Wilson

by A. Scott Berg

  Wilson had transformed into a true Progressive, and in coming to terms with Jefferson’s beliefs, he completed his conversion. In their wisdom, the Founding Fathers had woven elasticity into the fabric of the new nation, and Wilson believed that applied especially to the Jeffersonian principle about the best government being that which governed least. That was said, Wilson now realized, in a day when “the opportunities of America were so obvious to every man,” and just as available. But that time had passed, Wilson asserted: “America is now not and cannot in the future be a place for unrestricted individual enterprise.”

  “I do not find the problems of 1911 solved in the Declaration of Independence,” Wilson told the audience in Indianapolis. And over the next year, his thoughts on the subject only intensified. Wilson was “confident” that were Jefferson then alive, he would see the current American trammeled in circumstances that no longer allowed him to pursue happiness because all men were no longer created equal. “Monopoly, private control, the authority of privilege, the concealed mastery of a few men, cunning enough to rule without showing their power,” Wilson said, “—he would have at once pronounced the rank weeds which are sure to choke out all wholesome life.” To fail to protect the American citizen—“to let him alone”—Wilson believed, “is to leave him helpless as against the obstacles with which he has to contend.” Thus, the Governor declared, “law in our day must come to the assistance of the individual.” In time, Wilson would declaim, “It is the object of Government to make those adjustments of life which will put every man in a position to claim his normal rights as a living human being.” Toward that end, he believed that “government must regulate business, because that is the foundation of every other relationship.”

  With the $3,000 that Page, McCombs, and McCorkle raised, Frank Stockbridge completed his plans for their noncandidate’s tour of the West. Wilson began in Missouri, the home of Champ Clark, the new Speaker of the House, who had Presidential aspirations of his own. Over the next month, Wilson visited a dozen cities, delivering twice as many speeches. Never talking down to his audience, Wilson made the tariff his primary topic, arguing in Kansas City that it had gone from a “system of protection” to one of “patronage.” In Denver, twelve thousand people came to hear him deliver a talk about the Bible on the occasion of the tercentenary of its translation into English. He referred to the Scripture as “the people’s book of revelation.” The Governor spoke several more times in Colorado at the very moment that New York and Denver had just been connected by telephone wire. When the New York Times reporter asked a local for news from the Rockies, the Coloradan replied, “The town is wild over Woodrow Wilson and is booming him for president.”

  For the rest of the Western tour, Wilson’s straight talk incited similar enthusiasm. In Los Angeles, he said, “The business of every true Jeffersonian is to translate abstract portions of the Declaration of Independence into the language and the problems of his own day”; and he proudly declared himself a “radical.” Before 2,500 people at the City Club in Los Angeles, Wilson explained that he was a Progressive not an insurgent, the former taking the lead in his party while the latter rebelled against the majority of his party. In San Francisco he told four hundred members of the Harvard, Yale, and Princeton clubs that they were the problem with politics in America—for letting government truckle to special interests. In Oregon, Wilson said, “The Presidency of the United States is not an office for which a man can start out and declare he is fitted. On the other hand no man can refuse such a nomination for the office if it be offered him.”

  “There is a general impression among newspaper men that I dragooned the Legislature of New Jersey into passing a great deal of reform legislation,” Wilson told the Press Club of Portland. “I did nothing of the sort.” Instead, Wilson explained, the people began to assert themselves against the machines so that legislators could vote their own minds as they had not done in years. Progressive pioneer W. S. U’ren himself introduced the New Jersey Governor of five months at one gathering as “the greatest constructive statesman of the century.” By the time Wilson reached the state of Washington, The Seattle Daily Times referred to him as “the most logical successor to William Jennings Bryan as the leader of the advanced wing in the Democratic party, and a strong presidential possibility.” Wilson persisted in telling the press that the Presidency was not even on his mind. At long last, Ellen told him, “Please, please don’t say again that you are not thinking of the presidency. All who know you well know that this is true fundamentally; but superficially, it can’t be true and it gives the cynics an opening they seize with glee.”

