by G. J. Meyer
The pain, fear, and despair of the time are expressed in the letter that a farm wife sent to the governor of Kansas in 1893. “I take my pen in hand to let you know that we are starving to death,” she wrote. “It is pretty hard to do without anything to eat in this God forsaken country….My husband went away to find work and came home last night and told me that we would have to starve. He has been to 10 counties and did not get no work.”
This was happening on a continental scale, and it gave rise to what would be called the populist revolt and a profound change in the politics of the nation. Trouble erupted first among white farmers growing cotton on smallholdings in the South, spread to the wheatfields of the Great Plains, and fed on widespread hatred of the railroads, the banks, and big corporations generally. The idea that government might regulate these concentrations of power entered the nation’s political discourse for the first time. A People’s Party was formed, with demands ranging from a tax on incomes and direct election of U.S. senators to an eight-hour workday and strict regulation of the railroads and their rates.
It need hardly be said that such notions were widely regarded as incompatible with the nation’s core values. The People’s Party seemed insanely radical even to many Americans troubled by the power of the corporations. In 1896 a young newspaper editor named Joseph Bristow, who fourteen years later would become a progressive member of the U.S. Senate, wrote that though “we have a horror for the wild excesses of populist doctrines,” the situation against which the populists were rebelling was little less intolerable. The corporate elite “represents the cool calculating selfishness of wealth and the desire for power,” he complained, while the populists stood for “the wild fury of ignorance, envy and prejudice.”
Millions felt similarly torn, and new lines of political affiliation began to appear. The populists attracted discontented Democrats in a number of southern states and discontented Republicans in the Midwest. The results were alarming to the political establishments in both regions. Alone or in fusion with one or another of the major parties, the populists won eleven gubernatorial contests and elected six U.S. senators and thirty-nine House members before their revolt petered out.
Professor Wilson of Princeton was not impressed: the populists and their program had no appeal for Democrats of his conservative stripe. Nor was he better pleased when, in 1896, insurgents seized control of the Democratic Party’s national convention and nominated a presidential candidate of strongly populist leanings, William Jennings Bryan. This left the People’s Party with little choice but to nominate Bryan as well, thereby rendering itself irrelevant and doomed. Wilson was far from alone in finding the whole situation deplorable. His party was now in the hands of people he scorned, championing a cause he despised.
The 1896 election pitted Bryan against the Republican William McKinley, with Democratic President Grover Cleveland occupying the White House and widely blamed for the economic mess. The most inflammatory issue of the campaign turned out to be one of the populists’ favorites: the question of gold versus silver. The United States was on the gold standard, issuing only gold coins, and the populists blamed this for the shortage of credit that had contributed to making the financial panic as destructive as it was. Money had become exceedingly scarce, and fifteen thousand companies, including the Northern Pacific and Union Pacific railroads, went bankrupt. Five hundred banks folded, their depositors not insured. It became dogma with the People’s Party, and with the Bryan wing of the Democratic Party, that silver currency would not only increase access to capital but generate enough inflation to ease the debt burden of those farmers who had not yet been ruined. Bryan electrified the convention that nominated him with a speech vowing that the United States would not be crucified on a cross of gold.
Inevitably, Bryan and his following were roundly condemned as socialist. But “if they were,” as one historian has observed, “they were advocates of a peculiar brand of socialism.” To the extent that many of them advocated public ownership of certain commanding heights of the economy, such as the railroads, the objective, “to their way of thinking, was to serve the interests of millions of small-scale, land-owning farmers, businessmen, and wage-earning laborers.” The Georgia firebrand Tom Watson, the People’s Party’s vice-presidential candidate in 1896, said the purpose of the populist movement was “to destroy class rule and restore to the people the government.” It was not, most populists would have agreed, to replace all-powerful corporations with an all-powerful government.
But the Republicans damned the free silver campaign, and the call for reduced tariffs, as irresponsible and worse. Enough voters of the industrial Northeast agreed to give the Republicans a victory that, although narrow, cleared the way for them to regain the dominance that they had enjoyed in Washington in the decades following the Civil War.
Not only the People’s Party but the whole populist phenomenon lost impetus after 1896. One reason was the demoralization of many populists by the co-optation, as they saw it, of their movement and the party they had founded by the Democrats. More fundamentally, passions cooled as the economy began to recover. There were also cultural and class reasons for the decline. Even middle-class Americans who saw a need for reform commonly found it impossible to identify with agitators depicted in the newspapers as raving anarchists and ignorant yokels in bib overalls.
William Jennings Bryan
The Great Commoner—and a three-time presidential loser.
But as the economy resumed the generation of great wealth, once again only a minority felt that they had any share in the benefits. Politically and socially as well as economically, the country remained a tangle of conflicts and problems that few politicians of real influence could see any reason to touch. Where business and government intersected, corruption flourished. The economy became a breeding ground not only for new fortunes but for a new kind of journalist, the muckrakers. Their exposés disturbed the complacency of the middle classes by revealing that the political bosses were not the only ones enriching themselves in dubious ways. Businessmen, some of them pillars of their communities, were in on it, too, often quite as ready to offer bribes as the party chieftains were to accept them.
