Decisions Of Destiny

I HE greatest moments in the Iiistory
of the fAmericaa ^Presidency were those
in which courageous decisions, as unpre-
dictable as they were dramatic, brought
about crucial changes in the office, gradu-
ally shaping it into the world's most
powerful political instrument. In this
brilliant volume, Richard L. Tobin gives
us a moving picture of the turbulence and
the passion of the times in which our out-
standing Presidents lived, and describes
in detail the contributions great Presi-
dents have made to our democracy and
the permanent impact they have had on
the American way of life.

Each of our great Presidents was faced
with a special set of circumstances and
conditions that required his immediate,
total and personal response. George
Washington rejected the title of "king" in
favor of more democratic distribution of
federal power than many of his time
desired. Thomas Jefferson bought the
Louisiana Territory almost on his own.
Andrew Jackson gave the American Presi-
dency greater prestige and more power
through his adoption of the "spoils sys-
tem." Abraham Lincoln suspended for a
time one of the most important rights of
free men in order to save the federal
union.

Chester A. Arthur, Grover Cleveland,
and Theodore Roosevelt followed in their
admimstrations the examples of our pio-
neer Presidents the first by successfully
(continued on back flap)

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DECISIONS Of DESTINY

DESTINY

by Richard L. Tobin

CLEVELAND AND NEW YORK

The World Publishing Company

PUBLISHED BY The World Publishing Company

2231 West iwth Street, Cleveland 2, Ohio

PUBLISHED SIMULTANEOUSLY IN CANADA

by Nelson, Foster 6- Scott Ltd.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 61-6643

FIRST EDITION
COPYRIGHT igSl BY RICHARD L. TOBIN.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be
reproduced in any form without written permission from
the publisher, except for brief passages included in a
review appearing in a newspaper or magazine.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. HC26l

ACKNOWLEDGMENT IS HEREBY MADE FOR PERMISSION TO QUOTE
FROM;

White House Profile by Bess Furman. Copyright 1951,
used by special permission of the publishers, The Bobbs-
Merrill Company, Inc.

Seven Ages of Washington by Owen Wister. Copyright 1907
by The Macmillan Company, by permission of The Macmillan
Company.

Woodrow Wilson by Arthur Walworth. Copyright 1958
by Longmans, Green and Co., Inc.

Makers of a New Nation, Vol. 9, The Pageant of America.
Copyright 1928 Yale University Press.

You re the Boss by Edward J. Flynn. Copyright 1947 by
The Viking Press, Inc. and reprinted by their permission.

Harry S. Truman Memoirs, Vol. n. Copyright 1956 Time
Inc.

The Autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt. Copyright 1913
by Charles Scribner's Sons, Centennial Edition. Copyright
1958 by Charles Scribner's Sons.

Grower Cleveland, a Study in Courage by Allan Nevins.
Copyright 1932 by Dodd, Mead and Co.

TO HELEN ROGERS REID,
the best newspaperman 1 know.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS g

i George Washington 14

Rejects a Monarchy

2* Thomas Jefferson 32

Buys Louisiana On His Own

3 Andrew Jackson 52

Invents the Spoils System

4 Abraham Lincoln 80

Suspends Habeas Corpus

5 Chester Arthur 98

Rises to the Occasion

6 Grover Cleveland 124

Dignifies the Presidential Veto

7 Theodore Roosevelt 150

Trust-Busts Changes in the Presidency

8 Woodrow Wilson 180

Ignores the Senate and Loses His Dream

CONTENTS

9 Franklin Roosevelt's 216

Amazing Hundred Days

10 Harry Truman 246

Commits His Country to War

POPULAR AND ELECTORAL VOTES FOR PRESIDENTS 2JI

PRESIDENTS AND VICE-PRESIDENTS OF THE UNITED

STATES 75

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

i SHOULD LIKE to express my special thanks to Lewis G. Vander
Velde, director of tie Michigan Historical Collections, for
his guidance and many helpful suggestions in my preparation
of tils manuscript Professor Vander Velde is, moreover, re-
sponsible for my initial interest in American history, which he
taught superbly at the University of Michigan. I never knew
a finer teacher; and the seed he planted in my youthful brain
became in later life a nightly reading habit which has given
me more pleasure than anything else I know.

Secondly, I should like to thank Peter Levin, my Wilton
neighbor and friend, whose excellent book Seven By Chance
is one of the undiscovered gems of American historical writing.
Mr. Levin's careful scholarship has saved me I cannot calculate
how many hours of drudgery, particularly in research on
Arthur, Cleveland, and T.R.

I also acknowledge with gratitude the following permissions:
Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, for Bess Furman's White House
Profile; Columbia University Press, New York, for a host of
reference favors from The Columbia Encyclopedia; Dodd,
Mead, New York, for Allan Nevins* Grover Cleveland; Double-
day, New York, for Harry Truman's Memoirs; Farrar, Straus
and Cudahy, New York, for Peter Levin's Seven By Chance,
and for other help from the author; Harcourt, Brace, New
York, for Henry Pringle's Theodore Roosevelt; Harper and
Brothers, New York, for Margaret Leech's Reveille in Wash-
ington; Houghton Mifflin, Boston, for Henry Cabot Lodge's

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

George Washington, Arthur Schlesinger Jr/s The Coming of
the New Deal, and William Allen White's Woodrow Wilson;
Alfred A. Knopf, New York, for Adrienne Koch's Jefferson and
Madison; Little, Brown, Boston, for John Morton Blum's
Woodrow Wilson and the Politics of Morality, Frank Freidel's
Franklin Roosevelt, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr/s The Age of
Jackson; Longmans, Green, New York, for Arthur Walworth's
Woodrow Wilson; McGraw-Hill, New York, for Herbert
Hoover s The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson; Macmillan, New
York, for Owen Wister's Seven Ages of Washington; Oxford
University Press, New York, for John W. Ward's Andrew Jack-
son: Symbol for an Age; Viking Press, New York, for Edward J.
Flynn's You're the Boss; Yale University Press, New Haven,
for material from Vol. IX in the "Pageant of America" series.
Also Brandt & Brandt, the New York agency, for Raymond
Moley's After Seven Years; Life magazine for Harry Truman's
Memoirs; and Look Magazine for further articles and material
by President Truman; to the Congressional Digest, Washing-
ton, D.C, for material on the Korean War debate in Congress;
and the New York Herald Tribune for permission to reprint
material from its files.

