9

PREPARATION

A few days after the presidential election, Woodrow Wilson talked with a former colleague from the Princeton faculty, the biologist Edward Grant Conklin. As Conklin later recalled their conversation, Wilson said to him, “It would be an irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign problems, for all my preparation has been in domestic matters.”¹ The first part of that remark proved prophetic because, following the outbreak of war in Europe in August 1914, Wilson did suffer that “irony of fate,” but the second part of the remark was especially revealing of Wilson’s character. When he talked about “preparation” he touched on the heart of his approach to politics. For him, “preparation” meant less the two years of practical political experience—a remarkably thin background for someone on the verge of entering the White House—and more the study of politics that had absorbed him since his days as a college student. He began his formal preparation for his presidency soon after the election returns had come in. Unlike most other politicians, Wilson did not surround himself with people when he made decisions. A decade as a college president and a governor had not changed the habits he had formed in his youth and strengthened as a professor. He still liked to be alone when pondering alternatives and sifting through ideas. Those were the activities he had engaged in during his monthlong sojourn with his family on Bermuda.

Two matters loomed largest in his preparation for the presidency: appointments and policy. He had a cabinet and other important positions to fill, and he had begun to receive advice and think about appointments even before he left for Bermuda. A new acquaintance proved useful in sorting out competing claims and assessing strengths, weaknesses, and political ramifications in various possibilities: Edward M. House. With his slight build and mild manner, House seemed to belie his origins in rough-and-tumbleTexas and his honorific title of Colonel. In some ways, he did belie that background. He was the son of an Englishman who had immigrated to Texas while it was still part of Mexico and had later amassed a large fortune. As a youth, House had gone to school in England and Connecticut before attending college at Cornell. Back in Texas, he had become active in Democratic politics and acquired a reputation as a kingmaker and power behind the throne of several governors. More recently, since retiring from business and moving to New York, House had cast about for ways to play a similar role in national Democratic politics and had involved himself in an intermittent, conciliatory way at the Wilson campaign headquarters.² He also ingratiated himself with the candidate by supplying him with a bodyguard during the campaign, Captain Bill McDonald, a former Texas Ranger who was also a crack pistol shot.

Wilson spent an hour and a half at House’s apartment on New York’s Upper East Side the day he sailed for Bermuda. “Cabinet material was discussed,” House recorded in his diary. House suggested McAdoo for secretary of the Treasury and Albert Burleson for postmaster general. Wilson favored Josephus Daniels for the post office spot, but House had said, “I thought he was not aggressive enough and that the position needed a man who was also in touch with Congress. [Wilson] agreed that this was true.” For attorney general, House recorded, “We practically eliminated Brandeis for this position,” and for secretary of state he noted that he supported Wilson’s leaning toward Bryan.³

Wilson seems to have deputized House to look into prospective cabinet officers and talk with Democratic leaders in Congress. Writing to Wilson about various possibilities for attorney general, House lavished special praise on James McReynolds, a Tennessean who was an experienced anti-trust prosecutor. He also had lunch with Brandeis, whom he praised to Wilson as “more than a lawyer” and dismissed criticism of him, but House noted, “There comes to the surface, now and then, one of those curious Hebrew traits of mind that makes one hold something in reserve.” On a trip to Washington, the colonel sounded out leading Democrats on Capitol Hill, most of whom favored Bryan as secretary of state. House talked about banking reform with Representative Carter Glass of Virginia, chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee, who said he would follow Wilson’s lead but did not favor “central control.”⁴ Glass’s attitude portended problems with banking reform.

Wilson kept his own counsel while he was in Bermuda, but he was clearly pondering what he would do in the White House. He wanted to accomplish something no incoming president had ever done: he wanted to introduce a comprehensive program of legislation at the outset of his administration. Before he left for Bermuda, he announced that he would call into session the newly elected Congress—where Democrats enjoyed a top-heavy majority in the House and a narrower margin of control in the Senate—on April 15, 1913, six weeks after his inauguration. Under the Constitution, this Congress did not have to convene until December 1913. The new president was signaling that he meant to break with politics as usual.

