Mr. Wilson's War by John Dos Passos
Like his father, William Howard Taft graduated at Yale. He studied law in the lawschool his halfbrother founded in Cincinnati. He was early elected to an Ohio judgeship which he reluctantly gave up for the post of Solicitor General in Benjamin Harrison’s administration. Then for six years he served as a federal circuit judge. The class war was heightening. Some of his decisions were considered antilabor but few of them pleased the vested interests.
In 1900 McKinley appointed Taft to the Philippine commission. Serving as their first civil governor he showed real friendship and understanding in his dealings with the various inhabitants of that barely pacified archipelago. He made himself such a reputation in Manila that Theodore Roosevelt brought him home for the job of Secretary of War. He gave a good account of himself in Washington.
As President, Taft, innately a conservative man, lost touch with the ebullient progressives in the east and with the western radicals accustomed to the strong drink of T.R.’s or La Follette’s public speeches. The resurgent Democrats took over the House of Representatives in 1910 and filled the welkin with their outcry against entrenched privilege and the Payne-Aldrich tariff. With his soupstrainer mustache and his elephantine girth Taft was the very picture of the Mr. Moneybags of the radical cartoonists. “Politics makes me sick” was a phrase that appeared oftener and oftener in his private letters.
Taft was not a popular president. T.R.’s campaign managers had made so much of his totem, the teddybear, that they enshrined it in the hearts of generations of American children. All the Republican committees could dream up for Taft was the drowsy opossum. Billy Possum never caught on. Taft left the White House after one term, a much misunderstood man.
Lion Hunter
The American public was not kept in ignorance of their hero’s prowess during T.R.’s months in the African wilderness. A steady stream of articles poured out from his tent on safari. Photographs filled magazines and Sunday supplements. Museums were embarrassed by the great shipments of pelts and skeletons and skulls representing every conceivable species that piled up in their storerooms.
On the way out and on the way home T.R. tracked as many lions in the courts of Europe as he did on the Kapiti plains. On his way home he was appointed by President Taft, anxious to apply healing unction because he knew T.R. was mad at him for falling out with T.R.’s friends, the Pinchots, to serve as his personal representative at the funeral of King Edward VII.
T.R. never tired telling stories about what was to prove to be the last assemblage of the crowned heads of Europe in their antique glory. He bubbled over with delight at hobnobbing with the heads of states. At tea at the American Embassy before going to the reception and banquet which preceded the interment he horrified Whitelaw Reid, who was grooming him for appearance at the court of St. James, by chuckling delightedly in his shrill voice: “I’m going to a wake tonight; I’m going to a wake.”
It was said that it was only Mrs. Roosevelt’s firm no that prevented him from wearing his Rough Rider uniform.
Appearing in plain evening dress amid all the gold lace and orders and decorations at Buckingham Palace he found himself the target of every eye. George V played host. The monarchs clustered around the bear-hunter and lionslayer who represented to them everything that was most amusingly mad and wild west about the American myth.
Completely at his ease T.R. lectured them roundly. “I would never have taken that step at all if I had been in your place, Your Majesty,” he’d say clenching his fist; or, “That’s just what I would have done,” clapping the back of his right hand into the hollow of his left: “Quite right.”
“Before the first course was over, we had all forgotten the real cause of our presence in London,” was how T.R. told the story when he got home. “I have never attended a more hilarious banquet in my life. I never saw quite so many knights. I had them on every side. They ran one or two false ones on me, and each had some special story of sorrow to pour into my ear.”
During a visit to Germany a short time before, T.R. had found the Kaiser cordial and excessively voluble. The cordiality was mutual. “I do admire him,” T.R. said of Wilhelm II, “much as I would a grizzly bear.”
At Buckingham Palace T.R. described the Kaiser as acting the drillmaster to the lesser monarchs. All evening he tried to monopolize the Rough Rider’s conversation. When the parvenu Czar of Bulgaria started pouring the tale of his troubles in the Balkans in Roosevelt’s ear, Kaiser Wilhelm dragged him away: “That man is unworthy of your acquaintance,” he said in a loud voice.
“Kings and such like are just as funny as politicians,” T.R. would explode into laughter when he told the story back home.
Try as he would to settle down to writing for the Outlook, and leading the life of an elder statesman at Sagamore Hill, he couldn’t help slipping back into politics. Out of sheer exuberance, when he got home, he helped ruin his old friend Taft’s political career, snatched the Progressive movement away from La Follette, who as senator was attaining a position of national leadership, and acted, as he liked to boast with a toothy grin and a flash of his glasses “like a bull in a china shop.”
Chapter 2
THE SCHOOLMASTER IN POLITICS
THE result of T.R.’s Bull Moose rampage was a split in the Republican Party that assured the Democrats a return to power if only they could find a leader who would appeal to both town and country wings of the party. New Jersey, the state which for years had furnished a convenient mailing address for every unsavory trust in the Union, where politics was considered safely under the thumb of the railroads and the utilities, had seethed with reform for a decade. The New Jersey reformers found themselves the leader the Democratic Party needed in a smoothvoiced lecturer on history and government who had since 1902 been president of Princeton.
