Mr. Wilson's War

by John Dos Passos

  Wilson had the knack of resting when he had to. He could sleep for hours on end. He took great pleasure in the sluggish green Cumberland countryside. He found entertaining friends, sat on a bench outside the local pub chatting with the northcountry characters, took walks between showers and read Browning and the lake poets to the girls or sang college songs after supper. Reverently he attended Sunday services in the little stone church where Wordsworth lay buried. In the fall he returned to Princeton in roaring health and ready for battle.

  Though he had started his campaign with the trustees on his side, now the board, like the faculty, had split into warring camps. The university seethed with backbiting. Wilson showed no ability to meet disagreement halfway. Whoever wasn’t for him must be against him. Associations were disrupted. There were charges and countercharges. Old friends crossed the street to avoid speaking.

  Even his dear Jack Hibben, whom he had made acting president during his absence, turned against him at a faculty meeting when he brought his “quad plan,” which would abolish the eating clubs, to a vote. Wilson’s propositions were defeated. “Nobody can make a gentleman associate with a mucker,” said a prominent alumnus.

  For the first time in his life Woodrow Wilson failed to get his own way. He wrote a friend, “I have got nothing out of the transaction but complete defeat and mortification.”

  After his illness the university furnished him an assistant to take some of the routine work off his hands. President Wilson was away from Princeton a great deal now, lecturing about the country, conferring with publisher friends and political sponsors in New York. He took winter holidays in Bermuda where a charming American hostess named Mrs. Peck collected prominent and amusing people at little dinners for his entertainment. Academic life began to pall. He was being taken up by the great world.

  The conflict at Princeton had settled down to a tug of war between the advocates of a new graduate school under Dean West and Wilson supporters who wanted first to go ahead with his undergraduate quadrangles. There was not enough money in sight for both projects. Then an old grad named Wyman suddenly died, in May 1910, leaving several million dollars in his will for a new graduate school. So that there would be no mistake as to his intentions he appointed the dean as executor. This meant victory for Andrew J. West.

  The eating clubs were to remain as exclusive as ever. Trustees began to speak hopefully of Wilson’s coming resignation.

  President Wilson wasn’t as afflicted by his defeat as his friends had expected. He had lost interest in Princeton when he found he couldn’t have his own way there. His ambitions had settled on a higher goal. He was planning to become President of the United States, nothing less.

  When friends suggested that he didn’t know enough about practical politics he pointed to his rows with the Princeton faculty. “Professional politicians,” his daughter Eleanor quoted him as saying, “have little to teach me; they are amateurs compared with some I’ve dealt with in the Princeton fights.”

  Kingmaker from Vermont

  Colonel Harvey, looking forward with relish to the role of presidentmaker, noted Woodrow Wilson’s disenchantment with academic life. He was planning to run him for governor of New Jersey as a preliminary to the Democratic Party’s nomination for the presidential race in 1912.

  George Harvey knew his way around in New Jersey politics. Having started life clerking in a Vermont country store he’d served his apprenticeship in journalism with the Springfield Republican and covered the Garden State for the New York World. A sharp pen, an acid tongue with a touch of the old crackerbarrel style combined with a convivial streak to carry him far in New Jersey. He was somewhat of a dandy. One governor, who wanted to make his administration a fashionable success, made young Harvey a colonel on his staff to handle the entertaining at the summer mansion at Sea Girt and provided him with a sinecure in the Department of Banking and Insurance. For a while he edited the Newark Journal and at the age of twentyeight was picked by Pulitzer to be managing editor of the New York World.

  From the time when at fifteen he managed to attend the Democratic state convention in Vermont he kept a shrewd eye on the political pot. He backed Grover Cleveland in 1892 and made such a killing in Wall Street that he was able to buy The North American Review.

  Dabbling in New Jersey banks and streetcar companies along with his wealthy and politicalminded friends William C. Whitney and Thomas Fortune Ryan he became associated with another convivial gentleman who had started life clerking in a store, Senator James Smith, Jr.

  Senator Smith was undisputed boss of Democratic state politics in New Jersey. He was as popular with the poor and downtrodden as he was with the public utilities. He was a tall and handsome man. His pink and white face under the silk hat was described as being as innocent as a child’s. A lavish entertainer, a free spender of his own and other people’s money, he was known as a prominent Catholic layman. It was said of him that not a day passed that he didn’t attend a funeral.

  Muckraking was in the air. Reform was sweeping out of the West. Newspapers were saying hard things of a swarm of lobbyists known as the Black Horse Cavalry that infested the statehouse at Trenton. Stirred out of their torpor by echoes of Teddy Roosevelt’s hue and cry against the control of politicians by malefactors of great wealth, the voters of New Jersey were beginning to yearn for righteousness.

  Senator Smith had three boys at Princeton. He had met President Wilson. He had heard him spoken of as being opposed to federal regulation of corporations, to woman’s suffrage, to the closed shop and to other bugaboos of men of means. The professor had even written kindly of political machines. Colonel Harvey invited Smith to a magnificent lunch at the private dining room he maintained at Delmonico’s for the benefit of the Harper publishing firm. There he managed to convince him that Woodrow Wilson as governor would head off the radicals and dress the state up with a few harmless reforms.

