American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  The candidates’ debate over liberty became part of a broader discussion of democracy. Both Wilson and Roosevelt stood on their party platforms, but the Democratic definition of democracy had been woefully weak compared to the Progressives’. Calling for “rule of the people,” the Democrats stood only on reforms already achieved—and achieved primarily by others: the overthrow of “Cannonism” and direct election of senators. The Progressives declared also for extension of the direct primary, easier amendment of the Constitution, “equal suffrage to men and women alike,” and urged on the states “the short ballot, with responsibility to the people secured by the initiative, referendum and recall.” And the Bull Moosers, boldly picking up on Roosevelt’s earlier speeches, demanded “such restriction of the power of the courts as shall leave the people the ultimate authority to determine fundamental questions of social welfare and public policy.”

  Wilson did little to spell out the Democratic plank on democracy. Interrupted during a speech with a question from the floor, “What about the referendum?” he shot back, “The referendum you can take care of in Pennsylvania. It is not a national question.” Throughout the campaign, Wilson offered homilies about democracy without clarifying what he meant. An observer remarked on his “vagueness and reiteration, symbolism and incantation,” as the chief secrets of his “verbal power.” He had mastered the technique of oratory, Alexander and Juliette George noted, he “knew the value of repetition, of catch phrases, of pleasing combinations of sounds.” Five or ten thousand people would stand or sit for an hour or so in mainly rapt attention while Wilson elegantly skated over the surface of explicit ideas and specific policy.

  Wilson’s ideas were much clearer on the most central issue of the campaign—economic policy. He campaigned proudly on the Democratic platform declaration that a “private monopoly is indefensible and intolerable,” on its promise to enforce vigorously the criminal as well as the civil law against trusts and trust officials, and on its support of the regulation and possible “prevention of holding companies, of interlocking directors, of stock watering, of discrimination in price, and the control by any one corporation of so large a proportion of any industry as to make it a menace to competitive conditions.” The Democrats would also restore the Sherman Antitrust Act to the full power it had had before its evisceration in the courts.

  The Progressive party platform was even more positive and forthright, but still lacking in precision. It demanded “a strong National regulation of inter-State corporations.” Admitting that business concentration was to some degree necessary and inevitable, it went on: “But the existing concentration of vast wealth under a corporate system … has placed in the hands of a few men enormous, secret, irresponsible power over the daily life of the citizen—a power insufferable in a free Government….” The Progressives promised the establishment of a “strong Federal administrative commission” that would use publicity, supervision, and regulation in curbing the power of monopoly. Taft’s plank promised to continue his Sherman Act policy toward the trusts, and Debs proposed simply to nationalize them.

  With such forthright party positions, the stage seemed set for a four-sided debate over monopoly; but the candidates, in the time-honored way of vote seekers, tended to blur the differences. What had seemed to be a yawning gap between Wilson and Roosevelt—the former’s emphasis on breaking down the big trusts into more efficient and responsible small units, versus the latter’s on better supervision and regulation of bigness—turned into a vague consensus as Wilson disclaimed any attack on big business as such and Roosevelt indicated he would still use the antitrust weapon.

  “You recall Mr. Pierpont Morgan said ‘You can’t unscramble the eggs in an omelet,’ ” Roosevelt explained. He overrode the attacks of those who charged—correctly—that one of his key economic advisers and contributors, George Perkins, had deleted a strong antitrust plank from the Progressive platform, and that when the original antitrust plank was inadvertently read to the convention, Perkins got it deleted all over again, and for good. Wilson was now taking the economic advice of the brilliant Boston lawyer Louis Brandeis, who had never met or seen Wilson before the governor was nominated, but found him so promising he even fantasized that Roosevelt might throw his Progressive support to Wilson. It was almost September before Brandeis met the Democratic candidate. They talked for three hours.

