16

TO RUN AGAIN

When Woodrow Wilson ran for reelection in 1916, he faced a daunting task. The increasing likelihood that the Republicans would heal their breach meant that any Democratic nominee, even an incumbent president, would be an underdog. This predicament reflected hard facts of political geography. Since 1896, the Republicans had enjoyed a lock on the Northeast and Midwest, where the population and number of states gave them a prohibitive edge in electoral votes for president and control of both houses of Congress. The Democrats held on to what Bryan liked to call the Great Crescent—the vast expanse that stretched south and west of the Potomac, Ohio, and Missouri rivers. That expanse contained far fewer people and a smaller number of states, and only in the white supremacist South did the Democrats dominate the way their opponents did in their heartland. The Republicans’ internecine strife in 1910 and seismic rift in 1912 had given the Democrats openings, first to win the House and then to gain all of Congress and the White House. Many of those gains had proved ephemeral, however. In 1914, Republicans bounced back strongly, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest. If that trend continued in 1916, the Democrats would most likely revert to their habitual minority status on Capitol Hill and banishment from the White House.

Those prospects did not dishearten Wilson. With his penchant for boldness, he liked fights against long odds, and not everything about the political scene looked gloomy. His victories in the preparedness struggle, the submarine crisis, Mexico, domestic reform legislation, and the Brandeis nomination underlined the three major themes of his upcoming campaign: peace, preparedness, and progressivism. There was also a fourth p: prosperity. The 1914 elections had occurred during a severe recession, which hit hardest in industrial states from New England to the Great Lakes—the Republican heartland. Now, thanks to stimulus from Allied war orders, the economy was booming, with robust demand for both manufactured goods and agricultural products. Any president and party in power were bound to take credit for prosperity, and Wilson and his Democrats were no exception. Finally, he had a united, enthusiastic party behind him. Bryan was coming back on board: he was an old campaign warhorse unable to resist the call to action, and he wanted to position himself so that he might have influence in the party. In all, Wilson could face the electorate in good spirits.

Of his three main campaign themes, the president wanted most to stress progressivism. In his Jefferson Day speech in April, he indicated his continued commitment to strong central government: “You cannot draw example from the deeds of Thomas Jefferson. … There is no parallel in the circumstances of the times of Thomas Jefferson with the circumstances of the time in which we live.” Shortly afterward, he began drafting the platform on which he and his party would run, and at the beginning of June he received a suggestion that helped give the document a sharper political focus: Senator Owen of Oklahoma urged him to take ideas from the 1912 Progressive platform “as a means of attaching to our party progressive Republicans who are in sympathy with us in so large a degree.”¹ Wilson liked the suggestion and asked Owen to specify the 1912 Progressive ideas to include.

The senator responded by highlighting federal legislation to promote workers’ health and safety, provide unemployment compensation, prohibit child labor, establish minimum wages and maximum hours, and require an eight-hour day and six-day workweek. Wilson, in turn, included in his draft platform a plank calling for all work done by and for the federal government to provide a minimum wage, an eight-hour day and six-day workweek, and health and safety measures and to prohibit child labor, and—his own additions—protections for female workers and a retirement program. That plank also expanded on the government’s efforts to help workers find employment and extend vocational training from agriculture to other work. In addition, he inserted a separate plank that read, “We recommend the extension of the franchise to the women of the country by the states upon the same terms as to men.”²

Wilson did not go as far as Owen, who also favored establishment of a department of health and was the author of a bill to outlaw child labor. The expedient of requiring these measures only in federal employment and government contracts was a bow toward the sensibilities of more conservative Democrats. With the president’s approval, however, the platform committee at the convention added a statement in favor of a comprehensive child labor law. Wilson’s woman suffrage plank fell short of the constitutional amendment that the suffrage organizations wanted and the Progressives had earlier endorsed. Yet for all its shortcomings, his platform marked a great leap forward for the Democrats in social and labor reform, while to recommend woman suffrage by any means was revolutionary in a party that up to now had shunned the issue. In the rest of the platform, Wilson touted the earlier accomplishments of the New Freedom and emphasized aid to farmers, particularly through the rural-credits program.

This courting of Progressives would later lead some interpreters to claim that Wilson was changing his ideological spots. In their view, he was forsaking the New Freedom’s limited government progressivism in order to embrace the New Nationalism’s more thoroughgoing reforms. Moreover, so they would argue, he did it strictly for reasons of expediency—solely because he needed Progressives’ votes in order to beat the Republicans in a two-party contest. Those interpreters misread him badly. Rather than grudgingly doing something he had to do, he was gladly doing something he wanted to do. He was indeed practicing expediency—but to him, as a Burkean, that was a virtue. “I feel sorry for any President of the United States who does not recognize every great movement in the Nation,” he avowed early in July. “The minute he stops recognizing, it, he becomes a back number.” Most tellingly, he did not embrace Roosevelt’s approval of collective bigness and vision of transcendent nationalism. The appointment of Brandeis, the arch-prophet of competition and small-scale enterprise, showed that Wilson had not budged in his devotion to the central tenets of the New Freedom. In his platform draft, he boasted that the Democrats had enacted “reforms which were obviously needed to clear away privilege, prevent unfair discrimination and release the energies of men of all ranks and advantages.” He was betting that Roosevelt’s followers loved the means of the New Nationalism more than the ends.³

This wooing of Progressives got a boost when the Republicans met in Chicago for their convention on June 7. Roosevelt harbored hopes that his former party might overlook his recent apostasy and nominate him again. He based those hopes on his having shelved domestic reform issues in favor of militant foreign policies and heated attacks on Wilson for more than a year. In March, in a remark that became famous, Roosevelt practically dared the Republicans to nominate him: “It would be a mistake to nominate me unless the country has in its mood something of the heroic.” The Republicans’ convention dashed those hopes. Their platform did strike a belligerent note on Mexico, but it took a vague, equivocal stand on the submarine issue, denouncing Wilson’s “shifty expedients” but also demanding “all our rights as a neutral without fear or favor”—a transparent bid for German American support. Domestically, the 1916 Republican platform was more conservative than the one Taft had run on four years earlier: it denounced the lowered tariff, condemned extravagance and incompetence, and ducked most of the current reform issues, as well as immigration restriction and prohibition.⁴ The delegates brushed aside all talk of picking Roosevelt, and on June 10 they nominated Charles Evans Hughes, who promptly resigned from the Supreme Court to run as their candidate.

