SOMETHING NEW IN POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS
Woodrow Wilson opened his gubernatorial campaign with a speech in Jersey
City, my home town. It was a distinct disappointment to those who attended
the meeting. His speech in accepting the nomination had touched us deeply
and had aroused in us great expectations, but after the Jersey City speech
we were depressed in spirit, for it seemed to us that he was evading the
real issues of the campaign. I was most anxious to meet the candidate and
give him, if he invited it, my impressions of this speech. A dinner given
to complete the ceremonies attendant upon the purchase of the Caldwell
residence of Grover Cleveland gave me the first opportunity to meet the
president of Princeton in an intimate way. Mr. Wilson's first wife, a most
delightful woman, made the introduction possible. As I fondly look back
upon this meeting, I vividly recall my impressions of the man who had just
been nominated for the governorship of the state in a convention in which
I had bitterly opposed him.
The democratic bearing of the man, his warmth of manner, charm, and kindly
bearing were the first things that attracted me to him. There was no
coldness or austerity about him, nor was he what the politicians would
call "high-browish." He impressed me as a plain, unaffected, affable
gentleman, who was most anxious to receive advice and suggestion from any
quarter. He made us doubly welcome by saying that he had heard a great
deal of favourable comment about the work of Judge Sullivan and myself in
the Legislature. This made us feel perfectly at home, and this frank
manner of dealing with us opened the way for the suggestions we desired to
make to him as to the attitude we younger Democrats thought he should
assume on what we believed were the vital, progressive issues of the
campaign.
When he was informed that I was present at his first meeting a few nights
before in Jersey City, he came over to me and in a most friendly way said:
"What did you really think of my speech?" For a moment I was embarrassed,
and yet the frankness of the man was compelling and so I said: "Doctor, do
you really desire an honest opinion of that speech? I really want to serve
you but I can do so only by speaking frankly." He replied: "That is what I
most desire." "Well," I said, "your speech was most disappointing." I
stopped suddenly, feeling that I had done enough damage to the Professor's
feelings. But he urged: "Please tell me what your criticism is. What I
most need is honesty and frankness. You cannot hurt my feelings by
truthfully expressing your opinion. Don't forget that I am an amateur at
this game and need advice and guidance." Encouraged by this suggestion, I
proceeded to tell him what I considered the principal defects of his
opening speech at Jersey City. I told him that there was a lack of
definiteness in it which gave rise to the impression that he was trying to
evade a discussion of the moral issues of the campaign, among them, of
major importance, being the regulation of Public Utilities and the passage
of an Employers' Liability Act. Briefly sketching for him our legislative
situation, I gave him the facts with reference to those large measures of
public interest; how, for many years, in face of constant agitation, the
Old Guard had prevented the enactment of these measures into law, and how,
therefore, his failure to discuss these matters in his first speech had
caused a grave feeling of unrest in the progressive ranks of both parties
in New Jersey.
[Illustration:
The White House
Washington
Cornish, N. H.,
July 3, 1915
My dear Tumulty:
I am heartily obliged to you for your telegrams. It is characteristic
of you to keep my mind free by such messages. I am really having a
most refreshing and rewarding time and am very thankful to get it. I
hope that you are not having depressing weather in Washington and that
you are finding it possible to make satisfactory arrangements for the
family, so that we can have the pleasure of having you with us at the
White House when I get back.
With warmest messages from us all,
Affectionately yours,
(signed)
Woodrow Wilson
Hon. Joseph P. Tumulty
Washington, D.C.
This letter reveals the warm personal relations between the President and
his secretary.]
He listened with keen attention and then modestly remarked: "I value very
highly this tip and you may rest assured I shall cover these matters in my
next speech. I meant that speech to be general."
In my ignorance of things past I did not know that the candidate had
himself written the platform adopted by the Trenton Convention, and in my
ignorance of the future I did not then know that one of the boldest and
most remarkable political campaigns in America was to be conducted on that
platform, and that after the election and inauguration of the nominee the
chief business of the legislation was destined to be the enactment into
law of each of the planks of the platform, a complete and itemized
fulfilment of preëlection promises, unusual in the history of American
politics. At the time of my first conversation with the nominee I only
knew that the Convention had been dominated by the reactionary elements in
the party, that under this domination it had stolen the thunder of the
progressive elements of the party and of the New Idea Republicans, and
that the platform had been practically ignored by the candidate in his
first campaign speech. In these circumstances, and smarting as I was under
the recollection of recent defeat, it is not strange that I thought I
detected the old political ruse of dressing the wolf in sheep's clothing,
of using handsome pledges as a mask to deceive the gullible, and that I
assumed that this scholarly amateur in politics was being used for their
own purposes by masters and veterans in the old game of thimblerig.
