Wilson

by A. Scott Berg

  On the night of May 30, the Wilsons took a small party to Baltimore, where the Friars Club of New York performed an out-of-town “Frolic.” Songwriter and performer George M. Cohan was the headliner that night, but a lanky young Oklahoman—part cowboy, part Cherokee—just starting out in vaudeville stole the show by spinning political commentary and a rope at the same time. Will Rogers would later look back on that night as the most nervous performance of his life. With the President right in front of him, he told jokes about the attempted capture of Pancho Villa, saying, “There is some talk of getting a Machine Gun if we can borrow one. The one we have now they are using to train our Army with in Plattsburgh. If we go to war we will just about have to go to the trouble of getting another Gun.” Wilson led the entire audience in laughter. After more jokes about Mexico, Rogers turned his attention to Europe, stopping the show when he said, “President Wilson is getting along fine now to what he was a few months ago. Do you realize, People, that at one time in our negotiations with Germany that he was 5 Notes behind?” The President guffawed.

  The Presidential election sparked most of the punch lines and rhetoric that year. While Woodrow Wilson still enjoyed the luxury of comfortable Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, the Republicans were gathering forces to end his progressive program, which had hardly slowed. He encouraged citizens to become as active as his administration. In June 1916, Wilson addressed an open-air convention behind Independence Hall in Philadelphia, to whom he said that Americans needed more than a simple understanding of their ideals. He summoned each citizen to ask not what his country could do for him but “to think first, not of himself or of any interest which he may be called upon to sacrifice, but of the country which we serve.” He offered a new motto: “America First.”

  Not to be confused with a noninterventionist policy that would adopt the same moniker a generation later, “America First” meant “the duty of every American to exalt the national consciousness by purifying his own motives and exhibiting his own devotion.” When Wilson said this meant putting the country first in their thoughts—being “ready . . . to vindicate . . . the principles of liberty, of justice, and of humanity”—the crowd cheered. “You cheer the sentiment,” Wilson said, looking up from his outline, “but do you realize what it means?” He explained that it carried the responsibility not only of being just “to your fellow men, but that, as a nation, you have got to be just to other nations.”

  In a “fighting mood,” Wilson then said he wanted to take a number of domestic actions, each of which was sure to antagonize large segments of the population, mostly the business community. These issues had all been among his original campaign promises. The President had long favored legislation to prevent the waste or control of the country’s natural resources by special interests. While a few of Wilson’s predecessors had reserved more than a dozen national parks—comprising millions of acres of natural wonderland—no President had established a proper bureau to preserve that land. Interests clashed: Wilson had signed a bill in 1913 damming the Hetch Hetchy Valley within Yosemite National Park in order to provide more water to San Francisco, and conservationist John Muir went to his death the next year damning the action, which altered the ecology of many square miles of territory. Strict preservationists supported the great parks for the public’s benefit, but their interests often conflicted with those of groups promoting tourism—the railroads and land developers who might allow more people to enjoy the parks. Following Taft’s example, Wilson approved a third naval oil reserve in the West—Teapot Dome—but his Secretary of the Interior, Franklin Lane, found himself repeatedly blocked in his efforts to get Wilson to sign leases allowing private businesses to tap into those reserves. And so in the summer of 1916, President Wilson signed the National Park Service Act, which not only regulated the existing parkland but allowed for the regulation and expansion of a vast network of hundreds of parks, monuments, and recreation areas. His administration’s negotiations with Great Britain (on behalf of Canada) resulted in the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which protected hundreds of species at a moment when commercial interests threatened to destroy them. In environmental matters, Wilson’s guiding principle was to preserve as much as possible while serving as many as possible.

