by Jane Brown
That was the time they would get away. Before that seemed rather an ordeal, and the bride, who had been suffering from tension headaches, looked weighed down by her veil of antique lace. Willard looked hardly more cheerful. A civil ceremony was followed by a service at the Episcopal church. Harry gave the bride away, and afterwards the wedding breakfast was served on the terrace of Polly and Almeric’s suite. Olive and Dorothy Paget were Dorothy’s bridesmaids, and Willard was supported by William Phillips from the American Embassy in London, as both Prather Fletcher and Harry Davison were too far away. In the wedding photograph Marraine and Beatrice Bend are apparently in tears. The bride and groom were driven to Lausanne to catch the Simplon express for Stresa, to spend their first night beside Maggiore, in view of Isola Bella on her lake of dreams.
Four: Porcelain and Polished Marble76
Two weeks in Venice ‘meeting experiences side by side’, as Dorothy put it, transformed the fearful bride into an ecstatic wife. Afterwards Willard had to dash briefly to Berlin necessitating his revealing note to ‘My Wonder of the World’, full of staccato intimacies and ending, ‘it seems impossible to write – my heart is too full of your dear heart – it is all aching, aching within me – you give so much – your love is so rich’. Dorothy, left at Versailles, felt alone ‘without the presence of the one person who means more than all the rest of the world together’. In fact the Bends were with her, though for the last time, and she cabled to Willard with the message that Beatrice was ‘all right’.77
Dorothy and Willard on their honeymoon
In early October they set out on the Trans-Siberian Railway for the three-week journey to Peking. Dorothy was overjoyed to find her house ready, the furnishings she had helped to choose, the big living room ‘full of lovely Chinese things’ and the remembered Chusan palm in the front garden. They each had a suite of bedroom, bathroom and sitting room, and the maid Louisa had a suite of her own. They settled down to recreate their idyll of almost exactly two years before, riding out and exploring their favourite places, returning to quiet evenings by the fireside which ended with a serenade from Willard and his (restored to health) guitar. But they were on borrowed time, and Willard noted his extended honeymoon experience as ‘a bit thick with excitement’. They were issued with service revolvers to keep by them, and warned to take extra care and secure their valuable belongings. Dorothy reported, ‘We have just hoisted our American flag – it waves a hands-off warning to any intruders. It is the first time in my life I have lived under our flag, regarding it solely as a protection. It is quite a thrilling sensation.’
The trouble came from the south. An accidental explosion in a revolutionary headquarters in Wuchang sparked a panic in a group of army officers who, fearing their collusion would be exposed, ordered rebellious uprisings which spread to fifteen provinces. A bomb exploded outside Willard’s house in early January and they were advised to leave for a while, which they did, travelling to Manila. Willard was anxious to secure the future of his loan agreements with the advisers to the westernised republican leader Sun Zhongshan and he appears to have been successful. After six weeks they returned to find that the Last Emperor had abdicated and that General Yuan Shikai was president of the new republic.78 Things appeared to be as before. The Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb arrived with a letter of introduction to Willard, and were warmly entertained – he ‘about five feet high with a shaggy beard’, and she ‘with a sweet face but great intellectual superiority’, reported Dorothy. A few evenings later they were dressing for dinner when a fire-fight and looting erupted, and they had to take refuge in the Legation, Willard returning through the dangerous streets to rescue Louisa. Next morning their house was surrounded, ‘smoking ruins on all sides’, and three days later the Marines arrived, marching into the American compound. Dorothy was thrilled and impressed. Government reprisals followed and she was soon revolted at ‘a horrible day of executions & dead bodies are to be seen lying around in all the streets’.
In New York they were headline news: ‘Peking set on fire and looted’, ‘Mr and Mrs Straight in Peril’, and ‘Great danger from flying bullets and fire brands’. Harry Whitney cabled his concerns, but an even greater power, J.P. Morgan, personally ordered their recall.79 Dorothy and Willard seemed the only people who took it all in their stride, giving farewell parties, Willard playing polo, then together they ‘took a last wonderful walk on the wall’. The Webbs were able to leave on the last crowded train because the conductor was a keen Fabian Socialist. Dorothy and Willard, the Marines at their backs, were given a rousing send-off. It was 26th March 1912, and Dorothy, ‘feeling so sick’, knew that she was pregnant.
