by G. J. Meyer
Days later, clearly in torment, the secretary put it this way: “Why be shocked at the drowning of a few people, if there is to be no objection to starving a nation?” The president’s answer was to show him the draft of a note that, Bryan’s protestations notwithstanding, he intended to send to Berlin. It asserted exactly what Bryan did not want asserted: that American citizens had a right to go anywhere they wished on any ship at any time and expect to be safe. Taking his last shot, Bryan observed that perhaps more weight should be given to the fact that Mr. Thresher had freely assumed the known risks of taking passage on a ship flying the flag of a nation engaged in a naval war. “I cannot see,” he pleaded, “that he is differently situated from those who, by remaining in a belligerent country, assume risk of injury. Our people will, I believe, be [slow] to admit the right of a citizen to involve his country in war when by ordinary care he could have avoided danger.”
This last message was particularly telling in light of the administration’s own record. It should have reminded Wilson—and must have been intended to remind him—of how, after involving the United States so deeply in Mexico’s affairs as to create a real danger of war, the president had disclaimed responsibility for the safety of American citizens south of the border. They were there voluntarily, he had said then. If they chose to remain, they did so at their own risk.
Bryan also passed along a dispatch, received from Berlin, claiming that the Falaba had attempted to escape when intercepted and had been pursued for a quarter of an hour while firing off flares in an attempt to bring help. The dispatch said also that the submarine did not fire its torpedo until twenty-three minutes after the Falaba had come to a stop and her captain was ordered to abandon ship, and that it did so only because a British destroyer was seen to be approaching. If this was true (it was never disputed), the U-boat captain had gone to impressive lengths to stay within cruiser rules.
Bryan was coming close to defying a president whom he knew to have little tolerance for disagreement. That Wilson took it all calmly probably shows how little he cared about Bryan’s view of the situation. (He also showed no interest in Lansing’s opinion, forwarded by Bryan to the White House, that “if the sinking of the Falaba had been the result of an attempt of the vessel to resist or to escape when summoned to stop or to surrender by a submarine, there would be no ground of complaint for the loss of an American life….In that case the submarine would be exercising a belligerent right recognized by international law.”)
Before Bryan’s refusal to let the matter rest could lead to a showdown, an event occurred that reduced the fate of Leon C. Thrasher to inconsequence. On May 7 the submarine U-20, returning to base after a period on station in the war zone, crossed paths with the great liner Lusitania. The U-boat’s skipper had three torpedoes remaining and fired one. It hit its target. A powerful second explosion followed, attempts to lower lifeboats went horribly wrong, and the Lusitania sank with shocking speed. Fatalities totaled 1,193. Among them were 128 Americans, a number of them children.
Much has been made, over the years, of questions about whether the Lusitania was armed and whether she was carrying munitions to the British. Where culpability is concerned, such questions matter less than the impact of British Admiralty instructions to merchantmen on how to respond to U-boat attacks, and the resulting dangers of observing cruiser rules, especially when intercepting vessels as formidable (and possibly heavily armed) as the Lusitania. As for the morality of the U-boat campaign itself, like many questions of what is admissible in warfare, it remains shrouded in uncertainty, with things to be said pro and con. The Germans would argue that if the campaign hastened the end of the war, it would stop the slaughter of millions at comparatively low cost, a worthy objective.
At a dinner party at the U.S. embassy in London hours after the sinking, the assembled guests were both stunned by the news and excited about what it portended. Colonel House offered cheery assurances. The United States, he said, would be at war with Germany within the month.
Background
____
The Tortoise and the Hare
It can come as a surprise to learn that William Jennings Bryan was three years younger than Woodrow Wilson. The history of the time leads one to assume that Bryan must have been older, possibly by a generation. By the time Wilson entered politics in 1910, Bryan had been nationally prominent for two decades and the Democratic Party’s dominant figure for most of that time.
