American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  The national arena—and especially the national Democracy—confronted Wilson with far severer challenges than Princeton or New Jersey. Not only was he plunging into a battle zone dominated by formidable leaders such as Roosevelt, La Follette, Bryan, and Taft; he was seeking the presidential nomination of a party that was really three parties.

  The dominant wing of the Democracy was the party of Bryan and his fellow silverites and agrarians. The former “boy orator of the Platte,” now entering his fifties, was still the peerless leader of those who had fought the battle against McKinleyism in 1896 and who had nominated their man for President twice after that. He continued to appeal to the old prohibitionist and moralistic vote, to the western silverites and other insurgents, and to much of the South. Responding to the urban reformism of the decade, he was by 1910 moving toward the left, as he urged adoption of a graduated income tax, governmental ownership of the railroads, woman’s suffrage, direct primaries, the initiative, referendum, and recall. He reached out to labor with his denunciation of labor injunction abuses. But while the Nebraskan was still a formidable party leader, few expected that he could bring his personal following over to a true progressive-labor-farmer coalition.

  The electoral base of the Democracy still lay in the solid South. The South—even the Southern bourbons—had stuck with Bryanism in 1896; above all, they offered loyalty, if only because they had no other place to go. The Southern Democracy had recovered with remarkable speed after the Civil War and by 1880 had crowded out the Republicans in most areas except for GOP patronage holders. Later Southern Democrats had taken a far more portentous step. Fearful of the threat to white supremacy and one-party politics that briefly loomed during the Populist years, Southern party leaders, governors, and legislatures destroyed the black political potential by systematically adopting a battery of devices to keep blacks from voting: literacy tests, poll taxes, property requirements, the “grandfather” clause. Southern elites had never been able to place their own man at the head of a presidential ticket, but they still could play a pivotal role in the choice among Northerners.

  The heart of the oldest Democratic party—the “party of Jefferson and Jackson”—still beat steadily, if a bit feebly, in the new century. This was the party of presidential nominees Seymour, Tilden, and Cleveland, and a host of Northern governors, senators, and congressmen, largely faithful to sound money, lowered tariffs, and states’ rights, to economic individualism, Bill of Rights liberties, laissez-faire, and governmental economy. They made bold bids for the presidency, sometimes carrying the popular vote but less often the electoral college because of the concentration of their vote in the one-party South. The election of 1896 had left this party shattered across the North; only the pride of vindication had survived, as the Clevelandites witnessed the drubbing of the Bryanites. Cleveland himself had died in 1908, a few months before Bryan was beaten for the third time, but he had fought to the end for a conservative Democracy, with unabated attacks on silver Democrats as “confidencemen, sharpers and swindlers.”

  Buffeted by these divergent party impulses, the Democracy had teetered between acquiescence in the power of the burgeoning industrial and financial elites, and challenging that power, and ended up doing neither. If the Republicans were now “firmly established as the party of rapid industrialization,” as Everett Carll Ladd concludes, the Democrats failed to take clear leadership of the loyal opposition. The Populists of 1892 could condemn both parties for drowning “the outcries of a plundered people” with a “sham battle” over the tariff. But even on the issue of protectionism—the ancient rallying ground of the Democracy—the party of Jefferson and Cleveland failed to offer a strong and united opposition. When Taft called for tariff revision in 1909, House and Senate Democrats defected from their party’s 1908 antitariff pledges and backed protection for lumber, hides, pelts, barley, and other products of rural counties. In the struggle over the Payne-Aldrich tariff, the press labeled the Democracy as leaderless in the House, utterly factionalized in the Senate.

  It was this party that Woodrow Wilson confronted in 1912—a party that he quite consciously planned to win over to his support, then to use first to win the presidency, then to govern the nation. To a degree, he embodied both the strengths and weaknesses of the divided Democracy. A native Virginian who could remind Southerners about his upbringing in Georgia and South Carolina, he had never established a clear identity with that section. An antimachine reformer of the old Nation school, he had smoothly accepted the backing of some of New Jersey’s most notorious bosses in order to win the governorship, just as Cleveland and the rest had welcomed machine support in earlier days. Increasingly progressive during the muckraking decade, he had established few ties with organized labor, Bryanites, or urban reformers.

