The Highest Calling, page 17
DR: He goes to Princeton. He’s an okay student.
ASB: Better than okay.
DR: He comes back to Princeton as a professor. He writes a lot. Then, all of a sudden, he’s elected president of the university?
ASB: He is elected president of Princeton in 1902. And he put his hand in everything. Princeton had been sliding into a long period of mediocrity, and the trustees decided, “We need some fresh blood. We need Wilson.” Practically overnight, he not only reformed Princeton education, he reformed college education in this country.
If you went to a college in which you majored in something, in which you had perhaps two lectures and a small class a week, in which you had core education requirements, and maybe some electives on top of that, maybe an honor code as well, you studied under the Wilson model. Those were all elements Woodrow Wilson introduced at Princeton. They became so successful they mushroomed everywhere.
DR: He was very popular as president of Princeton. He got a lot of attention. He was lecturing all over the country. But then there was a dispute over the future of the graduate school, and ultimately it led to his feeling disaffected and not being upset to leave Princeton?
ASB: That is correct. After Wilson had taken on the educational model, he wanted to go after the social model. He felt, correctly, that Princeton was this playground for the sons of the very rich. This is where the sons of J. P. Morgan and so forth went to school. Wilson didn’t like this. He remembered being a poor Presbyterian minister’s son when he went to Princeton. He wanted to get rid of the rich-playground mindset.
There were a couple of social structures, one of which had to do with the location of the graduate college, which really was about something bigger than that. It was about what graduate education meant in this country. Wilson lost that and another big social battle, and the trustees were about to fire him, in fact.
DR: He all of a sudden got the attention of some political person, and they said, “We’re going to nominate you to be governor of New Jersey.”
ASB: He got the attention of a man named “Sugar Jim” Smith. Beware of anyone named Sugar Jim. I don’t care if it’s politics, business, whatever. In any case, Sugar Jim was, to be kind about it, maybe the most corrupt political boss in America. Sugar Jim was so corrupt he realized how corrupt he was. So he thought, “What I really need is a puppet. Who is the squeaky-cleanest guy in the state of New Jersey? What about Professor Wilson at Princeton, who’s writing all these speeches and books about education? He’s a professor, so we know we can push him around.”
So Sugar Jim says, “Would you like to run for governor? I can pretty much assure you’re going to win this election.”
Wilson won in a landslide. After being handpicked by possibly the most corrupt machine to be its puppet, Wilson’s first action as governor of New Jersey in 1911 was to kick out the machine. He literally barred the machine from entering government buildings. Now everybody in the country is looking to New Jersey, saying, “Who is this man that broke this machine?” And the Democratic Party is saying, “We have an election in about a year and a half. Maybe we have somebody of presidential timber here.”
DR: The governorship then was a two-year term?
ASB: It was a four-year term. He served only two of his four years, and in that time introduced the most progressive legislation of any state in the country.
DR: So in those days you didn’t go out and campaign for the nomination. You had people do it for you, and you didn’t physically campaign. But he was not against being the presidential nominee of the party in 1912?
ASB: Correct.
DR: How did he get the nomination?
ASB: It was a little more like the parliamentary system, which he rather loved. He didn’t run for office, he would stand for office. “If everyone insists I become president, well, what can I do?”
He did travel around and gave some speeches. He was in some primaries, which were not the way primaries work today. But he made himself quite visible and made it known he was available.
DR: So they go to 46 ballots at the Democratic Convention.
ASB: Forty-six ballots. And by the 46th he was helped enormously by the man who was the face of the Democratic Party then, a man maligned by history, a three-time loser for the White House named William Jennings Bryan, from Nebraska. Bryan threw all his weight behind Wilson, because he felt Wilson was the purest progressive of all the Democrats.
DR: So in 1912 Wilson is the Democratic nominee. He’s running against one person who is president of the United States, William Howard Taft, and one person who was president, Teddy Roosevelt. How did he beat those two people?
ASB: It’s one of the glorious elections in American history. You’ve got this starchy college professor, Woodrow Wilson, running against William Howard Taft, a really decent man, the Republican incumbent, who didn’t want to be president, and had taken the Republican Party further to the right than his predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt.
Theodore Roosevelt was so incensed at what Taft had done, he ran as a Bull Moose candidate, a Republican progressive, and became the greatest third-party candidate the country has ever had. He came in second. The incumbent, William Howard Taft, came in third. As if that wasn’t enough, there was a fourth candidate, Eugene Debs, the great socialist. There was never a chance of Debs’s winning, but he really contributed a lot to the discussion. Even people who didn’t agree with Debs at least admired his sincerity.
DR: Wilson gets to be president of the United States, just two years after elected governor. What does he decide to do at the beginning of his term?
ASB: Until that time, Woodrow Wilson enjoyed arguably the most meteoric rise in American history. In October of 1910 Woodrow Wilson was the president of a small college in New Jersey. In November of 1912 he’s elected president of the United States. It’s just stunning. It’s staggering. And you think he didn’t have political elbows, you know? He came in and showed the country how it could be done.
