Unlike a British prime minister, an American president does not have a cabinet whose members also sit in the legislature, but Wilson clearly had cabinet government in mind when he assigned Treasury Secretary William G. McAdoo to lobby the Senate and Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson to manage his relations with the House. The Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, but they were a contentious lot. They often split along sectional lines, and one faction could be as conservative as the most reactionary Republicans. Unless Wilson could hold all of them together, the New Freedom would not materialize. McAdoo had demonstrated his political agility in managing Wilson’s floor fight at the Democratic National Convention, and Burleson was a seven-term veteran of the House. Working long into the night to win votes for the president’s legislation, the two would soothe the anxious, encourage the timid, and cajole the stubborn. In private Wilson called them his “wet nurses.”
It fell to Burleson to give the president his first hard lesson in party unity. After sixteen years out of power, the Democrats had an opportunity to replace thousands of Republican appointees. Wilson was eager to fill the ranks with high-caliber progressives, and he informed Burleson that if a first-rate Democrat could not be found, he would appoint a progressive Republican. For two hours Burleson tried to persuade Wilson that it did not matter who served as postmaster of some hamlet in the sticks—except to the locals and their congressman. Wilson would not budge. Burleson tried again: “I know these congressmen and senators. They are mostly good men. If they are turned down, they will hate you and will not vote for anything you want. It is human nature.”
Wilson understood human nature but fervently believed that those who enjoyed great power had a duty to rise above self-interest and act for the common good. Throughout his career he had held his temper, and he had stayed true to his ideals even when they cost him the presidency of his beloved Princeton. But after resisting Burleson for a week, Wilson gave in and abandoned the field. Burleson would oversee the appointment of 56,000 postmasters and thousands of other minor officials, and Wilson would confine his appointive efforts to judges, ambassadors, and others on the high rungs.
On May 8, only a month after Wilson’s speech to Congress, the House voted to cut the tariff and finally exercise its new power to create an income tax. Hundreds of members of the National Association of Manufacturers raced to Washington for the seemingly innocuous purpose of holding a convention. In truth, they were massing their forces to lobby the Senate, where the Democrats had an edge of only six seats and where every tariff fight since the Civil War had ended in a victory for the manufacturing establishment.
Wilson staged a one-man counterattack, accusing the lobbyists of buying votes and of spending heavily on publicity to create the illusion of a popular backlash to tariff reform. This was a serious matter, Wilson said, because the people had no lobby to rebut the clever men distorting the facts. Mother and the cornfields sided with the president, but the Senate embarked on a testy debate, with Democrats reciting the benefits of free trade and Republicans warning that a sudden influx of cheap foreign goods would drive American companies out of business, depress stock prices, and create massive unemployment. Wilson and the wet nurses interceded where they could but resigned themselves to a long wait.
As the tariff fight dragged on, Wilson prepared for the establishment of a central bank. During the campaign, Wilson had focused on the big banks’ monopoly on credit, but neither he nor his opponents had said much about the need for federal control of the nation’s money supply. By the time Wilson came to power, politicians and financiers were largely agreed on the need for a central bank but differed on the question of who would control it. Bankers wanted a private collaborative run by bankers, while progressives and would-be borrowers argued for federal control.
Wilson decided that he wanted the government in the saddle and asked Congress to authorize the creation of the Federal Reserve Board and the issuance of currency backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government. Once again he went to Capitol Hill, this time to request that Congress stay in session in order to pass the legislation as soon as possible. Once again he was the picture of self-possession. And once again he was brief. It was, he said, “perfectly clear that it is our duty to supply the new banking and currency system the country needs. . . . The only question is, When shall we supply it—now, or later, after the demands shall have become reproaches that we were so dull and so slow?”
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On June 20, the White House announced that on the advice of Dr. Grayson, Mrs. Wilson would give up her philanthropic activities. She was not seriously ill but would remain quietly in the White House until she went to Cornish. Cornish was Cornish, New Hampshire, where the Wilsons had rented a large house with the idea of summering in a place cooler than Washington. Wilson planned a working vacation. But after he lectured Congress on its duty to stay on the job until a banking bill was passed, a friend pointed out the obvious: Congress, baking in Washington, would resent his absence. On June 28, the Three Wilson Girls and their exhausted mother departed for Cornish and left the president to his tug-of-war with Congress.
