Mr. Wilson's War

by John Dos Passos

  For the Republicans it was a spite fight. La Follette excoriated T.R. T.R. excoriated Taft. Taft, who had been heard to growl that even a rat would fight if cornered, fought back. The occasional haymakers T.R. delivered in the direction of the Democratic candidate, whom he had not yet begun wholeheartedly to detest, went wide of the mark.

  Liberty for the Oppressed

  The dramatic moment came in October in Milwaukee when a crazy man put a bullet into T.R. as he was about to step out of an automobile to enter the hall where he was going to speak. His life was saved by the fact that the bullet was deflected by his glasses case and by the thick wad of the manuscript of his speech in his inside pocket. One of the doctors who examined him and found the bullet lodged next to a lung remarked that the heavy chest muscles T.R. had spent his life developing had helped too. Having done his best to protect the assassin from the frantic crowd T.R. strode up to the platform and before he allowed anything to be done about the wound hoarsely delivered his speech. He waved the perforated manuscript before the crowd and cried: “It takes more than that to kill a bull moose.”

  Woodrow Wilson’s magnanimous gesture in calling off speaking engagements until Theodore Roosevelt’s recovery was assured brought him wide acclaim.

  As was the custom the campaigns culminated in Stanford White’s Madison Square Garden in New York. Fresh from his hospital bed, T.R. delivered a speech which expressed better than anything any of the candidates said the aspirations of a people stirred by ten years of crusading against privilege and corruption:

  “We are for human rights and intend to work for them. Where they can best be obtained by the application of the doctrine of states’ rights, we are for states’ rights. Where in order to obtain them, it is necessary to invoke the power of the Nation, then we shall invoke to its uttermost limits that mighty power. We are for liberty. But we are for the liberty of the oppressed, and not for the liberty of the oppressor to oppress the weak.”

  The standpat Republicans feared T.R. more than they feared Wilson. While their papers poured out abuse on Theodore Rex, as they called him, they gave the mild laissez-faire liberalism of the Schoolmaster in Politics respectful attention. In spite of the hymnsinging zeal of his followers it was already obvious that T.R.’s hastily improvised party could not win. The odds on Wall Street were six to one on Wilson.

  The papers described the Madison Square meeting as a last salute to their leader from those about to die. Even the liberal New York Evening Post characterized T.R.’s final exhortations as a speech such as Custer might have made to his scouts when he saw the Indians coming.

  On the night after the Roosevelt rally Wilson’s joint managers McCombs and McAdoo, whose bickerings had been no help to his campaign, were able to work together long enough to foment an ovation when their candidate entered the hall that lasted one hour and four minutes. The Bull Moosers had worn themselves out after yelling fortyfive minutes for T.R. Wilson was able to exchange glances of happy triumph with his wife who sat in the box in front of him as he coolly proclaimed to an audience almost mad with enthusiasm: “All over the country, from one ocean to the other people are becoming aware that in less than a week the common people of America will come into their own again.”

  When the ballots were counted the result was Wilson (Democrat) 6,286,214; Roosevelt (Progressive) 4,126,020; Taft (Republican) 3,483,922 and Debs (Socialist) 897,011. The Democrats carried the Senate and the House. Wilson’s 435 votes in the electoral college against Roosevelt’s 88 and Taft’s 8 constituted a record, but uncommitted commentators noted that Wilson had received a minority of the popular vote. The majority vote was a vote for reform. Almost half as many voters again voted for Eugene V. Debs as in 1908. It was a vote, in T.R.’s words, “for the liberty of the oppressed.”

  A few days after the election Senator La Follette expressed the yearnings of the reform element in an article in La Follette’s Weekly Magazine: “Oppressed and heartsick, a nation of ninety million people, demanding plain, simple justice, striving for educational, political and industrial democracy, turned to Woodrow Wilson as the only present hope.”

