The Wilsons hoped to stay at the Homestead until January 5, but on the night of January 3, after telegrams and telephone calls from Lansing and Tumulty, they hurried home. The submarine war had taken a dangerous new turn. A British liner, the Persia, had been torpedoed without warning in the Mediterranean, and there were two Americans among the 350 dead. Only a few months before, the crisis over the sinking of the Arabic had ended with Ambassador Bernstorff and Secretary Lansing announcing that Germany had ordered its submarine commanders not to attack unresisting passenger ships. Oswald Garrison Villard’s New York Evening Post had celebrated the moment by running its first front-page photograph, a picture of Wilson, identified as “The man who, without rattling a sword, won for civilization.” The attack on the Persia suggested that the Germans had no intention of keeping their promise.
Surprisingly, the telegram Lansing sent to the Homestead expressed less alarm about the possibility of war than the possibility that Wilson’s absence would embolden Republicans to start their 1916 presidential campaign with an assault on his inaction in the face of repeated attacks on Americans. Even among Democrats, Wilson’s patience was beginning to look less like a policy than an excuse for doing nothing, and many Americans had come to believe that more patience would invite more lawlessness. No one on Capitol Hill was calling for war, but senators and congressmen were making demands: Arm American ships. Stop Americans from sailing on the ships of the nations at war. Sever relations with Germany. Build up the armed forces of the United States.
The Wilsons reached the White House at eight o’clock in the morning. By ten o’clock, Tumulty was painting a bleak picture of the political temper in Congress and on the editorial pages. The situation called for action, he said. Wilson stiffened. “Tumulty,” he said, “you may as well understand my position right now. If my reelection as president depends upon my getting into war, I don’t want to be president. . . . I will not be rushed into war, no matter if every damned congressman and senator stands up on his hind legs and proclaims me a coward.” When the facts came in, there was nothing to be done. The Persia had been armed with a cannon powerful enough to destroy a submarine, and it proved impossible to determine who was at fault.
• • •
Edith had only a few days to settle into her new quarters before the winter social season began. Her house would soon go up for sale, and the furnishings she kept—books, piano, sewing machine, and the contents of her bedroom—were transferred to Pennsylvania Avenue. The sewing machine drew howls from Margaret Wilson and Helen Bones. How absurd that the new first lady imagined she would have time to sew! Mrs. Wilson would have none of the leisure enjoyed by Mrs. Galt. After breakfast at eight, the president’s stenographer arrived, and the first lady went off to discuss the needs of the day with the household staff, then joined her secretary to answer the mail, set her schedule, and arrange social functions. Around ten o’clock, after Woodrow finished his dictation, Edith often walked him to the Oval Office—through the garden when the weather obliged, through the colonnade when it did not. From the outset, she tried to match her schedule to his.
At her White House debut, on January 7, Edith joined Woodrow in welcoming more than three thousand guests at a reception for the Latin Americans who had come to Washington for a Pan-American Union conference. A dinner for the cabinet and the annual state dinner for the diplomatic corps soon followed. Edith seemed to enjoy the role of hostess in chief. She looked happy, the newspapers praised the stylishness of her wardrobe, and the country seemed pleased to have a first lady again.
• • •
Two weeks after his prickly conversation with Wilson, Tumulty tried again to rouse him to action. This time he put his critique on paper and proposed a major shift in policy. The vital issue was not diplomacy but national security, and the vital question was whether the United States could defend itself, Tumulty said. At the end of 1914, Wilson had stood before a joint session of Congress and mocked the handful of “nervous and excited” Republicans calling for a stronger navy and a bigger army. But after the sinking of the Lusitania, he had asked Secretary Garrison and Secretary Daniels for studies of the state of the nation’s army and navy. The reports were not reassuring. The army’s glaring weakness was its size. With 108,000 officers and men, it was on a par with the army of Montenegro. The navy was bigger but not in good shape. In the war games held in the Atlantic after Wilson reviewed the fleet in New York, the admiral in charge had been unable to prevent the landing of “enemy” marines on the shores of Chesapeake Bay. Summing up the sorry facts in a letter to the Senate Committee on Naval Affairs, Daniels noted shortages of ships and trained personnel, mechanical defects, and submarines so prone to breakdowns that the navy could not complete the necessary training
With recommendations from Garrison and Daniels, Wilson had gone to Capitol Hill on December 7 to ask for a larger defense budget, an acceleration of shipbuilding plans already approved by Congress, a larger standing army, and a 400,000-man force of reserves. He had also asked that the expansion be financed with higher taxes rather than government borrowing, on the theory that “this generation should pay the bills of this generation.”
