Eight Years With Wilson's Cabinet, 1913 to 1920, With a Personal Estimate of the President
by . Garden City: Doubleday, Page & Co. 1926. Two volumes, xii+369, X+360 pp. Illustrated. $10.00.
TEN years ago the first term of the Wilson administration was drawing to a close and the United States had not yet reached, but was obviously approaching, participation in the World War. Ten years is as less than a day in world history, but in the experience of living men and women it is long enough to enable them at least to see the beginnings of a true perspective in looking back upon historic events. This contemporaneous record of one of President Wilson’s closest advisers — Secretary of Agriculture for seven years, Secretary of the Treasury for one — is the more welcome for not having come too soon: its contribution to the true perspective is more cogent at the end of a decade than it could have been in any of those earlier years through which the friends and enemies of the War President were rushing into print. Appearing as it does in a time of egregious immersion in material things, it recalls a day when ideals, now popularly flouted, were really dominant in the conduct of national affairs. It should keep many from forgetting that only ten years ago the country held something of that spirit of an heroic age which distinguishes a few periods of American history. In this respect it has the invigorating quality of a northwest wind.
For the production of the book Mr. Houston has drawn largely upon memoranda — often of Cabinet meetings — made immediately or soon after the occurrence of recorded events. His explanation of a confusion of tenses in the record as printed here falls short of justifying all the bewildering transitions from past to present. A more thorough editing of his material would have been advantageous, and this might well have been extended to the abridgment of quotations from documents and speeches and to a tendency, revealed especially in the concluding ‘ Estimate of Woodrow Wilson,’ towards straying from the matter under immediate consideration.
If these are shortcomings in the book, there are many virtues to offset them. The clear-sightedness, sagacity, and candor of Mr. Houston color its pages, and with admirable consequences. An ardent admirer, personally and politically, of Woodrow Wilson, Mr. Houston is by no means blind to elements in the nature and methods of his chief which worked to the damage of some of his efforts. With an equal frankness he records his disagreements with Wilson on matters of policy and his successes in influencing the President’s thought and action. Taken together with Colonel House’s recitals of instances in which his suggestions were adopted, the book should expunge finally the tradition of Wilson’s imperviousness to all advice.
When a group photograph of Wilson’s first Cabinet was taken in 1913, Mr. Houston noted on looking at it that ’it was not a bad-looking group of men,’ and proceeded to remark, ‘I decided without much difficulty that it was not a particularly able group of men — Cabinets seldom are.’ This is a characteristic bit of candor, followed by many others. The limitations of Bryan’s mind appalled him most of all, and, before Wilson had quite decided on the appointment of Bryan’s successor, this illuminating record is set down: ’He remarked that Lansing would not do, that he was not a big enough man, did not have enough imagination, and would not sufficiently vigorously combat or question his views, and that he was lacking in initiative.’
These are but typical fragments. Many others might be quoted — if this were more than the note it is— to illustrate the honesty of the book in its revelations, inspiring, pathetic, and occasionally humorous, of the achievements and defeats of Wilson, the President and the human being. It is a book destined to hold a significant and important place among the sources from which, with the cooling of opposing prejudices, the judgment of decades yet to come will be drawn.
M. A. DEWOLFE HOWE