The Soul of America

by Jon Meacham

  He knew it was not a matter of passing concern or quick solution. “The working out of this problem must necessarily be slow….It is a problem demanding the best thought, the utmost patience, the most earnest effort, the broadest charity, of the statesman, the student, the philanthropist; of the leaders of thought in every department of our national life.” He added:

  I believe in this country with all my heart and soul. I believe that our people will in the end rise level to every need, will in the end triumph over every difficulty that rises before them. I could not have such confident faith in the destiny of this mighty people if I had it merely as regards one portion of that people. Throughout our land things on the whole have grown better and not worse, and this is as true of one part of the country as it is of another. I believe in the Southerner as I believe in the Northerner….For weal or for woe we are knit together, and we shall go up or go down together; and I believe that we shall go up and not down, that we shall go forward instead of halting and falling back, because I have an abiding faith in the generosity, the courage, the resolution, and the common sense of all my countrymen.

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  Like Jacob Riis, Jane Addams helped shape Roosevelt’s vision of the emerging America of the twentieth century. The cofounder of Hull-House, a settlement house on the near west side of Chicago, Addams was a critical figure in reform movements ranging from women’s suffrage to civil rights to child labor. In 1913, TR opened his Autobiography with a meditation on the great democratic experiment of which Addams was a part. “Justice among the nations of mankind, and the uplifting of humanity, can be brought about only by those strong and daring men who with wisdom love peace, but who love righteousness more than peace,” Roosevelt wrote. “There must be the keenest sense of duty, and with it must go the joy of living; there must be shame at the thought of shirking the hard work of the world, and at the same time delight in the many-sided beauty of life. With soul of flame and temper of steel we must act as our coolest judgment bids us.”

  Addams had that kind of soul. She was delighted with the platform of the Progressive Party, also known as the Bull Moose Party, which nominated Roosevelt for another presidential term in 1912. “The conscience of the people,” the Progressive platform read, “in a time of grave national problems, has called into being a new party, born of the nation’s sense of justice.” TR took up the cause with typical ebullience, crying, “We fight in honorable fashion for the good of mankind; fearless of the future; unheeding of our individual fates; with unflinching hearts and undimmed eyes, we stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord!”

  The platform endorsed women’s suffrage, an issue TR embraced. It was, he wrote, “exactly as much a ‘right’ of women as of men to vote.” By his own account he had believed so “only tepidly” until moved by the passion of Addams, among others. In a larger sense, Roosevelt argued that the vote was a weapon, not the war. “A vote is like a rifle: its usefulness depends upon the character of the user….I believe in suffrage for women in America, because I think they are fit for it. I believe for women, as for men, more in the duty of fitting one’s self to do well and wisely with the ballot than in the naked right to cast the ballot.”

  The cofounder of Chicago’s Hull-House, Jane Addams was an important reformer, fighting for women’s suffrage and civil rights and against child labor. She seconded TR’s Bull Moose presidential nomination in 1912.

  At the new party’s convention in Chicago in August 1912, Addams seconded Roosevelt’s nomination. She was doing so, she told the delegates, because “he is one of the few men in our public life who has been responsive to modern movement. Because of that, because the program will need a leader of invincible courage, of open mind, of democratic sympathies—one endowed with power to interpret the common man and to identify himself with the common lot, I heartily second the nomination.” The crowd had greeted her appearance at the podium, a journalist wrote, with “a volcano of emotion and applause”; as she spoke, another reporter noted, “all noise ceased. The usual walking about…stopped. Everyone listened.”

  Addams saw the movement whole. “A great party has pledged itself to the protection of children, to the care of the aged, to the relief of overworked girls, to the safeguarding of burdened men,” she said. “Committed to these humane undertakings, it is inevitable that such a party should appeal to women, should seek to draw upon the great reservoir of their moral energy, so long undesired and unutilized in practical politics….The new party has become the American exponent of a world-wide movement toward juster social conditions, a movement which America, lagging behind other great nations, has been unaccountably slow to embody in political action.”

  Roosevelt thanked her profusely. “I prized your action not only because of what you are and stand for, but because of what it symbolized for the new movement,” TR telegraphed Addams. “Our party stands for social and industrial justice, and we have a right to expect that women and men will work within the party for the cause with the same high sincerity of purpose and with like efficiency.”

  That same year, Israel Zangwill wrote Roosevelt to check in on the former president’s views about the ideas of The Melting-Pot. An enthusiastic TR replied,

  Now as a matter of fact that particular play I shall always count among the very strong and real influences upon my thought and my life. It has been in my mind continually, and on my lips often during the last three years. It not merely dealt with the “melting pot,” with the fusing of all foreign nationalities into an American nationality, but it also dealt with the great ideals which it is just as essential for the native born as for the foreign to realize and uphold if the new nationality is to represent a real addition to the sum total of human achievement.