Trunks full of their ‘lovely Chinese things’ were shipped home to Old Westbury, the souvenirs of their happy hunting through the bazaars of old Peking: porcelain vases glazed in peacock blue and powder blue, and with apple-green or ox-blood crackle glazes were packed with antique flower pots, jardinières and more vases coloured in soft green celadon and pink and green splashed peachbloom. They had found endearing figures of Buddhas, immortals, warriors and ladies in various guises, and animals – horses harnessed and free, a trotting horse, a laughing camel and miniature carvings of jade and ivory. Chinese landscapes painted on silken scrolls, some of the Ming dynasty, were Dorothy’s favourites, and a collection of Tibetan bronzes, incense burners, teapots, tobacco pots and altar decorations came from Willard’s travels to the north. With these treasures around them the happiness they had found in China could not fade.80
April found Dorothy in Paris having dress fittings for her expanding waistline. They reached London with the news on 15th April of the ‘terrible Titanic disaster’. They were to stay for three months in a rented house at Amersham-on-the-Hill in the Chilterns, which was close enough to the station for Willard to commute to Morgan Grenfell’s office. Dorothy spent a quiet time, guarded by two West Highland White terriers that came with their house. She went to Nancy Astor’s Cliveden for tea – Waldorf Astor was a friend of Harry Whitney – and found a friend for herself. Nancy was thirty-three to Dorothy’s twenty-five, she had been married to Waldorf for five years, and had recently given birth to their third child, David. Despite Nancy’s being a Southerner, a Virginian, and wearing a Conservative label (she said, ‘If I thought it would work I would be a Socialist’), they had common causes in women’s and workers’ welfare. The Astors’ lives intrigued both Willard and Dorothy, for being radicals and American they found themselves outsiders in English society. Waldorf Astor had just bought the Sunday newspaper the Observer, which was to forward the broad liberal agenda of his friends of the Cliveden ‘Round Table’.81
From America Beatrice Bend had been agitating for Dorothy to come home and ‘be properly looked after’. They sailed on the Mauretania on 10th August, arriving in a sweltering New York, from where Beatrice whisked Dorothy away to the Catskills. Beatrice was still uncertain about Prather Fletcher’s proposal, Dorothy did not wish to force the issue, and found it impossible to say that she and Willard did not need her in their married life. Beatrice, in her mid-thirties, proud and strong-willed, devoted to Dorothy, seemed more than ever a subsidiary character of Henry James – a Maria Gostrey from The Ambassadors doomed to be an arranger of tours, a meeter and greeter, or companion to some upper-crust widow. If she lost her salary from Dorothy’s trustees what would she live on? Dorothy could only insist that Beatrice come to Old Westbury to help her with the baby’s birth.
Their baby boy, named Whitney Willard Straight, was born on 6th November 1912, the day after Theodore Roosevelt’s renewed presidential bid was defeated by Woodrow Wilson. Dorothy, a nursing mother, had her long confinement in the quiet warmth of Old Westbury, with an outing on Christmas Day when Willard took her, on an improvised sleigh, to Kate and Courtland Barnes at Manhasset, a ‘most exquisite day’.
She intended to move gradually back into her public life; in early 1913 she gave $1,000 in response to her sister-in-law Gertrude’s request that she support th
e New York Armory Show of Modern Art.82 Then, in early March Willard was summoned to Washington with Harry Davison to see Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, who ‘hedged diplomatically’ in their presence, but later recommended to President Wilson that the Chinese loans be cancelled. The new administration soon announced that it did not approve of the conditions of the American Group loans, and the ‘implications of responsibility’ that seemed too much like interference into the politics of ‘that great Oriental State just now awakening’. The administration by Morgan Grenfell in London (and partner-agents in Hamburg, Paris, St Petersburg and Yokohama) was, said the communiqué, ‘obnoxious to the principles upon which the Government of our people rests’.83
That was final. It was such a blow to Willard, a personal insult seeing how hard he had worked, throwing back into his face all he had argued and travelled for, those endless miles and endless hours. Morgan’s Bank was willing to keep a place for him for his knowledge of the Far East, but his lack of banking experience meant that his position would no longer carry the status he was used to; even Dorothy’s charms would no longer work, for her ‘sweetie’ Mr Morgan died at the end of March. They attended his funeral.
