Wilson

by A. Scott Berg

  That afternoon the tension at 25 Cleveland Lane increased as more and more supporters arrived. With his young friend Dudley Malone and McDonald, Wilson took a long nostalgic stroll through the town, visiting his favorite haunts—fields where Washington had fought and the campus where Madison had studied. Grover Cleveland’s telegraph ticker had been set up in the house; and during dinner, results clicked in. The telephone never stopped ringing with breaking news, which Tumulty dutifully reported. Even when Wilson heard unexpectedly good tallies, he muted his feelings, simply saying, “That is encouraging.”

  After dinner, the family retired to Ellen’s studio. Woodrow stood before the hearth, awaiting each bulletin. There were no surprises, just steadily positive updates. The Wilsons amused themselves with conversation for a while; and then, to fill a lull, Wilson grabbed a volume of Robert Browning and read aloud. Nobody paid much attention. Nell kept slipping out of the room, anxious to learn the latest. A little before ten, she was about to return to the reading when she heard the sound of a distant bell. Within a moment, it was clanging wildly; and that unmistakable peal from Nassau Hall drew Ellen to the front door. Tumulty burst from the crowd of newspapermen, calling out, “He’s elected, Mrs. Wilson!”

  Ellen returned to the studio and found her husband examining the latest tabulations. No words were required. She simply placed her hands on Woodrow’s shoulders and raised her face toward his as he leaned forward and kissed her gently. Margaret, Jessie, and Nell approached, and he hugged each of them. And then others entered the room to congratulate him, while a crowd gathered outside. Messenger boys kept arriving with telegrams. “I cordially congratulate you on your election and extend to you my best wishes for a successful administration,” read President Taft’s from Cincinnati. Theodore Roosevelt had wired from Oyster Bay, New York, “The American people by a great plurality have conferred upon you the highest honor in their gift. I congratulate you thereon.”

  The final numbers would not be known for days, but that great plurality held through the night. With a four-way race making a majority virtually impossible, Wilson was racking up a decisive victory—50 percent more votes than his closest competitor. In the end, he would win 6,293,454 votes (41.9 percent) to Roosevelt’s 4,119,538 (27.4 percent), Taft’s 3,484,980 (23.2 percent), and Debs’s 900,672 (6 percent). The electoral vote was much more lopsided, as Wilson carried all but eight states: California, Washington, South Dakota, Minnesota, Michigan, and Pennsylvania (88 electoral votes), which went to Roosevelt; and Utah and Vermont (8 electoral votes), which went to Taft. Wilson’s 435 electors were more than the nation had ever bestowed upon a single candidate.

  Amid the increasing excitement, Nellie Wilson had a chilling moment as she watched all the elation drain from her father’s face. In the meantime, the clamor outside demanded his presence. By the time Wilson reached the front door to confront the crowd, his countenance reflected only the gravity of the moment. He was able to suppress his emotions until he looked out and perceived a sea of undergraduates surging into Cleveland Lane, waving flags and singing “Old Nassau.” The ancestral wail of a bagpipe pierced the cool night air. At last, the old schoolmaster wept.

  For a moment, vanity got the best of him. Mindful of the patch on his head, he wanted to stand above the crowd. Tumulty and Dudley Malone carried a rocking chair to the portal and held it fast, so that Wilson could stand on it. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I am sincerely glad to see you. I have no feeling of triumph tonight, but a feeling of solemn responsibility. . . . You men must play a great part. I plead with you again to look constantly forward. I summon you for the rest of your lives to support the men who like myself want to carry the nation forward to its highest destiny and greatness.”

  After less than two years—only 658 days—of public service, Woodrow Wilson had been elected the twenty-eighth President of the United States. It had all happened so swiftly as to seem predestined, as though millennia of circumstances had paved the way to this moment . . . and all that lay ahead.

  8

  DISCIPLES

  On the next day . . . they heard that Iesus was comming to Hierusalem . . .

  And Iesus, when he had found a yong asse, sate thereon, as it is written . . .

  —IOHN, XII:12–14

  The President-elect slept well.