  By the time Wilson had returned to New Jersey, the Newark Evening News had reported that an informal poll suggested that four out of five Democratic Congressmen were favoring Wilson for their party’s nomination the next year. It also indicated that Northerners regarded him as a Northerner or Easterner and that Southerners considered him one of their own. On May 27, 1911, The New York Times ran a letter from Thomas Pryor Gore, the blind Senator from Oklahoma. “It is easier to nominate a Democrat who deserves to win than to nominate one who is able to win,” he wrote. “We must seek a leader in whom these two qualities are united. I believe that Mr. Wilson answers both requirements.” With this statement, Gore became the first major elected official to endorse him for the Presidency.

  Wilson took one more trip that spring to Washington, D.C. Led by Page and McCombs, the small team encamped at the Willard Hotel, where Senator Martine ushered in various Representatives from across the country. The visitors included Champ Clark and House Majority Leader Oscar Underwood of Alabama. Neither impressed Wilson as worthy of the nation’s highest office. “If I could satisfy myself that Oscar Underwood had a genuine grasp of progressive principles, I should instruct my friends to make no further efforts in my behalf, and work for Underwood,” Wilson confided to his inner group. He continued to maintain that he did not want the office himself but acknowledged, “While there is no certainty of my being nominated, on the other hand, if I am nominated, I shall be elected.” The campaign committee wanted to expand, but Wilson continued to hesitate, still afraid to suggest that he was running. Frank Stockbridge opened a small New York office at 42 Broadway, and Wilson retreated for his summer vacation.

  New Jersey provided its Governor with an ocean-side mansion in Sea Girt, forty-five miles due east of Trenton. It was a big white house whose deep front porch had a long row of rocking chairs. Although it came with a small staff, it did not provide the relaxation any of the Wilsons desired. The National Guard Parade Ground, with public access, lay in front of the house. Locals made themselves at home in the rockers, and sometimes even entered the house. The nearby railroad junction was so close that Wilson often paused midsentence until the latest train had passed. And as Governor, he was expected to review a dress parade of the Guard every Sunday, on horseback. Wilson thought the ceremony an inappropriate use of the Sabbath; even worse, custom dictated that he must perform this weekly duty wearing a frock coat and high silk hat, which made him feel like “a perfect fool.” He occasionally managed to escape for a drive in his first automobile—also provided by the state, complete with driver.

  Once Wilson realized the futility of finding peace in Sea Girt, he turned the house into a summer camp. He welcomed relatives and even invited Mrs. Peck to visit. The Wilson women found her charming, though she got on his daughters’ nerves with her constant suggestions for improving their appearance with chic coiffures and jewelry. Whatever ardor Wilson had once felt had long since transformed into a caring friendship; and the ease of her presence further suggested that an affair in the modern sense of the word had never occurred. Topping the season’s guest list were the nation’s Governors, who held their annual conference in the seaside town. The rounds of banquets and meetings gave Wilson the opportunity to size up some of his competition. An increasing stream of visitors committed to nominating Wilson also descended on the hou
se. Tumulty practically became a member of the family; and Wilson befriended Dudley Field Malone, an attorney and the son-in-law of New York’s newly elected Senator, James Aloysius O’Gorman, whose recent victory had confounded Tammany Hall.

  The most significant visitor that summer proved to be a man who immediately gained Wilson’s confidence. Seven years his junior, William Gibbs McAdoo was born in Georgia and raised there and in Tennessee, where he entered the state university and read law. He rose quickly in the railroad business—first as an attorney, then as an investor, and soon as president of the Knoxville Street Railway Company, which fell into receivership. McAdoo moved his wife and six children to New York, where he sold railroad bonds. While a frequent commuter on the increasingly crowded ferries between New York and New Jersey, he heard about half-constructed tunnels that lay beneath the Hudson River, abandoned because of tragic accidents and insufficient funding. In 1901, McAdoo took it upon himself to revive the project. At a cost of eight years and $70 million, twin tunnels—known for years as the “McAdoo Tunnels”—connected the two states; and the trains on their new paths under the river were known as “Red McAdoos.” They linked to New York’s rapid transit system. Because he was president of the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad Company, most assumed he had extracted millions of dollars from the enterprise; but he drew only his salary, $50,000 a year. In the shady world of public utilities, McAdoo was a beacon of progressivism, advocating growth over profits, and even equal pay for women. “The public be pleased” was the motto of this six-foot egret of a man, long-legged and lean with a prominent beak.

