Mr. Wilson's War

Chapter 1 T.R. AND THE YOUTH OF THE CENTURY

ONE hot dusty afternoon in the first week of September 1901 President William McKinley, accompanied by Mrs. McKinley and his two nieces, arrived for his official visit to the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. Amid the screeching of whistles and the jangling of chimes and the booming of a twentyone gun salute, the President and Mrs. McKinley were driven slowly around the grounds in a carriage drawn by four well-matched bays.

The next day had been designated President’s Day. Mr. McKinley delivered an address from a platform decorated with the massed flags of all the American republics to a crowd which the newspapers described as “packed to suffocation” on the esplanade.

Mr. McKinley was a fine figure of a man, with a high broad brow and a roman nose flanked by searching gray eyes. Under the black neckcloth an ample piqué vest gleamed white between the folds of the long Prince Albert coat. As he stood looking down into the enthusiastic faces, with the cheers and handclapping resounding in his ears, he couldn’t help a feeling of confidence in his country’s destiny and his own which amounted perhaps to complacency.

With the help of his friend Mark Hanna and “the full dinner pail” he had won re-election over William Jennings Bryan, nominee of Populists and Free Silver Democrats, by a plurality of over a million votes.

A new century was opening. The Spanish-American War was won. Expanding westward to include Hawaii and the Philippines, and southward to dominate Cuba and Puerto Rico, the United States had taken her place among the great powers in the world. After four years and a half of his administration, the nation rejoiced in unexampled prosperity.

“… This portion of the earth” said Mr. McKinley, and struck a responsive chord in the listening crowd, “has no cause for humiliation for the part it has played in the march of civilization. It has not accomplished everything, far from it. It has simply done its best, and without vanity or boastfulness, and recognizing the valid achievements of others, it invites the friendly rivalry of all the powers in the peaceful pursuits of trade and commerce and will co-operate with all in advancing the highest and best interests of humanity …”

He spoke of the effect of railroads and swift steamships and of the Atlantic cables in knitting the world together: “Isolation is no longer possible or desirable. The same important news is read, though in different languages, in all Christendom.”

He called for an increase in the merchant marine to spread the fruits of American prosperity — which he found so great as to be “almost appalling”—to less favored lands, and for increased intercourse with the Latin-American peoples to whom this exposition was dedicated. He demanded the immediate construction of an isthmian canal to join the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the laying of a cable out into the far Pacific. He spoke with enthusiasm of the development of arbitration treaties between nation and nation which hopeful men were looking for to eliminate forever the causes of war: “God and man have linked the nations together. No nation can longer be indifferent to any other. And as we are brought more and more in touch with each other, the less occasion there is for misunderstandings, and the stronger the disposition, when we have differences, to adjust them in the court of arbitration, which is the noblest forum for international disputes.”

After the speech the cheering crowd broke through the ropes and mobbed the stand. Smiling and dignified Mr. McKinley stepped forward and shook more than a hundred hands.

McKinley was a popular President. His enthusiastic reception wherever he met plain Americans man to man gave the lie to Bryan’s oratorical denunciations of the Republican Party as the party of the trusts and of the oppressors of the working man and the farmer; and to the Labor Day rabblerousers who had been reviving the issues of the campaign.

Labor Day parades, animated perhaps by the news of the strike in Pittsburgh of seventy thousand steel workers who didn’t seem to appreciate the fullness of their dinner pails, had drawn recordbreaking crowds.

In Kansas City, preaching to the text: “Muzzle not the ox that treadeth out the corn” William Jennings Bryan had castigated the interests that “would crucify mankind on a cross of gold” and deny a living wage to the working man.

McKinley’s own Vice President, young Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, speaking at the opening of the Minnesota State Fair, with the glamor of his citations for bravery on San Juan Hill still about him, had, amid the whoops and yelps of his Rough Riders, called for “supervision and control” of the great corporations in the public interest.

Friday, September 6 was the last day of the President’s visit. In the morning Mr. McKinley, accompanied by the ambassadors of the friendly nations south of the Rio Grande, journeyed to Niagara Falls in a private car. Everyone was captivated by the view of the falls from the International Bridge. After an excellent lunch the party returned to the exposition grounds for a presidential reception, in the old tradition of handshaking democracy, scheduled for four in the afternoon in the Temple of Music.

Still wearing his long Prince Albert coat, with what the reporters described as “a smile of dignity and benevolence” on his face, Mr. McKinley stood under a bower of greenery and palms at the end of a corridor hung with purple bunting so arranged as to reduce the incoming throng to a single file. Detectives, secretservice men, reporters and members of the diplomatic corps stood in a group behind him. The President was seen to rub his hands in pleased anticipation. Instead of an ordeal it was a pleasure for him to meet the common man.

When the doors were opened and the people poured in, the enormous organ installed in the building was still blaring forth a Bach sonata which was part of the afternoon concert.

The secretservice agents carefully scrutinized the men who filed in with outstretched hands. The reporter for the Baltimore Sun thought that one foreignlooking man whom he described as having a bushy black mustache, bloodless lips and a glassy eye, attracted their suspicion. They were so busy watching him that they hardly noticed a tall, boyishlooking smoothfaced fellow who wore his arm in a sling. The organ music had reached a crescendo when Czolgosz, offering his left hand to the President, shoved a pistol at him out of the bandage that swathed his right and shot him in the belly.

Mr. McKinley was assisted to a bench behind the purple bunting. The guards threw themselves on Czolgosz, who was with difficulty saved from lynching. He was quoted as saying that he was an anarchist and had done his duty. He came of a poor but respectable Polish family in Detroit. His head was said to have been turned by the theories of a young Russian Jewess named Emma Goldman who was inciting working people in Chicago to bring about the triumph of right and justice through anarchy.

The President was taken to a hospital and then to the home of friends where he was reported to be resting easily.

The Chicago police arrested Emma Goldman but the judge turned her loose for lack of evidence. Editorials demanded the deportation of foreign anarchists.

Senator Mark Hanna, who had first heard the news with stunned unbelief at the Union Club in Cleveland, hurried to the President’s bedside, as did members of the Cabinet and Vice President Roosevelt. The early bulletins of the medical men were so reassuring that Colonel Roosevelt decided to take a few days off with his wife and children in the Adirondacks before returning to politics and to Oyster Bay.

He joined Mrs. Roosevelt and the children at the Tahawus Club up above Keene Valley in the headwaters of the Ausable River. When a messenger arrived announcing that President McKinley’s condition had taken a sudden turn for the worse the Vice President was climbing in the mountains. A guide, set off in search of him, found him towards dusk on the trail down from Mt. Tahawus. He rode all night in a wagon and reached the railroad station at North Creek where his secretary was waiting with a special train to rush him to Buffalo.

When he reached Buffalo towards midday he found that Mr. McKinley was dead and was immediately sworn in as President of the United States.

Theodore Roosevelt was the youngest man ever to be President. When he moved into the Executive Mansion, which he preferred to call the White House, he brought with him the romping uninhibited family life of Sagamore Hill, where politics and amateur boxing and a passion for wild creatures and wild country mingled with jingo enthusiasms and a real taste for history and for certain kinds of literature. Since Jefferson, whom T.R. acutely disliked, no American president had exhibited such varied interests, or shown himself so completely to the manor born.

He was the descendant of six generations of eminent New Yorkers. From his mother, a southern gentlewoman from one of the great plantation homes in Georgia, he absorbed the conviction so general among the daughters of the defeated Confederacy, that if the human race had an aristocracy they belonged to it. This established preconception made for social selfconfidence, and enabled him to deal with King Edward or the Kaiser or Manhattan wardheelers or the cowhands on his ranch or his sparring partners from the Tenderloin, on a basis of courteous give and take between equals. The foundation of his personal magnetism was an ardent fellow feeling for all sorts and varieties of men. A man who could be friends with Sir Cecil Spring Rice and John L. Sullivan at the same time could really boast that nothing human was strange to him.

In his autobiography he described himself as having been “a rather sickly rather timid little boy very fond of desultory reading and natural history, and not excelling in any form of sport.” As a child he suffered terribly from asthma. Very early he was fascinated by the animal kingdom. He used to say that it was the feeling of romance and adventure he got from the sight of a dead seal laid out on a slab of wood outside of a Broadway market that started him on his career as amateur taxidermist and zoologist.

His parents worried about his nervousness and timidity, but when he found other kids beating him up he took to developing his muscles with dumbbells and exercises. His father arranged for lessons in boxing and wrestling.

As he grew older he developed a ferocious energy. Overcompensation with a vengeance. In spite of extreme nearsightedness he became a fair shot. He took to long walks and mountainclimbing. He acquired a good seat on a horse.

Though he loved life outdoors he had a bookish streak. He wrote fluent and expressive English. While still at Harvard College he started, probably under the influence of his mother’s brothers who had both been officers on the blockaderunner Alabama, a highly technical history of American seamanship in the War of 1812.

The fall after graduating from college he married a Chestnut Hill girl named Alice Lee whom he had fallen desperately in love with during a country walk. The couple settled down at his mother’s house in New York so that T.R. could study law at Columbia, but he was more interested in the assorted characters he met at the local Republican Club. He took up ward politics as he took up boxing, just to prove that he could do it.

At twentythree as a representative of the “better element” he found himself elected to the state legislature from the Twentyfirst Assembly District, known as the Diamond Back District, one of the few safely Republican districts in New York. In spite of the embarrassment of a Harvard drawl, dundreary whiskers and pincenez anchored by a black ribbon, he made such an impression on the assemblymen that he was soon being talked of as a possible minority leader. He was beginning to make a name for himself by exposing a stockjobbing scandal in connection with the financing of one of the new elevated railways when he suffered a crushing blow.

Hurrying joyfully home from Albany one winter weekend to greet his firstborn child he found his Alice dying and his mother desperately ill with typhoid fever. “There is a curse on this house” his brother Elliott cried. Their mother died during the night and Alice the next afternoon. “… as a flower she grew and as a fair young flower she died … when she had just become a mother, when her life seemed to be just begun, and when the years seemed so bright before her,” Theodore wrote in a memorial which he circulated among the family, “the light went from my life for ever.”

T.R. was no man to let grief get him down. Spring Rice once described his friend Theodore as “pure act.” After finishing up his duties with the legislature as best he could, he headed for the wild west. His father had left him a moderate income. As he put it, he had the bread and butter but he must earn the jam. His first effort to make himself some money was to invest in a Dakota ranch. In his bereavement he decided to give cowpunching his personal attention.

He stopped off in Chicago to attend the Republican convention. The nomination of James G. Blaine, whom he considered somewhat less than honest, to run against Grover Cleveland, thoroughly disgusted him. When he was asked whether he was going to make ranching his business he said no but it was the best way to avoid campaigning for Blaine.

The last thing T.R. wanted was to lose himself in the western wilderness. Immediately an item appeared in The Bad Lands Cowboy, a recently established newspaper in the recently established tanktown of Medora: “Theodore Roosevelt the young New York reformer made us a very pleasant call Monday in full cowboy regalia.”

T.R. took to the cowhands and the cowhands took to him. He was affectionately known as Four Eyes. He didn’t drink or smoke. He couldn’t shake off his Harvard drawl. His profoundest cussword was By Godfrey, but his energy and nerve and knack for leadership won him the amazed admiration of the whole countryside.

He was made a deputy sheriff and helped round up some horsethieves and was asked to run for Congress. He lost every cent of the sixty thousand dollars he invested in cattle but he wrote a successful book on his experiences called Hunting Trips of a Ranchman. The frontispiece was a photograph of Theodore Roosevelt in sombrero hat, beaded buckskin shirt, chaps and boots with silver spurs: the greatest showoff of his generation.

Not many months later he was in England marrying Edith Carow at St. George’s, Hanover Square. Cecil Spring Rice, then a sprightly young fellow just out of Oxford whom T.R. had taken a shine to on the boat, was best man. Theodore and Edith had been playmates in Gramercy Park when she was a little girl and he was a small boy. Probably she had been a motherly little girl. All their lives it was to be Mrs. Roosevelt who would watch over Theodore along with the other children, seeing that he got the proper meals and didn’t spend his money foolishly and changed his clothes when he came home drenched from a hike in the snow.

After one of those European honeymoons popular with wealthy Americans in the nineteenth century the couple settled at Sagamore Hill, in the house Theodore had been building on some family property at Oyster Bay and was wondering how he would pay for. Private life was repugnant to him. He missed the admiring throng. He was an industrious writer but writing wasn’t enough. Right away he was back in Republican politics.

With the election of Benjamin Harrison came an appointment in Washington to the new Civil Service Commission. “I rose like a rocket,” wrote T.R. President Harrison’s comment on T.R.’s activities was: “He wanted to put an end to all the evil in the world between sunrise and sunset.”

When, twelve years later, he took over the presidency T.R. carried with him to Washington all the enthusiasms of the grubby little blueeyed sandyhaired boy who had filled the house with the smell of formaldehyde and with the pelts of dead animals; and all his adolescent joys in hunting and warfare and naval tactics and history and literature; to which, with burgeoning virility, had been added the naturalborn leader’s passion to make other people do what he wanted them to do, and a type of bull-headed moralizing which was entirely his own. His friends complained that Theodore never would grow up.

No man ever enjoyed being President more.

When T.R. took the oath of office at the age of fortytwo on September 14, 1901, at his friend Wilcox’s house in Buffalo, he was thought of as a jingo with a knack for personal publicity, a political embodiment of Kipling’s theory of Anglo-Saxon supremacy. It was characteristic of his complex personality that the first scandal he caused was by inviting Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House. It was typical too, of the less attractive side of him, that he tried to explain the story away by giving out that the Negro president of Tuskegee had merely been invited to lunch on the spur of the moment.

However the incident was twisted around in the war of words that followed, the fact remained that social or racial snobbery had no place in T.R.’s gentleman’s code. He didn’t need to put himself out to make Jews feel at home. It never occurred to him that he couldn’t ask a man he admired to dinner because he happened to have a dark skin. In his correspondence with his dear friend and passionate admirer, Owen Wister, whose head was a roost for all the snobberies acquired in undergraduate days at Harvard, T.R. showed more understanding of what men of diverse races and traditions had to face before finding acceptance by the then dominant Anglo-Saxon elite than any other public man of the day. For T.R. ‘a man was a man for a’ of that.’

Conservation of national resources and of the beauties of nature were among his many passions. He instigated enforcement of the antitrust laws. He cudgelled the mine operators into arbitrating their differences with John Mitchell’s United Mine Workers. For the miners it was the first step out of serfdom to the coal companies.

Coming into conflict with financial barons whom he dubbed “malefactors of great wealth” he found himself adopting, as time went on, planks from the platform of “Messrs. Bryan, Altgeld, Debs, Coxey and the rest,” whom he’d lumped together when he was fighting free silver during McKinley’s first presidential campaign, as “strikingly like the leaders of the Terror in France in mental and moral attitude.”

By the time T.R. was ready to go on the stump for a second term he had managed to appropriate a large part of these gentlemen’s following. This was a generation that read Henry George and Bellamy’s Looking Backward and listened to young Debs, the impassioned spokesman for the railroad workers. The more distant reaches of the cornbelt abounded in enthusiasts eager to make the nation over in accordance with their aspirations for a perfect democracy. Populists, freesilver men, greenbackers, pacifists, nonresisters, utopian socialists vied with each other for the speakers’ platforms in the raw middlewestern towns.

The century was new. When the frontier reached the Pacific some of its backwash rolled back to invigorate the entire nation. Americans were ready to discover the globe. Beyond the oceans lay lands benighted, open to adventure. The heathen must be taught the ways of Christian self-government. If only the grip of corrupt politicians and greedy businessmen could be loosened at home the great example of American democracy was ready to set all mankind on the path of progress.

In spite of the New York Republicanism of his background T.R. managed, with his cowboy gear and his whooping escorts of Rough Riders, to appear as a Lochinvar off the western plains. He channelled the hopes and plans of the westerners for reform into his thoroughly personal program for justice and fair play. He spoke out with so much zest that soberer and older men found themselves following in his trail.

The Democrats made Roosevelt’s task easy. For eight years the ardent and active wing of the party had been swayed by William Jennings Bryan’s silver tongue. At their convention in St. Louis in 1904 the gold-standard men took over and nominated as their candidate, amid the indignant groans of the westerners, an estimable but politically colorless New York judge named Alton B. Parker instead of the peerless leader.

It was Bryan’s ironical fate, in spite of his gift of eloquence, twice to clear the path that was to lead another man into the presidency. Bryan’s oratory helped arouse the enthusiasms that Theodore Roosevelt took advantage of in 1904, and in 1912 it was Bryan’s prestige as leader of the forces of righteousness in the Democratic party that assured Woodrow Wilson’s nomination.

Bryan was nurtured on righteousness from the cradle. His father, a Democratic politician in southern Illinois, who served a number of terms in the state legislature and prospered in later years as a judge of the circuit court, was a “praying Baptist.”

His mother, though the most dutiful of wives, clung to the Methodist faith she’d been brought up in. Bryan in later life explained in his memoirs how much he had been the gainer: as a boy he had doubled his “Sunday school opportunities” by attending both churches.

His parents were stern in their upbringing. Their boys shirked no chores. The young Bryans got their education between McGuffey’s Reader and the Holy Bible continually elucidated at prayer meeting and Sunday school. William Jennings studied law in Jacksonville, Illinois, married and moved his family out to Nebraska in search of opportunity.

Opportunity was not far to seek. He was an agreeably handsome young man with an extraordinarily resonant voice. One day when the speaker didn’t turn up for a Democratic rally Bryan volunteered to pinch hit. His speech was so successful that when he reached home he woke up his wife and told her, “I found I had power over the audience. I found I could move them as I chose … God grant I may use it wisely.” He knelt down by the bed and prayed.

He was soon recognized as the best speaker in the state and a few years later, although a teetotaller, he was backed by the Lincoln liquor interests who trusted him to oppose prohibition when he ran for Congress. The Republicans teased him with the nickname of “Boy Orator of the Platte.” Proudly bearing that title he arrived in Washington to represent his district in the Fiftysecond Congress.

He immediately let himself be heard from with a successful speech against the protective tariff. Adopting the “free and unlimited coinage of silver” as his personal plank, he was renominated in Nebraska and returned to Congress with the frenetic support of the populists. Operators of silver mines were glad to furnish his campaign funds.

Another successful oration in the House almost took the Democratic leadership away from Grover Cleveland, representing gold and the economic creeds of the Wall Street bankers, who as President was the party’s titular head. Bryan earned obloquy in financial circles and near deification from the western insurgents by following it up with a demand for a tax on the incomes of the rich. He was only thirtysix when in 1896 he joined the Nebraska delegation to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

A few days before, as correspondent for the Omaha World-Herald in St. Louis, where the Republicans were convening, he had seen the freesilver men go storming out of the hall amid cries of “Take the Chicago train.” He had already tried out in the halls of Congress his peroration that was soon to be so famous: “I shall not help crucify mankind upon a cross of gold … I shall not aid in pressing down upon the bleeding brow of labor this crown of thorns.”

He had been experimenting for months with other booming passages of the great speech he was planning, at meetings in his home state and in private to his wife. Bryan was an orator who left nothing to chance.

His name had for some time been bruited about as presidential timber. His opportunity came when, in a conclave even more sharply torn than the Republican convention, but this time by antiplutocratic factions, he was called upon to speak. That speech was the climax of his career.

Edgar Lee Masters wrote down his recollections of the scene in the Colosseum: “Suddenly I saw a man spring up from his seat among the delegates, and with the agility and swiftness of an eager boxer hurry to the speaker’s rostrum. He was slim, tall, pale, raven-haired, beaked of nose … as this young man opened his great mouth all the twenty thousand persons present heard its thunder … He was smiling. A sweet reasonableness shone in his handsome face …”

Men and women present in the hall that day never tired of telling all who would listen of the magical effectiveness of the Cross of Gold speech. Bryan’s nomination for President followed. To the tune of Sousa’s “El Capitan” march, his oratory swept the country. Mark Hanna and the Wall Street “interests” had to strain every dollar to carry McKinley’s election.

Finding himself even in defeat one of the country’s great men and with the dignity of a presidential candidate to support, young Bryan had to find some suitable way of making a living. He had no taste for the drudgery of the law. He and his wife produced a book: The First Battle, which did well enough to clear up the debts of the campaign. As a permanent source of income he took up lecturing on the Chautauqua circuit.

When they moved to Nebraska the Bryans joined the Presbyterian Church. He soon became an elder. His speeches were lay sermons. A favorite was on reading the Bible. He tried to live the Christian life.

Although as a practicing Christian he deplored war, as a proselyting democrat he couldn’t help being stirred by the struggle for selfgovernment in Cuba that gave the American expansionists an opportunity to flex their youthful muscles by declaring war against the decrepit empire of the Spanish Bourbons.

“Universal peace cannot come until Justice is enthroned throughout the world,” Bryan declared to a shouting crowd at the Trans-Mississippi World’s Fair in Omaha. “As long as the oppressor is deaf to the voice of reason, so long must the citizen accustom his shoulder to the musket and his hand to the saber.”

The “young man eloquent” modestly enlisted as a private in the militia. Thereupon the governor of Nebraska commissioned him to raise a regiment and, after a summer spent with his troops fighting fever and mosquitoes in a Florida swamp, he emerged from the six weeks war as Colonel Bryan.

In uniform he had suffered acutely from what he called military lockjaw. His experience confirmed his inherent suspicion of the military way of doing things, and made him more than ever an opponent of the imperialism which was luring the youth of both parties away from the set-our-own-house-in-order-first creed of the reformers.

In the congressional debate over the disposition of Spain’s overseas empire, Bryan’s anti-imperialism took a turn which both his friends and his enemies found hard to explain. Ratification of the treaty by which the United States would assume sovereignty over the Philippines was bitterly contested in the Senate. In spite of remonstrances from such hearty pacifists as Andrew Carnegie and David Starr Jordan, Bryan used his influence among Democratic senators to “enthrone justice” in those distant islands by placing them under American rule. His supporters failed by a single vote to put through the justifying amendment he lobbied for desperately which would assure the Filipinos eventual independence.

The peerless leader was left impaled on the dilemma. The explanation, that the treaty, if ratified, would give the Democratic opposition to overseas expansion a better talking point in the coming campaign, never quite held water. His loss of a large part of the anti-imperialist vote had something to do with his defeat by McKinley in 1900.

After his defeat and his mistyeyed retirement from presidential politics Bryan made up for past inconsistencies by the increased ardor of his advocacy of the cause of peace. During the campaign he had been painting a picture of America as arbiter of the world’s disputes.

“Behold a republic,” he declaimed in President McKinley’s home town of Canton, “increasing in population, in wealth, in strength, and in influence … Behold a republic gradually but surely becoming the supreme moral factor in disputes.”

Bryan was not alone in these hopes. Peace by arbitration had been one of the themes of McKinley’s last speech. The world over, thoughtful men looked forward into the new century with the hope that at last they would see an end to the curse of war.

Andrew Carnegie, whom many good Bryan supporters had been excoriating as the plutocratic villain of the industrial warfare round Pittsburgh, was dedicating his vast fortune and his very considerable ability as a publicist to the cause of peace between nations.

Carnegie had early promulgated the theory that a businessman should spend half his life making money and the other half distributing his wealth “for the improvement of mankind.” He was as good as his word. After selling out his interests in steel and iron and coke to U. S. Steel for what was reputed to be the sum of two hundred and fifty million dollars in five percent gold bonds, the laird of Skibo Castle kept himself busy writing exhortatory letters to those in authority, accompanied by the relevant checks, in furtherance of the great cause.

Carnegie was the personal embodiment of the mythology of nineteenthcentury capitalism. Coming from a family of learned Scottish artisans, he was brought up in desperate poverty, since his father who was a weaver had lost his livelihood to the factories. America was the escape. The undersized towheaded boy, already a mighty reader, reached New York with his family on the old whaling ship Wiscasset in 1848.

Starting as bobbinboy at thirteen in an Allegheny textile mill, he worked as messenger for the telegraph office, then as telegraphist and private secretary to a railroad man who became Assistant Secretary of War in charge of transportation during the Civil War. When Scott retired from the railroad, Carnegie took over his job. Innovations were the air he breathed. As superintendent of the Pittsburgh division of the Pennsylvania Railroad he introduced the first Pullman cars. Still a young man he went into steel and imported the Bessemer process. He promoted some of the first oilwells and became dizzyingly wealthy.

His first benefaction was a public bath for the stony ancient capital of Scotland, Dunfermline, where he was born and had his schooling. He gave away libraries, bought a string of newspapers to promote republicanism among the English and engaged a large staff of wellpaid smoothies to talk peace at all seasons.

Arbitration had been in the air for a decade. The British and American governments had successfully arbitrated a dispute over the boundary between Colombia and Venezuela which had once seemed a casus belli. There had followed a long negotiation between the two governments for a permanent arbitration treaty. This treaty, in spite of urgent appeals from outgoing President Cleveland and incoming President McKinley, failed in ratification in the Senate in the spring of 1897. The short war with Spain, an unnecessary war if there ever was one, proved the need for renewed activity by the advocates of peace.

In 1899 they were much heartened by an appeal from Czar Nicholas of all the Russias to the principal powers to meet at The Hague to discuss the limitation of armaments, and to impose a humane code on nations that did have recourse to war. Out of this conference came a few rules of war more honored in the breach than the observance, and the Hague Tribunal. Carnegie furnished an endowment that housed the Tribunal in a handsome palace in the Dutch capital.

