Sworn in at 1:34 p.m. on March 4, 1913, the twenty-eighth president of the United States delivered an inaugural address that was half civics lesson, half sermon. Power had passed from the Republicans to the Democrats, but a party’s power mattered little unless the nation used it for a large purpose, Wilson said. The nation had accumulated great wealth, it had acquired great “moral force,” and its government had become a model for all peoples who sought to “set liberty upon foundations that will endure.” But Americans had been wasting their natural resources, ignoring the human toll of their industrial might, and contenting themselves with a government that was too often used to advance private interests at the expense of the public good. “Our great thought has been, ‘Let every man look out for himself, let every generation look out for itself.’ ” With the change of government came a vision of American life as a whole: “We see the bad with the good, the debased and decadent with the sound and vital. . . . Our duty is to cleanse, to reconsider, to restore, to correct the evil without impairing the good.” He pledged that lost ideals would be recovered and injustices would be redressed, but all changes would be accompanied by a “fundamental safeguarding of property and of individual right.”
That night, for the first time in living memory, there was no inaugural ball. A fixture of Washington life since the days of Dolley Madison, the ball had been called off only once—in 1853, by President Franklin Pierce and his wife, who were in mourning. Inaugural balls were largely underwritten by friends of the president, but the use of any federal monies for such a function did not sit well with Woodrow Wilson, and the new first lady thought it vulgar to put the highest office in the land at the center of an occasion so conspicuously commercial.
Wilson had other reasons not to preen. His election had left him 9 percentage points shy of a popular majority. He was also the first Southerner to live in the White House since Andrew Johnson, who had endeared himself to no one. And the reforms Wilson had promised would pit him against the most powerful men in the country. Small wonder, then, that Wilson had ended his inaugural address with the thought that the day was one of dedication, not of triumph. And small wonder that while the guests at the Wilsons’ private inaugural dinner were, in the words of the chief usher of the White House, “bubbling over with joy and all trying to talk at once,” the president himself seemed preoccupied and fatigued.
Come morning, though, Wilson seemed rested and robust, and at nine o’clock, after stoking himself on coffee, porridge, and raw eggs in orange juice, he set forth to show the country what sort of president he intended to be. It was customary for new presidents to see the hordes hoping to be appointed to office, but Wilson had decided to skip that task. As he explained to his first visitor, a president needed time for thought and for leisure, so he would concentrate on essentials and delegate everything else. Wilson’s break with custom made front pages across the country. In Columbia, South Carolina, where he had spent much of his boyhood, the headline read, “Seekers After Pie Get Cold Shoulder.”
At ten he met briefly with his cabinet, a collective of men he barely knew. The exception was William Jennings Bryan, who had been rewarded with the post of secretary of state. The men at the meeting were pleasantly surprised. The secretary of the interior, Franklin K. Lane, wrote a friend that Wilson was not the “cold nose” he was rumored to be. “He is the most sympathetic, cordial, and considerate presiding officer that can be imagined. And he sees so clearly. He has no fog in his brain.” The secretary of agriculture, David F. Houston, marveled in his diary that the new president had “no mark of the recruit about him.” Wilson conducted the meeting as if he had been president all his life, Houston thought.
At noon the president went back up to the family quarters of the White House for lunch with Woodrow relatives, and shortly after two o’clock he plunged into a reception in the East Room, where he shook 1,123 hands, a performance suggesting that while he would not be running a pie shop, he would not be in seclusion, either.
This day required the new president to make a nod to the rest of the world, and in a move that was both sensible and comfortable, he received the British ambassador, James Bryce. The two had met in 1883, when Wilson was a Johns Hopkins student and Bryce a visiting lecturer. A generation older than Wilson, Bryce was the sort of man the young Wilson had longed to become: don, politician, man of letters. Bryce had written a favorable review of Wilson’s first book and borrowed some of its ideas for his own writings.
Toward the end of the afternoon, the president took a ride out to the Washington Monument and back in one of the White House limousines. Wilson had never owned an automobile, but he became a motoring enthusiast as soon as he entered politics. Riding in a car relaxed him—so much so that he frequently drifted off into a nap. Back in his office by five-thirty, Wilson met with his campaign chairman, William F. McCombs, who had hoped to be named secretary of the treasury. When the position went to William G. McAdoo, McCombs asked for a face-saving written statement, Wilson promised him one, and McCombs had come to collect. Wilson was ready. McCombs had been offered a major embassy, the statement said, and Wilson hoped that he would accept.
