The World Remade

by G. J. Meyer

  It is probably no coincidence that within a year of the 1906 stroke Wilson set out to change Princeton in ways that showed utter disregard for the opinions of students, alumni, and trustees. Or that he dealt with those who failed to embrace his proposals in wrathful and self-defeating ways, destroying relationships built up over years and diminishing his stature. The first cause of trouble was his attempt to reorganize Princeton into colleges built around quadrangles and modeled on Oxford. Then came a protracted and unnecessary battle over the construction and funding of a graduate school. Wilson saw anyone who failed to support him as not merely wrong but a servant of evil. He ended his friendship with his one close friend on the Princeton faculty, John Grier Hibben, and for the rest of his life would rebuff Hibben’s efforts at reconciliation. His own position, as he saw it, was unassailable, his objectives not merely best for the institution but the only morally tolerable options. He elevated the fight over the quadrangle plan into a struggle between democracy and privilege and called his proposal a “scheme for salvation.” This made compromise impossible; even to consider it would be a moral failure.

  William Howard Taft, U.S. president, 1909–1913

  He called Woodrow Wilson “a ruthless hypocrite who has no convictions that he would not barter at once for votes.”

  In the midst of these controversies, Wilson was exposed as having lied to the trustees, denying that he had ever seen a document that he was known to have edited. The purpose of the lie was to discredit a graduate school dean who had once served him as a kind of father figure but whose plans differed from his. It backfired disastrously. For a man as insistent as Wilson on his own rectitude, as protective of his self-image as of his public image, to be caught out in such a way must have been excruciating.

  He was embroiled in these troubles as another presidential election approached. Roosevelt, having earlier and to his own eventual regret promised not to seek another term, remained so popular that he was able to choose the Republican nominee, the able, good-natured, and majestically obese William Howard Taft. The Democrats showed their bafflement and disarray by returning to Bryan for another try. He tried to stay closer to the center this time, abandoning such lost populist causes as public ownership of the railroads, and he became the first presidential candidate to receive the endorsement of the American Federation of Labor, two million members strong. But TR’s seven years in office had made it difficult for voters to see a sharp distinction between the parties; sometimes it seemed that the whole country had become progressive.

  Bryan continued to be disdained by conservative Democrats, Woodrow Wilson among them. “Personally, he is the most charming and lovable of men,” Wilson said of Bryan in March 1908, “but his theories are both foolish and dangerous.” He declined to appear with Bryan at a dinner of the National Democratic Club because he did not want to be associated even casually with “all the loose notions which he puts forth as a party program.”

  Wilson was also deploring publicly “the perfect mania for regulation that has taken hold of us.” He said that Bryan had “no mental rudder.” That was gentle compared to what Roosevelt was saying. He called Bryan “a professional yodeler, a human trombone.”

  Taft’s popular-vote margin was double what McKinley’s had been in 1896. For the Democrats the outlook was dismal. They had gone with Bryan and lost, gone with Bryan again and done less well, tried a conservative and lost disastrously, gone back to Bryan and not come close. They could not win with Bryan, could not win without him. Grover Cleveland remained the only Democrat to have won the White House since 1856, and when the next election rolled around, his last victory would be twenty years in the past. The Republicans looked invincible.

  For Wilson, too, the future looked dark. In 1908 he had two attacks of “neuritis”—near-disabling shoulder pain caused by the same problems that had caused his recurrent strokes. For those who understood the seriousness of these symptoms, the state of his health was alarming. And his position at Princeton was becoming untenable. He no less than Bryan appeared to be pretty much finished.

  He was not, however. By 1910 his health was so improved as to seem no longer a problem. In what was now his home state of New Jersey, by contrast, the Democratic Party was in almost as hopeless a state as it was nationally. In that fact lay a path to the fulfillment of his dreams.

  For thirty years the Democrats’ most dependable northeastern stronghold, New Jersey by 1894 had become so corrupt that the Republicans were able to win control. But then they, too, gradually became complacent and sank into corruption. By 1910 they were so subservient to big business that virtually every major holding company in the United States was chartered in New Jersey. The state was called “the mother of trusts.”

  Nonetheless, the Democrats were caught in a bind. To get back on top, they were going to have to attract the growing number of middle-class progressives, voters fed up with the status quo. But they had to do it without threatening the party’s chieftains, the bosses who ran the political machines in every major city and had no interest in reforming anything. The Democrats needed a coalition of opposites. It seemed impossible.

  Colonel George Harvey, a journalist and financier and power in the Democratic Party of the mid-Atlantic states, thought he had the answer. New Jersey’s Democrats needed a candidate for governor who could appeal to the do-gooders on Election Day but afterward make no trouble. They needed a figurehead, someone who looked good and could be depended upon not to do too much. And the bespectacled, pinch-faced Harvey thought he had found the right man.

