Such short, unruffled workdays seemed better suited to a more easygoing chief executive than the ambitious, activist president Wilson soon showed he was. Yet he was able to maintain these working habits through most of his two terms in office, including the war years. Only the frenetic, unrelenting demands of the peace negotiations in 1919 would derail this approach to his presidential duties.
His powers of concentration and disciplined habits were what allowed him to work this way. Nearly every journalist who interviewed him commented on the atmosphere of quiet control in his office. In June 1914, the young radical journalist John Reed described the contrast between Wilson and the last strong president: “There was none of that violent slamming of doors, clamor of voices, secretaries rushing to and fro, and the sense of great national issues being settled in the antechamber that characterized Mr. Roosevelt’s term in the White House. The window curtains swayed in a warm breeze; things were unhurried, yet the feeling in that room was of powerful organization, as if no moment were wasted—as if an immense amount of work was being done.” About the president himself, Reed noted, “I never met a man who gave such an impression of quietness inside. … Wilson’s power emanates from it.”7
Wilson continued to do much of his work himself. He would be the next to last president to write his own speeches (Herbert Hoover would be the last); it never occurred to him not to. On less formal occasions, he still spoke without notes or from a few jottings in his shorthand. On more formal occasions—as were increasingly the case—he would make an outline and notes in shorthand and then produce a draft on his own typewriter. He also typed correspondence that he regarded as especially intimate or important, such as letters to Colonel House and Mary Hulbert. He wrote those letters and some of the speeches in off-hours in an upstairs study, which was lined with books and piled with papers and offered a quiet refuge. The professor still lurked within the president.
Wilson acted like a bit of both in handling the press. At Tumulty’s suggestion, he held regularly scheduled press conferences, often twice a week, becoming the first president to do so. His first meeting with reporters occurred on March 15, 1913. At twelve-forty-five in the afternoon, more than 100 journalists crowded into the president’s office. Some of those present later remembered him as stiff in manner and terse and not at all forthcoming in answering their questions. A week later, at his second press conference, Wilson apologized for his earlier performance and made a fresh start. To relieve the crowding, he moved the gathering to the East Room, and he began with a talk that echoed both his campaign speeches and his lectures at Princeton. He claimed that newspapers could improve the atmosphere of public opinion, which, he asserted, “has got to come, not from Washington, but from the country. You have got to write from the country in and not from Washington out.” Wilson asked the correspondents to “go into partnership with me, that you lend me your assistance as nobody else can, and, then, after you have brought this precious freight of opinion into Washington, let us try and make true gold here that will go out from Washington.”8
There is no record of the exchange between Wilson and the reporters at those first two meetings; thereafter, the president had Swem take down what was said. These press conferences featured brisk exchanges between the president and his questioners, with Wilson usually responding in a sentence or two, and he often showed flashes of anger, but also of wit. He held sixty-four press conferences in 1913 and another sixty-four in 1914. All his remarks were off the record, although he sometimes permitted reporters to quote him, and a few angered him by leaking things he said.
The light, bantering tone set at the early press conferences persisted, although it is unclear whether Wilson really felt so jovial toward the reporters. Like most presidents, he fumed in private about the way the press treated him. Rumors of dissension within his administration annoyed him, and reports about his wife and daughters infuriated him so much that he dressed down the reporters at the beginning of a press conference in March 1914: “Gentlemen, I want to say something to you this afternoon. … I am a public character for the time being, but the ladies of my household are not servants of the government and they are not public characters. I deeply resent the treatment they are receiving at the hands of newspapers at this time. … Now, put yourselves in my place and give me the best cooperation in this that you can, and then we can dismiss a painful subject and go to our afternoon’s business.”9
Reporters did not always enjoy the repartee either. One of them later recalled, “The President gave the impression that he was matching his wits against ours, as a sort of mental practice with the object of being able to make responses which seemed to answer the questions but which imparted little or nothing in the way of information.”10 As with Wilson’s complaints about the press, such journalistic carping about him was endemic to their relationship. Wilson’s manner with the press, particularly the joviality and evasiveness, strongly resembled Franklin Roosevelt’s performance twenty years later. With both presidents, the off-the-record setting facilitated the behavior. After the 1950s, with the advent of public press conferences carried live on television, there would be greater formality and accountability, but the relationship would remain fundamentally adversarial.
