THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  He had not matriculated at Princeton. Nor had he been a professor or university figure. The trustees, bored by waiting, wondered who he was. No one knew: not the editor-in-chief of Time magazine, nor the chairman of the Union Pacific Railroad, nor the U.S. Senator, nor the university president, a polymath whose interests were almost as broad as the curriculum. Someone read the nameplate, “E. M. House,” and then some of the party recalled. “Colonel” House, as he was known to his contemporaries, had been the most famous American in the world in 1919, excepting only his ally and friend Woodrow Wilson. This fame was the result of a friendship unique in twentieth century American political history, for Wilson had devolved on the silent and mysterious Colonel the extensive powers of the U.S. presidency, though House never held any governmental office. His elusive figure was for seven years the alter ego of the president. House was often sent on missions to foreign governments though he was given no precise instructions save the president's assurance that he knew House would “do the right thing.” House bypassed the Department of State entirely and communicated directly with Wilson by a private secret code. Indeed the two men seemed always to communicate with one another in a kind of mutual but exclusive sympathy. Yet in 1919 the two parted in Paris, never to meet again: Wilson to return to the defeat of the League of Nations and the rejection of American international involvement, of which House was the principal architect; House ultimately to vanish into the obscurity with which he had assiduously cloaked his achievements. House's story is the story of how America moved from being a marginal actor on the world scene to attempting to remake that scene on the basis of American consti-tutional ideas.

  Edward Mandell House was born in Houston, Texas, on July 26,1858. His father had come from England to make his fortune, first to New Orleans and then to Texas, where he fought in the Revolution. During the Civil War he was a blockade runner and there clings about Thomas House something of the Rhett Butler. Subsequently House became one of the leading citizens of Texas, a wealthy merchant, banker, and landowner. His son Edward idealized the West and its cowboy culture but he was small and after a childhood accident, rather frail. He was sent to Bath, England, for school and later to the Hopkins School in New Haven, Connecticut, to prepare for Yale. At Hopkins, House's roommate and closest friend was Oliver Morton (the son of Senator Morton of Indiana, Republican candidate for the nomination for president in 1876). When the nomination went to Hayes and the election resulted in a contested outcome, Senator Morton managed the Republican forces that won the White House. This was a constitutionally fraught period—in which the election was thrown into the House as the Constitution properly provides (they seemed to know better how to handle things in those days). The two teenage boys spent their time in Washington attending the sessions of the Electoral Commission on which Senator Morton was serving. This experience was a turning point for House. He became utterly absorbed by politics and he saw, he said later, that the system was actually run by a very few players in Washington.*

  One of the boys failed his entrance exam to Yale; the two ended up at Cornell, where House remained until the beginning of his third year, when he left school to care for his father.

  After Thomas House's death Edward married and went for a year-long honeymoon in Europe. His father had left him an independent income sufficient to ensure that he need never work, and so in 1885 he moved to Austin, the state capital, to bring himself closer to the political scene. As a youth, House had been brought close to national power, close enough to know that he wanted to surround himself with that distinctive, almost palpable aura of great things possible and great things attempted; but also close enough to realize how unlike the rest of the world such an environment is, and thus how rare and how very hard to achieve. He had been an observer on the national stage by chance. Could he now be a participant, by design?

  Soon he had made his residence, invariably open to politicians, lobbyists, and journalists, into a focal point of the social and political life of the small city. House pinned his hopes on the key role Texas would play in the progressive wing of the Democratic party. For ten years, he studied Texas politics, and then in 1892 he ran the campaign of the progressive governor James Hogg.

  Hogg was opposed by a coalition of railroad and corporate interests; every daily newspaper in the state was against him. When, despite this, he was re-elected, House's reputation as a campaign manager was assured. Thereafter he ran successful campaigns for the governorship in 1894, 1896, 1898, 1900, 1902, and 1904, becoming so powerful that when one incumbent attempted to stay on for another term in spite of House's advice, the sitting governor was turned out. Indeed, in each of these elections, House opposed potent political machines that he managed to overcome.

  One aspect of his success is important to note. Texas at this time, like all the formerly Confederate states, was thoroughly committed to the Democratic Party. The Republicans were so identified with Reconstruction and the corrupt governments of that period that no legislature or gubernatorial office in the South was held by them for almost a century after the Civil War. This meant that once he had won the nomination (a process from which African American voters were effectively excluded), the Democratic candidate would inevitably win the general election. The successful nominee was chosen at a convention of delegates picked in local primary elections. In this way the state system actually mirrored the federal system, within which presidential candidates were elected by a college chosen on the basis of electoral victories in the states. Thus it had been possible for Tilden to win the popular vote nationwide in the 1876 election for the presidency but fail to achieve a majority in the electoral college. House's strategy of abandoning contests in constituencies that were committed to his opponents and focusing entirely on marginal contests was perfected in the Texas gubernatorial primary campaigns and would be the blueprint for electing Wilson to the presidency.

