Worldmaking (13 page)

When Roosevelt failed to wrest the nomination from Taft at the Republican National Convention on June 22, 1912, he left the GOP and formed the Progressive Party to contest the presidency in the forthcoming election. Running on a platform that called for woman suffrage, new inheritance and income taxes, social welfare legislation for women and infants, and wholesale improvements to America's transport infrastructure, the Bull Moose Party (as it became known following Roosevelt's response that he was “as strong as a bull moose” to a journalist's question regarding his health) attracted many supporters impressed by its Progressive agenda and the breakaway candidate's stature as a forceful former president with a formidable record of achievement.

Mahan was on the conservative wing of the Republican Party and so was dismayed by Roosevelt's steeply Progressive policy agenda. He was consequently torn by the Republican split of 1912, as he confided to his friend Henry White:

Personally, my views are nearer those of Taft than those of Roosevelt, but I have lost faith in the former as able to guide the ship, because he has not commanded the confidence of his people, as I think Roosevelt has … If I see reason to believe that Roosevelt can be carried in by a third party, I shall vote for him and use any influence I can in the same direction. But if I conclude that the only effect of the third party will be to defeat the Republicans and put in the Democrats, I shall vote for Taft.
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The only thing Mahan knew for certain was that the Democrats were unfit for office, and their leader, Woodrow Wilson, whom he had met for lunch in New York City earlier in the year, was worryingly dogmatic in his approach to domestic and foreign affairs:

We are threatened, and I fear the accession to power of a doctrinaire party—the Democratic—which is dominated by a number of theories which can by no means be made to fit present facts; like the wrong key to a lock. Among others [is] that of keeping the navy well below strength, and ignoring all the dangerous contingencies of the present by the simple process of shutting their eyes, and taking a sleeping potion of the doctrines of a man who died nearly a century ago. Perhaps you know the name Jefferson. He made a hideous mess in his own day, and yet has a progeny of backwoodsmen and planters who think what he taught a great success.
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Mahan identified in Wilson's Jeffersonian disposition an abstract and theoretical quality—one that might ultimately lead to policies “which can by no means be made to fit present facts.” On Election Day, Mahan cast his vote for Roosevelt, surmising that he was better placed than Taft to stop Wilson in his tracks and to pursue a purposeful yet carefully calibrated policy toward the fast-escalating military tensions in Europe. Mahan believed that much rested on the election of 1912.

 

2

KANT'S BEST HOPE

WOODROW WILSON

Not in universal harmony, nor in fond dreams of unbroken peace, rest now the best hopes of the world … Rather in the competition of interests … in these jarring sounds which betoken that there is no immediate danger of the leading peoples turning their swords into ploughshares—are to be heard the assurance that decay has not touched yet the majestic fabric erected by so many centuries of courageous battling.