In 1915, the press conferences would grow a little less frequent, and in July he would cancel them. The stated reason was the pressure of foreign affairs, but some reporters believed that was just an excuse for doing something Wilson wanted to do anyway. Both explanations may be correct. The sinking of the ocean liner Lusitania by a German submarine, killing more than 100 Americans, had raised the specter of the United States’ being drawn into the world war, and Secretary of State Bryan had just resigned in protest against Wilson’s diplomatic responses to Germany. At the same time, the president was wooing the woman who would become his second wife, and rumors of his amorous escapades were already bubbling up. High policy and personal circumstance seem to have conspired to make regularly scheduled meetings with reporters less appetizing to Wilson.11
Questions have also arisen about whether abandonment of the press conferences sprang from Wilson’s basically solitary temperament, but that is unlikely. If those meetings had been truly distasteful to him, the time to stop them would have been in the fall of 1914, following Ellen’s death, one of the two worst times in his life. But he met the reporters as usual then. Even after he had stopped holding press conferences, he granted long interviews with individual journalists, such as one with Ray Stannard Baker in 1916. Those interviews helped writers such as Baker, Samuel G. Blythe, and Ida Tarbell produce penetrating and favorable magazine articles about him. Moreover, Tumulty persuaded the president to resume holding press conferences late in 1916. Unfortunately, the renewed submarine crisis and intervention in the war led to their abandonment again. Wilson would hold just one more press conference, in July 1919, when he returned from the peace negotiations in Paris. Soon afterward, the stroke he suffered would rule out any public appearances. In all, his relations with the press would be sometimes fruitful and harmonious but ultimately ill-starred.
• • •
Relations with his cabinet resembled those with the press, but with a better outcome. Wilson held his first cabinet meeting the day after the inauguration. From then until November 1913, they met twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays. Thereafter, Wilson cut back on the frequency to once a week, with individual conferences taking the place of the second meeting. The cabinet gathered around a long mahogany table in a room in the West Wing next to the president’s office. Wilson sat at one end of the table, with the heads of the two ranking departments, Secretary of State Bryan and Secretary of the Treasury McAdoo, on his right and left. Secretary of the Navy Daniels later recalled that from the outset, Wilson “act[ed] as if being chief executive were no new experience to him.” He found the president’s manner “matter-of-fact” and described him as “the moderator.” Wilson would present a point and go around the table for responses and discussion. He never took votes
but treated these meetings, “as he often said, more like a Quaker meeting” and would conclude, “It seems to me the sense of the meeting is so and so.”12 If any of the cabinet members had served on the Princeton faculty, they would have found all this familiar.
Another one of the new president’s practices with the cabinet also recalled his academic leadership. Once more, Wilson delegated. Just as he had deferred at Princeton to Harry Fine’s expertise in the sciences, he now assumed that his department heads knew their areas better than he did, and he allowed them to run their agencies with little interference. This approach offered a sharp contrast to what was then and later taken to be the model for a strong president. Theodore Roosevelt had set an example of hyperactive meddling in every aspect of his administration; in the future, his cousin Franklin and Lyndon Johnson would do the same, throwing in manipulation and bullying. By contrast, Wilson would endorse bold financial initiatives by McAdoo and would initially bow to Secretary of Agriculture David Houston’s opposition to government aid to farmers. This approach had the advantage of promoting an efficient, smooth-running government; it would show its greatest value after Wilson’s stroke in 1919, when the administration could function without him. Its great disadvantage lay in permitting cabinet members to take unfortunate actions at times, as when they repressed civil liberties at home after the country went to war.
One ill consequence of Wilson’s permissiveness emerged at the beginning of his administration. More than half of the cabinet hailed from the South, and nearly all of the congressional leadership was southern. Journalists frequently commented on Washington’s newly Dixiefied political atmosphere—an atmosphere that was not entirely to Wilson’s liking. Before the inauguration, he had publicly urged sectional reconciliation, and afterward he gave private encouragement to the proposal offered by the civil rights activist Oswald Garrison Villard that a government commission investigate race relations. Despite such talk and gestures, Wilson raised no objection early in April when Postmaster General Burleson echoed widespread southern white anger at racial mingling in federal offices, particularly in the case of black supervisors overseeing white clerks. “The President said he had made no promises to negroes, except to do them justice,” Daniels recorded in his diary, “and he did not wish to see them have less positions than they have now, but he wishes the matter adjusted in a way to make the least friction.”13
Burleson and McAdoo started to make arrangements to segregate offices, rest rooms, and eating facilities at the Post Office, Treasury Department, and Bureau of Printing and Engraving. McAdoo tried to create an all-black division in his department, but the project fell through, ironically because southern senators refused to confirm the African American Democrat chosen to head the office. More outspoken racists on Capitol Hill, spearheaded by Senator James K. Vardaman of Mississippi, fought Wilson’s appointments to positions in the District of Columbia that were traditionally filled by African Americans. The appointments Wilson did make were exceptions to a general reduction in the number of black-held positions in the government during his administration, including lower-level positions.14
Plans to segregate federal departments stirred up strong protests from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Villard, who was a founder, took the organization’s case directly to the president. “I cannot exaggerate the effect this has had upon colored people at large,” he wrote Wilson. Negroes had taken “from your ‘New Freedom’ the belief that your democracy was not limited by race or color.” Wilson answered testily, “It is as far as possible from being a movement against negroes.”15 He also backed away from his earlier encouragement of the race commission idea, pleading the press of other business.
