Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  By and large, the managers mounted an effective campaign. They arranged the candidate’s speaking tours, and they produced leaflets and brochures and delved into the new medium of motion pictures, making and distributing a campaign film. Their only failure was in fund-raising. Despite strenuous appeals to make this a campaign financed by “the people,” less than a third of the money raised came from small donors. The rest came from big contributors. Charles R. Crane, the Chicago plumbing-fixture tycoon and longtime backer of progressive causes, was the biggest, with $40,000; Cleveland Dodge, Wilson’s Princeton classmate and supporter from the board of trustees, was the second largest, with $35,000. Other big contributors included such leaders of the New York Jewish community as Henry Morgenthau, Jacob Schiff, and Samuel Untermyer, as well as a newcomer to their ranks, Bernard Baruch. Wilson drew the line at contributions from notorious trust magnates, but otherwise this champion of progressivism took money from the kind of people he was denouncing on the hustings.32

  He wrapped up his campaign with a week of speechmaking in Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey. On October 28, he praised the middle class as the place “from which the energies of America have sprung” but whose members felt “a great weight above them—a weight of concentrated capital and of organized control—against which they are throwing themselves in vain.” He also declared, “We do not want a big brother government. … I do not want a government that will take care of me. I want a government that will make other men take their hands off so that I can take care of myself.” This final round ended with a big rally at Madison Square Garden and some barnstorming by automobile around New Jersey, where his car hit a bump and threw him up against the roof, giving him a scalp wound that bled a lot and required a doctor’s attention and a bandage. “It was a very hard blow,” he told reporters. “There is no doubt about that. But, fortunately, I am hard-headed.”33

  On November 5, Wilson voted in the morning at a fire station in Princeton. He spent the rest of the day walking with companions around the town and the campus. He pointed to the boardinghouse where he had lived as a freshman, his room in Witherspoon, and, in Nassau Hall, James Madison’s diploma—“the diploma of the only Princeton man who has been elected President.”34 At the end of the afternoon, he went back to the house on Cleveland Lane, where his sister Annie Howe and Stockton Axson joined him and Ellen and their daughters for supper. Afterward, they sat in front of the fire, and as they often did, they read poetry aloud, mostly Robert Browning.

  They did not have to wait long to know the outcome of the election. Around eight-thirty, early returns came in on a teletype machine set up in the library of the house. The reports showed a sweep for Wilson and the Democrats in New York and other northeastern states, and soon after nine o’clock newspapers and wire services called the election for him. When the grandfather clock in the library chimed ten, Ellen put her hands on her husband’s shoulders and kissed him. “Let me be the first to congratulate you,” she said. In response to Nell’s excitement, her father said, “Now Daughter, there is no cause of elation.” Congratulatory telegrams began to pour in, including a terse one from Roosevelt and a warmer one from Taft. On the campus, President Hibben ordered the bell in Nassau Hall to toll, and a crowd of students carrying torches marched to Cleveland Lane. Wilson stood on a chair in the entrance so that, he joked, “you couldn’t see the patch on my head.” But one observer noted that he spoke “with great emotion and tears in his eyes.” He told the students, “When I see the crowds gather it carries me back to the days when I labored among you.” For himself, he said, “I have no feeling of triumph, but a feeling of solemn responsibility.”35

  The election returns gave Wilson reason to feel both triumphant and circumspect. He won the popular vote decisively: 6,294,327 to Roosevelt’s 4,120,207 and Taft’s 3,486,343. His Electoral College victory was overwhelming: forty states in all regions of the country, for a total of 435 electoral votes. Roosevelt took six states: California (where Wilson got 2 electoral votes), Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and Washington, for a total of 88. Taft won Utah and Vermont, for a total of 8 electoral votes. Wilson’s party shared in the sweep. Democrats won additional governorships, raised their majority in the House, and picked up ten seats in the Senate to win control of that chamber for the first time in eighteen years. Yet all was not as sweet as it seemed. Wilson’s share of the popular vote was only 42 percent. He won majorities only in the former Confederate states. His total fell 100,000 votes short of Bryan’s showing in 1908. All Wilson and the Democrats did in 1912 was maintain their grip on their previous minority share of the electorate.36

