Mr. Wilson's War

by John Dos Passos

  “By the election to office of men who will refuse to submit to it … and by pitiless publicity,” Wilson replied. He answered the nineteen questions frankly. Sometimes he agreed with Record. Sometimes he didn’t.

  By the time election day came around Woodrow Wilson had appropriated a large part of George Record’s progressive platform: state control of utilities, workingmen’s compensation, a corrupt practices act and even the direct election of United States senators. In every speech he was drawing cheers from the crowds by attacking the privileges of entrenched corporations and by harrying the political bosses.

  He had been developing his flair for carrying day to day politics up into the epic sphere:

  “We have begun a fight that, it may be, will take many a generation to complete,” he announced in his ringing tenor voice that so effortlessly filled the hall during his address that closed the campaign at Newark. “No man would wish to sit idly by and lose the opportunity to take part in such a struggle. All through the centuries there has been this slow painful struggle forward, forward, up, up, a little at a time, along the entire incline, the interminable way …”

  Listening to his candidate’s speeches Boss Smith seems to have been torn between admiration for the “Presbyterian priest’s” political skill and dismay at what he was saying. When his friends shook their heads he called it confidently “great campaign play.” He thought he had the professor in his pocket.

  Wilson was elected by a majority of almost fifty thousand. To everyone’s amazement he carried with him a Democratic majority in the lower house of what had been considered a firmly Republican legislature.

  Every successful politician learns from his audiences. Wilson had been learning fast during the campaign. One thing he learned was that the bosses needed him more than he needed the bosses. The reform tide was rising.

  He meant exactly what he said when, in the final speech at Newark, he announced in the vibrant voice that stirred listeners to the marrow of their bones: “If I am elected governor I shall have been elected leader of my party … If the Democratic Party does not understand it that way, then I want to say to you very frankly that the Democratic Party ought not to elect me governor.”

  Part of his agreement with Smith when Wilson accepted his tender of the nomination had been, so Wilson’s supporters claimed, that Smith, who had left Washington in bad odor after his previous term, should not try to get the legislature to elect him to the Senate again.

  A reform enactment, part of the nationwide campaign for the direct election of United States senators, had established a senatorial primary in New Jersey. The designate was a gentleman known as “Farmer Jim” Martine, an old tubthumper in the Bryan style whose name was put on the ticket largely because no one else thought it worthwhile to run.

  Now after Wilson’s victory, the Democrats were sure to elect whomever they picked for senator. So James Smith changed his mind and announced that the primary didn’t mean a thing and that he would run for election. Meanwhile he suggested, pointedly, that the professor needed a rest after a strenuous campaign. Why didn’t he go back to Old Lyme for a vacation?

  The professor did no such thing. Instead he travelled about the state, dropping in on his newfound friends, the progressives, and asking them whether he ought to come out for Martine or let Smith have his way. He found young Tumulty, who had been such a help in the populous eastern counties, acting as Martine’s campaign manager.

  Jim Kerney and the whole band of progressive newspapermen who had become Wilson’s warmest adherents admitted that Martine was a fool, but claimed that, since he’d been nominated by popular vote, if they believed in their principles as true Democrats they had no choice but to send him to the Senate. They urged Wilson to come out against Smith.

  The governor-elect made quite a show of calling on the party bosses at their homes to try to argue them out of supporting Smith’s candidacy. The bosses answered that they had given Smith their word. Wilson went to see Smith himself and argued with him for two hours.

  The conversation was civil, because Smith was a civilspoken man, but he insisted he wanted to go to Washington. He’d left a bad impression last time. This time he’d do better. He wanted another chance for his boys’ sake. He laughed off Wilson’s threat to come out against him. They parted political enemies.

  Wilson issued a dignified statement against Smith and promptly invaded the machine’s own bailiwick in Jersey City. Before an uproarious meeting he described the political bosses as warts on the body politic. “It is not a capital process to cut off a wart. You don’t have to go to the hospital and take an anaesthetic. The thing can be done while you wait …”

  Wilson’s speeches were widely reported by the New York press, and reprinted by local newspapers from Texas to California. Martine’s campaign for senator became a national issue.

