American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  For Wilson, “going to the country” was far more an expression of personal conviction and philosophy than a mere political tactic. His faith in representative democracy, in majority rule, in the ultimate wisdom of the people went to the very core of his being. His ultimate value—individual liberty—could be secure only in a democratic system. While still a Princeton undergraduate he had written that “representative government,” at its highest development, was that form “which best enables a free people to govern themselves.” He admired parliamentary systems—especially the British—where leaders could appeal directly to the people for decision and support. He favored not the “disintegrate ministry” of a checks-and-balances system but strong executive leadership directly linked to the people through political parties. He even proposed that the Constitution be amended so that members of Congress might join the Cabinet without surrendering their seats in House or Senate. He believed that Presidents should if necessary appeal to the voters over the heads of the legislators, as he had done in 1918, and even appeal to peoples of foreign countries over the heads of their leaders, as he had done in Europe as a world leader. By the same token, he felt that leaders who had lost the confidence of the people should resign instantly, as he had planned to do if he had lost to Hughes in 1916.

  And now he would stake all on a colossal throw of the electoral dice. Doubters abounded even in his official family. How could treaty ratification be made the single issue in an election involving many questions? Lansing asked in his private diary. How could the people render a decision on several grades of League reservations, “interpretive, slightly modifying, radical, and nullifying?” The whole idea of obtaining a popular judgment by election or referendum was “absurd and utterly unworkable.”

  1920 was hardly shaping up as a year for isolating and testing even a transcendent issue like the League. The end of the war seemed to bring not peace but heightened social tensions. It was a time of race riots—in Chicago, Gary, Omaha, even Washington itself; of radical and revolutionary unrest in the streets of New York and other metropolises; of a rash of labor disputes; of a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan; of food shortages and price rises; of thousands of ex-servicemen searching for jobs; of “red hunts,” by Wilson’s Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, culminating in the arrest of several thousand suspected radicals in New York on New Year’s Day, 1920. The world prospect seemed much worse. “Europe is in the throes of great changes,” wrote socialist Seymour Stedman, “class wars, nationalistic wars, revolutions, repudiation of debts, starvation, revenge, subjugation, outbursts of the oppressed, strikes, the fall of kings and cabinets; and Asia is shaking as she stretches to arise.” Everywhere recession, radicalism, repression, revolt seemed to herald a new age of the Four Horsemen.

  And who would carry the League issue to the country? As Wilson looked over the field of Democratic presidential aspirants, he could see little to inspire hope. Palmer he had had to restrain, urging him, “Do not let the country see red.” The trouble was, the country already had. Then there was McAdoo, the President’s son-in-law, brilliant but not a veteran of the hustings. Out in the hinterland, one could dimly perceive the figure of James Cox, an Ohio newspaper editor, and even of William Jennings Bryan. Impossible! Who but the President himself could go to the people, could fight for vindication? They had never failed him when he was the nominee.

  The idea of Woodrow Wilson as a third-term candidate seemed incredible, shocking, even to persons in Wilson’s entourage—indeed, most of all to them, for they saw him close up, while the public hardly knew of his condition. Months after his stroke, Wilson could walk only by using a cane and someone’s helping arm, and by dragging his left leg forward. Still unable to work more than a few hours a day, he looked gaunt and old, his white hair thin and wispy above the cavernous face, his voice often weak and faltering, his left arm still dangling at his side. Mrs. Wilson no longer isolated him, and he was meeting with his aides and Cabinet, but only irregularly. Visitors were still shocked by the inert, reclining figure; they remembered the man who had always leaned forward as though tensed for a footrace. But the President was slowly learning to walk again—and if he could walk, why could he not run?

  In the spring of 1920, the Republicans appeared to be as united and resolute as the Democrats seemed divided and leaderless. The Grand Old Party could blame all the ills of the nation, if not of Europe, on the Wilson Democracy. It could benefit from the tides of postwar reaction and race and ethnic hostility sweeping the nation. It had a simple goal—to eradicate Wilsonism root and branch. It could boast of a galaxy of leaders—seasoned national campaigners like Taft and Hughes, Senate gladiators like Lodge and Hiram Johnson, favorite sons like Governor Calvin Coolidge of Massachusetts and reform governor Frank Lowden of Illinois, Old Guard politicos in Senate and House, even a military hero, the TR protégé and Rough Rider General Leonard Wood, who had been kept out of the fighting in France, it was said, precisely because Wilson still hated Roosevelt men.

