American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Roosevelt could no more keep to his middle course than Taft had been able to a year earlier. His indignation soared as Taft moved into closer embrace with the Old Guard. He now dismissed his successor as a man who had been a good first lieutenant but was not fit to be captain. Taft’s shift toward the right had left a leadership vacuum and progressives were now turning to Roosevelt to supply it. A “Roosevelt party” indeed stretched across the country, founded in the moralistic mugwump tradition, rooted in the nation’s social and political fabric, and fully equipped with its own ideology and platform, zealous troops, and an unemployed hero.

  From the grass roots of this Roosevelt party came seductive words of praise and even more seductive calls of moral duty. In January 1911: “On the trains and in the hotels, you are the main subject under discussion”—people now “awaken to a realization of what you were trying to do for the people.” “Don’t attempt to thwart the spontaneous movement for you.” “I trust and admire you more every year”—this from editor William Allen White. “Will you lead in the formation of a new party [that will] break the solid South?” By 1912, the appeals—and invitations to speak—had risen from a trickle to a torrent. Even a former President “is not big enough” to decline a nomination which comes to him “unsought.” He should brush aside the “third term phantom—you were only elected once and you did not serve two full terms.” “It is God’s will that you be our next President.”

  All that was needed now was the spark to bring this movement to life. That spark was struck from Roosevelt’s smoldering ambition. Into his letters during 1911 crept a note that betrayed his appetite for leadership and power even as he tried to contain it. “I very emphatically feel that to me personally to be nominated in 1912 would be a calamity,” he wrote in a typical letter of 1911. But then came the giveaway sentence: “Moreover I am absolutely certain that it would be criminal folly under any circumstances to nominate me unless it could be made clear as day that the nomination came not through intrigue or political work, not in the least to gratify any kind of wish or ambition on my part, but simply and solely because the bulk of the people wanted a given job done, and for their own sakes, and not for mine, wanted me to do that job.” Elihu Root astutely compared his old chief to a “thirsty sinner.”

  While Roosevelt invited the call that was sure to come, opposition was looming on the left. By 1910, Robert La Follette had become the acknowledged leader of western progressives in the Senate. La Follette met the Alger image in politics: born in a two-room cabin in Wisconsin pioneer country, he had worked his way through the University of Wisconsin, served as a horseback district attorney, and was making his way through the power system of the House of Representatives as a run-of-the-mill congressman when he rebelled against the reactionary Republican establishment in Congress and back home and struck out on his own progressive course. As perhaps the most effective governor of his time, he had forced through an opposition legislature measures for an industrial commission to protect the health and safety of labor in his state, a railroad commission that slashed rates, a direct primary, and ample money and recognition for the university.

  La Follette had created his personal organ, La Follette’s Weekly, in January 1909; he created his personal organization two years later when he convened a meeting of progressives in his Washington home. The cream of the progressive leadership was present: Norris of Nebraska, Senator Jonathan Bourne of Oregon, Governor Chase S. Osborn of Michigan, bathtub tycoon Charles R. Crane of Chicago, and reformer Frederic C. Howe of New York. These men and Senators Joseph L. Bristow of Kansas and Moses E. Clapp of Minnesota, and such redoubtables as Congressman Irvine L. Lenroot of Wisconsin and Gifford Pinchot of Pennsylvania, were elected to the leadership of a new organization, the National Progressive Republican League. The aim of the League was announced as the promotion of democratic government and progressive legislation, but politicos and press suspected that it was a vehicle to promote La Follette for President.

  Certainly Roosevelt so suspected. He had long been personally friendly with the Wisconsin senator, but had kept a political distance from him. Now he could hardly ignore “Battling Bob,” who was the very image of progressive militancy with his eloquent speeches, quick and savage thrusts in debate, and shock of bristling hair crowning photogenic features and a sturdy frame. Roosevelt moved warily, not wanting to alienate rank-and-file progressive leaders in the West. Some of these leaders had supported La Follette on the premise that Roosevelt was unavailable; as the former President inched toward availability, La Follette suffered serious defections.

