As he did whenever he needed to gather legislative support, Wilson dispatched McAdoo and Burleson—his “wet nurses,” he called them behind their backs—to the Senate floor, where they threatened and cajoled. The repeal became law by a vote of 50 to 35 in the Senate, and 247 to 162 in the House. Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, thereafter became a great friend of Colonel House and the United States government. The recently retired British Ambassador James Viscount Bryce told friends he considered Wilson’s words and deeds in the Panama matter “the finest, most dignified, most courageous thing done in the United States for many years: perhaps, indeed, since Lincoln’s second inaugural.” Bryce wrote the President himself that his behavior reminded him of the one British statesman “in whom the sense of moral obligation always found expression in the simplest and noblest words”—John Bright. Bryce could have heaped no greater praise.
• • •
In his annual message to Congress in December 1913, Wilson had spoken of the need to protect the business communities of America by letting the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 stand unaltered, even with its large gray areas that allowed some leeway for monopolies. Six weeks later, carried by the strong current of his legislative successes, he returned to Congress to sharpen the definitions—if not the teeth—within that law. Rather than create a new political conflict, he approached the task by encouraging cooperation between two traditionally hostile adversaries. “The Government and businessmen are ready to meet each other half way in a common effort to square business methods with both public opinion and the law,” he said. Having turned once again to Louis Brandeis for advice, Wilson proposed several means to correct the nation’s unfair business practices.
The core of the problem remained the elite club of tycoons who sat on boards of the nation’s major banks and railroads, as well as its industrial, commercial, and public service entities. Those who borrowed and those who lent, those who bought and those who sold, were one and the same—a group with the power to stifle competition. And so Wilson recommended a prohibition of “interlockings of the personnel of the directorates of great corporations.” Such a prohibition, Wilson contended, “will bring new men, new energies, a new spirit of initiative, new blood, into the management of our great business enterprise,” thereby enriching the nation’s business activities. Second, he hoped to see the Interstate Commerce Commission superintending the financial operations of the nation’s railroads; “the prosperity of the railroads and the prosperity of the country are inseparably connected,” he said, and without greater oversight, the interests of the transportation systems were subordinated to their financiers.
Wilson also believed there were enough ambiguities in existing laws to discourage America’s entrepreneurs. “Nothing hampers business like uncertainty,” Wilson said; and nothing daunted business more than “the risk of falling under the condemnation of the law before it can make sure just what the law is.” He believed there should be an interstate trade commission—not another watchdog agency but a bureau that would serve “only as an indispensable instrument of information and publicity, as a clearinghouse for the facts by which both the public mind and the managers of great business undertakings should be guided.” As he had asserted when he had run for Governor of New Jersey, Wilson did not believe there were bad corporations, only individuals who did bad things under the corporate guise. “It should be one of the main objects of our legislation to divest such persons of their corporate cloak and deal with them as with those who do not represent their corporation,” he said, “but merely by deliberate intention break the law.” In other words, malfeasants should be held individually responsible, “and the punishment should fall upon them, not upon the business organization of which they make illegal use.” Wilson listed other injustices, insisting that “conscientious businessmen the country over” would be unsatisfied until they had rewritten the “constitution of peace, the peace that is honor and freedom and prosperity.”
Congressman Henry D. Clayton of Alabama, who headed the House Judiciary Committee, sponsored a comprehensive anti-trust bill that would bear his name and which contained most of the remedies Wilson had requested and included language that protected labor organizations from being considered illegal combinations themselves in restraint of trade. It passed in both houses with overwhelming majorities. With the cooperation of Senator Francis G. Newlands of Nevada and Commerce Secretary William C. Redfield, Congress also created the Federal Trade Commission just as the nation was entering a period of vast international commerce. The Commission, said Agriculture Secretary Houston, would “give legitimate and honest business advice and guidance and protect it from the unfair competition and practices of dishonest enterprises.”
Meanwhile, Wilson did not neglect rural America. Houston estimated that little more than half the country’s arable land was under cultivation, and of that, but an eighth was yielding its potential. From the start, the Administration set several programs into motion to stimulate the agricultural economy. More innovative were the plans to unite the scientific and agricultural communities. Houston created an Office of Information to disseminate in readable English the latest discoveries in soil improvement, plant and animal breeding, and the eradication of farm diseases. And then two Southerners—Senator Hoke Smith of Georgia and Congressman A. F. Lever of South Carolina—sponsored a bill that yoked land-grant colleges across the country to farms that would put the latest agricultural methods into practice.
The Smith-Lever Act also promoted greater cooperation between federal and state governments. It hitched most of the nation’s three thousand rural counties together to make the United States the world’s most productive supplier of food. In 1913, Secretary Houston observed, the rural roads between Richmond, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., were too muddy to allow an automobile to make the journey. Soon the Federal Aid Road Act was put in motion so that the federal and state governments could work together to create highways, linking the modernizing nation’s backcountry with its metropolises.
