Wilson

by A. Scott Berg

  By midnight of June 25, 1912, twenty thousand Democrats had gathered in the fetid 5th Maryland Regiment Armory. A little after two o’clock that morning, the state of Delaware yielded to New Jersey so that Judge John W. Wescott, at the candidate’s behest, could nominate Woodrow Wilson. Although Wescott had once denounced him, his rousing speech conjured up Wilson’s remarks to the Princeton alumni of Pittsburgh, the very words for which he had been lampooned—“The great voice of America does not come from seats of learning. It comes in a murmur from the hills and woods, and the farms and factories and the mills”; the judge cited Wilson further, capturing his essence when he said, “‘No man is great who thinks himself so, and no man is good who does not strive to secure the happiness and comfort of others.’” Sitting in the closet at Sea Girt to hear the news over the telephone, Tumulty learned that the response to the nomination of “the Princeton schoolmaster” lasted more than an hour, longer than anybody else’s. Wilson, of course, had long since gone to bed.

  State-by-state voting did not begin until dawn; and by the time Wilson had returned from a morning of golf, he had learned from any number of reporters that Clark had taken a decisive lead on the first ballot: 440½ to Wilson’s 324; Harmon had fewer than half that number (most of which were from New York), and Underwood had fewer than that. Wilson spoke to McCombs during the day; but for the most part, he carried on nonchalantly, reading aloud from a biography of Gladstone at night. While he slept, his wife and daughters and Tumulty waited through the night for any news. The delegates settled in for what promised to be endless roll calling, waiting for one delegation or another to budge from its position, usually in response to some bartered deal. On the tenth ballot, Boss Murphy of New York announced his state was shifting its support to Clark, effectively knocking Harmon out of the game. Wilson’s tally inched upward, but Clark had accrued 556 votes, a simple majority. Saturday morning, McCombs sounded despondent, as he and Wilson discussed Wilson’s exit strategy and to whom he should release his delegates. Ellen cried; and Woodrow comforted her, saying, “After all, it is God’s will, and I feel that a great load has been lifted from my shoulders.” Besides, he added, “now we can see Rydal again.”

  Later that Saturday, McAdoo confronted McCombs, who was convinced of Clark’s impending nomination. McAdoo could not have disagreed more, arguing that Clark had peaked while Wilson had steadily gained. When McAdoo learned that McCombs had a telegram from Wilson authorizing the release of his delegates, McAdoo immediately called the candidate to say, “Your nomination is inevitable, Governor—your delegates will stick, if it takes all summer.” Wilson agreed to withhold his withdrawal. On the fourteenth ballot, Bryan announced that as long as New York supported Champ Clark, he would refrain from endorsing him, ostensibly because he wanted to stop the establishment machines from controlling the party. Clark maintained that Bryan’s contention was “dishonest” at best, as the Great Commoner really wanted only to deadlock the convention so that the delegates, in desperation, would turn to him a fourth time.

  A first-term New York State Senator later claimed credit for the subsequent shift in the convention hall. Thirty-year-old Franklin Delano Roosevelt played his first significant role in a national election that season as he formed a Woodrow Wilson Club and took a delegation to Baltimore, where they were promptly barred from participating in the convention because they lacked proper credentials. Outside the armory, FDR heard that the Mayor, a Clark supporter, had been packing the hall with two hundred Clark men who were required to show nothing more than a specially made Clark button in order to gain admittance. Young Roosevelt happened to know the manufacturer, and he secured three hundred buttons, which he immediately distributed among his fellow Wilson supporters. Once inside, they created an uproar promoting their man.

