John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

The Adamson Act was passed as an emergency measure in the muggy dogdays of a summer session of Congress to stave off a strike of railroad workers which threatened to involve four hundred thousand men and all the important railroads in the country. A general strike had been brewing for months against working conditions and low wages. It was part of labor’s demand for a share in war profits.

At a time when the railroads offered the only means of transport, outside of the inland waterways, for food and fuel and necessities, a prolonged stoppage was a terrible prospect. The President grew gray and haggard haggling with committees from the brotherhoods and from management, while he tried to induce both sides to arbitrate their differences.

The union leaders refused to be convinced. “I was shocked to find a peculiar stiffness and hardness about these men. When I pictured to them the distress of our people in case this strike became a reality, they sat unmoved and apparently indifferent,” he told Tumulty. “I am at the end of my tether.”

Disgusted with the union leaders he tried to reason with the railroad executives. A committee from various railroad managements was assembled in the heavily curtained Blue Room in the White House. After they had been sitting for some time in sullen obscurity on rows of little gold chairs, a curtain was pulled open at the end of the room and the President appeared freshfaced and eager in his white suit in the stream of sunlight that poured through the long windows behind him.

“I have not summoned you to Washington as President of the United States to confer with me on this matter,” he said, in what Tumulty considered one of the most moving appeals he ever made, “for I have no power to do so. I have invited you merely as a fellow-citizen to discuss this great and critical situation. Frankly, I say to you that if I had the power as President I would say to you that this strike is unthinkable and must not be permitted to happen … A nation-wide strike at this time would mean absolute famine and starvation for the people of America … They will not quietly submit to a strike that will keep these things of life away from them. The rich will not suffer in case these great arteries of trade and commerce are temporarily abandoned, for they can provide themselves against the horror of famine and the distress of this critical situation. It is the poor unfortunate men, and their wives and children, who will suffer and die. I cannot speak to you without a show of emotion, for, my friends, beneath the surface in America there is a baneful seething which may express itself in radical action, the consequences of which no man can foresee …”

He stepped forward and continued in his most confidential, man to man manner. “The Allies are fighting our battle, the battle of civilization, across the way. They cannot ‘carry on’ without supplies and means of sustenance which the railroads of America bring to them … Who knows, gentlemen, but by tomorrow a situation will arise where it will be found necessary for us to get into the midst of this bloody thing?… I know that the things I ask you to do may be disagreeable and inconvenient, but I am not asking you to make a bloody sacrifice. Our boys may be called upon any minute to make that sacrifice for us.”

“What the hell does he mean?” one railroad director asked another when the President left the room.

“I suppose he means it’s up to us to settle the strike.”

Neither side made a move to settle, so Wilson appealed to his Democratic supporters in Congress, and with extraordinary speed a bill was drafted by Representative Adamson of Georgia giving the railroad workers their eight hour day and setting up machinery for the arbitration of grievances. The Adamson Law went through Congress like lightning and was upheld a few months later by the Supreme Court.

As perplexities and crises piled up on his desk Woodrow Wilson retired more and more into isolation. He conferred less frequently with his cabinet officers. Everything had to be sent in to him in writing. Mrs. Wilson was with him constantly. Together they pored over pardons, bills before Congress, over the texts of projected notes or the first drafts of speeches and statements.

Dr. Grayson, preaching fresh air and exercise as preventive medicine, urged a little horseback riding. He insisted on the daily golf at the Kirkside Club. Mrs. Wilson took up the game to keep her husband company. There were never enough hours in the day. Often they got up at five, and worked through, except for the family meals and necessary public appointments, until eleven or twelve at night.

Walter Hines Page, called home for consultation from England, arrived in Washington on a steaming August day when the railroad crisis was at its hottest. House and the President had long agreed that Page needed a spell at home in America to get the London warfever out of his system. The ambassador, remembering his long almost affectionate association with Wilson over the years, arrived bubbling with phrases he hoped would make the President see the English point of view. He was primed for a long heart to heart talk. He was bursting with a private message from Sir Edward Grey.

“The President was very courteous to me, in his way,” Page wrote in his journal. “He invited me to luncheon the day after I arrived. President; Mrs. Wilson, Miss Bones, Tom Bolling, his brotherinlaw, and I … not a word about England. Not a word about a foreign policy or foreign relations. He explained that the threatened railroad strike engaged his whole mind.”

It was agreed that Page should take a few days rest and come back when the President had time to listen to him.

Two weeks later Page was again invited to lunch at the White House. He found his old friend redeyed from having been up all night working over a special message he was to deliver to Congress that afternoon. Wilson had just come from his appeal to the railroad executives. There was no time for a word on European affairs. Page found himself talking to the ladies of the family, reinforced by some extra cousins from New Orleans. Mr. Sharpe, the ambassador to Paris, who was there on the same sort of errand, got no chance either to put in a word about European politics.

After hurrying through luncheon the party was bundled off to the Capitol to hear the President address both houses to ask for immediate passage of the Adamson bill. Page didn’t even have a chance to bid his old friend goodby.

“There’s no social sense at the White House,” Page wrote in his disgruntlement. “The President has at his table family connections only … It is very hard to understand why so intellectual a man doesn’t have notable men about him. It is the college professor’s village habit I dare say … Mr. Wilson shuts out the world and lives too much alone, feeding only on knowledge and subjects he has already acquired and not getting new views and fresh suggestions from men and women.”

“The President,” Page wrote his friend Laughlin in the State Department, after he’d cooled his heels at the New Willard for another couple of weeks, “dominates the whole show in a most extraordinary way. The men about him (and he sees them only on business) are very small fry, or worse — the narrowest twopenny lot I’ve ever come across. He has no real companions. Nobody talks to him freely and frankly …”

Page still hadn’t had a private talk. His explanations of why the British had cooled to House’s peace proposals were stale by now, but still he was determined to have his say. “I’m not going back to London,” he insisted, “till the President has said something to me or at least until I’ve said something to him … if he does not send for me, I’m going to his house and sit on his front steps till he comes out.”