The project filled T.R. with the old zest. At breakfasttime at the Planters Hotel in St. Louis he jumped on a couch in the crowded lobby and in an impromptu speech attacked hyphenated Americans. There were no English-Americans or Irish-Americans or German-Americans, he shouted in his squeaky voice while his arms flailed the air. There were only Americans.
At the City Club he leapt on the speaker’s table and accused President Wilson, who had come around to advocating preparedness and military training for those who wanted it, of using weasel words, words that had the content sucked out of them, the way a weasel sucks the yolk out of an egg. “Teddy oh Teddy, there’s nobody like you,” somebody chanted in the audience.
St Louis was a center of German vereins and German beer and had a truculent Irish population, to boot, infuriated by Britain’s bloody suppression of the Easter rebellion, but the throng at the City Club cheered T.R. to the rafters. He returned to Sagamore Hill hoping against hope.
Something of the Heroic
A couple of days later the news of the sea battle off Denmark pushed local politics off the front pages. GERMANS ACCLAIM JUTLAND VICTORY BUT ENGLAND IS CALM announced the New York Times.
The losses were enormous on both sides and the decision was doubtful. When propaganda exaggerations were sifted out it became known fairly accurately that the British lost three heavy cruisers, five light cruisers and eight destroyers: a total of one hundred twelve thousand tons with six thousand eight hundred men killed and wounded, while the Germans lost a firstclass battleship, a new heavy cruiser, three light cruisers, and five destroyers: sixty thousand tons and three thousand men. The German armor plate and artillery and particularly their armorpiercing shells proved superior, but their fleet, badly battered, limped back into its protected anchorage.
The British were at sea again in two days. It was a virtual victory, the London papers said; the Germans suffered a greater relative loss. In America Jutland proved a sobering blow to German and Allied supporters alike.
The grim news, indicating that no conclusion to the European war could be expected in the foreseeable future, was swallowed up in the indigenous distractions of the presidential campaign.
The first week in June Chicago hummed like a beehive. The hotels were crowded with Republican and Bull Moose delegates. The Loop resounded with the brass bands of a “preparedness” parade that filled the streets for eleven consecutive hours. Ten thousand women tramped through the rain in behalf of woman’s suffrage.
The same morning that the Republican convention came to order in the Coliseum with Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio in the chair, the Progressive Party, with less bunting, but more shouting, started proceedings in the Auditorium. The Bull Moose leaders, deep in private negotiations with a committee appointed by the Republican regulars, wanted to keep their excitable delegates from blowing the lid off and nominating Roosevelt prematurely. At the first mention of his name they cheered for ninetythree minutes. T.R. heard the roaring over his private wire to Sagamore Hill. In spite of the enthusiasm of the crowd he already knew in his heart that this time there would be no miracle.
In March he had cabled from Trinidad to the New York Evening Mail, “It would be a mistake to nominate me unless the country has in its mood something of the heroic, unless it feels not only like devoting itself to ideals, but to the purpose measurably to realize these ideals in action.”
No one knew better than T.R. that by coming out flatfootedly for a war program he had alienated great segments of his supporters. The reformers who had responded to his leadership in earlier campaigns now had very different ideas about how to “realize their ideals in action.” The rural and western Progressives, led by La Follette in Wisconsin and Hiram Johnson in California, were either outright pacifists or sceptical of any headlong involvement in European quarrels. Only the wellconnected Bull Moosers from the financial and industrial centers in the east were for war on the side of the Allies, and they were hard to distinguish from the elements who were working for the nomination of Charles Evans Hughes on the Republican ticket.
The Reluctant Justice
Hughes was sincerely reluctant to allow his name to be placed before the Republican convention. He was so conscientious about keeping the Supreme Court out of politics he had even given up voting. Chief Justice White, a frank and garrulous old man in feeble health, had been telling Hughes he would retire soon and that he expected him to be his successor. President Wilson, whose daughters were on friendly terms with the young people of the Hughes family, made it quite clear that if Hughes kept out of the presidential race, and if Wilson were re-elected, he would be the next Chief Justice.
Ex-President Taft’s letters played a large part in convincing Hughes that it was his moral duty to run. It was to Taft that Hughes was beholden for his appointment to the supreme bench. Taft knew that Hughes was a conscientious party man in much the same spirit as he was a conscientious member of the Baptist church.
“… The Democratic party,” Taft wrote him, “is what it has always shown itself to be—the organized incapacity of the country. I am no partisan but I cannot escape this conclusion. The Republican party was split in two in 1912. The great body of Progressives have enrolled themselves again in the party. To retain them however and to win over the others, we must have a candidate who will … stimulate the enthusiasm of both elements and give them confidence in victory … Mr. Roosevelt is thundering. He is a genius. In certain ways he commands my admiration more than he ever did for his genius … But I cannot think it is on the cards for him to win.”
Taft insisted that after his first disappointment T.R. would have to come out in support of Hughes: “… he has put himself in a position which makes it absolutely necessary for him to support you if you are nominated.”
