1913 Page 17
Some of the means for America’s completion as a nation were obvious to any observer in 1913. In January of that year the Parcel Post introduced a nationwide parcel service, allowing a business in Boise, Idaho, to ship direct to a customer in Savannah, Georgia. In October, President Wilson’s finger on a button in Washington launched the explosion of several tons of dynamite breaching the last obstruction in the Panama Canal, and connecting the east and west coasts of the north American continent. Throughout the year, under the motto ‘One Policy – One System – Universal Service’, Bell telephones advertised the nation-building role of their system:
The telephone, by making communication quick and direct, has been a great cementing force. IT has broken down the barriers of distance … The Bell System, with its 7,500,000 telephones connecting the east and the west, the north and the south, makes one great neighbourhood of the whole country. IT brings us together 27,000,000 times a day, and thus develops our common interests, facilitates our common dealings, and promotes the patriotism of our people.4
The first transcontinental phone call did not take place until 1915, but the march of progress – and the spread of railways – brought America closer together, just as it brought the globe closer together.5
This raised a supplementary question. As America completed the work of becoming a nation, what was to be its role in the world? In Philip Dru, Colonel House imagined the United States as a global peacemaker, intervening in Mexico and – through a combination of military strength and attraction – placing the entire North American continent under its wings. But in 1913 the United States was no military superpower, nor did it have the trappings of global diplomatic supremacy. Walter Hines Page, appointed ambassador to London that year, found his embassy in a converted flat entered through a dark and dingy hallway between two cheap stores. Such surroundings hardly proclaimed the twentieth century as American.
Yet perceptive observers understood that as the United States became more powerful economically – and as its population grew, partly through immigration from Europe – it would necessarily be drawn into the affairs of the wider world. As Page wrote to President Wilson: ‘we are in the international game – not in its Old World intrigues and burdens and sorrows and melancholy, but in the inevitable way to leadership and to cheerful mastery in the future; and everybody knows that we are in it but us’.6 The United States could no longer be aloof from the world, secure in its singular uprightness, a distant ‘city upon a hill’. Rather, in the future, America would have to live in the world, examining its moral purpose in the light of the realities of global politics: how to exert power both in the name of principle and in the service of the nation, and what to do when others failed to adopt its chosen determination of their best interests. Would America as a rising power, emerging into its rightful place in the global order, become more and more like the European powers on the other side of the Atlantic? America had been the New World for a long time; would it now become more like the Old?
The United States, like any other powerful country in an age of imperialism, was subject to the temptations of empire. In the Pacific and in the Caribbean an American empire had begun to take shape at Spain’s expense at the end of the nineteenth century, from the Philippines to Puerto Rico. This first flush of imperialism took place under the auspices of two Republican presidents: William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. But this was an American, not a party-political, enterprise. In 1901, the Princeton academic Woodrow Wilson stated America’s imperial duty in plain terms. It lay not in giving the peoples of the Philippines ‘the full-fangled institutions of American self-government’. These things, he argued, ‘are not blessings, but a curse, to undeveloped peoples, still in the childhood of their political growth’. Rather, his country’s responsibility was to give the Philippines a ‘government and rule which shall moralize them by being itself moral, elevate and steady them by being itself pure and steadfast, inducting them into the rudiments of justice and freedom’.7
And if this was a familiar sentiment to a European mind, that is because it was drawn from a wider imperial culture. For many years Wilson carried the poem ‘If’ by Rudyard Kipling, the great poet of the British Empire, neatly tucked inside his jacket pocket.8 Although Americans preferred not to use the word ‘empire’ to describe their overseas possessions, the arguments used to justify continued over-lordship did not differ substantially from those made by right-thinking imperialists in France or Britain. Others saw it differently, worrying that America might gain an empire but lose itself. Mark Twain, America’s most famous essayist and one-time ‘red-hot imperialist’ suggested that the flag of the United States should be adapted for the Philippines, with its white stripes redrawn in black and the stars replaced with skull and crossbones.9
As House published Philip Dru in 1912, four men contested the presidency of this half-formed, half-united United States. William Taft, the sitting President, ran as a Republican. Theodore Roosevelt, his predecessor as President, deserted the Republicans and ran as a Progressive candidate, earning the nickname ‘Bull Moose’ for his characteristically robust response to an assassination attempt while on the campaign trail. Eugene Debs, from Indiana, ran as the socialist candidate. Woodrow Wilson, one-term Democratic Governor of New Jersey, ran as a Democrat. Edward House had already committed to Wilson, helping to swing Texan support behind his candidacy within the Democratic Party. Now he was to see if his man could make it all the way to the White House.
