Wilson
Page 53
Social reformers Jane Addams and Lillian D. Wald rallied behind Wilson, as did leftist intellectuals Max Eastman, John Reed, Herbert Croly, a cofounder of The New Republic, and one of his first staff members, Walter Lippmann. The latter became Wilson’s strongest advocate through articles in his influential magazine of Progressive thought. Where he had once been a strong TR supporter and Wilson critic, Lippmann had now come to appreciate that the President was a man of vision. He argued to his colleagues, “What we’re electing is a war President—not the man who kept us out of war. And we’ve got to make up our minds whether we want to go through the war with Hughes or with Wilson.” Lippmann appreciated that truly thoughtful people could—and inevitably should—have the power to change their minds, as he did in the pages of The New Republic just before the election. “I shall not vote for the Wilson who has uttered a few too many noble sentiments,” he wrote, “but for the Wilson who is evolving under experience and is remaking his philosophy in the light of it.”
“If I understand myself,” Wilson told Ida Tarbell in an interview in Collier’s that ran the week before the election, “I am sincere when I say that I have no personal desire for reelection.” Indeed, he admitted that he regretted not having been able to read a serious book in years. “It would be an unspeakable relief to be excused, but I am caught in the midst of a process.” He reminded the voters that his progressive program was a work in progress; and he asked, “Is it wise that the country should change now, leaving so much at loose ends?” Tarbell could not help thinking of Lincoln in August 1864, when he felt he might not be reelected and made a secret compact with himself to cooperate as much as possible with the President-elect, to save the Union in the period between the election and the inauguration. For weeks Wilson had been developing a secret compact of his own.
Since 1886, the law had stipulated that in the event of vacancies in the offices of both the President and the Vice President, the line of succession ran through the Cabinet, starting with the Secretary of State. In light of the seriousness of the world situation and the speed with which crises required handling, Wilson devised an exit strategy should Hughes win. He would ask Marshall and Lansing to resign from their positions so that he could appoint Hughes Secretary of State; then Wilson would resign, allowing Hughes to take office immediately instead of having to wait until the following March.
On Sunday, November 5, 1916, the President of the United States sat in his office at Shadow Lawn and typed a strictly confidential letter to the Secretary of State, one unique in Presidential archives. He outlined the plan, not overlooking the “consent and cooperation” of the Vice President and Secretary Lansing himself. Wilson thought his argument compelling enough for both men to accept: “No such critical circumstances in regard to our foreign policy have ever before existed. It would be my duty to step aside so that there would be no doubt in any quarter how that policy was to be directed. . . . I would have no right to risk the peace of the nation by remaining in office after I had lost my authority.” He sent the letter and fully intended to act upon it, if necessary—“just as soon as the result of the election was definitely known.”
Only that morning, Edith had spoken to her husband about losing the election, which she expected. Such a result was difficult for Wilson to imagine, having just faced tens of thousands in cheering throngs at Madison Square Garden and Cooper Union in New York City. But the candidate’s wife had endured sleepless nights, tossing and turning over the opposition to Wilson’s Mexican policy, the daily news from Europe, and, most of all, the massive amounts of money the Republicans had spent to smear him. Without knowing of Woodrow’s plan, she told him how happy they would be living their own lives. Upon hearing her, Woodrow stood and said, “What a delightful pessimist you are! One must never court defeat. If it comes, accept it like a soldier; but don’t anticipate it, for that destroys your fighting spirit.” They took a long ride along the Jersey Shore.
Tuesday morning the Wilsons drove to Princeton, arriving a little before nine. Crowds of students and photographers watched the President vote in the firehouse. He spent the rest of the day back at Shadow Lawn working, making lists of states with the number of electors from each. The telegraph company offered to run a special wire into the house so he could receive the election results as they were transmitted, but Wilson said he would rather learn the news by telephone from his campaign directors. Early indications from Colorado and Kansas suggested that Wilson would do better there than he had in 1912. After a quiet dinner, the family passed the time playing Twenty Questions. Then at ten o’clock the telephone rang. A friend of Margaret’s in New York was calling with condolences. Margaret could barely speak, spluttering that it was too early to know any results, that the polls were still open in the West. The caller explained that The New York Times had announced that it would indicate the winner with a colored light atop its building—white for Wilson, red for Hughes—and there was no mistaking the flash of crimson.
Dr. Grayson arrived from the executive offices in Asbury Park with the news that the New York World had also predicted a Hughes victory; and when the President phoned Tumulty, the normally cheery Irishman delivered the same verdict. In spite of that, Tumulty issued a statement that Wilson would win, once the results from the West arrived. Wilson laughed over the phone and said, “Well, Tumulty, it begins to look as if we have been badly licked.” Tumulty heard no sadness in his boss’s voice and offered more positive signs from the West. “Tumulty, you are an optimist,” Wilson replied. “It begins to look as if the defeat might be overwhelming. The only thing I am sorry for, and that cuts me to the quick, is that the people apparently misunderstood us. But I have no regrets. We have tried to do our duty.”
