Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  Wilson, with his penchant for extemporaneous speaking and his inexperience in national politics, with its far greater press coverage, opened himself to misrepresentations. Roosevelt had learned his lesson the hard way in 1910, when his remarks about recalling judicial decisions had been similarly quoted out of context; now he supplied the press with advance texts of his speeches. During one of his campaign trips, Wilson asked reporters who had covered Roosevelt how the ex-president managed to produce those texts. “I wish I could do that,” one reporter said Wilson confessed. “I’ve tried to do it over and over again, but I can’t.” He thought prepared texts spoiled the spontaneity of his speaking. Only on the most formal occasions, such as the acceptance speech in August and major state addresses he delivered as president, would he write an address and read from a prepared text. Otherwise, he persisted in speaking from sketchy notes, usually in shorthand, or using no notes at all. As president, however, he would remedy the problem by having a team of stenographers quickly prepare transcripts of his speeches.16

  Nevertheless, Roosevelt’s counterattack proved a boon to Wilson. On his first extended campaign tour—a grueling five-day railroad trip that took him around a large swath of the Midwest at the middle of September—he began to spell out his economic views. In Sioux City, Iowa, he argued, “Now a trust is not merely a business that has grown big. … A trust is an arrangement to get rid of competition, and a big business is a business that has survived competition by conquering in the field of intelligence and economy. I am for big business, I am against trusts.” But, he noted, “the third party says that trusts are inevitable; that is the only way of efficiency. I would say parenthetically that they don’t know what they are talking about.” In other speeches, he denied that monopoly was inevitable—“I absolutely deny that we have lost the power to set ourselves free”—and explained that regulated competition would open the marketplace to newcomers: “We are going to say to the newcomers, ‘It depends upon your genius, upon your initiative.’ ”17

  Roosevelt’s aspersions on Wilson’s progressivism provided still richer grist for his mill. On Wilson’s second campaign tour—another five-day train trip immediately afterward, this one through the Northeast—he expounded on his political beliefs. In a speech in Pennsylvania, he explicitly rejected Jefferson’s limited-government views and threw Roosevelt’s accusation back in his face: “Because we won’t take the dictum of a leader who thinks he knows exactly what ought to be done by everybody, we are accused of wishing to minimize the powers of the Government of the United States. I am not afraid of the utmost exercise of the powers of the government of Pennsylvania, or of the Union, provided they are exercised with patriotism and intelligence and really in the interest of the people who are living under them.” In another speech, he used the story from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass about Alice’s running as hard as she can just to stay in the same place to explain his progressivism: “I am, therefore, a progressive because we have not kept up with our own changes of conditions, either in the economic field or the political field.” He also affirmed that modern life often left individuals helpless in the face of great obstacles and, “therefore, law in our day must come to the assistance of the individual.”18

  On that campaign swing, Wilson had two important meetings, both in Boston on September 27. The first was a chance encounter that stirred up some nice publicity. When he arrived at the Copley Plaza Hotel, he learned that President Taft was in the building, preparing to give a speech. He asked to call on the president, and the two men met in a private room on the fifth floor. According to press reports, the president asked the governor if campaigning had worn him out. “It hasn’t done that, but it has nearly done so,” Wilson answered and asked in turn, “How’s your voice, is it holding out?” Taft said that it was and put the same question to Wilson. “It’s pretty fine, but now and then it gets a bit husky,” Wilson answered. Taft then observed, “Well, there are three men that can sympathize with you, Mr. Bryan, Mr. Roosevelt, and myself. We have been through it all.” Afterward, Wilson told reporters, “It was a very delightful meeting. I am very fond of President Taft.” He also made a joke about the president’s renowned girth, saying that he knew the bed in his hotel room would be big enough “because it was built especially for the President.”19 This was the only face-to-face encounter between any of the candidates in 1912.

  Wilson could afford to joke about Taft. No one believed the president had a chance of winning, not even Taft himself. Some people believed that he was staying in the race out of spite, to ensure Roosevelt’s defeat by splitting the Republican vote. Taft did harbor deep feelings of hurt and resentment toward his onetime friend and patron, but in not bowing out he also believed he was pursuing a greater political aim. At the time of the convention, he had confided to a supporter, “If I win the nomination and Roosevelt bolts, it means a long hard fight with probable defeat. But I can stand defeat if we retain the regular Republican party as a nucleus for future conservative action.” In his campaign speeches, Taft attacked Roosevelt and preached a conservative sermon. Two days after his encounter with Wilson, he admonished, “A National Government cannot create good times. It cannot make the rain to fall, the sun to shine, or the crops to grow, but it can, by pursuing a meddlesome policy, attempting to change economic conditions, and frightening the investment of capital, prevent a prosperity and a revival of business which might otherwise have taken place.”20 Such sentiments were new for Taft, who had earlier been a moderate progressive, and they sounded like the limited-government views then usually associated with conservative Democrats. This marked an early step toward the ideological transformation of the Republican Party during the rest of the twentieth century.

