Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  Woodrow Wilson would never have said or thought those things. He, too, believed that the “real America” lay outside the Northeast, and he had a similar faith in the potency of public opinion. As governor, he had appealed to people over the heads of the legislature. As president, he would soon make another speaking tour to appeal to the citizenry over the heads of Congress. But Wilson’s model of public persuasion was education, whereas Bryan’s was evangelism. Likewise, Wilson never exalted a leader’s role as a speaker above that of actually wielding power. He would never have dreamed of trading a place at or near the center of power for a perch on the stump. That difference was what Wilson had been getting at in January when he said he thought Bryan would make a bad president. He repeated that judgment when he told Edith Galt a few days after Bryan’s resignation, “No stranger man ever lived, and his naïveté takes my breath away.”22

  Wilson handled Bryan’s departure with dignity. He wrote a warmly worded letter accepting Bryan’s equally warmly worded resignation, and Bryan attended a last cabinet meeting after the announcement of his departure. Behind his mask of cordiality, however, Wilson was apprehensive; he knew Bryan’s departure brought both danger and opportunity. Its timing—in the middle of a diplomatic crisis—brought down on Bryan’s head an expected deluge of abuse, even from fellow Democrats, but Wilson recognized that Bryan was poised to pounce at any perceived sign of belligerence, and he would soon come out swinging against proposed increases in the army and navy. Stockton Axson, who was staying at the White House at the time, recalled that at breakfast one day Wilson, “piercing me with that sharp look which he sometimes had,” said about Bryan, “He is absolutely sincere. That is what makes him dangerous.”23

  Yet Bryan’s attack from the pacifist flank highlighted Wilson’s stance as champion of the “double wish.” The terms hawk and dove would not be used for another fifty years, but the cartoonist Rollin Kirby of the New York World captured their essence when he drew Wilson standing between Bryan, who is holding a birdcage with a dove of peace inside, and Roosevelt, who is wearing a cowboy outfit and shooting off a pair of six-guns.

  Others besides Democrats rallied to Wilson’s side. Taft praised the president’s position publicly and privately told a friend, “I have very little sympathy with such statements as those of … Theodore Roosevelt, which are calculated to make his [Wilson’s] course more difficult.” According to Tumulty, Wilson held up two fingers to symbolize his appreciation of Taft’s support.24

  The second Lusitania note went out on June 9, over the signature of Lansing as acting secretary of state. While he waited for the German reply, Wilson faced the task of choosing a successor to Bryan. Houston later recalled that the president thought House might be a good choice but ruled him out because of his frail health. He sent McAdoo to consult with the colonel, who had just returned from Europe. According to House, McAdoo floated the names of Houston and Wilson’s old friend and Princeton supporter Thomas Jones. “I asked McAdoo why the President did not consider Lansing. He replied that he [Wilson] did not think he was big enough. I told McAdoo to say to the President that, in my opinion, it would be better to have a man with not too many ideas of his own.” The colonel pressed this backhanded case for Lansing by letter and in person. In the letter, he conceded that he had met the man only once, “and while his mentality did not impress me unduly,” he thought he would do. The meeting, their first in nearly five months, took place on June 24, when the president stopped over in New York on his way to Harlakenden—where Edith Galt was joining members of the Wilson family. Wilson and House discussed Lansing, and Wilson said he had decided to appoint him because, as House recorded, the president was “practically his own Secretary of State and Lansing would not be troublesome by obtruding or injecting his own views.”25

  Wilson announced Lansing’s appointment the next day. He may have been simply following the path of least resistance. Lansing was already the number two person in the State Department, and at a critical time like this the country needed a secretary of state. Yet this would be one of the worst appointments Wilson would make as president. With his perfectly barbered white hair and mustache and impeccably tailored suits, Robert Lansing looked like a theater director’s idea of a secretary of state. That appearance and his technical knowledge of international law and diplomatic procedure were his chief qualifications. Privately, Lansing held pro-Allied views not too different from Roosevelt’s or House’s, but he kept those opinions to himself. He could be furtive and underhanded, as he had shown in going behind Bryan’s back over the Lusitania “tip.” Wilson’s treating him like a clerk during the next four years would understandably breed resentment and aggravate Lansing’s inclinations to try to undermine the president.26

