IF YOU’RE VERY young, you’ve probably never even heard of a fellow named Champ Clark, but he was a very important man to Missourians and to a lot of other people back in 1912. He was speaker of the House at that time, and he seemed much more certain to become our twenty-eighth president than a relatively obscure former college professor named Thomas Woodrow Wilson.

I was fairly young myself in June 1912, twenty-eight years of age, and I was helping my father out and cutting wheat in the field at home, on our 160 acres where there’s a big business development now, while the Democratic National Convention was going on in Baltimore. There was a little telegraph station in a field about a quarter of a mile away, and information would come in the form of short little bulletins, and somebody would tell me that a new message was in, and I’d run over there. I’d bring the binder around there and tie the lines around the brake and go over and find out what was going on. My father was for Champ Clark, practically all Missourians were; as you’ve gathered, old Champ was a Missourian himself, and he would have been the first president ever from Missouri, so we all hoped he would be nominated and elected. And we were sort of stunned when we finally learned that the Democratic Party had nominated Wilson instead of Clark.

In that election, the Republicans were fighting with each other, their official candidate being President William Howard Taft, up for reelection, while Teddy Roosevelt ran as an independent on the Bull Moose ticket, so the Democratic choice was just about certain to get in, and just about the whole country assumed that the Democratic choice would be Champ Clark. Clark was an old war-horse politician who was born in 1850 and served in the House of Representatives from 1893 to 1921, with just a single brief break in 1896. The more progressive members of the Democratic Party considered him just a touch too cautious and slow-moving in most of his policies, but he was a very popular man and seemed certain to get the nomination.

Among other reasons, there was no one else around as well-known to the voters as he was. Wilson was in the picture, of course, with a growing reputation for intelligence and efficiency as a man who rose from a salary of $1,500 a year as a professor at Bryn Mawr to become president of Princeton University and then governor of New Jersey; but he also had a reputation of being a stiff-necked professorial type, still very much the aristocratic president of a great university, a man who found it hard to get along with people who he was sure didn’t know as much as he did. That’s where his trouble lay: he knew many things better than most people who came in contact with him and couldn’t help but show it, and that doesn’t work too well with congressmen and senators with whom a presidential candidate and president has to get along. And William Jennings Bryan was still around and in many ways was still one of the strongest people in the party, but Bryan had run for president twice and been beaten by McKinley in 1900 and by Taft in 1908 and wasn’t likely to be put up again.

These days, about the only thing people seem to remember about Bryan is that he was on the wrong side in that nonsense in Dayton, Tennessee, in July 1925, when young John T. Scopes was put on trial for teaching, in his biology class, the Darwin theory about man’s being descended from apes, and thereby contradicted the biblical explanation of man’s creation. But that was just a bit of silliness that Bryan himself came quickly to regret, and in many other ways Bryan was one of the best people in the country and certainly one of the best men associated with Wilson. I truly think that Bryan might well be one of the most misunderstood and underestimated men in American history. He was in a class by himself from about 1896 on, the man who was in the forefront for the welfare of the common, everyday fellow who didn’t have any real representation of any other kind.

If it hadn’t been for Bryan, there would have been no truly liberal program continued in the United States; the things Bryan suggested and wanted, financially and in every other way, were the things that came into effect when Wilson was president, and were the stimulant for the even more liberal programs that came into effect with Franklin Roosevelt twelve years later. The idea of the Federal Reserve Board, which was set up under Wilson in 1913, was to arrange things so that there was enough circulating medium to enable the ordinary man to carry on his business and his life, and that’s all Bryan ever wanted in that area, and he was also in the forefront in agricultural reform and labor reform and child labor reform and a lot of other things. These things were mostly the result of influence exerted by William Jennings Bryan. That’s absolutely correct, and in my opinion, history will tell it that way.

Well, Bryan knew that he didn’t have a chance personally in the 1912 election, and he went to the convention strictly with the idea of supporting Clark. But the situation at that point in our history was that the finances of our country had developed to the point where the bankers were in total control, and Bryan wanted to be sure that that would change if, as seemed certain, the Democrats would get in this time and displace Taft and Teddy Roosevelt and all the other Republicans.

To understand the question of financial control of our country, and to put it into the simplest terms, you’ve got to keep in mind the fact that the Federal Reserve Board was set up with the plan of increasing the circulating medium, of issuing more currency so that there would be more money around for business loans and for transacting business in general. But you’ve also got to keep in mind the fact that those dollar bills had to be based on something valuable so they wouldn’t just be meaningless pieces of paper, but rather, a sort of promissory note backed by something of value. In those days, the valuable thing backing our currency was gold, with the issuing of currency dependent on the amount of gold in the country, and our finances became a controlled proposition because the New York banks cornered most of the gold in the country and thereby controlled most of the currency in the country, and that made money scarce because the banks kept raising interest rates on loans and only very big firms could afford to borrow money at those rates.

