Although seldom missing an opportunity to mention his expanding worldview, Wilson never neglected the local issues—waterways, public commissions, the low tax rates railroads were granted. As time passed, he found himself increasingly struggling to save the soul of the state. At Toms River, a Republican village where candidates seldom drew two dozen citizens to hear a political talk, eight hundred people gathered, some arriving on special trains from all over Ocean County. Then, in the Hippodrome in Asbury Park on October 15, he told the throngs, “If you find out that I have ever been or ever intend to be connected with a machine of any kind I hope you will vote against me.” On October 21, he covered ninety miles of Warren County, stopping at eight towns and making seven speeches, six of those demanded by locals who had stood waiting for his arrival and insisted upon hearing him.
The Republicans hit Wilson hard, attacking his inexperience, suggesting that the statehouse was not a schoolhouse. To prove his mettle, Wilson challenged any politician in New Jersey to debate any public matter on any public platform. None other than New Idea candidate George Record took up the gauntlet, which came in the form of a nineteen-point questionnaire. Democratic handlers advised against engaging in an exercise that could so easily backfire; but a fortnight before the election, Wilson—the lifelong student of American history—breezed through the exam. In preparation, he jotted shorthand responses right on Record’s letter, which he then typed up and emended by hand before submitting his final draft.
Most of the questions required little more than Progressive solutions to statewide injustices; but there were several tricky questions, starting with Record’s asking if Wilson thought “the boss system” existed. The candidate replied that it did, and that he would propose to abolish it by “the election to office of men who will refuse to submit to it and bend all their energies to break it up, and by pitiless publicity.” Record asked if the leaders of that system included such men as Wilson’s benefactors, Smith and Nugent. Wilson said yes. In his next reply he said he would join Record “or any one else in denouncing and fighting any and every one, of either party, who attempts such outrages against the government and public morality.”
If Record had intended to expose Wilson as a waffler, if not the conservative Southern Democrat he had been most of his life, he failed miserably. In fact, the exercise allowed Wilson to articulate his positions in the most precise terms. By the time he had answered all the questions, he had completely converted, becoming a veritable New Idea man who had seen the light, an outspoken, unabashed Progressive who believed only a Democrat could lead his state, if not the country, on the path from darkness. Wilson even answered the hardest question of all, one Record had failed to ask. “I am very glad to tell you,” he wrote on October 24, 1910.
If elected, I shall not, either in the matter of appointments to office or assent to legislation, or in shaping any part of the policy of my administration, submit to the dictation of any person or persons, special interest, or organization. . . . I should deem myself forever disgraced should I in even the slightest degree cooperate in any such system or any such transactions as you describe in your characterization of the “boss” system. I regard myself as pledged to the regeneration of the Democratic party.
Wilson’s declaration of his political independence became the talk of New Jersey. Colonel Harvey called it “the most effective political document I ever read.” Joseph P. Tumulty, who had by then actively endorsed Wilson, praised the “virility” of the statement. Smith, Nugent, and Davis did not even flinch, since they considered it “a great campaign play.”
In the final week of October, Wilson traveled from one end of the “barrel” to the other. He continued to attract Republicans. On Saturday, November 5, he concluded his tour in Newark, where one newspaper reported, “No mortal man ever won the hearts of an awakened people like this man did those in a vast audience in the Krueger Auditorium.” Before three thousand enthusiasts, Wilson talked about leadership; and, in so doing, he drew a bead on a distant target—President Taft, who had signed the Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act. “We have begun a fight that it may be will take many a generation to complete,” he said, “—the fight against special privilege.”
“Letting down the curtain on the first act of the stirring drama of American history, in which he is the new-risen star,” The Philadelphia Record reported, “Woodrow Wilson to-night was accorded a mark of approval that must ring in his ears and linger in his eyes till the lights go out forever upon his stage of action.”
Turnout on the eighth was huge. Wilson was the only person to remain calm at Prospect that Tuesday as early predictions came in. “We stood breathlessly by when he answered the telephone,” Nell recalled, “but he would never give the slightest inkling whether the news was favorable or not. . . . Even after he hung up, we had to beg for details.”
By ten o’clock that night, the family realized that Wilson had won in a landslide—233,682 votes to Vivian Lewis’s 184,626, 54 percent to 43 percent, with a smattering of votes for third-party candidates. He swept fifteen of the state’s twenty-one counties. Moreover, Wilson had coattails: New Jersey Democrats gained four seats in the Congress, won four of the seven elections for the State Senate, and walked away with forty-two of the sixty seats in the State Assembly, which meant they could now send a Democrat to the United States Senate. In Washington, the new Congress would reflect the changing sentiment of the nation at large, as the Democrats picked up fifty-eight seats in the House, more than enough to change its leadership. Democrat James Beauchamp “Champ” Clark of Missouri would replace the seemingly omnipotent Old Guard Republican Joseph “Uncle Joe” Cannon, who had pounded the Speaker’s gavel for the last seven years.
