6

GOVERNOR

As an academic political scientist, Woodrow Wilson seldom studied state politics, and he rarely wrote about the office of governor. Likewise, except for speaking about it a couple of times in the mid-1890s, he did not involve himself in local or state politics. In 1910, Wilson had been living in New Jersey for twenty years, but he had seen little of his adopted state. Speaking engagements as president of Princeton sometimes took him to Jersey City, Morristown, or Newark, but he visited few other places in the state, and he had never set foot inside the capitol in nearby Trenton. It might seem odd, then, even ironic, that he first entered active politics by running for and winning the governorship of New Jersey. In fact, it turned out to be an ideal way for him to begin his political career. Circumstances seemed to conspire to propel this fifty-three-year-old neophyte on a meteoric rise in both state and national politics. He became a political star practically overnight and a hot prospect for his party’s presidential nomination almost as soon as the ballots were counted in New Jersey in November 1910.

Irony abounded, especially in the way Wilson won the Democratic nomination for governor. This freshly minted progressive and future reformer at the state and national level owed his start in politics to conservatives, machines, and bosses. As before, George Harvey got the ball rolling. The magazine editor owned a seaside home in New Jersey, which gave him good connections in conservative Democratic circles at the state as well as the national level. For several years, he had worked to interest the foremost leader of the New Jersey Democrats in Wilson. This was James Smith, a wealthy onetime U.S. senator. Widely known as Sugar Jim for his services as senator to the sugar-refining industry, Smith fit the popular image of the political boss. He was a big, smooth-faced Irish American with expensive tastes and a hearty manner. Politics was a family business: his son-in-law, James Nugent, was the boss of Newark’s Democratic machine and his second in command in the state party. No two figures roused greater enmity among New Jersey’s fledgling progressive Democrats.¹

Yet it was Smith and, to a lesser extent, Nugent who made Wilson the Democrats’ choice for governor. The Princeton president and the party bosses engaged in a lengthy and elaborate mating dance. Nineteen ten was starting to look like a good political year for Democrats at both the state and the national levels. In Washington, the Republicans were teetering on the brink of civil war as progressives, led by Robert M. La Follette, now a senator from Wisconsin, openly rebelled against the Taft administration over the recently passed Payne-Aldrich tariff and other issues. In Trenton, the Republicans were similarly suffering from internal strain as local progressives challenged their party’s conservative leadership. In these circumstances, Smith and Nugent liked the idea of having an attractive, respectable new face at the top of their ticket. Harvey, whose hornrimmed glasses and slicked-down hair made him look like an owl, again put Wilson’s name in play with Smith. In January 1910, he assured Wilson that “the nomination for governor shall be tendered to you on a silver platter, without your turning a hand to obtain it.”² Rumors about Wilson’s nomination began to circulate in the spring, and he talked about the idea with Ellen and some of his supporters on the Princeton board of trustees.

Curiously, however, the road to Wilson’s gubernatorial nomination really began in Chicago. Smith was there in June 1910, at a luncheon with the city’s Democratic boss, Roger Sullivan, when some lawyers and businessmen with Princeton connections talked up Wilson. That talk led to a meeting at the middle of July between Wilson and party leaders, where he impressed them, although Smith did not like his favoring local option on liquor sales. He also struck some of the party men as unfamiliar with state issues, but he reportedly assured them that he would not try to interfere with the Democratic organization. Three days after that meeting, Wilson issued a public statement in which he asserted that if “a decided majority of the thoughtful Democrats of the State” wanted him to run for governor, “I should deem it my duty, as well as an honor and a privilege, to do so.”³ In other words, his hat was in the ring.

He was not yet home free, however. Nugent wanted a different candidate, but he promised to defer to the “Big Fellow.” In August, Wilson drafted a set of suggestions for the New Jersey Democrats’ platform, expressing progressive ideas. He also made some public pronouncements to cover divergent political bases, such as insisting that he was “the warm friend of organized labor” but also praising corporations “as indispensable to modern business enterprise.” Coming out in the open as an aspiring politician gave Wilson mixed feelings. “I feel very queer adventuring upon the sea of politics,” he told a Princeton friend, “and my voyage may be brief.”⁴ He also chafed under an injunction from the bosses that he not talk to reporters, although he acknowledged that it allowed him to duck the liquor question.

Wilson did not have to put up with enforced silence for long. The state Democratic convention opened in Trenton on September 14. Smith arrived, accompanied by Harvey, and ensconced himself in room 100 of the Trenton House, the hotel where party bosses customarily resided. From there he and Nugent worked through the night to round up the votes needed to nominate Wilson. The party’s progressives were furious at having a political unknown shoved down their throats by the bosses, but Wilson was duly nominated. A few minutes after five o’clock in the afternoon on September 15, 1910, he strode into the auditorium where the delegates were meeting. Many of the progressives sat in sullen silence while machine supporters and Princeton students shouted and cheered. Few of those present knew what to expect from their new nominee for governor, and few had ever seen him or heard him speak. “God, look at that jaw!” one man reportedly exclaimed.⁵

