THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (65 page)

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.

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 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:

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 will 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:

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.