Wilson’s campaign got off to a later start because he had to stay in Washington to attend to public business, yet the delay gave him an advantage. The last measures of the New Freedom helped his reelection prospects much more than any speeches or tours. Moreover, because he was president, Wilson could speak out in ways that ostensibly were non-political but really advanced his campaign. On July 4, he dedicated the new American Federation of Labor building, and with Gompers and other union leaders present, he lauded labor over capital for being “in immediate contact with the task itself—with the work, with the conditions of the work.” Two weeks later, he dropped the nonpartisan mask when he told a convention of patronage-appointed postmasters, “The Democratic party is cohesive. Some other parties are not.”25 Those speeches and his remarks when he signed the rural-credits and child labor laws served as warm-ups for his acceptance of the Democratic nomination. To reestablish his political base in New Jersey, he rented an oceanside estate at Long Branch, called Shadow Lawn, where on September 2, in a setting reminiscent of Sea Girt four years before, he met the delegation from the Democratic convention and delivered his acceptance speech.
As expected, Wilson praised the party’s accomplishments and declared that the Democrats had kept the promises they had made in 1912. He also pitched a frank appeal to Roosevelt’s erstwhile followers: “This record must equally astonish those who feared that the Democratic Party had not opened its heart to comprehend the demands of social justice. We have in four years come very near to carrying out the platform of the Progressive Party as well as our own; for we also are progressives.” Most of the speech covered foreign affairs. With regard to the world war, Wilson reaffirmed neutrality as the bulwark against its hatred and desolation. Regarding Mexico, he deplored the loss of American lives and property but affirmed that Mexicans were seeking emancipation from oppression. He warned that new challenges would come when the world war ended, and he alluded to the league of nations idea without being specific in calling for “joint guarantees” against those who would disturb the peace. He closed by reiterating the basic message of the New Freedom, that people’s energies and initiative “should be set free, as we have set them free,” and power should never again “be concentrated in the hands of a few powerful guides and guardians.”26
Immediately afterward, Wilson hit the campaign trail. He signed the Adamson Act in the railroad car, rather than in the White House or at Shadow Lawn, because he was on his way to Kentucky to dedicate Lincoln’s birthplace. On this ostensibly nonpolitical occasion, Wilson once again used the example of the nation’s greatest self-made man to underline the populist message he had just delivered in his acceptance speech. He then spoke in Atlantic City to the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Mindful that Hughes had stolen a march on him by endorsing a constitutional amendment, Wilson was eager to assure the suffragists that he believed in their cause. He called their movement “one of the most astonishing tides of modern history,” and he declared, “We feel the tide; we rejoice in the strength of it, and we shall not quarrel in the long run as to the method of it.” Those stirring but vague words made a hit with the 4,000 mostly female delegates, who gave the president a standing ovation.27
Wilson intended to give his next speech to an insurance executives’ convention in St. Louis, but family misfortune upset those plans. On September 11, he got word that his sister, Annie Howe, was dying in New London, Connecticut. He and Edith traveled there aboard the Mayflower, but his sister was heavily sedated and her doctors advised him not to stay. She died on September 16, and Wilson, Edith, and Grayson left for Columbia, South Carolina, for the funeral. This was a doubly sad occasion for Wilson. Of all his siblings, Annie had been closest to him, and her son George had lived with the Wilsons while he was a student at Princeton. Coming just two years after Ellen’s death, this funeral and burial at a Presbyterian church in the South could not help but stir painful memories. Edith later remembered the days at Shadow Lawn after their return from the funeral as a peaceful interlude during which her husband read aloud to her in the evening before a fire, but she conceded that such evenings and other quiet moments were rare.28
An unceasing stream of visitors came to Shadow Lawn. The first to call after their return from South Carolina was the party chairman, Vance McCormick, who brought good news and bad news. The good news was that he and his assistants had the campaign machinery humming along and that Bryan was barnstorming through the Midwest and West in a manner reminiscent of his own campaign swings, stressing peace—with Mexico rather than in Europe—and progressivism. The bad news concerned Maine and money. Thanks to its September gubernatorial elections, which tended to presage its—and the nation’s—returns in the November presidential elections, there had long been a widely bruited maxim: “As Maine goes, so goes the nation.” Maine almost always went Republican and had done so again in September 1916. Democratic spokesmen tried to discount the results, but they were worried about a possible trend in the Northeast.