In addition, I should like to acknowledge the great help
rendered by the New York Public Library, the Westport, Con-
necticut, Library, and the Pequot Library of Southport, Con-
necticut, for research material, much of it from contemporary
sources. Further, I should like to thank Grace Horvath for aid
in preparation of the manuscript and Theodore Carlson for
unique material on Chester A. Arthur, given to me along with
much encouragement and aid.

K L. T.
Wilton, Connecticut

Who knows only his own generation
remains always a child.

CICERO

DECISIONS OF DESTINY

George Washington

IN FESTERING camps near the Atlantic seaboard, particularly
at General Washington's headquarters at Newburgh, just
sixty-five miles up the Hudson from New-York, the miserable
Continental Army lay impatient and mutinous that frigid early
spring of 1782, It was morose, hungry, forgotten and unpaid.
Lord Cornwallis had surrendered the autumn before at York-
town in southeast Virginia, and the War of the Revolution
was supposed to have come to an end. Yet, somehow it was
not over.

Valley Forge, five timeless years ago, had been a ghastly
nightmare of bloody frost and starvation, but also of incredible
fortitude and vibrant hope. There had been many difficulties,
almost impossible ones, and men had deserted hourly across
the rolling winter hills of Pennsylvania. But there had also
been sufficient challenge and heroism to keep a ragged corps
of 11,000 patriots together. The Cause was the glue that had
done it, a catalytic agent which gave adhesive power to what
appeared a crazy human mixture. But now that Cause seemed
a thing of the past: the glue was becoming unstuck in idleness
and despairing gossip. Surrender of the British at Yorktown
in October of 1781 had insidiously dissolved the catalyst.

A new and subtle poison had begun to eat into the heart of
the Continental Army. The men wanted desperately to go
home. There seemed no reason to stay any longer particularly
without food or pay, even if at the absurd rate of only four
pennies a day. If the war were over, the men asked, why
14

1

Rejects a Monarchy

shouldn't they go home? Some hadn't seen their families for
half a decade of wandering, starving, bleeding, hurting, and
fighting. Homes of many a ragged Continental were now deso-
late, families in dire want. As never before or after in the
history of our nation, the gaunt and hideous specter of starva-
tion was haunting America that winter.

Were there any more campaigns to bewitch and excite? Was
there any reason to stay in camp? The men in faded buff and
blue had ample time to ask such questions, to share their
complaints, to worry about their deserted and hungry families,
to bemoan the incredible futility of the Continental Congress.
How absurdly disorganized and poverty-stricken appeared the
tiny nation to which they had given birth in an extended agony
of frustrating forced marches, fighting, and bloodshed.

Despite the increasing flood of dissatisfaction and com-
plaint, Washington ordered his soldiers to remain with him.
The incandescent star of Valley Forge, whose name was pro-
nounced in tones reserved for some Messiah, was still a hero
to his men; yet now he began to seem more and more incompe-
tent to them. He was unable, on the one hand, to let them go
home because Britain's King George obstinately refused to
acknowledge the loss of his best colony and Washington feared
new encounters. 1 On the other hand, however, the six-foot

i. Most historians believe that Yorktown need not have ended the
war. That it did is largely because the British ministry following Lord
North's fall was friendly to America.

15

GEORGE WASHINGTON

three-inch hero could not persuade that absurdity, the Con-
tinental Congress, to send sufficient money to take care of Ms
men. So the once great champion stubbornly required that his
men stand ready to fight battles they could not imagine, even
at the cost of the personal luster he had gained the autumn
before with the surrender at Yorktown.

The arrival in New- York, just down river from Washington's
headquarters at Newburgh, of Sir Guy Carleton confirmed the
General's disquiet and forebodings. Washington knew about
Carleton's diplomatic skill and acumen in the handling of the
Canadians. Sir Guy had upset Montgomery and Arnold in their
early expedition against Quebec. And it was Carleton's beguil-
ing peace talk that Washington had had in mind when he
wrote Robert R. Livingston, then Secretary for Foreign Affairs: 2

We want no fresh opiate to increase that stupor into
which we have fallen, but I much fear that the idle, and
delusive offers of Peace with which the Country resounds,
will, if it is not powerfully counteracted, be exceedingly
injurious to us; not (I apprehend) from any disposition of
the people to listen to improper terms, but from a
misconception of what is really meant, and the arts which
are used to make them believe that Independence and
what not, are preferred to them.

Washington could painfully remember Sir Guy's adroit meas-
ures placating the Roman Catholic Church activities which
gave both English-speaking and French-speaking Canadian
settlers sufficient autonomy to save their country for the crown.
If Carleton had succeeded in the north he might (Washington
thought) succeed in Tory New- York, the lone British garrison
of any consequence still holding out against total union with
the revolutionaries. Washington shuddered at what might
have been had Wit and not Stupidity been King, Prime Min-
ister, and General throughout the Colonial War. Almost any
palpable conciliation to the Colonies, like Carleton's to Canada,
might have shattered the revolutionary effort, never whole-

2. John Dos Passes, The Men Who Made the Nation (Garden City,
Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1957), p. 36.

Rejects a Monarchy 17

hearted nor unanimous and always subject to periods of black
doubt.

Sir Guy was in New- York, less than three days' march from
Newburgh, backed by Admiral George Rodney's magnificent
post-Yorktown conquests in the West Indies, where Rodney
had lately captured St. Eustatius and thoroughly whipped the
French fleet under De Grasse. It didn't matter for the moment
that De Grasse's disaster in the Caribbean would inevitably
take pressure off French claims for American aid during the
Revolution and make the peace treaties easier to negotiate.
New-Yorkers would surely read of Admiral Rodney's great
West Indian conquest and toast King George anew. Rumor had
it that settlers in the Green Mountains, eager to rid themselves
of the border fight between New-Hampshire and New- York,
were negotiating secretly with the British. Peace, peace, but
there was no peace!