Although the House had given Wilson a swift victory on tax reform, the Senate had yet to act, and neither chamber had begun work on the Federal Reserve bill. Bryan tried to shepherd the errant into the fold with the argument that a Democratic president, a Democratic House, and a Democratic Senate had to act in accord with the principles of the Democratic Party.
At the end of July, Senate Republicans announced that they would ask for an adjournment after finishing with tax reform. Wilson replied that if Congress adjourned, he would immediately invoke his power to call an extra session and would direct the country’s attention to the dereliction of duty on Capitol Hill. Burleson helped to wear down the president’s adversaries by sidelining their patronage requests.
Wilson did not flinch, but he felt the strain. As he wrote Ellen, the pressure was “great, very great: eternal watchfulness, incessant shifts of personal sensitiveness and jealousy, incalculable currents to be watched for and offset and controlled.” Why, he wondered in a letter to his friend Mary, should U.S. senators have to be dragooned into doing their duty? Why should they find it so hard to see the straight path? “To whom are they listening?” he wondered. “Certainly not to the voice of the people.”
Going well beyond the call of duty, Grayson and Tumulty moved into the White House for the summer to keep the president company. Grayson was still unmarried, and Tumulty’s wife and children had gone to the Jersey Shore. Tumulty kept the work side of Wilson’s life in excellent order, and Grayson saw to his relaxation, golfing with him, arranging daily sessions of deep breathing and calisthenics, and taking him out for long automobile rides in the country and evenings at the theater. Sometimes they weekended on the presidential yacht Mayflower. Woodrow reported to Ellen that Grayson and Tumulty were “lovely fellows, both of them, and good company all the while.”
The neuritis that plagued Wilson at Princeton reappeared, and he and Grayson finished many of their summer nights with a half-hour massage done with the aid of a contraption that pumped electric current into glass tubes and balls. A medical textbook of the time instructed the physician to adjust the current to produce “the thickest disruptive charge from the largest ball electrode [and then] apply single thick, thumping sparks slowly, with intermissions, but persistently, over the course of the affected nerve trunk and on each point of tenderness until the greatest possible relief is obtained.”
Woodrow mentioned his symptoms in letters to Mary, but not to his wife. Ellen missed him keenly, and after a month in New Hampshire asked to come to Washington for a few days. “Indeed, dear, I must go!” she wrote. “I love you unspeakably.” He longed for her, too, but asked her not to come. She needed rest, and her presence might break his concentration, he said. “If I succeed in this session, the rest is easy. We must act together and without a touch of weakness. . . . Be a Spartan wife . . . and it will make it easy for me to be a Spartan statesman.”
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Wilson’s breakthrough in the Senate came on September 9, with the passage of the Underwood-Simmons Tariff Act. The new law cut the average tariff rate by 25 percent and imposed a graduated income tax. Those who earned less than $3,000 (the vast majority of working Americans) would be exempt. The tax rate started at 1 percent and stopped at 7, a rate to be paid only by those whose annual earnings topped $500,000.
Printed on gilt-edged parchment and bound in blue leather, the Tariff Act reached the White House early on the afternoon of October 3. On the advice of his attorney general, the president postponed the signing until customhouses across all of the country’s time zones had closed for the night, so it was nine o’clock when cabinet members, the vice president, and the congressional Democrats who had led the fight crowded into the Oval Office. The proceedings were more solemn than celebratory. No backslapping, no newspaper photographers. A hush settled in when the president sat for the signing. He wrote “Woodrow” with one gold pen, “Wilson” with another, and handed the pens to Underwood and Simmons.
The president expressed his thanks in a short talk that left no doubt about his gratitude to Congress, and he paid an oblique compliment to himself, quoting Shakespeare’s Henry V: “If it be a sin to covet honour, I am the most offending soul alive.” “I have had the accomplishment of something like this at heart ever since I was a boy,” he said. It was true: the English statesmen who had inspired him in his youth were ardent free traders. But the Democrats’ work would not be finished until they broke the money monopoly, he reminded his guests. “So I feel tonight like a man who is lodging happily in the inn which lies halfway along the journey and [knowing] that in time, with a fresh impulse, we shall go the rest of the journey.”
