Wilson

by A. Scott Berg

  Meanwhile all that cotton sat on the docks as the next crop was being picked. Everybody suspected the war would create a greater need for the bales, though many feared it might be declared contraband, which would reduce further demand. Money in the South—where cotton was the foundation of the financial infrastructure—tightened, threatening an already stressed economy. Once again the Administration stepped in, issuing currency to Southern banks for loans to the farmers, to finance storage of the new crop and to invest for the following year. Once again, the New Freedom was creating elasticity, allowing supply and demand to find their equilibrium. Within weeks, cotton had bounced to 8.5¢ per pound; and Wilson’s success at jump-starting a disabled but essential American industry would provide precedent for future Presidents.

  The President consulted with J. P. Morgan, Jr., who was concerned that the war and the restrictions imposed by the New Freedom legislation would hurt the American economy. The value of securities was his immediate concern; but Morgan, who was powerful enough to bail out whole countries, was thinking worldwide. The curtailment of international trade, Morgan suggested, should be “a tremendous opportunity for America, but the country is not in a position to take advantage of that opportunity if it does not feel that its own capital invested in its own country is safely and remuneratively placed.” In fact, France had just retained the House of Morgan in hopes of securing $100 million.

  J. P. Morgan & Company asked the Department of State if there were any objections to such a loan. Robert Lansing, an expert in international law and an adviser to the Department, could offer no legal grounds, but Secretary Bryan suggested several reasons to oppose the transaction—all rooted in the President’s stated position. “Money is the worst of all contrabands because it commands everything else,” Bryan wrote Wilson on August 10, 1914. “I know of nothing that would do more to prevent war than an international agreement that neutral nations would not loan to belligerents.” Bryan contended that a loan to France would sanction future loans to Great Britain or Germany or Russia or Austria, which would tend to factionalize American citizens. Lending institutions would find themselves exerting pressure on the media to support the governments they were financing. All that, Bryan announced, was terribly “inconsistent with the true spirit of neutrality.” Wilson agreed, at first.

  One of the President’s strengths was in remaining as flexible as his nation’s currency. Wilson appeared before another joint session of Congress to urge the raising of $100 million in internal taxes to compensate for the loss of revenues from customs. When he saw that the nation’s railroads needed financial relief, he expressed as much to the Interstate Commerce Commission. And two months after Bryan spoke against the Morgan loan to France, Wilson reversed himself, as the funding involved was not to be considered loans so much as “credits” for American goods—including guns as well as grains, machinery, meat, and cotton. The nation emerged from its recession.

  Without straying from Ellen’s rose garden, Wilson limited his midterm campaigning to a few statements, primarily a long letter to House Majority Leader Oscar Underwood—written for publication. In it the President catalogued the Sixty-third Congress’s accomplishments and announced the agenda for the Sixty-fourth. (That included a conservation program protecting natural resources and developing water power, in the name of economy as much as ecology.) Without “a Congress in close sympathy with the administration,” Wilson wrote, “a whole scheme of peace and honor and disinterested service to the world of which they have approved cannot be brought to its full realization.”

  The Republican Party remained divided, its Progressive insurgents still unsettled, while the Democrats were uncharacteristically unified. The New York Times credited this “reversal of ancient tradition” to the personality of the President himself, saying, “He has inspired the nation with confidence in him as a leader; he has inspired the world with confidence in him as a statesman; it is not strange that he has inspired his party with confidence in him as its chief.” In the weeks before the midterm elections, Wilson even extended his hand to Tammany Hall candidates in New York, a machine boss in Illinois, and the old Smith-Nugent machine in New Jersey, where he still voted. In truth, Wilson admitted to Tumulty after two years in office, he had developed new respect for some of the old party warhorses, even a few of the hacks, who loyally stood by his side “without hitching.”

  Under the newly ratified Seventeenth Amendment, the midterm elections of 1914 marked the first time the people—not the state legislatures—directly elected its Senators. The vote skewed Democratic, with Wilson’s party attracting Progressive voters and picking up four seats. The House of Representatives, on the other hand, revealed a growing desire to slow, if not stop, all the radical changes, and the Democrats lost sixty votes there. They maintained a lead of thirty-four votes, but the results distressed the President. He said it did not seem worthwhile to work as hard as he had in the past two years only “to have it scantily appreciated.” Colonel House tried to console the President, reminding him that he was not on the ballot; but Wilson said, “People . . . know that to vote against a democratic ticket is to vote indirectly against me.” While the Republicans had found votes in the industrial Midwest, Tumulty took heart in the Democrats’ successfully planting their flag in the West—where he believed the 1916 election would be won. The President himself took to touting that his party, which had been called “sectional,” was becoming “unmistakably national.” The biggest loser in the election proved to be the Progressive Party, which ran almost 150 candidates for Congress in 1914 and saw only a handful elected. Insurgents from each of the two major parties drifted back to their respective folds.

