Mr. Wilson's War

by John Dos Passos

  The Candidate Switches Colonels

  It was becoming evident that the split between Roosevelt and Taft supporters amongst the Republicans was so irreconcilable that for the first time in years the man the Democrats were going to pick at their convention in June would have a real chance to be elected. Woodrow Wilson was beginning to understand that taking over the progressive platform would serve him even better in national politics than it had in New Jersey. The reformers of the South and West had a superstitious horror of Wall Street. To establish himself in the running against such dangerous radical contenders as Roosevelt and La Follette he had publicly to kick away the stool which had offered him his first foothold.

  Colonel Harvey’s Harper’s Weekly, published by the old New York publishing house which the Morgans were known to control, was carrying at the head of its editorial column a rubric: “For President, Woodrow Wilson.” To the West that meant Wall Street’s blessing.

  The ministrations of the mercurial Harvey, which a few short months ago had seemed so congenial, were becoming an embarrassment. There were rumors that Harvey himself, though he pretended to cantankerous independence, shared the misgivings of his financial associates.

  Colonel House before enlisting wholeheartedly in the Wilson campaign, had to discover how the winds blew on Franklin Square. A few days after House’s first meeting with Wilson, the two colonels conferred.

  Next day House wrote Bryan, undoubtedly coloring his narrative a little to suit the Commoner’s prejudices:

  “I took lunch with Colonel Harvey yesterday. It is the first time I have met him. I wanted to determine what his real attitude was towards Governor Wilson, but I think I am left as much in the dark as ever.

  “He told me that everybody south of Canal Street was in a frenzy against Governor Wilson and said they were bringing all sorts of pressure upon him to oppose him. He said he told them he had an open mind and that if they would convince him he was a dangerous man he would do so.

  “He said that Morgan was particularly virulent …”

  House ended diplomatically by asking Mr. Bryan’s advice as how best to meet these attacks from entrenched privilege.

  The day after Colonel House left for Texas to make sure of his state delegation, Wilson and Colonel Harvey met at the Manhattan Club as guests of another honorary colonel, a Kentucky one this time, Henry Watterson who edited the Louisville Courier-Journal. Marse Henry, the “grand old man” of Southern journalism, had been a Wilson backer since the early days. The conversation seems to have been about where to go for campaign contributions.

  Just as Wilson was leaving, Colonel Harvey, maybe stung by some carefully barbed remark Colonel House dropped on purpose in his ear, or from a tactless communication from a Wilson enthusiast from the literary bureau, asked Wilson whether there was anything left of the cheap talk about Harvey’s promoting him on behalf of the “interests”!

  “Yes, there is,” Wilson blurted out sharply: some of his supporters felt that Harvey’s backing was having a bad effect in the West.

  Harvey bristled. “Is there anything I can do except to stop advocating your nomination?”

  Wilson shook his head. “I think not,” he said.

  Harvey replied, “I shall sing low.” According to Harvey, Governor Wilson left the room abruptly.

  Next week “For President, Woodrow Wilson” was no longer seen at the head of Harvey’s editorial column. The candidate had switched colonels.

  The incident made a great flurry in the press. The Republican papers blew it up as another instance of Wilson’s ingratitude.

  On the other hand Tumulty’s publicitymen managed to make political hay by circulating the tale that what had really happened was that Wilson had righteously turned down insidious offers of contributions to his campaign by Thomas Fortune Ryan and other malefactors of great wealth who thought they could buy the Democratic Party. Marse Henry announced that this version was not in accord with the facts. Wilson countered with the statement that Colonel Watterson was “a fine old gentleman,” implying that his memory was not to be trusted, and became touchy with the reporters whenever they brought the subject up.

  On the whole the Wilson men had the better of it. The impression left in the public mind was that Wilson had simply told the truth when asked a direct question, like the good honest oldtime Presbyterian schoolmaster that he was.

  The loss of the New Jersey colonel as a political handyman made the acquisition of the urbane Texan, with whom Wilson had so much more in common, all the more agreeable. The correspondence between the two became affectionate to a degree.

