13

IRONY AND THE GIFT OF FATE

The guns of August 1914 began to boom as Ellen Wilson lay dying. The news from Europe startled and shocked Americans. To some, the war looked like a great natural disaster. Henry James called it the “plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness,” while Theodore Roosevelt said it was “on a giant scale like the disaster to the Titanic.” Others reached for their Bibles, dubbing the war Armageddon, after the final nation-shattering miracle in the book of Revelation. Woodrow Wilson felt devastated by grief after his wife’s death, but he had to snatch moments from his mourning to respond to this world calamity. Now his inner anguish added to his sense of a lack of preparation to make his having to deal mainly with foreign affairs “an irony of fate.”¹

Ellen’s funeral, on August 10, 1914, was a simple service in the East Room of the White House—the scene of Jessie’s wedding nine months before—conducted by Dr. Beach of Princeton and Dr. James Taylor, pastor of Washington’s Central Presbyterian Church. The service included prayers and readings from scripture but no music. Only family members, the cabinet, and a delegation from Congress were invited. After the service, Wilson; his brother, Joseph; his nephew George Howe; and Stockton Axson accompanied the casket to Union Station, where other family members joined them. Wilson and their daughters had decided that Ellen should be buried in the Axson family plot in Rome, Georgia. As the train made its way through Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia, people lined the tracks to watch. At Rome, six of Ellen’s cousins and the husbands of two others carried her casket into the church where her father had preached. The service included her favorite hymns and a eulogy by the pastor. At the grave site, a thunderstorm broke as the service began, and Wilson wept as his wife’s body was lowered into the ground.²

Except for those tears, he bore himself stoically during the funeral services and burial. Privately, he confessed to Mary Hulbert, “I never understood before what a broken heart meant, and did for a man. It just means that he lives by the compulsion of duty only. … Every night finds me exhausted,—dead in heart and body.” That “compulsion of duty” helped him shoulder his burden of grief. The most pressing duties arose from the war in Europe. The nation’s diplomatic response was to proclaim neutrality, but there were urgent problems involving travel and trade. Thousands of Americans stranded across the Atlantic clamored for assistance getting home, and the president asked Congress for money to help cover their expenses. In London, Ambassador Page enlisted the services of an American businessman living there, Herbert Hoover, and the efficient way in which Hoover tackled the job launched his public career. Yet for most Americans, this war was a calamity that was happening to somebody else far away. Page, who would soon sing a different song, wrote to Wilson, “Again and ever I thank Heaven for the Atlantic ocean.”³

The president did not share those feelings of remoteness from the war. In a statement to the press on August 18, he warned his countrymen not to become “divided in camps of hostile opinion, hot against each other,” because of their ties to the nations at war. He urged instead, “The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name during these times that are to try men’s souls. We must be impartial in thought as well as in action, must put a curb upon our sentiments.”⁴ As he implied when he talked about curbing sentiments, he was speaking from his own inner turmoil, and he was also evoking the vision of his Fourth of July speech. The twin tragedies of the war and his wife’s death made his designs for America’s role in the world deeply personal and heartfelt.

Disrupted trade presented the first serious confrontation with the war’s ramifications. Heavy selling by Europeans caused the biggest losses on the New York Stock Exchange since the panic of 1907, and McAdoo allowed the exchange to close temporarily. Equally heavy selling of debt instruments held by Europeans caused a fall in the dollar’s exchange value and set off a run on gold. Wilson encouraged McAdoo to issue emergency currency, thereby averting all but a handful of bank failures. In the broader economy, they sought to forestall undue interruptions in the flow of exports, as interruptions could hurt such vital Democratic constituencies as southern cotton growers and western lead and copper miners. A shortage of ships appeared to pose a special danger, and the administration proposed to buy German vessels stranded in American ports to fill the predicted shortfall. This “ship-purchase” plan roused objections from the British, who saw it as a breach of neutrality, and it ran into roadblocks on Capitol Hill, where sour feelings at the end of the congressional session prevented bills from reaching the floor in either chamber.⁵

Yet the horrendous cloud of carnage had a silver lining for the United States. Financial dislocations and export uncertainties at the war’s outbreak worsened the already bad state of the economy, but only in the short run. By the end of 1914, massive orders from warring nations for munitions and other military-related products and agricultural commodities would begin to reverse the yearlong recession and fuel a boom that would last into the next decade. Because the British dominated on the seas, only the Allies were able to buy from America, a situation that would later bring unanticipated dangers and add fuel to the economic boon. The boost to the economy almost failed to come to pass, however, thanks to a well-meant gesture. In anticipation of big war orders, the British and French governments engaged J. P. Morgan and Company to float a $100 million loan for them. The move raised Bryan’s hackles. He reflexively distrusted anything involving Morgan or other big Wall Street firms, and he had long believed that lending money to nations at war was immoral and unneutral. “Money is the worst of all contrabands because it commands everything else,” he told Wilson and argued that refusing to lend to the belligerents would shorten the war and set a noble example. Wilson assented, and on August 15 Bryan declared to the press, “[I]n the judgment of this government loans by American bankers to any foreign nation which is at war is inconsistent with the true spirit of neutrality.”⁶

Why Wilson went along with Bryan’s policy is not entirely clear. He did not discuss the matter with Bryan face-to-face, although they probably talked about it over the telephone. He may have been showing his usual deference toward a cabinet member in that man’s area of responsibility, and he may have shared a fellow progressive’s distrust of the influence of Wall Street. He may also have agreed with Bryan’s intuition that loans to belligerents could have untoward consequences and likewise wanted to do something that might promote peace. Yet such a sweeping gesture and expression of faith in influence through example were not in character for him, and he had learned hard lessons during the previous year and a half about the difficulty of influencing other people and their governments. The distractions of grief may have affected Wilson’s judgment.

