At the White House an extra force of clerks had to be taken on to handle the congratulatory mail.
Colonel House was assiduous in his attentions to the betrothed couple. The day after their engagement was announced he had them both to dinner at his New York apartment. This dinner was far from being conducted in the privacy customary to the colonel’s little affairs. After arriving on the Pennsylvania train in the afternoon the President and Mrs. Galt took a drive up and down Manhattan Island. Their car was followed by nine cars full of secretservice agents and newspapermen. Wherever they went they were cheered from the sidewalks. The photographers were given every opportunity.
The President’s party consisted of Mrs. Galt and her mother, Mrs. Bolling, both in wide dark hats, and Helen Bones and Dr. Grayson and Joe Tumulty. The ladies stayed at the St. Regis. The police had to make a lane for them as they entered and left the hotel.
They were joined at dinner by the colonel’s daughter and soninlaw Mr. and Mrs. Gordon Auchincloss. It was a festive occasion. Flowers and asparagus fern were everywhere. Reporters were previously given a glimpse of large framed portraits of Mr. Wilson and Mrs. Galt bowered in roses on a table in the colonel’s newly decorated library.
After dinner the colonel took his guests to the theatre. Though the President, who didn’t care for the serious drama but loved comedy, had already seen the play, he wanted Mrs. Galt to see Grumpy, which was the laughprovoking hit of that season, with Cyril Maude in the lead. When the party filed into their boxes the audience rose and applauded.
During the months of his engagement President Wilson became less accessible than ever. No matter how important their errands, few visitors got further than Tumulty’s office. Whenever he could spare an hour from his official correspondence he took Mrs. Galt out driving, always along the same roads. The White House chauffeur was restricted to an established series of drives. Number one, number two, number three. Each drive had to follow its customary track: the President hated change in his routine.
Days when he couldn’t see her he wrote her copious letters. Ike Hoover, the White House usher, remarked that the President was continually calling up the Library of Congress to check on the correct wording of some poem he wanted to quote. He had a direct telephone line installed between Mrs. Galt’s house on Twentieth Street and his private study.
It was during the summer and fall of the President’s courtship that a note of disillusion began to appear in House’s diary: “I am afraid the President’s characterization of himself as ‘a man with a onetrack mind is all too true … I say this regretfully because I have the profoundest admiration for his Judgement, his ability and his patriotism.” Or later: “… He dodges trouble. Let me put something to him that is disagreeable and I have great difficulty getting him to meet it.… The President, as I have often said,” House complained again, “is too casual and does the most important things sometimes without reflection.”
The Beginning of Relief
One result of the President’s absorption in his private life with his bride to be was that, more and more, people who needed to keep in touch with the Administration were taking their problems to Colonel House in New York. Early in November it was Herbert Hoover calling to say goodby before returning to his relief job in London.
Hoover was the engineer who formed the American Refugee Committee to help the Consulate and the Embassy in London finance stranded Americans during the first August days of the war. From this he was drawn into relief work for the Belgians, who were threatened with starvation by the German refusal to guarantee the subsistence of civilians after their invasion. He now found himself heading the hugest charity the world had ever seen.
Although British Naval Intelligence at one point suspected him of being a German spy, the story was reported by Ambassador Page in his letters to House and the President, that the British were so impressed by Hoover’s efficiency in handling Belgian Relief that they offered him citizenship and a place in the cabinet if he would join in their war effort. Hoover was said to have answered that as soon as he became a British subject he’d lose his Yankee drive.
A plumpfaced man with a hick curl to his hair and a California accent, he was still known in his early forties as young Hoover. He had packed a great deal of successful adventuring and prospecting into a few years. Coming from a family of impoverished Iowa Quakers, he was left an orphan at the age of eight and raised by an uncle in the Willamette Valley in Oregon. With a hundred and sixty dollars saved up working as officeboy in his uncle’s landoffice he enrolled in the new university being launched under the presidency of David Starr Jordan at Palo Alto. He put himself through the course in mining engineering by working summers as a geologist. In the geology laboratory he met Lou Henry whom he married a few years later. He showed his budding administrative ability by managing first the baseball team and then, senior year, the whole athletic program of Leland Stanford.
