Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  Running that office also required attention to practical matters, and that was where Tumulty proved to be a godsend. He functioned as the governor’s chief administrative and legislative assistant and liaison to the press. Thirty-one-year-old Joseph Patrick Tumulty was a trim, neat man of medium height with a smooth, round face that made him look like a young priest. He was the son of an Irish immigrant and a Union veteran who had been wounded in the Battle of the Wilderness and later struggled to establish himself as the owner of a corner grocery store. His mother, also Irish-born, could not read or write, but she had pushed her children to go to school. Joe, the seventh of nine who survived, was a graduate of St. Peter’s College in Jersey City. His opposition to the political machine did not bar him from knowing and savoring all sides of public life. He loved the game of politics and reveled in trading gossip and inside information with reporters and politicians. His gregariousness and attention to small matters made him a perfect complement to Wilson, who still liked to spend time by himself pondering political questions in their larger dimensions. The two men quickly developed a smooth working relationship, one that was warm and informal. Wilson did not call his secretary Joe. When others were present he called him Tumulty, but when they were alone he often addressed him as “my dear boy.” Tumulty, in turn, called his boss Governor.27

  From his own study of the issues and the campaign encounter with Record, Wilson had a good idea of what he wanted on his legislative agenda. Nevertheless, he took the unusual step of reaching across party lines to enlist Record’s advice and support. First, he met privately with Record, and then, the day before his inauguration, he presided over a conclave at a New York hotel that included, besides Record, several legislators, newspaper editors and publishers, and veteran reformers. The group agreed that election reform, public utility regulation, and employers’ liability laws should be top priorities, and Wilson assigned Record the task of drafting new legislation dealing with primaries and corrupt election practices. One of the legislators at the meeting leaked news of the deliberations to Smith. The boss’s forces, in turn, denounced Wilson for secret dealings and perfidy to the party by ceding power over legislation to Record and other Republicans. Wilson shot back with a statement to the press that Record was “one of the best informed men in this State with regard to the details involved in the reforms proposed” and that the conference “was non-partisan in its purpose and meant in the public interest.”28 The new governor was getting his own dose of “pitiless publicity.”

  On January 17, Wilson set the tone for his governorship with a hardhitting inaugural address. Although he offered a bit of reassurance to conservatives by observing that corporations were not “unholy inventions of rascally rich men,” he affirmed that “wise regulation, wise adjustment,” was nothing less than “an imperative obligation.” Turning to specifics, he said employers’ liability came first “because it is the adjustment for which justice cries loudest.” He likewise called for stronger corporate regulation, a new public service commission, tax reform, and conservation of natural resources. Beyond that, in order to get “to the root of the whole matter,” the legislature needed “genuine representatives, who will serve your real interests,” and the only way to get that was through “the direct primary, the direct choice of representatives by the people.” He did not close the speech, as most speakers would, with a stirring peroration but listed further measures, including consideration of initiative, referendum, and recall legislation, corrupt-practices and campaign-finance reform, and the investigation of how cold storage rates affect food prices.29

  Wilson then moved into the governor’s office and went to work. Although this was a big change from academic life, he adjusted quickly. “He seemed to be perfectly at home from the start and the duties seemed easy and pleasant to him,” one of his stenographers, Ida Taylor, later told Wilson’s first biographer. “He was an indefatigable worker and spent long hours at his desk.” He attended to correspondence first thing in the morning, dictating to one of the staff, sometimes from shorthand notes he had made. He once reportedly tried using a dictating machine but was amused at how unnatural he thought his voice sounded and did not take to it. Wilson also continued to do much of his own typing. After attending to correspondence, the governor spent most of the rest of the day with appointments. He maintained an open-door policy, never turning away a caller, at least until he was elected president. By his fourth week in office, Wilson could tell Mary Peck that “when I am at them the things I deal with day by day do not pall upon me at all. I take them, on the contrary, with zest and unflagging interest.”30

