Mr. Wilson was at his most agile in the summer of 1916, and thanks to his economic reforms and the Allies’ insatiable demand for American crops and manufactures, more citizens were enjoying more prosperity than they had ever known. Even so, it was far from certain that he would be reelected. The chief obstacle was not the brilliant, politically independent Charles Evans Hughes but a quirk of American voters: although they often elected Democratic senators and representatives, they showed a preference for Republican presidents. In twelve of the fifteen elections since the party’s founding, the people had sent a Republican to the White House. Wilson had won the four-way race of 1912, but to beat the odds in 1916, he would have to wring the most out of every opportunity for votes, steer wide of every foreseeable pitfall, and concoct a silver lining for every cloud that might come over the horizon.
Colonel House, more astute about American politics than European diplomacy, proved a valuable advisor. Reasoning that Hughes would dominate the Northeast and Wilson would again sweep the South, House persuaded the Democrats to bear down on the Midwest and the West. Some political observers assumed that Roosevelt’s four million progressive followers would heed his instruction to fall in behind Hughes, but House sensed that the Roosevelt orphans might resist out of anger over his endorsement of the party led by the very forces he had abominated in 1912. House also had a feeling that voters would put more stock in Wilson’s solidly progressive record than in any promises Hughes might make. Hughes was said to be a progressive, but the Old Guard dominated the party, and surely it would try to dominate Hughes.
In one of his appeals for the Bull Moose vote, Wilson pointed out that the Democrats had come close to carrying out the Progressives’ platform. It was true: of the thirty-three items on T.R.’s 1912 agenda, the Democrats had enacted twenty-two in whole or in part. On another occasion, he reminded a crowd of young Democrats that the Progressives had sprung up out of Republican discontent with the Republican Party. Although the new party had not lasted, he said, “[t]he interesting thing for all politicians to remember is that the progressive voters of this country, all put together, outnumber either party.”
• • •
Wilson faced three foreign crises during the campaign, the first of which erupted only a day after the Democrats finished their work in St. Louis. Mexico informed General Pershing, who was still marking time in the middle of nowhere, that it would not allow any more U.S. soldiers to enter the country or permit Pershing’s troops to march in any direction but north, toward home. Failure to comply would bring an attack from the Mexican army. Wilson immediately mobilized nearly the whole of the National Guard, ordered it to the border, and dispatched sixteen warships to the east and west coasts of Mexico. President Carranza asked all available men to enlist, and to hinder an influx of U.S. troops the Mexicans destroyed the railroad tracks on their side of the bridge between Juárez and El Paso, Texas. Mexico countered the U.S. deployment of warships with an order forbidding American sailors to go ashore except to visit a U.S. consulate.
On June 21, an American cavalry patrol defied the new Mexican orders and marched east toward the town of Carrizal to investigate a rumor that the Mexican army was massing troops within easy reach of Pershing’s forces. Mexican machine guns opened fire, and when the fighting ended, twelve Americans were dead, twelve were missing, and twenty-four had been taken prisoner. Wilson was devastated. “The break seems to have come in Mexico; and all my patience seems to have gone for nothing,” he wrote House. “I am infinitely sad about it.”
Senators Stone and Lodge, the chairman and ranking member of the Committee on Foreign Relations, and Representative Henry Flood of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs were summoned to the White House that evening for a briefing. Lodge was disturbed to find that Wilson did not know where the Punitive Expedition was or how many troops Pershing had. Nor did the president seem to have an objective apart from staying in the good graces of the American electorate. In his notes of the meeting, Lodge wrote that Wilson was “in a nervous condition” and “torn between fear of losing votes and fear of war.”
The first good news came the next morning, when Mexico agreed to free the prisoners. In an address to the New York Press Club, Wilson hailed the outcome as a triumph of American forbearance. The great lesson of history, he said, was that the most powerful force in world affairs was moral force, the force inherent in what the Declaration of Independence defined as “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” Asserting that the leaders who started the world war had ignored the opinion of mankind, he predicted that nothing permanent would be achieved by the fighting. No good would come of that until the slaughter ended and the belligerents reached a settlement that took the world’s opinion into account. Anticipating his Republican critics, who would say that he had once again let Mexico humiliate the United States, Wilson professed himself unafraid: “I am willing, no matter what my personal fortunes may be, to play for the verdict of mankind. Personally, it will be a matter of indifference to me what the verdict on the seventh of November is, provided I feel any degree of confidence that, when a later jury sits, I shall get their judgment in my favor. Not in my favor personally—what difference does that make?—but in my favor as an honest and conscientious spokesman of a great nation.”