The Republicans thought they had the perfect candidate, and given the party’s situation in 1916, they were right. The fifty-four-year-old Hughes had all the right qualifications. He was from New York, the state with the biggest electoral vote, and he had served two terms as governor, the office that Roosevelt and Grover Cleveland had held and that had supplied two other major-party presidential nominees in the last half century. Hughes had won the governorship in 1906 by defeating someone not just conservatives but also most respectable people feared and loathed—the demagogic newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst. As governor, Hughes had shown himself to be a strong administrator and an energetic public speaker. He had held his party’s bosses at arm’s length and pushed through a moderate reform program. He first attracted attention as a potential presidential candidate in 1908 and again as a possible compromise choice in 1912. Best of all, from the Republicans’ standpoint in 1916, he had sat on the Supreme Court since 1910. That judicial seat had removed him completely from the party’s internecine bloodletting and, therefore, made him acceptable in all quarters.⁵

For Wilson, Hughes promised to be almost as formidable a foe as Roosevelt had been. As with Roosevelt, the two men had known each other and enjoyed pleasant relations for some years. They had first met nine years earlier, when they shared the speakers’ platform at the Jamestown, Virginia, tercentenary celebration, and had enjoyed staying together as guests in the same house; years later, in his autobiographical notes, Hughes remembered Wilson reciting a risqué limerick. During the past three years, the two men had met from time to time in Washington, and a special bond arose between them because Wilson’s son-in-law Frank Sayre was a law school classmate and close friend of Hughes’s son. By coincidence, the Wilsons and the Hugheses had gone to dinner at the McAdoos’ the day the president announced Brandeis’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Brandeis himself was there too, and Wilson had taken the arm of another of the guests, the irascible and anti-Semitic justice James McReynolds, and said, “Permit me to introduce you to Mr. Brandeis, your next colleague on the Bench.”⁶

Personally, the justice and the president had a lot in common. Hughes was also a minister’s son with a parent born in England—his father, a Welshman, was a Baptist clergyman with high moral and intellectual standards. Many people who met Hughes compared him to Wilson because he was not a gregarious sort, and professional politicians often found him cold and aloof. Despite those similarities, differences separated them, both physical and intellectual. Hughes had almost as long a jaw as Wilson, but he concealed his with a full beard, which he parted in the middle and combed to the sides. In his earlier years, his rapid-fire delivery and mobile facial expressions on the speaking platform had earned him the nickname of Animated Feather Duster. More recently, his beard had turned gray, giving him a stern look. That look, combined with his reserved manner, earned Hughes such less-fond epithets as “bearded lady” and “bearded iceberg” and, from Roosevelt, “whiskered Wilson.” But unlike the president, he had enjoyed law school and had graduated first in his class. He had been a highly successful Wall Street lawyer and had first gained public notice as a special prosecutor in well-publicized investigations of fraud in the insurance industry. As governor, Hughes had sometimes clashed with his state’s party bosses but had never battled them in the spectacular way Wilson had battled New Jersey’s bosses. Hughes was a warm family man with a well-cloaked sense of humor, but he lacked the playful streak that Wilson showed when he twitted McReynolds at that dinner.

How strong a race Hughes would run in 1916 depended in part on Roosevelt. The Progressives desperately desired their hero to run again—he offered them their only hope of staying afloat as a party. At the Progressive convention, which was meeting in Chicago at the same time as the Republicans, the delegates defied Roosevelt’s orders and nominated him a few minutes before the Republicans nominated Hughes. Roosevelt immediately telegraphed to decline, and he added insult to injury by suggesting that the Progressives might nominate a conservative who had opposed their party—Lodge. Angry cries erupted. Delegates took off their Roosevelt badges, threw them on the floor, and stomped out of the hall. Wilson and the Democrats would have preferred to have Roosevelt run again and split the opposition as before, but the bitter taste left by his behavior meant that many Progressives’ votes were up for grabs. Roosevelt was already straining to steer them toward Hughes. He announced his endorsement of the Republican nominee, though he told a friend, “I do wish the bearded iceberg had acted a little differently during the last six months so as to enable us to put more heart into the campaign for him.”⁷

By contrast, Wilson’s emerging campaign was coming together splendidly. The Democrats’ national chairman, the unstable William McCombs, could have posed a problem. Wilson delegated the business of getting rid of him to House. The colonel, in turn, enlisted the help of the financier Bernard Baruch, who extracted a letter of resignation from McCombs, to take effect at the end of the convention. As his replacement, House suggested Vance McCormick, a wealthy newspaper publisher from Pennsylvania, who was prominent among the state’s more progressive Democrats. After some hesitation and because several other men declined to be considered, Wilson agreed to McCormick’s appointment, and the forty-four-year-old bachelor turned out to be an effective campaign manager. With the assistance of two able operatives, Robert Woolley and Daniel Roper, he assembled a large, efficient headquarters in New York. There were also regional offices around the country and divisions that targeted appeals to labor, women, the foreign born, and other interest groups, together with a publicity bureau that produced reams of printed material, sound recordings, and movies.⁸

House’s role in McCormick’s selection signaled his temporarily renewed involvement in party affairs. For all his conniving and furtive-ness, the colonel could be a source and conduit for novel ideas. He showed this when Wilson was in New York in May for Grayson’s wedding. In a hurried discussion that included both foreign affairs and party matters, House suggested a cabinet appointment for Martin Glynn, a former governor of New York, who was to be the keynote speaker at the Democratic convention. Wilson, House noted, “thought the country would not approve of his putting a Catholic in the Cabinet.” House disagreed “and contended that the country would not object in the slightest. What they do object to is having the President’s Secretary a Catholic.” To House’s surprise, Wilson responded to this slam at Tumulty by asking the colonel to suggest a replacement. “I asked him, when he would make the change,” House noted, “and he again surprised me by saying, ‘immediately, if I can find the right man. I will offer Tumulty something else.’ ”⁹

Then, after discussing other party affairs, House made a much bolder suggestion—for the vice presidency:

We talked of … whether we should sidetrack Marshall and give the nomination to [Newton] Baker. He felt that Baker was too good a man to be sacrificed. I disagreed with him. I did not think that any man was too good to be considered for Vice President of the United States. I thought if the right man took it, a man who has his confidence as Baker has, a new office could be created out of it. He might become Vice President in fact as well as in name, and be a co-worker and co-helper of the President. He was interested in this argument but was unconvinced that Baker should be, as he termed it, sacrificed. He was afraid he could not educate the people in four years up to the possibilities of this office. He reminded me that no Vice President had ever succeeded a President by election.¹⁰

Neither man could know that three years later Wilson would suffer a stroke and thereby precipitate the worst crisis of presidential disability in the nation’s history. That crisis might have been handled better if Wilson had responded differently to House’s suggestion. Even without intimations of mortality, he could and should have warmed to the idea. House was speaking for other high-placed Democrats when he proposed dumping Vice President Marshall, who had been practically invisible during the preceding three years. Though no dynamo, Marshall was not entirely to blame for his invisibility. Leaders at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue largely ignored him, and Wilson saw him only when he addressed a joint session of Congress or attended official functions. Marshall’s home state of Indiana was one the Democrats wanted to carry, but Baker’s Ohio offered a much richer electoral prize—second only to New York. A month later, Wilson would soon show how much carrying Ohio was on his mind when he filled the vacancy left on the Supreme Court by Hughes’s resignation with an Ohioan. After consulting with Newton Baker and the Democratic former governor of Ohio, he named John Hessin Clarke, a federal judge from Cleveland with a reputation as a progressive and friend of labor.

More than short-run political calculations commended replacing Marshall with Baker. The idea of a vice president who might serve as a co-president should have appealed to Wilson. Having spent much of life studying political systems and institutions, he was better equipped than anyone else to grasp the merits of this idea. Having an able and trusted vice president such as Baker at his side during his second term could have made a big difference in management and policy, particularly when it became a wartime presidency. Why Wilson’s political imagination failed him at this moment is a troubling question. House left a couple of clues as to possible answers. First, he sprang the suggestion at the end of a hurried meeting. Second, in his last remark Wilson made an elementary error of fact: four vice presidents had gone on to be elected president—John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Van Buren, and, most recently and most pertinently, Theodore Roosevelt. “The President showed some signs of fatigue,” House noted, “and it was time for him to call for Mrs. Wilson to take her to the wedding.”¹¹ It was unfortunate—perhaps tragic—that such great consequences could hang on such ordinary things as timing, fatigue, and personal engagements.