  One aspect of the governorship did not interest Wilson—patronage. He resented the waste of time and energy involved in dealing with rival claimants for jobs, and he left this duty largely to Tumulty. Wilson did make some first-rate appointments. These included Record, whom he named to the Board of Assessors; Samuel Kalish, the first Jew to serve as a justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court; and Winthrop Daniels, a former faculty colleague from Princeton, whom he would appoint to the Public Utility Commission. By contrast, Wilson genuinely enjoyed personal interaction with legislators and other politicians. In one-on-one encounters, he again demonstrated the persuasive powers that he had exercised as president of Princeton. In group settings, he bared his playful side. At an outing with state senators in Atlantic City in April 1911, the governor and the senators joined in singing and dancing after a fried-chicken supper, and he led them in the cakewalk. “Such are the processes of high politics!” he joked to Mrs. Peck. “This is what it costs to be a leader.”31

  Such frolicking also served a serious purpose. It helped Wilson do the part of his new job he cared about most—legislative leadership. As soon as the senatorial election was settled, he started pushing the legislature to enact the measures he had enumerated in his inaugural address. The primary became the storm center of this legislative offensive. Record drafted a far-reaching measure that required primaries for all elected officials and delegates to the parties’ national conventions; it also required that legislators vote for the man who won their party’s primary for U.S. senator and restricted the activities of state conventions to drafting platforms. Wilson enlisted a Democratic assemblyman and former student of his from Princeton, Elmer Geran, to introduce the measure.32 Smith-Nugent Democrats charged once more that Wilson was turning their party over to that insidious radical Record.

  The governor responded with inside and outside strategies. Throughout February 1911, he met repeatedly with legislators, listened to their comments and criticisms, and eventually agreed to accept some amendments to what everyone was calling the Geran bill. Meanwhile, he spoke around the state in favor of his reform program. Besides the primary, he touted other measures, such as the proposed Public Utility Commission, noting pointedly their adherence to the Wisconsin models “introduced by that very able and very energetic man, Mr. La Follette.” Wilson also drew upon his ideas about the nature of politics to ask, “If your tree is dying, is it revolution to restore the purity of its sap and to purify the soil that will sustain it? Is this process of restoration a process of disturbance? No! It is a process of life; it is a process of renewal; it is a process of redemption.”33 The speaking engagements tired him, but Wilson enjoyed himself.

  The showdown came in March. “Things are getting intense and interesting again,” Wilson observed to Mary Peck, adding that “my spirits rise as the crisis approaches.” He stepped up his speaking schedule, and back in Trenton he made another bold move. “Why not invite me to the caucus?” he reportedly said to the Democratic leader in the state assembly. “It is unprecedented, I know. Perhaps it’s even unconstitutional; but then I’m an unconstitutional governor.” On March 6, when he attended the assembly Democratic caucus, one member challenged the constitutionality of his presence. “Since you appeal to the constitution,” Wilson reportedly replied, “I think I can satisfy you.” He pulled a copy of the New Jersey constitution from his pocket and read the
clause that authorized the governor to communicate with the legislature and recommend “such measures as he may deem expedient.”34 He then spent two hours explaining features of the legislation dealing with the Public Utility Commission, corrupt practices, and employers’ liability, as well as the Geran bill. The assemblymen easily reached agreement to support the first three measures, but they wanted more time to consider the Geran bill.