The ban on loans did not stand for long. Credit is the lifeblood of international trade, and the Allied governments were not about to let it be cut off. In September, France proposed a $10 million loan through a different Wall Street firm, Frank Vanderlip’s National City Bank of New York. The French ambassador, Jean-Jules Jusserand, approached Bryan personally and told him the loan ban was prejudicial toward his government and its side in the war. As Vanderlip later recalled, Jusserand’s argument shook Bryan, and in ensuing negotiations he agreed to call the loan a “commercial credit” and let it go forward so long as there was no publicity. Reporters soon got wind of the change, however. When they questioned the president at a press conference on October 15, he refused to discuss the matter and claimed nothing had changed. Wilson was employing the same sophistry Bryan had bought into, and that was the end of the loan ban. By early 1915, major financial houses were floating multimillion-dollar loans to belligerent governments and initiating an ever-tightening financial entanglement with the world war.⁷

Another, still more potent, entanglement involved merchant ships. The British began at once to impose a naval blockade of Germany and the other Central powers, but an accident of geography threatened to undermine the effectiveness of this move. The Rhine—the main artery for waterborne German commerce—empties into the North Sea in the Netherlands, and in peacetime more goods bound to and from Germany flowed through Rotterdam than through any other port. Now, with the outbreak of the war, shipments to that neutral Dutch port rose sharply, along with shipments to ports in neutral Scandinavian countries adjacent to Germany. The British were determined to close those loopholes, even at the cost of clashes with the largest neutral trading nation, the United States. Wilson first faced this aspect of the war at the end of September, when Britain published an expanded contraband list that included such unprecedented items as the important American exports of cotton and copper. The State Department drafted a diplomatic note strongly protesting the action and forwarded it to the president. House, who happened to be visiting, noted that he found the draft “exceedingly undiplomatic and … urged the President not to permit it to be sent.” He also suggested that Wilson have him confer with the British ambassador, who was by then Sir Cecil Spring-Rice.⁸

The colonel met with the ambassador the next day and apprised him of how seriously the American government regarded this expansion of the contraband list. Meanwhile, Wilson used his literary skills to soften the draft, and a shortened, revised note went to Ambassador Page for presentation to the British. In coming years, many interpreters would make much of this episode, alleging that House and Wilson showed an unneutral bias in favor of the Allies and passed up a golden opportunity to oppose their blockade. Such allegations are wrong because the revised note, though more politely phrased, made the same points as the original draft. This decision and others regarding responses to the blockade in 1914 sprang mainly from a desire to avoid trouble. Fittingly, Bryan, whom no one ever accused of harboring unneutral sentiments, approved of the decision. This episode also revealed another element in Wilson’s thinking: his fear of being drawn into the war. He read House a passage from his own History of the American People about how public anger had made it impossible for President Madison to avoid going to war in 1812 and said, “Madison and I are the only two Princeton men that have become President. The circumstances of the War of 1812 and now run parallel.” Stockton Axson also recalled that when they returned from Ellen’s burial, Wilson told him, “I am afraid something will happen on the high seas that will make it impossible for us to keep out of the war.”⁹

Intentionally or not, invocation of the War of 1812 sent a useful signal to the British. House repeated Wilson’s statement to Spring-Rice, who passed the story on to the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, and quoted the president as saying about Madison, “I only hope I shall be wiser.” This signal buttressed Grey’s already set determination to avoid conflict with the Americans. Earlier than most leaders in London and Paris, he recognized how dependent the Allies were on munitions and other supplies from the United States. The British removed cotton from the contraband list for the present, and they began preemptively buying up cotton and other commodities, both to keep them out of German hands and to mitigate any economic damage in the United States. For their part, Wilson and his advisers decided against further protests and suggestions regarding the blockade, and they said nothing when Britain escalated the naval war by mining shipping lanes in the North Sea in November 1914. Matters subsided into little more than small frictions until after the beginning of the next year.¹⁰

The visit of House’s, in which he conferred with the president on the subject of the blockade, was one of thirteen that he made between August 1914 and January 1915. As in the first year of Wilson’s presidency, when he came to Washington, he usually stayed at the White House for two or three days. He continued to advise Wilson on party affairs and to meet with Democrats on and off Capitol Hill, but he increasingly pursued his bent toward foreign affairs. Besides Spring-Rice, he likewise met and corresponded frequently with the German ambassador, Count Johann-Heinrich von Bernstorff. These months marked the high point in the closeness between House and Wilson. The colonel was one of the few people outside his family with whom the president shared his agony of soul. “He said he was broken in spirit by Mrs. Wilson’s death and was not fit to be President because he did not think straight any longer, and had no heart in what he was doing,” House noted.¹¹

The soft-spoken Texan came as a godsend in this ordeal. Stockton Axson and other family members spent as much time as they could with Wilson, and Dr. Grayson offered pleasant, undemanding companionship. But the colonel was the only male friend of his own age with whom Wilson shared both work and personal feelings. House’s warm, easygoing presence, sensitive reading of moods, and availability made the president’s life more bearable during these awful months. But House’s help came at a price. For all his genuine sympathy, the colonel dispensed aid to the president in the spirit of protecting a valuable investment and repairing an irreplaceable instrument. He had his own ends to serve, and he intended to use Wilson as his means toward those ends. House was as determined as ever to pursue his grand design for a great-power directorate to manage world affairs. But Wilson’s level of engagement did not satisfy him, and he worked to make the president pay more attention to the European situation. House also continued to try to undermine Bryan, and he got the president to agree not to tell the secretary about House’s big project. They talked about the colonel going abroad to assess conditions, but House thought that such a mission might be premature and advised Wilson “to keep the threads in your hands as now and not push unduly.”¹² That meant keeping “the threads” in House’s hands, and he would soon decide that the situation was ready for him.