  Four Years’ Hard Labor

  The governor’s election disrupted the Wilsons’ family life. Deserving Democrats in shoals converged on Princeton. “Our little house was a terrible mess” wrote daughter Eleanor, “and mother, for the first and only time in her life, walked through rooms pretending she didn’t see the confusion and disorder … Even the tables and shelves in the studio were piled high and the easel was pushed aside to make room for efficient young women and their typewriters.”

  William F. McCombs, who considered himself the first Wilson for President man and felt he should be rewarded for his services by being made Secretary of State at least, was one of the first to appear. During the campaign Wilson had been disgusted by his erratic behavior, his drinking and his chumming up to the political bosses.

  It was the businesslike McAdoo who had endeared himself to the Wilson family; so much so that, although he was twice her age and a widower with grown children, he had already fluttered the heart of daughter Eleanor.

  According to McCombs’ own story Woodrow Wilson told McCombs off in no uncertain terms and sent him away an enraged and frustrated man, to die a few years later, so his friends claimed, of a broken heart. “Before we proceed,” he remembered Wilson as saying as soon as they were alone, giving him a cold gray stare through his eyeglasses, “I wish it clearly understood that I owe you nothing. Remember that God ordained that I should be the next President of the United States.”

  Fifteen thousand letters and telegrams poured into the little house on Cleveland Lane. McCombs was only the first of the parade of office-seekers. The Democrats had been out of office for twenty years. The Democrats were hungry.

  Ten days after his election Wilson hurried his ladies aboard the Bermudian for a month’s rest on his favorite island. He took along a single secretary and the now inevitable secretservice men. Only he and his wife knew how frayed his nerves were. His digestion was out of kilter. He was suffering from his old neuritis. He had to have quiet.

  “As soon as I knew I had been sentenced to four years hard labor my first thought was to get away to Bermuda and enjoy my liberty while I might,” he told the British official who greeted him at the dock. He begged the reporters and photographers to leave him alone. How tense he still was was shown by his blowup when he caught a photographer outside of the family cottage about to snap one of his daughters coming back hot and dusty from a bicycle ride, garbed, it was whispered, in bloomers. “You are no gentleman” he shouted at the astonished photographer. “If you want a good thrashing keep that up.”

  When his ship docked in New York the President-elect was met by prophets of doom. McCombs brought a rumor that the financial community was so alarmed by the prospect of a Democratic administration they were about to precipitate a panic. The bosses were filtering back into the State House at Trenton.

  In a speech before the Southern Society the night after he arrived Wilson lashed out at “some gentlemen in New Jersey” who were counting the days until they could get rid of him. “I informed them today that they were not going to get rid of me.” He was going to remain governor until the last moment. Of the rumors of panic on Wall Street he said, pushing out his sharp jaw in cold fury, “A panic is merely a state of mind … Frankly I do not believe there is any man living who dares use that machinery for that purpose. If he does, I promise him, not for myself but for my countrymen, a gibbet as high as Haman.”

  The Republican papers made a lot of the hanging high as Haman remark. The Sun printed a cartoon: “Lord High Executioner Wilson.” Many of Wilson’s supporters felt he had gone too far, but the Schoolmaster in Politics had let it be known that he intended to keep order in the classroom.

  Founding an Administration

  There was one haven of refuge from the importunities of the politicians and the clamors of party stalwarts trying to tell him whom he should ap
point to his cabinet. That was Colonel House’s quiet apartment in the Murray Hill section of New York. The colonel was discretion itself. No visitors were allowed to intrude. No telephone call got past the switchboard downstairs. With the colonel Wilson could talk over the pros and cons of cabinet appointments without feeling that something was being put over on him. Already he had expressed his trust in his Texas friend by offering him any office except Secretary of State.

  House disclaimed any interest in holding office. “My reasons were,” he noted in his diary, “that I am not strong enough to tie myself down to a cabinet department … I very much prefer being a free lance, and to advise with him concerning matters in general, and to have a roving commission …”

  “Take my word for it,” a senator is quoted as having said of Colonel House, “he can walk on dead leaves and make no more noise than a tiger.”

