Wilson

by A. Scott Berg

  “I have long been convinced that financing presidential campaigns by private contributions should be prohibited,” McAdoo wrote in 1931. “It is the seed of innumerable evils.” He believed the national treasury should fund all Presidential elections, and that contributions by any individual or corporation should be made a criminal offense. As that was not the case, the campaign functioned along guidelines Wilson set for Morgenthau: he would accept no money from anybody who expected a favor in return or from any corporation, even indirectly; he preferred money from small donors; he wished to publicize all gifts to the campaign; and he urged care in the ways in which these dollars were spent. He told Morgenthau the names of three rich Democrats with dubious backgrounds whose money must not infiltrate the campaign. That said, Morgenthau told Wilson to dismiss all thoughts of finance from his mind, which he did. The two men never discussed campaign money again; and under Morgenthau’s supervision, ninety thousand citizens contributed $1,110,952.25 to the Wilson campaign.

  At the end of August, Wilson sought one contributor in particular, but not for his money. The defining argument between Bull Moosers and Democrats that fall would be over their stands on trusts, and Wilson needed somebody to sharpen his message. Always better on the big picture than on the small particulars, he wanted to discuss the issue with the most incisive mind on the subject. Fortunately, that man had already expressed an interest in his campaign, though when he shuttled from Boston to New York by night boat on August 27, Louis D. Brandeis could not have known that he, as much as anybody, would shape the future of Woodrow Wilson’s campaign and career.

  One month older than Wilson, Brandeis was born in Louisville, Kentucky, the son of highly cultured Jewish parents from Prague who had fled eastern European anti-Semitism in a moment of political upheaval. His father prospered as a merchant; and an uncle had been a delegate at the Republican Convention that nominated Lincoln. A brilliant student, Louis graduated from Harvard Law School as class valedictorian, at twenty; and over the next few decades, his practice relentlessly challenged special privilege. He became a public advocate, “the People’s Attorney.” An ardent Progressive, he helped reform the insurance business in Massachusetts, fought for protective labor laws for women in Oregon, and successfully challenged J. P. Morgan as his New Haven Railroad tried to buy yet another of its competitors.

  In Sea Girt, Brandeis gave Wilson a three-hour lesson in trusts. He proved to be “eager to learn,” the attorney observed, a serious and deliberate student. Where Theodore Roosevelt announced his plan was to regulate monopolies, Brandeis and Wilson concurred on a more radical approach—one that went to the root of the problem. They wanted to regulate competition before monopolies could form. “Our whole people have revolted at the idea of monopoly and have made monopoly illegal,” Brandeis said with absolute clarity, “yet the third party proposes to make legal what is illegal. . . . The party is trying to make evil good, and that is a thing that cannot be done.” After meeting with Wilson, he told reporters, “We must undertake to regulate competition instead of monopoly, for our industrial freedom and our civic freedom go hand in hand.”

  While TR was already selling what he called the New Nationalism, Brandeis and Wilson spoke repeatedly of a legislative program that would move the nation toward industrial freedom—a New Freedom. In a memorandum as politically canny as it was socially caring, Brandeis proposed that the Democratic Party embrace competition, which trusts inhibited. Brandeis positioned the Bull Moosers as a party that embraced big trusts and required big government to control them. Wilson intended to argue that “what this country needs above everything else is a body of laws which will look after the men who are on the make rather than the men who are already made.” Wilson would be the Jeffersonian proponent of less government—the friend of big business but the enemy of trusts and unfair business practices.