When he graduated as a mining engineer the best job he could get was pushing a car in a Nevada goldmine for two dollars a day, but it wasn’t long before he was working on the staff of one of the most brilliant engineers in San Francisco. At twentythree he was hired by a British firm as an expert in California methods to reorganize production in their mines in western Australia. At twentysix he was in China prospecting coal deposits for the same firm. As he was making twenty thousand a year he felt he was welloff enough to marry.
Lou Henry adopted the Quaker faith. The young couple had hardly been in China a year before they were besieged, with a small band of Europeans, in the neighborhood of Tientsin by Chinese troops during the Boxer uprising and barely escaped with their lives.
Hoover returned to London with such valuable information on the Chinese coal deposits that Berwick Moreing and Co. made him a partner. At thirtyfour he set up for himself, with offices in San Francisco, London, Paris and St. Petersburg, as a mining consultant, and administrator of ailing properties. His troubleshooting carried him to every raw new region of the globe.
The Hoovers already had as much money as they needed. They were raising their two boys on the Stanford campus. They had a house in London. Herbert Hoover had a certain scholarly bent in his own field. With the help of his wife, who was a good latinist, he made the first usable translation out of the Renaissance Latin of Agricola’s De Re Metallica. Being a Quaker he couldn’t keep from public service. As a trustee of Leland Stanford he was one of the mainsprings of the university.
The outbreak of the war caught him in London promoting the Panama Pacific Exposition to be held in California to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal. He threw all his talent for administration, first into getting Americans home, and then into the incredibly difficult task of feeding occupied Belgium. The food had to be bought, the food had to be shipped through warring blockades, the food had to be distributed in territory occupied by enemy troops. “I did not realize it at the time,” he wrote in his memoirs, “but on Monday August 3rd my engineering career was over forever. I was on the slippery road of public life.”
In the summer of 1915 he was back in America mending his fences. The relief was originally planned merely to tide the Belgians over the first winter. About thirtyfive million dollars of Belgian government funds was spent and fifteen million was raised by contributions from Belgians living abroad and from private sources in America and in the British Empire. But now there was no telling how long the war would last. The situation in Belgium and Northern France was worse than ever. The population was being trampled into the mud by the contending armies. Almost three million people were destitute. The original plan had been to sell food to those who could pay for it, but, as the economic paralysis continued, that became less and less feasible. Money, a great deal of money, must be raised in America.
Ambassador Page in London was cooperating loyally with Hoover’s relief work. It was at his table that Hoover and House first met. The colonel supported him from the beginning, but now House had let Hoover know that his project was in d
anger in America. A discharged and disgruntled associate was filling the lobbies of Congress with talk of Hoover’s highhanded negotiations with the warring governments. It was claimed that Belgian Relief was operating like a sovereign state. Senator Lodge was out for Hoover’s scalp and threatening prosecution under the Logan Act.
As soon as he arrived in America, House arranged for Hoover to see the President. Hoover found him completely sympathetic. The fact that Lodge was on Hoover’s trail was in his favor. The President publicly commended the work of the Belgian Relief Commission and helped select an advisory committee of prominent New Yorkers to raise funds.
When T.R. heard of Hoover’s difficulties he invited him to lunch at Oyster Bay and talked his ear off. “Mr. Roosevelt kept me all afternoon—making havoc of several appointments.” When Hoover told him of a frigid interview with Lodge in Boston, T.R. almost laughed himself sick. He said Lodge could see involvements in Europe under every bush. “I’ll hold his hand,” he said.
On this American trip, by which he assured the continuation of Belgian Relief, Hoover’s last interview, like his first, was with House. For the confidential colonel, he was becoming an important source of information on the realities of the war.