As time passed after Ellen’s death, Wilson appeared to bear his grief better. In December he told a friend, referring to two political opponents, that such men as Lodge and Gardner “do not annoy me.” Partisan squabbles likewise did not bother him, and he avoided reading the newspapers so as to maintain his composure. “Somebody must keep cool while our people grow hotter with discussing the war and all that it involves! There seems to be this advantage in having suffered the keenest, most mortal blow one can receive, that nothing else seems capable of hurting you!” The men he named were two Massachusetts Republicans, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and his son-in-law, Representative Augustus (Gussie) Peabody Gardner, and he mentioned them because they had taken the lead in fomenting the first political controversy to arise out of the war. This pair of patrician conservatives had been making their accustomed summer grand tour in Europe when the war broke out. After they returned, Gussie Gardner, who tended to be more outspoken than his haughty father-in-law, declared that he had come back “entirely convinced that the German cause is unholy, and moreover a menace to civilization.” He charged that American armed forces were pitifully inadequate to meet the dangers that would arise out of the war.¹³

Wilson responded by joking publicly that Gardner’s charges were harmless “mental exercise” and the sort of talk he had been hearing since he was a boy of ten. This dismissal did not dispose of the problem. Lodge and other Republicans were working with Roosevelt to mount an attack when Congress reconvened in December. Some observers predicted that their efforts would reunite Republicans and Progressives in common cause against Wilson. The president met the challenge in his second State of the Union address, on December 8, 1914, when he defended modest increases in the army and navy. Reportedly looking Gardner straight in the eye, he declared, “More than this, proposed at this time, permit me to say, would mean merely that we had lost our self-possession, that we had been thrown off our balance by a war with which we have nothing to do, whose causes can not touch us, whose very existence affords us opportunities of friendship and disinterested service which should make us ashamed of any thought of hostility or fearful preparation for trouble.” The move succeeded brilliantly. Democrats rallied to his side, and Republicans displayed their disunity. Insurgents such as La Follette dismissed talk of strengthening the armed forces, as did some conservatives, particularly Taft, who enjoyed taking a swipe at Roosevelt.¹⁴ In fact, Wilson succeeded too well. Within months, he would have to eat his words about “a war with which we have nothing to do” and reverse himself on the preparedness issue.

When he overstated the nation’s remoteness from the war, Wilson had other motives besides repelling a political attack. He was again trying to cool down public feelings. He had good reason to reiterate such counsels of calm and coolness. Gardner’s calling Germany’s cause “unholy” expressed a widely shared sentiment. Germany’s violation of Belgian neutrality and its conquest of that little country had whipped up a storm of condemnation around the world, including in the United States. Roosevelt, in particular, denounced Germany and cheered the Allies in the fall of 1914. Privately, Taft and some other Republicans felt the same way, as did Colonel House. In November, a poll of newspaper editors by The Literary Digest found a quarter of them expressing the same sentiment, as compared with about 5 percent who sympathized with the Central powers.¹⁵

With his Scottish heritage, English-born mother, Anglophilic literary tastes, and long-standing admiration for British political institutions, Wilson could easily have shared such pro-Allied sentiments. In fact, he did harbor some of them. At the end of August, House recorded that Wilson expressed an opinion “to the effect that if Germany won it would change the course of our civilization and make the United States a military nation,” and he condemned the Germans’ actions in Belgium. Around the same time, Spring-Rice reported to Grey that Wilson had said, “Every thing that I love most in the world is at stake,” and about the Germans, “If they succeed, we shall be forced to take such measures of defence here as would be fatal to our form of Government and American ideals.” As with his response to the blockade, some interpreters would later seize upon such statements as proof that Wilson was unneutral and pro-Allied. Actually, those views had little impact on his policies and basic approach to the war. He declined to protest against alleged German atrocities in Belgium, as Roosevelt and some others were demanding, and he told Bryan he did not know “in sufficient detail the actual facts … [and] the time for clearing up all these matters will come when the war is over and the nations gather in sober counsel again.”¹⁶

Such pro-Allied and anti-German sentiments, combined with determination to keep the war at arm’s length, were in tune with broader public opinion. The Literary Digest claimed that sympathy for belligerents was “that of a detached observer,” and a journalist later compared such sympathizers to baseball fans cheering from the bleachers. The first political trouble to arise out of public sympathy for belligerents came from the other side. Pro-Central powers sentiment flourished almost entirely among people of German extraction, whose sympathies were sharply focused and well organized. More than a decade before, the major brewing companies—with such names as Anheuser-Busch, Pabst, and Schlitz—had formed and financed the National German-American Alliance to lobby against prohibition. Soon after the outbreak of the war, the German embassy had taken over this organization and used it to agitate for a prohibition on the shipment of munitions to belligerents. The rationale for such an arms embargo had what The New Republiccalled “catchy reasonableness”—the idea that America should not add to the killing and destruction. But its main effect—and the reason the Germans were pushing it—would be to cut off the Allies from a vital source of munitions.¹⁷

Bryan, despite having backed a similar scheme with his abortive ban on loans, took the lead in opposing an arms embargo as unneutral. He and Wilson persuaded Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill to keep embargo resolutions bottled up in committee. They also received strong backing from Lodge and other Republican senators. On the other side stood perennially dissident Democrats such as Gilbert Hitchcock of Nebraska, together with La Follette, Albert Cummins, and other Republican insurgents, many of whose states contained substantial German American constituencies. On February 15, 1915, those dissidents and insurgents mustered thirty-seven votes in the Senate for an amendment to a ship-purchase bill that would have barred shipments of munitions. Such support for the arms embargo spelled trouble for Wilson if he sought congressional support for tough diplomacy toward Germany.¹⁸

Also at the beginning of 1915, the president was having problems on Capitol Hill on another war-related issue—purchase of foreign-owned ships stranded by the war for use by a government-owned corporation in the transatlantic trade. During the three months of this lame-duck session of Congress, Wilson tried to exercise the party leadership that had worked so well for the past two years. In January, at the Democrats’ Jackson Day dinner, he breathed some of Old Hickory’s fire as he denounced “any group of men [who] should dare to break the solidarity of the Democratic team for any purpose or from any motive” and admonished the party to “march with the discipline and with the zest of a conquering host.” This time his magic did not work. The House passed a ship-purchase bill on February 17, by a vote of 215 to 122, but the other chamber did not follow suit. Seven Democrats refused to support the administration’s bill, and all but four Republicans opposed the measure. They balked at an expansion of government power, and some of them cited British threats to seize converted German vessels. Wilson might have gotten a bill through if he had been willing to promise that the government would not purchase ships owned by belligerents, but for him that was half a loaf not worth having. Asked at a press conference on February 2 about accepting changes in the bill, he shot back, “No changes of any sort that are not consistent with the principle of the bill.” The ship-purchase bill did not come up for a vote before the Congress expired on March 4. It was Wilson’s first real defeat as president.¹⁹

