Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  Given Wilson’s wish for “an intellectual contest,” two particularly gratifying endorsements came from editors of the erstwhile Progressive house organ, The New Republic: Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann had criticized many of Wilson’s actions and policies, but the president’s progressivism combined with support for a league of nations and international reform had slowly won them over. In a signed editorial at the middle of October, Lippmann credited Wilson with “remaking his philosophy” and, in the process, “creating, out of the reactionary, parochial elements of the Democracy, the only party which at this moment is national in scope, liberal in purpose, and effective in action.” Croly hesitated longer. More fully than anyone else, he shared Roosevelt’s belief that individuals and groups must rise above their interests in order to serve the New Nationalism. Yet later in October, Croly produced a signed editorial that endorsed Wilson on the same grounds as Lippmann—for making the Democrats the more progressive of the two parties by changing its ideas: “The New Freedom has been discarded.”39 Wilson may have smiled at the way Croly rationalized his support, but these endorsements and others from Progressives brought a new intellectual respectability and sophistication to the Democrats.

  Still, some of the president’s prospects did not look good. Opposition from German American organizations and other anti-Allied groups remained sharp. Reports reaching Democratic headquarters indicated that ordinary German Americans were not following their spokesmen, but the concentration of those voters in key midwestern states made them a worrisome piece of the electoral puzzle. Also disturbing was opposition from some Catholics, including members of the church hierarchy. They lambasted Wilson’s refusal to intervene in Mexico against Carranza’s anticlerical Constitutionalists.40 Above all, the Republicans still enjoyed two big assets: their apparent stranglehold on much of the electorate in the Northeast, as evidenced by the results in Maine, and their edge in campaign spending, thanks to support from big business and the wealthy, which allowed Hughes’s managers to outspend their rivals for advertising, pamphlets, and other publicity.

  By mid-October, the president and his campaign managers knew that the election was going to be extremely close and that he might lose. “It is evident, of course, that Mr. Hughes is making very little headway, because he has done so many stupid and insincere things,” Wilson told his brother, “but other influences are at work on his behalf which are undoubtedly powerful, chiefly the influence of organized business. I can only conjecture and hope.” The chance of losing led him to make an unusual move. House suggested a plan by which Wilson would get Secretary of State Lansing and Vice President Marshall to resign and appoint Hughes to succeed Lansing. Under the law then in force, the secretary of state stood next in the line of succession after the vice president. This meant that if Wilson resigned, Hughes would become president immediately, rather than waiting until the following March 4. “Times are too critical to have an interim of four months between the election and the inauguration of the next President,” the colonel wrote in his diary. He broached the plan to Lansing, who went along with it, and then to Wilson. The president said nothing, but two days before the election he drafted a letter in his shorthand, typed it himself, sealed it in an envelope with wax, and had it hand-delivered to Lansing with instructions that no one else was to open it.41

  In the letter, Wilson outlined the resignation plan to Lansing and observed, “All my life long I have advocated some such responsible government for the United States as other constitutional systems afford as [a matter] of course, and as such action on my part would inaugurate, at least by example.” He wanted to avoid a four-month interregnum because these were not “ordinary times. … No such critical circumstances in regard to our foreign policy have ever before existed.” He believed he had “no right to risk the peace of the nation by remaining in office after I had lost my authority.” The “critical circumstances” involved submarines. Confidential reports from Berlin told of growing pressure for unrestricted undersea warfare. Also, Germany’s first and as yet only naval submarine with a transatlantic cruising range, the U-53, paid a call at Newport, Rhode Island, in October, and after departing, it sank—after giving warning—six merchant ships, four of them British, one Dutch, and one Norwegian. After discussions about the U-53 in Washington and at Shadow Lawn, Wilson decided to downplay the event. House may have made his suggestion about resignation in part because he was unhappy with the drift of foreign policy and was showing signs of pique. “To hear him talk,” House wrote, “you would think the man in the street understood the theory and philosophy of government as he does.”42

  The plan to resign gibed so well with Wilson’s thinking that the president almost certainly would have come up with it on his own. Ever since his college days, he had wanted to adapt parliamentary practices to the American system. Nor was he alone in regarding as an outmoded relic the four-month gap between elections and inaugurations that was mandated in the Constitution. Nearly two decades later, the Twentieth Amendment would abolish this calendar and fix January 20 for the inauguration and January 3 for the opening of Congress. Wilson’s plan would play no part in that change because no one besides him, House, Lansing, and possibly Edith and Grayson knew about it. House would mention the scheme in passing ten years later in the published edition of his diary, but it would not become public knowledge until Lansing’s War Memoirs were published posthumously in 1935. It is unfortunate that the plan did not become better known earlier. In 1932, the last election under the old calendar would come at an even more critical time. The defeated president in that election would be Herbert Hoover, who had served under and admired Wilson. If Hoover had known about this plan, he might have adopted it and spared the country four months of governmental paralysis at the nadir of the Great Depression, which has been called the “interregnum of despair.”43

