8
The election of 1912 witnessed one of the greatest presidential campaigns in American history, featuring a past president, a present president, and a future president: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson. Coincidentally, these men were graduates of three of the country’s oldest and most prestigious universities—Harvard for Roosevelt, Yale for Taft, and Princeton for Wilson. Also running was the country’s most appealing radical politician, the Socialist Party’s Eugene Victor Debs. From the outset, knowledgeable observers agreed that the real contest was between Roosevelt and Wilson. The fight between this pair held the center ring of the main tent of this electoral circus. It pitted the most colorful presidential politician since Andrew Jackson against the most articulate presidential politician since Thomas Jefferson. Woodrow Wilson could not have asked for a tougher or worthier opponent. If he won this fight, he could take pride in having beaten the heavyweight champion of politics.1
By another coincidence, Roosevelt and Wilson accepted their respective parties’ nominations on the same day, August 7, 1912. Roosevelt’s new Progressive Party met in the same hall in Chicago where the Republicans had gathered two months before. This convention struck many who were there as more like a religious revival than a political conclave. The delegates sang “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and words set to the tune commonly used in Protestant churches for the doxology. Roosevelt broke precedent by appearing in person at the opening of the convention to deliver his “Confession of Faith.” He denounced the Republicans as hidebound reactionaries and “Professor Wilson” and the Democrats as wedded to “an archaic construction of the States’-rights doctrine” and quack economic remedies derived from Bryan’s free-silver notions. He rejected “class government” by both “the rich few” and “the needy many”: the country needed a transcendent vision of the national interest that would “give the right trend to our democracy, a trend which will take it away from mere greedy shortsighted materialism.” He closed by repeating his famous shout: “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.” Curiously, however, when the Progressives nominated him with great fanfare the next day, he said only a few words thanking the delegates for the honor.2
Wilson’s acceptance of his party’s nomination, which occurred a few hours earlier, was a tamer affair. He observed the formality of waiting for a party delegation to come and inform him of his nomination, a practice dating back more than three quarters of a century, to the first party conventions, which had taken place before railroads and telegraphs, when it had presumably taken some time to learn that one had received the party’s nomination. In fact, the business of a delegation traveling to inform the nominee had long since become an artificial ritual, but it did give the nominee time to prepare an acceptance speech, which traditionally served to kick off the campaign. Wilson performed that duty when a committee of Democrats journeyed to Sea Girt on August 7.
Standing on the porch of the governor’s summer residence, he thanked the committee for this “great honor” and then delivered a strongly progressive message. “We stand in the presence of an awakened nation, impatient of partisan make-believe,” Wilson announced. “The nation has awakened to a sense of neglected ideals and neglected duties.” In this “new age,” it would require “self-restraint not to attempt too much, and yet it would be cowardly to attempt too little.” He praised the Democratic platform, especially the planks on the tariff, the trusts, banking reform, and labor, as well as those on presidential primaries, popular election of senators, and disclosure of campaign spending. On the tariff, he again refused to condemn protection in principle and urged caution. On the trusts, he did not condemn bigness in itself: “Big business is not dangerous because it is big.” Rather, new laws were needed to curb and prevent monopoly. He called banking reform a “complicated and difficult question” and confessed that he did not “know enough about this subject to be dogmatic about it.” On labor, he declared, “No law that safeguards [workers’] life, that improve[s] the physical and moral conditions under which they live … can properly be regarded as class legislation or as anything but a measure taken in the interest of the whole people.” He closed by demanding “unentangled government, a government that cannot be used for private purposes, either in business or in politics; a government that will not tolerate the use of the organization of a great party to serve the personal aims and ambitions of any individual. … It is a great conception, and I am free to serve it, as are you.”3
As the slam at “personal aims and ambitions” indicated, Wilson was taking aim at Roosevelt. Each man had been sizing up the other for some time. Their once-friendly, mutually admiring acquaintance was long since dead. For several years, Roosevelt had been casting aspersions on Wilson as an impractical academic who purveyed outmoded and pernicious notions and had been belittling his conversion to progressivism. Several times during 1911, progressive Republicans and even Roosevelt’s oldest son suggested to him that a Democratic victory in 1912 under Wilson might offer a good alternative to Taft and their party’s conservatives. Roosevelt spurned such suggestions. In October 1911, he had told Governor Hiram Johnson of California that the Democrats were hopeless because “even those among them who are not foolish, like Woodrow Wilson, are not sincere … but are playing politics for advantage, and are quite capable of tricking the progressives by leading them into a quarrel over States’ rights as against National duties.”4
Wilson’s attitude was more complicated. From the time he started to come out as a progressive, he publicly praised Roosevelt, despite his recent aspersion on the ex-president’s alleged egotism. In October 1910, during his gubernatorial campaign, he had discussed with a Princeton faculty colleague the recent espousal by Roosevelt of the “New Nationalism,” a phrase and idea borrowed from Herbert Croly’s Promise of American Life. In a campaign speech, Wilson praised the New Nationalism and dismissed fears of centralized government. When he emerged on the national scene, reporters often compared him to Roosevelt, and at the end of 1911, when it began to look as if he and Roosevelt might become opponents in the presidential election, he told Mrs. Peck, “That would make the campaign worth while.”5
Neither man rushed into the fray. Roosevelt faced the task of building a party and a campaign from scratch. Wilson was more fortunate in having an established party behind him, and one that smelled victory. Even before the ceremony on August 7, the governor had begun receiving visits and getting advice from leading Democrats. A sullen Champ Clark made an obligatory call and perfunctorily pledged his support. Oscar Underwood was more genial and voluble on his visit. The organizational work fell to McCombs, whose uncertain nerves compelled him to bow out for a while, and increasingly to McAdoo. Veteran party operatives likewise pitched in. After the acceptance ceremony, Wilson occasionally commuted to Trenton and received visitors in the governor’s office.6
Wilson was mulling over how to approach the campaign, and he was weighing the challenge he faced from Roosevelt. His daughter Nell later recalled, “Father gave a delicious imitation of Teddy delivering his hysterical slogan, ‘We stand at Armageddon and battle for the Lord,’ and added, ‘Good old Teddy—what a help he is.’” For all his joviality, Wilson regarded Roosevelt with the utmost seriousness. “Do not be too confident of the result,” he told Mary Peck. “I feel that Roosevelt’s strength is altogether incalculable. … He appeals to … [people’s] imaginations; I do not. He is a real, vivid person, whom they have seen and shouted themselves hoarse over and voted for, millions strong; I am a vague, conjectural personality made up more of opinions and academic prepossessions than of human traits and red corpuscles. We shall see what will happen!” He thought the popular stereotypes reversed their real selves, with Roosevelt the cool calculator and him the passionately committed politician. Taking Roosevelt on “would be a splendid adventure and it would make me solemnly glad to undertake it.”7
Wilson never thought about doing anything else but appealing to public opinion. Nell also remembered, “Father did not deny Roosevelt’s popularity and influence, but he said, ‘Are people interested in personalities rather than in principles? If that is true they will not vote for me.’” Another alternative might have been for Wilson to play things safe and rely upon having an undivided party behind him. Bryan advised against such a strategy, reminding Wilson that “our only hope is in holding our progressives and winning over progressive Republicans.”8 Wilson agreed, and he got potent reinforcement in this approach when a man whom he had not met before came to see him at Sea Girt on August 28, 1912.
