7

NOMINEE

Woodrow Wilson became a main contender for the Democratic Party nomination for president as soon as he was elected governor of New Jersey. This was an unusual turn of events. According to the political logic of the time, two other Democrats should have led the field for the presidential nomination: the governor-elect of New York and the governor of Ohio, states with much larger numbers of electoral votes. A governor or former governor of New York had run as the nominee of one of the two major parties in five of the last ten presidential elections, and the winning candidate for president in all but three of the last ten elections had been a native of Ohio, two of them governors. Yet the hottest prospect for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1912 came from a relatively small and politically undistinguished state, and the freshest new face in the party belonged to a neophyte freshly removed from academia.

Wilson owed his standing to a conjunction of luck, current issues, and changes in the political environment. The Democratic governors of the big swing states did not cut a strong figure in national politics. The New Yorker, John A. Dix, was indolent and colorless, while the Ohioan, Judson Harmon, was known mainly as an opponent of prohibition. Also, those governors came from the conservative side of the party, and Bryan’s ideological sway among Democrats, together with the rising tide of progressive sentiment, effectively ruled out any presidential nominee from the conservative side. Wilson’s well-publicized battles against privilege at Princeton had mitigated some of his vulnerability on those grounds even before he had taken on the New Jersey bosses. Moreover, a reputation earned outside the political arena had acquired newfound potency thanks to the proliferation of popular magazines and newspapers—the new “mass media.” Roosevelt had already demonstrated how fame gained in other pursuits could help lead to political preferment. Wilson could not match Roosevelt’s war-hero status or glamorous exploits as a hunter and rancher, but as a well-regarded former university president he stood out from the political pack.

The movement to gain him the nomination started in the opening months of 1911. An early impetus came from New Jersey Democrats, who relished the prospect of promoting one of their own to the White House, but a serious contender needed wider support, which Wilson had from the outset. Besides Harvey and the conservatives, whom the governor now began to hold at arm’s length, there was a trio of backers representing men who shared Wilson’s background as an expatriate southerner who had sought his fortune in the North. First to jump in was Walter Page, now a successful magazine and book editor in New York.¹ Next was Walter McCorkle, a native Virginian who practiced law on Wall Street and was president of the Southern Society of New York, an organization of expatriates at whose meetings Wilson had often spoken. Last came William F. McCombs, a native of Arkansas who had been a student of Wilson’s at Princeton, practiced law, and dabbled in New York politics. The three met on February 24, 1911, to discuss such campaign aspects as publicity for the candidate, out-of-state speaking tours, contacts with Democrats in Congress, and fund-raising. This meeting was the genesis of the Wilson presidential movement.

Wilson met with his new triumvirate for the first time a month later, at Page’s apartment in New York. Up to this point, he had felt detached from the activity on his behalf, and this meeting with his backers did not hearten him. They told him he needed to make a speaking tour in the West, and they had hired one of Page’s magazine writers, Frank Parker Stockbridge, to arrange this trip and handle publicity. “It is all a very strange business for me,” Wilson reported to Mary Peck, “and not very palateable [sic]. I feel an almost unconquerable shyness about it.” Having a publicity manager on the western tour likewise bothered him: “Already he is giving me no end of trouble to supply him with ‘copy.’ ”²

His actions belied his professed ambivalence. He had already begun his own campaign to try to win over Bryan, who earlier had sought the governor-elect’s views on a “political matter” and said, “The fact that you were against us in 1896 raised a question in my mind in regard to your views on public questions but your attitude in the Senatorial case has tended to reassure me.” The two men met for the first time in March. Ellen Wilson once more showed her acuity in guiding her husband’s career by arranging the meeting. When Wilson was out of town, she learned that Bryan would be giving a nonpolitical talk at the Princeton Theological Seminary. She telegraphed her husband to come back at once, and she invited Bryan to dinner with their family. The couple did their best to charm Bryan, who evidently reciprocated. Wilson confessed to Mary Peck that he now had “a very different impression of him” and was struck by Bryan’s “force of sincerity and conviction. … A truly captivating man, I must admit.” Two or three years later, Ellen reportedly told a friend, “[T]hat dinner put Mr. Wilson in the White House.”³

That was an exaggeration, but this first meeting did open a courtship. Early in April, Wilson spoke after Bryan at a political dinner in New Jersey. “I have never been matched with Mr. Bryan, or any other speaker his equal before,” he told Mary Peck, “and had my deep misgivings as to how I should stand the comparison.” His performance showed that he could hold his own with the nation’s champion orator. “Unless there was a general conspiracy to lie to me,” he reported to Mary Peck, “I spoke as well as Mr. Bryan did, and moved my audience more. Ellen said I was ‘more of an orator’ than she had ever seen me before: that is, that I put more colour and emotion into what I said than usual.” Bryan did not say anything about the speech, but in his own talk, Wilson reported, “Mr. Bryan paid me a very handsome tribute of generous praise, which my sanguine friends thought quite significant and were immensely pleased at; for of course no Democrat can win whom Mr. Bryan does not approve.”⁴

In seeking the Democratic presidential nomination Wilson had three principal tasks. First, he had to make himself better known throughout the country. Second, he had to convince Democrats in the Bryan wing of the party that he was one of them. Finally, he had to burnish his credentials as a progressive. Given the Democrats’ unbroken string of drubbings in the last four presidential elections, appealing beyond the bounds of the party was essential to winning the presidency. Wilson’s experience in New Jersey had shown that progressivism offered the best chance to cast a broader net.