Disappointment on Capitol Hill added to the emotional strain Wilson had been laboring under since Ellen’s death, and on one occasion during this time he failed to maintain his prized self-control. That was on November 12, 1914, when he again met with a delegation headed by the Boston editor William Monroe Trotter, who opened with a fierce statement: “Only two years ago you were heralded as perhaps the second Lincoln, and now the Afro-American leaders who supported you are hounded as false leaders and traitors to their race. What a change segregation has wrought!” As he had done earlier, Wilson responded with bland assurances and evasions, claiming that “it takes the world generations to outlive all its prejudices” and nobody could be “cocksure about what should be done.” Trotter lashed back, “We are not here as wards. We are not here as dependents. We are here as full-fledged American citizens.” Trotter charged that the government’s effort at segregation sprang only from prejudice, and he reminded the president of black support he had received in 1912. “Please leave me out,” Wilson snapped back. “Let me say this, if you will, that if this organization wishes to approach me again, it must choose another spokesman. … You are an American citizen, as fully an American citizen as I am, but you are the only American citizen that has ever come into this office who has talked to me with a tone with a background of passion that was evident.” Trotter rejoined, “I am from a part of the people, Mr. President.” Wilson answered, “You have spoiled the whole cause for which you came.”²⁰

None of the exchange between Trotter and Wilson was made public. Trotter’s opening statement was published in the Chicago Defender, but not in the white press. Mainstream papers did quote him saying after the meeting, “What the President told us was entirely disappointing. His statement that segregation was intended to prevent racial friction is not supported by the facts.” Wilson knew he had mishandled the encounter. The secretary of the navy recalled that the president told him soon afterward, “Daniels, never raise an incident into an issue. … I was damn fool enough to lose my temper and to point them to the door. What I ought to have done would have been to have listened, restrained my resentment, and, when they had finished, to have said to them that, of course, their petition would receive consideration. They would have withdrawn quietly and no more would have been heard about the matter. But I lost my temper and played the fool.”²¹

His remorse was sad and revealing. It was sad that he did not respond to what Trotter was telling him and did not grasp the facts of racial injustice that the editor was laying before him. By even friendly accounts, Trotter could be abrasive and imperious, but those qualities did not detract from the truth and power of his message. Wilson’s regret involved only the way he had handled himself. He had lost his self-control; he had surrendered to the “passion” he accused Trotter of bringing into the president’s office. More was involved here than Wilson’s usual desire to avoid issues involving race. It was revealing that he suffered this breakdown of self-control not long after Ellen’s death. Nothing like it would happen again while he was president, except in smaller, less conspicuous ways after he suffered his stroke. He rarely let personal turmoil and heartache affect his conduct of public affairs, at least not consciously. Except possibly for the ban on loans, this was almost the only time when the shadow of grief may have clouded the intelligence and discipline he relied upon to guide him as president.

Wilson tried to make partial amends for his exchange with Trotter. A month later he received a delegation from the University Commission on the Southern Race Question, an organization of white racial moderates, and told them that “as a southern man” he sincerely desired “the good of the Negro and the advancement of his race on all sound and sensible lines.”²²

Feeble as those words were, they might have helped if he had left matters there. Instead, he soon allowed himself to be dragged into an affair that made his racial views look worse than they were. At the beginning of 1915, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was protesting against and trying to prevent showings of D. W. Griffith’s newly released Birth of a Nation. Though a pathbreaking masterpiece of cinematography, this movie presents a lurid racist picture of the post-Civil War South and glorifies the Ku Klux Klan of that era. The Birth of a Nation took its story from The Clansman, a novel by Thomas Dixon, who had briefly been a fellow student with Wilson at Johns Hopkins in the 1880s. As a ploy to gain publicity and counter NAACP protests, Dixon called at the White House and disingenuously asked his old acquaintance to show the film there. Dixon bragged afterward that he had hidden “the real purpose of my film,” which was to spread southern white racial attitudes in the North: “What I told the President was that I would show him the birth of a new art—the launching of the mightiest engine for moulding public opinion in the history of the world.”²³

Wilson fell into the trap. On February 18, Dixon and a projection crew gave the president, his family, cabinet officers, and their wives a showing of The Birth of a Nation in the East Room of the White House. How Wilson reacted is a matter of dispute. Twenty-two years later, a magazine writer alleged that he said about the film, “It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” It is extremely doubtful that Wilson uttered those words, and Dixon did not quote them later in his memoirs. Sixty-two years later, the last person then living who had been at the showing recalled that the president did not seem to pay much attention to the movie and left when it was over without saying a word. Regardless of what he did or did not say, Dixon and Griffith soon touted the event and insinuated that The Birth of a Nation enjoyed a presidential seal of approval.²⁴

Far from dampening protests, these antics only fanned the controversy. The NAACP stepped up its campaign, and the incident caused political embarrassment. Two months later, Tumulty forwarded a clipping about protests in Boston organized by Trotter and advised the president to write a note saying he did not endorse the film. Wilson said he would if he did not appear to be responding to agitation “stirred up by that unspeakable fellow” Trotter. He found a way to do this when he drafted a statement for Tumulty to send under his own name to a Massachusetts Democrat: “It is true that ‘The Birth of a Nation’ was produced before the President and his family at the White House, but the President was entirely unaware of the character of the play before it was presented and has at no time expressed his approbation of it. Its exhibition at the White House was a courtesy extended to an old acquaintance.” Three years later, he told Tumulty that the movie was “a very unfortunate production” and he wished it would not be shown “in communities where there are so many colored people.”²⁵ Once more, he deplored stirring up emotions and showing bad manners rather than deploring the racist messages of Dixon’s novel and Griffith’s movie. Even more than segregation policies, Wilson’s involvement with The Birth of a Nation would make him anathema to African Americans.