Shadow Lawn darkened. At last, Wilson said, “Well, I will not send Mr. Hughes a telegram of congratulation tonight, for things are not settled.” And then his face turned grave as he acknowledged the inevitability of Hughes’s bringing the country into the war. Hughes himself remained properly silent that night, but Theodore Roosevelt could not help himself from issuing a statement at ten o’clock, saying, “I am doubly thankful as an American for the election of Mr. Hughes. It is a vindication of our national honor.” At Shadow Lawn, the butler brought a tray of sandwiches and beverages to the family. At 10:30, Wilson grabbed a glass of milk, said his goodnights, and added, “I might stay longer but you are all so blue.”
Edith joined him a few minutes later. “Well, little girl,” he said, “you were right in expecting we should lose the election. Frankly I did not, but we can now do some of the things we want to do.” She sat on his bed, holding his hand, ready to discuss the future. In an instant he fell into a deep sleep, as though a great burden had been lifted.
Edith was less fortunate. Feeling her husband’s pain, she was wide awake at 4 a.m., when someone knocked on her door. Margaret had just spoken to Vance McCormick at Democratic headquarters in New York and learned that the West was reporting unexpectedly favorable results. Margaret asked if they should awaken her father, and Edith said, “Oh no, do let him sleep.”
At daybreak, the results remained in doubt. Some newspapers reported the Hughes victory, while the more cautious press only hinted as much—what with New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois having gone Republican by hundreds of thousands of votes. New Jersey went solidly for Hughes, as did Iowa. But the electoral race remained neck and neck all day. New Hampshire and Delaware were each tipping Republican by only 1,000 votes, and Minnesota by 392 votes. And then Ohio surprisingly swung Democratic. Idaho followed; and so did New Hampshire by 56 votes. A reporter was said to have called Hughes in New York that morning hoping to get his comments on this possible Democratic trend. “The President can’t be disturbed,” the aide said. “Well,” replied the reporter, “when he wakes up tell him he’s no longer president.”
That comment was premature as well. The race had come down to the one state that had yet to report its results—Cal
ifornia, with 13 electoral votes. Poll watchers there guarded every ballot box amid allegations of voter fraud. Each ballot was painstakingly tallied. Into the morning after the election, the race remained a dead heat. A significant reason for the delay was that Sierra County, one hundred miles northeast of Sacramento and high in the Sierra Nevada, had not been heard from. An early snow had fallen upon sixteen rural precincts there. Voters had turned out, but now an entire nation had to wait for horse-drawn wagons carrying the ballot boxes to traverse the snowy crude roads so that the votes of this tiny county could be counted and certified.
Margaret Wilson knocked on her father’s bathroom door while he was shaving that morning to tell him that The New York Times had printed an “Extra” edition of the paper that day suggesting that the election was still in doubt but leaning Wilson’s way. “Tell that to the Marines,” Wilson said, running the razor across his face. Incertitude persisted through the day and into the next. On Thursday the ninth, Woodrow and Edith went to Spring Lake to play golf, and while they were at the eighth tee, Dr. Grayson arrived with news from headquarters about California, which was favorable but not definitive. Throughout the ordeal, the President maintained his calm, though Edith discerned his tension. On November 10, California officially went for Wilson by 3,806 votes and the election was over.
Pundits suggested that Hughes’s snub of Hiram Johnson cost him the Presidency. A sounder explanation for the traditionally Republican state’s turning Democratic that year was that in the final stretch of the campaign, Senator Gore of Oklahoma kept driving the same point to the crowds he drew in the West: “A vote for Hughes is a vote for war. A vote for Wilson is a vote for peace.” A decade later, Gore himself concluded, “The women voters in the west elected Wilson on the peace issue.” Indeed, twelve states in the Union then allowed women to vote in the Presidential election, eleven of which were in the West, ten of which went for Wilson. Despite their small numbers, women had become an electoral constituency in the United States.
The final electoral vote count was 277 to 254, which fairly reflected the popular vote: 9,126,868 for Wilson and 8,548,728 for Hughes—49.2 percent to 46.1 percent. The Socialist candidate captured 3 percent of the vote, and a few minor candidates less than that. Wilson became the first Democratic President elected to a second consecutive term since Andrew Jackson in 1832. He was also the first man since James K. Polk in 1844 to get elected without carrying his home state. There were other signs of erosion of public support: in Congressional races, the Democrats lost two seats in the Senate, leaving them with a comfortable but decreasing margin of 54 to 42; and they suffered another bad hit in the House of Representatives, dropping to 214 members against 215 Republicans. Because three Progressives chose to caucus with the Democrats, the President’s party could cobble together a coalition and maintain control of both houses. The South remained Wilson’s igneous base, where he carried some states with more than 90 percent of the vote.
