Where the Buck Stops

by Harry Truman

  In the beginning, Clark had a clear majority of the votes locked up, but not the two-thirds majority needed to give him the nomination. On the first ballot, Clark got 440½ votes, Wilson got 324, and a congressman named Oscar W. Underwood, a man from Alabama who was supported by conservative southerners, got 117½. The amount needed to give one of the candidates the nomination was 726 votes. Things continued pretty much the same way for eight more ballots, and then, on the tenth ballot, the Tammany Hall delegates gave their support to Clark. This Tammany Hall support brought Clark’s total up to 556, still not enough for the nomination, but it convinced Wilson that he had no chance, and he might as well throw in the towel. But just as he was ready to give up, one of his strongest supporters, a fellow named William Gibbs McAdoo, who later married one of Wilson’s daughters and also became the first chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, called him and begged him not to quit, and Wilson decided to stay in a while longer.

  And it was a good thing he did, because Tammany Hall’s support of Clark had a different effect on Bryan; as far as he was concerned, Tammany Hall was New York and New York was Wall Street and the bankers who controlled credit and currency flow and all the rest, and he got up and made a speech against August Belmont, who was the head of the Tammany organization. Belmont was immensely wealthy and a member of the famous old New York family, but he was also just a hack Tammany politician, and in a sense Bryan’s speech was also a speech against Champ Clark. He looked old Belmont right in the eye and pointed to him as he spoke, and then he would turn and look contemptuously at Clark, and then back at Belmont again. Just about everybody in the country was overwhelmed by that speech, and I think it was reported that they got something like 500,000 or 600,000 telegrams. It took quite a while longer, and the voting continued all the way from June 27 to July 2, but that was the end of the situation as far as Clark was concerned. Wilson began to move closer and closer to Clark after Bryan endorsed him officially, moving ahead of Clark in the thirtieth balloting. He had 633 votes in the forty-fifth balloting, and then everybody moved into his corner, and he won the nomination in the forty-sixth tally with 933 votes. Even my father and I decided that Bryan was right, and Wilson was the right man.

  All this made Wilson technically a minority candidate, of course, since the majority of the delegates at the convention and the general public behind them had started out by supporting Clark, but it made very little difference. It made about half as much difference as it did when Lincoln came in as a minority candidate, because a lot of people in Lincoln’s party continued to oppose him after he was nominated, and even after he was elected president, whereas most Democrats rallied behind Wilson and continued to support him after he was nominated. But there’s certainly no question about the fact that he was an unusual and unexpected man to be chosen.

  He was certainly no professional, knowledgeable politician. Back in his student days, Wilson said in his Ph.D. dissertation that leaders like governors and presidents should make decisions alone and not be influenced by hidden party machines or political bosses, and he tried hard to adhere to that philosophy when he went into politics himself. When he agreed to run for governor of New Jersey in 1910, he did so on the strict condition that nobody try to tell him which bills to support or which people to hire to run the state, and in the brief time he was in that job, he got through a number of laws designed to keep politics on the up-and-up, including a law that required political candidates to file financial statements on their campaigns and prohibited corporate contributions to those campaigns, and a law that simplified and improved voting methods. He even fired the top political boss in New Jersey, a fellow named James Smith, when Smith tried to tell him what to do. And at the Baltimore convention, Wilson made it clear that he wanted the nomination strictly on merit and not on the basis of a collection of little private deals, warning his associates that they’d be dropped if they even hinted at the possibility of a political office or other job to anyone, making it clear that “not a single vote . . . will be obtained by means of a promise.

  But he was also a practical man, and he learned pretty quickly that life just wasn’t that way, and he had to go to work and agree with political bosses on some things in order to get elected and then reelected. He couldn’t separate himself totally from the political bosses. Why, of course he couldn’t, because he’d never polled a precinct in his life, and he never had anything to do with the ordinary day-by-day fundamentals that make up politics like getting people out to vote, and he just didn’t have anybody down on the ground to go around and talk to people, to the general public. Politics is the ability to get along with people, and politics is government, and some of the so-called bosses are just people who understand the political situation from the ground up. Wilson had to make his peace with them in order to get into office and stay in office, and he never would have been nominated if the bosses at the Democratic Convention hadn’t been in control of certain parts of the organization that would nominate him. He still believed in personal leadership by men like himself, but leaders have to have an organization behind them, or they don’t get to lead.

