15

SECOND FLOOD TIDE

Woodrow Wilson needed the emotional lift that he felt when he returned from his honeymoon in January 1916, for his political prospects looked bleak. A year earlier, in his grief and gloom following Ellen’s death, he had doubted whether he could live up to people’s expectations, especially whether he could repeat his earlier feats as a legislative leader. Since then, the sinking of the Lusitania and the seething submarine controversy had promised to make such prospects look dimmer still by diverting attention from domestic concerns. His “irony of fate” had come home to roost with a vengeance—and that was not the worst of it. Bryan’s defection and vociferous opposition to a tough diplomatic stance toward Germany and increased military preparedness raised the specter of civil war among Democrats—the same kind of internecine strife that had fractured the Republicans four years earlier and doomed the reelection bid of Wilson’s predecessor. Now the tables appeared to be turning. Roosevelt’s mounting hostility toward Wilson’s foreign policy and his envy and loathing of Wilson personally made it increasingly likely that a reunited opposition would confront the president and his party in the fall elections. Despite newfound happiness at home, 1916 seemed to bode ill for the man in the White House.

Submarine attacks demanded immediate attention. Not only the sinking of the Persia but also the earlier sinking of an Italian liner, the Ancona, apparently by an Austrian submarine, was reheating the diplomatic pot. Now that Congress was back in session, sentiments on both sides found fresh outlets, and anti-war Democrats were bruiting about Bryan’s demand to keep Americans off the ships of belligerent countries. Wilson shared their sentiments to a degree. “If my re-election as President depends upon my getting into war,” Tumulty recorded him saying on January 4, “I don’t want to be President. … I have had lots of time to think about this war and the effect of our country getting into it.” He cared more about what people would think of him in ten years than what they thought now. He appreciated their desire for action, “but I will not be rushed into war, no matter if every damned congressman and senator stands up on his hind legs and proclaims me a coward.”¹

Luckily, the Germans and Austrians had little stomach for a new quarrel, and they apologized for sinking the Ancona and the Persia. But Lansing was determined to get the Germans to disavow the Lusitania sinking as well. He pushed the Germans hard, and some in Berlin seemed willing to accept a diplomatic break with the United States, which would have been a likely prelude to war. Learning about the situation in Germany through House, who was again in Europe, Wilson reined Lansing in at the beginning of February. Meanwhile, prominent Democrats on Capitol Hill publicly rejected all talk of a break with Germany. At the middle of February, Wilson accepted a partial acknowledgment of liability for the Lusitania and an implicit agreement to defer claims for a post-war settlement. This was the quiet, anticlimactic end to a long wrangle, but it did not resolve the submarine controversy or lift the threat of war.²

Lansing was able to bear down on the Germans because Wilson was away from Washington for part of this time. The political fight over military preparedness was almost as pressing as the diplomatic controversy over the submarines. At the middle of January, Tumulty warned, “I cannot impress upon you too forcibly the importance of an appeal to the country on the question of military preparedness.” Tumulty’s sources on Capitol Hill told him that support for preparedness was weak in both houses and public sentiment was indifferent and confused. Between Bryan’s pacifism and Roosevelt’s militarism, people did not know what to think, and the president needed to enlighten them by presenting sober, responsible arguments for an increase in armaments. “If your leadership in this matter is rejected,” Tumulty warned, “the Democratic party may as well go out of the business of government.”³ That argument fell on receptive ears, and after discussing the idea with the cabinet, Wilson authorized Tumulty to inform the press that the president was going to make a speaking tour about preparedness.

Before he embarked on the tour, he spoke in New York on January 27—and showed how sorely out of practice he was. Wilson rambled among several subjects, barely touching on preparedness. He announced that he had changed his mind and now favored a tariff commission to investigate and advise on rates, and he grew personal, repeating his earlier confession about having “volcanic forces … concealed under a most grave and reverend exterior.” He admitted that he had also changed his mind about preparedness and sounded a familiar note from his writings about politics: “The minute I stop changing my mind as President, with the change of all the circumstances in the world, I will be a back number.” Two days later, in his first speeches on the tour, he regained his wonted focus and force. “I believe in peace. I love peace,” he declared, but he warned, “The world is on fire, and there is tinder everywhere.” Therefore, it had become “absolutely necessary that this country should prepare herself, not for war, not for anything that smacks in the least of aggression, but for adequate national defense.” He promised to uphold both peace and honor, but he confessed that he was dealing with “things that I cannot control—the actions of others.”⁴

Those speeches set the pattern for the tour. During the following week, broken by his customary observance of the Sabbath, he gave fifteen speeches, talking several times each day, including brief remarks from the rear platform of his train. Accompanied by Edith, Tumulty, and a retinue of reporters, he traveled as far west as Kansas, speaking along the way in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa, and, on the return leg, in Missouri and Illinois again. The itinerary took him to the reputed strongholds of anti-war sentiment, and the tour harked back to his forays around New Jersey as governor to advocate his reform program. But now that he was president, it also took on the trappings of his 1912 campaign. Big crowds gathered almost everywhere he appeared—15,000 in Milwaukee, 18,000 in Des Moines—and parades escorted him to his appearances. These events afforded many people their first look at the new First Lady, who was frequently photographed beaming at her husband’s side. Yet not everyone warmed to Wilson’s message. In Kansas, the reception matched the winter weather. The Republican governor, who opposed increased preparedness, gleefully reported that the newspapermen on the train “said that the president’s reception was the coldest he received any place.” In most places, however, including heavily German Wisconsin, the audiences cheered wildly and applauded the president’s message.⁵

In making this tour, Wilson was exercising an aspect of political leadership that he prized, excelled at, and enjoyed. He was educating the public: explaining his programs and sharing his larger thoughts. These speeches allowed him to restate his grand vision of America’s role in the world. “America has no reason for being unless her destiny and her duty be ideal,” he avowed in Milwaukee. They also allowed him to draw a sharp line between himself and, as he said in Des Moines, “some men amongst us preaching peace who go much further than I can go”—a thinly veiled reference to Bryan and his cohorts. Apparently repudiating “too proud to fight,” he proclaimed that he would not “pay the price of self-respect.” In St. Louis, he warned that “one reckless commander of a submarine … might set the world on fire,” and he declared that America’s navy “ought, in my judgment, to be incomparably the greatest navy in the world.”⁶

Whether this speaking tour helped Wilson with his troubles within his party is questionable. The anti-preparedness stalwarts stood firm. Bryan complained about the “slush” in Wilson’s speeches and hinted at opposing his renomination for president. Kitchin reported to Bryan that the speeches changed no minds on Capitol Hill because “they sounded too much like Roosevelt.” Kitchin’s assessment was accurate but misleading. Many congressional Democrats wanted to remain loyal to the president without appearing militaristic. Republicans, except for some insurgents, most notably senators La Follette and George W. Norris of Nebraska, tended to support increased preparedness.⁷

In this situation, Wilson could exercise another of his favorite aspects of leadership: consulting and bargaining with legislators. Throughout the fall of 1915, he had been talking with the chairmen and key members of the Military Affairs and Naval Affairs Committees. Patient explanation and cultivation worked well with the navy bill. Die-hard Bryanites remained opposed and denounced construction of new warships as a boon to the steel trust. Their opposition notwithstanding, by the beginning of 1916 the navy bill appeared to be on its way to eventual passage. Some difficult times would come in the House later, when Kitchin and his followers temporarily succeeded in cutting new battleship and cruiser construction. Wilson stuck to his guns, however, and the Senate restored the ship authorizations. The senators also mollified critics by adding a provision to establish a government-owned factory to produce armor plate, thereby taking business and profits away from the steel industry. In final form, the navy bill gave the president everything he asked for.⁸

The army bill presented a tougher challenge at the outset. Opposition to it flared up early and focused on Garrison’s proposed reserve force, the Continental Army. In the eyes of opponents, this plan raised the age-old specter of a large standing army, like the ones then fighting in Europe. The Continental Army also drew fire from the state militias—the National Guard—which saw themselves being supplanted and diminished in importance. They had a potent lobby and enjoyed close ties with many senators and congressmen, and their influence extended well beyond the anti-preparedness phalanx. The key person with whom Wilson had to deal on the army bill was Representative James Hay of Virginia, chairman of the Military Affairs Committee. Like most Virginia Democrats, Hay was not an avid Bryanite, but he did have a long record of resisting Republican efforts to enlarge and modernize the army, and Garrison’s overbearing manner had also rubbed him the wrong way. Yet Hay was a good party man, and he had earlier promised to support the army bill, including the Continental Army. Once Congress convened and his committee held hearings, however, Hay backed away from that pledge. Garrison’s officious manner again offended him, and he began to apprehend the threat posed to the National Guard, which he favored. In mid-January, Hay presented an alternative plan, which would expand the National Guard to 425,000 men, about the same size as the proposed Continental Army, and give the president additional powers to “federalize” it—to call it into national service.⁹ Garrison exploded when he heard about that plan and once again threatened to resign. This standoff awaited the president’s return from his speaking tour.