The caller was the well-known “people’s attorney” and reformer from Boston, Louis D. Brandeis. Just a month older than Wilson, the craggy-faced, mournful-eyed Brandeis was the son of Czech Jewish immigrants who had come to America in the wake of the failed revolutions of 1848. Like Wilson, Brandeis was a southern expatriate. He had been born in Louisville, Kentucky, although his parents were abolitionists and supporters of the Union. Unlike Wilson, he spoke with a southern accent all his life, but he had also gone north in 1875, to complete his education, in his case at Harvard Law School. Settling in Boston, Brandeis had become a highly successful attorney and seemed to fit in well with the city’s Brahmin establishment. Yet he continued to view the economy and society from the standpoint of an outsider, and after the mid-1890s he had defended workers and small businesses. In 1908 he successfully argued before the Supreme Court in favor of Oregon’s law limiting the hours women could work. He was also a friend and political adviser to the insurgent Republican leader Robert La Follette of Wisconsin.9
Brandeis came to see Wilson as a man on a mission. His study of economics and his defense of workers and small businesses had made him a fierce opponent of the trusts, and he was appalled at the stand Roosevelt had forced on the Progressives in favor of regulating rather than breaking up the trusts. He told reporters at Sea Girt that the right course was “to eliminate the evil and introduce good as a substitute,” which meant “to regulate competition instead of monopoly.” The two men talked for three hours, over lunch and afterward, and claimed to reporters that they had had a meeting of the minds. Brandeis later recalled that he had spent much of the time in an effort to wean Wilson from his belief that punishing guilty individuals would solve the trust problem, arguing instead for attacking the system that permitted such wrongdoing and fostering conditions that encouraged competition.10 Brandeis seems to have been persuasive, because Wilson did address the trust issue in those terms during the rest of the campaign.
It would be wrong to think that Wilson’s concern about the trusts originated with Brandeis. He had been criticizing the shortcomings of the existing anti-trust law for some time, and his visitor supplied tactical rather than strategic advice for the upcoming campaign, something Wilson would later call upon him for again. Brandeis put his finger on the issue where Roosevelt was most vulnerable and offered plans for attacking him there. Also, Brandeis’s emphasis on freedom may have planted the seed in Wilson’s mind to stress that word and concept and eventually counter Roosevelt’s New Nationalism with his own “New Freedom.” In all, this meeting proved important to the way Wilson waged his campaign, although it probably was not essential to his winning the election. He was both gracious and accurate when he told Brandeis right after the election, “You were yourself a great part of the victory.”11
Wilson followed this new plan of attack five days later when he gave his first major speech since accepting the nomination. At a Labor Day rally in Buffalo, he commended the “social program” in the platform of Roosevelt’s new party, “the bringing about of social justice,” but he condemned its trust program “because once the government regulates the monopoly, then monopoly will see to it that it regulates the government.” Worse, the party’s program wanted to play “Providence for you,” and he feared “a government of experts. God forbid that in a democratic country we should resign that task and give the government over to experts. … Because if we don’t understand the job we are not a free people.” That objection hinted at another of Roosevelt’s vulnerable points—the widespread belief that he was a power-hungry potential despot. Wilson noted that people said he was “disqualified for politics” because he was a schoolteacher: “But there is one thing a schoolteacher learns that he never forgets, namely, that it is his business to learn all he can and then communicate it to others.” Likewise, his party, the Democrats, did not seek to legalize monopoly, and they were “the only organized force by which you can set your government free.”12
No one expected Roosevelt to take such charges lying down, and he did not disappoint expectations. Speaking in Fargo, North Dakota, four days later, he maintained that the past two decades’ attempts to break up the trusts had failed, and he quoted a celebrated remark by the greatest of the trust magnates, J. Pierpont Morgan: “You can’t unscramble the eggs in an omelet.” Taft had tried to unscramble the eggs with anti-trust prosecutions and had failed, and now Wilson wanted to try the same futile approach. He scoffed at Wilson’s aspersion on “government by experts” and extolled his own program as a “definite and concrete” approach to the trust problem, in contrast to Wilson’s “vague, puzzled, and hopeless purpose feebly to continue the present policy.”13 This rejoinder opened a debate on the trust question that would last for most of the month of September 1912.
Roosevelt’s reply contained the germ of the attack that he was about to launch at Wilson. If the trust issue was his Achilles heel, then Wilson’s was his onetime flirtation with conservative Democrats, which left lingering suspicions about the depth and sincerity of his progressivism. Roosevelt had also been taking his opponent’s mark and looking for a point of attack. One of his press aides on the campaign train recalled, “It was Wilson, Wilson, Wilson, all the time in the private car, and nothing but Wilson and his record in the Colonel’s talks. We believed we were on the way to drive Wilson into one of his characteristic explosions, with [a] result that could only be detrimental to his campaign.”14 Why they thought they could provoke Wilson is not clear. The governor did not have a record of “characteristic explosions;” the idea that he did may have come from some stories about quarrels at Princeton, exaggerated and distorted in the retelling. At any event, three days after Roosevelt spoke, he found the opening he wanted.