These tasks played to his strengths. Attracting publicity was never a problem for him. He had already earned a national reputation as president of Princeton, and now, as a crusading reform governor and dragon slayer in his fight with the bosses, he drew attention from people who wanted to size up this new boy on the political block. The experienced Frank Stockbridge knew how to ensure that local and national press gave the governor good coverage, which he supplemented by arranging personal interviews. The substantive side of the mission—appealing to Bryanites and progressives—fell entirely on Wilson’s shoulders, and this neophyte showed that he was ready for the political big league.

He was already using language that Bryan’s followers liked to hear. Early in 1911, he called himself a radical and avowed, “[T]he so-called radicalism of our time is nothing else than an effort to release the energies of our time.” At a business convention in Atlanta, where he was when Ellen summoned him home to meet Bryan, he shared the program with the two men who would eventually be his main opponents in the election. Ex-president Roosevelt spoke the night before, and President Taft was to speak right after Wilson. According to Taft’s military aide, Archie Butt, the governor held the audience spellbound for forty minutes with “a most polished and masterly address. … The President said it was the polished utterance of a politician. But he has got to be reckoned with.” Wilson also thought he did well, telling Mary Peck, “On the whole the reception accorded me was finer than that accorded either Mr. Roosevelt or Mr. Taft.” People in Atlanta talked about nominating him for president. It must have been particularly gratifying to receive such acclaim in the place where he had suffered through his brief, unsatisfying stint as a lawyer.⁵

Wilson expanded on his progressive themes during the spring of 1911. In a speech to a national Democratic gathering in Indianapolis, he lambasted the Republicans for favoring big business and the wealthy, and he coined a phrase he would use again later when he declared, “The men who understand the life of the country are the men who are on the make, and not the men who are made; because the men who are on the make are in contact with the actual conditions of struggle.” He also stuck up for labor unions, praised factory-safety and workmen’s compensation laws, and ridiculed the standard conservative line that such laws and union organizing interfered with freedom of contract: “[Workers] must work upon the terms offered them or starve. Is that freedom of contract?”⁶Curiously, although he was speaking on Thomas Jefferson’s birthday, Wilson made only perfunctory mention of the Sage of Monticello.

Jefferson posed a problem for Wilson both intellectually and politically He had always ranked this man among his least favorite founders of the Republic, and he had never been able to swallow the legacies of state rights and limited government that conservative Democrats drew from him. Hamilton remained his favorite among the founders, and he had enjoyed a recent study of him by F. S. Oliver, an English businessman, more than any other book he had read in a long time. These views involved more than historical and intellectual preferences. At this time, Republicans generally reviled Jefferson because of the way secessionists had invoked his legacy at the time of the Civil War. Sophisticated Republicans such as Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge went further, excoriating him in addition for having neglected military preparedness and for lowering the tone of politics to crass commercialism and self-interest. In his influential book published two years earlier, The Promise of American Life, the progressive writer Herbert Croly had refined such arguments into an indictment of Jefferson’s legacy as the worst obstacle to the development of transcendent nationalism and genuine idealism in American politics. Conversely, Hamilton came in for high marks in these circles on the same grounds. On the other side of the party divide, nearly all Democrats worshipped Jefferson as fervently as ever. Bryanites exalted him as the champion of the common people and the apostle of greater democracy. If Bryan’s approval was essential for the Democratic nomination, so, in a sense, was Jefferson’s.⁷

Wilson had begun to address this problem a while earlier. During the gubernatorial campaign, he had defined a “Progressive Democrat” as someone “who will try to carry forward in the service of a new age, in the spirit of Thomas Jefferson.” On the western tour that Stockbridge arranged, he expanded on this argument. Speaking to the Jefferson Club in Los Angeles, he argued that “every true Jeffersonian” must strive to translate the founder’s ideals into the language of the present time, and he claimed that “the Jeffersonian spirit” demanded support of such innovations as the primary and the referendum.⁸ Such measured praise marked the limit of Wilson’s embrace of Jefferson up to this point. He would go further later.

The western trip, which took up the month of May, began immediately after the end of the New Jersey legislative session. This was the most relaxed speaking tour Wilson ever made in his political career, more like a vacation than a campaign. The first and last parts of the trip, which took him across the Great Plains and the Rockies, featured only a few speeches, separated by long intervals of train travel. Princeton and Bryn Mawr alumni entertained him, and he visited with several cousins, including his old flame Hattie Woodrow Welles. He gave more speeches when he reached the West Coast, which he was visiting for the first time, and in all of his appearances he endorsed reform measures and refused to shy away from the word radical. He often praised the initiative, referendum, and recall, and in a newspaper interview he saluted “more freedom of action here in the West; you are younger and there exists a sort of brotherhood of pioneering.” In one speech on the return leg, he declared that the nation’s strength came from its ordinary people, not “its leading men. … You never heard of a tree deriving its energy from its buds or its flowers, but from its roots.” In another speech, he declared that the doors of opportunity were “shut and double bolted and we know who has locked them and bolted them”—it was “the concentration of money” that choked off opportunity to all but a pre-selected few.”⁹

