THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  House refused any appointment for himself because he knew that if he held administrative office he would be forced to take decisions that would, inevitably, be in advance of and occasionally at variance with the opinions of his chief. So long as he had no responsibility for making specific deci-sions he could defer to the president in conversation, avoiding committing himself until he and the president had come to mutual agreement. This freedom allowed him to be an ideal counselor, able to stimulate or soothe as required but never to be found in opposition once the president made up his mind. Moreover, House wanted the scope of the freelance, unconfined to any departmental duties. The historian Robert Hildebrand has written that:

  House's talents complemented Wilson perfectly. The president's greatest skills were rhetorical, House's were political… House willingly shouldered the burdens of the presidency that Wilson found most odious, making himself into a much-needed buffer between the president and the everyday world of politics. Above all, House was trustworthy; the value of both his advice and his friendship depended upon his complete lack of self-interest, which inspired Wilson's confidence and liberated his facility for emotional attachment.6

  House had become Wilson's “man of confidence”: anyone who wanted an appointment, who wished a change in policy, who sought a favor from the president, went to House. When the cabinet was complete, in addition to Bryan, two of House's closest associates from Texas—Burleson and Houston—were postmaster general and secretary of agriculture, while Gregory, a third friend from Austin, ultimately replaced McReynolds as attorney general. “Mr. House is my second personality,” Wilson replied when asked about his friend. “He is my independent self. His thoughts and mine are one. If I were in his place I would do just as he suggested… If anyone thinks he is reflecting my opinion by whatever action he takes, they are welcome to the conclusion.”7

  House's dream had been realized. But there was far more to this dream than mere access to power.

  Immediately after the election of 1912 a novel entitled Philip Dru: Administrator was published in New York. This novel was dedicated to “the unhappy many who have lived and died lacking opportunity because, in the starting, the world-wide social structure was wrongly begun.”

  The novel tells the story of a young West Point graduate, Philip Dru, who is so moved by a public vision of the common good transcending the selfish demands of interest groups that he chivalrously champions the needs and hopes of the great mass of persons. It is a romantic novel, but Dru is far from a purely romantic figure: he is described as disappointing to look at, a “man of medium height, slender but toughly built and with a strong but homely face.” He is taciturn in the extreme and never shares his plans. While in college his interest in politics is aroused by his connection to his roommate's family, who are influential members of New York financial and political circles. After leaving the army—though invalided he refuses a pension—Dru achieves instant fame when he wins a nationwide prize for solving a military problem. He uses this celebrity to become a syndicated writer, exposing the injustices of society and contributing proposals for their amelioration.

  Unknown to Dru or the general public, a talented but corrupt political manipulator, Senator Selwyn, has conspired with the boss of the Credit Trust, John Thor, to control the government through the judicious use of a $10,000,000 slush fund. With the election of a few senators and an apparently progressive president who is his creature, Selwyn effectively delivers the federal government to the gilded plutocracy that has supplied the fund. A neglected dictograph, however, discloses a conversation between Selwyn and Thor that reveals the entire scheme. When leaked to the press, a recall of the president is demanded, and eventually a new civil war breaks out in the West in revulsion at these revelations. Dru becomes a leader in this rebellion and ultimately its general. After winning a bloody victory in the battle for the Midwest, he marches on Washington, forces the government—now overtly in the hands of Selwyn—to surrender peaceably and seizes authority. He then proceeds to rule by decree, successively reforming the constitutional structure along more parliamentary lines, ending lifetime tenure for federal judges, giving the states identical and much subordinated constitutions, putting into place basic laws to protect union organizing and provide safe conditions of labor, and requiring government and labor representatives on corporate boards of directors. Dru institutes a graduated income tax and a federal inheritance tax; formulates a new banking law providing for a convertible currency administered by a federal central bank; introduces the corporate income tax, old-age pensions and unemployment insurance; abolishes tariff protection; and invigorates trust-busting. His reforms accomplished, he quits office, refuses to run in the elections he has organized, marries the love interest of the novel, and, quite literally, sails into the sunset to unknown destinations.

  Philip Dru was written in the weeks before the Baltimore convention and published just after the election. “John Thor” was obviously a portrait of the financier J. P. Morgan; “Senator Selwyn” was just as obviously patterned on Senator Mark Hanna, the Ohio political boss who had engineered the election of McKinley. All this the reviewers and newspapers duly noted. But who was the author?