Once that prickly business was done, the rest of the Democratic National Committee was brought in, and promptly at seven o’clock the president went upstairs to host a dinner for the Wilson side of the family. At eight-thirty he excused himself, went to his study for a look at the day’s paperwork, and received a governor for a short visit. He turned in at ten, his usual hour.
• • •
Taft had warned Wilson that the White House was the loneliest house in the world, and Wilson felt isolated from the start. It seemed to him that everyone in the capital was on the make night and day, lusting after more power, more influence, more success. Washington changes people, he told Nell. “They either grow or they swell—usually the latter.” At times he feared that the man he thought of as Woodrow Wilson had vanished. He felt betwixt, lost somewhere between the self he recognized and the role he played.
Although scores of people came to see him and he shook thousands of hands, these encounters were too fleeting to alleviate his sense of disconnection. During the Wilsons’ first three months in Washington, they hosted forty-one receptions and a total of 24,000 guests. As he wrote his friend Mary Allen Hulbert, the former Mrs. Peck, he and Ellen lived “at the beck and call of others (how many, many others!) and almost never have a chance to order our days as we wish, or to follow our own thoughts and devices. The life we lead is one of infinite distraction, confusions,—fragmentary, broken in upon and athwart in every conceivable way.” To be alone without fear of interruption, they often resorted to outings in one of the presidential automobiles.
But if he felt disoriented, he looked like a man at the height of his powers. “When I saw him come out of his study and stride down the hall toward us, I noticed that his walk had acquired more than its usual buoyancy,” Nell would recall. “His eyes were strikingly clear and bright, and there was a sort of chiseled keenness in his face. He was finer looking in those days than ever before in his life.” He was also better dressed. The White House valet, unhappy with the informality of the president’s wardrobe, had persuaded Ellen to find a tailor who would make a fresh start. Informed that the process would require numerous fittings, Wilson consented on the condition that the tailor make enough clothes to last through his presidency. By July, in his new white linen suit or his new navy blazer, white trousers, and straw boater, he could have passed as a summering oligarch.
The White House handed over to the Wilsons had been renovated by the Roosevelts and dressed up by the Tafts. By giving the house more softness, Ellen made it feel like a home. In the family quarters, dark walls were brightened with pale grass cloth, pastel paint, and airy wallpaper. Icy-white woodwork was redone in warm ivory. Carpeting was ripped up, floors were refinished, and area rugs were rolled out. Armchairs were reupholstered in gay chintzes, and here and there Ellen used fabrics and quilts made by women in Appalachia. The president’s bedroom was redecorated in white and Delft blue.
For the main floor, Ellen ordered white slipcovers, white curtains, and pleated white dimity to cover the dark silk panels on the walls. The animal heads that Roosevelt had put up in the State Dining Room were exiled to the Smithsonian. Only the Oval Office, built by Taft, proved irredeemable. Too new to justify the expense of redecorating, it would remain in the gloom of its olive green velvet draperies, dark paneling, and furniture upholstered in caribou hide stained a dark red.
With her painter’s eye and love of flowers, Ellen drew up an ambitious plan for beautifying the White House grounds, but the small congressional appropriation available for such purposes limited her to a garden on either side of the south Portico. Her rose garden lasted until the 1960s, when John F. Kennedy revised it with television cameras in mind. His version included a lawn large enough for a crowd of a thousand.
• • •
Before coming to Washington, Ellen had rarely involved herself in public causes. But after learning that thousands of Washington’s poor were living without water or electricity in the city’s alleys, she lent her time and prestige to a civic group lobbying Congress for a bill to clean up the alleys and move the inhabitants to better housing. She soon had the satisfaction of seeing bills introduced in both the House and the Senate.
The Three Wilson Girls, as the newspapers called them, were expected to contribute to the larger good, and two of them pitched in energetically. Margaret, who was twenty-seven, hosted musicales at the White House and joined a successful campaign to keep Washington’s schools open after hours as social centers for adolescents. Jessie had dreaded moving to the White House, where she pictured herself sentenced to four years of small talk at her parents’ teas and receptions. At twenty-six, she had been a social worker for five years and wanted only to carry on. With her parents’ blessing, she involved herself in the work of the YWCA. Nell, the only Wilson whose soul fattened on parties, resisted when her mother remarked that a woman of twenty-three ought to do more than amuse herself. Ellen persevered until Nell offered herself to a day nursery, where, she confessed, “I was a complete failure.”