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  A speech saved his life. Leaving the Hotel Gilpatrick in Milwaukee on the evening of Monday, October 14, 1912, Roosevelt was shot in the chest by a deranged unemployed saloonkeeper who said the ghost of William McKinley had ordered him to kill Roosevelt. The bullet, a .38, was slowed by his metal glasses case, an army overcoat, and a fifty-page manuscript of the address the candidate was scheduled to deliver that night. “They wanted to rush me to the hospital,” Roosevelt was recalled to have said. “It was nonsense; I had to make that speech! I knew that there were just two things that could happen: either I would die or I would recover. If I were to die, I specially wished to make the speech; if I were to recover, I might as well make it. And I have never thought of death as a calamity, as many do. It doesn’t seem to me a thing to dread.”

  In the auditorium shortly thereafter, Roosevelt persevered. “At one time I promoted five men for gallantry on the field of battle,” he told the crowd. “Afterward in making some inquiries about them I found that two of them were Protestants, two Catholic, and one a Jew. One Protestant came from Germany and one was born in Ireland. I did not promote them because of their religion. It just happened that way. If all five of them had been Jews I would have promoted them, or if all five of them had been Protestants I would have promoted them; or if they had been Catholics.”

  This, Roosevelt said, was the American way. “I ask in our civic life that we in the same way pay heed only to the man’s quality of citizenship, to repudiate as the worst enemy that we can have whoever tries to get us to discriminate for or against any man because of his creed or birthplace.”

  He carried that bullet in his chest for the rest of his life. In 1919, two days before the seemingly unimaginable happened—the death of Theodore Roosevelt, at about four o’clock on the morning of Monday, January 6, from an embolism—the former president mused about the country. “There can be here no divided allegiance,” he wrote in those final stages. “We have room for but one flag, the American flag; for but one language, the English language; for but one soul loyalty, and that is loyalty to the American people.”

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�Remember the Ladies,” Abigail Adams had written her husband, John, in 1776. The long campaign for women’s suffrage did not succeed until 1920, at the end of the Wilson years.

  It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union.

  —SUSAN B. ANTHONY, arguing for the equality of women before the law, 1873

  I would build a wall of steel, a wall as high as Heaven, against the admission of a single one of those Southern Europeans who never thought the thoughts or spoke the language of a democracy in their lives.

  —Georgia governor CLIFFORD WALKER, to the Second Imperial Klonvokation of the Ku Klux Klan, Kansas City, Missouri, 1924

  THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES typed the speech himself. It was, in a sense, the least Woodrow Wilson could do. Like many American men, he had hardly been an enthusiastic supporter of the decades-long struggle for a constitutional amendment on women’s suffrage, but, in the middle of a world war, Wilson had changed his mind and was now, in the early autumn of 1918, ready to take the case to the Senate. After generations of activism—of appeals in the press, of marches and rallies, of vigils and hunger strikes—supporters of extending voting rights to women had at last convinced the most powerful man in the nation to stand up for them.

  On Monday, September 30, 1918, Wilson went to Capitol Hill to deliver the speech he had composed on his typewriter. His mission: to urge lawmakers to approve the proposed Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution granting women the vote. The war against the European imperial powers, Wilson told the Senate, was also a war for a more inclusive and enlightened era. The people of the world, he told the Senate, were “looking to the great, powerful, famous Democracy of the West to lead them to the new day for which they have so long waited; and they think…that democracy means that women shall play their part in affairs alongside men and upon an equal footing with them.” Women had answered the call to service in war; they would soon be essential to the peace. “Without their counsellings,” Wilson said, “we shall be only half wise.”

  Wilson had long been familiar with the energy driving the suffrage movement. On arriving in Washington for his first inauguration five years earlier, in March 1913, the president-elect wondered why there were so few well-wishers at Union Station or on the streets.

  “Where,” Wilson said, “are the people?”

  “Oh,” he was told, “they are out watching the suffrage parade.”

  The demonstration that day was enormous—and chaotic. Angry men taunted the marchers and tried to break their ranks. The suffragists, the Baltimore American reported, “practically fought their way foot by foot up Pennsylvania Avenue, through a surging throng that completely defied Washington police.” Only the arrival of cavalry troops from Fort Myer, the army base across the Potomac, brought a semblance of order to the day.

  In a small meeting in the East Room later that month with Alice Paul, a leading advocate for suffrage, and seven of her colleagues, Wilson refused to take up their cause. The fact that the fight for the right to vote had been waged for seven decades—since, really, the founding convention of the movement at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848—did not impress the president. “I do not care to enter into a discussion of that,” Wilson told his visitors, ending the conversation.

