14

THE SHOCK OF RECOGNITION

Friday, May 7, 1915, was in its time what Sunday, December 7, 1941, and Tuesday, September 11, 2001, would be in their times. Interviewing Americans ten years later, the journalist Mark Sullivan found that this day had burned itself into people’s memories. Everyone he talked to remembered the sinking of the Lusitania; they remembered what they had thought and felt when they heard the news; they remembered where they had been; they remembered what they had done for the rest of the day. This sudden destruction of the world’s fastest and grandest ocean liner inevitably recalled the sinking of the Titanic almost exactly three years before. But this great ship went down not because she had grazed an iceberg but because a German submarine had fired a torpedo into her hull. The liner sank in eighteen minutes, killing 1,198 people, of whom 128 were Americans. The event instantly transformed the stance of the United States toward the war. It brought the shock of recognition: gone were notions of viewing from afar a tragedy that was happening to somebody else; gone were ideas about enduring and managing a gradual accumulation of small incidents caused by blockades and sporadic submarine attacks.¹

This traumatic recognition of how close and threatening the war now was spawned contradictory opinions. Nearly every person who spoke out expressed outrage. Roosevelt and Lodge stopped barely short of calling for war, but not many went so far. New York newspapers conducted the closest thing to a public opinion poll that was possible at the time, asking every editor in the country to telegraph his opinion of what the United States should do. Out of the thousand who responded, only six called for war. The lack of belligerence was not surprising. Newspaper and magazine coverage of the carnage on the Western Front and the recent use of poison gas left no room for illusions about the horrors of this war. Wilson summed up the public reaction best when he said to Bryan, “I wish with all my heart I saw a way to carry out the double wish of our people, to maintain a firm front in respect of what we demand of Germany and yet do nothing that might by any possibility involve us in the war.”²

The news of the sinking of the Lusitania shook the president. The first report reached the White House early in the afternoon, just as he was about to leave for his daily round of golf. He canceled the game and stayed to hear more news, leaving only to take a ride in the limousine. A cable with more information arrived in the evening, just after dinner. Soon afterward, reporters noticed the president walking by himself out the main entrance to the White House. He crossed Pennsylvania Avenue and Lafayette Square and walked several blocks up Sixteenth Street and back down Fifteenth Street, ignoring the rain that was falling. “I was pacing the streets to get my mind in hand,” he told Edith Galt the next morning. Typically for him at a stressful time, but unlike most other politicians, he did not see or talk with anyone.³

Over the weekend the president made a show of leading life as usual. On Saturday, he played golf and took a long ride. Whether Edith Galt accompanied him on the ride is not clear, but she came to dinner. The couple spent time alone afterward, and he handed her a love letter he had written that morning. On Sunday, Wilson went to church, but he departed from his usual practice of not working on the Sabbath to spend much of the day in his study. He started to draft a diplomatic note to Germany, and he made shorthand notes and wrote out two long letters to Edith. His only public reference to the incident came in a statement he had Tumulty give to the press on Saturday night, saying that he viewed the situation with utmost seriousness and was considering how to respond.⁴

Wilson began to involve others in the situation on Monday. He and Bryan exchanged several notes. Bryan broached the idea of warning American citizens not to travel on ships of belligerent countries. Wilson expressed no opinion of that idea, but he did say that they must weigh how their actions looked abroad. His stenographer, Charles Swem, noted that the president said he would not let the country be stampeded into anything and that he brushed aside a telegram imploring him, in the name of God, to declare war. The president said, “War isn’t declared in the name of God; it is a human affair entirely.”⁵ He did not meet with cabinet members, and Edith Galt was his only visitor during the day, for a private lunch, at which they talked ardently of their love for each other.

Even before the sinking of the Lusitania, Wilson had planned to use a speech in Philadelphia on May 10 to continue to set the tone of America’s response to the war. Because his audience included 4,000 newly naturalized citizens, the occasion lent itself to the subject. Mostly, he reiterated well-worn ideas of his about America’s “constant and repeated rebirth” through immigration and its standing as “a great hope of the human race.” He urged his listeners “not only always to think first of America, but always, also, to think of humanity.” He did not mention the Lusitania, but he did say, “The example of America must be the example, not merely of peace because it will not fight, but of peace because peace is the healing and elevating influence of the world, and strife is not. There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight. There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.”⁶

The words “too proud to fight” would live on as one of Wilson’s best-remembered phrases—to his chagrin. In uttering those words, he evidently did not think he was saying anything remarkable. They expressed a personal philosophy instilled in him since childhood, particularly by his mother. In the preceding weeks, he had been counseling calm and self-control in facing challenges posed by the war. He told Edith the next day that he did not remember what he had said in Philadelphia because he was thinking of her: “I did not know before I got up very clearly what I was going to say, nor remember what I had said when I sat down.” That was a bit of sweet sophistry. Even before he heard any public reactions to the speech, Wilson knew he had blundered with “too proud to fight.” At a press conference the next day, he claimed he had not been talking about policy and had expressed “a personal attitude, that was all.” He allowed reporters to paraphrase, though not quote, his retraction. Frank Parker Stockbridge, his press secretary in 1911, recalled that Wilson told him, “That was just one of the foolish things a man does. I have a bad habit of thinking out loud. That thought occurred to me while I was speaking, and I let it out. I should have kept it in or developed it further.” Of all the words he uttered in his public career, “too proud to fight” were probably the ones he most wished had never passed his lips.⁷

Actions, not words, caused him more immediate concern. Just how hard it would be to satisfy the “double wish” became painfully clear when he brought the Lusitania problem before the cabinet on May 11. Two days earlier, House had asserted in an impassioned telegram from London, “Think we can no longer remain neutral spectators. … We are being weighed in the balance, and our position amongst the nations is being assessed by mankind.” Wilson opened the cabinet meeting by reading that telegram, and he read aloud his draft of a diplomatic note. In the discussion, Bryan grew emotional and accused other cabinet members of not being neutral, and Wilson reportedly reproved him. He was not really put out with Bryan. “Both in mind and heart I was deeply moved by what you said in Cabinet this morning,” he wrote when he sent along the draft of the note, which demanded an apology and reparations for the sinking of the Lusitania as well as the earlier attack on the Falaba and warned that the United States would take “any necessary act in sustaining the rights of its citizens or in safeguarding the sacred duties of international law.”⁸