As House’s report from Washington indicated, their party’s senior men on Capitol Hill expected the new president to take the lead in proposing and drafting major legislation. This was a big change. Previously, when either party had won control of both the White House and Congress, legislative priorities had usually emerged slowly and collaboratively, and congressional leaders had often played a bigger role than the president. Even that recent paragon of presidential activism, Theodore Roosevelt, had bided his time before trying to push significant legislation through Congress. Taft had called Congress into session at the beginning of his administration and asked for reform and downward revision of the tariff. That effort had turned into a fiasco, and it did not offer an appealing precedent for major legislative initiatives by an incoming president. Wilson’s eagerness to take this path testified to his self-confidence and sense of preparation. Congressional Democrats’ willingness to follow him testified to their gratitude at finally having been led out of the political wilderness.

When his steamship docked in New York on December 16, reporters found Wilson tanned and in good spirits. He had enjoyed a restful vacation, he told them, “and we all feel ready for anything.” When asked about appointments, he refused to discuss the matter—a vow of silence he would keep for another month—and he stayed mum on major policy issues as well. He was forthcoming on two subjects: New Jersey politics and the general tone of his presidency. Back at his desk in Trenton the next day, the governor gave out a statement saying that he would stay active in state affairs and would keep up the fight against the bosses. Speaking to the Southern Society of New York that evening, Wilson declared, “America is not what it was when the Civil War was fought. We have come into a new age. There can be no sectionalism about the thinking of the American people from this time on.”⁵

Those four matters—appointments, policy, New Jersey politics, and presidential tone—would occupy Wilson for the remaining two and a half months before his inauguration. Behind the scenes and in public, he would deal with them simultaneously. He still preferred to tackle questions one at a time, and he often joked about his “single-track mind,” yet already as a college president and as a governor he had rarely been able to follow that bent. Now he was getting a foretaste of the many and varied questions that would come at him all at once in the White House.

Appointments held the least appeal for him. The day after his speech to the Southern Society, he had lunch with House in New York. They discussed ambassadorships, including the possibility of one for McCombs, and cabinet posts, including Bryan for secretary of state and Brandeis for attorney general. House continued to throw cold water on Brandeis and sing the praises of McReynolds. Wilson offered Bryan the post of secretary of state when the Great Commoner visited him in Trenton on December 21. Bryan later recalled that he told the president-elect that as a matter of conscience he could not serve alcohol at his house or at official functions and Wilson raised no objections. In a handwritten letter four days later, Bryan noted, “I am thinking of increasing pleasure of association with McAdoo.” This was the first indication that McAdoo would become secretary of the Treasury. In this almost offhand manner, Wilson filled the two top posts in his cabinet.⁶

As Democrats had predicted, Bryan weighed in with advice on other cabinet appointments. For secretary of the interior, he suggested the mayor of Cleveland, Newton D. Baker: “He is a man of ideals and capacity.” He praised Josephus Daniels as being “of the Salt of the Earth” but did not say which post he thought his friend should fill. “As to the Atty. Gen.,” Bryan wrote, “I share your high opinion of Brandeis & I do not know that a better man can be found. He has a standing among reformers & I am sure all progressives would be pleased.” Bryan offered an additional, less flattering reason for favoring Brandeis: “It is more important that he be at heart with the people against the special interests than that he be a brilliant lawyer—brilliant lawyers can be hired but the right kind of man for Atty Gen is not so easy to find.”⁷ Wilson does not seem to have responded to these suggestions. He would not turn his attention to filling the rest of the cabinet until January, and although he had picked McAdoo for the Treasury post, he would not make the offer until the beginning of February.

Setting the tone for his presidency was a more appetizing task. Starting with the speech to the Southern Society of New York, Wilson delivered messages that had two main aims, one partly retrospective, the other prospective. Looking back, he continued to rebut Roosevelt’s campaign charges that he, Wilson, was a limited-government, state-rights man only posing as a progressive. When he eschewed sectionalism in the speech to the Southern Society and bearded Virginia’s conservative leaders during his birthday jaunt to Staunton, he underlined his claims to be an emancipated, up-to-date progressive. Looking forward, Wilson opened a long-term campaign to win over Roosevelt’s third-party followers and build a majority behind himself and his party. He pursued both aims by dwelling on his newly coined slogan, the New Freedom, and he published a book with that title, which wove together some of his campaign speeches. In speeches during the first part of January 1913, he also expanded on his progressive vision. In one, he sounded like Roosevelt when he maintained that “men are no longer to be catalogued, … no longer to be put in classes,” and he sounded like himself and Bryan when he demanded a turning away from the widespread belief “that a poor man has less chance to get justice administered to him than a rich man. God forbid that should be generally true. But so long as that is believed, the belief constitutes a threatening fact.”⁸ To seize upon this new temper and combat perceptions of injustice, he called for action in four areas: conservation of natural resources, equal access to raw materials, equal access to credit, and reform of the tariff.