After just a few of Wilson’s legislative triumphs, the New York Evening Post had asserted that he had “more powerfully shaped more important legislation than any Executive of our time.” Wilson maintained his mantra of “cooperation” well into the spring of 1914, transcending the usual political bickering so often that he had produced the greatest spate of legislation the Republic had seen since its founding. Colonel Harvey had recently written that no President, save Lincoln, had been inaugurated with a larger number of perplexing problems before him. And, he added, “no President of the United States has demonstrated greater capacity for true leadership.” Reform-minded journalist Ray Stannard Baker wrote in his diary, “The government seems really to have become a popular government. Progress is really being made.” The very soul of the District of Columbia seemed revived.
The social event of that season began at six o’clock on May 7, 1914—a Thursday evening—when Eleanor Randolph Wilson married William Gibbs McAdoo in the White House. Largely in deference to Ellen Wilson, whose health remained fragile, the event was as modest as Jessie’s wedding had been grand. Beyond McAdoo’s fellow Cabinet members and their wives, the attendees were almost entirely old friends and family members. The groom arrived with his six children—half of whom were older than the bride, the youngest of whom served as flower girl. Nell wore a long-trained gown of heavy ivory-colored satin. For the second time in six months, the President walked one of his daughters down the aisle, this time in the Blue Room, which was adorned with lilies and white apple blossoms. The Washington Monument and the blue hills of Virginia stood witness in the background. Once again the Reverend Beach performed the ceremony. The wedding couple stepped into the Red Room, fragrant with American Beauty roses, and received their guests beneath the Gilbert Stuart portrait of Washington. Refreshments followed in the State Dining Room, where Nell cut the wedding cake with one of the military aides’ swords. Woodrow and Ellen—she in
a creamy lace dress, wearing amethysts he had given her—stood at the front door, holding hands, as their youngest daughter kissed them goodbye. The newlyweds managed to evade the press as they boarded a train for their two-week honeymoon at Harlakenden.
The difference in age between the bride and groom concerned Wilson, though he believed Mac was a “noble man” who would make Nell happy. But selfishly, the marriage left him despondent. Daughter Margaret would never marry and would always remain his favorite intellectual challenger; he and Jessie would be bound forever by their deep faith. But Nell was her father’s “chum,” the sprite who could release the boyishness that few got to see. “Ah! How desperately my heart aches that she is gone,” he wrote Mary Hulbert three days after the wedding. “She was simply part of me, the only delightful part; and I feel the loneliness more than I dare admit even to myself.” Nell was torn as well, though she knew her father was not suffering from “the desolate sense of being only half alive” that overwhelmed him whenever he and her mother were separated.
The contraction of the family circle drew Woodrow and Ellen even closer. For months he had been “dreadfully worried” about the health of his wife of twenty-nine years; but at Nell’s wedding, Ellen’s brother Stockton asked if he was still apprehensive. “No, not now,” he said. “She is coming out of the woods. . . .”
10
ECCLESIASTES
To euery thing there is a season, and a time to euery purpose vnder the heauen.
A time to be borne, and a time to die . . .
A time to weepe, and a time to laugh: a time to mourne, and a time to dance. . . .
A time to loue, and a time to hate: a time of warre, and a time of peace.
—ECCLESIASTES, III:1–8
Five hundred people waited on the steps of Blair Arch that Saturday—June 13, 1914—as the little shuttle train pulled up to the back door of the Princeton campus. Two Secret Service men jumped out, followed by Dr. Grayson, Joseph Tumulty, the newlywed McAdoos, and a beaming Wilson. Wearing a snappy blue jacket, white trousers, white shoes, and a straw boater, he fit right in among his classmates who were there to welcome him. They mingled among hundreds of men of all ages in bright-colored baseball uniforms, sailor suits, and kilts; there was even a cohort in Arab garb leading a camel and another group dressed as buccaneers, with three mules pulling their pirate ship. The merrymakers were all Princeton alumni, indulging in their annual rite of spring—Reunions, the highlight of which would be that afternoon’s “P-rade,” a procession of all the returning graduates through the campus by class, from oldest to youngest. A class member offered Wilson a ’79 hatband and an automobile ride to the class headquarters in Seventy-nine Hall, his former office building. The President of the United States said he preferred to walk.
Other than an official handshake with university president Hibben, the only special distinction accorded Wilson that day was the unusually raucous “locomotive” cheers when the men of 1879 “P-raded” before the alumni sections of other years. Later, at dinner, he spoke briefly, saying, in an obvious reference to his successor, “I hope never again to be fool enough to make believe that a man is my friend who I know to be my enemy.”
Only those closest to the President knew that pressures in his current position had recently induced nightmares, in which—curiously—his old Princeton enemies recurred. “Those terrible days,” Colonel House noted in his diary, “have sunk deep into his soul and he will carry their marks to his grave.”