Eventually, of course, Franklin Roosevelt took us off the gold standard entirely. His point was that gold was artificial backing, too, just a piece of metal in the way that the dollar bill is just a piece of paper and doesn’t mean anything unless it’s backed itself by commodities - corn and wheat and oats and automobiles and factories and everything else that makes up the industrial center of the country. Things were to be handled in a way so that the financial backing of the currency in circulation wouldn’t be gold alone, but gold backed by commodities; thereafter, gold would be used only on a very small percentage basis, and the real backing would be the whole commercial and commodity strength of the whole United States. That would make our currency much sounder than when just backed by gold, and the cornering of the gold market couldn’t in any way affect the currency of the United States. The government would base the issuance of currency on the economic strength of the country, trying to make sure that enough money was around so that it would be available to everybody and not just to the biggest and strongest business organizations.

But gold was still the backbone of our currency in Wilson’s day, and the idea of the Federal Reserve Board was to increase the circulating medium but with absolutely sound backing, by controlling gold and setting up twelve regional Federal Reserve banks - in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, Atlanta, Richmond, Chicago, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City, Dallas, and San Francisco. These would, in effect, be banks’ banks, issuing Federal Reserve notes and loaning out money to banks to loan to the public and to business more painlessly and cheaply, the money to be given out more freely when times were tough and loans were really needed and tightened up when it seemed necessary to try to control inflation. As an example, the circulating medium back in the twenties was about $3.5 billion, and I think it’s now up around $30 billion. If the big banks had had their way, they would have kept currency to the point where they could choke off credit whenever they felt like it. The objective of the Wilson administration for the Federal Reserve Bank, in short, was to make credit available in all sections of the country on the basis where it would increase building programs and help industry, and in particular, help the small merchants and small businessmen.

That was the kind of thing that Bryan wanted, and he set out to talk to Clark about it, but then Clark made a terrible tactical error; he shut himself up and wouldn’t talk to Bryan or anyone else on the subject. (I’m not sure why he behaved in that stupid way; the people who supported Clark never forgave him, and they’re still talking against him to this day. And I don’t blame them.)

Bryan was a delegate from Nebraska, and the Nebraska delegation was instructed for Clark and voted for him in the early balloting. But Bryan was a particularly important supporter because he was the head of the Democratic Party, and he wanted to be sure that control of the country’s finances didn’t remain in the hands of the bankers; and when Clark wouldn’t see him and talk to him about the matter, he kept thinking about it and thinking about it and finally decided that he just couldn’t support Clark.

In the beginning, Clark had a clear majority of the votes locked up, but not the two-thirds majority needed to give him the nomination. On the first ballot, Clark got 440½ votes, Wilson got 324, and a congressman named Oscar W. Underwood, a man from Alabama who was supported by conservative southerners, got 117½. The amount needed to give one of the candidates the nomination was 726 votes. Things continued pretty much the same way for eight more ballots, and then, on the tenth ballot, the Tammany Hall delegates gave their support to Clark. This Tammany Hall support brought Clark’s total up to 556, still not enough for the nomination, but it convinced Wilson that he had no chance, and he might as well throw in the towel. But just as he was ready to give up, one of his strongest supporters, a fellow named William Gibbs McAdoo, who later married one of Wilson’s daughters and also became the first chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, called him and begged him not to quit, and Wilson decided to stay in a while longer.

And it was a good thing he did, because Tammany Hall’s support of Clark had a different effect on Bryan; as far as he was concerned, Tammany Hall was New York and New York was Wall Street and the bankers who controlled credit and currency flow and all the rest, and he got up and made a speech against August Belmont, who was the head of the Tammany organization. Belmont was immensely wealthy and a member of the famous old New York family, but he was also just a hack Tammany politician, and in a sense Bryan’s speech was also a speech against Champ Clark. He looked old Belmont right in the eye and pointed to him as he spoke, and then he would turn and look contemptuously at Clark, and then back at Belmont again. Just about everybody in the country was overwhelmed by that speech, and I think it was reported that they got something like 500,000 or 600,000 telegrams. It took quite a while longer, and the voting continued all the way from June 27 to July 2, but that was the end of the situation as far as Clark was concerned. Wilson began to move closer and closer to Clark after Bryan endorsed him officially, moving ahead of Clark in the thirtieth balloting. He had 633 votes in the forty-fifth balloting, and then everybody moved into his corner, and he won the nomination in the forty-sixth tally with 933 votes. Even my father and I decided that Bryan was right, and Wilson was the right man.

All this made Wilson technically a minority candidate, of course, since the majority of the delegates at the convention and the general public behind them had started out by supporting Clark, but it made very little difference. It made about half as much difference as it did when Lincoln came in as a minority candidate, because a lot of people in Lincoln’s party continued to oppose him after he was nominated, and even after he was elected president, whereas most Democrats rallied behind Wilson and continued to support him after he was nominated. But there’s certainly no question about the fact that he was an unusual and unexpected man to be chosen.