No one doubted that there were only two likely winners, Wilson and Roosevelt, with Wilson clearly favoured by the Republican split. Both offered an image of American renewal. Roosevelt, under the banner of the ‘New Nationalism’, proposed to harness the dynamism of the modern world in the service of the nation. The energies unleashed by the scale and efficiency of modern business would be expertly redirected by a newly powerful state. Wilson, instead, proposed the ‘New Freedom’, a wide-ranging political manifesto proclaiming support of the common man and the taming of the industrial giants – the so-called ‘Trusts’ – which had emerged over the previous half-century. Freedom of competition would be restored to the marketplace, Wilson promised, and hope would be restored to small-town America.
Both candidates agreed on the extent of economic concentration over the last few decades, both in terms of wealth and in terms of the power of the few to influence the country’s economy as a whole. ‘The life of America’, Woodrow Wilson suggested, ‘is not the life that it was twenty years ago’:
We have changed our economic conditions, absolutely, from top to bottom; and, with our economic society, the organization of our life. The old political formulas do not fit the present problems; they read now like documents taken out of a forgotten age.10
The question now, then, was how to adapt to these changed conditions: by a radical centralised overhaul, or by unlocking the traditional forces of competition and initiative which some said the new economy had stymied.
The differences in Roosevelt’s and Wilson’s prescriptions for the future were ultimately as much temperamental as analytical. Roosevelt, with a superabundance of confidence, put faith in his personal ability to remould America from above. Wilson, more temperamentally conservative, inspired by classic English political philosophy, saw Roosevelt as a dangerous showman, destined to become a strongman were he elected. His own vision of society was more organic, one of constant renewal from below, from the striving classes from which he himself sprang. ‘The flower does not bear the root’, he opined on the campaign trail, ‘but the root the flower’.
Roosevelt was a serious challenger, Wilson noted, a ‘real vivid person, whom they [the voters] have seen and shouted themselves hoarse over and voted for millions strong’. Wilson himself was, in the public mind, ‘a vague conjectural personality, more made up of opinions and academic prepossessions than of human traits and red corpuscles’.11 Roosevelt would no doubt have agreed, viewing Wilson as an old-fashioned, pusillanimous conservative, rooted in the past
.
Yet Wilson made his strength felt. He issued a highly partisan campaign film: The Old Way and the New. In speeches across the country, he railed against the closeness of business and government – symbolised by the various import tariffs used to protect special interest industries in the United States – declaring this to be ‘un-American’. He attacked the rise of ‘great, impersonal’ corporations as threatening to stamp out competition and turning individuals into subservient employees. The enterprising middle classes, he warned, were being ‘squeezed out by the processes which we have been taught to call the processes of prosperity’. The spirit of freedom of American communities, in which lay America’s true vitality, was under threat. ‘If America discourages the locality’, he warned, ‘she will kill the nation’. ‘The amount of money in Wall Street’, he pronounced, ‘is no indication of the energy of the American people’.
In all this, Wilson, the son of a Presbyterian minister and himself deeply guided by his Christian faith, purported to see a challenge to the very moral fibre of American society. The impersonal nature of the corporation threatened to turn people away from notions of personal responsibility. This more corporation-driven America might make people forget the America of values forged in small communities:
… when America lay in every hamlet, when America was to be seen in every fair valley, when America displayed her great forces on broad prairies, ran her fine fires of enterprise up over the mountain sides and down into the bowels of the earth, and eager men were everywhere captains of industry, not employees; not looking to a distant city to find out what they might do, but looking about among their neighbors, finding credit according to their character not according to their connections, finding credit in proportion to what was known to be in them and behind them, not in proportion to the securities they held …12
So Wilson turned a set of economic questions into a set of moral questions. He turned himself from the leader by default, favoured by the electoral arithmetic of a split Republican Party, into the insurgent candidate, at the head of a moral movement for change. He aligned himself with progress, but proposed organic change, advising that ‘you cannot take a sheet of paper and determine what your life shall be tomorrow’ but rather ‘you must knit the new into the old’. He responded to the anxieties of an America undergoing deep social change, and provided level-headed reassurance. He reflected America’s mood at the close of 1912, the year of Philip Dru, winning forty of the forty-eight states in that year’s election. By early 1913, Woodrow Wilson was President.
WASHINGTON, DC
Republic, Nation, Empire
Wilson took the oath of office on 4 March 1913. Four years earlier, Taft’s inauguration had been forced inside by a snowstorm. This year, Wilson was able to take the oath outside on the east portico of the US Capitol building, in full view of a crowd of a quarter of a million.
The presidential inauguration was, by now, established as a national occasion, providing a rhythm to the country’s public life and drawing tourists to the nation’s capital. The touring department of the Automobile Club of America provided advice on how to drive from New York to Washington along the pike roads and dirt tracks that connected America’s financial capital to her political capital, taking in Philadelphia but avoiding Baltimore at all costs.1 The New York Times reported, a few days earlier, that the spirit of commercial enterprise was alive and well in Washington. Rooms in the big city hotels could be had for $20, but would have to be taken for a full five days. Those on Pennsylvania Avenue were more expensive, at $50 a night. Offices and private residences along the procession route could be rented out at similarly steep rates. On inauguration day itself, the crowd swarmed with young Princeton undergraduates wearing the orange and black colours of Wilson’s old university. Ex-President Taft, ‘the worst-licked, the least-sore and best-liked of any defeated Presidential candidate we ever saw’, was all smiles as he passed on the office of the presidency to Wilson.2 Though Taft had run third in the election he had, at least, prevented the renegade Roosevelt from returning to the White House by channelling off enough votes for the official Republican candidate.