When he pointed to the four areas in which he meant to take action, Wilson was tipping his hand to the major policies he intended to pursue. The first area—conservation of natural resources—was a gesture toward the Roosevelt following, because this was their most cherished issue. Wilson would appoint a conservationist as secretary of the interior, and his administration would compile a good record in this area. Except for the establishment of the National Park Service and consolidation of the parks under that agency in 1916, however, there would be no significant legislative initiatives. The second area—equal access to raw materials—was partly an appeal to westerners, who chafed under the domination of big outside-owned mining and timber interests, and was partly an oblique way of raising the anti-trust issue, which had loomed so large in the campaign. That was a complex problem to tackle: anti-trusters disagreed among themselves about whether to seek new laws or try administrative regulation. Finding common ground would require patience, diligence, and expert advice, and the anti-trust issue would become the last of the major issues that Wilson would address during the first part of his presidency.

The third area—equal access to credit—was another way of saying banking reform. It was the issue on which Wilson had received the most advice and had seen the most lobbying since the election—almost as much as on appointments. Carter Glass, the chairman of the House Banking Committee, wrote to Wilson several times before and after his trip to Bermuda, and on December 26 he traveled to Princeton to confer, accompanied by his adviser, Professor H. Parker Willis of George Washington University. Wilson, who was in bed with a cold, looked over a draft plan for a reserve system drawn up by Willis. According to Glass, the presidentelect wanted “some body of supervisory control.”⁹ The congressman was willing to have government oversight of the banking system, but he did not want a central bank. Their discussions on this matter highlighted the main point of contention in banking reform—the degree and the kind of central control—and showed that Wilson wanted supervisory control. Banking reform would prove to be as complicated as the anti-trust issue and even more contentious. It would become the hardest-fought of Wilson’s major legislative initiatives.

The last area—reform of the tariff—meant lowering rates. That would prove to be the easiest of Wilson’s main legislative initiatives. For a quarter of a century, the tariff had pitted the two parties against each other more than any other issue. Among Republicans—except for some, but not all, insurgent progressives—high tariffs were an article of faith, especially regarding industrial products and some raw materials. Among Democrats—except for a scattering of deviations, such as Louisiana sugar growers and some western mining and ranching interests—lower tariffs were just as strong an article of faith and overrode even the enmity between Bryanites and conservatives. Taft’s recent attempt to lower the tariff had broken the pattern, but his failure, along with an earlier stumble by Grover Cleveland, seemed to jinx any effort at downward revision. Still, with the Democrats in control of the White House and Congress, a renewed push in that direction seemed inescapable. As a corollary, if the effort succeeded, government revenues would decline, thereby providing an excuse to do what most Democrats, together with Progressives and progressive Republicans, wanted to do anyway—enact an income tax. Impending ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment by three quarters of the states would provide the required constitutional sanction, and a push in the next Congress to enact legislation to levy an income tax seemed well-nigh certain.

In the meantime, while preparing for his presidency, Wilson was still governor of New Jersey. Of all the tasks that occupied him between the election in November 1912 and his inauguration on March 4, 1913, this was the one he could have ducked. Thanks in part to the Republican-Progressive split, the Democrats had not only regained control of the New Jersey assembly in the November elections, but they had also won a majority in the state senate. Overall control of the legislature assured that Congressman William (Billy) Hughes, the victor of the 1912 Democratic primary in which Jim Smith had staged his ill-fated attempt at a comeback, would be chosen to fill the state’s second seat in the U.S. Senate. Even more important, control of the state senate meant that a Democrat would succeed Wilson as governor. Because New Jersey did not have a lieutenant governor, the president of the senate was required to fill a governor’s unexpired term. When the legislature met in January, the new Democratic majority chose James Fielder, a Wilson supporter, as its president. Wilson could have resigned at that point, but he did not: he believed he had unfinished business as governor.