  The GOP was divided, however, between its old presidential wing and its congressional leadership entrenched in the committee system on Capitol Hill—between the moderately liberal, internationalist party headed or symbolized by Abraham Lincoln, TR, Taft, and Hughes, and the more conservative, “unilateralist” party headed by Lodge and his fellow reservationists. Each party was bottomed in its own voting constituency, entrenched in its own governmental structures, inspired by its own memories, principles, and heroes. While the Democracy also embraced two leadership structures, its congressional party had been overshadowed by Wilson’s driving presidential leadership. The presidential parties usually dominated presidential elections—but 1920 loomed as an exceptional year in which the militant, anti-League congressional Republicans might hold unprecedented influence over the Republican nomination.

  Already some party leaders were counseling compromise between the Taft-Hughes leadership and the Senate Old Guard, but most of the potential nominees seemed to be lined up with one side or the other. Could a compromise candidate be found who was not a cipher? Some wondered if Senator Warren Gamaliel Harding would fill the bill. The Ohio senator had always been a party man—as a most partisan editor of the Marion Star, as an Ohio politico and officeholder, and as a conciliator who yet in 1912 had stuck with the party nominee, Taft, against the usurper back from Africa. Elected to the Senate in 1914, in Ohio’s first experience with the statewide direct primary and the direct election of senators, he had served a term distinguished mainly by his ability to win friends in all Republican factions.

  But it was—it would always be—too easy to caricature Harding, as a mere glad-hander, an easygoing, fun-loving, poker-playing politician, a small-town man with a small-town mind and outlook. Although brought up in a severe and pious home—or perhaps because of it—he had a reputation as an occasional cutup, hard drinker, womanizer. He had no convictions, it was said, no set of principles, no quality of leadership. His mind, somebody would quip, was like stellar space—a huge void filled with a few wandering clichés. At least he had the becoming virtue of modesty. He did not, he wrote a friend, “possess the elements of leadership or the widespread acquaintances” essential to the “ideal leadership of our Party in 1920.”

  Such was the basis of the legends that would sprout about Harding—that he did not want to be nominated for President, that he made no effort for the nomination, that he was the pawn of corporate interests seeking power, that he was a country yokel, a dumbbell, a spread-eagle orator who liked to “bloviate,” doze in his office, or relax around the poker table with his Ohio cronies.

  In fact Harding had convinced himself by the summer of 1920 that he wanted to be President, that he would at least be better than the other hopefuls, and that he must work for it. While his friend Harry Daugherty made the rounds asking otherwise committed delegates to make Harding their second or third choice at the convention, he campaigned in several states. Harding was barely able to stave off an invasion by Leonard Wood in the
Ohio primary, however, and he was shellacked in Indiana. By the time the first ballot was held at the broiling June convention in Chicago, Harding was far behind the front-runners, Wood, Lowden, and Johnson.

  What happened in Chicago that June was simple in essence and complex in mechanics. The three front-runners deadlocked in ballot after ballot, while the steaming delegates, sometimes politicking in temperatures over 100 degrees, grew more and more weary and impatient. Late in the week, a group of senators who considered themselves the real leaders of the party gathered at the Blackstone Hotel to see if they could resolve the stalemate. It looked like a Senate cabal—Reed Smoot of Utah was there, and James Watson of Indiana, Medill McCormick of Illinois, Henry Cabot Lodge and former senators Crane and Weeks of Massachusetts. But this was no cabal, with an agreed-on strategy. All through the evening politicians drifted in and out of the smoke-filled Blackstone suite, pouring themselves drinks, sending up small trial balloons, bickering and dickering. Someone said that the room seemed like the Senate in miniature, with Lodge sitting back in his chair and biting off brief comments, while the others indulged in what one senator, stalking off, called a “footless conversation.”