  The returns brought no joy to the opposition. Roosevelt’s second-place finish was impressive; it was the only time a third-party candidate had ever finished ahead of the nominee of one of the major parties. But that showing was largely a personal victory, since Roosevelt ran well ahead of all other Progressive candidates. Progressives did well only on the West Coast, a bright spot that owed to their having taken over the formerly Republican apparatus in California and, to a lesser extent, Washington. Roosevelt apparently did not attract new voters. The combined Roosevelt-Taft total fell 69,000 votes short of Taft’s showing in 1908. All Roosevelt had done was split the Republicans’ previous majority share of the electorate. Taft’s third-place finish, carrying only two states with a minuscule share of electoral votes, was personally galling, but he could take some comfort in coming in second in eighteen states, including several in the West and New York, Roosevelt’s home state. The Republicans had stood firm in the face of the Progressives, and they finished ahead of them in most places, despite weakness at the top of the ticket. The only surprise in the results was the performance of the man the major contenders largely ignored, the Socialist candidate, Eugene Debs. He racked up 901,873 votes, more than double his total in 1908. At 6 percent of the vote, this would stand as the best showing a Socialist or any left-wing party candidate would make at any time in American history.37 With that exception, the results in 1912 reflected politics as usual.

  Why such an exciting and momentous campaign produced such an unremarkable outcome has remained a puzzle. It did not stem from want of effort by the major candidates. Until mid-October, Roosevelt and Wilson poured their best persuasive energies into their campaigns. They offered contrasting styles on the stump. Roosevelt’s vivid personality buttressed an approach that derived from Protestant evangelism. Though not an orthodox believer, he had dubbed his former office a “bully pulpit” and often called his oratory “preaching.” He hammered away at a few basic themes and often appealed to voters’ emotions. Wilson’s previous profession led people, including Wilson himself, to call him a schoolmaster, and he did move gracefully among a variety of themes to appeal to voters’ intellect. Yet his oratory also sprang from the pulpit. His model was, not surprisingly, the basically educational preaching that Presbyterians favored.

  The content of the two men’s politics, unlike their images, did not strike many observers as offering much of a contrast. Woman suffrage, which did not loom large in the campaign, was the only issue on which they took clear-cut opposing stands. On the two questions that did loom large, the trusts and the size and strength of government, it was hard to see where they differed. Wilson talked about “big business” and “trusts;” Roosevelt talked about “good trusts” and “bad trusts.” Both would leave the former alone and break up the latter. If monopoly became unavoidable in an industry, both held out nationalization as a possible last resort. Roosevelt’s attacks on Wilson’s governmental views fell flat—not, as Roosevelt believed, because Wilson was an adroit speaker who could twist arguments but because they were not true. Both men had admired Hamilton since their youth, and neither could top the other in admiration for strong, centralized, activist, interventionist government. Their respective party platforms differed, aside from woman suffrage, in the Progressives’ endorsement of tariff protection and their emphasis on industrial labor and in the Dem
ocrats’ greater sympathy for farmers. During the campaign, Wilson obviated most of those differences by refusing to renounce the principle of protection and advocating aid to labor. Small wonder that twelve years later the journalist William Allen White rendered the most widely accepted judgment on the 1912 campaign: “Between the New Nationalism and the New Freedom was that fantastic imaginary gulf that has existed between tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee.”38

  This widely perceived lack of difference between the candidates explained much of the inertia among voters. Roosevelt and Wilson had each tried to chip away at the other’s support. In July, after Wilson’s nomination and before the Progressive convention, it had looked as if Republican progressives might defect in large numbers to the Democratic candidate. The new party’s convention and Roosevelt’s performance there and on the campaign trail had arrested that drift.39 But the Progressive nominee had failed to attract progressive Democrats. With both candidates taking the same stands on the main issues, voters had little incentive to cross old party lines. With his attacks on Wilson as a state-rights Democrat, Roosevelt was appealing to memories and prejudices that went back to the Civil War, which had ended less than fifty years before. Those memories and prejudices also threw up a formidable obstacle to any future effort by Wilson to build a majority coalition and win reelection against an undivided opposition.

