Wilson
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“The White House” became the official name for the sandstone Georgian mansion during TR’s stay, referring to both the President’s home and his workplace. Because his family had filled so many rooms at a time when the executive branch was expanding, TR had ordered construction of wings off the sides of the house to provide office space. His successor, Taft, created an elliptical room within the West Wing, which became the President’s office.
Sunshine filled the White House on March 5, 1913, Woodrow Wilson’s first full day at his new job. Arthur Brooks, his personal valet, had laid out his clothes. At precisely 8:30, Wilson sat at the mahogany table in the small family dining room on the north side of the house. Fred Yates joined him and his family, and they rehashed the prior day’s events as the President ate his customary breakfast—two unbeaten raw eggs in orange juice, swallowed like oysters, a bowl of porridge, and coffee. The President left at nine for what was then called “the oval room in the Executive offices.”
During his first official appointment—with friend and future diplomat Charles Crane—Wilson commented on the days of Washington and Jefferson, when “the President had time to think.” His first policy decision revealed his determination to find the hours in which to free his mind. He was going to rid himself of one of the “chief burdens” of his job, the meeting of candidates for appointment to public office. Wilson had telegraphed as much in his constitutional government lectures just a few years earlier, when he predicted that “as the multitude of the President’s duties increases,” holders of the great office should be “less and less executive officers and more and more . . . men of counsel and of the sort of action that makes for enlightenment.”
At ten o’clock Wilson met informally in the Cabinet Room with his ten departmental Secretaries, who were mostly strangers to him and to one another. Thereafter, their semiweekly meetings would usually begin at eleven with Wilson relating an anecdote before presenting issues of immediate concern. Then he would call upon each Secretary in turn, practically simulating a Princeton preceptorial. Shortly after this first meeting, Wilson developed nicknames for all the Cabinet members, which doubled as ciphers during confidential telephone conversations and telegrams between him and Colonel House. Bryan became “Prime”; Secretary of War Garrison was “Mars”; and Secretary of the Navy Daniels became “Neptune.” Wilson considered his Cabinet “executive counselors”; and from that day forward, observed Neptune, he gave them “free rein in the management of the affairs of their department. No President refrained so much from hampering them by naming their subordinates. Holding them responsible, he gave them liberty, confidence, and co-operation. More than that: he stood back of them when criticized and held up their hands.” The West Wing functioned with a staff of six, including the stenographer Charles Swem, who had accompanied Wilson from New Jersey.
Ceremonial duties consumed most of Wilson’s first day in office, as he greeted more than a thousand guests. There was a “Woodrow luncheon” for the two dozen relatives from his mother’s side and a “Wilson dinner” for those from his father’s. For almost an hour, he received well-wishers in the East Room, the “public audience chamber,” which, at almost three thousand square feet and running the width of the house, was the largest in the mansion. Guests arrived by appointment, but many brought guests of their own: one Illinois Congressman arrived with 150 Chicago Democrats; an Atlanta editor ushered in 150 of his newsboys. And then the entire Democratic National Committee appeared. Not until after dinner did Wilson discover the most satisfying moment of the day—when he could address the piles of letters and reports that awaited him next to his old familiar typewriter in the private book-lined study on the second floor.
Although Tumulty had announced that the government would not be conducting Presidential appointments as usual, Wilson immediately faced that disparity between aspiration and accommodation in the thousands of non-Cabinet appointments at his discretion. He believed no President had ever entered the White House so free of political debt, but he quickly learned that he owed more than he had thought. “I am not going to advise with reactionary or standpat senators or representatives in making these appointments,” Wilson announced at the start of his administration, as he intended to place capability above party loyalty. “Mr. President,” Postmaster Burleson, the savviest political mind in the Cabinet, replied, “if you pursue this policy, it means that your administration is going to be a failure. It means the defeat of the measures of reform that you have next to your heart. These little offices don’t amount to anything. They are inconsequential. It doesn’t amount to a damn who is postmaster at Paducah, Kentucky. But these little offices mean a great deal to the senators and representatives in Congress.”
Burleson put a practical example before him—the nation’s fifty-six thousand postmasterships. “The Cardinal,” as Burleson was nicknamed, said he hoped he could apply Wilson’s standards to all the appointees, but the Congressmen and Senators expected to have their say. “They are mostly good men,” Burleson explained. “If they are turned down, they will hate you and will not vote for anything you want. It is human nature. On the other hand, if you work with them, and they recommend unsuitable men for the offices, I will keep on asking for other suggestions, until I get good ones.” Wilson remained unconvinced until Burleson addressed the appointment atop a stack of papers—a recommendation from the Congressman in southeastern Tennessee. Wilson had received objections to the appointment and said he could not endorse it. Burleson proceeded to describe the little town near Chattanooga and the Representative’s familiarity with the people there. Wilson sat in silence during the long descriptive discourse, finally saying, “Well, Burleson, I will appoint him.” Seeing another 55,999 similar instances before him, Wilson relinquished control in the matter, simply asking Burleson where he should sign their commissions. Except for the ability to bring nonpolitical figures (especially academicians) into the government, Wilson found little pleasure in dispensing patronage. Sometimes it actually pained him, as he rejected friends—even family members—who sought judgeships or other appointments.