The Mexicans soon proposed a joint commission to mediate the differences between the two countries, and Washington accepted. So it was Venustiano Carranza, not Woodrow Wilson, who kept the United States out of war in 1916, but as long as the mediation continued, it was Wilson who got the credit, at least in the United States. Until the mediators completed their work, Wilson could leave General Pershing in Mexico, on guard against threats to the border. And as long as Pershing did not complete his mission, Wilson’s critics could not declare the Punitive Expedition a failure. Pershing was ordered to sit tight, and Secretary Lansing, temporizing as skillfully as any European diplomat, allowed two months to be frittered away in making arrangements for the commission’s first meeting.
Wilson and Lansing had barely doused the Mexican fires when the British presented the United States with a blacklist of eighty-five American companies and individuals suspected of aiding the Germans. Henceforth, His Majesty’s Government decreed, British-owned enterprises were not to do business with the suspects. After two years of British interference with U.S. trade—contraband lists, interdictions of ships and confiscations of cargo, censorship of the mails—Wilson considered the blacklist the last straw. He thought about banning loans and curbing exports to the Allies but changed his mind because of the damage such reprisals would inflict on the U.S. economy. Instead he persuaded Congress to give him the power to ban Allied imports and bar ships that refused cargoes from the blacklisted firms. With the British, as with the Mexicans, Wilson defused the crisis without actually ending it.
• • •
The presidential nominees of 1916 delivered their acceptance speeches a few weeks after their parties’ national conventions. The Republicans went first, gathering in New York’s Carnegie Hall on the night of July 31. The hall was packed, and the party faithful seemed particularly pleased to see their black sheep, Theodore Roosevelt, in one of the boxes. Once the felicities were out of the way, Hughes offered a long critique of Wilson’s foreign policy. Trying to exploit the administration’s problems in Mexico, Hughes focused on Wilson’s obsession with overthrowing Huerta but said nothing about the failures of the Punitive Expedition. Hughes also repeated his accusation that Wilson had filled the Foreign Service with good Democrats rather than good diplomats, and while the charge had merit, it was, like Huerta, old news. The speech was a dud.
Hughes suffered more serious wounds a few weeks later, on a visit to California, where Republican conservatives and Republican progressives hated each other even more than they despised Woodrow Wilson. The Southern Pacific Railroad’s stranglehold on state politics had led the reformist faction to form the California Progressive Party, and by 1911 it had a following large enough to elect a governor, Hiram W. Johnson. Now Johnson was running as a Republican for the U.S. Senate, the conservatives were determined to annihilate him, and Hughes found himself in the crossfire. He asked both camps to cooperate during his California tour, but when the Old Guard refused, he did not push back.
Hughes’s stand left him at the mercy of reactionaries who seized every chance to insult Johnson as they marched Hughes about the state. At one point, when Hughes attended a reception at a hotel in Long Beach, his escorts neglected to tell him that Johnson happened to be spending the night there. The governor waited in his room for word from Hughes, and when none came, he assumed the slight was deliberate. Appalled when he learned of his hosts’ maneuver, Hughes tried to make amends, but the prickly Johnson refused his overtures.
• • •
To deal with the Mexican crisis, the furor over the blacklist, and the long list of crowd-pleasing bills that he and Congress wanted to pass before the election, Wilson began rising at five in the morning, and Agent Starling of the Secret Service would remember the sound of the president’s typewriter well after most of Washington had gone to bed. Apart from a long bout of indigestion and one headache severe enough to send him to bed, Wilson was in good health. He kept up his exercise, golfing with Edith nearly every day. The summer was infernally hot, and when they could, they boarded the Mayflower for a weekend of fresh breezes on the Potomac.
In August, as Hughes traveled the West, Wilson was trying to stave off a nationwide rail strike. The unions wanted to shorten their workday from ten hours to eight with no reduction in wages, management refused, and the unions set a strike deadline of September 4. Wilson made four trips to the Capitol in four days to explain the emergency and press for action. “Cities will be cut off from their food supplies, the whole commerce of the nation will be paralyzed, men of every sort and occupation will be thrown out of employment,” he told a joint session of Congress. Maintaining that experience and scientific study had shown that the eight-hour day improved productivity and the well-being of the workforce, he asked Congress to meet labor’s demand and proposed a commission to assess the financial impact so that the railroads could raise their rates if the facts warranted. With the Adamson Act, Congress delivered what the president and the unions wanted, and just in time to avert the strike.