He was certainly no professional, knowledgeable politician. Back in his student days, Wilson said in his Ph.D. dissertation that leaders like governors and presidents should make decisions alone and not be influenced by hidden party machines or political bosses, and he tried hard to adhere to that philosophy when he went into politics himself. When he agreed to run for governor of New Jersey in 1910, he did so on the strict condition that nobody try to tell him which bills to support or which people to hire to run the state, and in the brief time he was in that job, he got through a number of laws designed to keep politics on the up-and-up, including a law that required political candidates to file financial statements on their campaigns and prohibited corporate contributions to those campaigns, and a law that simplified and improved voting methods. He even fired the top political boss in New Jersey, a fellow named James Smith, when Smith tried to tell him what to do. And at the Baltimore convention, Wilson made it clear that he wanted the nomination strictly on merit and not on the basis of a collection of little private deals, warning his associates that they’d be dropped if they even hinted at the possibility of a political office or other job to anyone, making it clear that “not a single vote . . . will be obtained by means of a promise.

But he was also a practical man, and he learned pretty quickly that life just wasn’t that way, and he had to go to work and agree with political bosses on some things in order to get elected and then reelected. He couldn’t separate himself totally from the political bosses. Why, of course he couldn’t, because he’d never polled a precinct in his life, and he never had anything to do with the ordinary day-by-day fundamentals that make up politics like getting people out to vote, and he just didn’t have anybody down on the ground to go around and talk to people, to the general public. Politics is the ability to get along with people, and politics is government, and some of the so-called bosses are just people who understand the political situation from the ground up. Wilson had to make his peace with them in order to get into office and stay in office, and he never would have been nominated if the bosses at the Democratic Convention hadn’t been in control of certain parts of the organization that would nominate him. He still believed in personal leadership by men like himself, but leaders have to have an organization behind them, or they don’t get to lead.

The other thing that surprised some people about Wilson’s quick political popularity and his nomination, his move in just a couple of years from Princeton University to the White House, was that very fact - the fact that he was a college professor, and a college professor who was extremely liberal in his political thinking at that. Nobody really expected an intellectual like Wilson to become president. Well, as far as his liberal political thinking is concerned, I’ve said several times in this book that I truly don’t like hanging those labels on people because they’re often misleading and mean different things to different folks; but if you want to call him a liberal, well, then he was a commonsense liberal. He wasn’t one of these synthetic liberals. He was a liberal who was for the welfare of all the people around in your neighborhood and my neighborhood. And when the time came for a decision between the special interests as represented by Belmont and Tammany Hall, and the people as represented by Wilson, the convention and then the country went for Wilson.

He was certainly also a college professor; in fact, he was the first professional educator to become president of the United States. (Of course, the last president, as I write these lines, was a college president, too, but we’re talking about very different kinds of people here, Wilson had great knowledge and a great mind.) Getting back to real educators, a great many presidents taught school, of course. Garfield taught school, and several others taught school, but they were not the executive heads of great universities; Wilson was the first one, I think, in that position. And he was a lot more than “a mere college professor,” as some people called him at the time. He had written a history of the United States that’s still one of the basic sources of information on government in the United States from the beginning, and he’d studied history thoroughly and knew what it was all about. And he’d made it clear in his history, and in his speeches, that his dream and his plan was to set up a program that would continue the ideals of the Constitution, and of course everybody liked that idea.

And of course, he was obviously and visibly one of the smartest people in the country and possibly in the world. Wilson had the idea that he was the smartest man in the United States, and as I’ve mentioned, people associated with him didn’t like that attitude, but it’s probably the truth. His speeches and his messages stated his case clearly and in a language that the people could understand, and he could always get his audience to be with him.

As I mentioned earlier, he was the first president in a long time to go down to the Congress personally and read his State of the Union message, and it made a big hit with the Congress. He knew his messages by heart; he didn’t read them, he delivered them. I was talking to a fellow recently who used to sit behind Wilson when he was making his speeches, and he said Wilson would keep one hand behind him, and every time he would go through a point he would put his thumb on his first finger on the next point, and the next point, and the next point, and the fellow said he followed his speeches through and he never changed a word in his delivery of his points after he’d written them. It takes a genius to do that. He was a great man, a truly great man. I’m certain that history and historians will mark Wilson down as one of our greatest presidents, and in a sense, this book is in some ways a history book, and I’m doing that right now.

I think the country had pretty much made up its mind that it didn’t want any more of the Republican program by the time Wilson received the nomination and began to campaign for the presidency. Teddy Roosevelt had been a pretty popular president from his start in office on September 14, 1901, after McKinley had been shot on the sixth and died a week later, until the end of his second term on March 4, 1909; and Taft was also popular during his single term after Teddy Roosevelt finished up and said he wanted Taft to succeed him, but people were just sick of what the Republicans had accomplished, or rather, failed to accomplish. The plain fact is that we had a backward-looking program in regard to the welfare of the country and the world from Cleveland’s second term in 1892 to the end of Taft’s term in 1912, and it was obvious that Wilson was determined to change all that. So when the time came to make a decision about who should be our next president, and Bryan got on Wilson’s bandwagon, that did it.