Joseph Ruggles Wilson: The father whose good looks his son wished he had inherited

Janet Woodrow Wilson: The mother whom many thought her son resembled physically and emotionally

Tommy Wilson, 1873: The earliest known photograph of Wilson, age sixteen

Thomas Woodrow Wilson, 1879: About to graduate from the College of New Jersey, known then familiarly as “Princeton” and later renamed Princeton University

The Alligators, Princeton, 1879: An eating club that Wilson joined as a sophomore—he is the student doffing his hat.

The Johns Hopkins Glee Club, 1883: Wilson, as a first-year graduate student, is in the back row, with the flowing mustache.

Ellen Louise Axson, 1881: The Presbyterian minister’s daughter from Rome, Georgia, with whom Wilson fell in love almost at first sight

Ellen Louise Axson, 1883: At the time of her engagement to Wilson, who was about to depart for Johns Hopkins

Jessie and Margaret Woodrow Wilson, early 1890s: The older two of the three Wilson daughters

Princeton faculty members with Grover Cleveland, early 1900s: Retired to Princeton after leaving the White House and a trustee of the university, Cleveland sits directly behind Wilson; to the left in the row above Cleveland sit Wilson’s two closest friends, John Grier Hibben (far left) and his brother-in-law Stockton Axson (middle left).

An academic procession at Princeton with Andrew Carnegie: Despite assiduous wooing that stressed Princeton’s Scottish heritage, Wilson succeeded only in getting Carnegie to endow a lake for rowing.

Defeat, 1910: Wilson on his way to his last commencement as president of Princeton, just after learning his opponents had received a large bequest, prompting him to say, “We have beaten the living, but we can’t beat the dead.”

With Mrs. Peck, 1908: On Bermuda, where Wilson met the divorced Mary Allen Hulbert Peck and entered into a relationship that included emotional intimacy and may or may not have become a short-lived affair

On the road to the White House, 1912: On the golf course at Sea Girt, New Jersey, with Joseph P. Tumulty (middle), his ever-loyal secretary and political helpmeet, Wilson hears news from the Democratic National Convention in Baltimore, where he was about to win the nomination for president.

The nominee and his family, 1912: Wilson and Ellen at Sea Girt, soon after learning of his nomination; behind them stand (left to right) Jessie, Eleanor (Nell), and Margaret.

On the campaign trail, 1912: No aloof academic, Wilson relished being on the campaign trail, as he had shown earlier while running for governor of New Jersey.

The First Lady and her daughters, 1913: Ellen Wilson on the White House portico with Jessie, Margaret, and Nell

President Wilson, 1913: At his desk in his office at the White House, already deep into the business of leadership

The Scholar in Politics, 1913: “President Wilson Visits Congress,” by the English caricaturist Max Beerbohm. Editorial cartoonists often depicted Wilson in a mortarboard cap and an academic gown, sometimes kindly, sometimes not. (DEPARTMENT OF RARE BOOKS AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, FIRESTONE LIBRARY, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY)

With Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, 1913: Despite differences in background and temperament, Wilson and Bryan worked well together until the sinking of the Lusitania raised the threat of the United States’ being dragged into World War I.

With Colonel House, 1914: The outwardly mild-mannered Texan Edward M. House formed an intimate bond with Wilson immediately after Wilson’s election to the presidency and kept a diary that emphasized his own influence. Wilson wears a black armband because this photograph was taken shortly after Ellen’s death.

Edith Bolling Galt, 1915: The official engagement photograph of the stylish Washington widow whom Wilson wooed and wed in 1915

Wilson, by John Singer Sargent, 1917: While he sat for this portrait, Wilson found conversing with the painter hard work, and Edith disliked the finished product. But his closest friend from their student days at Princeton, Bob Bridges, told “Tommy” that he liked it “hugely. I can see you getting ready to tell a story.” (NATIONAL GALLERY OF IRELAND)

Wilson, by Sir William Orpen, 1919: The official artist of the British delegation painted this portrait toward the end of the peace conference. Some people, including Colonel House, preferred this to the portrait by Sargent. (WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION)

At a baseball game with Edith Galt, autumn 1915: For their first outing in public after announcing their engagement, Wilson chose to take Edith to a baseball game, which also attested to his lifelong love of that sport.

Peacemaking, 1919: The “Big Four” in the study of Wilson’s temporary quarters in Paris: (seated, left to right) Premier Vittorio Orlando of Italy, Prime Minister David Lloyd George of Great Britain, Premier Georges Clemenceau of France, and President Wilson; (standing, left to right) Count Luigi Aldrovandi, the official Italian interpreter; Sir Maurice Hankey, secretary to the British cabinet and official note-taker; and Professor Paul Mantoux, the official French interpreter

Final colloquy at Versailles, 1919: Wilson in an exchange with Clemenceau just after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles; between them stands Dr. Cary T. Grayson (in uniform), Wilson’s physician; behind Clemenceau stands Ray Stannard Baker (in straw hat), press secretary to the American delegation to the peace conference and later Wilson’s biographer; behind Wilson, leaning over, stands Arthur James Balfour, the British foreign secretary.

The ravages of the League fight, 1919: At the end of his aborted speaking tour, Wilson walking through Union Station in Washington, four days before he suffered a massive stroke

Wilson with Isaac Scott, 1923: Living as an invalid on S Street in Washington after leaving the White House, Wilson depended heavily on Edith; her brother John Randolph Bolling, who served as his secretary; and Isaac Scott, his valet.

Wilson on his birthday, December 28, 1923: The last photograph taken of Wilson, riding in the open-topped Rolls-Royce given him by a group of wealthy friends and admirers; he died a little more than a month later.

The choice between these two men and their respective plans was not a hard one for Wilson. He had never felt close to Garrison, and since Bryan’s resignation he had found the secretary of war’s pretensions to premier-like status in the cabinet increasingly irksome. Garrison made the choice easier by drawing a line in the sand against not only Hay’s National Guard plan but also efforts in the Senate to speed up the proposed timetable for Philippine independence. Disagreement on either matter would be, Garrison told the president, “not only divergent but utterly irreconcilable.” This was tough talk, but thanks to having made his speaking tour, Wilson had less to fear now from Garrison’s presumed following among preparedness advocates. In consultation with Tumulty, he drafted an artful reply to Garrison. He sidestepped the Philippine matter and stated that it would be “a very serious mistake to shut the door” on Hay’s alternative to the Continental Army. He also reminded Garrison that he did not “at all agree with … favoring compulsory enlistment for training”: a draft, the political hot potato that no major figure but Roosevelt would touch. Garrison responded by offering his resignation, and Wilson allowed him to go “because it is so evidently your desire to do so.”¹⁰ He directed Tumulty to release their exchange of letters to the press, together with the preceding correspondence about the Continental Army.

