| Review of: | Woodrow Wilson's Right Hand: The Life of Colonel Edward M. House by Godfrey Hodgson |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Erez Manela |
| Reviewed in: | Diplomatic History |
| Date accepted online: | 02/11/2007 |
| Published in print: | Volume 31, Issue 2, Pages 341-345 |
Book Review: Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House
This is the first biography of "Colonel" Edward Mandell House, Woodrow Wilson's closest friend and adviser for the most crucial period in both of their lives. Like Wilson, House was a transplanted southerner, a Texan who attended Cornell, lived in New York City, and summered on the North Shore of Massachusetts. The two first met in the fall of 1911, as Wilson, then governor of New Jersey, was preparing to run for the presidency, and famously fell out in the spring of 1919, in the midst of the Paris Peace Conference. Godfrey Hodgson, a veteran journalist and author whose previous credits include biographies of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Henry L. Stimson, begins with House's family and childhood in Texas, and covers his early successes in business and his growing influence in state politics in the 1890s as a backroom operator. Most of the book, however, is devoted to the eight years of House's intimate relationship with Wilson, and the focus, unsurprisingly, is on House's influence on Wilson's foreign policy and diplomacy during and after the First World War. House served as the president's personal emissary to wartime Europe, especially to Britain, where he developed close relationships with a number of leading figures. Successive chapters recount House's diplomatic forays throughout the war; his role in shaping U.S. war aims through the Inquiry commission (where he put his brother in law, Sidney Mezes, in charge); and of course his work as an influential member of the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference.
Throughout the book, the author emphasizes House's closeness to Wilson, both personal and ideological. At the same time, he aims to defend House, who has been, Hodgson tells us in the preface, "unjustly blamed for failures that can be more fairly laid at the door of Wilson's weaknesses." It was Wilson, the rigid idealist, who failed, "for temperamental reasons ...to confront the awkward realities of the international situation and indeed certain uncomfortable truths about human nature" (p. x), while House, the thoughtful, supple realist, saw that U.S. "entry into the world scene could best be achieved not by boasting about the exceptional virtue of American society, but by finding partners in other societies who would work toward the same goals" (p. 276). Indeed, the contrast between Wilson's "self-righteous idealism" and House's "realistic accommodation of principle with the way of the naughty world" (p. 15) is a central theme in the book, and its contemporary relevance is obvious. The point can easily be overdrawn, however. Wilson certainly believed in America's virtue, but he also emphasized the need to work with others. On his Western tour in the fall of 1919, he attacked those who "believe that the United States is so strong ...that it impose its will upon the world," and warned that "only those who are ignorant of the world can believe that any nation, even so great a nation as the United States, can stand alone and play a single part in the history of mankind." [1]
The book is well written overall, and makes for an interesting read. For the readers of this journal, however, its usefulness is limited by its lack of engagement with much of the relevant historical literature. Reading it, one might be left with the impression that the central debate on House's historical role is still the one that raged in the 1920s between the pro-House camp of Charles Seymour and the pro-Wilson camp of Ray Stannard Baker. [2] But the heyday of that debate is long past, and few historians today follow Baker in laying the blame for the failures of Versailles at the feet of House rather than Wilson. Hodgson makes no reference to many important studies on Wilson and his foreign policies, including the writings of such leading Wilson scholars and biographers as Lloyd Ambrosius, Kendrick Clements, and August Heckscher. John Milton Cooper's recent
A second and related problem arises from the narrative's reliance on primary sources that House himself produced. The book is based largely on House's own diary and memoirs, and more broadly on the House Papers kept at Yale University. This is surely an important collection, but when it is used as an almost exclusive source for House's diplomacy and his relationship with Wilson, it inevitably produces an account that inflates both House's influence and his sagacity, in some cases beyond plausibility. It also produces a flat and clichéd image of the president, one that echoes the famous judgment of John Maynard Keynes, as influential as it was shallow, that Wilson was a naïve and rigid idealist "bamboozled" by the more sophisticated statesmen of Europe. Most scholars of Wilson now recognize that he was a much more complex figure. Neither a philosopher nor an ideologue, he was a politician who often displayed ruthless effectiveness in pursuing and attaining his goals, and whose rhetorical flourishes were designed to achieve political ends. And while his failures in Paris and then back home in 1919 were indeed of epic proportions, their causes can hardly be reduced to an analysis of his character flaws, of which he surely had many. House's significance as a historical subject, as the book's title clearly suggests, is tied to his relationship with Wilson, and a sophisticated grasp of Wilson is therefore crucial to understanding House's role.
Hodgson's monochromatic view of Wilson produces some curious interpretations, as when he excoriates Wilson as "either foolish or dissembling" for calling revolutionary Russia "a fit partner for a league of honor" (p. 170). But Wilson used this phrase in his war address in April 1917, months before the Bolsheviks took over the Russian provisional government. And even Wilson's praise of Russia that followed the Bolshevik takeover, for example in the Fourteen Points address, must be understood in the context of his hope of preserving the Eastern front, rather than as evidence of naïveté. The book also replicates the common but inaccurate view that Wilson was "the high priest" of "national self-determination" (p. 172) and then contravened this principle at the peace table by flouting its supposed requirement for ethnically homogeneous states. But Wilson used the term "self-determination," which he borrowed rather opportunistically from the Bolsheviks, as a gloss for his favored ideal of "government by consent." He rarely qualified it as specifically "national," much less as ethnic, and saw it as an antidote for autocracy, rather than for multiethnicity as such. Indeed, because the United States, whose multiethnic character he repeatedly acknowledged, was his model of a self-governing polity, he could hardly have believed that self-government required ethnic homogeneity. [4]
Throughout the book, Hodgson emphasizes that House shared Wilson's progressive internationalist vision, and that any disagreements stemmed from House's more realistic approach to its implementation. But the two clearly did not agree on some crucial points. House, for example, was eager for the United States to join the war as early as May 1915, after the sinking of the
Indeed, the general impression that the narrative left with this reviewer is that, the occasional protestations of the author notwithstanding, House's vision for the postwar world-assuming he was not simply the Machiavellian manipulator that some historians see him as-was in fact quite different from Wilson's. It appears more akin to the "conservative internationalism," as Thomas Knock called it, of Republicans such as Elihu Root, William Howard Taft, and, indeed, of Wilson's nemeses Theodore Roosevelt and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. (House's wish to have worked on the peace treaty with Root and Taft [p. 194] seems to support this view.) They saw the League of Nations as an alliance of like-minded great powers, centered on the Anglo-American relationship and based squarely on self-interest. They had little use for such favored Wilsonian notions as the equality of small nations, the promotion of democracy, respect for "world opinion," or the need to abdicate a measure of self-interest for the common good. It is, of course, possible to argue that House's vision, thus construed, was more desirable than Wilson's, or more plausible, or both; but it is a different vision nonetheless. As Hodgson himself notes, House believed that peace "could only be guaranteed by a close alliance" between Britain and the United States (p. 263). Regardless of the merits of this view, it was not Wilson's.
[1]Erez Manela, "A Man ahead of His Time? Wilsonian Globalism and the Doctrine of Preemption,"
[2]For the "House camp," see Edward Mandell House and Charles Seymour, eds.,
[3]For example, Lloyd E. Ambrosius,
[4]For Wilson's view of self-determination, see Lloyd E. Ambrosius, "Dilemmas of National Self-Determination: Woodrow Wilson's Legacy," in