Edward Mandell House

He was born July 26, 1858, in Houston, Texas, the last of seven children of Mary Elizabeth (Shearn) and Thomas William House Sr. His father was an emigrant from England by way of New Orleans, who became a prominent Houston businessman, with a large role in developing the city and served a term as its mayor. His father sent ships laden with cotton to evade the Union blockade in the Gulf of Mexico during the American Civil War. He traded Texas cotton through Matamoros, Mexico, in exchange for equipment and ammunition.

As a young man, House and his companions harassed recently freed slaves verbally and with slingshots. His diary entries "consistently reveal a deeply felt racism" and a belief in white supremacy.

House attended Houston Academy, a school in Bath, England, a prep school in Virginia, and Hopkins Grammar School, New Haven, Connecticut.

He went on to study at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in 1877 where he was a member of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity. He left at the beginning of his third year to care for his sick father, who died in 1880.

He married Loulie Hunter on August 4, 1881.

In 1892, he built a residence in Austin, designed by the architect Frank Freeman, that came to be known as Edward Mandell House Mansion. After being used by the University of Texas, it was demolished in 1967.

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 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 adviser 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.

House moved to New York City about 1902. 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.

House's friend David F. Houston shared his interests in England and the continent, concluding in August 1911 that “England and Germany are doing many interesting things in a desirable socialistic direction. We shall follow slowly because of the newness of conditions here and the lack of pressure.”

In 1912, House anonymously published a novel called Philip Dru: Administrator, in which the title character leads the democratic western U.S. states in a civil war against plutocratic eastern U.S. states. Becoming a dictator, through gradual amelioration of social ills, through progressive taxation, universal suffrage, and reform of the country's laws and its national constitution, he moves the U.S. toward a “socialism as dreamed of by Karl Marx”. Dru's reforms resemble the "Bull Moose" policy platform of 1912.