Most Americans cast a wary eye on Wilson’s proposals. Many doubted that the world war would lead to an attack on the United States. Few identified themselves as pacifists, but many agreed with the pacifists’ arguments against a larger defense establishment: Civilized nations ought to arbitrate their differences. Large armed forces gave generals and admirals too much political power. Big fleets and arsenals were an extravagance, and their very existence tended to provoke war.
Wilson also faced resistance from congressional Democrats. The Southern wing of the party recoiled at the thought of tens of thousands of African Americans in the army, while Midwestern Democrats were leery of offending their large German American constituencies in an election year. William Jennings Bryan publicly accused Wilson of “joyriding with the jingoes.” At the other extreme, Theodore Roosevelt denounced the administration’s requests as half-measures. He wanted a standing army of two million, universal military training, and military instruction in high schools.
Tumulty advised Wilson to make the case that despite the absence of immediate threats to American security, the future was full of question marks. Most Americans found Bryan and Roosevelt too radical, he told Wilson. “They are waiting for you.” Tumulty urged him to tour the country and explain the need for a defense buildup, and he begged Wilson to go at once.
Wilson took the advice, setting off on January 27. From New York City he traveled as far west as Kansas City, speaking to huge, enthusiastic audiences in more than a dozen cities along the way. On his first outing he admitted that he had changed his mind about the nation’s defense needs, because the war had thrust them into a new world, one they could neither control nor ignore. To protect all they held dear, they would have to come together on fundamental issues, and nothing was more fundamental than national security. How could Americans differ about the safety of America? he asked. And how dare they politicize the issue? In a show of nonpartisanship, he refused to meet with Democratic National Committee members along his route. Those afraid that the United States would become a military state had nothing to fear from him, he promised an audience in Pittsburgh. His plans called for a modest standing army augmented by a reserve force of men who were citizens first and soldiers second. And at the top, he reminded them, the Constitution had set a civilian commander in chief.
Wearing the mantle of statesman from first speech to last, Wilson said he regretted that 1916 was a campaign year. The dangers were such that Americans had to think like Americans, not like partisans. “The world is on fire, and there is tinder everywhere, he said. “The sparks are liable to drop anywhere, and somewhere there may be material which we cannot prevent from bursting into flame.”
From the rear platform of his train, the president assured the inhabitants of Racine that he was not acting at the behest of the arms-makers. In Milwaukee, he warned that war might prove impossible to avoid. By the time he reached Iowa City, he was no longer asking audiences to back his defense program, he was voicing his confidence in their support. In Des Moines he added a new thought, a dream of a day when the world’s governments would work together, through an association of nations, to guarantee the world’s peace.
At Kansas City he confessed his impatience with the argument that enlarging the army would put the United States on the path to militarism. The present army was so small that it could not even prevent Mexican rebels from crossing the border to raid American towns for supplies, he said. The army had to be expanded, and it had to be trained. The crowd cheered, applauded, and waved small flags as he made the case that a strong army and navy were America’s best hope for remaining at peace.
Wilson fared well everywhere but Topeka. Half of the five thousand members of the audience were farmers who had come to town for a convention, and the New-York Tribune’s reporter described them as “almost unmoved” except by the sight of the first lady. The highest praise the Tribune man heard after Wilson’s speech came from a grizzled farmer in a flannel shirt: “he said a heap worth thinking over.”
More than 100,000 people heard President Wilson speak. Hundreds of thousands more waited for hours in the cold to catch a glimpse of him and the new first lady. Editorial comment was overwhelmingly positive. Even the Tribune declared that he had “gained in every way—support for his policy, personal popularity, political standing and leadership, and, most important of all, in his ability to reach and move the people.” For the many Republicans who assumed that Wilson’s deeply divided party would cost him the White House in 1916, the Tribune added a warning: “President Wilson is not dead.”