Wilson went up against three pretty strong opponents. The three were Taft, the Republican candidate, who was a strong contender because he was the incumbent, which always helps, and because he was a big, fat, hearty fellow who weighed 332 pounds and was always smiling, and whom most people liked on sight; Teddy Roosevelt, who came back from a highly publicized African safari saying that he’d made a mistake in backing Taft because Taft had proved too conservative in his actions as president, announcing that he was going to run himself on the Progressive Republican, or Bull Moose, ticket; and Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist candidate.

Teddy Roosevelt was often more bull, without the moose, than substance. As I’ve said earlier in this book, he talked an awful lot about breaking up trusts but broke up darn few of them. He also talked a lot about serving the needs of the little man, but never really succeeded; I suppose he tried to a certain extent, but just couldn’t succeed because the controls at that time were again in the hands of the people who believed in special privilege. And up to 1912, he kept saying that he was absolutely against a president’s serving for more than two terms, but he now explained away his candidacy by saying that he meant a president shouldn’t serve more than two consecutive terms. To be completely honest about it, I think the best thing old Teddy ever did in his life was break up the Republican Party and get Wilson elected. And when people went to the polls on November 8, their preference for Wilson over the other three men was pretty obvious.

Wilson ended up with almost as many popular votes himself as the combined total of his three opponents and more than four times as many electoral votes. Wilson got 6,286,820 votes, representing 42 percent, to old Teddy’s 4,126,020 votes, 27 percent, Taft’s 3,483,922 votes, 23 percent, and Debs’ 901,255 votes, representing 6 percent. And in the electoral vote, Wilson got 435 votes to Roosevelt’s eighty-eight and Taft’s eight; he carried forty states out of the forty-eight we had at the time, giving only California, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and Washington to Roosevelt and only Utah and Vermont to Taft. And in Wilson’s bid for reelection in 1916, when he was opposed by Charles Evans Hughes, later the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and where things were much closer because Teddy Roosevelt stayed out personally this time and reunited the Republicans by throwing his support to Hughes, Wilson still managed to win with 9,129,606 popular votes to Hughes’ 8,598,221 votes, and 277 electoral votes to Hughes’ 254.

Wilson also had trouble in that second election, incidentally, because he had to take some strong action against Mexico in the years between 1913 and 1916, which made a lot of Catholics decide that Wilson was anti-Catholic and vote against him. They were dead wrong, of course, because the fact that Mexico’s population was mostly Catholic had absolutely nothing to do with it. At that time, we were not on very friendly terms with the Mexican government. A fellow named Porfirio Díaz was the head of the government for a very long time - from 1877 to 1911, in fact - and Americans invested around $1 billion in Mexican business; and then there was a revolution and a man named Francisco Madero took over and didn’t do a thing to protect Americans and American money; and then Madero was assassinated and another man, Victoriano Huerta, grabbed power by military means, not by election, and was even less friendly to Americans and to the United States, particularly after Wilson said he wouldn’t recognize a government built on assassination.

Things got bad when Mexican soldiers arrested some American sailors in Tampico, Mexico, even though they released them right away, and then got worse when a fellow whose real name was Doroteo Arango, but who called himself Francisco Villa and then was nicknamed Pancho Villa instead of Francisco, and who pretended to be a Mexican patriot but was really nothing more than a bandit and a gangster, invaded Columbus, New Mexico, and killed a number of Americans. Wilson had to send naval forces to shell and occupy Veracruz and Army forces under General John J. Pershing into Chihuahua after Villa, which is why he lost all those Catholic votes.

Huerta eventually resigned and left Mexico, lived in Europe for a while, and then came to the United States and died of alcoholism in an El Paso, Texas, jail. Pershing never caught Villa, who lived on for a number of years but was finally murdered by some of his own people in 1923. (Pershing’s expedition made him famous, however, and resulted in his becoming commanding general in World War I. And I served under him, of course.) But in more recent times, even though there was another Mexican president named Huerta, Adolfo de la Huerta, who came in by revolutionary means some years after that first one, Mexico has now had five or six duly elected presidents, and has followed a program of government on the basis of a chief executive and legislative and judicial branches, and it is as fine a government as there is anywhere in the world, including our own.

I don’t think Wilson’s intervention into Mexico was an act of aggression, not at all. He had no territorial ambitions. He was trying to keep peace on the border and prevent a dictator from going outside his prerogative as president of Mexico. And the successors of that regime, at least the more recent successors, have all been friendly to us, and they’ve been statesmen and the finest kind of men. I know from personal experience because I’ve been acquainted with nearly every one of the men who’s been in there since Wilson’s time. I think that Wilson’s actions helped stabilize the Mexican government. I think that was his real intention. When those things were done, there was terrible turmoil going on in Mexico, but that’s been straightened out, and they now have a peaceful approach to elections and to everything else that takes place in that country. I don’t think Wilson had any intention of infringing on the prerogatives and powers of the Republic of Mexico. I don’t think his action was contrary to his policies of peace. Wilson was trying to achieve peace in the Western Hemisphere, and his efforts finally succeeded.