  “Was very favorably impressed with Wilson,” Brandeis wrote his brother Alfred. “He is strong, simple, serious, open-minded, eager to learn.” But the lawyer did not yet have a major impact on the candidate’s utterances. Wilson was eager to reassure big business that he was not against big business as such, but only irresponsible big business, while for Brandeis the central problem was bigness itself. Still, Brandeis helped Wilson sharpen his ideas and liven up his debate with Roosevelt.

  As campaign fever mounted, five, ten, fifteen thousand persons flocked into the political gathering places or watched the candidates parade through town. Racked by fatigue, their voices worn down to a whisper, the candidates pleaded for quiet so that they could reach the outer fringes of the crowds. It seemed as if all America was now part of the campaign. But two large groups had to stand aside—blacks in the South, and women North and South.

  Whether to involve Southern blacks had posed the harshest of moral and political dilemmas for Roosevelt. Deeply ambivalent in his attitude toward blacks, he hardly knew what to do about contested Negro delegations that had come to the Progressive party convention because they too had been inspired by the Colonel’s commitment to moral leadership and social reform. He tried to solve the problem by approving mixed delegations from border states and lily-white delegations from the South. Thus the Progressives no less than the Republicans would repudiate the legacy of Abolition and Reconstruction. Taft Republicans could sit tight: they controlled most of the anti-Democratic leadership in the South. So could Wilson, who depended on solid support from Southern segregationists. But militant women suffragists were a problem for the governor—especially when a woman named Maude Malone suddenly rose in the audience while he was speaking on monopoly at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

  “Mr. Wilson, you just said you were trying to destroy a monopoly, and I ask you what about woman suffrage. The men have a monopoly on that.”

  “Woman suffrage, madam, is not a question that is dealt with by the national government at all, and I am here only as a representative of the national party.”

  “I appeal to you as an American, Mr. Wilson.”

  “I hope you will not consider it a discourtesy if I decline to answer this question on this occasion….” By now a hubbub was rising in the hall.

  “Why do you decline?” Maude Malone persisted. As Wilson answered again, a large detective swooped down on Maude Malone and carried her out. Wilson protested immediately that he did not “wish that the lady should be ejected,” and he kept his composure. Maude Malone was hardly in a position to do so.

  By mid-October Roosevelt’s throat was so raw that he had to cancel some appearances, but he insisted on making a major speech in Milwaukee. As he stepped out of the Gilpatrick Hotel, he waved to admirers and turned to sit down in an open car. At that moment, a man sprang from the darkness, screamed something like “No third term!” and fired a shot at the Colonel. The bullet tore through his overcoat, a metal glasses case, pages of a long speech, and sliced along four inches of his chest wall. As onlookers began to pummel his assailant, Roosevelt called out, “Don’t hurt the poor creature.” Then he insisted on proceeding to the auditorium.

  Unaware of the incident, people there applauded wildly as Roosevelt strode to the platform, then sat back horrified when the chairman announced that the Colonel had been shot. Roosevelt moved up to the rostrum. “There is a bullet in my body,” he said in a low, tense tone. “But it is nothing. I’m not hurt badly.” He pulled the mangled manuscript from his pocket, lifted it over his head, and proclaimed, “It takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose!”

  F
or over an hour he spoke, faltering at times, pushing away efforts to aid him. Finally taken to a hospital, he announced that he was willing to go down in the cause. “If one soldier who carries the flag is stricken, another will take it from his hands….” It was Roosevelt’s most glorious hour. He evoked such a wave of sympathy that pundits hitherto forecasting a Democratic landslide now hedged. Wilson announced that he would suspend talk on national issues until Roosevelt recovered. Wilson himself had tasted the perils of campaigning when a runaway freight train had smashed the observation platform of his Pullman while he slept, and later when the campaign car in which he was speeding hit a deep pothole and he smashed his head against the car roof.