  The 1912 Presidential campaign officially kicked off on Labor Day, September 2, when Wilson delivered a pair of talks in Buffalo, New York. They were the first of five dozen major speeches and a hundred minor public addresses he would deliver before Election Day. For the most part, they were extemporaneous, each appearance requiring a fresh page of notes. A plank or two from the Democratic platform became the springboard for each speech; and audiences found the addresses both soothing and inspiring, as Wilson spoke in language as poetic as that of any candidate who ever ran for President. He found his steel whenever he steered his talks to the economic oppression of the trusts. Addressing the United Trades and Labor Council of Buffalo in Braun’s Park, Wilson said Roosevelt’s policies looked to him “like a consummation of the partnership between monopoly and government, because when once the government regulates the monopoly, then monopoly will have to see to it that it regulates the government.” At a mass meeting that night, he struck a tone few voters had ever heard from a politician: “If you don’t believe the things that I believe, I don’t want you to vote for me.”

  Some tried to belittle Wilson because of his untraditional résumé, but he embraced it. “There is one thing a schoolteacher learns that he never forgets,” he said in Buffalo and later elsewhere; “namely, that it is his business to learn all he can and then to communicate it to others.” As in his classroom, Wilson believed the role of a leader was not to dictate but to inspire. “You have got to exercise your minds,” he told the people. “You have got to discriminate. You have got to set the chess board fully up and see how the game is going to be played.” Lest he appear effete, he assured the people that he was “bred in a football college . . . and what wins is team work.” The Democratic team, he said, had not just become progressive; it had been so for sixteen years—“and we saw the year 1912 half a generation before it came.” Three weeks later he milked his credentials, saying, “It is a fine system where some remote, severe academic schoolmaster may become President of the United States.”

  Wilson traversed the Midwest through September, becoming more at ease with every speech. He asked the crowd at the Minneapolis Fairgrounds, “Are you going to vote for a government which will regulate your master, or are you going to be your own masters and regulate the government and through the government these men who have tried to regulate you?” In the National Guard Armory in Detroit he said, “The pigmy hasn’t any chance in America; only the giant has. And the laws give the giant free leave to trample down the pigmy. What I am interested in is laws that will give the little man a . . . chance to show these fellows that he has brains enough to compete with them and can presently make his local market a national market and his national market a world market.” Wilson reminded the country that under President Roosevelt trusts “grew faster and more numerously than in any other administration we have had.”

  Wilson challenged his opposition’s charges before any had a chance to resonate. He told businessmen in Columbus, Ohio, that one of “the most amazing fictions of our politics” was that the Democratic Party was not interested in the business welfare of the United States. “I am for the regulation . . . of competition,” he said; the currency system was antiquated and needed to be more elastic; the tariff had “created the opportunity of monopoly.” To the opposition’s contention that he offered little more than flowery rhetoric, Wilson announced in Scranton, Pennsylvania, “This is the year in which we must render phrases into reality, when we must change the mist into the bar of iron,” and then he reminded audiences of the miraculous turnaround in New Jersey.

  Wilson’s allure tended to sneak up on people—in sharp contrast to that of his chief opponent. Where TR resorted to histrionics and hyperbole, Wilson quietly converted his followers, building from a political concept to a powerful exhortation. On September 25, 1912, the red meat of his talk to a crowd in Hartford, Connecticut, was the injustice of the Payne-Aldrich tariff; and over the course of an hour, he peppered that talk with allusions to Alice in Wonderland, England’s seventeenth-century Petition of Right, the god Baal, Gladstone, Bagehot, Henry Clay, the
direct election of Senators, initiative and referendum, the concept of a tabula rasa in politics, and the Latin derivation of the word “radical.” Whether one accepted his ideas or not, nobody left one of his speeches unimpressed. His insistence upon raising the populace to his intellectual level made audiences feel better about themselves. More than charm, he had charisma.

  On September 26, Taft’s and Wilson’s campaigns crossed, at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston. Taft was a dinner speaker in evening clothes, while Wilson, unrecognized, was checking in for the night, carrying two handbags. Before retiring, Wilson insisted that he would feel uncomfortable sleeping under the same roof as Taft without having greeted him. The two candidates went to a private room for a few minutes, during which they exchanged pleasantries about holding up under the strain of campaigning.

