Wilson

by A. Scott Berg

  Wilson at least hoped to have Independence Day off, especially as he had already declined an appearance at Gettysburg; but, he wired Ellen on June 28, “FIND SO LONG AS I AM PRESIDENT, I CAN BE NOTHING ELSE.” The next day he wrote to explain that Pennsylvania Congressman A. Mitchell Palmer had informed him that that year’s commemoration at the battlefield was to be “no ordinary celebration,” as it would mark the semicentenary of the great turning point of the Civil War. “Both blue and grey are to be there,” he explained to Ellen. “It is to celebrate the end of . . . all strife between the sections.” The President’s absence, he noted, would be publicly resented. “It would be suggested that he is a Southerner and out of sympathy with the occasion. In short, it would be more than a passing mistake; it would amount to a serious blunder.”

  Washington, D.C., became a ghost town, the houses on the best residential streets emptying of all who could escape the summer torpor, the furniture in the great rooms of the White House all covered in white sheets. Feeling “marooned,” Wilson prevailed upon Tumulty and Dr. Grayson to move into the Executive Mansion, and he found them good company. The former was married with small children, whom he joined on weekends on the New Jersey Shore; Grayson remained the President’s boon companion and constant medical consort. They spent practically all their free time together—dining, theatergoing twice a week, even attending church together. Dr. Grayson prescribed a daily dose of golf.

  “An ineffectual attempt to put an elusive ball into an obscure hole with implements ill-adapted to the purpose” is how Wilson delighted in describing the pastime. And perhaps because of the devotion, concentration, difficulty, and even prayer it required, golf became his second religion. He played every day that weather and work permitted. Wilson had supreme powers of concentration, and he loved impossible challenges; but he never became expert at the sport—in part because of his bad eye, which limited his peripheral vision. And so he played a methodical game that compensated for the ocular handicap—short, perfectly straight shots—though once he required twenty-six strokes on a single hole. Seldom did his score rise above 100, because upon reaching three digits, he was inclined to pack up his clubs and quit. One day at the Piping Rock Club in Locust Valley on Long Island, he shot 146, and even admitted as much to a reporter. He liked to play on the less exclusive courses around Washington—especially when they included a relaxing drive across the Potomac to Virginia. He was extremely selective about those in his party, as he forbade any talk of business and never played a second time with anybody who violated the rule. “Each stroke requires your whole attention and seems the most important thing in life,” he wrote Edith Reid that summer. “I can by that means get perfect diversion of my thoughts for an hour or so at the same time that I am breathing the pure out-of-doors.” His scorecard was not a barometer of his ability—which never changed—but of his mental state, the ease with which he could sink the ball into the hole suggesting how free from his responsibilities he had become. No President before or since played as much golf in the White House as Woodrow Wilson.

  The President and his physician found slight relief from the heat on Capitol Hill by cruising down the Potomac and Chesapeake Bay on the Presidential yacht, the Mayflower. They spent a sweltering July 3 in Yorktown. Wilson and Grayson eluded the Secret Service agents by saying they were going ashore with the captain of the ship and several sailors. But once the small motor launch had reached the wharf, the two men lost the others and spent the day wandering the sleepy streets of the old town by themselves. They visited the local courthouse and the battlefield and continued up the York River to see the farm that had once been Washington’s headquarters—crawling through brambles, shooing away bees, and encountering an angry bull along the way. The locals paid no attention to their visitors until a twelve-year-old girl saw them and said, “Excuse me, sir, but you certainly do remind me of the pictures of President Wilson.”

  He returned to Washington, only to leave by train early the next morning with Tumulty for Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. There, exactly fifty years prior, Union and Confederate soldiers had fought the costliest battle of the Civil War. The fifty-one thousand casualties (nearly eight thousand deaths) were almost equally divided; but, in retrospect, it proved to be the turning point of the war, as the Confederates steadily retreated over the next two years. In November of 1863, Lincoln delivered his deathless 272-word address, dedicating a portion of the battlefield as a final resting place for those who gave their lives there. In the half century since the battle, Gettysburg came to represent the reuniting of the nation. The symbol was so important that the Congress appropriated more than $2 million to mount a reunion, offering to transport any Civil War veteran from anywhere in the country and to feed and house him during this three-day “Peace Jubilee.”

  More than fifty thousand veterans flocked to the small town, proudly wearing uniforms and decorations and waving flags. Each man was provided with a cot and bedding in a 280-acre camp of eight-man tents. In the scorching heat, thousands gathered for speeches under a gigantic big top, walked the battlefield, and healed old wounds. The most compelling moment of the reunion came when two small teams of white-whiskered survivors of Pickett’s Charge faced each other and shook hands, reaching across the same stone wall each side had once fought to overtake. Goodwill seemed restored, but so little had been resolved: slavery had been abolished, but regionalism and racism in America were as rampant as ever. The survivors looked to Wilson for inspiration.

