Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  The Democratic convention that opened in St. Louis on June 14 was all Wilson’s show. He instructed the convention managers to stress patriotism. Flags festooned the hall where the Democrats met, and there were lots of patriotic songs. He, along with Tumulty and House, read and approved the keynote speech in advance. Ex-governor Glynn of New York, following instructions, played the patriotic card by using the undefined term “Americanism” as a refrain, but Glynn’s speech took on a life of its own when he declared that the United States would stay out of war. The delegates exploded in applause. From there on, as Glynn recited times in American history when the nation had not gone to war, shouts arose, “Go on, go on.” As he went on, the crowd would roar, “What did we do?” and Glynn would shout, “We didn’t go to war.”12

  On the second day of the convention, the delegates’ enthusiasm soared, and the peace theme got powerful reinforcement. Senator Ollie James of Kentucky, a burly man with a trumpeting voice, touted “a courage that must be able to stand bitter abuse; a courage that moves slowly, acts coolly, and strikes no blow as long as diplomacy can be employed.” As a shining example of such courage, James pointed to Wilson’s handling of the submarine challenge: “Without orphaning a single American child, without widowing a single American mother, without firing a single gun, without the shedding of a single drop of blood, he wrung from the most militant spirit that ever brooded above a battlefield an acknowledgment of American rights and an agreement to American demands.” Later in the day, cries arose from the floor, “Bryan!” “Bryan!” The Great Commoner was in the press box because enemies among the Nebraska Democrats had denied him a seat as a delegate. The convention suspended the rules to allow him to speak. Literally weeping with joy, Bryan called this convention “a love feast.” He brushed aside past differences and praised Wilson for having enacted so many important reforms, and he avowed, “I join the American people in thanking God that we have a President who does not want this nation plunged into this war.”13

  On the third and final day, the delegates dispensed with a roll call and renominated the president and vice president by acclamation. They likewise adopted the platform, to which the committee had added to Wilson’s draft the statement: “In particular, we commend to the American people the splendid diplomatic victories of our great President, who has preserved the vital interests of our Government and its citizens, and kept us out of war.” This was the origin of the campaign cry “He kept us out of war.”14 In all, Wilson could feel pleased with his party’s handiwork at St. Louis. The speakers and the delegates may have beaten the peace drum a bit too hard for his taste, but everything else had gone his way, and he was ready and eager to face the voters.

  Before he could plunge into the campaign, he had some welcome business of governing to attend to. The summer months of 1916 offered him a brief reprise of the first year of his presidency, when he had been able to give greater attention to domestic affairs, particularly legislative leadership. Thanks to the resolution of the submarine controversy, the country was no longer teetering on the brink of the world war, and the main diplomatic controversies now involved the British. The greater urgency of the submarine controversy had previously offered cover to the leaders in London as they tightened their blockade, and the main advocate of sensitivity and caution toward the United States, Sir Edward Grey, had lost influence. Others in the government who favored a harder line, particularly Lloyd George, maintained that the Americans would submit to any restrictions so long as they made money from the war. Now the British had to face the consequences of their attitudes and actions.

  During the summer of 1916, two of their blockade practices drew angry reactions from the American public and the Wilson administration. One was intercepting and opening mail from Americans who were suspected of having ties with the Germans. The British did not respond to diplomatic protests. The second practice was the compiling of a list of businesses suspected of trading with the Germans. This “blacklist” drew denunciations from the press and objections from the State Department. Wilson shared the widespread disgust with the British. “I am, I must admit, about at the end of my patience with Great Britain and the Allies,” he told House in July. “This black list business is the last straw.” Evidently presuming that the colonel would contact Grey, he warned, “I am seriously considering asking Congress to authorize me to prohibit loans and restrict exportations to the Allies.”15