  On November 7, when the returns came in, Wilson thought he might have to implement the plan. On election day, he and Edith drove to Princeton, where he voted once more at the fire station and joked with students and reporters. Back at Shadow Lawn, they spent a quiet afternoon and had dinner with his daughter Margaret, son-in-law Frank Sayre, and cousin Helen Bones, Edith’s brother and sister-in-law, and Grayson. They played twenty questions until ten o’clock, when a telephone call from New York brought bad news: The New York Times was declaring Hughes the winner. As Edith later recalled, Margaret declared indignantly, “Impossible. They cannot know yet. In the West they are still at the polls.” A call to the White House found a gloomy Tumulty repeating the same bad news. According to Edith’s recollection, her husband remained calm. He agreed with Margaret that everything was not settled yet, but he was not sanguine. “There now seems little hope that we shall not be drawn into the War,” Edith remembered him saying, “though I have done everything I can to keep us out; but my defeat will be taken by Germany as a repudiation of my policy. Many of our own people will so construe it, and will try to force war upon the next Administration.” Wilson asked for a glass of milk, and as he left the room to go upstairs to bed, he said, “I might stay longer but you are all so blue.”44

  They were blue at Shadow Lawn and the White House and Democratic headquarters. The returns appeared to be bearing out their worst fears. In the Northeast, the Republican tide swept every state except New Hampshire, which seesawed before finally going to Wilson by 52 votes. In the Midwest, the Republicans did almost as well, although they lost Ohio, and Minnesota remained in doubt. The Democrats’ gloom began to brighten during the early hours of the next morning. A tide of their own began to sweep the West, where only South Dakota and Oregon clearly went to Hughes. By noon on November 8, the president had a lead of 4 electoral votes among the declared states. Four states—with a total of 33 electoral votes—remained out: California, with 13; Minnesota, with 12; North Dakota, with 5; and New Mexico, with 3. By noon on November 9, it was clear that Wilson had carried three of those four states; only Minnesota went for Hughes—by 392 votes. Wilson was the
winner, with 277 electoral votes to Hughes’s 254. In the popular tally, he led by nearly 600,000 votes: 9,129,606 to 8,538,221. Hughes would not formally concede for almost two weeks; after his telegram arrived, the president joked to his brother, “It was a little moth-eaten when it got here but quite legible.”45

  Wilson was the first Democrat since Andrew Jackson to win a second consecutive term. He had increased his popular tally from four years earlier by nearly 3 million votes and his share of the total by a little under eight percentage points. He had beaten an undivided Republican Party, thereby showing that his victory four years earlier had been no fluke owing to his opponents’ split. He had outrun his party almost everywhere. On Capitol Hill, the Democrats retained a twelve-seat majority in the Senate. In the House, however, their already-slender majority shrank further, and no one could say which party would have control in the next Congress. Later, some horse-trading of the handful of remaining Progressives and the defection of a few Republicans would keep the Democrats in control, with Champ Clark as Speaker and Claude Kitchin as majority leader and chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. Most glaringly, Wilson had won by a paper-thin margin. His share of the popular vote fell just short of a majority: 49.26 percent. In the Electoral College, if just a single state—California, which was longest in doubt—had gone the other way, he would have lost. He carried California by only 3,806 votes out of nearly 1 million and a plurality of less than four tenths of a percentage point. Hughes was almost certainly right in believing that the misadventure with Hiram Johnson cost him California and the election.46

  The election of 1916 was one of the closest presidential contests in American history, and questions about why that was so have persisted. Assessing the results presents the classic choice of deciding whether a glass is half-empty or half-full. The half-empty choice, which most interpreters have taken, stresses not that Wilson won but that Hughes almost did. That near-miss was a remarkable feat, especially considering the wounds still carried by the Republicans from 1912 and the mistakes made by Hughes and his managers. One factor above all took him as far as he got: the Republicans’ traditional strength in the Northeast and Midwest. Four years before, party conservatives had believed that progressivism was a passing fad and that voters in those regions would return to the allegiances forged in 1896. That homecoming in 1916, coupled with the Republicans’ unbroken and overwhelming success in the next three presidential contests, has made such a view seem incontrovertible.

  In that view, Wilson’s reelection owed everything to his own luck, his personal skill, and the seductive drumbeat of “He kept us out of war.” Wilson was an incumbent president, and the White House has nearly always been the best place from which to run for president. He was a successful incumbent with an awesome record of legislative accomplishment, and he could claim credit for peace and prosperity. Yet even with all that going for him, he almost lost. In short, his reelection appears to be the exception that proved the rule of Republican dominance during this era of American politics.