Bryan, having retired from the political battlefield like the sulking Achilles, kept his name and admonitions before the public by publishing a weekly magazine from his home in Lincoln “with the purpose to aid the common people in the protection of their rights, the advancement of their interests and the realization of their aspirations.” He named it The Commoner. The magazine found immediate circulation.

Through The Commoner and constant lecturing on the Chautauqua platform he remained in touch with the aspirations of the mass of the American people. From the response of his audiences he gathered that next to fair play in the economy their most ardent desire was for international peace.

The peerless leader was now assured of an income. The Bryans built themselves a new home named Fairview on a hill overlooking the state capitol. Mrs. Bryan desired the broadening influence of travel. After a couple of short peeks into Mexico and Havana, Bryan made an article writing arrangement with Hearst that paid for a nine weeks European tour.

The Bryans, as uninformed about foreign lands as any of Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad, visited the British Isles, France, Germany and Italy and even Russia. Everywhere he was received as a great American. The Pope gave him an audience, and he was allowed to compliment Czar Nicholas to his face on the establishment of the international court at The Hague.

The high point of the trip was his visit to Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana. The venerable old Russian noble-in-peasant’s-clothing held forth on non-resistance and the power of love. Though Bryan followed Christ’s teachings literally indeed, he seems to have taken the doctrine of “turn the other cheek” with a grain of salt.

“Not long ago,” wrote Tolstoy soon after, “I read … that my recognition of the principle of nonresistance is a sad and partly comical error, which, taking into consideration my old age, and some of my deserts, one may pass with condescending silence. Just such an attitude … I met in my conversation with the remarkably clever and progressive American, Bryan.” Tolstoy had found more cleverness than Christianity in his visitor. “Bryan certainly does talk a lot,” he added.

Bryan regarded the interview with Tolstoy as one of the great moments of his life. His enthusiasm for nonresistance grew with the telling. “I am satisfied,” he wrote in The Commoner of the author of War and Peace, “that, notwithstanding his great intellect, his colossal strength lies in his heart more than in his mind … Love is the dominant note in Count Tolstoy’s philosophy … It is his shield and sword. He is a deeply religious man.”

Later in a lecture on peace by arbitration, trying to put the thing in practical terms for his audience, he used Tolstoy as an example: “There he stands proclaiming to the world that he believes that love is a better protection than force; that he thinks a man will suffer less by refusing to use violence than if he used it. And what is the result? He is the only man in Russia that the czar with all his army dare not lay his hand on … I believe that this nation could stand before the world today and tell the world it did not believe in war … that it had no disputes it was not willing to submit to the judgment of the world. If this nation did that, it not only would not be attacked by any other nation on earth, but it would become the supreme power in the world.”

After he had come reluctantly to the support of Judge Parker in the 1904 campaign, Bryan used his Tolstoyan convictions to belabor the Rough Rider from Sagamore Hill. “This is an exalting of the doctrine of brute force,” he said of T.R.’s New Nationalism, “it darkens the hopes of the race … It is a turning backward to the age of violence. More than that it is nothing less than a challenge to the Christian Civilization of the world.”

In the years that followed peace and social justice were The Commoner’s chief themes. Peace was the theme the silver tongue wove into the resonant orations that thrilled farmers and their families, seated on the hard chairs of Chautauqua tents; and small business men and schoolteachers and working people in crowded halls in the middlewest. Barred from high office by the vicissitudes of home politics the peerless leader aspired to become peacemaker to the world.

Theodore Roosevelt won handily in the election of 1904. He regarded his victory as a mandate from the American people to continue in the role which he had been playing with so much zest. The United States was too small a stage. With McKinley he believed that “no nation can longer be indifferent to any other.” He was the first American President to exercise a personal influence in the international drama.

Though an admirer of Admiral Mahan and an enthusiast for a powerful navy, and almost as fond as the Kaiser was of appearing in a military uniform and talking of “the fighting edge,” T.R. used his influence as President pretty successfully for world peace. He had an able assistant in his Secretary of State.

Querulous and whimsical old John Hay, who started public life as Abraham Lincoln’s private secretary, had given his country, under various administrations, a lifetime of discriminating public service of a sort unusual in America. Though one of the Americans most drenched in Europe of his generation, he never forgot that, like Mark Twain, he spent his boyhood in a Mississippi rivertown. He wrote graceful verse. The worshipful life of Lincoln he and Nicolay worked on for many years did much to enshrine the figure of the brooding emancipator in the mind of the nation. He wrote a novel on industrial strife and, from a diplomatic post in Madrid, travel sketches of a charm to rival Irving’s. McKinley brought him back from the Court of St. James to head the State Department.

John Hay and Henry Adams from their twin Richardson houses on Lafayette Square presided over the cultivated literary society of the national capital, which in T.R.’s day included, for once, the White House. Now in his late sixties Hay was an ailing, crotchety, disinterested and wise old man. Relying on his great experience in practical diplomacy T.R. steered the country through a period of competition and intrigue among European powers that kept the world on tenterhooks.

The victory over Spain, however much it distressed anti-imperialists in the United States, enhanced American prestige abroad. The President’s unique combination of athletics with statesmanship, together with his literary flair, made his grinning countenance with the buck teeth and the eyeglasses loom large in the European chancelleries. Here was an American politician at home in the world of books and ideas, which meant culture and refinement and status to European statesmen. His flamboyant costumes, the frontier pose, the impudence with which he led members of his “tennis cabinet” and unsuspecting visitors on breakneck hikes through Rock Creek Park, his endless stream of amusing conversation at the dinnertable, his knack for launching pat phrases which became the catchwords of the era, gave a special quality to his personality. As dissimilar Europeans as James Bryce and Kaiser Wilhelm found T.R. irresistibly attractive.

The diplomatic corps respected the professional skill with which he conducted his policy of “walk softly and carry a big stick.” After he had averted possible warfare by inducing the Germans and the British to arbitrate their quarrel over the collection of debts from the Castro who was then dictator of Venezuela, T.R. was admitted to their international club by the world’s potentates.

When they made their moves on the chessboard of power such highbinders as the Kaiser and Czar Nicholas and the imperialists of the Third French Republic could no longer disregard the United States.

Even the somewhat scandalous methods by which T.R. made possible the building of the Panama Canal caused more amusement than protest. The need for an isthmian canal had been dramatized for Americans by the length of time it took the battleship Oregon, plowing at full steam round South America and through the Straits of Magellan, to join the Pacific fleet in 1898. Opinion was about evenly divided on the merits of a canal through Panama and a canal through Nicaragua. Interested parties buzzed like scavenger flies about both projects.

For a century the isthmus had been the stamping ground for freebooters and adventurers. Ever since the failure of the French company its debentures had been the playthings of speculators and bluesky operators on the Paris Bourse. T.R. plunged in where other statesmen had feared to tread. To his death he considered the canal his greatest achievement.

Through John Hay he secured from the British a revision of the fiftyyearold Clayton-Bulwer treaty according to which any such canal was to have been built jointly. Having made the decision to continue the French project in Panama, he induced Congress to put up forty million dollars to pay off the investors in the old company. He looked on with amused approval when Monsieur Bunau-Varilla, de Lesseps’ chief aide, — who’d spent his life promoting the Panama route and was thick with various adventurers on the isthmus—, and a Mr. Nelson Cromwell of New York, representing a group of densely anonymous American investors, took their plot from an O. Henry short story, and backed a cast of comic opera characters in the establishment of an independent Republic of Panama.

The revolution was carried out in a rain of gold. When the Colombian authorities sent troops to prevent the secession of the freedom mad Panamanians, the colonel in charge received a handsome retainer. A couple of American warships were ordered to stand by to see that nobody played it rough. The United States Government thoughtfully paid for the transport of the pacified colonel’s troops back to Cartagena on one of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company’s liners. A Colombian general and an admiral each received whopping sums. Even the enlisted men got fifty dollars a head.

Amid the popular rejoicings that resulted from the distribution of this flood of baksheesh, the republic was proclaimed in November of 1903. An American officer was so indiscreet as to be seen hoisting the new Panamanian flag up a flagpole. When one of the sudden tropical downpours typical of the climate drove the demonstrators indoors, the founders of the new republic expressed their patriotic enthusiasm by pouring bottle after bottle of champagne over the head of defecting Colombian General Huertas, who now became commander of the Panamanian Army. Next day Monsieur Bunau-Varilla, with a cable appointing him Minister of the Republic of Panama in his pocket, called on John Hay. A few days later Washington recognized Panama as independent and sovereign.

“The haste with which the government at Washington acted was regrettable,” wrote one student of diplomatic protocol from the serenity of the Cosmos Club twenty years later. “President Roosevelt apparently could not be restrained.”

“If I had followed traditional, conservative methods I should have submitted a dignified state paper of probably two hundred pages to the Congress and the debate would have been going on yet,” T.R. blurted out to a California audience, “but I took the Canal Zone and let Congress debate, and while the debate goes on the canal does also.”

T.R. was nothing of a pacifist, but he worked hard to stave off wars. In his first administration he took up the cause of the arbitration treaties which had received such a setback when the Senate failed to ratify the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty under McKinley. He proved his good faith by submitting to The Hague court a complicated dispute with Mexico over the disposition of the funds of the ancient California missions.

Arbitration won a victory in Europe with the signature of the treaty between Britain and France in 1903. The following year President Roosevelt through his State Department suggested a fresh meeting of the powers at The Hague.

Taking the Anglo-French agreement as a model he signed arbitration treaties with France, Germany, Portugal and Switzerland, and was promoting negotiations with Great Britain, Italy, Mexico, Russia, Japan and a number of other countries when the Senate dropped a monkeywrench in the works by insisting that no arbitration should go through without specific senatorial approval in each case.

“I think that this amendment makes the treaties shams,” T.R. wrote his good friend Senator Lodge, the stickler for senatorial privilege who had proposed the amendment, “and my present impression is that we had better abandon the whole business rather than give the impression of trickiness and insincerity which would be produced by solemnly promulgating a sham.”

The outbreak of war in the Far East made it necessary to postpone the second Hague conference to a more propitious time.

Russia and Japan had been bickering over which of them should exploit Manchuria and bring the blessings of civilization to what was then called the hermit kingdom of Korea. When negotiations broke down in the winter of 1904 Japanese Admiral Togo made an unannounced attack on the Russian ships anchored at Port Arthur.

From then on the Japanese held the offensive. They crossed the Yalu River in the face of entrenched Russian positions. They outfought the Russians on land and sea, and knocked out the eastern section of their navy.

Early in the following year, the Russian Baltic fleet, which had distinguished itself by mistaking some British trawlers off Dogger Bank for enemy torpedoboats, and letting fly a salvo that killed a number of peaceful fishermen and added to the unpopularity of the czarist government among the Western nations, arrived in Japanese waters. Togo’s crack squadrons promptly swept the Baltic fleet off the map.

The Russians were driven back into Siberia but the war cost the Japanese lives and money that they could ill afford. Both sides were ready to negotiate a peace.

President Roosevelt, who was already dabbling in mediation between clashing European imperialisms in North Africa, let it be known to the German ambassador that he would favor an arrangement that would give Korea to Japan, and neutralize Manchuria (under German management) in return for a German engagement to respect the “open door” policy in China and not to meddle in the Philippines or other islands in the Pacific, which since the annexation of Hawaii had become necessarily an American sphere.

When the Imperial Foreign Minister forwarded this report to the Kaiser he added a note: “The President is a great admirer of Your Majesty and would like to rule the world hand in hand with Your Majesty, regarding himself as something in the nature of an American counterpart of Your Majesty.” Kaiser Wilhelm, who was not without humor in those days, scrawled in the margin: “One must not divide the hide of a bear before he has been shot.”

From this seed sprang suggestions to Czar Nicholas in one direction and to the Mikado’s foreign office in the other, that President Roosevelt would be just the man to mediate between them. A few days after the Battle of the Sea of Japan destroyed Russian seapower it was announced that plenipotentiaries were on their way to Washington.

John Hay, already very ill, who had been in Europe trying to recoup his health at one of the spas that were considered so restorative, wrote T.R. “… the big news was of your success in bringing Russia and Japan into conference. It was a great stroke of that good luck which belongs to those who ‘know how’ and are not afraid.”

John Hay died the first of July. His death dealt a fatal blow to the curious little Washington circle which had grown up round Lafayette Square. T.R. felt it keenly. Hay was replaced in the State Department by Elihu Root, a dignified New York lawyer who was already one of the elders of the Republican Party.

Throughout Hay’s last illness T.R. had been conducting arbitration in his own way. When Washington got too hot for the negotiators, who had gone into a deadlock on the question of indemnities and of Sakhalin Island, T.R. suggested that the seabreezes would refresh them at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. For two months the beautiful old New England seaport was the center of all the power politics of the world. T.R. watched the proceedings from Sagamore Hill, cajoling, advising, remonstrating, until in early September Russia and Japan came to the agreement that ended the war.

Immediately the President put his enhanced prestige to work to try to unravel the tangle of discords between the French, the British and the Germans over spheres of influence in North Africa. If they did nothing more the negotiations at Algeciras postponed the showdown in Europe for a number of years.

His efforts in that direction came to a head in his proposal for limitation of armaments to the second Hague conference sponsored again by Czar Nicholas in 1907. Campbell-Bannerman, a convinced anti-imperialist, was Prime Minister in England. Andrew Carnegie had hopes of inducing Sir Edward Grey, who was already Foreign Minister, to back T.R.’s plan.

T.R. understood the difficulties he was facing. “I do not want this new Liberal government with which in so many matters I have such hearty sympathy, to go to any maudlin extremes at The Hague conference,” he wrote Whitelaw Reid, U. S. ambassador in London. “It is eminently wise and proper that we should take real steps in advance towards the policy of minimizing the chances of war among civilized people … but we must not grow sentimental and commit some Jefferson-Bryan-like piece of idiotic folly such as would be entailed if the free people that have free governments put themselves at a hopeless disadvantage compared with military despotisms and military barbarisms.”

The proposals put forth at The Hague proved no panacea, but they bettered the peacemaking machinery. T.R.’s faith in arbitration, at least between nations of similar background, continued a modest growth. After he’d left the presidency he wrote Admiral Mahan, “I am prepared to say … I think the time has come when the United States and the British Empire can agree to a universal arbitration treaty … and that no question can arise between them that cannot be settled in judicial fashion.”

This first decade of the century was a period of great hopes. Progressiveminded men looked forward to a golden age of peace. As civilization became established throughout the world, democratic institutions as they had developed in America and in Great Britain and her dominions would serve as a model for other nations. People were beginning to speak of the twentieth as the Anglo-Saxon century.

In foreign affairs T.R. did his best to avoid what he called shams, while he sought the peaceful solution in his own peculiar way. When the Japanese seemed to be allowing their victory over the Russians to go to their heads a little, he walked softly with them. At the same time he sent his new white fleet around the world to show off its gunpower and practice its marksmanship on a goodwill tour.

On the domestic stage he became more and more the radical leader. He had early stolen the thunder of the populists and the reformers. The demagogue in him made him adapt his slogans to the demands of his audience. He got the wildest applause when he lambasted “malefactors of great wealth.”

The voter was in revolt. From the Atlantic to the Pacific righteous men were speaking out against political corruption and the highhanded behavior of captains of industry. Reform leaders were convinced that the cure was to make the machinery of selfgovernment more effective.

The first reform had been the adoption of the secret or Australian ballot. In Oregon U’Ren’s People’s Power League passed a corrupt practices act, put through a referendum borrowed from Switzerland, instituted the recall of public officials, popular election of U. S. senators and a system of preferential primaries for the nomination of presidential candidates which it was hoped would take the party conventions out of the hands of the bosses. In Ohio there was an epidemic of reform mayors. In Colorado Judge Ben Lindsey and his friends fought the utilities. In California the Lincoln-Roosevelt League was gradually shaking the state Republican Party loose from the hired men of the railroads.

It was the day of the young firebrands in politics. From the governor’s mansion in Madison Bob La Follette was proclaiming the Wisconsin idea.

Born in a sure enough log house five years after his family moved out from Indiana in covered wagons to take up a tract of farmland some twentyfive miles out from the state capital, La Follette grew up with the country. His people were literate hardworking borderers, farmers and schoolteachers of Huguenot and Scotch-Irish stock. His father made the farm succeed but died while Bob was still an infant. His mother, who had been brought up a Baptist, married a Baptist deacon reputed to be the leading citizen of the little town of Argyle. The deacon was an opinionated old man who didn’t believe in sparing the rod, or the rawhide whip either.

His mother’s remarriage when he was seven left little Bob very much on his own. He worshipped the image of his father. He picked up some skill at carpenter work by using his father’s set of tools, helped out the family by huckstering produce from house to house in Madison. His stepfather mismanaged the farm, kept petitioning the court to sell off strips of La Follette land; his business ventures failed.

Bob had to pay for his own schooling. At an early age he learned to shave and to cut hair and picked up a little money acting as barber at the Argyle hotel. He was a smart wrestler and a clever mimic, the darling of the elocution teachers. Even his stepfather said he had a career ahead of him. He early developed a knack for public speaking.

Already the farmers were in revolt against railroad barons, and the lumber barons who strangled their market in a network of monopolies. Bob La Follette listened eagerly to speeches of Grangers and agrarian radicals. He read Henry George. He cut his teeth on the Shakespearean style.

When he was seventeen his stepfather died and left him the head of the family. He was a wiry handsome youth with lustrous dark eyes full of ambition to forge ahead. He couldn’t decide whether he wanted to be an actor or a lawyer.

Determined to go to college, he rented the farm to his brotherinlaw and moved the family into Madison. His schooling had been so sketchy he had to take preparatory courses for a year at the Wisconsin Academy. He never did learn to spell. He taught school. He coached debaters. He edited and mostly wrote The University Press, the college paper, which he distributed at enough profit to pay for his college course. All this, and acting in amateur plays, kept him so busy his grades weren’t of the highest.

When he fell in love with Belle Case he won over her family by his readings from Hamlet. His graduation would have been doubtful if he hadn’t won first prize in an interstate contest by a speech on the character of Iago which for years was the pride of midwestern oratoricals.

Probably his fiancée influenced him towards studying law. He’d hardly passed his bar exam before he was running for district attorney. Riding from house to house with horse and buggy, the way he’d sold vegetables as a boy, he became an irresistible campaigner.

He stood for the people against the interests.

In 1884 he ran for the House of Representatives and at twentynine became the youngest member of the Fortyninth Congress. Belle and her small children moved with him to Washington. He served three terms, learned everything there was to know about the lawmaker’s profession. In a day when politicians were supposed to serve business for retainers his independence made him enemies. In 1890 he was defeated. The opposition of the state Republican machine threw the election to the Democrats. He went back to the practice of law but politics was his world.

New forces were stirring in the Republican Party. He became friends with T.R. but McKinley was his chosen leader. In 1896 La Follette and Roosevelt were McKinley’s two most effective campaigners. While Bryan thundered for the common man among the Democrats, Progressivism raised its voice among the Republicans.

In 1900 La Follette was elected governor of Wisconsin. With a large following, based on the student body at the university and on the farmers he visited on his famous horse and buggy circuits, or harangued from a spring wagon at country fairs, he started a systematic restoration of the processes of selfgovernment. If the people knew, he passionately believed, the people would vote right.

In New York the sword of righteousness which T.R. had brandished as police commissioner and then as governor, fell into the hands of an austere young man named Charles Evans Hughes.

Born in a tiny frame house in Glens Falls in the spring of 1862, the man who was to be reform governor of New York was the only son of a raven-haired Welshman, who emigrated to the United States in the middle fifties eager to do God’s work. By dint of preaching and teaching he managed to dig himself out an education in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, and to find himself a blueeyed bride from an upstate farming family. Raised a Baptist Mrs. Hughes soon convinced her husband that the Baptist faith was nearer to the primitive religion of Christ’s disciples to which they both aspired, so it was as a Baptist that they brought up their son.

Young Charles was precocious. His parents started training him for the ministry from the time he started to read at the age of three and a half. He was literally raised in church, because there was no one to leave him with at home while his father was preaching and his mother was playing the organ.

At fourteen Hughes was ready for college and was sent to board at the Baptist seminary in Hamilton, New York, which later developed into Colgate University. “Pray for me,” he wrote back to his doting parents, then living on Great Jones Street, in Manhattan, where the Reverend Hughes was secretary of the American Bible Union, “that I may be a useful servant in God’s vineyard.”

Already secular interests were crowding into God’s vineyard. As a precocious youngster living in the heart of Boss Tweed’s New York Hughes came to know something of the savagery and sin of the old brick seaport where masts and yards and steamboat funnels crowded in a forest about the wharves at the end of each crosswise street.

He honed to strike out on his own. He argued theology with his father in his letters home. In spite of their differences in points of doctrine his father loyally helped him transfer to Brown University where he obtained a small scholarship and, as a minister’s son, had his room free of rent.

At Brown his horizons broadened. He found he had inherited a Welshman’s flair for public speaking. He helped edit the magazine. For pocket money he tutored the duller students or occasionally wrote their themes for them for a price. He graduated in 1881, a slight, lively, smoothfaced lad of nineteen, the youngest in his class and third in scholastic standing.

A generation earlier he might well have been attracted to a career in the ministry, but growing up into the bustling moneymaking confident eighties, the law appeared to be the avenue to success for an able and impecunious young man.

Eking out the slender allowance his parents were able to spare him with teaching jobs and clerking, he passed his bar examination with record high marks at twentytwo, and was taken into the office of a successful attorney named Walter S. Carter. Not many years went by before Hughes, with the boss’s enthusiastic consent, was marrying the boss’s daughter.

During his college years he had missed out on many a good teaching job on account of his youthful and beardless appearance. Now he encouraged a bushy mustache and soon supplemented it with a neatly trimmed beard.

He worked himself down to skin and bone. He was so thin no company would give him life insurance. When Cornell offered him a professorship in law he jumped at the chance.

Hughes enjoyed teaching. He liked the country life and the walks over the hills overlooking Lake Cayuga. He gained weight. The life insurance company no longer turned him down for a policy. His courses were popular with the students.

A new baby was born. Responsibilities were multiplying. He hadn’t been able to sell his New York house and the mortgage payments were a drain. In spite of a heavy teaching load and a new course in international law he was induced to undertake, all Cornell could offer him for a salary was three thousand a year. Hughes loved Ithaca; he stoutly turned down an offer of five thousand from the New York University Law School; but at last his fatherinlaw’s cajoling letters and firm promise that by 1900 the business would be netting a hundred thousand dollars a year decided him to go back to New York … “if there is anything in this big money-making world I can win I’ll win it for wife and babies,” he wrote his wife. “I have no business to be out of the great rush.”

He taught the young men’s Bible class at the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church, and was elected a trustee. This was different from the impoverished meeting houses he had known as a boy. John D. Rockefeller was president of the board of trustees.

His work was all absorbing. He was the lawyer’s lawyer. Attorneys and even judges consulted him on knotty points. Outside of his profession he was unknown. “My dear,” he told his wife, who was complaining that though all the other lawyers’ names were mentioned in connection with a notorious lawsuit she couldn’t find her husband’s in any of the papers, “I have a positive genius for privacy.”

It wasn’t until after his fatherinlaw’s death when he was heading the Carter lawfirm that Hughes suddenly emerged into the light of the front pages as counsel for a committee of the state legislature which was investigating the gouging of the public by the company that furnished the city’s gas.

The early nineteenhundreds were the heyday of muckraking. In a moment of annoyance at the scandalmongering which had become habitual in newspapers competing desperately for the public’s pennies, T.R. had pulled the term out of a quotation from Pilgrim’s Progress.

The “better element” had worried for decades over the corruption of boss rule in the cities, but now the general public took up the cry. The exposure of corruption became profitable. S. S. McClure was presenting Lincoln Steffens’ The Shame of the Cities in his magazine. Ida Minerva Tarbell’s History of the Standard Oil Company was bringing home to people the political and economic power inherent in vast aggregations of capital. Muckrakers rose to fame and fortune. Pulitzer and Hearst sold their penny newspapers to hundreds of thousands by exposing the male-factions of the politicians in cahoots with unscrupulous businessmen. Every editorial page had its David slinging his pebbles at the Goliaths of the vested interests.

Skillfully and decorously Hughes began pulling such a story of corruption and extortion out of reluctant witnesses that the featurewriters were delighted.

Reporters, who at first had complained of his austerity and of the chilly personality they found behind his whiskers, now fell over each other to make a public figure of him. The Evening Mail, the house organ of the Roosevelt Progressives, described him as “a large man, not burly but with the appearance of one who is built on broad lines. He looks strong. His shoulders are square, his limbs solid, his teeth big and white and his whiskers thick and somewhat aggressive.” Pulitzer’s New York World described his whiskers as being “broader, braver, bigger, bushier” than they appeared in the cartoons … “In action they flare and wave about triumphantly like the battleflag of a pirate chief.”

He was invited to run for mayor on a reform platform. Instead he went mountainclimbing in Switzerland with the children, but soon he let himself be called back for a new investigation, this time of the life insurance companies. By the time he had grilled a choice assortment of capitalists and revealed the highhanded way in which the men who ran the companies paid off the politicians and handled the public’s funds as if they were their own, Hughes was a national hero.

Legislation followed which cut the insurance companies down to size. Ida Tarbell gave him the accolade: “Charles E. Hughes is engaged in a passionate effort to vindicate the American system of government.”

