It was a triumph for Wilson. Whether he really hoped to bring the Germans to heel is not clear. His decision to force their hand was reluctant, and it did not spring from a shrewd reading of their intentions. Neither the embassy in Berlin nor House’s informal network was particularly astute in assessing crosscurrents of opinion in Berlin or at the military headquarters. Wilson may have felt resigned to having to go to war, but unlike House and Lansing, he did not welcome that prospect. He may simply have gotten lucky, but he had shown great patience in seeking a way to satisfy the “double wish.” Ironically, he had succeeded by finally choosing one half over the other—gaining satisfaction from Germany even while risking war. Choruses of praise arose from newspapers and private citizens throughout the country. Wilson deserved their praise, although not as much as he did for keeping out of war in Mexico. This diplomatic triumph would alter the balance of relations with the belligerents. The German naval leader’s hopeful prediction of trouble between the United States and the Allies would soon come true. More important for Wilson, this triumph cleared the way for new initiatives abroad, fewer distractions on the domestic front, and a clearer path toward another four years in the White House.
He did not exult at his good fortune. Besides knowing how differently the confrontation might have gone, Wilson was painfully aware of how fragile and unstable American neutrality remained. On May 8, the same day that his reply to Germany went out, he met at the White House with a group of anti-preparedness leaders, who included the renowned social worker Lillian Wald, the young socialist writer Max Eastman, and the radical Progressive Amos Pinchot. After listening patiently to their arguments and defending his preparedness program, the president asserted, “This is a year of madness. … Now, in these circumstances, it is America’s duty to keep her head.” He wanted not only to keep the bad influences of European power politics out of the Western Hemisphere but also to create a new effort to maintain world peace, in which the United States would “play our proportional part in manifesting the force that is going to be back of that. Now, in the last analysis, the peace of society is obtained by force. … And if you say we shall not have any war, you have got to have force to make that ‘shall’ bite.”44
He was edging toward unveiling what he had hinted at earlier: his belief in the league of nations idea. Three days later, in his off-the-record interview with Baker, he said he was thinking about what he could do to promote peace and asked whether he should disclose his ideas to the League to Enforce Peace. That organization, headed by Taft and increasingly known by its initials, LEP (pronounced “el-ee-pee”), had invited the president to speak at its annual dinner in Washington on May 27. Ignoring House’s advice to the contrary, he accepted the invitation and found himself sharing the speaker’s platform with Lodge, who a year earlier had called for “great nations … united” to enforce peace. Wilson struck a properly circumspect pose. He declined to endorse or comment on the LEP’s program and talked instead about how the world war had changed so much. “With its cause and effects we are not concerned,” he maintained, but only with its profound impact on America: “We are participants, whether we would or not, in the life of the world. The interests of all nations are our own also.”45
One cause of the war did concern Wilson: “secret counsels” that had forged alliances and resorted to force. The shock and surprise of the war’s onset had shown “that the peace of the world must henceforth rest upon a new and more wholesome diplomacy.” The world’s “great nations” must decide what is “fundamental to their common interest, and as to some feasible method of acting in concert when any nation or group of nations seeks to disturb those fundamental things.” This was an unequivocal endorsement of the league idea. Wilson went further, declaring, “We [Americans] believe in these fundamental things: First, that every people has a right to choose the sovereignty under which they shall live. … Second, that the small states of the world have a right to enjoy the same respect for their sovereignty and for their territorial integrity that great and powerful nations expect and insist upon. And, third, that the world has a right to be free from every disturbance of its peace that has its origin in aggression and disregard of the rights of peoples and nations.” He vowed “that the United States is willing to become a partner in any feasible association of nations formed in order to realize those objects and make them secure against violation.”46