Bryan showed great persistence in pushing his views on how to deal with the protest to Germany. The following day, he sent Wilson two handwritten letters containing suggestions to mitigate the risk of war and avoid siding with either set of belligerents. He also proposed to protest the Allied blockade and issue a supplemental statement that would invoke the principle of his compulsory delay, or a cooling-off treaty. Germany had not agreed to such a treaty with the United States, but he argued that it had endorsed the underlying principle. Wilson ignored the protest to the Allies, but he liked the idea of a supplemental statement and proposed to accompany the diplomatic note with a “tip” to the press, a draft of which he sent to Bryan. In this “tip,” he noted that Germany had endorsed the principle of compulsory delay and expressed confidence that the Germans would either respond favorably to the note or submit the dispute to some process of arbitration.⁹

Wilson did not carry through with this move, seemingly scuttling it within hours. He told Bryan he had heard something from the German embassy that convinced him that such a statement would spoil the chance to resolve the dispute satisfactorily. That was not true. Instead, the “tip” fell victim to backstabbing intrigue. When Bryan described the move to Robert Lansing, the counselor of the State Department (the department’s second-ranking official), Lansing said he approved. Immediately afterward, however, Lansing went behind his boss’s back to inform Secretary of War Garrison, who was the most bellicose member of the cabinet. Garrison told Lansing to see Tumulty, who also reacted unfavorably to the “tip.” In turn, Tumulty informed Postmaster General Burleson, and the two of them went to see the president. Wilson defended the press statement, but Tumulty maintained that it would give the appearance of double-dealing. When Wilson read the statement to them, Burleson did not think it was so bad, but Tumulty stood his ground, and Wilson finally agreed not to issue it and sent the note as it stood. It is doubtful that Tumulty’s arguments swayed him and more likely that he had begun to have second thoughts of his own.¹⁰

In fact, Wilson had not completely scuttled the plan. He planted stories claiming that the mood of the administration was hopeful of a satisfactory reply from Berlin and a peaceful outcome to the situation. The stories, written by David Lawrence, who had gone to Princeton and was close to Wilson, appeared on May 14 and 15 in the New York Evening Post and The New York Times. Two weeks later, Wilson tried sending a stronger peace signal. He appears to have met with Bernstorff, the German ambassador, on May 28, before he received a reply to his diplomatic note. Bernstorff reported to Berlin that the president’s thinking about peace terms included, besides a return to the pre-war status quo, “[t]he freedom of the seas to such an extent that it would be equal to neutralization of the seas” and “[a]djustments of colonial possessions.”¹¹ This seems to have been the first time Wilson used the term “freedom of the seas,” a phrase and an idea that would appear repeatedly in his pronouncements about post-war international order.

In the meantime, the president awaited Germany’s reply to the Lusitania note. This waiting period marked the beginning of a sequence that would repeat itself several times over the next eleven months. It would be like a tennis game in extreme slow motion: first, the United States would send a diplomatic note; next, after a time, Germany would reply; then the United States would volley again. While this game took place, debate and conflict over the latest move would wax and wane on each side, often heightened by events on the battlefield or the seas.

Affairs of state did not keep Wilson from affairs of the heart. He invited Edith Galt and Altrude Gordon to accompany him, his daughter Margaret, his sister Annie Howe, Helen Bones, Grayson, and Tumulty on a cruise aboard the Mayflower. They sailed for New York, where Wilson was to give a speech and review the Atlantic fleet. A round of festivities greeted them on May 17. The president spoke at a luncheon given by the mayor and reviewed a parade, and Secretary of the Navy Daniels gave a dinner aboard the Navy Department’s official yacht. The following day, the president reviewed the fleet in the Hudson River. As the Mayflower steamed past, each warship fired a salute and played an anthem. Edith and Wilson had little time alone together, although she reveled in “the absolute abstraction and [in] forgetting there was anyone else in the launch but you.” Back in Washington, they resumed writing notes and meeting for rides and dinner. Wilson was growing impatient. Age had not cooled his physical desires; at fifty-eight he had the sexual appetite of a man half his age. Edith seems to have acted like a proper lady and resisted his advances. After spending two hours with her in the backseat of the presidential limousine with the curtains drawn, Wilson wrote the next morning, “For God’s sake try to find out whether you really love me or not. You owe it to yourself and you owe it to the great love I have given you, without stint or measure.”¹²

Edith was more upset with herself than with Wilson. “I have promised not to raise barriers and not to think defeat possible,” she told him the next day. “I will patiently keep those promises, for I love you, and your love for me has made the whole world new.” For her, his allure was inseparable from his office, as she later admitted in her memoirs.¹³ On his side, he played upon the presidency in wooing her. He shared secrets of state with her and gave her glimpses of inner workings at the highest level of government. Some of this was standard practice for him. He was used to divulging his deepest thoughts and feelings to female friends, and he was accustomed to baring his soul to a woman he loved, as he had done with Ellen almost as soon as he had met her. The lack of privacy surrounding a president—ever-present Secret Service agents and staff and servants and an inquisitive press—restricted opportunities for intimacy, but they made do as well as they could.

The day after the scene in the limousine, the German reply to the Lusitania note arrived and set off a second, even more trying, round in the diplomatic tennis game over the submarines. Although the Germans issued secret orders to spare large passenger liners from submarine attack, their official reply was haughty and evasive. Press reaction in the United States was uniformly negative. Wilson again kept to himself, except to deliver an address at Arlington National Cemetery on May 30, Decoration Day. Having learned his lesson from “too proud to fight,” he refrained from saying anything that might be taken as a comment on the current situation. When the cabinet met on June 1, everyone expressed disappointment at the German reply. Bryan had not changed his mind and once more argued against a quick response and for further inquiry into the Lusitania‘s sinking. Wilson did not agree, but he did not totally reject this approach. He met again with the German ambassador for what Bernstorff described as “an extraordinarily friendly exchange of views,” in which Wilson promised that if Germany would give up submarine warfare, he would press the British to end their food blockade.¹⁴ That overture did not satisfy Bryan, who wrote Wilson a lengthy letter in which he noted that theLusitaniawas alleged to have carried munitions and urged redoubled efforts to find a peaceful resolution.