Even though Hughes had given the chief financial backer of T.R.’s presidential campaign, George W. Perkins, a bad quarter of an hour, forcing him to admit that in a four million dollar bond deal he had represented both New York Life, which was the buyer and J. P. Morgan and Co., which was the seller, Theodore Roosevelt began quietly pushing Hughes as a Republican reform candidate for the governorship of New York.

The World proclaimed that he had “restored faith in legislative committees as a means of bringing the truth to light,” and described him as a man “who has a service of the highest order to give to the public and who can be neither intimidated or betrayed.” “Why not make him governor?” asked Ida Tarbell in the American Magazine.

To run against him Boss Murphy, who had been much bespattered by the reformers, put up William Randolph Hearst. Hearst had all the money in the world to spend and was a reformer, an extremely noisy one, to boot. It was an exciting campaign.

T.R. wrote Hughes from Washington … “You are an honest fearless square man, a good citizen and a good American first and a good republican also … If I were not president I’d be stumping New York from one end to the other for you.”

Hughes turned out an unexpectedly effective campaigner. His election put the quietus on William Randolph Hearst’s political career. He successfully served two terms as governor and became one of Taft’s chief assets in his campaign for the presidency in 1908.

William Howard Taft had been Roosevelt’s Secretary of War. In the Cabinet he was the President’s most faithful lieutenant. Such was T.R.’s prestige at the end of his second term that he was able to impose Taft’s nomination on the Republican Party in spite of the big man’s mumbled protest that as a Unitarian he could never be elected. Roosevelt considered Taft the man most certain to carry out his progressive policies.

It was only when T.R. saw his dear friend, in spite of innate modesty, willynilly taking the center of the Washington stage as President-elect that his enthusiasm for him began to cool. Now he talked as if Governor Hughes, whom in impatient moments he’d scornfully referred to as “that animated feather duster,” might be the man on whom the mantle of his strenuous Republicanism would fall when he disappeared from the Washington scene. To distract himself from the acute pain it gave him to leave the White House he was planning a public massacre of the lions and leopards and elephants of the African wilds.

In Taft’s inaugural parade, beset by a famous blizzard that almost froze out the proceedings, Governor Hughes reached the peak of his political popularity. In silk hat and frock coat he risked pneumonia by riding at the head of the New York militia.

“Thinking an overcoat too clumsy” Hughes wrote in his notes, “I had protected myself with a chamois vest But my hands inside my gloves were very cold and I had to dig them into the horse’s flesh to keep from freezing. As we came down the hill from the Capitol our horses almost slid on the icy street. My horse had always been in the ranks and it was with some difficulty he could be persuaded to take his place at the head of the procession. But with the cheers of the crowd as we came to the large stands, he seemed to realize that this was his day and he went along at the head, proudly arching his neck and acting his part as a well trained horse of the Commander in Chief should. I made my bows with all the grace I could command and managed to get through without mishap. I dismounted,” he added, “with a keen sense of relief.”

Mr. Hughes was being modest. The Washington Post reported that he had aroused the wildest enthusiasm. According to the New York Tribune “a continuous roar of applause … greeted him from one end of the avenue to the other.”

When Hughes stepped down as governor, Taft gratefully appointed him to the Supreme Court.

Once the ex-President was off harrowing the great carnivores in Africa, Taft, though he showed almost pathetic eagerness to carry out T.R.’s instructions, found himself straying from the straight path of progressivism. No continuous roar of applause greeted his administration.

President Taft was a corpulent humane slowmoving man with a sharp streak of intellectual honesty that made public life far from easy for him. He had the judicial temperament to a high degree and seems to have been forced to undergo the hazards of politics largely because he was a Cincinnati Taft and because his wife and the family expected it of him.

Politics with the Tafts was an avocation. The President’s father, Alphonso Taft, moved out to Ohio from Vermont in the early eighteen hundreds to grow up with the country. He served as Secretary of War and then as Attorney General in Grant’s cabinet and, in his declining years, as American minister to the courts of Vienna and St Petersburg. He left the family not only rich but leaders of a group of literate and cultured people who early made Cincinnati one of the intellectual centers of the middlewest. President Taft’s older halfbrother Charles started schools and endowed his home city with an art gallery and a symphony orchestra. The Tafts were the embodiment of public spirit.

Like his father, William Howard Taft graduated at Yale. He studied law in the lawschool his halfbrother founded in Cincinnati. He was early elected to an Ohio judgeship which he reluctantly gave up for the post of Solicitor General in Benjamin Harrison’s administration. Then for six years he served as a federal circuit judge. The class war was heightening. Some of his decisions were considered antilabor but few of them pleased the vested interests.

In 1900 McKinley appointed Taft to the Philippine commission. Serving as their first civil governor he showed real friendship and understanding in his dealings with the various inhabitants of that barely pacified archipelago. He made himself such a reputation in Manila that Theodore Roosevelt brought him home for the job of Secretary of War. He gave a good account of himself in Washington.

As President, Taft, innately a conservative man, lost touch with the ebullient progressives in the east and with the western radicals accustomed to the strong drink of T.R.’s or La Follette’s public speeches. The resurgent Democrats took over the House of Representatives in 1910 and filled the welkin with their outcry against entrenched privilege and the Payne-Aldrich tariff. With his soupstrainer mustache and his elephantine girth Taft was the very picture of the Mr. Moneybags of the radical cartoonists. “Politics makes me sick” was a phrase that appeared oftener and oftener in his private letters.

Taft was not a popular president. T.R.’s campaign managers had made so much of his totem, the teddybear, that they enshrined it in the hearts of generations of American children. All the Republican committees could dream up for Taft was the drowsy opossum. Billy Possum never caught on. Taft left the White House after one term, a much misunderstood man.

The American public was not kept in ignorance of their hero’s prowess during T.R.’s months in the African wilderness. A steady stream of articles poured out from his tent on safari. Photographs filled magazines and Sunday supplements. Museums were embarrassed by the great shipments of pelts and skeletons and skulls representing every conceivable species that piled up in their storerooms.

On the way out and on the way home T.R. tracked as many lions in the courts of Europe as he did on the Kapiti plains. On his way home he was appointed by President Taft, anxious to apply healing unction because he knew T.R. was mad at him for falling out with T.R.’s friends, the Pinchots, to serve as his personal representative at the funeral of King Edward VII.

T.R. never tired telling stories about what was to prove to be the last assemblage of the crowned heads of Europe in their antique glory. He bubbled over with delight at hobnobbing with the heads of states. At tea at the American Embassy before going to the reception and banquet which preceded the interment he horrified Whitelaw Reid, who was grooming him for appearance at the court of St. James, by chuckling delightedly in his shrill voice: “I’m going to a wake tonight; I’m going to a wake.”

It was said that it was only Mrs. Roosevelt’s firm no that prevented him from wearing his Rough Rider uniform.

Appearing in plain evening dress amid all the gold lace and orders and decorations at Buckingham Palace he found himself the target of every eye. George V played host. The monarchs clustered around the bear-hunter and lionslayer who represented to them everything that was most amusingly mad and wild west about the American myth.

Completely at his ease T.R. lectured them roundly. “I would never have taken that step at all if I had been in your place, Your Majesty,” he’d say clenching his fist; or, “That’s just what I would have done,” clapping the back of his right hand into the hollow of his left: “Quite right.”

“Before the first course was over, we had all forgotten the real cause of our presence in London,” was how T.R. told the story when he got home. “I have never attended a more hilarious banquet in my life. I never saw quite so many knights. I had them on every side. They ran one or two false ones on me, and each had some special story of sorrow to pour into my ear.”

During a visit to Germany a short time before, T.R. had found the Kaiser cordial and excessively voluble. The cordiality was mutual. “I do admire him,” T.R. said of Wilhelm II, “much as I would a grizzly bear.”

At Buckingham Palace T.R. described the Kaiser as acting the drillmaster to the lesser monarchs. All evening he tried to monopolize the Rough Rider’s conversation. When the parvenu Czar of Bulgaria started pouring the tale of his troubles in the Balkans in Roosevelt’s ear, Kaiser Wilhelm dragged him away: “That man is unworthy of your acquaintance,” he said in a loud voice.

“Kings and such like are just as funny as politicians,” T.R. would explode into laughter when he told the story back home.

Try as he would to settle down to writing for the Outlook, and leading the life of an elder statesman at Sagamore Hill, he couldn’t help slipping back into politics. Out of sheer exuberance, when he got home, he helped ruin his old friend Taft’s political career, snatched the Progressive movement away from La Follette, who as senator was attaining a position of national leadership, and acted, as he liked to boast with a toothy grin and a flash of his glasses “like a bull in a china shop.”

Chapter 2 THE SCHOOLMASTER IN POLITICS

THE result of T.R.’s Bull Moose rampage was a split in the Republican Party that assured the Democrats a return to power if only they could find a leader who would appeal to both town and country wings of the party. New Jersey, the state which for years had furnished a convenient mailing address for every unsavory trust in the Union, where politics was considered safely under the thumb of the railroads and the utilities, had seethed with reform for a decade. The New Jersey reformers found themselves the leader the Democratic Party needed in a smoothvoiced lecturer on history and government who had since 1902 been president of Princeton.

Although Woodrow Wilson was two years older than T.R. and six years older than Hughes, politically he was a newcomer. Like Hughes he entered politics fullblown from another profession. He was fiftythree when he resigned as president of Princeton to run for governor of New Jersey on the Democratic ticket. Almost immediately he developed into one of the most skillful political operators in the history of American statecraft. It began to be said of him that his whole career had been a preparation for the White House.

Like Hughes, Woodrow Wilson was a clergyman’s son. He was a Presbyterian by birth and rearing. His grandfather Wilson was a Scotch-Irish printer and journalist who, emigrating to Philadelphia as a very young man, worked on Duane’s famous old Aurora and then moved to the Ohio country to edit a newspaper of his own in Steubenville. There he raised numerous progeny.

The youngest son, Joseph Ruggles Wilson, turned out to be a scholarly boy with a gift for public speaking who took his degree in divinity at Princeton. He was teaching at the Steubenville Academy when he met the daughter of Thomas Woodrow, a Scottish minister who had made a name but no money for himself preaching in Carlisle in the North of England and had been forced to move to America in search of a living that would support his family. The Woodrows came of a long line of Presbyterian divines. Woodrow Wilson liked to speak of his forebears as troublesome Scotchmen, hardbitten and opinionated, calvinists and covenanters.

Born in the year of Buchanan’s election at the manse in Staunton, Virginia, Woodrow Wilson was still a babe in arms when his handsome preacher father, who was becoming famous for the high style and fine delivery of his sermons, was called to Augusta, Georgia, to become pastor of the First Presbyterian Church there.

Though the father and mother were both Ohiobred they absorbed the politics of their parishioners. Dr. Wilson became an ardent secessionist. The assembly that split the denomination in two was held in his church and he became permanent “stated” clerk of the Southern Presbyterians.

For the first ten years of his life Tommy as he was known was the only boy in a family of girls. His parents destined him for the ministry as a matter of course. It was a trial to Dr. Wilson, who was a passionate reader of books with a palate for the modulations of English style, that his son learned to read slowly and that he had difficulty in mastering the Shorter Catechism. Dr. Wilson had a sharp Scottish tongue. His sarcasms lashed the dull student. “Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth.” At the same time tales were handed down in the family of most unministerial frolickings when Dr. Wilson roughhoused with the children in the garden of the manse.

When Tommy was fourteen the father was called to a chair at the theological seminary in Columbia, South Carolina’s inland capital which Sherman had so thoroughly laid waste during the war. Dr. Wilson had a salary from his teaching and another from one of the principal pulpits in the town, and Mrs. Wilson had come into a legacy from a brother in the North who had died without issue. Amid the general impoverishment of the ruined South, all this meant opulence unusual for a minister’s family. They built themselves a brick house. The Lord was indeed providing. The children grew up steeped in righteousness and drilled in admiration of good English prose.

In the summer of 1873 Thomas Woodrow Wilson, with two other boys from the Sunday school, (according to the church register) “after free confession during which they severally exhibited evidences of the work of grace, were unanimously admitted to the membership of this church.”

Woodrow Wilson never wavered in his strict adherence to the Presbyterian creed. He prayed on his knees. He wore out Bibles reading them. “The Bible,” he said, “reveals every man to himself as a distinct moral agent responsible not to men, not even to those men he has put over him in authority, but responsible through his own conscience to his Lord and Maker.” So far as religion was concerned, he told Cary Grayson years later, argument was adjourned.

He loved his mother but so long as Dr. Wilson lived his father ruled his life. A warm, admiring, almost reverent affection grew up between father and son. Even so Tommy Wilson’s ambitions strayed early from the ministry. As a boy he’d read deep of Cooper’s and Captain Marryat’s seastories. Before he ever saw the sea he had drawn plans of frigates and entertained the phantasy of being admiral of an American fleet pursuing pirates in the Pacific. When his father accepted a call to a large church in Wilmington, North Carolina, young Wilson had his first sight of real seagoing ships. The story is told that it was only his mother’s supplications that kept him from shipping before the mast.

Meanwhile a new daydream intervened. His father subscribed to the Edinburgh Review and to Godkin’s Nation. Tommy began to read of debates in the British House of Commons. These were the years of the great liberals. England was in a period of fervid parliamentary activity. The slender shy awkward lad—“an old young man” the Wilsons’ colored butler called him — began to throw all his youthful passion into imagining himself a Cobden or a John Bright thundering from the opposition benches under the hallowed rafters of St. Stephen’s. Instead of drawings of fullrigged ships a portrait of Gladstone appeared above his desk.

When at sixteen he was sent to Davidson College near Charlotte he began to show an aptitude for hard work. He made good marks in his courses. He taught himself shorthand. In deportment his score was perfect.

He worked so hard at Davidson that he began to show signs of acute dyspepsia — all his life his nerves were too taut for good digestion—; he was ordered home to Wilmington for a rest and began to tutor in Latin and Greek for the entrance examinations at Princeton.

At nineteen he entered Princeton as a freshman carrying a letter from his father, which he was too shy to present, to that notable Scottish divine the Reverend James McCosh, who was president. Dr. McCosh was a scholar and a speaker famous for force and wit. In the Darwinian controversy then raging through schools and pulpits he had the courage (as did Tommy’s scholarly uncle Professor James Woodrow who fell into hot water with the Presbytery because of it) to take the side of science: “If it is found to be true,” Dr. McCosh affirmed, “… it will be found that it is consistent with religion.”

At Princeton young Wilson paid enough attention to the curriculum to get through with moderate honors, but his real interest was in reading and debating about politics, statesmanship and constitutional law. He devoured the witty accounts of the debates in British parliament he found in the library in bound volumes of The Gentleman’s Magazine.

Debating was popular with undergraduates at Princeton in those days. He joined the Whig Society, which was still operating under a constitution devised by James Madison, and became its star debater. Not content with that he founded a new society: The Liberal Debating Club, modelled on the British parliament, for which he himself furnished the constitution. He showed a lively interest in campus affairs generally, served as president of the Athletic Committee and of the Baseball Association and as managing editor of the Princetonian.

He found himself associating with a generation of young Americans who were beginning to think that they should emulate the English gentry and take politics away from the wardheelers. Among a gang of friends, mostly members of an eating club known as the Alligators, who used to meet in eachother’s rooms in Witherspoon Hall, there appeared a comic tag line to break off a discussion: “When I meet you in the Senate I’ll argue that out with you.”

Tommy Wilson went so far as to put his name on some visiting cards as “Senator from Virginia.”

With the Utica boy who later went to Congress from upstate New York he entered into one of those youthful compacts that do so much to mould men’s lives.

“I remember forming with Charlie Talcott, a class-mate and very intimate friend of mine,” he wrote in reminiscent vein, “a solemn covenant that we would school all our powers and passions for the work of establishing the principles we held in common; that we would acquire knowledge that we might have power; and that we would drill ourselves in all the arts of persuasion but especially in oratory (for he was a born orator if ever man was) that we might have facility in leading others into our ways of thinking and enlisting them in our purposes.”

He saw himself as part of the procession of the great parliamentarians. He read Macaulay with rapture; he tried to model his style on Bagehot’s.

Greene’s Short History of the English People delighted him so that he planned to follow it up with a History of the American People. He decided to be a writer as well as a talker. He wrote his father excitedly that he had discovered he had a mind. In vacationtime down at Wilmington, on days when the church was empty, he practiced oratory by reciting Burke’s speeches from his father’s pulpit.

He was obsessed with the beauties of the British parliamentary system. By his senior year he had produced an article on “Cabinet Government in the United States” which was printed in The International Review, then the foremost American journal of theoretical politics. He used the same theme for his commencement address when he graduated.

He carried some of the aura of that publication along with him when he went to the University of Virginia to study law. “The profession I chose was politics; the profession I entered was the law. I chose the one because I thought it would lead to the other,” he explained in a letter to his fiancée a few years later.

He hated the law but he plugged away at it. He had done well at Princeton, but at Charlottesville he was almost fulsomely admired. He had a good clear tenor voice; he sang in the glee club and in the chapel choir. He was described as having “rare charm and courtesy of manner” and as carrying himself “with an air of quiet distinction.” He was developing a sense of humor. He was in demand whenever a graceful speech was called for at some public function.

He was filling long arduous days with the law, with debating, with reading, with warm college friendships and with the unsuccessful courtship of one of his Woodrow cousins who attended the Female Seminary at Staunton, when he broke down again with what was still described as dyspepsia. Again the doctor told him to go home and take it easy. For a year and a half he let his mother nurse him back to health while he read law in the comfortable Wilmington manse.

The whole family connection had gone to work to find the most suitable place for Tommy Wilson to practice when he was strong enough to take his bar examination. He settled on Atlanta in partnership with a friend from the university. At twentyfive he was a seriousappearing young man with a mustache and sideburns. He had dropped the childish Tommy and signed himself Woodrow Wilson.

Woodrow Wilson was not cut out for the life of an attorney at law. He wanted a political career but, raised as he was among women, in the protective cocoon of his father’s affection, he didn’t have the brash energy needed to break into politics at the local level as Theodore Roosevelt did in New York. He was too shy and aloof and selfcentered for the rough moneygrubbing Atlanta of reconstruction days. He gave up his law-firm, which had hardly picked up a client, and went to Johns Hopkins, then in its first heyday as a great graduate school, to study for a Ph.D. The life there just suited him. At Hopkins he wrote his first and best book: Congressional Government.

Meanwhile he had fallen in love again. On a trip to Georgia to attend to some lawbusiness for his mother, he met Ellen Axson, the daughter of the pastor of Rome’s First Presbyterian Church, a quiet earnest girl of great charm. Her friends spoke of her “flowerlike” freshness. Their upbringings were so similar they might have been brother and sister.

The Axsons like the Woodrows came of a line of Scottish clergymen. Her grandfather had been known to his Presbyterian parishioners in Savannah as “the great Axson.”

Ellen Axson had been planning herself a career as a painter. She convinced Wilson that he must finish his work at Hopkins and that she must have a year studying at the Art Students League in New York before their marriage. Both families seem to have been overjoyed by the engagement. Ellen Axson’s brother Stockton became one of Woodrow’s most intimate friends.

It was as if they had known each other all their lives. They wrote almost daily. “You are the only person in the world,” he told her, “except the dear ones at home — with whom I do not have to act a part; to whom I do not have to deal out confidences cautiously …”

As usual he was working himself too hard: “One must dig in books,” he wrote from Baltimore, “he can’t find history anywhere else: he can’t understand present experience unless he knows the experience bound up between the senseless covers of ponderous books or recorded on the faded faces of old manuscripts … so that he must focus all his senses in his spectacles, and strive to forget he was not meant to sit all day in a hard chair at a square table … It’s quite as necessary for a Christian to work as for him to be glad.”

He was critical, in his letters, of the dryasdust quality of American scholarship even in the brilliant assemblage Professor Adams had collected in his Historical Seminary: “Style is not much studied here; ideas are supposed to be everything — their vehicle comparatively nothing. But you and I know that there can be no greater mistake … and style shall be, as under my father’s guidance, it has been, one of my chief studies. A writer must be artful as well as strong.”

From earliest boyhood his father had been drilling him in the niceties of English prose. Years later in an address to a teachers’ association he told of his father’s saying to him: “When you frame a sentence don’t do it as if you were loading a shotgun but as if you were loading a rifle. Don’t fire in such a way and with such a load that you will hit a lot of things in the neighborhood besides; but shoot with a single bullet and hit that one thing alone.”

From the prolix academic style of the period Woodrow Wilson did manage to develop a way of writing suited to the purpose for which it was intended; but his real gift was for public speaking. He seized every opportunity to address an audience. Primarily he was training himself for a career as a college lecturer, afterwards, who knew? “Oratory,” he wrote Ellen Axson, “is not declamation, not swelling tones and an excited delivery, but the art of persuasion, the art of putting things so as to appeal irresistibly to an audience.”

He described to her his joy in speaking “as an intellectual exercise. That is the secret,” he added, “undoubtedly of what little success I’ve had as a speaker. I enjoy it because it sets my mind — all my faculties aglow: and I suppose that this very excitement gives my manner an appearance of confidence and self-command which arrests the attention. However that may be I feel a sort of transformation — and it’s hard to go to sleep afterwards.”

Woodrow Wilson and Ellen Axson, as wellmatched a pair as ever said “I will,” were married in a Presbyterian manse in Savannah, Georgia, in June of 1885.

The following September Wilson settled down to academic life at Bryn Mawr as Associate Professor of History with a salary of fifteen hundred dollars a year. The young couple’s board and lodging would cost them twenty dollars a week. It was slim pickings.

Particularly after the first baby appeared it was essential for him to find means of increasing his income. The great work he was planning on the philosophy of politics had to be put aside for a textbook on government. He was beginning to manage to get articles into The Atlantic Monthly. It seemed as if he would have indefinitely to postpone his political ambitions. In the fall of 1886 he wrote his friend Charlie Talcott, who had gone home to upstate New York to practice law and was already city counsel in Utica, explaining why he wasn’t getting ahead with their project to reform the government of the United States: “After my winter had been hurried away by the unaccustomed, therefore arduous duties of the classroom, my summer vacation was swallowed up by work on a textbook … But Mrs. Wilson could tell you how, meanwhile, my thoughts have constantly reverted to our old compact.

“I believe, Charlie,” he wrote, “that if a band of young fellows (say ten or twelve) could get together (and by getting together I mean getting their opinions together, whether by circular correspondence or other means) upon a common platform, and, having gotten together good solid planks upon the questions of the immediate future, should raise a united voice in such periodicals, great or small, as they could gain access to, gradually working their way out, by means of a real understanding of the questions they handled, to a position of prominence and real authority in the public prints and so in the public mind, a long step would have been taken towards the formation of such new political sentiment, and party, as the country stands in such pressing need of, — and I am ambitious that we should have a hand in forming such a group.”

The “arduous duties of the classroom” occupied Woodrow Wilson’s life for the next twenty years. His academic career was notably successful The years at Bryn Mawr were the dullest. No one could have been less enthusiastic over the education of earnest young women. It was lecturing rather than teaching that interested him. He complained that if he got off a joke in class his girls copied it solemnly down in their notes.

Externally he was himself a solemn young man. “I am quite used to being taken for a minister,” he admitted to a friend. When his classmate Robert Bridges, who was making himself an editorial career in New York, arranged for him to give a talk at an alumni gathering there, he produced such an austere harangue on the duty of the colleges to prepare men for government service that people kept slipping out and only returned to their seats to roar with laughter when Chauncey Depew, who followed him, poked fun at the lanternjawed young professor with the eyeglasses.

He was happier at Wesleyan. Middletown was one of the loveliest places in Connecticut. He found New Englanders congenial. Students crowded into his classes. He established a debating club on the English model which he named The House of Commons. The club managers stayed in office only so long as they could secure votes of confidence from the floor.

Already he was the popular professor. He led a movement to break up the fraternity cliques and get men accepted, in athletics at least, on their merits alone. Though not athletic himself he was an enthusiast for college sports. An alumnus told one of his biographers of seeing Professor Wilson dash out from the bleachers in slicker and rubberboots at an edgy moment in a hardfought football game played in the rain against a heavier team from Lehigh to lead the Wesleyan cheering with his umbrella.

Among the colleges his reputation was building. Johns Hopkins invited him to give a course of lectures. He was elected president of the Alumni Association, honored by Phi Beta Kappa, given an honorary degree, which was to be the first of many, by Wake Forest in North Carolina. James Bryce, whom he’d met at a Baltimore lecture, commended his Congressional Government in a new edition of The American Commonwealth. By 1889 his friends of the class of ’79 didn’t find it too hard to put through this outstanding alumnus’ appointment to a professorship at Princeton.

At Princeton he passed pleasant years. The pay was far from ample but Ellen Wilson was an excellent manager. She set a hospitable table. She made most of her own dresses and the dresses for their three little girls and cut out paper dolls for them to save buying toys. She worked the flower garden, did embroidery, drilled the girls in the Shorter Catechism and even found time for a little painting. Hers were the crayon enlargements of portraits of Burke, Webster, Gladstone, Bagehot and of Professor Wilson’s own father that hung in the study. She acted as occasional secretary and helped him read proof. The professor was not a handy man around the house but with grim determination he tended the coal furnace in winter. He once was seen mowing the lawn.

His students loved his lectures. Year after year he was voted the most popular professor. He was much in demand as a public speaker. His articles were published in the leading magazines. He reviewed books for The Atlantic Monthly.