  The revelers on Cleveland Lane had dispersed around midnight, leaving Woodrow Wilson to turn in by one. He did not awaken until nine. When he faced the waiting phalanx of reporters, he revealed, “It has not quite dawned on me. I had been in an impersonal atmosphere for the last three months, reading about myself, reading that I was to be elected, and now I can hardly believe that it is true.”

  Before requesting the details of his own historic election—becoming the first Democrat elected to the White House in twenty years and the first Southerner since the Civil War—Wilson inquired about the Congressional results. In an election with the lowest turnout (58.8 percent) in seventy-six years, he had coattails. Democrats fortified their majority in the House of Representatives by picking up sixty-one new seats; and while most state legislatures still elected their United States Senators, Democrats were poised to start the next session of Congress with a seven-vote majority. The results, Wilson told the press, filled him with “the hope that the thoughtful Progressive forces of the Nation may now at last unite to give the country freedom of enterprise and a Government released from all selfish and private influences, devoted to justice and progress.” When somebody pointed out that many in the press had already chosen his departmental secretaries, Wilson replied, “Well, then, you have to forbid me reading the newspapers for they might prejudice me.” That afternoon, Wilson and his bodyguard walked to the far perimeter of the Princeton campus—greeting friends along the way and tramping around much of Lake Carnegie.

  The next few days brought more than fifteen thousand letters and telegrams and what felt like as many visitors. Overnight, influence peddlers and office seekers pushed the well-wishers aside. Those who restrained themselves least met Wilson’s resistance most. As the chairman of his successful campaign committee, William McCombs had every reason to make his way to Cleveland Lane, as he did late Election Night; but his erratic nature, periodic misjudgments, and blatant intentions troubled Wilson. “Before we proceed,” the President-elect said upon greeting him, “I wish it clearly understood that I owe you nothing.” As McCombs began to recount his contributions, Wilson interrupted to say, “God ordained that I should be the next president of the United States. Neither you nor any other mortal could have prevented that.” And though McCombs lingered in Princeton for most of that week, Wilson allowed him no private audience as he confined his few political conversations to telephone calls with Colonel House, whose judgment he already prized above all others’, as he would for most of his Presidency.

  Colonel House left a remarkable record of his hundreds of encounters with Woodrow Wilson—three thousand typed pages, which he dictated almost daily. They provide telling glimpses of Woodrow Wilson, so long as one never forgets that House is their focal point and that diary can be the falsest art. House presents himself as the man who often suggested Wilson’s best ideas and who had cautioned against the worst, an intimate who never overstepped or even misstepped. In truth, Wilson was phlegmatic on few topics. He appreciated new facts and entertained outside opinions; but from those closest to him, he preferred constancy over contention. He generally expected his advisers to react to his thoughts rather than supply him with new ones.

  In that capacity, House complemented Wilson perfectly. Stockton Axson wondered how much House actually did see and how much “he, Polonius-like, merely confirmed what the President saw.” He seemed “never to say anything rememberable” and was, in fact, “usually silent; and when he spoke, . . . deferentially in agreement with everything W. W. said.” Axson granted that most of their serious discussions took place behind closed doors, but he was never aware of
House’s arguing with Wilson; and he noticed that House “had the tact to refrain from even mentioning public affairs at the luncheon or dinner table unless the President himself should shift the table talk from anecdote and limericks to something serious.” No intellectual, House was a rapt listener, a challenging but undemanding conversationalist. He could keep a confidence.

  House’s greatest talent was in “playing” Wilson—tuning his temperament to Wilson’s and seldom striking a discordant note. He was vain but devoid of venality, seeming to want “nothing for himself.” That lack of greed kept him, in Wilson’s eyes, “clear-sighted”—for he looked at both national and international questions without a personal agenda. Unlike legislators, who had to consider their home districts, and even Cabinet members, who were responsible to their departments, House had a constituency of one. He drew the blueprints of plans Wilson could only sketch; as Axson said, “He relished the personal details involved, which the President disliked.” He was not afraid to speak his mind, but was careful never to cross the President. Wilson did not suffer fools; and he enjoyed listening to House—because, in large measure, that meant hearing himself. For his companionship as much as his counsel, House become an indispensable friend.