On September 9, Wilson gave a speech in New York that contained the sentence “The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it.” In the body of the speech, that statement was part of an exhortation to keep government in touch with the people. By itself, however, as many newspapers quoted the sentence, it seemed to show that Wilson still clung to conservative Democratic state rights, limited-government views. Roosevelt wasted no time in exploiting the opening. In a speech in San Francisco on September 14, he quoted that sentence and called it “the key to Mr. Wilson’s position,” which he dismissed as “a bit of outworn academic doctrine which was kept in the schoolroom and the professorial study for a generation after it had been abandoned by all who had experience of actual life.” He scorned Wilson’s position as outmoded laissez-faire economics and proudly proclaimed his own intention “to use the whole power of government” to combat “an unregulated and purely individualistic industrialism.”15 Roosevelt was damning Wilson as a heartless, outmoded conservative and an impractical academic out of touch with the real world while presenting his own position in the most attractive light.
Wilson, with his penchant for extemporaneous speaking and his inexperience in national politics, with its far greater press coverage, opened himself to misrepresentations. Roosevelt had learned his lesson the hard way in 1910, when his remarks about recalling judicial decisions had been similarly quoted out of context; now he supplied the press with advance texts of his speeches. During one of his campaign trips, Wilson asked reporters who had covered Roosevelt how the ex-president managed to produce those texts. “I wish I could do that,” one reporter said Wilson confessed. “I’ve tried to do it over and over again, but I can’t.” He thought prepared texts spoiled the spontaneity of his speaking. Only on the most formal occasions, such as the acceptance speech in August and major state addresses he delivered as president, would he write an address and read from a prepared text. Otherwise, he persisted in speaking from sketchy notes, usually in shorthand, or using no notes at all. As president, however, he would remedy the problem by having a team of stenographers quickly prepare transcripts of his speeches.16
Nevertheless, Roosevelt’s counterattack proved a boon to Wilson. On his first extended campaign tour—a grueling five-day railroad trip that took him around a large swath of the Midwest at the middle of September—he began to spell out his economic views. In Sioux City, Iowa, he argued, “Now a trust is not merely a business that has grown big. … A trust is an arrangement to get rid of competition, and a big business is a business that has survived competition by conquering in the field of intelligence and economy. I am for big business, I am against trusts.” But, he noted, “the third party says that trusts are inevitable; that is the only way of efficiency. I would say parenthetically that they don’t know what they are talking about.” In other speeches, he denied that monopoly was inevitable—“I absolutely deny that we have lost the power to set ourselves free”—and explained that regulated competition would open the marketplace to newcomers: “We are going to say to the newcomers, ‘It depends upon your genius, upon your initiative.’ ”17
Roosevelt’s aspersions on Wilson’s progressivism provided still richer grist for his mill. On Wilson’s second campaign tour—another five-day train trip immediately afterward, this one through the Northeast—he expounded on his political beliefs. In a speech in Pennsylvania, he explicitly rejected Jefferson’s limited-government views and threw Roosevelt’s accusation back in his face: “Because we won’t take the dictum of a leader who thinks he knows exactly what ought to be done by everybody, we are accused of wishing to minimize the powers of the Government of the United States. I am not afraid of the utmost exercise of the powers of the government of Pennsylvania, or of the Union, provided they are exercised with patriotism and intelligence and really in the interest of the people who are living under them.” In another speech, he used the story from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass about Alice’s running as hard as she can just to stay in the same place to explain his progressivism: “I am, therefore, a progressive because we have not kept up with our own changes of conditions, either in the economic field or the political field.” He also affirmed that modern life often left individuals helpless in the face of great obstacles and, “therefore, law in our day must come to the assistance of the individual.”18
On that campaign swing, Wilson had two important meetings, both in Boston on September 27. The first was a chance encounter that stirred up some nice publicity. When he arrived at the Copley Plaza Hotel, he learned that President Taft was in the building, preparing to give a speech. He asked to call on the president, and the two men met in a private room on the fifth floor. According to press reports, the president asked the governor if campaigning had worn him out. “It hasn’t done that, but it has nearly done so,” Wilson answered and asked in turn, “How’s your voice, is it holding out?” Taft said that it was and put the same question to Wilson. “It’s pretty fine, but now and then it gets a bit husky,” Wilson answered. Taft then observed, “Well, there are three men that can sympathize with you, Mr. Bryan, Mr. Roosevelt, and myself. We have been through it all.” Afterward, Wilson told reporters, “It was a very delightful meeting. I am very fond of President Taft.” He also made a joke about the president’s renowned girth, saying that he knew the bed in his hotel room would be big enough “because it was built especially for the President.”19 This was the only face-to-face encounter between any of the candidates in 1912.
Wilson could afford to joke about Taft. No one believed the president had a chance of winning, not even Taft himself. Some people believed that he was staying in the race out of spite, to ensure Roosevelt’s defeat by splitting the Republican vote. Taft did harbor deep feelings of hurt and resentment toward his onetime friend and patron, but in not bowing out he also believed he was pursuing a greater political aim. At the time of the convention, he had confided to a supporter, “If I win the nomination and Roosevelt bolts, it means a long hard fight with probable defeat. But I can stand defeat if we retain the regular Republican party as a nucleus for future conservative action.” In his campaign speeches, Taft attacked Roosevelt and preached a conservative sermon. Two days after his encounter with Wilson, he admonished, “A National Government cannot create good times. It cannot make the rain to fall, the sun to shine, or the crops to grow, but it can, by pursuing a meddlesome policy, attempting to change economic conditions, and frightening the investment of capital, prevent a prosperity and a revival of business which might otherwise have taken place.”20 Such sentiments were new for Taft, who had earlier been a moderate progressive, and they sounded like the limited-government views then usually associated with conservative Democrats. This marked an early step toward the ideological transformation of the Republican Party during the rest of the twentieth century.