  Like Theodore Roosevelt, House was attempting to put into place the policies that are the basic building blocks of the nation-state (less than a half century old at that point) in which it is assumed that the state's first duty is to benefit the mass of its people. In this his policies are to be distinguished from the old state-nation programs of the Southern Bourbons of the immediate postwar era, for this group conceived the purpose of the nation to be to serve the goals—moral, economic, or cultural—of the American state. What makes House interesting to us, however, is that he proposed an especially American constitutional vision of the nation-state to be the basis for the society of nation-states, an extrapolation that is only now basically complete just as it is about to become outmoded.

  By 1908 House had grown thoroughly tired of his role in Texas politics. He had rebuffed overtures to run for governor himself in 1902 and for twelve years had bided his time as the Populist movement washed across the Democratic party. The nomination of William Jennings Bryan in 1896 and the adoption of a free silver monetary platform had doomed the Democratic party to minority status in the country at large. House waited.

  In 1899 Bryan had sought a winter location in the South where he might bring his daughter, who had been ill. Hogg and House arranged for the Bryans to take a house virtually on the grounds of the House estate. As he did with so many politicians of this era, House captivated his guest with his mild manners and tough politics. Bryan was defeated for the U.S. presidency in 1900 and again in 1908, but his relationship with House grew stronger, despite the fact that House believed the Democrats had to be cleansed of the Bryan financial heresies before the party could regain the White House. Throughout this period, House cultivated the Bryans.

  House had been spending his summers for some years in Magnolia, Massachusetts. Now he began spending more time in New York and, in 1910, came east to find a candidate for the presidency. Bryan had suggested Mayor Gaynor of New York City and so a dinner was arranged at the Lotos Club. But an embarrassing miscommunication between the two men involving a visit to Texas removed Gaynor from House's list.

  He
had decided that the nominee could not come from the South; that he must be an Eastern governor who would attract the Western vote by his liberalism. The new governor of New Jersey, Woodrow Wilson, had been touted to House by the editor of Life magazine. House began studying the speeches of the former university president, who was holding his first political office following a very public defeat at the hands of the Princeton trustees. Wilson had no political record and thus started with no political enemies; his troubles at Princeton had given him a national reputation as an opponent of aristocratic privilege. House went back to Texas having become convinced that he had found the right man.

  Throughout the winter of 1910 – 1911 he began lining up political allies behind a Wilson candidacy. House returned to New York, where it was arranged that Governor Wilson would call on him at the Hotel Gotham.

  Wilson was aware of House, because the latter—working through former Texas governor Charles Culberson, who was now a United States Senator—had skillfully deflected attacks on Wilson's party regularity that had threatened to end his candidacy even before it got off the ground. Wilson had been impressed by his reception at the time of an address to the Texas legislature, also orchestrated by House. The two had never met, however, and Wilson knew nothing of House's relationship with Bryan.

  Wilson and House met in House's small hotel room on November 24, 1911, agreed to have dinner a few days later, and continued to meet alone at the Gotham as long as House remained in New York. House later wrote:

  The first hour we spent together proved to each of us that there was a sound basis for a fast friendship. We found ourselves in such complete sympathy, in so many ways, that we soon learned to know what each was thinking without either having expressed himself. A few weeks after we met and after we had exchanged confidences which men usually do not exchange except after years of friendship, I asked him if he realized we had only known one another for so short a time. He replied, “My dear friend, we have known one another always.” And I think this is true.2

  The next day House wrote his brother-in-law, Sidney Mezes, who was at the time the president of the University of Texas, “Never before have I found both the man and the opportunity.” That same week House wrote Culberson, “[t]he more I see of Governor Wilson the better I like him, and I think he is going to be a man one can advise with some degree of satisfaction. This, you know, you could never do with Mr. Bryan.”3

  As if to test this proposition, House urged Wilson to attack the tariff and make free trade a centerpiece of his speeches. He had D. F. Houston, formerly the president of the University of Texas, at that time the chancellor of the University of Washington, come to New York to brief Wilson on tariff policy. Afterwards Houston wrote, “I can't tell you how much I enjoyed my visit with House… He has a vision. I should like to make him Dictator for a while.” Wilson did refocus his campaign on tariff reduction. Despite his reputation in subsequent years, however, Wilson was no visionary; rather, he was a quick study of other men's ideas, an eloquent and passionate advocate, a sensitive and gifted performer.

  In addition to positioning Wilson on the national stage, House had two crucial tactical objectives designed to win the Democratic nomination: to bring Bryan on board and to secure the Texas delegation. Neither would be easy: in a letter to a Princeton trustee Wilson had written, “Would that we could do something at once dignified and effective to knock Mr. Bryan once [and] for all into a cocked hat,” and this letter had been leaked to the press by Wilson's opponents.

