’s messages to Wilson are studded with innumerable examples of his doing exactly this, often in terms that a less needy spirit would have found laughable.

  The examples are almost beyond numbering. On July 1, 1914, the colonel sent a letter telling Wilson that “you have more than fulfilled expectations at home, great as they were, and I have a keen desire for you to become the world figure of your time. Never again can the old order of statesman hold sway, and you are and will continue to be the prophet of a new day.” Five weeks later, the war having begun, House consoled the president on the loss of his wife in terms perfectly attuned to what Wilson desperately needed to believe: “It has fallen to your lot to bring a great nation through an epoch making time, and the noble, gentle soul that has gone would be the first to bid you bring to bear that splendid courage, which is yours and yours alone.” More followed a week after that: “In my opinion you have already written your name as high as any man America has yet produced, and I am convinced that when the story is told in the future, it will be the first.” House could go on endlessly in this vein. No matter how extravagant the flattery, Wilson was always ready for more.

  The colonel understood that Wilson was emotionally drained by face-to-face interaction with almost anyone outside his family, and needed frequent and extended doses of solitude. Even the most skilled flatterers were welcome on a limited basis only, and there were few surer ways of alienating him than by demanding too much attention. As his relationship with the president grew increasingly intense, House continued to live in New York and to visit the White House only when summoned—and even then, only when he found the temperature in Washington bearable. “Men often destroy themselves,” he observed, “by being too much in evidence.” By keeping his distance, he made the president crave his company as he craved that of no one else, even his own three daughters. “Beg you will come here,” Wilson said in a telegram to House sent three days after Christmas in 1914. “Lots of room and lots of welcome.”

  The colonel’s keen understanding of the president’s psyche had more than a little to do with his early acceptance of American neutrality. Though he was the son of an immigrant from England and himself a fervent Anglophile, having been sent to school in England as a boy, the colonel saw that to urge American intervention in the first months of the war would have been worse than pointless. No one could have persuaded the American public to enter the war at that stage. To urge such a thing would have put him at odds with the president, who from the start insisted both on neutrality and on his own right to determine what the term meant. House would not have remained an always-welcome visitor to the White House, where a bedroom was kept ready for his use, if he had not understood the price of getting out of step with the president.

  The evolution of Wilson’s neutrality has always been one of the puzzles of his presidency, one that historians continue to explain in contradictory ways. Though few administrations are as thoroughly and accessibly documented as his—all sixty-nine weighty volumes of The Papers of Woodrow Wilson are in libraries in every city—its archives do not put the biggest questions to rest. Wilson himself contributed s
ignificantly to making himself a mystery. His discomfort in dealing directly with people caused him to become, throughout his presidency, an ever more solitary figure. Writing, however, came naturally to him. Faced with a problem, his instinct was not to reach out for advice and an exchange of views but to put a piece of paper into his little portable typewriter and tap out his thoughts on what the nation or Congress or some foreign country should do. Until his last year and a half in office, he composed his own speeches, diplomatic notes, and other official documents, at the same time maintaining a copious correspondence.

  The result is a mountain of source material, almost all of it assembled and published after his death, so vast and varied that extracts from it can be and have been used to depict Wilson in a bewildering variety of ways. To one observer he is a seer and a saint, to another underhanded and repulsively self-righteous. Here he is the twentieth century’s Machiavelli, there a credulous and self-deceiving fool. The truth lies between the extremes, as usual, but not all of it is uncertain. Immersion in the sources makes it impossible not to conclude that the president’s idea of neutrality was idiosyncratic from the start, that it grew sporadically more dubious in the two years preceding America’s intervention in the war, and that the contradictions and ultimately the falsity of his policy were invisible to Wilson himself. He was—necessarily without having any awareness of the fact—a master of self-deceit.

  It is equally clear that House, however hard he may have struggled in the beginning to accept neutrality, was much quicker than Wilson to abandon it and much more forthright—with himself—about doing so. His challenge was to deceive not himself but the president. By the time the war was half a year old, he was committed to the Entente, to Britain above all. He concealed this from the president only to the extent necessary to avoid alienating him, finally pushing intervention so persistently as to put their relationship at risk.

  The record of House’s migration from presumed neutrality to feigned neutrality and finally to flagrant nonneutrality begins more than half a year before the start of the war. In December 1913, as the first year of the Wilson presidency was coming to an end, the United States received a visit from Sir William Tyrrell, a representative of the British Foreign Office whose mission was to ease some points of friction between Washington and London over their interests in Latin America. Colonel House was known, by this time, to be the president’s one great friend and principal adviser, and so Tyrrell was interested in getting close to him. House, for his part, saw in Tyrrell an opportunity to involve himself in global affairs, as he had yearned to do since before leaving Texas. Soon the two were having long talks. An eager House laid out various schemes for bringing together major powers from around the world—even faraway and mysterious Japan—and getting them to agree on ways to develop and uplift what he called the “waste places” of the earth. When Tyrrell suggested that a reduction of “militarism” might provide the resources for such good works, House became convinced that the two of them were in full accord.

  Tyrrell, accustomed to the dark subtleties of European great-power diplomacy, must have been charmed by the colonel’s simple earnestness. He was eager to demonstrate the United Kingdom’s receptiveness to his new friend’s ideas and a desire for closer ties between Washington and London. He encouraged House to go to Germany and share his ideas with Kaiser Wilhelm. Why Germany? Perhaps he thought that such a journey would give the American a quick lesson in how much less agreeable than the British the Germans were. Perhaps he hoped to spare his associates at the Foreign Office having to listen to the colonel’s fantasies. At this point, it should be remembered, no one was thinking about war. Neither Tyrrell nor House had any way of foreseeing that war would soon give a desperate urgency to Anglo-American relations.

