Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  The distractions of national politics did not fully explain his poor showing. His wider visibility and the state’s pride in having a potential presidential nominee might have enhanced his effectiveness as governor. A more potent influence behind the falloff was revenge by the bosses. Smith, who had reportedly left Trenton in tears after the collapse of his senate candidacy, was a spent force, but his son-in-law, Nugent, continued to fight Wilson even after the legislative session. In July, at a restaurant near the governor’s summer residence at Sea Girt, Nugent sent a bottle of wine to a table where several officers of the New Jersey National Guard were eating and said to them and everyone else in the restaurant: “I propose a toast to the Governor of New Jersey, the commander-in-chief of the militia. He is an ingrate and he is a liar. Do I drink alone?” An embarrassed silence fell over the room. Reports varied in claiming that Nugent was drunk and that others joined him in the toast, but several of the officers walked out. Cries immediately arose for Nugent to be ousted as state Democratic chairman. After conferring with Wilson, several members of the state committee called a meeting in order to remove Nugent as state party chairman, which they did on August 10.41

  From that time on, civil war raged among New Jersey’s Democrats. Wilson took advantage of the new primary law to attempt to shore up his support in the legislature. He spent most of September campaigning for supporters and against what he dubbed “the reactionary element, the element of the opposition.” He also declared, “I must mention names. Politics, when it means the service of a great people, is not a milk and water business.” The results of the primary gratified the governor for the most part. His candidates for the legislature won nominations throughout the state, except in Newark, where machine-backed candidates prevailed. That did not deter Wilson from using the state party convention to draft a platform calling for stronger business and workplace regulation, legislative redistricting, and reform of the state’s government machinery, tax system, and jury procedures. On the convention floor, the delegates greeted him with applause and shouted, “Three cheers for Governor Wilson, the next President of the United States.”42

  These victories were sweet, but they were only half the battle. Wilson barnstormed through the state in October and early November, giving at least one speech a day and sometimes as many as three. Besides boosting his candidates, he addressed state and national issues. He called himself “a modern radical” because, he said, he wanted “to bring my thinking up to the facts and not drag the facts back to my antiquated thinking.” He also urged Democrats to keep “the progressive wave that is sweeping through this Nation” in control of the party: “The Democratic party holds its lease of power on those terms and only upon those terms.”43 New Jersey’s voters responded to his appeal only up to a point. Democratic legislative candidates outpolled Republicans statewide. The governor’s supporters won in most places, and the Democrats picked up seats in the state senate, though not enough to gain control. In Newark, Nugent’s machine deliberately failed to get out the vote for its own candidates for the assembly, thereby turning over control of that chamber, and now both houses of the legislature, to the Republicans. The outcome was a bitter disappointment to Wilson and did not bode well for the rest of his governorship.

  When the next session of the legislature convened in January 1912, he trimmed his sails by proposing a more modest program of governmental and tax reform and the creation of a state board of health. He hoped that the good relations he had developed the preceding year with some Republican senators might ensure cooperation, but that was not to be. The governor was now a leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, and New Jersey Republicans were not going to do him any favors. Not only did they refuse to act on any of his proposals, but they passed bills of their own that he felt obliged to veto. Wilson found the experience frustrating, but he still found professional politicians easier and pleasanter to deal with than academic ones.

  His daughter Nell later recalled that her father met these troubles “with philosophic understanding and calm. And this was not like the Princeton controversy, where his old friends and his heart were involved.”44 He needed understanding and calm in the early months of 1912. This low point in his governorship was also a low point in his personal and larger political fortunes. After an impressive start, his drive for the presidential nomination had stalled, and meanwhile his old foes at Princeton had just installed Hibben as his successor, and West was about to open the new Graduate College.

  Some events did relieve the gloom. In February 1912, President William Howard Taft nominated Wilson’s friend and Princeton classmate Mahlon Pitney to serve as a justice of the Supreme Court. Pitney had served in Congress and in New Jersey’s senate and supreme court, where he had earned a reputation as a political and judicial conservative. He came under attack in the U.S. Senate from some progressive Republicans and Democrats, and Wilson came to his aid by making telephone calls to Democratic senators in Washington. One journalist recalled that the two men sat together in the governor’s office when he made the calls, “calling each other Tommy and May—reminiscent of their days together at Princeton.”45 Wilson also enlisted local party figures to work on Senator Martine, whose support of the nominee was doubtful.

  Other aspects of the governorship also gave Wilson pleasure. Summers took the family to a seaside resort for long periods. A nearby golf course gave him a chance to pursue this newfound pastime, and he even enjoyed some of the ceremonial duties of his office. One of these required him to ride horseback as he reviewed the New Jersey National Guard on parade. Wilson had not ridden much since his youth, and he cut a decidedly civilian figure in top hat and tailcoat. Yet observers commented on how smartly he sat on his horse.