I think I ought to stop at this point and say a few things about Wilson’s personal life, so that you know a bit more about the man who served as president during the crucial period of the first of the two terrible world wars. And I guess as good a way as any to start is to express my personal opinion that he should have continued to call himself Thomas Woodrow Wilson, or possibly even just plain Thomas Wilson if he was bent on dropping one of his names, because he was an austere-looking fellow all his life, and I think he’d be remembered more affectionately if people could think of him as Tom Wilson the way you think of Lincoln as Abe Lincoln. “Woodrow” always struck me as an awfully fancy name, but that was apparently the way Wilson wanted it, since he started calling himself T. Woodrow Wilson right after college, and then dropped his first name and that initial entirely.

He really wasn’t as cold and reserved as he looked in his photos and public appearances, and he wanted almost desperately to help people and improve the world around him, but he was no bundle of laughs, either. He was essentially a serious type, possibly because he was descended from and surrounded by church people. His maternal grandfather, Thomas Woodrow, after whom he was named, was a Presbyterian minister; so was his father, Joseph Ruggles Wilson; one of his two sisters, Marion, married a minister, Anderson R. Kennedy; and his first wife, Ellen Louise, was the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, Samuel E. Axson, and granddaughter of another minister, I.S.K. Axson. But Wilson had a sense of humor, too, and because he had a thin face and wore glasses from the age of eight and considered himself an ugly man, he once wrote a limerick about himself that I still hear people quoting from time to time, even though I don’t think that most people remember that it was the work of our twenty-eighth president:

For beauty I am not a star

There are others more handsome by far

But my face I don’t mind it

For I am behind it

It’s the people in front that I jar.

Wilson was of Scotch-Irish descent; his maternal grandfather came to this country from Paisley, Scotland, in 1835, and his paternal grandfather, James Wilson, came here from Strabane, Ireland, in 1807. Wilson’s father grew up in Ohio and served as pastor in churches in Virginia, Georgia, and North Carolina, and his mother, Janet Woodrow Wilson, whom people called Jessie, also grew up in Ohio, and attended the Chillicothe Female Seminary before settling down with her husband and raising a family. The Wilsons had four children: Marion, who was the oldest, Annie next, then Thomas Woodrow, and finally Joseph, who became a newspaperman in Nashville and then an insurance man.

Wilson, who was born on December 28, 1856, in Staunton, Virginia, where his father was then serving, worried his parents as a child because he seemed almost retarded and didn’t learn to read until he was nine, and he remained baffled by mathematics throughout his life. But he managed to get through his preliminary schooling and enrolled in the College of New Jersey, which later became Princeton University, in 1875, and graduated with a ninety average, after which he entered the University of Virginia Law School. He had to drop out due to illness, but studied at home and was admitted to the bar in 1882. But he didn’t really care for law and went back to school, entering Johns Hopkins and earning a Ph.D. in political science in 1886. (He’s the only president in our history, incidentally, with an earned doctorate. As I say, the man had quite a brain.) And then he taught law and political science at Bryn Mawr, history at Wesleyan in Middletown, Connecticut, politics and jurisprudence at Princeton, and finally became president of Princeton and president of the United States.

Wilson met Ellen Louise Axson in April 1883 and became engaged to her in September, but their marriage was postponed until June 24, 1885, so that he could get through Johns Hopkins and get that job teaching at Bryn Mawr, which was just then starting up as a brand-new college for women. The Wilsons were married for twenty-nine years, and they had three daughters: Margaret, born in 1886, who never married, but was first a singer with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, then an advertising executive and stockbroker, and died of uremic poisoning in 1944 in a religious retreat in Pondicherry, India; Jessie, born in 1887, who was a social worker before she married a law professor named Francis B. Sayre, and died in 1933 of complications after an operation for appendicitis; and Eleanor, born in 1889, who married Wilson’s friend William Gibbs McAdoo in 1914, but the couple were divorced twenty years later, and she lived out her life in California and died in 1967.

The Wilsons had a good marriage, and Ellen Wilson supervised happily the marriage of her two daughters in the White House. But then she came down with Bright’s disease, the official name of which is glomerulonephritis, a kidney ailment that is nearly always fatal, and she died on August 6, 1914, aged only fifty-four. Wilson was prostrated by her death; he told his close friend Colonel Edward Mandell House that he hoped someone would assassinate him, and House believed that his death wish was sincere. But just eight months later, one of Wilson’s cousins, Helen Bones, who took over as White House hostess after Ellen Wilson’s death, introduced Wilson to a forty-three-year-old widow named Edith Boiling Galt, a lively and good-looking woman who was the daughter of a Washington judge and a direct descendant of Pocahontas. Wilson fell in love immediately with Mrs. Galt, and the next month asked her to marry him.