Wilson began his acceptance speech by claiming, “I did not seek this nomination.” Therefore, he vowed, if he was elected governor, there would be “absolutely no pledge of any kind to prevent me from serving the people of the State with singleness of purpose.” On the major issues, Wilson declared, “I take the three great questions before us to be reorganization and economy in [government] administration, the equalization of taxation and the control of corporations.” Other important issues included employers’ liability for workplace injuries, corrupt practices in elections, and conservation of natural resources. Wilson sounded a conservative note when he asserted, “We shall not act either justly or wisely if we attack established interests as public enemies.” But he also called for the establishment of a public service commission to regulate rates for utilities and transportation, to be modeled on the one La Follette’s progressives had instituted in Wisconsin. In closing, Wilson proclaimed, “We are witnessing a renaissance of public spirit, a re-awakening of sober public opinion, a revival of the power of the people.” At that point, he offered to stop, noting that the delegates must be tired after putting in so many hours of work. Cries arose from the floor: “Go on!” He then repeated his promise to serve only the people and his demand for a public service commission, and he declared that the state needed to control corporations. Appealing to the “ideal” of America as a haven for equal rights, he urged the delegates, “Let us devote the Democratic party to the recovery of these rights.”⁶

The speech was a triumph. Joseph Tumulty, a young Irish American assemblyman from Jersey City who was one of the leading progressive foes of the bosses, later recalled that many delegates stood with tears running down their cheeks and left the auditorium charged with crusading zeal. As for Tumulty himself, another delegate reported to Wilson that after the speech he “threw his arms about me & said ‘… this is one of the happiest days of my life—the Wisconsin R. R. law!—the best in the country—if Wilson stands for legislation of that caliber, Jim Smith will find that he has a “lemon.” ’ ”⁷ Tumulty instantly became one of Wilson’s most ardent backers and went on to serve as the governor’s and president’s right-hand man.

Wilson’s speech and the progressives’ response did not bother the party bosses because they were sure they could control their handpicked nominee. Four days after the convention, a group of them visited him at Prospect House. Standing on the portico and gazing at the tree-lined campus, Smith asked James Kerney, the editor of the Trenton Evening Times, “[C]an you imagine anyone being damn fool enough to give this up for the heartaches of politics?” As Nell Wilson later recalled, the politicians seemed ill at ease in the university president’s book-lined study. “Do you read all these books, Professor?” Smith reportedly asked. “Not every day,” Wilson answered. His jocularity broke the ice, and, he told Nell later, “[T]hey treated me like a school boy once they got over the professorial atmosphere.” The politicians spent three hours instructing their pupil on campaign plans, and he now impressed them with his familiarity with local affairs and people. “We were charmed by the reception he had given us,” Kerney wrote later. “When he unbent he could be the most urbane and delightful of companions.”⁸

On the campaign trail, Wilson struck some observers as a bit stiff and formal in his first speeches, more professorial than political. That may have been the case, since he was a rookie on the stump with a lot to learn about modern political campaigns, especially how much they cost. He originally thought that he could pay all his expenses from his own pocket. He was still drawing his Princeton salary, and after the election he planned to earn $500 from speaking fees to cover expenses. In fact, he left overall financial matters to Harvey and Jim Smith, who later claimed to have personally contributed $50,000 to the campaign. In all, according to one estimate, the Democratic managers spent $119,000 during the campaign, which was big money in those days.⁹

Wilson quickly became a pungent, hard-hitting stump speaker. He stressed partisanship and national issues from the outset. “I am a Democrat by conviction because I am persuaded that it is the party through which the salvation of the country must come,” he asserted in a newspaper interview early in October. “The Republican party has been guilty of forming an unholy alliance with the vast moneyed interests of the country.” At the same time, he declared in a speech in Long Branch, “Between a real Democrat and a really progressive [Republican] insurgent there is very little difference. What has been happening to these insurgents is that they have been catching the Democratic infection.”¹⁰

He did not neglect state issues. At the outset of the campaign, his Republican opponent presented him with a golden opportunity to play to his greatest strengths. Dominant since the mid-1890s, the New Jersey Republicans had experienced a much stronger progressive insurgency than the Democrats. Four years earlier, “New Idea” Republicans had mounted an intraparty revolt. They had attacked their party’s alliances with big business and pushed for the kind of reform in taxation that Wilson advocated in 1910. The New Idea men had gone down to defeat before the conservative machine, but they remained a force to be reckoned with. In 1910, the Republicans bowed in their direction by picking a moderate progressive as their gubernatorial nominee. He was Vivian M. Lewis, a good-looking and respected lawyer who was the state commissioner of banking and insurance. Lewis opened his campaign by likewise calling for a powerful public service commission and endorsing a favorite progressive idea, the direct primary to pick party nominees. He promised to observe the “constitutional limitations” on the governor’s authority and never to “coerce the Legislature into subordinating its judgment to my own.” Those words helped ensure his defeat, because Wilson immediately announced, “I cannot be that kind of a constitutional Governor. … If you elect me, you will elect … an unconstitutional Governor.”¹¹

Wilson was having the time of his life as he crisscrossed New Jersey by train and automobile, going places he had never gone before, giving two or three speeches a day, translating ideas from his academic study of politics into campaign discourse. In Atlantic City, he asserted that government was not “an intellectual matter.” Rather, people must use such “splendid, handsome passions” as love, honor, and patriotism to restrain and block such base passions as hatred and envy. In Flemington, he defended party government. He wanted to smash the “secret power” of machines. “But I am not here to break up parties,” he declared, for they are indispensable instruments for addressing complicated issues and channeling popular opinion into constructive action. In Newton, he argued that government was needed “to protect the unprotected classes, the classes that cannot look out for themselves.”¹² Yet gratifying as it was to express his ideas, he had an election to win. Wilson needed to overcome two liabilities. One was his party label. Though weakened by factional strife, the Republicans were still by far the stronger party in New Jersey, and Wilson had to persuade many Republicans to vote for him. The other, more glaring liability was his sponsorship by Smith and the bosses.

