American Experiment (216 page)

Each man worked from his political base. For Taft, this was the great pyramid of local and state parties, fueled by corporate money, secured by patronage, and long accustomed to the business of choosing the right delegates to state and national conventions. Early, and as quietly as they could, the Taft managers picked loyalists as delegates to the 1912 Republican convention, while Roosevelt men vainly howled in protest against the shenanigans in smoke-filled rooms. Roosevelt’s strength lay—as he was not slow to point out—in the hundreds of thousands of “plain Republicans” who had embraced the party’s progressive tradition. In this, the first election in which the direct primary was extensively used, Roosevelt after some initial setbacks rolled up 1.2 million votes against 760,000 for Taft and 350,000 for La Follette.

But delegates counted in the convention, not primary votes, and it
seemed likely weeks before the conclave that Taft had it sewed up. Characteristically, Roosevelt resolved to carry his fight into the convention. By now, the two sides were excelling mainly in invective. Roosevelt men called Taft men crooks and robbers, apaches and garroters, for issuing credentials to bogus delegates risen from the “cesspools of Southern corruption,” while Taft men responded in kind, and Taft and Roosevelt labeled each other demagogue and fathead, respectively. When the Taft forces selected Elihu Root as their man for convention chairman, Roosevelt forgot the old days when he had singled out Root as the very model of an American statesman. Now he was a “representative of reaction” and had to be rejected.

Mr. Dooley forewarned that the convention would be a “combynation iv th’ Chicago fire, Saint Bartholomew’s massacres, the battle iv th’ Boyne, th’ life iv Jessie James, an’ th’ night iv th’ big wind,” but he was going anyway, because he hadn’t “missed a riot in this neighborhood for forty years.” The convention opened amid fisticuffs, charges of “liar” and “thief,” and tumult so noisy that even the shrillest speechifiers were drowned out. Amid the pandemonium, the Taft steamroller did its work, producing a 558 to 502 win for Root that meant the President’s men would control the convention. While Roosevelt men walked out or sat on their hands, the convention proceeded to nominate William Howard Taft, whose name was put forward by a small-town Ohio editor, Warren Gamaliel Harding.

Roosevelt was prepared for his defeat and for a bolt. He had already given his nomination speech the night before the convention, to a hysterical crowd of thousands that overflowed a hall and into the street, ending with a prophecy: “We stand at Armageddon,” he trumpeted, “and we battle for the Lord.”

Delegates were starting to leave their convention hall, an opera house in Trenton, late on a September afternoon in 1910, when they heard an unexpected announcement from the rostrum: Mr. Wilson, “candidate for the governorship,
and the next President of the United States,
has received word of his nomination; has left Princeton, and is now on his way to the Convention.” Soon a tall bespectacled man in a dark gray sack suit was making his way to the stage through cheering ranks of New Jersey Democrats. “God, look at that jaw!” a ward politician exclaimed. Not all the Democrats cheered; a group of reform Democrats sat glumly on their hands as they reflected that the bosses had beaten them once again, this time with a
college professor. Most of the delegates were simply curious, never having seen Wilson before or perhaps even heard of him.

Within a few minutes the man from Princeton was transporting the crowd into a fever of enthusiasm. He electrified the reformers at the start by declaiming, “As you know, I did not seek this nomination. It has come to me absolutely unsolicited. With the consequence that I shall enter upon the duties of the office of Governor, if elected, with absolutely no pledge of any kind to prevent me from serving the people of the State with singleness of purpose.” Scenting victory in November, the regulars too kept applauding. Wilson placed himself squarely behind the progressive platform the delegates had adopted, save for the direct primary, which he did not mention. Out of the ranks of the reformers came the cry, “Thank God, at last, a leader has come!”

“Go on, go on,” delegates shouted when Wilson halted, and the orator did. Americans must reconstruct their economic order, he said, and in doing so would reconstruct their political structure. Then delegates rushed up to the platform to greet him, to lift him to their shoulders—but even the exultant speaker would not go this far. Next day the press across the country was hailing a new star in the political firmament.