  With close to ten million foreigners coming to America in the preceding decade—many from nations with growing hostility toward the United States—xenophobia descended upon this “nation of immigrants” with its 100 million people. After a year of work, Congress passed a bill requiring a literacy test of prospective citizens. Wilson vetoed it. As President, he was loath to exercise this power of one man opposing the majority of two houses of Congress, but he felt this bill violated the spirit of the nation, as it excluded those “to whom the opportunities of elementary education have been denied, without regard to their character, their purposes, or their natural capacity.” When the bill appeared before him a second time, he vetoed it again, condemning it as “a penalty for lack of opportunity.” But this time the Congress prevailed, planting the first of many hedges against foreign invaders, as the United States inched closer to war.

  Wilson had run for President on the proposal of shortening the standard ten-hour workday to eight. At the start of 1916, the railroad workers agitated for that concession from the railway executives. They threatened to strike, which would affect the lives of every American. Henry Ford wired the President that the moment such a strike should occur, the Ford Motor Company—then manufacturing 2,200 cars a day and dependent upon the railroads to transport its product—would shut its factory and all its assembly plants across the country, taking more than forty-nine thousand workers off the payroll. The President reasoned with the railroad brotherhoods to table the rest of their demands while convincing management, in essence, to put America first. Many accused the President of cozying up to labor; but Wilson issued a statement of his own composition stating: “I have recommended the concession of the eight-hour day . . . because I believed the concession right.”

  Wilson did not leave the capital that summer, so that he could put this legislation—which would become the Adamson Act—on a fast legislative track. After addressing Congress as a whole, he spent the next several days and even nights on the Hill stoking support. The bill’s passage averted the strike and marked the beginnings of controversial government intervention into the private enterprise system, bold Presidential action Wilson believed national necessity demanded.

  During this time he kept appearing unannounced in the President’s Room in the Capitol to lobby Democratic leaders. He also wanted to see the immediate passage of the Keating-Owen child labor bill, which would prohibit the sale in interstate commerce of goods manufactured by children, and the Kern-McGillicuddy bill, a workmen’s compensation bill that would protect federal employees in the event of injury or death, thus establishing guidelines for disability insurance. All three pieces of labor legislation quickly passed and received Wilson’s signature, establishing guidelines throughout the nation’s businesses and industries.

  Seldom if ever in American history had a President made good on as many campaign promises as Woodrow Wilson. They were bold pledges, and to help safeguard them, he sent to Congress his most audacious request yet. In January 1916, a vacancy occurred on the Supreme Court when Joseph Rucker Lamar, Wilson’s boyhood friend from Georgia, died. A week later, the President asked McAdoo whom he might suggest to take Lamar’s place, and without hesitation McAdoo recommended “the people’s lawyer,” Louis Brandeis. Nobody embodied the principles of the New Freedom more than this essential member of candidate Wilson’s first brain trust; and nobody engendered more of Wilson’s admiration than this profound liberal thinker, social activist, and spokesman for the voiceless. But Wilson asked McAdoo if he thought Brandeis could be confirmed. “Yes . . . if you appoint him,” McAdoo said, “but it will be a stiff fight.” Nobody could have known how rigid that opposition would be.

  For all hi
s admirers, Brandeis had enemies everywhere. Because he was a trust-buster, Wall Street regarded him as a radical, or worse; because he was “a militant crusader for social justice,” as future Justice William O. Douglas would write, the establishment considered him a troublemaker; because he was an attorney who relied on sociological and psychological data, strict constructionists considered him dangerous, a casuist who would use the Court to activate social change. No less an eminence than former President Taft himself (who had long cast a sheep’s eye on the high court) privately called the nomination “one of the deepest wounds that I have ever had as an American and a lover of the Constitution and a believer in progressive conservatism.”

  Largely unspoken, at least in public, was that Brandeis was a Jew—not only the first to be nominated for a position on the Supreme Court, but an active Zionist at that. To Woodrow Wilson—who had appointed the first Jewish professor at Princeton and the first Jewish Justice to the New Jersey Supreme Court—Brandeis’s religion meant nothing, except in its controversial correction of a longtime oversight. If nothing else, Brandeis’s presence on the Court would neutralize the biggest mistake Wilson felt he had made as President; it would be the only possible antidote to the conservative anti-Semite James C. McReynolds, whom he had named two years prior.

