Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  None of Wilson’s other victories in this season of legislative triumphs tasted so sweet. Here, he did something different from the New Freedom legislation. He was not pulling his party together to deliver things that its leader and followers had long wanted. Instead, he was taking the party in a new direction and defying some of his strongest congressional allies. “There is nothing that succeeds in life like boldness,” Wilson told Princeton classmates just after the final vote, “provided you believe you are on the right side.” This victory boded well for future confrontations with party leaders. “I realized the political risks in undertaking to obtain a repeal of the tolls exemption,” he wrote to Bryce, “but I do not know of anything I ever undertook with more willingness or zest.” Winning this fight provided a fine capstone to Wilson’s early foreign policy program, and it had the unforeseen benefit of putting relations with Britain on a good footing for dealing with “matters of greater delicacy and nearer consequences,” which he had uncannily predicted.30

  One other aspect of Wilson’s European diplomacy in the first half of 1914 showed a kind of boldness and laid groundwork for dealing with future trials. This was Colonel House’s self-named “Great Adventure”—his project to bring Britain, Germany, and the United States together to maintain international peace and order. The Texan worked with the German ambassador in Washington to make contacts in Berlin, which was his first stop on a European trip that lasted from late May until the middle of July. In the German capital, House found “jingoism run stark mad,” as he reported to Wilson. “Unless someone acting for you can bring about an understanding there is some day to be an awful calamity.” The colonel saw several German leaders and had an audience at Potsdam with Kaiser Wilhelm, who reportedly agreed that America must lead the way. “I made it plain, however,” House noted, “that it was the policy of our Government to have no alliances of any character, but that we were willing to do our share towards promoting international peace.” Next, House went by way of Paris to London, where he found an eager accomplice in Ambassador Page, and met the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey. At the beginning of July, he reported that Grey asked him to communicate with the Germans “in regard to a better understanding between the Nations of Europe, and to try to get a reply before I leave.” House sent an ecstatic message to the kaiser, but he got no reply before he departed on July 21.31 By the time his ship landed, the diplomatic crisis that led to the world war was in full swing.

  How much stock Wilson put in House’s efforts is difficult to judge. He told the colonel that the report of the audience at Potsdam “gives me a thrill of deep pleasure. You have, I hope and believe, begun a great thing and I rejoice with all my heart.” Later, he expressed his thankfulness “to have a friend who so thoroughly understands me to interpret me to those whom it is important and inform and enlighten with regard to what we are really seeking to accomplish.” Those words may have been little more than a characteristically sentimental expression of feelings to someone whose big scheme appealed to his own fanciful tendencies. House actually reported little of what he discussed in the European capitals, and when he got back to America he did not rush to see Wilson. When they finally met, at the end of August, House recorded that he had spoken “of the great work there was to do for humanity in the readjustment of the wreckage that would come from the European war.”32 The colonel’s “Great Adventure” had started at a tragically inopportune moment, but he continued to dream big dreams about what he might accomplish through his friend in the White House.

  Other matters on the home front also occupied Wilson during his first year and a half in office. Some burning social issues demanded his attention largely against his will. Racial justice continued to dog him as white southerners denounced the administration’s few black appointments. When Wilson reappointed Robert H. Terrell, a respected black judge in the District of Columbia, howls of protest arose on Capitol Hill. He explained to one southern senator that he believed Terrell was well qualified and that during the 1912 campaign he had told some black leaders that he felt “morally bound to see to it that they were not put to any greater disadvantage than they suffered under previous Democratic administrations.”33 This lame excuse neither squared with the facts nor satisfied the more rabid racists.

  Another issue from the campaign likewise dogged him—woman suffrage. When Wilson received delegations of female suffragists at the White House, he drew a line between his personal views and stands he could take as president and leader of his party. In June 1914, he told one delegation, “It is my personal conviction that this is a matter for settlement by the states and not by the federal government.” Two of his visitors questioned him about whether that view did not leave room for women to seek the vote through an amendment. “Certainly it does,” Wilson answered. “There is good room.” Pressed further, he responded, “I do not think it is quite proper that I submit myself to cross-examination.”34 He felt genuinely ambivalent and uncomfortable. Anti-suffrage sentiment ran high among Democrats, especially southerners and members of urban ethnic groups, yet Wilson had taught at a leading women’s college and had suffragist daughters. Political expediency and personal preference left his views in flux.

  On two other pressing social issues—immigration restriction and prohibition—he felt no ambivalence, although he treated each one differently. Perhaps in part because he was the son and grandson of immigrants, he resisted efforts to curtail immigration from southern and eastern Europe. In May 1914, he extolled immigrants at a memorial service for the sailors killed at Veracruz. The president observed that some of the fallen had come from “several national stocks. … But they were not Irishmen or Frenchmen or Hebrews or Italians any more. They were not when they went to Vera Cruz: they were Americans, every one of them.”35 Political calculation may have colored his views, inasmuch as the Democrats enjoyed a large and growing following in the Northeast and Midwest among recent immigrants and second-generation Americans. Expedient or not, Wilson’s views impelled him to veto literacy tests designed to keep out immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. In February 1917, Congress overrode the last of those vetoes and imposed the first of a series of twentieth-century bars to immigration.