  The other thing that surprised some people about Wilson’s quick political popularity and his nomination, his move in just a couple of years from Princeton University to the White House, was that very fact - the fact that he was a college professor, and a college professor who was extremely liberal in his political thinking at that. Nobody really expected an intellectual like Wilson to become president. Well, as far as his liberal political thinking is concerned, I’ve said several times in this book that I truly don’t like hanging those labels on people because they’re often misleading and mean different things to different folks; but if you want to call him a liberal, well, then he was a commonsense liberal. He wasn’t one of these synthetic liberals. He was a liberal who was for the welfare of all the people around in your neighborhood and my neighborhood. And when the time came for a decision between the special interests as represented by Belmont and Tammany Hall, and the people as represented by Wilson, the convention and then the country went for Wilson.

  He was certainly also a college professor; in fact, he was the first professional educator to become president of the United States. (Of course, the last president, as I write these lines, was a college president, too, but we’re talking about very different kinds of people here, Wilson had great knowledge and a great mind.) Getting back to real educators, a great many presidents taught school, of course. Garfield taught school, and several others taught school, but they were not the executive heads of great universities; Wilson was the first one, I think, in that position. And he was a lot more than “a mere college professor,” as some people called him at the time. He had written a history of the United States that’s still one of the basic sources of information on government in the United States from the beginning, and he’d studied history thoroughly and knew what it was all about. And he’d made it clear in his history, and in his speeches, that his dream and his plan was to set up a program that would continue the ideals of the Constitution, and of course everybody liked that idea.

  And of course, he was obviously and visibly one of the smartest people in the country and possibly in the world. Wilson had the idea that he was the smartest man in the United States, and as I’ve mentioned, people associated with him didn’t like that attitude, but it’s probably the truth. His speeches and his messages stated his case clearly and in a language that the people could understand, and he could always get his audience to be with him.

  As I mentioned earlier, he was the first president in a long time to go down to the Congress personally and read his State of the Union message, and it made a big hit with the Congress. He knew his messages by heart; he didn’t read them, he delivered them. I was talking to a fellow recently who used to sit behind Wilson when he was making his speeches, and he said Wilson would keep one hand behind him, and every time he would go through a point he would put his thumb on his first finger on the next point,
and the next point, and the next point, and the fellow said he followed his speeches through and he never changed a word in his delivery of his points after he’d written them. It takes a genius to do that. He was a great man, a truly great man. I’m certain that history and historians will mark Wilson down as one of our greatest presidents, and in a sense, this book is in some ways a history book, and I’m doing that right now.

  I think the country had pretty much made up its mind that it didn’t want any more of the Republican program by the time Wilson received the nomination and began to campaign for the presidency. Teddy Roosevelt had been a pretty popular president from his start in office on September 14, 1901, after McKinley had been shot on the sixth and died a week later, until the end of his second term on March 4, 1909; and Taft was also popular during his single term after Teddy Roosevelt finished up and said he wanted Taft to succeed him, but people were just sick of what the Republicans had accomplished, or rather, failed to accomplish. The plain fact is that we had a backward-looking program in regard to the welfare of the country and the world from Cleveland’s second term in 1892 to the end of Taft’s term in 1912, and it was obvious that Wilson was determined to change all that. So when the time came to make a decision about who should be our next president, and Bryan got on Wilson’s bandwagon, that did it.

  Wilson went up against three pretty strong opponents. The three were Taft, the Republican candidate, who was a strong contender because he was the incumbent, which always helps, and because he was a big, fat, hearty fellow who weighed 332 pounds and was always smiling, and whom most people liked on sight; Teddy Roosevelt, who came back from a highly publicized African safari saying that he’d made a mistake in backing Taft because Taft had proved too conservative in his actions as president, announcing that he was going to run himself on the Progressive Republican, or Bull Moose, ticket; and Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist candidate.

