Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  Luckily, the Germans and Austrians had little stomach for a new quarrel, and they apologized for sinking the Ancona and the Persia. But Lansing was determined to get the Germans to disavow the Lusitania sinking as well. He pushed the Germans hard, and some in Berlin seemed willing to accept a diplomatic break with the United States, which would have been a likely prelude to war. Learning about the situation in Germany through House, who was again in Europe, Wilson reined Lansing in at the beginning of February. Meanwhile, prominent Democrats on Capitol Hill publicly rejected all talk of a break with Germany. At the middle of February, Wilson accepted a partial acknowledgment of liability for the Lusitania and an implicit agreement to defer claims for a post-war settlement. This was the quiet, anticlimactic end to a long wrangle, but it did not resolve the submarine controversy or lift the threat of war.2

  Lansing was able to bear down on the Germans because Wilson was away from Washington for part of this time. The political fight over military preparedness was almost as pressing as the diplomatic controversy over the submarines. At the middle of January, Tumulty warned, “I cannot impress upon you too forcibly the importance of an appeal to the country on the question of military preparedness.” Tumulty’s sources on Capitol Hill told him that support for preparedness was weak in both houses and public sentiment was indifferent and confused. Between Bryan’s pacifism and Roosevelt’s militarism, people did not know what to think, and the president needed to enlighten them by presenting sober, responsible arguments for an increase in armaments. “If your leadership in this matter is rejected,” Tumulty warned, “the Democratic party may as well go out of the business of government.”3 That argument fell on receptive ears, and after discussing the idea with the cabinet, Wilson authorized Tumulty to inform the press that the president was going to make a speaking tour about preparedness.

  Before he embarked on the tour, he spoke in New York on January 27—and showed how sorely out of practice he was. Wilson rambled among several subjects, barely touching on preparedness. He announced that he had changed his mind and now favored a tariff commission to investigate and advise on rates, and he grew personal, repeating his earlier confession about having “volcanic forces … concealed under a most grave and reverend exterior.” He admitted that he had also changed his mind about preparedness and sounded a familiar note from his writings about politics: “The minute I stop changing my mind as President, with the change of all the circumstances in the world, I will be a back number.” Two days later, in his first speeches on the tour, he regained his wonted focus and force. “I believe in peace. I love peace,” he declared, but he warned, “The world is on fire, and there is tinder everywhere.” Therefore, it had become “absolutely necessary that this country should prepare herself, not for war, not for anything that smacks in the least of aggression, but for adequate national defense.” He promised to uphold both peace and honor, but he confessed that he was dealing with “things that I cannot control—the actions of others.”4

  Those speeches set the pattern for the tour. During the following week, broken by his customary observance of the Sabbath, he gave fifteen speeches, talking several times each day, including brief remarks from the rear platform of his train. Accompanied by Edith, Tumulty, and a retinue of reporters, he traveled as far west as Kansas, speaking along the way in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa, and, on the return leg, in Missouri and Illinois again. The itinerary took him to the reputed strongholds of anti-war sentiment, and the tour harked back to his forays around New Jersey as governor to advocate his reform program. But now that he was president, it also took on the trappings of his 1912 campaign. Big crowds gathered almost everywhere he appeared—15,000 in Milwaukee, 18,000 in Des Moines—and parades escorted him to his appearances. These events afforded many people their first look at the new First Lady, who was frequently photographed beaming at her husband’s side. Yet not everyone warmed to Wilson’s message. In Kansas, the reception matched the winter weather. The Republican governor, who opposed increased preparedness, gleefully reported that the newspapermen on the train “said that the president’s reception was the coldest he received any place.” In most places, however, including heavily German Wisconsin, the audiences cheered wildly and applauded the president’s message.5

