While Theodore Roosevelt stood at Armageddon and battled for the Lord, while Eugene V. Debs and his Socialist Party called for the abolition of capitalism, while William Howard Taft marched under the limp banner of IT IS BETTER TO BE SAFE THAN SORRY, Woodrow Wilson promised to level the economic playing field. In his acceptance speech, he noted that the United States had grown immensely rich. But to what end? he asked. “Prosperity? Yes, if by prosperity you mean vast wealth no matter how distributed.” The financial struggle of the average American of 1912 was the great issue of the election, and the great question before the voters was, What should government do about it?
There had been no presidential contest more critical since the one in 1860, which had propelled four-year-old Tommy Wilson into the manse to ask what the stranger in the street had meant when he said Lincoln had been elected and there would be war. The house was again divided, this time between the rich and everyone else, and if the gaping disparity was unlikely to sunder the Union, it nevertheless corroded the country’s belief in itself as the most democratic nation on earth. America was supposed to be a place where “the strong could not put the weak to the wall,” Wilson said, and unless she lived up to her ideals, she would lose the right to hold her head high.
President Taft defended his record and assured the country that the economic machinery needed no more than a tweak. His minimalism appealed only to the most conservative Republicans, and two months before Election Day he wrote his wife, “I think I might as well give up so far as being a candidate is concerned. There are so many people in the country who don’t like me.”
It was true. “The country will have none of him,” Woodrow Wilson wrote his friend Mary early in the summer. “But just what will happen, as between Roosevelt and me, with party lines utterly confused and broken, is all guess work.” Wilson worried that he would seem colorless next to the pyrotechnic Roosevelt, who was still loved by Americans of all descriptions. “He is a real, vivid person, whom they have seen and shouted themselves hoarse over and voted for, millions strong,” Wilson wrote. “I am a vague, conjectural personality, more made up of opinions and academic prepossessions than of human traits and red corpuscles.”
When Roosevelt bellowed that he felt as strong as a bull moose and pledged to give his all to his new National Progressive Party, Wilson said without embarrassment, “I haven’t a Bull Moose’s strength.” Roosevelt would travel north, south, east, and all the way west to the Pacific, speaking in thirty-eight states. Wilson hopscotched around the Northeast and the Midwest, ventured no farther west than Colorado, and did not put so much as a toe in the South, which was sure to vote Democratic. Free to follow his own wishes, Wilson would have done even less. He loathed the idea of repeating himself to audience after audience, feared that his health would give out, and doubted that his exertions would net any more votes than he could get by making a few substantive speeches and letting the newspapers do the rest. But McCombs and McAdoo insisted that he tour. Most Americans had never laid eyes on a doctor of philosophy, and only a few had lived long enough to remember the last presidential nominee born in the South (California’s John C. Fremont, a native of Savannah, who had run in 1856).
Wilson made more than seventy major speeches during the campaign. Wherever he went, thousands came out to have a look at him—more than 175,000 in a single week. They saw a rather plain fellow—fifty-five years old, not quite six feet tall, a bit too thin. His chestnut-brown hair was graying, and the odd combination of his pensive expression and his golfer’s tan gave him the look of a bookworm who had been made to play outdoors. Many who met him in close quarters were struck by his inquiring blue-gray eyes, hard in some lights but kind when he smiled. When tense, he sometimes left an unfortunate impression. The journalist William Allen White, a genial man, recalled that when he was introduced to Wilson, “the hand he gave me to shake felt like a ten-cent pickled mackerel in brown paper.”
Wilson was at his best on a stage. He had studied elocution as diligently as any actor and without seeming to raise his voice could make himself heard by a crowd of fifteen thousand even in a hall with poor acoustics. A genius at the harmonics of political speech, he could easily work idealism and self-interest into the same chord, and he had the rare ability to stir emotion even as he appealed to reason. As the literary critic Edmund Wilson pointed out in the 1920s, Woodrow Wilson’s speeches were often lackluster on the page but “magnificently successful” when delivered; his voice was “quiet, well-mannered and beautifully distinct, with an edge that made his words seem incisive. He had just enough of a Southern accent and a grace and ease learned in the South to make one forget his square face and rather rigidly looming figure; and . . . a persuasiveness that was almost hypnotic. He gave the impression of a deep conviction and burning zeal, under imperturbable control.”
