John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

Finally, after an insistent letter, Page received through Tumulty an invitation to “Shadow Lawn.” Shadow Lawn, near Long Branch, was the great rambling seaside summer mansion with wide verandahs and a cavernous living room, ornamented, like the lobby of a summer hotel, with a gilt piano and statuary, which Wilson was using as his headquarters because he had scruples about conducting a political campaign from the White House. After a family dinner the President listened to his old friend’s explanation of the deep rift he believed the President’s policies were producing between America and England.

Page tried in vain to interest Wilson in a medal the British had struck off to commemorate the Lusitania outrage and solemnly repeated his oral message from the British cabinet: the Germans were using the campaign for mediation for their own purposes: if the Germans proposed an armistice on the President’s terms, the British would refuse.

The President was polite but unimpressed. All he seemed interested in, Page noted rather naively in his diary, was ending the war.

Page left after breakfast next morning feeling that Wilson was completely out of touch with the thoughts and feelings of daily life. Their last handshake was final. The old confidence and friendship was gone. They never met again. “I think he is the loneliest man in the world,” Page told his son.

At Shadow Lawn Wilson at last found time to let himself be formally notified, in Senator Ollie James’ booming periods, of the Democratic nomination, and to make his speech of acceptance.

The partyworkers were uneasy. Tumulty was in the dumps. He saw Hughes running away with the woman’s suffrage issue and attacking the Adamson Law as submission to blackmail. The Republicans would get the German-American vote. Maine, on September 11, went even more solidly Republican than usual. Tumulty begged for more action. The President refused to be flustered. “The moment is not here,” he told his secretary soothingly. “Let them use up their ammunition and then we’ll turn our guns upon them.”

That September the President was preoccupied with a new private grief. His sister, Mrs. Howe, died. For a few days the Wilsons gave all their attention to her funeral at the old Wilson home in Columbia, South Carolina.

He got back to Shadow Lawn to find Tumulty and his friends in great distress. Judge Westcott, the devoted Wilson supporter who made the nominating speeches in both conventions, had been defeated in a New Jersey senatorial primary.

The President kept his confident attitude. “I believe that the independent vote,” he wrote his brother in Baltimore, “the vote of the people who aren’t talking and aren’t telling the politicians how they are going to vote, is going to play a bigger part in this election than it ever played in any previous election and that makes the result truly incalculable.”

Though the President refused to allow the photographers to take pictures of his and Mrs. Wilson’s private life, he allowed Tumulty to arrange press conferences. Trainsful of supporters trampled the grass at Shadow Lawn every Saturday afternoon. When one man asked Wilson what he thought of Hughes’ campaign he replied, “If you will give that gentleman enough rope he will hang himself.”

“Never murder a man who is committing suicide,” was how he put it to Bernard Baruch. “Clearly this misdirected gentleman is committing suicide slowly but surely.”

In October he did allow himself to be induced to tour the midwest, delivering speeches to enthusiastic crowds in Omaha and Indianapolis and Cincinnati. “He kept us out of war,” was the slogan of all the introductions by local politicians. The crowds were wild for it. Woodrow Wilson tried not to work it too hard. “I can’t keep the country out of war. They talk of me as if I were a god,” he said in private. “Any little German lieutenant can put us into the war at any time by a calculated outrage.”

This time Woodrow Wilson’s hunches sized up the political situation better than the calculations of the professionals. Hughes didn’t have his heart in the campaign. He found it hard to heckle the President over policies with which he basically agreed. His clumsy mishandling of his personal relations with Hiram Johnson lost him muchneeded Progressive votes in California. His speeches gave the impression of quibbling over details. People began to say “Oh he’s just a Wilson with whiskers.”

T.R.’s plumping for Hughes not only alienated the Progressives, but his wartalk produced many a Wilson vote. The crowds laughed and hooted when he jeered at “Nice Mr. Baker, he knits” and described Wilson as “kissing the bloodstained hand that slapped his face,” but working people and farmers made it clear that they were going to vote for the eight hour day and keeping out of war. When T.R.’s campaign train stopped at Gallup, New Mexico, he bounced out on the rear platform to greet a crowd of ranchers and section hands. Gallup had been a recruiting station for the Rough Riders and was strictly Roosevelt territory. The railroad workers waved pictures of Wilson under his nose. “I think the world of the colonel, but I love the President,” shouted a voice.

“I love no one too proud to fight,” T.R. snapped back.

“You’re a grand man,” came another voice, “but me for Woodrow Wilson.”

The final rally of the campaign was held as usual in Madison Square Garden. The national committee was planning it as the greatest ever.

“Final touches were given this afternoon,” noted House in his diary, “for November 1. I hope everything will work out as planned, though there is a danger it will not — for much will depend on luck, as matters are supposed to happen spontaneously which are really prepared far in advance. For instance, the head of the parade must be down at Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue at 8:30. At twenty minutes of nine the President must come out of the Waldorf Hotel and start for the Garden, stopping at Thirty-fourth Street and Madison Avenue for ten minutes to receive the cheers of the crowd and review the parade … Glynn is to commence his speech at the Garden at fifteen minutes of nine … The President must walk on the speaker’s platform just as it ends, in order to receive continuous applause for Heaven knows how many minutes.”

Next day the colonel found his affectionate friend suffering from campaign jitters: “The President arrived promptly at nine o’clock. McCormick and I met him and went with him to the Mayflower which is anchored in East River. We talked to him for an hour and a half and it was the most acrimonious debate I have had with him for a long while … He thought New York ‘rotten to the core’ and should be wiped off the map … He thought McCormick and I had New Yorkitis and that the campaign should be run from elsewhere. He was absolutely certain of the election without New York.

“I have heard the story so often from candidates that it makes me tired. They go about receiving adulation everywhere, hearing the people declare that they look upon them as their savior, until they begin to look upon themselves in that light.

“It is true we have organized wealth against us, and in such aggregate as never before. On the other hand we are pitting organized labor against it and the fight is not an unfair one. I feel it good sport to fight with the odds against us, for the United States is normally Republican.”

In the privacy of his diary House couldn’t help being a little scornful of Wilson’s peevishness: “The President reminds me of a boy whose mother tells him he has ridden long enough on his hobbyhorse and he must let little Charlie have a turn … His attitude is not unlike that of T.R. who has never forgiven the electorate for not continuing him directly in the White House.”