1913 Read online

  On the evening of 4 March there was no traditional inaugural ball, deemed too frivolous. Instead the President dropped in on a dinner at the Shoreham Hotel, retreating into the presence of those amongst whom he felt most comfortable, the Princeton class of 1879. Later he wrote to one of his former classmates: ‘You may be sure that I only followed the dictates of my heart on Tuesday night and that my visit to the ’79 dinner was the best part of the day for me’.9 Colonel House, author of Philip Dru and now Wilson’s closest political confidant, stayed away from the public ceremonies, though he attended a lunch with the newly minted President and his Cabinet, many of whom House had been instrumental in selecting. He preferred to sit out the inauguration itself in the Metropolitan Club, a few blocks from the White House.

  As night fell, the American nation had a new champion, the federal government had a new leader and Washington a new master.

  Even in 1913, Washington had a reputation to live down. Its introspection was famous. As Henry James put it, ‘Washington talks about herself, and about nothing else’.10 At his first meeting with the ‘gentlemen’ of the press Wilson urged them not to tell the country what Washington was thinking but rather to ‘tell Washington what the country is thinking’:

  … and then we will get things with a move on, we will get them so refreshed, so shot through with airs from every wholesome part of the country, that they cannot go stale, they cannot go rotten, and men will stand up and take notice, and know that they have got to vote according to the purposes of the country, and the needs of the country, and in the interpreted general interests of the country, and in no other way.11

  At a press conference in May, Wilson raised another familiar and related gripe. ‘This town is swarming with lobbyists’, he complained, ‘so you can’t throw bricks in any direction without hitting one – much inclined as you are to throw bricks’.12

  The intensity of lobbying was partly a matter of the import tariff, which Wilson proposed to radically reduce. In the early summer of 1913, as the Underwood Tariff Bill made its way from the House of Representatives to the Senate, lobbyists made the case for the continued necessity of some sort of tariff protection for their particular industry. A centrepiece of Wilson’s ‘New Freedom’ agenda – the wholesale reduction of import tariffs, to be paid for by the introduction of a federal income tax – was threatened with a slow and painful death, only avoided by the President’s personal intervention.

  But the presence of so many lobbyists in the city at all was also a reflection of Washington’s growing importance in the political and economic life of America. In the eighteenth century the city had been chosen as the nation’s capital, rather than Philadelphia or New York, so as to place the federal government beyond the narrow political life of the various states. So it was natural that as the national element in politics grew, so Washington grew in importance. ‘Whether designedly or unconsciously, the American people have become Federalists’, editorialised Alfred Maurice Low, ‘and Washington symbolizes Federalism’.13

  There had been a time, Low remembered, when ‘Washington was shunned by everyone who was not compelled by stern necessity to go there’. In those days, the city was ‘a mud-hole, a slattern among cities, unkempt, sprawling, elbows out of sleeves, unashamed of its patches, and in ignorance glorying in its dirt and general untidiness’. This, he argued, had now changed. Honeymooners were now as likely to go to Washington as to go to Niagara Falls.

  Only a few decades previously the ‘big places’ politically and socially had been the state capitals, characterised by little formality and much hospitality, where everyone would know their elected representative personally. Washington, in contrast, was a distant ‘stony-hearted step-mother’. There, your average State Assemblyman Bill Jones, everyone’s best friend, would become the more austere Congressman William Jones ‘known only to a handful of the voters, and … nothing but a name to the rest’.14

  Now Washington was becoming the big place politically, bringing more formality to politics and making the city both more familiar to most Americans, and more refined. People who, in the past, had gone to Washington on business, now made it their business to live there. The population of the District of Columbia, of which Washington was the major part, more than quadrupled from the Civil War years to 1913: from 75,000 to over 330,000.

  The big, sprawling girl, all legs and arms with awkward feet and hair uncombed, is now a finished woman of the world, proud of her beauty and conscious of her power. Washington, the mud-hole, is now only a memory – memory that no one cares to revive. The mud and slush have gone with the old customs and the old ideas. Broad and well-paved streets; stately tree-lined avenues; public buildings that have not sacrificed use to beauty but, in remembering use, have not forgotten art; hotels and restaurants of the first class, theaters and shops and many fine residences – make Washington one of the most attractive capitals in the world.15

  The confirmation of Washington’s place amongst the great cities of the world – smaller than most European capitals, but elevated to their rank by its political status and urban beauty – was surely to be found in the judgement of Frenchman Baron Paul-Henri d’Estournelles de Constant. Travelling through America, he recalled with pleasure that Washington’s layout had been set out by his compatriot, Pierre-Charles l’Enfant. He noted the central location of a statue of the Marquis de Lafayette – the French General who fought in the American War of Independence with George Washington, after whom he named his only son. He celebrated ‘the creation of a large city, yet giving its streets the charm of a park or a garden … the dream which has made Washington one of the most beautiful cities in the world’. Above all, he rhapsodised on the elegance of Washington’s women, reflecting the beauty and newfound worldliness of the city itself:

  I can see them coming, sure of themselves, certain of their attractions, and satisfied by this certainty … Ah, American women of the world! Elected queens, aristocrats of a democracy, how much money will your husbands, fathers and your country have to earn to continue to dress you! Let us be reassured that a fair bit of this money will be spent in Paris …16

  Constant celebrated the European inspiration behind Washington’s progressive refinement. But he also saw it as a challenge to Washington’s enduring Americanness. When the city was established as capital, Constant wrote, no one could have predicted that the United States would expand so quickly to the point where Washington found itself not in the geographic heartland of the American people, but on its eastern fringe, several thousand miles from its coastline on the Pacific.