  Over time, House evolved into a figure unique in American history—a full-time unpaid adviser with singular and total access to the President of the United States, and answerable only to him. So long as Woodrow Wilson was pleased, Colonel House operated of his own volition and on his own dime, always behind the scenes. No man in American history ever wielded so much power yet remained so unaccountable. “Take my word for it,” said the blind Senator T. P. Gore of Oklahoma, “he can walk on dead leaves and make no more noise than a tiger.”

  “Clearly,” William G. McAdoo wrote of House and Wilson, “he was the friend to whom he could turn and to whom he did turn” when it came to selecting the Cabinet. Moving “outside the periphery of official life,” McAdoo noted, House was “better situated than the Governor to look into the merits and capacities of those who were being considered.” House began to prepare lists, revealing what one colleague called his “extraordinary political clairvoyance, a subtle feeling for the inwardness of events and the drifts of public opinion.”

  While House deflected most of the petitioners from the President-elect, the rest of the Wilsons came under siege. The daughters received requests for photographs and autographs and even a few marriage proposals. Dressmakers sent swatches hoping the Wilson women might select from one of their samples for an inaugural gown. Eleanor Wilson indulged in the frivolous exercise more than the others. Because TR’s daughter had long since claimed Nellie’s favorite color, this new First Daughter opted for a magenta—though “Nell Red,” as it would be advertised, never caught on as had “Alice Blue.” With the promise of Wilson’s new Presidential salary—$75,000 per annum—and plenty of special occasions ahead, the entire family shopped for the first time without considering costs. Ellen suddenly found department store floorwalkers bowing before her and crowds surrounding her. “Oh, Woodrow,” she said upon her return from one shopping trip, “we felt like animals in a zoo!” Even Woodrow realized it was time to retire items from his rumpled wardrobe for more elegant suits. He became an understated fashion plate, with immaculate stiff collars and a stickpin just below the knot of his tie, and looked underdressed when he appeared in public without his top hat.

  With so many strangers descending upon 25 Cleveland Lane, Wilson stopped taking notice, especially as the Secret Service now stood guard. One evening, he returned from his office in Trenton and met an affable, sandy-haired young man as he rushed out the door, though he did pause to tip his hat. Later Woodrow asked Ellen who he was. “You’d better stop and make his acquaintance the next time,” she said. “That’s Frank Sayre, and I think you’re going to be his father-in-law.”

  Francis Sayre, valedictorian of his class at Williams and a fresh graduate of Harvard Law School, had taken a job as an assistant in the office of New York City’s District Attorney. He had known Jessie for almost two years. Two Sundays before the election, he had rung the Wilsons’ bell, only to find the Governor himself at the door. Frank had asked to see Jessie, and her father had said, “Oh, no; she’s not at home. She’s off teaching her Sunday school class.” In that moment, Jessie had appeared on the stairs, and all three of them burst into laughter. Frank proposed marriage later that day, but he and Jessie kept their intentions secret until three days after the election, when she began to wear her ring. “Nothing can separate us now,” he wrote his fiancée, “for we know and are sure that God wanted us to join together in our service for him.”

  • • •

  In 1913—twenty years before the Twentieth Amendment would shorten a President’s “lame duck” period by six weeks—Inauguration Day fell on March 4. With plenty of time to catch their breath, the Woodrow Wilsons checked into the Collingwood Hotel on West Thirty-fifth Street in New York City on November 15. The President-elect spent the next morning with Colonel House at his apartment a few blocks away, discussing the future Cabinet. Shortly after one o’clock, Wilson and his family—except Margaret, who was remaining in New York to pursue her singing career—left for the pier, where they boarded the Bermudian. Plans for the departure were kept so quiet, no crowds had gathered. The Wilsons occupied the two choicest suites on the Promenade Deck, their entourage consisting only of his private secretary, Charles Swem, and two Secret Service agents. “I ceased to be a politician when I stepped aboard this ship,” Wilson told the press as they set sail for a four-week vacation. “Anybody who comes to see me in Bermuda,” he said in parting, “will get the very reverse of what he wants.”

  Wilson was not to enjoy the anonymity he had known during his prior visits to Bermuda, but he found the quiet civility he had expected. The Mayor of Hamilton, a few local officials, and some applauding citizens greeted them. “As soon as I knew that I had been sentenced to four years hard labour,” he told them, “my first thought was to get away to Bermuda and enjoy my liberty while I might.” He expressed his hope that “having so received me you will let me go about among you as if I were no one in particular.”

