Wilson

by A. Scott Berg

  Because the political system thrived on working one’s way up through the ranks, it unsettled even Wilson’s “supporters” to have a novice shoved down their throats. They wondered how a genteel professor could hold his own in the jungle of New Jersey politics. “Every progressive Democrat in the Convention was opposed to the nomination of the Princetonian,” observed one nondelegate; “and every standpatter and Old Guardsman was in favour of Woodrow Wilson.” It simply remained to be seen how the numbers would add up. “Not three men outside of the leading actors in this great political drama had ever seen the Princeton professor, although many had doubtless read his speeches,” added the interested observer. “The bosses, with consummate precision, moved to the doing of the job in hand, working their spell of threats and coercion upon a beaten, sullen, spiritless body of delegates.”

  Regardless of all protest and skepticism that morning, the chairman of the convention announced the tally of the first ballot at 4:55 that afternoon: Woodrow Wilson had received 749 votes, more than twice the number of his nearest rival, Katzenbach. Wilson was the nominee. While delegates re-cast their votes to show party unity, a car rolled up to Prospect to fetch the man of the hour. Wilson answered the door and said, “Gentlemen, I am ready.” They whisked him to the Trenton House Hotel, through a side door, and up to Colonel Harvey’s room. Clarence Cole, a delegate from Atlantic County who had been drafted to place Wilson’s name in nomination, came in to announce that the nomination had been made unanimous.

  Despite the suggestion of an undivided party, a great number of delegates were downcast, believing they remained under the yoke of the bosses. Before they could disperse in dissatisfaction, the chairman’s voice boomed through the hall: “We have just received word that Mr. Wilson, the candidate for the governorship, and the next President of the United States, has received word of his nomination; has left Princeton, and is now on his way to the Convention.” Pandemonium raged, and when Wilson entered the hall a few minutes later, even the opposition surged forward to get a good first look at their candidate. He walked to center stage and stood beneath the huge proscenium arch, backed by an energetic cohort of Princeton students.

  Looking neither the stern schoolmaster nor the strict minister many had expected, Wilson stood tall and trim, sporting a healthy summer tan and wearing his golfing outfit—a blue sweater beneath his jacket and a soft hat with a narrow brim. The audience felt as at ease as he looked, though upon seeing Wilson’s profile for the first time, one man sitting near Stockton Axson could not help commenting, “Gawd, look at his jaw!” Wilson summoned every oratorical experience of his nearly fifty-four years and, in his clear and resounding voice, delivered the first speech of his political life.

  “You have conferred upon me a very great honor,” he said; “. . . I feel the deep responsibility it imposes upon me. For responsibility is proportioned to opportunity.” He promptly reminded his audience that he had not sought the nomination; and so, if elected, he would assume his duties “with absolutely no pledge of any kind to prevent me from serving the people of the State with singleness of purpose.”

  Upon hearing that last sentence, even the doubting Thomases in the crowd started to believe in him. Among the skeptics was a sprightly Irish American grocer’s son from the Fifth Ward of Jersey City, a Roman Catholic whose blue eyes brightened his round pink face. A lawyer and a member of the State Assembly, Joseph Patrick Tumulty was a dejected Silzer man. But Tumulty had never heard an orator quite like Wilson, who allowed simplicity and modesty to punctuate his rhetoric. “Attempting none of the cheap ‘plays’ of the old campaign orator,” Tumulty wrote, “he impressively proceeded with this thrilling speech, carrying his audience with him under the spell of his eloquent words. . . . It was not only what he said, but the simple heart-stirring way in which he said it.” Applause came in waves, which kept building.

  Wilson concluded with an unexpected message. “The future,” he said, “is not for parties ‘playing politics,’ but for measures conceived in the largest spirit, pushed by parties whose leaders are statesmen, not demagogues, who love not their offices, but their duty and their opportunity for service. . . . With the new age we shall show a new spirit.” And then he closed with a question: “Shall we not forget ourselves in making it the instrument of righteousness for the State and for the nation?” The speech had ended, but the people would not let him leave the stage. “Go on, go on,” they cried.