In both parties, large numbers of educated and active people, though they had spurned the populists, found the state of the nation unacceptable. As a new century approached, they formed the core of a new progressive movement, which cut across party lines and quickly replaced populism as the means by which those who wanted reform strove to achieve it. Much less rural than populism, it had stronger roots in the urban middle classes. Once again, however, Woodrow Wilson stood apart, even from the progressives of his own party. He viewed many of the proposed reforms as unnecessary or worse.
Chapter 3
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Quickly to the Brink
AS THE AUTUMN of 1914 drifted toward winter and Europe settled more deeply into its vast, bloody, and stalemated war, public life in the United States was focused on November’s midterm election. A third of the seats in the Senate and the entire House of Representatives would go before the voters. The Wilson administration’s control of national policy was at stake.
The Republican opposition, already looking ahead to the 1916 presidential election, adopted a strategy that turned out to be a great favor for President Wilson. It called him, sometimes in so many words, a coward and a pacifist, too timid and morally corrupt to join the Entente in its defense of democracy and heroic resistance to Teutonic aggression. The favor lay in the fact that most voters wanted nothing to do with a European bloodbath that appeared to have started over nothing and threatened to go on more or less forever and accomplish nothing. Foes eager to replace Wilson accused him of being exactly what the public wanted him to be: determined to stay out. Theodore Roosevelt, the least temperate of those foes, called the president “the demagogue, adroit, tricky, false, without one spark of loftiness in him, without a touch of the heroic.” Wilson was blessed to have such enemies. Their bellicosity repelled
even the progressive, reformist Republicans, men who disliked and distrusted their party’s dominant Eastern Brahmin wing and were despised by it in return.
When the election results came in, the Republicans made substantial gains in the House. They had accomplished this partly by emphasizing their friendliness to business and their determination to address the deep slump in exports that the outbreak of war had brought on. A more important factor, probably, was that Roosevelt had returned to the fold and was no longer dividing the Republicans as he had done with his third-party run two years before. Even so, the Democrats retained a thirty-three-seat majority in the House and strengthened their hold on the Senate. This was the first election in which, thanks to the newly passed Thirteenth Amendment, all senators were chosen by popular vote, none by state legislatures. The Democrats lost no Senate seats and took three from the Republicans, giving them a commanding majority: fifty-six to forty.
Theodore Roosevelt
“There is a sweetness about him that is very compelling,” said Wilson. “You can’t resist the man.”
For Wilson, maintaining a firm hold on both houses against a reunited Republican Party, when registered Republicans still outnumbered Democrats and the economy was staggering under the shock of war, was a thoroughly satisfactory result. He remained free to carry forward the program of progressive reforms that had made his first two years in office so remarkable. (To the chagrin of the progressives in both parties, however, he would display no interest in doing so.) The Republican attacks had positioned him so firmly as the champion of neutrality that in the next two years the public would have difficulty seeing him in any other way. This would help him to favor the Entente in crisis after crisis and draw surprisingly little criticism in doing so.
A month after the election, when Congress reconvened, members introduced a number of bills aimed at prohibiting the export of arms to the warring nations. Trade with the Central Powers having been shut down by the blockade, such a prohibition if enacted would affect the Entente exclusively—and would have been a hard blow to American manufacturers. The bills received no encouragement from the White House, but some of them had sufficient support to begin moving forward through the slow-grinding legislative mill. Secretary Bryan took a friendly view of them and was increasingly troubled by President Wilson’s understanding of what neutrality should entail. Bryan was particularly unhappy about the British policy of impounding ships and cargoes suspected of being bound for the Central Powers. This escalation of the blockade strategy bordered on being a direct affront to American sovereignty. The American ambassador to Britain, Walter Hines Page, exhausted Bryan’s patience by failing to follow instructions to take a firm line with the Foreign Office.
And so Bryan bypassed Page, sending Sir Edward Grey a message bearing a title that left no room for doubt about his attitude: “Note to Great Britain Protesting Against Seizures and Detentions Regarded as Unwarrantable.” Britain’s behavior, the note said, “exceeds the manifest necessity of a belligerent and constitutes restrictions upon the rights of American citizens upon the high seas which are not justified by the rules of international law or required under the principle of self-preservation.” These words produced no result. It was understood in London, thanks largely to what the devoutly Anglophile Page was saying unofficially, that Bryan and the president took very different views of the situation—and that Bryan’s opinion didn’t much matter. Colonel House would not have disagreed.
Bryan himself might not have disagreed by this point. He met with frustration and disappointment everywhere he turned. When he sent the president a memorandum suggesting that the United States should offer to mediate between the warring nations, Wilson’s response was once again to turn to Colonel House. House, according to his diary, told the president that he was “certain it would be entirely footless to do this, for the Allies would consider it an unfriendly act, and further it was not good for the United States to have peace brought about until Germany was sufficiently beaten to cause her to consent to a fundamental change in her military policy.” Wilson was not, at this early point, nearly ready to embrace such a candid statement of desire for an Entente victory. But he declined Bryan’s suggestion all the same.