In the circumstances, no general, least of all a tenacious red-
head from Virginia, could disband his army, theoretically vic-
torious though it was. He could not disband it; also he could
neither feed nor pay it.

A nineteenth-century British book gives us a brisk and dis-
arming account of how difficult things must have been for
Washington prior to the preliminary peace talks the following
November. It also suggests the startling conclusion colonists
and soldiers drew from the apparent anarchy of their time: 3

The years 1782-83 saw discontent become quite prevalent
throughout the (Colonial) Army. The whole Army suffered
from arrearages of pay, and in various ways had long been
exposed to disappointment and irritation from the vacillating
and fluctuating course of policy of the various colonial gov-
ernments upon which they depended, and also from the im-
potency of Congress under the Articles of Confederation.
These discontents naturally produced dissatisfaction with
the civil authorities as then constituted. In meditating upon
their wrongs, some of the officers and soldiers were led to the
conclusion that justice could only be done to them, or the

3. C. W. Upham, Life of George Washington, Vol. II (London, The
National Illustrated Library, 1881), pp. 91-92.

GEORGE WASHINGTON

affairs of the public managed with efficiency and success by
introducing a strong government.

The idea of a Monarchy became a favorite one with per-
sons who entertained these views, especially in the unpaid
Army. They believed that it would be vain to attempt to
preserve the prosperity or establish the power of a nation
without a King, and, as a matter of course, they fixed upon
Washington as the man on whom alone the honor and the
burden of Royalty could be placed.

The Continental Army was not alone in feeling the need to
plant the seed of American monarchy to replace the unwork-
able muddle of an impotent Continental Congress and a
useless constitution. Beyond the garrison bugles of New- York,
King George's royal forces, it is true, exercised little or no for-
mal authority in the Colonies. During 1782 the Southern ports
would be abandoned and the Continental Army become theo-
retically supreme so long as it remained intact. But politically
considered, the Colonies were losing their unity and their peace
and out of this chemistry the reversion to monarchy soon
gained headway. 4

In March, 1781, certain Articles of Confederation had been
adopted, but they were merely a "league of friendship" lacking
police power of enforcement No true national executive ex-
isted, therefore; nor were there national courts in which a man
from Connecticut, for example, could find redress for a
Federal 5 wrong done him by a man from Pennsylvania. Why
should a Pennsylvania jury decide in favor of a stranger from
New England whom they would never see again? Without
Federal law enforced throughout the whole country in Federal
courts under a powerful Federal executive, each colony had
to take care of its own people and ignore the Articles and
Continental Congress. There was no other regional choice.

Common people, whom the Revolution was to have benefited
most, were the first to be disillusioned by the replacement of
the British monarchy with self-government. The Continental

4. Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager, A Short History of the
United States (New York, The Modem Library, 1945), pp. 108-34.

5. The word "Federal" is here used in the post-1787 sense. la the
pre-1787 sense it denoted Confederation relationship.

Rejects a Monarchy 19

Congress consisted of only one house in which each state had
a single vote, regardless of size. Huge Virginia or Massachu-
setts had to swallow legislative equality with tiny Rhode Island
or Delaware. Twenty Bostonians were the equivalent of one
New Hampshire farmer. This wasn't equality, as everyone
knew, but worse still it wasn't even common sense.

The Continental Congress could levy no taxes, punish no
men who broke laws it passed, compel no state to observe its
foreign treaties if it didn't like them, or enlist a single troop.
Worst of all, it couldn't raise sufficient money to pay interest
on a large and insolvent national debt, which daily increased,
nor carry on the simple functions of what toothless government
there was. The American Revolution had given a new people
independence in the family of nations a radically altered
social order in which privilege, wealth, and heredity counted
for less and human equality for more. But the American people
had yet to show they possessed a genuine capacity for self-
government. Their loose league of friendship amounted to no
more than an ocean of frustrations, dissensions, and imperfec-
tions.

Though no group suffered more intensely from this chaotic
babel than the army, disgust with The System was universal.
In every colony at one time or another from 1782-1787 were
introduced resolutions pleading for a change of Federal pro-
cedure and aegis. These resolutions, it is important to note,
did not seek more democratic systems of government. The
most frequent toast of 1782 was, in fact, "Here's to a hoop for
the barrel," and when Washington's officers at Newburgh said
it they meant a Strong Man one who would give less em-
phasis to equality and more insistence on order in government.
They wanted Washington the hoop without whom, many felt,
the barrel of thirteen separate staves would quickly collapse
to be a king and they wanted him to begin the reign of a royal
family.

As the country's situation rapidly deteriorated in early spring,
1782, there was a concerted drive to make Washington King
George of America. On May 13, 1782, news of the birth of a
Dauphin in -France ignited an absolute paroxysm of rejoicing

GEORGE WASHINGTON

in freedom-loving America, celebrations exploding without re-
straint wherever the happy news was told. It seems likely this
was the spark which set off the timing device of as strange a
letter as any American has ever sent a national hero, strange
yet somehow natural in setting, date, and circumstances. To
plumb Washington's thinking about the subject of a monarchy,
a letter was addressed to him May 22 by a distinguished Phila-
delphian, an Army officer of renown and standing, Colonel
Lewis Nicola. 6 The Colonel was a highly respected officer, no
young hothead, an elderly Philadelphian of Huguenot extrac-
tion who had risen to Major in the British army before emigrat-
ing to America. Before the war he had published and edited
the first regular magazine in Philadelphia, become one of the
founders of the American Philosophical Society, and had
written a drill and conduct manual for the use of Colonial
troops. During the war he had become well known as Town
Major of Philadelphia.

