The winner of the 1912 Democratic presidential nomination would need the votes of two-thirds of the delegates to the national convention. In most states, the party’s voting would begin in caucuses and state party conventions, but for the first time, thirteen states would hold Democratic presidential primaries, an innovation long advocated by the most progressive wings of both major parties. The hope was that if the people chose candidates in primaries, the bosses would lose their hold on presidential politics.
As the electioneering began, Wilson’s campaign was operating mainly on the generosity of his Princeton friends—his old classmates and young William F. McCombs. After he choreographed Wilson’s tour of the West, McCombs had opened a small office in New York to mail Wilson’s speeches to newspapers from coast to coast. McCombs also collected the names and addresses of 147,000 progressives around the country—a base of people who could help Wilson in the primaries and, if all went well, in the general campaign. The progressives of the era were a loose collection of reform-minded optimists, Republicans as well as Democrats, who had been working through hundreds of organizations to cure a host of societal ills, from the concentration of wealth and the exploitation of labor to racial injustice and living conditions in the slums. Recalling the energy and optimism of the era, the progressive journalist William Allen White wrote that 1912 was a moment when forward-thinking Americans coalesced around the idea of using the president and the Congress to end the reign of the plutocrats and pass laws that would make the federal government “an agency of human welfare. Lord, how we did like that phrase.” White and his fellow progressives believed that if they could send enough like-minded representatives to Washington, they would get the laws needed to heal the body politic.
The spadework done by McCombs and the success of the Western tour led Wilson to think that he could win the primaries. He knew he could make an excellent case for his ideas, and he hoped that if he made it directly to the people, they would carry him to victory. Oratory would always be Wilson’s weapon of choice. Wilson also reasoned that if he kept his distance from the bosses and party hacks, he would not be beholden to them.
Pleasant as it might have been for Wilson to imagine that oratory had won him the governorship, it is unlikely that he or any other novice could have succeeded without the progressive tidal wave of 1910 and the power of the Smith machine. A year later, with Smith working against him, Governor Wilson had not been able to conjure a Democratic victory out of pure oratory. Nor had oratory carried the day in his political battles at Princeton. Twice he had gone on the road to ask Princeton clubs for their support in his battles with the trustees, and twice he had been beaten back. Although the losses bothered Wilson, they did not rattle his confidence in the power of oratory.
In his pursuit of delegates, Wilson traveled to eighteen states to speak to the people. They cheered lustily wherever he appeared, but his competitors regularly bested him in the primaries. They had the support of local politicians, most of whom were strangers to Wilson, and they shrewdly avoided the primaries they knew they would lose. In Georgia and Florida, Wilson hoped that his Southern roots would give him an edge over Champ Clark of distant Missouri. But Clark was not even on the ballot; he had ceded the Deep South to Oscar Underwood, a congressman from Alabama. Underwood stayed out of the contests in and around Missouri, and Governor Judson Harmon of Ohio monopolized his region but steered clear of Clark’s and Underwood’s territories. Standing alone against favorite sons, Wilson took drubbing after drubbing.
Wilson suspected that Wall Street had ganged up on him, but when told that he needed more friends in the Democratic Party, he hastened to Washington to meet with a dozen senators and thirty-odd congressmen. Hoping to win the Illinois primary, he spoke four times in Chicago and whistle-stopped up and down the state, making twenty-odd speeches from the train, on courthouse steps, and in halls packed with cheering audiences. He was stunned when Clark, who had not even set foot in Illinois, beat him three to one. The state’s Democratic establishment knew Clark, and they were old hands at getting out the vote.