Wilson got a warm reception everywhere, and the tour gave him a preview of the presidential campaign trail. He also used the trip to continue to woo Bryan. On his way back, he visited Bryan’s adopted hometown, Lincoln, Nebraska, where he paid tribute to “the great Nebraskan, W. J. Bryan,” and, referring to the name of Bryan’s home, called him the “sage of Fairview.” The object of this adulation was not present, because business had called him away, but his younger brother and political sidekick, Charles, was part of the welcoming committee. Charles Bryan took Wilson to Fairview, where Bryan’s wife, Mary, received him. Also on the journey east, he met with his backers in Washington, D.C., where he had dinner with Page, McCorkle, McCombs, and Stockbridge. He told them he wanted to eschew “the usual methods” of politics, but he conceded, “I am far too well acquainted with practical [considerations] to think that the matter can be allowed to take care of itself.” McCombs—who was the youngest of the group, unmarried, and independently wealthy—volunteered to take charge.¹⁰

The new manager did his job ably, up to a point. McCombs lavished nearly manic energy on coordinating Wilson’s supporters in various states. He set up an office in New York and gathered a staff. He recognized the need to deal with politicians around the country, maintain an organization, and not just rely on publicity and the eloquence of the would-be candidate. But his contribution carried a stiff price. He began pestering Wilson to refrain from calling himself a radical and to cultivate leading businessmen and “stick to a few fundamentals.” McCombs also grew possessive of Wilson and domineering in his management of the campaign. He forced Stockbridge out and became jealous of anyone who was attracted to Wilson’s candidacy. His behavior would grow worse during the months leading up to the 1912 Democratic convention and may well have sprung from a deep-seated psychological disorder.¹¹

Unfortunately for McCombs but fortunately for the Wilson presidential campaign, his jealousy was justified in one case. Late in the summer of 1911, yet another expatriate southerner in New York climbed aboard the bandwagon and gradually began to augment and then supplant McCombs’s leadership. He was William Gibbs McAdoo. A tall man with sharp features and a dark complexion and hair, the forty-seven-year-old McAdoo had the air of the successful businessman that he was. He was a native of Georgia who had studied law at the University of Tennessee and practiced in that state until moving to New York in the early 1890s. In New York, he switched careers to organize, promote, and head the company that built and operated a new railway link beneath the Hudson River between lower Manhattan and New Jersey, known familiarly as the Hudson Tubes. Difficulties raising money to build the Tubes had left McAdoo with an abiding dislike for the financial barons of Wall Street. He became a hero in New York when he reversed the railroad magnate William Henry Vanderbilt’s notorious sneer, “The public be damned,” adopting for the Tubes the motto “The public be pleased.” Those attitudes, together with boyhood memories of hard times in the South after the Civil War, set McAdoo apart from the conservatism that prevailed among New York’s leading businessmen. This newcomer proved to be a quick learner in politics, and he had a steadiness and resolve that McCombs lacked.¹²

McAdoo’s qualities proved sorely needed in the months that stretched between the fall of 1911 and the Democratic National Convention in the summer of 1912. This was a time of troubles for Wilson’s bid for the nomination, with opposition coming from bosses in New Jersey, conservatives, and political rivals. The governor’s foes at home did their greatest mischief now. Ever since his earlier fights with Smith and Nugent, they had bad-mouthed him to machine leaders in other states, especially New York, and they conspired to spoil his shot at the presidential nomination. His party’s losing control of the lower house of the state legislature led to the stalemate of the 1912 legislative session, which broke the governor’s string of successes and helped to slow the momentum of his presidential bid outside New Jersey.

Conservatives inside and outside the Democratic Party also became a thorn in Wilson’s side. He heeded McCombs’s warning not to appear overly radical, and in October, speaking in Madison, Wisconsin, Robert La Follette’s hometown, he stated, “The diagnosis is radical, but the cure is remedial; the cure is conservative. I do not, for my part, think that remedies applied should be applied upon a great theoretical scale.” Yet he stuck to his guns on the issue of financial concentration, excoriating a bill introduced in Congress by conservative Republicans as a move toward greater consolidation and a threat to small banks. At the national governors’ conference, he publicly sparred with a fellow Democrat, the governor of Alabama, who cast aspersions on majority rule. As that spat indicated, conservative views still prevailed among many Democrats, particularly, but not exclusively, in the South. “The South is a very conservative region,” he told Mary Peck, “… and I am not conservative. I am a radical.” He worried that his southern supporters might “make a mistake and repent it too late.”¹³ He was right to worry. His Dixie roots were not enough to induce all of his fellow southern whites to flock to his standard, and opposition from his native region soon proved to be a major obstacle on the road to the nomination.

The first conservative assaults came from another quarter, however. The New York Sun, the leading conservative Republican newspaper, had disliked Wilson from even before his governorship, and in December 1911 and January 1912 this paper published two potentially damaging disclosures about him. Both matters had roots in Wilson’s presidency of Princeton. First, the Sun revealed that shortly before being elected governor, Wilson had applied for a $4,000 annual pension from a fund recently established by Andrew Carnegie for retired college professors and administrators. Both his age—fifty-three, not the usually mandated sixty-five—and the sponsor of the fund exposed him to scathing attacks. “The Carnegie Foundation was created for indigent teachers and not for indigent politicians,” thundered one anti-Wilson newspaper. “I cannot understand how a real Democrat could touch such money,” declared a radical Massachusetts party activist.¹⁴

This disclosure tarnished Wilson’s progressive credentials. He immediately issued a statement explaining that Carnegie pensions were also awarded “on the ground of length and quality of service.” He added, “I have no private means to depend upon. A man who goes into politics bound by the principles of honor puts his family and all who may be dependent upon him for support at the mercy of any incalculable turn of the wheel of fortune.” Although he still felt justified in having applied for the pension, he noted that the Carnegie trustees had declined his request and “I have not renewed the application.” Money worries did weigh on the family. Ellen told a friend that “his income from his books averages less than $1000 a year,—all of which goes for life insurance. … When he was a mere professor he could and did make some money writing and lecturing, so that we even built a home for ourselves,—but for the past ten years he has given his pen and his voice to the public service absolutely free, gratis, for nothing!”¹⁵ In the meantime, Wilson did accept a personal gift of $4,000 raised by wealthy Princeton friends.