  Teddy Roosevelt was often more bull, without the moose, than substance. As I’ve said earlier in this book, he talked an awful lot about breaking up trusts but broke up darn few of them. He also talked a lot about serving the needs of the little man, but never really succeeded; I suppose he tried to a certain extent, but just couldn’t succeed because the controls at that time were again in the hands of the people who believed in special privilege. And up to 1912, he kept saying that he was absolutely against a president’s serving for more than two terms, but he now explained away his candidacy by saying that he meant a president shouldn’t serve more than two consecutive terms. To be completely honest about it, I think the best thing old Teddy ever did in his life was break up the Republican Party and get Wilson elected. And when people went to the polls on November 8, their preference for Wilson over the other three men was pretty obvious.

  Wilson ended up with almost as many popular votes himself as the combined total of his three opponents and more than four times as many electoral votes. Wilson got 6,286,820 votes, representing 42 percent, to old Teddy’s 4,126,020 votes, 27 percent, Taft’s 3,483,922 votes, 23 percent, and Debs’ 901,255 votes, representing 6 percent. And in the electoral vote, Wilson got 435 votes to Roosevelt’s eighty-eight and Taft’s eight; he carried forty states out of the forty-eight we had at the time, giving only California, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and Washington to Roosevelt and only Utah and Vermont to Taft. And in Wilson’s bid for reelection in 1916, when he was opposed by Charles Evans Hughes, later the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and where things were much closer because Teddy Roosevelt stayed out personally this time and reunited the Republicans by throwing his support to Hughes, Wilson still managed to win with 9,129,606 popular votes to Hughes’ 8,598,221 votes, and 277 electoral votes to Hughes’ 254.

  Wilson also had trouble in that second election, incidentally, because he had to take some strong action against Mexico in the years between 1913 and 1916, which made a lot of Catholics decide that Wilson was anti-Catholic and vote against him. They were dead wrong, of course, because the fact that Mexico’s population was mostly Catholic had absolutely nothing to do with it. At that time, we were not on very friendly terms with the Mexican government. A fellow named Porfirio Díaz was the head of the government for a very long time - from 1877 to 1911, in fact - and Americans invested around $1 billion in Mexican business; and then there was a revolution and a man named Francisco Madero took over and didn’t do a thing to protect Americans and American money; and then Madero was assassinated and another man, Victoriano Huerta, grabbed power by military means, not by election, and was even less friendly to Americans and to the United States, particularly after Wilson said he wouldn’t recognize a government built on assassination.

  Things got bad when Mexican soldiers arrested some American sailors in Tampico, Mexico, even though they released them right away, and then got worse when a fellow whose real name was Doroteo Arango, but who called himself Francisco Villa and then was nicknamed Pancho Villa instead of Francisco, and who pretended to be a Mexican patriot but was really nothing more than a bandit and a gangster, invaded Columbus, New Mexico, and killed a number of Americans. Wilson had to send naval forces to shell and occupy Veracruz and Army forces under General John J. Pershing into Chihuahua after Villa, which is why he lost all those Catholic votes.

  Huerta eventually resigned and left Mexico, lived in Europe for a while, and then came to the United States and died of alcoholism in an El Paso, Texas, jail. Pershing never caught Villa, who lived on for a number of years but was finally murdered by some of his own people in 1923. (Pershing’s expedition made him famous, however, and resulted in his becoming commanding general in World War I. And I served under him, of course.) But in more recent times, even though there was another Mexican president named Huerta, Adolfo de la Huerta, who came in by revolutionary means some years after that first one, Mexico has now had five or six duly elected presidents, and has followed a program of government on the basis of a chief executive and legislative and judicial branches, and it is as fine a government as there is anywhere in the world, including our own.