  Tyrrell’s most specific suggestion was that the colonel should urge the kaiser and his henchmen to “evidence their good intentions by agreeing to stop building an extravagant navy, and to curtail militarism generally.” This is House’s paraphrase of Tyrrell’s words, approvingly dictated to a secretary for inclusion in what the colonel called his diary. It suggests the extent to which the English visitor was shaping his American friend’s thinking. The German navy was now seen as the “extravagant” one—yet even after 1900, when the Germans embarked on an ambitious program of warship construction, their naval expenditures were only 42 percent of Britain’s, only 8 percent more than France’s, and less than 60 percent of France’s and Russia’s combined. As for “curtailing militarism,” that apparently was Germany’s responsibility alone.

  Five months later House set out for Berlin on exactly the kind of mission Tyrrell had proposed. He carried papers introducing him as the representative of the president of the United States, but he had no official position and was traveling at his own expense.

  During his voyage House made the acquaintance of a fellow passenger bearing the famous name Moltke. He was a count, a cousin of the Helmuth von Moltke who headed the German general staff and nephew of the earlier, greater Moltke whose military genius had made possible the unification of Germany in 1871. House was impressed, and in putting his impressions into a letter to Wilson, he revealed something significant about himself. The count, he wrote, “is perhaps the only noble in Germany who has a detached point of view and sees the situation as we do.” These words expose a lack of rigor in the colonel’s thinking, coming as they do from a man who did not read or speak German, had only scant knowledge of Germany, and could never in his life have exchanged views on any subject with more than a handful of “German nobles.” Implicit in this one fraught sentence is the assumption that in order to be credited with a “detached point of view,” one had to think what House and Wilson thought. It was an early example of House’s tendency to mistake his own prejudices for facts.

  In Berlin, House was granted the honor of a one-on-one talk with Kaiser Wilhelm II, evidence of the importance that official Germany attached to its relations with the United States. The colonel was more favorably impressed than he had expected to be. As with Tyrrell, he sketched out his plans for disarmament and international cooperation, and again he got an encouraging response. Now that he had expressions of interest from Britain and Germany alike, he thought it might be possible to take the next step and arrange the negotiation of specific issues. But what issues? Disarmament? House’s “waste places of the earth”? The colonel needed to get somebody to propose some action. He told the kaiser that he would now move on to Paris and London for that purpose. Wilhelm, no less fluent in English than in German, asked to be kept informed. Whatever the extent of the kaiser’s interest in House’s ideas—in all likelihood it was minimal—he like Tyrrell wanted to demonstrate goodwill to the personal representative of the president of the United States.

  House, whom the Germans believed to be a military man because of the honorific colonel, was taken to some of the army parades and ceremonies that marked the arrival of summertime in all the European capitals. It was assumed that he would find this enjoyable. Instead it stirred him to report to his chief that he had encountered “jingoism run stark mad.”

  Behind the colonel’s report was the implication, destined to be embraced as a self-evident truth first by the Entente powers and not long thereafter in Washington, that Germany was the most militaristic (and yes, most jingoistic) of nations and therefore the most mad. The facts, however, make this proposition questionable. From 1900 to 1913 France, Britain, and Russia spent the equivalent of almost £1.5 billion on their armies, exclusive of Britain’s expenditures on the Boer War. Germany and Austria-Hungary, in the same period, spent £834 million. France’s army was only marginally smaller than Germany’s at the start of 1914 and was growing more rapidly. If Russia had had no allies, her army alone would have outnumbered those of Germany and Austria-Hungary together by hundreds of thousands of troops.

  House’s visit to Berlin was the occasion on which, with almost ridiculously transparent coyness, he sent Wilson a warning that “unless some one acti
ng for you can bring about a different understanding, there is some day to be an awful cataclysm. No one in Europe can do it. There is too much hatred, too many jealousies.” That statement, written less than three months before Europe went to war, has been cited as evidence that House was so insightful as to be almost clairvoyant. Which is fair enough, though his purpose in writing it was almost certainly less to predict the future than to put before Wilson a vision of himself as the president who could save Europe from itself. Assuming of course that he had “some one”—guess who—to act on his behalf.

  Upon leaving Germany, House spent an uneventful week in Paris. He received little attention there, the French president and prime minister being occupied with their impending visit to Russia. The city’s obsession with a sex-and-murder scandal involving the wife of a leading politician satisfied him that jingoism was not as advanced in France as in Germany. In June he crossed to London, where Tyrrell had arranged for him to be much fussed over. He was launched into a whirl of social engagements and invited to meet with Prime Minister H. H. Asquith, Foreign Secretary Grey, Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George, and other notables. All showed themselves eager to hear about his plans and what he had learned in Berlin. It is no denigration of the colonel to suppose that he must have been thrilled to find himself discussing momentous undertakings with so many of Europe’s leading men. Nor was it villainous of his hosts if they saw this improbable little Texan as naïve and presumptuous but nevertheless did everything possible to show that they took him seriously. They, like the Germans, wanted President Wilson to understand that they shared his aspirations. They wanted to convince him of this while committing their nations to nothing.