10
The Wilson family arrived in Washington on the afternoon of March 3, 1913. They spent a quiet evening, which included a brief visit to the White House and dinner by themselves in their hotel room. They stayed away from most of the public events of the day, such as a big parade for woman suffrage and a host of parties thrown by jubilant Democrats. The next morning, Wilson met briefly with Bryan and the incoming vice president, Thomas R. Marshall, and at ten o’clock he joined Taft at the White House for the traditional ride down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. There, the two men went into the Senate chamber for the swearing in of the vice president and then walked outside to the platform erected at the front of the Capitol, on the eastern side, for the main event. After repeated cheers for the new president and his family, Wilson stepped up to take the oath of office from Chief Justice Edward White. After taking the oath, Wilson kissed the Bible that he had put his hand on, the same Bible that he had used two years before when he was sworn in as governor. Woodrow Wilson was now president.1
He opened his inaugural address with a telling gesture. Noticing that police had cleared a space in front of the platform, he directed, “Let the people come forward.” Those words offered a nice prelude to a carefully crafted speech that balanced partisan and national appeals with a blend of specifics and generalities. “My fellow citizens,” Wilson began, “there has been a change of government.” Democrats now controlled all the elected branches, but, he asserted, “The success of a party means little except when the nation is using that party for a large and definite purpose.” His party’s purpose was “to cleanse, to reconsider, to restore, to correct the evil without impairing the good. Our work is a work of restoration.” After that brief bow toward conservatives came a list of progressive priorities—tariff, tax, and banking reform; conservation; agricultural organization and efficiency—all intended to bring justice and protection to ordinary citizens. He closed by proclaiming, “Men’s hearts wait upon us, men’s lives hang in the balance; men’s hopes call upon us to say what we will do. Who shall live up to the great trust? Who dares fail to try? I summon all honest, all patriotic, all forward-looking men to my side. God helping me, I will not fail them, if they will but counsel and sustain me.”2
Wilson’s inaugural address afforded a national audience its first taste of his eloquence—his blend of stirring appeals, exalted purpose, and divergent ideas—and gave an accurate forecast of the legislative and ideological direction his administration would take. Before he got down to pursuing his goals, however, other matters required his attention. On a practical level, he and Ellen and their daughters needed to settle into their new, though necessarily temporary, home. The new president and First Lady set an unostentatious tone. In keeping with their personal preferences and the incoming administration’s reformist posture, they did not sponsor a ball on the night of the inauguration, although Democrats and wealthy socialites staged another round of private parties. On their first evening in the White House, the couple had a family dinner in the State Dining Room, after which they gathered at the windows to watch a fireworks display on the Mall.3
Despite her best efforts, Ellen Wilson found herself swept up in a whirl of duties and projects. Official entertaining began the day after the inauguration with a series of receptions, each for several hundred invited guests, together with smaller teas. The next week, the Wilson family and Secretary of State Bryan and his wife received the diplomatic corps. During the three months following the inauguration, the number of official receptions totaled forty-one, with average attendance exceeding 600. In addition, old friends and family members, including Stockton Axson and Wilson’s brother, Josie, came to stay for a few days at a time. One weekend guest in May, at Ellen’s invitation, was Mary Hulbert, as the former Mrs. Peck now called herself. Some of the entertainment included musical performances, and the Wilsons often went to the theater or to one of the new “movie” houses.