  Since George Washington had begun filling the bench, twenty-one nominees had got tangled in the process of Senate confirmation. Some sensed rejection and withdrew, while eight actually failed to obtain the necessary votes. Historically, the process had been a routine vote, aye or nay—generally the same day the nomination was presented. Opposition to Brandeis was as rabid as it was rapid. Overnight the establishment press proved especially virulent, attacking his character more than his qualifications. Harvard’s President A. Lawrence Lowell—who was about to urge a Jewish quota and segregated dormitories on his liberal campus—mustered more than fifty signatories to a petition denouncing the nomination; six former members of the American Bar Association—Taft and Elihu Root among them—formally objected to the appointment. The Senate Committee on the Judiciary announced an investigation of the many charges already leveled against Brandeis; and McAdoo shrewdly urged Brandeis to ask the committee to hold their hearings in public, as he figured most of the objections would fade in the light of day. The nominee stuck to his work and avoided the press, though he did quietly marshal supporters to hold a brief for him in Congress, where he had no intention of appearing.

  On February 9, 1916, a Senate subcommittee considering a high court nominee held a public hearing for the first time. Three Democratic and two Republican Senators listened to testimony before a standing-room-only crowd. More than forty witnesses—largely Boston Brahmins or other establishment figures from the losing side of cases that Brandeis had prosecuted—paraded before the tribunal, cloaking their personal criticisms in rhetoric about dishonorable and unprofessional conduct. More compelling advocates countered every charge, while Felix Frankfurter and Walter Lippmann defended Brandeis in the press and former Harvard President Charles W. Eliot sent the committee a ringing endorsement, as did nine of Harvard Law School’s eleven law professors. The arguments came down to a partisan vote. To help seal the nomination, chairman Charles Culberson of Texas asked Wilson to expound upon his reasons for nominating Brandeis.

  The President happily obliged. As the committee had already put to rest any personal accusations and aspersions, Wilson cited former Chief Justice Melville Fuller, who had called Brandeis “the ablest man who ever appeared before the Supreme Court of the United States.” Speaking for himself, Wilson wrote:

  I cannot speak too highly of his impartial, impersonal, orderly, and constructive mind, his rare analytical powers, his deep human sympathy, his profound acquaintance with the historical roots of our institutions and insight into their spirit, or of the many evidences he has given of being imbued to the very heart with our American ideals of economic conditions and of the way they bear upon the masses of the people.

  Culberson made the letter public; and Brandeis supporters arranged a few private social encounters between wavering Senators and the nominee himself. The four-month confirmation process was as brutal as any the Court, if not the country, had ever seen—a “low-tech lynching.” It opened the doors for future examination of judicial nominees, who were soon required to defend themselves in person.

  After partisan committee votes, the full Senate confirmed Brandeis on June 1 as the sixty-seventh Supreme Court Justice by a vote of 47 to 22. One Democrat and three progressive Republicans crossed the aisle. “I never signed any commission with such satisfaction as I sign his,” Wilson told Henry Morgenthau in concluding another highly successful Congressional inning, with no action more far-reaching than that appointment: if a Jew could ascend to the country’s highest court, there was no stopping other minorities from shattering other glass ceilings, even though it would take generations to slough off age-old prejudices. Whenever Brandeis spoke in judicial conference, for example, Wilson’s first appointee, Justice McReynolds, was known simply to rise and leave the room. He went so far as to avoid official Court pictures because he did not want to be photographed with a Jew. And when Brandeis retired in 1939—leaving a distinguished legacy of liberal decisions behind him—he received the customary panegyric letter, signed by his colleagues . . . all except one.