In his carefully written proposal Colonel Nicola first summed
up the grievances and discontents of the Army:

The injuries the troops have received in their pecuniary
rights have been and will continue to be too obvious to
require a particular detail, or to have escaped your
Excellencies [sic] notice, tho' your exalted station must have
deprived you of opportunity of information relative to the
severe distress occasioned thereby.

Washington read this well-aimed salvo 7 at "the eternal igno-
rance of top command to problems that beset the lower ranks,"
and he must have gone cold in the stomach since he himself
knew the truth only too well. The General's correspondent
(the ingenuous memorial was written in Colonel Nicola's hand
with covering letter enclosed) next pointed out that the
Continental Congress had taken no effective action to find
money for the arrears owed the Army. Not only was the
Army's paper "not worth a Continental/' but it was for the
most part nonexistent.

6. Dos Passes, op. cit., pp. 37-39.

7. Joseph DiHaway Sawyer, Washington, VoL II (New York, The
Macmillan Company, 1927), pp. 84-94.

Rejects a Monarchy si

This gives us a dismal prospect for the time to come
[Washington read on] and much reason to fear the future
provision promised to officers, and the settling and
satisfying their and their men's just demands will be little
attended to, when our services are no longer wanted, and
that the recompense of all our toils, hardships, expense
of private fortune will be, to those who cannot earn a
livelihood by manual labor, beggary; and that we who
have borne the heat and labor of the day will be forgotten
by such as reap the benefits without suffering any of the
hardships.

Washington's petitioner then stated that officers as well as
men were selling their pay certificates and paper money to
speculators at enormous discounts. To keep body and soul to-
gether, the worn heroes of American liberty were having to
settle for a small part of the value of the paper, "never more
than one-tenth, but often less/' The Army's patience was
running out, wrote Colonel Nicola, and an explosion seemed
imminent. He went on:

I believe it is generally intended not to separate after the
peace until all grievances are redressed, engagements and
promises fulfilled . . . God forbid that we should ever
think of involving that country which we have, under your
conduct and auspices, rescued from oppression, into a new
scene of blood and confusion, but it cannot be expected
we should forego claims on which our future subsistence
and that of our families depend.

Nicola then began a carefully reasoned argument against
democracy as a workable form of government (the word for
democracy was more popularly "republick" in those days).
Said he: "I own that I am not that violent admirer of a repub-
lican form of government that numbers in this country are."
He cited the disasters to the aristocratic municipalities of
Genoa and Venice, and the weakness of the Dutch Republic
as proof that republicanism was flaccid and unworkable, as
that parody on good government, the Continental Congress,
was amply proving.

"Does not the great similarity there [the Dutch Republic's

GEORGE WASHINGTON

failure] between her form of government and ours give us
room to fear our fate will be like hers?" he asked. The truth of
this sally must have made anguished reading for the patriot of
Valley Forge. He knew better than most how impotent were
the Articles of Confederation and the Continental Congress,
and he must have been able at this point to guess what Nicola
was about to suggest: a return to monarchy in limited form
similar to the English style. Nicola rammed home his point:

This war must have shown us all, but to military men in
particular, the weakness of republicks. . . .

The same abilities which have led us, through
difficulties apparently insurmountable by human power,
to victory and glory, these qualities that have merited and
obtained the universal esteem and veneration of an army
would be most likely to conduct and direct us in the
smoother paths of peace. Some people have so connected
the ideas of tyranny and monarchy as to find it very difficult
to separate them; it may therefore be requisite to give the
head of such a constitution as I propose some title
apparently more moderate, but if all things are once
adjusted I believe strong arguments might be produced
for admitting the title of King. 8

Nicola even had a suggestion for solving the Army's terrible
pay problem under the new American monarchy. Congress
would, on the day of the coronation, pay arrears owed to men
and officers, one third in cash, the remainder in public lands
to the West where the Army's families would pioneer a new
state as a military buffer against British and Indians a sort
of frontier police force at the rim of the colonial stockade.

Though Washington had been raised an aristocrat and had
sworn fidelity to the crown as a young colonial officer, his Vir-
ginia upbringing had taught him the necessity for the military
to be subordinate to the civil power. From Douglas Southall
Freeman's biography of Washington, it is clear that the essen-
tial equality of man and man had somehow, somewhere pene-
trated the very core of George Washington's thinking at an
early age. He was an instinctive gentleman in the finest sense

8. Revolutionary Archives, Pequot Library, Southport, Connecticut.

Rejects a Monarchy 23

of that noble word, but he was also an instinctive democrat.
He had too often seen colonial interest sacrificed to British
Toryism to hold any great love for the third George and if he
had ever supported the House of Hanover it was certain that
a man of his character superseded this fealty the hour he took
command of the Continental Army by his oath of allegiance
to the revolution.

A military man, Washington doubtless had the same black
doubts about representative government that the army mind
always harbors. Nevertheless, as the years wore on, he saw
more clearly that The Cause had become indissolubly inter-
twined with the equality of man and he had given his solemn
word to champion in every way "the support of the Glorious
Cause/' When the war was finally at an end and the peace
treaty signed, he planned to ride back to his beloved Mount
Vernon and to remain there forever. And as a final gesture of
love and affection for the cause of independence and liberty
he had served so magnificently., Washington had decided, it is
now known, to lay down his command without any payment
or reward. For such a just man, Colonel Nicola's proposal of
kingship must have been chastening and shocking.

Early Americans were well acquainted with the various pro-
posals to make George Washington a monarch and the subject
was common table talk throughout the trying period between
revolution and constitution. One of the most popular books
of its time was Parson Weems's famous, if imaginative, school-
boy account of the life of George Washington. In it was born
the wholly untrue but delightful story of George Washington
and the cherry tree ("Father, I cannot tell a lie. I did it with
my little hatchet"). Yet, besides complete fabrication, Weems's
precious volume contains much that reflects the age of Wash-
ington, and from its pages, which went through forty editions
after 1800, the thread of the seriousness of the agitation to
create an American monarchy with Washington as King George
the First is markedly evident. 9

9. M. L. Weems, Life of George Washington (Philadelphia, Joseph
Allen, 1800), pp. 131-32. The Rev. Weems was formerly rector of
Mount Vernon Parish, and the book was sold by J. Grigg, No. 9 North
Fourth Street.

