Later that August, Wilson managed to get away to a country home in Cornish, New Hampshire, called Harlakenden House, a large Georgian residence overlooking the Connecticut River on which he held a two-summer lease. Wilson’s friend Col. Edward House came to join him and was struck by the depth of his sorrow. At one point as they talked about Ellen, the president, his eyes welling, told House that he “felt like a machine that had run down, and there was nothing in him worth while.” The president, House wrote in his diary, “looked forward to the next two and a half years with dread. He did not see how he could go through with it.”
There were crises on all fronts. The United States was still in the grip of a recession now in its second year. The South in particular suffered. Cotton, its main product, had been transported mainly on foreign vessels, but the war had brought an acute shortage of ships, whose owners, fearing submarine attack, kept them in port; the belligerents, meanwhile, commandeered their own merchant ships for military use. Now millions of bales of cotton piled up on southern wharves. There was labor trouble as well. The United Mine Workers of America were on strike in Colorado. The preceding April, the state had sent a force of National Guard troops to break the strike, resulting in a massacre at Ludlow, Colorado, that left two dozen men, women, and children dead. Meanwhile, south of the border, violence and unrest continued to plague Mexico.
Wilson’s great fear, however, was that America might somehow find itself drawn into the war in Europe. That the war had begun at all was a dark amazement, for it had seemed to come from nowhere. At the start of that beautiful summer of 1914, one of the sunniest Europe would ever see, there had been no sign of war and no obvious wish for it. On June 27, the day before Europe began its slide into chaos, newspaper readers in America found only the blandest of news. The lead story on the front page of the New York Times was about Columbia University at last winning the intercollegiate rowing regatta, after nineteen years of failure. A Grape-Nuts ad dealt with warfare, but of the schoolyard variety, extolling the cereal’s value in helping children prevail in fistfights: “Husky bodies and stout nerves depend—more often than we think—on the food eaten.” And the Times’ society page named dozens of New York socialites, including a Guggenheim and a Wanamaker, who were scheduled to sail for Europe that day, on the Minneapolis, the Caledonia, the Zeeland, and two German-owned ships, the Prinz Friedrich Wilhelm and the gigantic Imperator, 24 feet longer than the Titanic.
In Europe, kings and high officials set off for their country homes. Kaiser Wilhelm would soon board his yacht, the Hohenzollern, to begin a cruise of the fjords of Norway. The president of France, Raymond Poincaré, and his foreign minister departed by ship for a state visit to Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, who had moved to his summer palace. Winston Churchill, forty years old and already Britain’s top naval official, First Lord of the Admiralty, went to the beach, a home in Cromer on the North Sea, 100 miles north of London, where he joined his wife, Clementine, and his children.
In England, the lay public was transfixed, not by any prospect of war, but by Sir Ernest Shackleton’s planned expedition to the Antarctic in the square-rigger Endurance, set to depart August 8 from Plymouth, on Britain’s southeast coast. In Paris, the big fascination was the trial of Henriette Caillaux, wife of former prime minister Joseph Caillaux, arrested for killing the editor of the Paris newspaper Le Figaro after the newspaper had published an intimate letter that the prime minister had written to her before their marriage, when they were having an adulterous affair. Enraged, Mrs. Caillaux bought a gun, practiced with it at the gunsmith’s shop, then went to the editor’s office and fired six times. In her testimony, offering an unintended metaphor for what was soon to befall Europe, she said, “These pistols are terrible things. They go off by themselves.” She was acquitted, after persuading the court that the murder was a crime of passion.