  After that, Wilson sagged into a diagnosable “acute depression”—the thirteenth such “breakdown” in his adult life. He continued to perform his duties, but he slumped with fatigue at the end of each day. Colonel House shuttled from New York to Washington almost weekly and spent several nights at a time at the White House. His companionship proved to be as valuable as his counsel; when the Colonel could not engage the President after dinner with talk of politics, he would ask him to read aloud. Wordsworth or Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” always revived him. But Wilson’s melancholia persisted. He said that Ellen’s death had broken his spirit and that he simply “was not fit to be President because he did not think straight any longer, and had no heart in the things he was doing.” On November 12, 1914, his nerves were so frayed that he lost his temper for the first time in the White House.

  William Monroe Trotter, a Negro activist and a Wilson supporter in the 1912 election, had already presented the President with a national petition signed by African Americans in thirty-eight states protesting the Administration’s segregation of the Departments of Treasury and the Post Office. At that time, Wilson had assured the suppliants that he would personally investigate their complaints. A year later, Trotter appeared in the West Wing of the White House with representatives of the National Independence Equal Rights League to inform Wilson that the conditions for the Negro had only worsened. Negroes felt so betrayed that they had just registered their protest to Wilson’s policies at the polls. Discovering their strength as a bloc, they voted against every Democratic candidate except those who opposed segregation.

  “In the first place,” the President said, bridling at Trotter’s remarks, “let’s leave politics out of it.” Wilson insisted this was “a human problem, not a political problem,” and that if “the colored people made a mistake in voting for me, they ought to correct it and vote against me if they think so.” As a whole, he said, the American people wished to support the advancement of the Negro race; but Wilson acknowledged that friction still existed and that prejudice in America ran deep. “It takes the world generations to outlive all its prejudices,” Wilson said, insisting this was not “a question of intrinsic equality, because we all have human souls.” It was a current question of “economic equalit
y—whether the Negro can do the same things with equal efficiency.” Once he had proved it, he said, “a lot of things are going to solve themselves.”

  Trotter had no use for such talk. “Only two years ago you were heralded as perhaps the second Lincoln,” he said, “and now the Afro-American leaders who supported you are hounded as false leaders and traitors to the race. What a change segregation has wrought!” Trotter did not stop there. “You said that your ‘Colored fellow citizens could depend upon you for everything which would assist in advancing the interest of their race in the United States.’” And then he asked if there was a “new freedom” for white Americans and a “new slavery for your ‘Afro-American fellow citizens.’”

  That did it. “Your tone, sir,” Wilson announced, “offends me.” The President said that he had enjoyed the exchange of ideas expressed by this delegation, but Trotter’s last personalization had crossed a line. “You are an American citizen, as fully an American citizen as I am, but you are the only American citizen that has ever come into this office who has talked to me with a tone . . . of passion that was evident. Now, I want to say that if this association comes again, it must have another spokesman.” Trotter did not back down, insisting he was “from a part of the people” who waited to hear that the President was without prejudice, and then implied that they would defect from the Democratic Party. Trying to dismiss the delegation, Wilson told Trotter, “You have spoiled the whole cause for which you came.”

  Trotter said he was sorry to hear that, especially—he added, now baiting the President—in an America that professed to be Christian. A fuming Wilson snapped, “I expect those who profess to be Christians to come to me in a Christian spirit.” For several more minutes, Trotter held the floor of the Oval Office, expounding upon each of his arguments, insisting that Wilson’s policy brought more dangers than advantages. At last, Trotter led his colleagues to the street, where he announced to the press a protest meeting the following Sunday. He intended to take this movement to the churches.

  The confrontation galvanized the black community. James Weldon Johnson—then editing The New York Age, the city’s oldest African American newspaper—addressed the President in an editorial, saying, “Mr. Wilson, the men who waited upon you did not go to ask any favors; neither did they go . . . to be patted on the head and told to be ‘good little niggers and run home.’” No, Johnson said, they were simply citizens asking their “Chief Magistrate” to right a wrong. The President had preached the New Freedom and sent his Army and Navy “in the interest of the landless peons of Mexico,” he said, “but not one word has he uttered for fair play to the ten million Negroes in this country.” For Johnson, the episode revealed a basic truth about Woodrow Wilson: he “bears the discreditable distinction of being the first President of the United States, since Emancipation, who openly condoned and vindicated prejudice against the Negro.”

  The white liberal press took Wilson to task as well. Oswald Garrison Villard sent copies of newspaper editorials to the President, lamenting that “an Administration so noble in its feeling for the under-dog . . . cannot do simple justice when it comes to the color line.” The New York Evening Post suggested that Trotter’s “bad manners” aside, the Wilson Administration had drawn a color line where it had not existed. Blacks and whites had worked side by side for half a century, and this administration “went out of its way to create the issue it now deplores.”

