Penguin History of the United States of America (86 page)

From a purely party point of view, he had some justification. The Republicans were splitting dramatically, and the insurgent wing (now beginning to describe itself as ‘progressive’) was getting stronger and stronger. Taft had made himself unacceptable to what was now the most dynamic element in his party. And Republican disarray was proving a huge tonic to the Democrats. Taft tried to purge the insurgents in the primary elections of 1910; he failed; the insurgents carried state after state; and in the general Congressional and gubernatorial elections of the autumn the Democrats swept to victory in every section except the Pacific West (where the progressive Republicans scored a smashing victory in California, defeating the Old Guard and the Southern Pacific Railroad simultaneously). Even before election day Roosevelt was convinced that some radical steps were necessary. He read Herbert Croly, he began to preach what he called ‘the New Nationalism’ (a popularization of Croly’s ideas) and he went on a huge speaking tour in a vain effort to hold the Republicans together and stave off their defeat.

The sequel may be briefly sketched. The insurgents gathered round Senator La Follette to form the Progressive Republican League, with the avowed aim of denying Taft renomination in 1912. Their original candidate was to be La Follette, but before very long ‘the Colonel’, having suffered one too many affronts at the hands of the administration, threw his hat into the ring and took the League away from its founder. He then moved against Taft. His instrument was the new institution of the primary election. One of the chief concerns of progressives was to rescue politics from the undue influence of the great capitalists, and the politicians, seeing a chance to reassert their own independence, had in many states lent themselves to the cause. The result was the adoption of various measures, the most important of which were the direct election of Senators, which became part of the US Constitution in 1913; the referendum; the recall; and the primary election.
The referendum idea permitted any proposal to be laid before a state’s voters, provided that enough of them had petitioned the legislature to have it put on the ballot; the recall election was a device by which an unsatisfactory politician might be forced to face the voters again before his normal term ran out. Though widely adopted in state constitutions, particularly in the West, neither procedure found its way into national politics or the national Constitution. The recall election, in particular, proved rather futile: it was a sort of modernized form of impeachment and, like impeachment, was too cumbersome to be effective. There have been next to no successful recalls in modern times. The primary idea was much more successful. Instead of a party’s candidates being selected in private, by party bosses or any other unrepresentative group, they would now be chosen by the registered voters of that party. There might be primary elections for state offices, or for federal ones (Senatorships and seats in the House of Representatives). There might be primary elections for the Presidency. Not all states had (or have) adopted the system (and it has never been incorporated in the Constitution) but there were enough for Roosevelt to make a great showing in 1912. He swept triumphantly through them all, and arrived at the Republican convention in Chicago announcing that ‘We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord.’ Nobody quite knew what this stirring message meant, but it was certainly memorable. However, it did not guarantee success. Taft, using his patronage as President to the utmost and benefiting from the support of the bosses, retained the support of a majority of the delegates, and was renominated.

Roosevelt had always prided himself on his ‘regularity’. Not for him the nice conscience and the finicky disloyalty of a Mugwump. But his blood was up. He and his followers walked out of the convention as soon as the control of the Taft managers was made apparent, and on 6 August met as the Progressive party. ‘The Colonel’ was the candidate; Hiram Johnson, the Governor of California, was the Vice-Presidential candidate; the bull moose challenged the Republican elephant and the Democratic donkey as the party symbol; the party platform, embodying the New Nationalism, was one of comprehensive radicalism, promising such things as votes for women, the prohibition of child labour and the eight-hour day. It denounced ‘the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt polities’, the labour injunction and convict labour, and demanded a national system of social insurance. It endorsed labour unions. All this might have alarmed the mighty, except that it was notorious that the funds for the new party were largely supplied by the House of Morgan and that a senior Morgan partner, George Perkins, had had a leading hand in drafting the platform – which is why it also contained a pledge for banking and currency reform. It remained the most remarkable thing of its kind since the 1892 Populist platform. It was also notable for the fact that, unlike the Populist platform, its concerns were overwhelmingly industrial and urban. America had changed profoundly in twenty years.

