John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

When, three weeks later, both men appeared on the same platform at Burlington, Wilson paid Bryan a handsome compliment: “It is because he has cried ‘America awake’ that other men have been able to transform into action the doctrines he so diligently preached.”

The presidentmakers were buzzing. A Princeton graduate from Arkansas named William McCombs, who practiced law in New York and dabbled in Tammany politics, opened a small office on lower Broadway to nourish the Wilson boom. Wilson insisted on calling it his literary bureau. McCombs was financed by Cleveland Dodge, Walter Hines Page, the publisher, and a few other of Wilson’s old admirers from Princeton days. Between them they organized a western lecture tour for the governor right after the windup of that first triumphant session of the New Jersey legislature. The Schoolmaster in Politics must be shown to the country.

Wilson, who had never been west of Colorado, spent the month of May lecturing in the mountain states and on the Pacific coast. In Kansas City, on the way out, he was so carried away by the progressive atmosphere that he came out for the initiative, referendum and recall, and talking to newspapermen, barely stopped short of the recall of the judiciary. Some of his eastern backers set up such a doleful clamor at the news that he promptly dropped these inflammatory expressions from his vocabulary.

He spoke in Denver on a Sunday. Since he had scruples against talking politics on the Sabbath, he harangued twelve thousand people in the auditorium on the Holy Bible and sent them away so fired with enthusiasm that when next morning the first long distance phone connections were opened between New York and Denver, and the Times reporter asked what the news was, the answer came that the town was wild over Woodrow Wilson and was booming him for President.

Wilson was applauded in Los Angeles and San Francisco. He hobnobbed with the progressive leaders of the Northwest He travelled eight thousand miles and delivered thirtyfive speeches. The facile enthusiasm of western audiences warmed his heart. He began to admit publicly that indeed he was out for the presidency.

On the long trainride east to Minneapolis he told the reporter for the Baltimore Sun that he had been waiting to weigh the results of this trip. Now he felt that the response was such that if he could get the nomination he could surely be elected: “It’s an awful thing to be President of the United States … I mean just what I say. It means giving up nearly everything that one holds dear … In spite of what I said to you I do want to be President and I will tell you why: I want this country to have a President who will do certain things … I am sure that I will at least try to the utmost to do them.”

His final address, at Lincoln, Nebraska, in William Jennings Bryan’s home bailiwick, was a rousing appeal to businessmen to forget their own selfish interests and to work for the public good. Men jumped to their feet and clapped and cheered. Charles Bryan, the Commoner’s banker brother, came across with a check to help defray the expenses of Governor Wilson’s campaign.

Back in Trenton the governor discovered, with some chagrin, that an article in the state constitution, which he hadn’t had time to peruse, made it impossible for the state controller to pay him his salary for the days he had spent out of the state. The president of the senate, sworn in as acting governor in his stead, had received his paycheck. The senator generously endorsed the check back to Wilson and continued to do so during all the many absences from duty made necessary by his new career as presidential timber.

It was a period of money worries for the Wilsons. The governor’s salary was only ten thousand dollars. They had a few savings from Princeton days and occasional royalties from his books, but Mrs. Wilson had to pinch every penny.

The main business of the summer, which the Wilson family spent at the official residence at Sea Girt, was gaining control of the state Democratic committee. James R. Nugent, who by this time hated Wilson with a bitter personal hatred, was chairman. The report that Nugent on a champagne drunk at a nearby summer resort had publicly toasted the governor as an ingrate and a liar was seized on by Wilson supporters. They made it a pretext for forcing Nugent’s resignation. His successor was a Wilson man.

The immediate result was a split in the New Jersey Democracy which resulted in the loss of the legislature to the Republicans. Just as at Princeton Wilson lost interest in university affairs, when opinion began to turn against him after the first flush of enthusiasm for his setting everything to rights, so now the executive offices at Trenton began to lose their glamor. He was always away lecturing. The New York Sun, a Republican paper continually yapping at his heels, took to describing the governorship as Professor Wilson’s travelling fellowship.

He did press through a batch of laws, known to the newspapers as the Seven Sisters, which made New Jersey less the promised land for the incorporation of outofstate trusts and holding companies, but his lack of interest in the local problems of the people of his home state was becoming painfully evident.

His veto of the bill to force the railroads to start eliminating grade crossings came as a disappointment to supporters in both parties. Kerney told the story that when the bill was returned to the state senate with the veto message the senators found a letter to the governor from a railroad official which had slipped into the engrossed copy by mistake. The letter was couched in terms strangely similar to the terms of the veto message. Such was Woodrow Wilson’s prestige that the senators, although bitterly disappointed by the veto, returned the letter to Wilson instead of tipping off the newspapers, in order not to damage his prospects of the presidential nomination.

Woodrow Wilson was becoming the center of a political cult, but personally he remained a lonely man. His craving for love and admiration was insatiable. His home was full of doting female relatives but that was not enough. He missed his friendships among the Princeton faculty. No one had taken the place of Jack Hibben as a daily and approving companion since their bitter break in the row over the quadrangles. Then one day in late November, 1911, Governor Wilson paid a call, at the suggestion of his literary bureau, on a gentleman from Texas. He found, right in the world of politics where he most needed a crony, a sympathetic friend, who like himself had spent a lifetime cultivating the arts of power.

EDWARD Mandell House was two years younger than Wilson. He was born and raised in Texas. His first memories were of living in a whitepillared redbrick mansion set among oleanders in an orange grove near the beach in Galveston. The roof was crowned with a cupola where his father, a trader and shipowner who had run away from England as a boy and fought the Mexicans with Sam Houston, spent a good deal of his time searching the horizon with a telescope for federal gunboats. T. W. House invested heavily in blockaderunners. Sometimes he lost, but when he won he deposited his winnings in gold with Baring Brothers in London. The end of the war found him a very wealthy man. In reconstruction times a man with gold sovereigns could buy almost as much of Texas as he wanted.

House liked to tell of those murderous days when he was one of a band of guntoting youths running wild in Houston. He told Arthur Howden Smith, who became his biographer, that he used to spend hours practicing the quick draw before the mirror. His mother died when he was twelve. The same year he suffered a severe concussion falling out of a swing onto his head. In later life he attributed to the brain fever and to the severe bouts of malaria that followed, his continued poor health and his inability to stand hot weather.