Garrison’s resignation had the air-clearing effect Wilson hoped for. Hay thanked him on behalf of his committee and pledged their cooperation, and the choice of Garrison’s successor enhanced these newfound good feelings. At the beginning of March, Wilson named Newton D. Baker, the mayor of Cleveland, whom Wilson had earlier tried to enlist to serve as his secretary or fill a cabinet post. A short man with horn-rimmed glasses, Baker enjoyed a stellar reputation among Democrats and other progressives. His appointment raised some controversy when reporters unearthed statements in which he called himself a pacifist and opposed increased preparedness. Those revelations actually helped smooth the way for the army bill in the House, however, where it passed later in March by the lopsided margin of 402 to 2, with even Kitchin and other Bryanites voting in favor. The Senate subsequently resurrected a modified Continental Army and added a government-owned factory to manufacture nitrates for munitions—another scheme to take profits away from big business. In May, with Wilson mediating between the chambers, the House bill largely prevailed, but the nitrate plant stayed in, with the president’s backing. This was a huge legislative victory. Wilson had won a huge political fight and, thereby, taken a giant step toward proving that he, not Bryan, was master of the Democratic Party.¹¹

Before he won that fight, however, he had to beat back another, still graver, threat from Bryan and his followers on Capitol Hill. During the second half of February, panic swept through Congress in reaction to rumors of impending intervention in the world war. The spark that ignited the hysteria emanated from other negotiations that Lansing had been conducting since the beginning of the year. Recurring tensions with Germany over the submarines, combined with persistent though less threatening friction with Britain over the blockade, impelled Lansing to grasp at an expedient to solve the underlying problems finally. With Wilson’s approval, he broached the idea of what he called a modus vivendi—a scheme whereby the Germans would abandon surprise submarine attacks and the British would stop arming their merchant ships. Reporters soon got wind of the idea, and support for it grew in the press and in Congress. The British, however, bristled at the scheme, and the Germans appeared bent on using their submarines without restraint. House cabled from London to urge delay until his return: “I cannot emphasize the importance of this.” After discussion in the cabinet the next day, Wilson had Lansing announce withdrawal of the modus vivendi.¹²

Many representatives and senators believed that the administration was abandoning a promising idea and risking war. Representative Jeff McLemore of Texas, a Bryanite, introduced a resolution in the House to warn citizens not to travel on armed merchant vessels, while Senator Thomas Gore of Oklahoma, another Bryanite, demanded a vote on a resolution he had introduced earlier to forbid Americans to travel on ships of belligerent nations. In an effort to head off a confrontation, Wilson asked three leading congressional Democrats—Senator William J. Stone of Missouri, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee; Senator John W. Kern of Indiana, the majority leader; and Representative Hal Flood of Virginia, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee—to come to the White House late in the afternoon of February 21. The meeting did not go well. The president condemned the Gore and McLemore resolutions, affirmed Britain’s right to arm ships, and maintained his tough line against German submarine attacks. According to one newspaper account, Senator Stone reacted by beating his fist on a table and asking, “Mr. President, would you draw a shutter over my eyes and my intellect? You have no right to ask me to follow such a course.”¹³ Despite that outburst, Stone and the others agreed to try to calm fears among their colleagues.

Their efforts did not succeed. In the House, pressure grew for a vote on the McLemore resolution, with predictions that it would pass handily. Speaker Clark and majority leader Kitchin asked for a meeting of their own with the president. On the morning on February 25, Wilson met with them, accompanied by Flood, for what came to be called the Sunrise Conference. The Speaker warned that the McLemore resolution might pass by a two- or three-to-one margin, and he or one of the others asked what would happen if a submarine attacked an armed ship with Americans aboard. “I believe we should sever diplomatic relations,” Wilson answered. Pressed further, he added that Germany would then declare war, which might lead to an earlier end to the world war. Clark objected to that remark and warned that the president could count on his support only so long as he believed the administration was not seeking war. According to one newspaper account, Wilson retorted that people had jeered and sneered at him for his efforts to keep the peace: “In God’s name, could anyone have done more than I to show a desire for peace.”¹⁴

Meanwhile, on February 24, with assistance from Tumulty, he had sent Senator Stone a public letter in which he affirmed that he would do everything possible to stay out of the war but stuck to his hard line on the submarines. He would not accept any abridgment of American citizens’ rights: “Once accept a single abatement of right and many other humiliations would follow.” Diplomacy as well as party politics moved him to take this line. Reports from Berlin indicated that the Germans were on the verge of expanding their submarine attacks, and the president was trying to warn them off. Next, he decided to force a showdown in the House. Addressing a public letter on February 29 to the second-ranking Democrat on the House Rules Committee, in the absence of the chairman (who was out of town), he asked for an early vote on the McLemore resolution. It was a bold stroke—too bold for his party’s congressional leaders, who trooped to the White House to urge delay. Wilson stood his ground and tightened the screws by dispatching the most politically potent cabinet members, Burleson and McAdoo, to the Capitol. They carried with them a handwritten letter from the president asking congressmen to relieve “the present embarrassment of the Administration” by defeating the McLemore resolution: “No other course would meet the necessities of the case.”¹⁵

These moves did the trick. The Senate acted first. That same day, March 2, Gore intensified the debate by charging that at the Sunrise Conference the president had said he wanted war. Wilson fired back by labeling such reports “too grotesquely false to deserve credence for a moment.” The next day, Senate debate degenerated into a muddle when Gore perversely struck a critical “not” from his resolution to make it state that submarine attacks “would constitute a just and sufficient cause of war.” Just 14 senators voted against tabling—in effect voting for—the resolution. Only 2 Democrats, James O’Gorman of New York and George Chamberlain of Oregon, joined 12 Republicans, nearly all of them midwesterners and westerners who opposed increased preparedness. Several Democrats who favored the resolution, including Stone and Gore himself, voted to table it. Some claimed the situation was too confused, while others said they did not want to embarrass the president. In all, 68 senators—48 Democrats, 19 Republicans, and the 1 Progressive—voted to table the Gore resolution.¹⁶

The House disposed of the McLemore resolution in a more straightforward way. During seven hours of debate on March 7, a parade of Democrats declared that they favored the idea behind the resolution but would vote to table it because, as one said, “the question presented in this context is whether we shall stand by the President in this crisis or not.” The motion to table carried almost two to one: 276 to 142. Only 32 Democrats opposed tabling, while 181 backed the administration, including Kitchin and others close to Bryan. Also voting to table were 94 Republicans and 1 Progressive. By contrast, 104 Republicans, 5 Progressives, and the House’s lone Socialist opposed tabling. The Republican split was mainly sectional, with the number of northeasterners for tabling and the number of midwesterners against nearly equal; many of the midwesterners represented districts with substantial numbers of German Americans. This division embarrassed Republican hard-liners toward Germany, such as Lodge, who up to now had appeared to speak for their party on the issue. The Progressives’ votes were even more embarrassing to Roosevelt.¹⁷

These votes in Congress marked a political triumph for Wilson, and everyone knew whom he had beaten. Bryan had rushed to Washington to rally his cohorts on Capitol Hill behind the resolutions, and he was particularly active, along with German American organizations, in lobbying congressmen before the House vote. Wilson closely followed the debates from the White House, but he refrained from public comment. He did talk privately about Bryan on the day of the House vote, during a late-afternoon drive with Edith and House, who had just returned from Britain. “He seems to have come to a parting of the ways with Mr. Bryan,” House wrote. “We thought that the real cause of Bryan’s displeasure was that the President is standing for a second term.”¹⁸ Bryan put a good face on what happened in the Capitol, stating that the debates showed that Congress and the people did not want war. He was whistling in the dark. The votes proved that Wilson was undisputed master of the Democratic Party, and Bryan knew it. The House votes on the army bill later in March would reaffirm the president’s primacy.