  In making this tour, Wilson was exercising an aspect of political leadership that he prized, excelled at, and enjoyed. He was educating the public: explaining his programs and sharing his larger thoughts. These speeches allowed him to restate his grand vision of America’s role in the world. “America has no reason for being unless her destiny and her duty be ideal,” he avowed in Milwaukee. They also allowed him to draw a sharp line between himself and, as he said in Des Moines, “some men amongst us preaching peace who go much further than I can go”—a thinly veiled reference to Bryan and his cohorts. Apparently repudiating “too proud to fight,” he proclaimed that he would not “pay the price of self-respect.” In St. Louis, he warned that “one reckless commander of a submarine … might set the world on fire,” and he declared that America’s navy “ought, in my judgment, to be incomparably the greatest navy in the world.”6

  Whether this speaking tour helped Wilson with his troubles within his party is questionable. The anti-preparedness stalwarts stood firm. Bryan complained about the “slush” in Wilson’s speeches and hinted at opposing his renomination for president. Kitchin reported to Bryan that the speeches changed no minds on Capitol Hill because “they sounded too much like Roosevelt.” Kitchin’s assessment was accurate but misleading. Many congressional Democrats wanted to remain loyal to the president without appearing militaristic. Republicans, except for some insurgents, most notably senators La Follette and George W. Norris of Nebraska, tended to support increased preparedness.7

  In this situation, Wilson could exercise another of his favorite aspects of leadership: consulting and bargaining with legislators. Throughout the fall of 1915, he had been talking with the chairmen and key members of the Military Affairs and Naval Affairs Committees. Patient explanation and cultivation worked well with the navy bill. Die-hard Bryanites remained opposed and denounced construction of new warships as a boon to the steel trust. Their opposition notwithstanding, by the beginning of 1916 the navy bill appeared to be on its way to eventual passage. Some difficult times would come in the House later, when Kitchin and his followers temporarily succeeded in cutting new battleship and cruiser construction. Wilson stuck to his guns, however, and the Senate restored the ship authorizations. The senators also mollified critics by adding a provision to establish a government-owned factory to produce armor plate, thereby taking business and profits away from the steel industry. In final form, the navy bill gave the president everything he asked for.8

  The army bill presented a tougher challenge at the outset. Opposition to it flared up early and focused on Garrison’s proposed reserve force, the Continental Army. In the eyes of opponents, this plan raised the age-old specter of a large standing army, like the ones then fighting in Europe. The Continental Army also drew fire from the state militias—the National Guard—which saw themselves being supplanted and diminished in importance. They had a potent lobby and enjoyed close ties with many senators and congressmen, and their influence extended well beyond the anti-preparedness phalanx. The key person with whom Wilson had to deal on the army bill was Representative James Hay of Virginia, chairman of the Military Affairs Committee. Like most Virginia Democrats, Hay was not an avid Bryanite, but he did have a long record of resisting Republican efforts to enlarge and modernize the army, and Garrison’s overbearing manner had also rubbed him the wrong way. Yet Hay was a good party man, and he had earlier promised to support the army bill, including the Continental Army. Once Congress convened and his committee held hearings, however, Hay backed away from that pledge. Garrison’s officious manner again offended him, and he began to apprehend the threat posed to the National Guard, which he favored. In mid-January, Hay presented an alternative plan, which would expand the National Gua
rd to 425,000 men, about the same size as the proposed Continental Army, and give the president additional powers to “federalize” it—to call it into national service.9 Garrison exploded when he heard about that plan and once again threatened to resign. This standoff awaited the president’s return from his speaking tour.

  ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF THE SEELEY G. MUDD MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY,

  PRINCETON UNIVERSITY, EXCEPT THE DRAWING BY MAX BEERBOHM AND

  THE PORTRAITS OF WILSON BY JOHN SINGER SARGENT AND SIR WILLIAM ORPEN

  Joseph Ruggles Wilson: The father whose good looks his son wished he had inherited

  Janet Woodrow Wilson: The mother whom many thought her son resembled physically and emotionally

  Tommy Wilson, 1873: The earliest known photograph of Wilson, age sixteen

  Thomas Woodrow Wilson, 1879: About to graduate from the College of New Jersey, known then familiarly as “Princeton” and later renamed Princeton University

  The Alligators, Princeton, 1879: An eating club that Wilson joined as a sophomore—he is the student doffing his hat.