  Philip Dru: Administrator was published with nothing to indicate the author's name. “Who Wrote ‘Philip Dru‘?” read an advertisement in the New York Times. “A forecast of the government of the United States after the Revolution…. [T]he story of the reforms he initiates is told well by one who knows politics from the inside.” The publisher's prospectus, however, listed the author only as “Anonymous.” “There will be no attempt to make capital out of this anonymity,” the press release read. “The fact is simply that it would be uncomfortable and unpleasant for the author to have his name known.”8

  The press release alluded to the sophistication of the author, in contrast to “most of the utopian, forecast, prophecy and reform novels that… are written by men who have little experience in the world of practical affairs,”9 and this theme was picked up by the early reviews. The Portland Evening Telegram, for example, concluded:

  Although the name of the author of this book is withheld from the public, the reader can readily judge that whoever wrote the novel knows something of the “big business” of the country and the great forces which control the Nation's policies.10

  The Dallas Morning News speculated that the author was “a man of great wealth, fine ideas and a desire to be of use in the world.”11 Others were not so sure. The Hartford paper wrote, “Somehow [this plea for anonymity] strikes one as weak and a suspicion arises as to this [author]. The political boss who, concealing his name, ‘tells all he knows,’ is pretty sure to tell a great deal more than he knows.”12 Similarly the Trenton newspaper suggested that “a lack of knowledge of the author offers doubt as to this authority.”13

  Generally, however, the press was enthralled. “Who wrote Philip Dru?” was the lead in the Philadelphia Public Ledger. “Men have endeavored to guess the author, but the fact that the latter makes no pretense to being a man of letters adds to the difficulty.”14 The Los Angeles Times wrote in February, that the “authorship of Philip Dru still remains a puzzle.”15 The Cincinnati Inquirer suggested, “Is the writer by any chance Bryan himself”16 but the New York Times retorted that the “style, with its slight rhetorical touch may well give rise to such a supposition but the schemes suggested for governmental benefit” do not.17 The Nashville Tennessean proposed that “[a] strenuous person, brave and speechful, had a finger in the Philip Dru: Administrator pie,” alluding to former president Theodore Roosevelt, the advocate of “the strenuous life,” but to this suggestion the Los Angeles Times retorted that “if [Colonel Roosevelt] were trying his hand at fiction whatever its nature the world would not long have been left in doubt of it,”18 and a Philadelphia paper concurred: “Surely the personage referred to has not accustomed his public to anonymity, and to see in [Theodore Roosevelt] a retiring or timid author requires a flight of imagination of which few wi
ll be found capable.”19

  Some papers hinted darkly at more sinister reasons for anonymity: “Even a casual survey of his pages will convince the reader that there are very good grounds for secrecy, for the plot hovers perilously near to revolutionary doctrines…”20 All were curious: “If one wants to preach his political creed through a novel, well and good. But who is the author?”21 In March the Los Angeles Times could report that, according “to reliable sources, [Philip Dru] has been read by… the President and at least three members of his Cabinet” and that suggestions that Roosevelt or Bryan had written the book were incorrect; however, the Times went on, “it is unlikely that the writer's identity will be revealed.”22

  Few reviewers proposed that the book had much in the way of novelistic merit. “As a work of fiction the book is… stilted and often absurd,”23 one wrote. Walter Lippmann concluded:

  Now if the author is really a man of affairs, this is an extraordinarily interesting book. It shows how utterly juvenile a great man can be. If he is really an “insider” then we who are on the outside have very little to learn. If he is really an example of the far-seeing public man, then, in all sincerity, I say, God help this sunny land. The imagination is that of a romantic boy of 14 who dreams of what he would do if he had supreme power and nobody objected.24

  The writing in Philip Dru is stilted, and its hero's expressions of chivalry do sound adolescent in parts. It is unlikely, however, that Lippmann had so little to learn from its author. For by the election of 1916 the following measures dreamt of by Dru had been adopted by the Congress and signed into law: the graduated income tax; a federal inheritance tax; the Federal Trade Commission; the Glass-Owen banking act; the parcel post; a maximum-working-hour law; a significant reduction in the tariff; the creation of a Federal Reserve Bank. If nothing else, the author had proved to be a political prophet. Lane, the secretary of the interior, wrote, “All that book has said should be comes about… The President comes to Philip Dru in the end.”25 One measure proposed by Philip Dru that had not been brought into being, and to which Lippmann may have most strongly objected, was the creation of a world federation of states bound to accept arbitration in lieu of force and subordinated to international rules based on “the Anglo-Saxon” rule of law.

  Wilson believed, as Dru argued, that special interests had to be excluded from government because by their nature their point of view was selfish; that government must be ruled by a spirit of charity rather than the spirit of ruthless efficiency; and that the time had come when the State was responsible for reconciling the differences among classes, sexes, the economically, physically, or mentally strong and the weak, rather than exploiting those differences for the aggregated good of the State. Like House, Wilson had come of age in the defeated South and the two men shared a lack of faith in the discarded model of the state-nation that had collapsed. But Wilson was more like Dru in that he disdained political methods; in fact that was the principal reason he relied so heavily on House. House, ironically, had a large measure of the Selwyn in him—this made him valuable to Wilson—and this difference in attitude toward the world would ultimately be felt in the Versailles negotiations that ended their friendship and their political alliance. Dru could rule by decree. He did not need to court Congress or the interest groups that elected congressmen. Dru could conquer recalcitrant foreign countries; he did not need to parley with them. Above all, Dru did not need to compromise and thus had disdain for it. He sought a spiritual transformation of the society as the basis for a new politics. Compromise was certain to entrench the old ethos; only a constitutional metamorphosis could change it, and create a structure that would embody and reflect a new ethos.