Focused on replacing the bosses’ choice with the people’s choice, the progressives who were making primaries a fixture of presidential politics did not see that they were replacing one set of hurdles with another. Primaries prolonged the physical ordeal of campaigning, and the exorbitant cost of a national primary campaign increased the chances that the successful candidate would owe his soul to one wing or the other of the moneyed class. As The Atlantic Monthly explained in a long-winded sentence: “Willingness on the part of adequate men to serve the public in office is rare enough at best, and willingness on the part of adequate men to undergo a protracted and necessarily expensive campaign of personalities with Tom, Dick, and Harry for the right to undergo another protracted and expensive campaign for the right to serve the public in office is more than can be expected normally except from those at once very rich and very patriotic.” Wilson did not complain about the physical strain but was dismayed by the small number of votes cast in the primaries. “Possibly the people will wake up later to the significance of the whole thing,” he wrote an old friend, “but for the present there seems to be extraordinary lethargy and indifference.”
As Clark’s victories piled up, Wilson wore a confident mask in public but privately began to say that he wanted to drop out. “He intimated it more than once,” McCombs wrote in his account of the campaign. “He thought it was too much to call on his friends to do.” McCombs persuaded him that his friends would rather lose than quit in the middle of a fight. Wilson’s stock rose briefly with triumphs in Pennsylvania and Oregon, then plunged with Clark’s wins in Massachusetts and Washington. After two more losses, in early May, it was rumored that Wilson had suffered a physical collapse. In fact, he was in bed with a bad cold. But the rumor had many grains of truth. Under pressure, Wilson often suffered from digestive upsets severe enough to land him in bed, and “a bad cold” was often the explanation given to the public.
Though Wilson quickly recovered, his presidential prospects dwindled day by day. Clark won the primaries in Maryland and California. Harmon, as expected, took Ohio. Toward the end of May, with nothing to lose, Wilson made a frontal assault on big business, confronting five hundred oligarchs at the annual dinner of the Economic Club of New York. Wilson the prosecutor charged them with crushing the hopes of the have-nots, manipulating financial markets, corrupting government, and making a mockery of American ideals. Wilson the historian chronicled the origins and the course of the trouble, Wilson the statesman explained why a modern government could not stand apart from business affairs, and Wilson the preacher held out the possibility of redemption. The speech had the urgency of a last lecture, and it laid out the two great questions that the presidential candidates of 1912 would have to answer: how should the excesses of large-scale capitalism be reined in, and who should hold the reins?
The problems were nearly a century old, Wilson said. They had begun with a tariff that promised to raise revenue for the government and foster its growth by protecting American industry from foreign competition. The government became dependent on tariff revenue, and manufacturers increased the dependency by demanding ever-higher walls of protection. The legislator disinclined to play along was likely to meet a fierce, well-funded opponent in the next election. Had wages kept pace with rising prices, few Americans would have minded the high tariff, but the disparity between rich and poor steadily widened, and while shareholders grew rich, the tariff cost the typical American family dearly—more than 10 percent of its income, on average.
The public was increasingly uneasy about the concentration of power in the business world, Wilson said. Bankers sat on the boards of railroads, railroad men sat on the boards of commodities companies, and so on. “I do not suspect that any man has deliberately planned these things,” he said, but these interlocking directorates had created “so extraordinary a concentration in the control of business in this country that the people are afraid that there will be a concentration in the control of government.” And control was the issue. “Do not get impatient, therefore, gentlemen, with those who go about preaching, ‘We must return to the rule of the people.’ All they mean . . . is that we must consent to let a majority into the game.”
The socialism dreaded by the American ruling class was, in Wilson’s view, a logical reaction to the present state of affairs. “If you want to oust socialism you have got to propose something better. It is a case, if you will allow me to fall into the language of the vulgar, of ‘put up or shut up.’ . . . Many of you do know what is going on. You know what part is wrong and what is right, if you have not lost your moral perspective, and you know how the wrong can be stopped.”
Government could not allow business to police itself, Wilson said. It was the business of the businessman to further his own interests, but it was the business of government to make policy in the interest of all citizens. Wilson conceded that government might not do a perfect job of regulating business, and he warned that government officials would err unless they were properly instructed by the business world. But, he said, “they must go forward whether instructed or not.” Besides insisting that Washington serve as watchdog, Wilson proposed that the laws be rewritten in a way that would open the gates of opportunity to all so that
in some distant day, men shall look back to our time and say that the chief glory of America was not that she was successfully set up in a simple age when mankind came to begin a new life in a new land, but that, after the age had ceased to be simple, when the forces of society had come into hot contact, when there was bred more heat than light, there were men of serene enough intelligence, of steady enough self-command, of indomitable enough power of will and purpose to stand up once again and say: “Fellow citizens, we have come into a great heritage of liberty, our heritage is not wealth, our distinction is not that we are rich in power, our boast is, rather, that we can transmute gold into the lifeblood of a free people.”