  In vain the La Follette forces sought to stem the Roosevelt tide. Warning the former President that Taft delegates would carry Nebraska because of division in progressive ranks, Norris asked Roosevelt to support La Follette delegates—or at least not oppose them. If later La Follette failed of nomination, the Wisconsin’s delegates would shift toward Roosevelt. Would Roosevelt announce categorically his noncandidacy? Roosevelt would not.

  The denouement came unexpectedly in early February 1912, when La Follette, himself ill and exhausted, and with his daughter facing a serious operation, gave a speech in Philadelphia to a dinner audience of publishers and politicians that included such luminaries as Alexander Graham Bell, Lincoln Steffens, and Governor Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey. As the six hundred banqueters watched first indignant, then astonished, and finally embarrassed, La Follette, after vitriolically attacking the press, the bankers, and the interests, lost control of himself and simply ranted for over two hours. After the press caricatured La Follette as having had a mental breakdown, a number of progressive leaders found the episode a good reason—or excuse—for shifting to their true love, their “colonel.”

  And by now their true love was ready. For Roosevelt, the decision to run had not been as easy as the press suspected. Certainly he wanted to beat Taft and the Old Guard. But he did not wish to do so at the risk of sending La Follette or even Bryan to the White House. And he could not forget the prospect of 1916. If he supported Taft and in the end the President lost, as Roosevelt expected he would, TR would stand well with the regulars, and, backed by his progressive followers, he could take over the GOP after some incompetent Democrat served one term. If Taft won in 1912, Roosevelt could still succeed him after the President’s second term.

  Oddly, it was Taft who forced the issue, as much as Roosevelt. During 1911, he mobilized the congressional Old Guard and the rank-and-file regulars with promises, patronage, and portents. With its usual lack of skill, the Taft White House took a number of steps bound to infuriate the thin-skinned Roosevelt. A few days before Roosevelt announced, Taft wrote his brother that the former President was “surrounded by so many sycophants and neurotics who feed his vanity and influence his judgment that his usual good political sense is at fault in respect of the election.” Such provocations from Taft were not slow to reach the ears of his predecessor.

  Rising differences over issues, bolstered by each man’s followers and sharpened by ambition and self-esteem, lay at the center of the escalating conflict between the two old comrades. Of all Roosevelt’s heresies, the one that Taft found most incomprehensible and unforgivable was his proposal for the people’s power to recall judicial decisions. For Taft, judicial power and independence were almost sacrosanct. He had vetoed the admission of Arizona because of a provision in its constitution authorizing the recall of judges. (The astute Arizonans removed the offending clause, gained admission to statehood in February 1912, and later restored the provision.) Roosevelt’s call, in a Columbus speech, for recall of state—but not federal—judicial decisions roused Taft to hyperbole. Such extremists, he said, were “political emotionalists or neurotics” who would cause “bubbling anarchy.” Since calling his enemies lunatics or neurotics had long been one of Roosevelt’s own specialties, he could not help being infuriated by the charge.

  Each man worked from his political base. For Taft, this was the great pyramid of local and state parties, fueled by co
rporate money, secured by patronage, and long accustomed to the business of choosing the right delegates to state and national conventions. Early, and as quietly as they could, the Taft managers picked loyalists as delegates to the 1912 Republican convention, while Roosevelt men vainly howled in protest against the shenanigans in smoke-filled rooms. Roosevelt’s strength lay—as he was not slow to point out—in the hundreds of thousands of “plain Republicans” who had embraced the party’s progressive tradition. In this, the first election in which the direct primary was extensively used, Roosevelt after some initial setbacks rolled up 1.2 million votes against 760,000 for Taft and 350,000 for La Follette.