Wilson’s other meeting in Boston on September 27 was with Brandeis. He asked the attorney to give him fresh proposals for dealing with the trusts. First in a lengthy talk and a few days later in two long memoranda, Brandeis outlined a legislative program. His proposals included, first, the removal of uncertainties in the current anti-trust law by facilitating court enforcement and establishing an agency to aid in enforcement and, second, the enumeration of prohibited practices and remedies for those practices. The remedies included withdrawing government business from convicted firms and attacking those firms’ patents. At first, Wilson planned to use Brandeis’s ideas in a letter to the press on anti-trust policy, but he decided instead to incorporate them into his speeches. Even before he received the memoranda, he revealed Brandeis’s influence when he announced in a speech the same day that they met, “[T]here is a point of bigness—as every businessman in this country knows, though some will not admit it … where you pass the point of efficiency and get to the point of clumsiness and unwieldiness.” He also warned that the country was nearing “the time when the combined power of high finance would be greater than the power of the government.”21
Wilson was starting to hit his full stride as a campaigner. In the first half of October, he made his longest and most intensive tour, a nine-day trip in which he revisited the Midwest and went as far west as Colorado. In Indianapolis, he coined his own great slogan when he urged people “to organize the forces of liberty in our time to make conquest of a new freedom.” Americans had a choice: either submit to “legalized monopoly” or else “open again the fields of competition, so that new men with brains, new men with capital, new men with energy in their veins, may build up enterprises in America.” In Omaha, he poked fun at people who “have regarded me as a very remote and academic person. They don’t know how much human nature there is in me to give me trouble all my life.” He particularly relished meeting “the plainest sort of men. … And when they call me ‘Kid’ or ‘Woody,’ and all the rest of it, I know that I am all right.” In Lincoln, which he called “the Mecca of progressive Democracy,” he stayed overnight at Bryan’s home, where the two men talked late into the night about the campaign, and they attended church together the next day. Despite the strains of train travel and constant speechmaking, he enjoyed talking with the reporters who accompanied him; it was on this western trip that he quizzed them on how Roosevelt got out advance texts of his speeches. The reporters found him more down-to-earth, humorous, and given to cussing than they had expected. When he heard about a New York paper refusing to support a Tammany-backed candidate, he scoffed, “There’s no use in being so damned ladylike.”22
On this campaign swing, Wilson grew relentless in attacking Roosevelt and seeking to undercut his appeal. He praised insurgent Republicans and reminded people that La Follette, “that sturdy little giant in Wisconsin,” refused to support Roosevelt and what Wilson always called the “third party,” the “new party,” or the “irregular, the variegated Republicans”—never the Progressives. He also called Roosevelt “a very, very erratic comet on the horizon” and accused him of harboring delusions of being the nation’s savior. Reciting the famous rhyme about the purple cow, he said he felt the same way about such would-be saviors: “I never saw one, I never hope to see one, but I’ll tell you, I would rather see one than be one.” Not all of his campaigning was negative, however. In Abraham Lincoln’s adopted hometown, he apologized for speaking while the World Series was going on and appealed to memories of “the Great Emancipator. We are going to repudiate all this [monopolistic] slavery as emphatically as we repudiated the other.” This oratorical effort came at a cost. Early on the trip, he strained his voice: “The trouble with me is I talk too damn much,” he told Mary Peck.23
Wilson was not the only candidate who strained his voice. Taft’s quip about the three men in the country who could sympathize with his laryngeal problem applied even more aptly to their mutual adversary. Roosevelt was not a polished, disciplined speaker like Wilson or Bryan, and early in October he also started to suffer from the rigors of making himself heard to the crowds. This physical problem came on top of other troubles. Vigorous and blustery as ever, he kept up a campaign schedule that was even more grueling than the governor’s. As he crisscrossed the eastern half of the country, he hammered away at his messages of trust regulation and strong government, but he did not talk much about his basic message of transcendent nationalism to overcome class division. This emphasis testified to how effectively Wilson was fending off Roosevelt’s attacks and putting the ex-president himself on the defensive. Speaking in a cracking voice on October 12, he denied being pro-monopoly: “Free competition and monopoly—they’re all the same thing unless you improve the condition of workers. … What I am interested in is getting the hand of government put on all of them.”24 Later, he issued a statement that endorsed strengthening the anti-trust laws along lines similar to those Brandeis had recommended to Wilson.
In a twisted way, both candidates found relief for their strained voices. On October 14 in Milwaukee, a mentally deranged bartender shot Roosevelt in the chest. The ex-president’s practice of preparing speeches in advance helped save his life. The manuscript pages and his steel-reinforced spectacle case, both of which were in his jacket pocket, absorbed much of the impact of the bullet. True to form, Roosevelt insisted on going ahead with the speech. After informing the audience that he had just been wounded, he declared, “I have altogether too important things to think of to feel any concern over my own death; and now I cannot speak to you insincerely within five minutes of being shot.” He said the incident showed the need to overcome the division between the “Havenots” and the “Haves,” and he likened his present political crusade to the time when he had led his troops in the Spanish-American War, another battle “for the good of our common country.” Those lines read like a dying declaration, and some historians have speculated that he was disappointed that he did not die after uttering those words. But he kept on talking and grew incoherent from shock and loss of blood until supporters led him off the stage. Roosevelt spent several days in a Chicago hospital and then convalesced at home for another two weeks. He gave one last speech, at a rally at Madison Square Garden, but for all practical purposes the attempt on his life ended his campaign.25
Wilson responded to this dramatic turn of events with a gesture that was at once generous and shrewd. After conferring with McAdoo and other campaign managers, the governor announced that he would suspend his campaign as soon as he fulfilled a few more obligations. McAdoo and most of the managers evidently opposed this move, but he overruled them. His daughter Nell later recalled, “He laughed when he told us of his decision. I couldn’t see why it was funny, and when I questioned him, he said, ‘Teddy will have apoplexy when he hears of this.’ We were told that it did enrage him, but he made no comment of any sort.”26 The gesture looked good to the public and gave him time for rest and preparation.