GEORGE WASHINGTON

Weems writes that, around the time of Nicola's formal offer
to support or launch a monarchial system with Washington its
king, the man who was "first in war, first in peace and first in
the hearts of his countrymen" became "suddenly alarmed by
the appearance of an evil which threatened to put an end to
all his well-meant labours for ever this was the incipient
dissolution of the federal government!!!" Weems's report
quotes Washington as saying: "We cannot long exist as a
nation, without lodging somewhere a power that may com-
mand the full energies of the nation for defense from all its
enemies, and the supply of all its wants. The people will soon
be tired of such a government. They will sign for a change;
and many of them already begin to talk of Monarchy, without
horror II*

Owen Wister's more authentic Seven Ages of Washington 10
underlines the father's concern for his country as an incipient
dictatorship. Between Yorktown and the signing of the peace,
Wister writes, "to men's angry minds it occurred that there
were not many steps to march between themselves and the
control of government and they talked of their beloved leader
as Dictator. Washington's words (to Nicola) quickly burst
the bubble."

In response to what Dr. Freeman calls "the preposterous
and plundering suggestion" 11 of Colonel Nicola amid the pub-
lic clamor for a monarchy, Washington took immediate action.
He wrote so that no one, then or ever, could misunderstand.
In addition, he took the precaution, for purposes of record, of
asking both Humphrys and Trumbull, his military amanuenses,
to sign an attestation that the copy of his letter they sent off in
reply to Nicola was a true one. If the matter ever came out
(as it was bound to amid much sentiment along these lines)
he wanted to be in the position of being able to counter the
"animadversions" he dreaded. 12

This is his letter to Nicola in full. It begins "Newburg [sic],

10. Owen Wister, The Seven Ages of Washington (New York, The
Macmillan Company, 1907), p. 194.

11. Douglas Soufiall Freeman, George Washington, Vol. V (New
York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1952), p. 416.

12. Dos Passos, op. cit., pp. 38-39.

Rejects a Monarchy 25

22 May, 1782," two months after the new British cabinet had
recognized American independence, yet more than six months
prior to the signing of the preliminary agreement in Paris on
November 30:

Sir, With a mixture of great surprise and
astonishment, I have read with attention the sentiments
you have submitted to my perusal. Be assured, sir, no
occurrence in the course of the war has given me more
painful sensations, than your information of there being such
ideas existing in the Army, as you have expressed, and I
must view with abhorrence and reprehend with severity,
For the present the communication of them will rest in my
bosom, unless some further agitation of the matter shall
make a disclosure necessary.

I am much at a loss to conceive what part of my
conduct could have given encouragement to an address,
which to me seems big with the greatest mischiefs, that can
befall my country. If I am not deceived in the knowledge of
myself, you could not have found a person to whom your
schemes are more disagreeable. At the same time, in justice
to my own feelings, I must add, that no man possesses a
more sincere wish to see ample justice done to the Army
than I do; and, as far as my powers and influence, in a
constitutional way, extend, they shall be employed to the
utmost of my abilities to effect it, should there be any
occasion. Let me conjure you, then, if you have any regard
for your country, concern for yourself or posterity, or
respect for me, to banish these thoughts from your mind,
and never communicate, as from yourself or anyone else, a
sentiment of the like nature.
I am, sir, your most obedient servant

G. Washington

If the General had been aghast and chastened at Colonel
Nicola's 13 memorial to him, his reaction was as nothing com-
pared with Nicola's when he received Washington's stern reply.
So shocked was the Colonel at the tone of his commander and
the flagrant lashing his proposal had received that he wrote

13. Washington spelled Colonel Nicola's name "Nichola" in the saluta-
tion of his response.

GEORGE WASHINGTON

three separate letters of apology in the next few days. All had
different dates and^ it is even likely, historians say, that he
wrote others which he subsequently destroyed. All expressed
profuse sorrow for misdoings, all were forthright and gentle-
manly, and all of them backtracked rapidly. Yet somehow none
ever really came to grips with the General's fundamental point.
Without precisely retracting anything about the glories of
monarchy, they bowed to General Washington's superior judg-
mentand rank: "Since I find your sentiments so different
from mine I shall consider myself as having been under a
strong delusion and beg leave to assure you it shall be my fu-
ture study to combat, as far as my abilities reach, every gleam
of discontent,'*

From that hour onward, the man his people would unhesi-
tatingly call the Father of his Country knew that, just as he
had spent his life's vigor in raising a makeshift army and
keeping it alive over seven intrepid years, his energies must
now be focused wholly on getting that army home again
without a calamity, Nicola's letters had dramatized it as
nothing else could.

There are those who like to believe that Washington was
actually not averse to such a royal scheme. Many modern
patriotic societies based on blood descent from revolutionary
heroes have mirrored such sentiments. Such groups speak of
how Washington was first President of the Society of the Cin-
cinnati, where a well-grounded effort, one which gained con-
siderable headway after the revolution, sought to create a
permanent nobility. Nor, they also point out, was Colonel
Nicola's proposal the only one. So monarchial was the at-
mosphere of this country in 1782 that Gouverneur Morris, the
superpatriot whose family name was signed to the Declaration
of Independence and had long been a votary of the common
man, wrote to General Nathanael Greene in the Carolinas: "I
have no hope that our union can subsist except in the form of
an absolute monarchy."

Even so sterling an American as John Adams was dubious
about democracy, and he spoke of its questionable stability and
leaned for a time to a stronger executive. John Jay supported

Rejects a Monarchy 27

for a while the idea of an American monarchy. The King bee
buzzed in many a patriotic brain and colonists had no sooner
thrown one monarch into discard than they began to yearn for
another in the muddled morass of do-nothing self-rule. Would-
be courtiers, possessed of more ardor than common sense,
made several abortive attempts to establish royalty in a new
nation that had just rejected and repudiated it.