He had gotten his career off to an astonishingly fast start, entering the House of Representatives before he was thirty and from then on living a life that Professor Wilson could only dream of. When he became the Democrats’ nominee for president in the midst of the economic upheavals of the mid-1890s, he was barely old enough to meet the constitutional age requirement. In 1908, when he was a candidate for president for the third and last time, he was still not fifty.
Though after 1908 he abandoned his pursuit of the White House, his following remained so large and loyal that no one else was likely to win the Democratic nomination without his approval. And he had changed the character of his party in lasting ways. Before Bryan it was a marriage of convenience of the so-called Bourbons of the South and the big-city bosses of the North, people with no wish to let the federal government interfere in their business or their lives. Because of Bryan, the Bourbons and the bosses had to compete with Democrats of a new kind, people who wanted to use the government to attack corruption, curtail the power of the big money, and defend the obscure and vulnerable.
Bryan and Wilson were similar in many ways. Both came out of a growing and upward-aspiring professional middle class, Bryan’s father having been a self-made lawyer, gentleman farmer, Illinois state senator, and judge. Both were Presbyterians who took their faith seriously, though Bryan, while still in school, joined a subsect called the Cumberland Presbyterians that rejected the iron-hard doctrine of predestination. This may have contributed to his becoming more easygoing than the often rigid and self-righteous Wilson. More likely it reflects a difference in temperament that was there from the start.
Christianity played a more conspicuous part in Bryan’s public life than in Wilson’s (though even as president, Wilson prayed daily on his knees). For Wilson, religion was personal and somewhat fraught, a kind of psychic burden in which the belief that one was among the elect was laced with guilt and fear. Bryan, however, saw it as an engine of progress, summoning believers not to salvation alone but also to ever-widening equality and social justice. Wilson in his speeches referred to religion sparingly and obliquely, in ways that even today do not offend secular good taste. Bryan sounded like a revivalist preacher. He said himself that “when you hear a good democratic speech it is so much like a sermon that you can hardly tell the difference.” But both grew into young men of what seems a distinctly late nineteenth-century American type: earnest, chaste, incapable of cynicism, and ambitious to rise but also to be and do good.
It is not surprising that both set out to become orators. When they were boys, long before the advent of radio, political debates and speeches were a leading form of entertainment. Holding the attention of audiences was an indispensable political skill, and college debating societies ranked above sports as an undergraduate diversion. Bryan and Wilson became two of the greatest speechmakers of their time, but in person Bryan was the more masterful of the two. One Republican later gave thanks that radio had not been invented in 1896, saying that if more voters had been able to hear Bryan extemporize, the Democrats would have won. Wilson’s gift was different, a function of his introverted nature. At its core was the solitary polishing of draft speeches later delivered with artfulness and conviction.
It is more for reasons of style than of substance that Bryan today seems the more antique figure. In his baggy black coat-tailed suits, floppy bow ties, and slouch hats, he appears in photographs as almost a cartoon caricature of a huckster out of the Gilded Age. The paunch and jowls that came with middle age did not help. It is impossible to ima
gine him as a professor, still less as president, of an institution like Princeton University. The dapper Wilson was, by contrast, the very picture of an Ivy Leaguer.
But Bryan’s appeal was by no means limited to rubes from the backwoods. Even that professional cynic H. L. Mencken, in covering the Democratic convention of 1904, compared Bryan’s speech there to Beethoven’s Eroica and went into raptures over it: “What a speech, my masters! What a speech!” Tellingly, he said it had the simplicity of all great art. Bryan could be naïve, wrong about important things, foolish in a variety of ways. But he was never in any way insincere. He spent his life crusading for those on the losing end of the American dream. Even those who thought him ridiculous acknowledged the genuineness of his commitment.
Bryan the orator at work
News that he would be speaking was “good for forty acres of parked Fords, anywhere, at any time.”