The Democratic convention that opened in St. Louis on June 14 was all Wilson’s show. He instructed the convention managers to stress patriotism. Flags festooned the hall where the Democrats met, and there were lots of patriotic songs. He, along with Tumulty and House, read and approved the keynote speech in advance. Ex-governor Glynn of New York, following instructions, played the patriotic card by using the undefined term “Americanism” as a refrain, but Glynn’s speech took on a life of its own when he declared that the United States would stay out of war. The delegates exploded in applause. From there on, as Glynn recited times in American history when the nation had not gone to war, shouts arose, “Go on, go on.” As he went on, the crowd would roar, “What did we do?” and Glynn would shout, “We didn’t go to war.”¹²

On the second day of the convention, the delegates’ enthusiasm soared, and the peace theme got powerful reinforcement. Senator Ollie James of Kentucky, a burly man with a trumpeting voice, touted “a courage that must be able to stand bitter abuse; a courage that moves slowly, acts coolly, and strikes no blow as long as diplomacy can be employed.” As a shining example of such courage, James pointed to Wilson’s handling of the submarine challenge: “Without orphaning a single American child, without widowing a single American mother, without firing a single gun, without the shedding of a single drop of blood, he wrung from the most militant spirit that ever brooded above a battlefield an acknowledgment of American rights and an agreement to American demands.” Later in the day, cries arose from the floor, “Bryan!” “Bryan!” The Great Commoner was in the press box because enemies among the Nebraska Democrats had denied him a seat as a delegate. The convention suspended the rules to allow him to speak. Literally weeping with joy, Bryan called this convention “a love feast.” He brushed aside past differences and praised Wilson for having enacted so many important reforms, and he avowed, “I join the American people in thanking God that we have a President who does not want this nation plunged into this war.”¹³

On the third and final day, the delegates dispensed with a roll call and renominated the president and vice president by acclamation. They likewise adopted the platform, to which the committee had added to Wilson’s draft the statement: “In particular, we commend to the American people the splendid diplomatic victories of our great President, who has preserved the vital interests of our Government and its citizens, and kept us out of war.” This was the origin of the campaign cry “He kept us out of war.”¹⁴ In all, Wilson could feel pleased with his party’s handiwork at St. Louis. The speakers and the delegates may have beaten the peace drum a bit too hard for his taste, but everything else had gone his way, and he was ready and eager to face the voters.

Before he could plunge into the campaign, he had some welcome business of governing to attend to. The summer months of 1916 offered him a brief reprise of the first year of his presidency, when he had been able to give greater attention to domestic affairs, particularly legislative leadership. Thanks to the resolution of the submarine controversy, the country was no longer teetering on the brink of the world war, and the main diplomatic controversies now involved the British. The greater urgency of the submarine controversy had previously offered cover to the leaders in London as they tightened their blockade, and the main advocate of sensitivity and caution toward the United States, Sir Edward Grey, had lost influence. Others in the government who favored a harder line, particularly Lloyd George, maintained that the Americans would submit to any restrictions so long as they made money from the war. Now the British had to face the consequences of their attitudes and actions.

During the summer of 1916, two of their blockade practices drew angry reactions from the American public and the Wilson administration. One was intercepting and opening mail from Americans who were suspected of having ties with the Germans. The British did not respond to diplomatic protests. The second practice was the compiling of a list of businesses suspected of trading with the Germans. This “blacklist” drew denunciations from the press and objections from the State Department. Wilson shared the widespread disgust with the British. “I am, I must admit, about at the end of my patience with Great Britain and the Allies,” he told House in July. “This black list business is the last straw.” Evidently presuming that the colonel would contact Grey, he warned, “I am seriously considering asking Congress to authorize me to prohibit loans and restrict exportations to the Allies.”¹⁵

Compounding those troubles for the British was widespread revulsion in America over what was happening in Ireland. On April 24, 1916, revolutionaries had mounted an armed uprising in Dublin that opened what would become a bloody six-year conflict that would lead finally to independence for Ireland. The British army brutally suppressed this Easter Rising and had its leaders shot after summary military proceedings. One incident in particular attracted international attention: the capture and sham trial of the Irish nationalist Sir Roger Casement. Despite appeals for clemency from the pope and a resolution by the U.S. Senate asking that Casement’s life be spared, the British executed him. Those acts understandably stirred wrath among Irish Americans, an important Democratic constituency. More generally, British behavior in Ireland ignited latent Anglophobia that stretched back to the Revolution and the War of 1812 and had flared up periodically since then. The British seemed intent on proving that they were only marginally less brutal than the Germans. Ireland damaged their moral standing in American eyes the way Belgium had done for the Germans.

One American felt particularly acute pain at this turn of events. In August, Ambassador Walter Page came home for the first time in three years, hoping to smooth the waters. In Washington, he found negative feelings toward Britain. After several frustrating encounters at the State Department and repeated delays, Page wrangled a private talk in September with his old friend Wilson. It was a painful meeting. Wilson said that he had “started out as heartily in sympathy as any man [could] be,” Page recorded immediately afterward. Then, however, England “[h]ad gone on as she wished,” ignoring “the rights of others,” and that had hurt America’s “pride,” which was also Wilson’s pride. Page also wrote, “He described the war as a result of many causes—some of long origin. He spoke of England’s having the earth and Germany’s wanting it.” For such an impassioned champion of the Allies, these revelations of Wilson’s thinking were disheartening. For Page personally, the encounter marked a parting of the ways in a friendship that dated back more than thirty years, to the time when they had been a pair of ambitious young southerners yearning to make their mark in the world.¹⁶

Actually, diplomatic friction with the British did not rank high among Wilson’s concerns. Besides his reelection campaign, he cared most about the reform measures that would round out the second installment of the New Freedom. First on the legislative agenda were child labor and workmen’s compensation laws. In February, the House had easily passed a child labor bill, but in the Senate, Democrats stalled action on Robert Owen’s version. A measure to provide workmen’s compensation for federal employees passed the House virtually without opposition but also languished in the Senate. The Republicans were using the failure to act on those bills in their campaign propaganda. Wilson broke the stalemate by going to the Capitol, where he met with Democratic senators in the President’s Room and urged passage of the bills both because they merited passage and because they would honor pledges in the party’s platform. The Senate passed the workmen’s compensation bill without a recorded vote. Some southern Democrats continued to oppose the child labor bill as an intrusion on state rights and as a blow to their region’s cheap labor, but they did not resort to a filibuster, and the bill passed by a vote of 52 to 12. Wilson signed it into law at a White House ceremony on September 1, declaring, “I want to say that with real emotion I sign this bill, because I know … what it is going to mean to the health and to the vigor of the country, and also to the happiness of those whom it affects.”¹⁷

Two other pieces of legislation enacted in 1916 were becoming flash points of conflict in the presidential campaign. One was the Revenue Act of 1916, whose curious history involved Wilson only marginally. It stemmed from the preparedness program, which was going to cost $300 million in new spending. The Treasury Department proposed to raise most of that money through excise taxes, which would fall most heavily on middle- and lower-income Americans. Bryanite Democrats on Capitol Hill rose up in revolt, charging that this tax burden was unfair, and besides, the rich and big business should pay for the military spending because they were the ones who were pushing for it. In the House, Claude Kitchin’s position as both majority leader and chairman of the Ways and Means Committee gave him the opportunity to write such views into law with a revenue bill that doubled the income tax rate, raised the surtax on high incomes, and levied the first federal inheritance tax. The bill also included a special tax on the profits of the munitions industry. McAdoo pressed Wilson to try to get changes, but the president stayed out of the conflict. In heated debate on the House floor, Republicans denounced the bill as a raid by southerners and westerners on the hard-earned, well-deserved wealth of the Northeast and Midwest; they were raising a sectional argument that would become one of their favorite battle cries in the campaign. On July 10, the House passed the revenue bill by a largely partisan vote of 240 to 140.¹⁸