  In some ways, he and, even more so, Ellen found the summers at Sea Girt a trial. There, the Wilsons had a hard time maintaining their customary separation between work life and home life. First at the Princeton Inn and then in the house on Cleveland Lane, family life went on in much the same way as before Wilson entered politics. He would have dinner with Ellen and Margaret and Jessie and Nell, and afterward they would read aloud together or sing around the piano. This routine sprang not only from their desire for privacy but also from Wilson’s attitude toward his work in both academic and public life. As Stockton Axson later observed, his brother-in-law had a “creative, literary type of mind” that would be absorbed “with a tremendous theme, an epic.” He therefore wanted his time away from work “simply to relax, not have business follow him.” Because he wanted “to let his mind play, to give it a thorough rest, he talks small talk with the members of his family, he recites limericks and makes puns and tells anecdotes.”46

  Sea Girt, however, was a different story. Railroad tracks close by, the National Guard parade ground next door, swarms of visitors to the beach, and a constant parade of politicians—all these made it what Ellen Wilson’s biographer called “a veritable gold fish bowl.”47 But the New Jersey governor’s summer residence witnessed the turn of fortune that would always make Wilson remember the place with special fondness. The Wilsons were back at Sea Girt at the end of June 1912 when the Democrats met for their national convention in Baltimore. Here, they and Tumulty rode an emotional roller-coaster as seemingly endless rounds of balloting first seemed to doom Wilson’s chances for the presidential nomination and then finally brought victory. Troubles in New Jersey and unpleasant reminders from Princeton now faded as Wilson set out on the greatest adventure of his life.

  7

  NOMINEE

  Woodrow Wilson became a main contender for the Democratic Party nomination for president as soon as he was elected governor of New Jersey. This was an unusual turn of events. According to the political logic of the time, two other Democrats should have led the field for the presidential nomination: the governor-elect of New York and the governor of Ohio, states with much larger numbers of electoral votes. A governor or former governor of New York had run as the nominee of one of the two major
parties in five of the last ten presidential elections, and the winning candidate for president in all but three of the last ten elections had been a native of Ohio, two of them governors. Yet the hottest prospect for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1912 came from a relatively small and politically undistinguished state, and the freshest new face in the party belonged to a neophyte freshly removed from academia.

  Wilson owed his standing to a conjunction of luck, current issues, and changes in the political environment. The Democratic governors of the big swing states did not cut a strong figure in national politics. The New Yorker, John A. Dix, was indolent and colorless, while the Ohioan, Judson Harmon, was known mainly as an opponent of prohibition. Also, those governors came from the conservative side of the party, and Bryan’s ideological sway among Democrats, together with the rising tide of progressive sentiment, effectively ruled out any presidential nominee from the conservative side. Wilson’s well-publicized battles against privilege at Princeton had mitigated some of his vulnerability on those grounds even before he had taken on the New Jersey bosses. Moreover, a reputation earned outside the political arena had acquired newfound potency thanks to the proliferation of popular magazines and newspapers—the new “mass media.” Roosevelt had already demonstrated how fame gained in other pursuits could help lead to political preferment. Wilson could not match Roosevelt’s war-hero status or glamorous exploits as a hunter and rancher, but as a well-regarded former university president he stood out from the political pack.

  The movement to gain him the nomination started in the opening months of 1911. An early impetus came from New Jersey Democrats, who relished the prospect of promoting one of their own to the White House, but a serious contender needed wider support, which Wilson had from the outset. Besides Harvey and the conservatives, whom the governor now began to hold at arm’s length, there was a trio of backers representing men who shared Wilson’s background as an expatriate southerner who had sought his fortune in the North. First to jump in was Walter Page, now a successful magazine and book editor in New York.1 Next was Walter McCorkle, a native Virginian who practiced law on Wall Street and was president of the Southern Society of New York, an organization of expatriates at whose meetings Wilson had often spoken. Last came William F. McCombs, a native of Arkansas who had been a student of Wilson’s at Princeton, practiced law, and dabbled in New York politics. The three met on February 24, 1911, to discuss such campaign aspects as publicity for the candidate, out-of-state speaking tours, contacts with Democrats in Congress, and fund-raising. This meeting was the genesis of the Wilson presidential movement.

  Wilson met with his new triumvirate for the first time a month later, at Page’s apartment in New York. Up to this point, he had felt detached from the activity on his behalf, and this meeting with his backers did not hearten him. They told him he needed to make a speaking tour in the West, and they had hired one of Page’s magazine writers, Frank Parker Stockbridge, to arrange this trip and handle publicity. “It is all a very strange business for me,” Wilson reported to Mary Peck, “and not very palateable [sic]. I feel an almost unconquerable shyness about it.” Having a publicity manager on the western tour likewise bothered him: “Already he is giving me no end of trouble to supply him with ‘copy.’ ”2

  His actions belied his professed ambivalence. He had already begun his own campaign to try to win over Bryan, who earlier had sought the governor-elect’s views on a “political matter” and said, “The fact that you were against us in 1896 raised a question in my mind in regard to your views on public questions but your attitude in the Senatorial case has tended to reassure me.” The two men met for the first time in March. Ellen Wilson once more showed her acuity in guiding her husband’s career by arranging the meeting. When Wilson was out of town, she learned that Bryan would be giving a nonpolitical talk at the Princeton Theological Seminary. She telegraphed her husband to come back at once, and she invited Bryan to dinner with their family. The couple did their best to charm Bryan, who evidently reciprocated. Wilson confessed to Mary Peck that he now had “a very different impression of him” and was struck by Bryan’s “force of sincerity and conviction. … A truly captivating man, I must admit.” Two or three years later, Ellen reportedly told a friend, “[T]hat dinner put Mr. Wilson in the White House.”3