Congress would do as the president asked and shore up the nation’s defenses, but not without a fight. The first casualties were Secretary Garrison and his 400,000-man army of reserves. For some it was too big, for others it was a poor substitute for a larger standing army, and for the National Guard, which was run by the states, it was an unwelcome competitor. With champions in every state, the Guard wielded enormous influence in Congress, and Wilson, needing Congress more than he needed Secretary Garrison, chose not to carry Garrison’s torch. Garrison resigned on February 10.
That night the president and first lady dined with the cabinet at the home of Josephus Daniels. Wilson told stories and recited limericks, activities he found less taxing than conversation. To all appearances, he was in high spirits. But in a private conversation with one of the other guests, the journalist Ida Tarbell, he confessed to constant anxiety. “I never go to bed without realizing that I may be called up by news that will mean that we are at war,” he told her.
• • •
Wilson’s tour was brilliant political theater. Tumulty had asked him to give the country a show of leadership, and he had played his part perfectly. Onstage he warned of the dangers posed by modern warfare and offered a rational way out, making his case in a style that was thoroughly modern—cool, brisk—a welcome change from the overstuffed, overacted political speeches of the era. Wilson had always loved the theater, and as long as he had the stage to himself, he was superb. But when circumstances called for dialogue, he sometimes floundered. Questions from the twelve reporters covering the preparedness tour were fielded by Tumulty, not Wilson. Wilson never mastered the back-and-forth of a press conference. He met many a straightforward question with a sardonic question of his own, leaving no doubt that he found the reporter wanting. When a yes or no might suffice, he often let it stand unadorned; to expound was to risk being misinterpreted, he thought.
• • •
Colonel House shared Wilson’s love of theater, although he preferred to stage his dramas for an audience of one. By training his attention on one person, he often succeeded in creating a feeling of intimacy well before any real intimacy existed. Wilson had been drawn in immediately. But not everyone was. House’s eagerness to ingratiate himself put Edith Wilson on guard, and it repelled the Secret Service agent Jimmie Starling. Recalling his first encounters with the colonel, Starling wrote, “Deliver me from a man who smiles, rubs his hands together, and calls me ‘Brother.’ ”
Given his talent for befriending powerful men and his success in serving them, House assumed that he would be invaluable to Wilson in foreign affairs. House enjoyed going toe-to-toe with powerful men. Having no official duties, he was free to travel. And in imagining that he would succeed at diplomacy, he resembled most of his fellow Americans. Filled with confidence, they liked to believe that there was no such thing as an irreconcilable difference. Whatever the problem, as long as reasonable men on one side were willing to confer with reasonable men on the other, they would arrive at a reasonable solution.
As Wilson was making plans for his preparedness tour, House was in Europe, hoping once again to find an opening for Wilson to intervene. The colonel’s previous mission, a search for common ground, had come to a dead end, with each side insisting that it would defeat the other and dictate the peace. Although European attitudes had not changed, the attacks on the Lusitania and two other British passenger ships with Americans aboard had led the president to wonder whether it would be possible for the United States to stay out of the war.
For months Sir Edward Grey had been carrying on a warm correspondence with House, ostensibly to tell him that several neutral governments wished to form a group that would hold itself at the ready to mediate an end to the war. Grey told House that he believed that mediation would have to come about through the United States. But, he added, the Allies were determined to fight until they were certain that they could make a peace that would preclude a second world war.
Grey’s next move had been a calculated appeal to Wilson’s idealism. Come the end of the war, Grey said, there could be no lasting peace unless the belligerents pared their armies and navies to the minimum needed for self-defense and committed themselves to collective action against disturbers of the world’s peace. “How much are the United States prepared to do in this direction?” he asked. “Would the president propose that there should be a League of Nations binding themselves to side against any power which broke a treaty . . . ? I cannot say which governments would be prepared to accept such a proposal, but I am sure that the government of the United States is the only government that could make it with effect.”
It was said of Colonel House that he could walk on dead leaves and make no more noise than a tiger. But Sir Edward was even lighter on his feet—and much swifter. Believing that the letters gave him the makings of a “master-stroke of diplomacy,” House failed to see that the master-stroke was Sir Edward’s. Grey had not said that the Allies were open to mediation; he had said that if they were to consider it, they would want the United States in the lead. And even as he encouraged Wilson to propose a league of nations, he wondered about its acceptance.
