16
TO RUN AGAIN
When Woodrow Wilson ran for reelection in 1916, he faced a daunting task. The increasing likelihood that the Republicans would heal their breach meant that any Democratic nominee, even an incumbent president, would be an underdog. This predicament reflected hard facts of political geography. Since 1896, the Republicans had enjoyed a lock on the Northeast and Midwest, where the population and number of states gave them a prohibitive edge in electoral votes for president and control of both houses of Congress. The Democrats held on to what Bryan liked to call the Great Crescent—the vast expanse that stretched south and west of the Potomac, Ohio, and Missouri rivers. That expanse contained far fewer people and a smaller number of states, and only in the white supremacist South did the Democrats dominate the way their opponents did in their heartland. The Republicans’ internecine strife in 1910 and seismic rift in 1912 had given the Democrats openings, first to win the House and then to gain all of Congress and the White House. Many of those gains had proved ephemeral, however. In 1914, Republicans bounced back strongly, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest. If that trend continued in 1916, the Democrats would most likely revert to their habitual minority status on Capitol Hill and banishment from the White House.
Those prospects did not dishearten Wilson. With his penchant for boldness, he liked fights against long odds, and not everything about the political scene looked gloomy. His victories in the preparedness struggle, the submarine crisis, Mexico, domestic reform legislation, and the Brandeis nomination underlined the three major themes of his upcoming campaign: peace, preparedness, and progressivism. There was also a fourth p: prosperity. The 1914 elections had occurred during a severe recession, which hit hardest in industrial states from New England to the Great Lakes—the Republican heartland. Now, thanks to stimulus from Allied war orders, the economy was booming, with robust demand for both manufactured goods and agricultural products. Any president and party in power were bound to take credit for prosperity, and Wilson and his Democrats were no exception. Finally, he had a united, enthusiastic party behind him. Bryan was coming back on board: he was an old campaign warhorse unable to resist the call to action, and he wanted to position himself so that he might have influence in the party. In all, Wilson could face the electorate in good spirits.
Of his three main campaign themes, the president wanted most to stress progressivism. In his Jefferson Day speech in April, he indicated his continued commitment to strong central government: “You cannot draw example from the deeds of Thomas Jefferson. … There is no parallel in the circumstances of the times of Thomas Jefferson with the circumstances of the time in which we live.” Shortly afterward, he began drafting the platform on which he and his party would run, and at the beginning of June he received a suggestion that helped give the document a sharper political focus: Senator Owen of Oklahoma urged him to take ideas from the 1912 Progressive platform “as a means of attaching to our party progressive Republicans who are in sympathy with us in so large a degree.”1 Wilson liked the suggestion and asked Owen to specify the 1912 Progressive ideas to include.
The senator responded by highlighting federal legislation to promote workers’ health and safety, provide unemployment compensation, prohibit child labor, establish minimum wages and maximum hours, and require an eight-hour day and six-day workweek. Wilson, in turn, included in his draft platform a plank calling for all work done by and for the federal government to provide a minimum wage, an eight-hour day and six-day workweek, and health and safety measures and to prohibit child labor, and—his own additions—protections for female workers and a retirement program. That plank also expanded on the government’s efforts to help workers find employment and extend vocational training from agriculture to other work. In addition, he inserted a separate plank that read, “We recommend the extension of the franchise to the women of the country by the states upon the same terms as to men.”2
Wilson did not go as far as Owen, who also favored establishment of a department of health and was the author of a bill to outlaw child labor. The expedient of requiring these measures only in federal employment and government contracts was a bow toward the sensibilities of more conservative Democrats. With the president’s approval, however, the platform committee at the convention added a statement in favor of a comprehensive child labor law. Wilson’s woman suffrage plank fell short of the constitutional amendment that the suffrage organizations wanted and the Progressives had earlier endorsed. Yet for all its shortcomings, his platform marked a great leap forward for the Democrats in social and labor reform, while to recommend woman suffrage by any means was revolutionary in a party that up to now had shunned the issue. In the rest of the platform, Wilson touted the earlier accomplishments of the New Freedom and emphasized aid to farmers, particularly through the rural-credits program.