  That was an exaggeration, but this first meeting did open a courtship. Early in April, Wilson spoke after Bryan at a political dinner in New Jersey. “I have never been matched with Mr. Bryan, or any other speaker his equal before,” he told Mary Peck, “and had my deep misgivings as to how I should stand the comparison.” His performance showed that he could hold his own with the nation’s champion orator. “Unless there was a general conspiracy to lie to me,” he reported to Mary Peck, “I spoke as well as Mr. Bryan did, and moved my audience more. Ellen said I was ‘more of an orator’ than she had ever seen me before: that is, that I put more colour and emotion into what I said than usual.” Bryan did not say anything about the speech, but in his own talk, Wilson reported, “Mr. Bryan paid me a very handsome tribute of generous praise, which my sanguine friends thought quite significant and were immensely pleased at; for of course no Democrat can win whom Mr. Bryan does not approve.”4

  In seeking the Democratic presidential nomination Wilson had three principal tasks. First, he had to make himself better known throughout the country. Second, he had to convince Democrats in the Bryan wing of the party that he was one of them. Finally, he had to burnish his credentials as a progressive. Given the Democrats’ unbroken string of drubbings in the last four presidential elections, appealing beyond the bounds of the party was essential to winning the presidency. Wilson’s experience in New Jersey had shown that progressivism offered the best chance to cast a broader net.

  These tasks played to his strengths. Attracting publicity was never a problem for him. He had already earned a national reputation as president of Princeton, and now, as a crusading reform governor and dragon slayer in his fight with the bosses, he drew attention from people who wanted to size up this new boy on the political block. The experienced Frank Stockbridge knew how to ensure that local and national press gave the governor good coverage, which he supplemented by arranging personal interviews. The substantive side of the mission—appealing to Bryanites and progressives—fell entirely on Wilson’s shoulders, and this neophyte showed that he was ready for the political big league.

  He was already using language that Bryan’s followers liked to hear. Early in 1911, he called himself a radical and avowed, “[T]he so-called radicalism of our time is nothing else than an effort to release the energies of our time.” At a business convention in Atlanta, where he was when Ellen summoned him home to meet Bryan, he shared the program with the two men who would eventually be his main opponents in the election. Ex-president Roosevelt spoke the night before, and President Taft was to speak right after Wilson. According to Taft’s military aide, Archie Butt, the governor held the audience spellbound for forty minutes with “a most polished and masterly address. … The President said it was the polished utterance of a politician. But he has got to be reckoned with.” Wilson also thought he did well, telling Mary Peck, “On the whole the reception accorded me was finer than that accorded either Mr. Roosevelt or Mr. Taft.” People in Atlanta talked about nominating him for president. It must have been particularly gratifying to receive such acclaim in the place where he had suffered through his brief, unsatisfying stint as a lawyer.5

  Wilson expanded on his progressive themes during the spring of 1911. In a speech to a national Democratic gathering in Indianapolis, he lambasted the Republicans for favoring big business and the wealthy, and he coined a phrase he would use again later when he declared, “The men who understand the life of the country are the men who are on the make, and not the men who are made; because the men who are on the make are in contact with the actual conditions of struggle.” He also stuck up for labor unions, praised factory-safety and workmen’s compensation laws, and ridi
culed the standard conservative line that such laws and union organizing interfered with freedom of contract: “[Workers] must work upon the terms offered them or starve. Is that freedom of contract?”6 Curiously, although he was speaking on Thomas Jefferson’s birthday, Wilson made only perfunctory mention of the Sage of Monticello.

  Jefferson posed a problem for Wilson both intellectually and politically He had always ranked this man among his least favorite founders of the Republic, and he had never been able to swallow the legacies of state rights and limited government that conservative Democrats drew from him. Hamilton remained his favorite among the founders, and he had enjoyed a recent study of him by F. S. Oliver, an English businessman, more than any other book he had read in a long time. These views involved more than historical and intellectual preferences. At this time, Republicans generally reviled Jefferson because of the way secessionists had invoked his legacy at the time of the Civil War. Sophisticated Republicans such as Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge went further, excoriating him in addition for having neglected military preparedness and for lowering the tone of politics to crass commercialism and self-interest. In his influential book published two years earlier, The Promise of American Life, the progressive writer Herbert Croly had refined such arguments into an indictment of Jefferson’s legacy as the worst obstacle to the development of transcendent nationalism and genuine idealism in American politics. Conversely, Hamilton came in for high marks in these circles on the same grounds. On the other side of the party divide, nearly all Democrats worshipped Jefferson as fervently as ever. Bryanites exalted him as the champion of the common people and the apostle of greater democracy. If Bryan’s approval was essential for the Democratic nomination, so, in a sense, was Jefferson’s.7