House Papers

NON-FICTION

House Papers*

The History. This is the story of one man's activities over a period of about five years, activities linked with the welfare of several hundred million people, of half a dozen countries, several colors and many faiths. In chief, it is the story of Colonel Edward Mandell House, unofficial (and unprecedented) emissary of President Woodrow Wilson, and his attempts to end or prevent war and of his four journeys to Europe in the cause of peace.

In the first journey (1913), he merely made friends, talked a little of a way for bringing about co-operation instead of competition among the great nations.

In his second journey (May, 1914), he went abroad to induce Germany, England and France to agree to limitation of armaments. He called this trip "the great adventure." From Berlin he wrote President Wilson that the situation there was "extraordinary." "It is militarism run stark mad. . . . There is some day to be an awful cataclysm." As he returned home at the end of July, having made some progress with his plan, the cataclysm came.

In his third journey (1915) he went to propose to the belligerents not only that they should end the War, but that in doing so arrangements should be made for permanent peace. Germany would not listen, France was wary, England thought the time was not opportune.

In his fourth journey (1916), he went to propose to the belligerents should call a peace conference and either force peace or enter the War against the side which would refuse reasonable terms. He assumed that Germany would be the one to refuse, and he believed that it was in the interest of the U. S. to see militarism crushed and democracy set up in Germany. But the Allies did not trust Germany and feared that Wilson would not bring the U. S. into the War even if Germany refused equitable terms. House felt that it was necessary to have Allied consent to the plan.

So in one sense all his four efforts came to naught. But he had established intimate relations with the statesmen of Europe--Grey, Balfour, Lloyd George, Cambon, Briand, Zimmermann, a host of others that were invaluable to President Wilson in conducting his foreign policy.

These journeys are the great stories of the book; but it also tells the story of the strategy of House in twice winning election for Wilson; the story of ths passage of the Federal Reserve Act; gives the impressions House formed of all the leaders of England, Germany and France; tells the methods of diplomacy which House used; tells a hundred incidents, such as how the imperturbable House lost his temper with the British Ambassador at Washington, how Von Bethmann-Hollweg explained his famous phrase, "a scrap of paper."

The Significance. These two volumes are not "memoirs." They consist of the letters and telegrams Colonel House wrote and those he received,* the gaps in the narrative being filled in from a journal or record of the substance of his important conversations, which during this period he dictated every evening to his secretary. The book is therefore no apology. From its nature it magnifies Colonel House, forces him to the centre of the stage. The result has already shown itself in criticism by the admirers of President Wilson. Senator Kenneth Douglas McKellar of Tennessee last week exploded: "It is the grossest piece of effrontery for this unknown man from Texas, whom no one ever heard of, to seek to show that Woodrow Wilson was a puppet. Of all the brazen effrontery, this is the worst. He is guilty of the basest ingratitude." Said Senator Caraway: "There is one thing that Colonel House absolutely proved, and that is the old French proverb that no man is ever a hero to his valet." He referred to Colonel House as "this little man that no one ever would have heard of but for his boot-licking proclivities."

But such critics had best beware, for House's book will strike back at them. It is not a record of what House now wants the world to think. It is documentary evidence, prepared at the time, of what House actually did and said from 1912 to 1917. If House wrote Wilson in 1915 advising him not to do something, his letter carries a great deal more force than would a criticism by House today of an act of 1915.

The book reveals in House a political artist of rare talent and a diplomat of enviable tact and insight, as well as a courageous statesman. It should be a textbook for diplomats during the next 50 years. His foresight, not only political and diplomatic but even military, was extraordinary. In 1916 Wilson needed 266 electoral votes to be reelected. House made a list of 21 states with 230 electoral votes, not only in the solid South but scattered over the entire country, and said to Wilson: "These you will surely win, and you must pick up 36 more electoral votes from the rest of the country." In the list of "certainties" not one failed. Throughout 1915 and 1916 he warned the Allied statesmen that Russia might make a separate peace before the War was over. He declared that there would be no political trouble in Germany during the War, but if Germany lost there would be an upheaval within. In 1916 at dinner with Lloyd George, Grey, Balfour and Asquith, House declared his belief that the Germans would soon start a drive on the western front and suggested Verdun as the point of attack. Exactly a week later the famous attack on Verdun began.

But it was as a diplomat and constructive statesman that he excelled. He planned a Pan-American policy in 1914 that was to supersede the Monroe Doctrine--a plan that fell through when his whole attention was taken up by the War, but which had in it many points that were afterward incorporated in the League of Nations. He suggested to Wilson many things that became landmarks in foreign policy. He took part in framing many of the President's famous utterances, suggested topics for others and edited out not a few ill-timed phrases that had a way of creeping into Wilson's public remarks. Besides all this, he was the President's political assistant par excellence. And the cynically surprising fact remains that coupled with so much practical ability was a uniformly high idealistic purpose.

The Editor. Charles Seymour, Sterling Professor of History at Yale, to whom Colonel House entrusted his papers for arrangement and selection, is a man of distinction not only in his profession but out of it. He began his career by taking his A. B. at Cambridge University, returned to New Haven (his birthplace) and repeated the process at Yale. After that, M. A., Ph. D., Litt. D. and LL. D. followed in natural sequence. Reputation came to him in 1916 when he published his Diplomatic Background of the War. In 1919 he was one of the U. S. experts who served on the commissions which drew up the peace treaty. Now, only 41, he is no penurious pedagog, no mere historian, but a well-to-do, cultivated gentleman," noted in his profession.