Behind this whole business lay some tortuous, delicate diplomacy that Wilson did not believe he could disclose. The reason House had insisted so vehemently on dropping the modus vivendi was that he was on his second wartime mission to Europe and in the midst of negotiations that he thought could change the course of history. As soon as his ship docked in New York, on March 5, the colonel took the train to Washington, and he met with the president the next day. He carried with him a document he had drawn up two weeks earlier with Foreign Secretary Grey. Later known as the House-Grey Memorandum, the document stated, purportedly in Grey’s words, “Colonel House told me that President Wilson was ready, upon hearing from France and England that the moment was opportune, to propose that a Conference should be summoned to put an end to the war. Should the Allies accept this proposal and should Germany refuse it, the United States would probably enter the war against Germany.” The memorandum also offered assurances that this conference “would secure peace on terms not unfavourable to the Allies; and that, if it failed to secure peace, the United States would leave the Conference as a belligerent on the side of the Allies.” The “not unfavourable” peace terms included restoration of Belgium, return of Alsace and Lorraine to France, and a warm-water outlet to the sea for Russia.¹⁹

On its face, the House-Grey Memorandum encapsulated a breathtakingly bold initiative to end the war by means of mediation or intervention by the United States. It appeared to justify House’s growing reputation as a visionary strategist and adroit diplomatist. His self-styled “Great Adventure” seemed to be bearing fruit with actions that could bring untold good to the world and, as he kept telling Wilson, would make the president’s name shine brightly down through the ages. Yet as in so much involving House, the difficulty lies in figuring out what this scheme really amounted to. Did other people take the plan as seriously as House did? Most important, did he intend this memorandum to be an invitation to mediation or a pretext for intervention?²⁰

The colonel showed himself at his best and his worst on the mission. He spent nearly two months shuttling among the capitals of the main belligerents, London, Paris, and Berlin, but he passed the bulk of his time in London. In each city, he operated almost entirely on his own, communicating directly with Wilson by letter or by telegram in the private code the two men had devised a year earlier. He treated the American ambassadors there correctly, but he tried to involve only one of them in his contacts with foreign officials: in London, he attempted to draw in Page, who had been a friend of his in southern expatriate circles in New York and whose appointment he had helped to arrange. Page, however, had grown so ardently pro-Allied that he told House bluntly that he would have no part in his schemes. Page scorned the venture as “mere aloof moonshine.” Nor was this House’s first clash with Page. On the colonel’s mission to Europe the previous year, he had enlisted a junior diplomat in the embassy, Clifford Carver, to work behind Page’s back, and they took to referring to the ambassador in their correspondence as P.O.P.—Poor Old Page. This was an example of the antics that later prompted Daniels’s son Jonathan to say of House, “He was an intimate man even when he was cutting a throat.”²¹

In his dealings with the British, the colonel began to display the skill and sensitivity as a negotiator that led some to admire him as America’s ablest diplomat. The main object of his attentions and persuasion was Grey. With this hawk-nosed, nature-loving, melancholy widower, the colonel forged a bond that resembled the one between him and Wilson. His letters to Grey and diary entries about meetings with him took on the same intimate, ingratiating tone he used with the president. The colonel also met and got on well with other British leaders, including the strongman of the cabinet and soon-to-be prime minister, David Lloyd George, and the man who would later succeed Grey as foreign secretary, Arthur James Balfour. But nothing approached his closeness to Grey, without which the House-Grey Memorandum would not have come to pass. Therein lay one of the major flaws in this undertaking. As he often did with Wilson, House let his personal feelings and sense of his own importance get out of hand. In Grey’s case, he seemed to forget that he was dealing with the diplomatic leader of a foreign power—someone who had his nation’s interests to maintain and who operated under powerful constraints. House did not deceive himself about Grey’s affection for him, but he did exaggerate both the foreign secretary’s commitment to this scheme and his willingness and ability to sway others in his government.²²

Another defect in this undertaking lay in the way House represented it to the Allies and to Wilson. In both London and Paris, he stressed how his plan might facilitate American intervention. The French foreign minister, Jules-Martin Cambon, noted that House told him that if France cooperated, “inevitably America will enter the war, before the end of the year, and will align herself on the side of the Allies. … This statement from Colonel House astonished me. I had him repeat it and, after having noted it in English, I had him read it. He said to me: ‘exactly.’” To Wilson, House reported simply—in a letter, not a telegram—that he had “most interesting and satisfactory talks” with Cambon, “quite freely outlining the entire situation as it seems to me.” House also talked differently to Allied leaders and Wilson on the subject of peace terms. Just before he left on this mission, he assured the president that he would not get into issues involving territorial demands or financial indemnities. Wilson likewise instructed House to avoid such matters and stated, “The only possible guarantees … are (a) military and naval disarmament and (b) a league of nations to secure each nation against aggression and maintain the absolute freedom of the seas.” In fairness to House, it should be noted that Wilson’s only other guidance was encapsulated in these words: “You ask me for instructions as to what attitude and tone you are to take at the several capitals. I feel that you do not need any.”²³

Yet House plunged into just the matters that Wilson had instructed him, and he had pledged, to avoid. The references in the House-Grey Memorandum to Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine, and Russia came after extensive discussion of those and comparable subjects, including an independent Poland, a dissolved Ottoman Empire, a consideration of Italian ambitions at the expense of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the disposition of German colonies in Africa. As for the items Wilson specified, House dropped “freedom of the seas” as soon as the British predictably scorned this “German” notion, he did not raise disarmament, and he talked about a league of nations rarely and only with Grey. In his letters to Wilson, House did not tell the president much about what he was discussing and mainly touted British and sometimes French receptivity toward mediation. “A great opportunity is yours, my friend,” he exulted from Paris, “the greatest perhaps that has ever come to any man. The way out seems clear to me, and when I can lay the facts before you, I believe it will be clear to you also.”²⁴

The same day that he gushed to Wilson from Paris, House met again with Cambon and the French premier, Aristide Briand, to whom he sang a different tune. He assured them of American intentions to intervene either peaceably or militarily, in order to secure a peace that would favor the Allies. He also discussed Alsace-Lorraine, Turkey, and Armenia, and said he wanted Britain, France, and the United States to work together after the war. Cambon noted that House also stressed “the secrecy which he wanted to surround his statements.” His statements were so secret that he would not share them with his friend and boss, the president. Small wonder that Jonathan Daniels would also later call him “that devious son-of-a-bitch Colonel House” and “a porcelain chamber pot full of shit.”²⁵

What did the respective parties—Wilson and the British—make of these doings of House’s? The colonel noted, after delivering the memorandum to Wilson on March 6, “[T]he president placed his arm around my shoulders and said: ‘I cannot adequately express to you my admiration and gratitude for what you have done.’” When House showed him the memorandum, Wilson “accepted it in toto only suggesting that the word ‘probably’ be inserted in the ninth line after the word [‘would’] and before the word ‘leave[‘].”²⁶

A world of difference supposedly hung on that word probably, inserted in the clause “the United States would leave the Conference as a belligerent on the side of the Allies.” Lloyd George would later claim that Grey believed this addition “completely changed the character of the proposal” and therefore did not communicate it to the other Allies: “The world was once more sacrificed to the timidity of statesmanship.” That claim was totally wrong. The memorandum stated earlier that “the United States would probably enter the war against Germany.” So Wilson’s reiteration of probably simply underlined the plain meaning of the document. Nor did Grey react to probably, and he did pass the memorandum on to at least one Ally when he gave a copy to the French ambassador. The British had no reason to be surprised by Wilson’s insertion. Their soon-to-be-famous intelligence operation, Room 40 of the Admiralty, was tapping the American embassy’s cables and had broken both the regular diplomatic codes and House and Wilson’s amateurish “private” cipher. The British therefore knew that House was representing the situation differently to them and to Wilson. This Texan was playing poker with people who could read his cards. Also, Grey did pursue the matter further later in March, when he presented the memorandum to the cabinet War Committee; it was rejected there by nearly everybody, especially Lloyd George, with only Grey himself meekly suggesting the possibility of considering the plan.²⁷

Wilson’s probably was significant only as a window onto his thinking about House’s scheme. It showed that he did not regard that part of the House-Grey Memorandum as a veiled promise to come into the war but, rather, as an objective description of the state of relations with Germany. Despite his words of affectionate praise for House, he did not view the memorandum in the same world-shaking light that the colonel did. Other matters—such as the conflicts on Capitol Hill over preparedness and travel on armed ships, together with flare-ups in Mexico and in the submarine crisis—would relegate House’s scheme to the back burner. Ironically, the biggest effect of the House-Grey Memorandum on Wilson may have been to enhance the colonel’s standing in his eyes as a negotiator.