  Which way, then, will she [Washington] face? Towards the past, towards the Old World which lies across the ocean, or towards the New World of which she is only nominally the centre? Which of the two worlds will influence the other more? Will the New be infected with the ills of the Old or, on the contrary, will they be resisted?17

  What such observers overlooked – or perhaps consciously ignored – was that, behind the classical façades and porticos, behind the celebrations of republican values of justice, and behind the question of whether European-inspired Washington would Europeanise America or whether imperial Washington would Americanise the world, Washington remained, in its heart, a city of the American South. One in three of the city’s inhabitants was black, and they tended to be the poorest, the least educated and the least healthy of the population. In October 1913 journalist John Palmer Gavit wrote to Oswald Garrison Villard, a white newspaper owner and one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People:

  Washington is essentially a Southern city; the great majority of white people here hold the Southern view of the negro, and as for the Northerners here, it takes but a little while for them to become infinitely more anti-negro than any Southerner.18

  While a number of the black population of Washington were clerks in the federal government, with some hope of advancement as a result, a significant minority of the city’s black population were desperately poo
r. Around one in five, at least 16,000, lived in the unsanitary back alleys of the city, often within sight of the gleaming white dome of the Capitol. These were the ‘neglected neighbors’ written about by social reformers Charles Frederick Weller and Eugenia Winston Weller.19 The inhabitants of the alleys, suggested the Wellers, ‘have no connection whatever with those of the streets and avenues’, the larger tree-lined thoroughfares down which Washington’s wealthier, mostly white denizens – and foreign visitors – could cast their imperial gaze.

  The hidden dwellings are reached by distinct, winding roadways. Resourceful people live for years in attractive residences on the avenues without knowing or affecting in the slightest degree the life of the alley hovels just behind them. Such is the ground plan for some striking social contrasts in the National Capital.20

  Church Alley. Within sight of the Capitol, the promise of the republic remained unkept. Behind its grand exterior, Washington, DC remained a city of the South.

  The names of the alleys gave a sense of them: ‘Slop Bucket Row’, ‘Moonshine’ or, sarcastically, ‘Constitution Alley’. Closer inspection revealed the social conditions to which the alleys gave rise – appalling health, petty crime, illiteracy, unstable families, dependence on alcohol:

  On a soiled and broken lounge, in a little room which was crowded with children and adults, Annie Sammons lay one afternoon, rolling her head about weakly and gasping for breath. Her little baby was feeding fretfully at the consumptive’s wasted breast while Hattie, a child of seven, was playing about the room with seven other youngsters. Altogether there were fifteen people, including six adults, living permanently in the little four-room house, while improper lodgers also were accommodated from time to time. Although Maria Sammons, the mother of the household, is a large fine-looking woman who does not show bad character in her appearance, every one of her five grown daughters has had illegitimate offspring. Mrs Sammons herself has borne sixteen children, of whom five are happily dead. One son is in the insane asylum. The daughter Annie is dying of tuberculosis.21

  All rapidly growing American cities – and European cities – had slums. In most cities populations grouped themselves according to their origins. In Paris, Bretons concentrated themselves around the Gare de Montparnasse, where the trains arrived from Brittany. In Vienna, Jews tended to settle in Leopoldstadt, near to the Nordbahnhof station, and in proximity to a number of synagogues. Nowhere, however, was the physical distinction between slum and non-slum so clear, nor the racial connotations of the slum so obvious, as in Washington. For some, this meant that the alley problem was not really one of poverty, but something else and, as such, it should be accepted – or ignored:

  ‘Why they’re all negroes’, some will say, and conclude either that it does not matter in what condition members of that race may live, or that the evils and problems of alley life are merely the result of the intrinsic characteristics of the colored race … ‘Those high death rates, the large record of arrests, the low standards of life in the hovels and alleys, are simply due to the negro’.22

  Others took a different view. By 1913, the population of the alleys was falling. The Wellers’ book had brought renewed attention to a social crisis that had been festering for decades. In 1912, the Monday Evening Club, an organisation of social reformers, had published an inventory of Washington’s inhabited alleyways, so as to make the average citizen aware of the conditions that prevailed in parts of a city held up by the world as the exemplar of America. Ellen Axson Wilson, the President’s Southern-born wife, made the cause of cleaning up Washington’s slums her principal social endeavour. On her deathbed, in August 1914, she was gratified to learn that the Alley Dwelling Act – a law to renovate the alleys and improve housing – was making an accelerated passage through Congress, the body constitutionally responsible for the nation’s capital city.