A lot of it was by stagecraft, the way he chose to do things. But when he came in, the first thing on his mind was the economy. We had suffered economically. In 1907 there had been a crippling panic, and what freaked Wilson out the most was that J. P. Morgan almost single-handedly had bailed out the United States. This was just unbelievable to Wilson, that a man could bail out a country.
So the first thing Wilson did was a major reform of the tariff system, which he felt had been benefiting big business and was hurting lower- and middle-class Americans. It was a very tough fight, but he called a joint session of Congress. In the summer of 1913 he brought Congress back into session. He said, “What I have to offer is so important you’ve all got to come here and stay here. We’ve got to do this.” He showed up in the President’s Room every day and got that done.
After phase one, he wanted to start something he called a Federal Reserve System. And indeed this may be his most important legacy. The Federal Reserve System, now a hundred years old, was Woodrow Wilson’s second measure. He believed that wealth should not be concentrated among a few New York bankers but be spread out across the country, an archipelago of banks that would answer to the federal government, which would have some oversight.
Then he quickly moved us into the 40-hour workweek. Lots of labor laws. We got into the modern income tax—a graduated income tax to make up for the funds we weren’t getting from the tariffs. He put the first Jew—Louis Brandeis—on the Supreme Court, which was a controversial shattering of a glass ceiling. There’s a through-line that starts with Wilson as president of Princeton, through the governorship, and through his entire presidency: It was always about leveling the playing field.
DR: He was the first Democratic president since Grover Cleveland?
ASB: Yes.
DR: The workforce of the federal government had been integrated before him. He then segregated the workforce, upsetting part of his constituency and backsliding on racial equality in this country. That seems counter to his otherwise progressive ideals. Why would he have done that?
ASB: Woodrow Wilson was a Southerner. He was raised in the Old South. He remembered the Civil War. As a result, he grew up in a deeply segregated society. When Wilson came into office, he had another first, at the behest, largely, of two cabinet members: his postmaster general, former congressman Albert Burleson of Texas, and his secretary of the Treasury, William Gibbs McAdoo of California, who also became his son-in-law shortly thereafter. They were both Southern racists. And I mean rather virulent racists. Most of Wilson’s cabinet was from the South, and they were racist and they were pro-segregation.
Now, make no mistake about it. Woodrow Wilson appointed all these people to the cabinet. These were the people he was comfortable with, the kind of people he grew up with. Where it really began to come to a head, though, was the Treasury Department and the Post Office, the two areas in which integration was just starting to happen. And the postmaster general and the secretary of the Treasury said, “We cannot have Blacks and whites eating together, as the logical progression will be that someday perhaps a white person will have to work under a Black person, and that simply cannot be allowed.”
There was already huge racial tension around the country. Yes, integration was starting, but not everywhere. There were fights breaking out in the Post Office and the Treasury Department. Wilson did not want this on his watch. He kept his door open to African Americans for six and a half of his eight years, before his stroke. He listened to all the petitioners, promised to make some inroads, to do the best he could. I don’t think he did, but he promised that.
But the bigger point is, he felt the country was not ready for it. He felt that in the South, among the people he grew up with, there were still Civil War veterans alive and well, and he said, “There’s just no way this country will allow it.”
DR: So he tolerated the resegregation?
ASB: He tolerated it, though he never encouraged it. But he did allow it. He did not stop it. He must own it.
DR: We talked about the women’s suffrage movement. Under his administration, the Nineteenth Amendment, which allowed women to vote, was approved. But he wasn’t really a supporter of it initially?
ASB: Initially, he was not a supporter of the amendment. Wilson, from the time he was in government, was for the enfranchisement of women. He did think it was a states’ rights issue. Now, we know from the modern civil rights movement that “states’ rights” is often code for something else. In Wilson’s case, he very publicly went to New Jersey, to vote for his state to give women the right to vote. But he really did hold back when it came time to a Nineteenth Amendment—until we went to war. And then he became an active and vocal supporter.
DR: Let’s get to the Great War in Europe. His position his entire first term was to keep us out of the war. In fact, he got reelected saying, “I kept us out of the war.” Why did he want to stay out so much, and how did he change his mind?
ASB: He felt we should stay out of this war largely because it was primarily a European war. Up until our entry into the war, we were an isolationist country. We had armed forces, we had an army, and a navy of sorts, which numbered 100,000. Our military was the size of Portugal’s. We were not ready to go to war, by any means. We had Teddy Roosevelt saying, “We’ve got to go to war, let’s start building up a big army.” A lot of jingoist talk.
Wilson was very reluctant. He didn’t think it was America’s place. He felt the best thing we could do was to stay out of it. He even called on Americans to remain “neutral in thought.” But conditions kept changing. German militarism was not diminishing. They were torpedoing ships, most famously the Lusitania. American lives were being lost. Wilson tried every diplomatic measure he could think of—diplomatic notes back and forth, conferences, using anybody who might be able to reason with the other parties.