For Wilson, the month of March 1916 brought troubles in the proverbial threes. The first had been having to beat back the congressional revolt over travel on belligerent ships. The last would be the most dangerous round yet in the submarine dispute. In between, the violence in Mexico spilled over into the United States. In the predawn hours of March 9, Pancho Villa led a force of several hundred Mexicans in an attack on the border town of Columbus, New Mexico. Their main target was Camp Furlong, a U.S. Army garrison, which was caught by surprise because commanders in the area had discounted warnings of a possible raid. At the garrison, Villa and his men mistook the stables for the barracks and killed a number of horses. Their mistake gave the Americans time to set up machine guns and bring the Mexicans under heavy fire. Falling back, the marauders rampaged through the small, ramshackle town of Columbus. Yelling “Viva Villa!” and “Viva Mexico!” they shot wildly into houses and at any civilians they saw and set the town’s hotel on fire. Within an hour, a detachment of U.S. cavalry arrived from another post and chased the raiders back across the border. The fighting lasted less than three hours. It left eight American civilians and seven American soldiers dead and two civilians and five soldiers wounded; sixty-seven Mexicans were killed, and seven were wounded and taken prisoner.²⁸

News of the attack reached the White House within two hours. Wilson immediately decided to send a military force across the border in pursuit of Villa and his band. Lansing informed the diplomatic representative of the Mexican Constitutionalists of the president’s intention, and messages went out to the department’s agents who were assigned to keep in touch with the Constitutionalist leader, Carranza. The cabinet met the following day and discussed the incident; everyone present supported the president’s decision, although there was discussion of asking Carranza’s permission to enter Mexico—an idea that was rejected. After the meeting, Wilson had Tumulty issue a two-sentence statement to the press: “An adequate force will be sent at once in pursuit of Villa with the single object of capturing him and putting a stop to his forays. This can and will be done in entirely friendly aid of the constituted authorities in Mexico and with scrupulous respect for the sovereignty of that Republic.”²⁹

That statement captured the dilemma Wilson faced. On the one hand, this was an attack on American soil—the first one since the War of 1812—and it had to be answered forcefully. Outrage predictably flared on Capitol Hill and in newspapers across the country, but Wilson did not wait to gauge opinion when he told reporters that he was sending troops. Immediately after the cabinet meeting on March 10, an order went out from the War Department for a force under the command of Brigadier General John J. Pershing to pursue the marauders who had attacked Columbus. On the other hand, even a limited invasion, which was the way Mexicans of all persuasions would see Pershing’s pursuit, might ignite a nationalist backlash. That was Villa’s main motive behind this provocation—to foment outrage among his countrymen in order to strengthen his hand in his fight with Carranza. For Wilson, such a reaction would undo his months of restraint in the face of demands for intervention and his low-keyed encouragement of democracy and order in Mexico, for which Carranza’s side seemed to offer the best hope. References to “constituted authorities” and “scrupulous regard” for sovereignty in the War Department orders were meant to reassure the Constitutionalists.³⁰ Likewise, Pershing’s orders forbade any clashes with Carranza’s forces and stipulated withdrawal as soon as Mexicans could deal with Villa.

What followed was a frustrating and nerve-racking year of diplomatic and military controversy. Once more, there was danger of full-scale war between the United States and Mexico. The flash point lay not with Villa but in relations with Carranza, who proved as difficult as ever to deal with. At the outset, it looked as if he might refuse to sanction American forces entering Mexico. Yet despite his lofty talk about Mexican sovereignty, Carranza put up no real resistance. After all, the Constitutionalists would profit from Villa’s death or capture so long as they themselves did not appear to be American puppets. General Pershing’s force of, initially, 4,000 officers and men, which came to be called the Punitive Expedition, crossed the border on March 15 and quickly drove deep into Mexico.³¹

The deeper the expedition penetrated, the more Mexicans suspected that the dreaded Yanquis were bent on conquest, thereby increasing the chances for clashes with civilians or Constitutionalist troops. An incident occurred early in April when a mob attacked a cavalry unit in the town of Parral. In the ensuing melee, two Americans were killed and six wounded, while somewhere between 40 and 100 Mexicans died. For a while, it looked as if Pershing might fight with Constitutionalist forces in the area. A month later, a band of Mexican irregulars crossed the Rio Grande and attacked two settlements in Texas, killing a boy and taking two prisoners. American cavalry units pursued those raiders 180 miles into Mexico and killed some bandits. The most frightening incident took place on June 21 near the town of Carrizal, when two U.S. Cavalry units attacked Constitutionalist troops and were beaten back. Fourteen Americans were killed and twenty-three captured, and thirty Mexicans died and forty-three were wounded. The situation was growing intolerable. At Wilson’s initiative and with Carranza’s concurrence, a mediation commission was appointed, consisting of three representatives of each country. The mediators met first in New London, Connecticut, and later in Philadelphia and Atlantic City, New Jersey, for eight months of fractious, wearying negotiations. At long last, early in 1917, those negotiations led to withdrawal of the Punitive Expedition and diplomatic recognition of Carranza’s government.

The pursuit of Villa turned into a farce. Many Americans viewed him through the distorting lens of an ethnic stereotype: Pancho seemed to personify the lazy but wily, capriciously violent but slightly comical Mexican bandido later featured in innumerable Hollywood films; actually, for all his criminality and cruelty, he was a serious revolutionary leader. An American force that eventually numbered more than 7,000—equipped with the latest in military technology, including motor vehicles and airplanes—chased Villa through northern Mexico for months and never caught him. He regrouped his forces and captured the capital of Chihuahua in September 1916 and did not begin to lose his power until Carranza’s forces inflicted a decisive defeat on his forces in January 1917. Villa lived on until 1923, when he met the fate of most of the leaders of Mexico’s revolution, including Carranza—assassination. The best that can be said for the Punitive Expedition is that it provided the U.S. Army with timely experience in the field and that its commander, the obdurate Black Jack Pershing, kept his reputation intact and remained in line for higher command.³²

Wilson resisted intense pressure to go to war in Mexico. On March 15, the day the expedition crossed the border, Tumulty told him that members of the cabinet did not believe he was acting forcefully enough. Wilson answered, “I shall be held responsible for every drop of blood that may be spent in the enterprise of intervention,” and he told Tumulty to say to those cabinet members “that ‘there won’t be any war with Mexico if I can prevent it,’ no matter how loud the gentlemen on the hill yell for it and demand it.” He was not going to send “some poor farmer’s boy, or the son of some poor widow” to fight “unless I have exhausted every means to keep out of this mess.” He also worried about the Mexicans, who were fighting “the age-old struggle of a people to come into their own. … Poor Mexico, with its pitiful men, women, and children, fighting to gain a foothold in their own land.” As for talk about valor, he maintained, “Valour is self-respecting. Valour is circumspect. Valour strikes only when it is right to strike.” Tumulty’s recollection almost certainly embellished what Wilson said, but those remarks—with their echoes of “too proud to fight”—captured Wilson’s state of mind as American forces went into Mexico.³³

The armed clashes in Mexico did not change his thinking. On May 11, after the raid in Texas and the ensuing war scare, he talked off the record with the journalist Ray Stannard Baker, who noted, “He said his Mexican policy was based upon two of the most deeply seated convictions of his life: first his shame as an American over the first Mexican war & his resolution that while he was president there should be no such predatory war; Second upon his belief … that a people had the right ‘to do as they damned pleased with their own affairs’ (He used the word ‘damned’).” He also felt ashamed over the part played by the American ambassador in the overthrow of Madero in 1913 and thought the worst source of trouble lay with Americans “who wanted the oil & metals of Mexico & were seeking intervention to get them.” In addition, he gave Baker a novel reason not to go to war with Mexico—namely, that he “[d]id not want one hand tied behind him at the very moment the nation might need all its forces to meet the German situation”—and he believed that pacifying Mexico would take at least half a million troops.³⁴