Hoover’s work carried him back and forth across the battlelines. He was one of the few Americans who could appreciate the blind unreasoning hate the brutalities of warfare aroused in both camps. The execution of Edith Cavell, an English nurse who helped smuggle Belgian and escaped British prisoners out of Brussels, had thrown the Allied peoples into a fresh paroxysm of anger. Yet House and the President persisted in thinking these warmad populations could be made to listen to reason. Hoover felt this hope was unrealistic, at least for the present. House urged Hoover to dissuade the Germans from any more Zeppelin bombings of London. Hoover had little that was encouraging to say along that line. As soon as he brought House up to date Hoover drove straight to the Holland America Line pier where he was catching the Rotterdam, sailing at noon.
Pacifism’s Last Gasp
To cross the Atlantic in those days was like moving to a different planet. Peace and war were two worlds. Only determined idealists like Jane Addams, the queenbee of Chicago settlement house workers, who had been presiding at a women’s peace congress at The Hague, came back hopeful. She and a number of other pacifist ladies pestered House all summer to induce the President to appoint delegates to join with other neutrals in a permanent commission seated at The Hague to keep on making peace proposals until one was accepted.
House told the ladies, tactfully of course, that they were misinformed. The President knew better than they did what the best methods were to promote peace.
The peace agitation would not down. Peace societies were proliferating over the country. Herbert Hoover’s old preceptor, David Starr Jordan of Stanford, who headed the American Peace Society, turned up in House’s study asking for an appointment with President Wilson to present the resolutions passed at a congress in San Francisco. A few days later it was David Starr Jordan’s secretary, a popeyed and voluble young man named Louis P. Lochner, who took up an hour of the colonel’s time to talk permanent mediation. With him was none other than Henry Ford.
Henry Ford was in his heyday. Model T’s were chugging along every dirt road in the country. Ford’s mass production had revolutionized transportation. He had turned the tables on the bankers and learned how to finance his own concerns. Ford’s five dollars a day had laid the foundation for the highwage economy. Millions were pouring in faster than he could find a use for them.
Ford’s formation was that of a rural mechanic. To the mind of a simple rural mechanic from the American middlewest war was plumb madness. Why couldn’t these crazy Europeans be made to see reason: give up murder and destruction and go to work. If they spent the billions they were throwing away into massacre and destruction on useful production they could make more money in a year than any of the odd lots of real estate they were fighting for was worth.
Lochner and an ardent Hungarian lady named Rosika Schwimmer had talked Ford into backing Jane Addams’ plan for permanent mediation. Suppose it cost a couple of million dollars to send a committee to Europe to end the war. How better could he advertise Tin Lizzie?
House complained in his notes that young Lochner wouldn’t let Mr. Ford get a word in edgewise: … “just as soon as I got him discussing his great industrial plant at Detroit and the plans for the uplift of his workmen, the young man would break in.… Ford I should judge is a mechanical genius … who may become a prey to all sorts of faddists who desire his money.” House found Ford’s ideas about peace “crude and unimportant.”
Instead of letting the confidential colonel dash cold water on Lochner’s scheme, which was to charter a steamship to take a peace commission to Europe, Ford brashly suggested that House come along. House couldn’t be induced to consider it. For fear German propagandists might get hold of the idea he immediately wrote Ambassador Gerard in Berlin disclaiming any connection with the peace pilgrims. “Of course there’s no need to tell you that the Government are not interested in it, either directly, indirectly, or otherwise.”
The Ford Peace Ship turned out a saturnalia for the press. The word peace was already as unfashionable among up to date people in America as it was in England. Wiseguy reporters found plenty to poke fun at.
The expedition consisted of eightythree delegates, including one state governor; the wellknown reformer and judge of the juvenile court in Denver, Ben Lindsey; Ben Huebsch the New York publisher, and the lovely suffragist Inez Millholland Boissevain. There was an assortment of clergymen, professionals of the peace associations and plain crackpots.
