by G. J. Meyer
Wilson’s treatment of Smith is sometimes portrayed as a betrayal. It is easy to understand why Smith felt betrayed, but to call Wilson dishonorable is naïve. He had been clear from the start about owing nothing—least of all a Senate seat—to Smith or anyone else. If he unveiled a new Woodrow Wilson on the day of his nomination, his new persona served rather than betrayed the interests of the commonwealth. If his crushing of Smith and Nugent came as a surprise after his promise not to challenge the party organization, it should be remembered that that promise had a condition attached to it. Promise or no promise, it is hardly realistic to condemn Wilson for displaying the instinct for the jugular without which no political leader can achieve ambitious objectives. As the popular sage Mr. Dooley observed long ago, politics ain’t beanbag. It is, rather, a blood sport.
Smith and Nugent, for their part, never hesitated to play rough. They took their revenge in the legislative elections of 1911, undercutting not only Wilson but the entire state party. They made sure that all Democratic candidates lost in the parts of the state that they controlled, thereby allowing the Republicans to recapture the assembly. In doing this they not only blocked further reform but sowed doubts about Wilson’s plausibility as a presidential candidate.
Nonetheless, by the end of 1911 Wilson’s accomplishments had made him a major figure nationally. And he had taken every step with the presidential election of 1912—and William Jennings Bryan—in mind. Bryan was certain to have, as usual, the biggest following at the Democratic convention, controlling enough votes make or break other candidates. The Woodrow Wilson of Princeton, who had refused to appear in public with Bryan, was replaced by a Governor Wilson eager for opportunities not only to appear with but to praise him.
It is at this point that Edward House enters the story. He was living in Manhattan, nursing his ambition and looking for a horse to back in the race for the 1912 Democratic nomination. He was also intrigued by what he was hearing and reading about the governor of New Jersey. He wrote to Wilson, Wilson called on him at his apartment, and one of the most complicated and momentous friendships in American presidential history was quickly cemented.
“The first hour we spent together proved to each of us that there was a sound basis for a fast friendship,” House would remember. “We found ourselves in such complete sympathy, in so many ways, that we soon learned to know what each was thinking without either having expressed himself. A few weeks after we met and after we had exchanged confidences which men usually do not exchange except after years of friendship, I asked him if he realized that we had only known one another for so short a time. He replied, ‘My dear friend, we have known each other always.’ And I think this is true.”
Soon the colonel was telling his brother-in-law that his new friend the governor “has the opportunity to become the greatest president we have ever had, and I want him to make good. He can do it if the office-seekers will give him leisure to think, and I am going to try and help him to get it.” Three weeks later another letter shows House to be thinking of what a Wilson presidency could mean for him personally: “Never before have I found both the man and the opportunity” combined so perfectly in a single package.
Wilson’s nomination as Democratic presidential candidate was little short of a miracle. He faced rivals who had long been potent figures in Washington, and he could not have won if Bryan, after a grueling forty-six ballots, had not finally signaled that Wilson was his choice. Bryan did this in spite of the publication of letters in which, some years earlier, Wilson had poured scorn on him. In 1907 Wilson had expressed the wish that “we could do something at once dignified and effective to knock Mr. Bryan once and for all into a cocked hat!” The letters were made public by people wanting to destroy Wilson’s chances, but Bryan was accustomed to far worse and had too generous a spirit to allow his mind to be made up in such a way. House found an opportunity to display usefulness. He had a good relationship with Bryan, one of long standing, and took every opportunity to speak well of “the governor” in terms that Bryan would find appealing. Once Bryan became satisfied that Wilson was more genuinely progressive than the other candidates, the issue was settled.
One more miracle was needed to make Wilson president. It arrived on schedule: in 1912 the Republican Party, so long triumphant, unexpectedly fell apart. Theodore Roosevelt, freshly back from overseas adventures, found himself missing the “bully pulpit” of the presidency. He claimed to be disgusted with President Taft’s failure to be more activist. He set out to snatch the nomination from his successor, failed, and hastily created a third party that made him its candidate. This split the Republicans and made it possible for Wilson to be elected with only 42 percent of the vote, and for the Democrats to become the majority in both houses of Congress. Bryan became secretary of state, not to honor any deal and not because the new president’s opinion of him had improved all that much, but because Wilson didn’t expect the position to be particularly important in his administration. And because, wisely, he didn’t want to leave the Bryanites on the outside, where they would be free to snipe.
There followed, as in New Jersey, a period of blazing legislative achievement. Wilson drove Congress hard, keeping it in session for an unprecedented year and a half. Because he had firmer control of both houses than Roosevelt or Taft had ever enjoyed, he accomplished more than both. Tariff reform, currency and banking reform including the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank, new controls on trusts and monopolies, and establishment of the Federal Trade Commission all followed his inauguration. Some things that progressives wanted did not follow. Help for organized labor, credit for farmers, limitations on the use of child labor—these and other issues were not addressed because the president had no interest in them. But he stood supreme all the same. It was through his administration, wrote the young journalist Walter Lippmann, that “the middle class has put the ‘Money Power’ on the defensive” and “big business is losing its control of the government.”