  Prohibition drew no sympathy from him either, but it gave him political headaches, and he tried to duck it. An infrequent, moderate drinker himself, Wilson never liked the idea of legislating morality. Unfortunately, in running for the presidential nomination, he had occasionally appealed to prohibitionist groups, and those appeals came back to haunt him when dry forces used his remarks in their campaigns. At one point, Tumulty asked, “How did you come to write that, Governor? … Were you crazy when you wrote it?” Wilson answered, “I declare I don’t know. … I hate to look at it.” Mainly, he stayed silent on the subject and avoided the issue—with one exception. In October 1919, a veto of enforcement legislation under the recently ratified Eighteenth Amendment, which established nationwide prohibition, went out in his name. Congress overrode this veto too, and the law took effect as the Volstead Act.36

  Other domestic issues that bothered Wilson were, to an extent, of his own making. In hitching his own and his party’s fortunes to the progressive bandwagon, he stirred expectations for sweeping reforms and invited criticism for failing to deliver. Two measures in particular opened him to attack: prohibiting child labor and extending financial aid to farmers. On child labor, Wilson talked and acted equivocally. Shortly before taking office, he expressed sympathy for outlawing child labor but questioned the constitutionality of federal action. When the House passed the Palmer bill to prohibit child labor in February 1915—by a wide margin: 232 for and 44 against—he took no stand, and the bill did not come to a vote in the Senate before the end of the session on March 4.

  Financial aid to farmers—rural credits—found him similarly torn. Although he fought off moves to attach provisions for agricultural lending to the Federal Reserve Act, in his State of the Union speech in December 1913 he promised support in making �
�substantial credit resources available as a foundation for joint, concerted local action in their [farmers’] own behalf in getting the capital they must use.”37 Secretary of Agriculture David Houston adamantly opposed direct government loans to farmers, however, and for the time being Wilson deferred to his judgment.

  Pro-farmer Democrats on Capitol Hill refused to let the matter drop. In the spring of 1914, they introduced a measure to create a system of land banks, corresponding to the Federal Reserve banks, with authority to issue up to $50 million a year for farm mortgages. Party leaders warned that the bill would pass overwhelmingly in the House unless the president intervened, and he sent a letter to the Democratic caucus opposing the bill and hinting at a veto. That slowed momentum behind the bill, but in February 1915, the House and the Senate passed it. The session expired before a conference could resolve the differences and a final vote could be taken. It is not clear where Wilson’s true sentiments lay. He seemed to be resisting rural-credits legislation mainly because a valued lieutenant opposed it and it did not seem “expedient.”38

  Wilson had other reasons for applying the brakes to drives for such legislation. During the severe recession that began at the end of 1913, the stock market had plunged and unemployment shot up, particularly in industrial areas of the Northeast and Midwest. Business groups and Republicans, quick to blame the downturn on the Democrats’ reforms, demanded abandonment of the anti-trust program. Wilson was of two minds about how to respond. He never considered dropping the anti-trust bills or soft-pedaling his progressivism, but he did make soothing noises toward business. In June 1914, he told a gathering of journalists that once his program was finished, “business can and will get what it can get in no other way—rest, recuperation, and a successful adjustment.” Practical political considerations also weighed heavily against pushing reform further. In September, he told a Democratic congressman that he looked forward to such projects as the buildup of overseas shipping, the promotion of foreign commerce, and the conservation of natural resources, “to which we could turn without any controversy.” At the same time, House said about the president, “He feared the country would expect him to continue as he had up to now, which was impossible.”39

  Wilson did send one unmistakable signal that he was not wavering in his progressive convictions. The brief, lame-duck session of the Sixty-third Congress passed a final piece of reform legislation at the beginning of 1915. This was the La Follette Seamen’s Act. Andrew Furuseth, president of the International Seamen’s Union, had lobbied long and hard to get laws passed to improve safety and working conditions for merchant sailors and to free them from notoriously oppressive labor contracts. The sinking of the Titanic in April 1912 had heightened public awareness, and at the outset of his administration Wilson had approved La Follette’s bill to aid seamen. Complicating passage, however, were objections from foreign governments that the bill violated international treaties and would spoil the work of a conference that was to meet in London late in 1913 to draft a convention on safety at sea. At the behest of the State Department, Wilson stalled final congressional action on La Follette’s bill until after the Senate had given its consent to the convention, which it did on December 16, 1914. La Follette and other backers then redoubled their efforts, and the bill won Senate approval on February 27, 1915.40

  Wilson now faced a quandary. Bryan urged him to exercise a pocket veto—refrain from signing the bill and let it die with the end of the Congress on March 4—on grounds that the bill would disrupt trade and require the renegotiation of more than twenty treaties. On March 2, La Follette and Robert Owen changed Bryan’s mind by taking Furuseth to meet the secretary and plead his cause. That evening, La Follette brought Furuseth to see the president. After his visitors left, Wilson told Tumulty, “I have just experienced a great half-hour, the tensest since I came to the White House.” He signed the bill into law on March 4, admitting to a sympathetic Democrat that he had weighed “the arguments on both sides with a good deal of anxiety, and finally determined to sign it because it seemed the only chance to get something like justice for a class of workmen who have been too much neglected by our laws.”41