However, it had not changed so much that an entirely new party, suddenly appearing from within the Republicans, could brush aside both the old parties at once. The Democrats held fast, and could now make a fairly convincing case for themselves as a progressive party. There was the Bryanite tradition: its leader accepted that he could never again be nominated, but his ex-Populist followers were still numerous and vigorous. There was the strong commitment of the Democratic city machines to first- and second-generation immigrants, and to Catholics. Overlapping substantially with this group was organized labour. The workers had had a thin time of it since 1896. A string of court decisions had weakened the AFL, and as many important strikes had been defeated. Worst of all, in California in 1910 desperate union men had dynamited the
Los Angeles Times
building, which had been erected by non-union labour: twenty lives had been lost in the explosion, and there had been a nationwide reaction of anger and alarm. Plainly, the unions needed all the friends they could get, and ever since 1908 Gompers had skilfully led them to look chiefly in the direction of the Democrats. This had not been acceptable to the more radical wing of the labour movement, which turned rather to Debs and the Socialist party; but the radicals were an inconsiderable force. Their union movement, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or ‘Wobblies’), was no sort of threat to the AFL because of its incessant splits and quarrels. Even the strongly pro-labour platform of the Progressives did not lure the majority of workers away from the Democrats. That party was also helped by its control of the House of Representatives after the 1910 election. It set up the so-called Pujo Committee (named after its chairman, Pujo of Louisiana) to investigate the ‘money trust’ – in other words, J. P. Morgan, who was discovering, to his vast surprise, that most of his fellow-citizens regarded him as one of the problems of capitalism, instead of part of the solution (in 1911 Taft brought suit against US Steel under the Sherman Act). Morgan did not testify before Pujo at any length until after the 1912 election, but the mere existence of the committee seemed to confirm the Democrats’ commitment to reform. The impression was rubbed in by the man they nominated for the Presidency, Governor Wilson of New Jersey.

Wilson had all the right credentials. Initially a Cleveland Democrat, he had been moving leftward for ten years or so. He had acquired national fame as a reforming President of Princeton. In 1910 he accepted the Democratic nomination for the governorship of New Jersey. Winning election, he had shown himself to be a strong reforming leader: he had broken with the bosses who had nominated him, and that in itself was enough to commend him to the progressives, who were nearly as strong a force among the Democrats as they had become among the Republicans. There was an eloquence, an elevation in Wilson’s speeches that stirred men’s hearts. He was the man; as candidate he held the Democracy together, preaching of a ‘New Freedom’ (against the New Nationalism) in terms that were reassuringly old-fashioned: ‘As to the monopolies, which Mr Roosevelt
proposes to legalize and to welcome, I know that they are so many cars of juggernaut, and I do not look forward with pleasure to the time when the juggernauts are licensed and driven by commissioners of the United States.’ ‘If America is not to have free enterprise, then she can have freedom of no sort whatever.’ He ran against finance capitalism like Jackson running against the Bank of the United States. (His inaugural address, too, was to sound very Jacksonian.) Taft, who soon despaired of re-election, stayed in the race just to spoil things for Roosevelt; and in due course Wilson was elected President with 6,296,547 votes to Roosevelt’s 4,118,571. Poor fat Taft was a dismal third, with 3,484,956 votes; and Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist candidate for the fourth (but not the last) time, surprised everybody by more than doubling his 1908 vote to 900,672. The Democrats captured both houses of Congress. For a moment it seemed that everyone was a progressive. The reforming tide was at its peak.

Woodrow Wilson was perhaps luckier in the moment of his first election than any President since Andrew Jackson. Not a cloud was in the sky; his party colleagues in Congress were eager to respond to his wishes; the country was expectant; and twelve years of progressive turmoil had established a fairly comprehensive agenda for action, if the President chose to adopt it. It was a great opportunity which a quietist such as Taft might have deliberately forgone; but Wilson was an activist.