A popular song of the time, "No King But God/' composed
by Nathaniel Billings, is said to have aided materially in kill-
ing the monarchy idea and restoring the democratic logic of
Paine and Jefferson. But that Washington might have become
King George was apparently possible at almost any hour be-
tween Yorktown and the Constitutional Convention.

Henry Cabot Lodge the elder wrote in his biography of
Washington: 14

This incident has been passed over altogether too care-
lessly by historians and biographers. It has generally been
used merely to show the general nobility of Washington's
sentiments, and no proper stress has been laid upon the facts
of the time which gave birth to such an idea and such a
proposition. It would have been a perfectly feasible thing at
that particular moment to have altered the frame of gov-
ernment and placed the successful soldier in possession of
supreme power. The notion of kingly government was, of
course, entirely familiar to everybody . . .

Thomas Carlyle wrote disparagingly of George Washington
because he let events take their natural course and did not
"seize the tottering government with a strong hand." But Lodge
feels this is woeful misunderstanding of the man who flung
aside the mere suggestion of total, dictatorial power which
might have been his for a nod of the head, not simply because
becoming king would be unpatriotic and dishonorable, but
because such a result would have defeated the one great and
noble object at which he aimed." It was harder to wait it out,
to restore order by muddling through slowly, painfully but
from the people up, not from a dictatorship downward. Far

14. Henry Cabot Lodge, George Washington, Vol. I (Boston, Hough-
ton Mifflin Company, 1917), p. 336.

GEORGE WASHINGTON

easier would have been martial law and order restored at the
head of the willing Army. What is the glory that belongs to
Washington alone is that he was keenly aware of the defi-
ciencies of democracy under the Continental Congress, yet had
the patience to refuse supreme rule and let this tiny, new seed
sprout and break through the earth of freedom.

Washington continued to decry the idea of monarchy and
kingship, by letter, in speeches, through continuous support
of the philosophy that common men were able to govern
themselves, a most radical concept in his time. In his last
circular letter to the states on June 8, 1783, the General
stressed points he had repeatedly touched upon in his public
utterances. He was not unaware, it should be emphasized, of
the defects in the Articles of Confederation which governed
the young Republic. 15

There are four things [he wrote] which I humbly conceive
are essential to the well-being, I may even venture to say,
to the existence of the United States as an independent
power.

First. An indissoluble Union of States under one Federal
head.

Secondly. A sacred regard to the public justice.

Thirdly. The adoption of a proper peace establishment,
and

Fourthly. The prevalence of that pacific and friendly dis-
position among the people of the United States which will
induce them to forget their local prejudices and policies, to
make those mutual concessions which are requisite to the
general prosperity and, in some instances, to sacrifice their
individual advantages to the interest of the community.

If anyone else has written a better definition of the respon-
sibilities of individuals in a democracy it has been lost to
posterity. These are not the words of a man who wanted to be
king, who privately dwelt in marble halls and dreamed of
sitting on a throne. This is the philosophy of a true democrat.
Had he for a moment seriously entertained tenderness for

15. George Washington BiCentennial Commission Report, Washing-
ton, D.C., U. S. Government Printing Office, 1932.

Rejects a Monarchy 29

monarchy with his own blood line, the royal American family,
he could never have written the concluding portion of the
foregoing letter. Thomas Paine or Thomas Jefferson could have
done no better.

As late as August i, 1786 only nine months before the Con-
stitutional Convention monarchy in America was still raising
its ugly head and Washington was still combating it. In a
letter which Washington wrote to John Jay on that date, we
read: 16

Your sentiments, that our affairs are drawing rapidly to a
crisis, accord with my own. What the event will be, is also
beyond the reach of my foresight. We have errors to correct.
We have probably had too good an opinion of human
nature in forming our confederation. Experience has
taught us, that men will not adopt and carry into execution
measures the best calculated for their own good, without
the intervention of a coercive power. I do not conceive we
can long exist as a nation without having lodged somewhere
a power, which will pervade the whole Union in as energetic
a manner as the authority of the State governments extend
over the several states.

To be fearful of investing Congress, constituted as that
body is, with ample authorities for national purposes, appears
to me tie very climax of popular absurdity and madness.

What astonishing changes a few years are capable of
producing! I am told that even respectable characters speak
of a Monarchial form of government without horror. From
thinking proceeds speaking; thence to acting is often but a
single step. But how irrevocable and tremendous! What a
triumph for the advocates of despotism to find, that we are
incapable of governing ourselves, and that systems founded
on the basis of equal liberty are merely ideal and fallacious!
Would to God that wise measures may be taken in time to
avert the consequences we have but too much reason to
apprehend.

By May of 1787, with the opening of the Constitutional Con-
vention, the seed of the first American monarchy had been
uprooted completely by the one man who could in all likeli-

16. Ibid.

GEORGE WASHINGTON

hood have become king. 17 But then, something better and more
durable than monarchy was already being built: the totally
unique democratic Republic we have in America today. In
the creation of that democracy in a republic it was Washington
himself, the devout and lonely patriot, who made the firm de-
cision about what the American Presidency was to become:
not a hereditary monarch, a constitutional monarchy, a military
junta with dictator, nor a colonial despotism under foreign rule
and local peers, but the freely elected (and replaceable) Chief
Executive of all the people. This above all we owe the first
President of the United States.

17. The United States Senate, early in its life, actually voted to refer
to George Washington as "His Highness, the President of the United
States," but the House voted it down.

Thomas Jefferson

JT WAS one million square miles of the most continuously
JL fertile land in the world, and the President's agents bought
it for less than 3^ an acre. It was a territory obtained without
the expenditure of a single life or even one drop of blood.
Thirteen states would be carved out of it larger and wealthier
than the original Thirteen Colonies and richer than any com-
parable stretch of land anywhere in the world. This land gave
to a young nation vision of its destiny as a two-ocean world
power and guaranteed that the vital port of New Orleans would
be permanently American, opening the vast Mississippi-Mis-
souri-Ohio heartland all the way to the sea. From the moment
of its purchase, the United States could turn her back on the
Atlantic and forget for more than a century Europe's ageless
squabbles.

