Wilson

by A. Scott Berg

  At the same time, Dr. Grayson—McAdoo’s closest friend and Washington’s other most eligible bachelor—grew concerned about his two patients, the President and Mrs. Wilson. He convinced them that they desperately needed a vacation. With Jessie away on her honeymoon in London and Paris, Grayson urged Wilson to spend the Christmas holiday with the rest of his family in the Gulf country. Mississippi Senator John Sharp Williams recommended Pass Christian as an ideal winter resort. One evening just before the Wilsons’ departure, knowing that she would be gone for weeks and that he was leaving on a tour of the nation to select sites for the Federal Reserve Banks, Mac revealed his intentions. They agreed to search their souls before committing to each other, or even telling her parents.

  Pass Christian was everything Senator Williams had promised—balmy and restful. The Wilsons, Helen Bones, and Dr. Grayson stayed at Beaulieu, an antebellum mansion with tall white columns and garlands of moss hanging from the trees. They celebrated Christmas and Wilson’s fifty-seventh birthday; and, inevitably, the President began to chart the next stage of his New Freedom. Returning from a round of golf with Grayson one day, Wilson noticed smoke curling from the roof of a house. They ran to the door to inform the residents, only to have the mistress of the house invite her guests into the parlor to sit down. “I haven’t time to sit down,” the President said, “—your house is on fire.” They were able to get to the roof in time to extinguish it; and afterward, the local firefighters elected Wilson and Grayson members of their department. At that moment, however, the President had much bigger fires to put out—across the Gulf.

  • • •

  Two months earlier, Woodrow Wilson had delivered an address on foreign affairs at a convention of the Southern Commercial Congress in Mobile, Alabama, which several ministers from Latin America attended. The Panama Canal was approaching completion, and the isthmus was about to become the new crossroads of the globe. Before the world rushed in, Wilson wanted to articulate a new policy for his nation. He had every desire to expand the economy but only “upon terms of equality and honor.” For Wilson, that meant one principle: “the development of constitutional liberty in the world.”

  President Wilson hoped to change the course set by his predecessors, as the only American Empire he wished to create was one of ideas. “Human rights, national integrity, and opportunity as against material interest,” he said, “is the issue which we now have to face.” He seized this occasion to insist “that the United States will never again seek one additional foot of territory by conquest. She will devote herself to showing that she knows how to make honorable and fruitful use of the territory she has; and she must regard it as one of the duties of friendship to see that from no quarter are material interests made superior to human liberty and national opportunity.” What distinguished America, he said, were the beliefs on which it was founded. “I would rather belong to a poor nation that was free,” he said, “than to a rich nation that had ceased to be in love with liberty.” For a century, the Monroe Doctrine had served to keep Europe from securing political control over the nations of the Western Hemisphere; and Wilson believed—as Colonel House realized one day while lunching with him—that it was “just as reprehensible to permit foreign states to secure financial control of these weak and unfortunate republics.”

  A storm was brewing the January night Wilson went out to a cruiser at sea to confer with John Lind, his special agent in Mexico. Lind reported on Mexico’s recent elections, which had prompted General Huerta to nullify the results, dissolve the legislature, and remain as dictator. Regional opposition continued to mount, but the leaders remained too wary of one another to join forces. To defend himself against the insurrections of Venustiano Carranza in the north and Emiliano Zapata in the south, Huerta mobilized a vast army of federal forces, literally kidnapping men off the streets.

  When Wilson had addressed a joint session of Congress months earlier on the subject of Mexico, he had recommended neutrality, forbidding the United States to export munitions there. When this policy did nothing to weaken Huerta, Wilson changed tack, lifting the embargo in order to help arm General Francisco “Pancho” Villa, a popular leader from the north who also held Huerta in great contempt. When that showed little effect, Lind urged an aggressive attack against Huerta. Unfortunately, the Ambassador was neither knowledgeable nor sensitive enough to recognize that the Mexican people preferred Huerta to foreign imposition. Knowing he was not receiving enough reliable information, Wilson returned from his shipboard meeting badly shaken. He felt it was as essential as it was inevitable that the Huerta regime should fall, but he was committed to Mexico’s determining its own government—no matter how badly he wanted to intervene.

  The Wilsons returned to Washington, where Ellen’s ongoing efforts for slum clearance resulted in a bill being introduced in Congress. Although this pleased her, she was always weary and often looked drawn and pale. One night in early March 1914, after shaking hands with three thousand people at a White House reception, she fainted, falling hard on the polished floor of her bedroom. There was no sign of any deep injury, but she was sore for weeks. Ellen insisted she was fine and, referring to her husband, said, “This goose keeps worrying about me for no reason at all!”

