12
When Woodrow Wilson talked about his “single-track mind,” he was really describing his preferred method of working. If he could have had his way, he would have taken time to think in advance, prepare to deal with either one task or a related set of tasks, and stick to his game plan. As president, he came closest to working that way during the first year and a half, when he concentrated on the New Freedom legislative program. Seldom again would he enjoy the luxury of focusing so much on tasks of his own choosing. Even during those months, other matters constantly intruded. The biggest unsought distraction came from south of the border, where Mexico was melting into civil war. Other affairs in that region, such as turmoil in the Caribbean and Central America, made further claims on his attention. He also chose to take up some foreign policy matters, such as relations with Britain and thoughts about regional order and security in the Americas, and he began to speak about larger diplomatic designs. Domestic issues likewise demanded attention, often unpleasantly, as in the case of agitation over racial equality and woman suffrage. Finally, family life occupied his mind and his heart, at first happily and then tragically.
The new president showed some of his best and worst traits as a leader when he dealt with Mexico. Displaying both elementary prudence and his scholarly background, Wilson tried to get as much information and sound interpretation as he could. This was no easy task. There was clashing advice from the outset. From Mexico City, Ambassador Henry Lane Wilson and the American business community demanded recognition of the Huerta regime as the only way to restore order and protect American lives and property. Similar messages, more gently phrased, came from European governments, which had hastened to recognize Huerta. In April, when the president first brought up Mexico at a cabinet meeting, Josephus Daniels recorded in his diary that Secretary of War Garrison maintained that “it was doubtful whether the Mexicans could ever organize a government,” but it might be “well to recognize a brute like Huerta so as to have some form of government which could be recognized and dealt with.” Garrison added that lots of people on both sides of the border wanted America to intervene, but Secretary of the Interior Lane doubted “there were 500 people in Mexico who wished intervention.”1
As Lane’s retort indicated, there were equally strong views on the opposite side. Not even advocates of recognition found much good to say about Huerta, and in the opinion of most members of the cabinet, Daniels recorded, “the chief cause of this whole situation was a contest between English and American Oil Companies to see which would control.”2 Bryan opposed doing much to defend American property in Mexico, and he tried to squelch thoughts of intervention. Postmaster General Burleson, who was from Texas, believed that anti-Huerta forces in northern Mexico might welcome intervention, but he strongly opposed the idea. Besides airing conflicting views, that cabinet meeting showed how the subject of intervention was inexorably intruding on the discussion of Mexico.
Wilson contented himself at first with listening. Early in May, Colonel House suggested that a military move into Mexico would not be costly and urged the president to deal with Huerta. Soon afterward, at the behest of Cleveland Dodge, he met with a lawyer who represented mining and railroad interests in Mexico, Delbert Haff, who recapitulated his analysis and recommendations in a long memorandum. Haff called American intervention “a national calamity … to be avoided by the greatest care and by all honorable means,” and he observed that Mexicans hated Americans because of history and “the natural antipathy between the Latin and the Anglo-Saxon.” Anti-Huerta sentiment was widespread, but the organized opponents in the north, who called themselves Constitutionalists, were not strong. Predictably, Haff advocated protecting American investments and recommended offering recognition if Huerta promised to hold early elections, but Haff did not recommend demanding his resignation, because the real danger lay in disorder and anarchy.3
Those arguments swayed the president enough to draft a shorthand note incorporating this offer, presumably to be sent to Ambassador Wilson in Mexico City. Meanwhile, others who represented business interests were lobbying the State Department to mediate among the contending Mexican factions. That idea appealed to Bryan’s peacemaking inclination and determination to avoid intervention. Wilson hesitated to pursue either course, presumably because he still did not think he had a firm grasp of the situation. Adding to the uncertainty was growing distrust of the ambassador. Starting in March, the New York World mounted a campaign against Henry Lane Wilson, replete with charges of his complicity in the coup that had overthrown and murdered President Madero. Those charges, together with the ambassador’s inflated estimates of Huerta’s strength, eroded the president’s and the secretary of state’s faith in him as someone who could carry out their policies. At a press conference in May, Wilson asked, “Did you ever know a situation that had more question marks around it? … Nobody in the world has any certain information that I have yet found.”4
He decided to send his own man to Mexico. His choice struck many as odd: the journalist William Bayard Hale, who had written laudatory articles about Wilson as governor for Walter Page’s World’s Work and more recently had cobbled together Wilson’s campaign speeches in the book The New Freedom. Hale had never been to Mexico and did not speak Spanish, but he had the president’s trust and enjoyed a reputation as a first-rate reporter. For the next three months, from early June to late August 1913, Hale sent lengthy, insightful dispatches from Mexico City. He characterized Huerta as “an ape-like old man” who was usually “[d]runk or half-drunk (he is never sober)” but also resourceful, gritty, and brave. Hale likewise confirmed the president’s suspicions of Ambassador Wilson. Hale did not make contact with the Constitutionalists, but he did accurately describe their guerrilla warfare, which denied Huerta’s forces control of the countryside, and he confirmed their dominance in the north and near Mexico City.5
The president’s restraint and circumspection lasted through the summer and fall of 1913. Pressure to do something about the growing disorder mounted, and not all of it came from business interests. Thousands of Americans lived and worked in Mexico as clerks, teachers, nurses, plumbers, and builders, people whom Hale called “Americans of our own type and with our own sentiments and ideals.”6 But recognizing the Huerta regime did not appear to offer the only or best way to combat disorder and protect those Americans. Not just the moral cloud hanging over Huerta’s seizure of power argued against recognition; so did his regime’s weak hold on much of the country. Wilson needed to find an alternative and figure out how to pursue it.
