Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  With the passage of the Clayton Act and the creation of the FTC, Wilson’s initial legislative program was complete. The Sixty-third Congress could finally adjourn in October 1914, having met continuously for nearly eighteen months. This Congress had done more than set an endurance record. It had enacted a set of laws that would profoundly change American life. The men in the two chambers took great credit for these feats, but they knew they would have done far less without creative, wise, and indefatigable leadership from the White House. The hero of the hour was Wilson. He had not done everything right, even by his own lights, and he had not satisfied everyone who was presumably on his side. Nor had the world stopped while he and his legislative cohorts were going about their business. Everything they did occurred within a larger context that was already casting lights and shadows on their deeds. Yet when all was said and done, Wilson had emerged triumphant. He had set the course, taken the flood tide of progressivism, and reached the desired destination. It would be both ironic and tragic that he would have scant occasion to savor what he had wrought.

  12

  TRIUMPH AND TRAGEDY

  When Woodrow Wilson talked about his “single-track mind,” he was really describing his preferred method of working. If he could have had his way, he would have taken time to think in advance, prepare to deal with either one task or a related set of tasks, and stick to his game plan. As president, he came closest to working that way during the first year and a half, when he concentrated on the New Freedom legislative program. Seldom again would he enjoy the luxury of focusing so much on tasks of his own choosing. Even during those months, other matters constantly intruded. The biggest unsought distraction came from south of the border, where Mexico was melting into civil war. Other affairs in that region, such as turmoil in the Caribbean and Central America, made further claims on his attention. He also chose to take up some foreign policy matters, such as relations with Britain and thoughts about regional order and security in the Americas, and he began to speak about larger diplomatic designs. Domestic issues likewise demanded attention, often unpleasantly, as in the case of agitation over racial equality and woman suffrage. Finally, family life occupied his mind and his heart, at first happily and then tragically.

  The new president showed some of his best and worst traits as a leader when he dealt with Mexico. Displaying both elementary prudence and his scholarly background, Wilson tried to get as much information and sound interpretation as he could. This was no easy task. There was clashing advice from the outset. From Mexico City, Ambassador Henry Lane Wilson and the American business community demanded recognition of the Huerta regime as the only way to restore order and protect American lives and property. Similar messages, more gently phrased, came from European governments, which had hastened to recognize Huerta. In April, when the president first brought up Mexico at a cabinet meeting, Josephus Daniels recorded in his diary that Secretary of War Garrison maintained that “it was doubtful whether the Mexicans could ever organize a government,” but it might be “well to recognize a brute like Huerta so as to have some form of government which could be recognized and dealt with.” Garrison added that lots of people on both sides of the border wanted America to intervene, but Secretary of the Interior Lane doubted “there were 500 people in Mexico who wished intervention.”1

  As Lane’s retort indicated, there were equally strong views on the opposite side. Not even advocates of recognition found much good to say about Huerta, and in the opinion of most members of the cabinet, Daniels recorded, “the chief cause of this whole situation was a contest between English and American Oil Companies to see which would control.”2 Bryan opposed doing much to defend American property in Mexico, and he tried to squelch thoughts of intervention. Postmaster General Burleson, who was from Texas, believed that anti-Huerta forces in northern Mexico might welcome intervention, but he strongly opposed the idea. Besides airing conflicting views, that cabinet meeting showed how the subject of intervention was inexorably intruding on the discussion of Mexico.