Wilson’s circumspect pose could not hide his wonted boldness. Despite endorsing the LEP’s central idea—international enforcement—he said nothing about arbitration or international courts, which Taft and the organization’s other activists, mainly lawyers, stressed. Wilson’s second and third “fundamental things” foreshadowed Article X of the Covenant of the League of Nations, which he would call its “heart,” and he even foreshadowed the language of that article when he called for “a virtual guarantee of territorial integrity and political independence.” He was showing from the outset that he wanted an essentially political league, which differed from the judicial body that LEP leaders envisioned, and he was enunciating the concept that would later come to be called collective security. Likewise, when he deplored “secret counsels” and advocated “a right to choose … sovereignty,” he was foreshadowing elements of his Fourteen Points and other major policy statements, as he did further when he demanded “the inviolate security of the highway of the seas for the common and unhindered use of all the nations of the world.” These ideas would later come to be known as open diplomacy, self-determination, and freedom of the seas. These ideas, together with his demand for equal rights for small nations, put him at odds with some of the LEP leaders and Lodge, who envisioned a great-power directorate to run the world. Furthermore, these ideas put him more in line with liberal and left-wing thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic who wanted sweeping reforms to replace the balance of power, institute disarmament, and promote freedom for subject peoples.47
Wilson knew he had taken a bold step. Both Bryan and Roosevelt had been attacking the LEP, though for opposite reasons. Bryan had invoked traditional American isolation, with genuflections to Washington’s Farewell Address and Jefferson’s injunction against “entangling alliances,” and he had condemned the league idea as imperialistic and warmongering. Those arguments had drawn support from some Democrats and Republican insurgents. Wilson strove to reassure his party brethren in his next speech, a Decoration Day address three days later at Arlington National Cemetery. “I shall never consent to an entangling alliance,” he avowed, “but I would gladly assent to a disentangling alliance—an alliance which would disentangle the peoples of the world from those combinations in which they seek their own separate and private interests and unite the peoples of the world to preserve the peace of the world upon a basis of common right and justice.” He was aiming that rhetorical reversal at skeptical Democrats, but he was not retreating. A few days later, he drafted the Democratic platform on which he would run for reelection. In one section, he lifted both the ideas and many of the same words from his speech to the LEP, declaring, “[W]e believe that the time has come when it is the duty of the United States to join with other nations of the world in any feasible association that will effectively serve these principles.”48
Wilson’s attempt to bring Democrats on board a more activist, outward-looking foreign policy was an even bolder move than espousal of the league idea. In domestic affairs, he had been going further down a trail that others, especially Bryan, had blazed before him, and he had been taking the party in directions in which most of its members wanted to go. By contrast, in foreign policy he was trying to wean them from a heritage of resistance to overseas commitments and opposition to bigger armed forces—a heritage that Bryan was now distilling into self-conscious isolationism. Left to themselves, a majority of Democrats would most likely have followed the Great Commoner’s lead rather than accept the president’s new course. There was peril for Wilson, but he had advantages. As he had already shown in the preparedness fight, he could
appeal to party and patriotic solidarity. Equally important, this was an election year, and the Democrats’ hopes of remaining in power rested with him. Finally, he had long since proved to the more progressive Democrats, who gave the party its ideological lifeblood, that he was one of them and could deliver legislation and appointments that gave them their hearts’ desires.