The candidate soon struck his gait and astonished me and all New Jersey
with the vigour, frankness, and lucidity of his speeches of exposition and
appeal. No campaign in years in New Jersey had roused such universal
interest. There was no mistaking the character and enthusiasm of the
greeting the candidate received every place he spoke, nor the response his
thrilling speeches evoked all over the state. Those who had gathered the
idea that the head of the great university would appear pedantic and stand
stiff-necked upon an academic pedestal from which he would talk over the
heads of the common people were forced, by the fighting, aggressive
attitude of the Doctor, to revise their old estimates. The campaign had
only begun when the leading newspapers of the country, particularly the
large dailies of New York, were taking an interest in the New Jersey
fight.
Those of us who doubted Woodrow Wilson's sincerity and his sympathy for
the great progressive measures for which we had been fighting in the New
Jersey Legislature were soon put at ease by the developments of his
campaign and his sympathetic attitude toward the things we had so much at
heart.
No candidate for governor in New Jersey had ever made so striking and
moving an appeal. Forgetting and ignoring the old slogans and shibboleths,
he appealed to the hearts and consciences of the people of the state. His
homely illustrations evoked expressions of delight, until it seemed as if
this newcomer in the politics of our state had a better knowledge of the
psychology of the ordinary crowd than the old stagers who had spent their
lives in politics. His illustrations always went home.
For instance, speaking of progress, Doctor Wilson said that much depended
upon the action of the one who is supposed to be progressive. "I can
recall," he would say in trying to make his point, "the picture of a poor
devil of a donkey on a treadmill. He keeps on tramping, tramping,
tramping, but he never gets anywhere. But," he continued, "there is a
certain elephant that's tramping, too, and how much progress is it
making?" And then, again, he would grow solemn when he spoke of the
average man. Turning aside from the humorous, he would strike a serious
note like this one:
You know that communities are not distinguished by exceptional men.
They are distinguished by the average of their citizenship. I often
think of the poor man when he goes to vote: a moral unit in his lonely
dignity.
The deepest conviction and passion of my heart is that the common
people, by which I mean all of us, are to be absolutely trusted. The
peculiarity of some representatives, particularly those of the
Republican party, is that when they talk about the people, they
obviously do not include themselves. Now if, when you think of the
people, you are not thinking about yourself, then you do not belong in
America.
When I look back at the processes of history, when I look back at the
genesis of America, I see this written over every page, that the
nations are renewed from the bottom, not from the top; that the genius
which springs up from the ranks of unknown men is the genius which
renews the youth and the energy of the people; and in every age of the
world, where you stop the courses of the blood from the roots, you
injure the great, useful structure to the extent that atrophy, death,
and decay are sure to ensue. This is the reason that an hereditary
monarchy does not work; that is the reason that an hereditary
aristocracy does not work; that is the reason that everything of that
sort is full of corruption and ready to decay.
So I say that our challenge of to-day is to include in the partnership
all those great bodies of unnamed men who are going to produce our
future leaders and renew the future energies of America. And as I
confess that, as I confess my belief in the common man, I know what I
am saying. The man who is swimming against the stream knows the
strength of it. The man who is in the mêlée knows what blows are being
struck and what blood is being drawn. The man who is on the make is a
judge of what is happening in America, not the man who has made; not
the man who has emerged from the flood, not the man who is standing on
the bank, looking on, but the man who is struggling for his life and
for the lives of those who are dearer to him than himself. That is the
man whose judgment will tell you what is going on in America, and that
is the man by whose judgment I for one wish to be guided--so that as
the tasks multiply and the days come when all will seem confusion and
dismay, we may lift up our eyes to the hills out of these dark valleys
where the crags of special privilege overshadow and darken our path,
to where the sun gleams through the great passage in the broken
cliffs, the sun of God, the sun meant to regenerate men, the sun meant
to liberate them from their passion and despair and to lift us to
those uplands which are the promised land of every man who desires
liberty and achievement.
Speaking for the necessity of corporate reform in business, he said:
I am not objecting to the size of these corporations. Nothing is big
enough to scare me. What I am objecting to is that the Government
should give them exceptional advantages, which enables them to succeed
and does not put them on the same footing as other people. I think
those great touring cars, for example, which are labelled "Seeing New
York," are too big for the streets. You have almost to walk around the
block to get away from them, and size has a great deal to do with the
trouble if you are trying to get out of the way. But I have no
objection on that account to the ordinary automobile properly handled
by a man of conscience who is also a gentleman. I have no objection to
the size, power, and beauty of an automobile. I am interested,
however, in the size and conscience of the men who handle them, and
what I object to is that some corporation men are taking "joy-rides"
in their corporations.