The gentlemen of the Economic Club gave Wilson a huge ovation. He had dressed them down, but so what? He was about to be returned to the obscurity whence he came.
• • •
Wilson carried the last two primaries, in New Jersey and South Dakota, but not because momentum had suddenly shifted in his direction. He had run unopposed in New Jersey, and he had won South Dakota by a scant 419 votes. In mid-June, when the Wilsons moved out to the Governor’s Cottage for the summer, Woodrow was sure that his run for the presidency was over. “Just between you and me,” he wrote Mary Peck, “I have not the least idea of being nominated, because . . . the outcome is in the hands of the professional, case-hardened politicians who serve only their own interests and who know that I will not serve them except as I might serve the party in general. I am well and in the best of spirits. I have no deep stakes involved in this game.”
Writing to his friend Cleve Dodge, who had already put up thousands of dollars for Wilson’s campaign, Wilson admitted his disappointment: “sometimes when I see vast sums of money poured out against me, with fatal success, and it begins to look as if I must merely sit on the sidelines and talk as a mere critic of the game I understand so intimately, throw all my training away and do nothing, well, I do not repine, but I grow a little sad.” His whole life was in the game, and he was pained by the turn it had taken.
The newspapermen following Wilson were more optimistic. They had begun calling the Governor’s Cottage “the Little White House,” and by June 15, when the Wilsons arrived, the first of a half-dozen press tents had been pitched on the lawn. The Democratic convention, in Baltimore, would not open for ten days, but the reporters wanted to watch the governor and coax him into sharing his thoughts on every little twist in the presidential race. In Chicago, where the Republicans had convened to bestow their nomination on President Taft, Theodore Roosevelt had just quit the GOP and stormed off to form a new party. Did Governor Wilson have any comment? The governor did not. That night, Roosevelt told an audience of thousands that the new National Progressive Party was a necessity because Republicans were turning the country into a plutocracy. “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord,” Roosevelt thundered. Would Governor Wilson care to comment? No, except in private, where he said, “Good old Teddy—what a help he is!” and entertained his family by chanting the Armageddon line in Roosevelt’s high-pitched staccato. Roosevelt could not win but was sure to bleed millions of votes from the Republicans.
Although pleased by the Republican split, Wilson was still torn about his own part in coming events. Winning the nomination would be gratifying, but in a letter to Mary he confessed his devout wish to escape. He did not dread the burden of high office, he wrote her; what depressed him was the thought of all the trivia and distractions he would have to endure—hateful work that counted for nothing. Then, as if embarrassed by his petulance, he gave her a happier reading of his emotional state: “underneath, deep down, my soul is quiet.” If Roosevelt was the Lord’s warrior, Wilson was His faithful servant, held steady by the conviction that his fate would be ordained in heaven, not Baltimore.
• • •
Wilson’s managers, William F. McCombs and William Gibbs McAdoo, the entrepreneur who built the first rail tunnels under the Hudson River, were men of littler faith. While Wilson waited and trusted, they left nothing to chance. McCombs went to Baltimore early to hone their tactics for the convention floor, and McAdoo sped to Chicago to take the pulse of William Jennings Bryan. In town to cover the Republican convention for a newspaper syndicate, Bryan would go on to Baltimore in three capacities: journalist, Nebraska delegate, and party patriarch. It was also possible that he would angle for one more presidential nomination.