Domestic issues necessarily took a backseat for Wilson during the first half of 1916, but he did not forget them. In January, he made three moves that signaled a second and more progressive installment of the New Freedom. He reversed himself on two issues on which earlier he had not favored action. One was the tariff. As he had already publicly stated, he now supported an independent commission to investigate and advise on tariff rates, an idea formerly favored mainly by Roosevelt and his Progressives. The other was rural credits. He now brushed aside Secretary of Agriculture Houston’s objections and supported his government lending program for farmers. When the plan’s principal Democratic sponsors, Senator Henry Hollis of New Hampshire and Representative Asbury Lever of South Carolina, came to see him in the White House in late January, the congressman proposed a figure of $3 million. Wilson stunned his visitors by saying, “I have only one criticism of Lever’s proposition, and that is that he is too modest in his amount.” His visitors quickly agreed to double the sum.49
Wilson’s final move in January 1916 dramatically gave the strongest proof of his undiminished progressive zeal. On January 28, without warning, he nominated Louis Brandeis to a seat on the Supreme Court. The death of Justice Joseph Lamar three weeks earlier had created the vacancy. It probably helped that House, who had worked assiduously against appointments for Brandeis, was in Europe. Wilson evidently did not consider anyone else. He discussed the nomination only briefly with McAdoo and Attorney General Gregory, who were both enthusiastic, and he mentioned it to Samuel Gompers, the head of the American Federation of Labor, who assured him of the unions’ support. Wilson bypassed the custom of honoring “senatorial courtesy” by not consulting with Lodge and John W. Weeks, the two conservative Republicans who represented Brandeis’s adopted home state of Massachusetts. He did consult with La Follette, who assured him of progressive Republican support. The news of Brandeis’s nomination landed like a bombshell on Capitol Hill. As Taft’s friend and Washington informant Gus Karger reported to the ex-president, “When Brandeis’s nomination came in yesterday, the Senate simply gasped. … There wasn’t any more excitement at the Capitol when Congress passed the Spanish War resolution.”50
Those moves in January served as openers to a new legislative campaign. In March, Wilson urged his party’s leaders in Congress to push an ambitious program, and the House Democratic caucus committed itself to new taxation, a tariff commission, shipping regulation, and rural credits. Of those measures, rural credits unexpectedly proved the easiest to pass. Bills cleared both houses in May by lopsided margins, with most Republicans not voting. The tariff commission took longer to pass but excited little debate, as did a bill to establish a commission to regulate maritime shipping. Those measures drew scant attention because by the beginning of the summer the presidential campaign and more heated domestic issues would overshadow them.51
One domestic matter did stir up a major conflict from the outset—the Brandeis nomination. True to predictions, conservatives and legal traditionalists were apoplectic. Fifty-one leading citizens of Boston, where Brandeis lived and practiced law, issued a public letter that pronounced him lacking the proper temperament to sit on the Supreme Court. Most of the signers were Boston Brahmins, including Harvard’s president, A. Lawrence Lowell. Not everyone at Harvard agreed with Lowell, however. Former president Charles W. Eliot publicly supported Brandeis, as did Roscoe Pound, the dean of the law school, together with nine of the school’s eleven faculty members. A petition in support of Brandeis drew more than 700 signatures from Harvard students. On the other side, seven former presidents of the American Bar Association, including Taft, called Brandeis “unfit” for the Court. In view of Brandeis’s progressive activism and unorthodox legal thinking, such opposition was to be expected.52
Another element in the opposition was anti-Semitism. If confirmed by the Senate, Brandeis would become the first Jew to serve on the Supreme Court and thereby attain the highest public office in the United States yet held by a Jew. No prominent opponent ever publicly stated that Brandeis should not be on the Supreme Court because of his religion, but privately many of them thought so and said so. The use of the word unfit by the president of the bar association also carried a connotation of prejudice. Equally disturbing, in the Senate, La Follette proved to be a poor judge of sentiment among his fellow Republican insurgents. Two who served on the Judiciary Committee, Albert Cummins of Iowa and John Works of California, announced their opposition to the nomination. Some Democrats on the committee also seemed lukewarm. Brandeis did not testify at the Judiciary Committee hearings, although he played an active role behind the scenes in managing the public relations aspect of his nomination. The hearings became a parade of character witnesses for and against him, and his nomination appeared to be stalled in the committee. Some of his supporters privately accused Wilson of failing to act and not wanting the nomination to go through.
Those suspicions were unfounded. Early in May, Wilson intervened with another deft exercise in legislative leadership. Behind the scenes, he worked with Attorney General Gregory and the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Gregory’s friend and fellow Texan Charles A. Culberson, to move things along. By prearrangement, Culberson wrote to ask the president to give his reasons for choosing Brandeis. Wilson responded on May 5 with a long letter, which the chairman read to the committee and released to the press. Calling Brandeis “singularly qualified by learning, by gifts, and by character,” the president dismissed the charges leveled against this nominee as “intrinsically incredible. … He is a friend of all just men and a lover of the right, and he knows more than how to talk about the right—he knows how to set it forward in the face of its enemies.” Wilson recounted Brandeis’s stellar record as a lawyer and praised “his impartial, orderly, and constructive mind, his rare analytical powers, his deep human sympathy. … This friend of justice and of men will ornament the high court of which we are all so justly proud.”53
Wilson’s letter was a masterstroke, but his nominee was not out of the woods. One Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, James Reed of Missouri, had a history of giving the president trouble, and another, John K. Shields of Tennessee, was no friend of his either. Two others, Wilson’s nemesis at the Atlanta bar but more recently his supporter, Hoke Smith of Georgia, and Lee Overman of North Carolina, were also wavering. In response, Wilson had McAdoo, Burleson, and Gregory apply patronage pressure, and he personally courted Shields and Overman. In the latter case, Wilson invited Overman to accompany the presidential party on a trip to North Carolina, and he publicly praised the senator when the train stopped in his hometown.
