Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  Wilson had begun to address this problem a while earlier. During the gubernatorial campaign, he had defined a “Progressive Democrat” as someone “who will try to carry forward in the service of a new age, in the spirit of Thomas Jefferson.” On the western tour that Stockbridge arranged, he expanded on this argument. Speaking to the Jefferson Club in Los Angeles, he argued that “every true Jeffersonian” must strive to translate the founder’s ideals into the language of the present time, and he claimed that “the Jeffersonian spirit” demanded support of such innovations as the primary and the referendum.8 Such measured praise marked the limit of Wilson’s embrace of Jefferson up to this point. He would go further later.

  The western trip, which took up the month of May, began immediately after the end of the New Jersey legislative session. This was the most relaxed speaking tour Wilson ever made in his political career, more like a vacation than a campaign. The first and last parts of the trip, which took him across the Great Plains and the Rockies, featured only a few speeches, separated by long intervals of train travel. Princeton and Bryn Mawr alumni entertained him, and he visited with several cousins, including his old flame Hattie Woodrow Welles. He gave more speeches when he reached the West Coast, which he was visiting for the first time, and in all of his appearances he endorsed reform measures and refused to shy away from the word radical. He often praised the initiative, referendum, and recall, and in a newspaper interview he saluted “more freedom of action here in the West; you are younger and there exists a sort of brotherhood of pioneering.” In one speech on the return leg, he declared that the nation’s strength came from its ordinary people, not “its leading men. … You never heard of a tree deriving its energy from its buds or its flowers, but from its roots.” In another speech, he declared that the doors of opportunity were “shut and double bolted and we know who has locked them and bolted them”—it was “the concentration of money” that choked off opportunity to all but a pre-selected few.”9

  Wilson got a warm reception everywhere, and the tour gave him a preview of the presidential campaign trail. He also used the trip to continue to woo Bryan. On his way back, he visited Bryan’s adopted hometown, Lincoln, Nebraska, where he paid tribute to “the great Nebraskan, W. J. Bryan,” and, referring to the name of Bryan’s home, called him the “sage of Fairview.” The object of this adulation was not present, because business had called him away, but his younger brother and political sidekick, Charles, was part of the welcoming committee. Charles Bryan took Wilson to Fairview, where Bryan’s wife, Mary, received him. Also on the journey east, he met with his backers in Washington, D.C., where he had dinner with Page, McCorkle, McCombs, and Stockbridge. He told them he wanted to eschew “the usual methods” of politics, but he conceded, “I am far too well acquainted with practical [considerations] to think that the matter can be allowed to take care of itself.” McCombs—who was the youngest of the group, unmarried, and independently wealthy—volunteered to take charge.10

  The new manager did his job ably, up to a point. McCombs lavished nearly manic energy on coordinating Wilson’s supporters in various states. He set up an office in New York and gathered a staff. He recognized the need to deal with politicians around the country, maintain an organization, and not just rely on publicity and the eloquence of the would-be candidate. But his contribution carried a stiff price. He began pestering Wilson to refrain from calling himself a radical and to cultivate leading businessmen and “stick to a few fundamentals.” McCombs also grew possessive of Wilson and domineering in his management of the campaign. He forced Stockbridge out and became jealous of anyone who was attracted to Wilson’s candidacy. His behavior would grow worse during the months leading up to the 1912 Democratic convention and may well have sprung from a deep-seated psychological disorder.11