  Wilson steadily chipped away at Clark’s lead. Fueling the carnival-like atmosphere, concessionaires were selling peanuts, frankfurters, and beer, the smells of which mingled with the perspiration of the hundreds of delegates in their sixth day inside the overheated hall. On the twenty-seventh ballot, McAdoo challenged the vote of the New York delegation, which meant calling each delegate for his vote; it loosened nine new Wilson supporters. On the thirtieth ballot, Iowa shifted its votes and Wilson pulled ahead, 460 to 455; and the press in Sea Girt insisted upon a statement from the candidate. “You might say,” he told them, “that Governor Wilson received the news in a riot of silence.” By the forty-second ballot, Indiana had relinquished support for its favorite son, Governor Thomas R. Marshall, in favor of Wilson; and Clark supporters suggested that their man quit the race. On Tuesday, July 2, Illinois, with its 58 votes, jumped on the Wilson bandwagon; and at 3:30 that afternoon, on the forty-sixth ballot, Wilson piled up 990 votes, putting him over the top. Upon receiving the news, the victor searched for his family. Finding Ellen in her room, he said, “Well, dear, I guess we won’t go to Mount Rydal this Summer after all.”

  Joe Tumulty rushed from the house and waved his hands wildly from the porch. From behind a cluster of trees, a brass band emerged blaring “Hail to the Chief.” Wilson asked Tumulty if he had instructed them to slink away had he lost. Amid the jubilation, somebody said to the only calm person in the crowd, “Governor, you don’t seem a bit excited.” A grave Wilson replied, “I can’t effervesce in the face of responsibility.”

  During the post-nomination recess, McAdoo called Wilson, to ascertain his preference for Vice President. Wilson thought the convention should decide. McAdoo said the delegates would want to abide by his choice and, to balance the ticket, suggested Marshall of Indiana, whom he did not know except by reputation as an affable and popular liberal Governor of a Midwestern state. Nobody appeared to have told Wilson that McCombs had, in fact, already horse-traded the position to Marshall in exchange for Indiana’s votes. Wilson had earlier mentioned to Albert Burleson of Texas that Marshall was “a small-calibre man,” though he conceded that he was a vote-getter. That night, Marshall received the second spot.

  Wilson wanted to keep as low a profile as possible until the official start of the campaign in the fall, but that became increasingly impossible as he was suddenly the least-known important figure in American politics. “Our days are not our own any more and are very laborious,” he wrote Mrs. Peck, who had just divorced her husband and was thenceforth known as Mary Allen Hulbert. Having to write an acceptance speech for the Democratic Committee on Notification in early August, Wilson gave his secretaries a brief vacation while he “ran away from home.” Cleveland Dodge had offered Wilson use of his yacht, a 129-ton schooner, for as long as he wished; and so he, Ellen, Margaret, and his young friend Dudley Malone piled into a car and drove to a dock near Sandy Hook, where they boarded the Corona. Over the next six days, they sailed as far north as New London, enjoying the seclusion, for the vessel carried no wireless. Scrawling shorthand into two large notebooks, Wilson composed his speech.

  He returned to Sea Girt, where he found thousands of letters of congratulation and advice. Mindful of his campaign’s internal politics, Wilson asked an increasingly unpopular McCombs to elevate McAdoo to the position of vice chairman of the National Committee. This transfer of power proved well-timed: within weeks, McCombs suffered a breakdown and had to sit out most of the campaign. William Jennings Bryan offered to assist however Wilson wished; and he suggested that Wilson not count on carrying New York in the election—because of a reactionary Catholic and Wall Street vote. “As I see it,” the old warhorse recommended, “your fight must be won in progressive states.” A brilliant attorney from Boston named Louis D. Brandeis congratulated Wilson on his announced plan to deal with the existing tariff—which hurt the middle class—by reducing the duties gradually, at the rate of 5 percent per annum. Brandeis said this was not only further evidence of Wilson’s commitment to progressivism but also good for business. And Colonel House pointed out that Wilson’s election seemed as “certain as anything political ever is, but it can be lost.” He
offered to see that it would not be.