In the Senate, La Follette led the fight to keep the revenue bill in the form passed by the House. Acting with Democrats, he succeeded and also got the surcharge on high incomes raised further and the inheritance tax doubled. In angry floor debate, a Democrat and a Republican nearly got into a fistfight, but the bill passed on September 5, by a vote of 42 to 16. All thirty-seven Democrats voting were in favor, and all the negative votes came from Republicans. Also supporting the bill were five Republican insurgents: La Follette, George Norris, Albert Cummins, William Kenyon of Iowa, and Moses Clapp of Minnesota. Wilson involved himself only once, when he got Democratic senators to add amendments empowering the president to retaliate against nations that restricted American trade—a measure aimed at Britain’s blockade. Final passage came on September 7, and Wilson signed the bill into law the next day. The debates and votes on the Revenue Act in both houses again showed how party lines continued to be redrawn over progressive issues, as both parties appealed to their sectional core constituencies.¹⁹

The other piece of legislation that fed conflict in the campaign mandated an eight-hour day for workers on interstate railroads. The eight-hour day had been organized labor’s holy grail for nearly half a century, and it was the main demand of railroad unions in negotiations in the summer of 1916. Management refused to consider it, and Secretary of Labor William Wilson tried to mediate. When the secretary’s efforts failed early in August, President Wilson met separately with union leaders and railroad presidents. Neither side would budge, and the unions called a strike to begin on September 4. Such a strike spelled disaster for the economy and posed a threat to national security. After conferring briefly with Democratic congressional leaders, the president went to the Capitol on August 29 to address a joint session of Congress. Observers noted that the president seemed informally dressed for such an occasion: he wore a blue jacket and white flannel trousers. In fact, he meant his attire to suggest national security considerations: it was the same outfit he had worn when he marched in the preparedness parade on Flag Day. He told the congressmen and senators that management’s intransigence forced him to ask them to establish an eight-hour day for railroad workers by law. He also asked for stronger federal mediation powers, greater ICC oversight of railroads, and presidential authority to take over and run the railroads in the event of military necessity.²⁰

Democratic congressional leaders, though generally approving, balked at anything beyond the eight-hour day, and Wilson reluctantly agreed to a stripped-down measure. Bearing the name of the chairman of the House Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee, William C. Adamson of Georgia, it quickly passed, by a vote of 239 to 56, again mainly along party lines. In the Senate, Republicans denounced the measure as class legislation and a craven surrender to union threats—charges that would become another favorite campaign cry—but it passed quickly by a vote of 43 to 28, even more clearly along party lines. Among Democrats, forty-two favored the bill and only two—both southerners—opposed it. Among Republicans, only one, La Follette, voted in favor, and twenty-six voted against, including such insurgents as George Norris, Albert Cummins, and William Borah. The next day, Wilson signed the Adamson Act into law aboard his private railroad car at Washington’s Union Station. The location was symbolic, as was the timing: Wilson was returning from giving his acceptance speech for the Democratic presidential nomination.²¹

The Adamson Act marked the biggest extension of government power that Wilson ever asked for in peacetime and was the boldest intervention in labor relations that any president had yet attempted. It offered a fitting capstone to the second installment of the New Freedom. None of the measures enacted in 1916 was as monumental as the Federal Reserve, but most of them rivaled tariff revision and the anti-trust law in their lasting significance. Significant income tax rates and the inheritance tax of the Revenue Act would remain in place for the rest of the twentieth century. Aid to farmers and the shipping and tariff boards would likewise remain and pave the way for further action in those areas two decades later under the New Deal. A controversial Supreme Court decision would strike down the child labor law two years later, but that law would serve as the model for a permanent prohibition of child labor, also under the New Deal. Furthermore, the elevation of Brandeis to the Supreme Court rewarded the chief architect, besides Wilson, of the New Freedom, and it gave the Court one of its great justices, one who would open the way for more liberal and more flexible jurisprudence.

Wilson played a different part in passing these measures than he had played in the passage of the first New Freedom legislation. This time, he did not create a program in advance, and he did not involve himself as much in shepherding its parts through Congress. Much of the initiative came from progressive Democrats on Capitol Hill, and Wilson’s contribution often lay in giving them their head or stiffening their resolve. Even so, he played a critical role. As before, he kept his congressional supporters at their tasks and on course. Moreover, he had to overcome new obstacles, in addition to the distractions of foreign affairs. Democrats now had a sharply reduced majority in the House, and Bryan no longer stood at the president’s side to serve as chief lobbyist and legislative liaison.

Like its predecessor, this installment of the New Freedom was also a party program. Except for La Follette, Republicans did little to help frame, and increasingly opposed, these measures. Some of that was probably unavoidable, given the conservatives’ firm control of the party and the collapse of the Progressives. In all, Wilson could take great pride in this second round of legislative accomplishment. The New Freedom was alive and well.

Wilson’s looming campaign for reelection made the summer of 1916 different from the preceding months of his presidency. Both he and Hughes, unlike Roosevelt earlier, observed the old custom of waiting for the notification ceremony to deliver their opening speeches. The challenger got a month’s head start, giving his acceptance speech on July 31 to an audience of 3,000 at Carnegie Hall in New York. What should have been a rousing opener to Hughes’s campaign fell flat as the candidate droned on, delivering carping criticisms of the Wilson administration and offering few positive alternatives. In foreign policy, he sounded tough but vague; on the league of nations idea, he sounded like Wilson when he called for “the development of international organization” and affirmed that “there is no national isolation in the world of the Twentieth Century.” Most observers were disappointed with the speech, but one was delighted. Wilson told Bernard Baruch he was following “the rule never to murder a man who is committing suicide.” Later, he softened a bit, saying he felt sorry for Hughes: “He is in a hopelessly false position. He dare not have opinions: He would be sure to offend some important section of his following.” Remembering the Animated Feather Duster, some commentators expressed amazement that Hughes could give such a limp performance. He later explained that his campaign skills had grown rusty after six years on the Supreme Court.²²

Things got better for the Republican candidate when he made a tour in August that took him to the West Coast and back. Hughes made a bold move of his own by going beyond the Republican platform’s vague language on woman suffrage to endorse a constitutional amendment. He also recovered some of his wonted vigor as he lambasted Wilson for weakness toward Mexico, and he sometimes made a good personal impression. “Gosh!” one North Dakota farmer reportedly exclaimed. “He ain’t so inhuman after all.”²³ When the campaign train reached California, however, the trip turned into a comedy of errors. The local managers, who were conservative Republicans, did not serve Hughes well. In San Francisco, they scheduled an event at a hotel where the workers were on strike, and they refused to move to another location. As a result, Hughes wound up crossing a picket line and offending the city’s strong union movement.