Wilson received congratulations from all constituencies of his past: the Mayor of Staunton, Southern relatives, the Witherspoon Gang (including his political blood brother, Charles Talcott, who became that very day the first Democratic Congressman elected from his upstate New York district in more than fifty years), Heath Dabney from Virginia, Frederick Jackson Turner (“You are bringing Princeton into the nation’s service”), Princeton trustees, and—despite their irreparable separation—a nostalgic Jack Hibben. George Record, who lost his election, offered his political services; and Joseph P. Tumulty praised the victor’s courage during the campaign. Wilson sent James Smith a measured note—not to thank him but to say, “I feel very deeply the confidence you have displayed in me, and the deep responsibility to the people which our success has brought with it. I hope with all my heart that I may be able to play my part in such a way as to bring no disappointment to those who have trusted me.” Smith replied in equally calculated terms, wiring, “Every well wisher of good government will hail the result as a personal gain.”
Wilson had intended to return to Bermuda, but he had no time for a vacation. New Jersey did not provide its Governor with an official residence, compelling the Wilsons to leave Prospect for four rooms in the Princeton Inn until they could find more permanent lodging. The three Wilson daughters were establishing their own adult lives but still depended on their parents. Margaret was adjusting to two rooms in New York City, where she studied music; Jessie did settlement work in Philadelphia, where she lived Monday through Thursday, staying at the Inn on weekends; and Nell commuted weekdays to Philadelphia, where she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts. While they were all packing boxes at Prospect, Jim Smith appeared, with challenging though hardly startling news.
Smith announced to the Governor-elect that he wished to return to the United States Senate. Wilson balked. In September the Democrats had voted in a primary for James E. Martine, a prosperous landowner and developer. “Farmer Jim,” as he was known, was the only man who had bothered to list his name in the nonbinding preferential race, and he had received less than a quarter of Wilson’s total at that. Even so, Wilson said, for Smith even to present his name for consideration only confirmed all the ugliest suspicions raised durin
g the November election.
Smith utterly dismissed the primary. Although Wilson thought little of Martine, he maintained, “The question who is to enjoy one term in the Senate is of small consequence compared with the question whether the people of New Jersey are to gain the right to choose their own senators forever.” The decision rested with the state legislators, most of whom remained beholden to the machine. After making inquiries, Cleveland Dodge informed Wilson that he had heard that all but six of the Democratic Assemblymen were financially obliged enough to Jim Smith “that he owns them absolutely.” It fell upon Wilson to decide whether he intended to let the political machinery continue to run or whether to throw a monkey wrench into the works.
“It was a very great victory, and you were one of the most valiant fighters in it,” Wilson wrote James Martine on November 14, 1910, in a letter he also released to the press. While even Democrats had suggested to Wilson that “Farmer Jim” was generally incompetent, the Governor-elect believed that was secondary to this opportunity to reform the political system. He began by trying to avoid a confrontation. Wilson asked Dodge if he knew people who might persuade Smith to refrain from running; and he enlisted several newspaper editors to do the same. Then he went to Jersey City, where he explained to “Little Bob” Davis, then in the final stage of a terminal illness, that a failure to support Martine was tantamount to party disloyalty. Davis said he had given his word to Smith and that if Wilson would disengage from this Senatorial election, he would back Wilson’s ambitious legislative agenda. “How do I know you will?” Wilson asked. “If you beat me in this the first fight, how do I know you won’t be able to beat me in everything?”
“I am very anxious about the question of the senatorship,” Wilson wrote Colonel Harvey on November 15, 1910, knowing that if not handled correctly, “it will destroy every fortunate impression of the campaign and open my administration with a split party.” In a tone that suggested he thought Harvey would share his letter with the Boss himself, Wilson said he had come to a “very high opinion” of Smith and had little doubt that a second term in the Senate would alter the impressions he left from his first. But he insisted, “His election would be intolerable to the very people who elected me and gave us a majority in the legislature. They would never give it to us again: that I think I can say I know, from what has been said to me in every quarter during the campaign. They count upon me to prevent it.” If he did not, Wilson believed, all “their ugliest suspicions, dispelled by my campaign assurances, will be confirmed.” Wilson reminded Harvey that their recent victory was due to the “progressives” from both parties who had coalesced into a solid voting bloc. Should Smith become a candidate, he declared, “I would have to fight him; and there is nothing I would more sincerely deplore. It would offend every instinct in me,—except the instinct as to what was right and necessary from the point of view of the public.”
Wilson further appealed to Harvey, making a point with national implications. “If the independent Republicans who in this State voted for me are not to be attracted to us,” he argued, “they will assuredly turn again, in desperation, to Mr. Roosevelt, and the chance of a generation will be lost to the Democracy.” Wilson said all this rested on the shoulders of Jim Smith, who “can make himself the biggest man in the State by a dignified refusal to let his name be considered.”