Having three unmarried daughters in their twenties added to the social mix. Margaret was often away, pursuing her singing career, but Jessie and Nell were at home and had serious suitors. Early in 1912, Nell had become engaged to Benjamin (Ben) Mandeville King, an engineer and lumberman. The elder Wilsons liked King, but they asked the couple to keep the engagement secret because the press was poking into their private lives. Later in the year, Jessie met and fell in love with Francis (Frank) Bowes Sayre, a new graduate of Harvard Law School, and they had also become secretly engaged. Between official functions and family affairs, the spring of 1913 was a lively season at the White House. No one could know it then, but those months would mark the social high point of Wilson’s eight years as president.4
Ellen Wilson occupied herself with more than the social side of presidential life. The White House itself offered an outlet for her talents in art and architecture; she supervised the renovation of the third floor, which was completed during the summer of 1913, while she was away. She chose the decorations and furnishings for the new rooms, particularly favoring fabrics woven by women in the southern Appalachians. Urban renewal also became a cause of hers. Women active in the National Civic Federation interested her in working to clean up the neighborhoods where many of Washington’s African American residents lived, particularly the notorious alleys within a few blocks of the Capitol. The First Lady not only joined a private effort to build better housing but also lobbied Congress for slum-clearance legislation, which was introduced the following year. The pace of these activities took a physical toll, and the navy physician assigned to the White House, Cary T. Grayson, urged her to slow down and leave Washington for the summer.
Remarkably, Ellen did not let her new activities come between her and her husband. She had been advising Wilson and reading his writings for nearly thirty years, and busy as they both were, they found time for each other. During their first week in the White House, they began to go for late-afternoon rides in the presidential limousine, often staying out as long as two hours. The whole family took one all-day drive on a Saturday, causing a small stir by showing up unannounced for lunch at a Baltimore hotel. Although Wilson never learned to drive, car rides would remain his favorite form of relaxation for the rest of his life.5
For the new president, settling into work appeared to pose few challenges. Wilson had joked earlier about the presidency being just a magnified governorship, and in that remark he predicted much of the way he would handle the office. Tumulty played the same role in Washington that he had played in Trenton. His title was secretary, rather than chief of staff, because, except for clerks, stenographers, military and naval aides, and Dr. Grayson, Tumulty was the staff. He managed the office and controlled the appointment calendar; no one got to see the president without his clearance. He and Wilson ran a tight schedule, with each caller usually getting no more than fifteen minutes. Tumulty managed party, press, and now congressional relations. Senators, congressmen, reporters, and even cabinet members quickly learned to contact him first. The secretary likewise read and summarized newspaper and magazine stories for the president, clipping items and writing short memoranda to call matters to his attention. Wilson normally arrived at the Oval Office at nine o’clock. As before, he spent the first hour handling the mail, dictating replies to Charles Swem, who had also been his personal stenographer in Trenton, or to another stenographer. The president would then spend three hours with visitors, go upstairs for a private lunch, and resume appointments for another two hours. He usually knocked off work at four in the afternoon, in time for a drive with Ellen or, later, at Dr. Grayson’s suggestion, a game of golf.6
Such short, unruffled workdays seemed better suited to a more easygoing chief executive than the ambitious, activist president Wilson soon showed he was. Yet he was able to maintain these working habits through most of his two terms in office, including the war years. Only the frenetic, unrelenting demands of the peace negotiations in 1919 would derail this approach to his presidential duties.
His powers of concentration and disciplined habits were what allowed him to work this way. Nearly every journalist who interviewed him commented on the atmosphere of quiet control in his office. In June 1914, the young radical journalist John Reed described the contrast between Wilson and the last strong president: “There was none of that violent slamming of doors, clamor of voices, secretaries rushing to and fro, and the sense of great national issues being settled in the antechamber that characterized Mr. Roosevelt’s term in the White House. The window curtains swayed in a warm breeze; things were unhurried, yet the feeling in that room was of powerful organization, as if no moment were wasted—as if an immense amount of work was being done.” About the president himself, Reed noted, “I never met a man who gave such an impression of quietness inside. … Wilson’s power emanates from it.”7
Wilson continued to do much of his work himself. He would be the next to last president to write his own speeches (Herbert Hoover would be the last); it never occurred to him not to. On less formal occasions, he still spoke without notes or from a few jottings in his shorthand. On more formal occasions—as were increasingly the case—he would make an outline and notes in shorthand and then produce a draft on his own typewriter. He also typed correspondence that he regarded as especially intimate or important, such as letters to Colonel House and Mary Hulbert. He wrote those letters and some of the speeches in off-hours in an upstairs study, which was lined with books and piled with papers and offered a quiet refuge. The professor still lurked within the president.
