By the time he made his statement about lynching, Wilson was addressing another issue that he had come to see as part of the war effort—woman suffrage. The two wings of the movement dealt with him in starkly contrasting ways. The militant Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party (NWP) continued to berate him for refusing to endorse a constitutional amendment. The party’s picketers outside the White House displayed banners labeling him “Kaiser Wilson”—a hypocrite who professed to promote freedom abroad while not extending it to women at home—and began chaining themselves to the White House fence and disrupting traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue. During the summer of 1917, more than 200 women were arrested, and 97 went to jail. The tense situation exploded on July 14, when District of Columbia policemen arrested sixteen prominent members of the NWP, including the wife of a New Jersey Progressive leader who, with her husband, had recently been a dinner guest at the White House, and the sister-in-law of former Secretary of War Henry Stimson. After being held a few days in jail, these women received presidential pardons, which they indignantly refused.42
Wilson did not react to this affair the way he did to some other repressions of dissent. On July 19, he summoned to the White House Louis Brownlow, the D.C. commissioner who oversaw the police. “Mr. Wilson was indignant,” Brownlow later recalled. “He told me that we had made a fearful blunder.” He wanted the women pardoned and released, but the attorney general had ruled that pardons could not take effect unless accepted. The collector of the Port of New York and a strong suffrage advocate, Wilson’s friend Dudley Field Malone, was able to change the prisoners’ minds. For Wilson, the main consequence of the July 14 arrests was a painful break with Malone. In September, after a face-to-face argument over whether the president should push Congress to pass a suffrage amendment, Malone resigned and accused Wilson of showing bad faith toward the nation’s women. “I know of nothing that has gone more to the quick with me or that seemed more tragical than Dudley’s conduct,” Wilson told House. “I was stricken by it as I have been by few things in my life.” He thought “passion has run away with him,” and he quoted Kipling’s line about keeping your head when everyone else is losing his. “We must not let the madness touch us. It is the sort of strength I pray for all the time.”43
Wilson kept his head on the suffrage issue, with help from leaders of the other, more moderate, wing of the movement. Carrie Chapman Catt and Helen Gardener of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) stayed on the president’s good side by distancing themselves from the NWP and conspicuously enlisting themselves and their organization behind the war effort. Catt also artfully suggested to Wilson in May that suffrage might be viewed “possibly as a war measure”—as a way to symbolize the spread of democracy and recognize women’s support of the war. Gardener followed up by proposing that the president might inform the chairman of the House Rules Committee that he favored setting up a special committee on suffrage. These women knew the right approach to use with Wilson. He obliged them by telling the chairman, “I am writing this line to say that I would heartily approve. I think it would be a very wise act of public policy and also an act of fairness to the best women who are engaged in the cause of woman suffrage.” The Rules Committee complied, and a suffrage committee was established.44
During the rest of 1917, Wilson declined to come out for an amendment, but Catt kept up her campaign of support and flattery and solicited tactical advice from him about suffrage campaigns in the states. In October, he publicly endorsed the effort in New York, linking woman suffrage to the international “struggle between two ideals of government.” Those words undoubtedly helped, but the tide was already running strongly in favor of the cause. In November, suffrage prevailed on referenda in New York and Rhode Island—the first states in the Northeast to come over—as well as in North Dakota, Nebraska, and Arkansas—the first southern state. On Capitol Hill, the House scheduled a vote on an amendment in January 1918. The head of the Women’s Bureau of the Democratic National Committee, Elizabeth Bass, appealed to Wilson to come out in support of the amendment. She argued that his doing so would help the party in upcoming elections and “would enthrone you forever in the hearts of the women of America as the second Great Emancipator.”45
Such flattery aside, Wilson now came around to support the suffrage amendment. On January 9, the day before the House voted, he met with Democrats on the suffrage committee and allowed them to release a statement that the president “very frankly and earnestly advised us to vote for the amendment as an act of right and justice to the women of the country and the world.”46 As one of the Democrats recalled two weeks later, the president told them that passing the amendment would send the right message to the world and would acknowledge women’s service to the nation. That presidential endorsement, together with the results of the state referenda, did the trick. On January 10, 1918, the amendment squeaked through by a vote of 274 to 136, just two more than the required two-thirds. It was the first time that a house of Congress had endorsed woman suffrage.
