John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

La Follette arrived late. He was suffering from indigestion and overwork. He had been drinking. He was desperately worried because his daughter was in hospital and was to undergo a dangerous operation next morning. He brought with him one of those bulky and closely reasoned manuscripts with which he was accustomed to flagellate the United States Senate. It was a long denunciation of the evils of the kept press. It may be that he’d taken a shot of whiskey too many in an effort to settle his stomach before he came.

He spoke for two hours with more than usual asperity, shaking his finger in the faces of the newspapermen opposite him. He lost his place in his manuscript, repeated himself, lost his temper at some hecklers and ended with his audience slinking off to the rathskeller below. “There go some of the fellows I’ve been hitting,” he shouted. According to Owen Wister he shook his fist after them. “They don’t want to hear about themselves.” The speech was the worst failure of his life.

The toastmaster, representing the publishers who had sponsored the function, felt called upon to apologize to the audience for the speaker’s rudeness. La Follette rushed to the washroom immediately after he finished speaking and was taken with a fit of vomiting. His soninlaw hurried him back to Washington in a nervous collapse.

Meanwhile the embittered newspapermen were scattering throughout the country to fill their columns with the news of his failure. The headline in The Philadelphia Record ran: WILSON HERO OF BIG FEAST.

The spring of 1912 was a time of political tension in both parties. Among the Republicans the standpatters were closing ranks round Taft as a reluctant leader. La Follette’s collapse at Philadelphia gave T.R. the cue he was waiting for to throw his Rough Riders’ felt hat into the ring as Progressive candidate.

Among the Democrats there were even more contenders for the throne. Hearst was mobilizing his newspapers and his millions in support of Champ Clark of Missouri, the speaker of the House of Representatives, a rustic figure in black slouch hat and frock coat whose campaign ditty was “You got to quit kickin’ my dawg around.” Senator Underwood and Governor Judson Harmon, Ohio’s favorite son, each had more organization and money support behind him than Wilson had. Bryan was still keeping his thin lips clenched in stony silence when asked whether he would try for the nomination.

Only Texas and Pennsylvania were surely for Wilson. Colonel House came north in early April with assurances that the Texas delegation was solid; and, in Pennsylvania, Vance McCormick, A. Mitchell Palmer and William B. Wilson of the anthracite miners’ union had the conservative machine on the run. But as spring advanced Wilson’s hopes took a bad beating in the state primaries. When the delegates gathered in Baltimore in the midst of a ferocious heat wave Wilson’s chances of nomination looked slimmer than at any time since his campaign began.

The day the convention was called to order, Colonel House, having written Wilson: “I have done everything I could up to now to advise and anticipate every contingency,” embarked on the Cunarder Laconia for his customary summer trip to Europe. He was proving his detachment by planning a tour that would take him to Sweden and Finland and as far afield as Moscow. He had done his best, now he must care for his health.

William Jennings Bryan arrived in Baltimore fresh from the press gallery of the Republican convention in Chicago. There he had seen, with some satisfaction, Taft’s nomination steamrollered through against the sullen opposition of the progressives, with the result that more than three hundred delegates turned in blank ballots and surged into Orchestra Hall to form the Progressive Party under the lash of Theodore Roosevelt’s sibilant exhortations: “We stand at Armageddon and battle for the Lord.”

The Commoner was convinced that the reforms for which he had so long cried in the wilderness were at last just under the horizon. If the Democrats nominated a candidate who might be labelled a reactionary T.R. would scoop up the progressive votes of both parties and might very well win. It was Bryan’s business to keep the “interests”—typified in his mind by Whitney and Hearst and Thomas Fortune Ryan — from taking over the convention. During the long sweaty days and tumultuous nights in the Baltimore Armory it was Bryan’s grizzled fringe of hair and craggy nose and wide lipless mouth, clenched above a continually beating palmleaf fan, that dominated the proceedings.

While the delegates braved heat prostration in Baltimore, Woodrow Wilson, at the governor’s mansion at Sea Girt, was amazing his wife and daughters by his coolness and amusing them with imitations of T.R. in Chicago threshing his arms and whooping it up for Armageddon. “Good old Teddy,” he would chuckle, “what a help he is.”

Tumulty had a direct telephone line to campaign headquarters at the Emerson Hotel. The first problem his campaign manager McCombs put up to Wilson was whether to back Bryan in his fight for a progressive as chairman. McCombs wanted Wilson to hedge in the interests of harmony. As Eleanor Wilson tells the story, her father and the girls went up to her mother’s bedroom to consult. Her mother was often poorly these days. They were already worried about her health. “There must be no hedging,” was Mrs. Wilson’s advice. “What’s the use of having a principle if you don’t stick to it,” had always been her motto. Sitting on the edge of his wife’s bed Wilson wrote out a telegram to Bryan: “You are quite right …”

All night Tumulty clung to the telephone, clocking the cheering that followed the nominating speeches. The Wilson crowd yelled for twenty minutes longer than Champ Clark’s but when the balloting began Champ Clark was ahead. His strength increased until it was only the twothirds rule that kept him from the nomination.

Only Texas and Pennsylvania stood firm for Wilson. The galleries were all for Wilson; Wilson telegrams were pouring in; the Baltimore Sun , which was the first newspaper that came to the delegate’s hand every morning, talked nothing but Wilson; but Clark still had the majority vote.

Bryan turned the tide. He early announced that he would oppose whatever candidate Tammany and the financial magnates stood for. After Boss Murphy had delivered his Tammany votes to what seemed to be a stampede for Clark, Bryan got to his feet and asked for the floor. His Nebraska delegation had been instructed for Clark and he had dutifully been voting for Clark. Now he declared he would cast his vote for Nebraska’s second choice: Woodrow Wilson.

Still the Champ Clark forces seemed to be in control. Saturday morning McCombs called Governor Wilson to the phone. “The jig is up,” McCombs said, and told Wilson to release his delegations. Wilson drafted a telegram. Mrs. Wilson and the girls comforted each other by promising themselves a long quiet summer on the English lakes.

It was William Gibbs McAdoo, the energetic promoter of the first Hudson River tube, who had been promoting Wilson as energetically as he had under river transportation, who first got wind of the telegram. He bawled out McCombs and snatched for the telephone. He begged Wilson not to quit; he assured him there was no conceivable way Clark could get twothirds of the vote.

The convention went on and on. The Sunday that ended the first week was a day of smoky hotel rooms, of finagling and palaver. It’s hard to imagine that Bryan was not still hoping against hope that maybe his would be the name to break the deadlock.

On the Jersey coast the Wilsons went quietly to a little country church at Spring Lake. In the afternoon the governor read Morley’s life of Gladstone aloud to the family.