On May 7, after an engagement of six months, Eleanor Randolph Wilson, the youngest of Woodrow and Ellen’s three daughters, married William Gibbs McAdoo in the Blue Room of the White House. Out of solicitude for Ellen’s health, Nell and Mac arranged a small wedding, inviting only their relatives, a handful of Nell’s childhood friends, the cabinet, and the president’s closest associates—Tumulty, Grayson, and House. Grayson served as best man and lent his navy dress sword for the cutting of the cake. Nell’s bridal party included only Jessie and Margaret.
The mother of the bride cried openly. The father managed to control every physical manifestation of his sadness except in one eyelid, which quivered with the strain of keeping the tears back of the duct. He let them fall in his letters to Mary. “Ah! how desperately my heart aches that she is gone,” he wrote a few days after the wedding. Nell was his ideal chum, a wonder, too good for any husband, and although he would not say it, his favorite. She was, he said, “simply part of me, the only delightful part; and I feel the loneliness more than I dare admit even to myself.” Though he disapproved of his selfishness, he could not suppress it: “I have lost her, for good and all. She will love me as much as ever, but she will not be at my side every day in my life, and I am desolate.”
Wilson had no evident wish to stand in the way of Nell and Mac’s marriage, but he would never be entirely at ease with it. He had been supplanted by a fifty-year-old widower, a man whose age made him a surrogate father as well as a husband. At twenty-four, Nell was younger than some of Mac’s children. Wilson was also heavily indebted to McAdoo—for the presidential nomination in 1912, his service as secretary of the treasury, the passage of the New Freedom, the organization of the Federal Reserve Board, and the creation of a system to collect the new income tax. Wilson was grateful and clearly wanted to feel all that a father-in-law is supposed to feel, but his affections were laced with uneasiness. McAdoo was an astute politician with presidential ambitions. It was not long before Wilson began blaming his indigestion, an old problem, on his new son-in-law’s habit of talking politics at the dinner table.
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After the invasion of Veracruz, peace activists, clergymen, labor unions, and social reformers wrote Wilson to protest and to demand an immediate evacuation. Wilson refused. He had decided that the troops would stay until Huerta was gone and a new provisional government agreed to conduct a fair national election. The USS Montana carried the American war dead to New York for a funeral procession and a service at the Brooklyn Navy Yard on May 11. Daniels asked Wilson to take part, and against the advice of the Secret Service, he accepted. Haunted by the deaths in Veracruz, he felt that he had a duty to pay his respects in person. Ellen begged him to heed the Secret Service, which worried about his safety in the crowd. He refused. Wilson and Daniels rode through a crowd estimated at one million, in an open carriage behind the caissons bearing the coffins.
At the Navy Yard the president and the secretary of the navy shared the platform with the families of the fallen. The coffins, wrapped in flags, had been lined up shoulder to shoulder in one long row. After a hymn and an invocation, Daniels turned to Wilson and read the names of the dead. “All were in their prime of vigorous young manhood,” Daniels said, and “[t]hey gave not only all they were, but all they hoped to be.”
The commander in chief found himself in an uncharacteristic struggle for words. He sounded familiar chords of gratitude and patriotism, and offered an explanation for resorting to armed force: “We have gone down to Mexico to serve mankind, if we can find out the way.” At last he used the word he had so assiduously avoided—war—but only in the abstract, to draw a distinction between a war of aggression and “a war of service.”
No amount of abstraction could soften the hard fact of the coffins, but Wilson pressed on: “War, gentlemen, is only a sort of dramatic representation, a sort of dramatic symbol, of a thousand forms of duty.” After quoting Kipling at his toplofty worst and spouting clichés about the ultimate verdict of conscience, Wilson found his way back to the eulogy. “These boys have shown us the way, and it is easier to walk on it because they have gone before and shown us how,” he said.
But what was the way, and where did it lead? If the sailors’ deaths were real, how could their war be merely a symbol? How had the killing in Veracruz served Mexico or mankind? And why should a president anchor his foreign policy in the idea of serving another nation, much less mankind? What if the other nation did not wish to be served? Or saw the alleged service as interference? Was it not enough for a president to tend to the interests of his own nation? Those who had come to the ceremony for comfort or clarification left empty-handed.