Wilson acted like a bit of both in handling the press. At Tumulty’s suggestion, he held regularly scheduled press conferences, often twice a week, becoming the first president to do so. His first meeting with reporters occurred on March 15, 1913. At twelve-forty-five in the afternoon, more than 100 journalists crowded into the president’s office. Some of those present later remembered him as stiff in manner and terse and not at all forthcoming in answering their questions. A week later, at his second press conference, Wilson apologized for his earlier performance and made a fresh start. To relieve the crowding, he moved the gathering to the East Room, and he began with a talk that echoed both his campaign speeches and his lectures at Princeton. He claimed that newspapers could improve the atmosphere of public opinion, which, he asserted, “has got to come, not from Washington, but from the country. You have got to write from the country in and not from Washington out.” Wilson asked the correspondents to “go into partnership with me, that you lend me your assistance as nobody else can, and, then, after you have brought this precious freight of opinion into Washington, let us try and make true gold here that will go out from Washington.”8
There is no record of the exchange between Wilson and the reporters at those first two meetings; thereafter, the president had Swem take down what was said. These press conferences featured brisk exchanges between the president and his questioners, with Wilson usually responding in a sentence or two, and he often showed flashes of anger, but also of wit. He held sixty-four press conferences in 1913 and another sixty-four in 1914. All his remarks were off the record, although he sometimes permitted reporters to quote him, and a few angered him by leaking things he said.
The light, bantering tone set at the early press conferences persisted, although it is unclear whether Wilson really felt so jovial toward the reporters. Like most presidents, he fumed in private about the way the press treated him. Rumors of dissension within his administration annoyed him, and reports about his wife and daughters infuriated him so much that he dressed down the reporters at the beginning of a press conference in March 1914: “Gentlemen, I want to say something to you this afternoon. … I am a public character for the time being, 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 newspapers at this time. … Now, put yourselves in my place and give me the best cooperation in this that you can, and then we can dismiss a painful subject and go to our afternoon’s business.”9
Reporters did not always enjoy the repartee either. One of them later recalled, “The President gave the impression that he was matching his wits against ours, as a sort of mental practice with the object of being able to make responses which seemed to answer the questions but which imparted little or nothing in the way of information.”10 As with Wilson’s complaints about the press, such journalistic carping about him was endemic to their relationship. Wilson’s manner with the press, particularly the joviality and evasiveness, strongly resembled Franklin Roosevelt’s performance twenty years later. With both presidents, the off-the-record setting facilitated the behavior. After the 1950s, with the advent of public press conferences carried live on television, there would be greater formality and accountability, but the relationship would remain fundamentally adversarial.
In 1915, the press conferences would grow a little less frequent, and in July he would cancel them. The stated reason was the pressure of foreign affairs, but some reporters believed that was just an excuse for doing something Wilson wanted to do anyway. Both explanations may be correct. The sinking of the ocean liner Lusitania by a German submarine, killing more than 100 Americans, had raised the specter of the United States’ being drawn into the world war, and Secretary of State Bryan had just resigned in protest against Wilson’s diplomatic responses to Germany. At the same time, the president was wooing the woman who would become his second wife, and rumors of his amorous escapades were already bubbling up. High policy and personal circumstance seem to have conspired to make regularly scheduled meetings with reporters less appetizing to Wilson.11
Questions have also arisen about whether abandonment of the press conferences sprang from Wilson’s basically solitary temperament, but that is unlikely. If those meetings had been truly distasteful to him, the time to stop them would have been in the fall of 1914, following Ellen’s death, one of the two worst times in his life. But he met the reporters as usual then. Even after he had stopped holding press conferences, he granted long interviews with individual journalists, such as one with Ray Stannard Baker in 1916. Those interviews helped writers such as Baker, Samuel G. Blythe, and Ida Tarbell produce penetrating and favorable magazine articles about him. Moreover, Tumulty persuaded the president to resume holding press conferences late in 1916. Unfortunately, the renewed submarine crisis and intervention in the war led to their abandonment again. Wilson would hold just one more press conference, in July 1919, when he returned from the peace negotiations in Paris. Soon afterward, the stroke he suffered would rule out any public appearances. In all, his relations with the press would be sometimes fruitful and harmonious but ultimately ill-starred.