The brouhaha eventually calmed down, but in a letter to Mary Peck he blamed the situation on “certain big business interests in N.Y., who know that I could not be managed to their mind,” together with the nominally Democratic newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, who opposed him “for personal reasons.” Wilson felt “set about by vindictive men, determined to destroy my character, by fair means or foul.” He also feared that old enemies at Princeton were conspiring with his political foes, and a skeleton from that closet did come back to haunt him. On January 8, 1912, The Sun published the letter written almost five years earlier by Wilson to a conservative alumnus that closed with the sentence “Would that we could do something, at once dignified and effective, to knock Mr. Bryan once and for all into a cocked hat!”¹⁶ When he wrote those words, he was still consorting with other conservative Democrats and trying to curry favor with this wealthy alumnus, Adrian Joline. Wilson began to change his political stance soon afterward, and Joline became one of his bitterest opponents in the fights over the Quad Plan and the Graduate College. Joline started circulating the letter in the spring of 1911, and one of his friends leaked it to The Sun.

This transparent attempt to discredit Wilson with Bryan and his followers fooled nobody, but it caused some tense moments. McCombs panicked and charged that a conspiracy was afoot, masterminded by Wall Street tycoons. Bryan took the matter in stride. It helped that he happened to be in Raleigh, North Carolina, when the news broke and staying with his close friend Josephus Daniels, a newspaper editor and prominent Democrat who backed Wilson. Daniels worked on Bryan and traveled with him to Washington, where the New Jersey governor was scheduled to speak on January 8 at the Democrats’ biggest annual event, the Jackson Day dinner. One Democrat who sought to mollify Bryan remembered him saying, “If the big financial interests think they are going to make a rift in the Progressive ranks of the Democratic Party by such tactics, they are mistaken.”¹⁷

Wilson reacted in a similar manner. He drafted a statement to the press praising Bryan but decided against issuing it. “We must not appear to place ourselves on the defensive,” an adviser recalled him saying. “I will cover the situation tonight in my address.” In his Jackson Day speech, he praised Bryan for having “the steadfast vision of what it was that was the matter” and having based his career unfailingly on principle. He urged Democrats to “move against the trusts” and remain faithful to “that vision which sees that no society is renewed from the top and every society is renewed from the bottom.” The speech did the trick. Bryan put his hand on Wilson’s shoulder and said to him, “That was splendid, splendid.” Other Democrats rushed to congratulate him, and as he told Mary Peck, “I was made the lion of the occasion,—to my great surprise; and the effect of it all (for it was a national affair) seems to have been to strengthen the probabilities of my nomination many-fold.”¹⁸

One more problem from the conservative side vexed Wilson in January 1912. This involved George Harvey and his cohort Henry Watterson, editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal. In December, Wilson had dinner with the two men in New York, and they discussed the political situation. At the end of the evening, Harvey asked for “a perfectly frank answer” to the question of whether his support was embarrassing Wilson, who answered that it might be. Wilson quickly regretted his frankness and, not having thanked Harvey for his support, said, “Forgive me, and forget my manners.” Harvey affected to accept the apology, but he did not forgive his onetime protégé for his apostasy from Democratic conservatism. Harvey dropped the slogan “For President: Woodrow Wilson,” which he had been running on the cover of Harper’s Weekly. He also fed stories to newspapers about a “break” between him and Wilson and released a misleading statement to the press accusing Wilson of acting on his own initiative to brush him off. This attack backfired because Watterson wrote a letter to The New York Times in which he inadvertently confirmed that Harvey had initiated the affair. Meanwhile, Bryan sprang to Wilson’s defense. In his magazine, The Commoner, he asserted that the attacks “are proving the sincerity of his [Wilson’s] present position. … [T]he venom of his adversaries removes all doubt as to the REALITY of the change.”¹⁹

In retrospect, this incident and the others would shrink in importance compared with the biggest test Wilson faced in his quest for the nomination—challenges from rival aspirants. His apparent ease in marching toward the party’s top prize was deceptive. Novelty at first enhanced his attractiveness, while the Democrats’ losing record in recent presidential contests initially made more-established politicians shy away. Both of those circumstances had changed by the end of 1911. Wilson’s novelty may have been wearing off, and mounting political troubles for the Taft administration—together with open warfare in Republican ranks—made the Democrats’ presidential prospects look unexpectedly bright.