  The Grand Dress Parade

  While House was in Austin laboring to get just the right men picked for the Texas delegation Wilson’s campaign had to take another hurdle. Just before the Jackson Day dinner in Washington in January 1912 a corporation lawyer whom Wilson had tangled with as a Princeton trustee during the quadrangle row, turned over to the New York Evening Sun a letter Wilson had written him five years back (when they were still good friends) suggesting that something be done “at once dignified and effective, to knock Mr. Bryan once for all into a cocked hat.”

  Fortunately for Democratic harmony Bryan was stopping off with Josephus Daniels in North Carolina when the reporters poked this bit of news under his nose and asked for comment. Daniels was a liberal newspaper editor who genuinely believed in both Bryan and Wilson. He exuded good nature. His Raleigh home was famous for easy hospitality, good conversation and crisp fried chicken. He urged Bryan not to go off halfcocked and was delighted when the Commoner growled out the comment that the Sun had been trying to knock him into a cocked hat for years and hadn’t succeeded yet.

  The “cocked hat” letter threw Wilson’s literary bureau into a panic. Everybody knew that he could never be nominated against Bryan’s opposition. Even Wilson himself felt that his presidential aspirations hung by a thread. On the train down to Washington on his way to the Jackson Day dinner he gave vent to his feelings in a letter to the sympathetic Mrs. Peck:

  “… The banquet in the evening is to be a grand dress parade of candidates for the presidential nomination … I hate the whole thing but it is something ‘expected’ of me by my friends and backers … There is a merry war against me. I am evidently regarded as the strongest candidate at present, for all the attacks are directed against me … this rain of small missiles makes me feel like a common target for the malicious (by the way nearly all the darts are supplied by Princetonians who hate me), and somewhat affect my spirits for a day at a time (the strongest nerves wince under persistent spite); but for the most part I go serenely on my way. I believe very profoundly in an overruling Providence and do not believe that any real plans can be thrown off the track. It may not be intended that I shall be President—but that would not break my heart—and I am content to await the event, doing what I honorably can, in the meantime, to discomfort mine enemies.”

  That night Wilson discomforted his enemies by a speech which combined candor with tact. He made no attempt to deny that he had disagreed with some of Bryan’s policies in the past, but proclaimed that he had ever been in accord with his underlying principles. He ended by turning to the Commoner, who sat near him at the speaker’s table, with what the politicians round about described as “a chesterfieldian gesture”: “Let us apologize to each other that we ever suspected or antagonized one another; let us join hands once more—all around the circle of community of counsel and of interest which will show us at the last to have been indeed the friends of our country and of mankind.”

  Applause drowned out the last words. Bryan’s face, we are told, was “a study.” Afterwards he confided to a friend that it was the greatest speech in American political history. The New York World summed up the situation next day with a headline: WILSON LEADS IN CLASH OF BOOMS.

  La Follette’s Blunder

  Three weeks later Wilson won another oratorical victory. At the annual banquet of a publishers’ association in Philadelphia he spo
ke on the same program with the redoubtable Bob La Follette who for months had been campaigning for the Republican nomination as ardently as Wilson had for the Democratic. Wilson started by poking a little gentle fun at publishers: he used as a writer to be afraid they wouldn’t publish him, and now, as a public figure, he was afraid when they did. He frothily outlined some of the principles of what was soon to be known as the New Freedom, and sat down amid great applause.

  La Follette arrived late. He was suffering from indigestion and overwork. He had been drinking. He was desperately worried because his daughter was in hospital and was to undergo a dangerous operation next morning. He brought with him one of those bulky and closely reasoned manuscripts with which he was accustomed to flagellate the United States Senate. It was a long denunciation of the evils of the kept press. It may be that he’d taken a shot of whiskey too many in an effort to settle his stomach before he came.

  He spoke for two hours with more than usual asperity, shaking his finger in the faces of the newspapermen opposite him. He lost his place in his manuscript, repeated himself, lost his temper at some hecklers and ended with his audience slinking off to the rathskeller below. “There go some of the fellows I’ve been hitting,” he shouted. According to Owen Wister he shook his fist after them. “They don’t want to hear about themselves.” The speech was the worst failure of his life.

