American Experiment (219 page)

During the progressive era, Americans underwent one of the longest and most expansive periods of prosperity in their history, interrupted only by short recessions in 1903 and 1907. Gold flowed into the capital markets from Alaska, South Africa, and the Rockies; immigrants flowed in from Europe, sometimes more than a million in a year. A steady rise in wholesale prices between 1897 and 1914 helped fuel heavy industrial growth and agricultural output. The prophets of capitalism were exultant. Yet during the same years the currents of progressive thought and action ran strong, perhaps because the fulfillment of some people’s basic needs—especially those of the burgeoning middle class—aroused “higher” needs of self-esteem, including the sense of moral self-fulfillment involved in “doing good.”

To American Marxists, applying the Master’s teachings in their own way and for their own purposes, the mighty economic and social forces rolling in America were predictable and inescapable. Evolving technology—the new inventions, mass production, industrial integration—inevitably forced wider and deeper economic combination. Corporate capitalism, crushing the workers in its industrial and financial grinders, was producing an unintended product—socialism. As the capitalists triggered imperialist wars in their global struggles for markets, as they aroused proletarian consciousness in workers in all lands, they would incubate a militant worldwide proletariat poised for revolution. At last, workers of the world would unite.

Everything depended on the crucial nexus between workers’ blighted needs and hopes and their rising revolutionary consciousness. And here something seemed to be going wrong in the New World. American capitalism had burgeoned and exploited, the proletariat had swollen and suffered—but then something had cut into the logical flow from economic misery to class consciousness to proletarian militancy. American workers seemed conscious enough of their low wages and long hours and atrocious working and living conditions, but they seemed conscious of much more—of their religious feelings, their ethnic affiliations, their roots in the old national rivalries of Europe, their special little statuses in factory and office, their faith in individualism, their hopes for improving their lot.

Something clearly had gone wrong with the socialist scenario, something had gone askew in the world of ideas. Eugene Debs had gained almost a million votes in 1912, but many more millions of workers had voted for the old party of Wilson or the new party of Roosevelt. Progressive Republicans had found a new political vehicle that would continue under TR; progressive Democrats could hope for a liberalized party under this new man from academe. Only the Old Guard Republicans under Taft seemed to follow the scenario of the left—and even Taft had busted trusts and backed the income tax.

A new leader had arisen to champion democracy and challenge corporate power. His was a fresh face on the national scene, a rather stern, composed face, bespeaking a man utterly committed to the task ahead and remarkably clear as to how to undertake it. Everything seemed to conspire to Woodrow Wilson’s advantage as his inauguration neared early in 1913. He appeared to hold a firm mandate from the electorate, after an election campaign that had posed central issues of trusts and monopoly as sharply as any party battle in memory. He led a party that after decades of Bryanite division had squarely confronted the issue of concentrated economic power in a democracy. He presided over a citizenry eager for action.

Wilson was ready. He had lived his life for this moment. He had studied and preached the vocation of leadership. “This vast and miscellaneous democracy of ours must be led,” he had said; “its giant faculties must be schooled and directed. Leadership cannot belong to the multitude; masses of men cannot be self-directed, neither can groups of communities.” He would lead. But he stuck to his old belief that great leaders must truly engage with their followers. The nation could not move forward, he said a few weeks before taking office, “by anything except concert of purpose and of judgment. You cannot whip a nation into line. You cannot drive your leaders before you.” He would concert his party, his government, his people.

Woodrow Wilson looked down at the 50,000 persons massed in front of the Inaugural stand. It was March 4, 1913, a cold day but sunny. Shortly before, he had descended the east Capitol steps with William Howard Taft, followed by Vice-President Thomas Marshall and members of the new Cabinet. He had taken the oath of office before Chief Justice Edward D. White, and had kissed the Bible, his lips touching the 119th Psalm: “And I will walk at liberty: for I seek thy precepts…. And I will delight myself
in thy commandments, which I have loved.” Turning to the crowd, he had observed a large cleared area just in front of the stand. “Let the people come forward,” he had commanded, and they did.

