Colonel House? Can anyone recommend a good book?

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

I seek something in the moderately paranoid range(US); if not on House a book with a lot of good stuff on him would be good also. It would be good if the book mentioned something besides the Federal Reserve Bank, although I suspect it will have to be an ingredient, and am far from allergic.

[Peter McKenna]

I seek something in the moderately paranoid range(US); if not on House a book with a lot of good stuff on him would be good also. It would be good if the book mentioned something besides the Federal Reserve Bank, although I suspect it will have to be an ingredient, and am far from allergic.

I would suggest reading any books documenting the birth of the Council on Foreign Relations.

[Paul Rigby]

I seek something in the moderately paranoid range(US); if not on House a book with a lot of good stuff on him would be good also. It would be good if the book mentioned something besides the Federal Reserve Bank, although I suspect it will have to be an ingredient, and am far from allergic.

Nat,

Try Michael Wala's The Council on Foreign Relations & American Foreign Policy in the Early Cold War (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1994) - it contains a very extensive bibliography. Beware, though, for the rear cover blurb informs us that the author "previously edited Allen Dulles' The Marshall Plan (1993)." Nice.

From memory, House was enthusiastic about Hitler & Mussolini. If I can remember source(s), will let you know. He also flits in and out - mostly "out" of the indices - of any number of books on the "left-wing" luminaries backing FDR.

Paul

[Ronald R. Williams]

I seek something in the moderately paranoid range(US); if not on House a book with a lot of good stuff on him would be good also. It would be good if the book mentioned something besides the Federal Reserve Bank, although I suspect it will have to be an ingredient, and am far from allergic.

Nathaniel,

There is a new biography (I haven’t read it), Woodrow Wilson's Right Hand : The Life of Colonel Edward M. House, by Godfrey Hodgson. (2006). The one review on Amazon says good starting reference but too short “to do justice to House’s legacy.”

It’s been quite a while since I read it but I thought this valuable: Road to War: America 1914 – 1917, by Walter Millis, 1935.

Forum member Anton Chaitkin’s Treason in America: From Aaron Burr to Averell Harriman has this on House:

(after the collapse of the Maximilian regime in Mexico-rw) Most of the high-ranking Confederates in Mexico drifted back into the United States, where many of them simply reentered the mainstream of American life. In fact there was no accounting done, no sorting out, no “Nuremberg Trials” for the insurrection of 1861, which killed more than a half-million Americans—more than died in both of the World Wars.

A particularly chilling example of the failure of post-Lincoln Americans to appreciate the nature of the Rebellion is the case of Edward House. His father Thomas House was a British merchant who came to the Texas province of Mexico in the 1830s. The elder House did not stick by Sam Houston when Houston fought against Secession; Thomas House made a fortune as a British national, carrying guns from Britain through the Union blockade to Texas. After the Rebellion was defeated Thomas House returned to England and educated his son Edward at Bath. Years later, the young man returned to America to tend his father’s cotton plantations; he despised the United States as an enemy land, retained a fierce loyalty to Great Britain. This was “Colonel” House, who directed the foreign policy and much of the domestic affairs of the United States during the administration of President Woodrow Wilson…the years of the World War and the League of Nations... (pp 258-259)

The following are items from Lloyd Miller’s old A-Albionic book catalog:

British-American Relations, 1917-1918: The Role of Sir William Wiseman by W. B. Fowler, 1969…

Intriguing Establishment account of the intimate relationship between Sir William Wiseman and the notorious Colonel House.

Philip Dru: Administrator--A Story of Tomorrow 1920-1935; by Anonymous, 1912…

"Colonel" Edward Mandell House was eventually revealed as the author of this novel by Yale Professor Seymour's Intimate Papers of Colonel House. Seymour revealed that House would hand the book to influential people with the words, "This might interest you." House (Woodrow Wilson's "Kissinger", founder of the CFR, Federal Reserve System advocate, Income Tax advocate, WWI enthusiast, and Kuhn-Loeb associate) presented in the form of a novel, the actual rationale and program by which the welfare-warfare statism (veiled as socialism as dreamed by Karl Marx) required by the "Imperial Crisis" presented Britain by Germany was to be substituted for traditional American individual liberties and isolationism. We are still living in this novel.