In a neat bit of political choreography, Wilson gave his acceptance speech on September 2, the day after the passage of the Adamson Act and the day before he signed it. The timing guaranteed that he would not be competing for headlines with his Republican critics, who viewed the new law as an assault on free enterprise. The Democrats held their festivities in Long Branch, New Jersey, at Shadow Lawn, a house that the Wilsons had rented on the advice of Colonel House, who did not think it proper for a president to use the Executive Mansion as a stage for his reelection campaign.
The president recited the Democrats’ achievements and expressed confidence that the American people would want to keep the party in office. The Republicans had lost power by serving the few rather than the many, he said, and they would not deserve to rule again until they brought themselves up to date.
In Mexico, he said, he had tried to act with the sympathy he thought the American people would like him to show. Mindful of the public’s opposition to U.S. involvement in the world war, he made no reference to such a possibility. Instead, he focused on the war’s end. “It is not a future to be afraid of,” he said. “It is, rather, a future to stimulate and excite us to the display of the best powers that are in us.” The world would need a just peace, and the United States would have to do its utmost to ensure that the peace would last.
The newspapers gave Wilson a day of glory before turning their attention to the storm over the Adamson Act, which broke as soon as Wilson affixed his signature. Campaign donations from Wall Street and big business ceased, and Hughes lit into Wilson for bowing to labor, strong-arming Congress, and undermining the very principle of arbitration. Wilson parried by taking full responsibility. Labor had not asked him to go to Congress, he said. He had done so on his own, after the unions and the railroads refused to negotiate. He noted, too, that more than half of the Republicans in the House had supported the bill and that the Senate had allowed it to go to a vote without a fight. For good measure, he reminded the critics that it was the business of government to make sure that neither capital nor labor nor any other interest triumphed over the general welfare.
• • •
A few days later, Woodrow and Edith Wilson went to Atlantic City, where he addressed a convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Edith, who was resolutely old-fashioned, opposed women’s suffrage in private and did not discuss it in public. Woodrow had not only authored the suffrage article in the Democratic platform, he had voted for a suffrage initiative in New Jersey in 1915. (It did not pass.) As presidential candidates, he and Hughes had started at the same point: both parties supported women’s suffrage, and both recommended that the question be settled by the states. But in early August, Hughes had decided to step out ahead of his party and campaign for a suffrage amendment to the Constitution, which would resolve the issue for the whole country. Margaret Wilson lobbied her father to take the same position, and now that he was neck and neck with Hughes, Margaret’s case had practical as well as moral force: there were ninety-one electoral votes at stake in the twelve states where women already had the right to vote. But Wilson held back, saying that if he changed his stance in an election year, he would be accused of pandering.
His claim was disingenuous. On matters large and small, Wilson had often changed his mind. A leader who did not adjust in the face of new information or new circumstances was, in his phrase, “a dead letter.” His refusal to budge on women’s suffrage was undoubtedly meant to assure the South that he had no intention of mounting a federal challenge to states’ rights on racial matters. Southerners feared that if he gave in to the women who wanted a suffrage amendment, it would not be long before blacks and the whites who sympathized with their struggles for equal rights would pressure him to take action against the welter of Southern state laws that segregated the races and made it all but impossible for Southern blacks to vote.
In hopes of persuading the suffragists that he sympathized with their ends if not their means, Wilson gave them a lecture. He began with the Founding Fathers and their preoccupation with legalities, then moved on to the nineteenth century and the great question of slavery, which, he said, had been more a human question than a legal one. “And is it not significant that it was then, and then for the first time, that women became prominent in politics in America?” he asked. Industrialization had raised new human questions, and women had again stepped to the fore.
Wilson assured the women at the convention that they would one day prevail:
when the forces of nature are steadily working and the tide is rising to meet the moon, you need not be afraid that it will not come to its flood. We feel the tide; we rejoice in the strength of it; and we shall not quarrel in the long run as to the method of it. . . . The whole art and practice of government consists not in moving individuals, but in moving masses. It is all very well to run ahead and beckon, but, after all, you have got to wait for the body to follow. I have not come to ask you to be patient, because you have been, but I have come to congratulate you that there was a force behind you that will, beyond any peradventure, be triumphant, and for which you can afford a little while to wait.