Woodrows and Wilsons and Axsons came to visit, and one of the president’s first cousins, Helen Bones, moved in to assist the first lady’s social secretary, Isabella (Belle) Hagner. Belle, who had perfected her role in the Roosevelt and Taft administrations, managed Ellen’s schedule and instructed the girls in the ways of Washington society. Belle believed that presidential offspring ought to socialize with an eye on their father’s political fortunes, and she advocated a policy of divide and conquer: if they went out en bloc, they would thrill one hostess, but if they split up, they could delight three.
The president was happiest when surrounded by women, and when Belle hinted to his wife and daughter that his circle ought to include a man or two, they shrugged. Belle was one of the first in Washington to notice Wilson’s avoidance of powerful men. He collaborated with them when necessary and did not shrink from confrontation, but he did not seek them out for the sake of expanding his power. Nor did he make the spontaneous social overtures that enable a gregarious politician to build goodwill just by being himself.
President Wilson had three male confidants, all of whom were subordinates. Joseph Patrick Tumulty had been at his side since 1910. Tumulty’s father, an Irish immigrant who had fought in the Civil War, was a Democratic leader in a Jersey City ward so rough it was called the Bloody Angle, after a stretch of ground where Union and Confederate soldiers had fought hand to hand. The Tumulty family’s grocery store became a gathering place for local Democrats, and Joe grew up in their midst. He went on to the local Jesuit college, read law at a local firm, established his own practice, and in 1906, at the age of twenty-seven, won a seat in the State Assembly.
In the White House, Tumulty functioned as Wilson’s chief of staff, political advisor, and manager of press relations. He also served as the warm face of a president whose reserve and self-discipline intimidated some people and annoyed others. Everyone liked Joe Tumulty. The White House ran smoothly under his direction, he was unfailingly cordial, and if he could lend a hand, he did. Why not? His boss would need favors, too. Tumulty treated reporters well and, sharing Wilson’s belief in the importance of molding public opinion, he took the national pulse daily by scanning newspaper articles clipped by his staff.
Set up in a room adjacent to the Oval Office, Tumulty was the only staff member with unrestricted access to the president. If Wilson had a visitor he did not want to see, Tumulty cut the meeting short by barging in with an allegedly urgent piece of business. Wilson often did his paperwork upstairs in his study and asked his staff and the cabinet to communicate by memo. Even when he was in the Oval Office, he liked Tumulty to submit his questions and suggestions in writing. Typically the memos were sent back with a penciled “No” or “Okeh.” Perhaps because he believed that his father had taught him all that could be known about the English language, Wilson insisted that the expression came from an American Indian language and that “Okeh” was the orthodox spelling.
Wilson also permitted himself a friendship with Captain Cary T. Grayson of the U.S. Navy, a physician who had occasionally attended the Roosevelts and Tafts. Taft introduced Grayson to Wilson, and Wilson immediately had him assigned to the White House. Like Tumulty, Grayson was a generation younger than Wilson. He had grown up in Virginia, in a family of doctors, and held degrees in pharmacology as well as medicine. Half an inch shy of five-feet-eight, Grayson had jet-black hair and strong features offset by a welcoming smile. Called to Wilson’s bedside on the sixth day of his presidency, Grayson found a patient with a hammering headache and an intestinal upset that he described as “turmoil in Central America.” The doctor urged the president to stay in bed for the rest of the day. For the long term he prescribed a change of diet, regular exercise, and more rest. He also emptied Wilson’s medicine chest. Soon after Grayson’s house call, Wilson told the cabinet that he would absent himself from many of the president’s customary social appearances. “While I am not ill, my health is not exceptionally good, and I have signed a protocol of peace with my doctor,” he explained. “I must be good.”
Wilson had total confidence in his new physician’s medical knowledge. He was also attracted to Grayson’s Southern courtliness and his skill as a raconteur. Wilson preferred golf to other forms of exercise, and he and Grayson were soon playing several times a week. They went out for their first round on May 31 and over the next six months played ninety times. A cannier politician would have taken along a senator or congressman from time to time, but Wilson balked at enlarging the twosome. His mealtimes were only marginally less exclusive. Grayson was a frequent guest, but the president ate virtually all of his breakfasts, lunches, and dinners alone or with his family. He delegated the social side of his political work to Tumulty, who lunched daily at a nearby hotel with a rotating cast of journalists, politicians, and other men of influence.
