Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  Equivocal though this so-called Arabic pledge was, it set off an outburst of jubilation. Newspapers across the country hailed the president as the savior of peace. In the New York Evening Post, Oswald Garrison Villard, who bitterly resented the recent segregation efforts, emblazoned Wilson’s portrait and gushed about him in a front-page editorial: “Without mobilizing a single regiment or assembling a fleet, … he has compelled the surrender of the proudest, most arrogant, best armed of nations.”40 If this seemed too good to be true, Wilson thought it was, and events soon confirmed his doubts. On September 4, a submarine sank the British liner Hesperian. Fortunately, because no Americans were killed in this attack and the circumstances were ambiguous—the Germans claimed the Hesperian had tried to ram the submarine—it did not reignite the dispute. Still, it served as a reminder of how fragile and fraught with danger the situation remained.

  Wilson was fortunate not to have a full-fledged diplomatic emergency on his hands in September 1915 because he had to deal with a romantic one, in his courtship of Edith Galt. After she returned to Washington on September 3, they resumed their routine of rides in the limousine, dinners at the White House, and the exchange of frequent, passion-filled letters. Edith agreed to announce their engagement soon, but fearing the political ramifications, she still wanted to marry Wilson after the election, more than a year in the future. Others worried about the political effects of a marriage, too. Rumors of the president’s romance were beginning to circulate, and members of the cabinet were fussing about the situation. A group of them met and decided to tap Daniels for the assignment of talking to Wilson. Daniels later recalled that he recoiled at once from the “dangerous high and exalted mission of Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extraordinary to the Court of Cupid … in the performance of which my official head might suffer decapitation.” Instead, McAdoo made a clumsy stab at confronting his father-in law by resurrecting concerns about Mary Hulbert, the former Mrs. Peck. He told Wilson he had heard that the president had sent $15,000 to her, and he added a story he had probably made up about having received an anonymous letter saying that she was showing Wilson’s letters around Los Angeles, where she now lived.41

  Wilson responded in two ways. At some point, he wrote two shorthand drafts titled “Analysis and Statement of Admission.” He opened the first draft with “Even while it lasted I knew and made explicit what it did not mean,” and added, “It did not last but friendship and genuine admiration ensued.” In the second draft, he characterized his letters to Mary Hulbert as “a passage of folly and gross impertinence in my life,” and added, “I am deeply ashamed and repentant.” He insisted that nothing untoward had happened between them while admitting, “But none of this lessens the blame or the deep humiliating grief and shame I suffer, that I should have so erred and forgotten the standards of honorable behavior by which I should have been bound.” Whether he meant to turn those drafts into a letter to Edith is not clear. Instead, on Saturday, September 18, he wrote a short note: “There is something, personal to myself, and I am going to take the extraordinary liberty of asking that I may come to your house this evening at 8, instead of your coming here to dinner.” When he went there, he told her about Mrs. Peck and abjectly begged forgiveness. What Edith said is not known, but Wilson agonized through what he told her were “conflicting emotions that have surged like a storm through me all night long.”42

  He did not have to stay in that storm. Almost as soon as he wrote those words, he received a letter that Edith had written at dawn. After spending the night sitting in her big chair by the window, she declared, “I now see straight—straight into the heart of things—and am ready to follow the road ‘where love leads.’ … This is my pledge, Dearest One, I will stand by you—not for duty, not for pity, not for honor—but for love—trusting, protecting, comprehending Love.” She felt so tired she could put her head down and sleep at her writing desk, “but nothing could bring me real rest until I had pledged you my love and my allegiance.”43

  The relief Wilson felt was almost painful. “Your note has just come and I could shout aloud for the joy and privilege of receiving such a pledge, conceived by such a heart,” he wrote to her at once. He and Edith could now resume their romance where they had left off. After this, he began going to her house almost every evening and often stayed until midnight. The Secret Service agents noticed a new bounciness about the president when he walked back to the White House. As he waited for traffic to pass, he would dance a few steps and whistle or sing a vaudeville tune. One tune that an agent remembered him singing as his feet tapped out the rhythm was “Oh you beautiful doll! You great big beautiful doll! Let me put my arms around you, I can hardly live without you.”44

  The romantic crisis might have been over, but its political ramifications remained. Wilson asked House to come to Washington, and on September 22 the two men met for the first time in nearly three months. After going over the diplomatic situation, House noted, “The President at once took up his most intimate personal affairs. I could see that he did it with reluctance, but with a determination to have it over.” Wilson told House about Mrs. Peck and the anonymous report to McAdoo of threats to publish his letters to her. The colonel discounted McAdoo’s fears and thought any attempt at blackmail most unlikely. Turning to the subject of Mrs. Galt, a relieved Wilson asked his advice about when to announce their engagement and when to have the wedding. He also asked Edith to meet with House, and two days later they had tea together at the White House. The colonel talked about the president’s accomplishments and said that Wilson probably would not run again. Edith, in turn, played his own game of flattery, going on about the president’s great affection and respect for him, to which House responded, “I thought if our plans carried true, the President would easily outrank any American that had yet lived; that the war was the greatest event in human history excepting the birth of Jesus Christ.” Whether this conversation completely won Edith over is open to question, although she told Wilson that evening that she had found House “just as nice and fine as you pictured him” and she now had faith in his judgment.45