This courting of Progressives would later lead some interpreters to claim that Wilson was changing his ideological spots. In their view, he was forsaking the New Freedom’s limited government progressivism in order to embrace the New Nationalism’s more thoroughgoing reforms. Moreover, so they would argue, he did it strictly for reasons of expediency—solely because he needed Progressives’ votes in order to beat the Republicans in a two-party contest. Those interpreters misread him badly. Rather than grudgingly doing something he had to do, he was gladly doing something he wanted to do. He was indeed practicing expediency—but to him, as a Burkean, that was a virtue. “I feel sorry for any President of the United States who does not recognize every great movement in the Nation,” he avowed early in July. “The minute he stops recognizing, it, he becomes a back number.” Most tellingly, he did not embrace Roosevelt’s approval of collective bigness and vision of transcendent nationalism. The appointment of Brandeis, the arch-prophet of competition and small-scale enterprise, showed that Wilson had not budged in his devotion to the central tenets of the New Freedom. In his platform draft, he boasted that the Democrats had enacted “reforms which were obviously needed to clear away privilege, prevent unfair discrimination and release the energies of men of all ranks and advantages.” He was betting that Roosevelt’s followers loved the means of the New Nationalism more than the ends.3
This wooing of Progressives got a boost when the Republicans met in Chicago for their convention on June 7. Roosevelt harbored hopes that his former party might overlook his recent apostasy and nominate him again. He based those hopes on his having shelved domestic reform issues in favor of militant foreign policies and heated attacks on Wilson for more than a year. In March, in a remark that became famous, Roosevelt practically dared the Republicans to nominate him: “It would be a mistake to nominate me unless the country has in its mood something of the heroic.” The Republicans’ convention dashed those hopes. Their platform did strike a belligerent note on Mexico, but it took a vague, equivocal stand on the submarine issue, denouncing Wilson’s “shifty expedients” but also demanding “all our rights as a neutral without fear or favor”—a transparent bid for German American support. Domestically, the 1916 Republican platform was more conservative than the one Taft had run on four years earlier: it denounced the lowered tariff, condemned extravagance and incompetence, and ducked most of the current reform issues, as well as immigration restriction and prohibition.4 The delegates brushed aside all talk of picking Roosevelt, and on June 10 they nominated Charles Evans Hughes, who promptly resigned from the Supreme Court to run as their candidate.
The Republicans thought they had the perfect candidate, and given the party’s situation in 1916, they were right. The fifty-four-year-old Hughes had all the right qualifications. He was from New York, the state with the biggest electoral vote, and he had served two terms as governor, the office that Roosevelt and Grover Cleveland had held and that had supplied two other major-party presidential nominees in the last half century. Hughes had won the governorship in 1906 by defeating someone not just conservatives but also most respectable people feared and loathed—the demagogic
newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst. As governor, Hughes had shown himself to be a strong administrator and an energetic public speaker. He had held his party’s bosses at arm’s length and pushed through a moderate reform program. He first attracted attention as a potential presidential candidate in 1908 and again as a possible compromise choice in 1912. Best of all, from the Republicans’ standpoint in 1916, he had sat on the Supreme Court since 1910. That judicial seat had removed him completely from the party’s internecine bloodletting and, therefore, made him acceptable in all quarters.5
For Wilson, Hughes promised to be almost as formidable a foe as Roosevelt had been. As with Roosevelt, the two men had known each other and enjoyed pleasant relations for some years. They had first met nine years earlier, when they shared the speakers’ platform at the Jamestown, Virginia, tercentenary celebration, and had enjoyed staying together as guests in the same house; years later, in his autobiographical notes, Hughes remembered Wilson reciting a risqué limerick. During the past three years, the two men had met from time to time in Washington, and a special bond arose between them because Wilson’s son-in-law Frank Sayre was a law school classmate and close friend of Hughes’s son. By coincidence, the Wilsons and the Hugheses had gone to dinner at the McAdoos’ the day the president announced Brandeis’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Brandeis himself was there too, and Wilson had taken the arm of another of the guests, the irascible and anti-Semitic justice James McReynolds, and said, “Permit me to introduce you to Mr. Brandeis, your next colleague on the Bench.”6
Personally, the justice and the president had a lot in common. Hughes was also a minister’s son with a parent born in England—his father, a Welshman, was a Baptist clergyman with high moral and intellectual standards. Many people who met Hughes compared him to Wilson because he was not a gregarious sort, and professional politicians often found him cold and aloof. Despite those similarities, differences separated them, both physical and intellectual. Hughes had almost as long a jaw as Wilson, but he concealed his with a full beard, which he parted in the middle and combed to the sides. In his earlier years, his rapid-fire delivery and mobile facial expressions on the speaking platform had earned him the nickname of Animated Feather Duster. More recently, his beard had turned gray, giving him a stern look. That look, combined with his reserved manner, earned Hughes such less-fond epithets as “bearded lady” and “bearded iceberg” and, from Roosevelt, “whiskered Wilson.” But unlike the president, he had enjoyed law school and had graduated first in his class. He had been a highly successful Wall Street lawyer and had first gained public notice as a special prosecutor in well-publicized investigations of fraud in the insurance industry. As governor, Hughes had sometimes clashed with his state’s party bosses but had never battled them in the spectacular way Wilson had battled New Jersey’s bosses. Hughes was a warm family man with a well-cloaked sense of humor, but he lacked the playful streak that Wilson showed when he twitted McReynolds at that dinner.