  The senators continued to ruffle through possible dark horses “like a deck of soiled cards,” in Francis Russell’s words, but however many times “the political cards were shuffled and dealt and discarded, somehow the Harding card always remained.” Senators who knew Harding had little respect for his intellect, his convictions, or his qualities of leadership. But he came from a pivotal and symbolically important state, he was the right age at fifty-five, he looked like a President, and above all he was a party man who would follow the Republican senators’ lead on policy, especially on the League. He seemed perfectly to fill the party slot. Still, the few stalwarts remaining in the Blackstone suite came to no final conclusion—essentially they agreed to give Harding a run for his money for a few ballots the next day, and if the Ohioan did not click with the delegates, to try some other compromise possibility.

  That evening Harding was not sitting in a hotel room awaiting the call to greatness. He was roaming the Blackstone corridors, unshaven, unkempt, liquored up a bit, buttonholing any man he could meet. Gradually word leaked out to reporters—and to Harding—that he was the group’s trial horse. Next day, many of the senators in the “cabal” stuck to their earlier commitments over several ballots. But the delegates, eager to go home, knew that Harding now more than ever was “available.” Slowly they edged toward him, as Daugherty scurried around the convention floor calling in those second-chance promises, while the fading front-runners desperately tried to patch together a stop-Harding coalition. No one would run as his rival’s running mate. On the tenth ballot the man from Marion went over the top amid a burst of enthusiasm and relief.

  Already a legend was sprouting—that a cabal of determined, like-minded senators had gathered at the Blackstone with the single determination to make an obscure colleague their President, and their patsy. Weeks before the convention Daugherty, in a euphoric moment, had predicted to two reporters, in New York’s Waldorf-Astoria, that “about eleven minutes after two o’clock on Friday morning of the convention, when fifteen or twenty men, bleary-eyed and perspiring profusely from the heat, are sitting around a table ... at that decisive time the friends of Senator Harding can suggest him and can afford to abide by the result.” He might suggest Harding himself, Daugherty added brightly. And now the prophecy was resurrected, even though Daugherty had not attended the smoke-filled proceedings and the cabal had been far more a cloudiness than a conspiracy.

  The truth was simpler and more significant—that the anti-League, conservative Republicans at the convention had wrested control from the old presidential leadership; that its leaders—primarily senators but including also national party leaders and local party bosses—had rummaged through their “soiled cards” and found their man; and that the actions of the first-cadre leaders in smoke-filled rooms had largely turned on their estimates of how hundreds of second- and third-cadre leaders on the floor of the stink-filled convention would react. Ultimately, Harding was the delegates’ choice—a party choice. And if anyone doubted the capacity of the rank-and-file delegates to work their will, they showed their power by brushing aside establishment candidates for Vice-President and nominating that law-and-order man from Massachusetts, Calvin Coolidge, as Harding’s running mate.

  So, as the whole national party rallied behind Harding in its common hatred of Wilsonism, the Ohio senator sallied forth in his front-porch campaign as a party man, in the McKinley tradition. And it was as a party man that he harmonized the wings of his party, stuck to the party platform, and equated Republicanism with Americanism. The League continued to be the overriding issue. Every time Harding made a strong anti-League statement, he heard from internationalists like Herbert Hoover. When he softened his stand, Johnson and Borah descended on him like furies. Teetering back and forth, concealing his position behind clouds of platitudes, Harding skillfully held his party together until election day.

  The Democrats too sought a candidate who could unite the party—and also exploit the Wilson heritage without being overburdened by it. For thirty-eight ballots McAdoo, Cox, and Palmer waged a stand-off battle at the party’s convention in San Francisco, until Palmer pulled out, Cox picked up a majority of his delegates, and the Ohio Democrat won by acclamation on the forty-fourth ballot. Refusing to desert their leader languishing in the White House, the party paid fulsome tribute to Wilson in their platform, endorsed his League, and reaffirmed Wilson’s New Freedom. But they would not renominate the President, who waited at the White House through ballot after ballot, hoping that the party might still turn to him. When word came to the President of Cox’s nomination Wilson burst into a stream of profanities and obscenities, according to his valet. The President was hardly mollified by the choice for Vice-President of young Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had something of a reputation in Washington for being independent and a bit bumptious, but the delegates liked him for his youth and vigor—especially after his spirited seconding speech for Al Smith for President, during which FDR said that the Democrats’ choice would not be made in a hotel room at two in the morning—and above all they loved him for his last name.

