Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  Similarities in their backgrounds and the doctor’s quiet charm soon gained him a place in the affections of both Wilson and Ellen. After Ellen and other family members left Washington in June—on Grayson’s recommendation that Ellen get away—Wilson invited the bachelor physician to move in with him at the White House. The two men spent evenings on the porch, where Wilson would unwind by talking about nonofficial matters, sometimes reminiscing about his early life. On Sundays, the president took his Episcopalian physician with him to the Central Presbyterian Church, which he and his family regularly attended. “The doctor goes to church with me,” Wilson reported to Ellen, “and is very sedate and an excellent imitation of a Presbyterian.”21

  Wilson’s presidency afforded him something he had never had before—a full-time physician to attend to his health. Grayson was not a highly trained graduate of a university-affiliated medical school; he had learned most of his skills in the navy, serving briefly aboard ship and mostly at the Naval Dispensary in Washington. And he had had some White House medical assignments under Roosevelt and Taft.

  Grayson found his new patient in reasonably good health. Politics still seemed to agree with him. “Father looked extraordinarily well and vital during these weeks,” his daughter Nell later recalled of the first days in the White House. Grayson’s main concerns lay with Wilson’s diet and exercise. He got the president to abandon such practices as eating charcoal and pumping his stomach, and he got him to eat more vegetables. He also encouraged Wilson to play more golf and usually accompanied him on the links. Like automobile rides, golf relaxed the president and took his mind off problems, and he played the game avidly. Despite his earlier facility with tennis and baseball, he never became a good golfer, possibly because impaired vision in his left eye as a result of the 1906 hemorrhage prevented him from placing shots accurately.22

  • • •

  Appointments continued to be a headache. Rival Democratic leaders and members of inter- and intrastate factions were jockeying to snare jobs for their faithful. Party infighting remained especially fierce in New York, where Tammany regulars and reformers battled in 1913 over both the New York City mayoralty race and the state’s gubernatorial race. A plum federal appointment, collector of the port of New York, drew Wilson into the fray. He made a choice worthy of King Solomon by appointing his friend Dudley Field Malone, who was both a reformer and the son-in-law of a Tammany leader. The president also used House as an emissary to the feuding New Yorkers; it was in this capacity that he supposedly made the statement, to be relayed to them, “Mr. House is my second personality. He is my independent self. His thoughts and mine are one.”23

  Diplomatic appointments gave the new president almost as many headaches as domestic political patronage. Wilson had originally wanted to name distinguished nonpolitical figures to major ambassadorships—academics such as Harry Fine to Germany and Harvard’s ex-president Charles W. Eliot to China and his editor friend Page to Britain. He was able to persuade Page to go, and a leading scholar of Asian affairs, Paul S. Reinsch of the University of Wisconsin, did accept the China post. Otherwise, Wilson fell back on the time-honored practice of picking big campaign contributors. The post in Berlin went to James W. Gerard, a wealthy Tammany-affiliated lawyer. Because McCombs dithered for months before saying no to the post in Paris, the outgoing Republican appointee would stay until after the outbreak of the world war, when a rich Ohio manufacturer and former congressman, William G. Sharp, finally filled that ambassadorship. Most of the appointees to major European capitals were of a similar ilk.

  Another problem in making diplomatic appointments involved the secretary of state. Bryan was an unreconstructed spoilsman, and he filled lower-ranking posts abroad, particularly those in Latin America—most of which were at the ministerial, not the ambassadorial, level—with “deserving Democrats.” Wilson did resist a complete partisan housecleaning; he continued Roosevelt’s and Taft’s practice of staffing the consular service and subministerial foreign service by means of merit systems. Overall, the incoming administration did not distinguish itself with its diplomatic personnel.24

  Given such fumbling and lack of concern for qualifications, it was just as well that the diplomatic front was comparatively quiet. Yet Wilson was not entirely free from foreign concerns. Mexico landed on his desk the moment he arrived in the White House. Less than three weeks before his inauguration, there was a bloody coup that Mexicans call the Ten Tragic Days, in which an army general, Victoriano Huerta, overthrew and sanctioned the murder of the reformist moderate president, Francisco Madero. Taft’s ambassador, Henry Lane Wilson, sympathized with the coup and was urging recognition of the Huerta regime, as were a number of American businessmen with large holdings in Mexico. Partly because these events occurred so late in his administration, Taft left the question of whether to recognize Huerta to his successor. For his part, Wilson resisted pleas from business interests, relayed through House. Instead, on March 12, he issued a policy statement that stressed his desire “to cultivate the friendship and deserve the confidence of our sister republics of Central and South America” but warned that this would be possible “only when supported in turn by the orderly processes of just government based upon law and not upon arbitrary and irregular force.” Without naming Huerta, he declared, “We can have no sympathy with those who seek the power of government to advance their own personal interests or ambitions.”25