At the end of July, he summoned the American ambassador home. When the two namesakes met at the White House on August 3, the president politely heard his visitor out and then dismissed him. The next day, he announced the appointment of a special envoy to meet with Huerta. As before with Hale, he made an unusual, perhaps dubious choice: John Lind, a former Democratic governor of Minnesota and a friend of Bryan’s. Lind, too, spoke no Spanish and knew next to nothing about Mexico. In his letter of instruction to the former governor, Wilson sounded another Rooseveltian note when he said the United States did not “feel at liberty any longer to stand inactively by” in the face of disorder: the situation was not compatible with Mexico’s international obligations, “civilized development … [and] the maintenance of tolerable political and economic conditions in Central America.” Specifically, the envoy was to demand immediate cessation of fighting, early and free elections, and Huerta’s departure.7
Lind’s mission got nowhere. Huerta blustered, declaring that he would refuse to receive the envoy, but he and his foreign minister did have several meetings with Lind. The talks were unproductive, but this envoy also produced insightful reports on conditions, particularly an assessment of social and economic conflicts and the relative strength of contending factions. After two weeks, the foreign minister broke off the talks, and Lind left for home. With the collapse of the Lind mission, the president decided to go before Congress on August 27 to talk about conditions in Mexico. “Those conditions touch us very nearly,” he affirmed. The right conditions in Mexico would mean “an enlargement of the field of self-government” and thus realize “the hopes and rights of a nation … so long suppressed and disappointed.” Warning against impatience, he affirmed, “We can afford to exercise the self-restraint of a really great nation which realizes its own strength and scorns to misuse it.” He predicted that civil strife in Mexico was likely to worsen and promised to protect citizens there. He also ruled out arms sales and pledged continued American efforts to help bring peace.8
This was Wilson’s first foreign policy speech as president. In it, he sought to serve several ends. Politically, he wanted to drum up public and congressional support and fend off criticism. Diplomatically, he wanted to send signals to the Mexicans by eschewing intervention and arms sales—something the anti-Huerta forces desired—for now. In the longer run, he pointed toward a larger design to guide his administration’s policies abroad. This speech contained the earliest expressions of themes that would come to be hallmarks of Wilsonian foreign policy. His tone was unmistakably idealistic, particularly the reference to the “field of self-government.” His model for international conduct drew upon his philosophy of personal conduct—“the self-restraint of a really great nation”—combined with its justification—“realizes its own strength and scorns to misuse it.” Those words and images reached back to his childhood and foreshadowed some of his striking future pronouncements. This speech marked his opening gambit in laying down the vision that would shape both his own policies and his party’s posture toward international affairs.
Meanwhile, Mexico festered. “The apparent situation changes like quicksilver,” Wilson told Ellen in September, “but the real situation, I fancy, remains the same, and is likely to yield to absent treatment.” It would have turned out better for his peace of mind and historical reputation if he had continued to heed those counsels of self-restraint and “absent treatment.” A presidential election was scheduled in Mexico for October 26, but earlier that month the leader of the Constitutionalists, Venustiano Carranza, refused to participate, and his forces briefly seemed on the verge of taking Mexico City. Huerta responded by dissolving the Mexican congress, arresting most of the members, and declaring himself dictator. Complicating matters, the newly arrived British ambassador, Sir Lionel Carden, presented his credentials to Huerta three days later and started making statements to the press in support of the regime. These moves infuriated Wilson. After stewing over the situation, he drafted a diplomatic note to be sent to all nations, asserting that the United States “is and must continue to be of paramount influence in the Western Hemisphere” and must act under the Monroe Doctrine “to assist in maintaining Mexico’s independence of foreign financial power.”9 In the end, Wilson scrapped that note in favor of one to Mexico simply demanding Huerta’s departure.
Wilson’s comment about “foreign financial power” harked back to earlier claims in the cabinet about British oil interests in Mexico. Many, including the president, thought Carden was under the thumb of the oil magnate Lord Cowdray, whose company had extensive holdings in Mexico. Fortunately, amicable relations prevailed, thanks mainly to a visit to Washington in November by a high-ranking Foreign Office official, Sir William Tyrrell, who was filling in for the ailing British ambassador. Colonel House laid the groundwork for a meeting on November 13 at the White House, at which Wilson stressed his unshakable opposition to Huerta and affirmed his support for dropping discriminatory tolls to be levied when the Panama Canal opened, something the British were demanding. Thereafter, the Foreign Office reined in and soon replaced Carden, and Britain reverted to its established policy of deferring to the United States in the Western Hemisphere.10
With that complication removed, Wilson turned to finding a way to get rid of Huerta. In his State of the Union address to Congress on December 2, 1913, he called Mexico the “one cloud upon our horizon” and avowed, “There can be no certain prospect of peace in America until General Huerta has surrendered his usurped authority.” But he did not believe that the United States would be “obliged to alter our policy of watchful waiting.” Privately, he seemed to hanker to do more than watch and wait. At the end of October, House noted that Wilson wanted to blockade Mexican ports and send troops into northern Mexico: “It is his purpose to send six battleships at once.”11 Wilson seems to have been venting frustration rather than setting policy. Yet such sentiments disclosed an interventionist streak in him, and these remarks eerily predicted much of what he would eventually do.
Still, steps short of intervention might bring Huerta down. The most promising seemed to be something Wilson had previously ruled out—selling arms to the Constitutionalists. Talks opened with Carranza during November in the Mexican border town of Nogales, Arizona, with Hale representing Wilson. The envoy found Carranza, who held the title first chief, impressive but difficult to deal with. Carranza demanded freedom to buy arms with no strings attached, and he adamantly rejected any kind of American intervention. The talks broke off acrimoniously, but Wilson decided at the end of January 1914 to recognize the Constitutionalists officially as belligerents opposed to Huerta, and on February 3 he lifted the arms embargo. This move did not produce the expected result. Huerta’s forces held out, and Mexican conservatives continued to rally to their side. Meanwhile, dissension was mounting in the Constitutionalists’ ranks. Carranza’s chief deputy, the blustery, violence-prone Francisco “Pancho” Villa, was conspiring to overthrow the first chief, and each man seemed more interested in stalemating the other than in fighting Huerta. In these circumstances, Wilson came to believe that intervention was his only option.12
An excuse to go in presented itself on April 9. Mexican troops in the Huerta-controlled port of Tampico arrested some American sailors who had gone ashore. The Mexican general in charge quickly released the sailors and apologized, but Rear Admiral Henry T. Mayo, the commander of the naval squadron, stiffly demanded the raising of the Stars and Stripes, accompanied by a twenty-one-gun salute. The Mexicans understandably balked, and a tense situation ensued. The incident would have caused little commotion if Wilson had not decided to seize upon it. Months later, after Huerta finally fell, he stated off the record at a press conference that “a situation arose that made it necessary for the dignity of the United States that we should take some decisive step; and the main thing to accomplish was a vital thing. We got Huerta. That was the end of Huerta. That was what I had in mind. It could not be done without taking Vera Cruz.”13
The reference to “taking Vera Cruz” was to the military action that Wilson ordered. He was giving in to his interventionist urge because he saw an opportunity to shape events. The Constitutionalists were now bouncing back, and Lind, whom Wilson had again sent to Mexico, reported that cutting Huerta off from ports such as Veracruz would seal his doom. In an interview with a magazine journalist, the president claimed that a “new order, which will have its foundations on human liberty and human rights, shall prevail.” On April 20, Wilson went to Capitol Hill to speak to Congress again about Mexico. After recounting what had happened at Tampico and on other occasions, he claimed that such incidents could “lead directly and inevitably to armed conflict.” Dismissing Huerta as an illegitimate authority who controlled little of the country, he contended that action against him would not mean war against Mexico, and he asked Congress to approve the use of the armed forces.14 That evening, the House voted overwhelmingly to authorize the president to enforce demands on Huerta, and Wilson closeted himself with the secretaries of war and the navy and their top officers to plan a naval blockade and possible landing at Veracruz. During the night, a report from that city reached the State Department with the news that a large shipment of arms for the Huerta forces would arrive the next day from Europe. Wilson authorized Secretary of the Navy Daniels to order landings at Veracruz to seize the customhouse and intercept the munitions.