The days in Chicago had been a reckoning of sorts for Bryan. It was here, at the Democratic National Convention of 1896, that he had delivered his great jeremiad, warning the predators of Wall Street that they were doomed because America would not consent to be crucified upon a cross of gold. Now fifty-two, Bryan ought to have been at the pinnacle of his political career, and 1912 ought to have been his year. His call for a government that would take on the Plunderbund, a cause that had sounded like political extremism when he began, was finally at dead center. But his three failed presidential campaigns had put him out of the running.
McAdoo found Bryan in his hotel suite, shirt-sleeved and sitting at an open window in hopes of catching a breeze from Lake Michigan. It was only eight-thirty in the morning, but Bryan was already surrounded by supplicants. When McAdoo introduced himself, Bryan escorted him out to the corridor for a private talk. He explained that as a member of the Nebraska delegation, he was pledged to Champ Clark, at least on the first ballot. But after that he would feel free to vote his conscience and, he said, “if, during the course of the convention, anything should develop to convince me that Clark cannot or ought not to be nominated, I shall support Governor Wilson.”
McAdoo caught a train for Baltimore and spent much of the trip reading newspaper predictions of the death of the Wilson movement. The prophets’ case rested on the fact that Clark was coming to the convention with 450 delegates, Wilson with only 324. McAdoo bored in on another set of numbers: Republicans chose their nominee by a simple majority, but Democrats required a majority of two-thirds, or 726 of the 1,088 delegates. The gap between 324 and 450 was smaller than the gap between 450 and 726, and McAdoo thought that with the right kind of missionary work among the delegates, he and McCombs could stop Clark.
The Democratic convention, which opened on Tuesday, June 25, turned out to be as contentious, sweaty, and peculiar as its Republican counterpart, and while the Democrats did not end in a fatal schism, it seemed as if their convention would never end at all. After the seventeenth ballot, Wilson joshed with the reporters at Sea Girt about being nominated just after the 175th ballot. The convention dragged on for more than a week in sessions that seldom adjourned before midnight and once lasted till breakfast. Delegates trapped day after day in the hotbox of the armory began disappearing for naps on the grass. Many ran out of money. After seven days and forty-two ballots failed to produce a nominee, the Los Angeles Times carried a testy headline: “Democrats in a Stupor.”
Party leaders tried to keep moving toward a decisive vote but were stalled again and again by Bryan. The champion of party harmony six months earlier, Bryan was now in a pugnacious mood. To one reporter covering both conventions, Bryan seemed older, paler, and sterner than he had been a few days before in Chicago. Whether he was secretly scheming for the nomination is still subject to debate, but his campaign against the party’s reactionaries was waged in the open, probably with the aim of dominating the news from Baltimore. No one was better than Bryan at rousing the moral indignation of Americans west of the Alleghenies, a constituency known to Eastern reporters as “mother and the cornfields.” Bryan knew that once roused, these plain folk, thousands upon thousands of them, would flood their delegates with high-minded telegrams.
Parliamentary squabbling delayed the start of the balloting until almost midnight on Thursday, the third day of the convention. Alabama, first in the alphabet, nominated its favorite son, Oscar Underwood. Next came Arkansas, which yielded to neighboring Missouri, home of Champ Clark, whose name touched off cheers and parades lasting sixty-five minutes. Sometime after two in the morning, New Jersey nominated Wilson and set off a demonstration that his followers kept going for ten minutes longer than Clark’s. Ohio nominated Harmon, and it was well after sunup when the results of the first ballot were announced: 440-1/2 for Clark, 324 for Wilson, 148 for Harmon, and 117-1/2 for Underwood. The rest went to a scattering of favorite sons.
McAdoo found McCombs sobbing on his bed, sure that all his work had been for nothing. McAdoo tried to persuade McCombs that Wilson could still win, but McCombs was inconsolable. McAdoo’s optimism was rooted in a poll that McCombs himself had taken before the convention. He had asked the delegations that were pledged to other candidates how they thought they would vote if their man fell out of the running. Most favored Wilson. With that in mind, McAdoo and the best-organized Wilson supporters, the Pennsylvania and Texas delegations, had devised a strategy for wooing these Wilson-second men. Texans and Pennsylvanians paired up and each pair worked a delegation amenable to Wilson. Men were also assigned to walk the aisles after each ballot to talk with the Wilson point man in each delegation and try to get a sense of how the delegation might vote on the next ballot.