Wilson’s dearest friend from Charlottesville, Heath Dabney, pointed out that the President had received more votes than any candidate had ever received for any office on earth—three million votes more than he had received in 1912—and his tallies in the individual states were almost always larger than those of Democratic candidates for Congress or governorships. Woodrow and Edith left directly for Williamstown, Massachusetts, for the baptism of Frank and Jessie Sayre’s daughter, named Eleanor Axson; and then the President and his wife returned to the White House, after months away, to begin his second term. Charles Evans Hughes did not concede by telegram until November 22, 1916, claiming he had waited for the official count in California to end. Wilson replied graciously, though he commented to his brother, Josie, that Hughes’s wire “was a little moth-eaten when it got here but quite legible.”
• • •
“My husband . . . was weary and unwell,” Edith would recall, “—reaction from the strain of the campaign.” Other factors, of course, weighed heavily upon him. Thousands of miles away, the war continued to rage, as the British persisted in blockading and the Germans in torpedoing. The Continent became a charnel house—1916 seeing more slaughter than any year in history, with three of the bloodiest battles ever fought. The months-long Battle of Verdun produced 800,000 casualties; twice that number were wounded or killed in the second half of the year in the Battle of the Somme (where the prescient American poet Alan Seeger had his “rendezvous with Death”); another 1,600,000 people fell that summer in the Brusilov offensive, in which Russia defeated the Central Powers on the Eastern Front; and lesser battles in 1916 saw another 600,000 killed or wounded.
While the seas had remained quiet since the Sussex note of the spring had demanded that the Germans stop attacking ships with American passengers, turbulence returned. In less than three weeks, U-boats sank four ships conducting trade between Britain and the United States, taking several American lives. The Germans insisted they were playing by the rules, and notes continued to be exchanged as Germany offered reasonable enough excuses to warrant months of investigation. “Foreseeing an inevitable crisis with Germany over the frequent sinking of our ships,” Tumulty recorded, Wilson believed that he could not “draw the whole country with him in aggressive action if before he took the step leading to war he had not tried out every means of peace.” His enemies decried his “meekness and apparent subservience to German diplomacy.” In truth, the British did not make Wilson’s life any easier.
That summer England had imposed a “black list,” which forbade Britons from dealing with eighty-five American companies the government perceived as conducting business for the benefit of their enemies. Congress considered retaliation in the form of an embargo on loans and supplies, but the President argued otherwise. He recalled a similar vengeful action in 1807 in which “the states themselves suffered from the act more than the nations whose trade they struck at.”
To complicate matters, neither side in Europe was ready to throw in the towel. “Never before in the world’s history,” observed Wilson, “have two great armies been in effect so equally matched; never before have the losses and the slaughter been so great with as little gain in military advantage. Both sides have grown weary of the apparently hopeless task of bringing the conflict to an end by the force of arms; inevitably they are being forced to the realization that it can only be brought about by the attrition of human suffering, in which the victor suffers hardly less than the vanquished.” The brutal fighting had lasted so long, each side was punch-drunk, convinced that the next blow would provide the knockout.
By December, a chink had appeared in the German armor. Wilson received intelligence revealing that “Germany as a whole”—its most militaristic factions aside—appeared “ready to welcome steps toward peace as the food situation, while by no means critical, is becoming more and more difficult and as there is a general weariness of war.” Chancellor von Bethmann Hollweg and new Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann showed signs of budging. In London, Colonel House met with a colleague of David Lloyd George’s and said that England had become “the only obstacle to peace.” Wilson was eager as ever to mediate a settlement, one he felt could include everything England had been fighting for. Even though House had said that the United States had been “quite unneutral in its friendliness to England,” both sides complained that America had been partial toward the other. Each wanted commercial advantages from America—in the way of food and munitions—without offering anything in return, not even a willingness to negotiate peace.
On November 25, Wilson sat at his desk and considered the uniqueness of his position. “Perhaps I am the only person in high authority amongst all the peoples of the world who is at liberty to speak and hold nothing back,” he wrote. He could speak “as an individual” and “as the responsible head of a great government.” As such he felt compelled to speak not only for the people of the United States but “for friends of humanity in every nation.” He hoped to produce a series of terms th
at would deliver “an enduring peace.” Unlike prior conflicts, Wilson believed this war—“with its unprecedented human waste and suffering and its drain of material resource”—presented “an unparalleled opportunity for the statesmen of the world to make such a peace possible.” Toward that end, Wilson drafted what came to be called a “peace note” to all the powers at war. He told Edith it “may prove the greatest piece of work of my life.”
Wilson called upon leaders on both sides to clarify their respective war aims and to consider their progress in the last two years. “The conflict moves very sluggishly,” he suggested; and a prolonged war could only lead to “irreparable damage to civilization.” Wilson proposed a conference of representatives of the belligerent governments and of the governments whose interests were directly involved. He was not butting in either to mediate or even to propose peace. He was merely calling for “a concrete definition of the guarantees which the belligerents on the one side and the other deem it their duty to demand as a practical satisfaction of the objects they are aiming at in this contest of force.” The answers to these questions, he said, would be nonbinding, merely suggestions to help neutral nations determine their future courses of action. “The United States,” he said, “feels that it can no longer delay to determine its own.”