  Unfortunately for McCombs but fortunately for the Wilson presidential campaign, his jealousy was justified in one case. Late in the summer of 1911, yet another expatriate southerner in New York climbed aboard the bandwagon and gradually began to augment and then supplant McCombs’s leadership. He was William Gibbs McAdoo. A tall man with sharp features and a dark complexion and hair, the forty-seven-year-old McAdoo had the air of the successful businessman that he was. He was a native of Georgia who had studied law at the University of Tennessee and practiced in that state until moving to New York in the early 1890s. In New York, he switched careers to organize, promote, and head the company that built and operated a new railway link beneath the Hudson River between lower Manhattan and New Jersey, known familiarly as the Hudson Tubes. Difficulties raising money to build the Tubes had left McAdoo with an abiding dislike for the financial barons of Wall Street. He became a hero in New York when he reversed the railroad magnate William Henry Vanderbilt’s notorious sneer, “The public be damned,” adopting for the Tubes the motto “The public be pleased.” Those attitudes, together with boyhood memories of hard times in the South after the Civil War, set McAdoo apart from the conservatism that prevailed among New York’s leading businessmen. This newcomer proved to be a quick learner in politics, and he had a steadiness and resolve that McCombs lacked.12

  McAdoo’s qualities proved sorely needed in the months that stretched between the fall of 1911 and the Democratic National Convention in the summer of 1912. This was a time of troubles for Wilson’s bid for the nomination, with opposition coming from bosses in New Jersey, conservatives, and political rivals. The governor’s foes at home did their greatest mischief now. Ever since his earlier fights with Smith and Nugent, they had bad-mouthed him to machine leaders in other states, especially New York, and they conspired to spoil his shot at the presidential nomination. His party’s losing control of the lower house of the state legislature led to the stalemate of the 1912 legislative session, which broke the governor’s string of successes and helped to slow the momentum of his presidential bid outside New Jersey.

  Conservatives inside and outside the Democratic Party also became a thorn in Wilson’s side. He heeded McCombs’s warning not to appear overly radical, and in October, speaking in Madison, Wisconsin, Robert La Follette’s hometown, he stated, “The diagnosis is radical, but the cure is remedial; the cure is conservative. I do not, for my part, think that remedies applied should be applied upon a great theoretical scale.” Yet he stuck to his guns on the issue of financial concentration, excoriating a bill introduced in Congress by conservative Republicans as a move toward greater consolidation and a threat to small banks. At the national governors’ conference, he publicly sparred with a fellow Democrat, the governor of Alabama, who cast aspersions on majority rule. As that spat indicated, conservative views still prevailed among many Democrats, particularly, but not exclusively, in the South. “The South is a very conservative region,” he told Mary Peck, “… and I am not conservative. I am a radical.” He worried that his southern supporters might “make a mistake and repent it too late.”13 He was right to worry. His Dixie roots were not enough to induce all of his fellow southern whites to flock to his standard, and opposition from his native region soon proved to be a major obstacle on the road to the nomination.

  The first conservative assaults came from another quarter, however. The New York Sun, the leading conservative Republican newspaper, had disliked Wilson from even before his governorship, and in December 1911 and January 1912 this paper published two potentially damaging disclosures about him. Both matters had roots in Wilson’s presidency of Princeton. First, the Sun revealed that shortly before being elected governor, Wilson had applied for a $4,000 annual pension from a fund recently established by Andrew Carnegie for retired college professors and administrators. Both his age—fifty-three, not the usually mandated sixty-five—and the sponsor of the fund exposed him to scathing attacks. “The Carnegie Foundation was created for indigent teachers and not for indigent politicians,” thundered one anti-Wilson newspaper. “I cannot understand how a real Democrat could touch such money,” declared a radical Massachusetts party activist.14

  This
disclosure tarnished Wilson’s progressive credentials. He immediately issued a statement explaining that Carnegie pensions were also awarded “on the ground of length and quality of service.” He added, “I have no private means to depend upon. A man who goes into politics bound by the principles of honor puts his family and all who may be dependent upon him for support at the mercy of any incalculable turn of the wheel of fortune.” Although he still felt justified in having applied for the pension, he noted that the Carnegie trustees had declined his request and “I have not renewed the application.” Money worries did weigh on the family. Ellen told a friend that “his income from his books averages less than $1000 a year,—all of which goes for life insurance. … When he was a mere professor he could and did make some money writing and lecturing, so that we even built a home for ourselves,—but for the past ten years he has given his pen and his voice to the public service absolutely free, gratis, for nothing!”15 In the meantime, Wilson did accept a personal gift of $4,000 raised by wealthy Princeton friends.