  • • •

  “That summer of 1916 was crowded with every sort of thing,” Edith Wilson would recall. “First on the list was the ever-encroaching menace of the War in Europe. Then came the Presidential campaign.” Nationalism had become a global epidemic, and it had at last infected the United States. The First Lady was still trying to process how she had awakened from her uncomplicated quiet life into a world in which every public moment was fraught with significance. Woodrow encouraged her to learn all the verses of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” for she would surely need to know them. Indeed, it had become a season of endless flag-waving, a coming of age for the nation, its first reunion since the country had divided a half century earlier.

  June 14—the day in 1777 on which Congress had adopted the Stars and Stripes as the emblem of the Union—had been sporadically observed ever since the start of the Civil War; but in the spring of 1916, Wilson officially proclaimed it a day for “special patriotic exercises” on which Americans might “rededicate ourselves to the nation, ‘one and inseparable,’ from which every thought that is not worthy of our fathers’ first views of independence, liberty, and right shall be excluded.” It had an electrifying effect.

  The entire month was filled with one parade after another. The message was the same everywhere: “Americanism” and preparedness. Chicago staged the largest parade in its history, in which more than 130,000 people—each carrying a flag—marched for more than eleven hours. There were neither floats nor costumes, just people from all walks of life—telephone operators, bankers, judges, firemen, Spanish-American War veterans, and druggists—marching to the cheers of one million onlookers. Even militant feminist Alice Paul leading a troop of fifty suffragists down Michigan Avenue, against the flow, drew cheers from the crowd as fellow marchers diverted themselves to the curb so that the ladies might pass. On Long Island, 2,500 “Pilgrims” marched through Oyster Bay to the Roosevelt home at Sagamore Hill—each carrying a flag—to appeal to the Colonel to lead the nation once again. In Hollywood, German-born Carl Laemmle had his Universal Film Manufacturing Company release a forty-reel serial called Liberty, and his studio staged a preparedness parade.

  Nobody exhibited more patriotism that season than the President himself. At Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day, he raised George Washington’s time-honored argument against “entangling alliances”; but, by way of national preparation, Wilson suggested, “I would gladly assent to . . . an alliance which would disentangle the peoples of the world from those combinations in which they seek their own separate and private interests and unite the people of the world to pres
erve the peace of the world upon a basis of common right and justice.” On Flag Day, he led a parade of sixty-six thousand down Pennsylvania Avenue, from the Capitol to the White House, and spoke of the flag’s importance as it united a people whose citizenship was derived from every nation in the world. “Americanism” became the shibboleth of the day, as Wilson urged citizens to pledge their allegiance to the flag of the United States of America instead of honoring the hyphen that linked every American to the country of his ancestry. Wilson insisted the time had come for “hyphenated” citizenship to end.

  That same week, Wilson addressed the graduating class of the United States Military Academy, where he seemed to allude to Teddy Roosevelt as he asserted, “I am an American, but I do not believe that any of us loves a blustering nationality—a nationality with a chip on its shoulder, a nationality with its elbows out and its swagger on. We love that quiet, self-respecting, unconquerable spirit which doesn’t strike until it is necessary to strike, and then strikes to conquer.” A decade later, Vice President Marshall would reflect on those “long and weary” months of 1916, remembering that Wilson was “busy with the hope of finding some loophole through which he might enter as the great pacifier of the conflict in Europe.”

  Amid this patriotic fervor, the Republican Party opened its National Convention in the Chicago Coliseum on June 7, 1916. The delegates hoped to select from among a half dozen candidates the one most likely to beat Wilson, but their own house was still in disarray. They had not resolved the differences that had riven the Grand Old Party in 1912 and driven it to defeat. The Republicans remained so divided that the Progressive Party, their offshoot, opened its own convention a mile away, in the Auditorium. The Bull Moosers were eager to rejoin their old herd, should the Republicans be of the same mind. They nominated Theodore Roosevelt, hoping that would incite the Republicans to do the same so they could all join forces.