  The Johns Hopkins Glee Club, 1883: Wilson, as a first-year graduate student, is in the back row, with the flowing mustache.

  Ellen Louise Axson, 1881: The Presbyterian minister’s daughter from Rome, Georgia, with whom Wilson fell in love almost at first sight

  Ellen Louise Axson, 1883: At the time of her engagement to Wilson, who was about to depart for Johns Hopkins

  Jessie and Margaret Woodrow Wilson, early 1890s: The older two of the three Wilson daughters

  Princeton faculty members with Grover Cleveland, early 1900s: Retired to Princeton after leaving the White House and a trustee of the university, Cleveland sits directly behind Wilson; to the left in the row above Cleveland sit Wilson’s two closest friends, John Grier Hibben (far left) and his brother-in-law Stockton Axson (middle left).

  An academic procession at Princeton with Andrew Carnegie: Despite assiduous wooing that stressed Princeton’s Scottish heritage, Wilson succeeded only in getting Carnegie to endow a lake for rowing.

  Defeat, 1910: Wilson on his way to his last commencement as president of Princeton, just after learning his opponents had received a large bequest, prompting him to say, “We have beaten the living, but we can’t beat the dead.”

  With Mrs. Peck, 1908: On Bermuda, where Wilson met the divorced Mary Allen Hulbert Peck and entered into a relationship that included emotional intimacy and may or may not have become a short-lived affair

  On the road to the White House, 1912: On the golf course at Sea Girt, New Jersey, with Joseph P. Tumulty (middle), his ever-loyal secretary and political helpmeet, Wilson hears news from the Democratic National Convention in Baltimore, where he was about to win the nomination for president.

  The nominee and his family, 1912: Wilson and Ellen at Sea Girt, soon after learning of his nomination; behind them stand (left to right) Jessie, Eleanor (Nell), and Margaret.

  On the campaign trail, 1912: No aloof academic, Wilson relished being on the campaign trail, as he had shown earlier while running for governor of New Jersey.

  The First Lady and her daughters, 1913: Ellen Wilson on the White House portico with Jessie, Margaret, and Nell

  President Wilson, 1913: At his desk in his office at the White House, already deep into the business of leadership

  The Scholar in Politics, 1913: “President Wilson Visits Congress,” by the English caricaturist Max Beerbohm. Editorial cartoonists often depicted Wilson in a mortarboard cap and an academic gown, sometimes kindly, sometimes not. (DEPARTMENT OF RARE BOOKS AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, FIRESTONE LIBRARY, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY)

  With Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, 1913: Despite differences in background and temperament, Wilson and Bryan worked well together until the sinking of the Lusitania raised the threat of the United States’ being dragged into World War I.

  With Colonel House, 1914: The outwardly mild-mannered Texan Edward M. House formed an intimate bond with Wilson immediately after Wilson’s election to the presidency and kept a diary that emphasized his own influence. Wilson wears a black armband because this photograph was taken shortly after Ellen’s death.

  Edith Bolling Galt, 1915: The official engagement photograph of the stylish Washington widow whom Wilson wooed and wed in 1915

  Wilson, by John Singer Sargent, 1917: While he sat for this portrait, Wilson found conversing with the painter hard work, and Edith disliked the finished product. But his closest friend from their student days at Princeton, Bob Bridges, told “Tommy” that he liked it “hugely. I can see you getting ready to tell a story.” (NATIONAL GALLERY OF IRELAND)

  Wilson, by Sir William Orpen, 1919: The official artist of the British delegation painted this portrait toward the end of the peace conference. Some people, including Colonel House, preferred this to the portrait by Sargent. (WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION)

  At a baseball game with Edith Galt, autumn 1915: For their first outing in public after announcing their engagement, Wilson chose to take Edith to a baseball game, which also attested to his lifelong love of that sport.