He did not have as easy a time as many expected. Assembly Democrats rebuffed his choice for speaker, and he had to fight the machine over his choice for state treasurer. Nevertheless, when he addressed the legislature on January 14, 1913, the governor presented a list of proposals designed to round out his program. The main measures were reform of securities to discourage fraud and monopoly, changes in the jury system to reduce political manipulation, and a constitutional convention to streamline and democratize the state’s government. He also again urged ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment, to allow an income tax, and the Seventeenth Amendment, to require popular election of U.S. senators. As before, Wilson employed a combination of cajolery and charm to bring the legislators around. Securities reform passed fairly easily, although some observers questioned whether the new law accomplished much, and the legislature also ratified the amendments to the Constitution. Those actions betokened a brief revival of the governor’s honeymoon with the legislators. At the end of January, at a dinner with state senators in Atlantic City, the governor grew a bit misty-eyed as he reminisced about their times together and told them it was going to be “a great wrench” to leave. Near midnight, as the dinner ended, he proposed a walk on the Atlantic City boardwalk. “The Senate accepted the proposition en masse,” reported The New York Times, “and led by the Governor the twenty-one Senators marched along the walk before the brisk breeze until the Governor’s ‘right face,’ when they wheeled and returned.” The entourage covered two miles in a little over half an hour.¹⁰

All did not remain fun and games with the legislature. The assembly passed a bill to call a constitutional convention, but the senators dragged their feet until after Wilson left for Washington and then defeated the bill. Jury reform turned into a fiasco. Machine forces were able to water down a bill embodying Wilson’s ideas and attached a provision to require a referendum before any changes could take effect. The matter was not resolved when Wilson stepped down. Later, despite personal intervention by the president, the affair ended in a muddle, with the voters approving a much-weakened law in November 1913. Those wrangles marked the beginning of the resurgence of the machine forces, still led by Nugent, who was now joined by Frank Hague of Jersey City.¹¹

Wilson put a good face on the last days of his governorship. He resigned on February 25, 1913. At Fielder’s swearing-in ceremony, he called the governorship the greatest privilege of his life and expressed confidence in his successor. He had the satisfaction of seeing Fielder elected governor the following November, but that was almost the only post-gubernatorial victory he enjoyed. Between the renewed strength of the Democratic machine and the reversion of voters to Republican majorities under conservative control, New Jersey would not become a model progressive state like Wisconsin or Oregon. Moreover, despite repeated pledges to stay in touch with the state, Wilson would take little part in state affairs after 1913, except for an unsuccessful attempt in 1915 to get voters there to adopt woman suffrage. There was some truth to the acid line in John Dos Passos’s novel U.S.A.: “so he left the State of New Jersey halfreformed.”¹²

Meanwhile, Wilson was somewhat reluctantly tackling presidential appointments. He met with House ten more times during the last seven weeks before his inauguration, mostly at House’s apartment in New York, where he stayed overnight five times. Except when the president-elect had a ceremonial dinner to attend, he would dine with House and spend the evening and the next morning discussing appointments and, occasionally, policy. The two men sometimes interrupted their discussions to attend a Broadway play, often a light comedy, Wilson’s favorite form of theater. Telephone calls and letters from House supplemented the face-to-face meetings. In addition, Ellen Wilson visited the colonel once in New York and talked with him about appointments. These meetings between Wilson and House had a twofold significance. They were the times when Wilson thought about whom to appoint to cabinet posts and ambassadorships. They were also the times when he and House formed what House later called the “intimate” bond that became one of the two most important relationships of Wilson’s presidency.¹³

Contrary to his normally orderly nature, Wilson went about cabinet making in a haphazard, almost sloppy way. From the outset, familiar names figured in the discussions. Early in January, the colonel drew up a list of possible cabinet picks; it included Bryan, McAdoo, and McReynolds at the State, Treasury, and Justice departments, with Brandeis, Page, and Daniels as possibilities for other departments. Also on the list or discussed were David F. Houston, who was chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis and a special friend of House’s, and William C. Redfield, an anti-Tammany Democratic congressman from New York.¹⁴ All except Brandeis and Page eventually wound up with cabinet posts; Page would become ambassador to Great Britain, and Brandeis would later be appointed to the Supreme Court.