Wilson’s speeches after the announcement of the campaign suspension showed him at his best. On October 17, he saluted Roosevelt as “that gallant gentleman” who had done “so much to wake up the country to the problems that now have to be settled.” He again praised La Follette and wished that he himself had joined the progressive ranks much sooner than he did. He revived an earlier catchphrase when he called for laws and government to “look after the men who are on the make rather than the men who are already made,” but he also eschewed class warfare and sounded like Roosevelt when he maintained that “we must overcome class prejudice by making classes understand one another and see that there is a common interest which transcends every particular interest in the United States.” Talking about himself, he affirmed, “If I am fit to be your President, it is only because I understand you. … I do not wish to be your master. I wish to be your spokesman.”27
After those speeches, Wilson enjoyed a nine-day respite from the campaign trail. He spent part of the time dealing with two touchy issues, the first of which was race relations. Since July, some African American spokesmen and their white sympathizers, most notably Oswald Garrison Villard, editor of the New York Evening Post and grandson of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, had been conferring with the Democratic nominee about the possibility of black support for him and his party. Some African American leaders had grown disgusted with long-standing Republican efforts to distance themselves from blacks and seek support from southern whites. Taft had made overtures toward the white South early in his administration, and Roosevelt had allowed the Progressives to organize in the South as a lily-white party. In response, Bishop Alexander Walters of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church had switched parties and now headed the National Colored Democratic League. Likewise, W. E. B. DuBois, the editor of The Crisis, the magazine of the recently organized National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, endorsed Wilson in August: “He will not advance the cause of the oligarchy in the South, he will not seek further means of ‘Jim Crow’ insult, he will not dismiss black men from office, and he will remember that the Negro in the United States has a right to be heard.”28
Wilson responded warily. He stalled Villard and Walters until finally, on October 21, he sent a letter assuring African Americans of “my earnest wish to see justice done them in every matter, and not mere grudging justice, but justice executed with liberality and cordial good feeling. … My sympathy with them is of long standing, and I want to assure them through you that should I become President of the United States they may count upon me for absolute fair dealing and for everything by which I could assist in advancing the interest of their race in the United States.”29 Those guarded words were as far as Wilson was willing to go; he declined to make any further statement. This encounter foreshadowed the heartache and disappointment that would be felt after he entered the White House, when most of what DuBois said would not happen did come to pass.
The other touchy issue was woman suffrage. Here a real difference separated the two major candidates. The most renowned woman in the country, the social worker Jane Addams, had seconded Roosevelt’s nomination at the Progressive convention, and the party platform and the nominee had endorsed woman suffrage. Roosevelt admitted privately that he did not feel strongly about the issue, and he rarely mentioned it in his speeches. Still, he was the first leading male politician to come out for woman suffrage. Wilson, despite having taught at a women’s college and having two suffragist daughters, tried to duck the issue, claiming it was a state matter. He had to confront it publicly only once during the campaign, when, on October 19, a militant suffragist interrupted a speech and demanded to know what he thought about men’s exclusive right to vote. Wilson answered that this was “not a question that is dealt with by the National Government at all.” His answer did not satisfy the suffragist, who shouted, “I am speaking to you as an American, Mr. Wilson.” Police carted her off to jail so that he could resume.30
Party affairs and the campaign organization also required the candidate’s attention. New Jersey and New York remained trouble spots for the Democrats. In September, Sugar Jim Smith entered the primary for New Jersey’s other U.S. Senate seat, but Wilson spoke against him and he lost. Across the Hudson, anti-Tammany reformers were trying to dump Governor Dix from the ticket; Wilson sympathized strongly with them but did not openly take sides. The reformers did succeed in replacing Dix, although Tammany’s hold on the party remained strong. At the national headquarters, tensions between McAdoo and an ailing McCombs continued unabated, but others helped keep the organization running fairly smoothly, including two Texans. One was Congressman Albert S. Burleson, a hard-bitten political operator who oversaw speaking assignments for the campaign and coordinated publicity. The other was Edward M. House, a wealthy expatriate Texan who held the honorary title of Colonel. House made himself and his spacious apartment available to the candidate and other managers, and his soft, ingratiating manner smoothed matters over at headquarters and led Wilson to warm to him.31
By and large, the managers mounted an effective campaign. They arranged the candidate’s speaking tours, and they produced leaflets and brochures and delved into the new medium of motion pictures, making and distributing a campaign film. Their only failure was in fund-raising. Despite strenuous appeals to make this a campaign financed by “the people,” less than a third of the money raised came from small donors. The rest came from big contributors. Charles R. Crane, the Chicago plumbing-fixture tycoon and longtime backer of progressive causes, was the biggest, with $40,000; Cleveland Dodge, Wilson’s Princeton classmate and supporter from the board of trustees, was the second largest, with $35,000. Other big contributors included such leaders of the New York Jewish community as Henry Morgenthau, Jacob Schiff, and Samuel Untermyer, as well as a newcomer to their ranks, Bernard Baruch. Wilson drew the line at contributions from notorious trust magnates, but otherwise this champion of progressivism took money from the kind of people he was denouncing on the hustings.32
He wrapped up his campaign with a week of speechmaking in Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey. On October 28, he praised the middle class as the place “from which the energies of America have sprung” but whose members felt “a great weight above them—a weight of concentrated capital and of organized control—against which they are throwing themselves in vain.” He also declared, “We do not want a big brother government. … I do not want a government that will take care of me. I want a government that will make other men take their hands off so that I can take care of myself.” This final round ended with a big rally at Madison Square Garden and some barnstorming by automobile around New Jersey, where his car hit a bump and threw him up against the roof, giving him a scalp wound that bled a lot and required a doctor’s attention and a bandage. “It was a very hard blow,” he told reporters. “There is no doubt about that. But, fortunately, I am hard-headed.”33
On November 5, Wilson voted in the morning at a fire station in Princeton. He spent the rest of the day walking with companions around the town and the campus. He pointed to the boardinghouse where he had lived as a freshman, his room in Witherspoon, and, in Nassau Hall, James Madison’s diploma—“the diploma of the only Princeton man who has been elected President.”34 At the end of the afternoon, he went back to the house on Cleveland Lane, where his sister Annie Howe and Stockton Axson joined him and Ellen and their daughters for supper. Afterward, they sat in front of the fire, and as they often did, they read poetry aloud, mostly Robert Browning.