“It has occurred to me,” House wrote Grey (as if Grey had not put the idea into his head), “that the time may soon come when this government should intervene between the belligerents and demand that a peace parley begin upon the broad basis of the elimination of militarism and navalism. . . . What I want you to know is that whenever you consider the time is propitious for this intervention I will propose it to the president.” “Intervention” now replaced “mediation” in House’s vocabulary, and he craftily spoke of it without specifying whether he meant diplomatic intervention or the military kind. Worse, he volunteered to stack the deck against Germany: “I would not let Berlin know of course of any understanding with the Allies,” he told Grey. “This might induce Berlin to accept the proposal, but, if they did not do so, it would nevertheless be the purpose to intervene. If the Central Powers were still obdurate, it would be necessary for us to join the Allies and force the issue.”
When House revealed the scheme to Wilson, in October 1915, Wilson had seemed startled but did not protest. He lapsed into silence, which House chose to read as acquiescence. To a degree it was. Wilson inserted a “probably” before the “necessary” but otherwise offered no objections. The letter went off to Grey, and two months later House discovered that he and Wilson were no longer of one mind on the subject of military intervention. While House considered it inevitable, Wilson thought that if the Allies could not win on their own, the United States would be of no use because of the long time it would take to muster and train a fighting army.
Now it was House who was startled. A victorious Germany would set its sights on the United States, he said, and when it did, the United States would need the Allies. Although Wilson understood, House told his diary, “I cannot quite get him up to the point where he is willing to take action. By action, I mean not to declare war, but to let the Allies know we are definitely on their side and that it is not our intention to permit Germany to win if the strength of this country can prevent [it]. The last time we talked he was quite ready to take this stand, but he has visibly weakened.”
On December 22, a week before sailing, the colonel took the precaution of writing the president to ask “what to say in London and what to say in Berlin and how far I shall go.” Wilson, still on his honeymoon, sent a muddled reply, saying first that instructions were superfluous because House understood him so well and then setting definite limits. House was not to discuss reparations or territorial questions. The United States was concerned only with the guarantees that might be made to secure world peace and, Wilson wrote, the only rational guarantees were disarmament and a league of nations.
• • •
House moved from capital to capital in a fog, apparently unaware that the Europeans assumed he was trying to end their war for the purpose of securing Wilson’s reelection. Nor did House realize that the British, despite their cordiality and compliments, thought of him as “the Empty House.” As one close student of American neutrality remarked, “His mind was not quite in the first class and his sudden transfiguration into a person of world importance left him just a little too pleased with himself.” And to the dismay of Walter Hines Page, the U.S. ambassador in London, neither House nor Wilson guessed that Europeans might resent the idea of Wilson crossing the Atlantic to play peacemaker “and give a blessing to these erring children. There was a condescension in this attitude that was offensive.”
House had been in London for only a week when Grey persuaded him that diplomatic intervention would not suffice and explained that the British could not recommend a peace conference to the French because France would panic at any hint that Britain was ready to give up the fight. But even if His Majesty’s Government had been open to the idea of peace talks, some members of the cabinet would have balked at the thought of Wilson in the role of broker. As Page reminded House, the British had lost confidence in the president because of his weak response to the submarine attacks.
Near the end of his stay in London, House disingenuously informed Wilson that he thought diplomatic intervention would be possible and that military intervention would be a mistake. But, he added, “we should be ready to throw our weight at the right time in the right direction for the good of humanity. We are growing stronger as [the Allies] grow weaker, consequently our power is increasing in double ratio.” The colonel was running amok.
• • •
In Berlin, House found that Germany, too, was dead set against peace talks. With victorious armies and a rapidly growing fleet of faster, more powerful U-boats, the Germans had nothing to gain by negotiating an end to the war, the chancellor told him. Nor could they imagine Wilson, whom they regarded as an Anglophile, in the role of peacemaker. The chancellor met House’s unacceptable offer with an unacceptable offer of his own: a promise to evacuate Belgium and France—if the Allies would compensate Germany for the lost territory.