The biggest question hanging over the party was whether its top national officeholder would make a bid for the nomination. He was the Speaker of the House of Representatives, James Beauchamp Clark of Missouri. Clark, who went by the nickname Champ, was sixty-one years old in 1911. Active in Democratic politics for four decades, he had served in the House, with one interruption, for the past eighteen years, becoming minority leader in 1907 and Speaker after the party won control in 1910. An educated man who had practiced and taught law and had briefly been a college president, Clark nevertheless gave the appearance of being Wilson’s polar opposite. Folksy and taciturn, he had once endorsed a patent medicine in a speech on the floor of the House, and he had gotten ahead in politics in part by letting people underestimate him. To the press, Clark seemed the epitome of the small-town party hack, a public image that was both unfortunate and unfair. In his years as minority leader, Clark had welded the House Democrats into a disciplined, progressive force, and on all the important issues he was a loyal Bryanite. That record prompted many observers to predict that Bryan would endorse Clark for the nomination after the Speaker announced his candidacy late in the fall of 1911. Champ Clark was a formidable contender, as Wilson and his backers soon discovered.²⁰

Nor was Clark the only serious challenger. The Democrats’ second-ranking national officeholder also entered the race for the nomination. He was the majority leader in the House, Oscar W. Underwood of Alabama. At first, his candidacy seemed to be just another home-state “favorite son” bid, but in the early months of 1912 Underwood began to gather support throughout the South. His attractiveness was testimony to the weakness in the South that worried Wilson.

Wilson drew fire from opposite ends of the political spectrum in the South. So-called Bourbon Democrats—conservatives who led the political machines in their states—recoiled from his “radical” progressive views. Agrarian radicals—such as Tom Watson of Georgia, once a leading Populist, and James K. Vardaman of Mississippi—rejected him on account of his anti-Bryan past. The common denominator of this opposition was the belief that this expatriate was no longer a “real” southerner. Wilson’s opponents viewed him as someone who had adopted alien Yankee ways—either the radical progressivism that irked the Bourbons or the friendliness toward urbanites and big business that irked the agrarian radicals. His southern supporters tended to be more progressive types, such as Josephus Daniels and, ironically, Wilson’s old but not fond acquaintance at the Atlanta bar, Hoke Smith. The fault line separating his supporters and opponents in the former Confederacy ran mainly between reconstructed and unreconstructed white southerners.²¹

Another irony made it clear that Underwood’s backers did not so much love him more as they loved Wilson less. The forty-nine-year-old congressman was arguably no more a “real” southerner than the New Jersey governor. He was a native of Louisville, Kentucky, and had spent part of his boyhood in Minnesota. Only after attending the University of Virginia—his time there briefly overlapping with Wilson’s, although the two men never knew each other—did he move to the Deep South, where, like Wilson, he had set up a law practice in a New South boomtown, in Underwood’s case the rising manufacturing center of Birmingham, Alabama. After his election to Congress in the mid-1890s, Underwood became a spokesman for his city’s business interests. Smooth-faced and affable, he owed his rise among House Democrats to his pleasant manner and his championship of tariff reform. His candidacy for the nomination was a blessing in disguise for Wilson. Besides keeping Bourbons from backing Clark, as some of them probably would have done, it kept sectional feeling strong. Southerners wanted one of their own to be the nominee, and an expatriate might be better than an outsider.

The race for the nomination got going in earnest when William Randolph Hearst came out for Clark at the end of January 1912. This was another case of loving Wilson less. The “personal reasons” cited by Wilson to account for Hearst’s opposition evidently dated back to the beginning of his term as governor. According to later recollections, the newspaper tycoon had made a roundabout approach to Wilson, who responded, “Tell Mr. Hearst to go to hell.” Wilson reportedly also remarked, “God knows I want the Democratic presidential nomination and I am going to do everything legitimately to get it, but if I am to grovel at Hearst’s feet, I will never have it.”²² Wilson had made a dangerous enemy. Hearst’s newspapers enjoyed a wide readership, particularly among working-class people in big cities. Those papers started to blacken the governor’s name by reprinting derogatory comments about recent immigrants from southern and eastern Europe that appeared in Wilson’s History of the American People. Conversely, Tom Watson attacked him as a tool of the Catholic church because Joe Tumulty was his secretary, and as soft on race because he had spoken to African American audiences.

The four months from February to the end of May 1912 marked a time of trial and discouragement for Wilson. His bid for the nomination met one setback after another, with only a few bright moments to relieve the gloom. In 1912, neither party chose a majority of its convention delegates through primaries, although several states did pick their delegates that way. Those primaries provided indications of how well candidates were doing and helped or hurt them in the race to gain other delegates. Wilson skipped the first of the primaries, in Missouri, because it was Clark’s home state. The Speaker won handily there, despite some factional divisions. The governor prevailed in primaries in Wisconsin, Kansas, and Oklahoma, but he skipped Alabama because it was Underwood’s home state. Meanwhile, Underwood drew support throughout the South. A heavy blow to Wilson’s candidacy fell early in April in Illinois, where Clark beat him in the primary by a two-to-one margin. Soon afterward, the Speaker carried Bryan’s adopted home state, Nebraska, although with only a plurality. The news was not good in the nonprimary states either. In New York, despite the efforts of such supporters as a young Democratic state senator named Franklin D. Roosevelt, Tammany chose a delegation that was hostile to Wilson. In May, Underwood swept primaries in several southern states, including one where Wilson had strong personal ties, Georgia; in another state where he had strong ties, South Carolina, he did eke out a victory. Meanwhile, Clark won primaries in western and northeastern states, and many observers predicted that he would be the nominee.²³