At home he was the center of a group of admiring females. The Wilsons’ house was always full of relatives who joined the family as a matter of course in the oldtime southern way. There were Ellen Wilson’s brothers and sisters and nieces, Woodrow and Wilson cousins, distantly related students they were helping through college.

Meals were on the dot, breakfast at eight, lunch at one. The professor led the conversation from the head of the table. Only his wife dared contradict him. “Oh Woodrow, you don’t mean that,” she would sometimes say. “Madam I was endeavoring to think that I meant that,” he would answer with a sarcastic smile, “until I was corrected.”

Though he made warm friends and fervent supporters among the faculty he remained a shy standoffish man. He was reluctant to meet strangers.

It was only at home that he relaxed from the cold intellectual stance. At home he made puns, recited limericks, told dialect stories. Evenings he read aloud from Dickens or Macaulay or Matthew Arnold. He enjoyed charades and sometimes said he wished he’d been an actor. To amuse the little girls he’d pull the loose skin of his long face into odd shapes, or act out little skits. The town drunk or the affected Englishman were favorites with the children. He is even described as having been seen dancing a jig with his silk hat cocked over his eyes. He rode to his classes on a bicycle.

His health was uneven. There was a consistent history of breakdowns from overwork. When in the spring of 1896 he finished his George Washington he was so crippled by “writers’ cramp” that he had to start learning to write with his left hand. The doctors advised a change. Since there wasn’t money enough to take the whole family Ellen Wilson urged him to leave for a solitary English holiday. He sailed on one of the economical Anchor Line boats to Glasgow.

Princeton’s foremost political theorist, who remained a Democrat though he deplored the populist heresies that the Boy Orator of the Platte was arousing in the cornbelt, spent the summer of Bryan’s freesilver campaign bicycling through Scotland and England.

The sight of the Gothic colleges at Oxford sent him into ecstasy. He read Wordsworth at Tintern Abbey. After an afternoon with the Rembrandts and the Reynoldses and the Turners at the National Gallery he wrote his dear Ellen that he felt quite guilty looking at them without her.

He picked up travelling acquaintances. On the Ethiopia going over he became so cosy with a South Carolina lawyer and his wife that they chummed up for the whole trip. He unbosomed himself of his ambitions to them. They parted with the halfhumorous understanding that when he was President he’d make Mr. Woods a federal judge. Years later he fulfilled this pledge to the letter.

Around the turn of the century higher education in America was in the throes of one of its periodical soulsearchings. Hadley at Yale and Eliot at Harvard were much in the news. The Princeton trustees, reinforced by ex-President Grover Cleveland and several other prominent alumni who had chosen the pleasant village for their residence, were getting tired of having their college known as a rural resort for wealthy young loafers. In the fall of 1896 Professor Wilson, fresh from his visit to Oxford, at the ceremonies incidental to the formal changing of the name of The College of New Jersey to Princeton University, called for a sound rigorous classical education to train up young men in conservative principles for the service of the state. The speech made an impression. When Dr. Patton resigned as president in 1902 Professor Wilson found himself elected by unanimous vote of the trustees to serve in his stead.

That was the end of a plan he had been forming to take sabbatical leave and to give his girls the advantages of travel in Europe while he devoted himself to his project for a philosophy of politics which would be the Novum Organum of nineteenthcentury liberalism.

His inauguration was a great occasion. Ex-President Grover Cleveland and Governor Murphy of New Jersey led the academic procession. Friends remarked on Woodrow Wilson’s slim erect keenfaced appearance under the mortarboard. Henry van Dyke the poet preacher, Booker T. Washington, Hadley of Yale, Lowell of Harvard, Butler of Columbia added their varicolored hoods to the train. The participants were astonished by the size of J. Pierpont Morgan’s nose. There was Mark Twain whitemaned in his invariable linen suit, and William Dean Howells. Plughatted Colonel Harvey and Walter Hines Page followed in the rear as the faithful publishers of the professor’s books.

The new president’s inaugural speech was received with acclaim. Only Grover Cleveland is said to have muttered under his mustache: “Sounds good. I wonder what it means.”

Dr. Joseph Wilson, bowed down by the years, had taken to his bed for his last illness, but a visitor downstairs told of hearing his singing, “Crown him with many crowns,” at the top of his voice. He said it was the best day of his life. He lined up his three little granddaughters at the foot of his bed and told them never to forget what he was going to tell them: their father was the greatest man he had ever known.

Woodrow Wilson was fortysix years old when he moved from the cosy stucco house in the fashionable halftimbered style which he and his wife had built for themselves on Library Place into the grandeurs of Prospect, the official residence.

As president of Princeton he was a talkedabout and writtenabout man. He began a drive for funds. He hired fifty new tutors to superintend the students’ studies according to the preceptorial system he had admired at Oxford and Cambridge. He made plans to abolish the snobbish eating clubs which took the place of the forbidden fraternities and to divide the university into colleges in the English manner, where students and tutors would eat their meals together. He tightened up the curriculum. Sons of wealthy alumni found themselves flunking out.

“He’s spoiling the best country club in America,” groaned the old grads, but for a while they went along, even in the face of a drop in enrollment. Led by Grover Cleveland and M. Taylor Pine, wealthy Princetonians began to make really sizeable contributions. Ralph Adams Cram was designing the new quadrangles in the Tudor Gothic style dear to the hearts of the anglophiles.

These were the years of Theodore Roosevelt’s New Nationalism. The president of Princeton, who was described as fighting the entrenched snobbery of privileged wealth in the colleges, was greatly in demand as a speaker. His campaign for equality of opportunity for education for the service of the commonweal was closer to the theories of the Republican progressives than to what was considered in the East as the rabblerousing appeal of William Jennings Bryan. But even to him the word democracy was taking on an egalitarian tone. Professor Wilson who had previously been a Hamilton man began to interest himself in the ideas of Thomas Jefferson.

In the winter of 1905 his health broke down again. A hernia operation followed by phlebitis forced him to take five weeks off in Florida to recuperate.

His reforms at Princeton had at first clear sailing, but now opposition was raising its head. He ran up against another Presbyterian, equally enthusiastic for a great future for Princeton, but with somewhat different ideas as to how to bring it about.

Andrew West was dean of the Graduate School. At first he and Wilson agreed as to how this school, which they were both promoting, should fit into the new scheme. Indeed Dean West was induced to refuse the presidency of Massachusetts Tech in order to assist with the good work.

Differences of opinion as to details turned into a personal contest of wills. The rancors of the presbytery began to work in both men. Once Woodrow Wilson had formed an opinion it became to his mind the cause of righteousness. If you disagreed you were either a knave or a fool. He decided Dean West was both.

Political omens “barely the size of a man’s hand” had begun to appear in the Democratic sky. Talk was beginning of Woodrow Wilson as a standardbearer to whom conservative Democrats might rally. “Don’t you pity me,” he wrote Robert Bridges, then editor of Scribner’s Magazine, “With all my old political longings … set throbbing again.”

After a speech on Americanism in Charleston, South Carolina, the influential News & Courier spoke of him as the most promising southern candidate for the presidency. Introducing him to a dinner held in his honor at the Lotos Club in New York, George Harvey, the hardbitten Vermont publicist and political wirepuller who had been entrusted by the Morgans with the reorganization of Harpers’ publishing firm and who personally edited Harper’s Weekly, formally nominated him to be the Democratic candidate in the next election:

“As one of a considerable number of Democrats who have become tired of voting Republican tickets, it is with a sense of rapture that I contemplate even the remotest possibility of casting a ballot for the President of Princeton University to become President of the United States.”

Wilson quoted Tennyson in reply and declared he had learned more about statesmanship from the poets than from the politicians. He affected to make light of Harvey’s suggestion, but his political longings were indeed set throbbing. He began to see his battle for righteousness at Princeton as the preliminary skirmish in a greater campaign to reform the nation.

His mail increased. He travelled all over the country to speak. He drove himself hard. There was research to do for his History of the American People. He was handling an enormous amount of paperwork with only the help of his wife and an occasional student. He did all his own typing. It would have been a strenuous enough life if his plans for Princeton had gone unopposed. He could never reconcile himself to opposition.

One morning in the spring of 1907 he woke up to find that he couldn’t see out of his left eye. It was only then that he admitted to his wife that he had been suffering severe pain which he described as neuritis in his left shoulder and leg. His friend Professor Hibben hurried him to Philadelphia to consult a specialist. The specialist reported that he had a severe case of hardening of the arteries and must immediately give up all activity and spend the rest of his life as an invalid.

Outwardly Woodrow Wilson bowed to the verdict. He cancelled his speaking engagements and secured leave of absence from the university. Meanwhile he shopped around for other physicians who might see his predicament in a less drastic light. A doctor was found who considered that the symptoms were not so alarming after all and promised him complete recovery after a three months rest.

Here was an opportunity to take Ellen and the girls on an outing to England. Sitting in a chair Woodrow Wilson packed the family trunks, as he always did. Ellen Wilson brought along her paints. They rented a cottage (from a Mrs. Wordsworth who had married some descendant of Wilson’s favorite poet) in the English lake country for the summer, and were completely happy there.

Wilson had the knack of resting when he had to. He could sleep for hours on end. He took great pleasure in the sluggish green Cumberland countryside. He found entertaining friends, sat on a bench outside the local pub chatting with the northcountry characters, took walks between showers and read Browning and the lake poets to the girls or sang college songs after supper. Reverently he attended Sunday services in the little stone church where Wordsworth lay buried. In the fall he returned to Princeton in roaring health and ready for battle.

Though he had started his campaign with the trustees on his side, now the board, like the faculty, had split into warring camps. The university seethed with backbiting. Wilson showed no ability to meet disagreement halfway. Whoever wasn’t for him must be against him. Associations were disrupted. There were charges and countercharges. Old friends crossed the street to avoid speaking.

Even his dear Jack Hibben, whom he had made acting president during his absence, turned against him at a faculty meeting when he brought his “quad plan,” which would abolish the eating clubs, to a vote. Wilson’s propositions were defeated. “Nobody can make a gentleman associate with a mucker,” said a prominent alumnus.

For the first time in his life Woodrow Wilson failed to get his own way. He wrote a friend, “I have got nothing out of the transaction but complete defeat and mortification.”

After his illness the university furnished him an assistant to take some of the routine work off his hands. President Wilson was away from Princeton a great deal now, lecturing about the country, conferring with publisher friends and political sponsors in New York. He took winter holidays in Bermuda where a charming American hostess named Mrs. Peck collected prominent and amusing people at little dinners for his entertainment. Academic life began to pall. He was being taken up by the great world.

The conflict at Princeton had settled down to a tug of war between the advocates of a new graduate school under Dean West and Wilson supporters who wanted first to go ahead with his undergraduate quadrangles. There was not enough money in sight for both projects. Then an old grad named Wyman suddenly died, in May 1910, leaving several million dollars in his will for a new graduate school. So that there would be no mistake as to his intentions he appointed the dean as executor. This meant victory for Andrew J. West.

The eating clubs were to remain as exclusive as ever. Trustees began to speak hopefully of Wilson’s coming resignation.

President Wilson wasn’t as afflicted by his defeat as his friends had expected. He had lost interest in Princeton when he found he couldn’t have his own way there. His ambitions had settled on a higher goal. He was planning to become President of the United States, nothing less.

When friends suggested that he didn’t know enough about practical politics he pointed to his rows with the Princeton faculty. “Professional politicians,” his daughter Eleanor quoted him as saying, “have little to teach me; they are amateurs compared with some I’ve dealt with in the Princeton fights.”

Colonel Harvey, looking forward with relish to the role of presidentmaker, noted Woodrow Wilson’s disenchantment with academic life. He was planning to run him for governor of New Jersey as a preliminary to the Democratic Party’s nomination for the presidential race in 1912.

George Harvey knew his way around in New Jersey politics. Having started life clerking in a Vermont country store he’d served his apprenticeship in journalism with the Springfield Republican and covered the Garden State for the New York World. A sharp pen, an acid tongue with a touch of the old crackerbarrel style combined with a convivial streak to carry him far in New Jersey. He was somewhat of a dandy. One governor, who wanted to make his administration a fashionable success, made young Harvey a colonel on his staff to handle the entertaining at the summer mansion at Sea Girt and provided him with a sinecure in the Department of Banking and Insurance. For a while he edited the Newark Journal and at the age of twentyeight was picked by Pulitzer to be managing editor of the New York World.

From the time when at fifteen he managed to attend the Democratic state convention in Vermont he kept a shrewd eye on the political pot. He backed Grover Cleveland in 1892 and made such a killing in Wall Street that he was able to buy The North American Review.

Dabbling in New Jersey banks and streetcar companies along with his wealthy and politicalminded friends William C. Whitney and Thomas Fortune Ryan he became associated with another convivial gentleman who had started life clerking in a store, Senator James Smith, Jr.

Senator Smith was undisputed boss of Democratic state politics in New Jersey. He was as popular with the poor and downtrodden as he was with the public utilities. He was a tall and handsome man. His pink and white face under the silk hat was described as being as innocent as a child’s. A lavish entertainer, a free spender of his own and other people’s money, he was known as a prominent Catholic layman. It was said of him that not a day passed that he didn’t attend a funeral.

Muckraking was in the air. Reform was sweeping out of the West. Newspapers were saying hard things of a swarm of lobbyists known as the Black Horse Cavalry that infested the statehouse at Trenton. Stirred out of their torpor by echoes of Teddy Roosevelt’s hue and cry against the control of politicians by malefactors of great wealth, the voters of New Jersey were beginning to yearn for righteousness.

Senator Smith had three boys at Princeton. He had met President Wilson. He had heard him spoken of as being opposed to federal regulation of corporations, to woman’s suffrage, to the closed shop and to other bugaboos of men of means. The professor had even written kindly of political machines. Colonel Harvey invited Smith to a magnificent lunch at the private dining room he maintained at Delmonico’s for the benefit of the Harper publishing firm. There he managed to convince him that Woodrow Wilson as governor would head off the radicals and dress the state up with a few harmless reforms.

The senator did take the precaution of sending an underling to ask “the Presbyterian priest” as he called Wilson, whether if he were elected he would set about “fighting and breaking down the existing Democratic organization.” President Wilson looked the man straight in the face with the grayeyed ingenuousness which was his greatest asset and said certainly not, “the last thing I should think of would be building up a machine of my own.”

Boss Smith was convinced but Wilson continued to play hard to get. He was spending the summer with his family in a boarding house at a painters’ colony at Old Lyme that Ellen Wilson loved. At various conferences with the politicians he made no commitments whatsoever. Meanwhile he was asking the advice of such college friends as had stuck to him through the battles at Princeton and of his old cronies who had become opinionmoulders through editorial positions in New York magazines.

Ellen Wilson’s counsel was sought at every step. The Wilsons went through weeks of agonizing indecision. There wasn’t any question that Woodrow intended to be President. The question was would the governorship of New Jersey be the best steppingstone. Finally Ellen Wilson, that smart little lady who, on top of her other virtues, was developing a discriminating political sense, told him to go in and win.

So it came about that the day before the Democratic convention met in the Trenton opera house on September 15, 1910, Colonel Harvey and Senator Smith went to work, operating from the boss’s suite at the adjoining hotel, to railroad the nomination through. They were up all night arguing with the delegates. They had a rough time of it. All the liberal and progressive elements were opposed to the bosses’ candidate. Wilson was unknown to the political stalwarts of his own Mercer County. In important elections he hadn’t even voted. When his name was placed in nomination there were cries of “accredit him to Virginia, he’s not a Jerseyman.”

Boss Smith said later it was one of the toughest nights in his career. With the help of the machine bosses of Hudson County he finally put Wilson’s name before the convention and bludgeoned the delegates into voting for it.

William Inglis, Harvey’s handyman, to whom the colonel entrusted the mission of fetching Professor Wilson over to Trenton, told of the embarrassment of waiting with the candidate at the Trenton House. Inglis had been instructed on no account to let his charge be seen until the nomination was a certainty.

He ushered him into a stuffy little Victorian parlor reserved for ladies waiting for their escorts and closed the door. There they sat for two hours. Inglis was on tenterhooks but the professor was cool and seemed entirely relaxed. Inglis kept offering him a drink or a cup of tea. No he didn’t care for any. It wasn’t till after five in the afternoon that a delegate from Atlantic County rushed in, white as a sheet and all out of breath, to announce that the nomination had been made unanimous.

The convention was still in a sullen mood when Professor Wilson appeared on the stage of the opera house. James Kerney of the Trenton Evening Times who had not yet seen the candidate, described him as “… wearing a dark gray business suit with a sack coat, a type which he used almost exclusively. He had a dark felt hat with a narrow brim, with a knitted golf jacket under the coat. It was a bangup Democratic outfit.

“Wilson looked the part of one of the romantic figures of American politics as he stood before that convention. He was in the pink of mental and physical condition, fresh from the golf-links, with all the color of the outdoors upon him, and a general appearance of having been battered by life and of having given it somewhat of a battering in return. Behind him was the background of teacher, writer, historian and educator. Here was the beginning of the ‘schoolmaster in politics.’ ”

“As you know,” Wilson told the delegates, “I did not seek this nomination …” Not only had no pledges of any kind been given but none had been proposed or desired. The future was not for parties playing politics but for measures “conceived in the largest spirit, pushed by parties whose leaders were statesmen, not demagogues, who loved not their office but their duty and their opportunity for service.”

It was his manner of speaking more than what he said, his air of cool determination, the flash of the gray eyes behind his noseglasses. Stockton Axson, the professor’s brotherinlaw listening from the wings, saw one wardheeler poke another with his elbow: “God, look at the man’s jaw,” he said. The smalltime lawyers and partyworkers and local officeholders who made up the delegations, sodden and blearyeyed from a night of wrangling, were carried away. “A leader at last. The Big Fellow was right,” men whispered hoarsely in each others’ ears. “Boss Smith knew what he was doing.” They cheered at every pause in Wilson’s short speech of acceptance. “Go on, go on,” they shouted.

Wilson cast his eyes up at the flag above the platform and delivered himself of a carefully prepared peroration: “When I think of the flags our ships carry, the only touch of color about them, the only thing that moves as if it had a settled spirit — in their solid structure — it seems to me I see alternate strips of parchment on which are written the rights of liberty and justice and strips of blood spilled to vindicate these rights, and then — in the corner — a prediction of the blue serene into which every nation may swim which stands for these great things.”

Young Joe Tumulty who had been bitterly opposed to the nomination had wormed his way from the back of the hall and was standing beside the band in front of the speakers’ stand. He used to tell how the men around him had tears streaming down their faces. He himself fell like Saul on the road to Damascus. An old progressive from Atlantic City named John Crandall was trying to fight off the spell. The drum was beating. Men were cheering at the top of their lungs. Finally he started wildly waving his hat and cane. “I’m sixty-five years old and still a damned fool,” he yelled.

Four days later when Kerney went over to Prospect with Smith and James R. Nugent, the conservative city counsel of Newark, to plan the campaign, he noted that the boss seemed awed by the quiet sweep of the green lawns, the flowerbeds, the airy stateliness of the big house. “Jim,” he whispered to Kerney, “can you imagine anybody being damn fool enough to give this up for the heartaches of politics?”

Jim Kerney who was thick with the reform element had been as opposed as Tumulty to Wilson’s nomination. When the professor came out to usher them into his booklined study Smith introduced Kerney as a troublesome progressive editor. Wilson shook hands warmly and said something about having Irish blood himself in his veins. Right away they were all bits of the old sod together.

“The manner in which he grasped every suggestion” as to how to win over the local Mercer County partyleaders “was a revelation,” wrote Kerney admiringly. At the same time “he had his own notions about things … He did not favor the handshaking, house to house, Roosevelt style of whirlwind campaign and was against all day tours … One big evening speech in each county was his idea of the way of conducting the fight.”

It fell to Nugent to arrange the practical details. He confided in Kerney that the professor was devilish hard to manage. It was Nugent who enlisted the services of irrepressible young Joe Tumulty who had already made a name for himself as an orator during his three years in the state legislature. Tumulty’s job was to keep the candidate in touch with the rank and file. They had been horrified to discover how ignorant Professor Wilson was of local issues.

The only newspaper he read was Oswald Garrison Villard’s New York Evening Post. According to Kerney they told off a man named St. John to slant articles in the Evening Post especially for the political education of Woodrow Wilson.

The Democratic leaders held their breath when the professor stepped out to open the campaign before a rough and tumble audience in St. Peter’s Hall in Jersey City. His first story fell flat, he fumbled and hesitated. Then all at once he caught the feel of his hearers. Taking advantage of his bad beginning he explained, in a simple man to man tone, that up to then he had asked audiences to accept ideas and principles … “and now I find myself in the novel position of asking you to vote for me for Governor of New Jersey.”

Why shouldn’t he be embarrassed?

He went on to outline his principles of independence from political and financial interests in a rather general way, but in such a sincere and personal tone that the whole hall was captivated. “Something new in stump speeches” commented the Trenton True American.

The Republicans were running a reform campaign. Their aspirant for governor was a good man. On the whole the New Jersey reformers had come more from among the Republicans than from the tightly ruled Democratic organizations. Republican progressivism was greatly stimulated in 1906 when, during a furious campaign, La Follette cut a tornado path across the state. He made seventeen speeches in six days. “If in this eastern country,” announced the apostle of the Wisconsin Idea, “where the money power is strongest, I could do something towards bringing down the lightning, it would be more effective than anything I could do.”

One of the reasons La Follette came into the state was that his friend and admirer, the prince of muckrakers Lincoln Steffens, had written up the reform movement in Jersey City in the magazines.

Reform in Jersey City was the work of an Irishman named Mark Fagan. By profession an undertaker he had been raised in the machine. As a youth he read Henry George and was excommunicated by the Church for joining the Anti-Poverty League. He was a warmhearted simple sort of man with a great deal of the common touch. When he was elected mayor he tried “to make Jersey City a pleasant place to live in.” He even said, “I’d like to make it pretty.”

His corporation counsel and general mentor was a tall shambling lawyer, so obsessed with the character of Abraham Lincoln that his friends claimed he was getting to look like him, named George L. Record. Record came from Maine. He had worked his way through Bates on jobs in a shoefactory and as carpenter’s helper and had come to the New York area to study law and make his fortune. Although originally a Democrat he was attracted by the progressive ideas of the Jersey Republicans. He and Fagan between them founded the Equal Taxation League which worked to cut the excessive tax reductions enjoyed by the railroads and utilities which threw the support of municipal government on the small home owners.

Record had little success when he tried to run for office himself, but his influence was great as a lobbyist for progressive measures. He had put through a senatorial primary law. Now he was agitating for a corrupt practices act, for the sort of control of corporations which Hughes had put through in New York, for employers’ liability and other measures out of the progressive textbook as set forth in Oregon and Wisconsin. Record’s word carried great weight with reform elements in both parties. When he described Professor Wilson’s speeches as “glittering generalities beautifully phrased, but having nothing to do with the political campaign in New Jersey,” Wilson’s backers were dismayed. Record challenged Professor Wilson to debate the issues.

To the consternation of the old pros running the Democratic campaign, who considered George Record a radical too dangerous even to speak to, Wilson accepted. The campaign committee pointed out that the professor was falling into a trap. Wilson announced, with the greatest air of innocence, that he still would be glad to debate with Mr. Record if the Republican committee would designate him as their spokesman. The Republican committee, who thought of Record as a son of the wild jackass, would do no such thing. In terms of sweet reasonableness Wilson suggested an exchange of letters.

Record promptly fired off a long list of questions. Wilson’s nomination had been steamrollered through by bosses Nugent and Smith; how did he propose to abolish boss control in politics?

“By the election to office of men who will refuse to submit to it … and by pitiless publicity,” Wilson replied. He answered the nineteen questions frankly. Sometimes he agreed with Record. Sometimes he didn’t.

By the time election day came around Woodrow Wilson had appropriated a large part of George Record’s progressive platform: state control of utilities, workingmen’s compensation, a corrupt practices act and even the direct election of United States senators. In every speech he was drawing cheers from the crowds by attacking the privileges of entrenched corporations and by harrying the political bosses.

He had been developing his flair for carrying day to day politics up into the epic sphere:

“We have begun a fight that, it may be, will take many a generation to complete,” he announced in his ringing tenor voice that so effortlessly filled the hall during his address that closed the campaign at Newark. “No man would wish to sit idly by and lose the opportunity to take part in such a struggle. All through the centuries there has been this slow painful struggle forward, forward, up, up, a little at a time, along the entire incline, the interminable way …”

Listening to his candidate’s speeches Boss Smith seems to have been torn between admiration for the “Presbyterian priest’s” political skill and dismay at what he was saying. When his friends shook their heads he called it confidently “great campaign play.” He thought he had the professor in his pocket.

Wilson was elected by a majority of almost fifty thousand. To everyone’s amazement he carried with him a Democratic majority in the lower house of what had been considered a firmly Republican legislature.

Every successful politician learns from his audiences. Wilson had been learning fast during the campaign. One thing he learned was that the bosses needed him more than he needed the bosses. The reform tide was rising.

He meant exactly what he said when, in the final speech at Newark, he announced in the vibrant voice that stirred listeners to the marrow of their bones: “If I am elected governor I shall have been elected leader of my party … If the Democratic Party does not understand it that way, then I want to say to you very frankly that the Democratic Party ought not to elect me governor.”

Part of his agreement with Smith when Wilson accepted his tender of the nomination had been, so Wilson’s supporters claimed, that Smith, who had left Washington in bad odor after his previous term, should not try to get the legislature to elect him to the Senate again.