When he talked to Tumulty and Baker, Wilson was airing his views in strict confidence, but he also voiced such thoughts publicly. Speaking in New York at the end of June, after the Carrizal incident, he charged that “a war of conquest in Mexico” would bring no glory and any “violence by a powerful nation against this weak and distracted neighbor” would add no distinction to the United States. He observed that the letters he was getting contained “but one prayer … ‘Mr. President, do not allow anybody to persuade you that the people of this country want war with anybody.’” He related that when he got off the train that had brought him to New York, the engineer had said to him, “Mr. President, keep us out of Mexico.” He also noted that Napoleon had once said that force never accomplished anything permanent.³⁵

Those convictions and the resolve to stick to them prevented the Mexican situation from escalating into war. In the upcoming presidential campaign, Democrats would trumpet the slogan “He kept us out of war.” Many people at the time and nearly all interpreters since then have assumed the slogan referred to the war in Europe. In fact, campaign material would mention Mexico more often, and Wilson did deserve credit for staying out of war there. He may have let his domestic progressive prejudices get out of hand when he saw only nefarious financial influences behind agitation for intervention, but he did not mistake how strong and widespread popular opposition was. In New York, when he asked whether war with Mexico would bring glory to America, his listeners—more than 600 journalists and businessmen—shouted, “No!” In coming days, a flood of approving letters and telegrams swamped the White House mail room. Contrary to what critics such as Roosevelt charged, Wilson’s reluctance to go to war did not spring from any trace of timidity or tinge of pacifism. He believed it took more courage to stay out of war than to go in, and no pacifist could have said valor meant striking “when it is right to strike.” House noted that Wilson’s “determination not to allow Germany to force him into intervention in Mexico could account for this.”³⁶ The comment to Baker also showed that he was thinking along those lines, and at the same time that he was reluctant to go to war in Mexico, he came close to risking war with Germany.

On March 24, a German submarine torpedoed the Sussex, a French steamer carrying passengers and cargo in the English Channel. Though heavily damaged, the Sussex did not sink and was towed into port at Boulogne. Eighty people were killed or injured, including four Americans who were hurt. On a much smaller scale, the incident was eerily reminiscent of the Lusitania. Wilson greeted the news with the same outward show of calm as he had shown earlier. He and Edith played golf together on Saturday morning and went for a long automobile ride in the afternoon. On Sunday, the president attended church, took another drive with the First Lady, and had dinner at her mother’s house.³⁷ Newspapers also carried the news that his daughter Jessie had given birth to her second child, a daughter, who was named Eleanor Axson Sayre.

The major difference in the way Wilson approached this crisis—besides having Edith openly and constantly at his side—lay with his advisers. In place of Bryan’s implacable inclination toward peace now came peremptory advice from Lansing to follow a course that would lead to war. “I do not see how we can avoid taking some decisive action,” he told the president. “We can no longer temporize in the matter of submarine warfare.” House was on the scene too, as he rushed to Washington to try, in his softer way, to push in the same direction. He countered Wilson’s worries about war by offering to go to Europe again to coordinate planning with the Allies for the peace settlement; Wilson seemed “visibly pleased at my suggestion and I believe will now be more inclined to act.” The colonel again overestimated his influence. As usual, Wilson kept his own counsel. Lansing drafted a diplomatic note that had a harsh tone and presented two alternatives: severing diplomatic relations at once or threatening to do so unless the Germans abandoned submarine attacks against all merchant ships. When the cabinet discussed the situation two days later, everyone reportedly agreed that an ultimatum was called for. After taking an overnight cruise with Edith on the Mayflower, Wilson worked all weekend—including again, unusually for him, on Sunday—to produce his own draft. He softened Lansing’s language but still condemned sneak submarine attacks as inhumane and contrary to international law, and threatened to break relations unless such attacks ceased.³⁸

This draft sparked almost as much internal dissension as the first Lusitania notes had done, but with the opposite slant. On April 11, House met with Wilson and Edith and objected to the draft as only opening the way for more argument with the Germans. Wilson stood firm, but he cut out a sentence about hoping for an amicable outcome and added the word immediately to the demand for cessation of submarine attacks without warning. According to House, Edith also thought the draft was weak. Wilson denied that it was, and he reminded them that he had promised Senator Stone that he would not break relations without informing Congress first. Lansing likewise tried to inject a more threatening tone, and he again resorted to his old tricks. He did not pass on to Wilson a message from the German foreign minister to Bernstorff that hinted at conciliation, and he did not tell Wilson about a meeting at which the ambassador was conciliatory.³⁹

At the same time, the president had to deal with Congress and the public. On April 13, he gave a Jefferson Day speech to Democrats in Washington. Again, mindful of “too proud to fight,” he stuck mostly to domestic matters, sounding a strongly progressive note, and touched only once, cryptically, on foreign affairs: “God forbid that we should ever become directly or indirectly embroiled in quarrels not of our own choosing. … But if we should ever be drawn in, are you ready to go in only where the interests of America are concerned with the interests of mankind and to draw out the moment the interest centers in America and is narrowed from the wide circle of humanity?”⁴⁰ Yet he knew he had to be more specific with Congress. He honored the letter of his promise to Stone, though just barely. The diplomatic note to Germany was sent at the end of the day on April 18, and at ten o’clock the next morning he met with Stone, Congressman Flood, and the ranking Republicans on their committees to tell them the contents of the note.

At noon on that day, Wilson went to the Capitol and delivered a sixteen-minute address to a joint session of Congress. Comparing the attack on the Sussex to the sinking of the Lusitania as “singularly tragical and unjustifiable,” he declared that he had regretfully decided to threaten to break relations because he recognized “that we are in some sort and by the force of circumstances the responsible spokesmen of the rights of humanity, and that we cannot remain silent while those rights seem in process of being swept utterly away in the maelstrom of this terrible war.” The assembled senators and representatives sat in silence throughout the speech, and only at the end was there a little applause, mostly from Democrats. In view of the earlier congressional agitation over travel on belligerent ships, the subdued mood seemed strange. Bryan again came to Washington to rally anti-war congressmen and senators, but he departed after only a day, in a mood of resignation. Predictably, Roosevelt blamed the current crisis on Wilson’s previous weakness in dealing with the submarine threat.⁴¹

Everything now depended on what the Germans decided to do. To nearly universal surprise and relief, they backed down. Heated debates raged within imperial, military, and naval circles. The chancellor, who favored conciliation, threatened to resign. The head of the navy unexpectedly weighed in against unrestricted submarine warfare. He argued that the time was not yet ripe for an all-out campaign and that coming to terms with the Americans would cause trouble for the British blockade. Germany replied with two notes: the first, on May 4, dealt with submarine warfare, and the second, on May 8, apologized for the Sussex attack. The first note pledged to limit submarines to established rules of warfare, which forbade attacks without warning, but it equivocated by stating that the United States should help to get the British to modify the blockade and by reserving the right to resume submarine attacks if that did not happen.⁴²

Many Americans objected to the haughty tone of the German response and its conditions, but Wilson responded to the positive signals while downplaying the unsatisfactory parts. Again breaking his rule of not working on the Sabbath, he spent Sunday, May 7—the anniversary of the sinking of the Lusitania—drafting a reply to the May 4 note. The president expressed his government’s “satisfaction” at the Germans’ decision, and he added that the United States took it for granted that Germany’s new policy did not depend on American negotiations with other nations. Lansing got him to remove the word satisfaction and tone down the reply to a bald statement.⁴³ This version of the reply went to Germany on May 8 and was released to the press the next day. The Germans acquiesced, and the yearlong submarine crisis was over—for the time being.