  Wilson regretted the encounter with Trotter, but not for any substantive reason. “Daniels,” he later remarked to his Secretary of the Navy, “never raise an incident into an issue. When the negro delegate threatened me, I was damn fool enough to lose my temper and to point them to the door.” In retrospect, he believed he should have listened quietly and said he would consider their petition, allowing the matter to pass. “But I lost my temper,” Wilson said, “and played the fool.” A few months later, Wilson got sucker punched again—but this time from the other side.

  In 1914, David Wark Griffith—a former actor from Kentucky who became the predominant filmmaker of his time, transforming motion pictures from a nickel-and-dime novelty into a storytelling art—adapted a bestselling novel called The Clansman, by Thomas Dixon, Jr., into a film. Part of a trilogy, the book was inspired by Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But where Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic novel exposed the evils of slavery, Dixon’s rabble-rousing work meant to portray the injustices of Reconstruction. Subtitled An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, it picked the scabs off the nation’s Civil War wounds, hoping to incite a reaction to what he considered a growing acceptance of racial equality. A proud white supremacist—who deplored miscegenation and the government in the postwar Confederacy—Dixon depicted Reconstruction from the losing side, suggesting that Negroes had once happily worked in the cotton fields before the war had freed them to run amok. He preyed upon the reader’s sentiments by presenting the most blatant racial stereotypes: one character—a former slave—lusts after an innocent white girl; when she plummets to her death from a cliff, to evade his touch, the righteous Klan gallops forth to mete out the ultimate justice, a lynching.

  The result was an epic film—the most expensive ($112,000) and the longest (190 minutes) that had ever been produced. Rich in detail and wondrous in scope, The Clansman reenacted visceral battle sequences, sentimental love scenes, and even the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. (White actors in blackface assumed the important Negro roles.) Less than a week before its premiere, Dixon arranged a meeting at the White House with the President, his friend and colleague from Johns Hopkins—whose early writings were quoted in the movie’s title cards.

  A born self-promoter, Dixon could think of no better means of publicizing his work than a Presidential endorsement. He appealed to Wilson, as one historian to another, describing how the camera could record and disseminate history. “Of course,” Dixon later wrote Tumulty, “I didn’t dare allow the President to know the real big purpose back of my film—which was to revolutionize Northern sentiments by a presentation of history that would transform every man in my audience into a good Democrat!” What he did tell the President was “that I would show him the birth of a new art—the launching of the mightiest engine for moulding public opinion in the history of the world.” Wilson was still in mourning and said he could not attend a theater, but he was not averse to a small unpublicized viewing.

  On February 8, 1915, The Clansman premiered at Clune’s Auditorium in Los Angeles and became an overnight sensation. Nobody in the new industry had ever witnessed such spectacular storytelling. The Los Angeles chapter of the NAACP sought an injunction against exhibiting the film, claiming it was a threat to public safety because of the violence it would incite. The show went on, but word about the incendiary nature of the film spread. Then, on February 18, Wilson and his daughters and his Cabinet gathered in the East Room for the first running of a motion picture in the White House.

  “It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true,” Woodrow Wilson purportedly said when the lights came up. In fact, Wilson almost certainly never said it. The encomium does not even appear in the unpublished memoirs of the self-serving Thomas Dixon. The only firsthand record of Wilson’s feelings about the film appear in a letter three years later, in which he wrote, “I have always felt that this was a very unfortunate production and I wish most sincerely that its production might be avoided, particularly in communities where there are so many colored people.” There is no record of his sentiments beyond that, though he surely would have been troubled by the political implications of publicly supporting a movie mired in controversy. Another member of the audience that night reported that the President seemed lost in thought during the film and exited the East Room upon its completion without saying a word to anybody.

  The first sentence of the famous “review” definitely captures the voice of a lyrical historian; the second, however, sounds more like Chief Justice Edward
White, whom Dixon invited to another screening and who admitted to having shouldered a rifle as a Klansman in New Orleans. Whether the remark was a conflation of the two men’s thoughts or a complete fabrication, the comment did not appear in print for more than two decades. In any case, word of a White House screening circulated, and that was tantamount to a Presidential endorsement. By the time the film opened in New York City on March 3, Dixon had urged Griffith to drop the title in favor of the subtitle—The Birth of a Nation. Not only did it carry more weight, but it also took the klieg lights off the worst of the controversy.

  Before the New York premiere, the NAACP appealed to the courts and the National Board of Censorship to block the film. Its racism disturbed some of the liberal members of the board, but art trumped politics; and the courts followed suit, taking no action. The NAACP picketed the Liberty Theatre, but the protesters went virtually unnoticed by the people in the endless queues. Small riots and protests broke out in Northern cities; William Monroe Trotter led a protest rally in Boston’s Faneuil Hall. City councils, editorial pages, and cocktail party guests debated the right to screen the film wherever it played. A former Massachusetts Congressman sought confirmation that the President had viewed the film and had voiced no objection. Wilson turned the controversy over to Tumulty, instructing him to write that the President had seen the film but “was entirely unaware of the character of the play before it was presented and has at no time expressed his approbation of it. Its exhibition at the White House was a courtesy extended to an old acquaintance.”