  But delegates counted in the convention, not primary votes, and it seemed likely weeks before the conclave that Taft had it sewed up. Characteristically, Roosevelt resolved to carry his fight into the convention. By now, the two sides were excelling mainly in invective. Roosevelt men called Taft men crooks and robbers, apaches and garroters, for issuing credentials to bogus delegates risen from the “cesspools of Southern corruption,” while Taft men responded in kind, and Taft and Roosevelt labeled each other demagogue and fathead, respectively. When the Taft forces selected Elihu Root as their man for convention chairman, Roosevelt forgot the old days when he had singled out Root as the very model of an American statesman. Now he was a “representative of reaction” and had to be rejected.

  Mr. Dooley forewarned that the convention would be a “combynation iv th’ Chicago fire, Saint Bartholomew’s massacres, the battle iv th’ Boyne, th’ life iv Jessie James, an’ th’ night iv th’ big wind,” but he was going anyway, because he hadn’t “missed a riot in this neighborhood for forty years.” The convention opened amid fisticuffs, charges of “liar” and “thief,” and tumult so noisy that even the shrillest speechifiers were drowned out. Amid the pandemonium, the Taft steamroller did its work, producing a 558 to 502 win for Root that meant the President’s men would control the convention. While Roosevelt men walked out or sat on their hands, the convention proceeded to nominate William Howard Taft, whose name was put forward by a small-town Ohio editor, Warren Gamaliel Harding.

  Roosevelt was prepared for his defeat and for a bolt. He had already given his nomination speech the night before the convention, to a hysterical crowd of thousands that overflowed a hall and into the street, ending with a prophecy: “We stand at Armageddon,” he trumpeted, “and we battle for the Lord.”

  Wilson and the Three Democratic Parties

  Delegates were starting to leave their convention hall, an opera house in Trenton, late on a September afternoon in 1910, when they heard an unexpected announcement from the rostrum: Mr. Wilson, “candidate for the governorship, and the next President of the United States, has received word of his nomination; has left Princeton, and is now on his way to the Convention.” Soon a tall bespectacled man in a dark gray sack suit was making his way to the stage through cheering ranks of New Jersey Democrats. “God, look at that jaw!” a ward politician exclaimed. Not all the Democrats cheered; a group of reform Democrats sat glumly on their hands as they reflected that the bosses had beaten them once again, this time with a college professor. Most of the delegates were simply curious, never having seen Wilson before or perhaps even heard of him.

  Within a few minutes the man from Princeton was transporting the crowd into a fever of enthusiasm. He electrified the reformers at the start by declaiming, “As you know, I did not seek this nomination. It has come to me absolutely unsolicited. With the consequence that I shall enter upon the duties of the office of Governor, if elected, with absolutely no pledge of any kind to prevent me from serving the people of the State with singleness of purpose.” Scenting victory in November, the regulars too kept applauding. Wilson placed himself squarely behind the progressive platform the delegates had adopted, save for the direct primary, which he did not mention. Out of the ranks of the reformers came the cry, “Thank God, at last, a leader has come!”

  “Go on, go on,” delegates shouted when Wilson halted, and the orator did. Americans must reconstruct their economic order, he said, and in doing so would reconstruct their political structure. Then delegates rushed up to the platform to greet him, to lift him to their shoulders—but even the exultant speaker would not go this far. Next day the press across the country was hailing a new star in the political firmament.

  It was Woodrow Wilson’s first political speech—and a moment he had been anticipating for decades. As a young man, he had devoured Houghton Mifflin’s American Statesmen series and its tales of the great orators. As a young professor at Wesleyan, he had tried to convert the debating society into a House of Commons. In his first academic writings, he had called for better parliamentary debates. He had indeed become one of the most accomplished and renowned college lecturers of his time.