  The brouhaha eventually calmed down, but in a letter to Mary Peck he blamed the situation on “certain big business interests in N.Y., who know that I could not be managed to their mind,” together with the nominally Democratic newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, who opposed him “for personal reasons.” Wilson felt “set about by vindictive men, determined to destroy my character, by fair means or foul.” He also feared that old enemies at Princeton were conspiring with his political foes, and a skeleton from that closet did come back to haunt him. On January 8, 1912, The Sun published the letter written almost five years earlier by Wilson to a conservative alumnus that closed with the sentence “Would that we could do something, at once dignified and effective, to knock Mr. Bryan once and for all into a cocked hat!”16 When he wrote those words, he was still consorting with other conservative Democrats and trying to curry favor with this wealthy alumnus, Adrian Joline. Wilson began to change his political stance soon afterward, and Joline became one of his bitterest opponents in the fights over the Quad Plan and the Graduate College. Joline started circulating the letter in the spring of 1911, and one of his friends leaked it to The Sun.

  This transparent attempt to discredit Wilson with Bryan and his followers fooled nobody, but it caused some tense moments. McCombs panicked and charged that a conspiracy was afoot, masterminded by Wall Street tycoons. Bryan took the matter in stride. It helped that he happened to be in Raleigh, North Carolina, when the news broke and staying with his close friend Josephus Daniels, a newspaper editor and prominent Democrat who backed Wilson. Daniels worked on Bryan and traveled with him to Washington, where the New Jersey governor was scheduled to speak on January 8 at the Democrats’ biggest annual event, the Jackson Day dinner. One Democrat who sought to mollify Bryan remembered him saying, “If the big financial interests think they are going to make a rift in the Progressive ranks of the Democratic Party by such tactics, they are mistaken.”17

  Wilson reacted in a similar manner. He drafted a statement to the press praising Bryan but decided against issuing it. “We must not appear to place ourselves on the defensive,” an adviser recalled him saying. “I will cover the situation tonight in my address.” In his Jackson Day speech, he praised Bryan for having “the steadfast vision of what it was that was the matter” and having based his career unfailingly on principle. He urged Democrats to “move against the trusts” and remain faithful to “that vision which sees that no society is renewed from the top and every society is renewed from the bottom.” The speech did the trick. Bryan put his hand on Wilson’s shoulder and said to him, “That was splendid, splendid.” Other Democrats rushed to congratulate him, and as he told Mary Peck, “I was made the lion of the occasion,—to my great surprise; and the effect of it all (for it was a national affair) seems to have been to strengthen the probabilities of my nomination many-fold.”18

  One more problem from the conservative side vexed Wilson in January 1912. This involved George Harvey and his cohort Henry Watterson, editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal. In December, Wilson had dinner with the two men in New York, and they discussed the political situation. At the end of the evening, Harvey asked for “a perfectly frank answer” to the question of whether his support was embarrassing Wilson, who answered that it might be. Wilson quickly regretted his frankness and, not having thanked Harvey for his support, said, “Forgive me, and forget my manners.” Harvey affected to accept the apology, but he did not forgive his onetime protégé for his apostasy from Democratic conservatism. Harvey dropped the slogan “For President: Woodrow Wilson,” which he had been running on the cover of Harper’s Weekly. He also fed stories to newspapers about a “break” between him and Wilson and released a misleading statement to the press accusing Wilson of acting on his own initiative to brush him off. This attack backfired because Watterson wrote a letter to The New York Times in which he inadvertently confirmed that Harvey had initiated the affair. Meanwhile, Bryan sprang to Wilson’s defense. In his magazine, The Commoner, he asserted that the attacks “are proving the sincerity of his [Wilson’s] present position. … [T]he venom of his adversaries removes all doubt as to the REALITY of the change.”19

  In retrospect, this incident and the others would shrink in importance compared with the biggest test Wilson faced in his quest for the nomination—challenges from rival aspirants. His apparent ease in marching toward the party’s top prize was deceptive. Novelty at first enhanced his attractiveness, while the Democrats’ losing record in recent presidential contests initially made more-established politicians shy away. Both of those circumstances had changed by the end of 1911. Wilson’s novelty may have been wearing off, and mounting political troubles for the Taft administration—together with open warfare in Republican ranks—made the Democrats’ presidential prospects look unexpectedly bright.