The press began an immediate and fierce attack on Wilson, saying that Wilson was behaving with extreme disrespect to his late wife in courting a woman so soon after his wife’s death. There was also a typographical error in a Washington Post story that was so pointed, though it was apparently unintentional, that the Post hurried to call back all copies of the edition, but some got out and became collector’s items.35

Wilson and Mrs. Galt were engaged officially in July, but the furor over their alliance became so severe that Wilson offered to let her out of their engagement if she wished it. She didn’t, and they were married on December 18, 1915. The second marriage was as happy as Wilson’s first, and Wilson’s last word was a calling out of his wife’s name when he died nine years later, on February 1, 1924. The second Mrs. Wilson lived on for thirty-seven years and died at the age of eighty-nine on December 28, 1961 - coincidentally, you’ll notice, Woodrow Wilson’s birthday. She remained active all her life, attending Franklin Roosevelt’s and John F. Kennedy’s inaugurations and other functions, and was still quite a good-looking woman even in old age. My daughter Margaret stood next to her at the Roosevelt inauguration and was quite impressed with her good looks, even though she was already well into her seventies.

Thinking about it now, many years later, it’s really astonishing that Wilson was able to put through so much reform in so short a period, far more than most other presidents managed to accomplish during their administrations. A leader who has a program that’s worthwhile, as Wilson did, can put his program over, and if it hadn’t been for the First World War, and the things that forced us into that war, I think the Wilson administration would have been considered one of the best we’ve ever had, second perhaps only to Franklin Roosevelt’s. Well, the country was ready for it - I guess that’s the principal reason. The country had all sorts of difficulties and problems at the time, and when Wilson came along, he appealed to the people in a way that no other president had appealed to the people since - well, I’d say since the time of Grover Cleveland, though I suppose that Teddy Roosevelt had a certain amount of appeal in his earliest days. And when a program appealed to the country, why, the Congress went along with it.

In the beginning, Wilson had practically no trouble at all with the Congress. He had no problem at all in getting along with the various senators and representatives during his first term. But when we became involved in the war, and then when he later made a terrible and exhausting trip around the country to promote the League of Nations and his health broke down as a result of that trip, then the Congress began to figure out who was going to be in next, and you know how Congress is. Their attitude toward him changed so much that it was almost like limiting the term of the president, almost like limiting the period of the Wilson administration. But he still managed to get such a lot done during his eight years, and that’s the incredible thing.

He also had quite an excellent cabinet. His relationship with his cabinet wasn’t always very cordial because he hated to delegate responsibility. He also had a tremendous number of different men in his cabinet because of constant turnover. I think he was always listening to his people, but then he’d make up his own mind, and it was all too frequently in exactly the direction opposite to the one on which he’d just been advised. But just as frequently, the members of his cabinet ended up influencing his thinking despite his initial reaction against their suggestions, and before they quit because so many of them were first-rate people.

Bryan, for example, became secretary of state, and Wilson was smart enough to take over all the things that were right in what Bryan wanted to do and put them into effect, and that, of course, is what Wilson did with the Federal Reserve Board and other things. The separation between the two men came about because of the World War. Wilson was in general agreement with Bryan until the time came that it was absolutely necessary for him to meet the situation. Wilson tried hard to keep us out of the war; he took a neutralist position, and so did Bryan. But when the time came that the ugliness of things being done by the Germans forced us into the war, when the sovereignty and the welfare of the United States were in danger, Wilson had to do what he did, and I think he did the right thing.

Other good people in Wilson’s cabinet were William McAdoo, the fellow who told him to hang in there during the Democratic Convention and became his son-in-law, and who was his secretary of the treasury from 1913 to 1918 and a damn good one. Then Carter Glass took over the job and had a lot to do with helping Wilson set up the Federal Reserve System. And Newton D. Baker was Wilson’s secretary of war, a man who was a pacifist, but was capable of swinging into action when necessary, and managed to get our Army up to 4 million men, the strength needed to enable us to win the war. James C. McReynolds was the attorney general before he left to become a Supreme Court justice, and he was very helpful in pressing antitrust laws against AT&T and the New Haven Railroad and a lot of other companies that were getting to be too greedy. And just to name two more good men, the secretary of the navy was Josephus Daniels, who later became our ambassador to Mexico and a very efficient one, and as you may remember, he was helped out while running the Navy by a bright young assistant secretary named Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Wilson also had some people around him who weren’t so good, of course. Like almost everybody in politics, Wilson became involved with some unfortunate associates. The man most people remember is Colonel Edward Mandell House, who was a pretty minor politician in Texas - that “colonel” is a strictly honorary Texas title - until he latched onto Wilson and became Wilson’s closest friend and constant advisor; but Jim Smith, that fellow who ran the New Jersey political machine, was worse. Smith was the worst man ever associated with Wilson, but fortunately, Wilson soon realized that he had to throw Smith over if he was going to do an honest job, and he did throw him over quickly and early in the game.

I guess House is remembered because he was associated with Wilson for a much longer period, and another not-too-wonderful fellow associated with Wilson for quite a while was George Harvey, or Colonel George Brinton McClellan Harvey to give him his full handle, the editor and publisher of a magazine called North American Review and later editor of Harper’s Weekly and another one he started himself and called Harvey’s Weekly, I suppose in the hope that people would become confused and buy it thinking they were buying Harper’s. (His “colonel” was another honorary title given a fellow who never got any closer to any army than watching soldiers parade on holidays.) Harvey was one of the first people to suggest to Wilson that he ought to try for the presidency, so we can thank him for that, and House also deserves some thanks because he did some wheeling and dealing at the Democratic Convention and helped Wilson get the nomination, but that’s about it.