  The President-elect’s advisers mostly agreed that Bryan should be Secretary of State. Wilson owed his nomination to Bryan’s steadfast opposition to Champ Clark. Bryan was the leader of progressive Democracy. Then too, as Finley Peter Dunne put it in his “Mr. Dooley” column: “With a brick in his hand he’s as expert as a rifleman. An’ I’d rather have him close to me bosom thin on me back.”

  McAdoo was to have the Treasury. Lindley M. Garrison, an able and uninspiring lawyer who presided over the chancery court of the state of New Jersey, became Secretary of War. Josephus Daniels, the genial social leveller and prohibitionist for whom Wilson felt real friendship, got the Navy. David F. Houston, an old friend of House’s who had been president of the University of Texas, was to be Secretary of Agriculture. Another Texan, Albert S. Burleson, a professional of politics who led the Texas delegation in Baltimore, disposed of the presidential patronage as Postmaster General.

  Among the lesser planets were Franklin K. Lane, a cheerful and garrulous San Francisco conservationist whom Daniels used to say reminded him of Humpty Dumpty, in the Interior; William Redfield, whose main claim to fame was that he was the last man in American politics to wear sidewhiskers, in the Department of Commerce; and William B. Wilson, who had come up out of the coalpits to become secretary-treasurer of the United Mine Workers under John Mitchell, filling the new post of Secretary of Labor. It was a cabinet heavily weighted with southerners and westerners. These were men more given to shirtsleeves than to frock coats.

  Tumulty, who had served Wilson ably at Trenton, became the President’s secretary. Talkative, warmhearted, somewhat scatterbrained in the violence of his party feelings, he became an effective buffer between the aloof President and the reporters and politicians who besieged the executive offices.

  The Wilsons in the White House

  The inaugural weather proved good. Wall Street remained calm. The threatened panic did not materialize. Except for the loss of a trunk containing the President’s nightwear, the Wilson family, with its abundance of female relatives in attendance, was successfully transferred from the modest dwelling on Cleveland Lane to the great spaces of the White House.

  When Woodrow Wilson turned towards the crowd after taking the oath on the Capitol portico, he saw the police pushing people back to clear a place in front of the stand. “Let the people come forward,” he called in his clear tenor voice. Then looking into the upturned faces in front of him, he began: “My fellow citizens, there has been a change of government …”

  The address was short and wellreceived. Lyman Abbott’s Outlook hailed it as “the call of a prophet to a Nation to repent of its sins and return, not to the methods, but to the spirit of the Fathers.”

  The day after the inauguration the Wilsons entertained the entire Woodrow connection, with a few old friends mixed in, for lunch; and the Wilson cousins, to the number of twentyfive, for dinner. During the afternoon the President shook hands with one thousand, one hundred and twentythree persons at a public reception and received, in the Blue Room, with the punctilious assistance of Mr. “Ike” Hoover, the chief usher—who had been conducting such ceremonies ever since he was called to the White House to help install the first electrical wiring in Benjamin Harrison’s day—the ambassador of Great Britain.

  Ambassador James Bryce was a wiry ruddyfaced little man with white hair and beard and an energetic manner of speaking. For many years Bryce had been one of the idols of Woodrow Wilson’s life. Of similar Scotch Presbyterian lineage, Bryce too had come a long way since Wilson, as an impecunious graduate student, heard him lecture at Johns Hopkins.

  It was a career such as young Wilson dreamed of for himself in those days. Bryce had not only won fame as a writer on constitutional law and democratic government and as traveller and mountainclimber, but had become one of the voices of the nonconformist conscience in England in the agitation against Turkish oppression of the Armenians, of which he had personal experience while on an expedition to ascend Mount Ararat. He sat in Parliament, served in Gladstone’s last cabinet, was president of the Board of Trade and occupied the uneasy eminence of Secretary for Ireland under Campbell-Bannerman. He twice refused a peerage.