  Both candidates were ready for their climactic speeches. In Madison Square Garden, before a roaring crowd, Roosevelt urged his followers not to allow “the brutal selfishness of arrogance and the brutal selfishness of envy, each to run unchecked its evil course. If we do so, then some day smoldering hatred will suddenly kindle into a consuming flame.” Proposing to cast out “dead dogmas of a vanished past,” he promised to “lift the burdens from the lowly and weary, from the poor and oppressed.” He appealed to “the sons of the men who followed Lee no less than to the sons of the men who followed Grant.” It was a grand performance.

  In the Garden next evening, to an equally fervent crowd, Wilson proclaimed, “We are proposing nothing for these people except what is their due as human beings.” He would go about “with the strong hand of government” to see that “nobody imposes on the weak, to see that nobody lowers the levels of American vitality by putting on the working people of this country more than flesh and blood and nerves and heart can bear.”

  On election day, the voters seemed to suspend their sense of excitement and to settle back into familiar voting patterns. Wilson won 6.3 million votes, less than Bryan had totaled three times, but Bryan had faced only one opponent. Roosevelt with 4.1 million votes and Taft with 3.5 million sliced in two the Republican constituency. Because of the peculiar workings of the electoral college Wilson won 435 electoral votes, Roosevelt 88, mainly from Pennsylvania and the West Coast, and Taft 8—Utah and Vermont. Debs gained an amazing 900,000 votes, but carried no states. The total vote of Democrats, Republicans, and Progressives had hardly increased over the major-party vote of 1908. No fundamental voting shifts had occurred that would be lasting; no major party realignment had occurred. After the smoke of conflict cleared, the political battlefield appeared unchanged.

  Roosevelt felt overwhelmed by his defeat. He had expected to lose, he wrote a friend, but not so badly. “We had all the money, all the newspapers and all the political machinery against us and, above all, we had the habit of thought of the immense mass of dull unimaginative men who simply vote according to the party symbol. Whether the Progressive Party itself will disappear or not, I do not know; but the Progressive movement must and will go forward even though its progress is fitful.”

  To another friend he wrote, “We have fought the good fight, we have kept the faith, and we have nothing to regret.”

  PART IV

  Democracy on Trial

  CHAPTER 11

  The New Freedom

  THE GARY STEEL WORKS, Gary, Indiana: A huge charging machine rumbles past a quarter mile of the new open hearths. The machine pauses by a hearth, the furnace door opens, red and white flames spew out; unperturbed, the charging machine thrusts a carload of pig and scrap metal into the maw as the furnace erupts in a new crescendo of flame and smoke. Behind the pit, a ladle slides into place and 150 tons of molten steel pour into it as the flame now billows into a whirlwind of blue and purple heat.

  At the end of a narrow tunnel under Appalachian hills, coal miners slowly drill a hole in the black face with a six-foot auger and pack the hole with dynamite. Crouching in the heading, they set off the blast, then move back to shovel coal into the cars. As they drill and blast and shovel, they push the tunnel forward, shoring up the roof with short pieces of timber they call sprags. The pick mining of old is giving way to cutting machines, and the hand shoveling is yielding to loading machines that, like prehistoric monsters, reach their long thin snouts into the slack. A thousand feet above, managers are lamenting the passing of the “wonderful craftsmen” of old; today, they say, miners need no “great brains” but merely a strong back.

  In the spinning room of the Amoskeag Company in Manchester, New Hampshire, long lines of men, women, and children tend more than a hundred thousand spindles. Opened in 1909, the huge spinning room, with its solid banks of milling machines stretching hundreds of yards, looks little different from the Lowell and Lawrence manufactories of six or seven decades earlier. Life in the textile factory has not changed much either—the noise, the heat, the dirty fuzz from the cotton, the long hours and days. But there are more specialized machines now: bale breakers that pick apart the compressed cotton that has been brought to Manchester by railroad; openers that break apart the tufts of cotton more thoroughly; pickers that beat out the coarser impurities in the cotton, until the cotton is ready for carding, combing, roving, spinning, weaving, burling, bleaching, and finishing.