To Woodrow Wilson, oratory was “the greatest power granted unto man” and the sine qua non of great leadership. The oratorical statesman never spoke over people’s heads or proposed drastic change or presented unfamiliar ideas. He spoke common sense uncommonly well. He was also a keen observer, “a sort of sensitive dial registering all forces that move upon society.” Once registered, the forces could be rightly interpreted by any leader worthy of the name, explained in his speeches to the people, and used to persuade their elected representatives to make government responsive to the collective will. As he had written years earlier, “There are men to be moved. How shall [the statesman] move them? He supplies the power; others supply the materials upon which that power operates. It is the power which dictates, dominates: the materials yield. Men are as clay in the hands of the consummate leader.” Oratory was the wheel on which the clay was worked.
• • •
For more than a decade, senators and congressmen beholden to big business had done their shameless best to obscure the connections between the tariff, the trusts, and the banks. The tariff had been sold as the protector of American jobs, monopoly’s economies of scale were said to reduce the cost of living, and the bankers who lent only to the privileged few presented themselves as bulwarks against folly and catastrophe.
Wilson blew away the smoke. Tariff, trusts, banks—he treated them all as causes of the hardship felt by everyone but the rich. The tariff enabled American manufacturers to sell their own goods at inflated prices, monopolies stifled potential rivals, and banks denied credit to new businesses in order to protect their investments in monopolies, Wilson said. “We naturally ask ourselves, how did these gentlemen get control of these things? Who handed our economic laws over to them?” Not the people, he said. “The high cost of living is arranged by private understanding.”
Roosevelt, whose analysis was similar, prescribed two new commissions of experts, one to regulate the trusts and one to see that labor got its fair share of the high profits thrown off by the tariff. Courteously but firmly, Wilson disagreed. The experts who worked for the monopolists would easily manipulate the experts on the commission, and the idea of regulating monopoly was absurd, Wilson said. Monopoly was illegal. It needed destruction, not regulation. He would raze the trusts with laws giving all businesses equal access to markets and credit.
Roosevelt claimed that his new National Progressive Party occupied the sensible middle ground between Republicans who would do nothing and Democrats who, by doing too much, would throttle the goose laying the golden eggs. Wilson accused the monopolists and protectionists of being sissies, the Republicans of coddling the sissies, and the Progressives of being Republicans in all but name. In his judgment, the tariff had turned powerful American manufacturers into weaklings “afraid to venture out into the great world on their own merits and on their own strength.” Look at them, he said: “paralyzed by timidity” and “tied to the apron strings of the government at Washington.”
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Wilson gravitated toward large ideas, and his large idea in 1912 was brought to him by Louis D. Brandeis, the son of Jewish Czech immigrants. Born in 1856, he was a Kentuckian who never lost his Southern accent. After graduating from Harvard Law School at twenty, with high honors, he joined a law firm in Boston, where his suits against railroads and other corporations led him to study the mismatch between commonsense morality and the privileges enshrined in corporate law. His success in the courtroom and his formidable skill as a polemicist infuriated New England’s business establishment, which retaliated by turning a cold shoulder. At the Dedham Polo Club, Brandeis was left to “flock by himself,” one Brahmin reported to another; “he ceased to frequent the Club—and his absence was not regretted.”
By the time Brandeis was in his mid-thirties, he was earning more than $50,000 a year and had accumulated a fortune of $2 million. With his family amply provided for, he scaled back his legal practice to devote more time to issues of economic justice, and at the time he and Wilson met, Brandeis was studying the cabal between the banks and the trusts. The big banks were lending to the trusts, investing in the trusts, and sitting on the boards of the trusts, a state of affairs that gave the banks every incentive to collude with the trusts in crushing their competitors. The banks often did their part simply by depriving new enterprises of capital. Brandeis persuaded Wilson that it made sense to regulate competition instead of monopoly. If the government passed laws creating truly free markets, it could stand back as long as competition remained open to all. Wilson was soon painting the picture in black and white: Roosevelt’s way meant “industrial absolutism,” his own would bring “industrial liberty.”
After a few exchanges with Brandeis in late August, Wilson committed himself to an ambitious program that would banish monopoly, expand access to credit, and speedily reduce tariff rates. His was a campaign for freedom, he said: freedom from the “thralldom of monopoly,” from the favoritism embedded in the tariff, from the strangulating grip of special interests, from all the powers that “have set us in a straitjacket to do as they pleased.” By October, he was calling his program the New Freedom, which he described as the old freedom “revived and clothed in the unconquerable strength of modern America.” He aimed for a restoration of “absolutely free opportunity,” he said, with laws that would make it possible for individuals to prosper on their merits.
