Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  The speech was a triumph. Joseph Tumulty, a young Irish American assemblyman from Jersey City who was one of the leading progressive foes of the bosses, later recalled that many delegates stood with tears running down their cheeks and left the auditorium charged with crusading zeal. As for Tumulty himself, another delegate reported to Wilson that after the speech he “threw his arms about me & said ‘… this is one of the happiest days of my life—the Wisconsin R. R. law!—the best in the country—if Wilson stands for legislation of that caliber, Jim Smith will find that he has a “lemon.” ’ ”7 Tumulty instantly became one of Wilson’s most ardent backers and went on to serve as the governor’s and president’s right-hand man.

  Wilson’s speech and the progressives’ response did not bother the party bosses because they were sure they could control their handpicked nominee. Four days after the convention, a group of them visited him at Prospect House. Standing on the portico and gazing at the tree-lined campus, Smith asked James Kerney, the editor of the Trenton Evening Times, “[C]an you imagine anyone being damn fool enough to give this up for the heartaches of politics?” As Nell Wilson later recalled, the politicians seemed ill at ease in the university president’s book-lined study. “Do you read all these books, Professor?” Smith reportedly asked. “Not every day,” Wilson answered. His jocularity broke the ice, and, he told Nell later, “[T]hey treated me like a school boy once they got over the professorial atmosphere.” The politicians spent three hours instructing their pupil on campaign plans, and he now impressed them with his familiarity with local affairs and people. “We were charmed by the reception he had given us,” Kerney wrote later. “When he unbent he could be the most urbane and delightful of companions.”8

  On the campaign trail, Wilson struck some observers as a bit stiff and formal in his first speeches, more professorial than political. That may have been the case, since he was a rookie on the stump with a lot to learn about modern political campaigns, especially how much they cost. He originally thought that he could pay all his expenses from his own pocket. He was still drawing his Princeton salary, and after the election he planned to earn $500 from speaking fees to cover expenses. In fact, he left overall financial matters to Harvey and Jim Smith, who later claimed to have personally contributed $50,000 to the campaign. In all, according to one estimate, the Democratic managers spent $119,000 during the campaign, which was big money in those days.9

  Wilson quickly became a pungent, hard-hitting stump speaker. He stressed partisanship and national issues from the outset. “I am a Democrat by conviction because I am persuaded that it is the party through which the salvation of the country must come,” he asserted in a newspaper interview early in October. “The Republican party has been guilty of forming an unholy alliance with the vast moneyed interests of the country.” At the same time, he declared in a speech in Long Branch, “Between a real Democrat and a really progressive [Republican] insurgent there is very little difference. What has been happening to these insurgents is that they have been catching the Democratic infection.”10

  He did not neglect state issues. At the outset of the campaign, his Republican opponent presented him with a golden opportunity to play to his greatest strengths. Dominant since the mid-1890s, the New Jersey Republicans had experienced a much stronger progressive insurgency than the Democrats. Four years earlier, “New Idea” Republicans had mounted an intraparty revolt. They had attacked their party’s alliances with big business and pushed for the kind of reform in taxation that Wilson advocated in 1910. The New Idea men had gone down to defeat before the conservative machine, but they remained a force to be reckoned with. In 1910, the Republicans bowed in their direction by picking a moderate progressive as their gubernatorial nominee. He was Vivian M. Lewis, a good-looking and respected lawyer who was the state commissioner of banking and insurance. Lewis opened his campaign by likewise calling for a powerful public service commission and endorsing a favorite progressive idea, the direct primary to pick party nominees. He promised to observe the “constitutional limitations” on the governor’s authority and never to “coerce the Legislature into subordinating its judgment to my own.” Those words helped ensure his defeat, because Wilson immediately announced, “I cannot be that kind of a constitutional Governor. … If you elect me, you will elect … an unconstitutional Governor.”11