George Record, the irascible transplanted Maine Yankee who led the New Idea Republicans, presented him with a golden opportunity to overcome both of those liabilities. Record harped on the way Wilson had gotten his party’s nomination, and he challenged the Democratic candidate to debate him on state issues. Wilson accepted on the condition that the Republicans endorse Record as their spokesman. Predictably, the Republican leaders balked, and Wilson declined to debate but added that he would publicly answer any written questions that Record put to him. On October 17, Record sent a sharply worded public letter that posed nineteen questions on subjects ranging from the powers of a public service commission to primaries to the popular election of senators to corrupt election practices to workmen’s compensation. The letter contained a denunciation of machines and asked, “Do you admit that such a system exists as I have described it? If so, how do you propose to abolish it?” Record also asked whether Wilson would overthrow the Democratic bosses and demand that candidates for the legislature pledge themselves to progressive reforms.¹³

This letter allowed Wilson to show his greatest qualities as a campaigner: boldness and articulateness. A week later, in a carefully crafted letter of his own, Wilson quoted Record’s questions in their entirety, followed by his answers. To most of them, particularly the ones about state reforms, he simply said yes. To some, such as the direct primary, he said he favored even stronger measures than Record proposed. Only to the last question, about requiring candidates to favor progressive measures, did he answer no, stating that it was up to voters to assess candidates. The questions about the boss system afforded Wilson a chance to admit its existence and propose to abolish it by passing new laws, by electing “men who will refuse to submit to it and bend all their energies to break it up, and by pitiless publicity,” a phrase that would become one of his favorite slogans. As to whether he would fight the Democratic bosses, he shot back, “Certainly!” He claimed to be already reorganizing his own party, and he avowed, “I should deem myself forever disgraced should I in even the slightest degree cooperate in any such system or any such transaction as you describe in your characterization of the ‘boss’ system.”¹⁴

Record knew at once that he had met his match. “That letter will elect Wilson governor,” he was quoted as saying. Years later, he added, “If he had been a small man, such a set of questions would have finished him off, but he had boldness and courage and he could rise to a great emergency.” Wilson’s letter became the sensation of the campaign and allowed him to finish the campaign with a flourish. In his closing speech, he sounded like Theodore Roosevelt as he affirmed, “We have begun a fight that it may be will take many a generation to complete—the fight against special privilege, but you know that men are not put into this world to go the path of ease; they are put into this world to go the path of pain and struggle. … We have given our lives to the enterprise, and that is richer and the moral is greater.”¹⁵

The only discordant note in the final weeks of the campaign came out of Princeton. On October 20, Pyne and his followers on the board of trustees forced Wilson to resign as president. Wilson had planned to step down anyway, but he and his supporters had hoped he could wait until after the election. As he told a friend, he was glad the campaign “absolutely dominated my thoughts. Otherwise I believe that I should have broken down under the mortification of what I discovered last week to be the real feelings of the Pyne party toward me.”¹⁶ He refused to accept any further salary from Princeton, although he and his family did continue to live at Prospect until the following January.

On November 8, 1910, the voters of New Jersey elected Woodrow Wilson governor by a wide margin. He polled 233,682 votes to Lewis’s 184,626, 54 percent to 43 percent. Only one gubernatorial candidate in the state’s history had won a bigger majority, a Republican who rode Roosevelt’s coattails in 1904. Wilson carried fifteen counties to Lewis’s six, all of which were Republican strongholds, and he came close to winning four of those. He ran ahead of other Democratic candidates, but the party also did well, picking up four congressional seats and sweeping the state assembly, gaining forty-one of the sixty seats. Democrats did not win control of the state senate, but their margin in the assembly gave them enough votes to choose a U.S. senator when the legislature met in January. As the returns came in on November 8, a crowd that included many students gathered in Princeton and marched to Prospect House. Visibly moved, Wilson thanked the throng, but for once he was at a loss for words: “I think I have said all I know in my speeches in the campaign.”¹⁷

Wilson would have liked the “honeymoon” typically accorded newly elected officials, especially because he wanted time to think and plan, but he did not get his wish. The spoiler was Sugar Jim Smith. Ever since he had sponsored Wilson as his choice for governor, rumors had persisted that he wanted an attractive candidate who would help the party gain enough seats in the state legislature to send him back to the U.S. Senate. When the two men met a week after the election, the boss evidently did not raise the question of his candidacy, but he later claimed that the governor-elect had dismissed the state’s nonbinding senatorial primary as a “farce” and called the man who had won it a “disgrace.” This was James E. “Farmer Jim” Martine, a perennial aspirant for office and one of New Jersey’s few supporters of the Bryan wing of the Democratic party.¹⁸

Within days, however, Wilson changed his mind about the Senate seat. Though professing high regard for Smith personally, Wilson told Harvey that “his election would be intolerable to the very people who elected me and gave us a majority in the legislature. … It was no Democratic victory. It was a victory of the ‘progressives’ of both parties, who are determined to live no longer under either of the political organizations that have controlled the two parties of the State.” That fact ruled Smith out for the Senate seat and meant that “ridiculous though it undoubtedly is,—I think we shall have to stand by Mr. Martine.”¹⁹ Wilson urged Harvey to get Smith to bow out. He reminded the editor that their party faced both opportunity and peril, and he raised the specter of a Roosevelt revival—the prospect that frightened conservative Democrats most.

