Wilson sailed on to one of the most exhilarating seasons of his presidency. On June 1, after five months of wrangling, the Senate confirmed his nominee for the Supreme Court, Louis D. Brandeis. In 1913 Wilson had wanted him in the cabinet as attorney general or secretary of commerce but yielded to warnings that Brandeis’s advanced progressivism would intensify the business world’s hostility to the New Freedom. Known as “the people’s lawyer,” Brandeis had exposed the accounting hijinks and monopolistic practices of railroads, utilities, and banks, and he had represented labor in several lawsuits against employers. Wilson had stayed in touch, consulting him on the creation of the Federal Reserve Board, the drafting of the Clayton Antitrust Act, and the powers of the new Federal Trade Commission. Few appointments pleased Wilson as much as this one. He admired Brandeis’s intellect and commitment to economic justice, and he had few associates who understood his political philosophy as deeply as Brandeis did. Brandeis also shared Wilson’s faith that capitalism could be made safe for democracy.
Over the summer, Congress authorized Wilson’s buildup of the army and navy, passed the tax increases necessary to pay for the expansion, and established the U.S. Shipping Board to modernize and enlarge the nation’s merchant marine. It also passed a half-dozen laws giving millions of Americans more economic security than they had ever had. The Workmen’s Compensation Act aided federal employees injured on the job and would eventually be extended to the rest of the workforce. Goods made by child labor were banned from interstate commerce. The Federal Farm Loan Act and the U.S. Warehouse Act gave farmers their first access to long-term loans at low interest rates and allowed them to use their harvested crops as collateral. Wilson’s congressional triumphs in the summer of 1916 would be his last, but no president before him had won so much substantive legislation in a single term, and among his successors, only Franklin Roosevelt surpassed him.
• • •
During the first days of June, it looked as if the presidential race of 1916 might resemble the campaign of 1912, with Theodore Roosevelt again at the head of the National Progressive Party’s ticket. But Roosevelt refused the Progressives’ nomination, and the Republicans chose Charles Evans Hughes, an associate justice of the Supreme Court.
The Progressives were disappointed, but not as disappointed as the Democrats. Roosevelt firmly believed that the United States ought to be fighting alongside the Allies, and given the antiwar mood of the country, Democrats were confident that a Roosevelt run would end with a Wilson victory. But Hughes, sequestered on the bench for six years, had taken no stand on the war or any other political issue. Nor had he made any enemies during the Republican feud of 1912. By four o’clock on June 10, Hughes’s one-sentence letter of resignation from the Supreme Court had been delivered to the White House, and a few hours later he issued a statement taking aim at Wilson’s “weak and vacillating” Mexican policy and his habit of appointing party hacks to diplomatic posts, which, Hughes said, “presented to the world a humiliating spectacle of ineptitude.” Roosevelt capped the day by announcing that Hughes would have his full support.
Like Woodrow Wilson, Charles Evans Hughes was a minister’s son who had received his early education at home. A much better pupil than Wilson, Hughes was a mathematical prodigy and a precocious reader with a near-photographic memory. He entered college at fourteen, graduated at eighteen, and after two years of teaching the classics in a high school, had saved enough money to enter Columbia Law School. He passed the New York State bar exam with the unheard-of score of 99.5 percent.
Said to be delightful in private, Hughes cut an austere figure in public. Tall and erect, starched and creased, he parted his hair precisely in the middle and hid most of his face behind a full beard and a large mustache. To one of his Washington neighbors, he seemed like a mannequin. In 1905, after nearly twenty years of practicing and teaching law, Hughes was appointed by the state of New York to investigate two scandal-ridden businesses, utilities and insurance. The revelations of accounting fraud, price gouging, and other misdeeds culminated in major legislative reforms that brought him instant fame and, a year later, the governorship of New York. Like Governor Wilson, Governor Hughes had been moderately progressive. The two were so much alike that soon after Hughes’s nomination, the pundits began calling him “the whiskered Wilson,” and wondering if the public would see any difference between the two.
• • •
Wilson had no rivals for the Democratic nomination, so the party’s leaders planned a convention that would celebrate his presidency and extol the glories of Americanism, a theme that had played well on his preparedness tour. On Memorial Day, Wilson had augmented the traditional presidential address at Arlington National Cemetery with a proclamation asking that every June 14 be marked as Flag Day, with patriotic exercises throughout the country “to give significant expression to our thoughtful love of America.”
Walter Lippmann of The New Republic, puzzling over the attraction of a concept as vapid as “Americanism,” ascribed it to his fellow citizens’ uneasiness about their country’s place in the world. Unsure whether neutrality was right yet fearful of going to war, Americans were taking refuge in platitudes. “There is a fervent desire on everyone’s part to proclaim his adhesion to ideas which almost no one can dispute,” Lippmann wrote.