A reform enactment, part of the nationwide campaign for the direct election of United States senators, had established a senatorial primary in New Jersey. The designate was a gentleman known as “Farmer Jim” Martine, an old tubthumper in the Bryan style whose name was put on the ticket largely because no one else thought it worthwhile to run.

Now after Wilson’s victory, the Democrats were sure to elect whomever they picked for senator. So James Smith changed his mind and announced that the primary didn’t mean a thing and that he would run for election. Meanwhile he suggested, pointedly, that the professor needed a rest after a strenuous campaign. Why didn’t he go back to Old Lyme for a vacation?

The professor did no such thing. Instead he travelled about the state, dropping in on his newfound friends, the progressives, and asking them whether he ought to come out for Martine or let Smith have his way. He found young Tumulty, who had been such a help in the populous eastern counties, acting as Martine’s campaign manager.

Jim Kerney and the whole band of progressive newspapermen who had become Wilson’s warmest adherents admitted that Martine was a fool, but claimed that, since he’d been nominated by popular vote, if they believed in their principles as true Democrats they had no choice but to send him to the Senate. They urged Wilson to come out against Smith.

The governor-elect made quite a show of calling on the party bosses at their homes to try to argue them out of supporting Smith’s candidacy. The bosses answered that they had given Smith their word. Wilson went to see Smith himself and argued with him for two hours.

The conversation was civil, because Smith was a civilspoken man, but he insisted he wanted to go to Washington. He’d left a bad impression last time. This time he’d do better. He wanted another chance for his boys’ sake. He laughed off Wilson’s threat to come out against him. They parted political enemies.

Wilson issued a dignified statement against Smith and promptly invaded the machine’s own bailiwick in Jersey City. Before an uproarious meeting he described the political bosses as warts on the body politic. “It is not a capital process to cut off a wart. You don’t have to go to the hospital and take an anaesthetic. The thing can be done while you wait …”

Wilson’s speeches were widely reported by the New York press, and reprinted by local newspapers from Texas to California. Martine’s campaign for senator became a national issue.

The senatorial election was the new legislature’s first business. The whole country was watching to see who would come out on top, the schoolmaster in politics, only inaugurated in his first political post a week before, or the man who had bossed New Jersey for years.

Using all the old blarney, with the brass knuckles hidden under the kid glove Boss Smith confidently mobilized his troops. While Smith’s henchmen poured out whiskey for the faithful in the famous old room 100 of the Trenton House, Wilson and Tumulty sat up all night keeping tab on their supporters from the executive offices. Their only weapon was the telephone.

On the day of the vote Smith’s cohorts paraded through Trenton with a brass band and were reviewed by the Big Fellow himself from the steps of the hotel. Everybody who could be reached had been reached. Smith was confident.

When the two houses voted separately Martine lacked one vote of a majority. Next day he was elected in joint session. Only three men voted for Smith.

“I pitied Smith at the last,” Wilson wrote his friend Mrs. Peck, with whom ever since Bermuda he had carried on a brisk and, later slanderers to the contrary, platonic correspondence. “It was plain he had few real friends, that he held men by fear and power and the benefits he could bestow, not by love or loyalty or any genuine devotion. The minute it was seen that he was defeated his adherents began to desert him like rats leaving a sinking ship. He left Trenton, (where his headquarters had at first been crowded) attended, I am told, only by his sons, and looking old and broken … It is a pitiless game … — and for me it has only begun.”

Wilson was proving himself, for an amateur, remarkably adept. Turning the tables on Boss Smith did him more good politically than all the “glittering generalities beautifully phrased” of his campaign speeches.

Bryan Democrats and progressive Republicans were alike smarting over their failure to attain national leadership. Bryan had beaten his head against a wall. Roosevelt had gone off to Africa and let his party fall back into the hands of the reactionaries. La Follette was tied to the middlewest. Hiram Johnson was local to California. Here was a reformer stepping down from the high sphere of academic wisdom. He seemed to mean what he said. The muckraking journals applauded him from coast to coast.

The professionals, to be sure, saw Governor Wilson in a less favorable light. When he heard of Smith’s misadventures old Boss Croker of New York is reported to have growled: “An ingrate in politics is no good.”

The Wilsons were rapidly becoming professionals themselves. Ellen Wilson struck up a friendship with Joe Tumulty who was already the indispensable adjutant. Between them they kept the governor informed on local politics. She subscribed to all the papers and began to keep a scrapbook of clippings that had to do with her husband’s presidential candidacy.

It wasn’t easy for her after the pleasant academic years to become a politician’s wife. Moving out of Prospect into cramped quarters at the Princeton Inn was a wrench. The girls hated hotel life. Of course what Woodrow wanted Ellen wanted but she couldn’t help repining a little. She confided in Jim Kerney that she feared it was the end of the “happy home days” when she would play the piano evenings while her husband sang college songs with the girls. “That kind of joy is largely over for us.”

Wilson was oblivious of everything except the task in hand. He had to make himself a record as a modern liberal and he had to do it fast. Up to now his liberalism had been distinctly of the Manchester school. He had preached in his courses the beauties of the English Constitution. Along with the great Britishers he’d admired as a young man he had been for free trade and against wars of aggression and for limiting the powers of government. Like Bright and Cobden he had been suspicious of government interference in such things as the wages and hours of labor. In the name of Southern chivalry he had scoffed at women’s suffrage. Now the word liberal was beginning to be applied to a set of tenets that would have made Gladstone’s hackles rise.

Wilson was going to school with the progressives. For the first time in his life he had discovered the people. The vested interests, as represented by the wealthy Princeton alumni who had opposed his plans, had given him a hard time. Now he found great exhilaration in addressing halls full of plain uneducated people right off the streetcorners. They thrilled to his words; he thrilled to them. The people must rule.

He made a friend of George L. Record. He set himself to learn about the legislation the reformers hoped would take local and state governments, and eventually the national government, away from the vested interests and their hired politicians, and restore control to the voters. These measures were already being tried out. Hadn’t James Bryce written, somewhat puzzled, after a recent trip through the United States, that rapid changes were causing him to revise some of his views of American government? These were currents of day to day life that the professor had ignored during his years in the academic backwater.

The day before his inauguration Wilson attended a meeting that George Record organized at the Hotel Martinique in New York for progressive assemblymen of both parties to map out a program for the coming session. Record read the project for an election law setting up direct primaries as a means of ridding New Jersey of boss control. He outlined a stiff corrupt practices act, a law to regulate public utilities such as Governor Hughes had put through in New York and a workingmen’s compensation act. By the time Governor Wilson took the train to Princeton that night he had made Record’s program his own.

In an extraordinary burst of activity, the new governor, taking advantage of the mantle of invincibility he had worn since the defeat of Boss Smith, rammed the most important items through the legislature in three months. Record furnished drafts of the bills and Wilson and Tumulty sat in the executive office and saw to it that the assemblymen did the right thing.

The oldtimers were aghast. Smith was so shaken he stayed home. When Nugent, who had worked so hard for Wilson’s election, tried to stack the cards against the new legislation in a Democratic caucus, the governor announced that as leader of the party he had the right to attend. He lectured the Democratic legislators for three hours on civic duty. Boss Smith threatened to have him impeached, but Wilson had convinced the assembly that the voters expected reform. He threatened to expose to public wrath any man who stood in the way of the people’s will. With Record and his friends doing the paperwork, in spite of a continuous outcry from Boss Smith’s personal press and collusion between the Republican and Democratic machines, the bills were drafted and passed.

Getting them approved by the state senate was a fresh problem. The senate was still in Republican hands. Wilson used all his charm, all his humor, all his felicity of phrase to woo the state senators as he had wooed the undergraduates at Princeton. He invited them to his office, he attended their banquets.

In a letter to Mrs. Peck he described himself as joining one senator in a cakewalk. “We pranced together to the content of the whole company. I am on easy and delightful terms with all the Senators. They know me for something else than an ambitious dictator.” By April 23, 1911, he was able to write her: “I got absolutely everything I strove for — and more besides … Everyone, the papers included, are saying that none of it could have been done, if it had not been for my influence and tact and hold upon the people … The result was as complete a victory as has ever been won, I venture to say, in the history of the country.”

The news of Governor Wilson’s performance at Trenton spread over the nation’s newsstands. William Jennings Bryan who, in spite of his three defeats for the presidency, still considered himself leader of the popular wing of the Democratic Party, wrote to inquire how such things could be. How could a man sponsored by Colonel Harvey, whom Bryan considered an errandboy from the Morgan office, turn out a progressive? To try Governor Wilson’s sincerity, he suggested that he endorse the constitutional amendment for a federal income tax. Governor Wilson promptly obliged with a special message to the legislature. The Commoner was “gratified.”

Bryan at fifty was a disappointed man. In spite of Mrs. Bryan’s leavening good sense, a shrewish tone was creeping into his exhortations to righteousness. His religious fundamentalism, his ranting against the demon rum, and war, and imperialism, and high finance, and vested privilege, began to pall even on the Chautauqua circuits. The great speeches had been so often repeated they had lost their savor. The voice was losing its resonance. But, even in his decline William Jennings Bryan remained the embodiment of the aspirations of the plain people, and the most powerful single factor in Democratic politics.

The situation was ticklish. In his academic days Professor Wilson had hardly let pass an opportunity to hold the crude notions of the cornbelt demagogue up to ridicule. He had once refused to share a platform with him. The two men had never met. Bryan had to be conciliated.

Ellen Wilson, who was using all her gentle housewifely guile to advance her husband’s political fortunes, made the first move. When she discovered that Bryan was coming to Princeton to deliver an address on Faith to the theological seminary, she invited him to dinner and wired Woodrow, who was off lecturing in Georgia, to come home at once.

The evening was a success. Bryan, whose lips never touched liquor, was a colossal trencherman. The Princeton Inn did its best. Instead of talking politics the men swapped stories. The Commoner announced himself afterwards as charmed by the governor’s gaiety and nimblemindedness and captivated by Mrs. Wilson. The governor wrote Mrs. Peck that he found in Bryan force of personality and sincerity and conviction. Tumulty who had been hovering in the lobby rushed up to Mrs. Wilson after the guests had left, his blue eyes popping. “You’ve nominated your husband,” he said. She smiled and answered that she hadn’t done a thing.

When, three weeks later, both men appeared on the same platform at Burlington, Wilson paid Bryan a handsome compliment: “It is because he has cried ‘America awake’ that other men have been able to transform into action the doctrines he so diligently preached.”

The presidentmakers were buzzing. A Princeton graduate from Arkansas named William McCombs, who practiced law in New York and dabbled in Tammany politics, opened a small office on lower Broadway to nourish the Wilson boom. Wilson insisted on calling it his literary bureau. McCombs was financed by Cleveland Dodge, Walter Hines Page, the publisher, and a few other of Wilson’s old admirers from Princeton days. Between them they organized a western lecture tour for the governor right after the windup of that first triumphant session of the New Jersey legislature. The Schoolmaster in Politics must be shown to the country.

Wilson, who had never been west of Colorado, spent the month of May lecturing in the mountain states and on the Pacific coast. In Kansas City, on the way out, he was so carried away by the progressive atmosphere that he came out for the initiative, referendum and recall, and talking to newspapermen, barely stopped short of the recall of the judiciary. Some of his eastern backers set up such a doleful clamor at the news that he promptly dropped these inflammatory expressions from his vocabulary.

He spoke in Denver on a Sunday. Since he had scruples against talking politics on the Sabbath, he harangued twelve thousand people in the auditorium on the Holy Bible and sent them away so fired with enthusiasm that when next morning the first long distance phone connections were opened between New York and Denver, and the Times reporter asked what the news was, the answer came that the town was wild over Woodrow Wilson and was booming him for President.

Wilson was applauded in Los Angeles and San Francisco. He hobnobbed with the progressive leaders of the Northwest He travelled eight thousand miles and delivered thirtyfive speeches. The facile enthusiasm of western audiences warmed his heart. He began to admit publicly that indeed he was out for the presidency.

On the long trainride east to Minneapolis he told the reporter for the Baltimore Sun that he had been waiting to weigh the results of this trip. Now he felt that the response was such that if he could get the nomination he could surely be elected: “It’s an awful thing to be President of the United States … I mean just what I say. It means giving up nearly everything that one holds dear … In spite of what I said to you I do want to be President and I will tell you why: I want this country to have a President who will do certain things … I am sure that I will at least try to the utmost to do them.”

His final address, at Lincoln, Nebraska, in William Jennings Bryan’s home bailiwick, was a rousing appeal to businessmen to forget their own selfish interests and to work for the public good. Men jumped to their feet and clapped and cheered. Charles Bryan, the Commoner’s banker brother, came across with a check to help defray the expenses of Governor Wilson’s campaign.

Back in Trenton the governor discovered, with some chagrin, that an article in the state constitution, which he hadn’t had time to peruse, made it impossible for the state controller to pay him his salary for the days he had spent out of the state. The president of the senate, sworn in as acting governor in his stead, had received his paycheck. The senator generously endorsed the check back to Wilson and continued to do so during all the many absences from duty made necessary by his new career as presidential timber.

It was a period of money worries for the Wilsons. The governor’s salary was only ten thousand dollars. They had a few savings from Princeton days and occasional royalties from his books, but Mrs. Wilson had to pinch every penny.

The main business of the summer, which the Wilson family spent at the official residence at Sea Girt, was gaining control of the state Democratic committee. James R. Nugent, who by this time hated Wilson with a bitter personal hatred, was chairman. The report that Nugent on a champagne drunk at a nearby summer resort had publicly toasted the governor as an ingrate and a liar was seized on by Wilson supporters. They made it a pretext for forcing Nugent’s resignation. His successor was a Wilson man.

The immediate result was a split in the New Jersey Democracy which resulted in the loss of the legislature to the Republicans. Just as at Princeton Wilson lost interest in university affairs, when opinion began to turn against him after the first flush of enthusiasm for his setting everything to rights, so now the executive offices at Trenton began to lose their glamor. He was always away lecturing. The New York Sun, a Republican paper continually yapping at his heels, took to describing the governorship as Professor Wilson’s travelling fellowship.

He did press through a batch of laws, known to the newspapers as the Seven Sisters, which made New Jersey less the promised land for the incorporation of outofstate trusts and holding companies, but his lack of interest in the local problems of the people of his home state was becoming painfully evident.

His veto of the bill to force the railroads to start eliminating grade crossings came as a disappointment to supporters in both parties. Kerney told the story that when the bill was returned to the state senate with the veto message the senators found a letter to the governor from a railroad official which had slipped into the engrossed copy by mistake. The letter was couched in terms strangely similar to the terms of the veto message. Such was Woodrow Wilson’s prestige that the senators, although bitterly disappointed by the veto, returned the letter to Wilson instead of tipping off the newspapers, in order not to damage his prospects of the presidential nomination.

Woodrow Wilson was becoming the center of a political cult, but personally he remained a lonely man. His craving for love and admiration was insatiable. His home was full of doting female relatives but that was not enough. He missed his friendships among the Princeton faculty. No one had taken the place of Jack Hibben as a daily and approving companion since their bitter break in the row over the quadrangles. Then one day in late November, 1911, Governor Wilson paid a call, at the suggestion of his literary bureau, on a gentleman from Texas. He found, right in the world of politics where he most needed a crony, a sympathetic friend, who like himself had spent a lifetime cultivating the arts of power.

Chapter 3 THE SILENT PARTNER

EDWARD Mandell House was two years younger than Wilson. He was born and raised in Texas. His first memories were of living in a whitepillared redbrick mansion set among oleanders in an orange grove near the beach in Galveston. The roof was crowned with a cupola where his father, a trader and shipowner who had run away from England as a boy and fought the Mexicans with Sam Houston, spent a good deal of his time searching the horizon with a telescope for federal gunboats. T. W. House invested heavily in blockaderunners. Sometimes he lost, but when he won he deposited his winnings in gold with Baring Brothers in London. The end of the war found him a very wealthy man. In reconstruction times a man with gold sovereigns could buy almost as much of Texas as he wanted.

House liked to tell of those murderous days when he was one of a band of guntoting youths running wild in Houston. He told Arthur Howden Smith, who became his biographer, that he used to spend hours practicing the quick draw before the mirror. His mother died when he was twelve. The same year he suffered a severe concussion falling out of a swing onto his head. In later life he attributed to the brain fever and to the severe bouts of malaria that followed, his continued poor health and his inability to stand hot weather.

His father sent him north to a rundown school in Virginia and then to New Haven where it was hoped he might matriculate at Yale. There he made friends with another young scapegrace, the son of Oliver P. Morton, Republican senator from Indiana, who aspired to the Republican presidential nomination in 1876. The pair of them decided to tutor for Cornell instead of entering a preparatory school for Yale.

“Both Morton and I were more bent on mischief than books,” House wrote in his memoir, “and while the mischief was innocent it made us poor students. We were both filled to the brim with interest in politics and public affairs.”

House was an enthusiastic Democrat and Morton was an enthusiastic Republican but they were thick as thieves, nevertheless. During the convention in 1876 instead of studying at Cornell they hung around the telegraph office on Union Square in New York. When Rutherford B. Hayes was nominated instead of Morton’s dad they were equally disappointed. In the breathtaking suspense of the winter of the disputed election they dropped their studies completely and moved in with the Morton family at the Ebbitt House in Washington. As the Mortons were friends of the Grants, the boys had the run of the White House, and even managed to squeeze into the old Supreme Court Chamber in the Capitol for the sessions of the Electoral Commission which eventually awarded the election to Hayes, in spite of Tilden’s popular majority.

House used to speak of these bloodheating days as “an education in representative government.” It left him, so he said, with no ambition to hold office or taste for public speaking but with an insatiable appetite for the machinery of politics. “Yet I have been thought without ambition. That I think is not quite true. My ambition has been so great it has never seemed to me worth while to try to satisfy it.”

When his father, whom he adored, suffered a stroke a couple of years later, he went home to Houston to nurse him. Meanwhile he read up on American government. Back at Cornell he had eagerly studied de Tocqueville. After his father’s death he pitched in with his brothers to help manage the widespread holdings the elder House had left to his children.

When at twentythree young House married Miss Loulie Hunter of Hunter, Texas, he felt himself well enough off to take a year’s honeymoon in Europe with his bride.

Back home in the early eighties he found himself in the thick of a new generation growing up in Texas on the heels of the empirebuilders. His father, a humane man who had manumitted his slaves as fast as they learned a trade, taught him to admire character and initiative more than money and social position. It came natural to him to side with the people against the magnates.

When his friend James S. Hogg became governor House joined in his campaign to free Texas politics from the domination of railroad and financial interests. House used to say he considered Hogg the greatest Texan after Sam Houston. It was Governor Culberson who made House a colonel on his staff. House used to tell in his deadpan way how much his colored coachman enjoyed wearing the uniform.

House devoted three years of his life to promoting the Trinity and Brazos Valley Railroad on capital furnished by Thomas Jefferson Coolidge of Boston. He used to boast that this was one honest railroad, honestly financed and honestly built.

After that he seems to have felt he was as well off as he wanted to be. He and his wife built themselves a fine house with broad verandas in Austin, where they lived lavishly, and entertained out of state visitors. They interested themselves in the university. They were friendly with the professors. Their home was the center of the intellectual life of Austin. Without ever running for office himself the colonel became the guide and philosopher of several generations of Texas politicians.

“So in politics,” he wrote, “I began at the top rather than at the bottom, and I have been doing since that day pretty much what I am doing now; that is advising and helping wherever I might.” In Austin if you wanted to accomplish some reform Colonel House was the man to see. He never wanted anything for himself. His pleasure was in making the wheels go round.

When Joseph D. Sayers became governor House was consulted on every detail of the administration. “I lay upon a large lounge in our living room, for I was in anything but good health, and gave my opinion as to the best man for each office … I had long made it a rule not to visit and it was understood that if anyone desired to see me it must be at my home. I did this not only to conserve my strength but because it enabled me to work under more favorable conditions … Those days and those guests are among the pleasantest recollections of my life.”

Bryan’s freesilver campaign in 1896 failed, but it taught House, who was beginning to fancy himself as a political weatherprophet, how much talent and how many resentments could be marshalled in behalf of a Democratic revival. He became interested in trying out on the national stage the techniques of behind the scenes manipulation he had developed at home.

His appetite for national politics was heightened by the appearance of the Bryan family in Austin one winter during McKinley’s first administration. House and ex-governor Hogg arranged for the Bryans to rent a house adjoining theirs. House started spinning his webs, hoping that Bryan would fall under his influence as easily as his Texas friends. “I found Mrs. Bryan very amenable” he wrote, “but Mr. Bryan was as impracticable as ever … I believe he feels his ideas are God-given.” Bryan, he said, was the most opinionated man he’d ever met.

House was convinced he couldn’t stand the Texas summers. Heat prostrated him. He took to spending more and more time in the North or in European spas. Going and coming to and from Europe in the spring and fall he and his wife would stay several weeks in New York. He began to cultivate the more respectable Democratic politicians. He was spoken of as searching, like Diogenes with his lantern, for a Democrat who could be elected President.

Colonel House was described in those days as a slight grayish almost mousily quiet man with high cheekbones and a receding chin. There was something pebblelike about the opaque blue of his eyes. He wore a close-clipped colorless mustache. His speech was meticulous with a slight Texas drawl. A good listener, he had a way of punctuating a visitor’s outpourings with exclamations of “True, true.”

People remarked on his soundless tread when he came into a room. In conversation he was master of the meaningful silence. He continuously wore the air of having just left a conference where men of importance had been concerned with transcendant events. The impression he gave was that he knew more than he let on. At the same time he was incurably confidential. “Just between you and me and the angels” was a favorite expression.

The meeting between Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House had not gone unprepared. Wilson had for some months been in communication with friends of the colonel’s in Texas. That October he delivered an address at the state fair in Dallas which set the forwardlooking politicians to discussing him favorably. His friend Harvey urged him to get in touch with House. Congressman Burleson of Texas wrote describing House as “a good politician, a wise counselor, able and unselfish … I think he can help you.”

A couple of letters were exchanged on questions of party regularity and it was arranged, through the young men of the literary bureau, that Governor Wilson would take it upon himself to call on Colonel House.

It was a great day in both men’s lives.

“He came alone to the Gotham promptly at four and we talked for an hour,” House noted portentously in his diary. “From that first meeting I have been in as close touch with Woodrow Wilson as with any man I have ever known.”

Years later, talking to Arthur Howden Smith, he described that first interview:

“We talked and talked. We knew each other for congenial souls from the very beginning … We exchanged our ideas about the democracies of the world, contrasted the European democracies with the United States, discussed where they differed, which was best in some respects and which in others … I remember we were very urbane. Each gave the other the chance to have his say … The hour flew away. It seemed no time when it was over.”

Wilson was engaged to confer with a California Democrat and had to leave when the hour was up. They arranged to dine together a couple of days later. After a few more ardent meetings at the Gotham, House remembered having remarked to Wilson one day as he was about to leave, “Governor, isn’t it strange that two men who never knew each other before, should think so much alike?”

Woodrow Wilson answered, “My dear fellow, we have known each other all our lives.”

This pair of middleaged politicians, family men both, were as excited about each other as two schoolgirls developing a crush.

Here was a man, House confided to Senator Culberson “one can advise with some degree of satisfaction.” “He is not the biggest man I ever met,” he wrote Sidney Mezes, his brotherinlaw who taught government at the University of Texas, “but he is one of the pleasantest, and I would rather play with him than any prospective candidate I have seen … From what I have heard I was afraid that he had to have his hats made to order: but I saw not the slightest evidence of it … Never before have I found both the man and the opportunity.”

House was ill a great deal that fall and winter. From his bed he kept in touch by letter and telephone with all the political skirmishing preliminary to next June’s Democratic convention. At the same time he was engaged in putting down on paper a fantasy in the style of Bellamy’s Looking Backward, which does a great deal to explain the remark in his memoir: “My ambition has been so great it has never seemed to me worth while to try to satisfy it.”

This fantasy, a daydream remarkably boyish to be the work of a man of fifty, was eventually published, anonymously of course, by Ben Huebsch under the title of Philip Dru, Administrator.

A quotation from Mazzini on the title page expressed the political creed House was hoping to put into effect, by advice and cajolement, during the Democratic administration to come:

“No war of classes, no hostility to existing wealth, no wanton or unjust violation of the rights of property, but a constant disposition to ameliorate the condition of the classes least favored by fortune.”

The dedication restated the theme in his own words: “To the unhappy many [he must have remembered Stendhal’s ‘happy few’] who have lived and died lacking opportunity, because, in the starting, the worldwide social structure was wrongly begun.”

It is a rather awkward story, set ten years forward in the nineteentwenties, of a civil war between progressive and reactionary forces in the United States. The hero is a lithe young West Pointer named Philip Dru whose army career is cut short by a case of heat prostration contracted while riding out in the Mexican desert with a highly imaginary young lady named Gloria. During his convalescence the hero lives over a hardware store on the lower East Side of New York and absorbs the mystique of the coming European revolution from a Jewish idealist who escaped from Polish pogroms to take refuge in America. Meanwhile Gloria, who has taken up settlement house work, tells him of a Senator Selwyn’s conspiracy, backed by a fund raised by a thousand multimillionaires, to take over the United States Government in the interest of the rich.