• • •
Relations with his cabinet resembled those with the press, but with a better outcome. Wilson held his first cabinet meeting the day after the inauguration. From then until November 1913, they met twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays. Thereafter, Wilson cut back on the frequency to once a week, with individual conferences taking the place of the second meeting. The cabinet gathered around a long mahogany table in a room in the West Wing next to the president’s office. Wilson sat at one end of the table, with the heads of the two ranking departments, Secretary of State Bryan and Secretary of the Treasury McAdoo, on his right and left. Secretary of the Navy Daniels later recalled that from the outset, Wilson “act[ed] as if being chief executive were no new experience to him.” He found the president’s manner “matter-of-fact” and described him as “the moderator.” Wilson would present a point and go around the table for responses and discussion. He never took votes but treated these meetings, “as he often said, more like a Quaker meeting” and would conclude, “It seems to me the sense of the meeting is so and so.”12 If any of the cabinet members had served on the Princeton faculty, they would have found all this familiar.
Another one of the new president’s practices with the cabinet also recalled his academic leadership. Once more, Wilson delegated. Just as he had deferred at Princeton to Harry Fine’s expertise in the sciences, he now assumed that his department heads knew their areas better than he did, and he allowed them to run their agencies with little interference. This approach offered a sharp contrast to what was then and later taken to be the model for a strong president. Theodore Roosevelt had set an example of hyperactive meddling in every aspect of his administration; in the future, his cousin Franklin and Lyndon Johnson would do the same, throwing in manipulation and bullying. By contrast, Wilson would endorse bold financial initiatives by McAdoo and would initially bow to Secretary of Agriculture David Houston’s opposition to government aid to farmers. This approach had the advantage of promoting an efficient, smooth-running government; it would show its greatest value after Wilson’s stroke in 1919, when the administration could function without him. Its great disadvantage lay in permitting cabinet members to take unfortunate actions at times, as when they repressed civil liberties at home after the country went to war.
One ill consequence of Wilson’s permissiveness emerged at the beginning of his administration. More than half of the cabinet hailed from the South, and nearly all of the congressional leadership was southern. Journalists frequently commented on Washington’s newly Dixiefied political atmosphere—an atmosphere that was not entirely to Wilson’s liking. Before the inauguration, he had publicly urged sectional reconciliation, and afterward he gave private encouragement to the proposal offered by the civil rights activist Oswald Garrison Villard that a government commission investigate race relations. Despite such talk and gestures, Wilson raised no objection early in April when Postmaster General Burleson echoed widespread southern white anger at racial mingling in federal offices, particularly in the case of black supervisors overseeing white clerks. “The President said he had made no promises to negroes, except to do them justice,” Daniels recorded in his diary, “and he did not wish to see them have less positions than they have now, but he wishes the matter adjusted in a way to make the least friction.”13
Burleson and McAdoo started to make arrangements to segregate offices, rest rooms, and eating facilities at the Post Office, Treasury Department, and Bureau of Printing and Engraving. McAdoo tried to create an all-black division in his department, but the project fell through, ironically because southern senators refused to confirm the African American Democrat chosen to head the office. More outspoken racists on Capitol Hill, spearheaded by Senator James K. Vardaman of Mississippi, fought Wilson’s appointments to positions in the District of Columbia that were traditionally filled by African Americans. The appointments Wilson did make were exceptions to a general reduction in the number of black-held positions in the government during his administration, including lower-level positions.14
Plans to segregate federal departments stirred up strong protests from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Villard, who was a founder, took the organization’s case directly to the president. “I cannot exaggerate the effect this has had upon colored people at large,” he wrote Wilson. Negroes had taken “from your ‘New Freedom’ the belief that your democracy was not limited by race or color.” Wilson answered testily, “It is as far as possible from being a movement against negroes.”15 He also backed away from his earlier encouragement of the race commission idea, pleading the press of other business.