Roosevelt, architect of the New Nationalism, denounced the New Freedom as “a queer kind of Toryism,” by which he meant that it would crimp the powers of the federal government and return the country to the days when states’ rights and property rights took precedence over human rights. Roosevelt argued that an industrialized country needed a powerful central government to ensure that the strong did not exploit the weak or otherwise abuse the public interest. Wilson’s talk of regulating competition struck Roosevelt as airy, and he warned that it would “leave unchecked the colossal embodied privileges of the day.”
Wilson countered with a warning: Roosevelt’s New Nationalism, with its powerful federal government, would curtail individual freedom. “The minute you are taken care of by the government, you are wards, not independent men,” Wilson said.
Both Wilson and Roosevelt ignored Debs. An Indiana native who spent much of his life as a railway worker and union official, Debs had gone to jail in 1895 for defying federal authorities seeking to end a strike at the Pullman Palace Car Company in Illinois. While in jail, Debs read Karl Marx and concluded that capitalism was beyond redemption. He decided that private enterprise should become public enterprise, and he dreamed of accomplishing the transformation peacefully, at the polls. In front of an audience, Eugene Debs radiated so much goodness and character that even skeptics of socialism fell under his spell. One such citizen who was puzzled by his strong attraction to Debs told a reporter, “That old man with the burning eyes actually believes that there can be such a thing as the brotherhood of man. And that’s not the funniest part of it. As long as he’s around I believe it myself.” The speeches of Eugene Debs were well reasoned, well informed, and moving, but something went awry between the lyceum and the ballot box. In 1908, on his third try for the presidency, he had polled no more votes than he had in 1904—about 400,000.
Issues unrelated to the economy barely registered, and when they did arise, the public seemed inclined to side with the newcomer. Roosevelt spoke out strongly in favor of women’s suffrage. Wilson did not, yet he would carry five of the six states where women already had the vote. African Americans traditionally supported the party of Lincoln, but with little to show for their decades of loyalty, they opened themselves to other possibilities in 1912. It was time, said the Afro-American of Baltimore. “Too many black people have been on one side of the boat.” And there was a practical reason to look elsewhere, the editors said: “The poverty of the colored man makes it imperative for him to support the party which takes the least from his pocket, and therefore the Democratic Party should receive his support.”
Most black leaders endorsed Wilson in spite of the fact that he was a Democrat born in the South, where the Democratic Party was a powerful force for white supremacy. Wilson assured Bishop Alexander Walters, president of the National Colored Democratic League, that he earnestly wished to see justice done to his colored fellow citizens—“not mere grudging justice, but justice executed with liberality and cordial good feeling.” Should he become president, Wilson said, “they may count upon me for absolute fair dealing and for everything by which I could assist in advancing the interests of their race in the United States.”
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Although the candidates refrained from personal attacks, the personal sometimes threatened to become political, and the campaigns of both Wilson and Roosevelt narrowly escaped derailment. In July, when a court in Massachusetts granted Woodrow Wilson’s friend Mary Peck a divorce, the steadfastly Republican New-York Tribune put the news on the front page and identified her as “a friend of Governor and Mrs. Woodrow Wilson.” It was true, but the item’s prominence and the mention of the social connection seemed calculated to cause mischief and raise a titillating question: had Mrs. Peck’s friendship with the governor figured in the divorce? One of Roosevelt’s confidants shared rumors of a romance, apparently in the hope of using the gossip against Wilson. T.R. instantly cut him off. He did not doubt Wilson’s decency, he said, and besides, the mere thought of this prim Presbyterian in the role of swain was absurd. The picture set Roosevelt to laughing so hard that he could barely speak.
At the end of September, Wilson learned that Republicans were whispering about his relationship with Mary, and the account he sent her might be the most panicked and jumbled letter he ever wrote. In one passage he seemed to choke on his thoughts: “It at once came into my mind that this might be an attempt to set gossip afloat, if nothing more, which would, no matter how completely discredited later, abundantly suffice, just at this juncture, to ruin me utterly, and all connected with me. . . .” He caught his breath but still could not think straight. Noting that she was on Nantucket and that he had just spoken in Fall River, he asked, “Is it not from Fall River that the boats ply to Nantucket? I thought that you might have heard of the meeting, and looked eagerly around among the women of the audience in the hope that I might see you there. How jolly, how delightful that would have been! No such luck!” He seemed oblivious to his great luck in not seeing her. A meeting at that point might well have sunk his candidacy. When his mind righted itself, he assured her that he was pegging away at the campaign: “There are great issues, the greatest imaginable, issues of life and death, as it seems to me, so far as the sound political life of the country is concerned; and therefore I keep heart and strength. The people believe in me and trust me.”
