“Yesterday,” noted House on October 15, “was one of the stirring days of my life. The President and I got together immediately after breakfast. I never saw him more disturbed … He wanted to make his reply final so that there would be no exchange of notes …”
Wilson’s first demand, before an armistice could be considered, was the cessation of such atrocities as the sinking of the Leinster …
“Neither the President nor I desired to make a vengeful peace. Neither did he desire to have the Allied armies ravage Germany as Germany has ravaged the countries she has invaded … He is very fine in this feeling and I am sorry he is hampered in any way by the Allies and the vociferous outcry in this country. It is difficult to do the right thing in the right way with people like Roosevelt, Lodge, Poindexter and others clamoring for the undesirable and the impossible.”
At this point it was essential that the President be personally represented on the Supreme War Council at Versailles, where the American representative, sturdy old General Bliss, had never been given any power to assume the initiative. Even before Wilson concluded his exchange of notes with Berlin, which cleared the way for an armistice, Colonel House was on the high seas headed for France.
Accompanied by Mrs. House, and by Miss Denton, who had furnished herself with a small pearlhandled pistol to protect the colonel’s life if need be; and by Miss Denton’s assistant, Miss Tomlinson; and by his soninlaw Gordon Auchincloss, on loan from the State Department, the confidential colonel boarded the U.S.S. North Pacific off Staten Island. On board he found Rear Admiral William S. Benson and his staff; Joseph C. Grew, onetime counsellor at the Berlin Embassy; a number of clerks and stenographers; and Frank Cobb of the New York World. That made up the party. They had a stormy crossing. They left in the fog and arrived in the fog. On October 26 the ship dropped anchor in the harbor at Brest.
In his pocket Colonel House carried a personal letter from the President which amounted to a power of attorney, and an impressively sealed document concocted at the State Department: “… Reposing special trust and confidence in the integrity and ability of William M. House of Texas, I do appoint him a special representative of the Government of the United States of America … and do authorize and empower him to execute and fulfill the duties of his mission with all the powers and privileges thereunto of right appertaining …”
To all concerned the moment seemed heavy with destiny. The President’s farewells, and indeed those of Mrs. Wilson, were unusually affectionate. “As I was leaving,” House noted in his diary, “he said ‘I have not given you any instructions because I feel you will know what to do’ … He knows that our minds are generally parallel and he also knows that where they diverge, I will follow his bent rather than my own.”
As the congressional-elections approached, in spite of the vigor of the wellfinanced campaign led by Will Hays, newly appointed chairman of the Republican National Committee, administration leaders remained confident. The morning of election day the New York Times predicted a Democratic victory. When the results were tallied, Woodrow Wilson was confronted, not with a Republican landslide to be sure, but with a clear indication that the Republican trend, which had come near defeating him in 1916, was continuing.
Both campaigns were hampered by the calling off of public meetings in many parts of the country on account of the influenza epidemic. The Republicans claimed that more of their rallies were cancelled than of their opponents’. In spite of this, and of a certain wariness that the fear of the Department of Justice’s interpretation of the Espionage Act instilled in antiadministration orators, the Republicans carried the House of Representatives by thirtythree seats and had a thin edge in the Senate. The cornbelt returned to the Republican fold.
In Illinois popular and pinkwhiskered J. Hamilton Lewis, who had tried to introduce a Senate resolution authorizing the President to conduct peace negotiations without senatorial consultation, lost to a Republican.
In Michigan, Lieutenant Commander Truman H. Newberry, industrialist and big navy enthusiast, had shown such zeal in his successful campaign against Henry Ford, who was induced to run for the Senate on a Wilson platform, that he had already become embroiled with a grand jury for the alleged misuse of campaign funds. If Newberry’s election could be made to stick, the Republican regulars would organize the Senate and Henry Cabot Lodge would have the chair of the committee, all-important at this juncture, on foreign affairs.
Political postmortems were almost unanimous in laying a large share of the blame for the administration’s defeat on the President’s appeal to the voters to show their support of his policies by electing a Democratic Congress.
“I have no thought of suggesting that any political party is paramount in matters of patriotism,” Wilson wrote in a statement issued a few days before election. “I mean only that the difficulties and delicacies of our present task are of a sort that makes it imperatively necessary that the nation should give its undivided support to the government under a unified leadership, and that a Republican Congress would divide the leadership … I am asking your support not for my own sake, or the sake of a political party, but for the sake of the Nation itself.”
In spite of its disarming phraseology, the President’s appeal was greeted by an outpouring of righteous indignation from Republican orators. “An insult,” shouted Will Hays, “to every loyal Republican in the land.” In vain George Creel and Tumulty pointed out that similar appeals had been issued at electiontime by George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and that McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt and Taft had been far more partisan in their election day pronouncements.
The Democratic defense was lukewarm. Such administration leaders as had been consulted had advised against this sort of statement. Washington newspapermen claimed that McAdoo was “mad as a hornet” because the President hadn’t asked his advice. Newton D. Baker was quoted as having pointed out wryly to a friend that of course it was wrong for a Democrat to ask people to vote for him; that was the prerogative of Republicans.
In the Senate lobby Henry Cabot Lodge, in behalf of his opposition group, handed the newspapermen an abusive rebuttal. “This is not the President’s personal war” was its burden. Theodore Roosevelt made Wilson’s appeal the theme of the final speech of his career.
Ever since Wilson made him give up his scheme to lead troops in the European war, T.R. had been beating himself to pieces against a wall of frustration. He was fighting illhealth. His explorations in the Amazon basin had left him with an intermittent fever. The bullet lodged next his lung caused chronic bronchitis. “When I went to South America I had one captain’s job left in me,” he confided to Owen Wister. “Now I’m good only for a major’s … It doesn’t matter what the rest is,” he added hastily, “I’ve had fun the whole time.”
He showed occasional bursts of the old energy; like a fighting bull bemused by the capes of the toreros, he was still good for an occasional deadly charge. He’d see red in a Wilsonian phrase and show his old fire and dash for a while, but he would soon tire and trot back weakly to his wife, Edith, and to Sagamore Hill for a rest.
He was subject to fits of rage, as in his runin with Samuel Gompers in the summer of 1917, when they appeared on the same platform in Carnegie Hall to greet the democratic revolution in Petrograd.