They did not have to wait long to know the outcome of the election. Around eight-thirty, early returns came in on a teletype machine set up in the library of the house. The reports showed a sweep for Wilson and the Democrats in New York and other northeastern states, and soon after nine o’clock newspapers and wire services called the election for him. When the grandfather clock in the library chimed ten, Ellen put her hands on her husband’s shoulders and kissed him. “Let me be the first to congratulate you,” she said. In response to Nell’s excitement, her father said, “Now Daughter, there is no cause of elation.” Congratulatory telegrams began to pour in, including a terse one from Roosevelt and a warmer one from Taft. On the campus, President Hibben ordered the bell in Nassau Hall to toll, and a crowd of students carrying torches marched to Cleveland Lane. Wilson stood on a chair in the entrance so that, he joked, “you couldn’t see the patch on my head.” But one observer noted that he spoke “with great emotion and tears in his eyes.” He told the students, “When I see the crowds gather it carries me back to the days when I labored among you.” For himself, he said, “I have no feeling of triumph, but a feeling of solemn responsibility.”35
The election returns gave Wilson reason to feel both triumphant and circumspect. He won the popular vote decisively: 6,294,327 to Roosevelt’s 4,120,207 and Taft’s 3,486,343. His Electoral College victory was overwhelming: forty states in all regions of the country, for a total of 435 electoral votes. Roosevelt took six states: California (where Wilson got 2 electoral votes), Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and Washington, for a total of 88. Taft won Utah and Vermont, for a total of 8 electoral votes. Wilson’s party shared in the sweep. Democrats won additional governorships, raised their majority in the House, and picked up ten seats in the Senate to win control of that chamber for the first time in eighteen years. Yet all was not as sweet as it seemed. Wilson’s share of the popular vote was only 42 percent. He won majorities only in the former Confederate states. His total fell 100,000 votes short of Bryan’s showing in 1908. All Wilson and the Democrats did in 1912 was maintain their grip on their previous minority share of the electorate.36
The returns brought no joy to the opposition. Roosevelt’s second-place finish was impressive; it was the only time a third-party candidate had ever finished ahead of the nominee of one of the major parties. But that showing was largely a personal victory, since Roosevelt ran well ahead of all other Progressive candidates. Progressives did well only on the West Coast, a bright spot that owed to their having taken over the formerly Republican apparatus in California and, to a lesser extent, Washington. Roosevelt apparently did not attract new voters. The combined Roosevelt-Taft total fell 69,000 votes short of Taft’s showing in 1908. All Roosevelt had done was split the Republicans’ previous majority share of the electorate. Taft’s third-place finish, carrying only two states with a minuscule share of electoral votes, was personally galling, but he could take some comfort in coming in second in eighteen states, including several in the West and New York, Roosevelt’s home state. The Republicans had stood firm in the face of the Progressives, and they finished ahead of them in most places, despite weakness at the top of the ticket. The only surprise in the results was the performance of the man the major contenders largely ignored, the Socialist candidate, Eugene Debs. He racked up 901,873 votes, more than double his total in 1908. At 6 percent of the vote, this would stand as the best showing a Socialist or any left-wing party candidate would make at any time in American history.37 With that exception, the results in 1912 reflected politics as usual.
Why such an exciting and momentous campaign produced such an unremarkable outcome has remained a puzzle. It did not stem from want of effort by the major candidates. Until mid-October, Roosevelt and Wilson poured their best persuasive energies into their campaigns. They offered contrasting styles on the stump. Roosevelt’s vivid personality buttressed an approach that derived from Protestant evangelism. Though not an orthodox believer, he had dubbed his former office a “bully pulpit” and often called his oratory “preaching.” He hammered away at a few basic themes and often appealed to voters’ emotions. Wilson’s previous profession led people, including Wilson himself, to call him a schoolmaster, and he did move gracefully among a variety of themes to appeal to voters’ intellect. Yet his oratory also sprang from the pulpit. His model was, not surprisingly, the basically educational preaching that Presbyterians favored.
The content of the two men’s politics, unlike their images, did not strike many observers as offering much of a contrast. Woman suffrage, which did not loom large in the campaign, was the only issue on which they took clear-cut opposing stands. On the two questions that did loom large, the trusts and the size and strength of government, it was hard to see where they differed. Wilson talked about “big business” and “trusts;” Roosevelt talked about “good trusts” and “bad trusts.” Both would leave the former alone and break up the latter. If monopoly became unavoidable in an industry, both held out nationalization as a possible last resort. Roosevelt’s attacks on Wilson’s governmental views fell flat—not, as Roosevelt believed, because Wilson was an adroit speaker who could twist arguments but because they were not true. Both men had admired Hamilton since their youth, and neither could top the other in admiration for strong, centralized, activist, interventionist government. Their respective party platforms differed, aside from woman suffrage, in the Progressives’ endorsement of tariff protection and their emphasis on industrial labor and in the Democrats’ greater sympathy for farmers. During the campaign, Wilson obviated most of those differences by refusing to renounce the principle of protection and advocating aid to labor. Small wonder that twelve years later the journalist William Allen White rendered the most widely accepted judgment on the 1912 campaign: “Between the New Nationalism and the New Freedom was that fantastic imaginary gulf that has existed between tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee.”38
This widely perceived lack of difference between the candidates explained much of the inertia among voters. Roosevelt and Wilson had each tried to chip away at the other’s support. In July, after Wilson’s nomination and before the Progressive convention, it had looked as if Republican progressives might defect in large numbers to the Democratic candidate. The new party’s convention and Roosevelt’s performance there and on the campaign trail had arrested that drift.39 But the Progressive nominee had failed to attract progressive Democrats. With both candidates taking the same stands on the main issues, voters had little incentive to cross old party lines. With his attacks on Wilson as a state-rights Democrat, Roosevelt was appealing to memories and prejudices that went back to the Civil War, which had ended less than fifty years before. Those memories and prejudices also threw up a formidable obstacle to any future effort by Wilson to build a majority coalition and win reelection against an undivided opposition.