Arthur Zimmermann, the personable undersecretary of foreign affairs, was full of false compliments for the new American peace effort. House, taking the praise at face value and clearly relishing his own guile, replied that the world needed more statesmen of Zimmermann’s caliber. Zimmermann said that he looked forward to a time after the war when the English, the Germans, and the Americans—“the white races,” in his words—would be in accord.
In Paris, House talked war, not peace. With Jules Cambon, secretary general of the French Foreign Ministry, the colonel took up a point he had made to Sir Edward Grey: the Allies had to help the United States help them. If France could persuade the British to ease up on the blockade, House said, the United States would enter the war on the side of the Allies before the year was out. Cambon was so astounded by the mention of U.S. military intervention that he asked House to repeat the statement. House obliged. Cambon, wanting to be certain that he had it right, read his notes aloud. House confirmed them.
In order to take up arms against Germany, House said, the United States needed an “incident” of some sort, one more transgression that the president could use as a pretext for war. Cambon, undoubtedly thinking of the Lusitania, the Arabic, the Persia, and a long list of other “incidents,” tartly observed that the Germans seemed quite good at pacifying the United States. House parried with a claim that times had changed. The kaiser had just ruled against all-out submarine warfare, but House was convinced that the German navy would soon persuade the kaiser to change his mind. And when the restraints were thrown off, House said, the United States would have a powerful justification for entering the war.
During his final talk with the French, House went even further in his offer of American support. As he put it in his diary, “I again told them that the lower the fortunes of the Allies ebbed, the closer the United States would stand by them.” House told them that he had made the same pledge to the British.
France, like Britain, had assured its citizens that it would win the war, so Cambon wondered what plausible rationale the government could give the French people for a negotiated peace. Perhaps the Germans would be willing to return Alsace-Lorraine? Cambon and his colleagues asked. Here was a territorial question, the kind of question Wilson had instructed House to avoid, and here was House blithely assuring the French that the lost provinces could be regained by giving Germany a swath of Asia Minor. Taken aback once again, Cambon asked, “Then you would wipe out Turkey?” House said he had it in mind. The subject had come up in his talks with the British.
On his way back to London, House detoured to the Belgian coastal town of De Panne for a visit with King Albert. Fresh from dismantling Turkey, the colonel overflowed with ideas for imperial land swaps, and he asked Albert if he would consider selling the Belgian Congo to the Germans. The king answered that the Belgian people might object, but he did not. He asked only that the sale be consummated over his protest.
In Boulogne, waiting for the British troopship that would take him to England, House could hardly contain his excitement. He wrote separate letters to Wilson about his encounters with the Belgian king and the French Foreign Ministry, and in neither did he pause to reflect that he had gone to Europe in search of a path to peace but was now paving the American road to war. He reiterated his hope that the Lusitania would not be the pretext. The case was now nine months old—too old, in his view, to justify a plunge into war. American intervention would have to be based on “the highest human motives,” he wrote. “We are the only nation left on earth with sufficient power to lead them out, and with us once in, the war would have to go on to a finish with all its appalling consequences. . . . A great opportunity is yours, my friend, the greatest perhaps that has ever come to any man.”
• • •
In 1914 and 1915, Grey had often indulged House’s preference for an audience of one, but in 1916 Grey invited other cabinet members into many of their conversations. “I wish I had but a single man to deal with here as at home,” House grumbled in his diary after two weeks in London. He also complained about the pointed questions of Arthur J. Balfour, first lord of the admiralty. Nor did the colonel trust David Lloyd George, who was soon to become prime minister but was then doing double duty as minister of munitions and secretary of state for war. Lloyd George tended to listen sympathetically and agree wholeheartedly but often went home and changed his mind.
The enlargement of the cast put House in an awkward position with Ambassador Page. House generally conducted his British dealings behind Page’s back, and while he could trust Grey not to give him away, he worried that one of the others might mention the nature of his business in London. Within an hour of his arrival at the Ritz, House took Page into his confidence. Shocked to learn of the course that House had set, Page told him that it would be morally wrong for the United States to get into the war by springing a trick on the Germans. Page also reminded him that the Allies expected to win the war, which meant that any British cabinet member who spoke out in favor of a peace conference would be pilloried. Page finished by telling House that Wilson no longer enjoyed the confidence of the British.