  Like Edward House a “colonel” who had never served in any army, Harvey had come of age in the rough-and-tumble world of Chicago journalism, moved to New York, and at age twenty-seven become managing editor of Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, the biggest daily in the country. Along the way he made a fortune in the notoriously shady streetcar syndication racket (wheeler-dealers across the country were getting rich floating streetcar franchise stocks) and used some of his winnings to buy the influential North American Review. He also became a protégé of J. P. Morgan, who helped him to take over Harper’s Weekly as well. His publications and connections made him a force even in national politics—a force of a distinctly conservative, anti-Bryan type.

  He had been acquainted with Woodrow Wilson for years, had observed the skill with which Wilson used the presidency of Princeton as a platform upon which to build a national reputation as a speaker, author, and public intellectual. One of Wilson’s attractions was his lack of political or business experience. That made him pure, in the context of 1910 America. Nominally a Democrat, in his two decades in New Jersey he had taken no visible interest in the state’s politics. Therefore he knew little about the subject and would need guidance—would be grateful for it, no doubt. Better still, he was deeply conservative. He had shown this in a New York Times interview of 1907, proposing the creation of a council of wise men to chart the nation’s course. And who did he think might lead this “common council of the people”? No less a titan than J. Pierpont Morgan, the king of Wall Street.

  Wilson again demonstrated his soundness in 1908 by refusing to support Bryan. Told that he might be under consideration as the Great Commoner’s running mate, he had declared unequivocally that under no circumstances would he accept. He refused all invitations to speak at events at which Bryan was on the program and showed no hesitation in expressing his disdain for the Bryanite cause.

  Wilson was likewise solid on the great question of organized labor. What impressed was the depth of his contempt not only for the unions but for their members. In the summer of 1909, speaking at Princeton’s commencement, he mockingly declared that everyone present knew what “the employee” wanted: “to give as little as he may for his wages.” He agreed with the industrial magnates on the Princeton board that unions were seedbeds of decadence and made laziness mandatory.

  Similarly, during the 1908 campaign Wilson went on record as opposing “on principle” government programs for fee
ding needy children. They served only to foster dependency, he said. He likewise could see no reason to give women the vote. “It may be true that women in various parts of the world have to fight against severe odds,” he said, “but in America, at least, they are almost too much protected.” He hastened to add that he was fully in favor of protecting the ladies, who nevertheless should be kept out of politics because “as a rule, women prefer goodness as a quality to ability, and are apt to be not a little influenced by charm of manner.”

  With such a paragon at the top of their ticket, Harvey thought, the Democrats might not only win the governorship but recapture the state assembly as well. But he was a New Yorker and could only advise. The decision would be made by the men who ran the New Jersey party, starting with Harvey’s old friend James Smith, Jr., “Sugar Jim,” who headed the machine that ran Essex County and its throbbing metropolis of Newark. Like Harvey, he had risen from humble beginnings and done well for himself. He had even served a term in the U.S. Senate, his reward for delivering New Jersey to Grover Cleveland in 1892. Tall and silver-haired and always beautifully turned out, he looked senatorial and wanted another turn in Washington. He controlled several substantial companies, including a Newark bank, and was the publisher of two newspapers.

  Smith was interested if cautious. He and his fellow bosses in Jersey City and Hoboken and other places were having trouble with the progressives and their incessant complaints. They needed a way to keep such people in line. And though the status quo was in no way burdensome to Smith or his fellow bosses, life would be even better, the boodle richer, if they could get control of the governor’s office.

  But when Harvey and Smith approached Wilson, he was less enthusiastic than they had expected. A likely explanation is that he regarded battling an assortment of New Jersey hacks for the nomination as beneath his dignity and feared that failure, coming on the heels of his setbacks at Princeton, would be one humiliation too many. When he declared that he was willing to do nothing to win the nomination, Harvey asked a question that most politicians can only dream of hearing: “If I can handle the matter so that the nomination for governor shall be tendered to you on a silver platter, without your turning a hand to obtain it, and without any requirement or suggestion of any pledge whatsoever, what do you think would be your attitude?”

  Even then Wilson hesitated. He rose to his feet and began to pace the room. His answer, when he gave it, was not a decision but a prolongation of the suspense. He said that under the circumstances Harvey had described, he would consider it his duty not necessarily to accept the nomination, but to “give the matter very serious consideration.” This had to be a delicious experience for a man who had dreamed from boyhood of rising to greatness not by seeking to advance himself but simply on the basis of his innate superiority, and by doing what was right.

  Wilson’s attitude must have unsettled Sugar Jim and may have made him suspicious. He arranged for a mutual acquaintance, a Princeton alumnus and man of influence in Chicago named John Maynard Harlan, to write to Wilson and ask for assurance that he did not aspire to “set about fighting and breaking down the existing Democratic organization and replacing it with one of your own.” Wilson replied that he had no such intention and would regard any such action as inexcusable—unless the good name of New Jersey was at stake. He added, however, that upon taking office he would regard himself as “absolutely free in the matter of measures and men.” That was fair warning. Smith would regret not paying closer attention.