As before, Wilson decided from the outset to make a strong protest. He spent two days working on a new diplomatic note to Germany. On June 4, he read his draft at a cabinet meeting. He charged that the sinking of the Lusitania involved “principles of humanity” that lifted the incident “out of the class of ordinary subjects of diplomacy,” and he avowed that the loss of so many innocent lives imposed a “grave responsibility” on the United States. Another inconclusive discussion followed, with none of the cabinet members expressing his position clearly. By contrast, two senior Democrats from Capitol Hill showed no such hesitancy. The same day as the cabinet meeting, Thomas S. Martin, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and Henry (Hal) De La Warr Flood, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, both Virginians, went to see Bryan, who reported that they strongly opposed war and knew from talking with their colleagues that neither the House nor the Senate would vote for a declaration of war. Wilson responded that Bryan’s report of what they said “made a deep impression on me, and I have no doubt echoes a great part of public opinion,” and he made his comment about the people’s “double wish.”¹⁵

This expression of sentiment among congressional Democrats prompted Bryan to make one last stab at softening the diplomatic note. The next day, he suggested to Wilson “three matters which, to my mind, are necessary to prevent war with Germany”: invoking the principle of compulsory delay, barring passenger ships from carrying munitions, and simultaneously protesting British blockade practices. Wilson immediately rejected those proposals, though “with deep misgiving.” He liked the idea of keeping Americans off ships carrying munitions, but he could not see “the way to do it without hopelessly weakening our protest,” and he wanted to keep any dealings with Britain separate from the submarine controversy.¹⁶

That exchange with Bryan took place on a Saturday. The weekend brought Wilson no respite. When he saw Edith Galt the next day, he showed her his latest draft of the diplomatic note, and he confided in her what one of the gravest consequences of that note would be. “Then, I did want to ask you more about the resignation of ‘W.J.B.’,” she wrote to him, “but saw the subject troubled you so would not let myself discuss it.” That Saturday, he had learned that Bryan intended to resign rather than sign the new diplomatic note to Germany. Bryan had decided to tell McAdoo first, because he was Wilson’s son-in-law. McAdoo later recalled that Bryan was nervous and haggard when he came to his house and admitted he had not been sleeping well. McAdoo tried unsuccessfully to talk him out of resigning, pointing out that a sign of disunity might lead to war—“the very result which you say you are so anxious to avoid.” He suggested that Bryan and his wife spend the weekend away from the city and speak with him again on Monday. “Meanwhile I will see the President and tell him of our conversation.” McAdoo then went to the White House and related everything to Wilson. According to his recollection, the president was not surprised at Bryan’s intention but wanted to keep him in the cabinet if possible.¹⁷

The next day, Wilson again broke his custom of not working on the Sabbath and sought out Tumulty for advice. They talked over lunch, and Tumulty urged him to accept Bryan’s resignation at once. So, too, facetiously, did Edith Galt. “I think it will be a blessing to get rid of him,” she told Wilson, “and [I] might as well frankly say I would like to be appointed in his place, for then I should have to have daily conferences with you.”¹⁸ Wilson also met with McAdoo and Houston, his secretary of agriculture, in the afternoon and talked about possible successors to Bryan. The latter spent Saturday night and Sunday at the estate of a Democratic senator outside Washington, but time for reflection did not change his mind, as he told McAdoo on Monday. He wrote a lengthy final letter to Wilson suggesting changes to soften the note to Germany, and in the afternoon he went with McAdoo to the White House to inform the president in person of his intention to resign.

Wilson sat facing Bryan for more than an hour in his office. He remained calm, but Bryan grew agitated and at one point his hand shook so much that he spilled water from a glass as he was trying to drink. Wilson repeatedly urged Bryan to stay on, but the secretary would have none of it. The president was risking war, he maintained, and was letting other nations dictate America’s policies. At one point, Bryan remarked in a quavering voice, “Colonel House has been Secretary of State, not I, and I have never had your full confidence.” House, after hearing of this charge, wrote that Wilson “tried to minimize what I have done, but was not very successful for facts were against him, although Mr. Bryan knew but a small part of my work. The President said he had only shown him a few of my messages, and excused himself for this by saying how utterly impossible it would be to let Mr. Bryan know his whole mind.”¹⁹ House was getting in another dig at Bryan and exaggerating his own importance.

Wilson did not want Bryan to go. His resignation would not only send a signal of disunity to Germany but would also split the Democratic Party. Beyond such diplomatic and political considerations, he genuinely valued Bryan. He had worked more closely with him than with any other cabinet member. During the last two years, they had seen each other almost daily when they were in Washington, and they had exchanged a steady stream of notes and telephone calls. “No two officials ever got along more amicably,” Bryan later recalled. “I was in charge of the department and the President and I never differed on a matter of policy until the controversy over American citizens riding on belligerent ships.” Wilson agreed. At the meeting with McAdoo and Houston the day before, Robert Lansing’s name had come up as a possible successor to Bryan, and, as Houston recalled, the president “remarked that Lansing would not do, that he was not a big enough man, did not have enough imagination, and would not sufficiently vigorously combat or question his [Wilson’s] views, and that he was lacking in initiative.”²⁰ In other words, he was no William Jennings Bryan.