  A week later, on March 13, Wilson again went before the caucus. During the three-hour meeting, he spoke for more than an hour to plead for the Geran bill. One legislator recalled soon afterward, “I have never known anything like that speech. Such beautiful Saxon English, such suppressed emotion, such direct personal appeal. … It was like listening to music. And the whole thing was merely an appeal to our better unselfish natures.” A machine Democrat retorted that all those present owed their places to political organizations, and the governor acknowledged that he owed his own nomination to the party organization, but he “owed his election to the people only, and he would refuse to acknowledge any obligation that transcends his obligation to the people who elected him.” That answer and others impressed the legislators even more than his speech. One of them reportedly asked, “Where did this schoolmaster learn so much about politics—not only legislation, but practical politics?” Another agreed that “he acted like a small boy playing his favorite game; he certainly enjoyed the proceeding to the full.” The assembly Democrats voted to support the Geran bill, 27 to II.35

  Wilson was winning, but the game was not over. Smith’s son-in-law, Nugent, worked the halls of the capitol, lobbying against the primary. Between Democratic holdouts and Republicans, there were enough votes in the assembly to defeat the Geran bill. But Nugent underestimated Wilson. On March 20, the governor invited Nugent to his office and asked him, in his capacity as the state Democratic chairman, to support the bill. When Nugent refused, Wilson claimed that he had the votes lined up to pass it. “I do not know by what means you got them,” Nugent replied. “What do you mean?” Wilson asked. “The talk is that you got them by patronage,” Nugent responded. Wilson stood up and waved Nugent out: “Good afternoon, Mr. Nugent.” Nugent made a crack that Wilson was no gentleman, and Wilson repeated, “Good afternoon, Mr. Nugent.” In a public statement, the governor recounted the incident and commented, “I invited him here and he insulted me.” Privately, he told Mary Peck, “It was a most unpleasant incident which I did not enjoy at all; but apparently it did a lot of good. … I feel debased to the level of the men whom I feel obliged to snub. But it all comes in the day’s work.” There was some truth in Nugent’s charge. As he had done earlier in the fight with Smith, Tumulty was using patronage, this time to line up support for the Geran bill, and he acted with the governor’s implicit approval, if not his detailed knowledge.36

  Besides patronage and favorable publicity, Wilson had one other card to play. Wittingly or not, he had done a shrewd thing by enlisting Record to write the primary law. Drawing upon his background with the New Idea movement, Record now persuaded two progressive-leaning Republican assemblymen to announce that they would vote for the Geran bill. That move broke the back of the opposition. The bill passed the assembly on March 21 by a vote of 34 to 25. Thirty-one Democrats and three Republicans voted in favor, while ten Democrats and fifteen Republicans voted against it. Ironically, the bill had an easier time in the Republican-controlled senate. Both Democrats and Republicans in that chamber were less dependent upon their party’s machines and were not inclined to be obstructionist. Revised somewhat but not weakened, the Geran bill passed the senate unanimously on April 13. After assembly concurrence, again unanimous, the bill went to the governor for his signature on April 20.37

  Victory in the fight over the primary law smoothed the way for the passage of the rest of Wilson’s program. Record drafted a corrupt-practices bill based on the Oregon law that many regarded as the model progressive legislation in this area. He had to bargain with Republican leaders in the state senate, but a strong bill emerged and passed easily in both chambers. Utility regulation likewise had an easy time in the assembly, and one provision allowed the new Public Utility Commission to use the physical valuation of a company’s property as the basis for its rates, a scheme that ranked among the farthest-reaching regulatory proposals of the time. Wilson later had to accept a watered-down version that came out of the senate. These measures, together with the primary law, constituted what were known as the governor’s bills and made up the program that Wilson had advanced during the campaign and in his inaugural address.38

  Nor did those laws exhaust the accomplishments of the 1911 legislative session. A number of reformers and civic associations wanted to allow municipalities to adopt the new city commission form of government, which enjoyed wide popularity in progressive circles. After some initial hesitation, Wilson threw his weight behind municipal-reform legislation that included provisions for a local initiative, referendum, and recall, as well as the city commission. The bosses put up a fight against this measure, but Wilson and the reformers got a reasonably strong law in the end. Fittingly for a man with his professional background, the governor supported education reform, and the legislature enacted a set of laws that created a new state Board of Education with the power to conduct inspections and enforce standards, regulate districts’ borrowing authority, and require special classes for students with handicaps. At the governor’s urging, the legislature also enacted new food-storage and -inspection laws, strengthened oversight of factory working conditions, and limited labor by women and children.39

  Wilson’s only defeat occurred when he asked the legislature to ratify an amendment to the U.S. Constitution passed by Congress in 1909 to permit the levying of income taxes. Unlike the election of a U.S. senator, ratification of an amendment to the Constitution required separate approval by each chamber. The assembly promptly complied with the request, but the Republican-controlled senate refused to go along. Almost two years would pass before New Jersey would ratify the income tax amendment. By then, Wilson had been elected president and had carried enough Democrats with him to control both houses of the state legislature.