  This conversation and others removed the last barriers to disclosing their engagement and planning an early wedding. The announcement, which Wilson wrote on his typewriter while Edith peered over his shoulder, came on October 6. The following day, papers carried the news, along with a formal photograph of Edith that the White House had supplied in advance.46 That day, many people got their first look at the new First Lady-to-be when she accompanied the president to Philadelphia for the second game of the World Series. One photograph caught the couple wreathed in smiles after Wilson tossed out the first pitch. Edith was fashionably dressed, as always, with a fur-trimmed coat and corsage, gloves, and a wide-brimmed hat. Appearing in the Sunday rotogravure section of newspapers over the next two weeks, that photograph introduced Mrs. Galt to the public at large with a radiant image that made her a political asset.

  Politics, as well as romance, was on the president’s mind in October 1915. If House really thought his friend might not run again, for once his mind was not working in tandem with Wilson’s. On the same day he announced the engagement, the president gave another statement to the press: “I intend to vote for woman suffrage in New Jersey because I believe the time has come to extend that privilege to the women of the state.”47 He insisted that he spoke only as a private citizen and reiterated his view that suffrage was a state matter. This endorsement was not enough to carry the day in a referendum two weeks later, but suffrage leaders expressed gratitude to the president for the gesture. Breaking his Sphinx-like silence on woman suffrage marked the beginning of more active political involvement on Wilson’s part. He also started giving speeches again, but mindful of the “too proud to fight” fiasco, he stuck mostly to generalities.

  He needed to watch his tongue especially because he was still entangled in delicate diplomacy over the submarine issue. He and Lansing continued to press the Germans to disavow the sinking of the Arabic
and pay compensation. Without Wilson’s knowledge, Lansing made threats of a diplomatic break to the German ambassador at a time when the president was writing to House, “I feel under bonds to [the country] to show patience to the utmost. My chief puzzle is to determine when patience ceases to be a virtue.” Yet when Wilson saw House on September 22, he said that perhaps the United States should go to war in order to combat German militarism. The colonel’s surprise was well taken: such Rooseveltian thinking was out of character for Wilson and revealed how exasperated he felt. Fortunately, the Germans chose not to try the president’s patience much further. On October 5, Bernstorff presented Lansing with a letter that partially disavowed the attack on the Arabic and promised to pay an indemnity. With that, the submarine controversy subsided to its familiarly slow but ever-menacing simmer.48

  At the same time, the political controversy over military preparedness was threatening to boil over. Bryan particularly denounced increases in the army and navy in speeches around the country in the fall of 1915. He drew big, enthusiastic crowds, and pledges of solidarity poured in from his followers in Congress. The most potent of his cohorts promised to be Representative Claude Kitchin of North Carolina. The usually cooperative Underwood was no longer Democratic leader in the House because he had been elected to the Senate in 1914; Kitchin would succeed him as party leader and chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, which gave him power to name new members to committees. Between the presence of anti-preparedness Democrats on the Armed Services Committees and the party’s reduced majority in the House, Wilson’s program faced hard going. His opponents got reinforcement in the press from Villard. The editor lambasted the preparedness increases in the New York Evening Post and in The Nation, and he served as a liaison among opponents inside and outside Congress.49

  Wilson strove to counter the congressional opposition by cultivating the chairmen of the Armed Services Committees and by playing up to Speaker Clark. He also began to speak out on preparedness. Early in October, in brief remarks to the Naval Consulting Board, a civilian advisory group headed by the inventor Thomas A. Edison, he asserted, “I think the whole nation is convinced that we ought to be prepared, not for war, but for defense.” Later he declared, “Force everywhere speaks out with a loud and imperious voice.” In this changed world, America needed stronger, more efficient armed forces, “not for war, but only for defense.” Although he was calling for bigger armed forces, he reiterated, “There is no fear amongst us.” Yet he also warned against “alien sympathies, which came from men who loved other countries better than they loved America.”50

  Those speeches served as a warm-up for a major counterattack in the preparedness fight and a broader political campaign, which came in his State of the Union address on December 7, 1915. Wilson acknowledged that during the preceding year the world war had “extended its threatening and sinister scope,” but he pledged to “keep the processes of peace alive,” particularly in the Western Hemisphere. Professing goodwill toward neighboring nations, he promised not to impose any government upon them: “This is Pan-Americanism. It has none of the spirit of empire in it.” That noble vision seemed at odds with recent intervention in the Caribbean, but Wilson used it as a way to justify his military policy. “Great democracies are not belligerent,” he declared. “We regard war merely as a means of asserting the rights of a people against aggression.” The United States would maintain no more of a military establishment than necessary, as his program of increases in the army and navy would do. Because the preparedness and shipping programs would be costly, he urged raising the needed sums through taxes, particularly income taxes. He also proposed federal aid to vocational and agricultural education, a rural-credits plan for farm-mortgage lending, and stronger railroad regulation. Unfortunately, he again referred to disloyal people, particularly those immigrants who “seek to make this proud country once more a hotbed of European passion.”51