Both men later exploited their positions as special advisors to the president, not for the benefit of President Wilson or the country but to make themselves more and more important and influential, and in the end Wilson had to get rid of them, too. Wilson took on House because he thought he could trust him, and he also became close to Harvey for the same reason. A man in the job of president, as I’ve said before, has to have people he can trust who aren’t part of the cabinet or in other official jobs, special associates who are in a position to give the president information that the president is not able to get in any other way. A president has to have associates like that because he’s got to have information from every direction, and in order to have that information, he’s got to have people who aren’t restricted to information sources within their own official circles. And it isn’t a dangerous thing to have connections of that sort because the president is always in control.

But when House got to the point where he thought he was greater than the president, where he thought he was the president, why, then Wilson had to pull the rug out from under him and let him go, just like every president has had to do with some of his confidants. And the same thing happened to Harvey. House went around after that telling people that Wilson was “the most prejudiced man I ever knew,” and Harvey launched a whole series of bitter attacks on Wilson in that magazine of his, that Harvey’s Weekly, but nobody paid a whole lot of attention to the two fools.

I’ve already mentioned the Federal Reserve Board and some of the other things Wilson accomplished while in office, such as the first child labor laws in the country and the antitrust laws that legalized strikes and collective bargaining. But the two most important things accomplished by Wilson, of course, were the winning and ending of the war, and though it didn’t work out in the end, the starting of the League of Nations.

As I’ve mentioned, Wilson tried hard to keep us out of the war when it first started on July 28, 1914. He appealed constantly to prowar groups to calm down and issued a Neutrality Proclamation giving the reasons our country should stay out of the war; and even when a German submarine sank the Lusitania, which was a British passenger ship, without warning on May 7, 1915, and on which 128 Americans were among the 1,195 men and women who died that day, Wilson still pleaded for neutrality, telling an audience of just-naturalized citizens a few days later, “There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight. There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not have to convince others by force that it is right.” At the same time, however, Wilson protested bitterly to the German government, and for a while German submarines stayed away from American ships. As late as January 1917, Wilson was still hoping to keep the United States out of the war, and that month he made a speech that pleaded with the warring countries to accept “peace without victory.” But the response from the Germans was a contemptuous announcement that they’d stayed away from American shipping long enough, and that, starting February 1, German submarines would sink without warning all ships, including American ships, doing business with the Allies.

Two days later, Wilson appeared before a joint session of Congress and announced that the United States was breaking off diplomatic relations with Germany. He still hoped to keep our country out of the war, but later that month, a message from Germany to Mexico was intercepted in which Germany promised Mexico that it would return Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas to Mexico if Mexico joined Germany in attacking the United States and helped Germany win the war. Wilson didn’t tell Congress about that message at first; he asked only that he be allowed to arm American merchant ships, revealing Germany’s offer to Mexico only when the House gave permission, but the Senate held back. Then, on March 18, German submarines sank three American merchant vessels, and we entered the war two weeks later.

Our entry into the war turned the tide toward an Allied victory. As I’ve mentioned, Newton Baker got our Army up to 4 million men, and Josephus Daniels got our Navy up to a half million men; in March, 80,000 men were sent overseas, in April, nearly 120,000 more men were sent, in May, nearly 250,000 more men were sent, and by August there were over 1 million Americans in France and 1.75 men there by October.

Teddy Roosevelt also tried to get into the act, or at least into the newspapers, by announcing that he was eager to command a division in France. But Wilson wouldn’t agree to it because he thought it was a political maneuver, and in all probability, it was. I think Roosevelt might have made a good division commander, but like Wilson, I believe it was a political proposition all the way, and Wilson didn’t have any political generals. The generals who were placed in command of the divisions and all the other units in the First World War were selected on the basis of efficiency and military education and knowledge, not on the basis of being famous or an ex-president.

By the end of May, the Germans had moved to within fifty miles of Paris, but then the Allies stopped the German advance at Château-Thierry, Americans recaptured Belleau Wood and took Cantigny, and then captured thousands of German prisoners and mountains of German supplies and weaponry at Marne and St.-Mihiel. Late in September, more than a million Americans fought and won in the Meuse-Argonne offensive, terrible battles in which there were 120,000 Americans killed or wounded. More than a third of the total American casualties of the war occurred during that offensive. But it resulted, finally, in making the Germans and the Austrians ask for peace, and as everybody knows, the armistice was signed on November 11, 1918. Over 100,000 Americans died, and another 200,000 were wounded in the eighteen months we were in the war, and a conservative estimate of total casualties for all nations, which I saw just after the war ended, counted over 10 million dead and over 20 million wounded.