  Despite that defeat, he racked up an impressive record as a legislative leader and a progressive. “I got absolutely everything I strove for,—and more besides,” he exulted to Mary Peck when the legislature adjourned late in April. He called it “as complete a victory as has ever been won, I venture to say, in the history of the country. I wrote the platform, I had the measures formulated to my mind, I kept the pressure of opinion constantly on the legislature, and the programme was carried out to its last detail.”40 Pride did not blind Wilson to the secrets of his success. He correctly credited the spirit of the times for much of what he had been able to do. Progressivism was a rapidly rising tide in American politics, and Wilson was not the only governor to push through this kind of reform program in the ten years since La Follette had begun battling Wisconsin’s bosses in order to make government more accountable and business better regulated. Nineteen eleven stood out as a particularly dramatic juncture in this march of political and economic reform. In Wisconsin, La Follette’s forces were filling out a second ambitious reform agenda, which resembled Wilson’s. In California, a band of Republican progressives led by their newly elected governor, Hiram Johnson, pushed through a comparable program, although one that would stress direct popular measures such as the initiative and recall far more than Wilson’s did. The accomplishments of this academic-turned-governor were part of a bigger picture, and some of the other reform leaders were men with whom he would cross paths and swords in coming years.

  Still, Wilson unquestionably earned most of his success on his own. Given New Jersey’s history as a boss-laden, conservative-leaning state, it would have been easy for him to fall far short of such sweeping accomplishments. A vivid illustration of what could have happened lay just across the Hudson River. In New York, the Democrats had likewise ridden the reform wave in 1910 to win the governorship a
nd control of the legislature for the first time since the mid-1890s. Yet despite the Empire State’s previous experience with dynamic governors such as Roosevelt and Charles Evans Hughes and its moderately reformist record, the situation there deteriorated into a hopeless wrangle between progressive Democrats and Tammany Hall. The progressives did succeed in keeping the Tammany boss from becoming a U.S. senator, but the machine blocked most reform legislation. The New York World was prophetically right when it said that its state needed a Woodrow Wilson.

  The former president of Princeton brought to his governor’s office a potent mix of personal and intellectual gifts. He planned his strategy and then kept the legislators at their jobs and focused on the task at hand. His success depended on foresight, force, and perseverance, traits that he would soon show again as a legislative leader in Washington. He also put into practice ideas that he had developed earlier about how to be such a leader. He did act like a prime minister. By meeting so often with legislators, he acted as if he were one of them. By joining his party’s caucus, he became its leader. In effect, he was finding a practical application for the proposals he had advanced years before when he wrote about giving cabinet members seats in Congress. All this worked well, and it offered the first demonstration of how readily Woodrow Wilson could translate the study of politics into the practice of politics.

  This smashing success in New Jersey in 1911 launched his political career in the best possible way. His legislative accomplishments as governor won him his spurs in the hottest political arena of the time. Even before he attracted the limelight in the fight with Smith, talk about higher office was in the air, and a Wilson presidential boomlet started even before the end of the legislative session. Yet his governorship would witness no further triumphs. He had no way of knowing it, but when the legislators left Trenton in April 1911, his best days in the statehouse were behind him. The nearly two years that remained in Wilson’s governorship would be an anticlimax. Part of the letdown would spring from his presidential campaign, which increasingly occupied his attention and took him away from New Jersey.