  Nor was Wilson fully aware of the political forces heating up on the socialist left. Out of their fiery and fractious movements the socialists had forged a political party that was still rent with ideological and personal divisions but strong enough to arouse leftist hopes of eventual victory. For years, socialist parties had been nominating presidential candidates, receiving a scattering of votes, but the Socialist Party of the United States, founded in 1901, appeared to be better led, organized, and financed. And it had a candidate with wide appeal to labor in Eugene Debs. In 1904, the homegrown Indiana radical had won 400,000 votes for President. Four years later, he had crisscrossed the nation in his own railroad train, equipped with his portrait on the front of the boiler, a brass band, and a baggage car filled with campaign propaganda—a train soon dubbed the “Red Special.” He had won only a few thousand more votes than in 1904, but socialists vowed that 1912 would be their big election year.

  And now it was 1912, and the Socialist party had never appeared so popular and promising. In eight years, the dues-paying membership had soared from 20,000 to a peak of 135,000; the national office budget was almost $100,000, and the party planned to spend another $60,000 or so on the campaign. At its May 1912 convention in Indianapolis, the party once again chose Debs as its standard-bearer, over the opposition of the moderates. Good socialists were now united behind their spellbinding candidate and behind a radical, hard-hitting party platform full of biting attacks on the two “capitalistic” parties and glowing promises to the nation’s toilers.

  Governor Wilson’s moral and political leadership in New Jersey had brought him national press attention, but he needed far more than this to win the nomination of the tripartite Democracy. And he faced formidable rivals in each wing—Alabama’s Oscar Underwood, eager to prove that a true-blue Southerner could at last become President; Missouri’s Champ Clark, Speaker of the House, strict party man, and longtime Bryanite who even in his country attire and rustic ways seemed to resemble the Commoner; and a host of Northern favorite sons. Moral standing hardly helped in winning the backing of countless bosses and delegates who viewed the convention as a trading house for future patronage and other favors. Nor did morality help in dealing with Polish, Hungarian, and other groups who denounced Wilson for slurs against immigrants in his History of the American People. Wilson not only apologized to the ethnic leaders but promised to instruct his publisher to change the offending passages in the next printing. The governor writhed under the hatchet blows of William Randolph Hearst—himself an expert at political acrobatics—who labeled the “Professor” a “perfect jackrabbit of politics, perched upon his little hillock of expediency,” keenly alert to every scent or sound, “and ready to run and double in any direction.”

  Expediency was the order of the day at the Democratic convention that met in Baltimore late in June 1912, with hopes whetted by Roosevelt’s defiance of the GOP a few days before. While Wilson in New Jersey announced that he would not honor any trading done in his name—the same announcement Lincoln had made fifty-two years earlier during his party’s convention in Chicago—the governor’s lieutenants in Baltimore went about the time-honored task of wheeling and dealing. It took the Peerless Leader himself to
rouse the convention from pragmatics to principle. Renewing his crusade against capitalists allied with Tammany and other machines in the old Cleveland party, Bryan at a tumultuous moment in the proceedings suddenly introduced his motion:

  “Resolved ... As proof of our fidelity to the people, we hereby declare ourselves opposed to the nomination of any candidate for president who is the representative of or under obligation to J. Pierpont Morgan, Thomas F. Ryan, August Belmont, or any other member of the privilege-hunting and favor-seeking class.”

  In the tumult that followed, as Bryan stood immobile before the howling mob, his long slab mouth resolutely closed, some delegates remembered the triumphant moment of ’96. But now the roar from the audience contained hate as well, and even Bryan’s friends wondered if he was trying to smash the party. After police restored order, Bryan went on to charge that “an effort is being made right now to sell the Democratic party into bondage to the predatory interests of this nation.” With one stroke, the Commoner had catalyzed his party.