  Peacemaking, 1919: The “Big Four” in the study of Wilson’s temporary quarters in Paris: (seated, left to right) Premier Vittorio Orlando of Italy, Prime Minister David Lloyd George of Great Britain, Premier Georges Clemenceau of France, and President Wilson; (standing, left to right) Count Luigi Aldrovandi, the official Italian interpreter; Sir Maurice Hankey, secretary to the British cabinet and official note-taker; and Professor Paul Mantoux, the official French interpreter

  Final colloquy at Versailles, 1919: Wilson in an exchange with Clemenceau just after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles; between them stands Dr. Cary T. Grayson (in uniform), Wilson’s physician; behind Clemenceau stands Ray Stannard Baker (in straw hat), press secretary to the American delegation to the peace conference and later Wilson’s biographer; behind Wilson, leaning over, stands Arthur James Balfour, the British foreign secretary.

  The ravages of the League fight, 1919: At the end of his aborted speaking tour, Wilson walking through Union Station in Washington, four days before he suffered a massive stroke

  Wilson with Isaac Scott, 1923: Living as an invalid on S Street in Washington after leaving the White House, Wilson depended heavily on Edith; her brother John Randolph Bolling, who served as his secretary; and Isaac Scott, his valet.

  Wilson on his birthday, December 28, 1923: The last photograph taken of Wilson, riding in the open-topped Rolls-Royce given him by a group of wealthy friends and admirers; he died a little more than a month later.

  The choice between these two men and their respective plans was not a hard one for Wilson. He had never felt close to Garrison, and since Bryan’s resignation he had found the secretary of war’s pretensions to premier-like status in the cabinet increasingly irksome. Garrison made the choice easier by drawing a line in the sand against not only Hay’s National Guard plan but also efforts in the Senate to speed up the proposed timetable for Philippine independence. Disagreement on either matter would be, Garrison told the president, “not only divergent but utterly irreconcilable.” This was tough talk, but thanks to having made his speaking tour, Wilson had less to fear now from Garrison’s presumed following among preparedness advocates. In consultation with Tumulty, he drafted an artful reply to Garrison. He sidestepped the Philippine matter and stated that it would be “a very serious mistake to shut the door” on Hay’s alternative to the Continental Army. He also reminded Garrison that he did not “at all agree with … favoring compulsory enlistment for training”: a draft, the political hot potato that no major figure but Roosevelt would touch. Garrison responded by offering his resignation, and Wilson allowed him to go “because it is so evidently your desire to do so.”10 He directed Tumulty to release their exchange of letters to the press, together with the preceding correspondence about the Continental Army.

  Garrison’s resignation had the air-clearing effect Wilson hoped for. Hay thanked him on behalf of his c
ommittee and pledged their cooperation, and the choice of Garrison’s successor enhanced these newfound good feelings. At the beginning of March, Wilson named Newton D. Baker, the mayor of Cleveland, whom Wilson had earlier tried to enlist to serve as his secretary or fill a cabinet post. A short man with horn-rimmed glasses, Baker enjoyed a stellar reputation among Democrats and other progressives. His appointment raised some controversy when reporters unearthed statements in which he called himself a pacifist and opposed increased preparedness. Those revelations actually helped smooth the way for the army bill in the House, however, where it passed later in March by the lopsided margin of 402 to 2, with even Kitchin and other Bryanites voting in favor. The Senate subsequently resurrected a modified Continental Army and added a government-owned factory to manufacture nitrates for munitions—another scheme to take profits away from big business. In May, with Wilson mediating between the chambers, the House bill largely prevailed, but the nitrate plant stayed in, with the president’s backing. This was a huge legislative victory. Wilson had won a huge political fight and, thereby, taken a giant step toward proving that he, not Bryan, was master of the Democratic Party.11