  Wilson was having the time of his life as he crisscrossed New Jersey by train and automobile, going places he had never gone before, giving two or three speeches a day, translating ideas from his academic study of politics into campaign discourse. In Atlantic City, he asserted that government was not “an intellectual matter.” Rather, people must use such “splendid, handsome passions” as love, honor, and patriotism to restrain and block such base passions as hatred and envy. In Flemington, he defended party government. He wanted to smash the “secret power” of machines. “But I am not here to break up parties,” he declared, for they are indispensable instruments for addressing complicated issues and channeling popular opinion into constructive action. In Newton, he argued that government was needed “to protect the unprotected classes, the classes that cannot look out for themselves.”12 Yet gratifying as it was to express his ideas, he had an election to win. Wilson needed to overcome two liabilities. One was his party label. Though weakened by factional strife, the Republicans were still by far the stronger party in New Jersey, and Wilson had to persuade many Republicans to vote for him. The other, more glaring liability was his sponsorship by Smith and the bosses.

  George Record, the irascible transplanted Maine Yankee who led the New Idea Republicans, presented him with a golden opportunity to overcome both of those liabilities. Record harped on the way Wilson had gotten his party’s nomination, and he challenged the Democratic candidate to debate him on state issues. Wilson accepted on the condition that the Republicans endorse Record as their spokesman. Predictably, the Republican leaders balked, and Wilson declined to debate but added that he would publicly answer any written questions that Record put to him. On October 17, Record sent a sharply worded public letter that posed nineteen questions on subjects ranging from the powers of a public service commission to primaries to the popular election of senators to corrupt election practices to workmen’s compensation. The letter contained a denunciation of machines and asked, “Do you admit that such a system exists as I have described it? If so, how do you propose to abolish it?” Record also asked whether Wilson would overthrow the Democratic bosses and demand that candidates for the legislature pledge themselves to progressive reforms.13

  This letter allowed Wilson to show his greatest qualities as a campaigner: boldness and articulateness. A week later, in a carefully crafted letter of his own, Wilson quoted Record’s questions in their entirety, followed by his answers. To most of them, particularly the ones about state reforms, he simply said yes. To some, such as the direct primary, he said he favored even stronger measures than Record proposed. Only to the last question, about requiring candidates to favor progressive measures, did he answer no, stating that it was up to voters to assess candidates. The questions about the boss system afforded Wilson a chance to admit its existence and propose to abolish it by passing new laws, by electing “men who will refuse to submit to it and bend all their energies to break it up, and by pitiless publicity,” a phrase that would become one of his favorite slogans. As to whether he would fight the Democratic bosses, he shot back, “Certainly!” He claimed to be already reorganizing his own party, and he avowed, “I should deem myself forever disgraced should I in even the slightest degree cooperate in any such system or any such transaction as you describe in your characterization of the ‘boss’ system.”14

  Record knew at once that he had met his match. “That letter will elect Wilson governor,” he was quoted as saying. Years later, he added, “If he had been a small man, such a set of questions would have finished him off, but he had boldness and courage and he could rise to a great emergency.” Wilson’s letter became the sensation o
f the campaign and allowed him to finish the campaign with a flourish. In his closing speech, he sounded like Theodore Roosevelt as he affirmed, “We have begun a fight that it may be will take many a generation to complete—the fight against special privilege, but you know that men are not put into this world to go the path of ease; they are put into this world to go the path of pain and struggle. … We have given our lives to the enterprise, and that is richer and the moral is greater.”15

  The only discordant note in the final weeks of the campaign came out of Princeton. On October 20, Pyne and his followers on the board of trustees forced Wilson to resign as president. Wilson had planned to step down anyway, but he and his supporters had hoped he could wait until after the election. As he told a friend, he was glad the campaign “absolutely dominated my thoughts. Otherwise I believe that I should have broken down under the mortification of what I discovered last week to be the real feelings of the Pyne party toward me.”16 He refused to accept any further salary from Princeton, although he and his family did continue to live at Prospect until the following January.