Just before noon on April 21, marines and sailors went ashore and took over the customhouse without incident. Soon afterward, however, Mexican troops and naval cadets opened fire from surrounding buildings. The Mexicans brought in artillery to bombard the Americans, and a naval vessel offshore returned fire. The next morning, the main U.S. fleet, including five battleships, steamed into the harbor. Three thousand additional men landed during the morning and quickly gained control of Veracruz. The two days’ fighting left 152 to 175 Mexicans dead and 195 to 250 wounded, with 17 Americans killed and 61 wounded. Outrage flared throughout Mexico. Huerta immediately broke off diplomatic relations, and Carranza likewise denounced “the invasion of our territory.” It looked as if the only question now was whether the situation would lead to full-scale war. At a White House meeting on the evening of April 24, Garrison argued strongly for intervention and Bryan argued equally strongly against. The decision lay in the president’s hands.15
He acted quickly. Someone at the press conference on April 23 recalled that Wilson looked “preternaturally pale, almost parchmenty. … The death of American sailors and marines owing to an order of his seemed to affect him like an ailment. He was positively shaken.” The president gave no hint of his intentions, except when a reporter asked whether he regarded his moves in Mexico “as in the nature of a private act”—meaning not an act of war—and he responded, “Yes, sir, so far as they have gone.”16 He had already decided that military action would go no further. He scrapped plans for the naval blockade and a possible military expedition against Mexico City. On April 25, he eagerly accepted an offer by the ambassadors of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile to mediate the affair. The “ABC” mediators convened a conference at Niagara Falls, New York, in May. Tortuous negotiations ensued—with Carranza refusing to participate—before a face-saving formula emerged in the form of a mutual withdrawal from Veracruz by Huerta and the American forces. Huerta resigned and went into exile in July, and a triumphant Carranza rode on horseback into Mexico City on August 20. It was a good outcome from Wilson’s standpoint, but he would soon learn that his imbroglio in Mexico had not ended.
Why Wilson reversed himself so abruptly and completely has prompted various explanations. Some observers have agreed that the deaths of the servicemen woke him up to the gravity of what he had done, a view that has merit, up to a point. Then and later, sending young men to die in combat affected Wilson profoundly. After Veracruz, he would never again seem so cavalier and enthusiastic about military intervention. This marked the end of that part of the Rooseveltian tendency in his foreign policy thinking. But Veracruz did not convert Wilson to pacifism. Instead, he would cling to another part of his Rooseveltian tendency. He still believed that the United States, as one of the great powers, must take an activist, involved part in world politics, a part that included potential use of armed force. Hereafter, Wilson might be more chastened in his ardor for America to play such a role, but his basic thought did not change.
Other interpreters have maintained that near-universal condemnation of the Veracruz incursion at home and abroad forced Wilson to change course. Republicans such as Taft and Elihu Root were particularly scathing in their denunciations of the president and his secretary of state as a pair of bungling clowns, while peace and socialist groups condemned Wilson as an aggressor.17 Wilson was as sensitive to public opinion as the next politician, but he did not retreat before a barrage of criticism: he had changed course before he had any chance to gauge reactions. His about-face stemmed, instead, from self-criticism. He knew he had blundered. He had expected Huerta’s forces to crumble, and discounting strong evidence to the contrary, he had expected their opponents to welcome a decisive move to bring him down. His response to the Veracruz affair marked the beginning of a diplomatic self-education that would intensify in response to the world war.
From this time on, Wilson did not waver in his resolve to aid revolutionary and democratic forces in Mexico and keep American hands off if at all possible. In May, he had resisted appeals by Garrison to send more troops to Veracruz, and he had given an interview to the New York World in which he again condemned Huerta and his privileged backers and praised Emiliano Zapata and others for seeking economic justice. During the negotiations at Niagara Falls, despite Carranza’s noncooperation, he had insisted on terms that would favor the Constitutionalists. In August, he told Garrison, “There are in my judgment no conceivable circumstances which would make it right for us to direct by force or by threat of force the internal processes of what is a profound revolution, a revolution as profound as that which occurred in France. All the world has been shocked ever since the time of that revolution in France that Europe should have undertaken to nullify what was done there, no matter what the excesses then committed.”18
Coming from a self-proclaimed disciple of Edmund Burke, those were remarkable words. They did not mean Wilson had renounced his adherence to Burke’s organic, anti-ideological approach to politics, but they did mean that what he called the “progressive Democrat” in him was shaping his views not only at home but abroad as well. Mexico was giving him and the world the first experience in dealing with revolutions among downtrodden peoples, with attendant mixtures of nationalism, radicalism, and violence. The experience would stand him in good stead when he confronted a more cataclysmic revolution of this kind in Russia.19
The same strengths, virtues, and defects that Wilson showed with Mexico marked the rest of his pre-world war diplomacy. Mexico did not eclipse attention to the rest of Latin America. Bryan in particular wanted to strike an idealistic note there that offered a shining contrast to previous Republican interventionism and “dollar diplomacy.” In August 1913, he had talked to Wilson about America’s being “a Good Samaritan” toward Central America and helping its nations. As proof of the administration’s good intentions, Bryan negotiated with Colombia over the secession of Panama in 1903 and the alleged American part in the “revolution” that led to Panama’s cession of the Canal Zone. After some haggling, a treaty emerged that included a $25 million indemnity to Colombia and a statement by the United States of “sincere regret” over past incidents. That statement infuriated Roosevelt, who had long felt touchy about his role in the Panama affair. The ex-president denounced this treaty as “a crime against the United States, an attack on the honor of the United States, which, if true, would convict the United States, of infamy.” His friend Henry Cabot Lodge spearheaded opposition in the Senate, and together with fellow Republicans, he prevented the treaty from coming to a vote.20
Wilson wholeheartedly endorsed both the gesture toward Colombia and the idea of a new look in Latin American policy. In October 1913, he went to Mobile, Alabama, to speak to the Southern Commercial Congress, which was attended by Latin American diplomats. “The future, ladies and gentlemen,” he announced, “is going to be very different for this hemisphere from the past.” Regretting past insults and depredations suffered by countries to the south, he admitted, “We must prove ourselves their friends and champions upon terms of equality and honor.” He called for solidarity in the hemisphere, based upon rising above material interests, and he pledged that the United States would “never again seek one additional foot of territory by conquest.” He was promising to follow the same policies at home and abroad, and he linked his vision for the hemisphere to his New Freedom program: “I would rather belong to a poor nation that was free than to a rich nation that had ceased to be in love with liberty. But we shall not be poor if we love liberty, because the nation that loves liberty truly sets every man free to do his best and be his best.”21
This vision soon bore fruit in the project for a Pan-American pact. Originally the brainchild of a Democratic peace activist, Representative James L. Slayden of Texas, the project came to Wilson’s attention through Colonel House, who suggested at the end of 1914 that such a pact could serve as a model for a broader plan to enforce world peace. House noted that the idea excited Wilson, who proceeded to type a draft for a pact that covered four points: a “solemn covenant” of mutual guarantee “of undisturbed and undisputed territorial integrity and of complete political independence under republican forms of government;” arbitration of current disputes by three-nation panels; exclusive government manufacture and control of armaments; and, in the case of future disputes not affecting “honour, independence, or vital interests,” a one-year delay together with investigation and arbitration. Negotiations later foundered on opposition from Chile, which had long-standing border disputes, and fears by other Latin American nations of United States domination and aggression. Although nothing came of the Pan-American pact, its provisions contained language and ideas that Wilson would use in the Covenant of the League of Nations, and it pointed the way for Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy in the 1930s and hemispheric security pacts at the outset of World War II.22
The vision of hemispheric solidarity and a Pan-American pact presented the benign face of Wilson’s Latin American policy. That policy also had less attractive features. In Central America and the Caribbean, the president showed few, if any, qualms about intervention. Nor, surprisingly, did his secretary of state. As the nation’s leading opponent of imperialism since 1898 and a persistent critic of Republican incursions in that region, Bryan could and should have acted—as he did in Mexico—as a brake on intervention, but he did not. In fact, during his two years at the head of his department, he showed equal or greater relish than his chief for going forcibly into countries there.