  Their opponents’ split cast a shadow over the Democrats and their victory. A question haunted them: could Wilson have beaten Roosevelt in a two-man race? No one doubted that he could have trounced Taft, but nearly everyone assumed that he would have lost to Roosevelt. The ex-president’s huge popularity and his impressive second-place finish reinforced that view. But could Wilson have beaten Roosevelt by himself? Two states offered a test case. In California, Governor Hiram Johnson, Roosevelt’s running mate, hijacked the Republican organization and kept Taft’s name off the ballot. Roosevelt won the contest there by only 174 votes out of a total of half a million cast. Four years earlier, Taft had carried California with 55 percent of the vote to Bryan’s 33 percent. In South Dakota, local Progressives kept Taft off the ballot, and Roosevelt ran almost 10,000 votes ahead of Wilson. South Dakota was the only state Roosevelt carried with a majority, 50.5 percent, but in 1908 Taft had won that state with 59 percent of the vote to Bryan’s 35 percent. Such showings in strongly Republican states, coupled with Roosevelt’s third-place finishes elsewhere, especially in New York, raised doubts about the ex-president’s ability to beat Wilson in a two-man race.40

  The perceived lack of difference between the two major candidates also cast a shadow over their de facto debate. That perception, particularly as expressed in White’s crack about tweedledum and tweedledee, was doubly misleading: it ignored the deep differences that did separate Roosevelt and Wilson, and it missed the intellectual depth and sophistication and political significance of their debate. Some aspects of the campaign helped mask their differences. The need both men felt to attack each other did not facilitate a full exposition of their ideas, while the hiatus after the assassination attempt on Roosevelt cut down on his and Wilson’s opportunities to expound their thinking. Still, White should have known better. He was one of the most acute observers of his time, and by the time he rendered his verdict he had enjoyed a perspective enhanced by the passage of time and the opportunity to witness the later conflict between Roosevelt and Wilson. Similarly, subsequent generations of historians have had little excuse for failing to recognize what really transpired.

  The differences between Roosevelt and Wilson were like a nested Russian doll, in which each figure contains another one within it. Of the main issues on the surface, only the size and strength of government was a red herring. The trust question, for all the two men’s apparent similarities, really did divide them. They might agree in distinguishing between businesses that grew through efficient competition (Wilson’s “big business,” Roosevelt’s “good trusts”) and those that used illegitimate, anticompetitive methods (Wilson’s “trusts,” Roosevelt’s “bad trusts”), but they disagreed about whether there were more of one or the other. Roosevelt thought that bigness by and large promoted efficiency, whereas Wilson, like Brandeis, believed that bigness usually stifled efficiency. That difference in assessment led to a sharp disagreement about where to go next. For Roosevelt, the government needed to oversee a mature economy, manage a distribution of power that was not likely to change, and ensure that people affected by that power—workers and consumers—were protected from abuses. For Wilson, government had to reopen the marketplace to fresh players, intervene to restore competition, and ensure that smaller players and their workers got a fair shot at getting ahead. Despite their public images to the contrary, it was Roosevelt who held an essentially static view of the economy and Wilson who held an essentially dynamic view.41

  Those divergent convictions contained within them equally divergent views of society and political leadership. Each candidate drew his social views from his own background. Roosevelt was an aristocrat, born into a family of old wealth and exalted, long-established social position in the nation’s greatest metropolis. For all his carping at his upper-crust peers and sincere espousal of democratic values, he viewed society from the top, and he feared upheaval and possible revolution from the lower orders. Those perspectives were what prompted him to preach his New Nationalism—a vision of transcendent national interest that would inspire people to put aside selfish, parochial interests. It was what he meant by getting away from “the greed of the Haves and the envy of the Havenots.” Social betterment for him was analogous to military service, an enterprise in which each citizen would sacrifice and everyone would work together for the common good. It was a noble vision, and it was fundamentally aristocratic and conservative.