Wilson started to line up support. Joe Tumulty took him to meet with several legislators and with the Jersey City boss, who said he owed Smith his personal support but would not feel “hurt” if others opposed him. On December 6, Wilson made one last effort to avert a clash by traveling to Newark to see Smith at his home. “You have a chance to be the biggest man in the state by not running for the Senate,” Wilson reportedly told him and added that he, Wilson, could not ignore the results of the primary. Smith refused to step aside and asked if Wilson would be satisfied simply to announce his opposition and then leave the choice to the legislature. “No,” Wilson answered. “I shall actively oppose you with every honorable means in my power.” He warned that he would go public with his opposition if Smith did not reconsider within the next two days. When the deadline passed, the governor-elect issued a statement to the press noting that the voters in the primary had chosen Martine: “For me, that vote is conclusive. I think it should be for every member of the Legislature.”²⁰

Wilson braced for a fight. To Mary Peck he predicted “hard sledding,” and to a Princeton friend he called Smith a “tough customer.” During the rest of December, he met with legislators at Prospect House and in New York City. Early in January, he decided to appoint Tumulty his secretary, and with Tumulty’s guidance he continued to lobby legislators before and after his inauguration, on January 17, 1911. He also resorted to a favorite tactic, which he brought from his Princeton presidency: he spoke directly to his constituents. On January 5, he addressed a big rally in Jersey City, where he charged that Smith represented “a system of political control … a systematic, but covert alliance—between business and politics.” He likened his move toward breaking up that alliance by opposing Smith to “cut[ting] off a wart,” and on the eve of his inauguration he dismissed Smith’s candidacy as “a colossal blunder in political judgment.”²¹

Wilson read the situation right. The big boss turned out to be a paper tiger. After the legislature convened, Smith journeyed once more to Trenton and ensconced himself in the same hotel room where he had previously labored to secure Wilson’s nomination for governor, but this time he had no magic to work. At the party caucus, nine Democrats from the state senate and twenty-four from the assembly supported Martine; only fourteen backed Smith. Because the New Jersey constitution required a majority of the members of both houses voting together to choose a senator, the caucus canvass left Martine only eight votes short of the forty-one needed to elect him. By the time the legislators were ready to cast the first ballot in the joint session of the legislature on January 24, switches had given Martine forty votes, one short of victory, and Smith threw in the towel, releasing his supporters. The next day the joint session elected Martine with forty-seven votes, which included all but four of the Democrats. Wilson greeted the outcome with mixed feelings. “My victory last week was overwhelmingly complete,” he told Mary Peck. “The whole country is marvelling at it, and I am getting more credit than I deserve. I … [pitied] Smith at the last. … It is a pitiless game, in which, it would seem, one takes one’s life in one’s hands,—and for me it has only begun!”²²

The Smith affair may have spoiled Wilson’s political honeymoon, but it gave him a big boost as governor. The fight burnished his credentials as a progressive in New Jersey and it drew nationwide coverage in the press. The country’s leading Democratic newspaper, the New York World, anointed this new governor a special hero because a similar fight was taking place in New York, where the leader of Tammany Hall was also trying to grab a Senate seat for himself. “New York needs a Woodrow Wilson,” proclaimed The World. Wilson welcomed the publicity, although one aspect of this attention bothered him. “Thought of the presidency annoys me in a way,” he told Mary Peck. “I do not want to be President. There is too little play in it, too little time for one’s friends, too much distasteful publicity and fuss and frills.”²³ Again, the gentleman did protest too much. The eyes of the nation were on Wilson, and he was never going to be just another governor.

The fight with Smith gave him a chance to know and master his party’s men in the New Jersey legislature and thereby get his legislative program off to a fast start. Despite his complaints about the time that the Smith affair took, he did not let it distract him from planning what he wanted to do once he took office. Soon after the election, he gave some foretastes of his intentions. “Pitiless publicity is the sovereign cure for ills of government,” he asserted in a newspaper interview. In a speech to the national governors’ conference, he described his new office with a paraphrase of what he had said about the presidency in Constitutional Government: “There is no one in any legislature, who represents the whole commonwealth—no one connected with legislation who does, except the Governor.” Therefore, for the governor to appeal to the people over the heads of the legislators was “no executive usurpation.”²⁴

Family affairs and practical matters also required attention. As usual, most of the responsibility fell to Ellen, particularly the Wilsons’ move out of Prospect House. Just before they left, they held a wedding reception for their niece, Annie Howe, the daughter of Woodrow’s sister of the same name, who was married in the First Presbyterian Church on the last day of 1910. The immediate family circle had shrunk now. Ellen’s sister, Madge, had married Edward Elliott in September, and her brother Stockton had suffered a nervous breakdown over the summer and was in a sanatorium in Connecticut.²⁵

Still another element added to the upheaval. For the first time in more than twenty years the Wilsons did not have a home of their own. New Jersey did not provide a governor’s mansion, although there was a summer residence, at Sea Girt on the Atlantic coast, where the Wilsons spent the warmer months of 1911 and 1912.²⁶ In the meantime, Ellen put most of their possessions in storage, and she and her husband and daughters moved into a suite of rooms in the Princeton Inn. The following fall, they rented a house in Princeton at 25 Cleveland Lane, just a block from the home they had built on Library Place. The street was named after Grover Cleveland, who had lived a few doors away, as did Andrew West. It was from the rooms at the inn and from this house that Wilson commuted twelve miles to the governor’s office in the capitol at Trenton.