The controversy festered through the summer and into the fall of 1913. The black press—together with the New York Evening Post (which Villard owned) and The Nation (which then was affiliated with the Evening Post and edited by an uncle of Villard’s) and some northern Democrats—loudly criticized the segregation and appointment policies, and the segregation practices were put on hold. In October, an Evening Post reporter had a private meeting with Wilson to assess the situation for Villard. The president, he reported, probably did believe that blacks were inferior, but the views of the congressional leaders were much worse, and they would block any appointment to a post in which a black person “is to be in command of white people—especially of white women.” In this newly charged atmosphere, white bureaucrats could give free rein to their prejudices. In November, Wilson met with critics of the policies. Their spokesman, the fiery Boston editor William Monroe Trotter, an African American, delivered a lengthy indictment and challenged the president. Wilson lamely answered, “I am not familiar with it all,” and admitted, “Now, mistakes have probably been made, but those mistakes can be corrected.”16 This would not be Wilson’s last confrontation with Trotter, and it was not the end of the controversy.
The segregation controversy did not strain Wilson’s relations with the cabinet, but their honeymoon did not last. By the fall of 1913, some secretaries were complaining about the lack of serious discussion at cabinet meetings and the lack of consultation by the president. Some of them later offered an explanation for why Wilson clammed up at their meetings: they believed it was because Secretary of the Interior Lane was leaking information from the Cabinet Room to the press. Lane was an inveterate gossip, but there is no direct evidence that Wilson reacted to his or others’ indiscretions. Moreover, important matters still did get discussed at cabinet meetings, as when Wilson repeatedly talked in February and March 1917 about whether to enter the war—the most momentous decision he ever made. A better explanation for cabinet members’ complaints lies in their hunger to feel important, which has affected most presidents’ relations with their cabinets. Another explanation for those complaints lies in the temperamental differences that separated those men from Wilson. His habit of secluding himself when he pondered policies and made decisions did not sit well with more gregarious types, who wanted lots of talk and advice seeking. Those temperamental differences would underlie most of the complaints, which usually came from naturally sociable men, such as House, McAdoo, and sometimes Tumulty, who also thought the president ought to be following their advice on particular matters.17
It seems odd that House should have complained about a lack of discussion of great issues. If there was anyone in whom the Wilson did seem to confide, House was that person. He met with the president on seventeen occasions during his first year in office. Fifteen of those meetings took place in the White House, where House was an overnight guest twice. The two men also corresponded regularly, and at least twice they talked by long-distance telephone, which was not a common practice in those days. Wilson evidently felt comfortable discussing just about everything with House. Ellen Wilson also continued to take a shine to the Texan, and she discussed family finances with him. Curiously, House shied away from some contacts, as when he made an excuse for staying away from the inaugural ceremony.
Meetings between the two men followed a pattern that was partly political and partly seasonal. Ten of the first year’s meetings took place between March and May 1913, and no others occurred until late October. House, like many wealthy Americans with cosmopolitan aspirations, made an annual journey to Europe in late spring that lasted for several weeks. Also, he and his family retreated for the summer to a seaside estate on the north shore of Massachusetts. Despite being a native Texan, he claimed that his health could not stand the summer heat of New York, much less that of Washington. He did maintain home-state ties by making a yearly visit to mend political fences and oversee his property. He struck some people in New York as a bit of a professional Texan, and one acquaintance noted that the heading on his stationery always read “Edward M. House, Austin, Texas.”18 During the first year of Wilson’s administration, much of what he discussed with House centered on appointments and party matters, particularly the vexing question of what to do with McCombs. Domestic policy came up fairly often because this was the time when Wilson was launching his big legislative initiatives, and foreign affairs also came up.