With ten years between them, Woodrow had always been more of a father figure to Joseph Wilson, Jr., than a brother. While Josie had built his own modest career in the newspaper business in Tennessee, by his late forties, he had reached a dead end and sought a new career. He had been working for the Democratic Party, and McAdoo thought he might make a good candidate for the Senate. Short of that, the current junior Senator from Tennessee, Luke Lea, had another idea.
Since the founding of the Congress, a little-known position called Secretary of the Senate has existed. The Senators themselves elect this officer, who originally had served as their clerk, archivist, and quartermaster. By Wilson’s day, the job included overseeing the Senate payroll, its pages, and the public records; it paid $6,500 per annum. After the election of 1912, Senator Lea believed putting Joseph Wilson in that position might give Lea some special access. Josie bought into the idea, and, for a moment, so did his brother—until the Senator from Oklahoma, T. P. Gore, reminded Wilson of, as he put it, “something called the separation of powers.”
Even before the Senate elected somebody else, Josie cast his eye on another position, Postmaster of Nashville. Shortly after taking office, the President wrote his brother that it would be “a very serious mistake both for you and for me if I were to appoint you,” despite his “struggle against affection and temptation.” The brothers’ relationship did not change after that—as, after all, they already wrote each other irregularly and saw each other infrequently.
Wilson demonstrated more fraternal feelings toward his advisers, three in particular. “Mr. House is my second personality,” the President said, when asked of his silent partner in formulating policy. “He is my independent self,” and “his thoughts and mine are one.” The two men discussed House’s relocating; but, House wrote in his diary, “we both realize that one soon becomes saturated with what
might be termed the Washington viewpoint, and that everything is colored by that environment.” They concluded it would be best for House to continue living in New York, Massachusetts, and Texas, and shuttling to Washington whenever beckoned, relying on the telephone and on letters in between. House visited the White House ten times that spring alone, as they charted administration policy.
Joseph Tumulty continued as Wilson’s political adviser. More than merely tending to the pesky details of office for which Wilson had no patience, Tumulty’s Trenton-tested instincts allowed him to deal with the press, take the public’s pulse, interact with the legislature, and serve as gatekeeper to the Oval Office—tasks that future Presidents would divide among a dozen men.
The third crucial member of the Wilson team was Cary T. Grayson, who was already becoming the most indispensable. After five days as President—during which he had received nine Justices, dozens of envoys, and hundreds of commissioners and other governmental functionaries—Wilson fell ill. He suffered from a severe headache and gastric disorder—which he referred to as “turmoil in Central America.” Dr. Grayson, who had been monitoring Wilson’s sister since her Inauguration Day accident, found the President in bed. “When you get to know me better,” Wilson explained, “you will find that I am subject to disturbances in the equatorial regions.” Grayson’s first recommendation for Wilson to rest would become chronic advice.
Grayson did not yet know the extent of his new patient’s hypertension, but he promptly saw that Wilson had been overmedicating his headaches with coal-tar analgesics—such as the new wonder drug aspirin—which upset his stomach. His medicine cabinet already held a quart-sized can of tablets and a stomach pump, which he used regularly in a procedure that involved inserting a rubber hose from his mouth to his stomach and funneling in enough saline solution to siphon out the gastric acid. Recognizing a pernicious cycle, Grayson took Wilson off the drugs. The patient accused the doctor of being a “therapeutic nihilist.” Shortly thereafter, the President invited Dr. Grayson to lunch with Secretary of the Navy Daniels. “There is one part of the Navy that I want to appropriate,” Wilson said. “There have been a good many applications for the position but Mrs. Wilson and I have already become acquainted with Doctor Grayson and we have decided that he is the man we should like to have assigned to the White House.” He became the President’s personal physician, and soon a lot more.
As such, he learned all he could about his new patient from various sources. Long associating Woodrow’s prior history of “neuritis” and visual impairment with the strains of work, Ellen had privately consulted with Dr. Francis X. Dercum of Philadelphia (who treated her brother Stockton for his persistent breakdowns), to ask if he thought her husband could shoulder the Presidency. Dercum knew of Wilson’s ruptured blood vessel years earlier and saw no great danger; but another famous neurologist, Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, disagreed, prophesying that Woodrow Wilson would not live out his first term.
Dr. Grayson reminded Wilson that “he had four hard years ahead of him and that he owed it to himself and the American people to get into as fit condition as possible and to stay there.” The regime, Grayson would later recollect, “included plenty of fresh air, a diet suited to his idiosyncrasies as I discovered them by close study, plenty of sleep, daily motor rides, occasional trips on the Mayflower [the Presidential yacht], and especially regular games of golf, together with treatment for a persistent case of neuritis from which he had long suffered.” As a result of keeping the President engaged in leisure activities every day, Grayson became his regular companion, “drawn into close personal association with him.”