The Intimate Papers of Colonel House: Volumes I, II, III and IV, by Charles Seymour

Ron W

Edited December 9, 2007 by Ronald R. Williams

[Paul Rigby]

From memory, House was enthusiastic about Hitler & Mussolini. If I can remember source(s), will let you know. He also flits in and out - mostly "out" of the indices - of any number of books on the "left-wing" luminaries backing FDR.

Colonel House, Gruening and the New Deal

Robert David Johnson. Ernest Gruening and the American Dissenting Tradition (Harvard University Press, 1998), p.103:

“Colonel Edward House, whom, like Frankfurter, he knew from the campaign to end the occupation of Haiti…House no longer possessed the influence he had enjoyed as Wilson’s most intimate adviser on international affairs, although during the early New Deal he functioned as something akin to the progressive conscience of the era.”

Robert David Johnson. Ernest Gruening and the American Dissenting Tradition (Harvard University Press, 1998), pp.125-6:

In February 1935, Gruening, depressed by the FDR government’s insufficient progressivism, voiced his disillusion to Harold Ickes, who suggested “Gruening go to New York to see their mutual friend, Colonel House…House suggested the possibility of a conference of progressives in Washington…Upon his return to the capital, he met Frankfurter, who informed him that plans for such a gathering were already in the works; its agenda foreshadowed many of the programs associated with the Second New Deal of 1935.”

Robert David Johnson. Ernest Gruening and the American Dissenting Tradition (Harvard University Press, 1998), p.114:

“…the Frankfurter bloc’s ideological rival Rexford Tugwell, who hoped to structure a planned economy for the island as a model for his desired reforms in the United States…”

Colonel House and the utility of the Bolsheviks

From Preparata's tour de force, Conjuring Hitler, p.35:

“Colonel House, privy counsellor of US President Woodrow Wilson and always a pragmatic supporter of Bolshevism, offered in late 1917 the rationale for the West’s conspiratorial endorsement of the otherwise repugnant (to Western Liberalism) Bolshevik Communism:

‘It is often overlooked that the Russian Revolution, inspired as if by deep hatred of autocracy, contains within it…great motives of serious danger to German domination: [for example], anti-capitalist feeling, which would be fully as intense, or more intense, against German capitalism…”(78)

p.271, n78: N. Gordon-Levin, Jr. Woodrow Wilson and World Politics: America’s Response to War and Revolution (Oxford UP, 1968), p.60.

[Paul Rigby]

Forum member Anton Chaitkin’s Treason in America: From Aaron Burr to Averell Harriman has this on House:

A particularly chilling example of the failure of post-Lincoln Americans to appreciate the nature of the Rebellion is the case of Edward House. His father Thomas House was a British merchant who came to the Texas province of Mexico in the 1830s. The elder House did not stick by Sam Houston when Houston fought against Secession; Thomas House made a fortune as a British national, carrying guns from Britain through the Union blockade to Texas. After the Rebellion was defeated Thomas House returned to England and educated his son Edward at Bath. Years later, the young man returned to America to tend his father’s cotton plantations; he despised the United States as an enemy land, retained a fierce loyalty to Great Britain. This was “Colonel” House, who directed the foreign policy and much of the domestic affairs of the United States during the administration of President Woodrow Wilson…the years of the World War and the League of Nations... [/color](pp 258-259)

Not convinced by the suggestion that House was an agent of perfidious Albion.

R. Palme Dutt. World Politics 1918-1936 (London: Victor Gollancz, 1936), pp.59-60:

“In 1919-1921 the Anglo-American antagonism flared up at a reckless pace. Already in 1919 Colonel House could report to President Wilson (on July 30th, 1919):

‘Almost as soon as I arrived in England, I felt an antagonism to the United States…The relations of the two countries are beginning to assume the same character as that of England and German before the war.’