Taft was not alone. From all segments among the Republicans came earnest pleas that shook Hughes’ determination to continue the aloof and carefree life which he so much enjoyed. All the political augurs echoed Taft’s statement: “You will certainly be elected if you accept the nomination.”
Mrs. Hughes, who never concealed her conviction that her husband was a man of destiny, said she wanted to see him President. Hughes felt his resolution slipping, but he knew what the presidency might mean. “When you see me in my coffin,” he told Mrs. Hughes with some bitterness, “remember that I didn’t want to take this burden.”
The End of Bull Moose
Voting started on the third day of the conventions. Hughes, who had no personal organization, no throwaways, no badges, no banners, rolled up 253½ votes on the first ballot against Roosevelt’s 65 among the old guard Republicans at the Coliseum. At the Auditorium the Progressive managers wore themselves out trying to stave off a premature nomination. The “peace committees” trying to reach an agreement behind the scenes were at a deadlock.
When the conventions adjourned the night of June 9 with Hughes still 170 votes short, the Justice, who had been in his study keeping up the pretence of working on his Supreme Court cases, said rather snappishly to his wife, “That settles it. I shall not be nominated. I’m going to bed.”
Next day the regular Republicans put his nomination through. Hughes resigned from the Supreme Court with a note Woodrow Wilson felt was unnecessarily curt, and accepted. The Progressives in desperation nominated Roosevelt.
From the end of his private wire at Sagamore Hill T.R. stalled. He wouldn’t say yes and he wouldn’t say no. He made his refusal of the nomination conditional on the acceptance by Hughes of certain principles.
The convention heard his evasions with “anger, derision and groans.” The New Nationalism falling in ruins about them, Roosevelt’s reformers and conservationists and social workers left Chicago in a bitter mood. Many of them, like Mark Twain’s lawyerfriend Bainbridge Colby, eventually supported President Wilson. Bull Moose was dead.
Blessed Are the Peacemakers
The Democrats meanwhile were assembling for their convention in St. Louis. Woodrow Wilson had been taking a leaf out of T
.R.’s book and attacking hyphenated Americans. The national committee planned to make Americanism the keynote of the campaign. Words and music of all the patriotic songs were furnished to the convention bands. Arrangements were made to wave Old Glory at every opportunity. To the amazement of the backroom leadership their delegates rose to quite different bait.
The Honorable Martin H. Glynn, onetime governor of New York, delivered the keynote address. He had planned to open with an apology for the concessions Woodrow Wilson was forced to make to keep the peace and then to bring the audience to its feet with the eagle screaming for the red, white and blue. He enumerated some ticklish situations, involving American lives and American property, under Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Van Buren, Franklin Pierce …
“When Grant was President a Spanish commander in cold blood shot the captain of the Virginius, thirtysix of the crew and sixteen of the passengers … But we didn’t go to war. Grant settled our troubles by negotiation as the President of the United States is trying to do today.”
To Glynn’s surprise the crowd cheered. Every time he tried to lay aside his list of precedents for peace by arbitration there were shouts of “Give us more.” Glynn warmed to his task. He brought up crisis after crisis. “What did we do?” people roared. “We didn’t go to war,” their voices echoed.
William Jennings Bryan, sitting in the press gallery, was so moved he burst into tears. When he was invited to the platform at the opening of the night session he got almost as much applause as Woodrow Wilson’s name when it was first mentioned. Like a good party man he eulogized the President. In spite of their differences about ways and means, their aims were the same. The President had kept the peace.
Ollie James of Kentucky was permanent chairman. Senator James was a large loud man. A reporter from the New York Times described him as having “the face of a prizefighter, the body of an oak and the voice of a pipe organ.” He opened up with “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God.”
The words were met with a wild scream of excitement.
He described the long lonely struggle of the man in the White House to keep America neutral and to restore peace to the warring nations of Europe. “If that be evil and vacillating may God prosper it and teach it to the rulers of the world.”
“The delegates did not rise to their feet,” wrote the Times reporter, “they leaped. ‘Keep it up Ollie, keep it up,’ they shouted.”
The senator described the President’s victory in the Sussex case: “Without orphaning a single American child, without widowing a single American mother, without firing a single gun or shedding a drop of blood, he wrung from the most militant spirit that ever brooded above a battlefield the concession of American demands and American rights.”
“Repeat,” the crowd shouted.
Ollie James boomed out the sentence again. They made him repeat it a second time. Then they cheered for twentyone minutes which was one minute more than they had given Woodrow Wilson’s name.
Late that night Wilson’s nomination, which was a foregone conclusion, was carried with but a single dissenting vote. When the platform was put together next day someone, no one ever remembered who, inserted the phrase that became the keynote of the campaign: “He kept us out of war.”