  So Cox and Roosevelt, backed by a dispirited party, sallied forth on their quest like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and with about as much objective chance of success. Almost quixotically—at least in the minds of hardened Democratic politicos—they resolved that they would campaign for Wilson’s League. The two men visited the White House.

  “Mr. President,” Cox said, “I have always admired the fight you made for the League.”

  “Mr. Cox,” said Wilson, “that fight can still be won.”

  After a few moments Cox went on: “Mr. President, we are going to be a million per cent with you and your Administration, and that means the League of Nations.”

  “I am very grateful,” the President said in a faltering voice. “I am very grateful.”

  Cox and Roosevelt lived up to their promise, campaigning vigorously throughout the nation. Cox backslid only slightly on the League, saying that he would accept a reservation to Article 10 stating that the United States would not send its armed forces into action unless authorized by Congress in each case. But it was too late for compromise. Harding swept all the states outside the South, many of the far-northern states by two-to-one and three-to-one majorities. The omen of 1916 had been realized: the Democrats had been forced back on their shrunken base. And so had the omen of 1918: the Republicans now commanded top-heavy majorities in both House and Senate.

  The President’s life had settled down to a routine by the late fall of 1920. Each day he struggled to take a few steps, saw as many visitors as he could, perhaps took a drive. One of his pleasures was almost daily movies in a White House parlor. One day Ray Stannard Baker joined the President, Mrs. Wilson, and one or two others for a film on the President’s first trip to Europe.

/>   The projector clattered and whirred, and suddenly, Baker remembered, “we were in another world; a resplendent world, full of wonderful and glorious events”—President Wilson sailing into Brest amid beflagged ships and soldiers marshaled upon the quay, “smiling upon the bridge, very erect, very tall, lifting his hat to shouting crowds.” The film ground on: Wilson driving down the Champs-Elysées, Wilson crossing the Channel escorted by warships, Wilson riding down from Buckingham Palace with the King of England, “behind noble horses flanked by outriders flying pennants”—always amid bands and flags and shouting crowds.

  The film sputtered and ended. The little company sat silent in the darkness for a moment. Then Wilson was helped to his feet. He turned slowly and shuffled out of the room, without a word.

  PART V

  The Culture of Democracy

  CHAPTER 14

  The Age of Mellon

  HENRY FORD’S ROUGE PLANT, a working day in the early 1920s. A massive ship loaded with iron ore steams into a turning basin off the River Rouge, swings ponderously to starboard, and slides into a slip next to Henry Ford’s concrete holding bins. Hulett unloaders rumble down the tracks alongside the slip, pause, plunge their huge arms down into the ship’s hold, scoop out ten-ton bites of ore, and swing around to dump their loads into the bins behind. Within the day, the ore is rolling on bottom-dumping railroad cars from bins to blast furnaces; within hours, molten metal moves from furnace to foundry, to be cast into engine blocks, and to the machining rooms, where the engines pass through thirty or more machine-tool operations.

  In the vast assembly rooms, vehicles begin to take shape as castings, pistons, axles, springs, and thousands of other parts and pieces flow into the central assembly line. Coming in at right angles are the conveyors feeding in the parts via buckets, belts, rollers, monorails, and “scenic railways.” A seven-leafed car-spring has passed through its own assembly line—punch press, bending machine, nitrate bath, bolt insertion, painting, inspection—before joining the central procession. Roofs, wheels, windows, bumpers are clamped into place. A tall, black Model T triumphantly emerges at the end of the long line. Kindled into life by a gallon of gasoline, the car roars off in a cloud of exhaust to a railway siding and the awaiting freight train. The whole process, from ore to car, has taken perhaps a day….