Mr. Wilson's War

by John Dos Passos

  Disgusted with the union leaders he tried to reason with the railroad executives. A committee from various railroad managements was assembled in the heavily curtained Blue Room in the White House. After they had been sitting for some time in sullen obscurity on rows of little gold chairs, a curtain was pulled open at the end of the room and the President appeared freshfaced and eager in his white suit in the stream of sunlight that poured through the long windows behind him.

  “I have not summoned you to Washington as President of the United States to confer with me on this matter,” he said, in what Tumulty considered one of the most moving appeals he ever made, “for I have no power to do so. I have invited you merely as a fellow-citizen to discuss this great and critical situation. Frankly, I say to you that if I had the power as President I would say to you that this strike is unthinkable and must not be permitted to happen … A nation-wide strike at this time would mean absolute famine and starvation for the people of America … They will not quietly submit to a strike that will keep these things of life away from them. The rich will not suffer in case these great arteries of trade and commerce are temporarily abandoned, for they can provide themselves against the horror of famine and the distress of this critical situation. It is the poor unfortunate men, and their wives and children, who will suffer and die. I cannot speak to you without a show of emotion, for, my friends, beneath the surface in America there is a baneful seething which may express itself in radical action, the consequences of which no man can foresee …”

  He stepped forward and continued in his most confidential, man to man manner. “The Allies are fighting our battle, the battle of civilization, across the way. They cannot ‘carry on’ without supplies and means of sustenance which the railroads of America bring to them … Who knows, gentlemen, but by tomorrow a situation will arise where it will be found necessary for us to get into the midst of this bloody thing?… I know that the things I ask you to do may be disagreeable and inconvenient, but I am not asking you to make a bloody sacrifice. Our boys may be called upon any minute to make that sacrifice for us.”

  “What the hell does he mean?” one railroad director asked another when the President left the room.

  “I suppose he means it’s up to us to settle the strike.”

  Neither side made a move to settle, so Wilson appealed to his Democratic supporters in Congress, and with extraordinary speed a bill was drafted by Representative Adamson of Georgia giving the railroad workers their eight hour day and setting up machinery for the arbitration of grievances. The Adamson Law went through Congress like lightning and was upheld a few months later by the Supreme Court.

  The College Professor’s Village Habit

  As perplexities and crises piled up on his desk Woodrow Wilson retired more and more into isolation. He conferred less frequently with his cabinet officers. Everything had to be sent in to him in writing. Mrs. Wilson was with him constantly. Together they pored over pardons, bills before Congress, over the texts of projected notes or the first drafts of speeches and statements.

  Dr. Grayson, preaching fresh air and exercise as preventive medicine, urged a little horseback riding. He insisted on the daily golf at the Kirkside Club. Mrs. Wilson took up the game to keep her husband company. There were never enough hours in the day. Often they got up at five, and worked through, except for the family meals and necessary public appointments, until eleven or twelve at night.

  Walter Hines Page, called home for consultation from England, arrived in Washington on a steaming August day when the railroad crisis was at its hottest. House and the President had long agreed that Page needed a spell at home in America to get the London warfever out of his system. The ambassador, remembering his long almost affectionate association with Wilson over the years, arrived bubbling with phrases he hoped would make the President see the English point of view. He was primed for a long heart to heart talk. He was bursting with a private message from Sir Edward Grey.

  “The President was very courteous to me, in his way,” Page wrote in his journal. “He invited me to luncheon the day after I arrived. President; Mrs. Wilson, Miss Bones, Tom Bolling, his brotherinlaw, and I … not a word about England. Not a word about a foreign policy or foreign relations. He explained that the threatened railroad strike engaged his whole mind.”

  It was agreed that Page should take a few days rest and come back when the President had time to listen to him.