A Bloody Summer
While the Democrats were shouting for peace in St. Louis events in the world were taking a more and more warlike turn. Earl Kitchener, the British war leader, went down on the Hampshire that hit a mine off the Orkneys. The German armies were pressing, with men and metal, on the fortresses of the Verdun salient, where the French were defending their positions with desperate courage. The British were preparing to take the pressure off Verdun by squandering the recruits Kitchener’s drillmasters had trained in a reckless offensive on the Somme.
In Mexico, Carranza, egged on, it was whispered, by German agitators, was trying to unite all factions in a holy war against the gringo. Daily he called on Pershing to take his troops off the sacred soil of the Mexican republic.
Attacks on Americans, from Mazatlán to the Gulf of Mexico, became so threatening that the President instructed the state governors to call out the militia. On June 22 a group of Negro troopers from Pershing’s 10th Cavalry was ambushed at Carrizal by carranzista forces. The Mexican general who laid the trap was killed. Three American officers were dead or missing and twentythree troopers and a Mormon scout were captured and taken to Chihuahua.
Daily notes passed back and forth between Washington and Mexico City. The National Guard, now enlisted under federal orders, started taking up positions on the border. Peace societies and South American diplomats offered their good offices. On June 29 Carranza backed down and telegraphed his people in Chihuahua to turn loose the captured Americans. The twentyfour men were placed on a train for El Paso.
A couple of days later, while the news of the petering out of the Verdun offensive was encouraging Allied supporters, German prestige in America received a great boost with the appearance in the Chesapeake of a German merchant submarine. The Deutschland, loaded with dyes, had crossed the Atlantic unarmed and unscathed in spite of the British blockade.
I Wouldn’t Give a Dollar
Wilson’s campaign made a slow start. The President’s health was bothering him. Daily problems tied him to his desk in the White House. Vance McCormick, retired mayor of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and like Newton D. Baker a grassroots reformer from the progressive wing of the party, took the place of the petulant McCombs as campaign manager. Wilson described him glowingly as a steam engine in boots, but he had trouble finding campaign contributors. Betting in New York was still two to one on Hughes.
Henry Morgenthau, the wealthy real estate promoter and financier who had been the leading Wilson man in moneyed circles ever since a speech of Wilson’s had set tears streaming down his face years before, was back on leave from his embassy to Turkey to serve as treasurer; but, in spite of the help of Bernard Baruch who was rising like a new comet on the Wall Street sky, he was having tough going. Men of means favored Hughes.
Josephus Daniels used to tell an amusing tale in later years of how he was called in as a friend of Edison’s and Henry Ford’s to try to induce these gentlemen to part with some folding money. Both men were invited to lunch at Vance McCormick’s suite at the Biltmore in New York. No alcoholic beverages were served, but, when McCormick and Daniels tried to edge up to the topic of campaign contributions, the two great mechanical innovators became exceedingly skittish.
There was a gas and electric chandelier above the table with large groundglass globes. Henry Ford suddenly cried out to Edison, “I’ll bet you anything you want to bet that I can kick that globe off that chandelier.”
Though only the first course had been served, the table was pushed aside and Edison began limbering up his legs in the middle of the room. Daniels’ story was that the electrical wizard made the highest kick he’d ever seen and smashed the globe to smithereens. Ford missed by a fraction of an inch.
Through the rest of the lunch Edison was busy crowing over Ford: “You are a younger man than I but I can outkick you.”
It wasn’t till the arrival of the icecream that McCormick could get his guests’ attention back to the needs of the Democratic campaign. All his pretty speeches about the President’s great work for peace were of no avail. Ford was a little leery of the word since the razzing he’d taken over the fiasco of his “peace ark” the winter before. “All this campaign spending is the bunk,” he said. “I wouldn’t give a dollar to any campaign committee.”
In the end he was induced to run a series of newspaper advertisements which kept Ford products in the public eye at the same time as they gave reasons why people should vote for Woodrow Wilson. All McCormick got out of Edison was a catchy statement: “They say Wilson has blundered. Perhaps he has but I notice he usually blunders forward.”
The Eight Hour Day
One reason why money was shy was Wilson’s appointment of a Louisville
born Boston lawyer named Louis D. Brandeis to the Supreme Court. Brandeis, a scholarly product of the Harvard Law School, had made his career in the harrying of monopolies and trusts in the interests of the consumer. Bigness was his bugaboo. He was the knight errant of the small man. Conservatives looked with suspicion upon his glittering pronouncements. Even Taft, broadminded as he was, considered his appointment “the worst possible,” and every conservative voice in the country was raised against him in the bitter battle for approval of his appointment in the Senate.
Another reason was the La Follette Act establishing improved working conditions for American seamen, and greatly increasing the cost of operating merchantships under the American flag, which business blamed the President for conniving at. A third was the amendment to the Clayton Act exempting laborunions from the antitrust laws. A fourth was the Adamson Law establishing an eight hour day and arbitration procedures for railroad labor. To most of the business community the eight hour day was still a red flag to a bull.
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.”