The sharpest expression of this conflict was the naval building race which developed in 1919-21 (the conflict in fact ranged over all fields, notably oil, was in the sharp Curzon-Colby correspondence in 1920 over San Remo and Mesopotamian oil).”

Dutt goes on to note Lloyd George’s desperate attempt – what complete buffoons the Round Tablers were – to persuade Wilson at Versailles to agree to the preservation of British naval supremacy. The Round Table puppet’s position was summarised by a manifestly unsympathetic US Secretary of the Navy, Daniels, thus: Unless the US ends its naval expansion programme, London won’t support the League of Nations.

Dutt notes that the British were unsuccessful, and, in 1920, “began to climb down and announced a One-Power Standard” (Ibid., p.60). A year later, the US “summoned the Washington Conference….and was able to compel the acceptance by Britain of naval parity in capital ships, the acceptance by Japan of a three-fifths ratio, and the abandonment of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. This victory of the United States was one without a battle on the strength of its superior economic and financial resources” (Ibid., p.61).

[Paul Rigby]

From memory, House was enthusiastic about Hitler & Mussolini...

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-21058925.html

“House's 1912 novel, Philip Dru, provides much insight into House's fantasy life. In it he created a role-model administrator whom he sought to emulate. The novel also displays contempt for democratic processes, a taste for violence, and admiration for benevolent authoritarianism. House's protagonist, a young West Point graduate who, like House, suffers from frail health, quits the army to become a social critic. After overthrowing the U.S. government in a brief and bloody "Second Civil War" Dru disbands Congress and installs himself as a de facto dictator, keeping the president only as a figurehead. He institutes popular reforms, including some that smack of fascism: Strikes are outlawed, but labor is compensated by representation in a government-management-labor syndicate that eerily foreshadows Mussolini's Italian corporativism. House himself later compared Dru to Mussolini, while praising the Fascist strongman's ability and courage.(10)”

(10) Edward House, "Does America Need a Dictator?" Liberty, 7 January 1933, 6.

[Robert Howard]

Although I believe the gamut of literature regarding Colonel House has been pretty much explored, there is one other book, that is worth recommending, and that is......

Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House - A Personality Study - Alexander L. George & Juliette George

Dover Publications Inc, 1964 ISBN - 0-486-21144-4

The appeal of this book in my view is that it is a definitive scholarly work, which succeeds in analyzing, not only the personalities and motivations of the two, but in illuminating the realpolitik of a very turbulent situation, since Wilson's "go it alone" approach with regards to working with Congress and the political heavyweights of his day, ultimately destroyed the possibility of the United States being a member of the League of Nations.

In the current epoch the League of Nations, and the United Nations together are viewed through two different prisms, one being a sinister instrument to implement a New Order ultimately doing away with the nation state which has been the paradigm of governance since the Treaty of Vienna, while the other is, arguably the predominating view, which is that progress demands such a body, as a means to eliminate the possibility to what was called Mutually Assured Destruction [MAD].

My only comment regarding these two views is that ultimately humanity finds a way to take an honorable conceptualization and turn it into something obscene, in my worldview the role of Colonel Mandell House bears a striking similarity to Karl Rove, not ideologically, but in the sense that such an unknown commodity can ascend to such lofty heights as being a President's right-hand man, if you will.

If I had the power to create a vast change in the manner in which the world operates, it would be to articulate the hidden, and not so hidden forces that control, the world as we do not know it.

To illustrate my point, I would mention that in the period between the 1700's through the mid twentieth century, whenever a dictatorship, or a tyrant has assumed power, one of the first order's of business was to "round-up the intellectuals." Over the last sixty years in America, there has been speculation that if such a thing were to happen here it would be less overt but achieve the same ends.

I submit that is what is happening in America today, because what few checks and balances in this country

existed, have been eviscerated. My first hint that something of this nature was happening took place after 9-11 when I began reading that several members of the Republican Party were joining the American Civil Liberties Union. The warning signs started years before that, and ironically enough it was my lack of belief in a conspiracy that led me to discount the idea.