It was one thing for Wilson to think up names; it was another thing for him to make appointments. McAdoo got the nod for the Treasury post at the beginning of February, but the offer came after second thoughts that included naming him postmaster general or governor general of the Philippines. The attorney generalship continued to be a headache. Pressures from progressives and Wilson’s own admiration for Brandeis resurrected the candidacy of “the people’s attorney.” Strong opposition from lawyers, financiers, and some Democrats, abetted by House, helped block him, but Wilson still wanted to appoint him in some capacity, possibly as secretary of commerce. The colonel found an ally in Tumulty, who was evidently swayed by a campaign against Brandeis by some Massachusetts Democrats. They finally prevailed upon Wilson to appoint Redfield instead to head the Commerce Department.¹⁵

Even with Brandeis out, there was still a scramble for the attorney generalship. One candidate was A. Mitchell Palmer, a Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania who had a strong progressive record and was openly angling for the job. Unfortunately for his chances, Bryan did not like him and had a new candidate of his own in Joseph W. Folk, another progressive and a former governor of Missouri. Also working against Palmer were stories that during the deadlock at the convention Palmer had dallied with a scheme to supplant Wilson for the nomination. This time, Wilson gave in to House’s persistent advocacy and offered McReynolds the attorney generalship on February 15. Palmer could have joined the cabinet when Wilson offered him the secretaryship of war a week later. After briefly thinking it over, he declined, however, citing religious grounds: “As a Quaker Secretary, I should consider myself a living illustration of a horrible incongruity.” House had a different take on Palmer’s motives. “He wants to be Attorney General to advance his own fortunes,” the colonel recorded, “as he thinks it would be possible for him to obtain a lucrative practice after four years of service.” In the meantime, the War Department post had to be filled. Curiously, Wilson called in a New Jersey lawyer and judge, Lindley M. Garrison, whom he had not met before, and offered him the job.¹⁶

The other armed services secretaryship, the navy, came to be filled almost as casually. Of the men who had worked for his nomination, Wilson most liked and respected Josephus Daniels, and he initially thought of the North Carolina editor for the postmaster generalship. House and others maintained that this post should go to someone better versed in the tougher aspects of party politics. Wilson bowed to those objections, and just over a week before the inauguration he offered Daniels the secretaryship of the navy. Congressional politics helped sway the postmaster general appointment. Underwood, the House Democratic leader, came to see Wilson in Trenton after the election and argued that Albert Burleson of Texas, who was a ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, should be in the cabinet because he enjoyed “the implicit confidence of the Democratic members of the House and Senate.” The post office was the logical place for Burleson, and Wilson made the offer the same day that he wrote to Daniels.¹⁷

Walter Page and David Houston appeared as possibilities for the secretaryships of agriculture and the interior. After seeing Wilson for the first time in January, House recorded in his diary, “I gave Houston unqualified praise but was somewhat more guarded in regard to Page.” The colonel pushed Houston because, before going to Washington University, he had been president of the University of Texas, and House had come to regard him as a protégé. Page remained under consideration, with Wilson shifting him and Houston back and forth between the two departments. House’s patronage paid off for Houston, who was offered the agriculture secretaryship early in February. Page would have received the interior post if House had not continued to lobby against him and successfully pushed for Franklin K. Lane, a Californian who was serving on the Interstate Commerce Commission. Wilson did not meet Lane until the inauguration. The final cabinet slot was the head of the newly created Department of Labor. The only person considered, William B. Wilson, was, like Palmer, a Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania. Wilson was also a former officer of the mine workers’ union and was close to the president of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers.¹⁸

Two other appointments vexed Wilson. The first was the question of what to do with his nominal party chairman, the increasingly unstable McCombs. Wilson refused to appoint him to the cabinet; instead, he offered McCombs the ambassadorship to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After brooding over the matter for a month, McCombs declined and said he might take the ambassadorship to France but then declined that post too; he would fester for another three years as titular head of the party, increasingly isolated and embittered. The second troubling question about appointments was what to do with Tumulty. The governor’s secretary yearned to fill the same post in the White House, but he was not a shoo-in for the job. Anti-Catholic prejudice still dogged Tumulty, and the president-elect received a raft of letters opposing his appointment, some of them scurrilous. Those prejudices carried no weight with Wilson, but he did worry about Tumulty’s political background. House recorded Wilson’s saying that “the trouble with Tumulty is that he cannot see beyond Hudson County, his vision is too narrow.”¹⁹ Fortunately for Tumulty, Ellen and House lobbied on his behalf, and at the beginning of February, Wilson agreed to appoint him. Overnight, Tumulty stepped in to advise and confer with House on filling the cabinet.

