John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

Record promptly fired off a long list of questions. Wilson’s nomination had been steamrollered through by bosses Nugent and Smith; how did he propose to abolish boss control in politics?

“By the election to office of men who will refuse to submit to it … and by pitiless publicity,” Wilson replied. He answered the nineteen questions frankly. Sometimes he agreed with Record. Sometimes he didn’t.

By the time election day came around Woodrow Wilson had appropriated a large part of George Record’s progressive platform: state control of utilities, workingmen’s compensation, a corrupt practices act and even the direct election of United States senators. In every speech he was drawing cheers from the crowds by attacking the privileges of entrenched corporations and by harrying the political bosses.

He had been developing his flair for carrying day to day politics up into the epic sphere:

“We have begun a fight that, it may be, will take many a generation to complete,” he announced in his ringing tenor voice that so effortlessly filled the hall during his address that closed the campaign at Newark. “No man would wish to sit idly by and lose the opportunity to take part in such a struggle. All through the centuries there has been this slow painful struggle forward, forward, up, up, a little at a time, along the entire incline, the interminable way …”

Listening to his candidate’s speeches Boss Smith seems to have been torn between admiration for the “Presbyterian priest’s” political skill and dismay at what he was saying. When his friends shook their heads he called it confidently “great campaign play.” He thought he had the professor in his pocket.

Wilson was elected by a majority of almost fifty thousand. To everyone’s amazement he carried with him a Democratic majority in the lower house of what had been considered a firmly Republican legislature.

Every successful politician learns from his audiences. Wilson had been learning fast during the campaign. One thing he learned was that the bosses needed him more than he needed the bosses. The reform tide was rising.

He meant exactly what he said when, in the final speech at Newark, he announced in the vibrant voice that stirred listeners to the marrow of their bones: “If I am elected governor I shall have been elected leader of my party … If the Democratic Party does not understand it that way, then I want to say to you very frankly that the Democratic Party ought not to elect me governor.”

Part of his agreement with Smith when Wilson accepted his tender of the nomination had been, so Wilson’s supporters claimed, that Smith, who had left Washington in bad odor after his previous term, should not try to get the legislature to elect him to the Senate again.

A reform enactment, part of the nationwide campaign for the direct election of United States senators, had established a senatorial primary in New Jersey. The designate was a gentleman known as “Farmer Jim” Martine, an old tubthumper in the Bryan style whose name was put on the ticket largely because no one else thought it worthwhile to run.

Now after Wilson’s victory, the Democrats were sure to elect whomever they picked for senator. So James Smith changed his mind and announced that the primary didn’t mean a thing and that he would run for election. Meanwhile he suggested, pointedly, that the professor needed a rest after a strenuous campaign. Why didn’t he go back to Old Lyme for a vacation?

The professor did no such thing. Instead he travelled about the state, dropping in on his newfound friends, the progressives, and asking them whether he ought to come out for Martine or let Smith have his way. He found young Tumulty, who had been such a help in the populous eastern counties, acting as Martine’s campaign manager.

Jim Kerney and the whole band of progressive newspapermen who had become Wilson’s warmest adherents admitted that Martine was a fool, but claimed that, since he’d been nominated by popular vote, if they believed in their principles as true Democrats they had no choice but to send him to the Senate. They urged Wilson to come out against Smith.

The governor-elect made quite a show of calling on the party bosses at their homes to try to argue them out of supporting Smith’s candidacy. The bosses answered that they had given Smith their word. Wilson went to see Smith himself and argued with him for two hours.

The conversation was civil, because Smith was a civilspoken man, but he insisted he wanted to go to Washington. He’d left a bad impression last time. This time he’d do better. He wanted another chance for his boys’ sake. He laughed off Wilson’s threat to come out against him. They parted political enemies.

Wilson issued a dignified statement against Smith and promptly invaded the machine’s own bailiwick in Jersey City. Before an uproarious meeting he described the political bosses as warts on the body politic. “It is not a capital process to cut off a wart. You don’t have to go to the hospital and take an anaesthetic. The thing can be done while you wait …”

Wilson’s speeches were widely reported by the New York press, and reprinted by local newspapers from Texas to California. Martine’s campaign for senator became a national issue.

The senatorial election was the new legislature’s first business. The whole country was watching to see who would come out on top, the schoolmaster in politics, only inaugurated in his first political post a week before, or the man who had bossed New Jersey for years.

Using all the old blarney, with the brass knuckles hidden under the kid glove Boss Smith confidently mobilized his troops. While Smith’s henchmen poured out whiskey for the faithful in the famous old room 100 of the Trenton House, Wilson and Tumulty sat up all night keeping tab on their supporters from the executive offices. Their only weapon was the telephone.

On the day of the vote Smith’s cohorts paraded through Trenton with a brass band and were reviewed by the Big Fellow himself from the steps of the hotel. Everybody who could be reached had been reached. Smith was confident.

When the two houses voted separately Martine lacked one vote of a majority. Next day he was elected in joint session. Only three men voted for Smith.

“I pitied Smith at the last,” Wilson wrote his friend Mrs. Peck, with whom ever since Bermuda he had carried on a brisk and, later slanderers to the contrary, platonic correspondence. “It was plain he had few real friends, that he held men by fear and power and the benefits he could bestow, not by love or loyalty or any genuine devotion. The minute it was seen that he was defeated his adherents began to desert him like rats leaving a sinking ship. He left Trenton, (where his headquarters had at first been crowded) attended, I am told, only by his sons, and looking old and broken … It is a pitiless game … — and for me it has only begun.”

Wilson was proving himself, for an amateur, remarkably adept. Turning the tables on Boss Smith did him more good politically than all the “glittering generalities beautifully phrased” of his campaign speeches.

Bryan Democrats and progressive Republicans were alike smarting over their failure to attain national leadership. Bryan had beaten his head against a wall. Roosevelt had gone off to Africa and let his party fall back into the hands of the reactionaries. La Follette was tied to the middlewest. Hiram Johnson was local to California. Here was a reformer stepping down from the high sphere of academic wisdom. He seemed to mean what he said. The muckraking journals applauded him from coast to coast.

The professionals, to be sure, saw Governor Wilson in a less favorable light. When he heard of Smith’s misadventures old Boss Croker of New York is reported to have growled: “An ingrate in politics is no good.”