  Wilson’s other meeting in Boston on September 27 was with Brandeis. He asked the attorney to give him fresh proposals for dealing with the trusts. First in a lengthy talk and a few days later in two long memoranda, Brandeis outlined a legislative program. His proposals included, first, the removal of uncertainties in the current anti-trust law by facilitating court enforcement and establishing an agency to aid in enforcement and, second, the enumeration of prohibited practices and remedies for those practices. The remedies included withdrawing government business from convicted firms and attacking those firms’ patents. At first, Wilson planned to use Brandeis’s ideas in a letter to the press on anti-trust policy, but he decided instead to incorporate them into his speeches. Even before he received the memoranda, he revealed Brandeis’s influence when he announced in a speech the same day that they met, “[T]here is a point of bigness—as every businessman in this country knows, though some will not admit it … where you pass the point of efficiency and get to the point of clumsiness and unwieldiness.” He also warned that the country was nearing “the time when the combined power of high finance would be greater than the power of the government.”21

  Wilson was starting to hit his full stride as a campaigner. In the first half of October, he made his longest and most intensive tour, a nine-day trip in which he revisited the Midwest and went as far west as Colorado. In Indianapolis, he coined his own great slogan when he urged people “to organize the forces of liberty in our time to make conquest of a new freedom.” Americans had a choice: either submit to “legalized monopoly” or else “open again the fields of competition, so that new men with brains, new men with capital, new men with energy in their veins, may build up enterprises in America.” In Omaha, he poked fun at people who “have regarded me as a very remote and academic person. They don’t know how much human nature there is in me to give me trouble all my life.” He particularly relished meeting “the plainest sort of men. … And when they call me ‘Kid’ or ‘Woody,’ and all the rest of it, I know that I am all right.” In Lincoln, which he called “the Mecca of progressive Democracy,” he stayed overnight at Bryan’s home, where the two men talked late into the night about the campaign, and they attended church together the next day. Despite the strains of train travel an
d constant speechmaking, he enjoyed talking with the reporters who accompanied him; it was on this western trip that he quizzed them on how Roosevelt got out advance texts of his speeches. The reporters found him more down-to-earth, humorous, and given to cussing than they had expected. When he heard about a New York paper refusing to support a Tammany-backed candidate, he scoffed, “There’s no use in being so damned ladylike.”22

  On this campaign swing, Wilson grew relentless in attacking Roosevelt and seeking to undercut his appeal. He praised insurgent Republicans and reminded people that La Follette, “that sturdy little giant in Wisconsin,” refused to support Roosevelt and what Wilson always called the “third party,” the “new party,” or the “irregular, the variegated Republicans”—never the Progressives. He also called Roosevelt “a very, very erratic comet on the horizon” and accused him of harboring delusions of being the nation’s savior. Reciting the famous rhyme about the purple cow, he said he felt the same way about such would-be saviors: “I never saw one, I never hope to see one, but I’ll tell you, I would rather see one than be one.” Not all of his campaigning was negative, however. In Abraham Lincoln’s adopted hometown, he apologized for speaking while the World Series was going on and appealed to memories of “the Great Emancipator. We are going to repudiate all this [monopolistic] slavery as emphatically as we repudiated the other.” This oratorical effort came at a cost. Early on the trip, he strained his voice: “The trouble with me is I talk too damn much,” he told Mary Peck.23

  Wilson was not the only candidate who strained his voice. Taft’s quip about the three men in the country who could sympathize with his laryngeal problem applied even more aptly to their mutual adversary. Roosevelt was not a polished, disciplined speaker like Wilson or Bryan, and early in October he also started to suffer from the rigors of making himself heard to the crowds. This physical problem came on top of other troubles. Vigorous and blustery as ever, he kept up a campaign schedule that was even more grueling than the governor’s. As he crisscrossed the eastern half of the country, he hammered away at his messages of trust regulation and strong government, but he did not talk much about his basic message of transcendent nationalism to overcome class division. This emphasis testified to how effectively Wilson was fending off Roosevelt’s attacks and putting the ex-president himself on the defensive. Speaking in a cracking voice on October 12, he denied being pro-monopoly: “Free competition and monopoly—they’re all the same thing unless you improve the condition of workers. … What I am interested in is getting the hand of government put on all of them.”24 Later, he issued a statement that endorsed strengthening the anti-trust laws along lines similar to those Brandeis had recommended to Wilson.

  In a twisted way, both candidates found relief for their strained voices. On October 14 in Milwaukee, a mentally deranged bartender shot Roosevelt in the chest. The ex-president’s practice of preparing speeches in advance helped save his life. The manuscript pages and his steel-reinforced spectacle case, both of which were in his jacket pocket, absorbed much of the impact of the bullet. True to form, Roosevelt insisted on going ahead with the speech. After informing the audience that he had just been wounded, he declared, “I have altogether too important things to think of to feel any concern over my own death; and now I cannot speak to you insincerely within five minutes of being shot.” He said the incident showed the need to overcome the division between the “Havenots” and the “Haves,” and he likened his present political crusade to the time when he had led his troops in the Spanish-American War, another battle “for the good of our common country.” Those lines read like a dying declaration, and some historians have speculated that he was disappointed that he did not die after uttering those words. But he kept on talking and grew incoherent from shock and loss of blood until supporters led him off the stage. Roosevelt spent several days in a Chicago hospital and then convalesced at home for another two weeks. He gave one last speech, at a rally at Madison Square Garden, but for all practical purposes the attempt on his life ended his campaign.25