How strong a race Hughes would run in 1916 depended in part on Roosevelt. The Progressives desperately desired their hero to run again—he offered them their only hope of staying afloat as a party. At the Progressive convention, which was meeting in Chicago at the same time as the Republicans, the delegates defied Roosevelt’s orders and nominated him a few minutes before the Republicans nominated Hughes. Roosevelt immediately telegraphed to decline, and he added insult to injury by suggesting that the Progressives might nominate a conservative who had opposed their party—Lodge. Angry cries erupted. Delegates took off their Roosevelt badges, threw them on the floor, and stomped out of the hall. Wilson and the Democrats would have preferred to have Roosevelt run again and split the opposition as before, but the bitter taste left by his behavior meant that many Progressives’ votes were up for grabs. Roosevelt was already straining to steer them toward Hughes. He announced his endorsement of the Republican nominee, though he told a friend, “I do wish the bearded iceberg had acted a little differently during the last six months so as to enable us to put more heart into the campaign for him.”7
By contrast, Wilson’s emerging campaign was coming together splendidly. The Democrats’ national chairman, the unstable William McCombs, could have posed a problem. Wilson delegated the business of getting rid of him to House. The colonel, in turn, enlisted the help of the financier Bernard Baruch, who extracted a letter of resignation from McCombs, to take effect at the end of the convention. As his replacement, House suggested Vance McCormick, a wealthy newspaper publisher from Pennsylvania, who was prominent among the state’s more progressive Democrats. After some hesitation and because several other men declined to be considered, Wilson agreed to McCormick’s appointment, and the forty-four-year-old bachelor turned out to be an effective campaign manager. With the assistance of two able operatives, Robert Woolley and Daniel Roper, he assembled a large, efficient headquarters in New York. There were also regional offices around the country and divisions that targeted appeals to labor, women, the foreign born, and other interest groups, together with a publicity bureau that produced reams of printed material, sound recordings, and movies.8
House’s role in McCormick’s selection signaled his temporarily renewed involvement in party affairs. For all his conniving and furtive-ness, the colonel could be a source and conduit for novel ideas. He showed this when Wilson was in New York in May for Grayson’s wedding. In a hurried discussion that included both foreign affairs and party matters, House suggested a cabinet appointment for Martin Glynn, a former governor of New York, who was to be the keynote speaker at the Democratic convention. Wilson, House noted, “thought the country would not approve of his putting a Catholic in the Cabinet.” House disagreed “and contended that the country would not object in the slightest. What they do object to is having the President’s Secretary a Catholic.” To House’s surprise, Wilson responded to this slam at Tumulty by asking the colonel to suggest a replacement. “I asked him, when he would make the change,” House noted, “and he again surprised me by saying, ‘immediately, if I can find the right man. I will offer Tumulty something else.’ ”9
Then, after discussing other party affairs, House made a much bolder suggestion—for the vice presidency:
We talked of … whether we should sidetrack Marshall and give the nomination to [Newton] Baker. He felt that Baker was too good a man to be sacrificed. I disagreed with him. I did not think that any man was too good to be considered for Vice President of the United States. I thought if the right man took it, a man who has his confidence as Baker has, a new office could be created out of it. He might become Vice President in fact as well as in name, and be a co-worker and co-helper of the President. He was interested in this argument but was unconvinced that Baker should be, as he termed it, sacrificed. He was afraid he could not educate the people in four years up to the possibilities of this office. He reminded me that no Vice President had ever succeeded a President by election.10
Neither man could know that three years later Wilson would suffer a stroke and thereby precipitate the worst crisis of presidential disability in the nation’s history. That crisis might have been handled better if Wilson had responded differently to House’s suggestion. Even without intimations of mortality, he could and should have warmed to the idea. House was speaking for other high-placed Democrats when he proposed dumping Vice President Marshall, who had been practically invisible during the preceding three years. Though no dynamo, Marshall was not entirely to blame for his invisibility. Leaders at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue largely ignored him, and Wilson saw him only when he addressed a joint session of Congress or attended official functions. Marshall’s home state of Indiana was one the Democrats wanted to carry, but Baker’s Ohio offered a much richer electoral prize—second only to New York. A month later, Wilson would soon show how much carrying Ohio was on his mind when he filled the vacancy left on the Supreme Court by Hughes’s resignation with an Ohioan. After consulting with Newton Baker and the Democratic former governor of Oh
io, he named John Hessin Clarke, a federal judge from Cleveland with a reputation as a progressive and friend of labor.
More than short-run political calculations commended replacing Marshall with Baker. The idea of a vice president who might serve as a co-president should have appealed to Wilson. Having spent much of life studying political systems and institutions, he was better equipped than anyone else to grasp the merits of this idea. Having an able and trusted vice president such as Baker at his side during his second term could have made a big difference in management and policy, particularly when it became a wartime presidency. Why Wilson’s political imagination failed him at this moment is a troubling question. House left a couple of clues as to possible answers. First, he sprang the suggestion at the end of a hurried meeting. Second, in his last remark Wilson made an elementary error of fact: four vice presidents had gone on to be elected president—John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Van Buren, and, most recently and most pertinently, Theodore Roosevelt. “The President showed some signs of fatigue,” House noted, “and it was time for him to call for Mrs. Wilson to take her to the wedding.”11 It was unfortunate—perhaps tragic—that such great consequences could hang on such ordinary things as timing, fatigue, and personal engagements.
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