Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  During the long, hot days and nights in Baltimore, Wilson’s managers worked tirelessly to get votes. McAdoo later claimed that he had a total of four hours’ sleep during the last three days of balloting. More than McCombs, who turned into a nervous wreck, it was McAdoo who played the biggest part in putting Wilson over the top. He and others worked several angles successfully. One was to gain Indiana’s votes by promising the vice-presidential nomination to Governor Marshall; that suited the state’s party boss, who wanted to get rid of the governor. Another tactic was to cling to the ironclad agreement with the Underwood forces not to withdraw in Clark’s favor. Wilson’s managers offered Underwood the vice-presidential nomination, which he declined, and they promised to switch their votes to him if Wilson withdrew. Finally and mysteriously, the managers persuaded the Chicago boss, Roger Sullivan, to shift a large bloc of Illinois votes from Clark to Wilson. McAdoo and others cultivated Sullivan, who had clashed with Hearst’s allies and Clark’s supporters in Illinois. Also, Sullivan was reportedly afraid that a prolonged deadlock might result in Bryan’s nomination. The Illinois switch came on the morning of July 2, on the forty-second ballot. It took four more ballots, and another of McCombs’s panic attacks, before Wilson finally reached the magic two thirds and became the Democrats’ nominee for president.36

  A telephone call at two forty-eight in the afternoon brought official word of the nomination to Sea Girt. Wilson was alone in the library when the call came. He went upstairs to tell Ellen, who was planning a family trip to their favorite spot, Rydal Mount, in England’s Lake District, in the event he was not nominated. She knew what was going to happen when she heard his footsteps on the stair. “Well, dear, I guess we won’t go to Mount Rydal [sic] this Summer after all,” he told her, and she answered, “I don’t care a bit, for I know lots of other places just as good.” The couple came downstairs, with Mrs. Wilson on her husband’s arm. Reporters noticed that Wilson’s eyes were moist, while Ellen was smiling. The men of the press stood in silence, holding their hats in their hands. Then the governor made a statement: “The honor is as great as can come to any man by the nomination of a party, especially in the circumstances, and I hope I appreciate it at its true value; but just [at] this moment I feel the tremendous responsibility it involves even more than I feel the honor. I hope with all my heart that the party will never have reason to regret it.”37

  That downbeat note was not just a bit of modesty for public consumption. Tumulty had hired a band to play outside, and Nell Wilson remembered, “Father asked him if he had instructed them to slink away in case of defeat.” Someone in the crowd said, “Governor, you don’t seem a bit excited.” Wilson answered, “I can’t effervesce in the face of responsibility.” Four days later, he told Mary Peck, “I am wondering how all this happened to come to me, and whether, when [the] test is over, I shall have been found to be in any sense worthy. It is awesome to be so believed in and trusted.”38 Such faith and trust were going to be needed as Woodrow Wilson went out to do battle with the most formidable opponent he could face in an election that promised to be one of the most momentous in the nation’s history.

  8

  THE GREAT CAMPAIGN

  The election of 1912 witnessed one of the greatest presidential campaigns in American history, featuring a past president, a present president, and a future president: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson. Coincidentally, these men were graduates of three of the country’s oldest and most prestigious universities—Harvard for Roosevelt, Yale for Taft, and Princeton for Wilson. Also running was the country’s most appealing radical politician, the Socialist Party’s Eugene Victor Debs. From the outset, knowledgeable observers agreed that the real contest was between Roosevelt and Wilson. The fight between this pair held the center ring of the main tent of this electoral circus. It pitted the most colorful presidential politician since Andrew Jackson against the most articulate presidential politician since Thomas Jefferson. Woodrow Wilson could not have asked for a tougher or worthier opponent. If he won this fight, he could take pride in having beaten the heavyweight champion of politics.1