  On November 8, 1910, the voters of New Jersey elected Woodrow Wilson governor by a wide margin. He polled 233,682 votes to Lewis’s 184,626, 54 percent to 43 percent. Only one gubernatorial candidate in the state’s history had won a bigger majority, a Republican who rode Roosevelt’s coattails in 1904. Wilson carried fifteen counties to Lewis’s six, all of which were Republican strongholds, and he came close to winning four of those. He ran ahead of other Democratic candidates, but the party also did well, picking up four congressional seats and sweeping the state assembly, gaining forty-one of the sixty seats. Democrats did not win control of the state senate, but their margin in the assembly gave them enough votes to choose a U.S. senator when the legislature met in January. As the returns came in on November 8, a crowd that included many students gathered in Princeton and marched to Prospect House. Visibly moved, Wilson thanked the throng, but for once he was at a loss for words: “I think I have said all I know in my speeches in the campaign.”17

  Wilson would have liked the “honeymoon” typically accorded newly elected officials, especially because he wanted time to think and plan, but he did not get his wish. The spoiler was Sugar Jim Smith. Ever since he had sponsored Wilson as his choice for governor, rumors had persisted that he wanted an attractive candidate who would help the party gain enough seats in the state legislature to send him back to the U.S. Senate. When the two men met a week after the election, the boss evidently did not raise the question of his candidacy, but he later claimed that the governor-elect had dismissed the state’s nonbinding senatorial primary as a “farce” and called the man who had won it a “disgrace.” This was James E. “Farmer Jim” Martine, a perennial aspirant for office and one of New Jersey’s few supporters of the Bryan wing of the Democratic party.18

  Within days, however, Wilson changed his mind about the Senate seat. Though professing high regard for Smith personally, Wilson told Harvey that “his election would be intolerable to the very people who elected me and gave us a majority in the legislature. … It was no Democratic victory. It was a victory of the ‘progressives’ of both parties, who are determined to live no longer under either of the political organizations that have controlled the two parties of the State.” That fact ruled Smith out for the Senate seat and meant that “ridiculous though it undoubtedly is,—I think we shall have to stand by Mr. Martine.”19 Wilson urged Harvey to get Smith to bow out. He reminded the editor that their party faced both opportunity and peril, and he raised the specter of a Roosevelt revival—the prospect that frightened conservative Democrats most.

  Wilson started to line up support. Joe Tumulty took him to meet with several legislators and with the Jersey City boss, who said he owed Smith his personal support but would not feel “hurt” if others opposed him. On December 6, Wilson made one last effort to avert a clash by traveling to Newark to see Smith at his home. “You have a chance to be the biggest man in the state by not running for the Senate,” Wilson reportedly told him and added that he, Wilson, could not ignore the results of the primary. Smith refused to step aside and asked if Wilson would be satisfied simply to announce his opposition and then leave the choice to the legislature. “No,” Wilson answered. “I shall actively oppose you with every honorable means in my power.” He warned that he would go public with his opposition if Smith did not reconsider within the next two days. When the deadline passed, the governor-elect issued a statement to the press noting that the voters in the primary had chosen Martine: “For me, that vote is conclusive. I think it should be for every member of the Legislature.”20

  Wilson braced for a fight. To Mary Peck he predicted “hard sledding,” and to a Princeton friend he called Smith a “tough customer.” During the rest of December, he met with legislators at Prospect House and in New York City. Early in January, he decided to appoint Tumulty his secretary, and with Tumulty’s guidance he continued to lobby legislators before and after his inauguration, on January 17, 1911. He also resorted to a favorite tactic, which he brought from his Princeton presidency: he spoke directly to his constituents. On January 5, he addressed a big rally in Jersey City, where he charged that Smith represented “a system of political control … a systematic, but covert alliance—between business and politics.” He likened his move toward breaking up that alliance by opposing Smith to “cut[ting] off a wart,” and on the eve of his inauguration he dismissed Smith’s candidacy as “a colossal blunder in political judgment.”21