  The senatorial election was the new legislature’s first business. The whole country was watching to see who would come out on top, the schoolmaster in politics, only inaugurated in his first political post a week before, or the man who had bossed New Jersey for years.

  Using all the old blarney, with the brass knuckles hidden under the kid glove Boss Smith confidently mobilized his troops. While Smith’s henchmen poured out whiskey for the faithful in the famous old room 100 of the Trenton House, Wilson and Tumulty sat up all night keeping tab on their supporters from the executive offices. Their only weapon was the telephone.

  On the day of the vote Smith’s cohorts paraded through Trenton with a brass band and were reviewed by the Big Fellow himself from the steps of the hotel. Everybody who could be reached had been reached. Smith was confident.

  When the two houses voted separately Martine lacked one vote of a majority. Next day he was elected in joint session. Only three men voted for Smith.

  “I pitied Smith at the last,” Wilson wrote his friend Mrs. Peck, with whom ever since Bermuda he had carried on a brisk and, later slanderers to the contrary, platonic correspondence. “It was plain he had few real friends, that he held men by fear and power and the benefits he could bestow, not by love or loyalty or any genuine devotion. The minute it was seen that he was defeated his adherents began to desert him like rats leaving a sinking ship. He left Trenton, (where his headquarters had at first been crowded) attended, I am told, only by his sons, and looking old and broken … It is a pitiless game …—and for me it has only begun.”

  The Pitiless Game

  Wilson was proving himself, for an amateur, remarkably adept. Turning the tables on Boss Smith did him more good politically than all the “glittering generalities beautifully phrased” of his campaign speeches.

  Bryan Democrats and progressive Republicans were alike smarting over their failure to attain national leadership. Bryan had beaten his head against a wall. Roosevelt had gone off to Africa and let his party fall back into the hands of the reactionaries. La Follette was tied to the middlewest. Hiram Johnson was local to California. Here was a reformer stepping down from the high sphere of academic wisdom. He seemed to mean what he said. The muckraking journals applauded him from coast to coast.

  The professionals, to be sure, saw Governor Wilson in a less favorable light. When he heard of Smith’s misadventures old Boss Croker of New York is reported to have growled: “An ingrate in politics is no good.”

  The Wilsons were rapidly becoming professionals themselves. Ellen Wilson struck up a friendship with Joe Tumulty who was already the indispensable adjutant. Between them they kept the governor informed on local politics. She subscribed to all the papers and began to keep a scrapbook of clippings that had to do with her husband’s presidential candidacy.

  It wasn’t easy for her after the pleasant academic years to become a politician’s wife. Moving out of Prospect into cramped quarters at the Princeton Inn was a wrench. The girls hated hotel life. Of course what Woodrow wanted Ellen wanted but she couldn’t help repining a little. She confided in Jim Kerney that she feared it was the end of the “happy ho
me days” when she would play the piano evenings while her husband sang college songs with the girls. “That kind of joy is largely over for us.”

  Wilson was oblivious of everything except the task in hand. He had to make himself a record as a modern liberal and he had to do it fast. Up to now his liberalism had been distinctly of the Manchester school. He had preached in his courses the beauties of the English Constitution. Along with the great Britishers he’d admired as a young man he had been for free trade and against wars of aggression and for limiting the powers of government. Like Bright and Cobden he had been suspicious of government interference in such things as the wages and hours of labor. In the name of Southern chivalry he had scoffed at women’s suffrage. Now the word liberal was beginning to be applied to a set of tenets that would have made Gladstone’s hackles rise.

  Wilson was going to school with the progressives. For the first time in his life he had discovered the people. The vested interests, as represented by the wealthy Princeton alumni who had opposed his plans, had given him a hard time. Now he found great exhilaration in addressing halls full of plain uneducated people right off the streetcorners. They thrilled to his words; he thrilled to them. The people must rule.