The defeats were embarrassing to Wilson. He believed in primaries and had brought them to New Jersey; plus, he was running as the most progressive candidate and the one with the broadest appeal. Republicans had a ready, if disparaging, answer to the question of why Wilson had failed to do better. With them—conservatives and progressives alike—it was an article of faith that the Democrats were fundamentally unsound, triply tainted by the legacies of slavery and secession, by the corrupt influence of city machines, and by the cranky notions of farmer radicals. In the South, memories of the Civil War, with race lurking in the background, undermined Wilson’s appeal. In northern states such as Illinois and New York, Hearst’s attacks and Clark’s ties to party organizations turned politicians and voters against him. Finally, Clark had a record on economic issues, which mattered more to Bryanites than political reform, and he stood unsullied by any earlier conservative flirtations.²⁴

Wilson’s high-toned but hard-hitting reformist style would have worked better with Republicans. In fact, at that moment Theodore Roosevelt was showing how strong such an appeal was. “My hat is in the ring,” the ex-president announced in February 1912. He elbowed aside La Follette, who had previously carried the insurgent progressive banner against Taft, to run for the nomination against his own handpicked successor. Roosevelt denounced bosses and big business, advocated political and economic reform measures, and demanded that the will of the people be heard. He won all but one of the primaries he entered, even beating the president in his home state of Ohio. This turn of events hurt Wilson’s prospects. The spectacular internecine fight in the other party—especially because it involved such a famous and colorful figure as Roosevelt—distracted public attention from the contest for the Democratic nomination. Moreover, the damage that Roosevelt’s fight with Taft did to their party vastly improved Democratic prospects in November, so that the Democrats looked likely to win no matter whom they nominated. Why, then, turn to an unconventional newcomer when they could send a tried-and-true party man to the White House?

Wilson’s poor showing in the primaries did not stem from lack of effort. When he spoke in various states during the first half of 1912, he gave a compelling exposition of his political thinking. He continued to hit away at the theme of unleashing the economic energies of ordinary people. In a newspaper interview, he echoed Bryan’s well-known refrain from the 1896 Cross of Gold speech: “Who are the business men of the country? Are not the farmers business men? … Is not every employer of labor, every purchaser of material and every master of any enterprise, big or little, and every man in every profession a business man?” He also invoked sacred symbols, appropriating Lincoln’s memory as an example of how high common folk could rise, and he traveled farther down the road to Monticello, avowing, “I turn, with ever renewed admiration, to that great founder of the Democratic party, Thomas Jefferson.” Wilson likewise painted his own vision of a vigorous government led by a dynamic president. Several times, he implicitly or explicitly praised Roosevelt’s assertive style, and he maintained, “Government must regulate business, because that is the foundation of every other relationship, particularly of the political relationship.”²⁵

By the time Wilson uttered those words, his prospects of leading the nation looked dim. Not only had the primaries gone against him around the country, but he also had to fight on his home turf. Vengeful to the end, Smith and Nugent endorsed Clark and mounted a campaign to deny the governor delegates to the convention. After some initial reluctance, Wilson came out swinging. He made speeches around the state, and in a public letter to the party faithful he asked, “Shall the Democrats of New Jersey send delegates to Baltimore who are free men, or are the special interests again to name men to represent them? … [D]o you wish to support government conducted by public opinion, rather than by private understanding and management, or do you wish to slip back into the slough of the old despair and disgrace?” Distraction from the hard-fought contest between Roosevelt and Taft in the Republican primary did not help. Wilson and Roosevelt crossed paths in Princeton, when the ex-president spoke in front of the Nassau Inn the day before the New Jersey primary and Wilson stood in the crowd across the street, in front of the First Presbyterian Church. In his own speech, on the steps of his rented house an hour later, he commented on “two very militant gentlemen” whose fight was making it hard for people to concentrate on the issues.²⁶ Still, the primary, on May 28, went Wilson’s way. The up-and-coming new boss in Jersey City, Frank Hague, failed to deliver for Clark, and Nugent’s Newark returned the only non-Wilson delegates—four of them.

Sweetening that outcome was an editorial endorsement two days later from the New York World. For The World, it was partly a matter of loving Clark a lot less. The paper had earlier called his nomination “Democratic suicide” and feared that it would open the way to another term for Roosevelt, whom the editorial called “the most cunning and adroit demagogue that modern civilization has produced since Napoleon III.” Wilson seemed a bit too Bryanite for The World’s taste, but that shortcoming was “vastly overbalanced by his elements of strength.” Wilson had proved “his political courage and fearlessness” and shown himself to be “the sort of a man who ought to be President.” This good news from New Jersey and The World did not hearten Wilson. He told Mary Peck, “I have not the least idea of being nominated, because … the outcome is in the hands of professional case-hardened politicians who serve only their own interests and who know I will not serve them except as I might serve the party in general. I have no deep stakes involved in the game.”²⁷

Wilson was bracing himself to face an impending disappointment. But his prospects were not quite as bleak as he thought. Despite the primary defeats, his candidacy had attracted widespread support. In addition to The World, a number of important newspapers and magazines endorsed his nomination, such as Page’s The World’s Work, The Independent, The Nation, The Outlook, the New York Evening Post, The Kansas City Star, and Daniels’s Raleigh News and Observer. Protestant church leaders and journals embraced him as one of their own, as did teachers around the country. Wilson college clubs had more than 100 chapters by the time of the convention, with 10,000 members. Most important, Wilson had a strong, well-financed organization behind him. His wealthy Princeton friends contributed $85,000, of which $51,000 came from Cleveland Dodge, while other big donors chipped in an additional $65,000. Tensions between McCombs and McAdoo did not prevent them from resourcefully working the political circuit. They played the southern cards skillfully, gaining second-choice support from Underwood backers and extracting promises from his managers not to withdraw in favor of Clark. Moreover, Bryan declined to endorse Clark, and some people thought he might try to exploit a deadlocked convention to gain another nomination for himself. In short, Wilson’s situation was serious but not hopeless.²⁸