Senator Selwyn bears a more than accidental resemblance to Senator Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island who, as sponsor of the Payne-Aldrich Tariff so hated in the south and west, was the bugbear good Democrats and Progressives used to frighten naughty children with. Senator Aldrich, able, ruthless, and thoroughly convinced of the Godgiven right of the moneymen to rule, led the standpat forces which had taken over Taft’s indecisive administration. In the story, House, as a science fiction touch, has his Senator Selwyn imprudently dictate his conspiratorial plans into a dictaphone. Dru, who has become a journalist for the muckraking press, gets hold of the guilty cylinder and forms a committee to fight for freedom and right. With Gloria raising money from the Pinchots and Walter Perkinses among the millionaires, Philip Dru becomes the leader of outraged democracy. Civil war breaks out. Transformed into a general of Napoleonic scope, he defeats the army of capitalist privilege and marches on Washington.

Wearing Dru’s fictional cloak, House simplifies the legal code and repeals unnecessary laws. He institutes a graduated income tax. He borrows a land tax on unimproved land from Henry George. He centralizes government administration, takes the currency out of the hands of the bankers, regulates public utilities and bans holding companies.

For the benefit of the workingman he sets up state employment agencies, old age insurance, workingmen’s compensation for accidents. Labor is to be represented in management and to share in the profits of industry.

He institutes cooperative financing and marketing for the farmer.

He rewrites the Constitution. The President with a ten year term becomes a mere head of state but an Executive is chosen by the House of Representatives and is responsible to the House. Party government in the English style. Senators are elected for life subject to recall every five years.

Having reformed the government to Colonel House’s satisfaction the hero resigns his powers and fades away in a rosy haze with the beautiful Gloria.

The few intimate friends House allowed to see the manuscript were impressed. In a naïve way it expressed the hopes and frustrations of a good many reformers disheartened by the slow working of the progressive panaceas. Sidney Mezes urged him to rewrite the book as a serious exposition of his ideas. E. S. Martin, who edited Life, in those days a New York counterpart of the London Punch, offered to help in revamping the story. “I had no time, however, for such diversions,” wrote House. “I was so much more interested in the campaign than I was in the book … that I turned it over to the publisher as it was.”

It was becoming evident that the split between Roosevelt and Taft supporters amongst the Republicans was so irreconcilable that for the first time in years the man the Democrats were going to pick at their convention in June would have a real chance to be elected. Woodrow Wilson was beginning to understand that taking over the progressive platform would serve him even better in national politics than it had in New Jersey. The reformers of the South and West had a superstitious horror of Wall Street. To establish himself in the running against such dangerous radical contenders as Roosevelt and La Follette he had publicly to kick away the stool which had offered him his first foothold.

Colonel Harvey’s Harper’s Weekly, published by the old New York publishing house which the Morgans were known to control, was carrying at the head of its editorial column a rubric: “For President, Woodrow Wilson.” To the West that meant Wall Street’s blessing.

The ministrations of the mercurial Harvey, which a few short months ago had seemed so congenial, were becoming an embarrassment. There were rumors that Harvey himself, though he pretended to cantankerous independence, shared the misgivings of his financial associates.

Colonel House before enlisting wholeheartedly in the Wilson campaign, had to discover how the winds blew on Franklin Square. A few days after House’s first meeting with Wilson, the two colonels conferred.

Next day House wrote Bryan, undoubtedly coloring his narrative a little to suit the Commoner’s prejudices:

“I took lunch with Colonel Harvey yesterday. It is the first time I have met him. I wanted to determine what his real attitude was towards Governor Wilson, but I think I am left as much in the dark as ever.

“He told me that everybody south of Canal Street was in a frenzy against Governor Wilson and said they were bringing all sorts of pressure upon him to oppose him. He said he told them he had an open mind and that if they would convince him he was a dangerous man he would do so.

“He said that Morgan was particularly virulent …”

House ended diplomatically by asking Mr. Bryan’s advice as how best to meet these attacks from entrenched privilege.

The day after Colonel House left for Texas to make sure of his state delegation, Wilson and Colonel Harvey met at the Manhattan Club as guests of another honorary colonel, a Kentucky one this time, Henry Watterson who edited the Louisville Courier-Journal. Marse Henry, the “grand old man” of Southern journalism, had been a Wilson backer since the early days. The conversation seems to have been about where to go for campaign contributions.

Just as Wilson was leaving, Colonel Harvey, maybe stung by some carefully barbed remark Colonel House dropped on purpose in his ear, or from a tactless communication from a Wilson enthusiast from the literary bureau, asked Wilson whether there was anything left of the cheap talk about Harvey’s promoting him on behalf of the “interests”!

“Yes, there is,” Wilson blurted out sharply: some of his supporters felt that Harvey’s backing was having a bad effect in the West.

Harvey bristled. “Is there anything I can do except to stop advocating your nomination?”

Wilson shook his head. “I think not,” he said.

Harvey replied, “I shall sing low.” According to Harvey, Governor Wilson left the room abruptly.

Next week “For President, Woodrow Wilson” was no longer seen at the head of Harvey’s editorial column. The candidate had switched colonels.

The incident made a great flurry in the press. The Republican papers blew it up as another instance of Wilson’s ingratitude.

On the other hand Tumulty’s publicitymen managed to make political hay by circulating the tale that what had really happened was that Wilson had righteously turned down insidious offers of contributions to his campaign by Thomas Fortune Ryan and other malefactors of great wealth who thought they could buy the Democratic Party. Marse Henry announced that this version was not in accord with the facts. Wilson countered with the statement that Colonel Watterson was “a fine old gentleman,” implying that his memory was not to be trusted, and became touchy with the reporters whenever they brought the subject up.

On the whole the Wilson men had the better of it. The impression left in the public mind was that Wilson had simply told the truth when asked a direct question, like the good honest oldtime Presbyterian schoolmaster that he was.

The loss of the New Jersey colonel as a political handyman made the acquisition of the urbane Texan, with whom Wilson had so much more in common, all the more agreeable. The correspondence between the two became affectionate to a degree.

While House was in Austin laboring to get just the right men picked for the Texas delegation Wilson’s campaign had to take another hurdle. Just before the Jackson Day dinner in Washington in January 1912 a corporation lawyer whom Wilson had tangled with as a Princeton trustee during the quadrangle row, turned over to the New York Evening Sun a letter Wilson had written him five years back (when they were still good friends) suggesting that something be done “at once dignified and effective, to knock Mr. Bryan once for all into a cocked hat.”

Fortunately for Democratic harmony Bryan was stopping off with Josephus Daniels in North Carolina when the reporters poked this bit of news under his nose and asked for comment. Daniels was a liberal newspaper editor who genuinely believed in both Bryan and Wilson. He exuded good nature. His Raleigh home was famous for easy hospitality, good conversation and crisp fried chicken. He urged Bryan not to go off halfcocked and was delighted when the Commoner growled out the comment that the Sun had been trying to knock him into a cocked hat for years and hadn’t succeeded yet.

The “cocked hat” letter threw Wilson’s literary bureau into a panic. Everybody knew that he could never be nominated against Bryan’s opposition. Even Wilson himself felt that his presidential aspirations hung by a thread. On the train down to Washington on his way to the Jackson Day dinner he gave vent to his feelings in a letter to the sympathetic Mrs. Peck:

“… The banquet in the evening is to be a grand dress parade of candidates for the presidential nomination … I hate the whole thing but it is something ‘expected’ of me by my friends and backers … There is a merry war against me. I am evidently regarded as the strongest candidate at present, for all the attacks are directed against me … this rain of small missiles makes me feel like a common target for the malicious (by the way nearly all the darts are supplied by Princetonians who hate me), and somewhat affect my spirits for a day at a time (the strongest nerves wince under persistent spite); but for the most part I go serenely on my way. I believe very profoundly in an overruling Providence and do not believe that any real plans can be thrown off the track. It may not be intended that I shall be President — but that would not break my heart — and I am content to await the event, doing what I honorably can, in the meantime, to discomfort mine enemies.”

That night Wilson discomforted his enemies by a speech which combined candor with tact. He made no attempt to deny that he had disagreed with some of Bryan’s policies in the past, but proclaimed that he had ever been in accord with his underlying principles. He ended by turning to the Commoner, who sat near him at the speaker’s table, with what the politicians round about described as “a chesterfieldian gesture”: “Let us apologize to each other that we ever suspected or antagonized one another; let us join hands once more — all around the circle of community of counsel and of interest which will show us at the last to have been indeed the friends of our country and of mankind.”

Applause drowned out the last words. Bryan’s face, we are told, was “a study.” Afterwards he confided to a friend that it was the greatest speech in American political history. The New York World summed up the situation next day with a headline: WILSON LEADS IN CLASH OF BOOMS.

Three weeks later Wilson won another oratorical victory. At the annual banquet of a publishers’ association in Philadelphia he spoke on the same program with the redoubtable Bob La Follette who for months had been campaigning for the Republican nomination as ardently as Wilson had for the Democratic. Wilson started by poking a little gentle fun at publishers: he used as a writer to be afraid they wouldn’t publish him, and now, as a public figure, he was afraid when they did. He frothily outlined some of the principles of what was soon to be known as the New Freedom, and sat down amid great applause.

La Follette arrived late. He was suffering from indigestion and overwork. He had been drinking. He was desperately worried because his daughter was in hospital and was to undergo a dangerous operation next morning. He brought with him one of those bulky and closely reasoned manuscripts with which he was accustomed to flagellate the United States Senate. It was a long denunciation of the evils of the kept press. It may be that he’d taken a shot of whiskey too many in an effort to settle his stomach before he came.

He spoke for two hours with more than usual asperity, shaking his finger in the faces of the newspapermen opposite him. He lost his place in his manuscript, repeated himself, lost his temper at some hecklers and ended with his audience slinking off to the rathskeller below. “There go some of the fellows I’ve been hitting,” he shouted. According to Owen Wister he shook his fist after them. “They don’t want to hear about themselves.” The speech was the worst failure of his life.

The toastmaster, representing the publishers who had sponsored the function, felt called upon to apologize to the audience for the speaker’s rudeness. La Follette rushed to the washroom immediately after he finished speaking and was taken with a fit of vomiting. His soninlaw hurried him back to Washington in a nervous collapse.

Meanwhile the embittered newspapermen were scattering throughout the country to fill their columns with the news of his failure. The headline in The Philadelphia Record ran: WILSON HERO OF BIG FEAST.

The spring of 1912 was a time of political tension in both parties. Among the Republicans the standpatters were closing ranks round Taft as a reluctant leader. La Follette’s collapse at Philadelphia gave T.R. the cue he was waiting for to throw his Rough Riders’ felt hat into the ring as Progressive candidate.

Among the Democrats there were even more contenders for the throne. Hearst was mobilizing his newspapers and his millions in support of Champ Clark of Missouri, the speaker of the House of Representatives, a rustic figure in black slouch hat and frock coat whose campaign ditty was “You got to quit kickin’ my dawg around.” Senator Underwood and Governor Judson Harmon, Ohio’s favorite son, each had more organization and money support behind him than Wilson had. Bryan was still keeping his thin lips clenched in stony silence when asked whether he would try for the nomination.

Only Texas and Pennsylvania were surely for Wilson. Colonel House came north in early April with assurances that the Texas delegation was solid; and, in Pennsylvania, Vance McCormick, A. Mitchell Palmer and William B. Wilson of the anthracite miners’ union had the conservative machine on the run. But as spring advanced Wilson’s hopes took a bad beating in the state primaries. When the delegates gathered in Baltimore in the midst of a ferocious heat wave Wilson’s chances of nomination looked slimmer than at any time since his campaign began.

The day the convention was called to order, Colonel House, having written Wilson: “I have done everything I could up to now to advise and anticipate every contingency,” embarked on the Cunarder Laconia for his customary summer trip to Europe. He was proving his detachment by planning a tour that would take him to Sweden and Finland and as far afield as Moscow. He had done his best, now he must care for his health.

William Jennings Bryan arrived in Baltimore fresh from the press gallery of the Republican convention in Chicago. There he had seen, with some satisfaction, Taft’s nomination steamrollered through against the sullen opposition of the progressives, with the result that more than three hundred delegates turned in blank ballots and surged into Orchestra Hall to form the Progressive Party under the lash of Theodore Roosevelt’s sibilant exhortations: “We stand at Armageddon and battle for the Lord.”

The Commoner was convinced that the reforms for which he had so long cried in the wilderness were at last just under the horizon. If the Democrats nominated a candidate who might be labelled a reactionary T.R. would scoop up the progressive votes of both parties and might very well win. It was Bryan’s business to keep the “interests”—typified in his mind by Whitney and Hearst and Thomas Fortune Ryan — from taking over the convention. During the long sweaty days and tumultuous nights in the Baltimore Armory it was Bryan’s grizzled fringe of hair and craggy nose and wide lipless mouth, clenched above a continually beating palmleaf fan, that dominated the proceedings.

While the delegates braved heat prostration in Baltimore, Woodrow Wilson, at the governor’s mansion at Sea Girt, was amazing his wife and daughters by his coolness and amusing them with imitations of T.R. in Chicago threshing his arms and whooping it up for Armageddon. “Good old Teddy,” he would chuckle, “what a help he is.”

Tumulty had a direct telephone line to campaign headquarters at the Emerson Hotel. The first problem his campaign manager McCombs put up to Wilson was whether to back Bryan in his fight for a progressive as chairman. McCombs wanted Wilson to hedge in the interests of harmony. As Eleanor Wilson tells the story, her father and the girls went up to her mother’s bedroom to consult. Her mother was often poorly these days. They were already worried about her health. “There must be no hedging,” was Mrs. Wilson’s advice. “What’s the use of having a principle if you don’t stick to it,” had always been her motto. Sitting on the edge of his wife’s bed Wilson wrote out a telegram to Bryan: “You are quite right …”

All night Tumulty clung to the telephone, clocking the cheering that followed the nominating speeches. The Wilson crowd yelled for twenty minutes longer than Champ Clark’s but when the balloting began Champ Clark was ahead. His strength increased until it was only the twothirds rule that kept him from the nomination.

Only Texas and Pennsylvania stood firm for Wilson. The galleries were all for Wilson; Wilson telegrams were pouring in; the Baltimore Sun, which was the first newspaper that came to the delegate’s hand every morning, talked nothing but Wilson; but Clark still had the majority vote.

Bryan turned the tide. He early announced that he would oppose whatever candidate Tammany and the financial magnates stood for. After Boss Murphy had delivered his Tammany votes to what seemed to be a stampede for Clark, Bryan got to his feet and asked for the floor. His Nebraska delegation had been instructed for Clark and he had dutifully been voting for Clark. Now he declared he would cast his vote for Nebraska’s second choice: Woodrow Wilson.

Still the Champ Clark forces seemed to be in control. Saturday morning McCombs called Governor Wilson to the phone. “The jig is up,” McCombs said, and told Wilson to release his delegations. Wilson drafted a telegram. Mrs. Wilson and the girls comforted each other by promising themselves a long quiet summer on the English lakes.

It was William Gibbs McAdoo, the energetic promoter of the first Hudson River tube, who had been promoting Wilson as energetically as he had under river transportation, who first got wind of the telegram. He bawled out McCombs and snatched for the telephone. He begged Wilson not to quit; he assured him there was no conceivable way Clark could get twothirds of the vote.

The convention went on and on. The Sunday that ended the first week was a day of smoky hotel rooms, of finagling and palaver. It’s hard to imagine that Bryan was not still hoping against hope that maybe his would be the name to break the deadlock.

On the Jersey coast the Wilsons went quietly to a little country church at Spring Lake. In the afternoon the governor read Morley’s life of Gladstone aloud to the family.

Meanwhile, according to the reporters, “the plain people of the hills” were making their views felt. Telegrams kept coming in disclaiming any candidate controlled by Tammany or Hearst or Thomas Fortune Ryan.

Monday morning the New York World ran an editorial saying that the nomination of Wilson was the only way to save the election from Roosevelt. On the sixth day and the thirtieth ballot Wilson’s total passed Champ Clark’s for the first time. Wilson told the newspapermen he was receiving the news with a riot of silence.

On the fortysixth ballot he was nominated.

At the governor’s mansion at Sea Girt pandemonium ruled. Brass bands played “Hail to the Chief” and “The Conquering Hero Comes.” Every room swarmed with reporters and with hoarse veterans of the Baltimore Armory, each telling how singlehanded he had snatched Wilson’s nomination out of the hands of the Wall Street interests. The ladies of the family, whom Wilson liked to keep in what he considered a decent seclusion, were persecuted by featurewriters and photographers. Eleanor Wilson told of finding her mother in the clutches of a peculiarly hardfaced female journalist.

“ ‘Have you some sort of prejudice against jewelry Mrs. Wilson?’ the woman was asking. I realized how impossible it would be for her to understand why mother had no jewelry,” Eleanor Wilson wrote in retrospect: “Mother, who had sacrificed for us, so that father might have the books he needed, and the vacations; that we might study art and singing; that there might be always room in the house for relatives and friends. I thought of her rigid economy, her perennial brown dress and hat … Mother said ‘No, I have no prejudice against it. We just haven’t any.’ ”

Chapter 4 THE NEW FREEDOM

IN the campaign that followed all Governor Wilson needed to do was to address the throngs the faithful Tumulty marshalled on the lawn at Sea Girt, charming them with his calculated otherworldliness and with the “glittering generalities” that had disquieted George Record, while the Republicans tore each other to pieces.

For the Republicans it was a spite fight. La Follette excoriated T.R. T.R. excoriated Taft. Taft, who had been heard to growl that even a rat would fight if cornered, fought back. The occasional haymakers T.R. delivered in the direction of the Democratic candidate, whom he had not yet begun wholeheartedly to detest, went wide of the mark.

The dramatic moment came in October in Milwaukee when a crazy man put a bullet into T.R. as he was about to step out of an automobile to enter the hall where he was going to speak. His life was saved by the fact that the bullet was deflected by his glasses case and by the thick wad of the manuscript of his speech in his inside pocket. One of the doctors who examined him and found the bullet lodged next to a lung remarked that the heavy chest muscles T.R. had spent his life developing had helped too. Having done his best to protect the assassin from the frantic crowd T.R. strode up to the platform and before he allowed anything to be done about the wound hoarsely delivered his speech. He waved the perforated manuscript before the crowd and cried: “It takes more than that to kill a bull moose.”

Woodrow Wilson’s magnanimous gesture in calling off speaking engagements until Theodore Roosevelt’s recovery was assured brought him wide acclaim.

As was the custom the campaigns culminated in Stanford White’s Madison Square Garden in New York. Fresh from his hospital bed, T.R. delivered a speech which expressed better than anything any of the candidates said the aspirations of a people stirred by ten years of crusading against privilege and corruption:

“We are for human rights and intend to work for them. Where they can best be obtained by the application of the doctrine of states’ rights, we are for states’ rights. Where in order to obtain them, it is necessary to invoke the power of the Nation, then we shall invoke to its uttermost limits that mighty power. We are for liberty. But we are for the liberty of the oppressed, and not for the liberty of the oppressor to oppress the weak.”

The standpat Republicans feared T.R. more than they feared Wilson. While their papers poured out abuse on Theodore Rex, as they called him, they gave the mild laissez-faire liberalism of the Schoolmaster in Politics respectful attention. In spite of the hymnsinging zeal of his followers it was already obvious that T.R.’s hastily improvised party could not win. The odds on Wall Street were six to one on Wilson.

The papers described the Madison Square meeting as a last salute to their leader from those about to die. Even the liberal New York Evening Post characterized T.R.’s final exhortations as a speech such as Custer might have made to his scouts when he saw the Indians coming.

On the night after the Roosevelt rally Wilson’s joint managers McCombs and McAdoo, whose bickerings had been no help to his campaign, were able to work together long enough to foment an ovation when their candidate entered the hall that lasted one hour and four minutes. The Bull Moosers had worn themselves out after yelling fortyfive minutes for T.R. Wilson was able to exchange glances of happy triumph with his wife who sat in the box in front of him as he coolly proclaimed to an audience almost mad with enthusiasm: “All over the country, from one ocean to the other people are becoming aware that in less than a week the common people of America will come into their own again.”

When the ballots were counted the result was Wilson (Democrat) 6,286,214; Roosevelt (Progressive) 4,126,020; Taft (Republican) 3,483,922 and Debs (Socialist) 897,011. The Democrats carried the Senate and the House. Wilson’s 435 votes in the electoral college against Roosevelt’s 88 and Taft’s 8 constituted a record, but uncommitted commentators noted that Wilson had received a minority of the popular vote. The majority vote was a vote for reform. Almost half as many voters again voted for Eugene V. Debs as in 1908. It was a vote, in T.R.’s words, “for the liberty of the oppressed.”

A few days after the election Senator La Follette expressed the yearnings of the reform element in an article in La Follette’s Weekly Magazine: “Oppressed and heartsick, a nation of ninety million people, demanding plain, simple justice, striving for educational, political and industrial democracy, turned to Woodrow Wilson as the only present hope.”

The governor’s election disrupted the Wilsons’ family life. Deserving Democrats in shoals converged on Princeton. “Our little house was a terrible mess” wrote daughter Eleanor, “and mother, for the first and only time in her life, walked through rooms pretending she didn’t see the confusion and disorder … Even the tables and shelves in the studio were piled high and the easel was pushed aside to make room for efficient young women and their typewriters.”

William F. McCombs, who considered himself the first Wilson for President man and felt he should be rewarded for his services by being made Secretary of State at least, was one of the first to appear. During the campaign Wilson had been disgusted by his erratic behavior, his drinking and his chumming up to the political bosses.

It was the businesslike McAdoo who had endeared himself to the Wilson family; so much so that, although he was twice her age and a widower with grown children, he had already fluttered the heart of daughter Eleanor.

According to McCombs’ own story Woodrow Wilson told McCombs off in no uncertain terms and sent him away an enraged and frustrated man, to die a few years later, so his friends claimed, of a broken heart. “Before we proceed,” he remembered Wilson as saying as soon as they were alone, giving him a cold gray stare through his eyeglasses, “I wish it clearly understood that I owe you nothing. Remember that God ordained that I should be the next President of the United States.”

Fifteen thousand letters and telegrams poured into the little house on Cleveland Lane. McCombs was only the first of the parade of office-seekers. The Democrats had been out of office for twenty years. The Democrats were hungry.

Ten days after his election Wilson hurried his ladies aboard the Bermudian for a month’s rest on his favorite island. He took along a single secretary and the now inevitable secretservice men. Only he and his wife knew how frayed his nerves were. His digestion was out of kilter. He was suffering from his old neuritis. He had to have quiet.

“As soon as I knew I had been sentenced to four years hard labor my first thought was to get away to Bermuda and enjoy my liberty while I might,” he told the British official who greeted him at the dock. He begged the reporters and photographers to leave him alone. How tense he still was was shown by his blowup when he caught a photographer outside of the family cottage about to snap one of his daughters coming back hot and dusty from a bicycle ride, garbed, it was whispered, in bloomers. “You are no gentleman” he shouted at the astonished photographer. “If you want a good thrashing keep that up.”

When his ship docked in New York the President-elect was met by prophets of doom. McCombs brought a rumor that the financial community was so alarmed by the prospect of a Democratic administration they were about to precipitate a panic. The bosses were filtering back into the State House at Trenton.

In a speech before the Southern Society the night after he arrived Wilson lashed out at “some gentlemen in New Jersey” who were counting the days until they could get rid of him. “I informed them today that they were not going to get rid of me.” He was going to remain governor until the last moment. Of the rumors of panic on Wall Street he said, pushing out his sharp jaw in cold fury, “A panic is merely a state of mind … Frankly I do not believe there is any man living who dares use that machinery for that purpose. If he does, I promise him, not for myself but for my countrymen, a gibbet as high as Haman.”

The Republican papers made a lot of the hanging high as Haman remark. The Sun printed a cartoon: “Lord High Executioner Wilson.” Many of Wilson’s supporters felt he had gone too far, but the Schoolmaster in Politics had let it be known that he intended to keep order in the classroom.

There was one haven of refuge from the importunities of the politicians and the clamors of party stalwarts trying to tell him whom he should appoint to his cabinet. That was Colonel House’s quiet apartment in the Murray Hill section of New York. The colonel was discretion itself. No visitors were allowed to intrude. No telephone call got past the switchboard downstairs. With the colonel Wilson could talk over the pros and cons of cabinet appointments without feeling that something was being put over on him. Already he had expressed his trust in his Texas friend by offering him any office except Secretary of State.

House disclaimed any interest in holding office. “My reasons were,” he noted in his diary, “that I am not strong enough to tie myself down to a cabinet department … I very much prefer being a free lance, and to advise with him concerning matters in general, and to have a roving commission …”

“Take my word for it,” a senator is quoted as having said of Colonel House, “he can walk on dead leaves and make no more noise than a tiger.”

The President-elect’s advisers mostly agreed that Bryan should be Secretary of State. Wilson owed his nomination to Bryan’s steadfast opposition to Champ Clark. Bryan was the leader of progressive Democracy. Then too, as Finley Peter Dunne put it in his “Mr. Dooley” column: “With a brick in his hand he’s as expert as a rifleman. An’ I’d rather have him close to me bosom thin on me back.”

McAdoo was to have the Treasury. Lindley M. Garrison, an able and uninspiring lawyer who presided over the chancery court of the state of New Jersey, became Secretary of War. Josephus Daniels, the genial social leveller and prohibitionist for whom Wilson felt real friendship, got the Navy. David F. Houston, an old friend of House’s who had been president of the University of Texas, was to be Secretary of Agriculture. Another Texan, Albert S. Burleson, a professional of politics who led the Texas delegation in Baltimore, disposed of the presidential patronage as Postmaster General.