The president had given the suffragists only half a loaf, but it was enough to stop them from endorsing Hughes.
• • •
September and October were trying months for Wilson. Maine held its state elections two months before the national election, and when voters went to the polls, the results were solidly Republican. The optimists around the president pointed out that the Republican majorities had thinned since 1912, but the old political adage, “As goes Maine, so goes the nation,” was never far from mind. Wilson also suffered the loss of one of his sisters, who died suddenly of peritonitis. And there was a new round of rumors about Woodrow Wilson and Mary Allen Hulbert, who had come into his life as Mrs. Peck. The tale bearers were saying that Ellen Wilson had died of a broken heart, that Mrs. Hulbert had once initiated a breach-of-promise suit against Wilson, that her silence had been purchased for $75,000 in an arrangement brokered by Louis D. Brandeis.
After Wilson’s death, Mrs. Hulbert revealed in a magazine article that a man calling himself Mr. Smith and claiming to represent the Republican Party had come to see her in 1916 and offered $300,000 for her letters from Wilson. When she asked why, he said that he and his associates believed it their patriotic duty to expose Wilson’s true character and see that he was impeached. Mrs. Hulbert replied that the letters would not help their cause, because they showed Wilson to be a thoroughly honorable man.
Wilson’s tribulations also included a surprisingly personal attack by his erstwhile friend Oswald Garrison Villard, in The North American Review. The gist was that Wilson lived in a world of his own, cut off from the rest of the government, the press, and the country. He did not so much lead the party as dictate to it, Villard wrote, and for a man who frequently said that a president ought to determine the will of the people and act on it, Wilson was mysteriously reluctant to meet with his fellow citizens and hear their thoughts. Because of Wilson’s aloofness, Villard said, many congressmen and senators believed that they did not even exist in the president’s mind until he wanted their votes.
It is not clear who in Wilson’s entourage decided that the issue of his aloofness had to be met, but George Creel, the former journalist who wrote the president’s 1916 campaign biography, audaciously declared it a virtue. “It is a matter of frequent comment that he has no friends,” Creel wrote. “What is this but recognition of the bitter truth that friendship is the great American conspiracy in restraint of public duty? . . . Affection is a guide that has led many honest, sincere men into byways of broken faith and virtual dishonor.” According to Creel, Wilson cloistered himself out of self-discipline; his emotions ran so deep that he had to guard himself against his “warmths and his impulses.”
Creel was not entirely wrong. Quick to anger in the face of opposition, Wilson tended to avoid people and situations likely to set him off. When adversaries had to be seen, he treated them courteously but with no pretense of affection. It would be mechanistic to ascribe his debilitating headaches, bouts of indigestion, and attacks of neuritis wholly to his suppression of emotion, but it is striking that in 1915 and 1916, when his romance with Edith was in full bloom and complaints about his inaccessibility were common, Woodrow’s physical ailments all but disappeared. Whatever the political drawbacks of his isolation, it appears to have been good for his health.
• • •
Wilson gave a half-dozen major campaign speeches at Shadow Lawn and made a few forays into other states, venturing as far west as Nebraska. The Democrats put William Jennings Bryan to work in the Midwest and the West, the regions where he had fared best in his own presidential campaigns. On the road for six weeks in September and October, Bryan drew large, appreciative crowds throughout his travels. In speech after speech he insisted that a vote for Hughes would restore the plutocracy, and he thanked the Lord for a president who had kept the country out of war. Wilson would carry fourteen of the nineteen states where Bryan campaigned.
The president’s touring was confined to states where he and Hughes were in a dead heat. The idea that Americans were destined to play a large part in the world figured in nearly all of his campaign addresses. After a month of alluding to the prospect, he shared the whole of his ambitious dream and explained what had to be done to realize it. To an audience in Omaha he declared that the first requirement was undiluted Americanism, because a divided country could not make its full influence felt in the world. Americans would also have to make the world understand that they had not chosen neutrality because of their indifference but because those who had started the war had yet to explain why or state their aims. The United States was deeply concerned about the carnage, he said, but “when we exert the force of this nation, we want to know what we are exerting it for.”
