John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

Taft was not a popular president. T.R.’s campaign managers had made so much of his totem, the teddybear, that they enshrined it in the hearts of generations of American children. All the Republican committees could dream up for Taft was the drowsy opossum. Billy Possum never caught on. Taft left the White House after one term, a much misunderstood man.

The American public was not kept in ignorance of their hero’s prowess during T.R.’s months in the African wilderness. A steady stream of articles poured out from his tent on safari. Photographs filled magazines and Sunday supplements. Museums were embarrassed by the great shipments of pelts and skeletons and skulls representing every conceivable species that piled up in their storerooms.

On the way out and on the way home T.R. tracked as many lions in the courts of Europe as he did on the Kapiti plains. On his way home he was appointed by President Taft, anxious to apply healing unction because he knew T.R. was mad at him for falling out with T.R.’s friends, the Pinchots, to serve as his personal representative at the funeral of King Edward VII.

T.R. never tired telling stories about what was to prove to be the last assemblage of the crowned heads of Europe in their antique glory. He bubbled over with delight at hobnobbing with the heads of states. At tea at the American Embassy before going to the reception and banquet which preceded the interment he horrified Whitelaw Reid, who was grooming him for appearance at the court of St. James, by chuckling delightedly in his shrill voice: “I’m going to a wake tonight; I’m going to a wake.”

It was said that it was only Mrs. Roosevelt’s firm no that prevented him from wearing his Rough Rider uniform.

Appearing in plain evening dress amid all the gold lace and orders and decorations at Buckingham Palace he found himself the target of every eye. George V played host. The monarchs clustered around the bear-hunter and lionslayer who represented to them everything that was most amusingly mad and wild west about the American myth.

Completely at his ease T.R. lectured them roundly. “I would never have taken that step at all if I had been in your place, Your Majesty,” he’d say clenching his fist; or, “That’s just what I would have done,” clapping the back of his right hand into the hollow of his left: “Quite right.”

“Before the first course was over, we had all forgotten the real cause of our presence in London,” was how T.R. told the story when he got home. “I have never attended a more hilarious banquet in my life. I never saw quite so many knights. I had them on every side. They ran one or two false ones on me, and each had some special story of sorrow to pour into my ear.”

During a visit to Germany a short time before, T.R. had found the Kaiser cordial and excessively voluble. The cordiality was mutual. “I do admire him,” T.R. said of Wilhelm II, “much as I would a grizzly bear.”

At Buckingham Palace T.R. described the Kaiser as acting the drillmaster to the lesser monarchs. All evening he tried to monopolize the Rough Rider’s conversation. When the parvenu Czar of Bulgaria started pouring the tale of his troubles in the Balkans in Roosevelt’s ear, Kaiser Wilhelm dragged him away: “That man is unworthy of your acquaintance,” he said in a loud voice.

“Kings and such like are just as funny as politicians,” T.R. would explode into laughter when he told the story back home.

Try as he would to settle down to writing for the Outlook , and leading the life of an elder statesman at Sagamore Hill, he couldn’t help slipping back into politics. Out of sheer exuberance, when he got home, he helped ruin his old friend Taft’s political career, snatched the Progressive movement away from La Follette, who as senator was attaining a position of national leadership, and acted, as he liked to boast with a toothy grin and a flash of his glasses “like a bull in a china shop.”

THE result of T.R.’s Bull Moose rampage was a split in the Republican Party that assured the Democrats a return to power if only they could find a leader who would appeal to both town and country wings of the party. New Jersey, the state which for years had furnished a convenient mailing address for every unsavory trust in the Union, where politics was considered safely under the thumb of the railroads and the utilities, had seethed with reform for a decade. The New Jersey reformers found themselves the leader the Democratic Party needed in a smoothvoiced lecturer on history and government who had since 1902 been president of Princeton.

Although Woodrow Wilson was two years older than T.R. and six years older than Hughes, politically he was a newcomer. Like Hughes he entered politics fullblown from another profession. He was fiftythree when he resigned as president of Princeton to run for governor of New Jersey on the Democratic ticket. Almost immediately he developed into one of the most skillful political operators in the history of American statecraft. It began to be said of him that his whole career had been a preparation for the White House.

Like Hughes, Woodrow Wilson was a clergyman’s son. He was a Presbyterian by birth and rearing. His grandfather Wilson was a Scotch-Irish printer and journalist who, emigrating to Philadelphia as a very young man, worked on Duane’s famous old Aurora and then moved to the Ohio country to edit a newspaper of his own in Steubenville. There he raised numerous progeny.

The youngest son, Joseph Ruggles Wilson, turned out to be a scholarly boy with a gift for public speaking who took his degree in divinity at Princeton. He was teaching at the Steubenville Academy when he met the daughter of Thomas Woodrow, a Scottish minister who had made a name but no money for himself preaching in Carlisle in the North of England and had been forced to move to America in search of a living that would support his family. The Woodrows came of a long line of Presbyterian divines. Woodrow Wilson liked to speak of his forebears as troublesome Scotchmen, hardbitten and opinionated, calvinists and covenanters.

Born in the year of Buchanan’s election at the manse in Staunton, Virginia, Woodrow Wilson was still a babe in arms when his handsome preacher father, who was becoming famous for the high style and fine delivery of his sermons, was called to Augusta, Georgia, to become pastor of the First Presbyterian Church there.

Though the father and mother were both Ohiobred they absorbed the politics of their parishioners. Dr. Wilson became an ardent secessionist. The assembly that split the denomination in two was held in his church and he became permanent “stated” clerk of the Southern Presbyterians.

For the first ten years of his life Tommy as he was known was the only boy in a family of girls. His parents destined him for the ministry as a matter of course. It was a trial to Dr. Wilson, who was a passionate reader of books with a palate for the modulations of English style, that his son learned to read slowly and that he had difficulty in mastering the Shorter Catechism. Dr. Wilson had a sharp Scottish tongue. His sarcasms lashed the dull student. “Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth.” At the same time tales were handed down in the family of most unministerial frolickings when Dr. Wilson roughhoused with the children in the garden of the manse.

When Tommy was fourteen the father was called to a chair at the theological seminary in Columbia, South Carolina’s inland capital which Sherman had so thoroughly laid waste during the war. Dr. Wilson had a salary from his teaching and another from one of the principal pulpits in the town, and Mrs. Wilson had come into a legacy from a brother in the North who had died without issue. Amid the general impoverishment of the ruined South, all this meant opulence unusual for a minister’s family. They built themselves a brick house. The Lord was indeed providing. The children grew up steeped in righteousness and drilled in admiration of good English prose.