  He made a friend of George L. Record. He set himself to learn about the legislation the reformers hoped would take local and state governments, and eventually the national government, away from the vested interests and their hired politicians, and restore control to the voters. These measures were already being tried out. Hadn’t James Bryce written, somewhat puzzled, after a recent trip through the United States, that rapid changes were causing him to revise some of his views of American government? These were currents of day to day life that the professor had ignored during his years in the academic backwater.

  The day before his inauguration Wilson attended a meeting that George Record organized at the Hotel Martinique in New York for progressive assemblymen of both parties to map out a program for the coming session. Record read the project for an election law setting up direct primaries as a means of ridding New Jersey of boss control. He outlined a stiff corrupt practices act, a law to regulate public utilities such as Governor Hughes had put through in New York and a workingmen’s compensation act. By the time Governor Wilson took the train to Princeton that night he had made Record’s program his own.

  In an extraordinary burst of activity, the new governor, taking advantage of the mantle of invincibility he had worn since the defeat of Boss Smith, rammed the most important items through the legislature in three months. Record furnished drafts of the bills and Wilson and Tumulty sat in the executive office and saw to it that the assemblymen did the right thing.

  The oldtimers were aghast. Smith was so shaken he stayed home. When Nugent, who had worked so hard for Wilson’s election, tried to stack the cards against the new legislation in a Democratic caucus, the governor announced that as leader of the party he had the right to attend. He lectured the Democratic legislators for three hours on civic duty. Boss Smith threatened to have him impeached, but Wilson had convinced the assembly that the voters expected reform. He threatened to expose to public wrath any man who stood in the way of the people’s will. With Record and his friends doing the paperwork, in spite of a continuous outcry from Boss Smith’s personal press and collusion between the Republican and Democratic machines, the bills were drafted and passed.

  Getting them approved by the state senate was a fresh problem. The senate was still in Republican hands. Wilson used all his charm, all his humor, all his felicity of phrase to woo the state senators as he had wooed the undergraduates at Princeton. He invited them to his office, he attended their banquets.

  In a letter to Mrs. Peck he described himself as joining one senator in a cakewalk. “We pranced together to the content of the whole company. I am on easy and delightful terms with all the Senators. They know me for something else than an ambitious dictator.” By April 23, 1911, he was able to write her: “I got absolutely everything I strove for—and more besides … Everyone, the papers included, are saying that none of it could have been done, if it had not been for my influence and tact and hold upon the people … The result was as complete a victory as has ever been won, I venture to say, in the history of the country.”

  The news of Governor Wilson’s performance at Trenton spread over the nation’s newsstands. William Jennings Bryan who, in spite of his three defeats for the presidency, still considered himself leader of the popular wing of the Democratic Party, wrote to inquire how such things could be. How could a man sponsored by Colonel Harvey, whom Bryan considered an errandboy from the Morgan office, turn out a progressive? To try Governor Wilson’s sincerity, he suggested that he endorse the constitutional amendment for a federal income tax. Governor Wilson promptly obliged with a special message to the legislature. The Commoner was “gratified.”

  The Commoner

  Bryan at fifty was a disappointed man. In spite of Mrs. Bryan’s leavening good sense, a shrewish tone was creeping into his exhortations to righteousness. His religious fundamentalism, his ranting against the demon rum, and war, and imperialism, and high finance, and vested privilege, began to pall even on the Chautauqua circuits. The great speeches had been so often repeated they had lost their savor. The voice was losing its resonance. But, even in his decline William Jennings Bryan remained the embodiment of the aspirations of the plain people, and the most powerful single factor in Democratic politics.

  The situation was ticklish. In his academic days Professor Wilson had hardly let pass an opportunity to hold the crude notions of the cornbelt demagogue up to ridicule. He had once refused to share a platform with him. The two men had never met. Bryan had to be conciliated.