  The world would little note what he said there. The President’s entrance into the great tent brought the crowd of ten thousand to its feet. In a black frock coat, he put his top hat down and stood without a podium before the assembly. Holding his text in his left hand, he delivered a peculiarly hollow speech—full of ethereal questions (“Who stands ready to act again and always in the spirit of this day of reunion and hope and patriotic fervor?”) while offering few concrete answers. He called upon his countrymen to serve “the people themselves, the great and the small, without class or difference of kind or race or origin.” That was as close as he got to the underlying themes of the terrible war that had torn the nation apart. Within a half hour of his arrival, Wilson had returned to his train. He left behind a stillness at Gettysburg—which, in some ways, was his intention.

  The nation dedicated to the proposition that all men were created equal was, in fact, built atop an active fault of discrimination. A deep fissure of intolerance remained. State laws, especially in the South, went a long way toward keeping the races apart; but even Northern states were enacting anti-intermarriage statutes. The purportedly color-blind Civil Service had long operated under the “rule of three,” by which an employer was able to select from the trio of top applicants, allowing him to bypass Negro candidates. Many in the white majority were unable to accept the concept of all races being on equal footing; and where statutes proved inadequate, some took the law into their own hands. In parts of America, racial violence was so common, Negroes instinctively kept their distance from whites and held their tongues. Lynchings in America occurred weekly. As President, Wilson wished to promote racial progress—equal opportunities and peaceful coexistence—by shocking the social system as little as possible. With both impatient blacks and intolerant whites clamoring for action, there seemed only one solution that might avert upheaval and allow social evolution to take its course.

  There were already two Americas. Negro activist James Weldon Johnson wrote of such commonplace practices as the refusal to tip one’s hat to a colored woman or to address a Negro as “Mister” as more than trivialities; he added that “they connote the whole system of race prejudice, hatred, and injustice; their roots go to the very core of the whole matter.” Such mere trifles, he said, declared that “there is no common ground on which we can stand.” At the same time, Agriculture Secretary David Houston, a highly regarded educator and political scientist, was considering the problem of discrimination against the Japanese
in California and how they rated more favorably than Negroes—who were as a rule, he would write years later, “of low mental capacity and lazy.” So it hardly took anyone aback when Postmaster General Burleson had raised a prickly policy matter at one of the first Cabinet meetings back in the spring: Burleson wanted to segregate white and Negro employees not just in the Postal Service but in all departments of the government.

  Many Negroes worked in the railway mail service, he explained, often in the same car with white men. In those instances, he suggested, it was presumed that the white men would outwork the black and resentments would grow. Furthermore, Burleson said, “It is very unpleasant for them to work in a car with negroes where it is almost impossible to have different drinking vessels and different towels, or places to wash.”

  More than any of Wilson’s Cabinet members, Burleson understood the practice of politics; and he had done his due diligence. He had spoken with African American leaders, including organizer Bishop Alexander Walters of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, who, he claimed, endorsed the idea of separating the races. Josephus Daniels wrote in his diary that Burleson said “he had the highest regard for the negro and wished to help him in every way possible, but that he believed segregation was best for the negro and best for the Service.” Burleson went even farther that day, asking the President to reconsider even the appointment of Negroes to midlevel clerical offices—including the Register of the Treasury, which a black man had held for years.

  Segregation was not new to Washington, having flourished since the Roosevelt Administration. TR may have invited Booker T. Washington to dine in the White House, but he was publicly chastised for it and decades would pass before another African American would find a place at the White House table. Under Taft the dining room for White House employees divided along a color line. So did the Census Bureau. In the few Washington departments that hired Negroes, many worked without question in areas apart from white workers. Some divisions simply became known as “Negro colonies.” A Harvard- and Howard-educated attorney named Robert H. Terrell spent a few years in the Treasury Department before Taft appointed him to the Municipal Court of the District of Columbia, making him the nation’s first Negro judge; government office lunchrooms refused to serve him or other equally distinguished black men. Negroes who sought equal treatment at lunch counters were only inviting violence.

  Legalized segregation—“Jim Crow” laws—seemed a logical way to avoid friction, as it would keep blacks and whites literally from having to rub shoulders. Fifty years after Gettysburg, it seemed unimaginable to most Southerners that white men might have to serve under a black boss. Wilson was still inclined to let each Secretary run his department as he saw fit; and so, on the two racial issues before him, he rendered a split decision: he permitted Burleson and McAdoo to segregate their departments; and he proceeded to appoint a Negro, Adam E. Patterson, as the Treasury Register.

  That settled nothing, as each announcement incited intense reaction. Although Wilson believed the purity and fidelity of the white women of the South were its very backbone, he did not subscribe to the primal fear–mongering of many other Confederates. His Johns Hopkins colleague Thomas Dixon, the author of the Ku Klux Klan trilogy, wrote Wilson that he was “heartsick” over the appointment, that unless he withdrew Patterson’s name, “the South can never forgive this. . . . The establishment of Negro men over white women employees of the Treasury Dept. has in the minds of many thoughtful men & women long been a serious offense against the cleanness of our social life.” Dixon asked Wilson to “purge Washington of this iniquity” and withdraw the appointment.