  The senator did take the precaution of sending an underling to ask “the Presbyterian priest” as he called Wilson, whether if he were elected he would set about “fighting and breaking down the existing Democratic organization.” President Wilson looked the man straight in the face with the grayeyed ingenuousness which was his greatest asset and said certainly not, “the last thing I should think of would be building up a machine of my own.”

  Boss Smith was convinced but Wilson continued to play hard to get. He was spending the summer with his family in a boarding house at a painters’ colony at Old Lyme that Ellen Wilson loved. At various conferences with the politicians he made no commitments whatsoever. Meanwhile he was asking the advice of such college friends as had stuck to him through the battles at Princeton and of his old cronies who had become opinionmoulders through editorial positions in New York magazines.

  Ellen Wilson’s counsel was sought at every step. The Wilsons went through weeks of agonizing indecision. There wasn’t any question that Woodrow intended to be President. The question was would the governorship of New Jersey be the best steppingstone. Finally Ellen Wilson, that smart little lady who, on top of her other virtues, was developing a discriminating political sense, told him to go in and win.

  So it came about that the day before the Democratic convention met in the Trenton opera house on September 15, 1910, Colonel Harvey and Senator Smith went to work, operating from the boss’s suite at the adjoining hotel, to railroad the nomination through. They were up all night arguing with the delegates. They had a rough time of it. All the liberal and progressive elements were opposed to the bosses’ candidate. Wilson was unknown to the political stalwarts of his own Mercer County. In important elections he hadn’t even voted. When his name was placed in nomination there were cries of “accredit him to Virginia, he’s not a Jerseyman.”

  Boss Smith said later it was one of the toughest nights in his career. With the help of the machine bosses of Hudson County he finally put Wilson’s name before the convention and bludgeoned the delegates into voting for it.

  William Inglis, H
arvey’s handyman, to whom the colonel entrusted the mission of fetching Professor Wilson over to Trenton, told of the embarrassment of waiting with the candidate at the Trenton House. Inglis had been instructed on no account to let his charge be seen until the nomination was a certainty.

  He ushered him into a stuffy little Victorian parlor reserved for ladies waiting for their escorts and closed the door. There they sat for two hours. Inglis was on tenterhooks but the professor was cool and seemed entirely relaxed. Inglis kept offering him a drink or a cup of tea. No he didn’t care for any. It wasn’t till after five in the afternoon that a delegate from Atlantic County rushed in, white as a sheet and all out of breath, to announce that the nomination had been made unanimous.

  A Leader at Last

  The convention was still in a sullen mood when Professor Wilson appeared on the stage of the opera house. James Kerney of the Trenton Evening Times who had not yet seen the candidate, described him as “… wearing a dark gray business suit with a sack coat, a type which he used almost exclusively. He had a dark felt hat with a narrow brim, with a knitted golf jacket under the coat. It was a bangup Democratic outfit.

  “Wilson looked the part of one of the romantic figures of American politics as he stood before that convention. He was in the pink of mental and physical condition, fresh from the golf-links, with all the color of the outdoors upon him, and a general appearance of having been battered by life and of having given it somewhat of a battering in return. Behind him was the background of teacher, writer, historian and educator. Here was the beginning of the ‘schoolmaster in politics.’ ”

  “As you know,” Wilson told the delegates, “I did not seek this nomination …” Not only had no pledges of any kind been given but none had been proposed or desired. The future was not for parties playing politics but for measures “conceived in the largest spirit, pushed by parties whose leaders were statesmen, not demagogues, who loved not their office but their duty and their opportunity for service.”

  It was his manner of speaking more than what he said, his air of cool determination, the flash of the gray eyes behind his noseglasses. Stockton Axson, the professor’s brotherinlaw listening from the wings, saw one wardheeler poke another with his elbow: “God, look at the man’s jaw,” he said. The smalltime lawyers and partyworkers and local officeholders who made up the delegations, sodden and blearyeyed from a night of wrangling, were carried away. “A leader at last. The Big Fellow was right,” men whispered hoarsely in each others’ ears. “Boss Smith knew what he was doing.” They cheered at every pause in Wilson’s short speech of acceptance. “Go on, go on,” they shouted.

  Wilson cast his eyes up at the flag above the platform and delivered himself of a carefully prepared peroration: “When I think of the flags our ships carry, the only touch of color about them, the only thing that moves as if it had a settled spirit—in their solid structure—it seems to me I see alternate strips of parchment on which are written the rights of liberty and justice and strips of blood spilled to vindicate these rights, and then—in the corner—a prediction of the blue serene into which every nation may swim which stands for these great things.”

  Young Joe Tumulty who had been bitterly opposed to the nomination had wormed his way from the back of the hall and was standing beside the band in front of the speakers’ stand. He used to tell how the men around him had tears streaming down their faces. He himself fell like Saul on the road to Damascus. An old progressive from Atlantic City named John Crandall was trying to fight off the spell. The drum was beating. Men were cheering at the top of their lungs. Finally he started wildly waving his hat and cane. “I’m sixty-five years old and still a damned fool,” he yelled.