The next day House turned up at the embassy with a bland alternative: Wilson would invite both sides to confer and work things out themselves. “As if they would now confer!” Page shouted in his diary. When House airily announced that the two of them were to meet with the prime minister and key cabinet members in a few days, Page refused to attend. House seemed unsurprised, which Page took as a sign that House was having doubts about his grand plan. In fact, House was relieved to have Page out of the way.
The ambassador silently vowed to resign if the colonel made another trip to London, and in an obvious bid to put an end to House’s scheme for intervention, he sent Wilson his own plan for ending the war: sever relations with Germany and impose an embargo on all goods from the Central Powers. German credit would collapse, and Germany would have to quit the war. “I do not believe we should have to fire a gun or risk a man,” Page wrote. He warned that delay “or any other plan will bring us only a thankless, opulent and dangerous isolation.” Page showed the cable to House and bluntly asked if he agreed. When House said he did not, Page demanded to know why. House lamely replied that it would take too long to explain.
The colonel’s meeting with the foreign secretary culminated in a secret agreement known as the House-Grey Memorandum, in which Grey wrote, “Colonel House told me that President Wilson was ready, on hearing from France and England that the moment was opportune to propose that a Conference should be summoned to put an end to the war. Should the Allies accept this proposal and should Germany refuse it, the United States would enter the war against Germany. Colonel House expressed the opinion that if such a Conference met, it would secure peace on terms not unfavorable to the Allies; and, if it failed to secure peace, the United States would leave the Conference as a belligerent on the side of the Allies, if Germany was unreasonable.” The colonel’s final thought addressed Wilson’s wish to avoid a useless American sacrifice on the battlefield. If the Allies delayed in accepting the U.S. offer and the war turned so sharply against them that U.S. intervention was unlikely to bring victory, “the United States would probably disinterest themselves in Europe, and look to their own protection in their own way.”
• • •
House reported to the White House on March 6. His diary contains only a sketchy account of his conversation with Wilson. He claimed that he outlined his mission in detail, but there is no telling how frank he was about the British opposition to diplomatic intervention or the intensity of his own wish for military intervention. The briefing took place on a long automobile ride with the president and first lady, after which House was deposited at the State Department, where he summarized his travels for Secretary Lansing. There is no record of that conversation, either. Back at the White House, the colonel had another long meeting with the president, the details of which were not put on paper. What is known is that as House was leaving for dinner elsewhere, Wilson put an arm around his shoulder and said, “It would be impossible to imagine a more difficult task than the one placed in your hands, but you have accomplished it in a way beyond my expectations.” House spoke of the pride he would feel on seeing Wilson at the head of a negotiating table at The Hague. “My dear friend,” Wilson answered, “you should be proud of yourself and not of me since you have done it all.”
House spent the night at the White House, and the next day, after a long discussion of the House-Grey Memorandum, the president took to his typewriter and tapped out a short note for House to send to Grey. Wilson made only one change to the memo. Where Grey had said that if Germany proved so unreasonable that the Americans quit the peace conference, they would enter the war on the Allied side, Wilson made it read “would probably enter.” Some historians have taken Wilson’s “probably” to mean that he was unwilling to commit to war, while others have argued that it merely acknowledged the fact that the Constitution assigns the war power to Congress, not the president.
Surely the most objectionable feature of the House-Grey Memorandum was not Wilson’s “probably” but his willingness to go along with House’s scheme for a dishonest peace. In assuring the Allies that he would devise a peace “not unfavorable” to them, he had consented to deceive not only the German government but the American people. As far as they knew, the United States had yet to take sides in the war.
Before leaving Washington, House briefed the British and French ambassadors on his mission and his conversations at the White House. He told Spring Rice and Jusserand that the United States would enter the war, and the only “probably” he mentioned was a reference to the timing. As Jusserand reported to the Quai d’Orsay, House had said that the United States would go to war à un moment qui n’est peut-être pas fort éloigné (at a moment perhaps not too far off).
Exhilarated by Wilson’s praise and the thought of the United States fighting alongside the Allies, House began to imagine that he was the only one who fully understood the world’s affairs. “The life I am leading transcends in interest and excitement any romance,” he told his diary. “I cannot begin to outline here what happens from day to day, how information from every quarter pours into this little unobtrusive study. I believe I am the only one who gets a view of the entire picture. Some get one corner and some another, but I seem to have it all.”