House’s collecting cabinet members’ complaints about the president probably stemmed from his relish for gossip and his willingness to lend a sympathetic ear. He would later disparage Wilson regularly in his diary for not mingling with other people, but at this point he still seemed a bit awed by the president, especially by his analytic powers. House also harbored a big scheme of his own, which he was gradually unveiling. In recent years he had become interested in foreign affairs, and in his novel he had spun a vision in which the world’s great powers, led by the United States, band together to maintain peace and order—a refined imperialism that resembled views held by Roosevelt and others close to him. In December 1913, House disclosed his gambit to a visiting British diplomat, recording in his diary that he wanted “to bring about an understanding between France, Germany, England and the United States regarding a reduction of armaments, both military and naval. I said it was an ambitious undertaking but was so well worth while that I intended to try it.”19 Ten days later, at a meeting with Wilson, he introduced the plan, and he would persist in pushing this scheme with the president during the spring of 1914. House was not the only person beyond the family circle who became close to Wilson. During the spring and summer of 1913, the president made a new intimate friend—his physician, Cary Grayson. As Grayson later recalled, he first met the incoming president the day before the inauguration, when Taft introduced them by saying, “Mr. Wilson, here is an excellent fellow that I hope you will get to know. I regret to say that he is a Democrat and a Virginian, but that’s a matter that can’t be helped.”20 The next day, Grayson was on hand to treat Wilson’s sister Annie Howe when she fell on some steps at the White House and cut her forehead. That encounter and Taft’s recommendation prompted the new president to ask the navy to assign the short, thirty-four-year-old lieutenant to the post of White House physician.
Similarities in their backgrounds and the doctor’s quiet charm soon gained him a place in the affections of both Wilson and Ellen. After Ellen and other family members left Washington in June—on Grayson’s recommendation that Ellen get away—Wilson invited the bachelor physician to move in with him at the White House. The two men spent evenings on the porch, where Wilson would unwind by talking about nonofficial matters, sometimes reminiscing about his early life. On Sundays, the president took his Episcopalian physician with him to the Central Presbyterian Church, which he and his family regularly attended. “The doctor goes to church with me,” Wilson reported to Ellen, “and is very sedate and an excellent imitation of a Presbyterian.”21
Wilson’s presidency afforded him something he had never had before—a full-time physician to attend to his health. Grayson was not a highly trained graduate of a university-affiliated medical school; he had learned most of his skills in the navy, serving briefly aboard ship and mostly at the Naval Dispensary in Washington. And he had had some White House medical assignments under Roosevelt and Taft.
Grayson found his new patient in reasonably good health. Politics still seemed to agree with him. “Father looked extraordinarily well and vital during these weeks,” his daughter Nell later recalled of the first days in the White House. Grayson’s main concerns lay with Wilson’s diet and exercise. He got the president to abandon such practices as eating charcoal and pumping his stomach, and he got him to eat more vegetables. He also encouraged Wilson to play more golf and usually accompanied him on the links. Like automobile rides, golf relaxed the president and took his mind off problems, and he played the game avidly. Despite his earlier facility with tennis and baseball, he never became a good golfer, possibly because impaired vision in his left eye as a result of the 1906 hemorrhage prevented him from placing shots accurately.22
• • •
Appointments continued to be a headache. Rival Democratic leaders and members of inter- and intrastate factions were jockeying to snare jobs for their faithful. Party infighting remained especially fierce in New York, where Tammany regulars and reformers battled in 1913 over both the New York City mayoralty race and the state’s gubernatorial race. A plum federal appointment, collector of the port of New York, drew Wilson into the fray. He made a choice worthy of King Solomon by appointing his friend Dudley Field Malone, who was both a reformer and the son-in-law of a Tammany leader. The president also used House as an emissary to the feuding New Yorkers; it was in this capacity that he supposedly made the statement, to be relayed to them, “Mr. House is my second personality. He is my independent self. His thoughts and mine are one.”23
Diplomatic appointments gave the new president almost as many headaches as domestic political patronage. Wilson had originally wanted to name distinguished nonpolitical figures to major ambassadorships—academics such as Harry Fine to Germany and Harvard’s ex-president Charles W. Eliot to China and his editor friend Page to Britain. He was able to persuade Page to go, and a leading scholar of Asian affairs, Paul S. Reinsch of the University of Wisconsin, did accept the China post. Otherwise, Wilson fell back on the time-honored practice of picking big campaign contributors. The post in Berlin went to James W. Gerard, a wealthy Tammany-affiliated lawyer. Because McCombs dithered for months before saying no to the post in Paris, the outgoing Republican appointee would stay until after the outbreak of the world war, when a rich Ohio manufacturer and former congressman, William G. Sharp, finally filled that ambassadorship. Most of the appointees to major European capitals were of a similar ilk.