His personality embodied many of the sources of the progressive impulse. For one thing, he was an educated professional. He had no private means, but his family had been able to send him to Princeton, to law school in Virginia and to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he attended the graduate seminar in history – the first of its kind in America. As President of Princeton he had shown himself to be a better educational reformer than he was a scholar; but he always knew himself to be a politician and orator by temperament. He had imbibed from his father, a distinguished Presbyterian minister, the tendency to do-goodism and to over-confident idealism which was so marked a feature of the era. He was intensely ambitious, and excited by the thought of getting power into his hands; perhaps he was tempted to think, like Lincoln, that the best thing about the American political system was the scope it offered for men like himself to rise to the top. As events were to show, he was also like Lincoln in having an instinct for great issues; there was a prophetic touch in him and, as events were to show, a deep emotionalism: the sorrows of the world were real to him. Persons near at hand were perhaps less so. He was courteous enough, but he was a poor judge of character, rather too disdainful of less able or upright mortals, and, in the end, with his thin frame, false teeth and professorial eyeglasses, definitely not one of the boys. His eloquence, vision, sincerity and intelligence could dazzle, charm and fascinate the most unlikely mortals, even hardbitten party bosses, who did not at once realize what a ruthless and realistic politician he was; but he was difficult to love. Some found him easy to hate, notably Theodore Roosevelt, whom he had defeated, and Roosevelt’s
closest political ally, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. He relied more on intuition, when it came to decision making, than on logic, and was absolutely stubborn in defending his intuitive conclusions. He demanded unquestioning loyalty from his family, friends, colleagues and subordinates; those who opposed him too persistently he regarded as personal enemies. Women were attracted to him.

In 1913 such a man, determined to leave a great mark on history, could not fail. He was helped by the fact that although he had made his career in the North he had been born and bred in Georgia and the Carolinas; as he once said, ‘the South is the only place where nothing ever has to be explained to me’. The Democrats in Congress, dominated by Southerners, were naturally anxious to help the first President from Dixie since Andrew Johnson. Their new-found ascendancy had one evil consequence: Southern practices of racial discrimination, which the Republicans had hitherto kept at bay, now entered the federal government, where Jim Crow would prevail for the next twenty years and more. Wilson seems scarcely to have noticed, or to have noticed that he was disappointing the numerous blacks who had voted for him. He was much too busy pushing through the Underwood tariff, which fulfilled an old Democratic dream by lowering the schedules significantly for the first time since the Civil War; the Clayton Act, which strengthened the anti-trust laws; and the Federal Reserve System, which went some way to fill the gap in America’s financial institutions resulting from the absence of a central bank. He developed new techniques of leadership, or perhaps it should rather be said that he revived old ones. Realizing, as befitted the author of
Congressional Government
, that it was essential to collaborate with Congress, he spent long hours on the Hill, cajoling and reasoning with Congressmen and Senators; and he revived the practice, discontinued since the time of Thomas Jefferson (who was no orator), of reading his messages to Congress in person, especially the annual State of the Union addresses. It worked wonderfully well. Even when the economy slid into a recession in 1914, leading to the loss of many Democratic seats in Congress (and to the slaughter of the Progressive party which thereafter, abandoned by Theodore Roosevelt, more or less ceased to count), he was able, by appropriating several leading ideas of Roosevelt’s New Nationalism – by accepting, above all, that the powers and activities of the federal government must be increased and therefore feeling free to propose further legislation, for instance, a law forbidding child labour in factories and sweatshops – to find new work for the legislature and enhanced authority for himself. By the elections of 1916 he had compiled the most impressive record of legislation proposed and passed of any President since George Washington, and in so doing had confirmed the insights of Herbert Croly. Wilson, with the great liberal lawyer Louis D. Brandeis at his elbow, might orate of the New Freedom and the delights of small-scale government as well as small-scale business; in fact the spirit of Alexander Hamilton was more potent. Wilson’s actions strengthened the capitalist order by reforming
it; they increased the functions and size of the federal bureaucracy; and they gave added power and authority to the Presidency. In a word, whether he admitted it to himself or not, Wilson’s mission was the same as Theodore Roosevelt’s: it was to give the United States an economic and political government adequate to the demands of the modern world, and the nostrums of the venerated Jefferson seemed to be of very little use to him in the task.