  The election of Ellen Axson Wilson’s husband to the White House was greeted by many as a return of the South from political no man’s land. For the first time since 1865, when a bullet lodged in Abraham Lincoln’s head had elevated Andrew Johnson to the presidency, Washington’s new ruler was one of its own. In February 1913, the month before Wilson’s inauguration, Harper’s Weekly ran an article entitled ‘The South in the Saddle’. But the attitudes of Woodrow Wilson on the South – and, inextricably linked to this, on race – were far from obvious. The President was indubitably from the South, but could he be called a Southerner?

  Born in Staunton, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley, Wilson grew up in Augusta, Georgia, in the midst of cotton-growing country. Half the population of the surrounding countryside were slaves and one-third in Augusta itself. Four years old when the Civil War began in 1861, Wilson remembered whispers of the election of Abraham Lincoln and what that meant for the peace of America. His family was split by the war. Two uncles rose to be senior officers in the army of the Union. His father, though born in the northern state of Ohio, became one of the founders of the Presbyterian Church of the Confederate States. His mother was born in England. In an address that Woodrow Wilson gave to the University of South Carolina in 1909 he declared that ‘a boy never gets over his boyhood’ and that in his case this meant ‘the only place in the country, the only place in the world, where nothing has to be explained to me is the South’.23

  All this helped electorally in 1912. In Rome, Georgia – birthplace of Wilson’s wife, Ellen – the editor of the Tribune-Herald declared the Democratic candidate ‘of southern blood, of southern bone and of southern grit’. In an election where Wilson carried forty states overall, it was only in the South that he won more than half the votes cast. In Alabama he took four times as many votes as those cast for his nearest rival. The electors of Mississippi awarded him nine out of every ten of their ballots. Wilson won outside the South as well, but nowhere by such convincing margins.

  Yet Wilson was not quite a true son of the South – at least not in the full meaning and prejudices of his electors. He saw his career play out on the national, not the provincial stage. He was keen to expunge Southernness from both his and his wife’s accents. He studied in the north, at Princeton, though he returned to law school at the University of Virginia. Whilst there, in 1880, he celebrated the ‘failure of the Confederacy’, arguing that ‘the damnable cruelty and folly of reconstruction was to be preferred to helpless independence’ for the South.24 The concord of the nation featured more highly in his political philosophy than the sectional interests of one region. His interpretation of the Civil War was not that the South had fought to defend the right to hold slaves, but that it had fought for the constitutional right to secede, which he thought reasonable but misplaced. As he put it in his chapter in The Cambridge Modern History:

  The South fought for a principle, as the North did: it was this that was to give the war dignity, and supply the tragedy with a double motive. But the principle for which the South fought meant standstill in the midst of change; it was conservative, not creative; it was against drift and destiny … Overwhelming material superiority, it turned out, was with the North; but she had also another and greater advantage: she was to fight for the Union and for the abiding peace, concord and strength of a great nation.25

  On 4 July 1913, fifty thousand veterans from that war gathered on the low fields of rural Pennsylvania, at Gettysburg, site of one of its most crucial battles, fought half a century previously. The overall estimated cost of the event, financed in large part by the state of Pennsylvania, but also by the federal government and the other states, was a million dollars.26 The oldest veteran present, Major Weiss from upstate New York, answered to the age of 112 years; the youngest was 61. The message of the gathering was clear. ‘These old soldiers’, wrote a reporter, ‘who know what real war means (no body of men in the world today has learnt the lesson more thoroughly) are determined, as a final service to their country, to show the world that between North and South no bitterness survives’.27 ‘Blue’ and ‘Gray’, ‘Yankee’ and ‘Johnny Reb’ embraced each o
ther on the field where, fifty years previously, they had tried to kill each other in a hail of gunfire.

  Wilson attended the commemorations. As he admitted to Ellen, he did so more out of a sense of obligation as President than because he felt personally invested in it: ‘Find so long as I am President, I can be nothing else’.28 But he was doubly compelled to attend: by the office he held and his Southern birth. Failure to show up at Gettysburg could be misread as disapproval of the war’s outcome. At the commemorations, Wilson made a speech. He celebrated ‘the vigor, the maturity, the might of the great Nation we love with undivided hearts’. He invoked the need to press the energies of war into the service of domestic peace and the national cause of economic development. Now, he said, ‘the quartermaster’s stores are in the mines and forests and fields, in the shops and factories’.29

  Fifty thousand veterans met at Gettysburg in 1913 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the great Civil War battle. ‘But has it yet squared itself with its own great standards set up at its birth?’ asked President Wilson of the United States.

  What he did not do – not once – was mention the words ‘slave’ or ‘slavery’. He used the word ‘race’ on a single occasion. He alluded to the incomplete fulfilment of America’s promise by asking whether the nation had ‘yet squared itself with its own great standards set up at its birth’. But these standards were general, not specific, applying to all Americans rather than to any particular section of the population. He reiterated the ‘naïve appeal to the moral judgement of mankind to take notice that a government had now at last been established which was to serve men, not masters’.