General Huerta soon resigned and took flight with eight of his generals. No one in the Wilson administration, including the president, could offer a convincing explanation of how the seizure of Veracruz had hastened Huerta’s abdication, but Wilson’s admirers gave him credit anyway. The truth was that Huerta had been brought down by the strength of Carranza’s army, and Huerta and his generals fled to escape assassination.
There was no celebrating in the White House or the State Department. Carranza’s ally Pancho Villa had just turned against him, raising considerable doubt about the durability of a Carranza government, and Wilson, having backed Carranza, would be blamed if he failed.
• • •
From Brooklyn Wilson went to Colonel House’s apartment in Manhattan for lunch. Grayson was there, and he and House devoted the afternoon to relaxing the president with a drive out to Long Island for a walk around a golf course. In the evening House listened for nearly an hour as Wilson read poetry aloud. About to leave for Europe, House had a long list of political and diplomatic matters to discuss with the president but waited patiently for him to wind down.
House had had his first taste of diplomacy in the summer of 1913, when Wilson sent him to London to tell Sir Edward Grey, the foreign secretary, that he thought Britain had the better case in a dispute with the United States over the tolls to be paid at the Panama Canal. Britain claimed that in 1901, when it relinquished its interests in the Canal Zone to the United States, it had done so with the understanding that the ships of all nations would use the canal on equal terms. Congress later construed “ships of all nations” to mean “ships of all nations except the United States,” arguing that American ships deserved an exemption because Americans had built and paid for the canal. Wilson had sent House to the Foreign Office with two messages: the president would ask Congress to repeal the exemption as soon as he could, and he would appreciate it if the British press maintained a discreet silence on the subject.
When the Foreign Office proved amenable, House was like a man awakened to the wonders of Champagne: he wanted more and longed to know all its varieties. So he was instantly galvanized when Walter Hines Page, the American ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, urged him to find a way for Wilson to stop the ruinously expensive, increasingly dangerous European arms race. Page hoped that if Wilson put his army and navy at the service of humanity, the Europeans would follow suit. For starters, Page said, they could collaborate in “cleaning up the tropics,” doing everything for the good of tropical peoples, with no thought of conquest. If Europe’s large armies and navies had a job, said Page, “they’d quit sitting on their haunches, growling at one another.” He asked House to draw up a plan.
House began to think about how the United States might ease the tensions that drove the Great Powers to build more dreadnoughts, fill more arsenals, invent more methods of killing. The arms race had been going on for more than a decade. The Hague Conference of 1899 banned the use of poison gas, aerial attacks, and dumdum bullets but had not banned their development, so the developers carried on.
While Page imagined turning militarism into humanitarianism, House imagined transforming the competition into a grand project for spreading prosperity. The Great Adventure, as he called it, would bring together the world’s richest nations—the United States, Great Britain, Germany, and France—to invest side by side in the poorer quarters of the globe. The rich nations would finance development on reasonable terms, everyone would prosper, and everyone would have a stake in maintaining amicable relations and stable governments.
When Colonel House tried out his idea on German and British envoys to the United States, they encouraged him to pursue it. He leaned heavily on the advice of Sir William Tyrrell, Grey’s private secretary, who spent the fall of 1913 at the British embassy in Washington. Tyrrell urged him to go to Berlin first, and, reaching for the moon, suggested that House encourage the kaiser to call off the arms race and invite Germany to join the United States and Britain in the economic development scheme. Tyrrell promised the colonel that Britain would cooperate with the United States. There is no sign that House wondered how a private secretary to a foreign minister could pledge his country to anything, or what “cooperate” might mean in this instance. House was equally incurious about Wilson’s detachment from the Great Adventure. Wilson tepidly endorsed it, then seemed to tuck it into the same mental file where he kept Bryan’s cooling-off treaties, a file that might have been labeled “Probably Harmless and Possibly Useful.”