  Four days later when Kerney went over to Prospect with Smith and James R. Nugent, the conservative city counsel of Newark, to plan the campaign, he noted that the boss seemed awed by the quiet sweep of the green lawns, the flowerbeds, the airy stateliness of the big house. “Jim,” he whispered to Kerney, “can you imagine anybody being damn fool enough to give this up for the heartaches of politics?”

  Jim Kerney who was thick with the reform element had been as opposed as Tumulty to Wilson’s nomination. When the professor came out to usher them into his booklined study Smith introduced Kerney as a troublesome progressive editor. Wilson shook hands warmly and said something about having Irish blood himself in his veins. Right away they were all bits of the old sod together.

  “The manner in which he grasped every suggestion” as to how to win over the local Mercer County partyleaders “was a revelation,” wrote Kerney admiringly. At the same time “he had his own notions about things … He did not favor the handshaking, house to house, Roosevelt style of whirlwind campaign and was against all day tours … One big evening speech in each county was his idea of the way of conducting the fight.”

  It fell to Nugent to arrange the practical details. He confided in Kerney that the professor was devilish hard to manage. It was Nugent who enlisted the services of irrepressible young Joe Tumulty who had already made a name for himself as an orator during his three years in the state legislature. Tumulty’s job was to keep the candidate in touch with the rank and file. They had been horrified to discover how ignorant Professor Wilson was of local issues.

  The only newspaper he read was Oswald Garrison Villard’s New York Evening Post. According to Kerney they told off a man named St. John to slant articles in the Evening Post especially for the political education of Woodrow Wilson.

  The Democratic leaders held their breath when the professor stepped out to open the campaign before a rough and tumble audience in St. Peter’s Hall in Jersey City. His first story fell flat, he fumbled and hesitated. Then all at once he caught the feel of his hearers. Taking advantage of his bad beginning he explained, in a simple man to man tone, that up to then he had asked audiences to accept ideas and principles … “and now I find myself in the novel position of asking you to vote for me for Governor of New Jersey.”

  Why shouldn’t he be embarrassed?

  He went on to outline his principles of independence from political and financial interests in a rather general way, but in such a sincere and personal tone that the whole hall was captivated. “Something new in stump speeches” commented the Trenton True American.

  Reform in the Jerseys

  The Republicans were running a reform campaign. Their aspirant for governor was a good man. On the whole the New Jersey reformers had come more from among the Republicans than from the tightly ruled Democratic organizations. Republican progressivism was greatly stimulated in 1906 when, during a furious campaign, La Follette cut a tornado path across the state. He made seventeen speeches in six days. “If in this eastern country,” announced the apostle of the Wisconsin Idea, “where the money power is strongest, I could do something towards bringing down the lightning, it would be more effective than anything I could do.”

  One of the reasons La Follette came into the state was that his friend and admirer, the prince of muckrakers Lincoln Steffens, had written up the reform movement in Jersey City in the magazines.

  Reform in Jersey City was the work of an Irishman named Mark Fagan. By profession an undertaker he had been raised in the machine. As a youth he read Henry George and was excommunicated by the Church for joining the Anti-Poverty League. He was a warmhearted simple sort of man with a great deal of the common touch. When he was elected mayor he tried “to make Jersey City a pleasant place to live in.” He even said, “I’d like to make it pretty.”

  His corporation counsel and general mentor was a tall shambling lawyer, so obsessed with the character of Abraham Lincoln that his friends claimed he was getting to look like him, named George L. Record. Record came from Maine. He had worked his way through Bates on jobs in a shoefactory and as carpenter’s helper and had come to the New York area to study law and make his fortune. Although originally a Democrat he was attracted by the progressive ideas of the Jersey Republicans. He and Fagan between them founded the Equal T
axation League which worked to cut the excessive tax reductions enjoyed by the railroads and utilities which threw the support of municipal government on the small home owners.

  Record had little success when he tried to run for office himself, but his influence was great as a lobbyist for progressive measures. He had put through a senatorial primary law. Now he was agitating for a corrupt practices act, for the sort of control of corporations which Hughes had put through in New York, for employers’ liability and other measures out of the progressive textbook as set forth in Oregon and Wisconsin. Record’s word carried great weight with reform elements in both parties. When he described Professor Wilson’s speeches as “glittering generalities beautifully phrased, but having nothing to do with the political campaign in New Jersey,” Wilson’s backers were dismayed. Record challenged Professor Wilson to debate the issues.

  To the consternation of the old pros running the Democratic campaign, who considered George Record a radical too dangerous even to speak to, Wilson accepted. The campaign committee pointed out that the professor was falling into a trap. Wilson announced, with the greatest air of innocence, that he still would be glad to debate with Mr. Record if the Republican committee would designate him as their spokesman. The Republican committee, who thought of Record as a son of the wild jackass, would do no such thing. In terms of sweet reasonableness Wilson suggested an exchange of letters.

  Record promptly fired off a long list of questions. Wilson’s nomination had been steamrollered through by bosses Nugent and Smith; how did he propose to abolish boss control in politics?