Among the lesser planets were Franklin K. Lane, a cheerful and garrulous San Francisco conservationist whom Daniels used to say reminded him of Humpty Dumpty, in the Interior; William Redfield, whose main claim to fame was that he was the last man in American politics to wear sidewhiskers, in the Department of Commerce; and William B. Wilson, who had come up out of the coalpits to become secretary-treasurer of the United Mine Workers under John Mitchell, filling the new post of Secretary of Labor. It was a cabinet heavily weighted with southerners and westerners. These were men more given to shirtsleeves than to frock coats.

Tumulty, who had served Wilson ably at Trenton, became the President’s secretary. Talkative, warmhearted, somewhat scatterbrained in the violence of his party feelings, he became an effective buffer between the aloof President and the reporters and politicians who besieged the executive offices.

The inaugural weather proved good. Wall Street remained calm. The threatened panic did not materialize. Except for the loss of a trunk containing the President’s nightwear, the Wilson family, with its abundance of female relatives in attendance, was successfully transferred from the modest dwelling on Cleveland Lane to the great spaces of the White House.

When Woodrow Wilson turned towards the crowd after taking the oath on the Capitol portico, he saw the police pushing people back to clear a place in front of the stand. “Let the people come forward,” he called in his clear tenor voice. Then looking into the upturned faces in front of him, he began: “My fellow citizens, there has been a change of government …”

The address was short and wellreceived. Lyman Abbott’s Outlook hailed it as “the call of a prophet to a Nation to repent of its sins and return, not to the methods, but to the spirit of the Fathers.”

The day after the inauguration the Wilsons entertained the entire Woodrow connection, with a few old friends mixed in, for lunch; and the Wilson cousins, to the number of twentyfive, for dinner. During the afternoon the President shook hands with one thousand, one hundred and twentythree persons at a public reception and received, in the Blue Room, with the punctilious assistance of Mr. “Ike” Hoover, the chief usher — who had been conducting such ceremonies ever since he was called to the White House to help install the first electrical wiring in Benjamin Harrison’s day — the ambassador of Great Britain.

Ambassador James Bryce was a wiry ruddyfaced little man with white hair and beard and an energetic manner of speaking. For many years Bryce had been one of the idols of Woodrow Wilson’s life. Of similar Scotch Presbyterian lineage, Bryce too had come a long way since Wilson, as an impecunious graduate student, heard him lecture at Johns Hopkins.

It was a career such as young Wilson dreamed of for himself in those days. Bryce had not only won fame as a writer on constitutional law and democratic government and as traveller and mountainclimber, but had become one of the voices of the nonconformist conscience in England in the agitation against Turkish oppression of the Armenians, of which he had personal experience while on an expedition to ascend Mount Ararat. He sat in Parliament, served in Gladstone’s last cabinet, was president of the Board of Trade and occupied the uneasy eminence of Secretary for Ireland under Campbell-Bannerman. He twice refused a peerage.

Sent to Washington during T.R.’s second term he had negotiated with the United States one of those arbitration conventions liberalminded men hoped were the forerunners of the rule of law in the civilized world. Now his chief preoccupation was the friendly settlement of the problem of tolls in the Panama Canal which was soon to be open for traffic. No Britisher alive was better suited by temperament and training to hit it off with Woodrow Wilson.

If Bryce looked forward to a renewal of the easy hospitality of the Roosevelt days, when he found the White House the center of the best brains and the most amusing conversation in Washington, he was to be disappointed. The new President, though he had his charming moments and was quite a wag in the privacy of his family circle, was to prove singularly lacking in the social graces.

In the White House even more than at Princeton, Wilson took refuge from the racket and glare of public life, which T.R. had frankly enjoyed and Taft had goodhumoredly tolerated, in the inner circle of his wife and daughters and admiring female cousins. He was desperately determined that his fireside should be his own.

Tumulty’s domain stopped at the entrance to the presidential suite. Colonel House was admitted but very few others from the outside world. Dr. Grayson was the exception.

Like Ike Hoover, Cary T. Grayson, a navy surgeon with rank of lieutenant, had been a White House familiar for some years. As a young man he was one of the party on T.R.’s breakneck ride to Warrenton and back in one day. He was a friend of the agreeable Archie Butt who was Roosevelt’s and then Taft’s military aide and perished on the Titanic. He served Taft as medical aide. Taft took a fancy to him. Entertaining the incoming President at their last White House tea, the Tafts recommended him warmly to the Wilsons.

Then when President Wilson’s sister Mrs. Howe fell on the steps and cut her forehead in the scramble of inauguration day Lieutenant Grayson tended her so assiduously that the Wilsons were captivated. Grayson was a Virginian. The President liked his Culpeper County accent and his selfeffacing demeanor. Immediately he asked Josephus Daniels to attach him permanently to the White House. Dr. Grayson found himself coping with a fit of dyspepsia and sick headaches into which the President had been thrown by the strain of the inaugural festivities. Instead of going to church his first Sunday in the White House Dr. Grayson ordered him to stay in bed and rest. It was good advice.

Woodrow Wilson was desperately trying to keep his head in the turmoil. “At least Washington and Jefferson had time to think,” he remarked bitterly.

His opinion of the position of the President had changed with the times. Before his inauguration he wrote A. Mitchell Palmer, a fervent supporter in the Pennsylvania delegation at Baltimore who was carried into Congress on the crest of the Wilson wave: “The President is expected by the Nation to be the leader of his party as well as the Chief Executive officer of the Government, and the country will take no excuses from him. He must play the part and play it successfully or lose the country’s confidence. He must be prime minister, as much concerned with the guidance of legislation as with the just and orderly execution of the law, and he is the spokesman of the nation in everything even in the most momentous and delicate dealings of the Government with foreign nations.”

Wilson had hardly been installed in the White House before he let it be known that he was going to use the President’s Room at the Capitol to confer with congressional leaders on important legislation. Since Jefferson had given up reading the President’s messages in person no President had appeared in the legislative chambers. Shocked horror and cries of “Federalism,” “tawdry imitation of English royalty,” and the like, met his announcement that on April 8 he would deliver in person his first message to the special session of Congress he had immediately called to consider revision of the tariff.

This breaking with a centuryold tradition assured the new President a breathless crowd in the galleries and the attention of the entire nation when he walked in to address the joint session. Friends noticed his pallor, a certain constraint about his erect figure. He took his place at the desk of the reading clerk, just below the speaker’s chair. The atmosphere was tense. Southern congressmen particularly were fidgety about this reckless innovation.

The moment he began to speak the strain was relieved. His voice was beguiling. He spoke with just a trace of humor of “verifying for himself the impression that the President of the United States was a person, a human being trying to cooperate with other human beings in a common service.”

He spoke for only ten minutes. He spoke of squaring tariff duties with the actual facts: “We must abolish everything that bears even the semblance of privilege … and put our business men and producers under the stimulation of a constant necessity to be efficient, economical, and enterprising, masters of competitive supremacy, better workers and merchants than any in the world.”

The speech was received with resounding applause. Driving back to the White House down the Mall, Ellen Wilson, delighted with the success of her husband’s defiance of tradition, said it was “the sort of thing Theodore Roosevelt would have liked to do if only he’d thought of it.”

The President laughed. “Yes I think I put one over on Teddy.”

Foreign affairs had been T.R.’s personal playground during his presidency. Taft, trained in the Philippines and as Secretary of War, tended to see the world as a whole; in his quiet way he supported every move towards peace by arbitration. Although careful listeners could already detect the ticking of the time bomb in Europe, Woodrow Wilson had ignored all mankind outside of the borders of the United States in his pronouncements during the 1912 campaign. A few found it odd. In the four months between his election and his inauguration, many an unwanted foreign fowl came home to roost.

Twentyfive years after the French project ended in pestilence and bankruptcy the Panama Canal was nearing completion. T.R.’s manner of achieving it had left problems for his successors. The secession of Panama was admittedly a farce, but the brazenness of its buffoonery left hurt feelings. There was the little matter of Colombian sovereignty which T.R. had laughed off as the delusion of greedy Latin politicos. Taft had been trying to put a legal face on the proceedings by negotiating a treaty as a form of heart balm for the government in Bogotá. Three weeks before Wilson’s inauguration Colombia rejected the Taft proposals.

When Ambassador Bryce called on the newly elected President he may not have mentioned tolls, but he surely had tolls on his mind. The Hay-Pauncefote Treaty between Great Britain and the United States, replacing the earlier treaty calling for joint management of some future isthmian canal, had stipulated that all nations were to have equal treatment, but Congress had lightheartedly passed a bill exempting American coast to coast shipping from paying any tolls at all. The Foreign Office sent Bryce to Washington with the idea of using his unique prestige among Americans to secure the repeal of that measure. After that he was planning on retirement.

Roosevelt’s diplomacy had been all his own, a mixture of aggressive nationalism and shrewd sense. Under Taft the flag had followed the dollar. Now Wilson and Bryan were determined to extend the blessings of democratic justice to all the world. How to go about it?

Wrongdoing abounded abroad and at home. The California legislature was passing exclusion acts against the Japanese. President Wilson had hardly settled at his desk in the executive office before the Japanese ambassador appeared to present a protest. Since defeating the Russians the Japanese were in no mood to accept discrimination.

Western ideas were stirring in the Far East. In China a republic had been proclaimed. Wilson’s first conversations with his newly installed Secretary of State dealt with the terms of a loan the European powers were trying to force on the backward Chinese.

The Caribbean was uneasy. Trouble was popping everywhere. In Mexico a revolution was on the march. Rifles bristled out of every adobe hut. Two weeks before Wilson’s inauguration, Francisco Madero, whom American Democrats had hailed as a kindred spirit when he displaced the old Mixtec dictator, Porfirio Díaz, a few months before, was shot full of lead by a new strong man named Victoriano Huerta. The reform wave that had swept the United States was agitating the Mexicans, but south of the Rio Grande the revolt against the vested interests took the form of arson and murder.

“It would be the irony of fate,” Wilson told a Princeton friend when he heard the news, “if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs.”

In spite of storms brewing on every frontier Wilson’s first duty was to his campaign commitments. In a rare burst of legislative energy, Congress, under the President’s skillful prodding, passed two basic measures during the first nine months of his administration.

Tariff for revenue only had long been a Democratic motto. The Underwood Tariff Act, pushed through the two houses during the summer, accomplished the first thoroughgoing downward revision of import duties since 1846.

For years the reformers had dreamed of an income tax to syphon off the guilty profits of the rich. A small progressive income tax, made possible by a constitutional amendment ratified by the states a couple of years before, was included ostensibly to make up for the loss of revenue. The bill was ready for signature by October 3.

“I have had the accomplishment of something like this at heart ever since I was a boy” the President cried out exultantly to the assembled cabinet members, congressmen and reporters who packed into the executive office to see him affix his Woodrow Wilson with two gold pens, “and I know men standing around me who can say the same thing, who have been waiting to see the things done which it was necessary to do in order that there might be justice in the United States.”

At the same time a far more intricate and controversial measure was in the works.

Breaking up what Bryan and his followers called the money trust was a shibboleth of the southern and western uprising against Wall Street which had landed the new administration in Washington. The management of the currency of the United States, and consequently of credit and finance, was admittedly chaotic and outdated. Conservatives and progressives agreed that the state of affairs where some seven thousand banks could issue money under the vague direction of a Comptroller of the Currency was a breeder of panics. For some years Senator Aldrich, heading a committee that sought the guidance of the New York bankers, had been working for legislation which would centralize the banking system. Nobody denied the need. The question at issue was who would run the new system, the bankers or the representatives of the people.

The construction of the Federal Reserve Act out of a welter of conflicting interests and conflicting dogmas was one of the great successes of the congressional system.

It would never have come to pass if Woodrow Wilson had not managed to make himself the leader of the whole Democratic Party, instead of merely its progressive wing; and if he had not shown, during that first summer of his administration, an unexpected ability to learn by doing. Finance was not his special province, but he eagerly soaked up information from such men as the reforming Louis D. Brandeis, who was then considered a dangerous firebrand by the conservatives, and from banker friends McAdoo smuggled into the White House when Bryan wasn’t looking. It was the President himself who suggested the Federal Reserve Board, which made control in the public interest a workable proposition.

At first the bare notion of such a board horrified both sides. Bryan’s followers claimed it would create “an oligarchy of boundless wealth … to govern the financial destiny of the nation, operating under governmental protection.” Conservatives were equally revolted. The New York Sun described the President’s project as “the preposterous offspring of ignorance and unreason … The provision for a government agency and an official board to exercise absolute control over the most important of banking functions is covered all over with the slime of Bryanism.”

Virginia Representative Carter Glass, who, starting from a printshop in Lynchburg, became publisher and owner of his smalltown papers, and developed into the southern congressman best qualified to deal with fiscal matters, steered the bill through the House. Robert L. Owen, a stockman and banker from Oklahoma, who had been a careful student of European banking systems, steered it through the Senate. Secretary Bryan did yeoman service keeping his radicals in order once the President had convinced him the measure was the nearest thing to public control of banking that could be achieved at that time. Secretary McAdoo, meanwhile, whose promotion of the Hudson tubes had won the admiration of the business community, cajoled the conservatives.

Throughout the hot summer and the long fall the President managed to simulate an air of coolness and equanimity while he conducted the general strategy from the White House. In private he blew off steam:

“Why should public men, senators of the United States, have to be led and stimulated to do what all the country knows is their duty—” he wrote Mrs. Peck, finding it hard, as usual, to imagine that any man in his right mind could honestly disagree with him on any topic whatsoever. “Why should they see less clearly, apparently, than anyone else what the straight path of service is? To whom are they listening? Certainly not to the voice of the people, when they quibble and twist and hesitate … A man of my temperament, and my limitations will certainly wear himself out on it … the danger is that he may lose his patience and suffer the weakness of exasperation.”

When President Wilson did lose his patience “and suffer the weakness of exasperation” his wrath found an unexpected target. There existed in Washington a branch of an organization of veterans of the Philippine insurrections know as the Military Order of the Carabao. The Carabao’s annual celebrations were bibulous affairs with skits and spoofing of public officials in the spirit of the Gridiron dinners conducted by the press. They were accompanied by the singing of old warsongs like “There’s Many a Man Been Murdered in Luzon,” and “Damn Damn Damn the Filipinos.” No one had ever taken their jollifications seriously until one December morning while the tug of war over the Currency Bill which was to set up the Federal Reserve was still undecided on Capitol Hill, the Schoolmaster in Politics read a facetious account of the antics of the local corral of the Carabao in his morning paper.

He was not at all amused. He decided to give the military a lesson.

Wilson’s policy towards the Philippines was a cautious advance in the direction of selfgovernment and his pronouncements on the subject had been received with jubilation in Manila. The oldtime jingos of the regular army viewed independence for the little brown brethren with derision.

Though not a prohibitionist himself Wilson had appointed two prohibitionists to his cabinet. Bryan was refusing to allow wine to be served at his state dinners and Josephus Daniels would soon go so far as to cut off the Navy’s traditional grog.

Here was a bunch of army officers poking fun at the Democratic Party’s Philippine policy, insulting the Filipinos with slanderous ditties and holding Secretary Bryan’s grape juice suppers up to ridicule. Wilson went after them like a college president cracking down on student pranksters. It was all Daniels and Garrison could do to argue him out of hauling the general officers involved up before a courtmartial. They compromised on a reprimand.

The President administered the chastisement personally in a letter which, to the embarrassment of all concerned, he gave to the press. “What are we to think of officers of the Army and Navy of the United States who think it fun to bring their official superiors into ridicule and the policies of the government … into contempt? If they do not hold their loyalty above all silly effervescences of childish wit, what about their profession do they hold sacred?”

Wilson had stuck to his desk for nine solid months with only a few short breathers in the country. His nerves were taut to the breaking point. During the summer he poured out his feelings in a letter to Mrs. Reid, another of the sympathetic matrons he liked to tell his troubles to:

“The days go hard with me just now. I am alone. My dear ones went away almost at my command. I could not have been easy about them had they not gone; and we have found a nest for them in New Hampshire … where they have just the right airs, a beautiful country around them, and most interesting neighbors … These are stern days, and this all but empty house fits well with them. My secretary [Tumulty] is living with me and the young naval doctor who is of my staff [Grayson] … I work hard of course (the amount of work a President is supposed to do is preposterous) but it is not that that tells on a fellow. It’s the anxiety of handling such ‘things’ as that scoundrel Huerta … I play golf every afternoon — [this was part of Dr. Grayson’s regime of ‘preventive medicine’] — because while you are playing golf you cannot worry and be preoccupied with affairs … I have myself well in hand. I find that I am often cooler in my mind than some of those about me. And of course I find a real zest in it all … So far things go very well and my leadership is most loyally and graciously accepted even by men of whom I did not expect it. I hope that this is in part because they perceive that I am pursuing no private and selfish purposes of my own. How could a man do that with such responsibilities resting on him!”

Two days before Christmas the President had his reward. He triumphantly signed the Federal Reserve Act in the presence of the ladies of the family in their billowing frocks and of the Speaker of the House and members of the congressional committees and his cabinet officers, with tall giraffenecked McAdoo towering above them grinning in his tight stiff collar. There was the usual distribution of gold pens to the deserving. Wilson spoke modestly of his satisfaction “… that I played a part in completing a work which I think will be of lasting benefit.”

This was statebuilding as he had dreamed of it. The New York Times reporter spoke of the look of radiant happiness on Mrs. Wilson’s face. She had reason to feel exultant. The establishment of the Federal Reserve system was possibly the most lasting achievement of her husband’s career.

Immediately after the ceremony the Wilson family embarked on a private car for a much needed holiday at Pass Christian on the Gulf of Mexico. They had hardly time to enjoy their Christmas tree and to wish each other a Happy New Year before the President became thoroughly preoccupied with new complications in his campaign to oust “that scoundrel Huerta” from the presidency of Mexico. His disinterestedness was not appreciated south of the Rio Grande. The Mexican politicians were not accepting his leadership as “loyally and graciously” as did the Democratic politicians on Capitol Hill.

On January 2, 1914, the cruiser Chester, after dashing at full steam across the Gulf from Vera Cruz, dropped anchor off Gulfport, Mississippi. Under conditions of considerable secrecy the President went out on a launch to confer for some hours with a large blond civilian on board the warship. This gentleman was the Honorable John Lind, Swedishborn retired governor of Minnesota, Bryan supporter and deserving Democrat, who had been chosen for no reason that anyone could imagine, unless his ignorance of Spanish and his lack of any Mexican experience qualified him as unprejudiced, to be the President’s personal representative in Mexico. At that conference Mr. Lind and Mr. Wilson decided to back the northern Mexican revolutionaries against Huerta. For a pacifist John Lind had remarkable faith in the efficacy of arms.

Ever since the inauguration the President had been carrying out a policy described as of “watchful waiting” towards the revolutions and counterrevolutions in Mexico. To implement that policy he had been using every possible means to bypass the Embassy in Mexico City. Wilson was even more suspicious of professional diplomats than of professional military men.

In this case there was some justification for his suspicions. When the unfortunate Madero called on General Huerta, who had grown up as a career man in Díaz’s army, to suppress a cuartelazo engineered by members of the old regime, Huerta joined with Díaz’s nephew Felix, to suppress Madero instead. This act of treachery was carried out with the blessing of Taft’s ambassador, Henry Lane Wilson. In fact the written agreement between the two counterrevolutionaries was known as “the pact of the Embassy.”

Neither Wilson nor Bryan had personal experience with any but Englishspeaking people. Their Mexican policy consisted of trying to find Americanstyle reformers in the Democratic tradition among the warring bands which Madero’s assassination and Huerta’s assumption of power had launched on the warpath.

There was Zapata pillaging the haciendas of the sugar barons in the south under the banner of “land and schools for the peons.”

In Chihuahua, Francisco Villa, recent convert from professional banditry to revolutionary idealism, was showing a genius for guerrilla fighting and building himself a small empire out of the ruined holdings of the cientificos.

In Coahuila, Venustiano Carranza, maderista governor, whose long white beard added respectability to his cause, proclaimed himself First Chief of the constitutionalist forces pledged to reestablish law and order and to continue Madero’s program of rational reform. After talking to Lind, Wilson decided that Carranza was his man.

“That scoundrel Huerta,” idolized as chief by the regular army, held the capital and central Mexico and the railroads to Vera Cruz and to the oil port of Tampico. He had the support of most of the foreign powers, and the sympathy of Mexican and American business interests. Seventeen nations had recognized his government. Particularly the British looked to Huerta to protect their investments and keep order as old Díaz had for forty years.

The British had reason to be anxious about Tampico. His Majesty’s fleet had recently switched from coal to oil and Mexico was its main source of supply. With such support Huerta remained unmoved by admonitions from Washington to retire and hold free elections.

When Huerta did announce elections he got ready for them by dissolving the largely maderista congress and arresting a hundred and ten of its members. For Wilson this was the last straw. Forcing out Huerta became an obsession.

The Foreign Office was amazed; but Sir Edward Grey was willing to make sacrifices to keep the good will of the new administration in Washington. The British began to intimate in their sly unspoken way that they might reconsider their support of Huerta in exchange for the President’s help in doing away with the exemption of American shipping from paying tolls in the Panama Canal which, in spite of landslides in the Culebra cut, was well on its way to completion.

Bryce had retired with his aim still unachieved, and T.R.’s old friend Cecil Spring Rice was slated to replace him. Meanwhile Colonel House brought Foreign Minister Grey’s private secretary Sir William Tyrrell to call on the President at the White House.

“We all spoke with the utmost candor and without diplomatic gloss,” House noted in his diary. “If some of the veteran diplomats could have heard us they would have fallen in a faint,” the Britisher confided to House after they left the executive office.

The British washed their hands of Huerta. From that moment on the Mexican problem was in Uncle Sam’s lap.

Bryan was only too glad to leave the day to day administration of foreign affairs to the President. As Secretary of State he felt that his historic function was to negotiate arbitration treaties. He was convinced he had found an infallible remedy for war.

Back in 1905 in an article in The Commoner he had suggested that all the differences between nations should be submitted to a court of arbitration. If nations could agree to a year’s cooling off period while some sort of neutral factfinding commission investigated their causes of friction, declarations of war would be postponed long enough to let hot tempers cool.

He explained his plan more in detail in an address to the Interparliamentary Union in London in the summer of 1906. James Bryce called it “certainly splendid.” The English press reported the project with enthusiasm. Arbitration was officially endorsed by the Interparliamentary Union and by the Liberal government. Bryan’s evangel appealed to the nonconformist conscience then in the ascendant in Britain. Great hopes were raised.

After Roosevelt failed to induce the Senate to ratify his arbitration treaties, Bryan, who was drumming up his plan before Chautauquas and at peace conferences all over the country, urged Taft to try again. At a meeting with Taft and Elihu Root he convinced them that his plan was practical and that it would find popular backing in Great Britain and at least in the smaller European countries. Taft’s arbitration treaties met the same fate as T.R.’s.

As soon as Bryan was installed as Secretary of State he went to work. He used all his skill in political manoeuvering and all his powers of persuasion. Before he accepted the office he showed a sample treaty to Woodrow Wilson for his approval. One of his first acts was to call together the entire diplomatic corps and ask them to submit his proposals to their governments.

The warmth of his dedication to the cause of peace melted the icy scepticism of the professional diplomats. Using the arts of compromise and cajolement he had acquired working with platform committees at many a party convention he allowed the treaties to be worded to suit the individual prejudices of the various governments. While trying to save the spirit he conceded the letter. Starting with San Salvador and the Netherlands he negotiated a first batch of eighteen arbitration treaties, and took them in person to the Senate. Germany was one of the few countries that refused.

Bryan had a knack with politicians, and especially with senators. “I remained in the office of the Clerk of the Senate two days while the treaties were being discussed, answering questions as they arose,” he wrote. While the treaties were being drafted he had taken the precaution of consulting the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs in advance on every provision. Where the two previous Republican administrations had failed, Bryan, by his conciliatory manner and his personal prestige with Democratic politicians, blarneyed the Senate into ratification.

Bryan’s chest swelled with pride under his piqué vest. For years he had been throwing all the organ notes of his voice into his favorite oration, which he called “the Prince of Peace.”

At the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Ghent that ended the War of 1812, his optimism rose to the point where he dared exclaim: “We know of no cause today that cannot better be settled by reason than by war. I believe there will be no war while I am Secretary of State … I hope we have seen the last great war.”

At the formal signing of a large batch of the treaties, amid the whir of motion picture cameras and the jostling of journalists, a lifesized oil painting was unveiled of Mr. Bryan with an arbitration treaty in his hand.

The Secretary had induced his friend Secretary of the Navy Daniels to have a set of paperweights made for him from some old steel swords at the Navy Yard. They were cast in the form of a plowshare and engraved with two quotations: one the soothing words Mr. Bryan himself used when the Japanese ambassador complained about the treatment of his nationals in California: “Nothing is final between friends”; and the other the more familiar phrase from Isaiah about beating swords into plowshares. These he distributed to the signatory diplomats as mementos of the occasion.

Chapter 5 THE RED MAN

WHILE Bryan was happily signing arbitration treaties and assuring Chautauquas and summer conferences that the triumph of peace was at hand, more wary observers of the international scene were expressing misgivings. A few months after the inauguration of Wilson’s administration, T.R.’s friend Spring Rice — then representing the British in Stockholm — wrote Henry Adams asking for his impressions of “the professor’s victory.” He went on to describe the mounting tension in Europe.