The year 1912 witnessed two of the most exciting national political conventions in American history. The first to meet and by far the more dramatic was the Republican gathering at the middle of June in Chicago. Nothing could match that convention’s furious exchanges on and off the floor between the Roosevelt and Taft forces, charges of a “steal” from the ex-president and his supporters, and the walkout by his delegates, who promised to start a third party. Roosevelt spoke to those delegates in person. In the most impassioned speech of his life, he pledged to carry the battle forward with the new party: “We fight in honorable fashion for the good of mankind; fearless of the future; unheeding of our individual hearts; with unflinching hearts and undimmed eyes; we stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.” Wilson’s reaction to these events was guarded and quizzical. Even before the Republican convention, he had soured on Roosevelt and what he called “his present insane distemper of egotism!”²⁹

The Republican split brought both peril and opportunity to Wilson’s cause. At first glance, this development worsened things for him by making victory for the Democrats now seem well-nigh certain. All they had to do was hang together, so the conventional wisdom went, and they would win no matter who headed their ticket. At a deeper level, however, Roosevelt’s bolt vastly expanded the stakes of the election. Some of the ex-president’s friends thought he got carried away with his emotions, while others shared Wilson’s view that he was at least slightly mad. Neither was true. Despite the sound and fury of the Republican convention and the pretext offered by the “steal,” there was long-pondered, deeply thought-out method in Roosevelt’s madness. He had convinced himself that the current battles over the control of big business and the extension of democracy were repeating the sectional conflict half a century earlier over slavery. He intended his new party to play the role previously played by Lincoln’s Republicans—of standing up and fighting for freedom and national unity—and to emerge as a major, lasting political force.³⁰

Wilson shared these views, though with a different twist. In February, he had alluded to Lincoln’s “fearless analysis” that the nation could not endure half-slave and half-free. “[T]hat statement ought be made now,” Wilson declared, “—that as our economic affairs are now organized they cannot go on.” The present division of the country was more intricate and difficult, but it was “something that can, by clear thinking, be dealt with and successfully dealt with, and no man who is a friend of this country predicts any deeper sorts of trouble.” Now Roosevelt’s actions threatened to inject dangerous passions into the present conflict and reshape the face of American politics. If the Democrats nominated a party regular like Clark or a southerner like Underwood, they would follow the Republicans in discrediting themselves in the eyes of progressive-minded voters, thus expanding Roosevelt’s new venture into a major party—so Roosevelt and his supporters believed and hoped. His son Kermit told their distant cousin Franklin, who was married to the ex-president’s niece Eleanor, “Pop is praying for the nomination of Champ Clark.”³¹

The delegates who convened in Baltimore on June 25, 1912, came close to giving the ex-president his heart’s desire. On the first ballot, Clark led Wilson by 440½ to 324, with Governor Harmon of Ohio next at 148 and Underwood fourth at 117½; another 57 votes were scattered among four candidates, including 31 for Governor Thomas R. Marshall of Indiana. On the next eight ballots, Wilson and Clark each picked up a few votes. The standoff broke on the tenth ballot. Persistent rumors predicted that Tammany would switch from Harmon to Clark, and that happened when the machine’s boss, Charles Murphy, cast the state’s 90 votes for the Speaker. That shift gave a majority of the delegates to Clark, who reportedly was writing his telegram of acceptance and expected to be nominated on one of the next few ballots, and Wilson was ready to concede.³²

If this had been a Republican convention, it would have been all over; only a majority was required for that party’s nomination. If this had been a normal Democratic convention, it would also have been all over. The party did require two thirds for nomination, but not since 1844 had a candidate won a majority and not gone on to win the nomination. But this was far from a normal Democratic convention. Though nowhere near as explosive as the Republicans’ recent fracas in Chicago, this one witnessed plenty of fireworks. Before the proceedings opened, Bryan had telegraphed the candidates to demand that they oppose anyone for temporary chairman of the convention who was “conspicuously identified with the reactionary element of the party.” He was taking a slap at Alton Parker, the party’s conservative nominee in the race against Roosevelt in 1904, who enjoyed the backing of Tammany and other northern machines. McCombs drafted a reply for Wilson that straddled the issue, just as Clark’s reply did. When the governor received McCombs’s draft, in his bedroom at Sea Girt, he said, “I cannot sign this.” Sitting on the edge of a bed, he wrote his own reply on a pad of paper. “You are quite right,” he told Bryan. “No one will doubt where my sympathies lie.” Parker won the convention chairmanship with votes from the Clark forces, thereby adding weight to the rumors about a deal with Tammany. Further fights followed over the seating of delegates and the rules for voting. Bryan stirred up more controversy when he introduced a resolution on the floor demanding that delegates allied with Wall Street moguls not be seated. It was a quixotic gesture that angered even some of his staunchest allies, but it kept progressive sentiment squarely at the fore of the convention.³³