  The toastmaster, representing the publishers who had sponsored the function, felt called upon to apologize to the audience for the speaker’s rudeness. La Follette rushed to the washroom immediately after he finished speaking and was taken with a fit of vomiting. His soninlaw hurried him back to Washington in a nervous collapse.

  Meanwhile the embittered newspapermen were scattering throughout the country to fill their columns with the news of his failure. The headline in The Philadelphia Record ran: WILSON HERO OF BIG FEAST.

  The Baltimore Convention

  The spring of 1912 was a time of political tension in both parties. Among the Republicans the standpatters were closing ranks round Taft as a reluctant leader. La Follette’s collapse at Philadelphia gave T.R. the cue he was waiting for to throw his Rough Riders’ felt hat into the ring as Progressive candidate.

  Among the Democrats there were even more contenders for the throne. Hearst was mobilizing his newspapers and his millions in support of Champ Clark of Missouri, the speaker of the House of Representatives, a rustic figure in black slouch hat and frock coat whose campaign ditty was “You got to quit kickin’ my dawg around.” Senator Underwood and Governor Judson Harmon, Ohio’s favorite son, each had more organization and money support behind him than Wilson had. Bryan was still keeping his thin lips clenched in stony silence when asked whether he would try for the nomination.

  Only Texas and Pennsylvania were surely for Wilson. Colonel House came north in early April with assurances that the Texas delegation was solid; and, in Pennsylvania, Vance McCormick, A. Mitchell Palmer and William B. Wilson of the anthracite miners’ union had the conservative machine on the run. But as spring advanced Wilson’s hopes took a bad beating in the state primaries. When the delegates gathered in Baltimore in the midst of a ferocious heat wave Wilson’s chances of nomination looked slimmer than at any time since his campaign began.

  The day the convention was called to order, Colonel House, having written Wilson: “I have done everything I could up to now to advise and anticipate every contingency,” embarked on the Cunarder Laconia for his customary summer trip to Europe. He was proving his detachment by planning a tour that would take him to Sweden and Finland and as far afield as Moscow. He had done his best, now he must care for his health.

  William Jennings Bryan arrived in Baltimore fresh from the press gallery of the Republican convention in Chicago. There he had seen, with some satisfaction, Taft’s nomination steamrollered through against the sullen opposition of the progressives, with the result that more than three hundred delegates turned in blank ballots and surged into Orchestra Hall to form the Progressive Party under the lash of Theodore Roosevelt’s sibilant exhortations: “We stand at Armageddon and battle for the Lord.”

  The Commoner was convinced that the reforms for which he had so long cried in the wilderness were at last just under the horizon. If the Democrats nominated a candidate who might be labelled a reactionary T.R. would scoop up the progressive votes of both parties and might very well win. It was Bryan’s business to keep the “interests”—typified in his mind by Whitney and Hearst and Thomas Fortune Ryan—from taking over the convention. During the long sweaty days and tumultuous nights in the Baltimore Armory it was Bryan’s grizzled fringe of hair and craggy nose and wide lipless mouth, clenched above a continually beating palmleaf fan, that dominated the proceedings.

  While the delegates braved heat prostration in Baltimore, Woodrow Wilson, at the governor’s mansion at Sea Girt, was amazing his wife and daughters by his coolness and amusing them with imitations of T.R. in Chicago threshing his arms and whooping it up for Armageddon. “Good old Teddy,” he would chuckle, “what a help he is.”