The morning of Flag Day found Wilson at the head of Washington’s patriotic exercises, a “preparedness parade” that marched past the cheering tens of thousands who lined Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the White House. As The Washington Post explained, “Flag Day was Wilson Day.” It was not about preparedness or patriotism. It was about the president’s bid for reelection. Watching her husband from the reviewing stand near the White House, Edith Wilson thought he seemed especially youthful and vigorous, and the photographs of the day bear her out. He is wearing white flannel trousers and a navy blue blazer, he is carrying a big flag, and he looks like he is having a ball.
After lunch at the White House, the Wilsons went to the Washington Monument, where the president gave a speech that began as a hymn to the flag and Americanism but evolved into an attack on an unnamed ethnic group. He was talking about German Americans, accusing them of “political blackmail” for saying that they would withhold their votes from a presidential candidate who ignored their interests. Although careful to point out that he was talking about a tiny minority of the unnamed group, he insisted that it was “a very active and subtle minority” but “must absolutely be crushed” because it was undermining the government’s influence in international affairs. Wilson challenged the American people to “teach these gentlemen once and for all that loyalty to this flag is the first test of tolerance in the United States.”
With this scurrilous speech, Wilson turned the chief symbol of American ideals into a symbol of unquestioning loyalty. By his novel construction, the good American was no longer the citizen who revered freedom but the one who refused to tolerate those who disagreed with their government. And sometime during the day, Wilson carried the speech a step further, with a last-minute addition to the Democratic platform: a plank summoning all who counted themselves truly American “to join in making clear to all the world the unity and consequent power of America. This is an issue of patriotism. To taint it with partisanship would be to defile it.” Groups that promoted the interests of any foreign power or tried to turn Americans against each other were condemned as subversive. Together, the speech and the plank proposed to abolish the Constitution’s guarantees of free expression and free assembly. Equally startling was the fact that no one in the mainstream press protested the demagoguery.
• • •
The finale of this overstuffed day, the opening of the Democratic National Convention, took place half a continent away, in St. Louis. The city’s major convention hall, the Coliseum, was a riot of red, white, and blue when the delegates took their places, and for a time they followed their instructions to cheer every mention of the flag or America or Woodrow Wilson. The impresarios had planned a patriotic show to be played out in front of movie cameras (a first in the history of American political conventions), and their idea was to unite the country behind the president who had delivered the prosperity he promised in 1912 and had fortified the country against the dangers of a world at war.
The keynote speaker, Martin H. Glynn, a former governor of New York, began by reminding the delegates that they had entered the hall as Democrats but would deliberate and act as Americans. “We stand for the Americanism which under the magic spell of citizenship and the mystic influence of the Stars and Stripes converts men of every country into men of one country, and that country our country; men of every flag into men of one flag, and that flag our flag.” The crowd did not catch fire until Glynn brought up the subject of peace and presented it as something more heroic and more American than war. Glynn had intended to make the point in passing, but whenever he tried to move on to patriotism or prosperity, the crowd hauled him back to his stories of presidents who had chosen peace over war.
Neutrality was as American as the flag, Glynn said, and the voters of 1916 would be asked to decide whether their tradition of holding themselves apart from European wars was to be kept or abandoned. “This is the paramount issue,” he said. “No lesser issue must cloud it, no unrelated problems must confuse us.” George Washington had started the tradition during the Napoleonic Wars, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay and Thomas Jefferson had upheld it, and all had been scorned. Woodrow Wilson now stood where Washington had stood “when he prayed that this country would never unsheathe the sword except in self-defense.” Neutrality did not mean that the United States would never go to war to protect its rights, Glynn went on, “but it does mean that America will exhaust every peaceful means of protecting those rights before it takes the step from which there is no appeal.”
The audience applauded every point, and it went wild when he spoke of President Ulysses S. Grant, who as General Grant had been the greatest military hero of the Civil War. “When Grant was president, during the war between Spain and the Spanish West Indies, a Spanish commandant in cold blood shot the captain of the ‘Virginius,’ thirty-six of the crew and sixteen of the passengers. But we didn’t go to war. Grant settled our troubles by negotiation, just as the president of the United States is trying to do today.”
Next came the story of President Benjamin Harrison, who had done the same after a scuffle in which Chilean revolutionaries had killed U.S. sailors.
During the Civil War, the British had preyed on merchant ships from the Union states, destroying cargoes and seizing American-owned vessels. “But we didn’t go to war,” Glynn said. Lincoln had settled the troubles by negotiation, “just as the president of the United States is trying to do today.” After another wave of applause, and when Glynn tried again to move on, the audience protested.
Glynn gave them the story of Franklin Pierce, who deported three British consuls for violating U.S. neutrality during the Crimean War, another tale that ended with the delirium-inducing refrain: “But we didn’t go to war.”