  Wilson responded to this dramatic turn of events with a gesture that was at once generous and shrewd. After conferring with McAdoo and other campaign managers, the governor announced that he would suspend his campaign as soon as he fulfilled a few more obligations. McAdoo and most of the managers evidently opposed this move, but he overruled them. His daughter Nell later recalled, “He laughed when he told us of his decision. I couldn’t see why it was funny, and when I questioned him, he said, ‘Teddy will have apoplexy when he hears of this.’ We were told that it did enrage him, but he made no comment of any sort.”26 The gesture looked good to the public and gave him time for rest and preparation.

  Wilson’s speeches after the announcement of the campaign suspension showed him at his best. On October 17, he saluted Roosevelt as “that gallant gentleman” who had done “so much to wake up the country to the problems that now have to be settled.” He again praised La Follette and wished that he himself had joined the progressive ranks much sooner than he did. He revived an earlier catchphrase when he called for laws and government to “look after the men who are on the make rather than the men who are already made,” but he also eschewed class warfare and sounded like Roosevelt when he maintained that “we must overcome class prejudice by making classes understand one another and see that there is a common interest which transcends every particular interest in the United States.” Talking about himself, he affirmed, “If I am fit to be your President, it is only because I understand you. … I do not wish to be your master. I wish to be your spokesman.”27

  After those speeches, Wilson enjoyed a nine-day respite from the campaign trail. He spent part of the time dealing with two touchy issues, the first of which was race relations. Since July, some African American spokesmen and their white sympathizers, most notably Oswald Garrison Villard, editor of the New York Evening Post and grandson of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, had been conferring with the Democratic nominee about the possibility of black support for him and his party. Some African American leaders had grown disgusted with long-standing Republican efforts to distance themselves from blacks and seek support from southern whites. Taft had made overtures toward the white South early in his administration, and Roosevelt had allowed the Progressives to organize in the South as a lily-white party. In response, Bishop Alexander Walters of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church had switched parties and now headed the National Colored Democratic League. Likewise, W. E. B. DuBois, the editor of The Crisis, the magazine of the recently organized National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, endorsed Wilson in August: “He will not advance the cause of the oligarchy in the South, he will not seek further means of ‘Jim Crow’ insult, he will not dismiss black men from office, and he will remember that the Negro in the United States has a right to be heard.”28

  Wilson responded warily. He stalled Villard and Walters until finally, on October 21, he sent a letter assuring African Americans of “my earnest wish to see justice done them in every matter, and not mere grudging justice, but justice executed with liberality and cordial good feeling. … My sympathy with them is of long standing, and I want to assure them through you that should I become President of the United States they may count upon me for absolute fair dealing and for everything by which I could assist in advancing the interest of their race in the United States.”29 Those guarded words were as far as Wilson was willing to go; he declined to make any further statement. This encounter foreshadowed the heartache and disappointment that would be felt after he entered the White House, when most of what DuBois said would not happen did come to pass.

  The other touchy issue was woman suffrage. Here a real difference separated the two major candidates. The most renowned woman in the country, the social worker Jane Addams, had seconded Roosevelt’s nomination at the Progressive convention, and the party platform and the nominee had endorsed woman suffrage. Roosevelt admitted privately that he did not feel strongly about the is
sue, and he rarely mentioned it in his speeches. Still, he was the first leading male politician to come out for woman suffrage. Wilson, despite having taught at a women’s college and having two suffragist daughters, tried to duck the issue, claiming it was a state matter. He had to confront it publicly only once during the campaign, when, on October 19, a militant suffragist interrupted a speech and demanded to know what he thought about men’s exclusive right to vote. Wilson answered that this was “not a question that is dealt with by the National Government at all.” His answer did not satisfy the suffragist, who shouted, “I am speaking to you as an American, Mr. Wilson.” Police carted her off to jail so that he could resume.30

  Party affairs and the campaign organization also required the candidate’s attention. New Jersey and New York remained trouble spots for the Democrats. In September, Sugar Jim Smith entered the primary for New Jersey’s other U.S. Senate seat, but Wilson spoke against him and he lost. Across the Hudson, anti-Tammany reformers were trying to dump Governor Dix from the ticket; Wilson sympathized strongly with them but did not openly take sides. The reformers did succeed in replacing Dix, although Tammany’s hold on the party remained strong. At the national headquarters, tensions between McAdoo and an ailing McCombs continued unabated, but others helped keep the organization running fairly smoothly, including two Texans. One was Congressman Albert S. Burleson, a hard-bitten political operator who oversaw speaking assignments for the campaign and coordinated publicity. The other was Edward M. House, a wealthy expatriate Texan who held the honorary title of Colonel. House made himself and his spacious apartment available to the candidate and other managers, and his soft, ingratiating manner smoothed matters over at headquarters and led Wilson to warm to him.31