  It was not, then, an auspicious beginning. But the White House meeting was only that—a beginning. Alice Paul soon headquartered herself on Lafayette Square and launched a persistent campaign of protest at Wilson’s doorstep. Born in 1885 to a distinguished Quaker family in New Jersey, Paul had been influenced by the more militant British suffrage movement during a stay in England from 1907 to 1910. There, under the leadership of Emmeline Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union, women moved from speechmaking to active street protest, including face-to-face challenges to lawmakers. If arrested, the suffragists, including the visiting Paul, would refuse food in jail, leading to highly publicized force-feedings. The gruesome details of prison officials jamming tubes carrying milk and mush through the protestors’ nostrils to prevent starvation lent moral urgency to the suffragist cause. “The essence of the campaign of the suffragettes,” Paul told American audiences on her return, “is opposition to the Government”—and a government that imprisoned and mistreated women for seeking the justice of the franchise was clearly worth opposing.

  Alice Paul, a leading suffragist, headquartered herself on Lafayette Square and focused intense reform pressure on President Wilson at the gates of the White House.

  The roots of the long campaign to extend the vote and equal protection to women are older even than the Republic. A few months before the Second Continental Congress broke decisively with Great Britain, John Adams was at work in Philadelphia when he received an engaging letter from his wife, Abigail. “I long to hear that you have declared an independency—and by the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors,” Mrs. Adams wrote. “Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.”

  The July 1848 Seneca Falls women’s rights convention—brought about by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, among others—issued a “Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions” that sanctified a movement’s creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.” The italics are mine; the vision the suffragists’. Susan B. Anthony, an essential figure, echoed the point down the years: “It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed this Union,” she said in 1873 after she illegally cast a ballot for U. S. Grant for president. “And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people—women as well as men.”

  Through the years, by fits and starts and in good times and bad, the work went on. The climactic drama came in the Wilson years when Alice Paul, focused on the passage and ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, kept the pressure on. Demonstrators known as “silent sentinels” stood outside the White House every day; when arrested (on charges of interfering with traffic), they, like their British counterparts, would refuse food in jail, leading to the dreaded force-feedings. During the 1916 State of the Union, suffragists in the House gallery displayed a banner that read MR. WILSON, WHAT ARE YOU DOING FOR WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE? For “the first time in American history,” the historian Jean H. Baker wrote, “an organized group of dissidents, not just a single individual like Thoreau, had employed passive resistance and civil disobedience in a direct confrontation with presidential authority.”

  And they prevailed when Wilson agreed to endorse the proposed amendment, which was ratified on Wednesday, August 18, 1920. “Will you take the opportunity to say to my fellow citizens that I deem it one of the greatest honors of my life that this great event, the ratification of this amendment, should have occurred during the period of my administration,” he wrote the suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt in the summer of 1920. “Nothing has given me more pleasure than the privilege that has been mine to do what I could to advance the cause of ratification and to hasten the day when the womanhood of America would be recognized by the nation on the equal footing of citizenship that it deserves.”

  Catt herself wrote a letter to her staff on Thanksgiving Day 1920, a few weeks after women in all forty-eight states had the right to cast ballots for president for the first time under the Nineteenth Amendment. “As I look back over the years,” Catt wrote, “I realize that the greatest thing in the long campaign for us was not its crowning victory, but the di
scipline it gave us all….It was a great crusade, the world has seen none more wonderful….My admiration, love, and reverence go out to that band which fought and won a revolution…with congratulations that we were permitted to establish a new and good thing in the world.”

  Though he was slow to join the side of the angels, Wilson got suffrage right. The ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment was a landmark in American life, the result of nearly a century and a half—if we date things from Abigail Adams’s admonition to her husband to “remember the ladies”—of toil. Leadership came from those without office; women resisted the suffocating opinion of generations to create new opinion, and new law, and a new nation.

  And yet, and yet—there is always an “and yet” in American history. Taken all in all, Woodrow Wilson and his age are revealing examples of the battles between hope and fear. The era of the suffrage triumph, for instance, was also the age of segregation, of the suppression of free speech in wartime, of the Red Scare of 1919–20, and of the birth of a new Ku Klux Klan. The story of America is thus one of slow, often unsteady steps forward. If we expect the trumpets of a given era to sound unwavering notes, we will be disappointed, for the past tells us that politics is an uneven symphony.

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  In the autumn of 1914, Wilson was in mourning. Ellen, his beloved wife, had died in the White House, of Bright’s disease, a kidney ailment, on Thursday, August 6. With Europe heading into war, Wilson labored under the weight of his grief and of his responsibilities. In that first season of the Great War, on Thursday, November 12, 1914, the president received a delegation of black leaders. In the 1912 campaign, Wilson had promised African Americans “absolute fair dealing,” only to allow the segregation of federal departments. His callers were unhappy and weren’t shy about speaking their minds.