His doing so should not be interpreted as indicating—as it sometimes has been—that at this point he had any wish to take the United States to war. It would have been surprising, considering his family background and place in the upper middle class of the American East, if he had not favored Britain. In addition to having family roots in the British Isles, he was fond enough of the place to have spent time there summer after summer, thought Britain’s political system the world’s most perfect, and was among the innumerable educated Americans with far stronger cultural links to Britain than to any continental nation. None of this meant, however, that he was insincere when he said in December 1914 that the chances of achieving “a just and equitable peace, and of the only possible peace that will be lasting, will be happiest if no nation gets the decision by arms.” Or when he said that the worst outcome would be one in which “some one nation or group of nations succeeds in enforcing its will upon the others.”
Colonel House’s chosen role was to keep the president mindful of the opportunity that the war offered the United States to guide the Old World, the Central Powers no less than Britain and her continental allies, to a safer, saner future. And there is no reason to doubt his sincerity, either. If he used his understanding of Wilson to keep him sympathetic to the Entente, exploiting his marrow-deep wish to make himself an immortal by doing great good, the goal of lasting world peace surely justified such devices. And if in devoting himself to that goal, Edward House of Houston put himself at the center of momentous world events, surely there was nothing ignoble about that. He was an idealist as well as an opportunist—not a unique combination—whose robust ego did not negate a genuine desire to serve. And he did admire Wilson. Though his diaries were obviously dictated with posterity in mind, he is entitled to be believed when he writes, as he did in 1915, that “Woodrow Wilson is today the greatest asset the world has. If he should die or become incapacitated, it is doubtful whether a right solution of the problems in this terrible conflict and its aftermath would be possible.” If Wilson were lost to the world, of course, House, too, would lose his chance at greatness. The colonel’s appreciation of this fact in no way makes him a sinister figure.
It is no mere coincidence that House was speculating about Wilson’s possible death or incapacity at just this time. In December 1915 the president’s physician, Rear Admiral Cary Grayson (elevated to that high rank from mere lieutenant by presidential order), would tell House that his patient’s kidneys were not functioning properly. Wilson was also complaining of headaches, fatigue, and weakness in his right arm. These were symptoms of high blood pressure and the cerebral arterial disease that had been causing him to have recurrent strokes, of varying degrees of seriousness, since the 1890s. They pointed to future trouble.
The war, by contrast, was trouble in the here and now. For Berlin, American passivity in the face of Britain’s increasingly aggressive blockade was trouble of a very high order. The question of how to respond was creating angry divisions among the men advising Kaiser Wilhelm. The naval minister, crusty old Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, bald as an egg but with a forked beard as long as his head, had taken the lead in demanding deployment of the U-boats. He was the father of the modern German navy, the man who had persuaded the young kaiser to spend immense sums on the fleet of battleships and cruisers that he thought appropriate to a world power. The result was an arms race that Germany was doomed to lose because Britain resolutely built two dreadnaught-class battleships for every one of hers. When the war came, Tirpitz was driven half mad with frustration at seeing the fleet that was his life’s work bottled up in port, absolutely useless. He saw the U-boats as the way to put things right. But he could not get the kaiser or the chancellor to agree. Even the army’s top general disagreed. All of them feared Was
hington’s reaction.
The German public was by now fully aware of the blockade and beginning to experience shortages of various kinds. This naturally received heavy and indignant press attention. People were aware also that the creator of the blockade, Britain, was enjoying unimpeded trade with North America. They were angry and not to be ignored. Imperial Germany was indeed the autocracy that the British never tired of calling it (Britain was one, too, to a quite considerable extent), but she had a cantankerous national assembly, the Reichstag, that was largely socialist in membership and rarely unwilling to make trouble for the government. She also had a press that was markedly less compliant than Britain’s.
Finally, the pressure to do something about the blockade became more than the kaiser could withstand. At the end of the winter of 1914–15, his government declared that the waters around Great Britain and Ireland were now a war zone, and that the U-boats had orders to sink, on sight if necessary, any Entente merchantmen encountered in it. Neutrals choosing to traverse those waters, Berlin warned, must do so at their own risk. Submarine warfare thus began in earnest.
There was more bravado than substance to this announcement, the Germans having so few submarines to send into the war zone. But in London the government and the press responded with outrage. They ignored the fact that in announcing their war zone, the Germans were merely echoing what Britain had already done in the North Sea. They also ignored the fact that British submarines—more numerous than Germany’s—were preying on the Baltic Sea shipping lanes connecting neutral Scandinavia to German ports.
The start of the U-boat campaign was a mistake on Germany’s part, and a costly one. Until it was announced, American indignation had been directed mainly at Britain’s interference with shipping and her bending of the law to suit her own purposes. But now U.S. newspapers, few of them troubled by or even aware of their dependence on London’s censors, followed London’s example in treating Berlin’s announcement as fresh confirmation of German “frightfulness.” Public attention was diverted from Britain’s transgressions, and enthusiasm for banning exports of guns and ammunition drained away.