Running that office also required attention to practical matters, and that was where Tumulty proved to be a godsend. He functioned as the governor’s chief administrative and legislative assistant and liaison to the press. Thirty-one-year-old Joseph Patrick Tumulty was a trim, neat man of medium height with a smooth, round face that made him look like a young priest. He was the son of an Irish immigrant and a Union veteran who had been wounded in the Battle of the Wilderness and later struggled to establish himself as the owner of a corner grocery store. His mother, also Irish-born, could not read or write, but she had pushed her children to go to school. Joe, the seventh of nine who survived, was a graduate of St. Peter’s College in Jersey City. His opposition to the political machine did not bar him from knowing and savoring all sides of public life. He loved the game of politics and reveled in trading gossip and inside information with reporters and politicians. His gregariousness and attention to small matters made him a perfect complement to Wilson, who still liked to spend time by himself pondering political questions in their larger dimensions. The two men quickly developed a smooth working relationship, one that was warm and informal. Wilson did not call his secretary Joe. When others were present he called him Tumulty, but when they were alone he often addressed him as “my dear boy.” Tumulty, in turn, called his boss Governor.²⁷

From his own study of the issues and the campaign encounter with Record, Wilson had a good idea of what he wanted on his legislative agenda. Nevertheless, he took the unusual step of reaching across party lines to enlist Record’s advice and support. First, he met privately with Record, and then, the day before his inauguration, he presided over a conclave at a New York hotel that included, besides Record, several legislators, newspaper editors and publishers, and veteran reformers. The group agreed that election reform, public utility regulation, and employers’ liability laws should be top priorities, and Wilson assigned Record the task of drafting new legislation dealing with primaries and corrupt election practices. One of the legislators at the meeting leaked news of the deliberations to Smith. The boss’s forces, in turn, denounced Wilson for secret dealings and perfidy to the party by ceding power over legislation to Record and other Republicans. Wilson shot back with a statement to the press that Record was “one of the best informed men in this State with regard to the details involved in the reforms proposed” and that the conference “was non-partisan in its purpose and meant in the public interest.”²⁸ The new governor was getting his own dose of “pitiless publicity.”

On January 17, Wilson set the tone for his governorship with a hardhitting inaugural address. Although he offered a bit of reassurance to conservatives by observing that corporations were not “unholy inventions of rascally rich men,” he affirmed that “wise regulation, wise adjustment,” was nothing less than “an imperative obligation.” Turning to specifics, he said employers’ liability came first “because it is the adjustment for which justice cries loudest.” He likewise called for stronger corporate regulation, a new public service commission, tax reform, and conservation of natural resources. Beyond that, in order to get “to the root of the whole matter,” the legislature needed “genuine representatives, who will serve your real interests,” and the only way to get that was through “the direct primary, the direct choice of representatives by the people.” He did not close the speech, as most speakers would, with a stirring peroration but listed further measures, including consideration of initiative, referendum, and recall legislation, corrupt-practices and campaign-finance reform, and the investigation of how cold storage rates affect food prices.²⁹

Wilson then moved into the governor’s office and went to work. Although this was a big change from academic life, he adjusted quickly. “He seemed to be perfectly at home from the start and the duties seemed easy and pleasant to him,” one of his stenographers, Ida Taylor, later told Wilson’s first biographer. “He was an indefatigable worker and spent long hours at his desk.” He attended to correspondence first thing in the morning, dictating to one of the staff, sometimes from shorthand notes he had made. He once reportedly tried using a dictating machine but was amused at how unnatural he thought his voice sounded and did not take to it. Wilson also continued to do much of his own typing. After attending to correspondence, the governor spent most of the rest of the day with appointments. He maintained an open-door policy, never turning away a caller, at least until he was elected president. By his fourth week in office, Wilson could tell Mary Peck that “when I am at them the things I deal with day by day do not pall upon me at all. I take them, on the contrary, with zest and unflagging interest.”³⁰

One aspect of the governorship did not interest Wilson—patronage. He resented the waste of time and energy involved in dealing with rival claimants for jobs, and he left this duty largely to Tumulty. Wilson did make some first-rate appointments. These included Record, whom he named to the Board of Assessors; Samuel Kalish, the first Jew to serve as a justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court; and Winthrop Daniels, a former faculty colleague from Princeton, whom he would appoint to the Public Utility Commission. By contrast, Wilson genuinely enjoyed personal interaction with legislators and other politicians. In one-on-one encounters, he again demonstrated the persuasive powers that he had exercised as president of Princeton. In group settings, he bared his playful side. At an outing with state senators in Atlantic City in April 1911, the governor and the senators joined in singing and dancing after a fried-chicken supper, and he led them in the cakewalk. “Such are the processes of high politics!” he joked to Mrs. Peck. “This is what it costs to be a leader.”³¹

Such frolicking also served a serious purpose. It helped Wilson do the part of his new job he cared about most—legislative leadership. As soon as the senatorial election was settled, he started pushing the legislature to enact the measures he had enumerated in his inaugural address. The primary became the storm center of this legislative offensive. Record drafted a far-reaching measure that required primaries for all elected officials and delegates to the parties’ national conventions; it also required that legislators vote for the man who won their party’s primary for U.S. senator and restricted the activities of state conventions to drafting platforms. Wilson enlisted a Democratic assemblyman and former student of his from Princeton, Elmer Geran, to introduce the measure.³² Smith-Nugent Democrats charged once more that Wilson was turning their party over to that insidious radical Record.