In 1896 he became the first presidential candidate to mount a campaign of travel and speechmaking. He crossed and recrossed the country by rail, denouncing the high tariffs that his followers blamed for keeping prices high, decrying the government’s refusal to issue silver currency. Religious imagery came naturally to his tongue, because it expressed the core of what he saw as his purpose. In the words of biographer Michael Kazin, he believed that “the prime duty of pietists was to side with the common man and woman in their perpetual battle with the defenders of privilege, corruption and big money.”
Passionate public interest in the contest moved almost 80 percent of eligible voters to turn out on Election Day. Republican William McKinley carried twenty-three states compared to Bryan’s twenty-two. Bryan won every western and southern state and received more votes overall than Cleveland had done in winning in 1892. He was, however, shut out in the industrial North. That made the difference.
—
After the election a new issue came to the fore, one rising out of the nation’s stature as an emerging world power. A rebellion against Spanish rule in Cuba attracted the attention of the American government and public, both because of U.S. investments on the island and because of the inherent appeal of a struggle against Old World tyranny. There was pressure for intervention, ardently supported by such press tycoons as Hearst and Pulitzer. When the American battleship Maine blew up in Havana harbor, killing 260 sailors, the cause was assumed to be Spanish villainy. “Remember the Maine!” became the cry of the hour, though the explosion was almost certainly an accident. The United States launched a hugely popular and ridiculously one-sided war on a Spanish “empire” so decrepit as to be incapable of defending itself. The invasion and conquest of Cuba, accomplished at little cost and with even less difficulty, made a hero of Theodore Roosevelt, a brash and aristocratic young New York politician-turned-soldier. The easy but much-celebrated conquest of San Juan Hill by Roosevelt’s regiment of Rough Riders vaulted him first into the New York governorship, then onto a place on the Republican national ticket as candidate for vice president in 1900.
Bryan had no argument with the war, seeing it as a fight for freedom. In fact he joined the National Guard, became the colonel of a regiment of Nebraska volunteers, and spent the months that the war lasted in a mosquito-infested camp in northern Florida. Trouble began when the McKinley administration bought the Philippine Islands in the western Pacific from Spain for a token $20 million. What happened next did not fit Washington’s script. Filipinos who had earlier rebelled against Spain now launched a guerrilla war against American troops, demanding independence. The result was a bloody and dirty jungle war marked by horrifying atrocities and dividing American public opinion almost as sharply as another war on the fringe of the western Pacific would do six decades later.
Bryan, having resigned his commission, erupted in indignation. Suddenly the great new issue was imperialism—the prospect of a global American empire on the European model. Bryan was far from alone in opposition, but his eloquence and fervor carried him back to center stage. “The fruits of imperialism, be they bitter or sweet, must be left to the subjects of monarchy,” he declared. “This is the one tree of which the citizens of a republic may not partake. It is the voice of the serpent, not the voice of God, that bids us eat.” The echoes of scripture were characteristic of Bryan, and again his rhetoric rose to the level of poetry. The Harvard philosopher William James, as sophisticated an intellect as was to be found on the North American continent, said, “I have fallen in love with [Bryan] so, for his character, that I am ready to forget his following.”
Bryan was again nominated in 1900 and again campaigned furiously. McKinley again stayed home, but in Theodore Roosevelt he had a running mate whose showmanship and appetite for political combat were equal to Bryan’s. TR (he hated to be called “Teddy”) descended upon the electorate with the force of a thunderbolt. He traveled more miles than Bryan, gave more speeches, and generated more headlines. He delighted Republicans by saying that the Bryanite cult was made up of “all the lunatics, all the idiots, all the knaves, all the cowards, and all the honest people who are slow-witted.”
Theodore Roosevelt
Denied a general’s stars, he called President Wilson a “demagogue, adroit, tricky, false, without one spark of loftiness.”
Turnout was lower than in 1896, undoubtedly because of the improving economy, and Bryan’s percentage of votes cast declined also. He remained immensely popular, however, and soon returned to being the brightest star of the Chautauqua circuit, which every summer brought famous speakers and entertainers to hamlets and cities across the country. He got $250 per appearance and half the gross above $500. One promoter said that word of an appearance by Bryan was “good for forty acres of parked Fords, anywhere, at any time, day or night.”