  Compounding those troubles for the British was widespread revulsion in America over what was happening in Ireland. On April 24, 1916, revolutionaries had mounted an armed uprising in Dublin that opened what would become a bloody six-year conflict that would lead finally to independence for Ireland. The British army brutally suppressed this Easter Rising and had its leaders shot after summary military proceedings. One incident in particular attracted international attention: the capture and sham trial of the Irish nationalist Sir Roger Casement. Despite appeals for clemency from the pope and a resolution by the U.S. Senate asking that Casement’s life be spared, the British executed him. Those acts understandably stirred wrath among Irish Americans, an important Democratic constituency. More generally, British behavior in Ireland ignited latent Anglophobia that stretched back to the Revolution and the War of 1812 and had flared up periodically since then. The British seemed intent on proving that they were only marginally less brutal than the Germans. Ireland damaged their moral standing in American eyes the way Belgium had done for the Germans.

  One American felt particularly acute pain at this turn of events. In August, Ambassador Walter Page came home for the first time in three years, hoping to smooth the waters. In Washington, he found negative feelings toward Britain. After several frustrating encounters at the State Department and repeated delays, Page wrangled a private talk in September with his old friend Wilson. It was a painful meeting. Wilson said that he had “started out as heartily in sympathy as any man [could] be,” Page recorded immediately afterward. Then, however, England “[h]ad gone on as she wished,” ignoring “the rights of others,” and that had hurt America’s “pride,” which was also Wilson’s pride. Page also wrote, “He described the war as a result of many causes—some of long origin. He spoke of England’s having the earth and Germany’s wanting it.” For such an impassioned champion of the Allies, these revelations of Wilson’s thinking were disheartening. For Page personally, the encounter marked a parting of the ways in a friendship that dated back more than thirty years, to the time when they had been a pair of ambitious young southerners yearning to make their mark in the world.16

  Actually, diplomatic friction with the British did not rank high among Wilson’s concerns. Besides his reelection campaign, he cared most about the reform measures that would round out the second installment of the New Freedom. First on the legislative agenda were child labor and workmen’s compensation laws. In February, the House had easily passed a child labor bill, but in the Senate, Democrats stalled action on Robert Owen’s version. A measure to provide workmen’s compensation for federal employees passed the House virtually without opposition but also languished in the Senate. The Republicans were using the failure to act on those bills in their campaign propaganda. Wilson broke the stalemate by going to the Capitol, where he met with Democratic senators in the President’s Room and urged passage of the bills both because they merited passage and because they would honor pledges in the party’s platform. The Senate passed the workmen’s compensation bill without a recorded vote. Some southern Democrats continued to oppose the child labor bill as an intrusion on state rights and as a blow to their region’s cheap labor, but they did not resort to a filibuster, and the bill passed by a vote of 52 to 12. Wilson signed it into law at a White House ceremony on September 1, declaring, “I want to say that with real emotion I sign this bill, because I know … what it is going to mean to the health and to the vigor of the country, and also to the happiness of those whom it affects.”17

  Two other pieces of legislation enacted in 1916 were becoming
flash points of conflict in the presidential campaign. One was the Revenue Act of 1916, whose curious history involved Wilson only marginally. It stemmed from the preparedness program, which was going to cost $300 million in new spending. The Treasury Department proposed to raise most of that money through excise taxes, which would fall most heavily on middle- and lower-income Americans. Bryanite Democrats on Capitol Hill rose up in revolt, charging that this tax burden was unfair, and besides, the rich and big business should pay for the military spending because they were the ones who were pushing for it. In the House, Claude Kitchin’s position as both majority leader and chairman of the Ways and Means Committee gave him the opportunity to write such views into law with a revenue bill that doubled the income tax rate, raised the surtax on high incomes, and levied the first federal inheritance tax. The bill also included a special tax on the profits of the munitions industry. McAdoo pressed Wilson to try to get changes, but the president stayed out of the conflict. In heated debate on the House floor, Republicans denounced the bill as a raid by southerners and westerners on the hard-earned, well-deserved wealth of the Northeast and Midwest; they were raising a sectional argument that would become one of their favorite battle cries in the campaign. On July 10, the House passed the revenue bill by a largely partisan vote of 240 to 140.18