As if the delegates to the Democratic National Convention had not shouted themselves hoarse over the U.S. tradition of standing aside from the politics of the Old World, Wilson said that he did not read George Washington’s warning against entangling alliances as an instruction to avoid the world’s problems. The United States was part of the world, and nothing that concerned the whole world could be alien to Americans. “What disturbs the life of the whole world is the concern of the whole world,” he said. “And it is our duty to lend the full force of this nation—moral and physical—to a league of nations which shall see to it that nobody disturbs the peace of the world without submitting his case first to the opinion of mankind. When you are asked, ‘Aren’t you willing to fight?’ reply [that] you are waiting for something worth fighting for.” Nebraska, a stronghold of isolationism and pacifism, cheered Wilson to the rafters.
A few weeks later, in Cincinnati, Wilson went even further: “I believe that the business of neutrality is over. Not because I want it to be over, but I mean this—that war now has such a scale that the position of neutrals sooner or later becomes intolerable.” In an age when a single act of international aggression could set whole continents ablaze, the world needed a society of nations to hold the aggressors in check. If the aggressor defied the opinion of mankind, he said, it would find mankind leagued against it. “That is the kind of war I am willing to engage in.”
The combination of Wilson’s international aspirations and his progressive record appealed to many of the forward-thinking citizens who had rallied around Roosevelt in 1912, and it won the admiration of many Socialists as well. Knowing that the election would be close and fearing that Hughes would take the country back to the days of the robber barons, prominent Socialists urged their comrades to abandon their party’s candidate and vote for Wilson.
• • •
Hughes rejected Wilson’s internationalist dreams with a declaration that a Hughes administration would be “an American administration with exclusively American policies, devoted to American interests.” He offered no specifics, nor did he seize the moment to point out the dangers of Wilson’s overreach. The lapses were emblematic of Hughes’s troubles throughout the campaign. Sometimes he talked over the heads of his listeners, and sometimes he was exasperatingly vague. After proudly committing himself to a women’s suffrage amendment, he was silent when women asked what he would do to bring it into being. Cautious to a fault, Hughes hesitated to offend the Old Guard, hesitated to support progressive ideas, hesitated to say anything of substance that could be turned against him.
Theodore Roosevelt spent a month campaigning for Hughes in thirteen states, and some who watched thought that he was once again helping Woodrow Wilson to victory. Though T.R. did his work energetically, in private he called Hughes “the bearded iceberg” and wondered how he could have played his hand so badly in California. Roosevelt and Hughes agreed that Wilson’s idealistic course in Mexico imperiled American interests and American security, and they shared the view that Wilson’s tardiness in building up the army and navy had put the United States at a disadvantage in its wartime dealings with Britain and Germany. But while Hughes assiduously avoided any suggestion that he would lead the country into war, Roosevelt fulminated against Germany and asserted that “President Wilson by his tame submission to insult and injury from all whom he feared has invited the murder of our men, women and children by Mexican bandits on land and by German submarines at sea.” Hughes grew increasingly irritated by Roosevelt’s bellicosity but did nothing to rein it in.
• • •
The last foreign crisis Wilson faced before the election began on October 7, when an odd-looking ship flying a flag with a black Maltese cross appeared off the coast of Newport, Rhode Island. It was Unterseeboot-53, commanded by one Hans Rose, who brought it into the harbor and dropped anchor near the U.S. Navy’s torpedo station. Over the next two days, the U-53 torpedoed nine merchant ships in the general vicinity of the Nantucket Lightship, a floating lighthouse forty miles southeast of Nantucket Island. Nearly all ships leaving New York for the North Atlantic relied on the light to keep them off the Nantucket Shoals. The exploits of the U-53 gave Americans an unforgettable demonstration of German sea power, and thanks to calm seas, Rose’s willingness to give passengers and crews time to evacuate, and distress signals that quickly brought a dozen U.S. destroyers to the rescue, not a single life was lost.
The episode unnerved Wilson. Rose had conducted his raid outside the territorial waters of the United States, and by evacuating the ships before blowing them up, he had complied with the terms of the Sussex pledge. Still, the idea that German submarines operating so close to the United States might shut off the flow of munitions to the Allies sent the British into a state of alarm. Wilson met twice at Shadow Lawn with Ambassador Bernstorff, who reported to Berlin that Wilson had seemed “very anxious.” The president’s hopes for reelection rested on two considerations, Bernstorff explained to his superiors. Wilson had kept the country out of war, and he had persuaded Germany to halt unrestricted submarine warfare. Although the U-53 had not, in a technical sense, violated the pledge, Wilson believed that more submarine attacks along the East Coast might drive the American public into a rage that he would not be able to contain.