When Colonel House reached Berlin in late May, he was shocked by the militarism in the air. As a guest at the U.S. embassy, he undoubtedly heard Ambassador James W. Gerard’s oft-stated view that the summer of 1914 would be an ideal moment for Germany to start a war. The Kiel Canal, widened and deepened to speed the new German dreadnoughts from the Baltic to the North Sea, had just reopened. No one but Germany had dirigibles or stores of poison gas. No other nation had more submarines or better airplanes. And with their big guns, they were confident that they could pulverize the great fortresses of France. Gerard also believed that the kaiser would have to move soon. Militarism had permeated the country, but there was also mounting popular resistance to it, and the kaiser and his circle feared that they would lose their hold on Germany unless they quickly marched the country into a short and successful war.
After a few days in Berlin, House wrote Wilson that the atmosphere was “jingoism run stark mad. Unless someone acting for you can bring about an understanding, there is someday to be an awful cataclysm.” He had an hour’s private conversation with Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, champion of German naval expansion, about the hazards of the dreadnought competition with Britain. Disclaiming any desire for conquest, Tirpitz insisted that the best way for Germany to maintain peace was to put fear in the hearts of her enemies. House let Tirpitz know that if any complications arose between the United States and Germany, Germany would have to deal with Woodrow Wilson, whom he described as “a man of iron courage and inflexible will.”
Gerard took House to meet the kaiser at his country palace in Potsdam on June 1. After lunch, House was taken to the terrace for a tête-à-tête with the kaiser, who spoke of soldiers and Mexico and his obsession with preserving the Anglo-Saxon race. For twenty years the kaiser had been warning Europe that if it did not stand up to the “yellow peril,” it would be overrun by the hordes of Asia. With House he spoke of Japanese “fanaticism” and the “semi-barbarous” character of Slavs and Latins. As the only countries able to advance Christian civilization, the United States, Germany, and England ought to unite against the rest of the world, the kaiser said. House replied that the United States did not form alliances but was more than willing to do its part for world peace.
House left Potsdam with a mixed message from the kaiser. The positives were a promise to consider any peace plan that did not compromise German security and a declaration that he did not want a war because it would interfere with trade. The great negative was his paranoia. “Every nation in Europe has its bayonets pointed at Germany,” he told House. “But we are ready.”
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Colonel House thrived on dualities: mixed messages, ostensible agendas and real agendas, dealings on the table and under the table. He was often duplicitous, and had he been asked to defend himself, he undoubtedly would have cited the purity of his ambitions: success for a president he admired, peace, freedom, and global prosperity. His diary, which summarizes hundreds of conversations with powerful men, reveals a man who listened and suggested but almost never inquired. His account of the afternoon at Potsdam was all “I told the kaiser and the kaiser told me.” House told the kaiser that Wilson, as an outsider to the quarrels of Europe, might play a useful role in defusing its tensions. I agree, said the kaiser. House told the kaiser about the Great Adventure, and the kaiser said that if the undertaking had the support of Germany, England, and the United States, it would succeed. House told the kaiser that he would write him about his talks with the British. That would be good, said the kaiser. Despite the kaiser’s talk of bayonets and Tirpitz’s impatience with the idea of halting the dreadnought competition, House told Wilson that the visit to Berlin had been a triumph. It would have been more accurate to say that the kaiser had been cordial but noncommittal.
In Paris, House saw only the U.S. ambassador, and if they discussed the Great Adventure, there is no sign of it. House left France with the mistaken idea that while the French people still dreamed of revenge and the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine, territory lost forty years earlier in the Franco-Prussian War, French political leaders had moved on. According to House, they were content with the boundaries of France and resigned to Germany’s preeminence on the Continent. “France, I am sure, will welcome our efforts for peace,” he wrote Wilson.
In London, House found the British less preoccupied with Germany than with their subjects in Ireland, who were on the brink of revolution. Despite the Irish crisis, they were remarkably attentive to House, and they readily agreed when he suggested that naval talks with Germany might ease tensions between the two countries. House’s notion that Wilson, as an outsider, might serve as mediator would be rejected again and again. The Great Powers did not regard the United States as an equal, and they disliked Wilson’s self-righteousness in foreign affairs. But the warm welcome that House found in the country palace of the kaiser and the garden parties of English aristocrats gave him an outsized sense of his own importance and led him to think that all things were possible.