  That statement in the second week of his presidency marked Wilson’s first step into an entanglement that would last for years. It also revealed part of his initial underlying approach to foreign affairs. Since his outburst of imperialist enthusiasm almost fifteen years before, Wilson had paid little attention to foreign affairs and had given every appearance of falling into step with the Democrats’ anti-imperialist, anti-militarist pronouncements set down by Bryan. When he chose Bryan to be secretary of state, Wilson raised no objections to the Commoner’s pacifist foreign policy views, and he gave his blessing to the secretary’s pursuit of his favorite scheme—a plan for compulsory delay when nations could not resolve disputes peacefully, often called cooling-off treaties. Yet Wilson’s first foreign policy pronouncement as president sounded like Roosevelt’s famous Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine of eight years before, which had proclaimed a United States “police power” over the nations of Latin America. It seems a bit of the imperialist was lurking within this new Democratic president.

  Still, the official stance of the Democrats was anti-imperialist, and Wilson hewed to the party line in his other early pronouncements and moves. Previously, as the party’s principal, and often only, spokesman in foreign affairs, Bryan had long attacked Republican diplomatic and military policies, and in recent years he had zeroed in on the Taft administration’s enlistment of bankers and investment houses to promote American interests in Latin America and Asia. Not only fellow Democrats but also some Republican insurgents, most notably La Follette, had joined in heaping scorn on “dollar diplomacy.” Now that he was secretary of state, Bryan could undo part of that diplomacy—the proposed American participation in an international syndicate of bankers that would lend money to China for railroad construction. The project offended Bryan’s domestic politics as well, because the American banks in the syndicate were Wall Street firms, headed by the house of Morgan. The secretary brought the matter before the cabinet on March 12, and he found that most of the other members and the president strongly agreed with him. Six days later, Wilson issued a statement to the press in which he rejected the loan for appearing “to touch very nearly the administrative independence of China itself; and this administration does not feel that it ought, even by implication, to be a party to those conditions.”26

  Wilson further showed his concern for China when he made the United States the first nation to extend diplomatic recognition to the shaky new republican government that had been set up in the wake of the revolution that had toppled the Ch’ing dynasty. After discussions in the cabinet, Bryan informed ambass
adors of other nations of the decision to recognize the Chinese Republic. Wilson drafted a formal message of recognition early in April, and the American chargé d’affaires in Peking delivered this message to the Chinese government on May 2. It included a statement by the president welcoming “the new China” and expressing confidence “that in perfecting a republican form of government the Chinese nation will attain to the highest degree of development and well being.”27

  Such uplifting words suited Wilson’s and Bryan’s wishes to present a vivid contrast to previous Republican policies, but they had little practical effect. At home, Democrats and some Republican insurgents applauded the rejection of the loan plan, and in China diplomatic recognition was popular. But American withdrawal from the railroad loan opened the way to further financial incursions by Japan and, in the view of many students of East Asian affairs, weakened China’s ability to resist pressures from Tokyo. At the same time, thanks to domestic politics, the United States faced troubles of its own with Japan. In the 1912 campaign, Democrats and Progressives in California had vied with each other in appealing to anti-Asian prejudices, primarily those aimed at recent Japanese immigrants. In March 1913, California’s legislature began debating measures to combat this “menace,” particularly laws that would prohibit land ownership by persons ineligible for citizenship—that is, Japanese immigrants. Wilson, who had endorsed the exclusion of Asian immigrants during the campaign, told a leading California Democrat that he hoped any discriminatory actions “might be so modulated and managed as to offend the susceptibilities of a friendly nation as little as possible.”28

  That hope led the Wilson administration down a thorny path. Bryan acted as an emissary to Governor Hiram Johnson and other California leaders. The secretary of state made two trips across the country in the spring of 1913 to deal directly with Johnson and others in Sacramento. These efforts at domestic diplomacy failed. The California legislature passed a law forbidding land ownership by Japanese immigrants, and public indignation exploded in Japan, ultimately causing the cabinet there to fall. In May, a war scare flared briefly after reports of possible Japanese naval action. Secretary of War Garrison angered some fellow cabinet members by insisting on a tough response. The controversy blew over, thanks to Wilson’s and Bryan’s sweet-talking the Japanese and the unwillingness of leaders in Tokyo to push the matter to a full-fledged crisis. Still, the incident sowed resentment in the minds of many Japanese and created problems that would later trouble Wilson.29

  Between Mexico and Japan, the new president spent a great deal of time on diplomatic matters. Foreign affairs offered a partial exception to Wilson’s practice of delegating to cabinet members. Five years earlier, in Constitutional Government, he had asserted, “The initiative in foreign affairs, which the President possesses without any restriction whatever, is virtually the power to control them absolutely.” Sounding a Rooseveltian note, he had added that the president “can never be the mere domestic figure” of bygone days but must “be one of the great powers of the world.”30 This greater involvement in foreign affairs did not spring from lack of confidence in Bryan. The Great Commoner drew criticism in some quarters for serving grape juice instead of alcohol at official functions, which some Republicans scorned as “grape juice diplomacy,” and he continued to earn money lecturing on the Chautauqua circuit. Wilson raised no objections to those practices, and the only evidence of his casting aspersions on Bryan comes from the diary of Colonel House, who was probably trying to sow discord.