  The biggest question hanging over the party was whether its top national officeholder would make a bid for the nomination. He was the Speaker of the House of Representatives, James Beauchamp Clark of Missouri. Clark, who went by the nickname Champ, was sixty-one years old in 1911. Active in Democratic politics for four decades, he had served in the House, with one interruption, for the past eighteen years, becoming minority leader in 1907 and Speaker after the party won control in 1910. An educated man who had practiced and taught law and had briefly been a college president, Clark nevertheless gave the appearance of being Wilson’s polar opposite. Folksy and taciturn, he had once endorsed a patent medicine in a speech on the floor of the House, and he had gotten ahead in politics in part by letting people underestimate him. To the press, Clark seemed the epitome of the small-town party hack, a public image that was both unfortunate and unfair. In his years as minority leader, Clark had welded the House Democrats into a disciplined, progressive force, and on all the important issues he was a loyal Bryanite. That record prompted many observers to predict that Bryan would endorse Clark for the nomination after the Speaker announced his candidacy late in the fall of 1911. Champ Clark was a formidable contender, as Wilson and his backers soon discovered.20

  Nor was Clark the only serious challenger. The Democrats’ second-ranking national officeholder also entered the race for the nomination. He was the majority leader in the House, Oscar W. Underwood of Alabama. At first, his candidacy seemed to be just another home-state “favorite son” bid, but in the early months of 1912 Underwood began to gather support throughout the South. His attractiveness was testimony to the weakness in the South that worried Wilson.

  Wilson drew fire from opposite ends of the political spectrum in the South. So-called Bourbon Democrats—conservatives who led the political machines in their states—recoiled from his “radical” progressive views. Agrarian radicals—such as Tom Watson of Georgia, once a leading Populist, and James K. Vardaman of Mississippi—rejected him on account of his anti-Bryan past. The common denominator of this opposition was the belief that this expatriate was no longer a “real” southerner. Wilson’s opponents viewed him as s
omeone who had adopted alien Yankee ways—either the radical progressivism that irked the Bourbons or the friendliness toward urbanites and big business that irked the agrarian radicals. His southern supporters tended to be more progressive types, such as Josephus Daniels and, ironically, Wilson’s old but not fond acquaintance at the Atlanta bar, Hoke Smith. The fault line separating his supporters and opponents in the former Confederacy ran mainly between reconstructed and unreconstructed white southerners.21

  Another irony made it clear that Underwood’s backers did not so much love him more as they loved Wilson less. The forty-nine-year-old congressman was arguably no more a “real” southerner than the New Jersey governor. He was a native of Louisville, Kentucky, and had spent part of his boyhood in Minnesota. Only after attending the University of Virginia—his time there briefly overlapping with Wilson’s, although the two men never knew each other—did he move to the Deep South, where, like Wilson, he had set up a law practice in a New South boomtown, in Underwood’s case the rising manufacturing center of Birmingham, Alabama. After his election to Congress in the mid-1890s, Underwood became a spokesman for his city’s business interests. Smooth-faced and affable, he owed his rise among House Democrats to his pleasant manner and his championship of tariff reform. His candidacy for the nomination was a blessing in disguise for Wilson. Besides keeping Bourbons from backing Clark, as some of them probably would have done, it kept sectional feeling strong. Southerners wanted one of their own to be the nominee, and an expatriate might be better than an outsider.