Another lapse in judgment during this time may also have owed something to his emotional turmoil. In this case it stemmed from the death of Justice Horace Lurton of the Supreme Court, in July 1914. Wilson and House had evidently agreed that Attorney General McReynolds should fill the first vacancy on the Court and that the colonel’s fellow Texan Thomas W. Gregory should become attorney general—as he did with McReynolds’s elevation. From Europe, House wrote to remind him of those choices. Whether Ellen’s illness and death and the outbreak of the war affected him when he appointed McReynolds to the Court is difficult to determine. Earlier, he had sometimes acted casually, almost thoughtlessly, in picking cabinet members and other officials, and this may have been another example of that weakness. McReynolds would make life unpleasant for fellow justices and bedevil presidents for more than twenty years, and appointing him would turn out to be one of the worst blunders Wilson committed as president. It was doubly unfortunate because McReynolds’s views of constitutional interpretation were totally at odds with his own, which stressed growth and adaptation rather than the imposition of rigidly held ideas. In his other two appointments to the Supreme Court, he would choose men whose thinking was much closer to his own.

Politically, the end of 1914 marked a difficult time for Wilson at home as well as abroad. The legislative triumphs of the preceding year and a half brought scant reward to his party in that November’s elections. In the House, Democrats lost forty-eight seats, though they still retained control. A few seats turned over in the Senate, but the party margins remained unchanged, with Democrats still holding a small majority. Most of the losses in the House and in governorships occurred in the Northeast and Midwest, particularly in New York, Ohio, and Illinois. Those states cast the big electoral votes, and Wilson had carried them in 1912. These results did not bode well for a run in 1916.

Yet Democrats were not the biggest losers in November 1914. Progressives lost everywhere except California, where Governor Hiram Johnson and his machine retained control. Republican insurgents likewise fared badly, even in Wisconsin, where La Follette’s followers lost to resurgent conservatives. Those outcomes appeared to vindicate the old guard Republicans’ reasoning in 1912—that progressivism was a passing fad and economic misfortune under the Democrats would bring voters to their senses. Roosevelt now agreed. “The fundamental trouble was that the country was sick and tired of reform,” he told William Allen White. Voters had “felt the pinch of poverty; … and compared with this they did not care a rap for social justice or industrial justice or clean politics or decency in public life.”²⁶ That conclusion, together with his growing obsession with the world war, would lead Roosevelt to do everything he could to scuttle the Progressives and reunite with the Republicans.

Wilson read the returns in just the opposite light. The results discouraged him at first, but he soon saw a brighter side. He took satisfaction from Democrats’ winning new House and Senate seats in mountain and West Coast states, apparently by picking up formerly Progressive votes. “A party that has been called sectional is becoming national,” he exulted to a friend. “The sweep of its power and influence is immensely broadened. That puts tonic in my lungs.” He quickly sounded a new battle cry of progressivism. In December, he declared in the State of the Union address that Americans “do not wish to curtail the activities of this Government; they wish, rather, to enlarge them.” In January, at the Jackson Day dinner at which he spoke about “march[ing] with the discipline and with the zest of a conquering host,” he maintained, “The Democratic party, and only the Democratic party, has carried out the policies which the progressive people of this country have desired.” Wilson was warming once more to party and progressive politics. “[T]here is a real fight on,” he said privately, adding that “it is no time for mere manners. … I cannot fight rottenness with rosewater.”²⁷

If he looked forward to concentrating on domestic politics, he was not reckoning with the world war. The beginning of 1915 marked the moment when it became the central, lasting fact of his presidency. In January, a diplomatic flap seemed about to erupt when the British threatened to seize the S.S. Dacia, a formerly German vessel purchased by an American businessman, but the affair blew over when, by coincidence, the French intercepted the ship. Britain’s ally Japan also caused friction, by following up its conquest of German-held areas in China with a sweeping set of demands for hegemony in much of northern China. Wilson agreed to send stiff diplomatic notes of protest, thereby setting off tensions with Japan that would last for the rest of his presidency.²⁸

Far more serious trouble arose from the other side in the war. On February 4, 1915, the German Admiralty declared the waters surrounding Britain “a war zone.” Starting two weeks hence, the Germans announced, all merchant ships, neutral or belligerent, would be legitimate targets for attack and sinking by submarines. This “submarine declaration” by Germany stemmed from a combination of frustration and enthusiasm in Berlin. Lack of action by their surface ships irked the German naval high command, and submarines—with the ability to sneak beneath enemy ships and attack without warning—seemed to offer a golden opportunity to get into the war at sea and achieve positive results. In their enthusiasm, however, the champions of undersea warfare overlooked some big drawbacks. As yet, Germany had only thirty slow-moving submarines, and no more than a third of those could be deployed at any time. Moreover, by attacking and sinking merchant ships, Germany was committing the one act that could cause a diplomatic crisis with the United States. This submarine declaration was really a bluff, and one that carried enormous risks.²⁹

Wilson reacted cautiously. At a cabinet meeting the next day, Secretary of War Garrison wanted to take a tough line, and he thought the president agreed with him. At his next press conference, however, Wilson told reporters he was waiting for more information from Berlin. He and Bryan approved a note that went to Germany on February 10, which asserted that sinking ships without warning was “an act so unprecedented in naval warfare” that the Germans should not contemplate it, and if they did, the United States would hold them to “a strict accountability for such acts of their naval authorities.” Those words sounded tough, and many interpreters would later point to them as further evidence of Wilson’s bias against Germany and in favor of the Allies. Actually, the note was a counterbluff. It did not specify what was meant by “strict accountability” or what might be done to hold the Germans to that standard. Wilson found the whole business nerve-racking and told Mary Hulbert that keeping a cool head involved “a nervous expenditure such as I never dreamed of.”³⁰

As these events were unfolding, he was not just reacting to challenges thrown at him by the belligerents. For some time, he had been thinking more broadly about the best way to end the conflict and how to bring far-reaching reform to international affairs. In a confidential interview in December 1914 with Herbert Brougham of The New York Times, he admitted that he did not believe Germany was solely to blame for the war, and he asserted that neither side ought to win a big victory. He did not think American interests would suffer if the Allies won, but such a victory did not strike him as the best outcome: “I think that the chances of a just and lasting peace, and of the only possible peace that will be lasting, will be happiest if no nation gets the decision by arms; and the danger of an unjust peace, one that will be sure to invite further calamities, will be if some one nation or group of nations succeeds in enforcing its will upon the others.” Two years later, he would publicly reiterate and expand this line of thinking and use the same phrases when he would attempt to end the war with “a peace without victory.”³¹