The issue of intervention first arose in Nicaragua. The Taft administration had sent marines there to quell chronic unrest, but matters remained unresolved when Wilson came into office. Bryan quickly decided to continue the previous policy, explaining to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the country would otherwise fall into chaos. He also asserted, “Those Latin republics are our political children, so to speak.” Bryan negotiated a treaty that included the right to intervene, a provision that was later withdrawn in the face of Senate opposition. Eventually, under strong prodding from the United States—which included sending in more marines and posting warships off its coasts—Nicaragua settled into a brief interlude of stability. But the whole business stirred resentment in the other Central American countries and stymied efforts to build better relations.23
The Nicaraguan intervention was smaller and shorter lived than other similar moves in the Caribbean. Two countries on the island of Hispaniola, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, witnessed the administration’s largest and longest-lasting actions in the Western Hemisphere. The United States had occupied the Dominican Republic for four years under Roosevelt and intervened again briefly under Taft. Wilson faced a confusing situation there, which he and Bryan spent months trying to figure out. Bryan’s rewarding “deserving Democrats” with diplomatic posts hurt most in that nation because American diplomats provided both inadequate information and poor representation. In July 1914, the president laid down what came to be called the Wilson plan for the Dominican Republic. It called for an immediate cease-fire between warring groups and the formation of a provisional government with free elections under American supervision. At first, the plan seemed to work, but fighting soon resumed. In May 1916, the United States mounted military operations that escalated into a full-fledged occupation and protectorate that would last until 1924. These actions could not have gone forward without the president’s approval, but Wilson was not much involved in them.24
The administration found itself simultaneously entangled in neighboring Haiti, where total anarchy appeared imminent. After some hesitation, Bryan proposed, and Wilson approved, an American takeover of Haitian customhouses at the middle of 1914. This limited intervention did not solve the problem. Wilson then proposed American-supervised elections, but local complications prevented them. When fresh violence erupted in July 1915, claiming American lives, the president’s patience ran out. “I suppose there is nothing for it but to take the bull by the horns and restore order,” he said privately.25 This decision set in motion steps toward an even more thoroughgoing military occupation and even longer control than in the Dominican Republic. American marines would not leave, and Haiti would not regain full sovereignty, until 1934.
These incursions into Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti formed the high-water mark of United States intervention in the Caribbean. Why did the nation reach this point under the professed idealist Woodrow Wilson, aided and abetted by the arch anti-imperialist William Jennings Bryan? At the time, socialists and some progressives denounced these moves as imperialistic and explained them as the workings of the same nefarious forces that Wilson himself had feared in Mexico—the influence of big business and finance. Later critics would deride him as a woolly-headed idealist and starchy moralist, with the leading historian of the Wilson administration dubbing these moves “missionary diplomacy” and maintaining that they sprang from a religious-based mania to spread democracy abroad—a mania that impelled the president to try to foist American-style institutions on other nations.26
Both of those lines of criticism miss the mark in explaining Wilson’s interventionism in Latin America. This president, who deeply and sometimes unfairly suspected “material interests,” was not listening to them and was not about to do their bidding. Likewise, his idealism was like his religious faith, deep-seated and ever-present but also largely taken for granted. Particular circumstances counted more than grand designs in his decisions to go into Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti. What later critics would fault Wilson for slighting—security considerations—weighed heavily in his mind. Protecting approaches and territory adjacent to the soon-to-be-opened Panama Canal appeared to leave few options other than trying to impose stability in the region. Those considerations gained added gravity after the outbreak of the war in Europe in August 1914, an event that largely explained why he paid so little heed to the later phases of operations in the Dominican Republic and Haiti. In addition, Veracruz did not seem to have totally quashed his interventionist urge. At bottom, Wilson and Bryan shared with the vast majority of their countrymen a callousness toward and an ignorance of their neighbors to the south, but those flaws were not products of their religiosity and idealism.
In other parts of the world, such as Asia, the president and the secretary of state behaved with more restraint and consistency. Despite their early enthusiasm for the semblance of democracy in China and their disavowal of “dollar diplomacy” there, Wilson and Bryan largely followed their Republican predecessors in not seriously challenging Japanese influence. They did break with the past in the Philippines. In every election since 1900, Democratic party platforms had pledged Philippine independence. Wilson had doubts about that pledge in 1912, but he chose not to buck the party. Once in office, he backed away from setting a deadline for getting out, but he did stick by the promise to grant autonomy and eventual independence. In October 1913, he announced that Filipinos would immediately have a majority in the appointive upper house of their legislature as well as in the elective lower house, an action that gave them a much larger share in their government.
