Philip Dru: Administrator: A Story of Tomorrow, 1920-1935 - Softcover

House, Edward Mandell

Softcover

ISBN 10: 143441633X ISBN 13: 9781434416339

Publisher: WP, 2010

Synopsis

"Philip Dru: Administrator: a Story of Tomorrow, 1920-1935" is a futuristic political novel published anonymously in 1912 by Edward Mandell House, an American diplomat, politician and presidential foreign policy advisor. His book's hero leads the democratic western U.S. in a civil war against the plutocratic East, and becomes the dictator of America. Dru as dictator imposes a series of reforms that resemble the Bull Moose platform of 1912 and then vanishes.

About this title

About the Author:

Edward Mandell House (July 26, 1858 March 28, 1938) was an American diplomat, politician, and presidential advisor. Commonly known by the purely honorific title of Colonel House, although he had no military experience, he had enormous personal influence with U.S. President Woodrow Wilson as his foreign policy advisor until Wilson removed him in 1919.

Review:

"...one difference between House and other authors of fantasy fiction was his attempts to put his principles into practice by insinuating himself at the right hand of power. Another was that House responded to political developments in terms of his own utopian fiction. Time and again in his diary House recorded events and related them to passages in Dru. Indeed, he was so pleased with apparent correlations that he later allowed his biographer to reveal his secret identity as Dru's author. His imaginary hero enacted tariff reduction, graduated income tax, and something akin to a federal reserve system, all of which became law under Wilson--without the dictatorship."
--Charles Seymour, The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, vol. 1 1926

"House never lost touch with his fictional hero. For example, in March 1917, while ruminating over the probability of a U.S. declaration of war with Germany, House wrote in his diary, "Philip Dru expresses my thoughts and aspirations .... Perhaps the most valuable work I have done in that direction has been in influencing the president." Two months later he proposed that Britain allow America to take an option on British battleships after the war in return for the United States building destroyers to defeat the German submarine menace. While awaiting British approval, which never came, he wrote, "This plan touches closely upon the proposal I made in Philip Dru." In his book, the United States and England welcome Germany as an equal partner in an alliance, thus cementing "the comity of nations, a lasting and beneficent peace, and the acceptance of the principle of the brotherhood of man." This was certainly a far cry from the actual wartime situation in 1917."
--House Diary, 19 May 1917

About this edition

• Publisher: WP
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 143441633X
• ISBN 13: 9781434416339
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 168