No friend would have more sway with Wilson than Edward Mandell House, a slight, dapper man who fulfilled his life’s ambition when he became Wilson’s confidential advisor. Two years younger than Wilson, House was the son of one of the richest men in Texas. A childhood bout of malaria left House with a permanently weakened constitution and an inability to tolerate summer heat. His career as a self-appointed éminence grise allowed him to make the most of his fascination with politics, his financial independence, and his physical limitations. House had entered his chosen profession in the early 1890s, helping four Democrats win the governorship of Texas. One expressed his thanks by making House an honorary colonel, but House disliked the title and everything else that made him an object of curiosity. He wished to be an insider known only to other insiders.
After a decade in Texas politics, House felt prepared to assist a national figure but had no interest in making himself available to William Jennings Bryan, the only Democrat with a large following as the twentieth century began. Patient as well as rich, House waited him out. For nine years he read history and politics, traveled, and widened his circle of political acquaintances. He wintered in Austin, summered abroad or in New England to escape the Texas heat, and passed much of the rest of the year in New York.
House watched Wilson’s ascent and at the end of 1911 wrote him to say that he was already urging Texas Democrats to support his nomination in 1912. House also invited Wilson to New York for a long talk, and both men went away with the intoxicating sensation that they understood each other perfectly. Describing the governor to a confidant, House said, “He is not the biggest man I have ever met, but he is one of the pleasantest and I would rather play with him than any prospective candidate I have seen. From what I had heard, I was afraid that he had to have his hats made to order; but I saw not the slightest evidence of it.” Ill for much of 1912, House had played only a minor role in Wilson’s campaign but afterward did most of the scouting for cabinet members. When Wilson offered him a cabinet post, House said he preferred to be a minister without portfolio. Endowed with an abundance of self-esteem, House thought of himself as Wilson’s peer.
• • •
Few incoming presidents had studied government as closely as Woodrow Wilson, who had thought, lectured, and written about it for three decades. In his youth he had seen the president as little more than the vassal of Congress. He could veto an act of Congress, but with enough votes, Congress could override the veto. A president was in charge of foreign relations, but in the 1880s, when Wilson’s serious political studies began, the world beyond the Atlantic and the Pacific barely registered in the American mind.
Wilson found the presidency more appealing after 1898, when the Spanish-American War returned foreign relations to center stage. He had watched closely as President Roosevelt made one unprecedented foray after another, and if Wilson did not applaud all he saw, his conception of executive power was undoubtedly enlarged by Roosevelt’s insistence that a president could do anything the Constitution did not expressly prohibit.
In 1907, soon after the Democrats of the Northeast began their “Wilson for President” talk, Wilson advanced a view of the chief executive that would have startled his younger self: “His office is anything he has the sagacity and force to make it,” he said. “The president is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can. His capacity will set the limit; and if Congress be overborne by him, it will be . . . because the president has the nation behind him, and Congress has not.” The president was the only official elected by all the people, and once he had their admiration and confidence, “no other single force can withstand him, no combination of forces will easily overpower him,” Wilson wrote. And even though the Constitution assigned the legislative domain to Congress, it had authorized the president to recommend that Congress pass measures that he deemed necessary. In short, the president’s place was “the vital place of action in the system.”
Looking on as the Roosevelt and Taft administrations battled the trusts, Wilson concluded that the increasing concentration of power and wealth in the United States called for a new interpretation of the separation of powers ordained by the Constitution. As he explained in a 1911 interview with Harper’s Weekly, a modern government needed “a single lever to control the whole complicated machine, so that you can start it by a single motion or stop it by a single motion. . . . We have made a great, complicated machine, and each part separately answers to our hands. But there is no one lever to control the whole machine, therefore it is not controlled at all.” Wilson believed that the problem could be solved by putting one person in charge and holding him accountable.
Wilson took all of these concepts to the White House, where he trained his formidable will on becoming as big a president as his sagacity and force could make him. He intended to be the representative of all the people, the vital center of action, the man at the lever of the great machine. He began with a drive to win enactment of his New Freedom and within eighteen months would transform the tax system, expand access to credit, and establish the Federal Reserve Board.