  Two weeks later Page was again invited to lunch at the White House. He found his old friend redeyed from having been up all night working over a special message he was to deliver to Congress that afternoon. Wilson had just come from his appeal to the railroad executives. There was no time for a word on European affairs. Page found himself talking to the ladies of the family, reinforced by some extra cousins from New Orleans. Mr. Sharpe, the ambassador to Paris, who was there on the same sort of errand, got no chance either to put in a word about European politics.

  After hurrying through luncheon the party was bundled off to the Capitol to hear the President address both houses to ask for immediate passage of the Adamson bill. Page didn’t even have a chance to bid his old friend goodby.

  “There’s no social sense at the White House,” Page wrote in his disgruntlement. “The President has at his table family connections only … It is very hard to understand why so intellectual a man doesn’t have notable men about him. It is the college professor’s village habit I dare say … Mr. Wilson shuts out the world and lives too much alone, feeding only on knowledge and subjects he has already acquired and not getting new views and fresh suggestions from men and women.”

  “The President,” Page wrote his friend Laughlin in the State Department, after he’d cooled his heels at the New Willard for another couple of weeks, “dominates the whole show in a most extraordinary way. The men about him (and he sees them only on business) are very small fry, or worse—the narrowest twopenny lot I’ve ever come across. He has no real companions. Nobody talks to him freely and frankly …”

  Page still hadn’t had a private talk. His explanations of why the British had cooled to House’s peace proposals were stale by now, but still he was determined to have his say. “I’m not going back to London,” he insisted, “till the President has said something to me or at least until I’ve said something to him … if he does not send for me, I’m going to his house and sit on his front steps till he comes out.”

  Finally, after an insistent letter, Page received through Tumulty an invitation to “Shadow Lawn.” Shadow Lawn, near Long Branch, was the great rambling seaside summer mansion with wide verandahs and a cavernous living room, ornamented, like the lobby of a summer hotel, with a gilt piano and statuary, which Wilson was using as his headquarters because he had scruples about conducting a political campaign from the White House. After a family dinner the President listened to his old friend’s explanation of the deep rift he believed the President’s policies were producing between America and England.

  Page tried in vain to interest Wilson in a medal the British had struck off to commemorate the Lusitania outrage and solemnly repeated his oral message from the British cabinet: the Germans were using the campaign for mediation for their own purposes: if the Germans proposed an armistice on the President’s terms, the British would refuse.

  The President was polite but unimpressed. All he seemed interested in, Page noted rather naively in his diary, was ending the war.

  Page left after breakfast next morning feeling that Wilson was completely out of touch with the thoughts and feelings of daily life. Their last handshake was final. The old confidence and friendship was gone. They never met again. “I think he is the loneliest man in the world,” Page told his son.

  The Labor Vote

  At Shadow Lawn Wilson at last found time to let himself be formally notified, in Senator Ollie James’ booming periods, of the Democratic nomination, and to make his speech of acceptance.

  The partyworkers were uneasy. Tumulty was in the dumps. He
saw Hughes running away with the woman’s suffrage issue and attacking the Adamson Law as submission to blackmail. The Republicans would get the German-American vote. Maine, on September 11, went even more solidly Republican than usual. Tumulty begged for more action. The President refused to be flustered. “The moment is not here,” he told his secretary soothingly. “Let them use up their ammunition and then we’ll turn our guns upon them.”

  That September the President was preoccupied with a new private grief. His sister, Mrs. Howe, died. For a few days the Wilsons gave all their attention to her funeral at the old Wilson home in Columbia, South Carolina.

  He got back to Shadow Lawn to find Tumulty and his friends in great distress. Judge Westcott, the devoted Wilson supporter who made the nominating speeches in both conventions, had been defeated in a New Jersey senatorial primary.

  The President kept his confident attitude. “I believe that the independent vote,” he wrote his brother in Baltimore, “the vote of the people who aren’t talking and aren’t telling the politicians how they are going to vote, is going to play a bigger part in this election than it ever played in any previous election and that makes the result truly incalculable.”