  On his side, Wilson would give in to his own inclinations toward lone-handedness, which he had largely held in check since entering politics. In pushing Lansing, House almost certainly believed that he was increasing his own influence, but Edith Galt had already begun to replace him as Wilson’s most intimate adviser. House would remain close to Wilson, but he would be a sounding board and valued negotiator rather than a source of counsel. No one would replace Bryan as a strong, quasi-independent force in making foreign policy. That would be doubly unfortunate because in dealing with the world war, there would no longer be a forceful voice close to the president’s ear warning against the risks of intervention. Doubt and restraint would have to come from Wilson himself, seldom from his advisers. From mid-1915 onward, he would make foreign policy decisions and set directions almost entirely on his own.

  Courting Edith Galt continued to provide welcome diversion from public business. Wilson told House about her during his visit on June 24. “What would you think of my getting married again?” Wilson asked. He explained that he had met a wonderful woman and needed female companionship. He also felt sure Ellen would have approved, “for she had talked to me about it and I am sure I would be following her wishes.” Grayson and Attorney General Gregory had already told House about Edith, but he did not let on, nor would he tell Grayson that Wilson confided in him. House gave his approval because, he noted, “I feel that his health demands it and I also feel that Woodrow Wilson is the greatest asset the world has.” He did suggest that the president wait for a year before remarrying.27

  Wilson spent three weeks at Harlakenden with Edith, Grayson, family members—and the ever-present Secret Service detail. “When we walked together,” Edith recalled in her memoir, “we would try to forget that lurking behind every tree was a Secret Service man.” The party took rides in the limousines and gathered around the fireplace after dinner. While Wilson worked on papers sent from Washington, in the next room Grayson, Frank Sayre, Jessie, and Margaret would take turns reading from his History of the American People, sometimes asking him for comments. Edith remembered Wilson rejoining at one point, “Do you youngsters realize that … right now I am in the midst of so much history in the making that I cannot turn my mind back to that time? Besides, I have never been proud of that History. I wrote it only to teach myself something about our country.” He said that the lavish payments for its serialization in Harper’s had come “like a windfall” and then explained how the term windfall came from the old English custom of tenants on an estate enjoying the right to gather wood blown down by the wind.28

  The couple made the most of the time they could snatch away from the rest of the party. On one of their walks early in the visit, Edith accepted Wilson’s renewed proposal of marriage, and they became secretly engaged. They enjoyed some physical intimacy, although probably not as much as they wanted. Despite their lack of privacy, Wilson enjoyed himself. “I am well and am profiting immensely by my delightful vacation,” he told House, “the first real one I have had since I went into politics.”29 The idyll ended temporarily when Wilson returned to Washington for a few days at the middle of July. The German reply to the second Lusitania protest had arrived, and once more the government in Berlin had taken a stand that struck
many in America as haughty and evasive. Yet there were also strong signs of anti-war sentiment, thanks in part to Bryan’s recent oratorical barnstorming. Before returning to Washington, Wilson began drafting a third note to Germany, and he telegraphed a statement for Tumulty to release to the press assuring that the president would be returning to Washington to confer with the cabinet.

  When Wilson met with the cabinet on July 20, he found that Bryan’s departure had changed things less than expected—except that pressure now was coming mostly from the opposite side. Bellicose, blustery Garrison arrived with his own draft of a reply to Germany and did most of the talking. Wilson responded by saying again that the American people wanted the government to issue a firm response but also to avoid war. Other cabinet members chimed in to support the president. In a note largely along the lines he had drafted, Wilson demanded an end to surprise attacks at sea but avoided an ultimatum. Despite that forbearance, he told Edith he feared war might come, and he worried about what that would mean for millions of people who “so confidingly depend on me to keep them out of the hor[r]ors of this war.”30