William Allen White never warmed to Wilson, but years later, as he was writing a biography of Wilson, someone showed him some of the letters Mrs. Peck had received from the man who signed himself “Your devoted friend.” Finding nothing unseemly, White speculated that Wilson’s fascination with Mrs. Peck owed much to the fact that she was “something quite outside the Calvin cycle”—a free spirit.
Roosevelt’s candidacy was threatened on October 14 by a delusional loner who shot him at close range while he was campaigning in Milwaukee. Roosevelt came literally within an inch of his life: a bullet that might have pierced his lung came to rest in a rib. Taft and Wilson put their campaigns on hold, partly out of a sense of decorum and partly because they feared a backlash if they carried on as Roosevelt lay wounded. William Jennings Bryan, as wily as ever, declared that to suspend the campaign was to let the would-be assassin decide the election. Roosevelt, as wily as Bryan, announced that he agreed with Bryan. The campaign resumed before the month was out.
Taft’s campaign was a misery, and the last week was surely the most miserable of all. On October 30, he lost his running mate, Vice President James Sherman, who had been ill for months. Two days later, at the suggestion of his campaign managers, Taft gave a long interview to the New York World. He was supposed to tell the full story of his break with Roosevelt, and the World was supposed to syndicate the story to newspapers across the country. The idea was to slam Roosevelt hard on the eve of the election. But there was not an ounce of meanness in Taft’s 335 pounds, and he could manage no more than a few faintly critical remarks about his old friend. Even that made him blue. At his request, the interview was spiked.
• • •
On Election Day, November 5, the Democratic candidate for president of the United States allowed himself to sleep until nine o’clock. After breakfast he walked over to Princeton’s firehouse, which had been outfitted as a polling place, and took his spot at the end of the line. At 10:15 a.m., Woodrow Wilson cast ballot 112 for himself and the rest of the Democratic ticket.
In the afternoon, Wilson’s bodyguard and two aides accompanied him on a long walk. He was in excellent shape. His fear of buckling under the stress of the campaign had gone unrealized, and he had put on seven needed pounds. Although he appeared unconcerned about the election, his itinerary suggested that he was thinking of little else. For a time he led his companions along a road taken by George Washington’s army during the American Revolution. The walking party also made stops to see the Princeton diploma of James Madison and the death mask of Grover Cleveland. One presidential destination might be a coincidence, but three?
By evening, a telegrapher had set up a ticker in Ellen’s studio, and nine reporters were working quietly at the large table in the library. Margaret, Jessie, and Nell were home, and Ellen’s brother Stockton Axson, two of Woodrow’s cousins, and a few close friends had been invited to dinner. When the party moved from the dinner table to the hearth in the living room, Wilson stayed on his feet, warming his back at the fire. He was convivial, amusing, at ease—the self-mastered man.
At ten o’clock, the governor’s chief aide, Joe Tumulty, hollered, “He’s elected, Mrs. Wilson!” Ellen reached for Woodrow’s hand, and Nell watched the gaiety drain from his face as he took in the news. While the reporters elbowed their way to Wilson’s side, Nell fled to the calm of the upstairs and opened a window. The university’s bell was ringing, and scores of townspeople were hurrying toward the house. Among them was a contingent of Princeton men marching by torchlight. Wilson went out to the porch, climbed onto a chair, and stood in silence while the crowd settled. His face, red in the torchlight, looked “utterly, utterly unfamiliar,” Nell thought. “I had a sense of awe, almost of terror—he was no longer the man with whom we had lived in warm sweet intimacy—he was no longer my father. These people, strangers who had chosen him to be their leader, now claimed him. He belonged to them.”
The president-elect seemed almost as lost. He voiced no joy, and to prime his oratorical pump, he had to borrow from one of his old heroes. “I have no feeling of triumph tonight, but a feeling of solemn responsibility,” he said. “I know the great task ahead of me and the men associated with myself.” William Gladstone had used almost exactly the same words on becoming prime minister. To the students in the crowd, Wilson said, “I look almost with pleading to you, the young men of America, to stand behind me.” He urged them to work quietly for the political change they sought, to accept that success would be long in coming, and to persevere. When he finished, scores of people waited for a turn to shake his hand, and he thanked each of them “for caring so much.”