The outlook for the rest of the journey was mixed. The optimists, including Ellen, pointed out that the Federal Reserve bill had sailed through the House by a wide margin. “The Senate surely cannot stand out against that,” she wrote from New Hampshire. She was right, but three more disputatious months would pass before the Senate approved it.
Wilson suspected that lobbyists were responsible for the foot-dragging in the banking committee, and he worried that with enough time, they would find a way to derail the bill. He called a few friendly senators to the White House on the morning of October 7 and told them he wanted the committee’s Democrats to stand together and cast a vote that would send the bill to the Senate floor. The visitors advised letting the hearings run their course. The president might well pick up a few more votes as the undecided made up their minds, they said, and his opponents would ultimately have to admit that their views had been heard.
• • •
The morning’s disappointment was followed by a lunch with Tumulty and Oswald Garrison Villard. A grandson of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and publisher of the New York Evening Post and The Nation, Villard had helped Wilson win the support of black voters in 1912. But the two men had been at loggerheads for months over the administration’s treatment of African Americans in the civil service.
Black voters who cast their ballots for Wilson assumed that the New Freedom, with its rhetoric of emancipation and equal opportunity, included all Americans, and they were shocked when Burleson and McAdoo began segregating their departments. The Wilson administration was only five weeks old when Burleson informed the cabinet of his segregation plan, which he said was a response to complaints from white workers. De facto discrimination had long existed in the civil service—the white face at virtually every supervisor’s desk attested to that—but blacks and whites in the clerical ranks had coexisted peacefully for years. The overt segregation introduced by the Wilson administration has been ascribed to the fact that the president and half of his cabinet, including Burleson and McAdoo, were native Southerners who took white superiority for granted and regarded segregation as the secret of racial harmony: minimize the interaction, and you minimize the hostility.
While such attitudes undoubtedly played a part, there was another potent force at work. Virtually all of the new segregation occurred in the Treasury and the Post Office, which happened to be run by McAdoo and Burleson, the same two who were twisting congressional arms on behalf of the president’s legislation. Most of the Democrats opposing Wilson’s economic reforms were Southerners who feared that Wilson’s drive for more federal control of the economy would eventually lead to federal abolition of state laws that segregated virtually every aspect of life. Emboldened by the South’s new dominance of the executive branch, Southerners in Congress wanted the civil service segregated in exchange for their votes on Wilson’s economic measures. McAdoo and Burleson accepted the terms with no apparent qualms and cooperated in thwarting federal appointments of African Americans throughout the South.
An NAACP investigation in the summer of 1913 confirmed that the new segregation in Washington was concentrated in the Post Office and the Treasury. Black civil servants were shunted to the edges of the big rooms where the clerks worked, barred from lunchrooms, and directed to separate lavatories. Those who protested the indignities often used the same figure of speech: they felt like lepers.
Southern Democrats in Congress praised the changes and pressed for more. A freshman congressman from Oklahoma demanded segregation of all federal offices, as did Senator James K. Vardaman of Mississippi. Vardaman, proud to be known as the Great White Chief, introduced bills to repeal two constitutional amendments—the Fourteenth, which granted all citizens equal protection under the law, and the Fifteenth, which gave the right to vote to all male citizens. Pointing out that the army and navy had been segregated years before by Republicans, they called on Democrats to finish the job by segregating the whole civil service.
When NAACP leaders decided to make a public protest, Villard wrote Wilson to say that before going ahead, they wanted to be certain that they had the facts and understood the president’s position. Distressed by the prospect of a public fight over the issue, Wilson replied that the segregation was not a movement against Negroes. “I sincerely believe it to be in their interest. . . . [W]e are rendering them more safe in their possession of office and less likely to be discriminated against.” Villard had no sympathy for Wilson’s distress and no patience with his argument.
The NAACP’s protest took the form of an open letter to Wilson. “Never before has the Federal Government discriminated against its civilian employees on the ground of color,” Villard and his NAACP colleagues wrote. “Every such act heretofore has been that of an individual state.” Where would it end? the letter asked. “Shall ten millions of our citizens say that their civic liberties and rights are not safe in your hands? To ask the question is to answer it. They desire a ‘New Freedom,’ too, Mr. President.”
