Edward M. House

 

I have a bachelor’s degree in history, so I like to think I have a fairly good grasp of the important figures in our past. I’ve known since my college days that Edward M. House was Woodrow Wilson’s right-hand man in foreign affairs. He was the President’s envoy to Europe before the US entered WWI. He helped develop Wilson’s Fourteen Points and the League of Nations Charter. He was definitely a key figure in foreign affairs in WWI.

Here's a Wikipedia article on his story.

For some reason I thought he was a Tennessean, but after looking through Jesse Ziegler’s book, “Wave of the Gulf,” I learned I was wrong. House was technically a Houstonian, but he had very close connections to Fort Bend County.

His story goes back to Jonathan Dawson Waters, who was reputed to be the richest man in Fort Bend County before the Civil War. He had a large plantation he called Arcola, near the present-day town of that name. He grew cotton and sugar cane. Waters went broke after the war, and Edward’s father, Thomas House, bought the plantation and amassed a fortune of his own. Edward spent a lot of time roaming the plantation before attending Houston Academy in the 1880s and then Cornell University in the 1890s.

House wasn’t much of a student, but he was apparently an astute guy. He was a close friend of James Hogg and played an instrumental role in Hogg’s hotly-contested gubernatorial campaign in 1892. Hogg was re-elected and so pleased that he bestowed the honorific rank of 'Colonel' on House.  He was forever after known as Colonel House.  

The Colonel spent time in Texas politics until 1904 when he moved up to national politics. He'd met Woodrow Wilson, and they hit it off from the start. House became an informal, but key advisor in Wilson’s administration, especially in the field of foreign affairs.

Wilson had a stroke in the last year of his administration. He went into seclusion, and his wife Edith essentially became president. She and House didn’t play well together, so his role in the Wilson administration came to an abrupt end. He lived until 1938. Although a life-long Democrat, House had serious concerns about the New Deal, but he never made them public.