A still worse misstep in California involved internal party strife. The Republicans’ split in 1912 had hurt them there badly because Governor Hiram Johnson, who was the Progressive vice-presidential nominee, had kept Taft and the regular Republicans off the ballot. In 1914, California was the only place where the Progressives did not collapse. Now, in 1916, the pugnacious governor grudgingly followed Roosevelt back into the Republican fold, and he was running hard for the party’s nomination for senator. That situation posed a dilemma for Hughes. He did not think he could endorse Johnson’s senatorial bid, but he desperately wanted the governor to share the campaign platform with him. Between Johnson’s notoriously prickly personality and the machinations of conservatives, no joint appearance or even a meeting came off. Worst of all—in the most notorious incident of the campaign—the nominee and the governor spent several hours on the same day in the same hotel in Long Beach without seeing each other. When he learned of the fiasco, Hughes immediately apologized, but the damage was done. Stories about his “snub” of the governor raced around the state, and Johnson declined all requests for a meeting. The governor won the senate primary and dutifully endorsed the Republican ticket. Hughes later believed that the incident cost him the state—and the election.²⁴

Wilson’s campaign got off to a later start because he had to stay in Washington to attend to public business, yet the delay gave him an advantage. The last measures of the New Freedom helped his reelection prospects much more than any speeches or tours. Moreover, because he was president, Wilson could speak out in ways that ostensibly were non-political but really advanced his campaign. On July 4, he dedicated the new American Federation of Labor building, and with Gompers and other union leaders present, he lauded labor over capital for being “in immediate contact with the task itself—with the work, with the conditions of the work.” Two weeks later, he dropped the nonpartisan mask when he told a convention of patronage-appointed postmasters, “The Democratic party is cohesive. Some other parties are not.”²⁵ Those speeches and his remarks when he signed the rural-credits and child labor laws served as warm-ups for his acceptance of the Democratic nomination. To reestablish his political base in New Jersey, he rented an oceanside estate at Long Branch, called Shadow Lawn, where on September 2, in a setting reminiscent of Sea Girt four years before, he met the delegation from the Democratic convention and delivered his acceptance speech.

As expected, Wilson praised the party’s accomplishments and declared that the Democrats had kept the promises they had made in 1912. He also pitched a frank appeal to Roosevelt’s erstwhile followers: “This record must equally astonish those who feared that the Democratic Party had not opened its heart to comprehend the demands of social justice. We have in four years come very near to carrying out the platform of the Progressive Party as well as our own; for we also are progressives.” Most of the speech covered foreign affairs. With regard to the world war, Wilson reaffirmed neutrality as the bulwark against its hatred and desolation. Regarding Mexico, he deplored the loss of American lives and property but affirmed that Mexicans were seeking emancipation from oppression. He warned that new challenges would come when the world war ended, and he alluded to the league of nations idea without being specific in calling for “joint guarantees” against those who would disturb the peace. He closed by reiterating the basic message of the New Freedom, that people’s energies and initiative “should be set free, as we have set them free,” and power should never again “be concentrated in the hands of a few powerful guides and guardians.”²⁶

Immediately afterward, Wilson hit the campaign trail. He signed the Adamson Act in the railroad car, rather than in the White House or at Shadow Lawn, because he was on his way to Kentucky to dedicate Lincoln’s birthplace. On this ostensibly nonpolitical occasion, Wilson once again used the example of the nation’s greatest self-made man to underline the populist message he had just delivered in his acceptance speech. He then spoke in Atlantic City to the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Mindful that Hughes had stolen a march on him by endorsing a constitutional amendment, Wilson was eager to assure the suffragists that he believed in their cause. He called their movement “one of the most astonishing tides of modern history,” and he declared, “We feel the tide; we rejoice in the strength of it, and we shall not quarrel in the long run as to the method of it.” Those stirring but vague words made a hit with the 4,000 mostly female delegates, who gave the president a standing ovation.²⁷

Wilson intended to give his next speech to an insurance executives’ convention in St. Louis, but family misfortune upset those plans. On September 11, he got word that his sister, Annie Howe, was dying in New London, Connecticut. He and Edith traveled there aboard the Mayflower, but his sister was heavily sedated and her doctors advised him not to stay. She died on September 16, and Wilson, Edith, and Grayson left for Columbia, South Carolina, for the funeral. This was a doubly sad occasion for Wilson. Of all his siblings, Annie had been closest to him, and her son George had lived with the Wilsons while he was a student at Princeton. Coming just two years after Ellen’s death, this funeral and burial at a Presbyterian church in the South could not help but stir painful memories. Edith later remembered the days at Shadow Lawn after their return from the funeral as a peaceful interlude during which her husband read aloud to her in the evening before a fire, but she conceded that such evenings and other quiet moments were rare.²⁸

An unceasing stream of visitors came to Shadow Lawn. The first to call after their return from South Carolina was the party chairman, Vance McCormick, who brought good news and bad news. The good news was that he and his assistants had the campaign machinery humming along and that Bryan was barnstorming through the Midwest and West in a manner reminiscent of his own campaign swings, stressing peace—with Mexico rather than in Europe—and progressivism. The bad news concerned Maine and money. Thanks to its September gubernatorial elections, which tended to presage its—and the nation’s—returns in the November presidential elections, there had long been a widely bruited maxim: “As Maine goes, so goes the nation.” Maine almost always went Republican and had done so again in September 1916. Democratic spokesmen tried to discount the results, but they were worried about a possible trend in the Northeast.

The money problems involved big contributors. Financiers such as Henry Morgenthau and Bernard Baruch gave generously, as did some of the president’s Princeton friends, most notably the ever-faithful Cleveland Dodge; otherwise, the pocketbooks of big business and the wealthy opened mostly to the Republicans. The eight-hour railroad law had lent a special edge to this disparity. Referring to business and the Adamson Act, McCormick told Colonel House, “Before this they were lukewarm, but now they are fighting mad and are offering freely their support to Hughes in both money and effort.”²⁹

The Adamson Act also gave a shot in the arm to the Republican candidate’s campaign performance. On the return leg of his speaking tour, Hughes lashed out at the law. “I want what is reasonable for labor,” he claimed, but more important is “the willingness to abide by the results of reason … and never surrender to any force of any kind.” Privately, he told Taft that passing this law was a “most shameful proceeding” and should be made “a fundamental issue. I propose to press it constantly.”³⁰ Hughes was as good as his word. Throughout the rest of the campaign, he lambasted the Adamson Act as proof of Wilson’s knuckling under to pressure and granting special privileges to one group. Only foreign policy would receive as much attention in Hughes’s speeches, and nothing else would engage his oratorical powers so well.

Hughes’s arguments dovetailed with the Republicans’ message that Wilson and the Democrats were purveyors of special interest and class legislation. Along with denunciations of the Revenue Act for sectional favoritism, this conservative stance suited the party’s increasingly sharp alignment against progressive measures. Another denunciation of the Adamson Act came from Roosevelt. The Republicans were using him as a campaigner the same way the Democrats were using Bryan. The ex-president spent most of his time attacking both Wilson’s foreign policy and his personal character as cowardly and debased. But he ventured also into domestic affairs a few times. To him, the Adamson Act epitomized “the policy of craven surrender to whichever side has the superiority ofbrute force.” More broadly, he accused Wilson of lacking “disinterestedness” and showing “frank cynicism of belief in, and appeal to, what is basest in the human heart.”³¹ Roosevelt was once more touching upon the core of his philosophy—the need to rise above material desires in order to serve a transcendent national purpose. Wilson’s poaching Progressive programs might fool others, but the prophet of the New Nationalism knew that this heretic had not embraced the true faith.

