John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

When friends suggested that he didn’t know enough about practical politics he pointed to his rows with the Princeton faculty. “Professional politicians,” his daughter Eleanor quoted him as saying, “have little to teach me; they are amateurs compared with some I’ve dealt with in the Princeton fights.”

Colonel Harvey, looking forward with relish to the role of presidentmaker, noted Woodrow Wilson’s disenchantment with academic life. He was planning to run him for governor of New Jersey as a preliminary to the Democratic Party’s nomination for the presidential race in 1912.

George Harvey knew his way around in New Jersey politics. Having started life clerking in a Vermont country store he’d served his apprenticeship in journalism with the Springfield Republican and covered the Garden State for the New York World. A sharp pen, an acid tongue with a touch of the old crackerbarrel style combined with a convivial streak to carry him far in New Jersey. He was somewhat of a dandy. One governor, who wanted to make his administration a fashionable success, made young Harvey a colonel on his staff to handle the entertaining at the summer mansion at Sea Girt and provided him with a sinecure in the Department of Banking and Insurance. For a while he edited the Newark Journal and at the age of twentyeight was picked by Pulitzer to be managing editor of the New York World.

From the time when at fifteen he managed to attend the Democratic state convention in Vermont he kept a shrewd eye on the political pot. He backed Grover Cleveland in 1892 and made such a killing in Wall Street that he was able to buy The North American Review.

Dabbling in New Jersey banks and streetcar companies along with his wealthy and politicalminded friends William C. Whitney and Thomas Fortune Ryan he became associated with another convivial gentleman who had started life clerking in a store, Senator James Smith, Jr.

Senator Smith was undisputed boss of Democratic state politics in New Jersey. He was as popular with the poor and downtrodden as he was with the public utilities. He was a tall and handsome man. His pink and white face under the silk hat was described as being as innocent as a child’s. A lavish entertainer, a free spender of his own and other people’s money, he was known as a prominent Catholic layman. It was said of him that not a day passed that he didn’t attend a funeral.

Muckraking was in the air. Reform was sweeping out of the West. Newspapers were saying hard things of a swarm of lobbyists known as the Black Horse Cavalry that infested the statehouse at Trenton. Stirred out of their torpor by echoes of Teddy Roosevelt’s hue and cry against the control of politicians by malefactors of great wealth, the voters of New Jersey were beginning to yearn for righteousness.

Senator Smith had three boys at Princeton. He had met President Wilson. He had heard him spoken of as being opposed to federal regulation of corporations, to woman’s suffrage, to the closed shop and to other bugaboos of men of means. The professor had even written kindly of political machines. Colonel Harvey invited Smith to a magnificent lunch at the private dining room he maintained at Delmonico’s for the benefit of the Harper publishing firm. There he managed to convince him that Woodrow Wilson as governor would head off the radicals and dress the state up with a few harmless reforms.

The senator did take the precaution of sending an underling to ask “the Presbyterian priest” as he called Wilson, whether if he were elected he would set about “fighting and breaking down the existing Democratic organization.” President Wilson looked the man straight in the face with the grayeyed ingenuousness which was his greatest asset and said certainly not, “the last thing I should think of would be building up a machine of my own.”

Boss Smith was convinced but Wilson continued to play hard to get. He was spending the summer with his family in a boarding house at a painters’ colony at Old Lyme that Ellen Wilson loved. At various conferences with the politicians he made no commitments whatsoever. Meanwhile he was asking the advice of such college friends as had stuck to him through the battles at Princeton and of his old cronies who had become opinionmoulders through editorial positions in New York magazines.

Ellen Wilson’s counsel was sought at every step. The Wilsons went through weeks of agonizing indecision. There wasn’t any question that Woodrow intended to be President. The question was would the governorship of New Jersey be the best steppingstone. Finally Ellen Wilson, that smart little lady who, on top of her other virtues, was developing a discriminating political sense, told him to go in and win.

So it came about that the day before the Democratic convention met in the Trenton opera house on September 15, 1910, Colonel Harvey and Senator Smith went to work, operating from the boss’s suite at the adjoining hotel, to railroad the nomination through. They were up all night arguing with the delegates. They had a rough time of it. All the liberal and progressive elements were opposed to the bosses’ candidate. Wilson was unknown to the political stalwarts of his own Mercer County. In important elections he hadn’t even voted. When his name was placed in nomination there were cries of “accredit him to Virginia, he’s not a Jerseyman.”

Boss Smith said later it was one of the toughest nights in his career. With the help of the machine bosses of Hudson County he finally put Wilson’s name before the convention and bludgeoned the delegates into voting for it.

William Inglis, Harvey’s handyman, to whom the colonel entrusted the mission of fetching Professor Wilson over to Trenton, told of the embarrassment of waiting with the candidate at the Trenton House. Inglis had been instructed on no account to let his charge be seen until the nomination was a certainty.

He ushered him into a stuffy little Victorian parlor reserved for ladies waiting for their escorts and closed the door. There they sat for two hours. Inglis was on tenterhooks but the professor was cool and seemed entirely relaxed. Inglis kept offering him a drink or a cup of tea. No he didn’t care for any. It wasn’t till after five in the afternoon that a delegate from Atlantic County rushed in, white as a sheet and all out of breath, to announce that the nomination had been made unanimous.

The convention was still in a sullen mood when Professor Wilson appeared on the stage of the opera house. James Kerney of the Trenton Evening Times who had not yet seen the candidate, described him as “… wearing a dark gray business suit with a sack coat, a type which he used almost exclusively. He had a dark felt hat with a narrow brim, with a knitted golf jacket under the coat. It was a bangup Democratic outfit.

“Wilson looked the part of one of the romantic figures of American politics as he stood before that convention. He was in the pink of mental and physical condition, fresh from the golf-links, with all the color of the outdoors upon him, and a general appearance of having been battered by life and of having given it somewhat of a battering in return. Behind him was the background of teacher, writer, historian and educator. Here was the beginning of the ‘schoolmaster in politics.’ ”

“As you know,” Wilson told the delegates, “I did not seek this nomination …” Not only had no pledges of any kind been given but none had been proposed or desired. The future was not for parties playing politics but for measures “conceived in the largest spirit, pushed by parties whose leaders were statesmen, not demagogues, who loved not their office but their duty and their opportunity for service.”