The governor responded with inside and outside strategies. Throughout February 1911, he met repeatedly with legislators, listened to their comments and criticisms, and eventually agreed to accept some amendments to what everyone was calling the Geran bill. Meanwhile, he spoke around the state in favor of his reform program. Besides the primary, he touted other measures, such as the proposed Public Utility Commission, noting pointedly their adherence to the Wisconsin models “introduced by that very able and very energetic man, Mr. La Follette.” Wilson also drew upon his ideas about the nature of politics to ask, “If your tree is dying, is it revolution to restore the purity of its sap and to purify the soil that will sustain it? Is this process of restoration a process of disturbance? No! It is a process of life; it is a process of renewal; it is a process of redemption.”³³ The speaking engagements tired him, but Wilson enjoyed himself.

The showdown came in March. “Things are getting intense and interesting again,” Wilson observed to Mary Peck, adding that “my spirits rise as the crisis approaches.” He stepped up his speaking schedule, and back in Trenton he made another bold move. “Why not invite me to the caucus?” he reportedly said to the Democratic leader in the state assembly. “It is unprecedented, I know. Perhaps it’s even unconstitutional; but then I’m an unconstitutional governor.” On March 6, when he attended the assembly Democratic caucus, one member challenged the constitutionality of his presence. “Since you appeal to the constitution,” Wilson reportedly replied, “I think I can satisfy you.” He pulled a copy of the New Jersey constitution from his pocket and read the clause that authorized the governor to communicate with the legislature and recommend “such measures as he may deem expedient.”³⁴ He then spent two hours explaining features of the legislation dealing with the Public Utility Commission, corrupt practices, and employers’ liability, as well as the Geran bill. The assemblymen easily reached agreement to support the first three measures, but they wanted more time to consider the Geran bill.

A week later, on March 13, Wilson again went before the caucus. During the three-hour meeting, he spoke for more than an hour to plead for the Geran bill. One legislator recalled soon afterward, “I have never known anything like that speech. Such beautiful Saxon English, such suppressed emotion, such direct personal appeal. … It was like listening to music. And the whole thing was merely an appeal to our better unselfish natures.” A machine Democrat retorted that all those present owed their places to political organizations, and the governor acknowledged that he owed his own nomination to the party organization, but he “owed his election to the people only, and he would refuse to acknowledge any obligation that transcends his obligation to the people who elected him.” That answer and others impressed the legislators even more than his speech. One of them reportedly asked, “Where did this schoolmaster learn so much about politics—not only legislation, but practical politics?” Another agreed that “he acted like a small boy playing his favorite game; he certainly enjoyed the proceeding to the full.” The assembly Democrats voted to support the Geran bill, 27 to II.³⁵

Wilson was winning, but the game was not over. Smith’s son-in-law, Nugent, worked the halls of the capitol, lobbying against the primary. Between Democratic holdouts and Republicans, there were enough votes in the assembly to defeat the Geran bill. But Nugent underestimated Wilson. On March 20, the governor invited Nugent to his office and asked him, in his capacity as the state Democratic chairman, to support the bill. When Nugent refused, Wilson claimed that he had the votes lined up to pass it. “I do not know by what means you got them,” Nugent replied. “What do you mean?” Wilson asked. “The talk is that you got them by patronage,” Nugent responded. Wilson stood up and waved Nugent out: “Good afternoon, Mr. Nugent.” Nugent made a crack that Wilson was no gentleman, and Wilson repeated, “Good afternoon, Mr. Nugent.” In a public statement, the governor recounted the incident and commented, “I invited him here and he insulted me.” Privately, he told Mary Peck, “It was a most unpleasant incident which I did not enjoy at all; but apparently it did a lot of good. … I feel debased to the level of the men whom I feel obliged to snub. But it all comes in the day’s work.” There was some truth in Nugent’s charge. As he had done earlier in the fight with Smith, Tumulty was using patronage, this time to line up support for the Geran bill, and he acted with the governor’s implicit approval, if not his detailed knowledge.³⁶

Besides patronage and favorable publicity, Wilson had one other card to play. Wittingly or not, he had done a shrewd thing by enlisting Record to write the primary law. Drawing upon his background with the New Idea movement, Record now persuaded two progressive-leaning Republican assemblymen to announce that they would vote for the Geran bill. That move broke the back of the opposition. The bill passed the assembly on March 21 by a vote of 34 to 25. Thirty-one Democrats and three Republicans voted in favor, while ten Democrats and fifteen Republicans voted against it. Ironically, the bill had an easier time in the Republican-controlled senate. Both Democrats and Republicans in that chamber were less dependent upon their party’s machines and were not inclined to be obstructionist. Revised somewhat but not weakened, the Geran bill passed the senate unanimously on April 13. After assembly concurrence, again unanimous, the bill went to the governor for his signature on April 20.³⁷

Victory in the fight over the primary law smoothed the way for the passage of the rest of Wilson’s program. Record drafted a corrupt-practices bill based on the Oregon law that many regarded as the model progressive legislation in this area. He had to bargain with Republican leaders in the state senate, but a strong bill emerged and passed easily in both chambers. Utility regulation likewise had an easy time in the assembly, and one provision allowed the new Public Utility Commission to use the physical valuation of a company’s property as the basis for its rates, a scheme that ranked among the farthest-reaching regulatory proposals of the time. Wilson later had to accept a watered-down version that came out of the senate. These measures, together with the primary law, constituted what were known as the governor’s bills and made up the program that Wilson had advanced during the campaign and in his inaugural address.³⁸