Wilson’s method of making major appointments provided a foretaste of his method as president. Previous presidential cabinet making had also witnessed scurrying and confusion, but nothing in recent decades had seen anything like this. Most of Wilson’s predecessors had mainly rewarded important factions and constituencies in their respective parties, nearly always in consultation with important state and congressional leaders. Roosevelt had broken away from that pattern to choose able men who were personally close to him, such as Taft and Elihu Root, for some—but not all—of his cabinet positions. Taft had followed Roosevelt’s practice to a degree—though not often enough to satisfy his predecessor and patron. Because the Democrats had been out of power for sixteen years, Wilson faced a far different situation. His party had neither the clearly defined interests to appease nor a deep bench of qualified people to choose from. In this situation, Wilson bounced around among competing claims of friendship or service to him (Tumulty, Daniels, McAdoo), party standing (Bryan, Burleson), interest group representation (W.B. Wilson, possibly Redfield), and advice from House (Houston, Lane, McReynolds), as well as making a stab in the dark (Garrison). Consistently choosing first-rate lieutenants would not be his strong suit, and at times he would tolerate mediocre performance and even disloyalty from high-ranking subordinates. Why Wilson behaved this way in making appointments and later in overseeing subordinates remains puzzling. It may have reflected his essentially solitary approach to leadership, which made him care less about advisers and lieutenants: in making major decisions, he would consult with and receive advice from the men around him, but he would rely strictly on his own judgment.

Another foretaste of Wilson’s presidency lay in his relationship with House. A deep affinity had arisen quickly between these men. Wilson supposedly once said, “Mr. House is my second personality. He is my independent self. His thoughts and mine are one.”²⁰He did seem to treat House like a second self. In picking his cabinet, he not only leaned heavily on the colonel, whom he had barely known before the election, but he also offered him a place in the cabinet. The colonel pleaded delicate health and preferred to remain a free agent and adviser.

Wilson and House made an odd couple. Wilson was an intellectual, and in the midst of public life he still liked to spend time alone thinking and writing. House, like Andrew West, was compulsively sociable, and he never read or wrote much: his anonymously published novel, Philip Dru, Administrator, was largely ghostwritten, and he dictated his diary to his secretary. This attraction of opposites harked back to Wilson’s friendship with Hibben, and House’s gentle, soothing manner may have reminded Wilson of Hibben. The colonel was also an accomplished flatterer, and he quickly learned how to play on his new friend’s sensibilities. Josephus Daniels later recalled that before House saw the president, he would ask cabinet members, “What is the Old Man thinking about so-and-so” and then repeat what he heard as his own views: “Wilson was astounded to find that their minds ran in the same channel, and that made him think that he and House were almost one man in their thoughts.”²¹

Yet it is not entirely clear what the relationship amounted to. Nearly all of the testimony about it comes from House’s side, including the “second personality … independent self” remark attributed to Wilson. House’s voluminous and highly informative diary has to be read with caution, particularly regarding his influence on Wilson. Only once did Wilson set down his opinion of House. Two and a half years into his presidency, writing to the woman who would become his second wife, he praised “dear House … for he is capable of utter self-forgetfulness and loyalty and devotion. And he is wise. He can give prudent and far seeing counsel. … But you are right in thinking that intellectually he is not a great man. His mind is not of the first class. He is a counselor, not a statesman. And he has the faults of his qualities.”²² Fond though he obviously was of House, Wilson recognized his friend’s shortcomings—with one exception.