The impresarios watched in distress as their innocuous pageant for Old Glory turned into a celebration of a peace that might not hold. No one was more distressed than Wilson, who would soon tell Josephus Daniels, “I can’t keep the country out of war. They talk of me as though I were a god. Any little German lieutenant can put us into the war at any time by some calculated outrage.”
Now out of stories of presidents who had chosen diplomacy over war, Glynn asked whether the Republicans realized that when they arraigned Wilson for his neutrality they were arraigning their own heroes. Neutrality “may not satisfy the fire-eater or the swashbuckler,” he said. “But it does satisfy those who worship at the altar of the God of Peace, and the mothers, fathers, and wives of the land.”
From the crowd came a long wave of applause and cries of “Say it again!” and “Repeat it!” Glynn obliged and launched another attack on Republicans: going to war over every assault on Americans would mean war without end, he said. “It would give us a war abroad each time the fighting cock of the European weathervane shifted with the breeze. . . . It would mean the reversal of our traditional policy of government.”
Knowing that Wilson had just broken with the American tradition of isolation in his speech advocating an association of nations, Glynn attempted to reconcile the contradiction by lamenting the Republicans’ insistence that Wilson’s efforts to avoid war had sullied the national honor. Were the Hotspurs saying that they were more honorable than Washington and Lincoln? Glynn asked. Eventually he worked his way around to preparedness and prosperity and Americanism and the greatness of Woodrow Wilson, whose name, he said, “will shine in golden splendor upon the page that is blackened with the tale of Europe’s war.”
The New York Times reporter on the scene realized the mass hysteria over a recitation of diplomatic precedents was a first in American politics, and he thought he understood it. The Democrats, who wanted no part in the war, had been jeered by Americans whose sentiments lay with the Allies. But Glynn was telling them that they were right, that one could be both a patriot and a pacifist, “and they could not contain themselves.”
Next up at the podium was Senator Ollie James of Kentucky, who began with a masterly survey of Wilson’s economic reforms. The delegates applauded throughout, but their applause was loudest when he spoke of peace: “Without orphaning a single American child, without widowing a single American mother, without firing a single gun, without the shedding of a single drop of blood,” Wilson had made the kaiser yield to American rights and American demands. There was a huge burst of applause, and thousands of flag-waving, cheering Democrats stomped around the Coliseum for more than twenty minutes. By the time order was restored, it had been vouchsafed unto Senator James that there would come a day when the blood-spattered monarchs of the earth would march into the Court of God and there among them would be Woodrow Wilson, holding a painting of Christ on a battlefield, “with the dead and dying all about him, with the roar of cannon, the screaming of shrapnel, the wail of the dying, and above his head written these words, ‘And He said unto them, love one another.’ ” The audience interrupted five times to applaud at length.
Spent, the Democrats gave themselves a recess and came back together at nine o’clock that evening, still feverish with peace. Someone started a cry for the party’s most committed pacifist, William Jennings Bryan, who was covering the national conventions for his weekly newspaper, The Commoner. Surrendering to the mood of the crowd, the ringmasters gave him a turn on the stage. Bryan said he and Wilson had differed, but he joined the American people in “thanking God that we have a president who does not want this convention plunged into this war.”
The convention moved on to the formalities of nominating Woodrow Wilson and Thomas R. Marshall for a second term. Unopposed, they were swept onto the ticket in a voice vote. All that remained was a reading of the twenty-six planks in the party’s platform, most of which had been drafted by Wilson. The sordid plank on Americanism was inserted near the top. The platform contained the usual boasts and promises, including a pledge to recommend to the states that women be given the right to vote. That was better than nothing but nowhere close to satisfying the progressives in the suffrage movement, who wanted a constitutional amendment that would enfranchise American women in every state. Wilson’s draft of the platform made several mentions of foreign affairs but was silent on the thorny subject of Mexico. The members of the platform committee did not allow the omission to stand, but the plank they hammered into place gave the impression that the administration’s course had been masterful. And to a section praising Wilson’s leadership, they added a sentence commending “the splendid diplomatic victories of our great president, who has preserved the vital interests of our Government and its citizens, and kept us out of war.” In spite of Wilson’s fear that the peace between Germany and the United States might end at any moment, he would hold his tongue as his advertising men plucked the words “he kept us out of war” from the platform and turned them into the mainstay of his campaign.
“President Wilson has had his day in St. Louis,” The New Republic told its readers. While the conservative Democrats of the South had objected to his drive to strengthen the power of the national government and the liberal Democrats of the North and West had criticized him for the arms buildup, the Punitive Expedition, and his ultimatum to Germany, both camps agreed that his leadership had given the party a unity essential for its survival. “The Democrats cannot get along without it,” The New Republic observed. “They have no substitute for Mr. Wilson.”