  Wilson contented himself at first with listening. Early in May, Colonel House suggested that a military move into Mexico would not be costly and urged the president to deal with Huerta. Soon afterward, at the behest of Cleveland Dodge, he met with a lawyer who represented mining and railroad interests in Mexico, Delbert Haff, who recapitulated his analysis and recommendations in a long memorandum. Haff called American intervention “a national calamity … to be avoided by the greatest care and by all honorable means,” and he observed that Mexicans hated Americans because of history and “the natural antipathy between the Latin and the Anglo-Saxon.” Anti-Huerta sentiment was widespread, but the organized opponents in the north, who called themselves Constitutionalists, were not strong. Predictably, Haff advocated protecting American investments and recommended offering recognition if Huerta promised to hold early elections, but Haff did not recommend demanding his resignation, because the real danger lay in disorder and anarchy.3

  Those arguments swayed the president enough to draft a shorthand note incorporating this offer, presumably to be sent to Ambassador Wilson in Mexico City. Meanwhile, others who represented business interests were lobbying the State Department to mediate among the contending Mexican factions. That idea appealed to Bryan’s peacemaking inclination and determination to avoid intervention. Wilson hesitated to pursue either course, presumably because he still did not think he had a firm grasp of the situation. Adding to the uncertainty was growing distrust of the ambassador. Starting in March, the New York World mounted a campaign against Henry Lane Wilson, replete with charges of his complicity in the coup that had overthrown and murdered President Madero. Those charges, together with the ambassador’s inflated estimates of Huerta’s strength, eroded the president’s and the secretary of state’s faith in him as someone who could carry out their policies. At a press conference in May, Wilson asked, “Did you ever know a situation that had more question marks around it? … Nobody in the world has any certain information that I have yet found.”4

  He decided to send his own man to Mexico. His choice struck many as odd: the journalist William Bayard Hale, who had written laudatory articles about Wilson as governor for Walter Page’s World’s Work and more recently had cobbled together Wilson’s campaign speeches in the book The New Freedom. Hale had never been to Mexico and did not speak Spanish, but he had the president’s trust and enjoyed a reputation as a first-rate reporter. For the next three months, from early June to late August 1913, Hale sent lengthy, insightful dispatches from Mexico City. He characterized Huerta as “an ape-like old man” who was usually “[d]runk or half-drunk (he is never sober)” but also resourceful, gritty, and brave. Hale likewise confirmed the president’s suspicions of Ambassador Wilson. Hale did not make contact with the Constitutionalists, but he did accurately describe their guerrilla warfare, which denied Huerta’s forces control of the countryside, and he confirmed their dominance in the north and near Mexico City.5

  The president’s restraint and circumspection lasted through the summer and fall of 1913. Pressure to do something about the growing disorder mounted, and not all of it came from business interests. Thousands of Americans lived and worked in Mexico as clerks, teachers, nurses, plumbers, and builders, people whom Hale called “Americans of our own type and with our own sentiments and ideals.”6 But recognizing the Huerta regime did not appear to offer the only or best way to combat disorder and protect those Americans. Not just the moral cloud hanging over Huerta’s seizure of power argued against recognition; so did his regime’s weak hold on much of the country. Wilson needed to find an alternative and figure out how to pursue it.

  At the end of July, he summoned the American ambassador home. When the two namesakes met at the White House on August 3, the president politely heard his visitor out and then dismissed him. The next day, he announced the appointment of a special envoy to meet with Huerta. As before with Hale, he made an unusual, perhaps dubious choice: John Lind, a former Democratic gov
ernor of Minnesota and a friend of Bryan’s. Lind, too, spoke no Spanish and knew next to nothing about Mexico. In his letter of instruction to the former governor, Wilson sounded another Rooseveltian note when he said the United States did not “feel at liberty any longer to stand inactively by” in the face of disorder: the situation was not compatible with Mexico’s international obligations, “civilized development … [and] the maintenance of tolerable political and economic conditions in Central America.” Specifically, the envoy was to demand immediate cessation of fighting, early and free elections, and Huerta’s departure.7

  Lind’s mission got nowhere. Huerta blustered, declaring that he would refuse to receive the envoy, but he and his foreign minister did have several meetings with Lind. The talks were unproductive, but this envoy also produced insightful reports on conditions, particularly an assessment of social and economic conflicts and the relative strength of contending factions. After two weeks, the foreign minister broke off the talks, and Lind left for home. With the collapse of the Lind mission, the president decided to go before Congress on August 27 to talk about conditions in Mexico. “Those conditions touch us very nearly,” he affirmed. The right conditions in Mexico would mean “an enlargement of the field of self-government” and thus realize “the hopes and rights of a nation … so long suppressed and disappointed.” Warning against impatience, he affirmed, “We can afford to exercise the self-restraint of a really great nation which realizes its own strength and scorns to misuse it.” He predicted that civil strife in Mexico was likely to worsen and promised to protect citizens there. He also ruled out arms sales and pledged continued American efforts to help bring peace.8