Wilson originally planned to take a leaf from William McKinley’s 1896 campaign and give weekly “front porch” speeches to visiting delegations at Shadow Lawn. In each talk, he intended to discuss a single issue in depth and thereby educate the public about his programs and purposes. In his first speech, he defended the Adamson Act by affirming that the bond between capital and labor must be more than “merely a contractual relationship. … Labor is not a commodity.” He stole Roosevelt’s favorite argument when he declared that government must “see that no organization is as strong as itself” and that no private interest could compete “with the authority of society.” He departed from the plan for educational “front porch” speeches, however, when he received a telegram from Jeremiah O’Leary, the head of the American Truth Society, a notorious anti-British, pro-German organization, that accused him of partiality toward the Allies. Wilson shot back publicly: “I would feel deeply mortified to have you or anybody like you vote for me. Since you have access to many disloyal Americans, and I have not, I will ask you to convey this message to them.”³² That reply caused a sensation and drew cheers from the press—reminiscent of his reply to George Record in the gubernatorial campaign six years before.

In his next speech at Shadow Lawn, to a group of college-student Democrats, Wilson made a stronger pitch for votes from former Progressives. “I myself expected that this campaign would be an intellectual contest,” he told them; “that, upon both sides, men would draw upon some essential questions of politics.” But he had been disappointed; except for touting the protective tariff, the Republicans were avoiding any serious discussion of domestic issues. These Republicans were not like the “great body of spirited Republicans” who four years earlier had formed “the great Progressive party—great … because it had the real red blood of human sympathy in its veins and was ready to work for mankind.” He pointed out that the Democrats had carried out the Progressives’ purposes and intentions, and he proclaimed, “I am a progressive. I do not spell it with a capital P, but I think my pace is just as fast as those who do.” He also digressed into foreign policy, where, he said, Republicans had taken a clear stand against his own policies and vowed to change them. How would they do that? “There is only one choice as against peace, and that is war.” If the Republicans won, he predicted, the country would go to war in Europe and in Mexico, where they wanted to protect American investors.³³

This was hitting hard and perhaps hitting below the belt. To accuse his opponents of warmongering smacked of the kind of thing Roosevelt was saying about him from the other side. Worse, Wilson was appealing to the “passion” that he deplored in this speech and had warned against for years. Why he said such things is not clear. The sensation caused by his reply to O’Leary may have prompted him to swing heavily to the other side of the “double wish;” perhaps he felt moved by looking at the faces of so many young men in the crowd. This attack did not gibe with his own thinking about “He kept us out of war,” at least as the slogan applied to Europe. Josephus Daniels later remembered Wilson telling him, “I can’t keep the country out of war. They talk of me as though I were a god. Any little German lieutenant can put us into war at any time by some calculated outrage.”³⁴

During the last month before the election, Wilson alternated between more speeches at Shadow Lawn and four campaign trips, and he mixed foreign and domestic policies when he spoke. In foreign policy, he took the high road of continuing to advocate a league of nations to maintain peace and the low road of again accusing the Republicans, particularly Roosevelt, of warmongering. In domestic policy, he praised the Adamson Act, appealed to farmers on the basis of rural credits, and opposed immigration restriction. He also denounced the Republicans for reverting to domination by big business and standpat conservatives: the Republicans offer people “masters,” whereas the Democrats “offer to go into the fight shoulder to shoulder with them to get the rights which no man has a right to take away from them.” Wilson might have been appealing to former Progressives, but he was not diluting or soft-pedaling the New Freedom message of helping ordinary people in their struggle to make their way up in the world. In the last days before the election, after prodding from the campaign managers, he grudgingly made a barnstorming tour of New York, saying privately that he could win with that state. “He thought both McCormick and I had ‘New Yorkitis,’” House declared, “and that the campaign should be run from elsewhere.”³⁵

This campaign showed once more that Wilson was the most articulate person in American politics. Regrettably, it was not, as he said, “an intellectual contest” like the one four years earlier. Unlike Roosevelt, Hughes was not expounding a competing political philosophy. Moreover, as president, Wilson had a record to defend, and the world war and Mexico made foreign affairs compete for attention with domestic concerns. Emotional appeals like the ones he made with his insinuations of warmongering were unusual for him, but they did betoken a new relationship with the public. He was forging the personal bond that he had earlier envied in Roosevelt. People repeatedly yelled out at him, “Woody” and “Woodrow.” Crowds lined the tracks when his train passed by. Those moments gratified Wilson. He could end his campaign knowing that he had connected strongly with the voters.

The Republicans did not feel so sanguine about the progress of their campaign. Hughes’s performance improved steadily after he began attacking the Adamson Act, and he found an able new manager in Will Hays of Indiana, who brought fresh discipline and focus to the operation. But problems persisted. Hard feelings still divided the party’s conservative high command from insurgents and returning Progressives. Foreign policy likewise gave the Republicans headaches because Roosevelt was both an asset and a liability. He drew bigger crowds than anyone else, but his stands on the war made other Republicans uneasy. Hughes sometimes emulated Roosevelt, as when he said that he was not “too proud to fight” and claimed that if he had been president, he would have taken a firm stand on the submarine issue and the Lusitania would never have been sunk. Yet he also criticized Wilson for not being tougher on the Allied blockade, and he welcomed support from German American and Irish American groups, meeting in October with some of their leaders, including the man Wilson had denounced as a “disloyal American”—Jeremiah O’Leary. Word of that meeting leaked to the Democrats, who gleefully spread stories about the encounter.

The insinuation of guilt by association was a political dirty trick, but it paled in comparison to the smears and innuendos Republicans were spreading. They tried to revive the Mrs. Peck stories but succeeded mostly in stirring up indignation against the slanders. Rumors circulated that Ellen Wilson had died after her husband pushed her down a flight of stairs in the White House. At Princeton, dirt-seeking emissaries from the Republican campaign approached Hibben for stories about Grover Cleveland’s alleged mistrust of Wilson. To his credit, Hibben swallowed hard feelings toward his former friend and angrily rebuffed the approaches. To counteract such stuff, Colonel House asked Stockton Axson to write a magazine article about his brother-in-law. Full of what House called “sob stuff,” the article appeared in The New York Times Magazine in October under the title “Mr. Wilson As Seen by One of His Family Circle” and was widely reprinted. The Democratic campaign circulated a million copies of it as a pamphlet.³⁶

Republicans’ gutter tactics exposed a seamy underside to their operation. Things also got rough in public when Lodge brought up the so-called Lusitania postscript, charging that Wilson had told the Germans not to take his protest seriously. After several cabinet members denied the story, Lodge responded, “This simply throws an additional light on the shifty character of this Administration in its foreign policies.” Wilson called Lodge’s statement “untrue” and denied that he had written or contemplated any postscript to theLusitania note. That denial was shifty: it was literally true but left out the proposed “tip” to the press about hoping for a peaceful outcome to the dispute. Soon afterward, in his final speech of the campaign, Roosevelt indulged in grisly wordplay on the name of Wilson’s temporary residence: “There are shadows enough at Shadow Lawn; the shadows of men, women, and children who have risen from the ooze of the ocean bottom and from graves in foreign lands; … the shadows of the tortured dead.”³⁷

As election day neared, many of the president’s prospects looked good. Farmers were grateful for what his administration had done for them, and their organizations lined up solidly behind him. Labor was even more enthusiastic; the Adamson Act had sealed the political engagement between unions and the Democrats. Following Gompers’s lead, AFL unions were pulling hard for Wilson and his party, particularly in Ohio and other midwestern states. More generally, the left side of the political spectrum was shifting in his direction. After Debs decided not to run again as the Socialist Party’s candidate in 1916, many well-known party members—including John Spargo, John Reed, Max Eastman, and William English Walling—came out for Wilson. Such prominent social workers as Jane Addams, Lillian Wald, and Florence Kelley also backed him, despite his not endorsing a suffrage amendment. The Nation supported Wilson’s reelection even though its backer, Villard, distrusted him because of the segregation overture and the about-face on preparedness; he believed that the Republicans’ conservative tilt left him no choice. Nearly all of those socialists and liberals based their support of the president on both his domestic program and his having stayed out of war in Europe and Mexico.³⁸

Wilson’s wooing of former Progressives similarly bore fruit. Most of the party’s few officeholders and professional politicians—such as Governor Johnson of California and Senator Poindexter of Washington—followed Roosevelt back to the Republicans. They had held office earlier as Republicans and could not see a political future for themselves in any other party. Personal closeness to Roosevelt swayed some well-known Progressives, as with the conservationist Gifford Pinchot and the journalist William Allen White. Other prominent party members backed Wilson, such as Representative William Kent of California, former representative Victor Murdock of Kansas, and Gifford Pinchot’s brother, Amos. Where the Progressive rank and file would go would be answered only on election day. Among Republican insurgents, only La Follette tacitly supported Wilson, as he had done in 1912; the rest backed Hughes, though often without enthusiasm.