  I don’t think Wilson’s intervention into Mexico was an act of aggression, not at all. He had no territorial ambitions. He was trying to keep peace on the border and prevent a dictator from going outside his prerogative as president of Mexico. And the successors of that regime, at least the more recent successors, have all been friendly to us, and they’ve been statesmen and the finest kind of men. I know from personal experience because I’ve been acquainted with nearly every one of the men who’s been in there since Wilson’s time. I think that Wilson’s actions helped stabilize the Mexican government. I think that was his real intention. When those things were done, there was terrible turmoil going on in Mexico, but that’s been straightened out, and they now have a peaceful approach to elections and to everything else that takes place in that country. I don’t think Wilson had any intention of infringing on the prerogatives and powers of the Republic of Mexico. I don’t think his action was contrary to his policies of peace. Wilson was trying to achieve peace in the Western Hemisphere, and his efforts finally succeeded.

  I think I ought to stop at this point and say a few things about Wilson’s personal life, so that you know a bit more about the man who served as president during the crucial period of the first of the two terrible world wars. And I guess as good a way as any to start is to express my personal opinion that he should have continued to call himself Thomas Woodrow Wilson, or possibly even just plain Thomas Wilson if he was bent on dropping one of his names, because he was an austere-looking fellow all his life, and I think he’d be remembered more affectionately if people could think of him as Tom Wilson the way you think of Lincoln as Abe Lincoln. “Woodrow” always struck me as an awfully fancy name, but that was apparently the way Wilson wanted it, since he started calling himself T. Woodrow Wilson right after college, and then dropped his first name and that initial entirely.

  He really wasn’t as cold and reserved as he looked in his photos and public appe
arances, and he wanted almost desperately to help people and improve the world around him, but he was no bundle of laughs, either. He was essentially a serious type, possibly because he was descended from and surrounded by church people. His maternal grandfather, Thomas Woodrow, after whom he was named, was a Presbyterian minister; so was his father, Joseph Ruggles Wilson; one of his two sisters, Marion, married a minister, Anderson R. Kennedy; and his first wife, Ellen Louise, was the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, Samuel E. Axson, and granddaughter of another minister, I.S.K. Axson. But Wilson had a sense of humor, too, and because he had a thin face and wore glasses from the age of eight and considered himself an ugly man, he once wrote a limerick about himself that I still hear people quoting from time to time, even though I don’t think that most people remember that it was the work of our twenty-eighth president:

  For beauty I am not a star

  There are others more handsome by far

  But my face I don’t mind it

  For I am behind it

  It’s the people in front that I jar.

  Wilson was of Scotch-Irish descent; his maternal grandfather came to this country from Paisley, Scotland, in 1835, and his paternal grandfather, James Wilson, came here from Strabane, Ireland, in 1807. Wilson’s father grew up in Ohio and served as pastor in churches in Virginia, Georgia, and North Carolina, and his mother, Janet Woodrow Wilson, whom people called Jessie, also grew up in Ohio, and attended the Chillicothe Female Seminary before settling down with her husband and raising a family. The Wilsons had four children: Marion, who was the oldest, Annie next, then Thomas Woodrow, and finally Joseph, who became a newspaperman in Nashville and then an insurance man.

  Wilson, who was born on December 28, 1856, in Staunton, Virginia, where his father was then serving, worried his parents as a child because he seemed almost retarded and didn’t learn to read until he was nine, and he remained baffled by mathematics throughout his life. But he managed to get through his preliminary schooling and enrolled in the College of New Jersey, which later became Princeton University, in 1875, and graduated with a ninety average, after which he entered the University of Virginia Law School. He had to drop out due to illness, but studied at home and was admitted to the bar in 1882. But he didn’t really care for law and went back to school, entering Johns Hopkins and earning a Ph.D. in political science in 1886. (He’s the only president in our history, incidentally, with an earned doctorate. As I say, the man had quite a brain.) And then he taught law and political science at Bryn Mawr, history at Wesleyan in Middletown, Connecticut, politics and jurisprudence at Princeton, and finally became president of Princeton and president of the United States.