The controversy festered through the summer and into the fall of 1913. The black press—together with the New York Evening Post (which Villard owned) and The Nation (which then was affiliated with the Evening Post and edited by an uncle of Villard’s) and some northern Democrats—loudly criticized the segregation and appointment policies, and the segregation practices were put on hold. In October, an Evening Post reporter had a private meeting with Wilson to assess the situation for Villard. The president, he reported, probably did believe that blacks were inferior, but the views of the congressional leaders were much worse, and they would block any appointment to a post in which a black person “is to be in command of white people—especially of white women.” In this newly charged atmosphere, white bureaucrats could give free rein to their prejudices. In November, Wilson met with critics of the policies. Their spokesman, the fiery Boston editor William Monroe Trotter, an African American, delivered a lengthy indictment and challenged the president. Wilson lamely answered, “I am not familiar with it all,” and admitted, “Now, mistakes have probably been made, but those mistakes can be corrected.”16 This would not be Wilson’s last confrontation with Trotter, and it was not the end of the controversy.
The segregation controversy did not strain Wilson’s relations with the cabinet, but their honeymoon did not last. By the fall of 1913, some secretaries were complaining about the lack of serious discussion at cabinet meetings and the lack of consultation by the president. Some of them later offered an explanation for why Wilson clammed up at their meetings: they believed it was because Secretary of the Interior Lane was leaking information from the Cabinet Room to the press. Lane was an inveterate gossip, but there is no direct evidence that Wilson reacted to his or others’ indiscretions. Moreover, important matters still did get discussed at cabinet meetings, as when Wilson repeatedly talked in February and March 1917 about whether to enter the war—the most momentous decision he ever made. A better explanation for cabinet members’ complaints lies in their hunger to feel important, which has affected most presidents’ relations with their cabinets. Another explanation for those complaints lies in the temperamental differences that separated those men from Wilson. His habit of secluding himself when he pondered policies and made decisions did not sit well with more gregarious types, who wanted lots of talk and advice seeking. Those temperamental differences would underlie most of the complaints, which usually came from naturally sociable men, such as House, McAdoo, and sometimes Tumulty, who also thought the president ought to be following their advice on particular matters.17
It seems odd that House should have complained about a lack of discussion of great issues. If there was anyone in whom the Wilson did seem to confide, House was that person. He met with the president on seventeen occasions during his first year in office. Fifteen of those meetings took place in the White House, where House was an overnight guest twice. The two men also corresponded regularly, and at least twice they talked by long-distance telephone, which was not a common practice in those days. Wilson evidently felt comfortable discussing just about everything with House. Ellen Wilson also continued to take a shine to the Texan, and she discussed family finances with him. Curiously, House shied away from some contacts, as when he made an excuse for staying away from the inaugural ceremony.
Meetings between the two men followed a pattern that was partly political and partly seasonal. Ten of the first year’s meetings took place between March and May 1913, and no others occurred until late October. House, like many wealthy Americans with cosmopolitan aspirations, made an annual journey to Europe in late spring that lasted for several weeks. Also, he and his family retreated for the summer to a seaside estate on the north shore of Massachusetts. Despite being a native Texan, he claimed that his health could not stand the summer heat of New York, much less that of Washington. He did maintain home-state ties by making a yearly visit to mend political fences and oversee his property. He struck some people in New York as a bit of a professional Texan, and one acquaintance noted that the heading on his stationery always read “Edward M. House, Austin, Texas.”18 During the first year of Wilson’s administration, much of what he discussed with House centered on appointments and party matters, particularly the vexing question of what to do with McCombs. Domestic policy c
ame up fairly often because this was the time when Wilson was launching his big legislative initiatives, and foreign affairs also came up.
House’s collecting cabinet members’ complaints about the president probably stemmed from his relish for gossip and his willingness to lend a sympathetic ear. He would later disparage Wilson regularly in his diary for not mingling with other people, but at this point he still seemed a bit awed by the president, especially by his analytic powers. House also harbored a big scheme of his own, which he was gradually unveiling. In recent years he had become interested in foreign affairs, and in his novel he had spun a vision in which the world’s great powers, led by the United States, band together to maintain peace and order—a refined imperialism that resembled views held by Roosevelt and others close to him. In December 1913, House disclosed his gambit to a visiting British diplomat, recording in his diary that he wanted “to bring about an understanding between France, Germany, England and the United States regarding a reduction of armaments, both military and naval. I said it was an ambitious undertaking but was so well worth while that I intended to try it.”19 Ten days later, at a meeting with Wilson, he introduced the plan, and he would persist in pushing this scheme with the president during the spring of 1914. House was not the only person beyond the family circle who became close to Wilson. During the spring and summer of 1913, the president made a new intimate friend—his physician, Cary Grayson. As Grayson later recalled, he first met the incoming president the day before the inauguration, when Taft introduced them by saying, “Mr. Wilson, here is an excellent fellow that I hope you will get to know. I regret to say that he is a Democrat and a Virginian, but that’s a matter that can’t be helped.”20 The next day, Grayson was on hand to treat Wilson’s sister Annie Howe when she fell on some steps at the White House and cut her forehead. That encounter and Taft’s recommendation prompted the new president to ask the navy to assign the short, thirty-four-year-old lieutenant to the post of White House physician.
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