John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

Meanwhile, according to the reporters, “the plain people of the hills” were making their views felt. Telegrams kept coming in disclaiming any candidate controlled by Tammany or Hearst or Thomas Fortune Ryan.

Monday morning the New York World ran an editorial saying that the nomination of Wilson was the only way to save the election from Roosevelt. On the sixth day and the thirtieth ballot Wilson’s total passed Champ Clark’s for the first time. Wilson told the newspapermen he was receiving the news with a riot of silence.

On the fortysixth ballot he was nominated.

At the governor’s mansion at Sea Girt pandemonium ruled. Brass bands played “Hail to the Chief” and “The Conquering Hero Comes.” Every room swarmed with reporters and with hoarse veterans of the Baltimore Armory, each telling how singlehanded he had snatched Wilson’s nomination out of the hands of the Wall Street interests. The ladies of the family, whom Wilson liked to keep in what he considered a decent seclusion, were persecuted by featurewriters and photographers. Eleanor Wilson told of finding her mother in the clutches of a peculiarly hardfaced female journalist.

“ ‘Have you some sort of prejudice against jewelry Mrs. Wilson?’ the woman was asking. I realized how impossible it would be for her to understand why mother had no jewelry,” Eleanor Wilson wrote in retrospect: “Mother, who had sacrificed for us, so that father might have the books he needed, and the vacations; that we might study art and singing; that there might be always room in the house for relatives and friends. I thought of her rigid economy, her perennial brown dress and hat … Mother said ‘No, I have no prejudice against it. We just haven’t any.’ ”

IN the campaign that followed all Governor Wilson needed to do was to address the throngs the faithful Tumulty marshalled on the lawn at Sea Girt, charming them with his calculated otherworldliness and with the “glittering generalities” that had disquieted George Record, while the Republicans tore each other to pieces.

For the Republicans it was a spite fight. La Follette excoriated T.R. T.R. excoriated Taft. Taft, who had been heard to growl that even a rat would fight if cornered, fought back. The occasional haymakers T.R. delivered in the direction of the Democratic candidate, whom he had not yet begun wholeheartedly to detest, went wide of the mark.

The dramatic moment came in October in Milwaukee when a crazy man put a bullet into T.R. as he was about to step out of an automobile to enter the hall where he was going to speak. His life was saved by the fact that the bullet was deflected by his glasses case and by the thick wad of the manuscript of his speech in his inside pocket. One of the doctors who examined him and found the bullet lodged next to a lung remarked that the heavy chest muscles T.R. had spent his life developing had helped too. Having done his best to protect the assassin from the frantic crowd T.R. strode up to the platform and before he allowed anything to be done about the wound hoarsely delivered his speech. He waved the perforated manuscript before the crowd and cried: “It takes more than that to kill a bull moose.”

Woodrow Wilson’s magnanimous gesture in calling off speaking engagements until Theodore Roosevelt’s recovery was assured brought him wide acclaim.

As was the custom the campaigns culminated in Stanford White’s Madison Square Garden in New York. Fresh from his hospital bed, T.R. delivered a speech which expressed better than anything any of the candidates said the aspirations of a people stirred by ten years of crusading against privilege and corruption:

“We are for human rights and intend to work for them. Where they can best be obtained by the application of the doctrine of states’ rights, we are for states’ rights. Where in order to obtain them, it is necessary to invoke the power of the Nation, then we shall invoke to its uttermost limits that mighty power. We are for liberty. But we are for the liberty of the oppressed, and not for the liberty of the oppressor to oppress the weak.”

The standpat Republicans feared T.R. more than they feared Wilson. While their papers poured out abuse on Theodore Rex, as they called him, they gave the mild laissez-faire liberalism of the Schoolmaster in Politics respectful attention. In spite of the hymnsinging zeal of his followers it was already obvious that T.R.’s hastily improvised party could not win. The odds on Wall Street were six to one on Wilson.

The papers described the Madison Square meeting as a last salute to their leader from those about to die. Even the liberal New York Evening Post characterized T.R.’s final exhortations as a speech such as Custer might have made to his scouts when he saw the Indians coming.

On the night after the Roosevelt rally Wilson’s joint managers McCombs and McAdoo, whose bickerings had been no help to his campaign, were able to work together long enough to foment an ovation when their candidate entered the hall that lasted one hour and four minutes. The Bull Moosers had worn themselves out after yelling fortyfive minutes for T.R. Wilson was able to exchange glances of happy triumph with his wife who sat in the box in front of him as he coolly proclaimed to an audience almost mad with enthusiasm: “All over the country, from one ocean to the other people are becoming aware that in less than a week the common people of America will come into their own again.”

When the ballots were counted the result was Wilson (Democrat) 6,286,214; Roosevelt (Progressive) 4,126,020; Taft (Republican) 3,483,922 and Debs (Socialist) 897,011. The Democrats carried the Senate and the House. Wilson’s 435 votes in the electoral college against Roosevelt’s 88 and Taft’s 8 constituted a record, but uncommitted commentators noted that Wilson had received a minority of the popular vote. The majority vote was a vote for reform. Almost half as many voters again voted for Eugene V. Debs as in 1908. It was a vote, in T.R.’s words, “for the liberty of the oppressed.”

A few days after the election Senator La Follette expressed the yearnings of the reform element in an article in La Follette’s Weekly Magazine : “Oppressed and heartsick, a nation of ninety million people, demanding plain, simple justice, striving for educational, political and industrial democracy, turned to Woodrow Wilson as the only present hope.”

The governor’s election disrupted the Wilsons’ family life. Deserving Democrats in shoals converged on Princeton. “Our little house was a terrible mess” wrote daughter Eleanor, “and mother, for the first and only time in her life, walked through rooms pretending she didn’t see the confusion and disorder … Even the tables and shelves in the studio were piled high and the easel was pushed aside to make room for efficient young women and their typewriters.”

William F. McCombs, who considered himself the first Wilson for President man and felt he should be rewarded for his services by being made Secretary of State at least, was one of the first to appear. During the campaign Wilson had been disgusted by his erratic behavior, his drinking and his chumming up to the political bosses.

It was the businesslike McAdoo who had endeared himself to the Wilson family; so much so that, although he was twice her age and a widower with grown children, he had already fluttered the heart of daughter Eleanor.

According to McCombs’ own story Woodrow Wilson told McCombs off in no uncertain terms and sent him away an enraged and frustrated man, to die a few years later, so his friends claimed, of a broken heart. “Before we proceed,” he remembered Wilson as saying as soon as they were alone, giving him a cold gray stare through his eyeglasses, “I wish it clearly understood that I owe you nothing. Remember that God ordained that I should be the next President of the United States.”