In Friday’s balloting, Clark and Wilson each picked up a handful of votes until late at night, on the tenth ballot, when Boss Charles Murphy of New York shifted his delegation’s 90 votes from Harmon to Clark. Clark’s tally shot from 452 to 556, giving him the first simple majority of the convention. Wilson was stuck at 350. The Clark forces cheered their lungs out and paraded around the armory, wrapped a flag around the speaker’s eighteen-year-old daughter, and cheered even louder as she was marched around on the shoulders of her father’s friends. The candidate who reached the halfway mark first had gone on to win the nomination at the last sixteen Democratic conventions.
Convinced that Wilson could not win, McCombs telephoned him early the next morning to say it was time to release his delegates. “So, McCombs, you feel it is hopeless?” Wilson asked. McCombs did. Ellen, who was listening to Woodrow’s end of the conversation, was in tears, but Woodrow was the epitome of the self-mastered man. “After all, it is God’s will, and I feel that a great load has been lifted from my shoulders,” he told her. He promised her a vacation in Wordsworth’s corner of England as soon as his term as governor expired. Then he composed a message authorizing McCombs to release his delegates. When he joined the family at breakfast, he was amused to see that the morning’s mail had brought a catalogue from a coffin maker.
The phone rang again. McAdoo was on the line. He had just learned of McCombs’s call to Sea Girt, and he was livid. Yes, Clark had the New York vote, McAdoo said. And yes, Clark had more than half the delegates. But Wilson was holding his own. To McAdoo the conclusion was obvious: Clark had peaked. Wilson decided to go a few more rounds.
Clark’s strength diminished inch by inch on the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth ballots, and on the fourteenth, when the roll call of the states reached Nebraska, Bryan rose to announce that he could not vote for Clark. Nebraskans had chosen Clark in the primary, Bryan said, but they had done so with the understanding that Clark stood with progressive Democrats. But as long as Boss Murphy of Tammany Hall stood with Clark, Bryan said, “I shall withhold my vote from Mr. Clark.” He cast his vote for Nebraska’s second choice, Woodrow Wilson, and declared that if Tammany later shifted its ninety votes to Wilson, Wilson, too, would lose the support of William Jennings Bryan.
Bryan’s move set off two hours of cheers, boos, and fistfights. Fearing for his safety, the Texas delegates moved in as bodyguards. But as often happened in the public life of William Jennings Bryan, the theatrics had slight effect. The fourteenth ballot shifted the balance by only one tenth of one percent. Enraged by the suggestion that he was beholden to any group, Clark demanded that Bryan either retract or prove his allegation. Bryan refused. When Bryan’s switch to Wilson was not followed by mass defections from Clark, many in the armory suspected that Bryan was merely prolonging the deadlock in hopes of forcing the convention to turn to him.
Word that Wilson had finally overtaken Clark clattered into the telegraph machine at Sea Girt on Monday afternoon. Twenty reporters shouting the news bounded into the house, where they found the paterfamilias reciting a limerick to his wife and daughters. He received their bulletin with maddening composure. “That’s the stuff,” he said, and resumed his recitation. The reporters threw a gentlemanly tantrum. For a week, they told the governor, they had played the game his way, writing pretty little stories about the sweeping lawns at the Little White House, the play of the moon on the surf, the cheerful thwack-thwack of balls on the tennis court, the governor’s departures for the golf links. There was no scenery left to paint and no more to say about the equanimity of the Wilson family. Would the governor please show some excitement?
Wilson thought for a moment, smiled, and offered a suggestion: “You might put it in the paper that Gov. Wilson received the news that Champ Clark had dropped to second place in a riot of silence.”