The New Freedom legislation crowded the Philippines off the legislative agenda until October 1914, when the House overwhelmingly passed a measure to grant independence, but Republicans blocked Senate approval during the short session after the 1914 elections. Congress took up another measure in 1916, but Republicans, who had increased their numbers in the 1914 elections, stood virtually unanimous in opposing any deadline for independence. Catholic interests, fearing confiscation of church property under an independent Philippine government, persuaded thirty Irish American Democrats to join the Republicans in blocking any deadline. Stripped of a date for independence, the measure won final passage in both houses at the end of August 1916. Satisfied with the outcome, Wilson declared that it was “high time that we did this act of justice which we have now done.” This law—known as the Jones Act, after the chairman of the House Insular Affairs Committee—marked one of the biggest milestones on the road to Philippine independence.27
Europe offered an example of restraint and consistency where Wilson did choose to buck his party. When he took office, he found a diplomatic dispute simmering over tolls to be levied when the Panama Canal opened. In 1912, Congress had passed, and Taft had signed, a law that exempted from all tolls American vessels engaged in shipping between American ports, and authorized lower tolls for all American ships. The British, who had the world’s largest merchant fleet, had immediately protested, maintaining that this law violated the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty of 1901, under which they had ceded to the United States exclusive rights to maintain and fortify a canal in return for equal treatment of ships of all nations. Wilson and the Democrats had endorsed the tolls exemption during the campaign, but the president quickly repented. Soon after taking office, he told the British ambassador, his old acquaintance James Bryce, that he planned to take up the matter after the tariff was out of the way. He did not mention the tolls issue in his State of the Union speech in December 1913, but shortly afterward he told Ambassador Page that he would ask Congress to repeal the exemption, “and I am not without hope that I can accomplish both at this session.”28
In February 1914, he publicly called the tolls exemption “a very mistaken policy” that was “economically unjust,” benefited “only a monopoly,” and violated the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty. The situation grew tense when House Democratic leader Underwood announced that he would oppose repeal as a breach of the party’s campaign pledge. The president responded by going to the Capitol on March 5 to speak to a joint session of Congress. “No communication I have addressed to Congress carried with it graver or more far-reaching implications to the interest of the country,” he declared, and he asked for repeal “in support of the foreign policy of the administration. I shall not know how to deal with other matters of even greater delicacy and nearer consequences if you do not grant it to me in ungrudging measure.” Making this an issue of loyalty was a risky strategy, which seemed to backfire when Speaker Clark joined Underwood in opposing him. Wilson refused to compromise and instructed Burleson to use patronage to bring wavering Democrats into line. The strategy worked. On March 31, the House approved a repeal bill, 247 to 162, with only Clark, Underwood, and some big-city Irish American Democrats breaking ranks. The Senate followed suit on June 11, approving the measure by a vote of 50 to 35.29
None of Wilson’s other victories in this season of legislative triumphs tasted so sweet. Here, he did something different from the New Freedom legislation. He was not pulling his party together to deliver things that its leader and followers had long wanted. Instead, he was taking the party in a new direction and defying some of his strongest congressional allies. “There is nothing that succeeds in life like boldness,” Wilson told Princeton classmates just after the final vote, “provided you believe you are on the right side.” This victory boded well for future confrontations with party leaders. “I realized the political risks in undertaking to obtain a repeal of the tolls exemption,” he wrote to Bryce, “but I do not know of anything I ever undertook with more willingness or zest.” Winning this fight provided a fine capstone to Wilson’s early foreign policy program, and it had the unforeseen benefit of putting relations with Britain on a good footing for dealing with “matters of greater delicacy and nearer consequences,” which he had uncannily predicted.30
One other aspect of Wilson’s European diplomacy in the first half of 1914 showed a kind of boldness and laid groundwork for dealing with future trials. This was Colonel House’s self-named “Great Adventure”—his project to bring Britain, Germany, and the United States together to maintain international peace and order. The Texan worked with the German ambassador in Washington to make contacts in Berlin, which was his first stop on a European trip that lasted from late May until the middle of July. In the German capital, House found “jingoism run stark mad,” as he reported to Wilson. “Unless someone acting for you can bring about an understanding there is some day to be an awful calamity.” The colonel saw several German leaders and had an audience at Potsdam with Kaiser Wilhelm, who reportedly agreed that America must lead the way. “I made it plain, however,” House noted, “that it was the policy of our Government to have no alliances of any character, but that we were willing to do our share towards promoting international peace.” Next, House went by way of Paris to London, where he found an eager accomplice in Ambassador Page, and met the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey. At the beginning of July, he reported that Grey asked him to communicate with the Germans “in regard to a better understanding between the Nations of Europe, and to try to get a reply before I leave.” House sent an ecstatic message to the kaiser, but he got no reply before he departed on July 21.31 By the time his ship landed, the diplomatic crisis that led to the world war was in full swing.
How much stock Wilson put in House’s efforts is difficult to judge. He told the colonel that the report of the audience at Potsdam “gives me a thrill of deep pleasure. You have, I hope and believe, begun a great thing and I rejoice with all my heart.” Later, he expressed his thankfulness “to have a friend who so thoroughly understands me to interpret me to those whom it is important and inform and enlighten with regard to what we are really seeking to accomplish.” Those words may have been little more than a characteristically sentimental expression of feelings to someone whose big scheme appealed to his own fanciful tendencies. House actually reported little of what he discussed in the European capitals, and when he got back to America he did not rush to see Wilson. When they finally met, at the end of August, House recorded that he had spoken “of the great work there was to do for humanity in the readjustment of the wreckage that would come from the European war.”32 The colonel’s “Great Adventure” had started at a tragically inopportune moment, but he continued to dream big dreams about what he might accomplish through his friend in the White House.
Other matters on the home front also occupied Wilson during his first year and a half in office. Some burning social issues demanded his attention largely against his will. Racial justice continued to dog him as white southerners denounced the administration’s few black appointments. When Wilson reappointed Robert H. Terrell, a respected black judge in the District of Columbia, howls of protest arose on Capitol Hill. He explained to one southern senator that he believed Terrell was well qualified and that during the 1912 campaign he had told some black leaders that he felt “morally bound to see to it that they were not put to any greater disadvantage than they suffered under previous Democratic administrations.”33 This lame excuse neither squared with the facts nor satisfied the more rabid racists.
Another issue from the campaign likewise dogged him—woman suffrage. When Wilson received delegations of female suffragists at the White House, he drew a line between his personal views and stands he could take as president and leader of his party. In June 1914, he told one delegation, “It is my personal conviction that this is a matter for settlement by the states and not by the federal government.” Two of his visitors questioned him about whether that view did not leave room for women to seek the vote through an amendment. “Certainly it does,” Wilson answered. “There is good room.” Pressed further, he responded, “I do not think it is quite proper that I submit myself to cross-examination.”34 He felt genuinely ambivalent and uncomfortable. Anti-suffrage sentiment ran high among Democrats, especially southerners and members of urban ethnic groups, yet Wilson had taught at a leading women’s college and had suffragist daughters. Political expediency and personal preference left his views in flux.