Wilson began to plan for the end of the war soon after we were in it, and on January 8, 1918, addressed both houses of Congress with a speech that became known as the Fourteen Points because it named fourteen things that he felt were necessary to achieve lasting peace and a settlement that all nations could accept. The speech was just wonderful; it was idealistic but also practical, and the language was as memorable in its way as Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. And it did a lot to hasten the end of the war because it made it clear to the German people, already sickened by the worldwide slaughter and as anxious to see an end of it as the people everywhere else, that the Allies or the United States, didn’t intend to occupy Germany or otherwise behave the way many victorious nations behaved in the past toward nations they conquered.

The first five points were general: They called for “open covenants, openly arrived at”; complete freedom of the seas for all nations, both in wartime and peace; elimination of all economic barriers between nations; drastic reduction of armaments worldwide to no more than the amount necessary for protection and safety; and settlement of colonial claims based on the desires of the people living in those colonies. Then he dealt with eight specific things: restoration of conquered territories to Russia, restoration of conquered territories to Belgium and maintenance of Belgium as a separate and sovereign nation, France to be given the Alsace-Lorraine territory that Germany had been demanding, Italian borders to be changed to give territories to those nations that had the most people of those nationalities in those territories, division of Austria-Hungary based on nationalities, division of Balkan countries according to principal nationalities, Turkey to control only Turkish people and allow all others to set up separately, and with unlimited access to the Dardanelles for vessels of all nations, and independence and access to the sea for Poland. And Wilson’s fourteenth point was the one I consider the most important of all, a concept that still gives me hope, the establishment of “a general association of nations . . . for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”

Wilson’s first message to Congress, in which he described the things he wanted to try to do for his country, is, I think, one of the greatest and most eloquent documents in the history of this country, but his speech on the fourteen points is even more so because it described what he was trying to do for the world. I believe that that great speech will always live on in the history of the world because, aside from the points that were necessary at the time for the peace of the world, he set out that concept of the League of Nations. And in his concept of an organization like the League of Nations, he was on the right track and brought something to the presidency that no other president had brought before him. I’m glad that it isn’t necessary to say “before him or since,” because Franklin Roosevelt tried to continue the program that Wilson started with his support of the United Nations. And the fact that the League of Nations didn’t work out in the end, or that the United Nations is ineffective in many ways and beset by many other problems, doesn’t diminish the importance of the concept by one iota, because at least it’s a start toward joining nations together to try to deal with injustice in the world.

As I mentioned earlier, Wilson decided to go personally to the Paris Peace Conference, the first time a president in office ever went to Europe, but he made the serious error of not including any Republicans or any senators from either party in his delegation. This was an especially major mistake because his personal popularity had eroded during the war, and the Republicans managed to regain control of both the House and the Senate in the 1918 elections. So when Wilson got back to the United States, he discovered that the acceptance of the treaty worked out at the Paris Peace Conference, which included the plan to work out the League of Nations, wasn’t going to be as easy to sell to some resentful and irritated Washington legislators, and some segments of the general public, as he thought it was going to be.

Then Wilson made another tactical error. Some senators and congressmen just didn’t like the idea of an association of nations because they had prejudices against some other countries and didn’t care to join together with them on anything, and some legislators had objections to other aspects of the treaty; and in particular one very influential Republican, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, was chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and a very conservative fellow who later headed the group of Republicans pushing Harding’s nomination, and had quite a number of objections to the League and to other things in the treaty. But none of the complaints about the treaty were really all that major, and Wilson could unquestionably have mustered up the necessary two-thirds majority to get the treaty through if he were willing to add some language to “guarantee the United States’ sovereignty.” But he wasn’t, and the Senate became just as intransigent and childish and refused to ratify the treaty.

That was when Wilson decided to take his cause to the people and went off on a speaking tour that took him 8,000 miles around the country and all the way to the West Coast, and that brought about his collapse from exhaustion on September 25, 1919, and a stroke on October 2 that paralyzed his left side and made him an invalid for the rest of his administration and the rest of his life.

Wilson was able, after a while, to walk with a cane and to speak, though somewhat unclearly, and he spent the last year of his second term mostly in bed and in a wheelchair, so much out of things that Edith Wilson checked every item of government and decided which matters to bring to his attention and which ones to skip. He left office on March 3, 1921, staying on in Washington and opening a law office in partnership with a man named Bainbridge Colby, who served as secretary of state during Wilson’s final year in office, but he was now almost totally blind and so sick that he did little more than have occasional conferences with Colby and others in his house on S Street. And on February 1, 1924, he told his wife, “I’m a broken piece of machinery,” and two days later, aged sixty-seven, he called out for Edith Wilson, lapsed into a coma, and died. It was a sad ending for a very fine man.

The United States never joined the League of Nations, though Wilson was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1920 for proposing the League and for his other work. Warren Gamaliel Harding was elected president on November 2, 1920, and in his bumbling way let a lot of the good things advocated or achieved by Wilson go out the window, and Franklin Roosevelt had to put them back when he became president. The League of Nations continued until 1940, at which time it was down to a skeleton staff, and then it disappeared entirely.