  Ellen Wilson, who was using all her gentle housewifely guile to advance her husband’s political fortunes, made the first move. When she discovered that Bryan was coming to Princeton to deliver an address on Faith to the theological seminary, she invited him to dinner and wired Woodrow, who was off lecturing in Georgia, to come home at once.

  The evening was a success. Bryan, whose lips never touched liquor, was a colossal trencherman. The Princeton Inn did its best. Instead of talking politics the men swapped stories. The Commoner announced himself afterwards as charmed by the governor’s gaiety and nimblemindedness and captivated by Mrs. Wilson. The governor wrote Mrs. Peck that he found in Bryan force of personality and sincerity and conviction. Tumulty who had been hovering in the lobby rushed up to Mrs. Wilson after the guests had left, his blue eyes popping. “You’ve nominated your husband,” he said. She smiled and answered that she hadn’t done a thing.

  When, three weeks later, both men appeared on the same platform at Burlington, Wilson paid Bryan a handsome compliment: “It is because he has cried ‘America awake’ that other men have been able to transform into action the doctrines he so diligently preached.”

  Professor Wilson’s Travelling Fellowship

  The presidentmakers were buzzing. A Princeton graduate from Arkansas named William McCombs, who practiced law in New York and dabbled in Tammany politics, opened a small office on lower Broadway to nourish the Wilson boom. Wilson insisted on calling it his literary bureau. McCombs was financed by Cleveland Dodge, Walter Hines Page, the publisher, and a few other of Wilson’s old admirers from Princeton days. Between them they organized a western lecture tour for the governor right after the windup of that first triumphant session of the New Jersey legislature. The Schoolmaster in Politics must be shown to the country.

  Wilson, who had never been west of Colorado, spent the month of May lecturing in the mountain states and on the Pacific coast. In Kansas City, on the way out, he was so carried away by the progressive atmosphere that he came out for the initiative, referendum and recall, and talking to newspapermen, barely stopped short of the recall of the judiciary. Some of his eastern backers set up such a doleful clamor at the news that he promptly dropped these inflammatory expressions from his vocabulary.

  He spoke in Denver on
a Sunday. Since he had scruples against talking politics on the Sabbath, he harangued twelve thousand people in the auditorium on the Holy Bible and sent them away so fired with enthusiasm that when next morning the first long distance phone connections were opened between New York and Denver, and the Times reporter asked what the news was, the answer came that the town was wild over Woodrow Wilson and was booming him for President.

  Wilson was applauded in Los Angeles and San Francisco. He hobnobbed with the progressive leaders of the Northwest He travelled eight thousand miles and delivered thirtyfive speeches. The facile enthusiasm of western audiences warmed his heart. He began to admit publicly that indeed he was out for the presidency.

  On the long trainride east to Minneapolis he told the reporter for the Baltimore Sun that he had been waiting to weigh the results of this trip. Now he felt that the response was such that if he could get the nomination he could surely be elected: “It’s an awful thing to be President of the United States … I mean just what I say. It means giving up nearly everything that one holds dear … In spite of what I said to you I do want to be President and I will tell you why: I want this country to have a President who will do certain things … I am sure that I will at least try to the utmost to do them.”

  His final address, at Lincoln, Nebraska, in William Jennings Bryan’s home bailiwick, was a rousing appeal to businessmen to forget their own selfish interests and to work for the public good. Men jumped to their feet and clapped and cheered. Charles Bryan, the Commoner’s banker brother, came across with a check to help defray the expenses of Governor Wilson’s campaign.

  Back in Trenton the governor discovered, with some chagrin, that an article in the state constitution, which he hadn’t had time to peruse, made it impossible for the state controller to pay him his salary for the days he had spent out of the state. The president of the senate, sworn in as acting governor in his stead, had received his paycheck. The senator generously endorsed the check back to Wilson and continued to do so during all the many absences from duty made necessary by his new career as presidential timber.