On two other pressing social issues—immigration restriction and prohibition—he felt no ambivalence, although he treated each one differently. Perhaps in part because he was the son and grandson of immigrants, he resisted efforts to curtail immigration from southern and eastern Europe. In May 1914, he extolled immigrants at a memorial service for the sailors killed at Veracruz. The president observed that some of the fallen had come from “several national stocks. … But they were not Irishmen or Frenchmen or Hebrews or Italians any more. They were not when they went to Vera Cruz: they were Americans, every one of them.”35 Political calculation may have colored his views, inasmuch as the Democrats enjoyed a large and growing following in the Northeast and Midwest among recent immigrants and second-generation Americans. Expedient or not, Wilson’s views impelled him to veto literacy tests designed to keep out immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. In February 1917, Congress overrode the last of those vetoes and imposed the first of a series of twentieth-century bars to immigration.
Prohibition drew no sympathy from him either, but it gave him political headaches, and he tried to duck it. An infrequent, moderate drinker himself, Wilson never liked the idea of legislating morality. Unfortunately, in running for the presidential nomination, he had occasionally appealed to prohibitionist groups, and those appeals came back to haunt him when dry forces used his remarks in their campaigns. At one point, Tumulty asked, “How did you come to write that, Governor? … Were you crazy when you wrote it?” Wilson answered, “I declare I don’t know. … I hate to look at it.” Mainly, he stayed silent on the subject and avoided the issue—with one exception. In October 1919, a veto of enforcement legislation under the recently ratified Eighteenth Amendment, which established nationwide prohibition, went out in his name. Congress overrode this veto too, and the law took effect as the Volstead Act.36
Other domestic issues that bothered Wilson were, to an extent, of his own making. In hitching his own and his party’s fortunes to the progressive bandwagon, he stirred expectations for sweeping reforms and invited criticism for failing to deliver. Two measures in particular opened him to attack: prohibiting child labor and extending financial aid to farmers. On child labor, Wilson talked and acted equivocally. Shortly before taking office, he expressed sympathy for outlawing child labor but questioned the constitutionality of federal action. When the House passed the Palmer bill to prohibit child labor in February 1915—by a wide margin: 232 for and 44 against—he took no stand, and the bill did not come to a vote in the Senate before the end of the session on March 4.
Financial aid to farmers—rural credits—found him similarly torn. Although he fought off moves to attach provisions for agricultural lending to the Federal Reserve Act, in his State of the Union speech in December 1913 he promised support in making “substantial credit resources available as a foundation for joint, concerted local action in their [farmers’] own behalf in getting the capital they must use.”37 Secretary of Agriculture David Houston adamantly opposed direct government loans to farmers, however, and for the time being Wilson deferred to his judgment.
Pro-farmer Democrats on Capitol Hill refused to let the matter drop. In the spring of 1914, they introduced a measure to create a system of land banks, corresponding to the Federal Reserve banks, with authority to issue up to $50 million a year for farm mortgages. Party leaders warned that the bill would pass overwhelmingly in the House unless the president intervened, and he sent a letter to the Democratic caucus opposing the bill and hinting at a veto. That slowed momentum behind the bill, but in February 1915, the House and the Senate passed it. The session expired before a conference could resolve the differences and a final vote could be taken. It is not clear where Wilson’s true sentiments lay. He seemed to be resisting rural-credits legislation mainly because a valued lieutenant opposed it and it did not seem “expedient.”38
Wilson had other reasons for applying the brakes to drives for such legislation. During the severe recession that began at the end of 1913, the stock market had plunged and unemployment shot up, particularly in industrial areas of the Northeast and Midwest. Business groups and Republicans, quick to blame the downturn on the Democrats’ reforms, demanded abandonment of the anti-trust program. Wilson was of two minds about how to respond. He never considered dropping the anti-trust bills or soft-pedaling his progressivism, but he did make soothing noises toward business. In June 1914, he told a gathering of journalists that once his program was finished, “business can and will get what it can get in no other way—rest, recuperation, and a successful adjustment.” Practical political considerations also weighed heavily against pushing reform further. In September, he told a Democratic congressman that he looked forward to such projects as the buildup of overseas shipping, the promotion of foreign commerce, and the conservation of natural resources, “to which we could turn without any controversy.” At the same time, House said about the president, “He feared the country would expect him to continue as he had up to now, which was impossible.”39
Wilson did send one unmistakable signal that he was not wavering in his progressive convictions. The brief, lame-duck session of the Sixty-third Congress passed a final piece of reform legislation at the beginning of 1915. This was the La Follette Seamen’s Act. Andrew Furuseth, president of the International Seamen’s Union, had lobbied long and hard to get laws passed to improve safety and working conditions for merchant sailors and to free them from notoriously oppressive labor contracts. The sinking of the Titanicin April 1912 had heightened public awareness, and at the outset of his administration Wilson had approved La Follette’s bill to aid seamen. Complicating passage, however, were objections from foreign governments that the bill violated international treaties and would spoil the work of a conference that was to meet in London late in 1913 to draft a convention on safety at sea. At the behest of the State Department, Wilson stalled final congressional action on La Follette’s bill until after the Senate had given its consent to the convention, which it did on December 16, 1914. La Follette and other backers then redoubled their efforts, and the bill won Senate approval on February 27, 1915.40
Wilson now faced a quandary. Bryan urged him to exercise a pocket veto—refrain from signing the bill and let it die with the end of the Congress on March 4—on grounds that the bill would disrupt trade and require the renegotiation of more than twenty treaties. On March 2, La Follette and Robert Owen changed Bryan’s mind by taking Furuseth to meet the secretary and plead his cause. That evening, La Follette brought Furuseth to see the president. After his visitors left, Wilson told Tumulty, “I have just experienced a great half-hour, the tensest since I came to the White House.” He signed the bill into law on March 4, admitting to a sympathetic Democrat that he had weighed “the arguments on both sides with a good deal of anxiety, and finally determined to sign it because it seemed the only chance to get something like justice for a class of workmen who have been too much neglected by our laws.”41
One reason opponents could cast doubt on Wilson’s progressivism was that he was not sharing his thinking with the public as much as he had done earlier. Yet he recognized that he needed to make a stronger personal impression on the public. In the spring of 1914, he admitted to the Washington press corps his concern that people thought he was “a cold and removed person who has a thinking machine inside. … You may not believe it, but I sometimes feel like a fire from a far from extinct volcano.” He said he never thought of himself as president, and he wanted to give the public “a wink, as much as to say, ‘It is only “me” that is inside this thing.’” He also did some Roosevelt-style preaching on personal virtues. He told a group of Princeton alumni, “Service is not merely getting out and being busy and butting into people’s affairs, and giving gratuitous advice. … You cannot serve your friend unless you know what his needs are, and you cannot know what his needs are unless you know him inside out.” To his fellow Princetonians he asserted, “The great malady of public life is cowardice. Most men are not untrue, but they are afraid.”42
Those remarks served as a warm-up for his 1914 Fourth of July address at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where he declared that liberty must be translated “into definite action.” At home, Americans must “put hope into the hearts of the men who work and toil every day.” Abroad, they must answer the question, “What are we going to do with the influence and power of this great Nation?” He closed with a stirring vision: “My dream is that, as the years go on and the world knows more and more of America, it will also drink at these fountains of youth and renewal; that it will also turn to America for those moral inspirations which lie at the basis of freedom; … and that America will come into the full light of the day when all shall know that she puts human rights above all other rights, and that her flag is the flag, not only of America, but of humanity.”43 These were the most visionary words he had yet uttered as president, and they foretold his own “great adventure” in world affairs.