  At five in the afternoon on Saturday, August 3, Wilson left Sea Girt for a strategy session at the University Club in New York. Carrying his own leather satchel, he walked from the house to the little train depot, where he stood absorbed in a magazine; the others on the platform left him alone. The Pullman porter who took his bag did not recognize him, and the railway car was empty except for the reporters who had been encamped on his lawn. When the porter at Pennsylvania Station was slow in getting Wilson’s bag, he grabbed it himself and purposefully charged through a bustling crowd, as the press ran to keep up. Once inside the large waiting room, they all expected him to head for the taxicab stand. Instead, they saw him look to the station dining room on his right. It was 7:30, well past Wilson’s normal dinner hour; and so the newspapermen were not altogether surprised . . . until he made a sharp left, entering a lunch counter lined with dozens of stools. Perching himself on one of them, the Democratic nominee for President of the United States spread a small paper napkin on his lap and—except for a few reporters—sat unrecognized as he ate his sandwich and washed it down with a glass of buttermilk.

  • • •

  At three o’clock on Wednesday, August 7, 1912, Woodrow Wilson stood on the portico of the mansion in Sea Girt, beside nine Democratic Governors and before thousands of New Jerseyans—many of whom had arrived by farm wagon and automobile. After a few minutes of introduction, he addressed his party’s Notification Committee, saying, “I accept the nomination with a deep sense of its unusual significance and of the great honor done me, and also with a very profound sense of my responsibility to the party and to the Nation.” As was his practice on momentous occasions, he read his remarks. Establishing both the tone and the substance of the campaign ahead, he said that he intended to “talk politics . . . in words whose meaning no one need doubt, because the times demanded as much. . . . We must speak, not to catch votes, but to satisfy the thought and conscience of a people deeply stirred by the conviction that they have come to a critical turning point in their moral and political development.” Plainly, he said, “it is a new age.”

  Over the next hour, Wilson recapitulated the Democratic platform, voicing the issues and themes that would reverberate until Election Day. He closed his remarks by reminding his audience that a Presidential campaign could “easily degenerate into a mere personal contest and so lose its real dignity and significance.” Without his having to mention any names, everybody knew he was speaking of the blustery Theodore Roosevelt, who had recently bolted from the Republican Party and was at that very minute in Chicago, where the first National Convention of the Progressive Party was nominating him as its candidate. To a chortling crowd, Wilson said, “There is no indispensable man. The government will not collapse and go to pieces if any one of the gentlemen who are seeking to be entrusted with its guidance should be left at home.” That included TR, who had just claimed to be as tough as a bull moose and had just delivered the rallying cry for the new third party, saying: “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.” Wilson found the remark fatuous; and, in private, he could not refrain from impersonating him in a tinny voice, to the delight of his family. “Good old Teddy,” Wilson would say, “—what a help he is.”

  Every Presidential election is a historic watershed; and in 1912, that was especially true. For the first time, a retired President returned to the electoral battlefield, challenging a sitting President from his former party, no less. And for the first time since 1860, there was a serious fourth-party candidate in the race who had no chance of winning but who was a veritable lightning rod. Even Wilson respected the sincerity of the party’s followers and its nominee, Eugene V. Debs.

  A year older than Wilson, Debs was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, to cultured Alsatian immigrants. In his teens he began working on the railroad; at twenty he became a founding member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen; and in his thirties he established the American Railway Union. “He was a tall shamblefooted man,” John Dos Passos would lyricize, “had a sort of gusty rhetoric that set on fire the railroad workers in their pineboarded halls.” Flexing all his muscle, Debs escalated a small wildcat strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company into an event involving hundreds of thousands of laborers; it shut down much of the nation’s transportation, necessitated federal troops, and led to several deaths, a Supreme Court decision, and Debs’s imprisonment for conspiracy to interfere with interstate commerce. He read Karl Marx in jail and emerged a Socialist, soon founding the Socialist Democratic Party of the United States. In 1905 he helped organize the Industrial Workers of the World—the “Wobblies”—an organization composed of Socialist comrades and radical trade unionists. Debs believed in both causes, but he shied from the labor union’s endorsement of anarchy and devoted himself to his party’s politics. He was the Presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party in 1900 and ran again as the nominee of the Socialist Party of America in 1904 and 1908, winning 400,000 votes (3 percent) in each race.