In early April 1913 Dorothy noted in her diary, ‘Ethel’s wedding to Dick [Derby] took place this morning at Oyster Bay at 12. So simple – wonderful all through. Nice, happy reception afterwards, home by 3.30.’ She and Willard settled to architectural pursuits, all done in his name as Dorothy was so sensitive to her ‘poor’ father’s feelings when Flora held the purse strings. Their new town house at 1130 Fifth Avenue at East 94th Street was commissioned from William Adams Delano and Chester Aldrich, the coming men, who also enlarged the Old Westbury house and built Willard’s new stable block. This was thought ‘a stimulating lesson in sociology’ and a revelation of modernity, that a building of such high quality should be devoted to servants, horses and motor cars. ‘Bill’ Delano, who had built Gertrude Whitney’s sculpture studio, also introduced them to the landscape architect Beatrix Farrand, who was Edith Wharton’s niece and a great favourite with the Roosevelts.84 Beatrix shared their deep conviction that it was vital to live in harmony with their natural surroundings, and she added that making a garden was the most vivid expression of this harmony. They planned Old Westbury’s Chinese garden together.
Marriage had infused both Dorothy and Willard with the elixir of love; they were changed beings, joyful in each other and in their baby son. They took parenthood very seriously, and Dorothy read the handbooks aloud to Willard as he painted his watercolours. And yet, as they approached their second wedding anniversary, it must have seemed that the frisson of destiny was subdued. Woodrow Wilson’s extinguishing the Chinese loan ‘with the hose of presidential rhetoric’ was a humiliating blow to Willard – from his lone assumption of the White Man’s Burden (as Kipling had written of the United States and the Philippines) striving for the greatness of America, he was reduced to a Wall Street commuter. He had plenty of ideas for foreign business but as Harry Davison tactfully pointed out Willard had not earned by experience in banking any right to such initiatives, his ‘pay grade’ did not allow him to influence bank policy. It was Dorothy who had to keep her head: ‘Almost every evening he would come home from the office with the same words on his lips, “I had a new idea today”,’ she wrote. ‘In spite of myself I was forced to become the critic, for though many of the plans were sound in conception, the means of execution were often not at hand – [and] I often had to break the blow of his disappointments.’ Willard’s estimated annual salary was $20,000, which would not go far in New York, even in 1913; Dorothy’s $7 million wisely invested might yield $250,000 annually – but then she was perfectly likely to give away $50,000 at a time to her favourite causes.85
Moreover Willard hated routine banking. Their hopes were pinned on Theodore Roosevelt who was leaving for Brazil. Dorothy sent him God-speed flowers, and he responded from the Vandyck, ‘As soon as I come back I shall want to see you both. I shall have much to tell you.’ Dorothy found his Bull Moose Progressive agenda, or New Nationalism, exciting with his endorsement of women’s suffrage, schemes for health and welfare insurances, for reform of the labour laws and a ‘clear and definite programme by which the people would be the masters of the trusts’, instead of vice-versa.86 She firmly believed that he would stand for the presidency in 1916, he would be triumphant and there would be a big job for Willard.
Willard, Dorothy and baby Whitney, c.1913
Meanwhile, they worked things through by reading and talking together – they talked of the Astors’ Observer and of the news that the Webbs were launching their radical New Statesman with a capital of £5,000 (£1,000 from George Bernard Shaw), with a captive Fabian and Labour Party readership and Shaw’s promised contributions. At T.R.’s suggestion they were reading Herbert Croly’s The Promise of American Life published in 1909. Croly was in his forties, humanist and a journalist by upbringing and an academic by inclination, and by a circuitous route he had arrived at the editor’s desk of Architectural Record where Willard found him.87 At first he was wary of the Whitney reputation and the imagined splendours of Old Westbury, but soon realised that Dorothy was unconventionally serious, and he confessed that it was his dream to edit a paper to perpetuate and extend his thesis of The Promise – that America must ‘become more of a nation’ and assume ‘a more definite and more responsible place’ in the world. To do this, the education of her people of an ‘awareness of the world in general’ was essential. Dorothy’s first opinion of Croly’s rather squashed visage was as ‘having the look of a disappointed frog’, but they warmed to each other. Legend has it that she said,
‘Why don’t you get out a weekly yourself, Herbert?’