Just about everything seemed to be going right for Woodrow Wilson as the summer of 1914 began. Several people remarked on how good he looked then and how the presidency seemed to agree with him. He had been healthy most of the time since his inauguration. His skin was tan from his golf games with Dr. Grayson, and he found time for reading. He admitted to devouring detective stories, and during the summer of 1914 the books he borrowed from the Library of Congress included such influential works in progressive circles as Graham Wallas’s Human Nature in Politics and Walter Lippmann’s Preface to Politics.44
Home life had gone well for the Wilsons in the White House once Ellen adjusted to the social demands. Actually, all five of them seldom lived together there after the spring of 1913. Margaret had already left home to pursue her musical studies in New York, although she came back for frequent visits. She, Jessie, and Nell joined their mother in Cornish, New Hampshire, during the summer and early fall of that year, where the Wilsons rented Harlakenden, a 200-acre estate with a large Georgian house overlooking the Connecticut River. Cornish provided Ellen with an idyllic interlude. Besides quiet and beautiful surroundings, she found a group of artists nearby with whom she exchanged visits and discussed their work. She had taken up her painting again while Wilson was governor and had begun exhibiting her work in 1912. To avoid trading on her husband’s name, she signed her paintings “E. A. Wilson,” and with dealers she used the pseudonym Edward Wilson. At Cornish, she completed more paintings, five of which were chosen for the annual exhibition of the Association of Women Painters and Sculptors in New York. Adding to Ellen’s happiness that summer were visits from old friends and the frequent presence of Jessie’s fiancé, Frank Sayre.45
The only disagreeable note during this interlude was Wilson’s absence. He managed just three short visits to Cornish. Ellen and Nell went back to Washington for a week in late August, in part to maintain their perfect record of attending Wilson’s appearances before Congress. The separation pained both Ellen and Woodrow, and they tried to fill the void by writing the kind of letters they had written as young lovers three decades earlier. “How incomparably sweet and dear you are!” he wrote at the end of July. “Your letters warm my heart and give me so vivid a realization of you that even this barren house seems full of you.” She replied, “Your wonderful, adorable Sunday letter has just come and made me fairly drunk with happiness. I would give anything to be able to express my love as perfectly as you do, dear heart.”46 Clearly, whatever hurt and rift had once come between them had long since healed, and their love burned as bright as ever. They wrote to each other several times a week and shared accounts of everything that was going on. She avidly followed the news and commented regularly on issues and personalities. He revealed his thoughts and feelings about the affairs of state that were swirling around him. These letters between them in 1913 likewise provide great insight into his mind and spirit.
The family’s return to the White House in mid-October brought a burst of activity. November 25 was Jessie’s wedding date, and much remained to be done. The White House staff pitched in with its wonted efficiency, and all was ready when the day arrived. The ceremony took place in the East Room, with Margaret and Nell among the bridesmaids. Performing the ceremony were two clergymen, Dr. Sylvester Beach, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Princeton, and the Reverend John Nevin Sayre, an Episcopalian and a social reformer who was the bridegroom’s brother. With her golden hair, fine features, and rosy complexion, Jessie made a radiant bride. After her father gave her away, he stepped back and held Ellen’s hand during the rest of the ceremony.
By all accounts, it was a gala occasion. Much of official Washington came, including cabinet officers, diplomats, and members of Congress. Most of the Wilsons’ extended family were also there, although one sad absence was Ellen’s brother Stockton, who was again hospitalized for depression. A lively reception followed the ceremony. “It was just like a big family party in the South,” said Margaret Howe, the wife of Wilson’s nephew. The Marine Band played dance tunes, including the newly popular turkey trot. Many of the diplomats danced with Margaret, who caught Jessie’s bouquet—an event that did not turn out to be an omen of the next wedding. The belle of the ball, according to the newspapers, was Nell. “You know Nell, as we call Eleanor Wilson, is just crazy about dancing,” Margaret Howe recounted.47 Wilson did not dance, but he looked on and laughed and joked. For him and Ellen, the occasion was also bittersweet, for the first of their children had broken from the family circle.
Any sadness the father of the bride felt at the time of the wedding would have found some relief at a sporting event four days later. The family went to New York on November 28 to see Frank and Jessie off to Europe on their honeymoon. Wilson and Ellen stayed overnight with the Houses and attended the theater. The next day, Wilson went to the Polo Grounds to attend his first Army-Navy game as president. It was rainy and misty, and Army dominated play, winning 22 to 9. “At the game many people of distinction came to our box to pay respects to the President,” House noted. The dignitaries included Senator O’Gorman, and seeing this sometime nemesis play up to him in front of the photographers may have been particularly sweet for Wilson.48 So, too, may have been memories of another Army-Navy game eight years before, when he had played host and supporting actor to the political star who had since become his greatest rival—Roosevelt.
Football was not the only athletic contest Wilson enjoyed as president. Living in Washington meant he could often follow baseball, his favorite sport. He gladly continued the custom, begun in 1910 by Taft, of throwing out the first ball at the opening game of the Major League season. On April 10, 1913, he tossed the first ball, and he attended a three-game series later that month. He missed opening day in 1914 because it came two days after the fighting at Veracruz. In October 1915, he would become the first president to attend the World Series, and he threw out the first ball at the second game. In his second term, Wilson would make it to only one game, a Red Cross benefit in 1918. Sportswriters often commented on how well pitched his tosses were.
Baseball, along with vaudeville shows and movies, offered him welcome respite in the spring of 1914. Matters at home were troubling him. Since February, Ellen had shown signs of ebbing energy, and Margaret often filled in for her mother at social functions. Early in March, Ellen took what Wilson described as “an ugly fall” when she slipped on a polished floor in her bedroom and was “recovering slowly from the shock and general shaking up it gave her.” Her slow recovery concerned her husband so much that he canceled a trip to New York to see House at the beginning of April. At the middle of the month, she spent a week at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, accompanied by Nell and Dr. Grayson. The trip seemed to help.49 She started making arrangements for another summer at Harlakenden, and on April 20 she sat in the gallery of the House chamber, as she always did when her husband spoke to Congress.