  Wilson himself now wrote to four Chicago-based Princeton trustees, men he regarded as loyal to him. He informed them that he was being asked to run for office and asked if they thought he would fail in his obligations to the university by doing so. One wonders if he was letting the board of trustees know that he still had career options, and that if they wanted to keep him they would be well advised to do as he wished. Be that as it may, all four told him that he need not feel bound in any way. Possibly they welcomed the prospect of being able to part with Wilson on friendly terms, with no more bitter and embarrassing quarrels. What we know is that when he later asked to be allowed to continue as the university’s president while running for governor, the trustees turned him down, requiring his resignation. They then overrode his objections in choosing as his successor John Grier Hibben, the professor who had been Wilson’s one close friend until he failed to support the quadrangle plan. (It is sadly typical of Wilson that he never forgave either Hibben or the men who elected him president of Princeton. In 1914, when as president of the United States Wilson was the star of the thirty-fifth reunion of the Princeton class of 1879, he refused to shake the hand of a trustee who had voted for Hibben’s appointment.)

  Harvey’s next move was to secure the blessings of other power brokers. He introduced Wilson to his fellow machine bosses, the New Jersey party’s chairman (who happened to be Jim Smith’s nephew), the state’s Democratic national committeeman, and Richard V. Lindaberry, an attorney for U.S. Steel and Standard Oil. All were satisfied with what they saw. Assured that he had the support of these men and others like them, Wilson sent the newspapers an announcement not that he was running for governor but was willing to accept the Democratic nomination. Thus he kept himself above the muck and mire through which mere politicians are obliged to wade in pursuit of offices high and low.

  There was trouble all the same. Progressive Democrats and labor leaders looked at Wilson’s past speeches and articles, looked, too, at his connections with the big money, and decided that he was a Trojan horse and had to be stopped. Liberal newspapers did the same. Among those who saw Wilson as the tool of enemies of reform was a young assemblyman named Joseph Patrick Tumulty. He and his fellow skeptics were beaten before they got started, however. George Harvey’s silver platter was real, Wilson’s nomination a certainty.

  And so began what a New Jersey newspaper editor would recall as Wilson’s “strange ascent.” Not the least part of its strangeness was the lucky timing. As a Princeton professor observed, if Harvey and Smith had not rescued him, Wilson “undoubtedly would have been forced to resign from Princeton in the near future.” Such a resignation would have blemished his reputation and in all likelihood would have led to a move out of New Jersey. The pursuit of the presidency in 1912 could not have happened.

  In September, with Wilson waiting in a nearby hotel room, Jim Smith and his fellow bosses extracted their man’s nomination as candidate for governor from a not conspicuously enthusiastic state convention. An hour later, in his first appearance before the delegates, Wilson unleashed as never before the power of which he was capable as an orator. He declared his independence, telling his audience that he had not sought the nomination and that “not only have no pledges of any kind been given, but none have been proposed or desired.” He ticked off the measures the progressives had long and unsuccessfully fought to put in the party platform—reorganization of government, tax equalization, regulation of business, a corrupt practices act—and pledged that if elected he would do his best to enact every one of them. The delegates began to perk up. Soon they were on their feet cheering, some of them weeping. Wilson walked out of the Trenton Opera House the hero of every progressive Democrat in the state and of no few Republicans. Joe Tumulty, who had started the day regarding Wilson’s nomination as a disaster, found himself volunteering to work in his campaign.

  Having taken on a new political identity, that of a no-holds-barred progressive, Wilson campaigned tirelessly. He asked voters to help him free them from the machines and the corporations. Jim Smith appears not to have been overly disturbed; after all, noble rhetoric was necessary in this so-called age of reform. Some modest legislative initiatives might have to be arranged after the governorship was bagged—so long as they didn’t go too far. Smith was satisfied, presumably, that his man was simply doing what any sensible candidate would do: saying things he didn’t mean, and creating expectations he neither could nor wished to satisfy.

  Joseph Tumulty

 
Wilson’s jack-of-all-trades and most faithful associate, destined to be spurned in the end.

  But Wilson made the voters believe. His appearances pulled in so many disaffected Republicans that he won in a landslide. His coattails were long enough to give the Democrats control of the state assembly and to turn him into a national sensation. He hired Tumulty as his “secretary” (the savvy and amiable Irishman would function as chief of staff, press secretary, and guide to the intricacies of New Jersey politics) and made himself the driving force behind a breathtakingly ambitious legislative agenda. In 1911 the most cherished dreams of New Jersey’s progressives became law. Among them were direct primaries, regulation of utilities, workmen’s compensation, and the promised corrupt practices act. Across the country, people took note.

  If some of the new laws were blows to Sugar Jim, they were not the worst he had to endure. When he attempted to collect the Senate seat that he regarded as now his by right, he was astonished to find Wilson blocking his way. The new governor used all the clout that had come to him with his victory to force the legislature to elect the nonentity who had won the nonbinding preferential primary for the Senate seat. (That primary had seemed so inconsequential that Smith had not bothered to have his name put on the ballot.) Wilson next set out to unseat Smith’s nephew, a rough-edged political battler called Little Bob Nugent (the boss of Jersey City, Robert Davis, was Big Bob), as Democratic state chairman. This was another risky move, again putting Wilson’s political capital on the line, but again he prevailed. He emerged supreme in the state party.