  He did, extemporizing for several minutes more, saying that he was absolutely free to serve the people of New Jersey, that the party had a winning platform, that it was “nonsense to declare that the Democratic party is an enemy of business,” and that they must arrive at some common understanding. “For New Jersey,” he confessed, “I covet the honor of showing the other States how corporations can be controlled.” Having mesmerized his entire audience, he turned to the Stars and Stripes hanging over the speakers’ stand. “When I look upon the American flag before me,” he said in unabashedly patriotic language, “I think sometimes that it is made of parchment and blood. The white in it stands for parchment, the red in it signifies blood—parchment on which was written the rights of men, and blood that was spilled to make these rights real. Let us devote the Democratic party to the recovery of these rights.” Hardened old politicos wept, and delegates thanked God that a leader had come to their rescue. Tumulty said they all felt like Crusaders, ready to “dedicate themselves to the cause of liberating their state from the bondage of special interests.” The crowd mobbed the candidate, requiring the police to rescue him.

  Wilson telephoned his wife and children in Old Lyme and cheerfully reported the evening’s events; and in a few days the Wilson women returned to Prospect. “Having, in our innocence, no idea of the ordeal we were facing,” Nell recalled, “we were due for a shock. A college professor thrust suddenly into active politics made the New Jersey situation more dramatic than the ordinary gubernatorial campaign.” With this new player in the game, the New York Evening Post declared, “It is a great day for New Jersey and a great day for the nation when a man like Woodrow Wilson comes forward to help reclaim and vivify our political life.” Days later, the Republicans nominated Mr. Vivian M. Lewis, the genial State Banking and Insurance Commissioner, who pledged to embrace several “New Idea” ideas, his only hope of capturing swing votes.

  The campaign had a most peculiar beginning, as the Democratic candidate still had a college to run. The day after Lewis’s nomination, Woodrow Wilson donned his cap and gown and led Princeton’s academic procession, as he had for the last decade, and conducted opening exercises in the Marquand Chapel. For the next several weeks, he continued to work his campaign schedule around his campus obligations, which still included giving lectures on jurisprudence and politics. While some trustees were already contriving Wilson’s removal from office, many presumed he would let the election results determine if and when he would resign. But on October 20, 1910, he opened the board meeting, asked that the regular order of business be suspended, and presented his resignation. With that, trustee Wilson Farrand recorded, he “picked up his hat and coat, and while we all stood in silence, passed from the room and from his connection with Princeton.”

  The severance was not quite that severe, though Wilson sensed plenty of hostility from his old adversaries. In officially accepting Wilson’s resignation, the board generously praised his contribution not only to Princeton but also to higher education in the United States, as they acknowledged his reformation of the curriculum, pedagogy, graduate studies, and the general culture of the campus, instilling his “ideals of character and conduct.” But Momo Pyne wanted to know just how long his salary should be paid and how long he should be permitted to stay at Prospect. The trustees decided to support him through the end of the first term of the academic year. Because of Wilson’s contributions to scholarship and education, they also bestowed upon him their greatest award, an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws. One
hundred eighty students in his Jurisprudence course signed a petition expressing their “sincere desire” that he might still resume his lectures. Wilson gladly accepted the degree; he said he would prefer to remain at Prospect only until the conclusion of the campaign; and he refused any further salary. He wrote the students that with his time “so broken in upon,” his teaching from that point on would be too unsatisfactory to be of advantage to them.

  “This is really worse than I expected even,” Wilson wrote Mrs. Peck ten days after the convention; “there has not been a half hour . . . that I could call my own since the nomination.” He was dictating 150 letters a day, which required a pair of stenographers; and there were, he said, “letters by the hundred, newspaper men, photographers, friends, advisers, committees, beggars.” The telephone never stopped ringing. Party bosses visited regularly, worried at first that their candidate was what they called “high-browish.” The first time Jim Smith walked into Wilson’s book-lined study, he held his silk hat in hand and asked in awe, “Do you read all these books, Professor?” Wilson replied, “Not every day”; and their laughter broke the ice. Smith would never fully understand the new politician he had anointed, but one day that September, he unknowingly got a glimmer of Wilson’s sincerity about politics. While waiting with Nugent for a meeting at Prospect, Smith soaked up some of the atmosphere of the grand house nestled into the wooded campus, with Ellen Wilson’s picturesque garden overlooking the New Jersey countryside. Smith asked, “Can you imagine anyone being damn fool enough to give this up for the heartaches of politics?”