  By another coincidence, Roosevelt and Wilson accepted their respective parties’ nominations on the same day, August 7, 1912. Roosevelt’s new Progressive Party met in the same hall in Chicago where the Republicans had gathered two months before. This convention struck many who were there as more like a religious revival than a political conclave. The delegates sang “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and words set to the tune commonly used in Protestant churches for the doxology. Roosevelt broke precedent by appearing in person at the opening of the convention to deliver his “Confession of Faith.” He denounced the Republicans as hidebound reactionaries and “Professor Wilson” and the Democrats as wedded to “an archaic construction of the States’-rights doctrine” and quack economic remedies derived from Bryan’s free-silver notions. He rejected “class government” by both “the rich few” and “the needy many”: the country needed a transcendent vision of the national interest that would “give the right trend to our democracy, a trend which will take it away from mere greedy shortsighted materialism.” He closed by repeating his famous shout: “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.” Curiously, however, when the Progressives nominated him with great fanfare the next day, he said only a few words thanking the delegates for the honor.2

  Wilson’s acceptance of his party’s nomination, which occurred a few hours earlier, was a tamer affair. He observed the formality of waiting for a party delegation to come and inform him of his nomination, a practice dating back more than three quarters of a century, to the first party conventions, which had taken place before railroads and telegraphs, when it had presumably taken some time to learn that one had received the party’s nomination. In fact, the business of a delegation traveling to inform the nominee had long since become an artificial ritual, but it did give the nominee time to prepare an acceptance speech, which traditionally served to kick off the campaign. Wilson performed that duty when a committee of Democrats journeyed to Sea Girt on August 7.

  Standing on the porch of the governor’s summer residence, he thanked the committee for this “great honor” and then delivered a strongly progressive message. “We stand in the presence of an awakened nation, impatient of partisan make-believe,” Wilson announced. “The nation has awakened to a sense of neglected ideals and neglected duties.” In this “new age,” it would require “self-restraint not to attempt too much, and yet it would be cowardly to attempt too little.” He praised the Democratic platform, especially the planks on the tariff, the trusts, banking reform, and labor, as well as those on presidential primaries, popular election of senators, and disclosure of campaign spending. On the tariff, he again refused to condemn protection in principle and urged caution. On the trusts, he did not condemn bigness in itself: “Big business is not dangerous because it is big.” Rather, new laws were needed to curb and prevent monopoly. He called banking reform a “complicated and difficult question” and confessed that he did not “know enough about this subject to be dogmatic about it.” On labor, he declared, “No law that safeguards [workers’] life, that improve[s] the physical and moral conditions under which they live … can properly be regarded as class legislation or as anything but a measure taken in the interest of the whole people.” He closed by demanding “unentangled government, a government that cannot be used for private purposes, either in business or in politics; a government that will not tolerate the use of the organization of a great party to serve the personal aims and ambitions of any individual. … It is a great conception, and I am free to serve it, as are you.”3

  As the slam at “personal aims and ambitions” indicated, Wilson was taking aim at Roosevelt. Each man had been sizing up the other for some time. Their once-friendly, mutually admiring acquaintance was long since dead. For several years, Roosevelt had been casting aspersions on Wilson as an impractical academic who purveyed
outmoded and pernicious notions and had been belittling his conversion to progressivism. Several times during 1911, progressive Republicans and even Roosevelt’s oldest son suggested to him that a Democratic victory in 1912 under Wilson might offer a good alternative to Taft and their party’s conservatives. Roosevelt spurned such suggestions. In October 1911, he had told Governor Hiram Johnson of California that the Democrats were hopeless because “even those among them who are not foolish, like Woodrow Wilson, are not sincere … but are playing politics for advantage, and are quite capable of tricking the progressives by leading them into a quarrel over States’ rights as against National duties.”4

  Wilson’s attitude was more complicated. From the time he started to come out as a progressive, he publicly praised Roosevelt, despite his recent aspersion on the ex-president’s alleged egotism. In October 1910, during his gubernatorial campaign, he had discussed with a Princeton faculty colleague the recent espousal by Roosevelt of the “New Nationalism,” a phrase and idea borrowed from Herbert Croly’s Promise of American Life. In a campaign speech, Wilson praised the New Nationalism and dismissed fears of centralized government. When he emerged on the national scene, reporters often compared him to Roosevelt, and at the end of 1911, when it began to look as if he and Roosevelt might become opponents in the presidential election, he told Mrs. Peck, “That would make the campaign worth while.”5