Edward Mandell House. The House family was originally Dutch, by name Huis. The Colonel's father settled in Texas while it was part of Mexico, lived there through its revolution, its independence, its entrance into the Union, its secession and its return. He was a leading citizen of Texas and left his son a fortune that was comfortable but not superfluous. Edward M. House was reared in an atmosphere of war, violence, gunplay. His college career at Cornell was impaired by his frequently playing hookey to become a spectator of the game of politics, and ended at his father's death. In Texas as a young man he made himself famous as a political manager, by electing three governors in succession, each of them over the opposition of the political machine. Not until 1911 did he feel the time was opportune to enter national politics. He began to "interview" possible candidates. Late in the year he met Governor Wilson of New Jersey, and at once an intimacy sprang up between the two men.

FICTION

Red Hot Togas

GLASS HOUSES--Eleanor Gizycka--Minion, Balch ($2). Senators have fun. Particularly the big he-ones from unshackled western states. This book leaves no doubt of it. They are pursued even in their grave assembly room by panting Washington women with devastating toilets and merciless divan technique. Second only to senators in desirability are titled young attaches at the embassies. For one of these a Washington flapper will do unvirtuously anything.

Eleanor Gyzicka, sister of Joseph Medill (Chicago Tribune) Patterson and niece of the late Robert S. McCormick (sometime U. S. ambassador to Russia and Austria) met Count Joseph Gyzicki (Austrian-Pole) in St. Petersburg and Vienna diplomatic life, marrying him in 1904.** She has long adorned and stimulated the chic milieu of which she writes. Photographs released to the public prints reveal her as an attractive, dark beauty well on the mentionable side of 35, posing in silks beside sophisticated bookshelves, cigaret in hand, large black eyes bent upon the beholder from beneath a high, thoughtful brow.

Her heroine, Mary Moore, is a creature of similar appearance, whose Wyoming nativity urges her into the wide open spaces of ex-Senator Bob Millar of that state./- Her cosmopolitan sophistication inclines to dapper young Count Andre de Servaise. Both men are out to marry money, of which Mary has little. A Wyoming interlude that might have been written by Elinor Glyn in collaboration with Harold Bell Wright and a Campfire Girl, eliminates Millar--and Mary's chastity. When she finally marries Andre, whose constancy does not soar above the average for Latins, she discovers the comfort resident in observing the adage about glass houses and stone-flinging.

The story should screen exceedingly well and make its author some money. Nor should it sell badly in book form. The wholesome wild-western setting of Mary's seduction will reassure a vast public that might be disconcerted by the plentiful bits of smart writing and the gratuitous, but fastidious, indoor carnalities.

In Demand

UNCHANGING QUEST--Philip Gibbs--Doran ($2). Averaging the reports of leading bookstores from Portland, Ore., to Boston, one finds that of all fiction published this year this book is most in demand.

For years Mr. Gibbs has not omitted the War from his novels. He feels that humanity's lesson will bear everlasting repetition. He is an excellent journalist, and one of the best features in this latest assignment is his verbal photography of Soviet Russia. But what is selling the book is not preaching or photography, nor the story, which differs little from what happens to most English families in War novels. Katherine Lambert is the person that pulls you. English idealist, she married middle-aged Prince Serge Detloff and spent all her youth and beauty helping to bring about the "bloodless" revolution in Russia that became so ironically sanguinary. Their son, Michael, and the gyp-yesque daughter Dorothy of Katherine's bacteriologist brother Paul, furnish a tense, vivid, very human secondary action in the second generation. The "quest," of course, is for peace, love, God.

Vestal

APPASSIONATA--Fannie Hurst-- Knopf ($2). Leading bookstores report this book second in demand only to Unchanging Quest out of all fiction published this year. It is the story of a little Manhattan colleen, Laura Regan, upon whom a ceinture de chastite is bound hard and fast, constitutionally, by her convent training, and by the despair of her child-weary sister Fleta. Her brother Frank, an "advanced" young man, fails to awaken her curiosity or appetites with his readings from Freud, Jung, Joyce & Co. She is saved from the dreaded consummation of marriage with big, blond, rich Dudley Streeter by the capsizing of his roadster, the fracture of her shoulder and, later, Dudley's being caught kissing her nurse. The one man she might have been able to take, Asfurth Ropps, comes too late, too insistently. She kneels to her Saviour and prays for a wimple. With great pertinacity but somewhat burdensome effect, Miss Hurst tells it all in the form of a long, impressionistic address to the girl herself.

*THE INTIMATE PAPERS OF COLONEL HOUSE--Charles Seymour, Editor--Houghton, Mifflin-- 2 vols. ($10).

*Except those from Woodrow Wilson. Mrs. Wilson has not yet given permission to publish any of her late husband's letters, but Professor-Editor Seymour saw those to Colonel House, translated their sense to his pages.

**Divorced in 1908, the Countess appealed to the Tsar of Russia for custody of her daughter Felicia, married Elmer Schlesinger, Manhattan lawyer, in 1925. Count Gyzicki died last month in Germany.

/- Only one Wyoming ex-Senator is now living: Clarence Don Clark, 1895-1917. It should be stated that, though Countess Gyzicka mentions by name many a real Senator--Curtis, the late Lodge, Pepper, Wheeler, Walsh, Heflin, Moses and Borah --her "Bob Millar" is drawn from none of these, nor from Wyoming ex-Senator Clark.