John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

Sent to Washington during T.R.’s second term he had negotiated with the United States one of those arbitration conventions liberalminded men hoped were the forerunners of the rule of law in the civilized world. Now his chief preoccupation was the friendly settlement of the problem of tolls in the Panama Canal which was soon to be open for traffic. No Britisher alive was better suited by temperament and training to hit it off with Woodrow Wilson.

If Bryce looked forward to a renewal of the easy hospitality of the Roosevelt days, when he found the White House the center of the best brains and the most amusing conversation in Washington, he was to be disappointed. The new President, though he had his charming moments and was quite a wag in the privacy of his family circle, was to prove singularly lacking in the social graces.

In the White House even more than at Princeton, Wilson took refuge from the racket and glare of public life, which T.R. had frankly enjoyed and Taft had goodhumoredly tolerated, in the inner circle of his wife and daughters and admiring female cousins. He was desperately determined that his fireside should be his own.

Tumulty’s domain stopped at the entrance to the presidential suite. Colonel House was admitted but very few others from the outside world. Dr. Grayson was the exception.

Like Ike Hoover, Cary T. Grayson, a navy surgeon with rank of lieutenant, had been a White House familiar for some years. As a young man he was one of the party on T.R.’s breakneck ride to Warrenton and back in one day. He was a friend of the agreeable Archie Butt who was Roosevelt’s and then Taft’s military aide and perished on the Titanic. He served Taft as medical aide. Taft took a fancy to him. Entertaining the incoming President at their last White House tea, the Tafts recommended him warmly to the Wilsons.

Then when President Wilson’s sister Mrs. Howe fell on the steps and cut her forehead in the scramble of inauguration day Lieutenant Grayson tended her so assiduously that the Wilsons were captivated. Grayson was a Virginian. The President liked his Culpeper County accent and his selfeffacing demeanor. Immediately he asked Josephus Daniels to attach him permanently to the White House. Dr. Grayson found himself coping with a fit of dyspepsia and sick headaches into which the President had been thrown by the strain of the inaugural festivities. Instead of going to church his first Sunday in the White House Dr. Grayson ordered him to stay in bed and rest. It was good advice.

Woodrow Wilson was desperately trying to keep his head in the turmoil. “At least Washington and Jefferson had time to think,” he remarked bitterly.

His opinion of the position of the President had changed with the times. Before his inauguration he wrote A. Mitchell Palmer, a fervent supporter in the Pennsylvania delegation at Baltimore who was carried into Congress on the crest of the Wilson wave: “The President is expected by the Nation to be the leader of his party as well as the Chief Executive officer of the Government, and the country will take no excuses from him. He must play the part and play it successfully or lose the country’s confidence. He must be prime minister, as much concerned with the guidance of legislation as with the just and orderly execution of the law, and he is the spokesman of the nation in everything even in the most momentous and delicate dealings of the Government with foreign nations.”

Wilson had hardly been installed in the White House before he let it be known that he was going to use the President’s Room at the Capitol to confer with congressional leaders on important legislation. Since Jefferson had given up reading the President’s messages in person no President had appeared in the legislative chambers. Shocked horror and cries of “Federalism,” “tawdry imitation of English royalty,” and the like, met his announcement that on April 8 he would deliver in person his first message to the special session of Congress he had immediately called to consider revision of the tariff.

This breaking with a centuryold tradition assured the new President a breathless crowd in the galleries and the attention of the entire nation when he walked in to address the joint session. Friends noticed his pallor, a certain constraint about his erect figure. He took his place at the desk of the reading clerk, just below the speaker’s chair. The atmosphere was tense. Southern congressmen particularly were fidgety about this reckless innovation.

The moment he began to speak the strain was relieved. His voice was beguiling. He spoke with just a trace of humor of “verifying for himself the impression that the President of the United States was a person, a human being trying to cooperate with other human beings in a common service.”

He spoke for only ten minutes. He spoke of squaring tariff duties with the actual facts: “We must abolish everything that bears even the semblance of privilege … and put our business men and producers under the stimulation of a constant necessity to be efficient, economical, and enterprising, masters of competitive supremacy, better workers and merchants than any in the world.”

The speech was received with resounding applause. Driving back to the White House down the Mall, Ellen Wilson, delighted with the success of her husband’s defiance of tradition, said it was “the sort of thing Theodore Roosevelt would have liked to do if only he’d thought of it.”

The President laughed. “Yes I think I put one over on Teddy.”

Foreign affairs had been T.R.’s personal playground during his presidency. Taft, trained in the Philippines and as Secretary of War, tended to see the world as a whole; in his quiet way he supported every move towards peace by arbitration. Although careful listeners could already detect the ticking of the time bomb in Europe, Woodrow Wilson had ignored all mankind outside of the borders of the United States in his pronouncements during the 1912 campaign. A few found it odd. In the four months between his election and his inauguration, many an unwanted foreign fowl came home to roost.

Twentyfive years after the French project ended in pestilence and bankruptcy the Panama Canal was nearing completion. T.R.’s manner of achieving it had left problems for his successors. The secession of Panama was admittedly a farce, but the brazenness of its buffoonery left hurt feelings. There was the little matter of Colombian sovereignty which T.R. had laughed off as the delusion of greedy Latin politicos. Taft had been trying to put a legal face on the proceedings by negotiating a treaty as a form of heart balm for the government in Bogotá. Three weeks before Wilson’s inauguration Colombia rejected the Taft proposals.

When Ambassador Bryce called on the newly elected President he may not have mentioned tolls, but he surely had tolls on his mind. The Hay-Pauncefote Treaty between Great Britain and the United States, replacing the earlier treaty calling for joint management of some future isthmian canal, had stipulated that all nations were to have equal treatment, but Congress had lightheartedly passed a bill exempting American coast to coast shipping from paying any tolls at all. The Foreign Office sent Bryce to Washington with the idea of using his unique prestige among Americans to secure the repeal of that measure. After that he was planning on retirement.

Roosevelt’s diplomacy had been all his own, a mixture of aggressive nationalism and shrewd sense. Under Taft the flag had followed the dollar. Now Wilson and Bryan were determined to extend the blessings of democratic justice to all the world. How to go about it?

Wrongdoing abounded abroad and at home. The California legislature was passing exclusion acts against the Japanese. President Wilson had hardly settled at his desk in the executive office before the Japanese ambassador appeared to present a protest. Since defeating the Russians the Japanese were in no mood to accept discrimination.