  This was Wilson’s first foreign policy speech as president. In it, he sought to serve several ends. Politically, he wanted to drum up public and congressional support and fend off criticism. Diplomatically, he wanted to send signals to the Mexicans by eschewing intervention and arms sales—something the anti-Huerta forces desired—for now. In the longer run, he pointed toward a larger design to guide his administration’s policies abroad. This speech contained the earliest expressions of themes that would come to be hallmarks of Wilsonian foreign policy. His tone was unmistakably idealistic, particularly the reference to the “field of self-government.” His model for international conduct drew upon his philosophy of personal conduct—“the self-restraint of a really great nation”—combined with its justification—“realizes its own strength and scorns to misuse it.” Those words and images reached back to his childhood and foreshadowed some of his striking future pronouncements. This speech marked his opening gambit in laying down the vision that would shape both his own policies and his party’s posture toward international affairs.

  Meanwhile, Mexico festered. “The apparent situation changes like quicksilver,” Wilson told Ellen in September, “but the real situation, I fancy, remains the same, and is likely to yield to absent treatment.” It would have turned out better for his peace of mind and historical reputation if he had continued to heed those counsels of self-restraint and “absent treatment.” A presidential election was scheduled in Mexico for October 26, but earlier that month the leader of the Constitutionalists, Venustiano Carranza, refused to participate, and his forces briefly seemed on the verge of taking Mexico City. Huerta responded by dissolving the Mexican congress, arresting most of the members, and declaring himself dictator. Complicating matters, the newly arrived British ambassador, Sir Lionel Carden, presented his credentials to Huerta three days later and started making statements to the press in support of the regime. These moves infuriated Wilson. After stewing over the situation, he drafted a diplomatic note to be sent to all nations, asserting that the United States “is and must continue to be of paramount influence in the Western Hemisphere” and must act under the Monroe Doctrine “to assist in maintaining Mexico’s independence of foreign financial power.”9 In the end, Wilson scrapped that note in favor of one to Mexico simply demanding Huerta’s departure.

  Wilson’s comment about “foreign financial power” harked back to earlier claims in the cabinet about British oil interests in Mexico. Many, including the president, thought Carden was under the thumb of the oil magnate Lord Cowdray, whose company had extensive holdings in Mexico. Fortunately, amicable relations prevailed, thanks mainly to a visit to Washington in November by a high-ranking Foreign Office official, Sir William Tyrrell, who was filling in for the ailing British ambassador. Colonel House laid the groundwork for a meeting on November 13 at the White House, at which Wilson stressed his unshakable opposition to Huerta and affirmed his support for dropping discriminatory tolls to be levied when the Panama Canal opened, something the British were demanding. Thereafter, the Foreign Office reined in and soon replaced Carden, and Britain reverted to its established policy of deferring to the United States in the Western Hemisphere.10

  With that complication removed, Wilson turned to finding a way to get rid of Huerta. In his State of the Union address to Congress on December 2, 1913, he called Mexico the “one cloud upon our horizon” and avowed, “There can be no certain prospect of peace in America until General Huerta has surrendered his usurped authority.” But he did not believe that the United States would be “obliged to alter our policy of watchful waiting.” Privately, he seemed to hanker to do more than watch and wait. At the end of October, House noted that Wilson wanted to blockade Mexican ports and send troops into northern Mexico: “It is his purpose to send six battleships at once.”11 Wilson seems to have been venting frustration rather than setting policy. Yet such sentiments disclosed an interventionist streak in him, and these remarks eerily predicted much of what he would eventually do.