Nor did those laws exhaust the accomplishments of the 1911 legislative session. A number of reformers and civic associations wanted to allow municipalities to adopt the new city commission form of government, which enjoyed wide popularity in progressive circles. After some initial hesitation, Wilson threw his weight behind municipal-reform legislation that included provisions for a local initiative, referendum, and recall, as well as the city commission. The bosses put up a fight against this measure, but Wilson and the reformers got a reasonably strong law in the end. Fittingly for a man with his professional background, the governor supported education reform, and the legislature enacted a set of laws that created a new state Board of Education with the power to conduct inspections and enforce standards, regulate districts’ borrowing authority, and require special classes for students with handicaps. At the governor’s urging, the legislature also enacted new food-storage and -inspection laws, strengthened oversight of factory working conditions, and limited labor by women and children.³⁹

Wilson’s only defeat occurred when he asked the legislature to ratify an amendment to the U.S. Constitution passed by Congress in 1909 to permit the levying of income taxes. Unlike the election of a U.S. senator, ratification of an amendment to the Constitution required separate approval by each chamber. The assembly promptly complied with the request, but the Republican-controlled senate refused to go along. Almost two years would pass before New Jersey would ratify the income tax amendment. By then, Wilson had been elected president and had carried enough Democrats with him to control both houses of the state legislature.

Despite that defeat, he racked up an impressive record as a legislative leader and a progressive. “I got absolutely everything I strove for,—and more besides,” he exulted to Mary Peck when the legislature adjourned late in April. He called it “as complete a victory as has ever been won, I venture to say, in the history of the country. I wrote the platform, I had the measures formulated to my mind, I kept the pressure of opinion constantly on the legislature, and the programme was carried out to its last detail.”⁴⁰ Pride did not blind Wilson to the secrets of his success. He correctly credited the spirit of the times for much of what he had been able to do. Progressivism was a rapidly rising tide in American politics, and Wilson was not the only governor to push through this kind of reform program in the ten years since La Follette had begun battling Wisconsin’s bosses in order to make government more accountable and business better regulated. Nineteen eleven stood out as a particularly dramatic juncture in this march of political and economic reform. In Wisconsin, La Follette’s forces were filling out a second ambitious reform agenda, which resembled Wilson’s. In California, a band of Republican progressives led by their newly elected governor, Hiram Johnson, pushed through a comparable program, although one that would stress direct popular measures such as the initiative and recall far more than Wilson’s did. The accomplishments of this academic-turned-governor were part of a bigger picture, and some of the other reform leaders were men with whom he would cross paths and swords in coming years.

Still, Wilson unquestionably earned most of his success on his own. Given New Jersey’s history as a boss-laden, conservative-leaning state, it would have been easy for him to fall far short of such sweeping accomplishments. A vivid illustration of what could have happened lay just across the Hudson River. In New York, the Democrats had likewise ridden the reform wave in 1910 to win the governorship and control of the legislature for the first time since the mid-1890s. Yet despite the Empire State’s previous experience with dynamic governors such as Roosevelt and Charles Evans Hughes and its moderately reformist record, the situation there deteriorated into a hopeless wrangle between progressive Democrats and Tammany Hall. The progressives did succeed in keeping the Tammany boss from becoming a U.S. senator, but the machine blocked most reform legislation. The New York World was prophetically right when it said that its state needed a Woodrow Wilson.

The former president of Princeton brought to his governor’s office a potent mix of personal and intellectual gifts. He planned his strategy and then kept the legislators at their jobs and focused on the task at hand. His success depended on foresight, force, and perseverance, traits that he would soon show again as a legislative leader in Washington. He also put into practice ideas that he had developed earlier about how to be such a leader. He did act like a prime minister. By meeting so often with legislators, he acted as if he were one of them. By joining his party’s caucus, he became its leader. In effect, he was finding a practical application for the proposals he had advanced years before when he wrote about giving cabinet members seats in Congress. All this worked well, and it offered the first demonstration of how readily Woodrow Wilson could translate the study of politics into the practice of politics.

This smashing success in New Jersey in 1911 launched his political career in the best possible way. His legislative accomplishments as governor won him his spurs in the hottest political arena of the time. Even before he attracted the limelight in the fight with Smith, talk about higher office was in the air, and a Wilson presidential boomlet started even before the end of the legislative session. Yet his governorship would witness no further triumphs. He had no way of knowing it, but when the legislators left Trenton in April 1911, his best days in the statehouse were behind him. The nearly two years that remained in Wilson’s governorship would be an anticlimax. Part of the letdown would spring from his presidential campaign, which increasingly occupied his attention and took him away from New Jersey.

The distractions of national politics did not fully explain his poor showing. His wider visibility and the state’s pride in having a potential presidential nominee might have enhanced his effectiveness as governor. A more potent influence behind the falloff was revenge by the bosses. Smith, who had reportedly left Trenton in tears after the collapse of his senate candidacy, was a spent force, but his son-in-law, Nugent, continued to fight Wilson even after the legislative session. In July, at a restaurant near the governor’s summer residence at Sea Girt, Nugent sent a bottle of wine to a table where several officers of the New Jersey National Guard were eating and said to them and everyone else in the restaurant: “I propose a toast to the Governor of New Jersey, the commander-in-chief of the militia. He is an ingrate and he is a liar. Do I drink alone?” An embarrassed silence fell over the room. Reports varied in claiming that Nugent was drunk and that others joined him in the toast, but several of the officers walked out. Cries immediately arose for Nugent to be ousted as state Democratic chairman. After conferring with Wilson, several members of the state committee called a meeting in order to remove Nugent as state party chairman, which they did on August 10.⁴¹