Ellen’s frail health came at a particularly inopportune moment, for a family crisis was brewing, thanks to their youngest daughter’s romantic inclinations. Nell had fallen madly in love with William Gibbs McAdoo, the secretary of the Treasury. She broke her engagement to Ben King in February and told her parents about McAdoo, who was out of town but took up the matter with the Wilsons when he returned. They were much less happy with this fiancé than they had been with his predecessor or with Frank Sayre. The fifty-year-old McAdoo was only seven years younger than Wilson, and he was more than twice Nell’s age. A widower for the past three years, he had seven children from his first marriage, two of them older than Nell. For her, however, any such drawbacks paled in the presence of his dark, burly good looks, superabundant energy, and aura of manly strength. The elder Wilsons could not resist the couple’s being, as Ellen put it, “simply mad over each other,” and they gave their consent. Reporters had been on to the romance for some time, and Washington newspapers announced the engagement on their front pages on March 13.50
The wedding took place at the White House on the evening of May 7, 1914. It was a small affair held in the Blue Room. Fewer than 100 guests were present, mostly family members. The official reason for their not having a larger, more festive event, according toThe New York Times, was that “[t]hese days are burdened with grave responsibilities for the President; public business of great and growing importance presses upon him.” Wilson felt even sadder at this breach in his family circle. “Ah! How desperately my heart aches that she is gone,” he wrote three days later to Mary Hulbert. “She is simply part of me, the only delightful part; and I feel the loneliness more than I dare admit to myself.” He did not embellish his grief. Of his daughters, Nell was his favorite. She shared her father’s playful streak and sense of fun, and she was the one who could always make him laugh.51
Besides losing his favorite daughter, Wilson was gaining a problematic son-in-law. McAdoo was the most dynamic member of the cabinet, and the president owed him debts of gratitude for the role he had played in 1912. He would call his new son-in-law Mac, but he would never feel entirely comfortable with him. In his memoirs, published after Wilson’s death, McAdoo recounted how he had once told Wilson a joke about an old black man who said, when a circus performer landed a balloon in his field, “Howdy do, Marse Jesus; how’s your pa?” Wilson, as McAdoo recalled, did not like the joke, but not because of its racism: He “did not laugh; he did not even smile. He looked at me silently for a moment, and then said: ‘Mac, that story is sacrilegious.’” Another time, McAdoo recalled, Wilson was reading something he had written and asked, “Mac, why do you write under the circumstances?” He then explained gently that circum refers to an enclosure: “You can be in a circumstance but not under it. The correct expression is ‘in the circumstances.’ ”52
It did not help relations between the two men that, unlike others in the family, McAdoo failed to respect the sharp line his father-in-law drew between work and private life. Without naming him, Stockton Axson was describing McAdoo when he later wrote:
Now, suppose a member of the family, a dear and valued relative, also full of his schemes, his plans, which he sees as the businessman, the man of affairs, the man of action—not the man of meditation, not the artist, not the literary man; suppose he insists on talking business. … It rasps the older man, the literary man—why can’t we drop business? At first he answers graciously by trying to avoid the topic. Then his tone takes a little edge on. Then he adopts the worst of all his defenses—silence. The silence of Woodrow Wilson is worse than the oaths of some men, more withering.53
The tension was not lost on McAdoo. In his memoirs he claimed he had known the president, whom he continued to call Governor, better than any other member of the cabinet. “But in another sense I hardly knew him at all. There were wide and fertile ranges of his spirit that were closed to me; and, I think, to everyone else except the first Mrs. Wilson. As far as I am aware, she was the only human being who knew him perfectly.”54
He was about to lose that source of love and understanding. The real reason for Nell’s small and simple wedding was Ellen’s health. The apparent upturn in her condition did not last. Grayson urged her to go to Harlakenden, and Wilson asked Jessie and Frank to get the house ready for the family to arrive later in the summer. Although she seemed to rally a few times, Ellen was dying. She had Bright’s disease, a condition related to tuberculosis that was destroying her kidneys. It is not clear when her doctors made the diagnosis, but they did not tell her or her husband. On July 12, Wilson wrote to Mary Hulbert, “Ellen is slowly (ah, how slowly!) coming to her strength again.” It was a false hope. By late July, Grayson was attending her constantly. Woodrow sat by her bedside every night. The news that Jessie was expecting her first child cheered Ellen, who managed to fuss about whether her daughter was taking proper care of herself. On August 3, Grayson informed the president that he should gather the members of the family. Margaret came at once, and Frank and Jessie arrived two days later. Sadly, neither Ellen’s sister, Madge, nor her brother Stockton, who were on the West Coast, where they were both living, arrived in time.55
Ellen knew the end was near. In the morning of August 6, she asked her husband if he could get Congress to act on her project to clean up Washington’s alleyways. Tumulty took the request to the Capitol, arranged for immediate passage by both houses, and brought back the news early in the afternoon. Ellen was drifting in and out of consciousness. In the morning, Woodrow had told her, “Jessie has arrived.” She smiled and replied, “I understand.” Several times, she awoke and asked, “Is your father looking well?” In the afternoon, when the news about her bill arrived from Capitol Hill, Ellen smiled again. She motioned to Grayson and said, “Doctor, if I go away, promise me you will take good care of my husband.” Those were her last words. She lay unconscious while Margaret, Jessie, and Nell sat beside her bed and Wilson held her hand. At five o’clock, her breathing stopped. With tears streaming down his cheeks, her husband asked, “Is it over?” Grayson nodded. Wilson got up and went to an open window. “Oh, my God,” he cried out, “what am I to do?”56
Ellen’s death dealt him a cruel blow. For more than thirty years, Ellen had been his closest, wisest adviser. She had exercised a stronger, more salutary influence over him than anyone else. She had rarely let her family-inherited disposition toward severe depression affect him or their daughters. She had seen Wilson through and forgiven him for his infatuation with Mrs. Peck. Ellen had given him so much, and he was a far better man for her gifts. He had gone further and accomplished more in the worlds of scholarship, education, politics, and government than he could have done without her. And he knew it. Five years later, when he himself lay in a bed in the White House after suffering a stroke, Nell was reading to him and thought he had gone to sleep. As she later recalled, “Suddenly, he opened his eyes and smiled at me, the live, happy smile of the old days.” After some reminiscences, he said to her, “I owe everything to your mother—you know that don’t you?” He talked about their lives together, and Nell said to him, “I wish I could hand her torch to my own children.” Her father answered, “You can—tell them about her. That is enough.”57
Now Ellen was gone. Wilson had lost her at the moment when the world was cascading into the most terrible war yet in history. His only other recorded words at the time are in a note he typed the next day to Mary Hulbert: “God has stricken me almost beyond what I can bear.”58