The flaw in the president’s perceptiveness lay in his thinking that House was “self-forgetful” and gave disinterested advice. In his surreptitious way, the colonel aspired to be more than a “counselor”—he wanted to be a “statesman.” His real reason for shunning office was, as he admitted, his belief that as a “free lance” with a “roving commission” he could have greater influence.²³ He began to attempt to exert influence from the outset. Not confining his advice to appointments, he also ventured opinions on policy matters, particularly banking reform. House fancied himself a progressive, but his advice on domestic policy usually had a conservative bent. Early in Wilson’s administration, however, House picked foreign policy as his special bailiwick, and that was where he would seek to exert his greatest influence.

The colonel also couched his advice on appointments in ways that would promote his own influence. These included not only pushing his protégé Houston and his acquaintances McReynolds and Lane but also giving slanted advice about the men he opposed. His persistent resistance to Brandeis probably did not stem, despite one of his remarks, from anti-Semitism. He had Jewish acquaintances in New York, and he would later become friendly with the journalist Walter Lippmann. Rather, House seems to have wanted to keep Brandeis out of the cabinet because the lawyer was a powerful intellect who struck sympathetic chords with Wilson. He resisted a cabinet post for Page with equal persistence, probably because the energetic, opinionated editor had known Wilson longer than anyone else involved in his presidential bid. (Sending Page abroad was another matter; the idea of an ambassadorial appointment for him would originate with House.) With the top cabinet appointments, Bryan and McAdoo, the colonel bowed to the inevitable, but in succeeding months he would never pass up an opportunity to get in a dig at Bryan.²⁴ Two years later, when Bryan resigned from his post as secretary of state, House would urge Wilson not to replace him with anyone of comparable independence of mind and political stature.

Few people would be neutral in their opinion of Colonel House and his reputed influence, either during or after Wilson’s presidency. To his admirers, he would become a fount of wisdom and a salutary softener of Wilson’s rigidity and self-righteousness. To his detractors, he would become a sinister player and a subverter of Wilson’s nobler inclinations. Both views would be greatly overdrawn. House would be neither a dispenser of saving grace nor an evil genius. The cabinet appointments that he pushed proved to be a mixed bag, and his views on domestic policy cut little ice. The colonel’s foreign policy influence would be another story, one that would unfold over almost the entire course of the Wilson presidency. House would play his greatest role as a personal, often close, presence. Like Hibben before him, he furnished a soothing companionship and acted as a friend who appeared happy to be dominated by Wilson. Unlike Hibben, he felt no need to get out of Wilson’s shadow. Just the reverse—he played upon his subordination and maintained a façade of what Wilson saw as “loyalty and devotion.” The relationship between these two men would wax early and then wane to a degree, but it would remain a constant until midway through Wilson’s second term. With just one exception, this would be the most important relationship of his presidency.

For someone who complained about having a one-track mind, Wilson took the multiple demands of preparing for his presidency and completing his governorship in stride. In February, his cousin Helen Woodrow Bones, who had lived with the family in Princeton and would live with them again in the White House, commented to her sister on how little “Cousin Woodrow” had changed: “The nicest thing about this President of ours is that we forget that he is President … because he is so simple and unaffected, so humble, I might almost say. I don’t believe Lincoln could have been any more simple and unpretentious.”²⁵

Wilson appeared so little changed because he retained not only the manners and working habits he had formed during his years as a professor but also the same basic outlook toward politics. Nothing better illustrated how much he was bringing to the presidency from his study of politics than his response to a vote in the Senate a little more than a month before his inauguration. On February 1, 1913, an odd coalition of Democrats and conservative Republicans approved an amendment to the Constitution limiting the president to a single six-year term. Bryan had championed this measure for nearly twenty years, and he had gotten it inserted into the 1912 Democratic platform. Now, in reaction to Roosevelt’s recent bolt and future prospects, Taft threw his weight behind the measure, and his supporters supplied the necessary margin in the Senate. Two days later, Palmer, who still harbored hopes of becoming attorney general, took it upon himself to solicit Wilson’s opinion. The president-elect fired back a ten-page letter in which he not only lambasted the proposed amendment and the reasoning behind it but also stated his view of presidential powers and accountability. In writing this letter, he did not consult with anyone, but it was not a hasty response. Six weeks earlier, he had composed a statement on the subject in his shorthand, and now he had his secretary type a draft of it, which he edited in his own hand.²⁶