The secretarial staff amounted to fifty. Among them were publicitymen from the Ford organization instructed to watch over the Old Man. The press was represented by S. S. McClure, fiftyfour reporters and three movie photographers. Eighteen college students were invited along for the ride. A Western Union messengerboy named Jake stowed away and was allowed to join the technical staff. As the Oscar II was about to sail somebody let loose two squirrels on the deck.
Ford, a tonguetied man who spoke in bunches, aroused the sophisticated risibilities of the press a few days before he sailed by blurting out to his interviewers: “We’ll get the boys out of the trenches by Christmas … The main idea is to crush militarism and get the boys out of the trenches … War’s nothing but preparedness. No boy would ever kill a bird if he didn’t first have a slingshot or a gun.”
“Do you actually expect to get the boys out by Christmas?” a reporter tried to pin him down. Ford gave him his famous grin. “Well there’s New Year’s and Easter and the Fourth of July, isn’t there?”
Ford’s great disappointment came when his dear friend Thomas Edison refused to sail with him. Jane Addams pleaded illness. John Burroughs the naturalist, another of Ford’s cronies, came to see him off, his mane of white hair flowing in the breeze, but said he was too old to go.
William Jennings Bryan, who had at first seemed willing to go along, delivered a moving address instead on the Hoboken dock. He was still insisting he would join the delegation in Holland. He made a point of shaking every individual pilgrim by the hand. A pair of the pilgrims added to the gaiety of the scene by getting themselves married in the firstclass saloon before the ship sailed.
The crowd was immense. One of the Ford publicitymen, a bigmouth named Bingham, led pacifist cheers through a megaphone. “Get together all you friends of peace,” he’d shout.
He led cheers for Henry Ford, for Jane Addams, for Rosika Schwimmer, for Thomas Edison and for Judge Lindsey. As the final whistle blew Henry Ford was seen at the rail with an armful of red roses which he threw down one by one to his friends on the dock below. A man named Ledoux was so moved that he jumped overboard after the Oscar II left the pier and tried to swim after the ship.
Preparedness
The same day that the newspapers carried rollicking stories of Henry Ford’s Peace Pilgrims sailing out of New
York on the “peace ark” they carried the news that Captain Boy-Ed the German naval attaché and Fritz von Papen were being recalled from Washington at the request of the United States Government. It was Wilson’s answer to the sinking in the Mediterranean, with heavy loss of life, of the passenger liner Ancona in disregard of the German pledges in the Arabic case.
The peculiarly brutal circumstances of the sinking of the Ancona, the shelling of the liner and its torpedoing before there was any opportunity to lower the boats, sent a shudder through the newspapers, but there was as yet little real war spirit. The President sensed a demand for a sterner stance. In his public speeches he was beginning to take the word “preparedness” away from the warhawks.
He had been particularly stung by some remarks T.R. made offhand to the reporters after delivering a speech to Leonard Wood’s amateur cadets at their Plattsburg camp. Asked about the administration slogan “We must stand by the President,” T.R. squeaked out: “The right of any President is only to demand public support because, if he does well, he serves the public well, and not merely because he is President.”
His next statement rankled so Wilson never forgave him; or Leonard Wood either, for having sponsored T.R.’s appearance: “To treat elocution as a substitute for action, to rely on highsounding words unbacked by deeds is proof of a mind that dwells only in the realm of shadow and of shame.”
Wilson’s answer came in an address before the Manhattan Club in New York: “We have it in mind to be prepared, but not for war, but only for defense.” The word “prepared” brought down the house.
At the same time preparedness meant something quite different to the President than it did to the pro-Allied fanatics who wanted the United States, by immediately backing up the French and British, to ensure Germany’s defeat. Wilson was turning over in his mind the prospects opened up by an intimation from Sir Edward Grey through his confidential colonel:
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