There was more to this resignation than met the eye. The stated reason—policy disagreement—was not so straightforward as it appeared. Wilson was taking a harder line toward Germany than Bryan thought right or safe, but the president was also making peaceable overtures. It was also odd that Bryan signed the first Lusitania note and only balked at the second protest. The strain of risking war was taking a toll on him emotionally and physically, but his reasons for resigning went deeper. Bryan was facing a political identity crisis. He believed he must leave in order to remain faithful to his most cherished view of himself. His daughter Grace later recounted that when her father came home from his meeting with the president, his face was flushed, his walk was unsteady, and he seemed to be in “great emotional agony.” Lying on a sofa, he told her and her mother, “We have come to a parting of the ways. The President does not seem to realize that a great part of America lies on the other side of the Alleghany Mountains. … By resigning I will be free to assist them in their struggle against entering this heart-breaking conflict on either side.” The next day, after his resignation was made public, Bryan said, “I believe that I can do more on the outside to prevent war than I can do on the inside. … I can work to direct public opinion so it will not exert pressure for extreme action.”²¹

Woodrow Wilson would never have said or thought those things. He, too, believed that the “real America” lay outside the Northeast, and he had a similar faith in the potency of public opinion. As governor, he had appealed to people over the heads of the legislature. As president, he would soon make another speaking tour to appeal to the citizenry over the heads of Congress. But Wilson’s model of public persuasion was education, whereas Bryan’s was evangelism. Likewise, Wilson never exalted a leader’s role as a speaker above that of actually wielding power. He would never have dreamed of trading a place at or near the center of power for a perch on the stump. That difference was what Wilson had been getting at in January when he said he thought Bryan would make a bad president. He repeated that judgment when he told Edith Galt a few days after Bryan’s resignation, “No stranger man ever lived, and his naïveté takes my breath away.”²²

Wilson handled Bryan’s departure with dignity. He wrote a warmly worded letter accepting Bryan’s equally warmly worded resignation, and Bryan attended a last cabinet meeting after the announcement of his departure. Behind his mask of cordiality, however, Wilson was apprehensive; he knew Bryan’s departure brought both danger and opportunity. Its timing—in the middle of a diplomatic crisis—brought down on Bryan’s head an expected deluge of abuse, even from fellow Democrats, but Wilson recognized that Bryan was poised to pounce at any perceived sign of belligerence, and he would soon come out swinging against proposed increases in the army and navy. Stockton Axson, who was staying at the White House at the time, recalled that at breakfast one day Wilson, “piercing me with that sharp look which he sometimes had,” said about Bryan, “He is absolutely sincere. That is what makes him dangerous.”²³

Yet Bryan’s attack from the pacifist flank highlighted Wilson’s stance as champion of the “double wish.” The terms hawk and dove would not be used for another fifty years, but the cartoonist Rollin Kirby of the New York World captured their essence when he drew Wilson standing between Bryan, who is holding a birdcage with a dove of peace inside, and Roosevelt, who is wearing a cowboy outfit and shooting off a pair of six-guns.

Others besides Democrats rallied to Wilson’s side. Taft praised the president’s position publicly and privately told a friend, “I have very little sympathy with such statements as those of … Theodore Roosevelt, which are calculated to make his [Wilson’s] course more difficult.” According to Tumulty, Wilson held up two fingers to symbolize his appreciation of Taft’s support.²⁴

The second Lusitania note went out on June 9, over the signature of Lansing as acting secretary of state. While he waited for the German reply, Wilson faced the task of choosing a successor to Bryan. Houston later recalled that the president thought House might be a good choice but ruled him out because of his frail health. He sent McAdoo to consult with the colonel, who had just returned from Europe. According to House, McAdoo floated the names of Houston and Wilson’s old friend and Princeton supporter Thomas Jones. “I asked McAdoo why the President did not consider Lansing. He replied that he [Wilson] did not think he was big enough. I told McAdoo to say to the President that, in my opinion, it would be better to have a man with not too many ideas of his own.” The colonel pressed this backhanded case for Lansing by letter and in person. In the letter, he conceded that he had met the man only once, “and while his mentality did not impress me unduly,” he thought he would do. The meeting, their first in nearly five months, took place on June 24, when the president stopped over in New York on his way to Harlakenden—where Edith Galt was joining members of the Wilson family. Wilson and House discussed Lansing, and Wilson said he had decided to appoint him because, as House recorded, the president was “practically his own Secretary of State and Lansing would not be troublesome by obtruding or injecting his own views.”²⁵

Wilson announced Lansing’s appointment the next day. He may have been simply following the path of least resistance. Lansing was already the number two person in the State Department, and at a critical time like this the country needed a secretary of state. Yet this would be one of the worst appointments Wilson would make as president. With his perfectly barbered white hair and mustache and impeccably tailored suits, Robert Lansing looked like a theater director’s idea of a secretary of state. That appearance and his technical knowledge of international law and diplomatic procedure were his chief qualifications. Privately, Lansing held pro-Allied views not too different from Roosevelt’s or House’s, but he kept those opinions to himself. He could be furtive and underhanded, as he had shown in going behind Bryan’s back over the Lusitania “tip.” Wilson’s treating him like a clerk during the next four years would understandably breed resentment and aggravate Lansing’s inclinations to try to undermine the president.²⁶

On his side, Wilson would give in to his own inclinations toward lone-handedness, which he had largely held in check since entering politics. In pushing Lansing, House almost certainly believed that he was increasing his own influence, but Edith Galt had already begun to replace him as Wilson’s most intimate adviser. House would remain close to Wilson, but he would be a sounding board and valued negotiator rather than a source of counsel. No one would replace Bryan as a strong, quasi-independent force in making foreign policy. That would be doubly unfortunate because in dealing with the world war, there would no longer be a forceful voice close to the president’s ear warning against the risks of intervention. Doubt and restraint would have to come from Wilson himself, seldom from his advisers. From mid-1915 onward, he would make foreign policy decisions and set directions almost entirely on his own.