The other half of the battle on Capitol Hill proved harder to win. During the spring and summer of 1918, Wilson actively lobbied senators on behalf of the amendment. He wrote to and met with southern Democrats who persisted in opposing suffrage, and he urged the governor of Kentucky to appoint a pro-suffrage successor to replace a Democratic senator who had died. At the middle of June he presented Catt and a delegation from NAWSA with a public letter that saluted women’s support of the war and declared that the Senate should acknowledge the debt. As a vote neared at the end of September, Catt wrote to him “in sheer desperation” because the amendment appeared to be two votes short of the necessary two thirds, and she begged him to issue another public appeal. McAdoo also took the drastic step of going to the White House on September 29, knowing, as he later recalled, “that the President did not like to discuss, or consider any public business on Sunday.” He urged Wilson to appear in person before the Senate the next day, arguing that even if the amendment fell short, such an appeal would help elect pro-suffrage candidates in November and thereby assure passage in the next Congress. Wilson listened noncommittally, but later that afternoon Edith Wilson telephoned McAdoo to say that he was working on a speech.47
Wilson spoke to the Senate on September 30, 1918. He had addressed this chamber only once before, with the “peace without victory” address in January 1917, and once more he gave the senators little warning. This time, however, he brought with him the entire cabinet, except Lansing, who opposed suffrage. He begged the senators’ pardon for his unusual move, pleading the “unusual circumstances of a world war in which we stand and are judged in the view of our own people and our own consciences but also in the view of all the nations and peoples. … We have made partners of women in this war, shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and not to a partnership of privilege and right?” He closed by asking the senators to lighten his burden in waging war and “place in my hands instruments, spiritual instruments, which I do not now possess and sorely need, and which I have daily to apologise for not being able to employ.”48
This time, his lobbying and eloquence failed to carry the day. On October 1, the suffrage amendment fell short of passage by the predicted two votes. Democrats split, twenty-six in favor and twenty-one against—all but three from southern or border states—while twenty-seven Republicans voted in favor and only ten against. Wilson and the suffragists stuck to their guns. In the 1918 elections, NAWSA targeted four anti-suffrage senators for defeat and succeeded in helping to knock off two of them, including Weeks of Massachusetts. Wilson renewed his plea for the amendment in his State of the Union address in December and lobbied senators, but on February 10, 1919, they again failed to pass the amendment. The president continued to lobby senators, even meeting with a newly elected Democrat during the peace conference in Paris. On May 20, he cabled a message about suffrage to Congress, which made the amendment its first order of business. The House passed it on
the same day as his message was conveyed, 304 to 89, and the Senate followed suit on June 4 by a vote of 56 to 25.