  Wilson showed little hesitation about plunging into foreign affairs. He seemed bold and confident despite his lack of experience. For him, foreign affairs went along with press relations, political appointments, and working with the cabinet: these constituted the normal business of governing, matters that any president had to manage. For him, the acid test of leadership always lay in great initiatives to change the order of things. For him as president of the United States, that test lay in legislation. The enactment of major new laws loomed ahead as his biggest and fondest challenge.

  11

  TAKEN AT THE FLOOD

  As a legislative leader in the White House, Woodrow Wilson repeated his performance as a college president and state governor. Once again, he got off to a fast start and pushed for major changes at once. Once again, he racked up big successes at the outset. In fact, he would succeed in pushing his programs through Congress throughout his first term as president. Taken together, his feats in enacting the New Freedom would rank him among the greatest legislative presidents in the twentieth century, perhaps in all of American history. His only rivals would be Franklin Roosevelt with the New Deal in the 1930s and Lyndon Johnson with the Great Society in the 1960s. In some ways, he wrought even more impressive feats than those men would. Unlike the second Roosevelt, he was not dealing with a desperate national emergency; unlike the second Johnson, he did not enjoy long experience, intimate knowledge, and mastery of the ways of Congress.

  No one could have accomplished as much as Wilson did without help and luck. Congressional Democrats were willing to follow him, although their conflicting ideas and interests sometimes made them difficult to pull together. His party’s leaders in the respective chambers, Congressman Underwood of Alabama and Senator John W. Kern of Indiana, proved able and cooperative. Speaker Champ Clark remained a bit sulky and passive, but he was no obstructionist. Bryan drew on his years of ideological primacy and his network of connections among Democrats to provide an important bridge to Capitol Hill. Brandeis continued to supply strategic policy advice at critical junctures. The larger political environment likewise smiled on Wilson. With the exception of Mexico, foreign problems would not greatly distract him from domestic matters. More important, the dominance of progressive issues in the 1912 campaign ensured that much of Wilson’s program had gained, to use a favorite word of his, taken from Edmund Burke, “expediency”—these were ideas whose time had come. Thanks to overwhelming reform sentiment and the defeat and departure of old guard Republicans, Wilson would face less of the conservative obstructionism that had hobbled and stymied Roosevelt’s and Taft’s initiatives.

  Ever since he won the election, he had been planning to break the custom, started by Jefferson, whereby the president did not appear in person before Congress. On April 6, 1913, the White House announced that President Wilson would deliver his first speech since the inauguration before a joint session of Congress. The news brought protests from strict Jeffersonians in his own party, who called the move “federalistic.” Wilson laughed at the comparison and told Daniels that “the only federalistic thing about it was delivering the message in person.” When he stood at the rostrum of the House chamber in the Capitol on April 8, he began, “I am very glad indeed to have this opportunity to address the two Houses directly and to verify for myself the impression that the President of the United States is a person, not a mere department of the government hailing Congress from some isolated island of jealous power, sending messages, not speaking naturally and with his own voice—that he is a human being trying to co-operate with other human beings in a common service.”1

  Wilson protested a bit too much when he disclaimed “federalistic” motives. As a long-standing critic of the separation of powers, he meant to make more than a symbolic break with that aspect of Jefferson’s legacy. He was doing something that the country’s most renowned admirer of Hamilton and greatest denigrator of Jefferson had not dared to do. His daughter Nell recalled her mother saying on the ride back to the White House from the Capitol, “That’s the sort of thing Roosevelt would have loved to do if he had thought of it.” Her father laughed and answered, “Yes, I think I put one over on Teddy.”2 Wilson meant to out-Roosevelt Roosevelt by working closely with Congress and taking command over legislation.

  The question of how to exercise legislative leadership appeared to present him with a fateful choice between progressivism and partisanship. Postmaster General Burleson later recounted that the president talked to him shortly after
the inauguration about lower-level federal appointments and party relations: “Now, Burleson, I want to say to you that my administration is going to be a progressive administration. I am not going to advise with reactionary or standpat Senators or Representatives in making these appointments.” Burleson, who said he felt “depressed” and “paralyzed” upon hearing that, advised playing along with the Democrats in Congress on “little offices” and other small matters, and he stuck to his guns for two hours. Wilson finally said, “All right, Burleson, I will think about the matter.” A week later, the president began to relent, and he soon left minor patronage to Burleson’s discretion. A year later, after he had racked up some of his legislative triumphs, Burleson recalled him conceding, “What you told me about the old standpatters is true. They at least will stand by the party and the administration. I can rely on them better than I can on some of my own crowd.”3