“I pray that you may not lose this great opportunity.
“Affectionately yours,
“E. M. House.”
The President’s reply was to mail House the text of a note, prepared with the usual agonizing care and typed as usual on his own typewriter. The gist of it was that although he refused to believe that the word of the present German Government could be trusted, he hoped to help negotiate with some eventual German Government which really represented the German people, an equitable peace.
“The object of this war,” Wilson wrote, “is to deliver the free peoples of the world from the menace and the actual power of a vast military establishment controlled by an irresponsible government.” The enemy was not the German people but their “ruthless masters.”
The night after House received the President’s rough draft he confided to his diary that this had been one of the busiest and most important days of the summer. “I did not receive it until twelve o’clock and … I succeeded in reading, digesting and answering it in time to mail on the Fedderal Express.” With one of his portentous looks he turned his packet of typescript over to the Boston postmaster, who had providentially come to call. The postmaster, much flattered, promised to convey it to Washington in a special pouch, or if necessary to take it there himself. House noted that the man “would have been even more impressed had he known that he had in his possession what at the moment was the most interesting document in the world.”
President Wilson’s reply to Pope Benedict was published by the State Department on August 29. In America it effectively cut the ground out from under such “wilful” senators as Borah and La Follette and the Socialist agitators who were risking jail under the Espionage Act by demanding a clear statement of war aims. Furthermore it reassured German-American opinion, which though muffled was still influential, that German-Americans who backed the President in his war against the Kaiser’s generals were not fighting the German people. It was the beginning of the politics of the wedge.
After the note was spread over the press House wrote the President, amid a torrent of praise: “You have again written a declaration of human liberty,” and signed his letter “your devoted.” Wilson had written him: “I think of you every day with the deepest affection.”
They had not seen each other for several months and the newspapermen were coming up with their usual summer crop of stories about a break between them. House joked the reporters about these stories. Weren’t they rather late this year? They usually came at midsummer along with the seaserpents.
The President’s next letter to House was written from the Mayflower. The Wilsons and a group of Mrs. Wilson’s relations were spending a weekend anchored out in Hampton Roads to escape what the President was beginning to call the madness of Washington. The following week he promised House he would get away for a longer time. “Do not be alarmed about my health. I need rest, and am growing daily more conscious that I do: but I am fit and all right. All join,” he added significantly, “in affectionate messages.”
In the same letter he made an important suggestion. It was following a train of thought that House had been gently urging all summer. The time had come, he suggested, to prepare American peace terms. He knew that the British and French had their preparations already made in case the war should come to a sudden end. “What would you think,” he wrote House, “of quietly gathering a group of men about you to assist you to do this? I could, of course, pay all the bills out of the money now at my command. Under your guidance these assistants could collate all the definite material available and you could make up the memorandum by which you should be guided.”
House went to work with enthusiasm. He asked his brotherinlaw, Sidney Mezes, who was president of the College of the City of New York, to head up an organization which came to be known as The Inquiry. Glib young Walter Lippmann of The New Republic was made secretary. The eminent Dr. Isaiah Bowman of the American Geographical Society gave the researchers working space in the society’s rooms in New York and put his mapmaking facilities at their disposal.
The aim of The Inquiry, so Dr. Mezes wrote the President, would be to collect information 1. “about Europe’s suppressed, oppressed and backward peoples,” 2. about international business, 3. about international law, 4. to analyze what serious proposals could be uncovered for an organization to insure peace, 5. to make suggestions as to the restoration of war damage in France and Belgium.
In answer the President immediately called for a further investigation of the needs of the larger states such as Russia, Germany and Austria, for access to the sea and to raw materials. “Of course,” he wrote, “what we are seeking is a basis that will be fair to all and which will nowhere plant the seeds of such jealousy and discontent and restraint of development as would certainly breed future wars.”
Wilson wanted facts he could trust. He knew something of England at first hand but he was only dimly aware of the particulars of the tangled ambitions, congenital hatreds, and crass conflicts of interest that he knew would confront him when the time came to straighten out continental Europe and put its congeries of peoples on the path to freedom and democracy and peace. He wanted The Inquiry to give him facts to base his theory on.
Although everybody connected with the enterprise was enjoined to secrecy, the newspapers got wind of it. The New York Times ran a headline: AMERICA TO SPEAK IN HER OWN VOICE AT THE PEACE TABLE.
The President was indignant. “I think you newspaper men can have no conception of what fire you are playing with when you discuss peace now at all,” he wrote David Lawrence, pointing out that Germany had achieved the hegemony of middle Europe from Hamburg to Baghdad and would be at a great advantage should negotiations start from that basis. “It is my stern and serious judgment that the whole matter ought to be let alone.” As a result the operations of Colonel House’s inquirers were swathed in as much secrecy as if they had been working on a high explosive or a new poison gas.
On September 9 House noted in his diary: “Around seven o’clock the Navy Yard of Boston called me over the telephone to say they had a wireless stating that the Mayflower would be in Gloucester Harbor at two o’clock. Loulie and I went over to meet the boat, boarded it, met the President and Mrs. Wilson, and motored along the shore for two hours or more. We stopped first at our cottage and then went over to Mrs. T. Jefferson Coolidge’s house to look at her prints, china etc., which have been inherited from Thomas Jefferson.” As they motored around the shore drive Wilson described himself as “a democrat like Jefferson with aristocratic tastes.”
Next morning the President played nine holes of golf and lunched with Colonel and Mrs. House. “Once or twice during the conversation,” House noted, “I threw the President off his line of thought by interpolations, and he found it difficult to return to his subject. He smiled plaintively and said ‘You see I am getting tired. This is the way it indicates itself.’ ”
The Mayflower steamed back around Cape Anne and into Massachusetts Bay. Passing through the Cape Cod canal the presidential party seated on deck watched the great groups of people gathered along the banks to cheer him. Schoolchildren waved little flags and sang. The President was much moved. Edith drank in the adulation of the distant crowds. Her husband was at the peak of his personal popularity. Every day there came, in the mail she often helped him cope with, photographs of babies and scrawled letters from the proud parents explaining that their latest had been named Woodrow or Wilson.