  At first, the other politicians treated Wilson like a “schoolboy,” but as soon as they began teaching him the rudiments of the state, they instantly found themselves students in his classroom, as Wilson revealed his familiarity with minute nuts-and-bolts local issues as well as large statewide matters. James Kerney, the editor of the Trenton Evening Times, sat in on some meetings and delighted in the fact that Wilson already knew every one of the local nabobs by name and his community’s concerns.

  For all his confidence as an orator, Wilson did not want his family to attend any of his speeches. The rule applied especially to Ellen, whose opinions he valued most. “I don’t know what sort of politician I’ll make,” he told his daughters. “I’m nervous—just plain scared—and if you girls are there, it will be worse.” And so, on September 28, 1910, he drafted Stockton Axson to accompany him on the train from Princeton to Jersey City, where he officially opened his campaign. A group of Democrats met him at the station and escorted him to St. Peter’s Hall. Armed with his standard set of notes—a single page with a few handwritten sentences, half of them in shorthand—the Democratic nominee for Governor proceeded to deliver a rambling address, full of pauses, clumsy shifts in subject, and several forced attempts at humor. “I never before appeared before an audience and asked for anything,” he said, “and now I find myself in the novel position of asking you to vote for me for governor of New Jersey.”

  Wilson articulated a few themes that would resound throughout his campaign. “I particularly want to confess to one obligation,” he said. “If you should vote for me for Governor I shall be under obligations to you, I shall be obedient to the people of this State, to serve them and them only.” In addressing the subject of modern corporate law and the need for personal responsibility, he used an analogy that he would long employ—that of an automobile that has been involved in something unlawful: “I say get the man who is running the automobile and teach him to behave and do not take the automobile away,” Wilson said; “the automobile is not to blame.” But his shying from the limelight made the first part of the speech a dud. Only after a half hour of speaking “ineffectively” did Wilson redeem himself. Just as he was losing his audience, he trusted his instincts and walked to the edge of the platform. “And so I have made my first political appeal. I leave my case in your hands,” he said. “I feel that it is a trustworthy jury and with its verdict I shall be content.” Wilson acknowledged that he did not think his first campaign speech had been a success, but when he threw himself at the mercy of his audience, in that simple moment of ingenuousness, they responded with a whoop. Observed Axson, “It was the first time he had touched them.”

  And it was the last time Wilson ever delivered so lackluster a speech. In just the minutes it took to drive him across town to deliver his next, Woodrow Wilson metamorphosed into a political candidate. He realized that in asking people for support—much like a minister passing the collection plate or a college president soliciting funds—he was empowering them, allowing them to share in his ideals, and he in theirs. During his second speech that day, the audience laughed, applauded, and listened intently to his every point.

  Over the next six weeks, Wilson delivered more than fifty major speeches across all of New Jersey’s twenty-one counties. He spoke only from skeletal notes and straight from his heart. Substantive and conversational, the addresses had a snowball effect—each one, like the campaign itself, steadily gathering momentum, the power of his rhetoric growing as did his commitment to Progressive ideas. Inevitably, he expounded upon topics of national importance, none more far-reaching than the new Payne-Aldrich tariff. It was meant to lower duties on imported products, but the Republican chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Nelson Aldrich, connived to raise hundreds of other tariffs for the benefit of select industries. Early in his campaign, Joseph P. Tumulty had the opportunity to meet Wilson, who was informed that the young legislator had been present at the Jersey City speech. Wilson beseeched him for an honest opinion of it, saying, “Don’t forget that I am an amateur at this game and need advice and guidance.” Tumulty urged as much “definiteness” in his speeches as possible.

