John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

The Wilsons were rapidly becoming professionals themselves. Ellen Wilson struck up a friendship with Joe Tumulty who was already the indispensable adjutant. Between them they kept the governor informed on local politics. She subscribed to all the papers and began to keep a scrapbook of clippings that had to do with her husband’s presidential candidacy.

It wasn’t easy for her after the pleasant academic years to become a politician’s wife. Moving out of Prospect into cramped quarters at the Princeton Inn was a wrench. The girls hated hotel life. Of course what Woodrow wanted Ellen wanted but she couldn’t help repining a little. She confided in Jim Kerney that she feared it was the end of the “happy home days” when she would play the piano evenings while her husband sang college songs with the girls. “That kind of joy is largely over for us.”

Wilson was oblivious of everything except the task in hand. He had to make himself a record as a modern liberal and he had to do it fast. Up to now his liberalism had been distinctly of the Manchester school. He had preached in his courses the beauties of the English Constitution. Along with the great Britishers he’d admired as a young man he had been for free trade and against wars of aggression and for limiting the powers of government. Like Bright and Cobden he had been suspicious of government interference in such things as the wages and hours of labor. In the name of Southern chivalry he had scoffed at women’s suffrage. Now the word liberal was beginning to be applied to a set of tenets that would have made Gladstone’s hackles rise.

Wilson was going to school with the progressives. For the first time in his life he had discovered the people. The vested interests, as represented by the wealthy Princeton alumni who had opposed his plans, had given him a hard time. Now he found great exhilaration in addressing halls full of plain uneducated people right off the streetcorners. They thrilled to his words; he thrilled to them. The people must rule.

He made a friend of George L. Record. He set himself to learn about the legislation the reformers hoped would take local and state governments, and eventually the national government, away from the vested interests and their hired politicians, and restore control to the voters. These measures were already being tried out. Hadn’t James Bryce written, somewhat puzzled, after a recent trip through the United States, that rapid changes were causing him to revise some of his views of American government? These were currents of day to day life that the professor had ignored during his years in the academic backwater.

The day before his inauguration Wilson attended a meeting that George Record organized at the Hotel Martinique in New York for progressive assemblymen of both parties to map out a program for the coming session. Record read the project for an election law setting up direct primaries as a means of ridding New Jersey of boss control. He outlined a stiff corrupt practices act, a law to regulate public utilities such as Governor Hughes had put through in New York and a workingmen’s compensation act. By the time Governor Wilson took the train to Princeton that night he had made Record’s program his own.

In an extraordinary burst of activity, the new governor, taking advantage of the mantle of invincibility he had worn since the defeat of Boss Smith, rammed the most important items through the legislature in three months. Record furnished drafts of the bills and Wilson and Tumulty sat in the executive office and saw to it that the assemblymen did the right thing.

The oldtimers were aghast. Smith was so shaken he stayed home. When Nugent, who had worked so hard for Wilson’s election, tried to stack the cards against the new legislation in a Democratic caucus, the governor announced that as leader of the party he had the right to attend. He lectured the Democratic legislators for three hours on civic duty. Boss Smith threatened to have him impeached, but Wilson had convinced the assembly that the voters expected reform. He threatened to expose to public wrath any man who stood in the way of the people’s will. With Record and his friends doing the paperwork, in spite of a continuous outcry from Boss Smith’s personal press and collusion between the Republican and Democratic machines, the bills were drafted and passed.

Getting them approved by the state senate was a fresh problem. The senate was still in Republican hands. Wilson used all his charm, all his humor, all his felicity of phrase to woo the state senators as he had wooed the undergraduates at Princeton. He invited them to his office, he attended their banquets.

In a letter to Mrs. Peck he described himself as joining one senator in a cakewalk. “We pranced together to the content of the whole company. I am on easy and delightful terms with all the Senators. They know me for something else than an ambitious dictator.” By April 23, 1911, he was able to write her: “I got absolutely everything I strove for — and more besides … Everyone, the papers included, are saying that none of it could have been done, if it had not been for my influence and tact and hold upon the people … The result was as complete a victory as has ever been won, I venture to say, in the history of the country.”

The news of Governor Wilson’s performance at Trenton spread over the nation’s newsstands. William Jennings Bryan who, in spite of his three defeats for the presidency, still considered himself leader of the popular wing of the Democratic Party, wrote to inquire how such things could be. How could a man sponsored by Colonel Harvey, whom Bryan considered an errandboy from the Morgan office, turn out a progressive? To try Governor Wilson’s sincerity, he suggested that he endorse the constitutional amendment for a federal income tax. Governor Wilson promptly obliged with a special message to the legislature. The Commoner was “gratified.”

Bryan at fifty was a disappointed man. In spite of Mrs. Bryan’s leavening good sense, a shrewish tone was creeping into his exhortations to righteousness. His religious fundamentalism, his ranting against the demon rum, and war, and imperialism, and high finance, and vested privilege, began to pall even on the Chautauqua circuits. The great speeches had been so often repeated they had lost their savor. The voice was losing its resonance. But, even in his decline William Jennings Bryan remained the embodiment of the aspirations of the plain people, and the most powerful single factor in Democratic politics.

The situation was ticklish. In his academic days Professor Wilson had hardly let pass an opportunity to hold the crude notions of the cornbelt demagogue up to ridicule. He had once refused to share a platform with him. The two men had never met. Bryan had to be conciliated.

Ellen Wilson, who was using all her gentle housewifely guile to advance her husband’s political fortunes, made the first move. When she discovered that Bryan was coming to Princeton to deliver an address on Faith to the theological seminary, she invited him to dinner and wired Woodrow, who was off lecturing in Georgia, to come home at once.

The evening was a success. Bryan, whose lips never touched liquor, was a colossal trencherman. The Princeton Inn did its best. Instead of talking politics the men swapped stories. The Commoner announced himself afterwards as charmed by the governor’s gaiety and nimblemindedness and captivated by Mrs. Wilson. The governor wrote Mrs. Peck that he found in Bryan force of personality and sincerity and conviction. Tumulty who had been hovering in the lobby rushed up to Mrs. Wilson after the guests had left, his blue eyes popping. “You’ve nominated your husband,” he said. She smiled and answered that she hadn’t done a thing.