It was Woodrow Wilson’s first political speech—and a moment he had been anticipating for decades. As a young man, he had devoured Houghton Mifflin’s
American Statesmen
series and its tales of the great orators. As a young professor at Wesleyan, he had tried to convert the debating society into a House of Commons. In his first academic writings, he had called for better parliamentary debates. He had indeed become one of the most accomplished and renowned college lecturers of his time.

And now he had held spellbound the political folk he was so eager to recruit. Still, for Wilson, oratory was a vehicle of leadership, not the heart of it. And leadership was the essence of true statesmanship. These were not pieties. By now, he had become the nation’s leading student of the complex phenomenon of leadership. Public opinion, he felt, had to be educated and persuaded by a forceful leader who, in John Blum’s summary, could perceive the inchoate desires of the community and formulate them in broad, clear, convincing arguments, and such leaders would possess poetic insights and talents. But for Wilson this was by no means a one-way process. Leaders led followers in order to mobilize and empower them. “All the renewal of a nation,” he said, “comes out of the general mass of its people.”

“The ear of the leader must ring with the voices of the people,” Wilson had told a Tennessee audience twenty years before this triumphant evening in Trenton. “The forces of the public thought may be blind: he must lend
them sight; they may blunder; he must set them right.” Twelve years later, he wrote a memorandum on leadership that anticipated theory about and analysis of the subject over the next sixty years. Leadership, he said, “is the practicable formulation of action, and the successful arousal and guidance of motive in social development.” Only by the action of leading minds was the organic will of a community stirred to a guiding control of affairs.

Leadership was not an end in itself. It was a means of realizing a people’s elevated values, a nation’s noblest goals. Nor was leadership a one-man show. The most effective leadership in the long run was collective—and this was one reason Wilson, in contrast to many of the educated persons he knew, believed in the indispensable role of strong parties in a democracy. He had long admired the superb debates, the orderly conflict, and the collective cabinet leadership of the two big British parties.

Who was this practitioner and theorist of leadership? some were asking after the triumph in Trenton. The man who had come to embrace an almost philosophical view of purposeful, high-minded leadership had spent his first twenty-five years in a condition of outward serenity and inner turbulence. Born in Virginia in 1856 into a religious and intellectual family, he did not learn his alphabet until he was nine or read well until he was eleven, probably as a result of a form of dyslexia. Undoubtedly this aroused considerable anxiety in his most literate and formidable father, a theologian and minister of the Presbyterian gospel, and a perfectionist as to the use of words. Sigmund Freud, with William Bullitt, theorized that Wilson’s “alienation from the world of reality” related to his religious feelings, that a passionate love of his father was at the core of his emotional life, that he probably exhibited extensive narcissism as a child, that he developed a hostility to his father which he repressed, but which broke out against father substitutes—rival leaders. Much later, Alexander and Juliette George hypothesized that power for Wilson was a means of compensation for self-esteem damaged in childhood. He could indulge his secret desire to dominate only by purifying his leadership, “by committing it to political projects which articulated the highest moral and idealistic aspirations of the people.” He had to feel virtuous.

The presidency of Princeton gave Wilson the opportunity to lead, and he seized it greedily. He promptly recruited fifty top-notch young teachers and some older and most distinguished ones. In 1905, he appointed the first Jew to the faculty and four years later the first Catholic. He instituted the preceptorial system. He immensely expanded Princeton’s physical plant. He raised an institution that was essentially at the level of excellent small colleges like Dartmouth and Williams to that of excellent universities like Harvard, Yale, and Chicago, John Cooper has noted. He did these
things not alone but in close cooperation with trustees and faculty. He failed in two efforts: to convert the Princeton eating clubs into a more democratic and educationally effective system, and to locate a proposed graduate college in close proximity to undergraduates and teachers.