Meanwhile, severe problems mounted at the White House. Even as Argentina, Brazil, and Chile were at Niagara Falls mediating the role America should play in the stabilization of Mexico, revolutionary leaders Carranza, Villa, Pablo González, and Álvaro Obregón were terrorizing each other. And the labor movement in America was reeling from a massacre in the Colorado town of Ludlow, where coal miners had been on strike for more than six months. The Colorado National Guard attacked their tent city of 1,200, killing a score of people—including women and children. The United Mine Workers of America—who counted more than half the nation’s colliers among its members—tried to organize the strikers in the region by arming them and exhorting them to take action against the owners and their guards. The ensuing violence resulted in the deaths of dozens more. Not until Wilson dispatched federal troops was order restored. The strike would persist through the end of the year, when the UMWA would run out of money; mine owner John D. Rockefeller, Jr., would ultimately offer acceptable reforms, but Ludlow’s mines would be abandoned, becoming a silent monument to the bloodiest struggle in American labor history. During all this time, the nation slogged through a recession that had begun under Taft, waiting for Wilson’s bold fiscal reforms to jump-start the economy.
Wilson’s most distressing problem, however, was his wife, who continued to weaken. “There is nothing at all the matter with her organically,” a distraught Woodrow wrote Mary Hulbert. Mindful of the Axson family’s psychological history, he feared the possibility of a nervous breakdown. Characteristically, Ellen kept insisting that Dr. Grayson maintain her husband’s regimen of golf, automobile rides, and regular visits to the theater. But for weeks, Woodrow could not help awakening at three o’clock in the morning so that he could sit at Ellen’s bedside and monitor her sleep. Nell McAdoo visited daily and observed her father’s gait slowing and the lines in his face deepening.
Then, on June 28, 1914, there was a new wrinkle: a teenaged Bosnian Serb shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, killing the heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The assassin was a member of a revolutionary group committed to liberating the Slavs from Habsburg rule. Over the next month, his bullet would ricochet around the globe, piquing animosities everywhere. One empire seemed to have been spoiling for just such an international brawl.
After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, dozens of small Germanic states had unified under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who spun a web of strategic alliances to assure Germany’s domination of Europe without further conquest. Kaiser Wilhelm II, however, had ideas of his own—“to increase this heritage for which one day I shall be called upon to give an account.” Every major power was soon poised to tackle age-old enemies.
In July, this bad situation worsened. Diplomatic efforts to avert war came up against unresolved disputes and petulant personalities, especially the crowned heads of Europe. Upon learning from Ambassador Frederic C. Penfield in Vienna of the Archduke’s assassination, Wilson sent his shocked condolences to Emperor Franz Joseph. Because the German military felt equipped to take on all its neighbors, a cautious Ambassador James W. Gerard in Berlin wrote Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, asking, “Is there nothing that my country can do . . . towards stopping this dreadful war? I am sure that the President would approve any act of mine looking towards peace.” He received no reply.
Upstairs at the White House, Wilson told himself that his wife’s strength was returning, until a sudden decline impelled Dr. Grayson to bring in three additional physicians. They concurred that Ellen was suffering from Bright’s disease, a fatal inflammation of the kidneys. Dr. Grayson went to the President’s office to deliver the dreadful news. Wilson listened in pained silence. “Let’s get out of here,” he said; and the two men ambled around the South Lawn of the White House, saying little. At last, Wilson exclaimed, “What am I to do!” In a moment, he answered his own question, saying, “We must be brave for Ellen’s sake.” He rose and marched directly to her room, where he sat by the side of her bed—as he would in the days that followed, whenever the duties of his office permitted. Discussion of her illness was confined to the second floor of the White House.
At a press conference on July 27, a reporter asked the President to comment on America’s plans to maintain peace in Europe. Wilson limited his answer, saying only, “The United States has never attempted to interfere in European affairs.” The next day—exactly one month after the Archduke’s assassination—Aus
tria declared war on Serbia. Lunching with the McAdoos, Wilson merely said, “It’s incredible—incredible.” Then he added, “Don’t tell your mother anything about it.” Nell asked her father if the declaration would implicate the rest of the world. Wilson only stared and then covered his eyes with his hand, saying, “I can think of nothing—nothing, when my dear one is suffering.”
Nor could he have done anything. By then a war in Europe was inevitable, with more at stake than vengeance for a slain prince. Because of pre-existing treaties, Russia mobilized in defense of Serbia and called upon France to honor the provisions of their Triple Entente with Great Britain. On August 1, Germany declared war on Russia and, two days later, announced war with France, which meant trampling over Belgium, which was neutral. When Germany did not heed a British warning to withdraw from the tiny nation, Great Britain declared war on Germany. Because of an old alliance with Britain, Japan was forced to declare war on Germany as well. In less than a week, seventeen million men were engaged in a fight among at least eight nations.
On August 4, Woodrow sat at Ellen’s bedside as she slept. One of his hands held hers while the other wrote a message to the Emperors of Germany and Austria-Hungary, the President of France, the King of England, and the Czar of Russia offering to “act in the interest of European peace, either now or at any other time that might be thought more suitable.” At that moment, one of the doctors told the First Family that Ellen was dying. For the first time in their lives, Wilson’s daughters saw their father weep.
By Thursday, August 6, Ellen sensed her demise, and she kept asking about the status of her slum clearance bill on Capitol Hill. At the President’s urging, Congress instantly passed the Alley Dwelling Act. Learning of the legislation brought a smile to her face. She felt that her business on earth was done—except for making one wish, which she expressed privately to Cary Grayson. She drew him near and whispered, “Please take good care of Woodrow, Doctor.”
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