  But for our purposes, the most interesting aspect of Philip Dru is its international focus, and the extrapolation to the international arena of American domestic constitutional ideas of federalism and legitimacy derived from the consent of the governed.

  The novel depicts a United States that, having conquered Mexico, allows it to develop its own constitutional institutions sheltered by an American military and economic umbrella. All customs duties between the two countries are abolished and Mexico retains her armed forces, flying the American flag alongside its own. Using this loose model, Mexico then amalgamates with the states of Central America into one government, though separate states are maintained.

  Under Dru the United States absorbs Canada, undertakes with Great Britain to protect the freedom of the seas, and negotiates a world federation committed to the maintenance of peace. Much of this is the standard utopian fare of the early part of the twentieth century; what is more intriguing about this dream-prophecy is its peculiar relation to the nation-state. States are to assume, vis-à-vis the international order, a role similar to that which the citizen plays in the domestic order. A constitution is envisaged that will govern the society of states, as domestic constitutions govern individual states. Each state is entitled to equality (in contrast to the great-power hierarchies of the imperial state-nations) as each sits within a kind of relaxed federalism, without “internal”—that is, international—tariffs or economic barriers. New states are encouraged to develop along their own cultural lines by means of constitutional systems of popular representation and national self-determination.

  In his illuminating and thoughtful book On the Law of Nations, former senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan expresses the idea

  associated primarily with Woodrow Wilson… of a world ruled by law. It is probably fair to say that at the turn of the 20th century, most statesmen in the West expected such a future for the World. It was part of the prevailing optimism of that time, closely associated with the confident expectation that liberal democracy—with its great emphasis on law as the arbiter of relations among citizens of equal rights—would become a near universal form of government.26

  Philip Dru takes this expectation about the individual state and externalizes it to the society of states as a whole. When we speak of the New World Order today, it is the World, not the Order, that is new. The collapse of the Soviet empire and of European communism has made this a New World. But the order, as Moynihan points out, is Woodrow Wilson's.

  Or is it? For at some point Wilson had to be persuaded to abandon the aloof, chaste isolationism with which he entered the White House and to adopt the broad internationalism with which his name is associated in the historical consciousness. We should remind ourselves that neither the tradition of the Democratic Party nor Wilson's background suggested any interest in other than domestic matters. The Democratic platform of 1912 touched on foreign affairs only in a single reference to the Philippines, and Wilson, in his first inaugural address, confined himself entirely to questions of social and industrial domestic reform. Yet by 1917 Wilson had gone to Congress and stated:

  We have seen the last of neutrality. We are at the beginning of an age in which it will be insisted that the same standards of conduct and responsibility for wrongs done shall be observed among nations and their governments that are observed among individual citizens of civilized states.27

  Wilson was not persuaded by a sentimental novel to abandon the convictions of a lifetime. What had happened? And what relation do those events have to do with the larger story of the development of a society of nation-states, a society within which a civil war was fought from 1914 to 1990?

  After the hard winter of 1912 – 13, during which Colonel House devoted himself entirely to currency and banking reform and the achievement of the legislative measures described above, he went to Europe on his customary annual trip. He carried with him letters of introduction from the president authorizing House to mediate a dispute between the United States and Great Britain over the Panama Canal. According to the Hay-Paunceforte Treaty, all states were to pay equal fees for the use of the canal, but in a statute, the Panama Canal Act, Congress had directed that the United States be exempted from paying any tolls and this, according to U.S. law, superseded the treaty. Great Britain protested, but there was little th
e international community or the U.S. president could do.

  At the same time, a rift had opened up between the United States and the United Kingdom over Mexican policy. The murder of the reformer-democrat Francisco Madero had horrified Wilson. Madero's successor, his enemy General Huerta, had not been recognized by Washington. London, on the other hand, was only too willing to settle for any end to the chaos that had plagued Mexico since the beginning of the revolution and believed that in Huerta they had a man “with whom we can do business.” The end result of House's dialogue with Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, was an agreement by the British to withdraw support for Huerta in exchange for American efforts to repeal the Panama Canal Act.28 More important, House began a friendship with Grey that was to have historic consequences.

  It had long been House's conviction that the Americans were uniquely suited to bringing about a period of détente, and even cooperation, between the British and the Germans. During a lunch with the German ambassador in Washington before House's departure for Europe, he had proposed that a sympathetic understanding between England, Germany, and the United States would be beneficial to all concerned. In his diary, House wrote that he told the German ambassador how

  together I thought they would be able to wield an influence for good throughout the world. They could ensure peace and the proper development of the waste places, besides maintaining an open door and equal opportunity to every one everywhere.29

  House discussed this plan with the American ambassador to London during his summer visit to Europe in 1913. The basic scheme was to organize a system of arms reduction, followed by cooperative efforts to develop the hitherto undeveloped regions of the world, 30 diverting competitive energies into work for the benefit of both the developed and the undeveloped world. House waited, however, before presenting the plan to Grey.