  Garrison did not come away from this encounter empty-handed. Wilson remained sensitive to the other side of the “double wish”—the need to strike a strong pose on the international stage. He now decided that he must put more military muscle behind his diplomatic stance toward Germany and the other belligerents. The day after the cabinet meeting, he drafted a statement for Tumulty to release to the press a few days later, announcing that the president was consulting with the secretaries of war and the navy about changes and increases in the armed forces. He wanted the navy “to stand upon an equality with the most efficient and serviceable,” and he wanted the army to have “proper training of the citizens of the United States to arms.” Wilson insisted that he was taking this action “regardless of present conditions or controversies” and that he intended to consult with the congressional Armed Services Committees.31 The same day, he asked Garrison and Daniels to provide specific recommendations.

  No matter how much Wilson might try to soft-pedal this move, he was making an about-face from his earlier rejection of increased military preparedness. Nor did anybody doubt that he was responding to the country’s changed stance toward the world conflict and repeated attacks by bellicose critics. Tumulty admitted as much when he released the statement, telling reporters, “It will pocket Roosevelt completely.”32 That was wishful thinking. The ex-president, Lodge, and others speedily denounced any new defense program from this administration as too little too late. Even more dangerous for Wilson were attacks coming from within his own party. As expected, Bryan quickly denounced any talk of strengthening the army and navy as a step toward war, and his followers on Capitol Hill soon followed suit. By reversing course on preparedness, Wilson was picking the biggest fight yet in his political life.

  The way Garrison and Daniels responded to Wilson’s request for recommended increases gave a foretaste of how thorny and complicated things would become. Roosevelt and his circle claimed that Daniels was a satellite of Bryan and singularly unfit to run the navy. Some ranking officers similarly scoffed at him as a country bumpkin who did not appreciate their needs and special culture. Daniels’s own deputy, thirty-three-year-old Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt, shared those attitudes; he often lampooned his boss behind his back and sometimes leaked damaging information to his wife’s “Uncle Ted” and Senator Lodge. Far from a rube, however, Daniels was a shrewd, experienced political operator gifted with a thick skin and an equable temperament; he likewise possessed the insight to detect a glimmer of merit in Franklin Roosevelt and put up with him despite the young man’s often flighty manner, furtive condescension, and occasional disloyalty. Daniels also felt the strongest personal loyalty to Wilson of any cabinet member except McAdoo. After some dickering with the navy’s planning arm, the General Board, Daniels presented the president with a five-year, $500 million program that called for 6 new battleships, 10 cruisers, 50 destroyers, and 100 submarines. This was to Wilson’s liking, and in October he approved the proposals without change.33

  The army program was another matter. Garrison basked in praise from the administration’s combative critics, and he felt little personal loyalty to the president. Earlier in 1915, he had made noises about resigning if he did not get his way. “If Garrison mentions it again,” House had recorded in his diary in June, “[Wilson] would let him go.” Garrison initially submitted only a sketchy outline of a big new reserve force, and then, without Wilson’s knowledge or approval, he publicly broached the idea in a magazine article. The Army War College eventually produced a concrete plan, which called for expansion of the regular army by nearly a third, to more than 141,000 officers and men, and a 400,000-man reserve force, separate from the state-controlled National Guard, to be called the Continental Army. Wilson warily approved this program at the end of October, but he found Garrison even more irksome than before, privately calling him “a solemn, conceited ass!”34

  Before he dealt with the preparedness fight and the next round in the submarine controversy, he returned to Harlakenden, where Edith was staying for one more week. The couple renewed their routine of walks and rides, and on sunny days they would sit on the terrace while Wilson went through the official mail and, as Edith later recalled, “each morning we worked together on what it contained.” When Edith departed as planned for visits with friends and family, Wilson missed her painfully: “I long for you so passionately, that I am as restless as a caged tiger if I cannot at least be pouring out my heart to you when I am come to my desk at all, before and after business.” Pour out his heart he did, in two or three letters a day. He also continued doing what he had begun on the terrace at Harlakenden—sharing secrets of state and matters of high policy. Wilson would enclose other people’s letters with his own, particularly letters from Page and House. For her part, Edith felt no hesitancy in commenting on those letters and their writers. She agreed with Wilson that Page had gone overboard in his pro-British sentiments and that it might be wise to bring him home for a visit. About House, whom she had not yet met, she ventured reservations: “I can’t help feeling he is not a very strong character. … [H]e does look like a weak vessel and I think he writes like one very often.”35