The money problems involved big contributors. Financiers such as Henry Morgenthau and Bernard Baruch gave generously, as did some of the president’s Princeton friends, most notably the ever-faithful Cleveland Dodge; otherwise, the pocketbooks of big business and the wealthy opened mostly to the Republicans. The eight-hour railroad law had lent a special edge to this disparity. Referring to business and the Adamson Act, McCormick told Colonel House, “Before this they were lukewarm, but now they are fighting mad and are offering freely their support to Hughes in both money and effort.”29
The Adamson Act also gave a shot in the arm to the Republican candidate’s campaign performance. On the return leg of his speaking tour, Hughes lashed out at the law. “I want what is reasonable for labor,” he claimed, but more important is “the willingness to abide by the results of reason … and never surrender to any force of any kind.” Privately, he told Taft that passing this law was a “most shameful proceeding” and should be made “a fundamental issue. I propose to press it constantly.”30 Hughes was as good as his word. Throughout the rest of the campaign, he lambasted the Adamson Act as proof of Wilson’s knuckling under to pressure and granting special privileges to one group. Only foreign policy would receive as much attention in Hughes’s speeches, and nothing else would engage his oratorical powers so well.
Hughes’s arguments dovetailed with the Republicans’ message that Wilson and the Democrats were purveyors of special interest and class legislation. Along with denunciations of the Revenue Act for sectional favoritism, this conservative stance suited the party’s increasingly sharp alignment against progressive measures. Another denunciation of the Adamson Act came from Roosevelt. The Republicans were using him as a campaigner the same way the Democrats were using Bryan. The ex-president spent most of his time attacking both Wilson’s foreign policy and his personal character as cowardly and debased. But he ventured also into domestic affairs a few times. To him, the Adamson Act epitomized “the policy of craven surrender to whichever side has the superiority of brute force.” More broadly, he accused Wilson of lacking “disinterestedness” and showing “frank cynicism of belief in, and appeal to, what is basest in the human heart.”31 Roosevelt was once more touching upon the core of his philosophy—the need to rise above material desires in order to serve a transcendent national purpose. Wilson’s poaching Progressive programs might fool others, but the prophet of the New Nationalism knew that this heretic had not embraced the true faith.
Wilson originally planned to take a leaf from William McKinley’s 1896 campaign and give weekly “front porch” speeches to visiting delegations at Shadow Lawn. In each talk, he intended to discuss a single issue in depth and thereby educate the public about his programs and purposes. In his first speech, he defended the Adamson Act by affirming that the bond between capital and labor must be more than “merely a contractual relationship. … Labor is not a commodity.” He stole Roosevelt’s favorite argument when he declared that government must “see that no orga
nization is as strong as itself” and that no private interest could compete “with the authority of society.” He departed from the plan for educational “front porch” speeches, however, when he received a telegram from Jeremiah O’Leary, the head of the American Truth Society, a notorious anti-British, pro-German organization, that accused him of partiality toward the Allies. Wilson shot back publicly: “I would feel deeply mortified to have you or anybody like you vote for me. Since you have access to many disloyal Americans, and I have not, I will ask you to convey this message to them.”32 That reply caused a sensation and drew cheers from the press—reminiscent of his reply to George Record in the gubernatorial campaign six years before.