H.C. ‘But where would I find the money?’
‘I will find it,’ said Dorothy quietly.
H.C. ‘It would take a lot of money, it might take five years to make the paper self-supporting.’
‘Yes, I understand. It may take longer, much longer. But let’s go ahead.’88
On Sunday 16th November 1913 she noted in her diary that it was the ‘Great Republican Conference’ at their house. Willard chaired the gathering of Herbert and Louise Croly, Judge and Mrs Learned Hand, Phil Littell – a Harvard classmate of Croly’s who would edit the book page – and Felix Frankfurter from Vienna, then a law lecturer at Harvard. Croly’s prize recruit was the journalist Walter Lippmann at a salary of $60 a week, and he also found two young economists, George Soule and Alvin Johnson. The byword for editorial policy was ‘looseness’ – Croly said, ‘We’ll throw a few firecrackers under the skirts of the old women on the bench and in other high places.’89
The paper was to be called The New Republic and its mission was ‘the enlightenment and enrichment of the nation’, its politics were liberal and progressive, in the hope it would be the flagship for Roosevelt’s campaign in 1916. Willard and Dorothy were joint proprietors and the first issue was scheduled for a year’s time, the fall of 1914. The paper’s home was at 421 West 21st Street downtown, bought from the Crolys and refurbished into a comfortable clubby atmosphere with an editorial round table and a well-equipped kitchen for serving good lunches.90 Croly wrote to Judge Learned Hand, ‘The vision I have... will, I fear, set angel Dorothy back some hundreds of thousands of dollars, but she will get a little education for her money, and so will I, and so, I hope will you and the others.’ Walter Lippmann suspected that she was ‘laundering’ her father’s tainted fortune in liberal causes.
Not long after The New Republic conference Dorothy realised she was pregnant again. This time, as her baby grew during the early months of 1914, there was the blessed harmony of making their Chinese garden. Mrs Farrand’s design was for a walled garden at some distance from the house, the entrance guarded by two Chinese stone dogs – the surrounding wall pink-washed and topped with heavy pantiles. Beds of spring flowers were to be followed by larkspur, poppies, columbines, peonies and meadowsweet for summer. Beyond the flowers
were matching tip-tilted roofed pavilions wreathed in soft blue Wisteria chinensis, with rounded ‘moon’ doorways and carved and painted bargeboards hung with musical bells. Beyond them was the swimming pool with twin changing pavilions. The flower garden was ready for planting when Beatrice Whitney Straight – ‘such a cunning little girl weighing 7–9 pounds’ – arrived on 2nd August. Two days later, though it must have seemed a world away, Europe went to war.
They summered in September in the Catskills, and returned to find their friends all concerned about the war, even though President Wilson insisted that it was none of America’s business if others ‘had lost their reason’. Roosevelt in his lair at Sagamore Hill was the magnet for those able to see that America would be drawn in and must arm herself for the fight. The first issue of The New Republic appeared as planned on 7th as our self-made Civil War’. Dorothy had paid for her own subscription, $4 a year; she was one of 875 opening subscriptions and this first issue sold a few thousand copies.91
Three weeks later, at very short notice from Harry Davison at Morgan’s, Willard was ordered to London; motherhood or no, Dorothy could not let him go alone, and leaving their babies, almost certainly with Beatrice Bend in charge, they left on the Adriatic – it was winter, memories of the Titanic were fresh, and rumours were rife. Dorothy noted the news of attacks on shipping in her diary, but avoiding the danger area of the English Channel they arrived safely if shakily in Liverpool on 3rd December. In London she went directly to Claridge’s, took a deep breath, and ‘spent all afternoon at the Red Cross office packing kit bags for British soldiers’.