  On the third evening of the campaign, James Smith tested the responsiveness of his “puppet”’s strings. The Boss summoned Judge Hudspeth and said the Newark audience that night would be filled with people interested in the question of Prohibition and that Wilson must take a position against local option. Hudspeth said Wilson had already told the bosses where he stood, and nothing they could say would change his opinion. Smith said Wilson would get heckled off the stage, and Nugent argued that this would rankle his most important supporters. But Wilson held fast, insisting it was a petty matter alongside greater issues of the day. As it turned out, the subject never even arose.

  Instead, Wilson stuck to his notes and beliefs and delivered a long and impassioned speech explaining the Democratic platform. He said there was one more plank he would have liked to have seen included, one involving stronger laws of incorporation in New Jersey that would offer “a severe scrutiny.” He even took a shot at the Sugar Trust. That night, and throughout the campaign, he spoke with civility about his Republican rival; and he maintained an air of humility about himself, assuring the voters that “no man with any sense of proportion . . . could stand up and pose as the savior of his fellow citizens. . . . But it is perfectly worthy and perfectly dignified to stand up and say: ‘Gentlemen, let us all get together and try to understand our common interest.’”

  Driving Wilson home that night, Judge Hudspeth reminded him that he owed his nomination to Smith and Nugent and “Little Bob” Davis, the big man in Jersey City. Wilson replied that he had entered the contest without making promises to any bosses. He intended to honor pledges only to the people. His experience at Princeton notwithstanding, Wilson still believed that the only way to reform the party, if not the politics of the state, was by making the strongest appeal possible and by avoiding deals with those who wrote the checks. In an interview with The Philadelphia Record, Wilson said the Republican Party had formed “an unholy alliance with the vast moneyed interests of the country,” while “Providence in its wisdom directed that the Democratic party should be reserved” for the great task of providing “the salvation of the country.”

  After only one week on the stump, Wilson was back at the Taylor Opera House, where he unabashedly played to the crowd, rel
easing the politician he had long repressed. “I am asking you for your votes,” he said, “and if you give them to me I will be under bonds to you—not to the gentlemen who were generous enough to nominate me.” He called himself “an amateur politician”; and as such, he added, “I shall, not timidly, as standing outside of the ranks of the profession, tackle the profession.” Despite the paternal ban, the Wilson girls had secretly entered the hall that night and hidden in one of the boxes. After they told him as much, he never again minded any of his family being in the audience.

  Two days later, in Woodbury, Wilson challenged the sincerity of the Republican Party in its talk of progressive reform. He praised some of the party’s history and even singled out the insurgent George L. Record, a Congressional candidate whom he admired. Wilson’s opponent, Vivian Lewis, had suggested that he intended to be a “constitutional governor” who would not make waves in office. Such would not be the case in a Wilson administration, Wilson himself warned. “I shall not be a constitutional governor, because there is one thing that a man has to obey over and above the State constitution, and that is his own constitution. . . . And although I try to be courteous to the men I differ from, I am always sure they are wrong.”

  Wilson’s crowds increased. On October 12, 2,600 people—including hundreds of Republicans—packed into the Paterson Opera House, with its 1,800 seats. More and more people wanted to sample Wilson’s celebrated oratory. On this occasion they were treated to a talk that was part lesson and part sermon, its primary theme “the purification of politics.” The next night he filled the Steeplechase Pier in Atlantic City and announced that he was going to dismantle the Republican machine, and that he believed in his heart “that the men who are going to assist with the greatest zest in this matter are Republicans themselves.” Wilson seldom failed to deliver at least that one aria of especial eloquence that his audiences had come to expect—a passionate combination of rhetoric and righteousness. In Atlantic City it came toward the end of a long speech, when he said the destiny of the United States was not in its amassing power or wealth but “that she shall do the thinking of the world,” and that thinking would be “ruled by our passions. . . . For America . . . is not a piece of the surface of the earth. America is not merely a body of towns. America is an idea, America is an ideal, America is a vision.”