It was a triumph for Wilson. Whether he really hoped to bring the Germans to heel is not clear. His decision to force their hand was reluctant, and it did not spring from a shrewd reading of their intentions. Neither the embassy in Berlin nor House’s informal network was particularly astute in assessing crosscurrents of opinion in Berlin or at the military headquarters. Wilson may have felt resigned to having to go to war, but unlike House and Lansing, he did not welcome that prospect. He may simply have gotten lucky, but he had shown great patience in seeking a way to satisfy the “double wish.” Ironically, he had succeeded by finally choosing one half over the other—gaining satisfaction from Germany even while risking war. Choruses of praise arose from newspapers and private citizens throughout the country. Wilson deserved their praise, although not as much as he did for keeping out of war in Mexico. This diplomatic triumph would alter the balance of relations with the belligerents. The German naval leader’s hopeful prediction of trouble between the United States and the Allies would soon come true. More important for Wilson, this triumph cleared the way for new initiatives abroad, fewer distractions on the domestic front, and a clearer path toward another four years in the White House.

He did not exult at his good fortune. Besides knowing how differently the confrontation might have gone, Wilson was painfully aware of how fragile and unstable American neutrality remained. On May 8, the same day that his reply to Germany went out, he met at the White House with a group of anti-preparedness leaders, who included the renowned social worker Lillian Wald, the young socialist writer Max Eastman, and the radical Progressive Amos Pinchot. After listening patiently to their arguments and defending his preparedness program, the president asserted, “This is a year of madness. … Now, in these circumstances, it is America’s duty to keep her head.” He wanted not only to keep the bad influences of European power politics out of the Western Hemisphere but also to create a new effort to maintain world peace, in which the United States would “play our proportional part in manifesting the force that is going to be back of that. Now, in the last analysis, the peace of society is obtained by force. … And if you say we shall not have any war, you have got to have force to make that ‘shall’ bite.”⁴⁴

He was edging toward unveiling what he had hinted at earlier: his belief in the league of nations idea. Three days later, in his off-the-record interview with Baker, he said he was thinking about what he could do to promote peace and asked whether he should disclose his ideas to the League to Enforce Peace. That organization, headed by Taft and increasingly known by its initials, LEP (pronounced “el-ee-pee”), had invited the president to speak at its annual dinner in Washington on May 27. Ignoring House’s advice to the contrary, he accepted the invitation and found himself sharing the speaker’s platform with Lodge, who a year earlier had called for “great nations … united” to enforce peace. Wilson struck a properly circumspect pose. He declined to endorse or comment on theLEP’s program and talked instead about how the world war had changed so much. “With its cause and effects we are not concerned,” he maintained, but only with its profound impact on America: “We are participants, whether we would or not, in the life of the world. The interests of all nations are our own also.”⁴⁵

One cause of the war did concern Wilson: “secret counsels” that had forged alliances and resorted to force. The shock and surprise of the war’s onset had shown “that the peace of the world must henceforth rest upon a new and more wholesome diplomacy.” The world’s “great nations” must decide what is “fundamental to their common interest, and as to some feasible method of acting in concert when any nation or group of nations seeks to disturb those fundamental things.” This was an unequivocal endorsement of the league idea. Wilson went further, declaring, “We [Americans] believe in these fundamental things: First, that every people has a right to choose the sovereignty under which they shall live. … Second, that the small states of the world have a right to enjoy the same respect for their sovereignty and for their territorial integrity that great and powerful nations expect and insist upon. And, third, that the world has a right to be free from every disturbance of its peace that has its origin in aggression and disregard of the rights of peoples and nations.” He vowed “that the United States is willing to become a partner in any feasible association of nations formed in order to realize those objects and make them secure against violation.”⁴⁶

Wilson’s circumspect pose could not hide his wonted boldness. Despite endorsing the LEP’s central idea—international enforcement—he said nothing about arbitration or international courts, which Taft and the organization’s other activists, mainly lawyers, stressed. Wilson’s second and third “fundamental things” foreshadowed Article X of the Covenant of the League of Nations, which he would call its “heart,” and he even foreshadowed the language of that article when he called for “a virtual guarantee of territorial integrity and political independence.” He was showing from the outset that he wanted an essentially political league, which differed from the judicial body that LEP leaders envisioned, and he was enunciating the concept that would later come to be called collective security. Likewise, when he deplored “secret counsels” and advocated “a right to choose … sovereignty,” he was foreshadowing elements of his Fourteen Points and other major policy statements, as he did further when he demanded “the inviolate security of the highway of the seas for the common and unhindered use of all the nations of the world.” These ideas would later come to be known as open diplomacy, self-determination, and freedom of the seas. These ideas, together with his demand for equal rights for small nations, put him at odds with some of the LEP leaders and Lodge, who envisioned a great-power directorate to run the world. Furthermore, these ideas put him more in line with liberal and left-wing thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic who wanted sweeping reforms to replace the balance of power, institute disarmament, and promote freedom for subject peoples.⁴⁷

Wilson knew he had taken a bold step. Both Bryan and Roosevelt had been attacking the LEP, though for opposite reasons. Bryan had invoked traditional American isolation, with genuflections to Washington’s Farewell Address and Jefferson’s injunction against “entangling alliances,” and he had condemned the league idea as imperialistic and warmongering. Those arguments had drawn support from some Democrats and Republican insurgents. Wilson strove to reassure his party brethren in his next speech, a Decoration Day address three days later at Arlington National Cemetery. “I shall never consent to an entangling alliance,” he avowed, “but I would gladly assent to a disentangling alliance—an alliance which would disentangle the peoples of the world from those combinations in which they seek their own separate and private interests and unite the peoples of the world to preserve the peace of the world upon a basis of common right and justice.” He was aiming that rhetorical reversal at skeptical Democrats, but he was not retreating. A few days later, he drafted the Democratic platform on which he would run for reelection. In one section, he lifted both the ideas and many of the same words from his speech to the LEP, declaring, “[W]e believe that the time has come when it is the duty of the United States to join with other nations of the world in any feasible association that will effectively serve these principles.”⁴⁸

Wilson’s attempt to bring Democrats on board a more activist, outward-looking foreign policy was an even bolder move than espousal of the league idea. In domestic affairs, he had been going further down a trail that others, especially Bryan, had blazed before him, and he had been taking the party in directions in which most of its members wanted to go. By contrast, in foreign policy he was trying to wean them from a heritage of resistance to overseas commitments and opposition to bigger armed forces—a heritage that Bryan was now distilling into self-conscious isolationism. Left to themselves, a majority of Democrats would most likely have followed the Great Commoner’s lead rather than accept the president’s new course. There was peril for Wilson, but he had advantages. As he had already shown in the preparedness fight, he could appeal to party and patriotic solidarity. Equally important, this was an election year, and the Democrats’ hopes of remaining in power rested with him. Finally, he had long since proved to the more progressive Democrats, who gave the party its ideological lifeblood, that he was one of them and could deliver legislation and appointments that gave them their hearts’ desires.

Domestic issues necessarily took a backseat for Wilson during the first half of 1916, but he did not forget them. In January, he made three moves that signaled a second and more progressive installment of the New Freedom. He reversed himself on two issues on which earlier he had not favored action. One was the tariff. As he had already publicly stated, he now supported an independent commission to investigate and advise on tariff rates, an idea formerly favored mainly by Roosevelt and his Progressives. The other was rural credits. He now brushed aside Secretary of Agriculture Houston’s objections and supported his government lending program for farmers. When the plan’s principal Democratic sponsors, Senator Henry Hollis of New Hampshire and Representative Asbury Lever of South Carolina, came to see him in the White House in late January, the congressman proposed a figure of $3 million. Wilson stunned his visitors by saying, “I have only one criticism of Lever’s proposition, and that is that he is too modest in his amount.” His visitors quickly agreed to double the sum.⁴⁹