Claiming to come to the issue “from a perfectly impersonal view” and with no thought about a second term for himself, he maintained that a four-year term was too long for a do-nothing president and too short for one who attempted “a great work of reform,” but six years would also be too long for the duds and too short for the reformers. The president was “expected by the nation to be a leader of his party as well as the chief executive officer of the government. … He must be the prime minister, as much concerned with the guidance of legislation as with the just and orderly execution of the law,” as well as the only leader in foreign affairs. The president therefore needed “all the power he can get from the support and convictions and opinions of his countrymen” and should enjoy “that power until his work is done.” Wilson acknowledged the fear of excessive aggrandizement of power, and to avoid that he proposed a solution: “Put the present customary limitation to two terms into the constitution, if you do not trust the people to take care of themselves, but make it two terms.” He ended with a plea: “If we want our Presidents to fight our battles for us, we should give them the means, the legitimate means. … Strip them of everything else but the right to appeal to the people; but leave them that; suffer them to be leaders; absolutely prevent them from being bosses.”²⁷

Wilson was applying ideas from Congressional Government and Constitutional Government to current affairs, and he was again giving the lie to any notion that he did not fully share progressives’ desires for vigorous, popularly accountable government. The drive to pass the amendment might have been an effort to derail Roosevelt, but Wilson refused to go along with it. Instead, he was promising to be another Roosevelt, if not more so. The only gesture he was willing to make in an anti-Roosevelt direction was the backhanded endorsement of a two-term limit, which would go into the Constitution nearly four decades later in a posthumous slap at another president named Roosevelt.

This political squall soon blew over. Palmer advised against publication of Wilson’s letter. He thought it might give the impression of a rift with Bryan, but he promised to share it with Henry D. Clayton, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. Meanwhile, at Wilson’s request, House showed a copy of the letter to Bryan, who wrote to Clayton that he would favor postponing application of the amendment until 1921, the end of a possible second term for Wilson. The Judiciary Committee shelved the amendment, and it was not seriously proposed again.²⁸

Another reason Wilson could seem so little changed was that his wife was managing the practical side of things. Public life had worn on Ellen Wilson. The move to Washington would mark the third time in two years that the family had changed its place of residence, not counting the summer decampments to Sea Girt. In addition to the responsibilities involved in managing the household and the moves, the burden of public appearances, interviews, and correspondence weighed heavily on Ellen. In January, she hired a secretary for the first time—Helen Woodrow Bones. Politically, she continued to advise her husband behind the scenes. Besides pressing him to name Tumulty as his secretary, she appears to have assuaged his doubts about appointing Bryan as secretary of state.

Help in the upcoming move to the White House came from President Taft, who harbored no hard feelings from the campaign. Early in January, he wrote to Ellen about the domestic staff. He advised the Wilsons to retain Elizabeth Jaffray, a Canadian-born widow, as head housekeeper, and Arthur Brooks, “the most trustworthy colored man in the District of Columbia,” as the president’s valet and personal clerk. “Mrs. Jaffray and Brooks work very well together,” Taft added. “Brooks is especially useful in looking after the wines and cigars to prevent their waste by waiters and others at entertainments.” Taft likewise assured Wilson that the presidential salary and expense allowances were more than adequate: “I have been able to save from my four years about $100,000.” Following Taft’s advice, the Wilsons retained both staff members, and the new president would find that he, too, could save money in the White House.²⁹

The family had mixed feelings about the impending revolution in their lives. Leaving Princeton was hard for them. The evening before the move, a crowd of more than 1,000 townspeople marched from Nassau Street to the house on Cleveland Lane. They carried torches, a band played, and the president of the local bank presented a silver loving cup to the president-elect of the United States. The Wilsons left Princeton the day before the inauguration. The weather was sunny and not too cold, and the family walked to the railroad station that adjoined the campus at the foot of Blair Arch. Friends and neighbors waved and greeted them along the way. At the station, a crowd gathered around the train, which had added seven cars to transport hundreds of Princeton undergraduates, including the college band, to Washington. As the train pulled out, Wilson stood on the rear platform and joined the crowd in singing “Old Nassau,” waving his silk hat in unison with the crowd. He was leaving the place where he had lived longer than any other place in his life, where he had pursued his first career and begun his second career. Now he was going out, as he said to Mary Peck, “to new adventures amongst strangers.”³⁰