John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

Fifteen thousand letters and telegrams poured into the little house on Cleveland Lane. McCombs was only the first of the parade of office-seekers. The Democrats had been out of office for twenty years. The Democrats were hungry.

Ten days after his election Wilson hurried his ladies aboard the Bermudian for a month’s rest on his favorite island. He took along a single secretary and the now inevitable secretservice men. Only he and his wife knew how frayed his nerves were. His digestion was out of kilter. He was suffering from his old neuritis. He had to have quiet.

“As soon as I knew I had been sentenced to four years hard labor my first thought was to get away to Bermuda and enjoy my liberty while I might,” he told the British official who greeted him at the dock. He begged the reporters and photographers to leave him alone. How tense he still was was shown by his blowup when he caught a photographer outside of the family cottage about to snap one of his daughters coming back hot and dusty from a bicycle ride, garbed, it was whispered, in bloomers. “You are no gentleman” he shouted at the astonished photographer. “If you want a good thrashing keep that up.”

When his ship docked in New York the President-elect was met by prophets of doom. McCombs brought a rumor that the financial community was so alarmed by the prospect of a Democratic administration they were about to precipitate a panic. The bosses were filtering back into the State House at Trenton.

In a speech before the Southern Society the night after he arrived Wilson lashed out at “some gentlemen in New Jersey” who were counting the days until they could get rid of him. “I informed them today that they were not going to get rid of me.” He was going to remain governor until the last moment. Of the rumors of panic on Wall Street he said, pushing out his sharp jaw in cold fury, “A panic is merely a state of mind … Frankly I do not believe there is any man living who dares use that machinery for that purpose. If he does, I promise him, not for myself but for my countrymen, a gibbet as high as Haman.”

The Republican papers made a lot of the hanging high as Haman remark. The Sun printed a cartoon: “Lord High Executioner Wilson.” Many of Wilson’s supporters felt he had gone too far, but the Schoolmaster in Politics had let it be known that he intended to keep order in the classroom.

There was one haven of refuge from the importunities of the politicians and the clamors of party stalwarts trying to tell him whom he should appoint to his cabinet. That was Colonel House’s quiet apartment in the Murray Hill section of New York. The colonel was discretion itself. No visitors were allowed to intrude. No telephone call got past the switchboard downstairs. With the colonel Wilson could talk over the pros and cons of cabinet appointments without feeling that something was being put over on him. Already he had expressed his trust in his Texas friend by offering him any office except Secretary of State.

House disclaimed any interest in holding office. “My reasons were,” he noted in his diary, “that I am not strong enough to tie myself down to a cabinet department … I very much prefer being a free lance, and to advise with him concerning matters in general, and to have a roving commission …”

“Take my word for it,” a senator is quoted as having said of Colonel House, “he can walk on dead leaves and make no more noise than a tiger.”

The President-elect’s advisers mostly agreed that Bryan should be Secretary of State. Wilson owed his nomination to Bryan’s steadfast opposition to Champ Clark. Bryan was the leader of progressive Democracy. Then too, as Finley Peter Dunne put it in his “Mr. Dooley” column: “With a brick in his hand he’s as expert as a rifleman. An’ I’d rather have him close to me bosom thin on me back.”

McAdoo was to have the Treasury. Lindley M. Garrison, an able and uninspiring lawyer who presided over the chancery court of the state of New Jersey, became Secretary of War. Josephus Daniels, the genial social leveller and prohibitionist for whom Wilson felt real friendship, got the Navy. David F. Houston, an old friend of House’s who had been president of the University of Texas, was to be Secretary of Agriculture. Another Texan, Albert S. Burleson, a professional of politics who led the Texas delegation in Baltimore, disposed of the presidential patronage as Postmaster General.

Among the lesser planets were Franklin K. Lane, a cheerful and garrulous San Francisco conservationist whom Daniels used to say reminded him of Humpty Dumpty, in the Interior; William Redfield, whose main claim to fame was that he was the last man in American politics to wear sidewhiskers, in the Department of Commerce; and William B. Wilson, who had come up out of the coalpits to become secretary-treasurer of the United Mine Workers under John Mitchell, filling the new post of Secretary of Labor. It was a cabinet heavily weighted with southerners and westerners. These were men more given to shirtsleeves than to frock coats.

Tumulty, who had served Wilson ably at Trenton, became the President’s secretary. Talkative, warmhearted, somewhat scatterbrained in the violence of his party feelings, he became an effective buffer between the aloof President and the reporters and politicians who besieged the executive offices.

The inaugural weather proved good. Wall Street remained calm. The threatened panic did not materialize. Except for the loss of a trunk containing the President’s nightwear, the Wilson family, with its abundance of female relatives in attendance, was successfully transferred from the modest dwelling on Cleveland Lane to the great spaces of the White House.

When Woodrow Wilson turned towards the crowd after taking the oath on the Capitol portico, he saw the police pushing people back to clear a place in front of the stand. “Let the people come forward,” he called in his clear tenor voice. Then looking into the upturned faces in front of him, he began: “My fellow citizens, there has been a change of government …”

The address was short and wellreceived. Lyman Abbott’s Outlook hailed it as “the call of a prophet to a Nation to repent of its sins and return, not to the methods, but to the spirit of the Fathers.”

The day after the inauguration the Wilsons entertained the entire Woodrow connection, with a few old friends mixed in, for lunch; and the Wilson cousins, to the number of twentyfive, for dinner. During the afternoon the President shook hands with one thousand, one hundred and twentythree persons at a public reception and received, in the Blue Room, with the punctilious assistance of Mr. “Ike” Hoover, the chief usher — who had been conducting such ceremonies ever since he was called to the White House to help install the first electrical wiring in Benjamin Harrison’s day — the ambassador of Great Britain.

Ambassador James Bryce was a wiry ruddyfaced little man with white hair and beard and an energetic manner of speaking. For many years Bryce had been one of the idols of Woodrow Wilson’s life. Of similar Scotch Presbyterian lineage, Bryce too had come a long way since Wilson, as an impecunious graduate student, heard him lecture at Johns Hopkins.

It was a career such as young Wilson dreamed of for himself in those days. Bryce had not only won fame as a writer on constitutional law and democratic government and as traveller and mountainclimber, but had become one of the voices of the nonconformist conscience in England in the agitation against Turkish oppression of the Armenians, of which he had personal experience while on an expedition to ascend Mount Ararat. He sat in Parliament, served in Gladstone’s last cabinet, was president of the Board of Trade and occupied the uneasy eminence of Secretary for Ireland under Campbell-Bannerman. He twice refused a peerage.