Time and time again men were reminded of the great speeches of Lincoln and
thought they saw his fine spirit breathing through sentences like these:
Gentlemen, we are not working for to-day, we are not working for our
own interest, we are all going to pass away. But think of what is
involved. Here are the tradition, and the fame, and the prosperity,
and the purity, and the peace of a great nation involved. For the time
being we are that nation, but the generations that are behind us are
pointing us forward to the path and saying:
"Remember the great traditions of the American people," and all those
unborn children that will constitute the generations that are ahead
will look back to us, either at those who serve them or at those who
betray them. Will any man in such circumstances think it worthy to
stand and not try to do what is possible in so great a cause, to save
a country, to purify a polity, to set up vast reforms which will
increase the happiness of mankind? God forbid that I should either be
daunted or turned away from a great task like this.
Speaking of the candidate who opposed him:
I have been informed that he has the best of me in looks. Now, it is
not always the useful horse that is most beautiful. If I had a big
load to be drawn some distance I should select one of those big,
shaggy kinds of horses, not much for beauty but strong of pull.
On one occasion, when he had been talking about his and Mr. Lewis's
different conceptions of the "constitutional governor", and telling his
audience how he, if elected, would interpret the election as a mandate
from the people to assist in and direct legislation in the interests of
the people of New Jersey at large, he paused an instant and then in those
incisive tones and with that compression of the lips which marked his more
bellicose words, he said curtly: "If you don't want that kind of a
governor, don't elect me."
Excerpts from the speeches cannot do justice to this remarkable campaign,
which Woodrow Wilson himself, after he had been twice elected President of
the United States, considered the most satisfying of his political
campaigns, because the most systematic and basic. As Presidential
candidate he had to cover a wide territory and touch only the high spots
in the national issues, but in his gubernatorial campaign he spoke in
every county of the state and in some counties several times, and his
speeches grew out of each other and were connected with each other in a
way that made them a popular treatise on self-government. He used no
technical jargon and none of the stereotyped bombast of the usual
political campaign. He had a theme which he wanted to expound to the
people of New Jersey, which theme was the nature and character of free
government, how it had been lost in New Jersey through the complicated
involvements of invisible government, manipulated from behind the scenes
by adroit representatives of the corporate interest working in conjunction
with the old political machines; how under this clever manipulation
legislators had ceased to represent the electorate and were, as he called
them, only "errand boys" to do the bidding of the real rulers of New
Jersey, many of whom were not even residents of the state, and how free
government could be restored to New Jersey through responsible leadership.
He was making an application to practical politics of the fundamental
principles of responsible government which he had analyzed in his earlier
writings, including the book on "Congressional Government." Beneath the
concrete campaign issues in New Jersey he saw the fundamental principles
of Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence
and the Constitution of the United States. His trained habit of thinking
through concrete facts to basic principles was serving him well in this
campaign; his trained habit of clear exposition in the Princeton lecture
hall was serving him well. People heard from him political speaking of a
new kind; full of weighty instruction and yet so simply phrased and so
aptly illustrated that the simplest minded could follow the train of
reasoning; profound in political philosophy and yet at every step
humanized by one who believed government the most human of things because
concerned with the happiness and welfare of individuals; sometimes he
spoke in parables, homely anecdotes so applied that all could understand;
sometimes he was caustic when he commented on the excessive zeal of
corporations for strict constitutionalism, meaning thereby only such
legislation and judicial interpretations as would defend their property
rights--how they had secured those rights being a question not discussed
by these gentlemen; sometimes, though not frequently, there would be
purple patches of eloquence, particularly when descanting on the long
struggle of the inarticulate masses for political representation.
One of the surprises of the campaign to those who had known him as an
orator of classic eloquence was the comparative infrequency of rhetorical
periods. It was as if he were now too deeply engaged with actualities to
chisel and polish his sentences. Of the many anecdotes which he told
during the campaign one of his favourites was of the Irishman digging a
cellar, who when asked what he was doing said: "I'm letting the darkness
out." Woodrow Wilson told the people of New Jersey that he was "letting
the darkness out" of the New Jersey political situation. "Pitiless
publicity" was one of his many phrases coined in the campaign which
quickly found currency, not only in New Jersey but throughout the country,
for presently the United States at large began to realize that what was
going on in New Jersey was symbolical of the situation throughout the
country, a tremendous struggle to restore popular government to the
people. Since the founders of the Republic expounded free institutions to
the first electorates of this country there had probably been no political
campaign which went so directly to the roots of free representative
government and how to get it as that campaign which Woodrow Wilson
conducted in New Jersey in the autumn of 1910.