Their opponents’ split cast a shadow over the Democrats and their victory. A question haunted them: could Wilson have beaten Roosevelt in a two-man race? No one doubted that he could have trounced Taft, but nearly everyone assumed that he would have lost to Roosevelt. The ex-president’s huge popularity and his impressive second-place finish reinforced that view. But could Wilson have beaten Roosevelt by himself? Two states offered a test case. In California, Governor Hiram Johnson, Roosevelt’s running mate, hijacked the Republican organization and kept Taft’s name off the ballot. Roosevelt won the contest there by only 174 votes out of a total of half a million cast. Four years earlier, Taft had carried California with 55 percent of the vote to Bryan’s 33 percent. In South Dakota, local Progressives kept Taft off the ballot, and Roosevelt ran almost 10,000 votes ahead of Wilson. South Dakota was the only state Roosevelt carried with a majority, 50.5 percent, but in 1908 Taft had won that state with 59 percent of the vote to Bryan’s 35 percent. Such showings in strongly Republican states, coupled with Roosevelt’s third-place finishes elsewhere, especially in New York, raised doubts about the ex-president’s ability to beat Wilson in a two-man race.40
The perceived lack of difference between the two major candidates also cast a shadow over their de facto debate. That perception, particularly as expressed in White’s crack about tweedledum and tweedledee, was doubly misleading: it ignored the deep differences that did separate Roosevelt and Wilson, and it missed the intellectual depth and sophistication and political significance of their debate. Some aspects of the campaign helped mask their differences. The need both men felt to attack each other did not facilitate a full exposition of their ideas, while the hiatus after the assassination attempt on Roosevelt cut down on his and Wilson’s opportunities to expound their thinking. Still, White should have known better. He was one of the most acute observers of his time, and by the time he rendered his verdict he had enjoyed a perspective enhanced by the passage of time and the opportunity to witness the later conflict between Roosevelt and Wilson. Similarly, subsequent generations of historians have had little excuse for failing to recognize what really transpired.
The differences between Roosevelt and Wilson were like a nested Russian doll, in which each figure contains another one within it. Of the main issues on the surface, only the size and strength of government was a red herring. The trust question, for all the two men’s apparent similarities, really did divide them. They might agree in distinguishing between businesses that grew through efficient competition (Wilson’s “big business,” Roosevelt’s “good trusts”) and those that used illegitimate, anticompetitive methods (Wilson’s “trusts,” Roosevelt’s “bad trusts”), but they disagreed about whether there were more of one or the other. Roosevelt thought that bigness by and large promoted efficiency, whereas Wilson, like Brandeis, believed that bigness usually stifled efficiency. That difference in assessment led to a sharp disagreement about where to go next. For Roosevelt, the government needed to oversee a mature economy, manage a distribution of power that was not likely to change, and ensure that people affected by that power—workers and consumers—were protected from abuses. For Wilson, government had to reopen the marketplace to fresh players, intervene to restore competition, and ensure that smaller players and their workers got a fair shot at getting ahead. Despite their public images to the contrary, it was Roosevelt who held an essentially static view of the economy and Wilson who held an essentially dynamic view.41
Those divergent convictions contained within them equally divergent views of society and political leadership. Each candidate drew his social views from his own background. Roosevelt was an aristocrat, born into a family of old wealth and exalted, long-established social position in the nation’s greatest metropolis. For all his carping at his upper-crust peers and sincere espousal of democratic values, he viewed society from the top, and he feared upheaval and possible revolution from the lower orders. Those perspectives were what prompted him to preach his New Nationalism—a vision of transcendent national interest that would inspire people to put aside selfish, parochial interests. It was what he meant by getting away from “the greed of the Haves and the envy of the Havenots.” Social betterment for him was analogous to military service, an enterprise in which each citizen would sacrifice and everyone would work together for the common good. It was a noble vision, and it was fundamentally aristocratic and conservative.
Wilson, on the other hand, was a product of the middle class, a man born and raised in the hinterlands who had sought his fortune in the environs of the metropolis. For all his prestigious education and hobnobbing with the wealthy and socially prominent, he still viewed society through the eyes of a striving outsider, and he did not fear upheaval or revolution. Those perspectives were what prompted him to expound his New Freedom—a vision of constant renewal from below, in which people would rise by dint of effort and ability. This was what he meant by praising “men who are on the make” and scorning “big brother government.” Social betterment for him was analogous to the growth of a tree, which is refreshed and kept vital from its roots. It was an equally noble vision, and it was fundamentally democratic and liberal.
These conflicting social views encapsulated, in turn, different models of leadership. For Roosevelt, despite his likening himself to a military commander after he was shot, leadership consisted of evangelism. He reconciled his conservatism with his democratic views through the conviction that people can be inspired to rise above their narrow, selfish interests. Oddly for someone who was a devotee of modern science and something of a religious skeptic, Roosevelt adhered to orthodox Christian beliefs that people must be “born again,” that they must become better through leaps of faith and pursue new lives of service and sacrifice. Inspiration was the right word for his approach; its Latin root is inspirare, “to breathe into.” Roosevelt wanted to breathe something finer and nobler into his followers.
For Wilson, leadership consisted of education. He believed that people could grasp what was best for themselves and ought to be able to follow their dreams and desires with a little guidance. Oddly for someone who had grown up in the bosom of Presbyterian Calvinism, Wilson adhered to the more modern, secular belief that people can be trusted, within limits and with some guidance, to lead honest, constructive lives. Education was the right word for his approach; its Latin root is educare, “to draw out.” Wilson wanted either to draw out the inner potential of his followers or to draw them out of their ignorance onto more enlightened paths.
The root of those differences—the final, irreducible doll in the nest—lay in divergent conceptions of human nature. Roosevelt held a pessimistic attitude toward human nature akin to the religious conception of original sin. For him, people left to themselves and pursuing their own interests would not produce either a good society or a strong, united nation capable of playing a great role in the world. This view has a long historical pedigree, stretching back many centuries to classical philosophy and early Christian teachings. Although he frequently called himself a radical, Roosevelt was at heart and by philosophy a conservative. Wilson, by contrast, had an optimistic attitude toward human nature akin to secular notions of innate human goodness and worth. For him, people left to themselves, safeguarded against predatory elements and pursuing their own interests, would produce both a good society and a vital, self-renewing nation. This view has a shorter historical pedigree, stretching back a few centuries to European and British, especially Scottish, Enlightenment thought. Although he also called himself a radical, Wilson was at heart and by philosophy a liberal.