Professor Wilson was also in demand as a speaker. He served a more sophisticated market than Bryan’s, becoming such a public relations asset for Princeton that the university’s trustees created a special fund from which to supplement his salary, thereby keeping him from accepting the offers that he received almost every year to become the president of other universities. He was popular with students and smoothly adept at academic politics. In 1902, when Princeton’s longtime president announced his retirement, the trustees hastened to put Wilson in his place.
The trustees expected much of him, and he did not disappoint. In short order he enriched the curriculum, raised standards, introduced a tutorial system modeled on those at England’s leading universities, and launched an ambitious construction program. His stature, and the prestige of his new position, are evident in the fact that among those attending his installation ceremony were Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, J. P. Morgan, and Henry Clay Frick. Even now, however, he continued to be plagued by the sense of not being in the career he craved. Always, with Wilson, there was what an associate described as “that undercurrent of restless dissatisfaction that was the man’s fundamental mood.”
Bryan went abroad—he was much more widely traveled than Wilson—and in December 1903 was in Russia, paying calls on Tsar Nicholas II and Count Leo Tolstoy. He and Tolstoy talked for twelve hours. The great author later described Bryan as “remarkably intelligent and progressive.” Bryan, asked to explain his admiration for an anarchist who regarded government as evil, said Tolstoy’s “philosophy rests upon the doctrine that man, being a child of God and a brother of all the other children of God, must devote himself to the service of his fellows.” That could stand as a summary of Bryan’s doctrine, too.
President McKinley, meanwhile, had been shot to death by an anarchist assassin. In his successor, Theodore Roosevelt, the country found itself with a whirlwind of a leader, a colorful character and tireless activist who not only began pushing for such innovations as national parks but took up many progressive issues. The Democratic Party, its reformist elements seemingly discredited by Bryan’s two losses, responded with a drastic reversal of course. In 1904 it nominated Alton B. Parker, a New York judge who repudiated the Bryanite free silver movement and declared the gold standard
“firmly and irrevocably established.” As his running mate, Parker chose an eighty-one-year-old anti-union coal and lumber millionaire named Henry G. Davis. The result was an electoral disaster, the worst in the party’s history. Roosevelt won every state except those of the Old South. If Bryanism had not quite been vindicated, a strategy based on rejection of Bryanism had definitely been discredited.
Back at Princeton, Woodrow Wilson’s life was turning into a race to complete his program of improvements in the face of increasingly serious medical problems. His health had long been erratic or worse. He was susceptible to periods of lethargy and general malaise that he called “colds” and probably were psychosomatic in origin. He had had a breakdown of some sort in 1895 and a year later suffered a stroke (not necessarily his first) that left him with a permanently weakened right hand. Another breakdown followed in 1899, another stroke in 1904. Yet another, a more serious one, came in 1906 when he awoke one morning to find himself blind in one eye. He recovered partial vision, but a specialist physician urged him to retire. A different specialist told him that this would not be necessary if he paced himself and continued to take long restful vacations. His devoted wife Ellen, his closest confidante and the only person able to reason with him when he was in danger of doing something foolish, now put all her emphasis on keeping him comfortable and protected from irritation. This deprived Wilson of almost the only brake on his less advisable impulses.
It became evident—and there are medical reasons why this would be so—that his personality had shifted in a dark direction. Ellen’s brother, who admired Wilson and had no ax to grind, would leave an unpublished memoir in which he described this change. After an initial period of depression—understandable in an active and ambitious man threatened with permanent disability or even death—Wilson became harder, less tolerant, and sometimes angrily impatient even in the bosom of his previously serene home. “Although he would have been perhaps the last person to realize it,” a member of the Princeton faculty recalled, “he placed everything upon a personal basis—if it were important to him. If you agreed with him you were perfect; if you disagreed you were guilty of a personal insult. You were either his friend or his foe.”