  Wilson read the situation right. The big boss turned out to be a paper tiger. After the legislature convened, Smith journeyed once more to Trenton and ensconced himself in the same hotel room where he had previously labored to secure Wilson’s nomination for governor, but this time he had no magic to work. At the party caucus, nine Democrats from the state senate and twenty-four from the assembly supported Martine; only fourteen backed Smith. Because the New Jersey constitution required a majority of the members of both houses voting together to choose a senator, the caucus canvass left Martine only eight votes short of the forty-one needed to elect him. By the time the legislators were ready to cast the first ballot in the joint session of the legislature on January 24, switches had given Martine forty votes, one short of victory, and Smith threw in the towel, releasing his supporters. The next day the joint session elected Martine with forty-seven votes, which included all but four of the Democrats. Wilson greeted the outcome with mixed feelings. “My victory last week was overwhelmingly complete,” he told Mary Peck. “The whole country is marvelling at it, and I am getting more credit than I deserve. I … [pitied] Smith at the last. … It is a pitiless game, in which, it would seem, one takes one’s life in one’s hands,—and for me it has only begun!”22

  The Smith affair may have spoiled Wilson’s political honeymoon, but it gave him a big boost as governor. The fight burnished his credentials as a progressive in New Jersey and it drew nationwide coverage in the press. The country’s leading Democratic newspaper, the New York World, anointed this new governor a special hero because a similar fight was taking place in New York, where the leader of Tammany Hall was also trying to grab a Senate seat for himself. “New York needs a Woodrow Wilson,” proclaimed The World. Wilson welcomed the publicity, although one aspect of this attention bothered him. “Thought of the presidency annoys me in a way,” he told Mary Peck. “I do not want to be President. There is too little play in it, too little time for one’s friends, too much distasteful publicity and fuss and frills.”23 Again, the gentleman did protest too much. The eyes of the nation were on Wilson, and he was never going to be just another governor.

  The fight with Smith gave him a chance to know and master his party’s men in the New Jersey legislature and thereby get his legislative program off to a fast start. Despite his complaints about the time that the Smith affair took, he did not let it distract him from planning what he wanted to do once he took office. Soon after the election, he gave some foretastes of hi
s intentions. “Pitiless publicity is the sovereign cure for ills of government,” he asserted in a newspaper interview. In a speech to the national governors’ conference, he described his new office with a paraphrase of what he had said about the presidency in Constitutional Government: “There is no one in any legislature, who represents the whole commonwealth—no one connected with legislation who does, except the Governor.” Therefore, for the governor to appeal to the people over the heads of the legislators was “no executive usurpation.”24

  Family affairs and practical matters also required attention. As usual, most of the responsibility fell to Ellen, particularly the Wilsons’ move out of Prospect House. Just before they left, they held a wedding reception for their niece, Annie Howe, the daughter of Woodrow’s sister of the same name, who was married in the First Presbyterian Church on the last day of 1910. The immediate family circle had shrunk now. Ellen’s sister, Madge, had married Edward Elliott in September, and her brother Stockton had suffered a nervous breakdown over the summer and was in a sanatorium in Connecticut.25

  Still another element added to the upheaval. For the first time in more than twenty years the Wilsons did not have a home of their own. New Jersey did not provide a governor’s mansion, although there was a summer residence, at Sea Girt on the Atlantic coast, where the Wilsons spent the warmer months of 1911 and 1912.26 In the meantime, Ellen put most of their possessions in storage, and she and her husband and daughters moved into a suite of rooms in the Princeton Inn. The following fall, they rented a house in Princeton at 25 Cleveland Lane, just a block from the home they had built on Library Place. The street was named after Grover Cleveland, who had lived a few doors away, as did Andrew West. It was from the rooms at the inn and from this house that Wilson commuted twelve miles to the governor’s office in the capitol at Trenton.