  Neither man rushed into the fray. Roosevelt faced the task of building a party and a campaign from scratch. Wilson was more fortunate in having an established party behind him, and one that smelled victory. Even before the ceremony on August 7, the governor had begun receiving visits and getting advice from leading Democrats. A sullen Champ Clark made an obligatory call and perfunctorily pledged his support. Oscar Underwood was more genial and voluble on his visit. The organizational work fell to McCombs, whose uncertain nerves compelled him to bow out for a while, and increasingly to McAdoo. Veteran party operatives likewise pitched in. After the acceptance ceremony, Wilson occasionally commuted to Trenton and received visitors in the governor’s office.6

  Wilson was mulling over how to approach the campaign, and he was weighing the challenge he faced from Roosevelt. His daughter Nell later recalled, “Father gave a delicious imitation of Teddy delivering his hysterical slogan, ‘We stand at Armageddon and battle for the Lord,’ and added, ‘Good old Teddy—what a help he is.’” For all his joviality, Wilson regarded Roosevelt with the utmost seriousness. “Do not be too confident of the result,” he told Mary Peck. “I feel that Roosevelt’s strength is altogether incalculable. … He appeals to … [people’s] imaginations; I do not. He is a real, vivid person, whom they have seen and shouted themselves hoarse over and voted for, millions strong; I am a vague, conjectural personality made up more of opinions and academic prepossessions than of human traits and red corpuscles. We shall see what will happen!” He thought the popular stereotypes reversed their real selves, with Roosevelt the cool calculator and him the passionately committed politician. Taking Roosevelt on “would be a splendid adventure and it would make me solemnly glad to undertake it.”7

  Wilson never thought about doing anything else but appealing to public opinion. Nell also remembered, “Father did not deny Roosevelt’s popularity and influence, but he said, ‘Are people interested in personalities rather than in principles? If that is true they will not vote for me.’” Another alternative might have been for Wilson to play things safe and rely upon having an undivided party behind him. Bryan advised against such a strategy, reminding Wilson that “our only hope is in holding our progressives and winning over progressive Republicans.”8 Wilson agreed, and he got potent reinforcement in this approach when a man whom he had not met before came to see him at Sea Girt on August 28, 1912.

  The caller was the well-known “people’s attorney” and reformer from Boston, Louis D. Brandeis. Just a month older than Wilson, the craggy-faced, mournful-eyed Brandeis was the son of Czech Jewish immigrants who had come to America in the wake of the failed revolutions of 1848. Like Wilson, Brandeis was a southern expatriate. He had been born in Louisville, Kentucky, although his parents were abolitionists and supporters of the Union. Unlike Wilson, he spoke with a southern accent all his life, but he had also gone north in 1875, to complete his education, in his case at Harvard Law School. Settling in Boston, Brandeis had become a highly successful attorney and seemed to fit in well with the city’s Brahmin establishment. Yet he continued to view the economy and society from the standpoint of an outsider, and after the mid-1890s he had defended workers and small businesses. In 1908 he successfully argued before the Supreme Court in favor of Oregon’s law limiting the hours women could work. He was also a friend and political adviser to the insurgent Republican leader Robert La Follette of Wisconsin.9

  Brandeis came to see Wilson as a man on a mission. His study of economics and his defense of workers and small businesses had made him a fierce opponent of the trusts, and he was appalled at the stand Roosevelt had forced on the Progressives in favor of regulating rather than breaking up the trusts. He told reporters at Sea Girt that the right course was “to eliminate the evil and introduce good as a substitute,” which meant “to regulate competition instead of monopoly.” The two men talked for three hours, over lunch and afterward, and claimed to reporters that they had had a meeting of the minds. Brandeis later recalled that he had spent much of the time in an effort to wean Wilson from his belief that punishing guilty individuals would solve the trust problem, arguing instead for attacking the system that permitted such wrongdoing and fostering conditions that encouraged competition.10 Brandeis seems to have been persuasive, because Wilson did address the trust issue in those terms during the rest of the campaign.