But then the president lost interest in reform. The darker, harder Wilson that had first appeared after his 1906 stroke, and had emerged again in his final few years at Princeton, became ever more conspicuous. This Wilson was unwilling to share power with anyone, worked mainly in isolation, and had little interest in the opinions of others. Even now, despite all the amazing things that had happened to him in the past four years, he gave evidence of being chronically dissatisfied, as hungry as ever for admiration, distrustful of anyone who failed to admire him unreservedly, and desperate to become a great president not only by domestic standards but on the world stage.
It was this darker Wilson who brought the United States to the brink of war on her own southern border. Revolution had broken out in Mexico during the Taft administration and turned into a protracted civil war. Within weeks of his inauguration Wilson was faced with the question of whether to extend official recognition to General Victoriano Huerta, the nasty piece of work who had set himself up as Mexico’s president. The general had the backing of American companies with substantial investments in Mexico and big American banks also wanted Washington to recognize him. Wilson declared refusal to be the right thing even if not in the financial interests of the United States. When asked to protect American citizens in Mexico, he replied in a way that contrasts curiously with his later insistence on the rights of Americans to travel in safety on the ships of nations at war. “We should earnestly urge all Americans,” he said, “to leave Mexico at once. They should take no unnecessary risks when it is impossible for them to leave.”
That his intentions were noble is hardly to be doubted. “We shall yet prove to the Mexican people,” he told Congress, “that we know how to serve them without first thinking how we shall serve ourselves.” But such sentiments did not keep him from making so much unnecessary trouble that war would for a time seem inevitable. There may have been medical—neurological—reasons for his doing so. On the morning of April 11, 1913, still new in the White House, he awoke in a state subsequently de
scribed as “ominous from a clinical standpoint.” His left shoulder gave him so much pain—probably as the result of another stroke—that he spent the day in bed. Though he was back on his feet on Monday, he went first through a period of euphoria and then fell into a deep depression. This appears to have affected his personality and behavior in much the same way as the stroke of 1906.
The consequences were simultaneously tragic and absurd. A party of sailors from one of the American warships prowling the Mexican coast went ashore at Tampico without seeking permission of the local authorities. They were only looking for fresh water, but an overzealous Mexican officer had them arrested. As soon as the commander of the Tampico garrison learned what had happened, he released the sailors and apologized. When Huerta was informed, he sent a formal apology to Washington. But the admiral commanding the American ships in the area was not satisfied. He demanded that Mexico make amends by giving the Stars and Stripes a twenty-one-gun salute, and President Wilson supported him. When Huerta refused, fearful of showing weakness to his rebellious countrymen, Wilson ordered the U.S. Atlantic and Pacific fleets to mass themselves off Mexico’s east and west coasts. This was a gross overreaction. Huerta offered a compromise in which the two neighbor nations would salute each other’s flags.
Wilson took this as an affront. He ordered the navy to seize the customs house at Veracruz. Marines went ashore on August 19 and met unexpected resistance. In the ensuing firefight, nineteen Americans were killed. More troops were sent in, and eventually the whole town of Veracruz was under American occupation. Wilson, horrified that his orders had led to so many deaths, forbade further action. But he had precipitated a calamity by refusing a simple compromise that would have resolved an essentially trivial dispute. This echoed the self-defeating inflexibility with which he had pressed his conflict with the Princeton trustees. It foreshadowed his actions during and after the European war.
Chapter 4
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Many Sacred Principles
THE SINKING OF the Lusitania, with its terrible loss of life, sent American public opinion lurching heavily to the Entente’s side. It so deepened the differences that separated the president from his secretary of state that Bryan began to find them unbearable. Wilson, regarding Europe and the war as matters to be managed from the White House, was untroubled by those differences. For such counsel and assistance as he required, he looked not to the State Department but to Colonel House, who held no office, scrupulously avoided the limelight, and so posed no threat to the president’s determination to be seen as master and sole maker of the nation’s foreign policy.
Though the outrage that the sinking provoked was overwhelming at first, the Lusitania crisis soon proved to be shrouded in ambiguities. The German embassy in Washington, headed by an ambassador who was horrified by the dangers of his country’s U-boat campaign and desperate to avoid a showdown with the United States, had arranged to run newspaper advertisements warning travelers of the risks of taking passage on liners flying the flags of Entente nations. Within forty-eight hours of the sinking, it was generally known that the Lusitania had been carrying munitions—six million rounds of small-arms ammunition and 1,250 cases of shrapnel shells, among other things. And anyone taking the trouble to consult the 1914 edition of Jane’s Fighting Ships, the authoritative source on its subject matter, would have found the Lusitania described as an “armed merchantman.” A British technical journal of 1913 described her as outfitted with a dozen six-inch guns. (The inches refer to the diameter of shells fired. Six-inch guns are heavy artillery.)
Such revelations took some of the edge off public anger, and questions were asked about whether passengers aboard a vessel carrying such cargo should expect to be untouchable. Bryan had already made clear that he thought the answer was no, and he continued to communicate his concerns to the president. “Germany has a right to prevent contraband going to the Allies,” he wrote on May 9, “and a ship carrying contraband should not rely upon passengers to protect her from attack. It would be like putting women and children in front of an army.”