In February 1915, he outlined another, equally significant part of that later call for a compromise peace. Stockton Axson recalled that Wilson spelled out a four-point program for instituting a new world order. His first point was: “No nation shall ever again be permitted to acquire an inch of land by conquest.” Second, everyone must recognize “the reality of equal rights between small nations and great.” Third, the manufacture of munitions must no longer remain in private hands. The final and most important point was: “There must be an association of nations, all bound together for the protection and integrity of each, so that any one nation breaking from the bond will bring upon herself war; that is to say, punishment, automatically.” Wilson would publicly restate these ideas and again use similar phrases when he called for “peace without victory.”³² He would reiterate them again in 1918 in his Fourteen Points address, and in 1919 he would make them the heart of the Covenant of the League of Nations.

Even as he responded to the Germans’ submarine declaration and shared his thoughts with Axson, Wilson was sending out his first feeler on mediation of the war. In January, House informed him that the time was ripe for the trip to Europe they had talked about the month before. The two men met at the White House, devised a private code for communicating by telegram, and had an emotional leave-taking. “The President’s eyes were moist when he said his last words of farewell,” House wrote. On January 31, the colonel sailed on the largest and most luxurious ship afloat, the British liner Lusitania. He carried with him a letter from Wilson giving him “my commission to go, as my personal representative … without any official standing or authority,” and stating that his talks were not meant “to urge action upon another government.” Wilson said his “single object” was to help the warring nations take “the first step towards discussing and determining the conditions of peace” by ascertaining on each side “what is the real disposition, the real wish, the real purpose of the other.” Two years later, Wilson would put forward the same idea and use similar words when, as a prelude to “peace without victory,” he would ask the belligerents to state their terms for ending the war.³³

It is difficult to judge how much stock he took in this effort and what House was expected to accomplish. Nor is it clear what House did accomplish, beyond cozying up to Sir Edward Grey and conveying the impression that Wilson was more pro-Allied than he really was. House would spend the next four months on the other side of the Atlantic, reporting on his conversations in the belligerent capitals and, in the last month, taking a strongly pro-Allied line. Despite his affection for House, Wilson would not take everything he said at face value, and upon his return the colonel would not enjoy the same degree of intimacy with Wilson as before.

The submarine challenge left the president little time to think about trying to end the war or reform international affairs. The Germans started using their new weapon during the latter part of February 1915. The British retaliated by tightening their blockade further, now including foodstuffs among the list of contraband—another potential blow to American exports. Submarines torpedoed a few American ships, including a freighter carrying grain and an oil tanker, during March and April, but for the most part their commanders obeyed secret orders to spare vessels flying the Stars and Stripes. That was no great sacrifice because the United States did not have many ships plying the North Atlantic. A potentially more dangerous issue involved the safety of American citizens traveling as passengers and crewmen on vessels of Allied countries. The danger became real at the end of March, when a submarine sank a small British passenger ship, the Falaba, and one of the those who perished was an American engineer, Leon Thresher. The Wilson administration now faced its first serious controversy with Germany over the submarine issue.

Wilson had feared such an incident. At the beginning of March, he had issued a statement to the press warning that the war might soon test Americans’ self-control and urging citizens “to think, to purpose, and to act with patience, with disinterested fairness, and without excitement.” The sinking of the Falaba and the death of Thresher confirmed the president’s forebodings. “I do not like this case,” he told Bryan. “It is full of disturbing possibilities.” He believed that the Germans had violated international law and that the United States would probably have to demand that its citizens’ lives not be endangered. Bryan reacted differently. He did not want to respond quickly to the Germans, and he worried about “whether an American citizen can, by putting his business above his regard for his country, assume for his own advantage unnecessary risks and thus involve his country in international complications.” He was sure that “the almost unanimous desire of our country is that we shall not become involved in this war” and that one man, “acting purely for himself and his own interests, and without consulting his government,” should not be allowed to put the country at risk of war.³⁴

Wilson did not immediately push the question of a diplomatic response. Instead, he delivered a series of foreboding speeches in April in an effort to prepare the public for trying times. At a meeting of the Associated Press in New York, he avowed, “I am not speaking in a selfish spirit when I say that our whole duty, for the present, at any rate, is summed up in this motto: ‘America first.’ Let us think of America before we think of Europe, in order that we may be Europe’s friend when the day of tested friendship comes.” America must remain neutral, he declared, “because there is something better to do than fight; there is a distinction waiting for this country that no nation has ever yet got. That is the distinction of absolute self-control and self-mastery.” Wilson was staking out the position that he would cling to not just for the next two months but for the next two years, in spite of conflicts within and without his administration and with great political consequences. Ironically, in “America first” he coined the motto of the isolationists who would later oppose him and the next Democratic president.³⁵

When he turned to the diplomatic response to the Falaba incident, his thinking did not mesh with Bryan’s. He proposed sending a note that assumed that Germany would abide by international law “with regard to the safety of non-combatants and of the citizens of neutral countries” and suggested that submarines conform to established practices of providing for their safety—all to be stated in restrained but firm protest. He wanted the note to be predicated “not on the loss of this single man’s life, but on the interests of mankind.” Bryan was not satisfied. He urged a public effort at mediation because the United States might be drawn into the war, and he again asked, was it right “to risk the provoking of war on account of one man?”³⁶ Wilson opposed mediation as unwise at that time, but when he and Bryan thrashed things out at a cabinet meeting, he conceded that it might be better not to send a note. Wilson was trying to devise a strategy to deal with small-scale incidents such as the British seizure of cargo or ships and German submarine attacks like the one on the Falaba—situations resembling events a century earlier that had dragged Madison into war. Whether that strategy would have worked can be only a matter for speculation because a huge incident was about to transform America’s whole stance toward the world war.