The purchase of this territory was surely the greatest real
estate bargain in the history of the world. And when we con-
sider that it was accomplished without the prior consent of a
newly elected Congress, most of whose members had just been
campaigning (as had Jefferson himself) against the very Con-
stitutional powers that would make it a legal act, the Louisiana
Purchase becomes all the more astounding and prophetic.

Though many considered it an un-Constitutional transaction,
the Louisiana Purchase was nevertheless immediately recog-
nized in Washington as so rich a bargain that many principles
and scruples went quickly overboard in order to justify it, The
Senate, which must ratify all treaties, approved the procure-

2

Buys Louisiana - On His Own

ment of Louisiana in less than three days, and Jeffersonian
democrats joined hands with their bitterest Tory opponents in
ratification and celebration of a magnificent event.

Because of the factors of distance and time, Jefferson had
given his representatives in Paris implied carte blanche to bar-
gain for the port of New Orleans and part of Florida, per-
mitting them to bid as high as $2,000,000. To this and this only,
Congress had reluctantly assented prior to their departure for
Paris. Yet when the opportunity suddenly came, Jefferson's
faraway agents struck quite another deal one that changed
the course of our whole history. They spent more in one eve-
ning in Paris than the Federal budget then allowed for an
entire year, and they spent it without legal precedent of any
sort.

Finally, by another incredible twist, history chose John
Marshall, Chief Justice of the United States, Jefferson's arch
enemy, to provide the constitutionality for the purchase of the
Louisiana vastness. If a man called John Marshall had never
lived, if another man had been named Chief Justice (which
would have suited Jefferson perfectly), Jefferson himself might
have been impeached as a traitor and his representatives in
Paris declared guilty of high treason. In the end, it was Mar-
shall's liberal interpretation of basic Federal law which vouch-
safed Jefferson and the legality of the purchase under "broad
powers implied by the Constitution.'* Indeed, this fundamental
conflict of Constitutional philosophies states' rights and strict

33

THOMAS JEFFERSON

construction on Jefferson's side; strong central government and
broad, implied powers on Marshall's underlies the whole
fantastic story.

Of all battles for control of the Constitutional destiny and
direction of the early Untied States, that between Marshall
and Jefferson cannot be outranked. Here two tremendous
political philosophies clashed continually in a bloody running
war to prove the true meaning of the Constitution and the
power of the judiciary. For the first thirty months of Jefferson's
first term he scrapped and argued with Marshall, acquiescing
only as he approached treasonable disregard of the Chief
Justice's decisions giving the Union strong central powers.

In a series of famous decisions early in the life of the Su-
preme Court, Federal jurisdiction and the ultimate power of
the court were molded. The names whirl through early U. S.
history like giant snowflakes before a winter storm, There are
Marbury v. Madison, the Dartmouth College case, McCulloch
v. Maryland, Gibbons v. Ogden, Martin v. Mott, the American
Insurance Company v. Canter, and scores of others. Except to
those of legal mind, the names are unimportant, but what these
legal precedents established should matter terribly to every
American. 1 In the end, John Marshall's broad construction of
implied powers clearly won, and Thomas Jefferson's "illegal"
purchase of the Louisiana Territory was ironically sustained by
none other than his greatest political enemy.

This is, then, the amazing story of a strange alliance to
legalize the first great stroke of executive power by a President
of the United States, an act which fixed forever a pattern of
the President as the nation's Chief Executive, and a strong one.
From Jefferson's Administration on, a President began to be
much more than a European-style figurehead, of use chiefly in
ceremonials. He would be the king, the queen, the representa-
tion of the flag on the one hand, and the chief executive officer
of the majority political party on the other, and many other

i. From sources in the Harvard Guide to American History (Cam-
bridge, Mass., The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1954). See
pp. 327-28 for complete bibliography on Louisiana Purchase and John
Marshall's decisions affecting it.

Buys Louisiana On His Own 35

things as well. From that moment of history, the Presidency be-
came a lively third of the tripartite Federal government, and
the Supreme Court a judiciary without precedent. And it was
Chief Justice Marshall, whose judicial decisions blessed the
bold stroke of the Louisiana Purchase as a legal act, ex post
facto as something perfectly within the limits of the President's
implied powers.

Any schoolboy knows Thomas Jefferson, yet John Marshall's
name is often found to be obscure. If Americans were asked to
identify John Marshall, only two in ten could do it 2 Yet here
is a man who was Chief Justice of the United States from 1801
to 1835 when the very status and meaning of the Supreme
Court were in the molding. No period of American history
established more precedents; therefore, no period of American
history meant more to the future pattern of Constitutional law.

Born in a log cabin on the Virginia frontier, John Marshall
spent his boyhood in straitened, primitive surroundings, though
distantly related to the rich Randolphs and Lees through his
mother, as well as to Thomas Jefferson. Marshall served as an
officer in the American Revolution, returning to Virginia law
and politics where he made such a mark that George Washing-
ton sought him as Attorney General of the United States, and
later wanted him for American Minister of France. Both of
these posts he turned down. He did, however, represent the
young country in France during the XYZ Affair which con-
cerned America's post-Revolutionary relations with France and
England, and which ended in a weakening of the traditional
French- American friendship.

Marshall's astuteness in uncovering French diplomatic du-
plicity in the XYZ Affair made him a popular American figure
and he was elected to Congress from Virginia as a Federalist
in 1799. One of a small but loyal unit which continued to sup-
port John Adams, Marshall became Adams's Secretary of State
in 1800. A year later, just before Jefferson took office, Marshall
was appointed Chief Justice of the United States. The Senate

2. Statistic from a New York Herald Tribune survey of famous Amer-
ican names.

THOMAS JEFFERSON

confirmed him, after a battle, most of Jefferson's Democratic-
Republicans and the anti-Adams Federalists being justifiably
skeptical of Marshall's competence as an interpreter of law for
the common man against the traditional rights of the aristocrat.