  Not until April did Ellen show signs of her old self, at which time Woodrow took the entire family—along with Dr. Grayson and a nurse—to the Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs. The West Virginia resort offered golf, tennis, riding, even a new indoor pool. After a few days, William McAdoo joined them, his engagement to Eleanor having just been announced. In asking for her hand, Mac had suggested to his boss that he would resign to spare the President any embarrassment. “I appreciate your generous and considerate attitude,” Wilson said, “but I hope you will dismiss all thought of such a thing. You were appointed Secretary of the Treasury solely on your merit. No one imagined, at that time, that the present situation would arise.” He then paused and said with a wink, “But I must admit . . . that, if you had married into my family before I became President, I could not have offered you a position in the Cabinet, no matter how outstanding your record and qualifications might have been.” It was a happy Easter for all of them, especially Woodrow and Ellen, who quietly rejoiced in each other’s company during long rides in a buckboard, reminiscent of their courtship in Rome, Georgia, thirty years earlier.

  On April 9, 1914—the day the Wilsons had left for the Greenbrier—a whaleboat attached to the American war vessel Dolphin docked at Tampico—then under Huerta’s martial law—and a few sailors disembarked for a routine supply run. These bluejackets did not produce the permits that were required. Mexican soldiers boarded the whaleboat, which flew American flags at the bow and stern, and took the unarmed Paymaster and his crew into custody. When they were but a few blocks into town, an officer of higher authority ordered the Americans’ return to the wharf until further instructions arrived. Within ninety minutes, Huerta’s forces ordered their release and issued an apology, complete with “an expression of regret” from Huerta himself. The apology did not satisfy Admiral Henry T. Mayo, commander of the naval squadron, who unilaterally demanded a twenty-one-gun salute to the American flag.

  The next morning, Secretary of State Bryan wired the President about the incident. Although everything Huerta said or did provoked him, Wilson was annoyed with Mayo, whose demand seemed unnecessary. Colonel House said Mayo should be admonished against making such decisions without authorization, but the Commander in Chief supported his Admiral: “Mayo could not have done otherwise,” Wilson wired Bryan back. The Mexican commander in Tampico felt unqualified to order that salute, and the matter escalated to a diplomatic incident. Huerta informed the American Chargé d’Affaires that he would accede to the demand, provided an American ship responded in kind. Wilson agreed, and the confrontation could have ended with forty-two bullets being fired into the air. But then Huerta tried to reopen the negotiation, demanding that a protocol between the two
governments be signed. Wilson knew that action could be construed as his recognition of the Huerta government, to which he would not accede. For the first time in his life, Wilson had difficulty sleeping.

  Eleven days after the incident, Wilson opened his press conference assuring everybody that there was not about to be a war between the United States and Mexico; but when he took the matter to Congress that afternoon, jingoism filled the air. His welcome before the joint session in the House was disturbingly enthusiastic. “The incident cannot be regarded as a trivial one,” he told the legislators—especially as two of the men arrested had been removed from the boat itself, and thus seized from United States territory. Furthermore, the President asserted, this was not an isolated incident. A few days later, an orderly from the USS Minnesota was arrested in Veracruz while obtaining his ship’s mail. Wilson reaffirmed that he had no intention of going to war, but he asked for Congress’s approval to “use the armed forces of the United States in such ways and to such an extent as may be necessary to obtain from General Huerta and his adherents the fullest recognition of the rights and dignity of the United States, even amidst the distressing conditions now unhappily obtaining in Mexico.”

  Several Republicans saw this as an opportunity for America, once again, to carry a big stick. Alongside Henry Cabot Lodge, the most forthright speaker that day was Senator Elihu Root of New York, who said the insult to Old Glory was the least of the matter: behind that lay “years of violence and anarchy in Mexico” that warranted bold action to reinforce America’s position of power in the world. “People seem to want war with Mexico,” Wilson told his family after seeing the Congressional reaction, “but they shan’t have it if I can prevent it.” The Senate authorized the President to employ the armed forces to back his demands “for unequivocal amends for affronts and indignities.” Thus empowered, Wilson would have to keep resisting the urge to remove the sword from its scabbard in Haiti and the Dominican Republic as well, nearby nations that had endured years of revolts and coups d’état and which had required American fiscal assistance as well as its occasional military presence to stabilize them and their economies.

  Woodrow Wilson had no intention of becoming another TR, an imperialistic warrior who exerted his might because he could; but he did see himself as a Christian soldier, fighting for what was right. Blinded by his desire to remove Huerta, Wilson did not see the irony of demanding a salute from a government he did not even recognize. Between his speech to Congress and the Senate approval, the Administration learned that a ship had left Havana for Veracruz laden with 1,333 boxes of German guns intended for Huerta. Wilson discussed the matter with his Secretaries of State and the Navy. Daniels said, “The munitions should not be permitted to fall into Huerta’s hands.” The President hesitated to act pre-emptively, but his advisers maintained that if the arms did reach the usurper, it would increase the loss of Mexican lives and the guns might later be turned upon Americans. “There is no alternative but to land,” said Wilson. Daniels immediately cabled Admiral Frank F. Fletcher, commander of the Atlantic Fleet, “Seize custom house. Do not permit war supplies to be delivered to Huerta government or to any other party.”

  On the morning of April 21, 1914, Fletcher’s fleet steamed to Veracruz, and eight hundred Marines and Navy bluejackets filled their whaleboats and sailed to the waterfront. By nightfall they had captured the customs house as well as the post and telegraph offices and the railroad station; the next day they overtook the rest of the town. Nineteen Americans lost their lives, and another seventy were wounded; more than a hundred Mexicans died.