  Tumulty had a direct telephone line to campaign headquarters at the Emerson Hotel. The first problem his campaign manager McCombs put up to Wilson was whether to back Bryan in his fight for a progressive as chairman. McCombs wanted Wilson to hedge in the interests of harmony. As Eleanor Wilson tells the story, her father and the girls went up to her mother’s bedroom to consult. Her mother was often poorly these days. They were already worried about her health. “There must be no hedging,” was Mrs. Wilson’s advice. “What’s the use of having a principle if you don’t stick to it,” had always been her motto. Sitting on the edge of his wife’s bed Wilson wrote out a telegram to Bryan: “You are quite right …”

  All night Tumulty clung to the telephone, clocking the cheering that followed the nominating speeches. The Wilson crowd yelled for twenty minutes longer than Champ Clark’s but when the balloting began Champ Clark was ahead. His strength increased until it was only the twothirds rule that kept him from the nomination.

  Only Texas and Pennsylvania stood firm for Wilson. The galleries were all for Wilson; Wilson telegrams were pouring in; the Baltimore Sun, which was the first newspaper that came to the delegate’s hand every morning, talked nothing but Wilson; but Clark still had the majority vote.

  Bryan turned the tide. He early announced that he would oppose whatever candidate Tammany and the financial magnates stood for. After Boss Murphy had delivered his Tammany votes to what seemed to be a stampede for Clark, Bryan got to his feet and asked for the floor. His Nebraska delegation had been instructed for Clark and he had dutifully been voting for Clark. Now he declared he would cast his vote for Nebraska’s second choice: Woodrow Wilson.

  Still the Champ Clark forces seemed to be in control. Saturday morning McCombs called Governor Wilson to the phone. “The jig is up,” McCombs said, and told Wilson to release his delegations. Wilson drafted a telegram. Mrs. Wilson and the girls comforted each other by promising themselves a long quiet summer on the English lakes.

  It was William Gibbs McAdoo, the energetic promoter of the first Hudson River tube, who had been promoting Wilson as energetically as he had under river transportation, who first got wind of the telegram. He bawled out McCombs and snatched for the telephone. He begged Wilson not to quit; he assured him there was no conceivable way Clark could get twothirds of the vote.

  The convention went on and on. The Sunday that ended the first week was a day of smoky hotel rooms, of finagling and palaver. It’s hard to imagine that Bryan was not still hoping against hope that maybe his would be the name to break the deadlock.

  On the Jersey coast the Wilsons went quietly to a little country church at Spring Lake. In the afternoon the governor read Morley’s life of Gladstone aloud to the family.

  Meanwhile, according to the reporters, “the plain people of the hills” were making their views felt. Telegrams kept coming in disclaiming any candidate controlled by Tammany or Hearst or Thomas Fortune Ryan.
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br />   Monday morning the New York World ran an editorial saying that the nomination of Wilson was the only way to save the election from Roosevelt. On the sixth day and the thirtieth ballot Wilson’s total passed Champ Clark’s for the first time. Wilson told the newspapermen he was receiving the news with a riot of silence.

  On the fortysixth ballot he was nominated.

  At the governor’s mansion at Sea Girt pandemonium ruled. Brass bands played “Hail to the Chief” and “The Conquering Hero Comes.” Every room swarmed with reporters and with hoarse veterans of the Baltimore Armory, each telling how singlehanded he had snatched Wilson’s nomination out of the hands of the Wall Street interests. The ladies of the family, whom Wilson liked to keep in what he considered a decent seclusion, were persecuted by featurewriters and photographers. Eleanor Wilson told of finding her mother in the clutches of a peculiarly hardfaced female journalist.

  “ ‘Have you some sort of prejudice against jewelry Mrs. Wilson?’ the woman was asking. I realized how impossible it would be for her to understand why mother had no jewelry,” Eleanor Wilson wrote in retrospect: “Mother, who had sacrificed for us, so that father might have the books he needed, and the vacations; that we might study art and singing; that there might be always room in the house for relatives and friends. I thought of her rigid economy, her perennial brown dress and hat … Mother said ‘No, I have no prejudice against it. We just haven’t any.’ ”

  Chapter 4

  THE NEW FREEDOM

  IN the campaign that followed all Governor Wilson needed to do was to address the throngs the faithful Tumulty marshalled on the lawn at Sea Girt, charming them with his calculated otherworldliness and with the “glittering generalities” that had disquieted George Record, while the Republicans tore each other to pieces.