Given Wilson’s wish for “an intellectual contest,” two particularly gratifying endorsements came from editors of the erstwhile Progressive house organ, The New Republic: Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann had criticized many of Wilson’s actions and policies, but the president’s progressivism combined with support for a league of nations and international reform had slowly won them over. In a signed editorial at the middle of October, Lippmann credited Wilson with “remaking his philosophy” and, in the process, “creating, out of the reactionary, parochial elements of the Democracy, the only party which at this moment is national in scope, liberal in purpose, and effective in action.” Croly hesitated longer. More fully than anyone else, he shared Roosevelt’s belief that individuals and groups must rise above their interests in order to serve the New Nationalism. Yet later in October, Croly produced a signed editorial that endorsed Wilson on the same grounds as Lippmann—for making the Democrats the more progressive of the two parties by changing its ideas: “The New Freedom has been discarded.”³⁹ Wilson may have smiled at the way Croly rationalized his support, but these endorsements and others from Progressives brought a new intellectual respectability and sophistication to the Democrats.

Still, some of the president’s prospects did not look good. Opposition from German American organizations and other anti-Allied groups remained sharp. Reports reaching Democratic headquarters indicated that ordinary German Americans were not following their spokesmen, but the concentration of those voters in key midwestern states made them a worrisome piece of the electoral puzzle. Also disturbing was opposition from some Catholics, including members of the church hierarchy. They lambasted Wilson’s refusal to intervene in Mexico against Carranza’s anticlerical Constitutionalists.⁴⁰ Above all, the Republicans still enjoyed two big assets: their apparent stranglehold on much of the electorate in the Northeast, as evidenced by the results in Maine, and their edge in campaign spending, thanks to support from big business and the wealthy, which allowed Hughes’s managers to outspend their rivals for advertising, pamphlets, and other publicity.

By mid-October, the president and his campaign managers knew that the election was going to be extremely close and that he might lose. “It is evident, of course, that Mr. Hughes is making very little headway, because he has done so many stupid and insincere things,” Wilson told his brother, “but other influences are at work on his behalf which are undoubtedly powerful, chiefly the influence of organized business. I can only conjecture and hope.” The chance of losing led him to make an unusual move. House suggested a plan by which Wilson would get Secretary of State Lansing and Vice President Marshall to resign and appoint Hughes to succeed Lansing. Under the law then in force, the secretary of state stood next in the line of succession after the vice president. This meant that if Wilson resigned, Hughes would become president immediately, rather than waiting until the following March 4. “Times are too critical to have an interim of four months between the election and the inauguration of the next President,” the colonel wrote in his diary. He broached the plan to Lansing, who went along with it, and then to Wilson. The president said nothing, but two days before the election he drafted a letter in his shorthand, typed it himself, sealed it in an envelope with wax, and had it hand-delivered to Lansing with instructions that no one else was to open it.⁴¹

In the letter, Wilson outlined the resignation plan to Lansing and observed, “All my life long I have advocated some such responsible government for the United States as other constitutional systems afford as [a matter] of course, and as such action on my part would inaugurate, at least by example.” He wanted to avoid a four-month interregnum because these were not “ordinary times. … No such critical circumstances in regard to our foreign policy have ever before existed.” He believed he had “no right to risk the peace of the nation by remaining in office after I had lost my authority.” The “critical circumstances” involved submarines. Confidential reports from Berlin told of growing pressure for unrestricted undersea warfare. Also, Germany’s first and as yet only naval submarine with a transatlantic cruising range, the U-53, paid a call at Newport, Rhode Island, in October, and after departing, it sank—after giving warning—six merchant ships, four of them British, one Dutch, and one Norwegian. After discussions about the U-53 in Washington and at Shadow Lawn, Wilson decided to downplay the event. House may have made his suggestion about resignation in part because he was unhappy with the drift of foreign policy and was showing signs of pique. “To hear him talk,” House wrote, “you would think the man in the street understood the theory and philosophy of government as he does.”⁴²

The plan to resign gibed so well with Wilson’s thinking that the president almost certainly would have come up with it on his own. Ever since his college days, he had wanted to adapt parliamentary practices to the American system. Nor was he alone in regarding as an outmoded relic the four-month gap between elections and inaugurations that was mandated in the Constitution. Nearly two decades later, the Twentieth Amendment would abolish this calendar and fix January 20 for the inauguration and January 3 for the opening of Congress. Wilson’s plan would play no part in that change because no one besides him, House, Lansing, and possibly Edith and Grayson knew about it. House would mention the scheme in passing ten years later in the published edition of his diary, but it would not become public knowledge until Lansing’s War Memoirs were published posthumously in 1935. It is unfortunate that the plan did not become better known earlier. In 1932, the last election under the old calendar would come at an even more critical time. The defeated president in that election would be Herbert Hoover, who had served under and admired Wilson. If Hoover had known about this plan, he might have adopted it and spared the country four months of governmental paralysis at the nadir of the Great Depression, which has been called the “interregnum of despair.”⁴³

On November 7, when the returns came in, Wilson thought he might have to implement the plan. On election day, he and Edith drove to Princeton, where he voted once more at the fire station and joked with students and reporters. Back at Shadow Lawn, they spent a quiet afternoon and had dinner with his daughter Margaret, son-in-law Frank Sayre, and cousin Helen Bones, Edith’s brother and sister-in-law, and Grayson. They played twenty questions until ten o’clock, when a telephone call from New York brought bad news:The New York Times was declaring Hughes the winner. As Edith later recalled, Margaret declared indignantly, “Impossible. They cannot know yet. In the West they are still at the polls.” A call to the White House found a gloomy Tumulty repeating the same bad news. According to Edith’s recollection, her husband remained calm. He agreed with Margaret that everything was not settled yet, but he was not sanguine. “There now seems little hope that we shall not be drawn into the War,” Edith remembered him saying, “though I have done everything I can to keep us out; but my defeat will be taken by Germany as a repudiation of my policy. Many of our own people will so construe it, and will try to force war upon the next Administration.” Wilson asked for a glass of milk, and as he left the room to go upstairs to bed, he said, “I might stay longer but you are all so blue.”⁴⁴