Fortunately for him and the country, at the time that Wilson faced these growing challenges his personal life was undergoing a transformation—dramatically and for the better. Family and friends had tried to distract him from his grief. In January, Jessie came to the White House to give birth to his and Ellen’s first grandchild, Francis Bowes Sayre, Jr. Nell and McAdoo came for dinner at least once a week, and Helen Woodrow Bones, Wilson’s cousin and Ellen’s former secretary, continued to live in the White House. Grayson played golf with him nearly every day, weather permitting, and persuaded him to go for rides in one of the limousines and for an occasional cruise on the presidential yacht, the Mayflower. Time and distractions did begin to dull the pain of his wounded spirit, and he was privately talking about running for reelection, if only to keep Bryan from making another bid for the White House. The secretary of state would be a bad president, Wilson told a friend—in one of his few criticisms of Bryan recorded anywhere besides House’s diary—because he was too trusting and was “a spoilsman to the core and a determined enemy of civil service reform.”³⁷

That determination to run again, together with his renewed zest for progressivism and political combat, were signs that he might be returning to his old self. Also in January, House noted that when Nell got her father to stand in front of a portrait of himself, “he made all sorts of contortions, sticking his tongue in his cheek, twisting his mouth into different positions, rolling his eyes, dropping his jaw, and doing everything a clown would do at a circus.” Yet there were signs to the contrary as well. One was that this devotee of English novelists and poets had lost his taste for reading. “Even books have grown meaningless to me,” he told a friend. “I read detective stories to forget, as a man would get drunk!” Wilson was not likely to drown his sorrows in alcohol, and he did not turn to another readily available and more respectable source of solace—religion—although in January 1915 he made a rare confession about his religious beliefs: “My life would not be worth living if it were not for the driving power of religion, for faith, pure and simple. I have seen all my life the arguments against it without ever having been moved by them.” He felt sorry, he said, for “people who believe only so far as they understand—that seems to me presumptuous and sets their understanding as the standard of the universe.”³⁸

With that kind of faith, it is not surprising that Wilson did not turn to religion in his grief. Privately, after his outcries at the time of Ellen’s death, he mentioned God only in conventional and unreligious comments, as when he said to Bryan, “God knows I have searched my mind and conscience.” Publicly, he gave just one speech that touched on religion. That was in October 1914, on his first trip outside Washington after Ellen’s death, when he addressed the Pittsburgh chapter of the Young Men’s Christian Association. He applauded faith like theirs, which expressed itself in good works and social reform, but he also said that he did not like to think of Christianity “as a means of saving individual souls.”³⁹ He was being true to his Presbyterian upbringing, which stressed the workings of God in the world in large ways, not as solace to individuals for life’s agonies. He was also being true to a personal faith that was deep and steady but something he took for granted and seldom thought about in good times or bad. That aspect of his religious attitude would change as he continued to confront the world war, when he would be dealing with the fate of millions of people, not personal tribulations.

Wilson found his greatest solace, predictably, in female companionship. This companionship came mainly in the form of letters, especially when he poured out his heart to Mary Hulbert, as he often did. His letters carried emotional intimacy but never a hint of romance or desire for physical intimacy; whatever passion had once burned between them had long since cooled, on Wilson’s side at least. Such friendships of emotional warmth on a plane of equality between a man and a woman were unusual in those days and might have caused comment if they had become publicly known. Long-standing social taboos against courtship and remarriage by widowed men and women were weakening, but individuals were expected to observe a “decent interval of time.” For someone who had lost his spouse so recently to fall in love again was unthinkable. Yet that is what Wilson did.

The relationship began as the offshoot of another couple’s romance. Grayson had been patiently courting Alice Gertrude Gordon, a fellow Virginian who had moved to New York and went by the nickname Altrude. She had a close friend who lived in Washington, a widow named Edith Bolling Galt, who was also a Virginian and a friend of Grayson’s. In the fall of 1914, the doctor confided in Mrs. Galt about his feelings for Altrude and talked about life in the White House after Ellen Wilson’s death. As Mrs. Galt later recalled, Grayson was worried about Helen Bones, who seemed lonely in Washington. He soon introduced the two women to each other, and they struck up a friendship, taking rides in Mrs. Galt’s car and walking on bridle paths in Rock Creek Park and taking tea afterward at Mrs. Galt’s house. Helen recounted how her aunt, Wilson’s mother, had raised her after her own mother died; she also described how Wilson and Ellen had taken her and other young relatives into their home and sent them to college.

Edith Galt first met Wilson on a sunny afternoon in March 1915. As she later recounted the story, Helen had insisted on their using one of the presidential limousines and returning to the White House for tea after their walk. The paths in the park were muddy that day, and Edith protested against the plan to return to the White House: “Oh, I couldn’t do that; my shoes are a sight, and I should be taken for a tramp.” Helen brushed aside her objections. Cousin Woodrow, she said, would be out playing golf with Grayson, and he had been urging her to have people come to visit. When they got off the elevator on the second floor, Edith found herself face-to-face with the president, who had just come back from the golf course with Grayson. His and the doctor’s shoes were as muddy as hers and Helen’s. “We all laughed at our plight, but I would have been less than feminine than I must confess to be, had I not been secretly glad that I had worn a smart black tailored suit which [the fashion house of] Worth had made for me in Paris, and a tricot hat which I thought completed a very good-looking ensemble.” Edith also recalled noticing that the president’s golf clothes “were not smart.” The women had their shoes cleaned, the men changed their clothes, and the foursome gathered for tea in front of a fire in the oval sitting room on the second floor.⁴⁰