He was not alone. Even the vice president, Thomas Marshall, said that “when a person boarded an English vessel he was virtually on English soil and must expect to stand the consequences.”
Meanwhile Colonel House, from London, was sending cables expressing a sharply different view. He urged the president to take a hard line with the Germans—to demand a promise that there would be no more such attacks or the price would be war with the United States. Thinking that the Lusitania had freed him from the need to conceal from the president his wish for war, he nevertheless took care to argue in terms that Wilson was certain to find appealing. “Our intervention will save rather than increase the loss of life,” he wired on May 9. “America has come to the parting of the ways, when she must determine whether she stands for civilized or uncivilized warfare. Think we can no longer remain neutral spectators.” Viewed from House’s perspective in London, the situation left the president with no choice.
But with the public’s anger subsiding at a pace that would have dismayed the colonel had he been at home to witness it, few of even the most jingoistic newspapers were suggesting that the nation should go to war. The president’s chief adviser on domestic politics, his secretary Joe Tumulty, cautioned him that the public was far from ready for such a step. Not that Wilson needed such a warning. On May 10 he made a long-scheduled appearance in Philadelphia, delivering the speech in which he famously declared that “there is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight—there is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.” News of these words, not the shrewdest Wilson ever uttered, caused dismay when they reached London. The president was derided in the British and French press and by Republican leaders at home. The speech served a purpose, however, even if it expressed little more than a strangely unfocused self-righteousness. It went down well with an American public far more receptive to Bryan’s position than to House’s.
Wilson was, however, determined to take a firm line with Germany, if not as hard a line as House wanted. At a cabinet meeting the day after his speech, he read House’s bellicose cable aloud, and from around the table came muttered approval. Bryan, however, was not pleased. He complained indignantly that there were men in that room who were not neutral at all. For stating this obvious truth, he was rebuked by the president, and apologized. Wilson then sketched out a diplomatic note that he had been preparing for delivery to Berlin. It demanded an end to U-boat attacks on merchantmen and financial reparation for the Lusitania sinking. It declared the use of submarines against ships carrying passengers a gross violation of “many sacred principles of justice and humanity.” It was characteristic of Wilson to offer such flights of rhetoric without saying just what sacred principles he had in mind.
Staying on the same high and abstract level, he said that his note, when complete, would invoke the “sacred duty” of the United States to maintain her rights and those of her citizens. It is revealing of Wilsonian logic that he was able to say such things so soon after surrendering the right of American merchants—a right enshrined in law but evidently not a sacred one—to trade with Germany and with the many neutral ports put off-limits by Britain.
The truth, as before, was simple enough: there existed in law no such thing as the right to a guarantee of safety if one chose to travel on the ship of a nation at war. To claim such a right when traveling on a ship carrying the materials of war to a nation at war was, in the view of Bryan and many others, ludicrous. Wilson was making use of—yielding to the temptations of—his ability to conceal thinness of substance behind grand verbiage. He was reverting to the same pattern of behavior that had become so conspicuous during his final years at Princeton. There, however, he had been confronted by a board of trustees with the power to thwart him. In 1915, in the Cabinet Room of the White House, he faced no such obstacle. There he encountered only men who were dependent on him for continued emp
loyment, many of them chosen not by him but by Colonel House, most of them as comfortable as the colonel with the prospect of going to war.
Bryan, again the sole exception, spoke of the likely consequences of leaving the Germans with only two options: a humiliating capitulation or a break with the United States. The subject was then dropped, and the meeting soon adjourned. That the president returned to his office in a state not just of uncertainty but of inner turmoil is apparent in the note he sent to Bryan later that same day. “Both in mind and in heart I was deeply moved by what you said in Cabinet this morning,” it said. “I have gone over it again and again in my thoughts since we separated, and it is with no sort of confidence that I am right, but, on the contrary with unaffected misgivings that I may be wrong, that I send you the enclosed with the request that you and Mr. Lansing will be generous enough to go over it and put it into shape for transmission to the German government.”
“The enclosed” was of course a completed draft of the note the president intended to send to Germany. If the president’s request caused Bryan to hope that he would find the note softened, he quickly learned otherwise. He returned it to the White House the next day, finished and ready for delivery, with his signature affixed along with the following message:
“I join in this document with a heavy heart. I am as sure of your patriotic purpose as I am of my own, but after long consideration both careful and prayerful, I cannot bring myself to the belief that it is wise to relinquish the hope of playing the part of a friend to both sides in the role of peacemaker, and I fear that this note will result in such a relinquishment…the jingo element will not only predict, but demand, war.” He added that the note was certain to be “applauded by the allies,” and that “the more they applaud the more Germany will be embittered.” He urged not a change of the presidential mind—clearly there was no hope of that—but the sending of an additional note. It would go to Britain and would protest her illegal acts, particularly “the announced purpose of the Allied to starve the non-combatants of Germany.”