Courting Edith Galt continued to provide welcome diversion from public business. Wilson told House about her during his visit on June 24. “What would you think of my getting married again?” Wilson asked. He explained that he had met a wonderful woman and needed female companionship. He also felt sure Ellen would have approved, “for she had talked to me about it and I am sure I would be following her wishes.” Grayson and Attorney General Gregory had already told House about Edith, but he did not let on, nor would he tell Grayson that Wilson confided in him. House gave his approval because, he noted, “I feel that his health demands it and I also feel that Woodrow Wilson is the greatest asset the world has.” He did suggest that the president wait for a year before remarrying.²⁷

Wilson spent three weeks at Harlakenden with Edith, Grayson, family members—and the ever-present Secret Service detail. “When we walked together,” Edith recalled in her memoir, “we would try to forget that lurking behind every tree was a Secret Service man.” The party took rides in the limousines and gathered around the fireplace after dinner. While Wilson worked on papers sent from Washington, in the next room Grayson, Frank Sayre, Jessie, and Margaret would take turns reading from his History of the American People, sometimes asking him for comments. Edith remembered Wilson rejoining at one point, “Do you youngsters realize that … right now I am in the midst of so much history in the making that I cannot turn my mind back to that time? Besides, I have never been proud of that History. I wrote it only to teach myself something about our country.” He said that the lavish payments for its serialization in Harper’s had come “like a windfall” and then explained how the term windfall came from the old English custom of tenants on an estate enjoying the right to gather wood blown down by the wind.²⁸

The couple made the most of the time they could snatch away from the rest of the party. On one of their walks early in the visit, Edith accepted Wilson’s renewed proposal of marriage, and they became secretly engaged. They enjoyed some physical intimacy, although probably not as much as they wanted. Despite their lack of privacy, Wilson enjoyed himself. “I am well and am profiting immensely by my delightful vacation,” he told House, “the first real one I have had since I went into politics.”²⁹ The idyll ended temporarily when Wilson returned to Washington for a few days at the middle of July. The German reply to the second Lusitania protest had arrived, and once more the government in Berlin had taken a stand that struck many in America as haughty and evasive. Yet there were also strong signs of anti-war sentiment, thanks in part to Bryan’s recent oratorical barnstorming. Before returning to Washington, Wilson began drafting a third note to Germany, and he telegraphed a statement for Tumulty to release to the press assuring that the president would be returning to Washington to confer with the cabinet.

When Wilson met with the cabinet on July 20, he found that Bryan’s departure had changed things less than expected—except that pressure now was coming mostly from the opposite side. Bellicose, blustery Garrison arrived with his own draft of a reply to Germany and did most of the talking. Wilson responded by saying again that the American people wanted the government to issue a firm response but also to avoid war. Other cabinet members chimed in to support the president. In a note largely along the lines he had drafted, Wilson demanded an end to surprise attacks at sea but avoided an ultimatum. Despite that forbearance, he told Edith he feared war might come, and he worried about what that would mean for millions of people who “so confidingly depend on me to keep them out of the hor[r]ors of this war.”³⁰

Garrison did not come away from this encounter empty-handed. Wilson remained sensitive to the other side of the “double wish”—the need to strike a strong pose on the international stage. He now decided that he must put more military muscle behind his diplomatic stance toward Germany and the other belligerents. The day after the cabinet meeting, he drafted a statement for Tumulty to release to the press a few days later, announcing that the president was consulting with the secretaries of war and the navy about changes and increases in the armed forces. He wanted the navy “to stand upon an equality with the most efficient and serviceable,” and he wanted the army to have “proper training of the citizens of the United States to arms.” Wilson insisted that he was taking this action “regardless of present conditions or controversies” and that he intended to consult with the congressional Armed Services Committees.³¹ The same day, he asked Garrison and Daniels to provide specific recommendations.

No matter how much Wilson might try to soft-pedal this move, he was making an about-face from his earlier rejection of increased military preparedness. Nor did anybody doubt that he was responding to the country’s changed stance toward the world conflict and repeated attacks by bellicose critics. Tumulty admitted as much when he released the statement, telling reporters, “It will pocket Roosevelt completely.”³² That was wishful thinking. The ex-president, Lodge, and others speedily denounced any new defense program from this administration as too little too late. Even more dangerous for Wilson were attacks coming from within his own party. As expected, Bryan quickly denounced any talk of strengthening the army and navy as a step toward war, and his followers on Capitol Hill soon followed suit. By reversing course on preparedness, Wilson was picking the biggest fight yet in his political life.

The way Garrison and Daniels responded to Wilson’s request for recommended increases gave a foretaste of how thorny and complicated things would become. Roosevelt and his circle claimed that Daniels was a satellite of Bryan and singularly unfit to run the navy. Some ranking officers similarly scoffed at him as a country bumpkin who did not appreciate their needs and special culture. Daniels’s own deputy, thirty-three-year-old Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt, shared those attitudes; he often lampooned his boss behind his back and sometimes leaked damaging information to his wife’s “Uncle Ted” and Senator Lodge. Far from a rube, however, Daniels was a shrewd, experienced political operator gifted with a thick skin and an equable temperament; he likewise possessed the insight to detect a glimmer of merit in Franklin Roosevelt and put up with him despite the young man’s often flighty manner, furtive condescension, and occasional disloyalty. Daniels also felt the strongest personal loyalty to Wilson of any cabinet member except McAdoo. After some dickering with the navy’s planning arm, the General Board, Daniels presented the president with a five-year, $500 million program that called for 6 new battleships, 10 cruisers, 50 destroyers, and 100 submarines. This was to Wilson’s liking, and in October he approved the proposals without change.³³

The army program was another matter. Garrison basked in praise from the administration’s combative critics, and he felt little personal loyalty to the president. Earlier in 1915, he had made noises about resigning if he did not get his way. “If Garrison mentions it again,” House had recorded in his diary in June, “[Wilson] would let him go.” Garrison initially submitted only a sketchy outline of a big new reserve force, and then, without Wilson’s knowledge or approval, he publicly broached the idea in a magazine article. The Army War College eventually produced a concrete plan, which called for expansion of the regular army by nearly a third, to more than 141,000 officers and men, and a 400,000-man reserve force, separate from the state-controlled National Guard, to be called the Continental Army. Wilson warily approved this program at the end of October, but he found Garrison even more irksome than before, privately calling him “a solemn, conceited ass!”³⁴