  The half-full choice for the 1916 results builds on the half-empty one. The absolutely critical state in 1916 was Ohio. Had Wilson swept the West, including California, he still would have lost if he had not made this one substantial crack in the Republican heartland. This was the first time in a quarter century that a Democrat had carried any state north of the Potomac and Ohio rivers and east of the Missouri in a two-party contest. It was true that except for New Hampshire, Ohio was the only state Wilson won in that region. But he came agonizingly close in Minnesota and reasonably close in Connecticut, Indiana, and Massachusetts. He also improved his share of the vote in every state, often substantially. Furthermore, he won fifteen states outside the South by popular majorities, and several of those majorities in the West were large. Some of this improvement may have reflected the power of incumbency, but bigger factors may also have been at work.47

  The two critical components in Wilson’s victory, then, were Ohio and a virtually solid West. In both places, more than personal popularity, a good campaign, and the peace issue helped to determine the outcome. In Ohio, as every observer noted, unions went all out for the president and his party; their votes and activity contributed to a sweep that recaptured the governorship and reelected a senator as well. This was a harbinger of the role that labor would later play in swinging big industrial states over to the Democrats. In the West, peace weighed heavily, but so did progressivism. The peace issue there involved Mexico more than Europe, and Republicans never seemed to grasp how deeply repugnant the prospect of war south of the border was in the West. Significantly, too, eleven of the twelve states in which women voted lay west of the Mississippi, and Wilson carried all but one of those states despite not having endorsed a suffrage amendment. Most analysts attributed this result to the peace issue. Likewise, Roosevelt had not done well west of the Mississippi in 1912, except on the coast, and people on the plains and in the Rockies had warmed to the New Freedom, especially the anti-trust and banking reform and aid to farmers and workers. Furthermore, those parts of the West where Roosevelt had not done well were the same places where Debs had realized some of his best showings in 1912, and statistical and anecdotal evidence pointed to Wilson’s picking up many of Debs’s votes there in 1916. In the nation at large, he also picked up votes from people who had previously favored Roosevelt, but much of the ex-president’s earlier support had been personal, and in the Northeast and Midwest the great majority of those supporters followed their leader back to the Republicans.

  What Wilson wrought in 1916 was the laying of the foundation for the majority Democratic coalition—one the party would enjoy from the 1930s through the 1960s. Three major elements of that future coalition were now in place: the South, farmers, and labor. Two others were not yet in place. One was aroused and energized white first- and second-generation voters among the immigrant groups. Despite opposing immigration restriction and prohibition, which these recent immigrants and their children loathed, and despite having Tumulty at his side, Wilson had abrasive relations with the mainly Irish urban wing of the party. Some of the coolness toward him sprang from his early battles with the New Jersey bosses, which had made him suspect to Tammany Hall and other machines. Wilson heartily returned their dislike. “He thought New York ‘rotten to the core,’” House recorded him saying just before the election, “and should be wiped off the map.” Catholic opposition may also have kept these groups from coming aboard Wilson’s bandwagon. Yet a new breed of urban Democrat was quietly on the rise. In 1916, that new breed defeated a Republican senator in Rhode Island and two years later would beat another Republican senator in Massachusetts and capture one of the biggest electoral prizes of all—the governorship of New York. Both of the 1918 winners would be Irish Americans, and New York’s new governor, Al Smith, would become the party’s brightest star—though also its most divisive leader—during the following decade.48

  The other element in the majority Democratic coalition that was not yet in place was African Americans. No black leaders supported Wilson in 1916, as they had done four years earlier. One of those former supporters, W. E. B. DuBois, wrote to the president during the campaign, challenging him to live up to his assurances to Negroes in 1912: “We received from you a promise of justice and sincere endeavor to forward their interests. We need scarcely to say that you have grievously disappointed us.” Wilson did not reply but instructed Tumulty “to answer this letter for me and say that I stand by my original assurances and can say with a clear conscience that I have tried to live up to them, though in some cases my endeavors have been defeated.”49 When African Americans did join the Democratic coalition twenty years later, it would be largely on their own initiative, not the party’s.

  Racial blindness notwithstanding, Wilson looked forward to building a new party coalition. Soon after the election, he told a former Progressive who had supported him that he wanted to realign the parties in the Democrats’ favor, but he admitted, “It is by no means easy to f
igure it out, but I agree with you that this is the fundamental job in the next four years.”50 That was not to be. Wilson’s “irony of fate” was about to reassert itself in the worst possible way. He could not know it, but his domestic presidency was over.

  17

  PEACE AND WAR

  Less than three months after he was reelected president, Woodrow Wilson’s worst fear came to pass. On February 1, 1917, the Germans unleashed their submarines in an onslaught of unrestricted warfare against all shipping, belligerent and neutral, in a broad zone surrounding the British Isles and the coasts of other Allied countries. Wilson now faced the crisis he had been willing to resign over if he had not won the election. How to meet this challenge would be the most important and agonizing decision of his presidency. He had tried to forestall the events that would force this decision with a bolder, more sweeping diplomatic initiative than any he had tried before. As soon as he knew that he would have another term in the White House, he began to lay the groundwork for a multi-pronged peace offensive. At the middle of December 1916, he prepared the way for an offer of American mediation of the war, which he tendered first through proper diplomatic channels and then revealed to the public. He coupled the offer with a proposal to set up a post-war league of nations empowered to maintain peace and in which the United States would be a fully participating member. Then, on January 22, 1917, he escalated this campaign by publicly laying out a program that called for a nonpunitive, compromise peace—“a peace without victory”—together with specific territorial adjustments, international reforms, and a league of nations to enforce peace. This peace offensive of December 1916 and January 1917 would embody his most heartfelt hope and most deeply desired design for the future of the world.