  Sent to Washington during T.R.’s second term he had negotiated with the United States one of those arbitration conventions liberalminded men hoped were the forerunners of the rule of law in the civilized world. Now his chief preoccupation was the friendly settlement of the problem of tolls in the Panama Canal which was soon to be open for traffic. No Britisher alive was better suited by temperament and training to hit it off with Woodrow Wilson.

  If Bryce looked forward to a renewal of the easy hospitality of the Roosevelt days, when he found the White House the center of the best brains and the most amusing conversation in Washington, he was to be disappointed. The new President, though he had his charming moments and was quite a wag in the privacy of his family circle, was to prove singularly lacking in the social graces.

  In the White House even more than at Princeton, Wilson took refuge from the racket and glare of public life, which T.R. had frankly enjoyed and Taft had goodhumoredly tolerated, in the inner circle of his wife and daughters and admiring female cousins. He was desperately determined that his fireside should be his own.

  Tumulty’s domain stopped at the entrance to the presidential suite. Colonel House was admitted but very few others from the outside world. Dr. Grayson was the exception.

  Like Ike Hoover, Cary T. Grayson, a navy surgeon with rank of lieutenant, had been a White House familiar for some years. As a young man he was one of the party on T.R.’s breakneck ride to Warrenton and back in one day. He was a friend of the agreeable Archie Butt who was Roosevelt’s and then Taft’s military aide and perished on the Titanic. He served Taft as medical aide. Taft took a fancy to him. Entertaining the incoming President at their last White House tea, the Tafts recommended him warmly to the Wilsons.

  Then when President Wilson’s sister Mrs. Howe fell on the steps and cut her forehead in the scramble of inauguration day Lieutenant Grayson tended her so assiduously that the Wilsons were captivated. Grayson was a Virginian. The President liked his Culpeper County accent and his selfeffacing demeanor. Immediately he asked Josephus Daniels to attach him permanently to the White House. Dr. Grayson found himself coping with a fit of dyspepsia and sick headaches into which the President had been thrown by the strain of the inaugural festivities. Instead of going to church his first Sunday in the White House Dr. Grayson ordered him to stay in bed and rest. It was good advice.

  Woodrow Wilson was desperately trying to keep his head in the turmoil. “At least Washington and Jefferson had time to think,” he remarked bitterly.

  The President on Capitol Hill

  His opinion of the position of the President had changed with the times. Before his inauguration he wrote A. Mitchell Palmer, a fervent supporter in the Pennsylvania delegation at Baltimore who was carried into Congress on the crest of the Wilson wave: “The President is expected by the Nation to be the leader of his party as well as the Chief Executive officer of the Government, and the country will take no excuses from him.
He must play the part and play it successfully or lose the country’s confidence. He must be prime minister, as much concerned with the guidance of legislation as with the just and orderly execution of the law, and he is the spokesman of the nation in everything even in the most momentous and delicate dealings of the Government with foreign nations.”

  Wilson had hardly been installed in the White House before he let it be known that he was going to use the President’s Room at the Capitol to confer with congressional leaders on important legislation. Since Jefferson had given up reading the President’s messages in person no President had appeared in the legislative chambers. Shocked horror and cries of “Federalism,” “tawdry imitation of English royalty,” and the like, met his announcement that on April 8 he would deliver in person his first message to the special session of Congress he had immediately called to consider revision of the tariff.

  This breaking with a centuryold tradition assured the new President a breathless crowd in the galleries and the attention of the entire nation when he walked in to address the joint session. Friends noticed his pallor, a certain constraint about his erect figure. He took his place at the desk of the reading clerk, just below the speaker’s chair. The atmosphere was tense. Southern congressmen particularly were fidgety about this reckless innovation.

  The moment he began to speak the strain was relieved. His voice was beguiling. He spoke with just a trace of humor of “verifying for himself the impression that the President of the United States was a person, a human being trying to cooperate with other human beings in a common service.”