  And now he had held spellbound the political folk he was so eager to recruit. Still, for Wilson, oratory was a vehicle of leadership, not the heart of it. And leadership was the essence of true statesmanship. These were not pieties. By now, he had become the nation’s leading student of the complex phenomenon of leadership. Public opinion, he felt, had to be educated and persuaded by a forceful leader who, in John Blum’s summary, could perceive the inchoate desires of the community and formulate them in broad, clear, convincing arguments, and such leaders would possess poetic insights and talents. But for Wilson this was by no means a one-way process. Leaders led followers in order to mobilize and empower them. “All the renewal of a nation,” he said, “comes out of the general mass of its people.”

  “The ear of the leader must ring with the voices of the people,” Wilson had told a Tennessee audience twenty years before this triumphant evening in Trenton. “The forces of the public thought may be blind: he must lend them sight; they may blunder; he must set them right.” Twelve years later, he wrote a memorandum on leadership that anticipated theory about and analysis of the subject over the next sixty years. Leadership, he said, “is the practicable formulation of action, and the successful arousal and guidance of motive in social development.” Only by the action of leading minds was the organic will of a community stirred to a guiding control of affairs.

  Leadership was not an end in itself. It was a means of realizing a people’s elevated values, a nation’s noblest goals. Nor was leadership a one-man show. The most effective leadership in the long run was collective—and this was one reason Wilson, in contrast to many of the educated persons he knew, believed in the indispensable role of strong parties in a democracy. He had long admired the superb debates, the orderly conflict, and the collective cabinet leadership of the two big British parties.

  Who was this practitioner and theorist of leadership? some were asking after the triumph in Trenton. The man who had come to embrace an almost philosophical view of purposeful, high-minded leadership had spent his first twenty-five years in a condition of outward serenity and inner turbulence. Born in Virginia in 1856 into a religious and intellectual family, he did not learn his alphabet until he was nine or read well until he was eleven, probably as a result of a form of dyslexia. Undoubtedly this aroused considerable anxiety in his most literate and formidable father, a theologian and minister of the Presbyterian gospel, and a perfectionist as to the use of words. Sigmund Freud, with William Bullitt, theorized that Wilson’s “alienation from the world of reality” related to his religious feelings, that a passionate love of his father was at the core of his emotional life, that he probably exhibited extensive narcissism as a child, that he developed a hostility to his father which he repressed, but which broke out against father substitutes—rival leaders. Much later, Alexander and Juliette George hypothesized that power for Wilson was a means of compensation for self-esteem damaged in childhood. He could indulge his secret desire to dominate only by purifying his leadership, “by committing it to political projects which articulated the highest moral and idealistic aspirations of the people.” He had to feel virtuous.

  The presidency of Princeton gave Wilson the opport
unity to lead, and he seized it greedily. He promptly recruited fifty top-notch young teachers and some older and most distinguished ones. In 1905, he appointed the first Jew to the faculty and four years later the first Catholic. He instituted the preceptorial system. He immensely expanded Princeton’s physical plant. He raised an institution that was essentially at the level of excellent small colleges like Dartmouth and Williams to that of excellent universities like Harvard, Yale, and Chicago, John Cooper has noted. He did these things not alone but in close cooperation with trustees and faculty. He failed in two efforts: to convert the Princeton eating clubs into a more democratic and educationally effective system, and to locate a proposed graduate college in close proximity to undergraduates and teachers.

  Wilson was later accused of inviting these two failures by being rigid and dogmatic. Yet these qualities—renamed consistency, determination, persistence, and principled leadership—helped make him a transforming leader at Princeton. And all these qualities reappeared in Wilson’s governorship of New Jersey during 1911, his first year in the post. He won the governorship by a most skillful mobilization of progressive and reform Democratic support without alienating the big-city bosses who had arranged his nomination in the first place. He then proceeded, by a careful combination of high principle and low expediency, to put through the program that he and his party had promised. During 1912, his legislative leadership faltered, in part because the Republicans had won control of the legislature, in part because Wilson was turning to the national political battle—but not because there was any discernible falling off of his ability to combine doggedness and flexibility.