—ALFRED THAYER MAHAN

The election of 1912 was one of the most ill-tempered and intellectually charged in American history.
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Republican loyalties had been split by Theodore Roosevelt's bolt for the convention exit, the Democrats had nominated a southern-born Ivy League professor as their candidate, and support for Eugene V. Debs's Socialist Party was approaching a historic high. It was one of those rare years when voters could not complain about lack of choice. To make the campaign even more compelling, the three main candidates attacked each other with ill-concealed rancor. The Republican antagonists, Taft and Roosevelt, clashed in print and on the campaign trail. On foreign affairs, Roosevelt alleged that Taft was blindly focused on securing international cooperation at the expense of America's national sovereignty. In an article for
Outlook
magazine, for example, Roosevelt dismissed the arbitration treaty that Taft had secured with Great Britain as “a sham” that was dangerous to American security. President Taft had failed to put “righteousness first,” in Roosevelt's harsh estimation. This intervention, combined with Henry Cabot Lodge's blocking maneuver in the Senate, killed the treaty before it reached the Oval Office. A furious Taft observed of Roosevelt (with more than a hint of veracity), “The truth is he believes in war and wishes to be a Napoleon and to die on the battlefield. He has the spirit of the old berserkers.”
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Unsurprisingly, relations degenerated further. By May, Roosevelt was describing Taft as a “puzzlewit” and “fathead” while Taft returned fire, describing Roosevelt as a “dangerous egotist” and a “demagogue.”
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Under normal circumstances, a battle royale between a sitting president and a colorful former president would have dominated media accounts of the election and defined its historical significance for generations to come. Yet most seasoned observers recognized that Taft's chances were slim; the election was a two-horse race between Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, with the latter holding a marked advantage due to the split in the Republican vote. Roosevelt was fully aware of Wilson's strengths, and his own underdog status, dismissing “Professor Wilson's” impractical “academic theories” with revealing contempt.
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To be verbally assaulted by the former president was a mark of recognition, if not necessarily respect, and Roosevelt conceded privately that Wilson was likely to win a plurality in the electoral college. The election was Wilson's to lose, although he refused to get carried away. In a letter to his friend and confidante Mary Peck, Wilson cautioned her not to be “too confident of the result. I feel that Roosevelt's strength is altogether incalculable … He appeals to … [people's] imaginations; I do not. He is a real, vivid person whom they have seen and shouted themselves hoarse over and voted for, millions strong; I am a vague, conjectural personality made up more of opinions and academic prepossessions than of human traits and red corpuscles. We shall see what will happen!”
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That Wilson refers here to “red corpuscles” rather than “red blood cells” illustrates his intellectualism rather well. But he wasn't wholly “conjectural,” having been battle hardened in the bruising world of New Jersey politics. Wilson could certainly hold his own in a war of words, summoning the animus to describe Roosevelt as “a very, very erratic comet on the horizon.”
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This election was also the first in which primaries played a decisive part, enlivening the contest and necessitating a much closer connection between the politicians and the citizens they sought to persuade. Primaries usually rewarded the best communicators and helped Wilson, who had honed his oratory as president of Princeton University and governor of New Jersey, to secure the Democratic nomination. His appeal to Democrats and the country at large was based on multiple strengths. Leading one of America's most prestigious colleges had allowed Wilson to establish a national reputation, for those were the days when a professorship launched rather than bookended a political career. A minor snag relating to Wilson's academic background did occur when the Boot and Shoe Workers' Union refused to endorse him because he was, in their damning assessment, an “intellectual.”
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But Wilson's chosen profession was not a critical disadvantage. Like Thomas Jefferson before him, Wilson spoke strongly in favor of the superior wisdom of the common man, as this campaign address illustrates:

What I fear is a government of experts. God forbid that in a democratic country we should resign the task and give the government over to experts. What are we for if we are to be scientifically taken care of by a small number of gentlemen who are the only men who understand the job? Because if we don't understand the job, then we are not a free people … I want to say I have never heard more penetrating debate of public questions than I have sometimes been privileged to hear in clubs of workingmen; because the man who is down against the daily problem of life doesn't talk about it in rhetoric; he talks about it in facts. And the only thing I am interested in is facts.
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Wilson's strengths went well beyond his erudition and ability to wear it lightly. Like Alfred Mahan, Wilson was a southerner in upbringing, but not southern enough to allow Republicans to attack him as a potential catalyst for disunity. Wilson had made his unionism clear as a twenty-three-year-old at the University of Virginia, when he had declared, “because I love the South I rejoice in the failure of the Confederacy.”
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Wilson was also a political Progressive—indeed, Roosevelt pushed him farther to the “left”—which allowed him to woo floating voters who admired Roosevelt's domestic proposals but found his foreign-policy bellicosity off-putting: a significant demographic. Indeed, there was little to substantively distinguish the Progressivism of Wilson's New Freedom from Roosevelt's New Nationalism—TR once gleefully observed to a group of friends: “Wilson is merely a less virile me.”
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Taft and Debs were the more conventional right-left candidates in 1912. Looking to end the run of three William Jennings Bryan–led defeats, Democratic Party strategists had identified the eloquent and authoritative Wilson as a potential winner, even against a political giant such as Roosevelt. It was a remarkable contest between two towering figures in American history whose varied gifts brought to mind the dramatis personae who dominated the first half century of the republic. As a recent Wilson biographer has observed, the 1912 election “pitted the most colorful presidential politician since Andrew Jackson against the most articulate presidential politician since Thomas Jefferson.”
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Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born on December 28, 1856, in Staunton, Virginia, where his father, Joseph, was the town's Presbyterian minister. He was literally a child of the manse. Wilson was a plump and preternaturally quiet infant, and his father joked “that baby is dignified enough to be Moderator of the General Assembly.”
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Growing up in the South during the Civil War, Wilson was affected directly and viscerally by the conflict. Wilson's father's church served as a Confederate hospital for a time, where the inflow of bloodied and mutilated soldiers would have been deeply disturbing for any child, while the graveyard doubled as a holding area for Union prisoners. In May 1865, a nine-year-old Wilson looked on as the captured Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, was paraded through Augusta, Georgia (where the Wilsons had moved subsequently), in chains. Davis's humbling was a harrowing sight for Confederates to behold.