Nor did House grasp that he was a bearer of old news and superficial impressions. He spoke of the military fever in Berlin as if the Foreign Office had received no word of it, and he seemed to think he was enlightening Grey when he reported that Germany would soon have aircraft capable of crossing the sea and bombing London. “The idea, then, is that England will be in the same position as the Continental Powers?” Grey asked. House replied with a self-satisfied “Quite so.” A man less self-deceived than Colonel House would have understood Grey’s question as a social gesture made simply to keep the wheel of conversation turning. Nor did House seem to realize that the Europeans’ willingness to listen was only that. They lost nothing by making themselves agreeable to the confidential advisor of the American president. The United States was not yet the most powerful nation on earth, but it was the wealthiest, and no genius was required to understand the value of its goodwill.
House made one more attempt to interest Grey in high-level talks with Germany. He presented his brief at a luncheon hosted by Grey, and reported in his diary that the guests, all men in the top echelon of the British government, agreed that special representatives should be sent to Germany “to talk over the situation and give assurances of good intentions.” Privately, House proposed to Grey that the two of them run up to Kiel, where the German regatta was under way. They would go on the pretext of seeing the races but behind the scenes would lay the groundwork for the Anglo-German talks House had in mind. House did not record Grey’s response but left in a buoyant mood. “It is difficult for me to realize that the dream I had last year is beginning to come true,” he told his diary. “I have seen the kaiser, and now the British government seem eager to carry on the discussion.”
There would be no trip to Kiel. On June 28, 1914, the archduke of Austria-Hungary and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo by Serbian nationalists, and the kaiser, who received the news while racing his yacht at Kiel, sped back to Berlin. House’s diary does not mention Sarajevo or the kaiser’s alarm, and it would be weeks before the White House press corps asked Wilson about the assassinations.
Grey was not expecting a war, but he suddenly hesitated to write the kaiser—for fear of offending the French, he said. Tyrrell was sent to ask House if he would write Berlin about his talks with the British. House was more than willing. “I feel we have gone a long way in the right direction and that much good has already been accomplished,” he reported in his diary on July 3. “I trust more will follow.”
• • •
House sailed for Boston on July 21 and landed on July 29, the day after Austria declared war on Serbia. “The kaiser does not want war,” he told reporters who met him at the pier. But as soon as Austria announced that it was at war with Serbia, the dominoes began to fall: the Russians mobilized in defense of the Serbs, Germany declared war on Russia, and France pledged to support Russia. The Germans promptly declared war on the French, then sought the Belgians’ permission to pass through Flanders en route to France. Belgium refused, and the Germans invaded. On August 4, the British decided to come to the defense of the Belgians with a declaration of war against Germany.
Colonel and Mrs. House settled into their summer rental in Prides Crossing, Massachusetts, and for several days the colonel ignored his diary. But before the week was out, he offered a flattering version of his role in recent events: “I clearly foreshadowed the present catastrophe. I knew then that the high tension under which Germany was working could lead to but one result unless something was done to stop it. I recall with what surprise Sir Edward Grey and other members of the British government listened to my story of the German situation as I saw it. They believed that matters were in better shape than they had been for a long while, and it was hard for them to think I was diagnosing the situation correctly. I take it that I will have some reputation as a prophet with Sir Edward and his confreres.”
In a letter to Page he spoke as if the two of them had almost prevented the war: “just think how near we came to making such a catastrophe impossible! If England had moved a little faster and had let me go back to Germany, the thing, perhaps, could have been done.” Page understood House’s disappointment but rejected his hypothesis: “No, no, no—no power on earth could have prevented it. The German militarism, which is the crime of the last fifty years, has been working for this for twenty-five years. It is the logical result of their spirit and enterprise and doctrine. . . . Don’t let your conscience be worried. You did all that any mortal man could do. But nobody could have done anything effective. We’ve got to see to it that this system doesn’t grow up again. That’s all.”
From Washington came a sympathetic note urging House not to despair. The war was far removed from their hopes, Wilson wrote, “but we must face the situation in the confidence that Providence has deeper plans than we could possibly have laid ourselves.”