When Ambassador Jusserand went to the White House to discuss the U-53, he pointed out that although Rose had kept to the letter of the Sussex pledge, he deserved no credit for preserving the lives of the passengers on the ships he sank. That, he said, had been due to the prompt aid from the American destroyers. Several of the torpedoed ships were British, but England was no more successful than France in getting Wilson to file a formal protest to Germany. The British found it galling that the U.S. Navy had come to the rescue of the passengers and crew, and they were incensed to learn that a U.S. destroyer had obeyed Rose’s order to move aside so that he would have a clear shot at one of the ships, which happened to be British. Ambassador Page asked the State Department more than once when the United States would make an official statement on the incident. The department replied with a question: did the British feel that the U.S. Navy should not have assisted in the rescues?
Roosevelt, blaming the U-53’s raid on Wilson’s weakness, told an audience in Louisville, “Instead of speaking softly and carrying a big stick, President Wilson spoke bombastically and carried a dish rag.” Hughes felt that commenting on the U-53 incident might complicate the administration’s handling of the matter, so he settled for deploring the attack on the Lusitania and declaring that he would protect Americans on land and sea. How he did not say, but the Democrats seized on the remark and warned that Hughes meant to take a stronger stand than Wilson had. Wilson himself had suggested as much in one of his speeches at Shadow Lawn. The Republicans had been excoriating his foreign policy, he said, “and if it is wrong and they are men of conscience, they must change it. And if they are going to change it, in which direction are they going to change it? There is only one choice as against peace, and that is war.”
Infuriated by such extrapolations, Hughes insisted that Wilson had not kept the country out of war. “We have had intermittent peace without honor, and intermittent war without honor,” he said in Philadelphia. When Vice President Marshall, on a campaign swing through Nebraska, said in several speeches that a vote for Hughes was a vote for war, Hughes exploded. “I am a man of peace. I have been spending my life in maintaining the institutions of peace.” As for “He kept us out of war,” Hughes asked, “What was Carrizal—a peace festival?”
• • •
In the last days of October, Republican leaders panicked when they realized that they might well lose Ohio, which the party had won in every election since 1860. In 1916, the state’s progressives and labor unions had convinced many voters that Hughes was a hawk and a tool of the plutocracy. While the Republicans worked frantically to save Ohio, the Democrats were loudly predicting a huge victory, but they, too, were alarmed. Wilson’s attorney general announced a series of probes into allegations that the Republican Party had been scheming to win the election by transplanting thousands of Southern blacks to the hotly contested states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The Republicans were dumbfounded by the accusation, which was groundless. The great black migration from South to North had been under way for several years.
Black voters felt abandoned by both parties in 1916. They had no reason to reelect a president who had promised justice and then stood by as his treasury secretary and postmaster general segregated civil servants in the government’s two largest bureaucracies. Wilson had refused to take any action against lynching. And blacks had noticed a wide streak of racism in Wilson’s foreign policy. In his confrontations with Germany and Britain, he was content to use strong language, but when crossed by nations inhabited primarily by people of color, he often resorted to military force. In addition to sending troops to Mexico twice, he had authorized military interventions in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
Hughes had met with a delegation of black leaders early in his campaign and gave at least one address to a black audience, but he never spoke out against the segregation of the civil service, and the issue of racial justice disappeared from his speeches. Put out with the Democrats and convinced that the Republican Party was the enemy of the working class, W. E. B. Du Bois of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People advised black voters to support the Socialists or stay home on Election Day.
• • •
The campaign ended on a series of sour notes. At Madison Square Garden on November 2, Wilson castigated the Republicans for trying to return the country to the plutocrats. In a ghoulish speech at Cooper Union, where Lincoln had delivered the address that ensured his presidential nomination, Roosevelt lamented the gulf between Lincoln and Wilson, who, he said, had dragged American honor in the dust. “Mr. Wilson now dwells at Shadow Lawn,” Roosevelt said.