  Bermuda honored his wishes. The Wilsons moved into Glencove in Paget West, which Woodrow had enjoyed during a prior visit. A high wall surrounded the “cottage” on a secluded point overlooking the sea; a locked gate warded off any visitors, including the Secret Service. From the verandah, Jessie and Nell could dive right into the blue waters. Except for one state dinner and a few small dinner parties, the Wilsons stuck to themselves. Ellen painted; Woodrow picnicked and bicycled with his daughters, golfed, napped, and even indulged in solitaire. He and Nell went several times to the small theater in town, where a stock company performed “excruciatingly bad” productions. (“I shall never grow up,” he told her. “I would rather see poor acting than not go to a play when I have a chance.”) He devoted part of every morning dictating to Swem, and over the next four weeks, they worked through the stack of vital correspondence, responding to seven hundred letters. Wilson even made time to review the proofs of a book called The New Freedom, a compilation of his campaign speeches about to be published. When a newspaper photographer snapped a picture of the President-elect behind the walls at Glencove, Wilson confronted him, declaring, “You’re no gentleman, and I’ll thrash you if you do that again.” The photographer apologized profusely.

  Beyond that, Wilson engaged in an activity Presidents seldom allow themselves—contemplation. His experiences as president of Princeton and Governor of New Jersey had taught him that the most opportune moment to institute change was at the beginning of one’s tenure—with the wind of optimism at one’s back and before the forces of resistance had a chance to gather. And so, Wilson began prioritizing his programs so that he might set them in motion upon his arrival at the White House. He turned directly to those decisions by which the public first judges its Chief Executive, the selection of a Cabin
et—ten departmental heads. “In his usual methodical way,” Nell observed, “he made a series of charts—a page for each man under consideration, listing the details of their careers, their qualifications, their friends, even the sort of wives they had.” And then, in his own form of solitaire, Wilson shuffled the charts, discarding one name each time he considered another. His family grew so exasperated with the secrecy of his process, it began to lose interest. “I don’t really care who you choose,” Nellie blurted one day, “as long as you make McAdoo Secretary of the Treasury.” That delighted her father. “Imagine!” he said to Ellen. “Nell wants me to appoint a man to the Cabinet just because she likes him.”

  With the President-elect sporting a tropical tan, the Wilsons returned on the Bermudian on December 16, 1912. Margaret Wilson and Joseph Tumulty met them at the pier. The four-week sojourn had been “an unmixed blessing,” Wilson wrote Mary Hulbert, then Stateside, as those “healing days in Bermuda gave us a great store of peace and vitality upon which to live in the months to come.” He would need it, as opposition forces were already plotting to reclaim New Jersey for themselves. Governor Wilson insisted that he had not finished fighting there—that he had no intention of resigning immediately or even of changing his residence. “It is very important that the people should feel that I am still connected with New Jersey,” he said, at least until “the progressive program is complete, even to the dot above the i.” Within hours of disembarking, he was on a train to Trenton, where—with the recent Democratic victories—a new generation of would-be state bosses was dispensing patronage, a young Frank Hague of Jersey City among them.

  A few weeks later, with his second annual message to the state legislature, Wilson hoped to turn the last year’s accomplishments into the drumbeat of the Progressive march onward. For immediate consideration, the Governor raised such matters as the need to alter the state’s corporation laws, regulation of investment companies, reform of the criminal justice system, an examination of tax assessment and collection, further empowerment of the Public Utility Commissioners, encouragement of the commission form of government, and conservation of natural resources, including forest preservation. He strongly urged approval of two amendments to the Constitution of the United States that awaited ratification—the Sixteenth, which would empower Congress to levy taxes on incomes, and the Seventeenth, which would establish the direct election of Senators by popular vote. While his ambitious program would face mixed results, Wilson saw the New Jersey legislature address all of it. The State Senate passed a woman suffrage resolution; and legislators agreed to enact a law that would remove jury selection from the hands of sheriffs. Before leaving office, Wilson would sign a set of anti-trust bills—called the “seven sisters”; and shortly thereafter, New Jersey would ratify the constitutional amendments.