Taft and Roosevelt wired their congratulations, Roosevelt’s being memorable for calling attention to the fact that Wilson’s victory was a plurality. At 42 percent it was a “great plurality,” Roosevelt said, but he was undoubtedly relieved that Wilson had fallen far short of his own commanding majority (56 percent) in 1904. Neither Roosevelt nor Taft saluted the sweep of Wilson’s victory: forty of the forty-eight states, 435 of 531 electoral votes, and majorities in both houses of Congress. Roosevelt came in second, with 27 percent, an impressive finish for a candidate whose party was a mere three months old. No incumbent president had ever fared worse than Taft, who won only 23 percent of the vote. In four states, Taft suffered the indignity of finishing behind Debs, who drew 6 percent nationwide. The Socialists had never done better in a presidential election and would never do so well again.
Ever since 1912, historians have said that Roosevelt’s candidacy cost Taft the election by splitting the Republican vote. The Republicans were indeed divided, but the deciding factor was Taft’s unpopularity: 77 percent of the electorate rejected him. Taft would have made a stronger showing if Roosevelt had not run, but in that case, a sizable share of Roosevelt supporters surely would have chosen Wilson’s progressivism over the reactionary Republicanism of 1912. In a Taft-Wilson race, Wilson could have achieved a majority with only a third of the votes that went to Roosevelt. The people did not want Roosevelt or Taft. They wanted a change and believed that Wilson would deliver on his promise of a New Freedom, an emancipation from rule by the rich for the rich. No one, not even Wilson, could say precisely how this emancipation would come about, but by their votes the people showed their confidence in Wilson’s ability to put government back into their hands. And they believed that when he succeeded, they would, too.
• • •
Woodrow Wilson had waged a consistently intelligent, consistently inspiring campaign. Most American newspapers concurred in his diagnosis of the country’s ills, considered his prescription sensible, and saw him as well schooled if not well practiced in the art of governing. The emphasis on the president-elect’s learning was not misplaced. He had more years of higher education (eight) than any of his White House predecessors, and as a scholar of American and English political institutions, he had thought deeply about what democratic government was, what it ought to do, and how the doing ought to be done.
But as Wilson thought ahead to the presidency, he told a friend that it would be “an irony of fate” if world affairs dominated his presidency, because his scholarship had focused on domestic politics. This offhand remark would be accorded unduly great significance because of the world war and the controversies that followed, controversies that ultimately overwhelmed his presidency. The truth was that he entered the White House with a rich understanding of the role a president might play in foreign relations, an education gleaned largely from close observation of President Theodore Roosevelt, who had steadily enlarged the part played by the United States on the world stage.
The great deficiency in the education of Woodrow Wilson was not in foreign relations but human relations. While he was more socially adept than his self-absorbed father had been, he showed no interest in mastering the arts of friendship, collaboration, and disagreement. Unsuccessful in his romance with Hattie Woodrow, he had pronounced her “heartless.” Unsuccessful as a young lawyer, he blamed the law. In neither instance is there evidence that he sought to understand his own part in the failures.
As a member of Princeton’s faculty, Woodrow Wilson enjoyed more success than his father had ever known. His classes were oversubscribed, publishers clamored for his work, and he was a favorite on the lecture circuit. As president of Princeton, Wilson had gone on to even greater success and was showered with acclaim. But success is a poor teacher. It discourages analysis and self-examination, and it tempts the successful to overestimate their abilities.
Eight years as president of Princeton and two years as governor had not taught Woodrow Wilson how to deal constructively with opposition or how to make friends. During his presidential campaign, he promised to “take counsel” before making decisions, and at times he would do so, but he would also cling to his preference for acting on his own. And despite the fact that his speeches to alumni had not led to victory in either of his big battles at Princeton, he still believed he would be able to govern the country and win the cooperation of Congress through oratory. When he resigned from Princeton, he acknowledged his hurts and had upsetting dreams about his foes, but there is no evidence that these disturbances led to self-reflection or efforts to change. Instead he had been defiantly proud, writing Ellen, “We have no compromises to look back on, the record of our consciences is clear in this whole trying business. We can be happy, therefore, no matter what may come of it all.” What came of it, quite by chance, was the political career he had always wanted. Happenstance allowed him to start near the top of the political ladder, giving him a governorship on his first try and the presidency on his second. What was Woodrow Wilson supposed to learn from that?