  A few years earlier, while visiting his son at Princeton, McAdoo had bumped into Wilson on the train platform at the junction. In the time it took Wilson to escort him across the campus, McAdoo became an admirer, finding Wilson’s casual talk “somehow inspiring and stimulating.” When Wilson entered the gubernatorial race, McAdoo had wanted to help but feared a man in his position would be wrongly suspected of being a tool of big business and Wall Street. Upon meeting Wilson again, he made it clear that the logical remedy for the evils of big business was not to be found in “repressive legislation which attempts to stunt the development of business enterprise,” but in letting it grow, surrounded by “adequate supervision and publicity.”

  Over the years, McAdoo observed a difference between America’s two major parties, a division in political thought that defined them historically and for at least another century. “The essential difference,” he said, “. . . is that the vital idea of the Democratic Party is people, and the vital idea of the Republican Party is property.” Sensing a kindred spirit, in the spring of 1911, McAdoo committed himself to catapulting Woodrow Wilson to higher office.

  McAdoo knew William McCombs, Wilson’s self-appointed campaign manager; and despite reservations about him, offered to serve his candidate. The two men met at least once a week, often joined by Walter Hines Page and Oswald Garrison Villard, the liberal editor of the New York Evening Post and grandson of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. At first, McAdoo admired the job McCombs was doing—the successful Western tour and his having raised an astronomical $200,000 before the convention. But as enthusiasm for Wilson rapidly grew, McAdoo worried that the mentally unstable McCombs lacked the organizational skills to marshal a countrywide campaign. With no national organization beyond a small office at 42 Broadway, it seemed hard to imagine Wilson’s competing against Champ Clark, for example, who had coordinated committees advocating his candidacy in every state in the Union.

  If the potency of an American political movement can be measured by the anger of its opposition, Wilson’s strength first appeared that summer of 1911. In July, Democratic state chairman James Nugent was dining out with a coterie of friends in Avon-by-the-Sea, not five miles up the coast from Sea Girt; officers of the National Guard sat at a nearby table. As the evening wound down, Nugent offered a toast and both parties rose from their seats. “I give you the governor of the state of New Jersey,” he said, as everybody raised a glass . . . until he concluded, “—a liar and an ingrate!” Everybody froze in silence. “Do I drink alone?” Nugent asked. All glasses lowered, and several guardsmen threw their wine on the floor. The state organization soon relieved Nugent of his chairmanship.

  Wilson’s enemies began dredging his past, combing his extensive paper trail in search of embarrassing, if not disqualifying, remarks. In the fifth volume of his History of the American People, published in 1902, they found a long paragraph about the demographic shift in immigration to America in the 1880s, in which Professor Wilson had written of certain new arrivals—of “multitudes of men of the lowest class from the south of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland, men out of the ranks where there was neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence,” as if those countries were “disburdening themselves of the more sordid and hapless elements of their population.” Furthermore, Wilson had observed, people on the Pacific coast were enjoying a new federal statute excluding Chinese immigration, even though “the Chinese were more to be desired, as workmen if not as citizens, than most of the coarse crew that came crowding in every year at the eastern ports.” At a time when America pigeonholed its population according to national origin, Wilson was trying to explain that the Asians’ skill, intelligence, and strong work ethic had forced their exclusion while those “unlikely fellows who came in at the eastern ports were tolerated because they usurped no place but the very lowest in the scale of labor.” Now pockets of protesters arose—spokesmen for the three million Polish Americans and the two million Italians who had joined the unskilled labor force in America in the last decade alone. Wilson explained the context of his remarks to those who petitioned him and asked his publishers if he might rewrite one or two passages for future printings of the book. No immigrant movement against him ever took hold.