Wilson was later accused of inviting these two failures by being rigid and dogmatic. Yet these qualities—renamed consistency, determination, persistence, and principled leadership—helped make him a transforming leader at Princeton. And all these qualities reappeared in Wilson’s governorship of New Jersey during 1911, his first year in the post. He won the governorship by a most skillful mobilization of progressive and reform Democratic support without alienating the big-city bosses who had arranged his nomination in the first place. He then proceeded, by a careful combination of high principle and low expediency, to put through the program that he and his party had promised. During 1912, his legislative leadership faltered, in part because the Republicans had won control of the legislature, in part because Wilson was turning to the national political battle—but not because there was any discernible falling off of his ability to combine doggedness and flexibility.

The national arena—and especially the national Democracy—confronted Wilson with far severer challenges than Princeton or New Jersey. Not only was he plunging into a battle zone dominated by formidable leaders such as Roosevelt, La Follette, Bryan, and Taft; he was seeking the presidential nomination of a party that was really three parties.

The dominant wing of the Democracy was the party of Bryan and his fellow silverites and agrarians. The former “boy orator of the Platte,” now entering his fifties, was still the peerless leader of those who had fought the battle against McKinleyism in 1896 and who had nominated their man for President twice after that. He continued to appeal to the old prohibitionist and moralistic vote, to the western silverites and other insurgents, and to much of the South. Responding to the urban reformism of the decade, he was by 1910 moving toward the left, as he urged adoption of a graduated income tax, governmental ownership of the railroads, woman’s suffrage, direct primaries, the initiative, referendum, and recall. He reached out to labor with his denunciation of labor injunction abuses. But while the Nebraskan was still a formidable party leader, few expected that he could bring his personal following over to a true progressive-labor-farmer coalition.

The electoral base of the Democracy still lay in the solid South. The South—even the Southern bourbons—had stuck with Bryanism in 1896;
above all, they offered loyalty, if only because they had no other place to go. The Southern Democracy had recovered with remarkable speed after the Civil War and by 1880 had crowded out the Republicans in most areas except for GOP patronage holders. Later Southern Democrats had taken a far more portentous step. Fearful of the threat to white supremacy and one-party politics that briefly loomed during the Populist years, Southern party leaders, governors, and legislatures destroyed the black political potential by systematically adopting a battery of devices to keep blacks from voting: literacy tests, poll taxes, property requirements, the “grandfather” clause. Southern elites had never been able to place their own man at the head of a presidential ticket, but they still could play a pivotal role in the choice among Northerners.

The heart of the oldest Democratic party—the “party of Jefferson and Jackson”—still beat steadily, if a bit feebly, in the new century. This was the party of presidential nominees Seymour, Tilden, and Cleveland, and a host of Northern governors, senators, and congressmen, largely faithful to sound money, lowered tariffs, and states’ rights, to economic individualism, Bill of Rights liberties, laissez-faire, and governmental economy. They made bold bids for the presidency, sometimes carrying the popular vote but less often the electoral college because of the concentration of their vote in the one-party South. The election of 1896 had left this party shattered across the North; only the pride of vindication had survived, as the Clevelandites witnessed the drubbing of the Bryanites. Cleveland himself had died in 1908, a few months before Bryan was beaten for the third time, but he had fought to the end for a conservative Democracy, with unabated attacks on silver Democrats as “confidencemen, sharpers and swindlers.”

Buffeted by these divergent party impulses, the Democracy had teetered between acquiescence in the power of the burgeoning industrial and financial elites, and challenging that power, and ended up doing neither. If the Republicans were now “firmly established as the party of rapid industrialization,” as Everett Carll Ladd concludes, the Democrats failed to take clear leadership of the loyal opposition. The Populists of 1892 could condemn both parties for drowning “the outcries of a plundered people” with a “sham battle” over the tariff. But even on the issue of protectionism—the ancient rallying ground of the Democracy—the party of Jefferson and Cleveland failed to offer a strong and united opposition. When Taft called for tariff revision in 1909, House and Senate Democrats defected from their party’s 1908 antitariff pledges and backed protection for lumber, hides, pelts, barley, and other products of rural counties. In the struggle over the Payne-Aldrich tariff, the press labeled the
Democracy as leaderless in the House, utterly factionalized in the Senate.