  In the Senate, La Follette led the fight to keep the revenue bill in the form passed by the House. Acting with Democrats, he succeeded and also got the surcharge on high incomes raised further and the inheritance tax doubled. In angry floor debate, a Democrat and a Republican nearly got into a fistfight, but the bill passed on September 5, by a vote of 42 to 16. All thirty-seven Democrats voting were in favor, and all the negative votes came from Republicans. Also supporting the bill were five Republican insurgents: La Follette, George Norris, Albert Cummins, William Kenyon of Iowa, and Moses Clapp of Minnesota. Wilson involved himself only once, when he got Democratic senators to add amendments empowering the president to retaliate against nations that restricted American trade—a measure aimed at Britain’s blockade. Final passage came on September 7, and Wilson signed the bill into law the next day. The debates and votes on the Revenue Act in both houses again showed how party lines continued to be redrawn over progressive issues, as both parties appealed to their sectional core constituencies.19

  The other piece of legislation that fed conflict in the campaign mandated an eight-hour day for workers on interstate railroads. The eight-hour day had been organized labor’s holy grail for nearly half a century, and it was the main demand of railroad unions in negotiations in the summer of 1916. Management refused to consider it, and Secretary of Labor William Wilson tried to mediate. When the secretary’s efforts failed early in August, President Wilson met separately with union leaders and railroad presidents. Neither side would budge, and the unions called a strike to begin on September 4. Such a strike spelled disaster for the economy and posed a threat to national security. After conferring briefly with Democratic congressional leaders, the president went to the Capitol on August 29 to address a joint session of Congress. Observers noted that the president seemed informally dressed for such an occasion: he wore a blue jacket and white flannel trousers. In fact, he meant his attire to suggest national security considerations: it was the same outfit he had worn when he marched in the preparedness parade on Flag Day. He told the congressmen and senators that management’s intransigence forced him to ask them to establish an eight-hour day for railroad workers by law. He also asked for stronger federal mediation powers, greater ICC oversight of railroads, and presidential authority to take over and run the railroads in the event of military necessity.20

  Democratic congressional leaders, though generally approving, balked at anything beyond the eight-hour day, and Wilson reluctantly agreed to a stripped-down measure. Bearing the name of the chairman of the House Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee, William C. Adamson of Georgia, it quickly passed, by a vote of 239 to 56, again mainly along party lines. In the Senate, Republicans denounced the measure as class legislation and a craven surrender to union threats—charges that would become another favorite campaign cry—but it passed quickly by a vote of 43 to 28, even more clearly along party lines. Among Democrats, forty-two favored the bill and only two—both southerners—opposed it. Among Republicans, only one, La Follette, voted in favor, and twenty-six voted against, including such insurgents as George Norris, Albert Cummins, and William Borah. The next day, Wilson signed the Adamson Act into law aboard his private railroad car at Washington’s Union Station. The location was symbolic, as was the timing: Wilson was returning from giving his acceptance speech for the Democratic presidential nomination.21

  The Adamson Act marked the biggest extension of government power that Wilson ever asked for in peacetime and was the boldest intervention in labor relations that any president had yet attempted. It offered a fitting capstone to the second installment of the New Freedom. None of the measures enacted in 1916 was as monumental as the Federal Reserve, but most of them rivaled tariff revision and the anti-trust law in their lasting significance. Significant income tax rates and the inheritance tax of the Revenue Act would remain in place for the rest of the twentieth century. Aid to farmers and the shipping and tariff boards would likewise remain and pave the way for further action in those areas two decades later under the New Deal. A controversial Supreme Court decision would strike down the child labor law two years later, but that law would serve as the model for a permanent prohibition of child labor, also under the New Deal. Furthermore, the elevation of Brandeis to the Supreme Court rewarded the chief architect, besides Wilson, of the New Freedom, and it gave the Court one of its great justices, one who would open the way for more liberal and more flexible jurisprudence.