  “I do not think you know what is going on down here,” an exasperated Wilson replied, trying to explain the shifting mores in a city where the black population could not be ignored. “We are handling the force of colored people who are now in the departments in just the way in which they ought to be handled.” At Treasury, for example, the President was standing by his appointment, as that particular office was being reconfigured into an all-black unit, one of several such divisions there: “I am trying to handle these matters with the best judgment but in the spirit of the whole country,” he wrote with some impatience, “though with entire comprehension of the considerations which certainly do not need to be pointed out to me.” Wilson considered this plan of putting “certain bureaus and sections of the service in the charge of negroes” a thoughtful means of “rendering them more safe in their possession of office and less likely to be discriminated against.”

  As Burleson’s proposals had portended, Southerners in Congress felt this was their moment to rise again. Senators James Vardaman of Mississippi, Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina, and Hoke Smith of Georgia all announced their refusal to support not only Patterson but any Negro who would be in a position to boss white women. A gracious Patterson requested that Wilson withdraw his name, which he did.

  In the meantime, McAdoo and Burleson segregated their departments with all deliberate speed. They supervised the creation of separate but ostensibly equal work, lunch, and lavatory facilities. That summer, Robert N. Wood, president of the United Colored Democracy of the State of New York, wrote Wilson that his people deeply resented the segregation of clerks in the Civil Service throughout the federal government—

  . . . not at all because we are particularly anxious to eat in the same room or use the same soap and towels that white people use, but because we see in the separation . . . of the races in the matter of soup and soap the beginning of a movement to deprive the colored man entirely of soup and soap, to eliminate him wholly from the Civil Service of the United States. For just as soon as there is a lunch-room or a work-room which the colored man may not enter in a government building, there will be separate tasks assigned the colored men and these will be, as the promoters of segregation have declared, the tasks which white men do not want.

  Even Booker T. Washington—“the great accommodator,” considered an “Uncle Tom” by uprising black leaders—wrote Oswald Garrison Villard of the NAACP that he had recently spent several days in Washington and that he had “never seen the colored people so discouraged and bitter as they are at the present time.”

  In a letter signed by Villard, Director of Publicity W. E. B. Du Bois, and President Moorfield Storey, the NAACP vigorously protested the new government policy. “Never before has the Federal Government discriminated against its civilian employees on the ground of color,” they wrote. States drafting discriminatory laws were one thing; segregating federal buildings in the District of Columbia was quite another. “It has set the colored people apart as if mere contact with them were contamination,” they wrote.

  Wilson had not intended such a result, as he did not equate segregation with subjugation. Rather, he considered it a way for Negroes to elevate themselves, getting a foothold in American institutions so that they could start assimilating. He thought the new forces of black workers in the federal government first had to occupy the same buildings as whites before they could share the same rooms. Gradually, he believed, proximity would breed familiarity, and, in time, harmony. Powerful bigots saw segregation as a means to keep the black man down; but Wilson viewed it “with the idea that the friction, or rather the discontent and uneasiness, which had prevailed in many of the departments would thereby be removed. It is as far as possible from being a movement against the negroes. I sincerely believe it to be in their interest.” While his Cabinet members had put the policy in motion, Wilson stood behind it and owned it. “My own feeling,” he told Villard, “is by putting certain bureaus and sections of the service in the charge of negroes we are rendering them more safe in their possession of office and less likely to be discriminated against.” Or so he had convinced himself.

  “I hope that you will try to see the real situation down here,” an exasperated Wilson tried to explain to Oswald Villard. He wished Villard understood the hatred that festered in the hearts of so many So
utherners. Wilson suggested that left to his own devices, he would not have instituted these new measures; but finding what he considered a middle ground, he believed a period of tranquillity would open more doors of opportunity for the Negroes. “I believe that by the slow pressure of argument and persuasion the situation may be changed and a great many things done eventually which now seem impossible,” Wilson said. “But they can not be done, either now or at any future time, if a bitter agitation is inaugurated and carried to its natural ends.” He appealed to Villard and the NAACP to “aid in holding things at a just and cool equipoise until I can discover whether it is possible to work out anything or not.” Wilson believed there was so much intolerance in the nation just then that it would take “one hundred years to eradicate this prejudice”; if they could all avoid stirring emotions with incendiary talk and rely on evolution, they might be able to avoid revolution.

  For Wilson, segregation remained secondary to the advancement of his New Freedom, though both matters were bound together. “It would be hard to make any one understand the delicacy and difficulty of the situation I find existing here with regard to the colored people,” the President of six months wrote Villard. In the matter of appointments, he explained, “I find myself absolutely blocked by the sentiment of Senators; not alone Senators from the South, by any means, but Senators from various parts of the country.”