From that time on, civil war raged among New Jersey’s Democrats. Wilson took advantage of the new primary law to attempt to shore up his support in the legislature. He spent most of September campaigning for supporters and against what he dubbed “the reactionary element, the element of the opposition.” He also declared, “I must mention names. Politics, when it means the service of a great people, is not a milk and water business.” The results of the primary gratified the governor for the most part. His candidates for the legislature won nominations throughout the state, except in Newark, where machine-backed candidates prevailed. That did not deter Wilson from using the state party convention to draft a platform calling for stronger business and workplace regulation, legislative redistricting, and reform of the state’s government machinery, tax system, and jury procedures. On the convention floor, the delegates greeted him with applause and shouted, “Three cheers for Governor Wilson, the next President of the United States.”⁴²

These victories were sweet, but they were only half the battle. Wilson barnstormed through the state in October and early November, giving at least one speech a day and sometimes as many as three. Besides boosting his candidates, he addressed state and national issues. He called himself “a modern radical” because, he said, he wanted “to bring my thinking up to the facts and not drag the facts back to my antiquated thinking.” He also urged Democrats to keep “the progressive wave that is sweeping through this Nation” in control of the party: “The Democratic party holds its lease of power on those terms and only upon those terms.”⁴³ New Jersey’s voters responded to his appeal only up to a point. Democratic legislative candidates outpolled Republicans statewide. The governor’s supporters won in most places, and the Democrats picked up seats in the state senate, though not enough to gain control. In Newark, Nugent’s machine deliberately failed to get out the vote for its own candidates for the assembly, thereby turning over control of that chamber, and now both houses of the legislature, to the Republicans. The outcome was a bitter disappointment to Wilson and did not bode well for the rest of his governorship.

When the next session of the legislature convened in January 1912, he trimmed his sails by proposing a more modest program of governmental and tax reform and the creation of a state board of health. He hoped that the good relations he had developed the preceding year with some Republican senators might ensure cooperation, but that was not to be. The governor was now a leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, and New Jersey Republicans were not going to do him any favors. Not only did they refuse to act on any of his proposals, but they passed bills of their own that he felt obliged to veto. Wilson found the experience frustrating, but he still found professional politicians easier and pleasanter to deal with than academic ones.

His daughter Nell later recalled that her father met these troubles “with philosophic understanding and calm. And this was not like the Princeton controversy, where his old friends and his heart were involved.”⁴⁴ He needed understanding and calm in the early months of 1912. This low point in his governorship was also a low point in his personal and larger political fortunes. After an impressive start, his drive for the presidential nomination had stalled, and meanwhile his old foes at Princeton had just installed Hibben as his successor, and West was about to open the new Graduate College.

Some events did relieve the gloom. In February 1912, President William Howard Taft nominated Wilson’s friend and Princeton classmate Mahlon Pitney to serve as a justice of the Supreme Court. Pitney had served in Congress and in New Jersey’s senate and supreme court, where he had earned a reputation as a political and judicial conservative. He came under attack in the U.S. Senate from some progressive Republicans and Democrats, and Wilson came to his aid by making telephone calls to Democratic senators in Washington. One journalist recalled that the two men sat together in the governor’s office when he made the calls, “calling each other Tommy and May—reminiscent of their days together at Princeton.”⁴⁵ Wilson also enlisted local party figures to work on Senator Martine, whose support of the nominee was doubtful.

Other aspects of the governorship also gave Wilson pleasure. Summers took the family to a seaside resort for long periods. A nearby golf course gave him a chance to pursue this newfound pastime, and he even enjoyed some of the ceremonial duties of his office. One of these required him to ride horseback as he reviewed the New Jersey National Guard on parade. Wilson had not ridden much since his youth, and he cut a decidedly civilian figure in top hat and tailcoat. Yet observers commented on how smartly he sat on his horse.

In some ways, he and, even more so, Ellen found the summers at Sea Girt a trial. There, the Wilsons had a hard time maintaining their customary separation between work life and home life. First at the Princeton Inn and then in the house on Cleveland Lane, family life went on in much the same way as before Wilson entered politics. He would have dinner with Ellen and Margaret and Jessie and Nell, and afterward they would read aloud together or sing around the piano. This routine sprang not only from their desire for privacy but also from Wilson’s attitude toward his work in both academic and public life. As Stockton Axson later observed, his brother-in-law had a “creative, literary type of mind” that would be absorbed “with a tremendous theme, an epic.” He therefore wanted his time away from work “simply to relax, not have business follow him.” Because he wanted “to let his mind play, to give it a thorough rest, he talks small talk with the members of his family, he recites limericks and makes puns and tells anecdotes.”⁴⁶

Sea Girt, however, was a different story. Railroad tracks close by, the National Guard parade ground next door, swarms of visitors to the beach, and a constant parade of politicians—all these made it what Ellen Wilson’s biographer called “a veritable gold fish bowl.”⁴⁷ But the New Jersey governor’s summer residence witnessed the turn of fortune that would always make Wilson remember the place with special fondness. The Wilsons were back at Sea Girt at the end of June 1912 when the Democrats met for their national convention in Baltimore. Here, they and Tumulty rode an emotional roller-coaster as seemingly endless rounds of balloting first seemed to doom Wilson’s chances for the presidential nomination and then finally brought victory. Troubles in New Jersey and unpleasant reminders from Princeton now faded as Wilson set out on the greatest adventure of his life.