In his next speech at Shadow Lawn, to a group of college-student Democrats, Wilson made a stronger pitch for votes from former Progressives. “I myself expected that this campaign would be an intellectual contest,” he told them; “that, upon both sides, men would draw upon some essential questions of politics.” But he had been disappointed; except for touting the protective tariff, the Republicans were avoiding any serious discussion of domestic issues. These Republicans were not like the “great body of spirited Republicans” who four years earlier had formed “the great Progressive party—great … because it had the real red blood of human sympathy in its veins and was ready to work for mankind.” He pointed out that the Democrats had carried out the Progressives’ purposes and intentions, and he proclaimed, “I am a progressive. I do not spell it with a capital P, but I think my pace is just as fast as those who do.” He also digressed into foreign policy, where, he said, Republicans had taken a clear stand against his own policies and vowed to change them. How would they do that? “There is only one choice as against peace, and that is war.” If the Republicans won, he predicted, the country would go to war in Europe and in Mexico, where they wanted to protect American investors.33
This was hitting hard and perhaps hitting below the belt. To accuse his opponents of warmongering smacked of the kind of thing Roosevelt was saying about him from the other side. Worse, Wilson was appealing to the “passion” that he deplored in this speech and had warned against for years. Why he said such things is not clear. The sensation caused by his reply to O’Leary may have prompted him to swing heavily to the other side of the “double wish;” perhaps he felt moved by looking at the faces of so many young men in the crowd. This attack did not gibe with his own thinking about “He kept us out of war,” at least as the slogan applied to Europe. Josephus Daniels later remembered Wilson telling him, “I can’t keep the country out of war. They talk of me as though I were a god. Any little German lieutenant can put us into war at any time by some calculated outrage.”34
During the last month before the election, Wilson alternated between more speeches at Shadow Lawn and four campaign trips, and he mixed foreign and domestic policies when he spoke. In foreign policy, he took the high road of continuing to advocate a league of nations to maintain peace and the low road of again accusing the Republicans, particularly Roosevelt, of warmongering. In domestic policy, he praised the Adamson Act, appealed to farmers on the basis of rural credits, and opposed immigration restriction. He also denounced the Republicans for reverting to domination by big business and standpat conservatives: the Republicans offer people “masters,” whereas the Democrats “offer to go into the fight shoulder to shoulder with them to get the rights which no man has a right to take away from them.” Wilson might have been appealing to former Progressives, but he was not diluting or soft-pedaling the New Freedom message of helping ordinary people in their struggle to make their way up in the world. In the last days before the election, after prodding from the campaign managers, he grudgingly made a barnstorming tour of New York, saying privately that he could win with that state. “He thought both McCormick and I had ‘New Yorkitis,’” House declared, “and that the campaign should be run from elsewhere.”35
This campaign showed once more that Wilson was the most articulate person in American politics. Regrettably, it was not, as he said, “an intellectual contest” like the one four years earlier. Unlike Roosevelt, Hughes was not expounding a competing political philosophy. Moreover, as president, Wilson had a record to defend, and the world war and Mexico made foreign affairs compete for attention with domestic concerns. Emotional appeals like the ones he made with his insinuations of warmongering were unusual for him, but they did betoken a new relationship with the public. He was forging the personal bond that he had earlier envied in Roosevelt. People repeatedly yelled out at him, “Woody” and “Woodrow.” Crowds lined the tracks when his train passed by. Those moments gratified Wilson. He could end his campaign knowing that he had connected strongly with the voters.
The Republicans did not feel so sanguine about the progress of their campaign. Hughes’s performance improved steadily after he began attacking the Adamson Act, and he found an able new manager in Will Hays of Indiana, who brought fresh discipline and focus to the operation. But problems persisted. Hard feelings still divided the party’s conservative high command from insurgents and returning Progressives. Foreign policy likewise gave the Republicans headaches because Roosevelt was both an asset and a liability. He drew bigger crowds than anyone else, but his stands on the war made other Republicans uneasy. Hughes sometimes emulated Roosevelt, as when he said that he was not “too proud to fight” and claimed that if he had been president, he would have taken a firm stand on the submarine issue and the Lusitania would never have been sunk. Yet he also criticized Wilson for not being tougher on the Allied blockade, and he welcomed support from German American and Irish American groups, meeting in October with some of their leaders, including the man Wilson had denounced as a “disloyal American”—Jeremiah O’Leary. Word of that meeting leaked to the Democrats, who gleefully spread stories about the encounter.