  It would be wrong to think that Wilson’s concern about the trusts originated with Brandeis. He had been criticizing the shortcomings of the existing anti-trust law for some time, and his visitor supplied tactical rather than strategic advice for the upcoming campaign, something Wilson would later call upon him for again. Brandeis put his finger on the issue where Roosevelt was most vulnerable and offered plans for attacking him there. Also, Brandeis’s emphasis on freedom may have planted the seed in Wilson’s mind to stress that word and concept and eventually counter Roosevelt’s New Nationalism with his own “New Freedom.” In all, this meeting proved important to the way Wilson waged his campaign, although it probably was not essential to his winning the election. He was both gracious and accurate when he told Brandeis right after the election, “You were yourself a great part of the victory.”11

  Wilson followed this new plan of attack five days later when he gave his first major speech since accepting the nomination. At a Labor Day rally in Buffalo, he commended the “social program” in the platform of Roosevelt’s new party, “the bringing about of social justice,” but he condemned its trust program “because once the government regulates the monopoly, then monopoly will see to it that it regulates the government.” Worse, the party’s program wanted to play “Providence for you,” and he feared “a government of experts. God forbid that in a democratic country we should resign that task and give the government over to experts. … Because if we don’t understand the job we are not a free people.” That objection hinted at another of Roosevelt’s vulnerable points—the widespread belief that he was a power-hungry potential despot. Wilson noted that people said he was “disqualified for politics” because he was a schoolteacher: “But there is one thing a schoolteacher learns that he never forgets, namely, that it is his business to learn all he can and then communicate it to others.” Likewise, his party, the Democrats, did not seek to legalize monopoly, and they were “the only organized force by which you can set your government free.”12

  No one expected Roosevelt to take such charges lying down, and he did not disappoint expectations. Speaking in Fargo, North Dakota, four days later, he maintained that the past two decades’ attempts to break up the trusts had failed, and he quoted a celebrated remark by the greate
st of the trust magnates, J. Pierpont Morgan: “You can’t unscramble the eggs in an omelet.” Taft had tried to unscramble the eggs with anti-trust prosecutions and had failed, and now Wilson wanted to try the same futile approach. He scoffed at Wilson’s aspersion on “government by experts” and extolled his own program as a “definite and concrete” approach to the trust problem, in contrast to Wilson’s “vague, puzzled, and hopeless purpose feebly to continue the present policy.”13 This rejoinder opened a debate on the trust question that would last for most of the month of September 1912.

  Roosevelt’s reply contained the germ of the attack that he was about to launch at Wilson. If the trust issue was his Achilles heel, then Wilson’s was his onetime flirtation with conservative Democrats, which left lingering suspicions about the depth and sincerity of his progressivism. Roosevelt had also been taking his opponent’s mark and looking for a point of attack. One of his press aides on the campaign train recalled, “It was Wilson, Wilson, Wilson, all the time in the private car, and nothing but Wilson and his record in the Colonel’s talks. We believed we were on the way to drive Wilson into one of his characteristic explosions, with [a] result that could only be detrimental to his campaign.”14 Why they thought they could provoke Wilson is not clear. The governor did not have a record of “characteristic explosions;” the idea that he did may have come from some stories about quarrels at Princeton, exaggerated and distorted in the retelling. At any event, three days after Roosevelt spoke, he found the opening he wanted.

  On September 9, Wilson gave a speech in New York that contained the sentence “The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it.” In the body of the speech, that statement was part of an exhortation to keep government in touch with the people. By itself, however, as many newspapers quoted the sentence, it seemed to show that Wilson still clung to conservative Democratic state rights, limited-government views. Roosevelt wasted no time in exploiting the opening. In a speech in San Francisco on September 14, he quoted that sentence and called it “the key to Mr. Wilson’s position,” which he dismissed as “a bit of outworn academic doctrine which was kept in the schoolroom and the professorial study for a generation after it had been abandoned by all who had experience of actual life.” He scorned Wilson’s position as outmoded laissez-faire economics and proudly proclaimed his own intention “to use the whole power of government” to combat “an unregulated and purely individualistic industrialism.”15 Roosevelt was damning Wilson as a heartless, outmoded conservative and an impractical academic out of touch with the real world while presenting his own position in the most attractive light.