John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

The President was undoubtedly edgy. He seemed to be blaming House and McCormick for the fact that the New York papers that morning ran sixteen columns of ads for Hughes to one and a half for his candidacy. “However before he left,” added House, “he put his arms around us both and expressed appreciation for what we were doing.”

That night the colonel walked around the streets. When he got home he made his entries in a more cheerful frame of mind. He had found “as much precision as could be expected in the circumstances … After the President had passed down the Avenue, I returned to the Garden to find it packed to the doors and the streets beyond. I merely looked in to hear the cheering and to find that everything was going as planned, and then left for home. All reports say it is the biggest demonstration of the kind ever given a President or a candidate for President in the city of New York.”

Election day, November 7, 1916, dawned mild and clear. The newspapers forecast a recordbreaking vote. Everywhere the voters lined up early at the polls.

Hughes voted in New York. The bearded former governor, still wrapped in some of the dignity of his recently doffed black robe, was photographed at 7 A.M. on the way to cast his vote in a small laundry on Eighth Avenue. His ballot was number 13. “This is a lucky omen,” he said to the reporters.

Later he attended a luncheon at the Harvard Club in honor of William R. Wilcox, the Republican National Chairman, who it was admitted later had made a hash of his campaign. Returning in midafternoon to Republican headquarters at the Hotel Astor, Mr. Hughes was told that the first precinct in the nation to register complete returns had given him a clear majority over President Wilson. It was New Ashford, Massachusetts. The figures were Hughes 16, Wilson 7. The candidate was reported to have expressed satisfaction over the Republican trend in New England.

At virtually the same moment, in the temporary executive offices in Asbury Park, New Jersey, Joe Tumulty was discovering a Democratic trend in the same figures. He was pointing out to reporters that several more Wilson votes had been cast in New Ashford than in 1912.

As the day wore on, Mr. Hughes, the public was told, was so gratified by growing Republican majorities, that he took Mrs. Hughes for a drive in the park before returning to what partyworkers were beginning to call the presidential suite for a late afternoon nap. He was completely fagged from the smiling and the travelling and the speaking and the waving and the handshaking. He was hoarse as a crow.

At Shadow Lawn the President shook himself out of bed at five that morning, stropped his razor on his old razorstrop and shaved; and after an early breakfast drove, with Mrs. Wilson on the seat beside him, over to Princeton to vote. Mrs. Wilson had to wait outside of the old firehouse while he voted; woman’s suffrage was not yet on the statute books in New Jersey. When he came out a group of students gave him the Princeton cheer.

Although he had spared himself as much as possible the campaign had tired him, too. Washington had been even hotter than usual. After the arduous summer, though public speaking usually refreshed him, the campaign speeches had been a punishing strain. Mrs. Wilson was worried about the blinding headaches he complained of.

After voting the President drove directly home to Shadow Lawn. There he sat at his desk keeping tally on a sheet of paper of the figures Tumulty reported over the telephone. The instructions were that he wasn’t to be bothered with scattering returns.

As always Wilson was trying to keep politics at arm’s length from the closed circle of his family life. In spite of all he could do there was a hush of expectation about the house. As they passed on the stairs, the ladies of the family exchanged comments on Woodrow’s composure in admiring whispers.

The day passed slowly. When there was nothing else to do the President could always while away the time signing documents. A host of papers, including every commission and every promotion in the army and navy, had to have the President’s personal signature. Sometimes it amounted to thousands of signatures in a single week. Signing papers filled every spare moment. Edith Wilson helped by arranging the papers neatly in a pile and handing them to him in an endless chain.

As the fine seaside afternoon wore on Joe Tumulty’s voice grew boyishly confident over the phone. Maybe the east was doubtful but the middlewest looked increasingly good. Colorado and Kansas were sure.

The shock came at dinnertime. Tumulty’s voice lost its resonance. Hughes would carry Illinois and New York.

Around nine that night the reporters broke into Tumulty’s office in Asbury Park to find him sitting with his son staring glumly out of the window. They brought in a bulletin for him to comment on. The New York World had conceded defeat. The World , edited by a personal friend, Frank Cobb, was Wilson’s most fervent supporter among eastern newspapers. Tumulty kept his dukes up with an optimistic pronouncement. “Wilson will win. The west has not yet been heard from.”

Tumulty’s heart was in his boots. As soon as he could get rid of the reporters he called Shadow Lawn.

The President had already heard the bad news from Grayson. “Well Tumulty, I guess we’ve been badly licked,” was all he would say.

Grayson had been trying to console him by prophesying a comeback like Grover Cleveland’s. Wilson replied with a favorite story about a Confederate veteran who reached home after Appomattox. He walked with a limp. He had his arm in a sling. His house and barns had been burned, his fences were down, his stock driven off, his family scattered. “I’m glad I fought,” he said, after surveying the ruins, “but I’m damned if I’ll ever love another country.”

In New York at the Hotel Astor Mr. Hughes was awakened from his afternoon nap with the news that he would be the next President. The Times searchlight was flashing a Republican victory. A skysign on the roof of the hotel spelled out HUGHES in electric bulbs. Marchers from the Union League Club appeared with a band in Times Square calling on Mr. Hughes to claim election. At Oyster Bay, Theodore Roosevelt was already declaring that the Republican victory was “a vindication of our national honor.”

Charles Evans Hughes was a careful man and a decorous man. There was a lot of rural upstate New York in his makeup. Against his own better judgement, he had allowed himself to be cajoled into resigning from the Supreme Court to run against Wilson. He wasn’t going any further out on that limb. He insisted that he would make no claims until the count was completed in California.

Meanwhile, over at the Biltmore, a victory banquet which had been arranged for the Democrats, with Henry Morgenthau at the head of the table, was falling flat. Colonel House refused to attend. “While I did not expect defeat”—House’s promise to Wilson of 230 electoral votes for sure left him needing only 35 more to be picked up in the heat of battle—“I did not wish to be at such a gathering without knowing whether the President was successful.” Morgenthau told House afterwards that “there never was such a morguelike entertainment in the annals of time.”

Instead of going to the Democratic banquet Colonel House walked around with Attorney General Gregory to the Bar Association Library to look up the federal statutes on the subject of the President’s resignation.

The outcome of the war in Europe seemed to teeter on a knife edge. The moment was too dangerous for an interregnum in Washington. Wilson had decided to resign at once if he failed in re-election.

The idea appealed to him as a political theorist as well as a practical politician. He was convinced that the American government must be made more responsive to the popular mandate, more like the English party government by a responsible ministry. He had talked it over many times with House. Resigning would turn defeat into a constitutionally constructive gesture.