Another problem in making diplomatic appointments involved the secretary of state. Bryan was an unreconstructed spoilsman, and he filled lower-ranking posts abroad, particularly those in Latin America—most of which were at the ministerial, not the ambassadorial, level—with “deserving Democrats.” Wilson did resist a complete partisan housecleaning; he continued Roosevelt’s and Taft’s practice of staffing the consular service and subministerial foreign service by means of merit systems. Overall, the incoming administration did not distinguish itself with its diplomatic personnel.24
Given such fumbling and lack of concern for qualifications, it was just as well that the diplomatic front was comparatively quiet. Yet Wilson was not entirely free from foreign concerns. Mexico landed on his desk the moment he arrived in the White House. Less than three weeks before his inauguration, there was a bloody coup that Mexicans call the Ten Tragic Days, in which an army general, Victoriano Huerta, overthrew and sanctioned the murder of the reformist moderate president, Francisco Madero. Taft’s ambassador, Henry Lane Wilson, sympathized with the coup and was urging recognition of the Huerta regime, as were a number of American businessmen with large holdings in Mexico. Partly because these events occurred so late in his administration, Taft left the question of whether to recognize Huerta to his successor. For his part, Wilson resisted pleas from business interests, relayed through House. Instead, on March 12, he issued a policy statement that stressed his desire “to cultivate the friendship and deserve the confidence of our sister republics of Central and South America” but warned that this would be possible “only when supported in turn by the orderly processes of just government based upon law and not upon arbitrary and irregular force.” Without naming Huerta, he declared, “We can have no sympathy with those who seek the power of government to advance their own personal interests or ambitions.”25
That statement in the second week of his presidency marked Wilson’s first step into an entanglement that would last for years. It also revealed part of his initial underlying approach to foreign affairs. Since his outburst of imperialist enthusiasm almost fifteen years before, Wilson had paid little attention to foreign affairs and had given every appearance of falling into step with the Democrats’ anti-imperialist, anti-militarist pronouncements set down by Bryan. When he chose Bryan to be secretary of state, Wilson raised no objections to the Commoner’s pacifist foreign policy views, and he gave his blessing to the secretary’s pursuit of his favorite scheme—a plan for compulsory delay when nations could not resolve disputes peacefully, often called cooling-off treaties. Yet Wilson’s first foreign policy pronouncement as president sounded like Roosevelt’s famous Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine of eight years before, which had proclaimed a United States “police power” over the nations of Latin America. It seems a bit of the imperialist was lurking within this new Democratic president.