  One reason opponents could cast doubt on Wilson’s progressivism was that he was not sharing his thinking with the public as much as he had done earlier. Yet he recognized that he needed to make a stronger personal impression on the public. In the spring of 1914, he admitted to the Washington press corps his concern that people thought he was “a cold and removed person who has a thinking machine inside. … You may not believe it, but I sometimes feel like a fire from a far from extinct volcano.” He said he never thought of himself as president, and he wanted to give the public “a wink, as much as to say, ‘It is only “me” that is inside this thing.’” He also did some Roosevelt-style preaching on personal virtues. He told a group of Princeton alumni, “Service is not merely getting out and being busy and butting into people’s affairs, and giving gratuitous advice. … You cannot serve your friend unless you know what his needs are, and you cannot know what his needs are unless you know him inside out.” To his fellow Princetonians he asserted, “The great malady of public life is cowardice. Most men are not untrue, but they are afraid.”42

  Those remarks served as a warm-up for his 1914 Fourth of July address at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where he declared that liberty must be translated “into definite action.” At home, Americans must “put hope into the hearts of the men who work and toil every day.” Abroad, they must answer the question, “What are we going to do with the influence and power of this great Nation?” He closed with a stirring vision: “My dream is that, as the years go on and the world knows more and more of America, it will also drink at these fountains of youth and renewal; that it will also turn to America for those moral inspirations which lie at the basis of freedom; … and that America will come into the full light of the day when all shall know that she puts human rights above all other rights, and that her flag is the flag, not only of America, but of humanity.”43 These were the most visionary words he had yet uttered as president, and they foretold his own “great adventure” in world affairs.

  Just about everything seemed to be going right for Woodrow Wilson as the summer of 1914 began. Several people remarked on how good he looked then and how the presidency seemed to agree with him. He had been healthy most of the time since his inauguration. His skin was tan from his golf games with Dr. Grayson, and he found time for reading. He admitted to devouring detective stories, and during the summer of 1914 the books he borrowed from the Library of Congress included such influential works in progressive circles as Graham Wallas’s Human Nature in Politics and Walter Lippmann’s Preface to Politics.44

  Home life had gone well for the Wilsons in the White House once Ellen adjusted to the social demands. Actually, all five of them seldom lived together there after the spring of 1913. Margaret had already left home to pursue her musical studies in New York, although she came back for frequent visits. She, Jessie, and Nell joined their mother in Cornish, New Hampshire, during the summer and early fall of that year, where the Wilsons rented Harlakenden, a 200-acre estate with a large Georgian house overlooking the Connecticut River. Cornish provided Ellen with an idyllic interlude. Besides quiet and beautiful surroundings, she found a group of artists nearby with whom she exchanged visits and discussed their work. She had taken up her painting again while Wilson was governor and had begun exhibiting her work in 1912. To avoid trading on her husband’s name, she signed her paintings “E. A. Wilson,” and with dealers she used the pseudonym Edward Wilson. At Cornish, she completed more paintings, five of which were chosen for the annual exhibition of the Association of Women Painters and Sculptors in New York. Adding to Ellen’s happiness that summer were visits from old friends and the frequent presence of Jessie’s fiancé, Frank Sayre.45

  The only disagreeable note during this interlude was Wilson’s absence. He managed just three short visits to Cornish. Ellen and Nell went back to Washin
gton for a week in late August, in part to maintain their perfect record of attending Wilson’s appearances before Congress. The separation pained both Ellen and Woodrow, and they tried to fill the void by writing the kind of letters they had written as young lovers three decades earlier. “How incomparably sweet and dear you are!” he wrote at the end of July. “Your letters warm my heart and give me so vivid a realization of you that even this barren house seems full of you.” She replied, “Your wonderful, adorable Sunday letter has just come and made me fairly drunk with happiness. I would give anything to be able to express my love as perfectly as you do, dear heart.”46 Clearly, whatever hurt and rift had once come between them had long since healed, and their love burned as bright as ever. They wrote to each other several times a week and shared accounts of everything that was going on. She avidly followed the news and commented regularly on issues and personalities. He revealed his thoughts and feelings about the affairs of state that were swirling around him. These letters between them in 1913 likewise provide great insight into his mind and spirit.

  The family’s return to the White House in mid-October brought a burst of activity. November 25 was Jessie’s wedding date, and much remained to be done. The White House staff pitched in with its wonted efficiency, and all was ready when the day arrived. The ceremony took place in the East Room, with Margaret and Nell among the bridesmaids. Performing the ceremony were two clergymen, Dr. Sylvester Beach, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Princeton, and the Reverend John Nevin Sayre, an Episcopalian and a social reformer who was the bridegroom’s brother. With her golden hair, fine features, and rosy complexion, Jessie made a radiant bride. After her father gave her away, he stepped back and held Ellen’s hand during the rest of the ceremony.