As soon as the protest was made public, Villard sent Wilson a friendly private note suggesting that the White House try to regain the confidence of black citizens by appointing a nonpartisan commission to study the well-being of African Americans. The two men had discussed the idea before the election, and Wilson had acknowledged its value but had asked Villard to give him time to get to know the Congress. Now he told Villard that Southern senators were bound to see a study of social conditions in black America as an indictment.
Infuriated by Wilson’s timidity, Villard asked why the delicate feelings of the South’s senators should be allowed to postpone any search for truth. And what of the new despair among African Americans? “Are they not to be recognized by you in any way? Are you not going to appoint any one of them to office? Are you going to continue the policy of segregation?” Villard asked to bring some of his NAACP colleagues to the White House for a talk that might lessen the tensions on both sides. Wilson had replied with an invitation to Villard only.
In the hour he spent with Wilson, Villard was unsparing. Early in the conversation, the president threw himself on Villard’s mercy. “I am in a cruel position,” he said. “I am at heart working for these people, but I cannot come out and say so for publication because that would naturally betray my plan and method to the senators.” Showing no sympathy, Villard blamed Wilson personally for the outrage felt by black citizens. Wilson struck back with a novel defense: the new segregation was social, not racial, and it was just plain unfortunate that the social cleavage coincided with the color line. Villard, refusing to follow him into the shallows, asked for his answer to the open letter from the NAACP. Wilson, clearly upset, said he wanted to act but did not know what to do. Figuring out what to do was the fundamental task of the statesman, Villard observed. The word “statesman” hit another nerve, for there was no title Wilson coveted more. “I say it with shame and humiliation, shame and humiliation, but I have thought about this thing for twenty years and I see no way out,” he said. He predicted that the situation would not change until Southern politicians needed black votes.
Villard landed one last blow. Wilson had stopped nominating African Americans as soon as he realized that the Senate would refuse to confirm them. Grover Cleveland and Theodore Roosevelt had been braver than that, Villard said. They had nominated the men they wanted and forced the Senate to do the rejecting. Wilson admitted that he could follow their example but did not promise that he would. At that point Villard realized that Wilson had no intention of undoing the segregation imposed by Burleson and McAdoo.
Shortly after Villard left, Wilson went out for a round of golf with Grayson, but the next day a roiling stomach forced him to stop work early and confined him to the family quarters. He was ill for a week. During his first ten months as president, Wilson was sick in bed at least six times, felled by headaches, “turmoil in Central America,” neuritis, and exhaustion—maladies caused more by stress than overwork. He rarely spent more than six hours a day in his office, and the time that he and Grayson devoted to golf and other diversions was recreation at its most literal, a recreation of physical and mental energy. But despite Wilson’s abbreviated workdays and regular exercise, his body often gave out after emotionally taxing events.
Although Grayson was quick to see the pattern, it is not clear what (if anything) he knew of the strokes Wilson had suffered during his years at Princeton. Edwin A. Weinstein, the neuropsychiatrist who made an exhaustive study of Wilson’s medical history, concluded that Wilson had a minor but ominous stroke about a month after taking office. As the first attack on Wilson’s left side, it indicated that arteries on both sides of the brain were diseased, a change that greatly increased the risk of further strokes. Grayson described it as neuritis, and Wilson used the same term in letters to friends.
In December Wilson suffered a two-week siege of influenza complete with fevered nightmares about his defeats at Princeton. He had barely recovered when the Senate passed the Federal Reserve Act and sent it to the White House for his signature. With the passage of the tariff and banking acts, Congress had at long last ended the contest between class and class, Wilson said. “The men who have fought for this measure have fought nobody. They have simply fought for those accommodations which are going to secure us in prosperity and in peace. Nobody can be the friend of any class in America in the sense of being the enemy of any other class. You can only be the friend of one class by showing it the lines by which it can accommodate itself to the other class. The lines of help are always the lines of accommodation.”
But one class had not been accommodated. It is unlikely that any of Wilson’s economic reforms would have passed without Burleson’s and McAdoo’s willingness to segregate their vast bureaucracies in exchange for Southern votes.