The insinuation of guilt by association was a political dirty trick, but it paled in comparison to the smears and innuendos Republicans were spreading. They tried to revive the Mrs. Peck stories but succeeded mostly in stirring up indignation against the slanders. Rumors circulated that Ellen Wilson had died after her husband pushed her down a flight of stairs in the White House. At Princeton, dirt-seeking emissaries from the Republican campaign approached Hibben for stories about Grover Cleveland’s alleged mistrust of Wilson. To his credit, Hibben swallowed hard feelings toward his former friend and angrily rebuffed the approaches. To counteract such stuff, Colonel House asked Stockton Axson to write a magazine article about his brother-in-law. Full of what House called “sob stuff,” the article appeared in The New York Times Magazine in October under the title “Mr. Wilson As Seen by One of His Family Circle” and was widely reprinted. The Democratic campaign circulated a million copies of it as a pamphlet.36
Republicans’ gutter tactics exposed a seamy underside to their operation. Things also got rough in public when Lodge brought up the so-called Lusitania postscript, charging that Wilson had told the Germans not to take his protest seriously. After several cabinet members denied the story, Lodge responded, “This simply throws an additional light on the shifty character of this Administration in its foreign policies.” Wilson called Lodge’s statement “untrue” and denied that he had written or contemplated any postscript to the Lusitania note. That denial was shifty: it was literally true but left out the proposed “tip” to the press about hoping for a peaceful outcome to the dispute. Soon afterward, in his final speech of the campaign, Roosevelt indulged in grisly wordplay on the name of Wilson’s temporary residence: “There are shadows enough at Shadow Lawn; the shadows of men, women, and children who have risen from the ooze of the ocean bottom and from graves in foreign lands; … the shadows of the tortured dead.”37
As election day neared, many of the president’s prospects looked good. Farmers were grateful for what his administration had done for them, and their organizations lined up solidly behind him. Labor was even more enthusiastic; the Adamson Act had sealed the political engagement between unions and the Demo
crats. Following Gompers’s lead, AFL unions were pulling hard for Wilson and his party, particularly in Ohio and other midwestern states. More generally, the left side of the political spectrum was shifting in his direction. After Debs decided not to run again as the Socialist Party’s candidate in 1916, many well-known party members—including John Spargo, John Reed, Max Eastman, and William English Walling—came out for Wilson. Such prominent social workers as Jane Addams, Lillian Wald, and Florence Kelley also backed him, despite his not endorsing a suffrage amendment. The Nation supported Wilson’s reelection even though its backer, Villard, distrusted him because of the segregation overture and the about-face on preparedness; he believed that the Republicans’ conservative tilt left him no choice. Nearly all of those socialists and liberals based their support of the president on both his domestic program and his having stayed out of war in Europe and Mexico.38
Wilson’s wooing of former Progressives similarly bore fruit. Most of the party’s few officeholders and professional politicians—such as Governor Johnson of California and Senator Poindexter of Washington—followed Roosevelt back to the Republicans. They had held office earlier as Republicans and could not see a political future for themselves in any other party. Personal closeness to Roosevelt swayed some well-known Progressives, as with the conservationist Gifford Pinchot and the journalist William Allen White. Other prominent party members backed Wilson, such as Representative William Kent of California, former representative Victor Murdock of Kansas, and Gifford Pinchot’s brother, Amos. Where the Progressive rank and file would go would be answered only on election day. Among Republican insurgents, only La Follette tacitly supported Wilson, as he had done in 1912; the rest backed Hughes, though often without enthusiasm.
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