The South had been crushed by force of Union arms, facilitated by the vast superiority of the northern economy, and its humiliation only worsened throughout Reconstruction. But while many well-to-do southerners suffered significant losses in wealth and status during and after the Civil War, the Wilsons, secure within the warproof Presbyterian Church, were largely unaffected. Woodrow—or Tommy, as friends and family knew him—had a stable childhood. In familial circumstances, Wilson shared a great deal in common with Alfred Mahan. But whereas the philosopher of sea power had served in the Civil War on the Union side, convinced of the necessity of waging righteous war, Wilson drew a different lesson. It is to his traumatic Civil War childhood that some scholars attribute Wilson's aversion to armed conflict and his sincere attempts as president to avoid it except as a very last resort.
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Tommy stood out at school for the wrong reasons. He did not learn to read with any facility until he was eleven years old, a cognitive delay that twentieth-century pediatricians would have diagnosed as dyslexia. Lacking awareness of such extenuating circumstances, Wilson's teachers, grandfather, and uncle, if not his admirably defensive parents, simply dismissed young Tommy as not too sharp. The method Wilson used to conquer his affliction was remarkable, constituting a model in self-possession and drive. With close tutelage from his father, he immersed himself in repetitive rote learning. He reread books to master them, rather than dipping widely into a range of literature, reciting long passages aloud from memory. This dull, exacting work gave Wilson a narrow knowledge base, but it was vital in the development of his written and spoken English.

Since writing longhand posed problems, Tommy learned shorthand by the time he was sixteen. He also bought a typewriter as soon as they were available. The key factor that allowed Wilson to realize his potential, however, was his doting parents and their boundless encouragement. In a family less devoted to words, and the word of God in particular, Wilson might have withered on the vine scholastically. But his father's intellect and rhetorical facility were inspirational, and his confidence in his son was unwavering. He devoted all his spare time to tutoring Tommy and instilled in him a strong work ethic and appreciation for fluent, compelling rhetoric. Wilson's teenage years were more formative than most, and his drive was more firmly entrenched than it was in his peers. At sixteen, Wilson enrolled at Davidson College in North Carolina, where he discovered a passion for history, improved his writing skills, and identified heroic historical figures to consciously emulate—orators all, such as Cicero, Edmund Burke, the British free-trade advocates Richard Cobden and John Bright, and William Gladstone (a portrait of whom hung on his dormitory wall). Nonetheless, Wilson found Davidson's narrow curriculum unchallenging; he expended most of his energies on the debating society and left before his freshman year was out. In 1875, Wilson enrolled at the College of New Jersey, the institution now known as Princeton University.