Although Woodrow Wilson was two years older than T.R. and six years older than Hughes, politically he was a newcomer. Like Hughes he entered politics fullblown from another profession. He was fiftythree when he resigned as president of Princeton to run for governor of New Jersey on the Democratic ticket. Almost immediately he developed into one of the most skillful political operators in the history of American statecraft. It began to be said of him that his whole career had been a preparation for the White House.
Like Hughes, Woodrow Wilson was a clergyman’s son. He was a Presbyterian by birth and rearing. His grandfather Wilson was a Scotch-Irish printer and journalist who, emigrating to Philadelphia as a very young man, worked on Duane’s famous old Aurora and then moved to the Ohio country to edit a newspaper of his own in Steubenville. There he raised numerous progeny.
The youngest son, Joseph Ruggles Wilson, turned out to be a scholarly boy with a gift for public speaking who took his degree in divinity at Princeton. He was teaching at the Steubenville Academy when he met the daughter of Thomas Woodrow, a Scottish minister who had made a name but no money for himself preaching in Carlisle in the North of England and had been forced to move to America in search of a living that would support his family. The Woodrows came of a long line of Presbyterian divines. Woodrow Wilson liked to speak of his forebears as troublesome Scotchmen, hardbitten and opinionated, calvinists and covenanters.
Born in the year of Buchanan’s election at the manse in Staunton, Virginia, Woodrow Wilson was still a babe in arms when his handsome preacher father, who was becoming famous for the high style and fine delivery of his sermons, was called to Augusta, Georgia, to become pastor of the First Presbyterian Church there.
Though the father and mother were both Ohiobred they absorbed the politics of their parishioners. Dr. Wilson became an ardent secessionist. The assembly that split the denomination in two was held in his church and he became permanent “stated” clerk of the Southern Presbyterians.
For the first ten years of his life Tommy as he was known was the only boy in a family of girls. His parents destined him for the ministry as a matter of course. It was a trial to Dr. Wilson, who was a passionate reader of books with a palate for the modul
When Tommy was fourteen the father was called to a chair at the theological seminary in Columbia, South Carolina’s inland capital which Sherman had so thoroughly laid waste during the war. Dr. Wilson had a salary from his teaching and another from one of the principal pulpits in the town, and Mrs. Wilson had come into a legacy from a brother in the North who had died without issue. Amid the general impoverishment of the ruined South, all this meant opulence unusual for a minister’s family. They built themselves a brick house. The Lord was indeed providing. The children grew up steeped in righteousness and drilled in admiration of good English prose.
In the summer of 1873 Thomas Woodrow Wilson, with two other boys from the Sunday school, (according to the church register) “after free confession during which they severally exhibited evidences of the work of grace, were unanimously admitted to the membership of this church.”
Woodrow Wilson never wavered in his strict adherence to the Presbyterian creed. He prayed on his knees. He wore out Bibles reading them. “The Bible,” he said, “reveals every man to himself as a distinct moral agent responsible not to men, not even to those men he has put over him in authority, but responsible through his own conscience to his Lord and Maker.” So far as religion was concerned, he told Cary Grayson years later, argument was adjourned.
He loved his mother but so long as Dr. Wilson lived his father ruled his life. A warm, admiring, almost reverent affection grew up between father and son. Even so Tommy Wilson’s ambitions strayed early from the ministry. As a boy he’d read deep of Cooper’s and Captain Marryat’s seastories. Before he ever saw the sea he had drawn plans of frigates and entertained the phantasy of being admiral of an American fleet pursuing pirates in the Pacific. When his father accepted a call to a large church in Wilmington, North Carolina, young Wilson had his first sight of real seagoing ships. The story is told that it was only his mother’s supplications that kept him from shipping before the mast.
Meanwhile a new daydream intervened. His father subscribed to the Edinburgh Review and to Godkin’s Nation. Tommy began to read of debates in the British House of Commons. These were the years of the great liberals. England was in a period of fervid parliamentary activity. The slender shy awkward lad—“an old young man” the Wilsons’ colored butler called him—began to throw all his youthful passion into imagining himself a Cobden or a John Bright thundering from the opposition benches under the hallowed rafters of St. Stephen’s. Instead of drawings of fullrigged ships a portrait of Gladstone appeared above his desk.
When at sixteen he was sent to Davidson College near Charlotte he began to show an aptitude for hard work. He made good marks in his courses. He taught himself shorthand. In deportment his score was perfect.
He worked so hard at Davidson that he began to show signs of acute dyspepsia—all his life his nerves were too taut for good digestion—; he was ordered home to Wilmington for a rest and began to tutor in Latin and Greek for the entrance examinations at Princeton.