  At the big Firestone Tire and Rubber plant in Akron, workers no longer have to pull plies of fabric by hand over the iron forming-core and smooth them down with stiff fingers, layer after layer. Machines feed the fabric into a rotating core, with little wheels on each side precisely stitching the ply. Then men take over, smoothing on a chafer strip of rubberized fabric, applying sidewalls of specially strengthened rubber, laying down a cushion of rubber to bind tread and body. With the new machines, the workers’ functions are more specialized and routine now, and the direct labor cost of building a tire is cut in half.

  During the progressive era, Americans underwent one of the longest and most expansive periods of prosperity in their history, interrupted only by short recessions in 1903 and 1907. Gold flowed into the capital markets from Alaska, South Africa, and the Rockies; immigrants flowed in from Europe, sometimes more than a million in a year. A steady rise in wholesale prices between 1897 and 1914 helped fuel heavy industrial growth and agricultural output. The prophets of capitalism were exultant. Yet during the same years the currents of progressive thought and action ran strong, perhaps because the fulfillment of some people’s basic needs—especially those of the burgeoning middle class—aroused “higher” needs of self-esteem, including the sense of moral self-fulfillment involved in “doing good.”

  To American Marxists, applying the Master’s teachings in their own way and for their own purposes, the mighty economic and social forces rolling in America were predictable and inescapable. Evolving technology—the new inventions, mass production, industrial integration—inevitably forced wider and deeper economic combination. Corporate capitalism, crushing the workers in its industrial and financial grinders, was producing an unintended product—socialism. As the capitalists triggered imperialist wars in their global struggles for markets, as they aroused proletarian consciousness in workers in all lands, they would incubate a militant worldwide proletariat poised for revolution. At last, workers of the world would unite.

  Everything depended on the crucial nexus between workers’ blighted needs and hopes and their rising revolutionary consciousness. And here something seemed to be going wrong in the New World. American capitalism had burgeoned and exploited, the proletariat had swollen and suffered—but then something had cut into the logical flow from economic misery to class consciousness to proletarian militancy. American workers seemed conscious enough of their low wages and long hours and atrocious working and living conditions, but they seemed conscious of much more—of their religious feelings, their ethnic affiliations, their roots in the old national rivalries of Europe, their special little statuses in factory and office, their faith in individualism, their hopes for improving their lot.

  Something clearly had gone wrong with the socialist scenario, something had gone askew in the world of ideas. Eugene Debs had gained almost a million votes in 191
2, but many more millions of workers had voted for the old party of Wilson or the new party of Roosevelt. Progressive Republicans had found a new political vehicle that would continue under TR; progressive Democrats could hope for a liberalized party under this new man from academe. Only the Old Guard Republicans under Taft seemed to follow the scenario of the left—and even Taft had busted trusts and backed the income tax.

  A new leader had arisen to champion democracy and challenge corporate power. His was a fresh face on the national scene, a rather stern, composed face, bespeaking a man utterly committed to the task ahead and remarkably clear as to how to undertake it. Everything seemed to conspire to Woodrow Wilson’s advantage as his inauguration neared early in 1913. He appeared to hold a firm mandate from the electorate, after an election campaign that had posed central issues of trusts and monopoly as sharply as any party battle in memory. He led a party that after decades of Bryanite division had squarely confronted the issue of concentrated economic power in a democracy. He presided over a citizenry eager for action.

  Wilson was ready. He had lived his life for this moment. He had studied and preached the vocation of leadership. “This vast and miscellaneous democracy of ours must be led,” he had said; “its giant faculties must be schooled and directed. Leadership cannot belong to the multitude; masses of men cannot be self-directed, neither can groups of communities.” He would lead. But he stuck to his old belief that great leaders must truly engage with their followers. The nation could not move forward, he said a few weeks before taking office, “by anything except concert of purpose and of judgment. You cannot whip a nation into line. You cannot drive your leaders before you.” He would concert his party, his government, his people.