page_title: Edward M. House
section_title: Texas business and politics
hierarchical_section_title: Edward M. House / Texas business and politics
caption_attribution_description: English: An Onlooker in France 1917-1919, by Sir William Orpen, K.B.E., R.A., Plate LXXXV. (c) 1921, published by Williams and Norgate, London.
context_page_description: Edward Mandell House was an American diplomat, and an advisor to President Woodrow Wilson. He was known by the nickname Colonel House, although he had performed no military service. He was a highly influential back-stage politician in Texas before becoming a key supporter of the presidential bid of Wilson in 1912. Having a self-effacing manner, he did not hold office but was an "executive agent", Wilson's chief advisor on European politics and diplomacy during World War I and at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. In 1919 Wilson, suffering from a series of small strokes, broke with House and many other top advisors, believing they had deceived him at Paris.
context_section_description: On his return to Texas, House ran his family's business. He eventually sold the cotton plantations, and invested in banking. He was a founder of the Trinity and Brazos Valley Railway.  House moved to New York City about 1902.
  In 1912, House published anonymously a novel called Philip Dru: Administrator, in which the title character leads the democratic western U.S. in a civil war against the plutocratic East, becoming the dictator of America. Dru as dictator imposes a series of reforms which resemble the Bull Moose platform of 1912 and then vanishes.
  House helped to make four men governor of Texas: James S. Hogg (1892), Charles A. Culberson (1894), Joseph D. Sayers (1898), and S. W. T. Lanham (1902). After their elections, House acted as unofficial advisor to each.  In 1893, Hogg appointed House to his military staff with the rank of lieutenant colonel, a position which came with a title but no actual military responsibilities.  He was reappointed by Culberson, Sayers, and Lanham, and was soon known as "Colonel House," the title which he used for the rest of his career.
  A "cosmopolitan progressive" who examined political developments in Europe, House was an admirer of the British Liberal welfare reforms instigated between 1906 and 1914, noting to a friend in June 1911 that David Lloyd George
  is working out the problems which are nearest my heart and that is the equalization of opportunity …. The income tax, the employers' liability act, the old age pension measure, the budget of last year and this insurance bill puts England well to the fore. We have touched these problems in America but lightly as yet but the soil is fallow.
caption: Edward M. House, from An Onlooker in France 1917–1919 by William Orpen, 1921. Plate LXXXV
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