  In 1907, Wilson, then president of Princeton, had written Adrian Joline—an alumnus and president of a railroad company—criticizing William Jennings Bryan’s campaign for government ownership of the railroads. “Would that we could do something, at once, dignified and effective, to knock Mr. Bryan, once for all, into a cocked hat,” he wrote. Now, almost five years later, Joline released that letter to the New York Sun. At least, he figured, it would reveal Wilson’s hypocrisy; at most, it would rupture the cordiality between the two prominent Democrats. Wilson made no comment; and when a reporter from the Sun asked Bryan what he thought about Wilson’s wanting to knock him into a cocked hat, Bryan laughed the comment off, saying, “That’s what the Sun has been trying to do to me since 1896.”

  At the same time, some of Wilson’s opponents accused him of trying to scam the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching by applying for a pension, even though he did not qualify under new foundation requirements. Like the other “scandals,” none of the accusations stuck. Perhaps because of his skimpy political résumé, Wilson proved to be the cleanest candidate for any office in recent memory.

  By the start of 1912, he observed, there was “a merry war on” against him, and he was “evidently regarded as the strongest candidate at present, for all the attacks are directed against me, and the other fellows are not bothered.” As Democrats flocked to Washington that week for the Jackson Day dinner, rumors spread that another old letter was about to surface, one in which Grover Cleveland cast doubt on Wilson’s “intellectual integrity.” Wilson continued to ignore the barbs from Princeton or elsewhere. “I believe very profoundly in an over-ruling Providence,” he wrote Mary Peck, “and I do not fear 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 honourably can, in the meantime, to discomfit mine enemies!”

  On January 8, 1912, seven hundred of the nation’s leading Democrats filled the gold-and-white ballroom of the Raleigh Hotel, four blocks from the White House. The head table included the
party’s past nominees for President and most of those eyeing the future. Everybody watched Bryan’s grand entrance, especially to observe his reactions to Clark and Wilson. He greeted the former warmly, and he grasped the latter by the shoulder, lingering in conversation for several minutes. Wilson was the penultimate speaker of the evening, and he laid any tensions to rest. For all the tidal shifts in the party over the last sixteen years, he said, the one fixed point had been “the character and the devotion and the preachings of William Jennings Bryan.” He promptly added:

  While we have differed with Mr. Bryan upon this occasion and upon that in regard to the specific things to be done, he has gone serenely on pointing out to a more and more convinced people what it was that was the matter. He has had the steadfast vision all along of what it was that was the matter and he has, not any more than Andrew Jackson did, not based his career upon calculation, but has based it upon principle.

  Homage paid, Wilson challenged the Hamiltonian doctrine that those with the biggest asset in the government should serve as the trustees for the rest of the nation, that those who conducted the biggest business transactions should maintain their leadership because the benefits of their prosperity would trickle down. He warned that the great danger to the nation was not the individual combinations in business but the “combination of combinations . . . the same groups of men [controlling] chains of banks, systems of railways, whole manufacturing enterprises, great mining projects, great enterprises for the developing of the natural water power of this country, and that threaded together in the personnel of a series of boards of directors is a community of interest more formidable than any conceivable combination in the United States.”

  Wilson called upon his brethren to “apologize to each other that we ever suspected or antagonized one another; let us join hands once more all around the great circle of community . . . which will show us at the last to have been indeed the friends of our country and the friends of mankind.” With that, he bowed slightly toward the Great Commoner. Bryan later told Judge Hudspeth of New Jersey that Wilson delivered “the greatest speech in American political history.” Even allowing for exaggeration and misquotation, Wilson was lionized that night. Bryan’s speech had proved anticlimactic, if not abdicative.