Wilson was not able to help much during the drive for ratification. After he returned from the peace conference in July, the fight to secure Senate approval of the Treaty of Versailles and membership in the League of Nations consumed nearly all his time and energy, until he suffered a stroke at the beginning of October. Later, in his semi-invalid condition, he did send messages, drafted by Tumulty, to state legislatures urging ratification. By mid-1920, the amendment stood just one state short of the thirty-six required for ratification. At Catt’s request, he telegraphed the governor of Tennessee, asking him to call a special session of the legislature to consider the amendment. The governor complied, and on August 18 Tennessee narrowly approved the amendment, thereby enabling women to vote nationwide for the first time in the 1920 elections. American women, starting with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, deserved the lion’s share of credit for this final, long-belated achievement of nationwide woman suffrage, but among men Woodrow Wilson deserved more approbation than anyone else.49
Woman suffrage became the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution because in December 1917 Congress had already passed, and in January 1919 the states had ratified, the Eighteenth Amendment, which banned the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages in the United States. Prohibition had been gathering strength for several years, and after the country entered the war, supporters used arguments for conserving grain and appeals to crusading idealism and sacrifice to push their cause over the top. Wilson had never backed prohibition, and since his run-ins with “dry” groups in 1912 he had studiously avoided saying anything about the issue. His only real involvement came at the end of the legislative process. In October 1919, just three weeks after suffering the stroke, he vetoed the Volstead Act, the law enforcing prohibition. Tumulty wrote the message, almost certainly with Edith Wilson’s consent, and Secretary of Agriculture Houston revised it. Given Wilson’s physical weakness and almost total isolation during the first month after the stroke, it is doubtful that he ever saw the message or knew anything about the veto, which Congress promptly overrode.50
Domestic problems did not occupy all that much of his time because war leadership brought heavy new burdens. “My days are so full now as to come near to driving me to distraction,” he lamented to Harry Fine in May 1917. Edith Wilson similarly recalled, “People descended upon the White House until their coming and going was like the rise and fall of the tides. To achieve anything amid such distractions called for the most rigid rationing of time.” Wilson was used to rationing his time, and before long he got his customary routine back in place. He managed to get in golf games, and Edith and Grayson persuaded him to go horseback riding with them. For distraction, he also went to vaudeville shows at Keith’s Theater on Fifteenth Street, and after dinner he would sometimes put a record on the player and say to Edith, “Now I’ll show you how to do a jig step.” He tried to teach her to ride a bicycle, but her lessons with him in the White House basement were not successful. She also recalled that at the end of every evening, “my husband would go back to his study for a look at The Drawer [the day’s accumulated official documents]. … He would take up one paper after another—and so work until the small hours.”51
A trip in August to visit the fleet afforded a chance for recreation amid official duties, and in September he and Edith spent a week cruising off the New England coast. In October, Wilson enjoyed a different kind of distraction when John Singer Sargent came to the White House to paint his portrait. The president had not wanted to sit for Sargent; according to House, Wilson was afraid to do so because of Sargent’s “alleged faculty of bringing out the latent soul of his sitter.” Still, this was an offer he could not refuse. The project had originated early in 1915, when Sargent had come out of retirement to help raise money for the British Red Cross. The director of the National Gallery of Ireland, Sir Hugh Lane, had put up the considerable sum of £10,000 (nearly $50,000 at the exchange rate of the time) for a portrait, but he had not chosen a subject for the portrait before his death in the sinking of the Lusitania, and the trustees of the gallery later picked President Wilson. The sittings lasted for more than a week, and Edith recalled, “My husband said he never worked harder than he did to entertain Sargent while he posed.”52
In the finished portrait, the president is seated with his right hand lightly grasping one arm of the chair and his left hand draped over the other arm in a relaxed manner. The portrait does not highlight Wilson’s long jaw and nose, and it gives a true impression of his solid though not stocky physique. His expression is pensive, and his posture conveys an air of calm strength and contained energy. Overall, the portrait is a favorable, perhaps flattering, but not heroic depiction of Wilson—a contrast to Sargent’s only other rendition of a president, the one he had done fourteen years earlier of Theodore Roosevelt standing at the foot of a staircase, his right hand resting on a large round finial that is easy to mistake for a globe. Sargent commented on the contrast between the experiences of painting these two presidents. “The White House is empty,” he told a friend. “How different from the days of Roosevelt who posed or didn’t pose in a crowd.”53