  Traveling to the heartland states of Indiana, Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Illinois, Missouri, and Ohio, Wilson delved into the core issues of his campaign. In the first week of October, a Congressional committee delivered a stunning report, an accounting of contributions to the Republican National Committee in 1904, when TR had been President. It revealed that three-quarters of its $2 million budget came from corporations or their representatives, a quarter of that from four fortunes—those of J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, E. H. Harriman, and Henry Clay Frick. Wilson had already accused Roosevelt of being supported by Frick’s United States Steel Corporation, which TR denied. But, Wilson explained in a speech in Kansas City, “He was thinking of money. I was thinking of ideas.” Wilson said it was a matter of “perfect indifference” to him where Roosevelt got his money; but “it is a matter of a great deal of difference to me where he gets his ideas.” Just when this story might have harmed the third party most, a bigger headline came Roosevelt’s way.

  On October 14, TR was leaving his hotel in Milwaukee to deliver a speech when a maniac shot him in the chest. An eyeglass case and the speech itself, stuffed in his breast pocket, deflected the bullet enough to prevent major harm. In fact, Roosevelt continued on his way that night and delivered his speech—saying, “It takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.” But then he entered a hospital, where doctors opted against removing the bullet. He would need two weeks to recover. So long as Roosevelt could not campaign, Wilson said he would not either. “Teddy will have apoplexy when he hears of this,” Wilson told his family. The immediate circle discussed Wilson’s getting a bodyguard; but Wilson said, “There is nothing that can be done to guard against such attacks. It seems to me that police and secret service guards are useless if a madman attempts to attack a man in public life.” Without discussion, Colonel House wired his friend Bill McDonald, the former captain of the Texas Rangers, to come north to shadow Wilson, leaving him only when he went to bed at night. At the end of October, the candidates returned to the hustings.

  A death knell for the Taft campaign sounded—literally—on the thirtieth, when Vice President James S. Sherman died at his home in upstate New York at the age of fifty-seven. He had suffered for years from Bright’s disease, a kidney ailment. With only six days until the election, it was impossible for Taft to select a running mate, though the Republican National Committee would later nominate Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University, to accept any electoral votes in Sherman’s name the following February.

  That night, Theodore Roosevelt spoke to sixteen thousand fanatical supporters at Madison Square Garden. A forty-five-minute welcome subsided to scattered applause during a speech in which he spoke softly and seemed weak. The next night Woodrow Wilson filled the same arena. Pundits observed that he received twenty minutes of applause more than Roosevelt had; and old-time Democrats said they had never seen an assembly “marked with such spontaneous and whole-souled enthusiasm.” Over the next few days, a series of speeches in New Jersey followed, during which Wilson made his closing arguments, warning: “Powers are being built up in this country which, if they are allowed to grow much stronger, may be stronger than the Government of the United States combined.”

  As Wilson was coming home from a speech in Red Bank, in the dark morning hours the day before the election, his chauffeur did not notice a bump in the road in Hightstown, and Wilson’s head struck the roof of the automobile, knocking his pince-nez from his nose and breaking one of its lenses. He felt the top of his head and discovered that it was bleeding profusely. They found a doctor, who shaved his pate and closed the four-inch gash. Wilson felt no ill effects from the accident, but he refused to pose for pictures looking as he did.

  The campaign had taken its toll in other ways. Wilson had been suffering for weeks from headaches and indigestion; and he seldom got his desired nine hours of sleep. He gained more than seven pounds. Ellen also suffered; friends and family frequently found her tired and weak. Neither complained—though, with the “pitiless blaze of publicity” engulfing life at Cleveland Lane, she spoke wistfully of their “old lost peace.” On Election Eve, Wilson’s erstwhile promoter Colonel Harvey congratulated him on the effectiveness of his campaign. “Never before to my knowledge,” he said, “has every utterance of a candidate added strength.”