Before he dealt with the preparedness fight and the next round in the submarine controversy, he returned to Harlakenden, where Edith was staying for one more week. The couple renewed their routine of walks and rides, and on sunny days they would sit on the terrace while Wilson went through the official mail and, as Edith later recalled, “each morning we worked together on what it contained.” When Edith departed as planned for visits with friends and family, Wilson missed her painfully: “I long for you so passionately, that I am as restless as a caged tiger if I cannot at least be pouring out my heart to you when I am come to my desk at all, before and after business.” Pour out his heart he did, in two or three letters a day. He also continued doing what he had begun on the terrace at Harlakenden—sharing secrets of state and matters of high policy. Wilson would enclose other people’s letters with his own, particularly letters from Page and House. For her part, Edith felt no hesitancy in commenting on those letters and their writers. She agreed with Wilson that Page had gone overboard in his pro-British sentiments and that it might be wise to bring him home for a visit. About House, whom she had not yet met, she ventured reservations: “I can’t help feeling he is not a very strong character. … [H]e does look like a weak vessel and I think he writes like one very often.”³⁵

Edith’s comments about House contained equal measures of perceptiveness and jealousy. She was reacting to the smarmy, sycophantic tone the colonel often used in addressing Wilson, and she was resenting anyone who might presume to be closer to him than she was. She also made critical remarks about Tumulty, whom she had met and talked about with Wilson. Wilson responded by defending both men. It was in his letter answering Edith’s reservations about House that he admitted that the colonel was “intellectually … not a great man” and called him “a counselor, not a statesman.” But he also assured her, “You are going to love House some day,—if only because he loves me and would give, I believe, his life for me.” In the same letter, he said about Tumulty, “You know that he was not brought up as we were; you feel his lack of breeding. … But the majority, the great majority of the people who come to the office are not of our kind, and our sort of a gentleman would not understand them or know how to handle them.”³⁶

Edith would come to accept Tumulty because she recognized how useful he was to Wilson, but she would never feel as warmly toward him as Ellen had. Nor would she come to love House. The part the colonel would soon play in helping her through a rough patch in their courtship would reconcile her to him a bit, but she would never fully trust or accept him. She would not try to come between Wilson and House because she did not need to. Her presence in Wilson’s life in itself diminished the colonel’s influence. House apparently recognized the change. “It seems the President is wholly absorbed in this love affair and is neglecting practically everything else,” he noted sourly at the end of July. It was after this time that House began noting his own complaints, as well as those of others, about Wilson’s not seeking advice or listening to people. The colonel would never again enjoy the intimacy that Wilson had formerly shared with him.³⁷

With Edith gone, Harlakenden held fewer charms for Wilson, and he returned to Washington a week after her departure. He had to deal with affairs in Mexico and the Caribbean, and the British had just tightened their blockade further by again declaring cotton contraband. This move brought angry protests from southern senators and congressmen and required Wilson and Tumulty to work to placate them. The British foreign secretary, Grey, remained sensitive to American opinion, particularly this vital Democratic constituency, and his government mitigated the economic damage by buying up much of that year’s cotton crop. Serious as those matters were, however, they paled in comparison to a fresh flare-up of the submarine crisis. On August 19, a German submarine torpedoed and sank the British liner Arabic, killing forty-four people, including two Americans. This incident rubbed raw the wound left by the Lusitania. Roosevelt and Bryan predictably piped up from their respective corners, but the general mood of the public seemed squarely behind the president.³⁸ As before, Wilson made a show of calm and business as usual. He brushed aside demands to call Congress into session. Also, as he had done after the sinking of the Lusitania, he kept to himself, although this time he did not have Edith nearby for advice and comfort.

The Arabic incident put the president in a bind. The firm line he had taken in his three Lusitania protests to Germany left him little room to back down. Yet few people wanted war; for his part, Wilson still wanted to foster a nonpunitive outcome to the dispute and build a better world, and remaining neutral would put him in a position to achieve those goals. To that end, he got little help from his advisers. Page irritated him by sending agitated reports of British demands that the United States stand up to the Germans, and House continued to counsel against softness in responding to the incident, even at the risk of war. After much agonizing, Wilson hit upon the expedient of a deliberate news leak. On August 23, newspapers published reports that “speculation in Government circles” predicted that the president might break relations with Germany. The “highest authority” stated that he would take such action if the facts of the case showed that the Germans had “disregarded his solemn warning in the last note on the Lusitania tragedy.” He also had Lansing tell Bernstorff how gravely the president regarded the situation. These moves got results. Debates rose in Berlin, and the chancellor journeyed to the kaiser’s castle at Pless, in Silesia, to put the matter before him. The outcome was a public promise not to sink liners without warning, although there was no disavowal of the sinking of the Arabic or the Lusitania.³⁹

Equivocal though this so-called Arabic pledge was, it set off an outburst of jubilation. Newspapers across the country hailed the president as the savior of peace. In the New York Evening Post, Oswald Garrison Villard, who bitterly resented the recent segregation efforts, emblazoned Wilson’s portrait and gushed about him in a front-page editorial: “Without mobilizing a single regiment or assembling a fleet, … he has compelled the surrender of the proudest, most arrogant, best armed of nations.”⁴⁰ If this seemed too good to be true, Wilson thought it was, and events soon confirmed his doubts. On September 4, a submarine sank the British liner Hesperian. Fortunately, because no Americans were killed in this attack and the circumstances were ambiguous—the Germans claimed theHesperian had tried to ram the submarine—it did not reignite the dispute. Still, it served as a reminder of how fragile and fraught with danger the situation remained.