Still, the official stance of the Democrats was anti-imperialist, and Wilson hewed to the party line in his other early pronouncements and moves. Previously, as the party’s principal, and often only, spokesman in foreign affairs, Bryan had long attacked Republican diplomatic and military policies, and in recent years he had zeroed in on the Taft administration’s enlistment of bankers and investment houses to promote American interests in Latin America and Asia. Not only fellow Democrats but also some Republican insurgents, most notably La Follette, had joined in heaping scorn on “dollar diplomacy.” Now that he was secretary of state, Bryan could undo part of that diplomacy—the proposed American participation in an international syndicate of bankers that would lend money to China for railroad construction. The project offended Bryan’s domestic politics as well, because the American banks in the syndicate were Wall Street firms, headed by the house of Morgan. The secretary brought the matter before the cabinet on March 12, and he found that most of the other members and the president strongly agreed with him. Six days later, Wilson issued a statement to the press in which he rejected the loan for appearing “to touch very nearly the administrative independence of China itself; and this administration does not feel that it ought, even by implication, to be a party to those conditions.”26
Wilson further showed his concern for China when he made the United States the first nation to extend diplomatic recognition to the shaky new republican government that had been set up in the wake of the revolution that had toppled the Ch’ing dynasty. After discussions in the cabinet, Bryan informed ambassadors of other nations of the decision to recognize the Chinese Republic. Wilson drafted a formal message of recognition early in April, and the American chargé d’affaires in Peking delivered this message to the Chinese government on May 2. It included a statement by the president welcoming “the new China” and expressing confidence “that in perfecting a republican form of government the Chinese nation will attain to the highest degree of development and well being.”27
Such uplifting words suited Wilson’s and Bryan’s wishes to present a vivid contrast to previous Republican policies, but they had little practical effect. At home, Democrats and some Republican insurgents applauded the rejection of the loan plan, and in China diplomatic recognition was popular. But American withdrawal from the railroad loan opened the way to further financial incursions by Japan and, in the view of many students of East Asian affairs, weakened China’s ability to resist pressures from Tokyo. At the same time, thanks to domestic politics, the United States faced troubles of its own with Japan. In the 1912 campaign, Democrats and Progressives in California had vied with each other in appealing to anti-Asian prejudices, primarily those aimed at recent Japanese immigrants. In March 1913, California’s legislature began debating measures to combat this “menace,” particularly laws that would prohibit land ownership by persons ineligible for citizenship—that is, Japanese immigrants. Wilson, who had endorsed the exclusion of Asian immigrants during the campaign, told a leading California Democrat that he hoped any discriminatory actions “might be so modulated and managed as to offend the susceptibilities of a friendly nation as little as possible.”28
That hope led the Wilson administration down a thorny path. Bryan acted as an emissary to Governor Hiram Johnson and other California leaders. The secretary of state made two trips across the country in the spring of 1913 to deal directly with Johnson and others in Sacramento. These efforts at domestic diplomacy failed. The California legislature passed a law forbidding land ownership by Japanese immigrants, and public indignation exploded in Japan, ultimately causing the cabinet there to fall. In May, a war scare flared briefly after reports of possible Japanese naval action. Secretary of War Garrison angered some fellow cabinet members by insisting on a tough response. The controversy blew over, thanks to Wilson’s and Bryan’s sweet-talking the Japanese and the unwillingness of leaders in Tokyo to push the matter to a full-fledged crisis. Still, the incident sowed resentment in the minds of many Japanese and created problems that would later trouble Wilson.29
Between Mexico and Japan, the new president spent a great deal of time on diplomatic matters. Foreign affairs offered a partial exception to Wilson’s practice of delegating to cabinet members. Five years earlier, in Constitutional Government, he had asserted, “The initiative in foreign affairs, which the President possesses without any restriction whatever, is virtually the power to control them absolutely.” Sounding a Rooseveltian note, he had added that the president “can never be the mere domestic figure” of bygone days but must “be one of the great powers of the world.”30 This greater involvement in foreign affairs did not spring from lack of confidence in Bryan. The Great Commoner drew criticism in some quarters for serving grape juice instead of alcohol at official functions, which some Republicans scorned as “grape juice diplomacy,” and he continued to earn money lecturing on the Chautauqua circuit. Wilson raised no objections to those practices, and the only evidence of his casting aspersions on Bryan comes from the diary of Colonel House, who was probably trying to sow discord.
Wilson showed little hesitation about plunging into foreign affairs. He seemed bold and confident despite his lack of experience. For him, foreign affairs went along with press relations, political appointments, and working with the cabinet: these constituted the normal business of governing, matters that any president had to manage. For him, the acid test of leadership always lay in great initiatives to change the order of things. For him as president of the United States, that test lay in legislation. The enactment of major new laws loomed ahead as his biggest and fondest challenge.