  Edith’s comments about House contained equal measures of perceptiveness and jealousy. She was reacting to the smarmy, sycophantic tone the colonel often used in addressing Wilson, and she was resenting anyone who might presume to be closer to him than she was. She also made critical remarks about Tumulty, whom she had met and talked about with Wilson. Wilson responded by defending both men. It was in his letter answering Edith’s reservations about House that he admitted that the colonel was “intellectually … not a great man” and called him “a counselor, not a statesman.” But he also assured her, “You are going to love House some day,—if only because he loves me and would give, I believe, his life for me.” In the same letter, he said about Tumulty, “You know that he was not brought up as we were; you feel his lack of breeding. … But the majority, the great majority of the people who come to the office are not of our kind, and our sort of a gentleman would not understand them or know how to handle them.”36

  Edith would come to accept Tumulty because she recognized how useful he was to Wilson, but she would never feel as warmly toward him as Ellen had. Nor would she come to love House. The part the colonel would soon play in helping her through a rough patch in their courtship would reconcile her to him a bit, but she would never fully trust or accept him. She would not try to come between Wilson and House because she did not need to. Her presence in Wilson’s life in itself diminished the colonel’s influence. House apparently recognized the change. “It seems the President is wholly absorbed in this love affair and is neglecting practically everything else,” he noted sourly at the end of July. It was after this time that House began noting his own complaints, as well as those of others, about Wilson’s not seeking advice or listening to peop
le. The colonel would never again enjoy the intimacy that Wilson had formerly shared with him.37

  With Edith gone, Harlakenden held fewer charms for Wilson, and he returned to Washington a week after her departure. He had to deal with affairs in Mexico and the Caribbean, and the British had just tightened their blockade further by again declaring cotton contraband. This move brought angry protests from southern senators and congressmen and required Wilson and Tumulty to work to placate them. The British foreign secretary, Grey, remained sensitive to American opinion, particularly this vital Democratic constituency, and his government mitigated the economic damage by buying up much of that year’s cotton crop. Serious as those matters were, however, they paled in comparison to a fresh flare-up of the submarine crisis. On August 19, a German submarine torpedoed and sank the British liner Arabic, killing forty-four people, including two Americans. This incident rubbed raw the wound left by the Lusitania. Roosevelt and Bryan predictably piped up from their respective corners, but the general mood of the public seemed squarely behind the president.38 As before, Wilson made a show of calm and business as usual. He brushed aside demands to call Congress into session. Also, as he had done after the sinking of the Lusitania, he kept to himself, although this time he did not have Edith nearby for advice and comfort.

  The Arabic incident put the president in a bind. The firm line he had taken in his three Lusitania protests to Germany left him little room to back down. Yet few people wanted war; for his part, Wilson still wanted to foster a nonpunitive outcome to the dispute and build a better world, and remaining neutral would put him in a position to achieve those goals. To that end, he got little help from his advisers. Page irritated him by sending agitated reports of British demands that the United States stand up to the Germans, and House continued to counsel against softness in responding to the incident, even at the risk of war. After much agonizing, Wilson hit upon the expedient of a deliberate news leak. On August 23, newspapers published reports that “speculation in Government circles” predicted that the president might break relations with Germany. The “highest authority” stated that he would take such action if the facts of the case showed that the Germans had “disregarded his solemn warning in the last note on the Lusitania tragedy.” He also had Lansing tell Bernstorff how gravely the president regarded the situation. These moves got results. Debates rose in Berlin, and the chancellor journeyed to the kaiser’s castle at Pless, in Silesia, to put the matter before him. The outcome was a public promise not to sink liners without warning, although there was no disavowal of the sinking of the Arabic or the Lusitania.39