  On May 11, Wilson went to New York to take part in a memorial for the American sailors killed at Veracruz. Past huge silent crowds, his carriage followed the slow procession of horse-drawn caissons up Broadway from the Battery to City Hall, and then across the Manhattan Bridge to the parade ground of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Speaking there, he rambled slightly as he attempted to define not only the justification for the action at Veracruz but also the precepts of his nascent foreign policy.

  Wilson remained conflicted. Just three weeks earlier, he had told Congress, “The people of Mexico are entitled to settle their own domestic affairs in their own way”; then he resorted to embargoes, invasion, and occupation of Veracruz—punishing Mexico’s misbehavior. On this occasion, after a few paragraphs extolling the selfless duty and service of the fallen nineteen, he reached the undefined core of his remarks: “We have gone down to Mexico to serve mankind if we can find out the way. We do not want to fight the Mexicans. We want to serve the Mexicans if we can, because we know how we would like to be free, and . . . a war of service is a thing in which it is a proud thing to die.” He would later admit that he could not dismiss the thought of the young men killed in Mexico. “It was right to send them there,” he said, “but that does not mitigate the sorrow for their deaths—and I am responsible for their being there.”

  Other news contributed to Wilson’s distress that day. The Secret Service had just foiled a plot against his life, and new threats appeared. Officials urged him to review the parade from a stand, which offered some protection. Mayor John P. Mitchel concurred, saying, “The country cannot afford to have its President killed.” More important, Wilson replied, “the country cannot afford to have a coward for President.”

  Just when the Mexican crisis weighed heaviest on Wilson, three men from South America arrived to ease the burden. Ambassadors from Argentina, Brazil, and Chile—the A. B. C. Powers—offered to mediate a settlement between Mexico and the United States. Both parties eagerly accepted, though Wilson made it clear his interest was not in resolving the incident at Tampico but in the “settlement by general pacification of Mexico.” Ridding Mexico of its dictator, of course, had been the subtext of Wilson’s actions all along, but he hoped this entire matter might establish a policy the United States could pursue going forward. At a time when American mining interests, English oil interests, German commercial interests, and French banking interests were all exploiting Mexico, Wilson told a journalist that he wanted the United States to be more than a good neighbor. The “business, prosperity, and contentment of Mexico mean more, much more, to us than merely an enlarged field for our commerce and enterprise.” House’s metaphor for the President’s foreign policy cheered him: “If a man’s house was on fire he should be glad to have his neighbors come in and help put it out, provided they did not take his property, and it should be the same with nations.”

  William Jennings Bryan had already done a lot of the spadework for America’s new foreign policy. As of mid-1914, more than thirty nations—representing four-fifths of the world’s population, including most of Europe except Germany—had signed his treaties. These accords provided for the submission of international disputes to a permanent tribunal and the agreement that there would be no hostilities for a year, during which time complaints would be investigated. The notion reminded Wilson of a rule a headmaster at a Southern school had imposed under which any student with a grievance might fight another provided he came first to the headmaster and agreed to fight under his supervision according to the Queensberry rules; it stopped fighting on campus altogether. Wilson decided to put America’s new code of ethics to the test.

  In 1901, Secretary of State John Hay and British Ambassador Sir Julian Pauncefote had signed an agreement permitting the United States to construct and maintain a canal in Central America; Article III of the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty dictated that the Panama Canal “shall be free and open” to vessels “of all Nations . . . on terms of entire equality.” Furthermore, it stipulated, “such conditions and charges of traffic shall be just and equitable.” During Taft’s last year in office, as the great pathway approached completion, Congress passed an act exempting U.S. vessels engaged in noninternational trade from paying tolls. After all, the lawmakers reasoned, the United States had underwritten the canal’s construction, and this exemption applied only to American ships going from coast to coast,
not competing against the ships of other nations conducting international commerce. Most Republicans—especially the vocal ex-President Roosevelt—considered the exemption an entitlement; even Democrats endorsed it. Great Britain believed the exemption violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the Treaty.

  So did Wilson. The exemption had been on his mind from the start of his term, but he felt he needed a few important legislative notches on his belt before he could persuade even his own party members to defy public sentiment as well as basic accounting. On March 5, 1914, the President returned to Congress with his briefest message ever, urging the repeal of the exemption provision of the Panama Canal Act. He asked the legislators to think beyond themselves. “We ought to reverse our action,” he said, “. . . and so once more deserve our reputation for generosity and the redemption of every obligation without quibble or hesitation.”

  Wilson’s position was sound, not only morally but also politically. “When everything else about this administration is forgotten,” the President once told his brother-in-law, “its attitude in the Panama Canal Tolls will be remembered as putting the conduct of nations on the same basis as that which prevails among honorable individuals, where a promise is a promise and is kept regardless of personal advantage.” He thought the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty was foolish in many ways; but, he said, “We gave Great Britain our word and that word must be respected by us.”