• • •
On the advice of his allies in Congress, Wilson pursued his big reforms one at a time. He started with the tariff, an issue that irritated Americans almost as much as it bored them. It caused widespread discontent because it raised the cost of living, but it was also the Treasury’s main source of revenue. Congress had agreed on a new source—an income tax—in 1909, but establishing the right of Congress to impose such a tax required a constitutional amendment, which was not ratified until the eve of Wilson’s inauguration. Armed with their new authority to impose taxes on any kind of income and their big majority in the House, Democrats were confident that they could at last lower the tariff and devise a tax schedule that would enjoy broad public support.
Within days of his inauguration, Wilson exercised his constitutional power to call a special session of Congress, and a few weeks later he sent word to the Capitol that he would like to address the House and Senate on April 8, the first day of the special session. He was not the first president to deliver a speech to Congress, but he was the first since Thomas Jefferson had abolished the custom on the grounds that such speeches smacked of orders from the throne. (Wilson suspected that the change had been prompted by the fact that Jefferson, for all his eloquence on paper, was a poor public speaker.) Wilson’s request was granted, but not without some senatorial grumbling about the return of monarchy.
Washingtonians curious about Wilson’s departure from tradition began packing the House galleries around noon. His family attended, as did most members of the cabinet, who came individually because of the president’s wish to avoid any hint of a royal procession. Shortly before one o’clock, Wilson entered the House chamber from a door behind the rostrum, shook hands with Vice President Marshall and Speaker Clark, and took his place at the clerk’s desk. He struck onlookers as commanding and wholly at ease.
Wilson began by saying that he was glad to have the opportunity to address the Congress and glad to confirm that the president was not a department of the government but “a human being trying to cooperate with other human beings in a common service.” He added that he might come back on other occasions but for the moment wished to speak only of the tariff bill. The world’s economy had changed, and the tariff made American goods uncompetitive abroad. “Only new principles of action will save us from a final hard crystallization of monopoly and a complete loss of the influences that quicken enterprise and keep independent energy alive,” he said. Undoubtedly there would be mistakes as tariff rates were adjusted, but the motives for the reform—eliminating special privilege and promoting prosperity for all—were in his view unassailable.
Barely six minutes after he’d begun, Wilson thanked Congress, bowed again, and exited to somewhat warmer applause. “Whereupon,” The Boston Globe reported, “diverse and sundry gentlemen of both houses turned to each other and said in effect, if not altogether in words, ‘What the h—l?’ ”
Wilson returned to the Capitol the next day in a motorcade that was a marvel of simplicity: a limousine trailed by two Secret Service agents in a taxi and two policemen on motorcycles. He had invited the Democrats from the Senate’s Committee on Finance to meet with him in the President’s Room, a chamber rarely used except on inauguration day, when the outgoing president signed the bills passed in the final hours of his administration. Assured that the House would act quickly on tariff reform, Wilson wanted to urge the committee’s Democrats to speed the measure through the Senate. His listeners replied that the Senate would do as the Senate thought best.
Two days later a hundred White House correspondents trooped into the East Room for their third press conference with President Wilson. His predecessors had often granted interviews, and sometimes they spoke with several journalists at once, but Wilson was the first to meet regularly with the press corps. The press conferences (sixty-four during his first year in office) gave all reporters access to the president and gave the president an opportunity to command public opinion.
The new president’s early dealings with reporters revealed a surprising amount of wishful thinking on his part. At the first press conference, he had asked reporters to be his partners in serving the country, a notion seriously at odds with the independence required for a free press. He also urged them to focus on bringing the opinions of the country to Washington rather than on reporting Washington’s news to their readers back home. “You have got to write from the country in and not from Washington out,” he said. In this he was extrapolating from his own desire to stay in touch with political sentiment across the country, but Washington correspondents could not write from the country in. They existed for the purpose of sending Washington’s news out.
The president’s iconoclastic week ended on Saturday night, when he dined out for the first time since taking office. His host was the Gridiron Club, and he used his time at the lectern to explain his visits to the Capitol. The Constitution’s checks on the powers of each branch of government had been carried to an extreme, he said. The president and the Congress no longer understood each other, so they were no longer able to work together, and unless that changed, neither he nor they could serve the country well.
The speech to Congress, the meeting in the President’s Room, the press conferences, the Gridiron speech—all emanated from Wilson’s conviction that the leader who commanded public opinion would command the government. He had dominated the headlines, but editorial reactions were reserved, politicians hesitated to comment, and the press conferences would prove as frustrating to the press as they were to the president. Reporters soon discovered that although Wilson was more available than his predecessors, he was no more forthcoming.