These tactics worked. On May 24, the Judiciary Committee reported favorably on Brandeis’s nomination. The vote was 10 to 8, strictly along party lines. Besides Cummins and Works, another Republican insurgent, William E. Borah of Idaho, also voted no. On June 1, the full Senate acted without debate in executive session, approving the nomination by a vote of 47 to 22. Only one Democrat, the aged, cranky Francis Newlands of Nevada, voted against Brandeis. Only two Republicans, La Follette and Norris, and the lone Progressive, Miles Poindexter of Washington, crossed party lines to vote in favor. This was an early sign of Republicans’ coming alignment against progressive measures. At the time, however, only joy abounded in reform circles. The president refrained from public comment, but he said privately, “I never signed a commission with such satisfaction as I signed his.” Brandeis’s friend and supporter Norman Hapgood recalled that the president told him, “I can never live up to my Brandeis appointment. There is nobody else who represents the greatest technical ability and professional success with complete devotion to the
people’s interest.”54 He was right. Besides striking a blow against religious prejudice, he had made his finest and most important appointment. In itself, this was one of Wilson’s greatest contributions to American public life. He had made his deepest bow yet toward progressivism, and he had thrown out a fitting opener to his bid for reelection.
Wilson was at the top of his form as a leader. By the middle of 1916, he had turned the troubles that had faced him into a tide that was leading him on to fortune. He was also happy in his personal life, and he owed most of his happiness to Edith. The newlyweds had settled into a comfortable routine at the White House. They usually woke early for a snack and a round of golf, followed by breakfast at eight. An hour later, the stenographer Charles Swem would come to the upstairs study to take dictation. Edith often stayed to listen. “It was a delight and an education to hear the lucid answers that came with apparently no effort from a mind so well-stored,” she recalled in her memoirs. Then, while her husband spent the morning in his office, she would tend to household management with Mrs. Jaffray and work on her own correspondence with her secretary, Edith Benham. The couple would have lunch together, usually with guests, and following his afternoon stint in the office, they would take a ride. On Saturdays, they often took longer rides, sometimes as far as Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, or they might go on an overnight or weekend cruise on the Mayflower. They saw friends and family as before, and Edith got on well with Wilson’s daughters and other relatives. Grayson remained a special friend, and on May 24 the Wilsons and McAdoos journeyed to New York for his wedding to Altrude Gordon.55
Private and official life frequently dovetailed, to Edith’s delight. She enjoyed public functions. Her first White House occasion was in January, when she and the president greeted 3,328 guests at a diplomatic reception. State dinners followed at regular intervals. Edith had a keen fashion sense and chose her ensembles with care on these gala occasions. She accompanied Wilson on the preparedness speaking tour in January and February, and she was with him when he gave most of his speeches at other times. She also paid attention to his appearance. Wilson was already a good dresser, but Edith injected a bit of flair into his wardrobe. Evidence of her touch could be seen on June 14, Flag Day, when the president led a big Preparedness Parade up Pennsylvania Avenue. “How young and vital he looked,” she recalled. “He wore white flannel trousers, a blue sack coat, white shoes, white straw hat, and carried an American flag about a yard and a half long. What a picture, as the breeze caught and carried out the Stars and Stripes!”56 That day, Woodrow Wilson was marching along the same route that he had ridden three years earlier at his inauguration. He was hitting his stride toward a second inaugural journey along that route.
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