  Though the President refused to allow the photographers to take pictures of his and Mrs. Wilson’s private life, he allowed Tumulty to arrange press conferences. Trainsful of supporters trampled the grass at Shadow Lawn every Saturday afternoon. When one man asked Wilson what he thought of Hughes’ campaign he replied, “If you will give that gentleman enough rope he will hang himself.”

  “Never murder a man who is committing suicide,” was how he put it to Bernard Baruch. “Clearly this misdirected gentleman is committing suicide slowly but surely.”

  In October he did allow himself to be induced to tour the midwest, delivering speeches to enthusiastic crowds in Omaha and Indianapolis and Cincinnati. “He kept us out of war,” was the slogan of all the introductions by local politicians. The crowds were wild for it. Woodrow Wilson tried not to work it too hard. “I can’t keep the country out of war. They talk of me as if I were a god,” he said in private. “Any little German lieutenant can put us into the war at any time by a calculated outrage.”

  This time Woodrow Wilson’s hunches sized up the political situation better than the calculations of the professionals. Hughes didn’t have his heart in the campaign. He found it hard to heckle the President over policies with which he basically agreed. His clumsy mishandling of his personal relations with Hiram Johnson lost him muchneeded Progressive votes in California. His speeches gave the impression of quibbling over details. People began to say “Oh he’s just a Wilson with whiskers.”

  T.R.’s plumping for Hughes not only alienated the Progressives, but his wartalk produced many a Wilson vote. The crowds laughed and hooted when he jeered at “Nice Mr. Baker, he knits” and described Wilson as “kissing the bloodstained hand that slapped his face,” but working people and farmers made it clear that they were going to vote for the eight hour day and keeping out of war. When T.R.’s campaign train stopped at Gallup, New Mexico, he bounced out on the rear platform to greet a crowd of ranchers and section hands. Gallup had been a recruiting station for the Rough Riders and was strictly Roosevelt territory. The railroad workers waved pictures of Wilson under his nose. “I think the world of the colonel, but I love the President,” shouted a voice.

  “I love no one too proud to fight,” T.R. snapped back.

  “You’re a grand man,” came another voice, “but me for Woodrow Wilson.”

  The final rally of the campaign was held as usual in Madison Square Garden. The national committee was planning it as the greatest ever.

  “Final touches were given this afternoon,” noted House in his diary, “for November 1. I hope everything will work out as planned, though there is a danger it will not—for much will depend on luck, as matters are supposed to happen spontaneously which are really prepared far in advance. For instance, the head of the parade must be down at Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue at 8:30. At twenty minutes of nine the President must come out of the Waldorf Hotel and start for the Garden, stopping at Thirty-fourth Street and Madison Avenue for ten minutes to receive the cheers of the crowd and review the parade … Glynn is to commence his speech at the Garden at fifteen minutes of nine … The President must walk on the speaker’s platform just as it ends, in order to receive continuous applause for Heaven knows how many minutes.”

  Next day the colonel found his affectionate friend suffering from campaign jitters: “The President arrived promptly at nine o’clock. McCormick and I met him and went with him to the Mayflower which is anchored in East River. We talked to him for an hour and a half and it was the most acrimonious debate I have had with him for a long while … He thought New York ‘rotten to the core’ and should be wiped off the map … He thought McCormick and I had New Yorkitis and that the campaign should be run from elsewhere. He was absolutely certain of the election without New York.

  “I have heard the story so often from candidates that it makes me tired. They go about receiving adulation everywhere, hearing the people declare that they look upon them as their savior, until they begin to look upon themselves in that light.

  “It is true we have organized wealth against us, and in such aggregate as never before. On the other hand we are pitting organized labor against it and the fight is not an unfair one. I feel it good sport to fight with the odds against us, for the United States is normally Republican.”