  Still, steps short of intervention might bring Huerta down. The most promising seemed to be something Wilson had previously ruled out—selling arms to the Constitutionalists. Talks opened with Carranza during November in the Mexican border town of Nogales, Arizona, with Hale representing Wilson. The envoy found Carranza, who held the title first chief, impressive but difficult to deal with. Carranza demanded freedom to buy arms with no strings attached, and he adamantly rejected any kind of American intervention. The talks broke off acrimoniously, but Wilson decided at the end of January 1914 to recognize the Constitutionalists officially as belligerents opposed to Huerta, and on February 3 he lifted the arms embargo. This move did not produce the expected result. Huerta’s forces held out, and Mexican conservatives continued to rally to their side. Meanwhile, dissension was mounting in the Constitutionalists’ ranks. Carranza’s chief deputy, the blustery, violence-prone Francisco “Pancho” Villa, was conspiring to overthrow the first chief, and each man seemed more interested in stalemating the other than in fighting Huerta. In these circumstances, Wilson came to believe that intervention was his only option.12

  An excuse to go in presented itself on April 9. Mexican troops in the Huerta-controlled port of Tampico arrested some American sailors who had gone ashore. The Mexican general in charge quickly released the sailors and apologized, but Rear Admiral Henry T. Mayo, the commander of the naval squadron, stiffly demanded the raising of the Stars and Stripes, accompanied by a twenty-one-gun salute. The Mexicans understandably balked, and a tense situation ensued. The incident would have caused little commotion if Wilson had not decided to seize upon it. Months later, after Huerta finally fell, he stated off the record at a press conference that “a situation arose that made it necessary for the dignity of the United States that we should take some decisive step; and the main thing to accomplish was a vital thing. We got Huerta. That was the end of Huerta. That was what I had in mind. It could not be done without taking Vera Cruz.”13

  The reference to “taking Vera Cruz” was to the military action that Wilson ordered. He was giving in to his interventionist urge because he saw an opportunity to shape events. The Constitutionalists were now bouncing back, and Lind, whom Wilson had again sent to Mexico, reported that cutting Huerta off from ports such as Veracruz would seal his doom. In an interview with a magazine
journalist, the president claimed that a “new order, which will have its foundations on human liberty and human rights, shall prevail.” On April 20, Wilson went to Capitol Hill to speak to Congress again about Mexico. After recounting what had happened at Tampico and on other occasions, he claimed that such incidents could “lead directly and inevitably to armed conflict.” Dismissing Huerta as an illegitimate authority who controlled little of the country, he contended that action against him would not mean war against Mexico, and he asked Congress to approve the use of the armed forces.14 That evening, the House voted overwhelmingly to authorize the president to enforce demands on Huerta, and Wilson closeted himself with the secretaries of war and the navy and their top officers to plan a naval blockade and possible landing at Veracruz. During the night, a report from that city reached the State Department with the news that a large shipment of arms for the Huerta forces would arrive the next day from Europe. Wilson authorized Secretary of the Navy Daniels to order landings at Veracruz to seize the customhouse and intercept the munitions.

  Just before noon on April 21, marines and sailors went ashore and took over the customhouse without incident. Soon afterward, however, Mexican troops and naval cadets opened fire from surrounding buildings. The Mexicans brought in artillery to bombard the Americans, and a naval vessel offshore returned fire. The next morning, the main U.S. fleet, including five battleships, steamed into the harbor. Three thousand additional men landed during the morning and quickly gained control of Veracruz. The two days’ fighting left 152 to 175 Mexicans dead and 195 to 250 wounded, with 17 Americans killed and 61 wounded. Outrage flared throughout Mexico. Huerta immediately broke off diplomatic relations, and Carranza likewise denounced “the invasion of our territory.” It looked as if the only question now was whether the situation would lead to full-scale war. At a White House meeting on the evening of April 24, Garrison argued strongly for intervention and Bryan argued equally strongly against. The decision lay in the president’s hands.15