“There has been a change of government,” Wilson began abruptly. “It began two years ago, when the House of Representatives became Democratic by a decisive majority.” The Senate also would be Democratic. “What does the change mean?

“It means much more than the mere success of a party. The success of a party means little except when the nation is using that party for a large and definite purpose. No one can mistake the purpose for which the nation now seeks to use the Democratic party. It seeks to use it to interpret a change in its own plans and point of view….

“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 broken, 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 groans and agony of it all had not yet reached our ears, the solemn, moving undertone of our life, coming up out of the mines and factories and out of every home where the struggle had its intimate and familiar seat….

“There has been something crude and heartless and unfeeling in our haste to succeed and be great. Our thought has been ‘Let every man look out for himself, let every generation look out for itself,’ while we reared giant machinery which made it impossible that any but those who stood at the levers of control should have a chance to look out for themselves…. There can be no equality or opportunity, the first essential of justice in the body politic, if men and women and children be not shielded in their lives, their very vitality, from the consequences of great industrial and social processes which they can not alter, control, or singly cope with….

“The nation has been deeply stirred, stirred by a solemn passion, stirred by the knowledge of wrong, of ideals lost, of government too often debauched and made an instrument of evil….

“This is not a day of triumph; it is a day of dedication. Here muster, not the forces of party, but the forces of humanity. Men’s hearts wait upon us; men’s lives hang in the balance; men’s hopes call upon us to say what we will do. Who shall live up to the great trust? Who dares fail to try? I summon all honest men, all patriotic, all forward-looking men, to my side. God helping me, I will not fail them, if they will but counsel and sustain me!”

There began, during the next few days, a government that would become a textbook example of presidential leadership of party and Congress. Building both on his theory of governing and his practical experience in New Jersey, Wilson appeared in person before Congress to propose measures; conferred often with party and committee leaders in the White House and on the Hill; exploited the caucus to unify the congressional party behind his program; threatened to wield the veto power against obnoxious bills; mobilized the influence of Bryan and other party leaders against wavering Democrats. The President, he had said a few weeks before his inauguration, must act and serve as “prime minister,” directing and uniting party, legislative, and executive leadership. And that was how he governed.

Wilson was not one to ignore the role of President as moral leader, however, especially when a swarm of Washington lobbyists opposing tariff revision gave him the perfect opportunity. A “brick couldn’t be thrown without hitting one of them,” he told the press at his semiweekly press conference. Then he made a public statement: “I think that the public ought to know the extraordinary exertions being made by the lobby in Washington” on the tariff bill. “Washington has seldom seen so numerous, so industrious, or so insidious a lobby. The newspapers are being filled with paid advertisements calculated to mislead the judgment of public men not only, but also the public opinion of the country itself.…” The public at large had no lobby, he added.

Above all, Wilson demonstrated a remarkable flair for executive leadership. He chose able subordinates for his Cabinet: the now-veteran Bryan for Secretary of State; William Gibbs McAdoo, a Southerner turned Northerner like Wilson, and a master of the politics of economics, for the Treasury; Josephus Daniels, editor of the Raleigh
News and Observer,
for Navy; Lindley M. Garrison, a New Jersey attorney, for War. “I’ve got to have men in the cabinet who have passed the acid test of honesty,” he told his confidant, Colonel House. “Men who are brave. Men who are efficient. Men who have imagination.” There was a limit to Wilson’s own courage, however. Louis Brandeis of Boston fit all those criteria, and the President wanted him at his side as Attorney General. But Brandeis had fought the railroad interests of the Northeast, which, with the help of influential Wall Streeters, the conservative Massachusetts bar, and such bluebloods as President A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard and Henry L. Higginson, warned Wilson off. House also opposed him. And when Wilson leaned instead toward picking Brandeis for Secretary of Commerce and Labor—then still one department—the united Democracy of Massachusetts, including Mayor John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald of Boston, and a number of other
Irish Democrats, dissuaded the President. The rejection of Brandeis, said La Follette, “breaks all our hearts.”