It was a shame that Roosevelt and Wilson never met in a face-to-face debate, with a format that would have allowed each to develop his own views and challenge the other’s arguments. Such debates had taken place only occasionally in American history. The most notable examples had taken place during the great confrontations in the Senate over slavery and the nature of the Union during the three decades that led to the Civil War and when Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas squared off against each other in the Senate race in Illinois in 1858. Such debates had never occurred in a presidential election, and these competing speaking tours gave the closest approach to one that had ever come to pass. This race pitted against each other two men who were true intellectuals, who had equal and often similar, though not identical, gifts of mind and temperament, and who strove to persuade voters by expounding their ideas. Intellectually and philosophically, it seems that this was as good as it gets in a presidential campaign.
The 1912 race between Roosevelt and Wilson was at heart more than a debate. It formed the opening round in a battle that would grow stronger and more heated, especially when foreign affairs entered the picture after 1914. The true precedent and analogy to their adversarial relationship was the long-running clash a century earlier between Jefferson and Hamilton, with their conflicting visions of the nation’s future. Roosevelt and Wilson were their twentieth-century successors. Roosevelt, despite his distaste for plutocracy and “materialism,” was the true heir to Hamilton. Something deeper than nationalism and affection for strong government dictated the affinity between those two men. It was their shared pessimistic view of human nature and their belief in the need to overcome people’s limitations through an attachment to a higher good. Wilson, despite his early disdain for Jefferson and continuing admiration for Hamilton, was the true heir to Jefferson. Something deeper than political expediency dictated Wilson’s late-blooming affinity for Jefferson. It was Wilson’s recognition that they shared the same optimistic view of human nature and the belief in the importance of creating an environment in which people can freely use their energies in the pursuit of their own happiness.
American politics might have followed a different, more interesting, and more constructive path if Wilson and Roosevelt had left legacies like those of Jefferson and Hamilton. Things turned out otherwise on both sides. For conservatives and Republicans, it was Taft, not Roosevelt, who pointed out the ideological path of the future. The link between approval of big business and revulsion from big government would take several decades to mature, and it would owe much to the trauma suffered by businessmen and Republicans in the 1930s, during the Great Depression. Roosevelt’s brand of statist-oriented, commercially skeptical conservatism would grow less and less welcome in his former party. Instead, by a quirk of fate, his big-government views and concern for the welfare of workers and consumers would find a home among Democrats.
This ideological crossover would happen, in part, because the next Democratic president after Wilson would be Roosevelt’s distant cousin and the husband of his niece, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The second Roosevelt had adopted “Uncle Ted” as his role model early and absorbed much of his approach to politics. At the same time, Franklin Roosevelt was Wilson’s political heir and a veteran of his administration. His eclectic, unintellectual temperament, together with the challenge of combating the Depression, afforded him lots of ideological latitude in drawing upon the visions of both his kinsman and his party predecessor. After the 1930s, with the exception of one slowly withering wing of the Republican Party, strong-government views along both Theodore Roosevelt’s and Woodrow Wilson’s lines would become the sole property of the Democrats. The result would be ideological mishmash, shallowness, and sterility in domestic political debate. Nothing would again match the depth and sophistication of what passed between Wilson and the first Roosevelt.42
In November 1912, the continuing conflict between these two men and their ideological legacies lay in the unseen future. For the man who won the election, the opportunities and the burdens of the presidency began to come in a rush. The flood of mail and telegrams that brought congratulations quickly gave way to an avalanche of men offering advice on policy and angling for office. Exhausted from the campaign, Wilson retreated to Bermuda for a month. This time, Ellen and their daughters accompanied him. The respite gave the president-elect more than rest and relaxation. It also afforded him time to do what he liked to do most—think, reflect, plan, prepare. When the family returned at the middle of December, Wilson was ready to tackle the twin tasks of finishing out his term in Trenton and choosing a crew and charting the course for his new ship of state in Washington. He also took time out for a backward-looking, sentimental journey.
At the end of December 1912, he and his wife made that two-day trip to Staunton, Virginia. The town pulled out all the stops to welcome back a native son who had risen to the highest office in the land. There were bands, cheering crowds, and another torchlight parade. On December 28, his birthday, Wilson gave two speeches, both of them a bit rambling, mixing sentiment with foretastes of politics to come. At the school where he had visited Hattie Woodrow, which was now called Mary Baldwin Seminary, he recalled visiting “five cousins” of whom he was “very fond.” He said he hoped that, as a native Virginian who was governor of a northern state and about to become president of the United States, he might become an “instrument in drawing together the hearts of all men in the United States in the service of a nation that has neither region, nor section, nor North, nor South.” He did not believe he faced an easy task in Washington. The capital contained many who did not appreciate the new responsibilities that government must assume and would “have to be mastered in order that they shall be made the instruments of justice and mercy. This is not a rosewater affair. This is an office in which a man must put on his war paint. Fortunately, I have not such a visage as to mind marring it; and I don’t care whether the war paint is becoming or not.”43
At an evening banquet sponsored by leading Virginia Democrats, Wilson hailed “my native place” and saluted “the standards established in the olden time in the great Commonwealth of Virginia. It is as if a man came back to drink at some of the original fountains of political impulse and inspiration in this country.” The compliment carried a sting. The men in Washington who had “to be mastered” included not just conservative Republicans. He noted that the leaders of Virginia’s Democratic machine—“I dare say one of them is present tonight”—had told him that “they thought I had some screw loose or that I was rather wild” and had opposed his nomination for president. He reminded them that he had advocated “nothing but the original doctrines of liberty as understood in America,” and he pointed to the Virginia Bill of Rights. He added, “So I am not in the least afraid of being regarded as a heretic, provided you know the standards of orthodoxy.”44 The Democrats were in for an exciting ride with their new president.
For all the celebration and fanfare, the highlight and purpose of the visit were personal. “I remember that I have played many times in the yard of that little house opposite,”45 Wilson said at the seminary, referring to the manse where he had been born fifty-six years before. The boy who was called Tommy Wilson had gone far in the intervening years. He had come back as Woodrow Wilson, husband, father, scholar, teacher, writer, speaker, university president, governor, and now soon-to-be president of the United States. This native of Staunton stood on the brink of the most challenging, fulfilling, and heartrending time of his life.