Wilson was fortunate not to have a full-fledged diplomatic emergency on his hands in September 1915 because he had to deal with a romantic one, in his courtship of Edith Galt. After she returned to Washington on September 3, they resumed their routine of rides in the limousine, dinners at the White House, and the exchange of frequent, passion-filled letters. Edith agreed to announce their engagement soon, but fearing the political ramifications, she still wanted to marry Wilson after the election, more than a year in the future. Others worried about the political effects of a marriage, too. Rumors of the president’s romance were beginning to circulate, and members of the cabinet were fussing about the situation. A group of them met and decided to tap Daniels for the assignment of talking to Wilson. Daniels later recalled that he recoiled at once from the “dangerous high and exalted mission of Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extraordinary to the Court of Cupid … in the performance of which my official head might suffer decapitation.” Instead, McAdoo made a clumsy stab at confronting his father-in law by resurrecting concerns about Mary Hulbert, the former Mrs. Peck. He told Wilson he had heard that the president had sent $15,000 to her, and he added a story he had probably made up about having received an anonymous letter saying that she was showing Wilson’s letters around Los Angeles, where she now lived.⁴¹

Wilson responded in two ways. At some point, he wrote two shorthand drafts titled “Analysis and Statement of Admission.” He opened the first draft with “Even while it lasted I knew and made explicit what it did not mean,” and added, “It did not last but friendship and genuine admiration ensued.” In the second draft, he characterized his letters to Mary Hulbert as “a passage of folly and gross impertinence in my life,” and added, “I am deeply ashamed and repentant.” He insisted that nothing untoward had happened between them while admitting, “But none of this lessens the blame or the deep humiliating grief and shame I suffer, that I should have so erred and forgotten the standards of honorable behavior by which I should have been bound.” Whether he meant to turn those drafts into a letter to Edith is not clear. Instead, on Saturday, September 18, he wrote a short note: “There is something, personal to myself, and I am going to take the extraordinary liberty of asking that I may come to your house this evening at 8, instead of your coming here to dinner.” When he went there, he told her about Mrs. Peck and abjectly begged forgiveness. What Edith said is not known, but Wilson agonized through what he told her were “conflicting emotions that have surged like a storm through me all night long.”⁴²

He did not have to stay in that storm. Almost as soon as he wrote those words, he received a letter that Edith had written at dawn. After spending the night sitting in her big chair by the window, she declared, “I now see straight—straight into the heart of things—and am ready to follow the road ‘where love leads.’ … This is my pledge, Dearest One, I will stand by you—not for duty, not for pity, not for honor—but for love—trusting, protecting, comprehending Love.” She felt so tired she could put her head down and sleep at her writing desk, “but nothing could bring me real rest until I had pledged you my love and my allegiance.”⁴³

The relief Wilson felt was almost painful. “Your note has just come and I could shout aloud for the joy and privilege of receiving such a pledge, conceived by such a heart,” he wrote to her at once. He and Edith could now resume their romance where they had left off. After this, he began going to her house almost every evening and often stayed until midnight. The Secret Service agents noticed a new bounciness about the president when he walked back to the White House. As he waited for traffic to pass, he would dance a few steps and whistle or sing a vaudeville tune. One tune that an agent remembered him singing as his feet tapped out the rhythm was “Oh you beautiful doll! You great big beautiful doll! Let me put my arms around you, I can hardly live without you.”⁴⁴

The romantic crisis might have been over, but its political ramifications remained. Wilson asked House to come to Washington, and on September 22 the two men met for the first time in nearly three months. After going over the diplomatic situation, House noted, “The President at once took up his most intimate personal affairs. I could see that he did it with reluctance, but with a determination to have it over.” Wilson told House about Mrs. Peck and the anonymous report to McAdoo of threats to publish his letters to her. The colonel discounted McAdoo’s fears and thought any attempt at blackmail most unlikely. Turning to the subject of Mrs. Galt, a relieved Wilson asked his advice about when to announce their engagement and when to have the wedding. He also asked Edith to meet with House, and two days later they had tea together at the White House. The colonel talked about the president’s accomplishments and said that Wilson probably would not run again. Edith, in turn, played his own game of flattery, going on about the president’s great affection and respect for him, to which House responded, “I thought if our plans carried true, the President would easily outrank any American that had yet lived; that the war was the greatest event in human history excepting the birth of Jesus Christ.” Whether this conversation completely won Edith over is open to question, although she told Wilson that evening that she had found House “just as nice and fine as you pictured him” and she now had faith in his judgment.⁴⁵

This conversation and others removed the last barriers to disclosing their engagement and planning an early wedding. The announcement, which Wilson wrote on his typewriter while Edith peered over his shoulder, came on October 6. The following day, papers carried the news, along with a formal photograph of Edith that the White House had supplied in advance.⁴⁶ That day, many people got their first look at the new First Lady-to-be when she accompanied the president to Philadelphia for the second game of the World Series. One photograph caught the couple wreathed in smiles after Wilson tossed out the first pitch. Edith was fashionably dressed, as always, with a fur-trimmed coat and corsage, gloves, and a wide-brimmed hat. Appearing in the Sunday rotogravure section of newspapers over the next two weeks, that photograph introduced Mrs. Galt to the public at large with a radiant image that made her a political asset.

Politics, as well as romance, was on the president’s mind in October 1915. If House really thought his friend might not run again, for once his mind was not working in tandem with Wilson’s. On the same day he announced the engagement, the president gave another statement to the press: “I intend to vote for woman suffrage in New Jersey because I believe the time has come to extend that privilege to the women of the state.”⁴⁷ He insisted that he spoke only as a private citizen and reiterated his view that suffrage was a state matter. This endorsement was not enough to carry the day in a referendum two weeks later, but suffrage leaders expressed gratitude to the president for the gesture. Breaking his Sphinx-like silence on woman suffrage marked the beginning of more active political involvement on Wilson’s part. He also started giving speeches again, but mindful of the “too proud to fight” fiasco, he stuck mostly to generalities.