For Woodrow Wilson, history was repeating itself. Thirty-two years earlier, he had fallen in love with Ellen Axson practically from the moment he first laid eyes on her. Now he would react the same way with Edith Galt. The forty-two-year-old widow was a tall woman, with a shapely though not slender figure, gray eyes, dark hair, and a glowing complexion. Her Virginia roots stretched back to 1607 and the original settlement at Jamestown, including among her ancestors Pocahontas and John Rolfe. Over the intervening generations, her family had belonged to the planter class of the Tidewater, and they had connections with one of Virginia’s grandest names, the Randolphs. Like many such families, the Bollings lost most of their money in the Civil War. Edith’s father, a graduate of the University of Virginia Law School, relocated, becoming a judge in Wytheville, a town at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains near the North Carolina border, where Edith was born in October 1872. A lively young woman with a talent for music but little liking for books, she had received a somewhat spotty education, although she did attend two boarding schools. In her teens and early twenties, she began traveling to Washington to visit her oldest sister, who had married a member of the Galt family, which owned the city’s most distinguished jewelry store. In the course of those visits, Edith met her brother-in-law’s cousin, Norman Galt, who also worked in the family business, and they were married in 1896.⁴¹

The Galts’ marriage lasted just eleven years. Outwardly, it appeared happy enough. As the wife of a prominent businessman, Edith enjoyed an assured though not elevated place in Washington society. She had been raised a devout Episcopalian, and she attended church regularly. Inwardly, some strains may have existed between the couple, possibly involving a tendency toward depression on Edith’s part. They had had one child, a son who was born in 1903 but lived only three days. The jewelry store also posed problems. Norman Galt had taken sole ownership, but soon afterward, in January 1908, he died unexpectedly and without having paid the debts he had incurred to buy out his relatives. “I had no experience in business affairs,” Edith later wrote, “and hardly knew an asset from a liability.” Nevertheless, with the help of an experienced manager, she kept the store going. After a few prosperous years, she was able to delegate active management to others, and she began to enjoy herself.⁴²

If not a merry widow, Edith certainly was a liberated one. She played golf, obtained the first driver’s license issued to a woman in the District of Columbia, attended the theater and concerts, had one or two romances, and traveled widely, to Europe and around the United States, often accompanied by Altrude Gordon. As her comment about her own and the president’s attire indicated, she had a flair for fashion. In sum, Mrs. Galt was a stylish, worldly, independent woman; in those respects, she resembled Mary Hulbert. Between that resemblance and her good looks, Edith Galt might well have been expected to catch the eye of the lonely widower who lived in the White House.

Catch his eye she did. Grayson recalled that one day they had been riding in a limousine when Wilson saw Mrs. Galt, whom he had not yet met, walking on the street and asked, “Who is that beautiful lady?” The story sounds apocryphal, but when Wilson did meet her, he was immediately smitten. She accepted an invitation to join Wilson, Grayson, Helen Bones, and a visitor from out of town for dinner on March 23. “I am just home from the White House where I spent the evening and dined informally with the President,” she told her sister-in-law. “He is perfectly charming and one of the easiest and most delightful hosts I have ever known.” After dinner, she and Helen went upstairs with Wilson to the oval sitting room, where they again sat in front of the fire, and he told “interesting stories” and, at Helen’s request, read three English poems, “and as a reader he is unequalled.” Two weeks later, she accepted another invitation, this time for a drive with Helen and the president. He sat in the front seat with the chauffeur and did not say much. After a quiet dinner, however, he talked about his childhood and his father. “The evening ended all too soon,” Edith recalled, adding, incorrectly, “for it was the first time I had felt the warm personality of Woodrow Wilson. A boylike simplicity dwelt in the background of an official life.”⁴³

Wilson saw Mrs. Galt several more times during the month of April. She came to dinner and took rides again and went to the opening-day game of the baseball season, where she sat behind him in the presidential party. At the end of the month, Wilson began writing to her almost daily. He would use his shorthand to draft a letter, which he would then write, not type—a sure sign of how deeply he felt. For him, it was a short step from epistolary intimacy to a face-to-face declaration of love. He took the step on May 4, right after returning from a trip to Williamstown, Massachusetts, for the christening of his grandson. As Edith later recalled, the two of them were sitting alone on the South Portico porch after dinner with Helen, Wilson’s daughter Margaret, and his sister Annie Howe. Drawing his chair closer to hers, he told her he loved her. She remembered that she felt almost shocked and blurted out, “Oh, you can’t love me, for you don’t really know me; and it is less than a year since your wife died.”⁴⁴

As Edith recounted the story, he replied, “Yes, I know that you feel that; but, little girl, in this place time is not measured by weeks, or months, or years, but by deep human experiences; and since her death I have lived a lifetime of loneliness and heartache. I was afraid, knowing you, I would shock you; but I would be less than a gentleman if I continued to make opportunities to see you without telling you what I have already told my daughters and Helen: that I want you to be my wife.” He explained that because he was a public personage and the White House a public place, her visits were bound to stir up gossip. “It is for this reason I have talked to the girls about it, so that they can safeguard you and make it possible for me to see you. They have all been wonderful about it, and they love you for your own sake, but would anyway for mine.” Edith recalled that they talked for more than an hour. She told Wilson that if he had to have an immediate answer, it would be no, but she agreed to keep seeing him. He then accompanied her home in a limousine.⁴⁵

This account leaves a mistaken impression of Edith’s feelings and behavior. She evidently did decline Wilson’s proposal of marriage: an initial refusal was the proper response from a gently bred woman of that time, even when she planned to say yes. Likewise, it was untoward for such a recently widowed man to ask a woman to marry him. In fact, Edith was not so discouraging as she later claimed. That night, after midnight, she wrote a letter to him, opening with a poem that began with the lines

Your dear love fills me with a bliss untold,
Perfect, divine
I did not know the human heart could hold
Such a joy as mine.

In her own words, Edith told him, “Ever since you went away my whole being is awake and vibrant! … I am a woman—and the thought that you have need of me—is sweet!” Those were not the words of a woman who intended to keep a man waiting for long.⁴⁶

Requited love brought out the best in Wilson. Thirty years earlier, Ellen’s love had helped him write Congressional Government and launch his academic career. Now this new love would invigorate him to meet fresh challenges as president. In the morning of May 7, he wrote to Edith, “Ah, my precious friend and comrade, what happiness it was to be with you last night! While your hand rested in mine I felt as if I could stand up and shout for the strength and joy that was in me. … I knew where I could get the solace that would ease the strain and felt fit for any adventure of the spirit.”⁴⁷