  The balloting of the delegates was almost dull compared to the oratory, as roll call followed roll call without decision. But behind the scenes, in the fabled smoke-filled rooms, a thousand dramas were enacted as the candidates’ men baited their hooks with promises of future recognition and influence, state factions traded convention votes to achieve local gains far removed from the contest in Baltimore, charges and countercharges cannonaded out of the several camps, favorite sons tried their luck and failed, all in a smoky atmosphere of hostility and paranoia. Much of the time, chance and contingency had their sway. When Clark gained a majority, Wilson suddenly lost his nerve and wired his manager, William F. McCombs, to release his delegates; McCombs stood fast. Later McCombs lost his nerve and gained Wilson’s agreement to pull out, but another Wilson man, William G. McAdoo, countermanded the order.

  For four days, the convention lay in gridlock as the ballot totals, with glacial slowness, edged toward Wilson. Underwood’s men would not give Clark the necessary votes to win because the Southerners hoped that after Clark and Wilson in turn rose and fell, the South would have its chance. Bryan seemed to shift to Wilson when the New York delegation, controlled by Tammany, moved toward Clark, but he made clear he would shift back if New York shifted back; all the while delegates suspected that the Commoner was angling for his own nomination.

  When the convention finally broke toward Wilson on the forty-sixth ballot, it was the immediate result of expedient trading by the Wilson men, notably with the boss-controlled Illinois delegation. But the main cause transcended the vast brokerage on and off the convention floor. Powerfully working for Wilson was his fresh image as reformist and progressive. A Democratic convention was not going to choose a reactionary or a machine candidate after a solid decade of ferment and reform. At a crucial moment, Bryan had thrown the convention into a right-left alignment. He had also thrown himself into an alignment with Woodrow Wilson, with major consequences in the days to come.

  Armageddon

  Not since the founding years had the nation produced such a galaxy of leaders as those who confronted one another on the hustings of America in the fall of 1912. Not since the Civil War era had the nation found leaders so passionately committed to their causes, so willing to risk the politician’s ultimate sacrifice—defeat—in fighting for their goals. Not for many years would Americans forget their glimpses of the men on the stump: Debs, his thin body coiled like a spring, the veins swelling in his forehead, as he reached out to his listeners with moving, imploring hands; Roosevelt, pulsating with energy, grimacing, gesturing, snapping his jaws open and shut, screeching out his denunciations of the two old parties; Wilson, warming to the task as he spoke, vibrant, even impassioned, but disdaining the demagogic or theatrical; Taft, seemingly calm and resolute as he looked out on the crowd from behind his thick white mustache, inwardly despairing of victory and hoping that at least he would place ahead of the man he had come to hate, Theodore Roosevelt.

  Nor had Americans ever quite witnessed such a convention as founded the Progressive party and nominated Roosevelt in Chicago in August. Youthful idealists, political opportunists, social reformers, urban planners, patronage seekers, cranks, suffragists, muckrakers were among the 10,000 or more persons, including 1,200 delegates and alternates, who converted the convention hall into an evangelical camp meeting. They gave their hero a rapturous welcome as he strode to the platform to offer his “Confession of Faith.” As he stood on the platform in his old familiar style, his body rocked back and forth to the rhythm of the applause.

  “Fifteen thousand people roared their welcome,” in Mowry’s words. “For fifty-two minutes, wildly waving red bandannas, they cheered him as they had never cheered anyone else.” When Roosevelt tried to stop them, they broke into song:

  Thou wilt not cower in the dust,

  Roosevelt, O Roosevelt!

  Thy gleaming sword shall never rust,

  Roosevelt, O Roosevelt!