Wilson was right not to celebrate. After another marathon day—fifteen ballots—he led 494 to 430 but was miles from the 726 needed for the nomination. For the first time, though, the momentum had been with Wilson all day, a change that visibly perturbed Bryan. The convention adjourned at 1:00 a.m., and by two accounts, Bryan spent most of the recess between the Monday and Tuesday sessions waging an eleventh-hour campaign on his own behalf. One account is in McCombs’s memoir, the other in a biography of Wilson by the journalist William Allen White. McCombs’s book is marred by errors and a few outright fabrications, but his portrait of Bryan as a man at the end of his tether is corroborated by White’s version.
McCombs claimed that he was asked to call on Bryan at his hotel, where he found him in a grim mood and a brown undershirt, baggy trousers, and slippers. Bryan stated his business, with his index finger pressed into McCombs’s chest. “McCombs,” he said, “you know that Wilson cannot be nominated. I know that Clark cannot be nominated. You must turn your forces to a progressive Democrat like me.” McCombs was deferential but expressed his loyalty to Wilson and left. “Mr. Bryan was in a rage,” he wrote.
White’s informant was George Harvey of Harper’s Weekly, who said that Bryan asked to see him on Tuesday morning. The two spoke privately, in Bryan’s bathroom, “each with a foot on the tub, and Bryan proposed to Colonel Harvey that he pass the word to the friends of Clark to propose the adjournment of the convention for thirty days,” White wrote. It seems that Bryan considered Clark a corpse, figured that the adjournment would turn Wilson into a corpse, and believed that the Democrats would then turn to William Jennings Bryan.
Harvey did not pass the word, and on Tuesday, July 2, at 3:30 p.m., New York boarded the Wilson bandwagon, on the forty-sixth and last ballot. Wilson carried the convention with 890 of the 1,088 votes.
Forty-five minutes before the final vote was in, Wilson had received a telephone call with a connection so poor that he could not identify the speaker or hear all that was said. But he gathered that his nomination was imminent, and he went upstairs to tell Ellen that they would not be going to Wordsworth country anytime soon. When they came down arm in arm, Ellen was beaming, and a reporter detected “a suspicious moisture in the governor’s eyes,” along with “strain under perfect control.” Wilson felt honored and intensely aware of his new duties, he said. “I hope with all my heart that the party will never have reason to regret it.”
A few hours earlier, he had gone over to the telegraphers’ tent to explain his uncommunicativeness during the week. Watching the votes accumulate in his column, he said, he had grown more and more aware of the responsibilities that lay ahead of him. Poor Woodrow Wilson. Defeat pained him, and victory brought no thrill. It was as if he feared that the gods would punish him for the sin of pride. The Democratic Party had just crowned him with its highest honor, and he was weighed down by the same dreary sense of responsibility that had overtaken him thirty years before, when his first book was published.
Ellen and the girls were more ebullient. They smiled and smiled. They embraced one another jointly and severally, and Jessie, who had recorded the results of every ballot, was clapping with delight. Nell divulged that the family had been excited all week. “Papa was excited, too,” she told a reporter, “and it was only his marvelous willpower that kept him from shouting it.”
Back in Baltimore, the Democrats stayed in the armory to approve the party’s platform and nominate a vice president. Wilson hoped to run with Underwood, but Underwood had no intention of giving up his power in the House of Representatives, where he chaired the Ways and Means Committee. A smooth-talking Texan was deputized to telephone Wilson and say that the convention leaned toward Thomas Riley Marshall, governor of Indiana. Wilson, who had met Marshall, protested that he was a “small-caliber” man. The Texan countered that Marshall was a skilled campaigner and would help Wilson win Indiana, which typically voted Republican. Marshall was nominated at 1:56 a.m., and the delegates were at last free to go home.
The New York Times, long suspicious of Bryan’s motives, expressed astonishment that a novice like Wilson had prevailed over Bryan. The editors considered Wilson “one of the ablest men in the country” but cautioned that he could not win unless he carried more than the Democrats’ long-solid South. “[I]f the people of Michigan and Iowa and Indiana and Pennsylvania will vote in November as their delegates have been shouting here . . . there need be no fear of the result. But will they?”