  This State of the Union address, his third, was not one of Wilson’s best speeches. As he had done before, he rambled as he covered diverse matters. This speech also suffered from a mixture of messages as Wilson sought to take a firm stand in military and foreign policy but also to give assurances of peaceful intentions. He made up for some of those deficiencies in other speeches during the next few days. To the Democratic National Committee, he declared that Mexicans could “raise hell. … It is their government, and it is their hell.” To a business group in Columbus, Ohio, he sounded the basic New Freedom theme that the average man was “the backbone of the country,” and he said he wanted the world war to end in a peace in which “the instrumentalities of justice will be exalted above the instrumentalities of force.”52 This was the closest he had come to divulging his agreement with those who were advocating some kind of league of nations. Those speeches in December 1915 flaunted a fresh political assertiveness. Wilson alluded to the upcoming campaign without explicitly announcing that he would run again. Still, hints here and elsewhere were hard to miss; he was clearly gearing up for a new round of action.

  Only one thing remained before he plunged in. On Saturday, December 18, 1915, Edith Bolling Galt and Woodrow Wilson were married. In deference to the circumstances—a second marriage for both of them and the relatively recent death of Wilson’s first wife—the ceremony took place at Edith’s home, on Twentieth Street, rather than at the White House. The guests included only family members: Edith’s mother, brothers, and sisters; Wilson’s brother, sister, and daughters; his cousin Helen Bones; and Stockton Axson. This restriction gave Edith an excuse not to invite House, although she did include Grayson and Altrude Gordon, as well as her family’s servants. As at Jessie’s wedding two years earlier, both an Episcopal and a Presbyterian clergyman officiated: Herbert Scott Smith, rector of St. Margaret’s Church, where Edith attended, and James Taylor of the Central Presbyterian Church. The ceremony, which took place at eight-thirty in the evening, was short and simple. There were no attendants, and the bride’s mother gave her away. After having supper with their guests, the newlyweds sped away in an unmarked car to elude reporters and boarded a private railroad car that took them to Hot Springs, Virginia, for a three-week honeymoon. When the train pulled into the station the next morning, a Secret Service agent noticed the president dancing a jig, clicking his heels in the air, and again singing, “Oh you beautiful doll! You great big beautiful doll!”53

  The honeymoon was suitably idyllic. The couple stayed in the finest suite at the famed Homestead hotel. They played golf most mornings and went for automobile rides in the afternoon, often getting out to take long walks. Although official business followed Wilson, he and Edith enjoyed plenty of time alone together—but the end came sooner than the honeymooners wanted. On January 2, 1916, reports reached Washington that a German submarine had sunk the British liner Persia, killing two Americans. On advice from Tumulty and Lansing, the president returned to Washington the next day. “The President looked very well after his trip and seemed to be in a fine mood, although it was plainly evident that the PERSIA affair weighed on him,” Tumulty noted.54 It was good for Wilson that his marriage and honeymoon had buoyed his spirits. The new year, 1916, was about to bring the greatest challenge—and fulfillment—yet in his life.

  15

  SECOND FLOOD TIDE

  Woodrow Wilson needed the emotional lift that he felt when he returned from his honeymoon in January 1916, for his political prospects looked bleak. A year earlier, in his grief and gloom following Ellen’s death, he had doubted whether he could live up to people’s expectations, especially whether he could repeat his earlier feats as a legislative leader. Since then, the sinking of the Lusitania and the seething submarine controversy had promised to make such prospects look dimmer still by diverting attention from domestic concerns. His “irony of fate” had come home to roost with a vengeance—and that was not the worst of it. Bryan’s defection and vociferous opposition to a tough diplomatic stance toward Germany and increased military preparedness raised the specter of civi
l war among Democrats—the same kind of internecine strife that had fractured the Republicans four years earlier and doomed the reelection bid of Wilson’s predecessor. Now the tables appeared to be turning. Roosevelt’s mounting hostility toward Wilson’s foreign policy and his envy and loathing of Wilson personally made it increasingly likely that a reunited opposition would confront the president and his party in the fall elections. Despite newfound happiness at home, 1916 seemed to bode ill for the man in the White House.

  Submarine attacks demanded immediate attention. Not only the sinking of the Persia but also the earlier sinking of an Italian liner, the Ancona, apparently by an Austrian submarine, was reheating the diplomatic pot. Now that Congress was back in session, sentiments on both sides found fresh outlets, and anti-war Democrats were bruiting about Bryan’s demand to keep Americans off the ships of belligerent countries. Wilson shared their sentiments to a degree. “If my re-election as President depends upon my getting into war,” Tumulty recorded him saying on January 4, “I don’t want to be President. … I have had lots of time to think about this war and the effect of our country getting into it.” He cared more about what people would think of him in ten years than what they thought now. He appreciated their desire for action, “but I will not be rushed into war, no matter if every damned congressman and senator stands up on his hind legs and proclaims me a coward.”1