It was as commander of his party that Wilson proposed to exert central leadership, and this was an imposing task. Most of the important Senate committees, and fifteen of the seventeen key House committees, were chaired by Southerners, who also in sheer numbers dominated both houses and both Democratic caucuses. It was not surprising that Wilson chose half his Cabinet from the South, and it helped that Colonel House was a Texan. During Wilson’s early presidency, he “established a degree of personal control over his party rare in American presidential history,” in John Broesamle’s estimate. He took such a firm grip of the congressional party that he organized the whole legislative package. “He personally delivered messages to both houses, employed careful timing and constant pressure, haunted the president’s room in the Capitol, working continuously with members and advisers, wielded the patronage and the influence of powerful figures like Bryan, threatened vetoes, and, when the time came and other resources had failed, appealed to the public over the heads of Congress.” The man who thirty years before had warned of disintegrated rule in
Congressional Government
now enjoyed the heady experience of uniting it.

Policy was the payoff. Even before he entered office, Wilson was helping to marshal the forces of the Democracy for a counterattack on the high-tariff legislation of the Grand Old Party. In his personal appearance before Congress—the first by any President since Jefferson—Wilson declared, “We must abolish everything that bears even the semblance of privilege or of any kind of artificial advantage, and put our business men and producers under the stimulation of a constant necessity to be efficient, economical, and enterprising, masters of competitive supremacy, better workers and merchants than any in the world.” Andrew Carnegie himself could not have said it better. The House enacted a moderate downward revision by a two-to-one vote early in May; the big test would come in the Senate, long the burying ground of tariff reduction. There the western sheep farming and beet sugar interests were overrepresented, and it took all Wilson’s leadership skills to persuade western Democrats in the Senate to accept his argument that sheep raisers and sugar growers could compete with foreign imports. Major tariff revision downward emerged from Congress by September—along with a hotly debated and momentous graduated federal income tax designed to compensate for anticipated revenue losses under the reduced tariff.

“Think of it—a tariff revision downwards after all—not dictated by the mfgs,” wrote Agriculture Secretary David Houston, “lower in the Senate
than in the House! ... A progressive income tax! I did not much think we should live to see these things.”

More challenging even than the tariff was the other key issue that dominated presidential-congressional politics during Wilson’s first year—the nation’s monetary system. Embracing the intertwined problems of currency, banking, the money supply, inflation, and the scope of corporate power over the economy, this issue had roiled the nation’s politics for almost a century and had come to a head during the later progressive years. “It is not like the tariff, about which opinion has been definitely forming long years through,” Wilson remarked in June 1913. “There are almost as many judgments as there are men. To form a single plan and a single intention about it seems at times a task so various and so elusive that it is hard to keep one’s heart from failing.” But forming a single plan and intention is precisely what Wilson accomplished.

The way had been prepared by years of debate and, more recently, by the Pujo committee’s investigation of the “money trust,” by now viewed as a “spider web of interlocking Wall Street directorates,” in Arthur Ekirch’s words. The probe predictably found an intensive concentration of control over the nation’s credit supply by J. P. Morgan & Co. and associated investment firms. Two sharp issues reemerged in the ensuing debate: whether to maintain a centralized or decentralized monetary system, and whether it should be privately or publicly controlled. Unfortunately for Wilson, these sets of issues crosscut each other, producing a ‘ parallelogram of pressure. The old inflationist wing of the Democracy was exemplified particularly by Congressman Carter Glass of Virginia, head of the House Banking Committee, who favored a decentralized and privately controlled system. Populists and progressives, including Bryan, La Follette, and Brandeis, wanted public control.