The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page
by Burton J. Hendrick
Summary
Burton Hendrick built this biography around Walter Hines Page's own wartime correspondence, letters written from the American embassy in London between 1913 and Page's death in December 1918, using them to reconstruct an ambassador who became one of the most insistently pro British voices in Woodrow Wilson's circle. The book follows Page from his earlier career as a journalist and magazine editor, founder of the World's Work and a partner in the publishing house that carried authors like Rudyard Kipling, into a diplomatic post that put him at the center of Britain's urgent campaign to draw American resources, and eventually American troops, into a war Wilson spent years trying to keep the country out of.
Hendrick quotes Page's letters at length rather than paraphrasing them, letting an ambassador who felt his own government dangerously slow to grasp what was happening in Europe make his case in his own voice, sometimes agitated, sometimes eloquent, always certain that neutrality could not survive contact with the reality he watched unfold from London. The book covers Page's role negotiating the sale of American war materials to Britain and his running argument with Washington over how closely the United States should align itself with the Allied cause, an argument Page pursued for years before Congress finally declared war in 1917.
Reading it means encountering diplomacy through one man's urgent, often frustrated private correspondence rather than through official communiques, and it suits a reader interested in how the war looked from inside an American embassy that increasingly saw itself as an advocate rather than a neutral observer. Hendrick's method, building the narrative almost entirely from Page's own letters, gives the book an intimacy unusual for a study of high level diplomacy, though it also means the reader mostly sees the war through Page's own conviction that America's entry was not just likely but right.
Historical Context & Significance
Doubleday, Page and Company published Hendrick's biography in two volumes in 1922, with a third volume of Page's letters to Woodrow Wilson following in 1925, and the first two won the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, honoring a book built on unusually direct access to a major diplomat's private papers. Page had died only a few years earlier, and the biography arrived while memory of the war, and of the debate over American intervention, was still immediate for most of its readers.
Hendrick returned to Page's life six years later with The Training of an American, a companion volume covering the years before the ambassadorship this book leaves largely unexamined, and that second book won its own Pulitzer in 1929, an unusual instance of one biographer receiving two separate prizes for two halves of the same life. Together the two books remain the fullest documentary record of Page's career, built almost entirely from his own letters rather than from later historical assessment.