Once out of bed, Wilson conscientiously attempted to maintain a balanced schedule. After breakfast, he would dictate correspondence from nine until ten and then receive visitors until one. He would lunch with family members and then work another hour or two. Every afternoon included an automobile ride; and except for some light paperwork, he worked at night only during crises. Sundays he slept in before attending services at the Central Presbyterian Church. He even made time for recreational reading, asking the Librarian of Congress to keep him supplied with detective novels. From the very start of his term, Wilson set his sights on its completion. “The day after I am released from this great job,” he wrote, “I shall take a ship for Rydal!” Until then, Wilson had an ambitious legislative program he hoped to bequeath, but every President quickly discovers that he must first untangle the state of affairs he has inherited.
• • •
In the centuries since Columbus, Spain, Germany, France, and England had all plundered Central and South America. Mexico became their piñata, which they repeatedly bashed so that more of its treasures would fall at their feet. In the mid-1800s, the United States took some swings as well, annexing Texas and grabbing Mexican land as far north as Oregon. In his History of the American People, Wilson characterized the Mexican-American War as “inexcusable aggression and fine fighting.” The American presence steadily increased south of the Rio Grande, as Mexico’s abundance of oil became more precious than its metals.
Longtime dictator General Porfirio Díaz invited outside investment; and under America’s Republican administrations at the start of the twentieth century, “dollar diplomacy”—the belief that the government should exploit all possible business opportunities in foreign countries—earned handsome dividends for Americans. With the rise of this private imperialism, Mexican resentment grew. In 1910 a reform-minded landowner, Francisco Madero, ran against Díaz in a “free election”—only to be imprisoned by his opponent. So began the Mexican Revolution, with Madero marshaling the forces of Emiliano Zapata, Pascual Orozco, and Francisco “Pancho” Villa—all of whom kept turning on one another. In the spring of 1911, Díaz fled the country, and Madero was named President. Not two years later, General Victoriano Huerta had him shot and on February 18, 1913, became President of Mexico.
Two weeks later, President Huerta sent congratulations to the newly inaugurated President Wilson. The gesture was barely reciprocated. Wilson wired a seven-word formal reply—carefully addressed to General—not President—Huerta, to avoid even suggesting diplomatic recognition of what Wilson considered an illegal regime. Days after the inauguration, the New York World implicated America’s Ambassador, Henry Lane Wilson (no relation), in the overthrow of Madero. Tensions in Latin America were the subject of the first official Cabinet meeting on Friday, March 7; and when they reconvened the following Tuesday, the President read aloud a statement he had written on the subject, taking his first steps into a quagmire not of his creation.
These initial words about Mexico would become the cornerstone of his foreign policy for as long as he held office; and they further signaled his intention to serve largely as his own Secretary of State. “Cooperation is possible only when supported at every turn by the orderly processes of just government based upon law, not upon arbitrary or irregular force,” he said. “We hold . . . that just government rests always upon the consent of the governed, and that there can be no freedom without order based upon law and upon the public conscience and approval. . . . We shall lend our influence of every kind to the realization of these principles in fact and practice. . . . We can have no sympathy with those who seek to seize the power of government to advance their own personal interests or ambition. . . . We shall prefer those who act in the interest of peace and honor, who protect private rights and respect the restraints of constitutional provision.” Some other Cabinet members commented that such a statement suggested the new administration was unnecessarily rushing into places where it did not belong. Wilson averred that “something had to be said, that the agitators in certain countries wanted revolutions and were inclined to try it on with the new Administration.” As Agriculture Secretary David Houston recalled, “He intimated that he was not going to let them have one if he could prevent it.” Secretary Bryan nodded and smiled.
However reluctantly, the United States was taking
its first steps along a new path into international affairs, becoming a global overseer. Under Woodrow Wilson, American foreign policy would increasingly find itself clucking its disapproval, if not disdain, for the misbehavior of other nations. The situation in Mexico was just the beginning of a series of conundrums in which Wilson questioned himself as to whether his actions imposed sound public policy or just his own personal morality—all the while questing, of course, to do both.
While the change in Mexico’s government had occurred in the prior administration, Taft had postponed taking a position, perhaps out of respect to the incoming President. A quick study of the situation reported that the conditions resulting from American nonrecognition of the Huerta government were already producing “serious inconvenience.” Several matters between the two countries hung in abeyance, from water rights along the Colorado River to a border dispute in El Paso; loans from American banks were coming due and would go unpaid. The professor who wrote the report allowed that the circumstances by which Huerta rose to power were deplorable; but, he added, “We cannot become the censors of the morals or conduct of other nations and make our approval or disapproval of their methods the test of our recognition of their governments without intervening in their affairs.” Others insisted that standing on the sidelines would threaten American lives, property, and profits.
“I will not recognize a government of butchers,” said the President, digging in his heels. “While recognition of Huerta was the wise course, as practicality defines wisdom,” an ardent supporter later wrote of his decision, “it was not the right course.” With American land, mineral, and industrial investors pleading for Wilson to change his mind, Wilson told Tumulty, “I have to pause and remind myself that I am President of the United States and not of a small group of Americans with vested interest in Mexico.”