  In the privacy of his diary House couldn’t help being a little scornful of Wilson’s peevishness: “The President reminds me of a boy whose mother tells him he has ridden long enough on his hobbyhorse and he must let little Charlie have a turn … His attitude is not unlike that of T.R. who has never forgiven the electorate for not continuing him directly in the White House.”

  The President was undoubtedly edgy. He seemed to be blaming House and McCormick for the fact that the New York papers that morning ran sixteen columns of ads for Hughes to one and a half for his candidacy. “However before he left,” added House, “he put his arms around us both and expressed appreciation for what we were doing.”

  That night the colonel walked around the streets. When he got home he made his entries in a more cheerful frame of mind. He had found “as much precision as could be expected in the circumstances … After the President had passed down the Avenue, I returned to the Garden to find it packed to the doors and the streets beyond. I merely looked in to hear the cheering and to find that everything was going as planned, and then left for home. All reports say it is the biggest demonstration of the kind ever given a President or a candidate for President in the city of New York.”

  Sweeping Victory for Hughes

  Election day, November 7, 1916, dawned mild and clear. The newspapers forecast a recordbreaking vote. Everywhere the voters lined up early at the polls.

  Hughes voted in New York. The bearded former governor, still wrapped in some of the dignity of his recently doffed black robe, was photographed at 7 A.M. on the way to cast his vote in a small laundry on Eighth Avenue. His ballot was number 13. “This is a lucky omen,” he said to the reporters.

  Later he attended a luncheon at the Harvard Club in honor of William R. Wilcox, the Republican National Chairman, who it was admitted later had made a hash of his campaign. Returning in midafternoon to Republican headquarters at the Hotel Astor, Mr. Hughes was told that the first precinct in the nation to register complete returns had given him a clear majority over President Wilson. It was New Ashford, Massachusetts. The figures were Hughes 16, Wilson 7. The candidate was reported to have expressed satisfaction over the Republican trend in New England.

  At virtually the same moment, in the temporary executive offices in Asbury Park, New Jersey, Joe Tumulty was discovering a Democratic trend in the same figures. He was pointing out to reporters that several more Wilson votes had been cast in New Ashford than in 1912.

  As the day wore on, Mr. Hughes, the publ
ic was told, was so gratified by growing Republican majorities, that he took Mrs. Hughes for a drive in the park before returning to what partyworkers were beginning to call the presidential suite for a late afternoon nap. He was completely fagged from the smiling and the travelling and the speaking and the waving and the handshaking. He was hoarse as a crow.

  At Shadow Lawn the President shook himself out of bed at five that morning, stropped his razor on his old razorstrop and shaved; and after an early breakfast drove, with Mrs. Wilson on the seat beside him, over to Princeton to vote. Mrs. Wilson had to wait outside of the old firehouse while he voted; woman’s suffrage was not yet on the statute books in New Jersey. When he came out a group of students gave him the Princeton cheer.

  Although he had spared himself as much as possible the campaign had tired him, too. Washington had been even hotter than usual. After the arduous summer, though public speaking usually refreshed him, the campaign speeches had been a punishing strain. Mrs. Wilson was worried about the blinding headaches he complained of.

  After voting the President drove directly home to Shadow Lawn. There he sat at his desk keeping tally on a sheet of paper of the figures Tumulty reported over the telephone. The instructions were that he wasn’t to be bothered with scattering returns.

  As always Wilson was trying to keep politics at arm’s length from the closed circle of his family life. In spite of all he could do there was a hush of expectation about the house. As they passed on the stairs, the ladies of the family exchanged comments on Woodrow’s composure in admiring whispers.

  The day passed slowly. When there was nothing else to do the President could always while away the time signing documents. A host of papers, including every commission and every promotion in the army and navy, had to have the President’s personal signature. Sometimes it amounted to thousands of signatures in a single week. Signing papers filled every spare moment. Edith Wilson helped by arranging the papers neatly in a pile and handing them to him in an endless chain.