  Out of this convention rose the authentic voice of the old Republican conscience—the conscience of the abolitionists, of the crusaders against spoils, of the middle-class respectables who despised the vulgar new rich, of the urban reformers who glimpsed the heightening needs of twentieth-century urban America. Taft had been left with a party of regulars who knew how to use the power of the Republican party for their own purposes. The party conscience had bolted with Roosevelt. But now the Progressives were a party without regulars, a conscience without power. The “old Colonel” who had united the two so brilliantly now found himself commanding cavalry without foot soldiers. No wonder a reporter at the convention noted that he seemed bewildered at the wild welcome of the crowd: “They were crusaders; he was not.”

  The supporting cast in the campaign that followed was almost as illustrious as the principals. After Jane Addams seconded Roosevelt’s nomination, he wrote a friend that he deeply prized her support, though there were “points where I had to drag her forward, notably as regards our battleship program, for she is a disciple of Tolstoi.” William Jennings Bryan, old grudges handsomely forgotten, threw himself into Wilson’s campaign and ranged the West trailing Roosevelt. Hiram Johnson, chosen Roosevelt’s running mate, sought to hold the progressive spotlight in his own California. La Follette came to Wilson’s support even while remaining a Republican. The aging Elihu Root, sick at heart over the Republican disruption, spoke for Taft to the degree his failing energies allowed. Norris backed Roosevelt while remaining both a Progressive and a Republican. But seven governors who had supported Roosevelt failed to join the new party because they feared losing the backing of the Republican rank-and-file in their states.

  The campaign of 1912 was a confrontation of leadership; even more it was a conflict of ideas. “I have no part to play but that of a conservative,” Taft wrote a friend, and he faithfully played that part to the end. He charged the Progressives with planning “dangerous changes in our present constitutional form of representative government and our independent judiciary”—changes that would threaten individual liberty. He inveighed against the pledges of both Democrats and Progressives to direct democracy. “These gentlemen,” he said, would cure defects caused by the failure of the public to attend to its political duties by asking that same public to assume three times the burden they had failed to assume. Deserted by most of his Cabinet, who pleaded illness or sat on their hands, Taft stolidly awaited his defeat.

  Debs preached a very different kind of liberty and democracy, as he summoned socialists to wrest control of government and industry from the capitalists and make “the working class the ruling class of the nation and the world.” But Debs too was plagued by division within his ranks, especially the old split between moderates who pressed immediate demands and revolutionaries who had set their hopes on ultimate goals. Debs preached unity and gained some, but even the great socialist leader could not control his irrepressible followers. Touring the Midwest he encountered the “Ohio yell”;

  Ripsaw, ripsaw, r
ipsaw, bang!

  We belong to the Gene Debs gang.

  Are we Socialists? I should smile!

  We’re Revolutionists all the while.

  With Debs pounding away on the left and Taft still finding time to play golf, it was Wilson and Roosevelt who fully confronted each other on the most vital questions of liberty and democracy. The debate started abruptly when Wilson, during a long talk at the New York Press Club, said, “Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it. Do these gentlemen dream that in the year 1912 we have discovered a unique exception to the movement of human history?”

  Roosevelt pounced on this statement when he read it in the New York Tribune the next day. Calling it the “key to Mr. Wilson’s position,” he labeled it “professorial rhetoric” without “a particle of foundation in facts,” a statement of a “laissez-faire doctrine of the English political economists” of seventy years earlier. It meant that “every law for the promotion of social and industrial justice which has been put upon the statute books ought to be repealed, and every law proposed should be abandoned.” Would Wilson propose abolishing the Interstate Commerce Commission?

  A cartoon in the Boston Journal showed Professor Wilson didactically lecturing to an Uncle Sam trussed up in a straitjacket marked “Limitation on Governmental Power,” while the interests and trusts applauded the professor from the sidelines. Wilson struggled to gain the initiative. He favored governmental exercise of power to the utmost, he explained, as long as this meant government “by the power of laws, and not by the power of men.” The Democratic party, he began to emphasize, did not stand for limiting either state or national power. “There is not a Democrat that I know who is afraid to have the powers of the government exercised to the utmost.”