  Wilson, on the other hand, was a product of the middle class, a man born and raised in the hinterlands who had sought his fortune in the environs of the metropolis. For all his prestigious education and hobnobbing with the wealthy and socially prominent, he still viewed society through the eyes of a striving outsider, and he did not fear upheaval or revolution. Those perspectives were what prompted him to expound his New Freedom—a vision of constant renewal from below, in which people would rise by dint of effort and ability. This was what he meant by praising “men who are on the make” and scorning “big brother government.” Social betterment for him was analogous to the growth of a tree, which is refreshed and kept vital from its roots. It was an equally noble vision, and it was fundamentally democratic and liberal.

  These conflicting social views encapsulated, in turn, different models of leadership. For Roosevelt, despite his likening himself to a military commander after he was shot, leadership consisted of evangelism. He reconciled his conservatism with his democratic views through the conviction that people can be inspired to rise above their narrow, selfish interests. Oddly for someone who was a devotee of modern science and something of a religious skeptic, Roosevelt adhered to orthodox Christian beliefs that people must be “born again,” that they must become better through leaps of faith and pursue new lives of service and sacrifice. Inspiration was the right word for his approach; its Latin root is inspirare, “to breathe into.” Roosevelt wanted to breathe something finer and nobler into his followers.

  For Wilson, leadership consisted of education. He believed that people could grasp what was best for themselves and ought to be able to follow their dreams and desires with a little guidance. Oddly for someone who had grown up in the bosom of Presbyterian Calvinism, Wilson adhered to the more modern, secular belief that people can be trusted, within limits and with some guidance, to lead honest, constructive lives. Education was the right word for his approach; its Latin root is educare, “to draw out.” Wilson wanted either to draw out the inner potential of his followers or to draw them out of their ignorance onto more enlightened paths.

  The root of those differences—the final, irreducible doll in the nest—lay in divergent conceptions of human nature. Roosevelt held a p
essimistic attitude toward human nature akin to the religious conception of original sin. For him, people left to themselves and pursuing their own interests would not produce either a good society or a strong, united nation capable of playing a great role in the world. This view has a long historical pedigree, stretching back many centuries to classical philosophy and early Christian teachings. Although he frequently called himself a radical, Roosevelt was at heart and by philosophy a conservative. Wilson, by contrast, had an optimistic attitude toward human nature akin to secular notions of innate human goodness and worth. For him, people left to themselves, safeguarded against predatory elements and pursuing their own interests, would produce both a good society and a vital, self-renewing nation. This view has a shorter historical pedigree, stretching back a few centuries to European and British, especially Scottish, Enlightenment thought. Although he also called himself a radical, Wilson was at heart and by philosophy a liberal.

  It was a shame that Roosevelt and Wilson never met in a face-to-face debate, with a format that would have allowed each to develop his own views and challenge the other’s arguments. Such debates had taken place only occasionally in American history. The most notable examples had taken place during the great confrontations in the Senate over slavery and the nature of the Union during the three decades that led to the Civil War and when Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas squared off against each other in the Senate race in Illinois in 1858. Such debates had never occurred in a presidential election, and these competing speaking tours gave the closest approach to one that had ever come to pass. This race pitted against each other two men who were true intellectuals, who had equal and often similar, though not identical, gifts of mind and temperament, and who strove to persuade voters by expounding their ideas. Intellectually and philosophically, it seems that this was as good as it gets in a presidential campaign.