  For months House had been nurturing Bryan's perception of Wilson, however. He pictured Wilson as opposed by the men who had opposed Bryan, and emphasized that the Hearst papers, who had made Bryan an object of ridicule for years, were for Champ Clark, the other liberal in the race and the other possible beneficiary of a Bryan endorsement. House depicted, accurately, the hostility Wall Street felt for Wilson and passed on stories to the populist Bryan that large slush funds were being collected to defeat Wilson. He urged Bryan's presence at a Washington banquet where Wilson praised Bryan, and he carefully maintained a separate correspondence with Mrs. Bryan, who was inclined toward the scholarly Wilson in preference to the professional politician, Clark. By June 7, he could write Wilson:

  Do you recall what I told you concerning the conversation I had with Mrs. B? I have a letter this morning from her containing this most significant sentence, “I found Mr. B well and quite in accord with the talk we had [that Clark was unacceptable].” It encourages me to believe that Mr. Clark will never receive that influence and that you will.4

  In Texas the governor and the chairman of the Democratic State Executive Committee—and thirty of its thirty-one members—were opposed to Wilson. This was in December of 1911; by April of 1912 House had rounded up all of the Texas delegates to the convention for Wilson. These delegates, under House's tight control, were the key to his strategy. Nomination for the presidency at this time required a two-thirds vote at the convention. Wilson couldn't hope to go in with anything like this number, so House sought pledges from delegates committed to the front-runners for the first few ballots that these delegates would vote for Wilson if their candidates faltered. By the time of the convention, Wilson's forces had lined up commitments from delegates committed to candidates other than the leading front-runner, adding up to more than a third of the total number of delegates. This meant that the leading contender—Champ Clark, the Speaker of the House—could not win the nomination.

  On June 20 House wrote Wilson from the Massachusetts shore expressing his regret that he could not be at the convention; he was, he said, “physically unequal to the effort” and he was leaving for two months in Europe. “However,” he wrote, if “Clark's strength crumbles on the second and third ballot—which I hope may be the case—you will be nominated forthwith.”

  It was a near run thing. Clark almost got the two-thirds vote but eventually crested just short; the Texas delegates held firm. After numerous ballots that Clark led but could not win, those votes pledged to other candidates began to drift toward Wilson. In desperation the New York delegation, dominated by the Tammany Hall machine, attacked Wilson, which had the unintended effect of bringing Bryan onto the field with a Wilson endorsement. Bryan's intervention was decisive and Wilson was nominated on the forty-sixth ballot.

  The United States had been governed by the Republicans since 1860, with the solitary exception of the Cleveland presidencies. It was a Republican country. The general election of 1912, however, would be dominated by the split in the Republican party between former President Theodore Roosevelt and his successor, President William H. Taft. House reasoned that Roosevel's independent campaign would make him the lightning rod for conservative public opinion. Not only would Roosevelt cripple the Republican nominee by splitting the vote—this much was obvious to many—but he would, in House's view, legitimate the other progressive in the race, Woodrow Wilson, and make him the candidate of those who above all did not want to see a return of Roosevelt to the White House. The margin of Wilson's victory would be provided by lukewarm Taft supporters reacting to the ferocity of Roosevelt's attacks. So strong was this conviction that House did not bother to cut short his European tour and returned only at the end of the summer.

  Then in October, only two weeks before the election, the country was stunned to learn that a would-be assassin had shot Roosevelt while the former president was campaigning. House immediately telephoned Wilson and persuaded him to cancel all further speaking engagements until Roosevelt recovered. Overruling the campaign committee, after some hesitation while House pressed for an immediate decision, Wilson abandoned his speaking tour for the balance of the campaign. House's appeal to Wilson's chivalry, coupled as it was with the shrewd insight of the true professional on whom Wilson could rely blindly, yielded an important public relations victory for the candidate at a crucial time. When the election returns came in on November 5, Wilson, though failing to gain a majority in the popular vote, had won an overwhelming victory in the el
ectoral college, bringing with him large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. House immediately began planning to push through the legislative program to which he had long been committed: tariff reform, a Federal Reserve (opposed by both Wilson and Bryan), the federal income tax, and antitrust measures.

  Before assuming the presidency, however, Wilson had to fill his cabinet. He had never held national office, never worked in Washington; indeed his only experience of politics was his single term as governor of New Jersey. His circle of experienced political office holders and administrators was limited. House persuaded Wilson to make Bryan secretary of state, on the grounds that this would prevent Bryan from opposing the Wilsonian legislative program. House himself resolutely refused to take any office—Wilson asked him to take any cabinet position save that to be offered Bryan—and urged instead that Wilson give Congressional leaders the largest say in appointments.

  This accords with House's consistent counsel to Wilson during the latter's presidency: he repeatedly urged Wilson to pay more attention to congressional leaders, to give them a larger role in policy matters. Wilson, however, leavened the natural egocentricity of a public performer with the intellectual's contempt for politicians: of one senator he said that he “is the most comprehensively ignorant man I have ever met.” Asked by someone whether he didn't think a particular statesman the “most selfish man in America,” Wilson demurred, saying only, “I'm sorry but I am already committed to Senator ___.”5 When House did induce Wilson to invite members of Congress to the White House, they were dismayed never to be offered any alcohol to drink and not to be permitted to smoke.