They were blue at Shadow Lawn and the White House and Democratic headquarters. The returns appeared to be bearing out their worst fears. In the Northeast, the Republican tide swept every state except New Hampshire, which seesawed before finally going to Wilson by 52 votes. In the Midwest, the Republicans did almost as well, although they lost Ohio, and Minnesota remained in doubt. The Democrats’ gloom began to brighten during the early hours of the next morning. A tide of their own began to sweep the West, where only South Dakota and Oregon clearly went to Hughes. By noon on November 8, the president had a lead of 4 electoral votes among the declared states. Four states—with a total of 33 electoral votes—remained out: California, with 13; Minnesota, with 12; North Dakota, with 5; and New Mexico, with 3. By noon on November 9, it was clear that Wilson had carried three of those four states; only Minnesota went for Hughes—by 392 votes. Wilson was the winner, with 277 electoral votes to Hughes’s 254. In the popular tally, he led by nearly 600,000 votes: 9,129,606 to 8,538,221. Hughes would not formally concede for almost two weeks; after his telegram arrived, the president joked to his brother, “It was a little moth-eaten when it got here but quite legible.”⁴⁵

Wilson was the first Democrat since Andrew Jackson to win a second consecutive term. He had increased his popular tally from four years earlier by nearly 3 million votes and his share of the total by a little under eight percentage points. He had beaten an undivided Republican Party, thereby showing that his victory four years earlier had been no fluke owing to his opponents’ split. He had outrun his party almost everywhere. On Capitol Hill, the Democrats retained a twelve-seat majority in the Senate. In the House, however, their already-slender majority shrank further, and no one could say which party would have control in the next Congress. Later, some horse-trading of the handful of remaining Progressives and the defection of a few Republicans would keep the Democrats in control, with Champ Clark as Speaker and Claude Kitchin as majority leader and chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. Most glaringly, Wilson had won by a paper-thin margin. His share of the popular vote fell just short of a majority: 49.26 percent. In the Electoral College, if just a single state—California, which was longest in doubt—had gone the other way, he would have lost. He carried California by only 3,806 votes out of nearly 1 million and a plurality of less than four tenths of a percentage point. Hughes was almost certainly right in believing that the misadventure with Hiram Johnson cost him California and the election.⁴⁶

The election of 1916 was one of the closest presidential contests in American history, and questions about why that was so have persisted. Assessing the results presents the classic choice of deciding whether a glass is half-empty or half-full. The half-empty choice, which most interpreters have taken, stresses not that Wilson won but that Hughes almost did. That near-miss was a remarkable feat, especially considering the wounds still carried by the Republicans from 1912 and the mistakes made by Hughes and his managers. One factor above all took him as far as he got: the Republicans’ traditional strength in the Northeast and Midwest. Four years before, party conservatives had believed that progressivism was a passing fad and that voters in those regions would return to the allegiances forged in 1896. That homecoming in 1916, coupled with the Republicans’ unbroken and overwhelming success in the next three presidential contests, has made such a view seem incontrovertible.

In that view, Wilson’s reelection owed everything to his own luck, his personal skill, and the seductive drumbeat of “He kept us out of war.” Wilson was an incumbent president, and the White House has nearly always been the best place from which to run for president. He was a successful incumbent with an awesome record of legislative accomplishment, and he could claim credit for peace and prosperity. Yet even with all that going for him, he almost lost. In short, his reelection appears to be the exception that proved the rule of Republican dominance during this era of American politics.

The half-full choice for the 1916 results builds on the half-empty one. The absolutely critical state in 1916 was Ohio. Had Wilson swept the West, including California, he still would have lost if he had not made this one substantial crack in the Republican heartland. This was the first time in a quarter century that a Democrat had carried any state north of the Potomac and Ohio rivers and east of the Missouri in a two-party contest. It was true that except for New Hampshire, Ohio was the only state Wilson won in that region. But he came agonizingly close in Minnesota and reasonably close in Connecticut, Indiana, and Massachusetts. He also improved his share of the vote in every state, often substantially. Furthermore, he won fifteen states outside the South by popular majorities, and several of those majorities in the West were large. Some of this improvement may have reflected the power of incumbency, but bigger factors may also have been at work.⁴⁷

The two critical components in Wilson’s victory, then, were Ohio and a virtually solid West. In both places, more than personal popularity, a good campaign, and the peace issue helped to determine the outcome. In Ohio, as every observer noted, unions went all out for the president and his party; their votes and activity contributed to a sweep that recaptured the governorship and reelected a senator as well. This was a harbinger of the role that labor would later play in swinging big industrial states over to the Democrats. In the West, peace weighed heavily, but so did progressivism. The peace issue there involved Mexico more than Europe, and Republicans never seemed to grasp how deeply repugnant the prospect of war south of the border was in the West. Significantly, too, eleven of the twelve states in which women voted lay west of the Mississippi, and Wilson carried all but one of those states despite not having endorsed a suffrage amendment. Most analysts attributed this result to the peace issue. Likewise, Roosevelt had not done well west of the Mississippi in 1912, except on the coast, and people on the plains and in the Rockies had warmed to the New Freedom, especially the anti-trust and banking reform and aid to farmers and workers. Furthermore, those parts of the West where Roosevelt had not done well were the same places where Debs had realized some of his best showings in 1912, and statistical and anecdotal evidence pointed to Wilson’s picking up many of Debs’s votes there in 1916. In the nation at large, he also picked up votes from people who had previously favored Roosevelt, but much of the ex-president’s earlier support had been personal, and in the Northeast and Midwest the great majority of those supporters followed their leader back to the Republicans.

What Wilson wrought in 1916 was the laying of the foundation for the majority Democratic coalition—one the party would enjoy from the 1930s through the 1960s. Three major elements of that future coalition were now in place: the South, farmers, and labor. Two others were not yet in place. One was aroused and energized white first- and second-generation voters among the immigrant groups. Despite opposing immigration restriction and prohibition, which these recent immigrants and their children loathed, and despite having Tumulty at his side, Wilson had abrasive relations with the mainly Irish urban wing of the party. Some of the coolness toward him sprang from his early battles with the New Jersey bosses, which had made him suspect to Tammany Hall and other machines. Wilson heartily returned their dislike. “He thought New York ‘rotten to the core,’” House recorded him saying just before the election, “and should be wiped off the map.” Catholic opposition may also have kept these groups from coming aboard Wilson’s bandwagon. Yet a new breed of urban Democrat was quietly on the rise. In 1916, that new breed defeated a Republican senator in Rhode Island and two years later would beat another Republican senator in Massachusetts and capture one of the biggest electoral prizes of all—the governorship of New York. Both of the 1918 winners would be Irish Americans, and New York’s new governor, Al Smith, would become the party’s brightest star—though also its most divisive leader—during the following decade.⁴⁸

The other element in the majority Democratic coalition that was not yet in place was African Americans. No black leaders supported Wilson in 1916, as they had done four years earlier. One of those former supporters, W. E. B. DuBois, wrote to the president during the campaign, challenging him to live up to his assurances to Negroes in 1912: “We received from you a promise of justice and sincere endeavor to forward their interests. We need scarcely to say that you have grievously disappointed us.” Wilson did not reply but instructed Tumulty “to answer this letter for me and say that I stand by my original assurances and can say with a clear conscience that I have tried to live up to them, though in some cases my endeavors have been defeated.”⁴⁹ When African Americans did join the Democratic coalition twenty years later, it would be largely on their own initiative, not the party’s.

Racial blindness notwithstanding, Wilson looked forward to building a new party coalition. Soon after the election, he told a former Progressive who had supported him that he wanted to realign the parties in the Democrats’ favor, but he admitted, “It is by no means easy to figure it out, but I agree with you that this is the fundamental job in the next four years.”⁵⁰ That was not to be. Wilson’s “irony of fate” was about to reassert itself in the worst possible way. He could not know it, but his domestic presidency was over.