There should be shadows enough at Shadow Lawn—the shadows of men, women and children who have risen from the ooze of the ocean bottom and from graves in foreign lands. The shadows of the helpless whom Mr. Wilson did not protect lest he might have to face danger; the shadows of babies gasping pitifully as they sank under the waves. The shadows of women outraged and slain by bandits. The shadows of . . . troopers who lay in the Mexican desert, the black blood crusted round their mouths and their dim eyes looking upward, because President Wilson had sent them to do a task and then shamefully abandoned them to the mercy of the foes who knew no mercy. Those are the shadows proper for Shadow Lawn; the shadows of deeds that were never done; the shadows of lofty words that were followed by no action; the shadows of the tortured dead.
The Democrats made one last appeal to the undecided, with a newspaper advertisement aimed at their fear:
YOU ARE WORKING;
—NOT FIGHTING!
ALIVE AND HAPPY;
—NOT CANNON FODDER!
WILSON AND PEACE WITH HONOR?
HUGHES WITH ROOSEVELT AND WAR?
In his turn at Madison Square Garden, Hughes made a dutiful run through his campaign themes—wholehearted Americanism, a foreign policy centered on American interests, and a protective tariff to keep American wages high after the war, when cheap European goods would pour into the United States. He said nothing about women’s suffrage, nothing about racial equality, nothing about entering the war or staying out of it.
Wilson had the last word, at Shadow Lawn. He scoffed at Republican predictions of a postwar economic collapse, calling them a blatant attempt to scare labor into voting Republican. He scoffed at those who called themselves statesmen but tried to make political capital out of unfolding foreign crises. And he scoffed at the notion that American foreign policy should concern itself wholly with American interests. “The world will never be again what it has been,” Wilson said. “The United States will never be again what it has been.” Splendid isolation was a thing of the past, “for now we are in the great drift of humanity which is to determine the politics of every country in the world.”
The reporters at Shadow Lawn thought that Wilson looked like a man confident of victory, but two days before the election, he drew up a plan to be carried out as quickly as possible in case of defeat. He spelled it out in a letter to Lansing: “Again and again the question has arisen in my mind, What would it be my duty to do were Mr. Hughes to be elected? Four months would elapse before he could take charge of the affairs of the government, and during those four months I would be without such moral backing from the nation as would be necessary to steady and control our relations with other governments. . . . Such a situation would be fraught with the gravest dangers.” The plan called for Lansing to resign as secretary of state and Hughes to be sworn in as his replacement. At that point, Marshall and Wilson would resign. Under the rules then governing the line of succession, the secretary of state would become president. After typing the final draft of the letter, Wilson put it into an envelope marked “most confidential” and sealed it with wax. He put it in the hands of Lansing’s deputy, Frank Polk, and instructed him to deliver it personally to Lansing on Election Day.
• • •
November 7 was a beautiful day across the country, and voters turned out in record numbers. Wilson voted in his usual polling place, a firehouse in Princeton. He and the first lady set off from Shadow Lawn at seven-thirty in the morning, and by about nine o’clock he had finished marking his ballot and was headed back to Shadow Lawn. The Wilsons rode alone in one of the White House limousines and were trailed by a Secret Service car and a car full of reporters. As one of New Jersey’s leading newspapers noted, “It required 16 men, three automobiles, four hours and 54 gallons of gasoline to deliver President Wilson’s vote for himself.”
Hughes, who was at the Astor Hotel in New York, rose early and walked the few blocks to his midtown polling place, a laundry on Eighth Avenue. He arrived at seven-thirty and was handed ballot number 13—Wilson’s lucky number. He walked back to the Astor, where he allowed himself to sleep away the day.
The early returns gave Hughes a commanding lead: the whole of the Northeast from Maine to Pennsylvania. And with the exception of Ohio, he had carried the most populous states of the Midwest. Apart from Ohio, Wilson’s early victories were all in the South. At nine-thirty in the evening, the New York World declared Hughes the winner, but he was not convinced that he had won.
Nor was Joe Tumulty, who was at work in the Asbury Park, New Jersey, offices used by the White House staff during the president’s stay at Shadow Lawn. When a band of reporters burst in with the World’s bulletin and asked when the president would concede, Tumulty predicted that Wilson would win the West and the election. Soon after the reporters left, the president telephoned to predict the opposite. Tumulty offered encouragement based on a scattering of returns from the West. Wilson was skeptical but not ready to concede.
