““Had the European traveller chanced upon Philip Dru, Administrator, a novel published anonymously the previous year about an America of the near future, they might have felt their curiosity particularly aroused – or perhaps, on further inspection, they might have wished to get off the boat. Here was an American book with a strange and unlikely vision of the United States, imagining that country in 1920, and on the eve of a second civil war. They would not have realised that the New York address, ‘Mandell House’, given to the book’s hero, Philip Dru, provided the clue to its author: Texan businessman and Democratic Party fixer ‘Colonel’ Edward Mandell House (the military title was honorary). And only if they followed American politics extremely closely would the name have meant anything to them – it was that of the closest political adviser to the newly elected President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson.””