The city was built to impress. Visitors were to be inspired by the republican virtues of Washington’s classical architecture and civic statuary, by the national coming together represented by the inauguration of a new President – only the second Democrat since the Civil War – and by the imperial magnificence of the city’s layout, with grand vistas in every direction. Arriving by train at Union Station, out-of-towners could feel the granite gaze of Louis Saint-Gaudens’ The Progress of Railroading, six stone figures atop the station’s main entrance which proclaimed both America’s modernity – in the statues of Prometheus representing fire and Thales representing electricity – yet reiterated the ancient values of justice, and reminded an urbanising America of the values of toil in the fields. Next to a proud statue of Ceres, the Roman god of agriculture, were inscribed words of which Thomas Jefferson himself would have approved: ‘The Farm. Best Home of the Family. Main Source of National Wealth. Foundation of Civilized Society. The Natural Providence.’
The British Ambassador, James Bryce, noted that while New York was ‘almost as much foreign as American’, Washington had a higher calling:
… to be the embodiment of the majesty and stateliness of the whole nation; to be … a capital of capitals … representing all that is finest in American conception, all that is largest and most luminous in American thought, embodying the nation’s ideal of what the capital of such a nation should be.3
The inauguration was an opportunity for Washington, not only the chief political city of the United States but the private domain of the federal government, to show off.
Wilson, standing in front of a Capitol decked with American flags, fronted by the Great Seal of the United States in coloured electric lights and topped by spectators peering down from the roof, offered to ‘interpret the occasion’ for the crowds. ‘There has been a change of government’, he intoned. But this was merely the outward sign of a national demand for renewed moral purpose. Government had been debauched for ‘private and selfish purposes’ by lobbyists. The country had become rich, but ‘the evil has come with the good, and much fine gold has been corroded’:
We have been proud of our industrial achievements, but we have not hitherto stopped thoughtfully enough to count the human cost, the cost of lives snuffed out, of energies overtaxed and broke, the fearful physical and spiritual cost to the men and women and children upon whom the dead weight and burden of it all has fallen pitilessly the years through.
The task ahead, therefore, was one of restoration: ‘to cleanse, to reconsider, to restore, to correct the evil without impairing the good, to purify and humanize every process of our common life without weakening or sentimentalizing it’. Wilson enumerated his priorities: tariffs on imported goods were to be removed; a national banking system was to be created that would ease access to credit and remove overweening power from the holders of capital; an industrial system which restricted competition and wasted the nation’s natural resources was to be reformed; the health of the nation’s workers was to be protected by law.
The burden of expectation lay on Wilson’s shoulders. As one breathless editorial put it, his inauguration was more than the passing of the presidential baton from one man to another, it meant that ‘the old days have died and that a new era has come’.4 A German journalist, writing a few months previously, forecast that Wilson would be not only ‘the head of the government, but a leader in American political thought’. In St Petersburg, a Russian paper expressed the expectation that ‘if the sinister party forces will not paralyze the will and initiative of the future president he, maybe, will inaugurate a new era in the United States, an era of real political honesty’.5 Having touted the ‘New Freedom’, Wilson would now have to provide it. There was no word in Wilson’s inauguration speech of international affairs. ‘It would be an irony of fate’, Wilson had commented to Princeton bi
ologist Edward Grant Conklin a few days after his election, ‘if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign problems, for all my preparation has been in domestic matters’.6
The speech reflected Wilson’s understanding of government, and his role in providing it. It was sincere and ambitious. The Economist contrasted Wilson’s cogency to earlier inaugural addresses, which had probably been ‘the work of secretaries, assistant secretaries, and short-hand writers’.7 The new President’s speech was economical in length. It did not match the rhetorical flights of Lincoln or Jefferson. ‘Evidently’, commented one editorialist, ‘the new President understands that the Presidency is not a medal to be worn, a prize to display, but a troublesome undertaking to be approached warily. We suspect he is right’.8 As Washington soon found, Wilson took seriously his role as head of America’s executive branch and as an impartial defender of the public interest. The following month, Congress was recalled to Washington, earlier than either tradition or the constitution dictated. Supporters seeking preferment – a federally appointed position or an ambassadorship somewhere or other – found the doors of the White House barred to them, earning the unreadable, apparently impassive Wilson the moniker ‘the sphinx’. He appeared before a joint session of Congress and, later in the year, delivered a State of the Union address in person, which few of his predecessors had bothered to do.