The suspense dragged on through Wednesday and Thursday. The president and his party left Shadow Lawn on Thursday night, boarding the Mayflower for the first leg of a journey to Williamstown, Massachusetts, to witness the christening of the president’s third grandchild, Eleanor Axson Sayre. The election was still undecided. Three small states—New Hampshire, New Mexico, and North Dakota—had slipped into Wilson’s column. Collectively they added 12 electoral votes, a gain that was canceled out by a bulletin confirming that the toss-up in Minnesota had gone to Hughes. Wilson was leading in the popular vote, but he and Hughes were tied 254 to 254 for the electoral vote. Only California was still unaccounted for.
At five the next morning, Jimmie Starling of the Secret Service went to the Mayflower’s galley for a cup of coffee and learned from Arthur Brooks, the president’s valet, that Wilson had won.
“Does he know?” Starling asked.
Brooks said no. The wireless message had come at midnight, and Brooks had a standing order not to wake the president.
“It was a funny election,” Starling mused. “The Republicans celebrated and the Democrats won.”
• • •
It was a funny election, across the board. The World hailed it as a defeat for “the cash-register patriotism of New York” and “a smashing victory for American democracy,” but Wilson could not muster a scintilla of joy for his first public comments. He was glad, he said, that the campaign was over, so that “we can settle down in soberness and unity of spirit to work for the welfare of the country.”
The popular vote, 9,126,868 to 8,548,728, gave Wilson an edge of 3.1 percent over Hughes, and Wilson received nearly three million more votes in 1916 than in 1912. But once again he had fallen short of a majority. His share came to 49.2 percent.
Democrats had placed their hopes on the dissension in the Republican ranks, but Hughes won nearly one million more votes than Taft and Roosevelt combined in 1912, evidence that the party’s conservatives and progressives were willing and able to work together. Wilson’s New Freedom had done more to enrich the average worker than Roosevelt’s Square Deal or McKinley’s Full Dinner Pail, and Democrats won a larger share of the labor vote in 1916 than in the three previous presidential elections, yet Hughes carried all the major industrial states except Ohio.
Hughes had taken the more progressive stand on women’s suffrage yet carried only two of the twelve states where women voted. In Montana, which Wilson won in a landslide, voters also elected the first woman member of the House of Representatives, Jeannette Rankin, a Republican.
Wilson’s California victory came down to 3,773 of the 999,603 votes cast—a whisker. It is always ascribed to Hughes’s mistakes during his tour of California, and every analysis notes that his fellow Republican Hiram Johnson won his Senate race by a huge margin. Some historians blame Hughes for aligning himself with the wrong faction. Some blame Johnson’s petulance. Some note that “He kept us out of war” strongly appealed to women voters in California. But there is rarely a mention of the benefit that Wilson derived from the steep decline in the state’s Socialist vote, which fell from 78,641 in 1912 to 42,898 in 1916. If all of California’s Socialists had voted their own ticket in 1916, Hughes would have carried the state and the election.
As a candidate, Wilson had not promised to keep the country out of war, but his cabinet members and others who campaigned for him had implied that a vote for Wilson meant peace and a vote for Hughes did not.
Hughes took his defeat graciously, but Roosevelt and Lodge were profoundly disturbed. Lodge regarded Wilson’s reelection as a calamity and blamed it on small-town and rural Republicans who had failed to understand the hypocrisy of “He kept us out of war.” To an English friend Lodge wrote that he feared he would never overcome “the depression caused to me by the nature of this deciding vote.” Roosevelt lashed out in a letter to his Kansas friend William Allen White, accusing Americans west of the Alleghenies of voting for Wilson because they were “yellow.”
The internationalism that Wilson preached with such fervor during the campaign probably did not capture many votes outside the small, overlapping circles of peace activists, intellectuals, and Socialists. But ordinary citizens who heard these sermons seemed pleased by his claim that the full force of American power would be exerted after the war, when it would be used for the noble purpose of safeguarding the world’s peace. In due course Senator Lodge would have much to say about what the United States ought and ought not to promise the world, but in the heat of the campaign, the only one who articulated what was really at stake in the contest between Hughes and Wilson was a twenty-seven-year-old journalist, Walter Lippmann. In an afternoon they spent together at Shadow Lawn, Wilson had said that neutrality was becoming impossible. He underscored the point by showing him a recent dispatch from the American embassy in Berlin, a prediction that the U-boats would be turned loose after the U.S. election. Lippmann immediately understood and put it into words, but only for his colleagues at The New Republic: “What we’re electing is a war president.”