  Wilson’s voice was all but gone. He had elaborated upon every topic save one. Although the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had been incorporated just three years prior, and though a number of black leaders were emerging with the support of several Protestant and Jewish Americans, race remained a marginal issue in the election of 1912. It appeared neither in the platform of any party nor as a priority of any candidate. Theodore Roosevelt had famously invited Booker T. Washington to the White House and appointed a few Negroes to minor positions; but when a dozen men from an African American division of the infantry were accused of going on a shooting rampage in Brownsville, Texas, the then-President Roosevelt authorized their discharges, despite the falsity of the charges against them. Even Eugene Debs made no great efforts to include Negroes, and he was known to make “darkey” jokes in public, a socially acceptable practice.

  Such jokes remained part of Wilson’s repertoire as well. They were never malicious, though the humor was based on the Negro being slow in body and mind, the stereotype of the day. Nor was it considered inappropriate, even to a Northern audience, when he spoke of an unsuspected item in the Payne-Aldrich tariff as a “nigger” in the woodpile. But increasingly, the African American community bridled at such insensitivity as it grew intolerant of illegalities—starting with the common practice of restricting the black man from the electoral process. Ironically, Wilson—a son of Dixie, heading the Southern-anchored Democratic Party—captivated the colored man more than any other candidate.

  Notes from a meeting of the Democratic National Committee revealed its desire to capture this emerging voting bloc. “The negro movement is a very promising factor,” said Judge Hudspeth of New Jersey. “It is going to cause a revolution in my judgment, in some states.” And he believed Negroes were inclined toward Wilson in high enough numbers to provide a margin of victory. That remained to be seen, as the leading Republican colored newspaper, The New York Age, had recently written a scathing editorial against Wilson, questioning how any self-respecting Negro could vote for him. “Both by inheritance and absorption,” the journal wrote, “he has most of the prejudices of the narrowest type of Southern white people against the Negro.” It reminded readers that Princeton had been the only major college in the North to close its doors to Negroes, that as Governor, Wilson had not included a single Negro in his administration, that his party’s platform contained not a word about Negroes, and that he owed his nomination to such proud white supremacist Senators as James K. Vardaman of Mississippi and Benjamin R. Tillman of South Carolina.

  Even so, more Negroes saw the election of 1912 as an opportunity for change; and many held that the unlikeliest candidate could open the frankest dialogue between the races. Among them was William Monroe Trotter, a pioneer in the civil rights movement and a founder of the Boston
Guardian—an activist newspaper opposed to the accommodating beliefs of Negro icon Booker T. Washington. This articulate Harvard graduate wrote Wilson that “many Colored men” felt he might just be “the democrat to begin the end of democratic aggression against their civil and political rights” and that if elected he would exercise his “personal influence with the Southern democracy in favor of fairer treatment of their Colored neighbors as men.” So long as Wilson did not sympathize with racial prejudice, discrimination, disfranchisement, or lynching and did believe in equal rights for all “regardless of race, color or nativity,” Trotter said, the colored people of America would support him.

  At the start of his campaign, Wilson told a delegation from the United Negro Democracy of New Jersey, “I was born and raised in the South. There is no place where it is easier to cement friendship between the two races than there. . . . You may feel assured of my entire comprehension of the ambitions of the negro race and my willingness and desire to deal with that race fairly and justly.” In letters and interviews, he reiterated that commitment throughout the campaign. He told Oswald Garrison Villard, the editor of the New York Evening Post and one of the white founders of the NAACP, that he would speak out against lynching—as “every honest man must do so.” By November 1912, many Negroes were believing that a leopard could change his spots.

  Wilson slept in on Election Morning, Tuesday the fifth. At breakfast he told his family that he had “done what he could” and that the result was “on the knees of the gods.” When he arrived at the Princeton fire station to vote, just past ten o’clock, he found reporters and photographers waiting for him. He took his place in line and joked with the officials and press. When his turn came, he gave his name and address and received his ballot. Before walking into the booth, he pointed out to his bodyguard, McDonald, a house where he had taken his meals as a freshman.