Those fights offered a prelude to what transpired next. Tammany’s switch on the tenth ballot infuriated Bryan, who began to maneuver against Clark. According to Tumulty’s recollection, Bryan telephoned Wilson to tell him that his only chance was to declare that he would not accept the nomination with Tammany’s help. Tumulty and Wilson decided that there was nothing to lose, and the governor sent a telephone message stating, “For myself, I have no hesitation in making that declaration.” Then, possibly at Ellen’s instigation, he sent a second message saying he would not make that declaration public. McCombs later claimed he had not delivered either message to Bryan. Whatever happened, Bryan took to the warpath against Tammany. During the calling of the roll for the fourteenth ballot, he declared on the floor that he could not vote for any candidate who would “accept the high honor of the presidential nomination at the hands of Mr. Murphy.” He then switched his previously instructed vote for Clark to Wilson.³⁴ This marked the beginning of the turn of Wilson’s fortunes.

At Sea Girt, the governor tried to deal at long distance with what was happening in Baltimore. He tried to stay calm by playing golf and reading John Morley’s Life of Gladstone. But as he later confessed to Mrs. Peck, “While the convention was in session there was hardly a minute between breakfast and midnight when some one of our little corps was not at the telephone on some business connected with the convention.” One telephone call came early in the morning of June 29 from a distraught McCombs, who said all was lost. According to William McAdoo’s recollection, McCombs went to pieces, and the two men got into an argument after the call. McAdoo then telephoned Wilson and talked him out of quitting. In Sea Girt, everyone around the breakfast table was dispirited—except Wilson. When he noticed a catalog from a coffin company in the morning mail, he commented, “They’ve got their catalogue here by the first mail.” But he was not ready to attend his own political funeral. Later in the day, reporters asked him what answer he might give to a telegram from Clark’s manager asking him to withdraw. “There will be none,” the governor said.³⁵

From then on, Wilson’s prospects improved, though at a snail’s pace. This convention offered a foretaste of the party’s fratricidal, seemingly interminable gatherings in the next decade. Behind the open debates about progressivism and bosses there were rumblings of the social and cultural conflict between country and city, “native” and immigrant, Protestant and Catholic, that would come close to destroying the Democrats in the 1920s. But in 1912, those conflicts had not yet come to the forefront. Also, an undemocratic rule and old-fashioned wheeling and dealing still prevailed. The two-thirds rule, which, like most progressive Democrats, Wilson opposed, saved him from defeat. Behind-the-scenes horse trading finally brought him victory.

During the long, hot days and nights in Baltimore, Wilson’s managers worked tirelessly to get votes. McAdoo later claimed that he had a total of four hours’ sleep during the last three days of balloting. More than McCombs, who turned into a nervous wreck, it was McAdoo who played the biggest part in putting Wilson over the top. He and others worked several angles successfully. One was to gain Indiana’s votes by promising the vice-presidential nomination to Governor Marshall; that suited the state’s party boss, who wanted to get rid of the governor. Another tactic was to cling to the ironclad agreement with the Underwood forces not to withdraw in Clark’s favor. Wilson’s managers offered Underwood the vice-presidential nomination, which he declined, and they promised to switch their votes to him if Wilson withdrew. Finally and mysteriously, the managers persuaded the Chicago boss, Roger Sullivan, to shift a large bloc of Illinois votes from Clark to Wilson. McAdoo and others cultivated Sullivan, who had clashed with Hearst’s allies and Clark’s supporters in Illinois. Also, Sullivan was reportedly afraid that a prolonged deadlock might result in Bryan’s nomination. The Illinois switch came on the morning of July 2, on the forty-second ballot. It took four more ballots, and another of McCombs’s panic attacks, before Wilson finally reached the magic two thirds and became the Democrats’ nominee for president.³⁶

A telephone call at two forty-eight in the afternoon brought official word of the nomination to Sea Girt. Wilson was alone in the library when the call came. He went upstairs to tell Ellen, who was planning a family trip to their favorite spot, Rydal Mount, in England’s Lake District, in the event he was not nominated. She knew what was going to happen when she heard his footsteps on the stair. “Well, dear, I guess we won’t go to Mount Rydal [sic] this Summer after all,” he told her, and she answered, “I don’t care a bit, for I know lots of other places just as good.” The couple came downstairs, with Mrs. Wilson on her husband’s arm. Reporters noticed that Wilson’s eyes were moist, while Ellen was smiling. The men of the press stood in silence, holding their hats in their hands. Then the governor made a statement: “The honor is as great as can come to any man by the nomination of a party, especially in the circumstances, and I hope I appreciate it at its true value; but just [at] this moment I feel the tremendous responsibility it involves even more than I feel the honor. I hope with all my heart that the party will never have reason to regret it.”³⁷

That downbeat note was not just a bit of modesty for public consumption. Tumulty had hired a band to play outside, and Nell Wilson remembered, “Father asked him if he had instructed them to slink away in case of defeat.” Someone in the crowd said, “Governor, you don’t seem a bit excited.” Wilson answered, “I can’t effervesce in the face of responsibility.” Four days later, he told Mary Peck, “I am wondering how all this happened to come to me, and whether, when [the] test is over, I shall have been found to be in any sense worthy. It is awesome to be so believed in and trusted.”³⁸ Such faith and trust were going to be needed as Woodrow Wilson went out to do battle with the most formidable opponent he could face in an election that promised to be one of the most momentous in the nation’s history.