This portrait drew mixed reactions among Wilson’s family and friends. Edith later said it disappointed her because it lacked “virility” and made Wilson look older. House agreed, saying it depicted “an esthetic scholar rather than a virile statesman.” By contrast, Bob Bridges, who saw the portrait in New York before it went to Ireland, wrote “Tommy” to say, “I like it hugely. I can see you getting ready to tell a story, with the quirk to the right side of your mouth.” Bridges acknowledged that the art critics disliked it: “What they want is a stern-looking Covenanter with a jaw like a pike.”54
Even with the workload of the wartime presidency, Wilson still kept the most important areas of foreign policy largely to himself. He continued to leave areas he considered less important—such as Asia, Latin America, and, now, Mexico—to Lansing. He also left most of the specific dealings with Britain to others, particularly House and Wiseman. To enhance his cohort’s influence at home, the colonel had Wiseman meet the president personally. “It is important that he should be able to say that he has met you,” House explained, adding, “Sir William has been the real ambassador over here for some time.” The meeting took place on June 26, 1917, at an official reception at the Pan American Building, and onlookers were reportedly goggle-eyed as the president spent so much time with this hitherto unknown person. On a trip back to London, that contact helped Wiseman pursue his and House’s agenda, which included the appointment of a special envoy to handle financial matters. The man chosen for that job, Lord Reading, the lord chief justice of England and a Liberal Party insider, came to America in September, temporarily accompanied by John Maynard Keynes. Reading soon forged a good relationship with McAdoo and others in Washington, and at the beginning of 1918 he succeeded the ailing Spring-Rice as ambassador.55
Wilson did not spend much time with relations with the other Allies either. France’s ambassador, Jean-Jules Jusserand, continued to enjoy pleasant, correct, if not close relations with the president, who had little contact with the Italians beyond formalities and relegated the Japanese to Lansing’s sphere. Russia did concern him, however. Immediately after entering the war, Wilson extended a $325 million credit to Russia and dispatched a high-level mission headed by Elihu Root, secretary of state under Roosevelt. The Root mission spent a month in Russia during the summer of 1917 but did little to help the Russian war effort. Part of its purpose was to show what would later be called bipartisanship by enlisting a top Republican, but it accomplished little in that direction too. Root later told his biographer that the mission had been “a grand-stand play”—a show of Wilson’s sympathy for the new post-czarist government—“that’s all he wanted.” George Creel remembered Wilson saying a year and a half after the mission that “its failure was largely due to Russi
an distrust of Mr. Root.”56
Wilson’s grand design in waging war remained to seek peace without victory. In May, he reminded an Alabama congressman that in the war address he had restated his devotion to a liberal, nonpunitive settlement. In his only major speech during the nation’s first six months at war, a Flag Day address on June 14, he declared “that this is a Peoples’ War for freedom and self-government amongst all the nations of the world, a war to make the world safe for the peoples who live upon it. … [W]oe be to that man or that group of men that seeks to stand in our way in this day of high resolution.” That bit of public rhetoric sounded more forthrightly militant than he may have wished, because his private thoughts followed a more twisted path. In July he told House, “England and France have not the same views with regard to peace that we have by any means. … If there is to be an interchange of views at all, it ought to be between us and the liberals in Germany, with no one else brought in.”57
Wilson was referring to a resolution just passed in the Reichstag that called for efforts to make peace. Another initiative came from the pope, who in August publicly called for a settlement on the basis of status quo ante bellum, together with future disarmament and international arbitration. To many people, that looked like peace without victory, but Wilson did not agree. In his reply to the pope on August 27, he stated, “Our response must be based upon the stern facts and upon nothing else.” America wanted “not a mere cessation of arms … [but] a stable and enduring peace,” which required saving “the free peoples of the world from the menace and the actual power of a vast military establishment controlled by an irresponsible government” that had “planned to dominate the world.” True peace could come only from the people, not from the governments, of the Central powers. “God grant that it may be given soon and in a way to restore the confidence of peoples everywhere in the faith of nations and the possibility of covenanted peace.” In walking a fine line between military resolve and generous peace terms, Wilson was establishing himself as the moral and ideological leader of his side in the war.58
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