On December 6, Wilson went to Newark, to discuss the situation in the privacy of Smith’s home—offering him another two days in which to decide. Wilson said he would interpret silence as an intention to fight for the office. On the morning of the ninth, he issued a long statement to the press, conceding that, legally speaking, it was not the Governor’s duty even to advise the legislature in its choice of Senator. “But,” he said, “there are other duties besides legal duties. The recent campaign has put me in an unusual position. I offered, if elected, to be the political spokesman and adviser of the people. I even asked those who did not care to make their choice of Governor upon that understanding not to vote for me.” It was now his duty to urge every Democratic legislator to vote for James Martine. This meant “war,” Wilson wrote Mrs. Peck in Bermuda. “It is hard sledding, but a fellow must fight at every step who means to clean up the dirty politics of this machine-ridden State, and I shall enjoy doing the thing as much like a gentleman as the circumstances permit.”
Smith issued his own gentlemanly statement to the press. “Gratitude was not expected of him,” he said referring to Dr. Wilson, “but fairness was, and his act denies it.” As only one member of the incoming legislature had agreed to be bound by the primary vote, Smith said Wilson “evidently believes that the practises he once condemned of dangling patronage before a hungry constituency may give to his position a support which fairness denies it.”
Wilson asked Joe Tumulty, an aggressive fighter in Trenton, to serve officially as his secretary, and even more as his political adviser—“a guide at my elbow in matters of which I know almost nothing.” Together they went to Jersey City and Newark, where Wilson exerted pressure by speaking at public meetings. People traveled from other states just to hear him; others read the interviews he freely granted. “Mr. James Smith, Jr., represents not a party but a system—a system of political control which does not belong to either party,” Wilson explained to the press. That night, he conferred with New Jersey legislators at the University Club in New York, using unorthodox tactics—reason and inspiration. Smith waged his fight as well, twisting arms.
Trenton, the state capital, was all smiles on the morning of Tuesday, January 17. Ellen Wilson and the girls went downtown to the grand house of a widow, who let them view the inaugural parade from her front room. A big brass band led the way, followed by the State Guard in dress uniform, and then four prancing black horses pulling an open landau in which sat the outgoing Governor, John Franklin Fort, and fifty-four-year-old Woodrow Wilson, in a frock coat and top hat. Crowds cheered and waved flags right up to the Taylor Opera House. Among the thousands of invited dignitaries, only one was conspicuously absent—former Senator James Smith.
The ceremony was simple. The Chief Justice administered the oath of office to the state’s thirty-fourth Governor, and Fort handed him the Great Seal of the State. Wilson had worked on his inaugural address over the prior week and a half, limiting himself to a few paragraphs of introduction before reiterating the plans for New Jersey on which he had run. Toward the end of his speech, he added a last-minute thought, one he had jotted in pencil on his speaking copy. “I shall take the liberty from time to time to make detailed recommendations to you on the matters I have dwelt upon,” he said, “and on others, sometimes in the form of bills if necessary.” The ceremony ended within an hour.
Receptions filled the afternoon, culminating in a ball that night. While Wilson was hardly a fan of such festivities, he suddenly seemed struck by his new position. “All sorts and conditions of people came, men, women, and children,” he reported to Mrs. Peck, “and I felt very close to all of them, and very much touched by the thought that I was their representative and spokesman, and in a very real sense their help and hope, after year upon year of selfish machine domination when nothing at all had been done for them that could possibly be withheld.” His new responsibilities as a “champion of the common people” filled him with awe. At the evening reception, Nell Wilson could not help noticing two officers at the door, scrutinizing everyone who entered the hall and forbidding anyone from carrying a muff or large handbag. Her heart raced, as she realized for the first time that her father stood in physical danger.
One week later, Woodrow Wilson faced his first gubernatorial test. The county bosses gathered in the capital for the Senate election. Jim Smith held court in his hotel room, an open house that ran through the night as he rallied legislators to vote for him. Wilson and Tumulty lingered in their offices almost until sunrise shoring up votes for Martine. This political match proved to be an eye-opener for the Governor, especially when he
learned that one of his trusted advisers—an attorney—was secretly reporting information to the enemy camp. The first ballot gave Martine a decisive lead but not a victory; and the lawmakers adjourned.
The key to a victory rested with the bloc of votes from Hudson County, once controlled by the now deceased “Little Bob” Davis, which had become the bailiwick of a clean-cut young man named James Hennessy. Wilson summoned him, only to learn that that Hennessy had already promised Davis that he would remain loyal to Smith. Wilson had a heart-to-heart conversation with the new county leader, arguing not only that a rejection of Martine would lead to disaster for the party but also that Martine already had the votes. Hennessy caucused his delegation, which decided to back Martine. The balloting at ten o’clock that morning became a formality. Three loyalists stuck by Smith, but the forty-seven other Democrats elected Martine their next Senator. Woodrow Wilson emerged the big winner.
Wilson Page 26