At nineteen he entered Princeton as a freshman carrying a letter from his father, which he was too shy to present, to that notable Scottish divine the Reverend James McCosh, who was president. Dr. McCosh was a scholar and a speaker famous for force and wit. In the Darwinian controversy then raging through schools and pulpits he had the courage (as did Tommy’s scholarly uncle Professor James Woodrow who fell into hot water with the Presbytery because of it) to take the side of science: “If it is found to be true,” Dr. McCosh affirmed, “… it will be found that it is consistent with religion.”
At Princeton young Wilson paid enough attention to the curriculum to get through with moderate honors, but his real interest was in reading and debating about politics, statesmanship and constitutional law. He devoured the witty accounts of the debates in British parliament he found in the library in bound volumes of The Gentleman’s Magazine.
Debating was popular with undergraduates at Princeton in those days. He joined the Whig Society, which was still operating under a constitution devised by James Madison, and became its star debater. Not content with that he founded a new society: The Liberal Debating Club, modelled on the British parliament, for which he himself furnished the constitution. He showed a lively interest in campus affairs generally, served as president of the Athletic Committee and of the Baseball Association and as managing editor of the Princetonian.
He found himself associating with a generation of young Americans who were beginning to think that they should emulate the English gentry and take politics away from the wardheelers. Among a gang of friends, mostly members of an eating club known as the Alligators, who used to meet in eachother’s rooms in Witherspoon Hall, there appeared a comic tag line to break off a discussion: “When I meet you in the Senate I’ll argue that out with you.”
Tommy Wilson went so far as to put his name on some visiting cards as “Senator from Virginia.”
With the Utica boy who later went to Congress from upstate New York he entered into one of those youthful compacts that do so much to mould men’s lives.
“I remember forming with Charlie Talcott, a class-mate and very intimate friend of mine,” he wrote in reminiscent vein, “a solemn covenant that we would school all our powers and passions for the work of establishing the principles we held in common; that we would acquire knowledge that we might have power; and that we would drill ourselves in all the arts of persuasion but especially in oratory (for he was a born orator if ever man was) that we might have facility in leading others into our ways of thinking and enlisting them in our purposes.”
He saw himself as part of the procession of the great parliamentarians. He read Macaulay with rapture; he tried to model his style on Bagehot’s.
Greene’s Short History of the English People delighted him so that he planned to follow it up with a History of the American People. He decided to be a writer as well as a talker. He wrote his father excitedly that he had discovered he had a mind. In vacationtime down at Wilmington, on days when the church was empty, he practiced oratory by reciting Burke’s speeches from his father’s pulpit.
He was obsessed with the beauties of the British parliamentary system. By his senior year he had produced an article on “Cabinet Government in the United States” which was printed in The International Review, then the foremost American journal of theoretical politics. He used the same theme for his commencement address when he graduated.
He carried some of the aura of that publication along with him when he went to the University of Virginia to study law. “The profession I chose was politics; the profession I entered was the law. I chose the one because I thought it would lead to the other,” he explained in a letter to his fiancée a few years later.
He hated the law but he plugged away at it. He had done well at Princeton, but at Charlottesville he was almost fulsomely admired. He had a good clear tenor voice; he sang in the glee club and in the chapel choir. He was described as having “rare charm and courtesy of manner” and as carrying himself “with an air of quiet distinction.” He was developing a sense of humor. He was in demand whenever a graceful speech was called for at some public function.
He was filling long arduous days with the law, with debating, with reading, with warm college friendships and with the unsuccessful courtship of one of his Woodrow cousins who attended the Female Seminary at Staunton, when he broke down again with what was still described as dyspepsia. Again the doctor told him to go home and take it easy. For a year and a half he let his mother nurse him back to health while he read law in the comfortable Wilmington manse.
The whole family connection had gone to work to find the most suitable
Woodrow Wilson was not cut out for the life of an attorney at law. He wanted a political career but, raised as he was among women, in the protective cocoon of his father’s affection, he didn’t have the brash energy needed to break into politics at the local level as Theodore Roosevelt did in New York. He was too shy and aloof and selfcentered for the rough moneygrubbing Atlanta of reconstruction days. He gave up his law-firm, which had hardly picked up a client, and went to Johns Hopkins, then in its first heyday as a great graduate school, to study for a Ph.D. The life there just suited him. At Hopkins he wrote his first and best book: Congressional Government.
Meanwhile he had fallen in love again. On a trip to Georgia to attend to some lawbusiness for his mother, he met Ellen Axson, the daughter of the pastor of Rome’s First Presbyterian Church, a quiet earnest girl of great charm. Her friends spoke of her “flowerlike” freshness. Their upbringings were so similar they might have been brother and sister.
The Axsons like the Woodrows came of a line of Scottish clergymen. Her grandfather had been known to his Presbyterian parishioners in Savannah as “the great Axson.”
Ellen Axson had been planning herself a career as a painter. She convinced Wilson that he must finish his work at Hopkins and that she must have a year studying at the Art Students League in New York before their marriage. Both families seem to have been overjoyed by the engagement. Ellen Axson’s brother Stockton became one of Woodrow’s most intimate friends.