In a sort of code used by the intimates of Henry Adams’ and John Hay’s twin houses on Lafayette Square the spirit of militarism was in those days called “The Red Man.” “Isn’t it curious,” Spring Rice wrote Uncle Henry, as he called him, “that we are all supposing ourselves to be standing on the edge of the most terrific disaster (for Europe) which has ever taken place. Even the hardened dip. looks a little solemn when the subject is alluded to at dinner. The appearance of the Red Man in a particularly realistic manner, in the middle of the cocked hats and laced coats, had had rather a calming effect”—he was talking about the latest outbreak of war in the Balkans, which he feared might be the beginning of something worse—“We shall have some red spots on our white kid gloves. But this isn’t yet the real thing. Austria may have given the order which may lead Europe to a several-years’ war”—he was referring to Austrian efforts to keep the southern Slavic nations from getting a port on the Adriatic—“but it is singular to think how tremendous are the calamities that may be brought about at any moment by one slight act, based on what look to you the meanest motives. As a matter of fact it is a peoples’ question, the struggle for existence between races; and this struggle has been going on for ages and perhaps the moment for the decisive struggle has come.”

The Red Man was indeed at large. In Mexico and in the Balkans armed bands fought and murdered and raped and burned. While the armies of civilized Europe marched and countermarched in more and more realistic manoeuvers, the “hardened dips” of the foreign chancelleries cooperated with Bryan and his aides in the State Department as they would humor some child’s game. Perhaps it eased their consciences a little to mutter little prayers for peace at a time when every move they made on the chessboard of power politics brought war nearer.

Woodrow Wilson, sitting long hours at his solitary typewriter upstairs in the White House, was conducting the relations of the United States with the Mexican revolutionists in such a way as to keep the diplomats thoroughly puzzled.

At the end of January 1914 Spring Rice, who was just settling down at the British Embassy in Washington, described the situation in a letter to Sir Edward Grey’s secretary:

“The President has maintained and rather increased his influence in Congress and in the country, but he is as mysterious as ever. When he summons the newspaper men he talks to them at length and in excellent language, but when they leave his presence they say to each other, What on earth did he say? When he sees the members of Congress he reads them a lecture and tells them what he thinks is good for them to know, which appears to them to be very little. He asks the advice of no one.”

In Mexico armed men kept springing up from the blood of the dead Madero. His mystique of democracy spread in strange forms to even the remotest hamlets where Spanish was hardly spoken, much as the reforming zeal of the Theodore Roosevelt era infected the North American backlands with a yearning for righteousness. In the United States the reforms took legal shape according to the ancient traditions of Anglo-Saxon comity; but in Mexico the young men who trooped out of the mountain cornfields and the dry maguey plantations and the irrigated sugarcane to make a revolution, found themselves slaves of the only social formation they knew outside of the communal village and the hacienda: the robber band under a chieftain who enforced his will with the gun.

The Mexicans remained puzzling to Woodrow Wilson to the last.

He had family perplexities too. Right along he had hated the idea of his daughters having beaux. At Princeton his sarcasms tore to pieces the young men the girls occasionally ventured to bring home to meals. Jessie managed to win her father’s approval of a college professor and married him. “The pang of it is still deep in my heart,” the President wrote Mrs. Peck after the wedding.

Now Eleanor, after an effort to keep her engagement secret for fear of her father’s wrath, was about to marry his Secretary of the Treasury. The press, inevitably nosy about the doings of nubile young women in the White House, was filling the society pages with rumors of Eleanor’s and Margaret’s engagement to this man and that. One day the President betrayed his underlying tension by lashing out at the newspapermen Tumulty worked so hard to keep in a cosy frame of mind.

“I am a public character for the time being,” he announced at a press conference, his sharp jaw jutting and his eyes flashing behind his nose-glasses, “but the ladies of my household are not servants of the government and they are not public characters. I deeply resent the treatment they are receiving at the hands of the newspapers … It is a constant and intolerable annoyance … If this continues,” he glowered into the embarrassed faces assembled in front of his desk, “I shall deal with you, not as President, but as man to man.”

The men trudged out of the oval office like schoolboys who had been tonguelashed by the headmaster.

It was hard for Wilson to keep his serenity amid so many worries. His greatest anxiety was about his wife. Ellen Wilson’s health was worse. She had a fall in her room one day, but she wouldn’t stay in bed. She laughed off her symptoms, appealing from their father to her daughters. “This goose keeps worrying about me for no reason at all.”

She was busy with a private project. While her husband worried about the Colorado mine strike, and the need to send troops to the Mexican border to keep the bandits from spilling over into United States territory, and busied himself piloting antitrust legislation through Congress, Ellen Wilson was lobbying for a bill of her own. As a southerner she had been raised to look out for the wellbeing of Negroes. Now in Washington she found families living in back alleys under conditions she felt were a disgrace to the national capital. She joined the group of social workers to get through a bill to clean up these conditions. All her ebbing strength, all her quiet charm and winsome ways, went into backing her housing bill.

In April the President stole a few days off to take his wife to White Sulphur Springs. He was trying to believe that the change of air would do her good. A nurse went along.

The presidential party had hardly settled at the Greenbrier before a dispatch from Secretary Bryan appeared on Wilson’s breakfast table. Huerta’s commander at Tampico had arrested a navy paymaster and the crew of a ship’s boat flying the American flag. The detention was short but Admiral Mayo, in command of the American fleet hovering off the Mexican coast, was demanding the punishment of the guilty Mexicans and a twentyone gun salute in apology for the insult to the flag.

The President hurried back to Washington. For a week the cables back and forth to the chargé d’affaires, who replaced the recalled ambassador in Mexico City, resounded with that twentyone gun salute.

Huerta was sorry. His officers were sorry. It had all been a mistake. Huerta offered to arbitrate the dispute at The Hague.

The President refused. Arbitration would mean recognizing the bloodstained old drunkard. Instead he delivered himself of an ultimatum, giving Huerta until April 19 to salute the American flag. “People seem to want a war with Mexico,” he told his daughters when they brought their mother back from the springs, “but they shan’t have it if I can prevent it.”

To Wilson this seemed the chance he’d been looking for to put the Mexican dictator out of office. To Huerta it looked like a chance to rally the Mexican people behind him. Already his prestige was rising so that wealthy Mexicans were subscribing to a loan to be used to buy munitions for his army.

When the news reached Washington that a shipment of arms was about to be landed at Vera Cruz from the Hamburg-America steamer Ypiranga, Wilson went before the two houses of Congress and obtained a joint resolution empowering him to use the army and navy to enforce his demands. The yellow press was all for cleaning up “the mess in Mexico.” Western senators even talked of taking over Central America clear to the Panama Canal.

Meanwhile Bryan and Wilson decided that, since no state of war existed and they didn’t intend it should exist, it would be most incorrect to seize the cargo off a friendly ship on the high seas. They must wait until the shipment was unloaded and seize the arms on Mexican soil.

At eleven in the morning on April 21, 1914, a thousand marines landed from the American fleet off Vera Cruz and occupied the customhouse. The Mexicans fought back. Another three thousand men had to be landed next day. Before quiet was restored in Vera Cruz a hundred and twenty-six Mexicans were dead and the American forces had lost nineteen dead and seventyone wounded.

President Wilson was very profoundly shocked.

Some good came of the affair. The sanitary methods which had proved successful in Cuba and in Panama were applied to the area occupied by American troops to the lasting benefit of the veracruzanos, and the dreadful old fortress prison of San Juan de Ullúa was opened to the light of day and its miserable victims turned loose.

The violation of Mexican soil, if it didn’t unite the warring factions in support of Huerta, at least gave unanimity to their hatred of the gringos. American consulates were burned, American property was looted, Americans were murdered. The cry of indignation resounded throughout Latin America and found a selfrighteous echo in the London press.

Sober opinion in the United States, particularly among the reforming element the President depended on for support, was almost wholly against him. In one of his moments of selfdeception he had told the reporters the day before the landing that the purpose of the naval demonstration was not to eliminate Huerta but “to compell the recognition of the dignity of the United States … I have no enthusiasm for war but I have enthusiasm for the dignity of the United States.”

The President became entangled in his own contradictions. There was a general outcry against going to war over a mere matter of prestige. Andrew Carnegie’s was one of thousands of messages of protest. He reminded Wilson of Gulliver’s adventures in Lilliput: this was like “the fabled war of two kings to decide which end of the egg should first be broken.”

The incident ended with the flight of Americans from Mexico, and a cordon of troops spread along the Mexican border. The Administration renewed the embargo on arms to the constitutionalists. Except for Villa, who tried to curry favor in Washington by pretending to be delighted, the constitutionalists were protesting even more vigorously than their enemy Huerta against the Yankee invasion.

An initiative, which had the bland encouragement of Colonel House, from three Latin-American ambassadors, Naon of Argentina, de Gama of Brazil and Suarez Mújica of Chile, gave the Administration a chance to retire from an impossible position. The three ambassadors offered to mediate between the various Mexican factions and between the Mexicans and Washington.

The Mexican problem was taken behind closed doors at one of the resort hotels at Niagara Falls. The mediation of the “A.B.C.” powers, if it did not do much to alleviate the anarchic situation in Mexico, at least did something to convince the rest of Latin America that the United States was not planning an invasion. United States citizens could once more venture out on the streets in Latin-American towns without having stones thrown at them.

On May 11, 1914, three days after his daughter Eleanor’s marriage to Secretary McAdoo, President Wilson rode in the New York funeral procession of seventeen of the navy men killed at Vera Cruz. Enormous crowds packed Broadway under the halfmast flags. In front of the Marine Barracks at the Brooklyn Navy Yard the President delivered an address to serve as their funeral oration.

It would have been disgraceful to die in a war of aggression, he said, but “to die in a war of service is glorious.” In landing at Vera Cruz Americans had been performing a service for the Mexican people. “I never was under fire but I fancy it is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shooting at you … The cheers of the moment are not what a man ought to think about but the verdict of his conscience and the conscience of mankind.”

It was a very hot day. The sun beat down on the ranks of bluejackets and marines at parade rest. A crowd of ten thousand people broke through the police lines and milled around on the Navy Yard. Nineteen women fainted and several small children narrowly escaped being trampled. Members of the official party noticed that the President’s face showed deep emotion when he looked down on the seventeen guncarriages and the flagcovered coffins: it was by his orders that these young men had gone to their deaths.

That evening the President and Dr. Grayson dined in the seclusion of Colonel House’s apartment at 135 East Thirtyfifth Street. Wilson was in a relaxed frame of mind. Public speaking always made him feel better. After supper Wilson read some of his favorite poems out of Wordsworth and Matthew Arnold and Keats aloud to the small company. Grayson tactfully took his leave. “When he finished reading,” noted the colonel, “I took up my budget.”

Though there was class war in Colorado between miners and mine-owners to talk about, and Mexico still seethed south of the border, most of the colonel’s budget dealt with Europe.

Colonel House was preparing to sail on the first of his missions as the President’s personal representative. Woodrow Wilson was about to take a hand in European affairs. He was about to try, as Theodore Roosevelt had tried, to talk, quietly behind the scenes, some sense into the heads of the great powers. Behind his poker face and deferential manner the colonel felt the excitement of a schoolboy who’s just been elected captain of the football team. In the privacy of his diary he wrote of the coming trip as The Great Adventure.

He went first to Germany. The Germans put themselves out for him. Since the days of T.R. American prestige had been high with the Kaiser. House found a worse state of affairs than he possibly could have imagined. After a talk with Admiral Von Tirpitz he reported to the President by diplomatic pouch: “It is militarism run stark mad. Unless someone acting for you can bring about a different understanding, there is some day to be an awful cataclysm. No one in Europe can do it. There is too much hatred, too many jealousies … It is an absorbing problem … I wish it might be solved, and to the everlasting glory of your Administration and our American civilization.”

The colonel had learned that, like Oscar Wilde, President Wilson liked his flattery to be gross.

The literalminded Germans couldn’t get it into their heads that President Wilson’s representative was only an ersatz colonel. They gave him the military whirl. At the aviation field they let him see “all sorts of dangerous and curious manoeuvres,” such as looping the loop performed in a new style airplane by a young Hollander in the German service named Fokker. “I was glad when he came down, for I was afraid his enthusiasm to please might result in his death.”

On June 1, Colonel House and Ambassador Gerard were entertained at Potsdam by the Kaiser at a very special military festival called the Schrippenfest. The colonel was placed among the generals right across the table from the Kaiser. The meal was served in a famous hall with walls made entirely of seashells which Gerard described as probably the ugliest room in the world. House noted that the food was delicious and, approvingly, “the meal not long, perhaps fifty minutes.”

After lunch His Majesty took House out on a terrace and talked to him, tête à tête, while Ambassador Gerard and Herr Zimmermann, the acting Secretary for Foreign Affairs, waited deferentially out of earshot. “I found he had all the versatility of Roosevelt with something more of charm, something less of force … He declared he wanted peace because it seemed to Germany’s interest. Germany had been poor, she was now growing rich and a few more years of peace would make her so … I asked the Kaiser why Germany refused to sign the ‘Bryan treaty’ providing for arbitration and a cooling off period … He replied Germany would never sign such a treaty. ‘Our strength lies in being always prepared for war at a second’s notice. We will not resign that advantage and give our enemies time to prepare.’

“I told him that the President and I thought an American might be able to … compose the difficulties here and bring about an understanding … He agreed … I talked to the Kaiser on the terrace for thirty minutes and quite alone … Gerard told me afterwards that all Berlin was talking of the episode and wondering what the devil we had to say to each other for so long and in such an animated way.”

Colonel House left for Paris the same day. He couldn’t get anywhere with the French. President Poincaré was preparing for his state visit to St. Petersburg which was to put a public seal on the Russian alliance. The cabinet was in crisis. The wife of one of the ministers had brought a long political feud to a head by shooting Gaston Calmette, the editor of Le Figaro, who had been calling her husband a traitor. The papers were full of the trial and acquittal of Mme. Caillaux. Among the politicians there was nobody home but the concièrge.

When House called at the Embassy he found Ambassador Myron T. Herrick in a whirl over T.R.’s carryingson at dinner the night before. T.R., fresh from his explorations of the Amazon basin which had nearly been the end of him, was rearing to get back into politics. Herrick predicted he would give the Democrats an unhappy time when he got home.

In England things were different indeed. The weather was delightful. It was the height of one of the most brilliant seasons in London’s history. Everybody who was anybody was everywhere. Right away Walter Hines Page had Colonel House to lunch with T.R. at the Embassy. House found himself the toast of the town. Since the repeal of the tolls exemption anybody connected with Woodrow Wilson was popular with the leading Britishers.

House had cosy chats with Bryce, who had signalized his retirement from active politics by accepting elevation to the peerage as Viscount Bryce of Dechmont. Sir Horace Plunkett and Sir George Paish couldn’t do enough for the confidential colonel. While waiting for Ambassador Page to get hold of Sir Edward Grey for lunch he had a talk with Henry James and renewed acquaintance with John Singer Sargent, at dinner with a wealthy art collector on Piccadilly.

Not a word of international tension, not a word of the ticking of the time bomb across the channel. The Irish question and the hysterical behavior of the suffragettes were the topics of conversation, and society … “I found here everything cluttered up with social affairs,” House wrote his dear friend in the White House, “and it is impossible to work quickly. Here they have their thoughts on Ascot, garden parties, etc. etc.”

Lunch with the British foreign minister was a great success. Sir Edward was “visibly impressed” when the colonel told him of his conversation with the Kaiser. He shied off, however, when House suggested that the pair of them go right over to Kiel where the Kaiser would be attending the yacht races and where there might be opportunities for private talks. That sort of thing was just not done. Sir Edward had to think of the Russians and French. No it was not an alliance, merely an entente, but feelings had to be spared.

House seems to have baited Sir Edward a little by telling him that the Kaiser had said the British Foreign Secretary couldn’t understand Germany because he had never been in Europe. Sir Edward answered, come now, he had crossed the continent once on his way to India, and he’d been in Paris only recently with the King.

To tell the truth Sir Edward was one of the most stayathome foreign ministers in English history. The birds of Britain and tennis and flyfishing and the broad dialect of his Northumberland constituents interested him more than travel among foreigners.

They agreed to meet again as soon as Sir Edward could consult his colleagues. The next lunch lasted two hours, and included Haldane, the former war minister, now Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Sir William Tyrrell. “Sir Edward was in a delightful mood and paid you a splendid tribute,” House wrote Wilson.

Colonel House spent six pleasant weeks in England. He had talks with Tyrrell and Spring Rice about the possibility of setting up an international consortium to furnish loans at decent rates to underdeveloped countries such as Mexico. He had a long talk with Prime Minister Asquith after the ladies had left the table at dinner at 10 Downing Street. He breakfasted with Lloyd George.

“I feel that my visit has been justified,” he jotted in his diary, “even if nothing more is done than that already accomplished. It is difficult for me to realize that the dream I had last year is beginning to come true. I have seen the Kaiser and the British Government seem eager to carry on the discussion.”

In Washington Bryan was working on a second batch of peace treaties. The State Department exuded optimism. That scoundrel Huerta had given up the fight and fled from Mexico leaving the A.B.C. powers to arrange a peaceful transfer of power to Carranza’s constitutionalistas. New Freedom policies were triumphing all over the world. Peaceful mediation in Europe would be another laurel wreath for the Wilson administration. The President had virtually endorsed ahead of time anything that House might do.

“House,” he wrote, “is my second personality. He is my independent self. His thoughts and mine are one. If I were in his place I should do just as he suggested … If anyone thinks he is reflecting my opinion by whatever action he takes they are welcome to the conclusion.”

While House, in the character of Woodrow Wilson’s alter ego, was being wined and dined in London and weekending at country houses with leaders of the ruling party, there occurred that “one slight act” which Spring Rice had spoken of with apprehension in his letter to Henry Adams.

A young enthusiast for the liberation of the southern Slavs shot a number of holes through the somewhat unpopular heir to the Hapsburg throne and his morganatic wife, while the couple were on a state visit to the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo.

There followed a strange lull while the Austrian authorities investigated the rumor that the Serbian Government had instigated the murders.

The Kaiser went about his projected cruise to Norway as if nothing had happened.

In St. Petersburg the Czar Nicholas continued to show Monsieur Poincaré the sights of the Russian capital amid all the splendor and pageantry the court of the Romanoffs could afford.

In London, the members of Asquith’s cabinet took their minds off the threatened civil war in Ireland long enough to give the nod to Sir Edward Grey’s cautious approbation of President Wilson’s plan as embodied in the suggestions of Colonel House.

On July 3, in the course of an affectionate letter, House wrote:

“Tyrrell brought me word today that Sir Edward Grey would like me to convey to the Kaiser the impressions I have obtained from my several discussions with this government, in regard to a better understanding between the nations of Europe and to try to get a reply before I leave. Sir Edward said he did not wish to send anything official or in writing for fear of offending French or Russian sensibilities … He also told Page he had a long talk with the German ambassador here in regard to the matter and that he had sent messages by him directly to the Kaiser.”

During the next few days House composed, with the help of one of the counsellors at the Embassy, who advised a stilted and ceremonious style of address in which, the colonel noted, he did not feel at home, a letter to the German Kaiser. In peroration he quoted an enthusiastic statement from President Wilson: “Your letter from Paris, written just after coming from Berlin, gives me a thrill of deep pleasure. You have I hope begun a great thing and I rejoice with all my heart.” If the Kaiser would join President Wilson in the effort, European peace was assured.

House sailed for Boston on July 21. By the time he arrived at his summer place at Prides Crossing on the North Shore the Austrians, having discovered that the Serbian Government was indeed implicated in the murder of the Hapsburg heir, had served their ultimatum on Serbia and the Russians were mobilizing to back up the Serbs. House’s letter lay on the Kaiser’s desk in Potsdam while he cruised through the Norwegian fjords. August 1, Herr Zimmermann wrote House from the German foreign office that the Kaiser had received his letter but that now it was too late.

Years later the Kaiser in rueful exile at Doorn confided in George Sylvester Viereck that Wilson and House by their offer of mediation very nearly managed to avert the war. Spring Rice propounded the opposite theory: that the war party was so alarmed by the prospect of the Kaiser’s being talked into peaceful negotiations, that they precipitated the crisis in Wilhelm II’s absence.

However it happened, during the first days of August 1914, the Germans answered the Russian mobilization by putting into effect their plan for the invasion of France that had been so long on the drafting board. That meant a violation of the neutrality of the innocent states of Belgium and Luxembourg. “Necessity knows no law,” Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg announced to a special session of the Reichstag. “We have broken the law of nations … The wrong — I say again — the wrong we have done we will try to make good as soon as our military objectives have been reached. He that is threatened as we are threatened thinks only of how he can hack his way through.”

Americans heard the news with stunned disbelief. Ambassador Page had gone down to Bachellor’s Farm in Surrey for the weekend. “I walked out in the night a while ago,” he noted in his diary. “The stars are bright. The night is silent, the country quiet, quiet as peace itself. Millions of men are in camp and on warships. Will they have to fight and many of them die to disentangle this network of treaties and alliances and to blow up the huge debts with gunpowder so that the world may start again?”

When he got back to London he found his embassy besieged by panicky American tourists.

“Upon my word!” he confided in his friend Woodrow Wilson, “if one could forget the awful tragedy, all this experience would be worth a lifetime of commonplace. One surprise follows another so rapidly one loses all sense of time: it seems an age since last Sunday.”

On August 4 Page entered in his diary: “At 3 o’clock I went to see Sir Edw. Grey.” Grey was a tall gaunt, rawboned man with jutting cheekbones and a powerful nose. “He rehearsed the whole situation in a calm, solemn, restrained way, sitting in a chair with both hands under his jaws, leaning forward eagerly. ‘Thus the efforts of a lifetime go for nothing. I feel as a man who has wasted his life,’ and tears came to his eyes …”

“I shall never forget Sir Edward Grey telling me of the ultimatum while he wept,” he wrote the President, “nor the poor German ambassador who has lost in his high game … almost a demented man; how the King as he declaimed at me for half an hour and threw up his hands and said ‘My God, Mr. Page, what else could I do?’ Nor the Austrian ambassador weeping and wringing his hands and crying out ‘My dear colleague, my dear colleague.’ ”

Prince Lichnowsky, a liberal Polish nobleman in the service of the German foreign office, had accepted his assignment to London as an official endorsement of his campaign for a peaceful settlement and had been immensely encouraged by the Kaiser’s interest in House’s suggestions. He took the German declaration of war as a personal affront.

“I went to see the German ambassador in the afternoon,” Page wrote. “He came down in his pyjamas, a crazy man. I feared he might literally go mad. He is of the anti-war party and has done his best and utterly failed. This interview was one of the most pathetic experiences of my life …”

Before signing the letter typewritten on his embassy stationery, Page scribbled some further details in the margin:

“The servant … who went over the house with one of our men came to the desk of the Princess Lichnowsky, the ambassador’s wife. A photo of the German emperor lay on the desk face down. The man said she threw it down and said ‘This is the swine that did this’ and she drew a pig on the blotting pad wh. is still there …”

Page wrote with some pride that he had stationed a naval officer at the German Embassy, and hung the letters U. S. on the door to protect it. He took a deep breath and ended with high emotion:

“And this awful tragedy moves on to what? We do not know what is really happening, so strict is the censorship. But it seems inevitable to me that Germany will be beaten after a long while, that the horrid period of alliances and armaments will not come again, that England will gain even more of the earth’s surface, that Russia may next play the menace; that all Europe (as much as survives) will be bankrupt, that relatively we shall be immensely stronger — financially and politically — there must surely come great changes — very many yet undreamed of. Be ready, for you will surely be called on to compose this huge quarrel. I thank heaven for many things — first the Atlantic ocean; second that you refrained from war in Mexico; third that we kept our treaty; the canal tolls victory I mean. Now when all this half the world will suffer the incredible brutalization of war, we shall preserve our moral strength, our political power and our ideals.

God save us!

Yrs faithfully,

WALTER HINES PAGE”

As the news of the breakdown of the European peace came item by item into the White House during those muggy desperate days of late July and early August, Woodrow Wilson’s face became taut and gray. Overseas, civilization was cracking in pieces. At home his family, which he relied on so for shelter and comfort, was full of wretchedness. Ellen Wilson’s secretary, their dear cousin Helen Bones, was ill. Cousin Mary Smith had been taken to the hospital stricken with appendicitis. And at last he admitted it to himself: his dear one could not live: Ellen was dying.

When the news came of Austria’s declaration of war his first thought was that his daughters must not tell their mother. They were at lunch. Their mother’s place was empty. He put his hand over his face. “I can think of nothing, nothing when my dear one is suffering.”

Dr. Grayson had done his best. The consultants he brought in diagnosed Bright’s disease, complicated by tuberculosis of the kidneys. August 2 was a Sunday. From the sickroom they could hear the newsboys calling the extras that announced the German ultimatum to Belgium. Woodrow Wilson’s old classmate Dr. Davis had come from Philadelphia. He had no hope to offer. Telegrams were sent to her brother, to her nearest relatives. On one of the last days the girls brought her the news that her housing bill had passed through Congress. She smiled contentedly. The last thing her daughter Eleanor heard her say was “Is your father looking well?” Then she whispered to Dr. Grayson, “Promise me you will take good care of my husband.” Not long after she was dead.