Wilson’s final move in January 1916 dramatically gave the strongest proof of his undiminished progressive zeal. On January 28, without warning, he nominated Louis Brandeis to a seat on the Supreme Court. The death of Justice Joseph Lamar three weeks earlier had created the vacancy. It probably helped that House, who had worked assiduously against appointments for Brandeis, was in Europe. Wilson evidently did not consider anyone else. He discussed the nomination only briefly with McAdoo and Attorney General Gregory, who were both enthusiastic, and he mentioned it to Samuel Gompers, the head of the American Federation of Labor, who assured him of the unions’ support. Wilson bypassed the custom of honoring “senatorial courtesy” by not consulting with Lodge and John W. Weeks, the two conservative Republicans who represented Brandeis’s adopted home state of Massachusetts. He did consult with La Follette, who assured him of progressive Republican support. The news of Brandeis’s nomination landed like a bombshell on Capitol Hill. As Taft’s friend and Washington informant Gus Karger reported to the ex-president, “When Brandeis’s nomination came in yesterday, the Senate simply gasped. … There wasn’t any more excitement at the Capitol when Congress passed the Spanish War resolution.”⁵⁰

Those moves in January served as openers to a new legislative campaign. In March, Wilson urged his party’s leaders in Congress to push an ambitious program, and the House Democratic caucus committed itself to new taxation, a tariff commission, shipping regulation, and rural credits. Of those measures, rural credits unexpectedly proved the easiest to pass. Bills cleared both houses in May by lopsided margins, with most Republicans not voting. The tariff commission took longer to pass but excited little debate, as did a bill to establish a commission to regulate maritime shipping. Those measures drew scant attention because by the beginning of the summer the presidential campaign and more heated domestic issues would overshadow them.⁵¹

One domestic matter did stir up a major conflict from the outset—the Brandeis nomination. True to predictions, conservatives and legal traditionalists were apoplectic. Fifty-one leading citizens of Boston, where Brandeis lived and practiced law, issued a public letter that pronounced him lacking the proper temperament to sit on the Supreme Court. Most of the signers were Boston Brahmins, including Harvard’s president, A. Lawrence Lowell. Not everyone at Harvard agreed with Lowell, however. Former president Charles W. Eliot publicly supported Brandeis, as did Roscoe Pound, the dean of the law school, together with nine of the school’s eleven faculty members. A petition in support of Brandeis drew more than 700 signatures from Harvard students. On the other side, seven former presidents of the American Bar Association, including Taft, called Brandeis “unfit” for the Court. In view of Brandeis’s progressive activism and unorthodox legal thinking, such opposition was to be expected.⁵²

Another element in the opposition was anti-Semitism. If confirmed by the Senate, Brandeis would become the first Jew to serve on the Supreme Court and thereby attain the highest public office in the United States yet held by a Jew. No prominent opponent ever publicly stated that Brandeis should not be on the Supreme Court because of his religion, but privately many of them thought so and said so. The use of the word unfit by the president of the bar association also carried a connotation of prejudice. Equally disturbing, in the Senate, La Follette proved to be a poor judge of sentiment among his fellow Republican insurgents. Two who served on the Judiciary Committee, Albert Cummins of Iowa and John Works of California, announced their opposition to the nomination. Some Democrats on the committee also seemed lukewarm. Brandeis did not testify at the Judiciary Committee hearings, although he played an active role behind the scenes in managing the public relations aspect of his nomination. The hearings became a parade of character witnesses for and against him, and his nomination appeared to be stalled in the committee. Some of his supporters privately accused Wilson of failing to act and not wanting the nomination to go through.

Those suspicions were unfounded. Early in May, Wilson intervened with another deft exercise in legislative leadership. Behind the scenes, he worked with Attorney General Gregory and the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Gregory’s friend and fellow Texan Charles A. Culberson, to move things along. By prearrangement, Culberson wrote to ask the president to give his reasons for choosing Brandeis. Wilson responded on May 5 with a long letter, which the chairman read to the committee and released to the press. Calling Brandeis “singularly qualified by learning, by gifts, and by character,” the president dismissed the charges leveled against this nominee as “intrinsically incredible. … He is a friend of all just men and a lover of the right, and he knows more than how to talk about the right—he knows how to set it forward in the face of its enemies.” Wilson recounted Brandeis’s stellar record as a lawyer and praised “his impartial, orderly, and constructive mind, his rare analytical powers, his deep human sympathy. … This friend of justice and of men will ornament the high court of which we are all so justly proud.”⁵³

Wilson’s letter was a masterstroke, but his nominee was not out of the woods. One Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, James Reed of Missouri, had a history of giving the president trouble, and another, John K. Shields of Tennessee, was no friend of his either. Two others, Wilson’s nemesis at the Atlanta bar but more recently his supporter, Hoke Smith of Georgia, and Lee Overman of North Carolina, were also wavering. In response, Wilson had McAdoo, Burleson, and Gregory apply patronage pressure, and he personally courted Shields and Overman. In the latter case, Wilson invited Overman to accompany the presidential party on a trip to North Carolina, and he publicly praised the senator when the train stopped in his hometown.

These tactics worked. On May 24, the Judiciary Committee reported favorably on Brandeis’s nomination. The vote was 10 to 8, strictly along party lines. Besides Cummins and Works, another Republican insurgent, William E. Borah of Idaho, also voted no. On June 1, the full Senate acted without debate in executive session, approving the nomination by a vote of 47 to 22. Only one Democrat, the aged, cranky Francis Newlands of Nevada, voted against Brandeis. Only two Republicans, La Follette and Norris, and the lone Progressive, Miles Poindexter of Washington, crossed party lines to vote in favor. This was an early sign of Republicans’ coming alignment against progressive measures. At the time, however, only joy abounded in reform circles. The president refrained from public comment, but he said privately, “I never signed a commission with such satisfaction as I signed his.” Brandeis’s friend and supporter Norman Hapgood recalled that the president told him, “I can never live up to my Brandeis appointment. There is nobody else who represents the greatest technical ability and professional success with complete devotion to the people’s interest.”⁵⁴ He was right. Besides striking a blow against religious prejudice, he had made his finest and most important appointment. In itself, this was one of Wilson’s greatest contributions to American public life. He had made his deepest bow yet toward progressivism, and he had thrown out a fitting opener to his bid for reelection.

Wilson was at the top of his form as a leader. By the middle of 1916, he had turned the troubles that had faced him into a tide that was leading him on to fortune. He was also happy in his personal life, and he owed most of his happiness to Edith. The newlyweds had settled into a comfortable routine at the White House. They usually woke early for a snack and a round of golf, followed by breakfast at eight. An hour later, the stenographer Charles Swem would come to the upstairs study to take dictation. Edith often stayed to listen. “It was a delight and an education to hear the lucid answers that came with apparently no effort from a mind so well-stored,” she recalled in her memoirs. Then, while her husband spent the morning in his office, she would tend to household management with Mrs. Jaffray and work on her own correspondence with her secretary, Edith Benham. The couple would have lunch together, usually with guests, and following his afternoon stint in the office, they would take a ride. On Saturdays, they often took longer rides, sometimes as far as Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, or they might go on an overnight or weekend cruise on the Mayflower. They saw friends and family as before, and Edith got on well with Wilson’s daughters and other relatives. Grayson remained a special friend, and on May 24 the Wilsons and McAdoos journeyed to New York for his wedding to Altrude Gordon.⁵⁵

Private and official life frequently dovetailed, to Edith’s delight. She enjoyed public functions. Her first White House occasion was in January, when she and the president greeted 3,328 guests at a diplomatic reception. State dinners followed at regular intervals. Edith had a keen fashion sense and chose her ensembles with care on these gala occasions. She accompanied Wilson on the preparedness speaking tour in January and February, and she was with him when he gave most of his speeches at other times. She also paid attention to his appearance. Wilson was already a good dresser, but Edith injected a bit of flair into his wardrobe. Evidence of her touch could be seen on June 14, Flag Day, when the president led a big Preparedness Parade up Pennsylvania Avenue. “How young and vital he looked,” she recalled. “He wore white flannel trousers, a blue sack coat, white shoes, white straw hat, and carried an American flag about a yard and a half long. What a picture, as the breeze caught and carried out the Stars and Stripes!”⁵⁶That day, Woodrow Wilson was marching along the same route that he had ridden three years earlier at his inauguration. He was hitting his stride toward a second inaugural journey along that route.