He needed to watch his tongue especially because he was still entangled in delicate diplomacy over the submarine issue. He and Lansing continued to press the Germans to disavow the sinking of the Arabic and pay compensation. Without Wilson’s knowledge, Lansing made threats of a diplomatic break to the German ambassador at a time when the president was writing to House, “I feel under bonds to [the country] to show patience to the utmost. My chief puzzle is to determine when patience ceases to be a virtue.” Yet when Wilson saw House on September 22, he said that perhaps the United States should go to war in order to combat German militarism. The colonel’s surprise was well taken: such Rooseveltian thinking was out of character for Wilson and revealed how exasperated he felt. Fortunately, the Germans chose not to try the president’s patience much further. On October 5, Bernstorff presented Lansing with a letter that partially disavowed the attack on the Arabic and promised to pay an indemnity. With that, the submarine controversy subsided to its familiarly slow but ever-menacing simmer.⁴⁸

At the same time, the political controversy over military preparedness was threatening to boil over. Bryan particularly denounced increases in the army and navy in speeches around the country in the fall of 1915. He drew big, enthusiastic crowds, and pledges of solidarity poured in from his followers in Congress. The most potent of his cohorts promised to be Representative Claude Kitchin of North Carolina. The usually cooperative Underwood was no longer Democratic leader in the House because he had been elected to the Senate in 1914; Kitchin would succeed him as party leader and chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, which gave him power to name new members to committees. Between the presence of anti-preparedness Democrats on the Armed Services Committees and the party’s reduced majority in the House, Wilson’s program faced hard going. His opponents got reinforcement in the press from Villard. The editor lambasted the preparedness increases in the New York Evening Post and in The Nation, and he served as a liaison among opponents inside and outside Congress.⁴⁹

Wilson strove to counter the congressional opposition by cultivating the chairmen of the Armed Services Committees and by playing up to Speaker Clark. He also began to speak out on preparedness. Early in October, in brief remarks to the Naval Consulting Board, a civilian advisory group headed by the inventor Thomas A. Edison, he asserted, “I think the whole nation is convinced that we ought to be prepared, not for war, but for defense.” Later he declared, “Force everywhere speaks out with a loud and imperious voice.” In this changed world, America needed stronger, more efficient armed forces, “not for war, but only for defense.” Although he was calling for bigger armed forces, he reiterated, “There is no fear amongst us.” Yet he also warned against “alien sympathies,which came from men who loved other countries better than they loved America.”⁵⁰

Those speeches served as a warm-up for a major counterattack in the preparedness fight and a broader political campaign, which came in his State of the Union address on December 7, 1915. Wilson acknowledged that during the preceding year the world war had “extended its threatening and sinister scope,” but he pledged to “keep the processes of peace alive,” particularly in the Western Hemisphere. Professing goodwill toward neighboring nations, he promised not to impose any government upon them: “This is Pan-Americanism. It has none of the spirit of empire in it.” That noble vision seemed at odds with recent intervention in the Caribbean, but Wilson used it as a way to justify his military policy. “Great democracies are not belligerent,” he declared. “We regard war merely as a means of asserting the rights of a people against aggression.” The United States would maintain no more of a military establishment than necessary, as his program of increases in the army and navy would do. Because the preparedness and shipping programs would be costly, he urged raising the needed sums through taxes, particularly income taxes. He also proposed federal aid to vocational and agricultural education, a rural-credits plan for farm-mortgage lending, and stronger railroad regulation. Unfortunately, he again referred to disloyal people, particularly those immigrants who “seek to make this proud country once more a hotbed of European passion.”⁵¹

This State of the Union address, his third, was not one of Wilson’s best speeches. As he had done before, he rambled as he covered diverse matters. This speech also suffered from a mixture of messages as Wilson sought to take a firm stand in military and foreign policy but also to give assurances of peaceful intentions. He made up for some of those deficiencies in other speeches during the next few days. To the Democratic National Committee, he declared that Mexicans could “raise hell. … It is their government, and it is their hell.” To a business group in Columbus, Ohio, he sounded the basic New Freedom theme that the average man was “the backbone of the country,” and he said he wanted the world war to end in a peace in which “the instrumentalities of justice will be exalted above the instrumentalities of force.”⁵² This was the closest he had come to divulging his agreement with those who were advocating some kind of league of nations. Those speeches in December 1915 flaunted a fresh political assertiveness. Wilson alluded to the upcoming campaign without explicitly announcing that he would run again. Still, hints here and elsewhere were hard to miss; he was clearly gearing up for a new round of action.

Only one thing remained before he plunged in. On Saturday, December 18, 1915, Edith Bolling Galt and Woodrow Wilson were married. In deference to the circumstances—a second marriage for both of them and the relatively recent death of Wilson’s first wife—the ceremony took place at Edith’s home, on Twentieth Street, rather than at the White House. The guests included only family members: Edith’s mother, brothers, and sisters; Wilson’s brother, sister, and daughters; his cousin Helen Bones; and Stockton Axson. This restriction gave Edith an excuse not to invite House, although she did include Grayson and Altrude Gordon, as well as her family’s servants. As at Jessie’s wedding two years earlier, both an Episcopal and a Presbyterian clergyman officiated: Herbert Scott Smith, rector of St. Margaret’s Church, where Edith attended, and James Taylor of the Central Presbyterian Church. The ceremony, which took place at eight-thirty in the evening, was short and simple. There were no attendants, and the bride’s mother gave her away. After having supper with their guests, the newlyweds sped away in an unmarked car to elude reporters and boarded a private railroad car that took them to Hot Springs, Virginia, for a three-week honeymoon. When the train pulled into the station the next morning, a Secret Service agent noticed the president dancing a jig, clicking his heels in the air, and again singing, “Oh you beautiful doll! You great big beautiful doll!”⁵³

The honeymoon was suitably idyllic. The couple stayed in the finest suite at the famed Homestead hotel. They played golf most mornings and went for automobile rides in the afternoon, often getting out to take long walks. Although official business followed Wilson, he and Edith enjoyed plenty of time alone together—but the end came sooner than the honeymooners wanted. On January 2, 1916, reports reached Washington that a German submarine had sunk the British liner Persia, killing two Americans. On advice from Tumulty and Lansing, the president returned to Washington the next day. “The President looked very well after his trip and seemed to be in a fine mood, although it was plainly evident that the PERSIA affair weighed on him,” Tumulty noted.⁵⁴ It was good for Wilson that his marriage and honeymoon had buoyed his spirits. The new year, 1916, was about to bring the greatest challenge—and fulfillment—yet in his life.