He finally realized, above all, that the Germans were not going to back down, and Wilson, a lifelong Anglophile, could finally admit, to himself anyway, that he was not neutral in thought. And then he learned of the Zimmermann Telegram—which, if you don’t remember your history books, was this discovered note from Germany to Mexico, saying “Come on into the war, and we’ll give you Texas and California back.”
DR: Zimmermann was the German ambassador to Mexico, and we intercepted a telegram that essentially encouraged the Mexicans to attack us. So Wilson goes to Congress and says, “Let’s go to war.” Congress approves. We send four million soldiers over. We lose 100,000. Ultimately, there is an armistice. Why does Wilson think he needs to go to Paris—the first president to ever leave the United States and go to Europe—and negotiate the peace agreement himself?
ASB: I want to back up one step. On April 2nd, 1917, what did Woodrow Wilson do? He called a joint session of Congress, and he delivered what has to be his most important speech. It is, I believe, the most important foreign policy speech in the history of this country, because at the heart of this speech is one deathless sentence: “The world must be made safe for democracy.”
Now, whether you like that sentence or not, whether you believe in it or not, doesn’t matter. All American foreign policy to this day stems from that one sentence. We have become, some say, the police force of the world, some say the minister spreading democracy.
Wilson remembered the Civil War. Wilson is the only president we ever had who grew up in a country that had lost a war—the Confederate States of America. He saw the devastation to the Southern states. He saw the deprivation. He didn’t want to go through that again for the country at large. He didn’t want any mother ever to have to lose her son to war.
So, he kept us out. And then he got us in. And he made a contract with himself. Okay, 100,000 Americans lost their lives. He really worried about that. He thought about those men every day. And he thought—this is Wilson, some say with a Christ complex—that he was the only man on Earth who could guarantee a proper peace.
So he went to Paris, largely because he had 14 points, the fourteenth of which was a League of Nations, but also because he felt all the other countries had big agendas. They wanted Alsace-Lorraine back, or they wanted big reparations paid. Wilson went over with one item on his agenda: that there should be this roundtable where every country could come and sit. It was his vision, and he believed that only he could communicate it to the others.
DR: He goes there for six months, coming back once, only to return to Europe. He spends six months there, and ultimately an agreement is reached. He comes back home but then can’t get it through the Congress. After the stroke, he is incapacitated. Things don’t really work out, he loses power. What happens when he leaves the White House?
ASB: Wilson became the first president of the United States to leave the White House and remain in Washington, D.C.—at what’s now the Wilson House on S Street. There, physically compromised, mentally and emotionally compromised, he’s thinking about writing a book. He gets as far as one paragraph. He’s not capable of doing it. He begins to lose his sight. And he just starts to fade away.
DR: He ultimately dies, at the age of 67. His wife lives in the house until 1961.
ASB: Woodrow Wilson dies in 1924. In 1961 John F. Kennedy is inaugurated as president of the United States, and outside the Capitol are the risers for the special guests. And there, in the third row, is a little old lady. Nobody had a clue who she was. She was Mrs. Woodrow Wilson. Kennedy specifically wanted her there for the inauguration.
DR: You spent 13 years of your life on this book. If you could ask one question of Woodrow Wilson, what would you want to know that you don’t know as a result of 13 years of research?
ASB: The question I would ask—though I know the answer that he would give—I would shake him by the lapels and say, “Why didn’t you give an inch? Why didn’t you practice so much of what you preached to Congress about compromise when it is important? Why not get at least half a loaf, get your treaty, get your League of Nations?” At the very end, Republican Henry Cabot Lodge counteroffered one final version, which did not change much. But he knew Wilson would never accept it, which is why he offered it. And Wilson, of course, didn’t accept it. He ended up getting nothing.
I would like to hear him articulate his feelings. His answer, I think, would be, as I suggest in the book, that he owed it to those 100,000 soldiers who didn’t come home to their mothers.
8 AMITY SHLAES
on Calvin Coolidge
(1872–1933; president from 1923 to 1929)
Not all presidents sought the job of president. Not all enjoyed politics. Not all liked public attention or to talk publicly. But one seems to lead the pack in not seeking to be president, not liking politics, not talking publicly (especially about himself), and in not seeking or enjoying public acclaim: President Calvin Coolidge.
Elected as Warren Harding’s vice president, Coolidge assumed office upon Harding’s untimely death from a heart attack. From that point forward, Coolidge maintained a flinty, New England approach to the presidency, as he had in previous parts of his life: do not talk more than absolutely necessary, do not spend more money than you have, do not brag about yourself or your accomplishments, and do not see or promise government as the solution to all of society’s ills.
The result was a low-key presidency, with a program of reducing federal indebtedness, without trying to become the most visible, important person in the world, or even the country.
This approach seemed to work for Coolidge. He finished Harding’s term, ran for election on his own, won overwhelmingly, and ultimately chose not to run for another term, allowing his secretary of commerce, Herbert Hoover, to run as the Republican nominee. Hoover won handily, no doubt reflecting citizens’ satisfaction with Coolidge policies. (The 1920s, often called the Roaring Twenties, were a generally robust time for the U.S., with the Great Depression not beginning until Hoover’s term.)