  Wilson played a different part in passing these measures than he had played in the passage of the first New Freedom legislation. This time, he did not create a program in advance, and he did not involve himself as much in shepherding its parts through Congress. Much of the initiative came from progressive Democrats on Capitol Hill, and Wilson’s contribution often lay in giving them their head or stiffening their resolve. Even so, he played a critical role. As before, he kept his congressional supporters at their tasks and on course. Moreover, he had to overcome new obstacles, in addition to the distractions of foreign affairs. Democrats now had a sharply reduced majority in the House, and Bryan no longer stood at the president’s side to serve as chief lobbyist and legislative liaison.

  Like its predecessor, this installment of the New Freedom was also a party program. Except for La Follette, Republicans did little to help frame, and increasingly opposed, these measures. Some of that was probably unavoidable, given the conservatives’ firm control of the party and the collapse of the Progressives. In all, Wilson could take great pride in this second round of legislative accomplishment. The New Freedom was alive and well.

  Wilson’s looming campaign for reelection made the summer of 1916 different from the preceding months of his presidency. Both he and Hughes, unlike Roosevelt earlier, observed the old custom of waiting for the notification ceremony to deliver their opening speeches. The challenger got a month’s head start, giving his acceptance speech on July 31 to an audience of 3,000 at Carnegie Hall in New York. What should have been a rousing opener to Hughes’s campaign fell flat as the candidate droned on, delivering carping criticisms of the Wilson administration and offering few positive alternatives. In foreign policy, he sounded tough but vague; on the league of nations idea, he sounded like Wilson when he called for “the development of international organization” and affirmed that “there is no national isolation in the world of the Twentieth Century.” Most observers were disappointed with the speech, but one was delighted. Wilson told Bernard Baruch he was following “the rule never to murder a man who is committing suicide.” Later, he softened a bit, saying he felt sorry for Hughes: “He is in a hopelessly false position. He dare not have opinions: He would be sure to offend some important section o
f his following.” Remembering the Animated Feather Duster, some commentators expressed amazement that Hughes could give such a limp performance. He later explained that his campaign skills had grown rusty after six years on the Supreme Court.22

  Things got better for the Republican candidate when he made a tour in August that took him to the West Coast and back. Hughes made a bold move of his own by going beyond the Republican platform’s vague language on woman suffrage to endorse a constitutional amendment. He also recovered some of his wonted vigor as he lambasted Wilson for weakness toward Mexico, and he sometimes made a good personal impression. “Gosh!” one North Dakota farmer reportedly exclaimed. “He ain’t so inhuman after all.”23 When the campaign train reached California, however, the trip turned into a comedy of errors. The local managers, who were conservative Republicans, did not serve Hughes well. In San Francisco, they scheduled an event at a hotel where the workers were on strike, and they refused to move to another location. As a result, Hughes wound up crossing a picket line and offending the city’s strong union movement.

  A still worse misstep in California involved internal party strife. The Republicans’ split in 1912 had hurt them there badly because Governor Hiram Johnson, who was the Progressive vice-presidential nominee, had kept Taft and the regular Republicans off the ballot. In 1914, California was the only place where the Progressives did not collapse. Now, in 1916, the pugnacious governor grudgingly followed Roosevelt back into the Republican fold, and he was running hard for the party’s nomination for senator. That situation posed a dilemma for Hughes. He did not think he could endorse Johnson’s senatorial bid, but he desperately wanted the governor to share the campaign platform with him. Between Johnson’s notoriously prickly personality and the machinations of conservatives, no joint appearance or even a meeting came off. Worst of all—in the most notorious incident of the campaign—the nominee and the governor spent several hours on the same day in the same hotel in Long Beach without seeing each other. When he learned of the fiasco, Hughes immediately apologized, but the damage was done. Stories about his “snub” of the governor raced around the state, and Johnson declined all requests for a meeting. The governor won the senate primary and dutifully endorsed the Republican ticket. Hughes later believed that the incident cost him the state—and the election.24