  All media in 1912 was local. The way to ignite an entire nation was by setting small fires across the country. That meant giving a speech in a major city and making shorter talks from the back of a train at the smaller whistle-stops en route to the next city. Regional press would report what was said, but word of mouth remained the best publicity. Abandoned by the progressive wing of the Republican Party and considered too liberal by its conservatives, President Taft waged a spiritless campaign. Finances limited the fiery Debs; and even his contention that the other parties were in the hands of the trusts did not keep organized labor from leaning toward the Democrats. The last two months of the campaign really became an argument between Roosevelt and Wilson. Because the public had experienced TR’s bluster before, Wilson became the object of curiosity in the race. He felt “stumping tours” were “not the most impressive method” of campaigning, but he understood that he was the newcomer in the eyes of the electorate and had to make himself known. “The people seemed to regard me as some remote academic person,” he told one newspaper at the start of the campaign, “but many of them wanted to see what manner of man I was, what sort of human animal, what freak of nature I might be.”

  Wilson felt the nation had long since progressed from the Republican Party’s positions and that Taft would come in third. “But just what will happen, as between Roosevelt and me, with party lines utterly confused and broken,” he wrote Mary Hulbert on August 25, 1912, “is all guesswork.” Wilson knew that voters inevitably made visceral decisions, based largely upon how the press had portrayed the candidates. With scholarly detachment, he delineated the differences between the two front-runners:

  He appeals to their imagination; I do not. He is a real vivid person, whom they have seen and shouted themselves hoarse over and voted for, millions strong; I am a vague, conjectural personality, more made up of opinions and academic prepossessions than of human traits and red corpuscles.

  On the other hand, Wilson confided, “Roosevelt never works the heart out of himself—I doubt if he has a heart for anybody but himself—but I do, and there are some strains (of responsibility plus stupid and corrupt resistance and fight) my heart cannot bear for long together.” As TR’s distant cousin Franklin put it years later, “Theodore Roosevelt lacked Woodrow Wilson’s appeal to the fundamental and failed to stir, as Wilson did, the truly profound moral and social convictions.”

  The Roosevelt campaign was, therefore, eager to make political hay of the rumors of Wilson’s alleged affair with Mary Peck. TR’s friend Senator Elihu Root insisted that he had evidence linking Wilson to the Peck divorce; and Washington wags referred to Wilson as “Peck’s Bad Boy,” the name of a popular newspaper series. But Roosevelt did not wish to endow his opposition with more personality than he felt he possessed; and, in truth, there never was any evidence of a relationship. More to the point, Roosevelt felt he had plenty of other political eggs to throw at his opponent, most of whi
ch Wilson simply ignored. He viewed the battle ahead as a “splendid adventure”—though he believed that “the next President of the United States would have a task so difficult as to be heartbreaking and that I w’d probably sacrifice my life to it if I were elected.”

  William Gibbs McAdoo knew nothing of running a national campaign, but given that task, he was an exemplary executive, unafraid of surrounding himself with talented people and delegating responsibility. Homer Cummings, a Connecticut politician, ran the party’s speakers’ division; Josephus Daniels, a North Carolina newspaper publisher who held a minor position in the Cleveland Administration, oversaw publicity; Abram Elkus, a New York attorney, supervised tasks related to the tariff and foreign affairs; and Senator T. P. Gore of Oklahoma headed an army of local organizers, some 100,000 precinct committeemen in 2,500 counties across what had just become forty-eight states. Although women would be able to vote for President in only nine states—all in the West—McAdoo appointed Mrs. Jefferson Borden “Daisy” Harriman, a socialite suffragist, to engage women by organizing meetings and mailings. In order to fuel this entire operation, Wilson asked the National Committee to create the position of chairman of the Finance Committee, which he wanted Henry Morgenthau to fill.