In thirty-four years of service as Chief Justice, Marshall
emerged as the most powerful, famous, and precedent-making
jurist in the history of America. He raised the Supreme Court
from an anomalous position in the Federal triangle of execu-
tive-legislative-judicial to one of majesty, power, and precedent
a balance wheel to be carefully reckoned with. By the
breadth and wisdom of his carefully reasoned decisions, and
by his broad interpretation of the Federal Constitution much
of this interpretation the first precedents in our law John
Marshall earned the right to be known as the Great Chief
Justice.

But Marshall's achievements matched his philosophical-legal
quarrels with Presidents Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Adams,
and Jackson, with all of whom he constantly warred. Mar-
shall was a loyal Federalist, a conservative who felt national
unity and Federal power essential to the future of the United
States of America. This cement took the form of historic inter-
pretations of the Federal Constitution which were, at the time
and in the circumstances, considered radical, strange, even un-
American. Beyond doubt they established an independent and
powerful judiciary.

John Marshall strengthened enormously the guarantee of
the security of private property in an age born of the French
and American revolutions. Above all, Marshall set forever the
precedent that the Supreme Court of the United States had
the right to review all legislation challenged as to its constitu-
tionality. If declared un-Constitutional, a law was null and
void; Congress and the Chief Executive would simply have to
start over again in another direction. This "veto" power over
all laws through judicial review had no parallel in other na-
tions; it was an American phenomenon.

Chief Justice Marshall viewed the Constitution as a living
instrument which could be broadly interpreted to make legal
acts that the original framers could not possibly have fore-

Buys Louisiana On His Oton 37

seen. 3 These "broad, implied powers" enabled future Presi-
dents, among them Roosevelt and Truman, to use virtual
dictatorial power in later crises which cried out for quick, de-
cisive action, in F.D.R/s case the amazing activity that dis-
pelled the blackness of the Depression, in Truman's the "police
action** history calls the Korean War.

But broad as these powers were, through John Marshall's in-
terpretation, other powers were quite clearly delegated and
specifically reserved in the document he grew to know so well.
These were certain powers earmarked, for example, for the
Senate, such as ratifying a treaty or trying a President for im-
peachment; other powers reserved to the states, such as the
right of each state to decide its own age qualifications for
voting in presidential elections (eighteen in Kentucky and
Georgia, nineteen in Alaska, and twenty in Hawaii, but twenty-
one in the other forty-six states).

In the famous case of McCulloch v. Maryland, Marshall for-
ever fixed the precedent that the Federal government must be
flexible, have room to move around in. The Constitution could,
therefore, as Mr. Dooley later said, "follow th' liction re-
turns," In other words, it was to be a document broad enough
to be adaptable to any age or circumstance.

Inviolability of American contracts was established in the
Dartmouth College case. In Gibbons v. Ogden, Marshall ruled
in favor of Federal power in interstate commerce at the expense
of each state's rights. It was a national matter, he argued, once
a vehicle or merchandise had crossed one state line into an-
other, and so it has since remained by Federal precedent.

Marshall generally opposed the doctrine of states* rights
when they clashed with Federal rights. The frequently undig-
nified quarrels with Jefferson had one of their earlier detona-
tions in the case of Marbury v. Madison wherein Marshall
firmly fixed the right of the Supreme Court to review the con-
stitutionality of legislation, sometimes even down to local laws.
Thus, the Supreme Court of the United States ultimately be-
came more powerful than the judiciary of any other democratic

3. E. S. Brown, Constitutional History of the Louisiana "Purchase,
(Berkeley, Calif., University of California Press, 1920), passim.

THOMAS JEFFERSON

:>r constitutional monarchial form. It was Marshall's undeni-
ible, unanswerable logic that made this view stick.

John Marshall mixed the honest friendliness of the hearty
Frontier with the grace of a Virginia gentleman. His writing
style was exact, concise, and eminently clear. Each opinion
developed from a series of logical sequences deduced from
self-evident propositions which no true friend of the common
cnan could deny. He almost never cited legal authority. He sim-
ply set precedent himself; and for this, if for nothing else, he
must have seemed the devil incarnate to Thomas Jefferson.

Shifting political currents in Europe were creating a new
era and new issues as the nineteenth century opened and Jef-
Ferson became the people's President. Napoleon was by now
master of France, threatening most of Europe, eager to extend
his power to the primitive New World which must surely have
seemed defenseless to him. The French war with England had
Eaded because the English could not sustain their end of it; the
United States of America, now a genuine political unit, was
nevertheless tender and impotent, a nation no European mili-
tarist yet took seriously.

On October i, 1800, by the secret treaty of San Ildefonso,
Spain was "persuaded" to cede all of the vast Louisiana Terri-
tory to France and Napoleon. The newly elected Jeffersonian
Administration had just taken over by the time the news
reached Washington early in 1801. Jefferson was alarmed, and
wrote to the U. S. Minister in Paris, Robert R. Livingston: "It
completely reverses all the political relations of the U. S. and
atill form a new epoch in our political course." 4 This, as things
would turn out, was the understatement of his life.

Quickly, U. S. foreign policy would find itself in a state of
political change. France had, of all nations on earth, been
\merica's staunch partner during the Revolution. Lafayette
was an unprecedented American hero, the French people our
latural friends. Yet, whoever possessed a certain swampy pin-
point on the planet had to be America's natural enemy. That

4. Adrienne Koch, Jefferson and Madison (New York, Alfred A,
Cnopf, Inc., 1950), p. 232.

Buys Louisiana On His Own 39

swampy pinpoint was New Orleans. "There is on the globe one
single spot, the possessor which is our natural and habitual
enemy. It is New Orleans . . ." Jefferson wrote Livingston. 5

Nothing could have more radically reversed U. S. foreign
policy. For two generations the United States had, as Adrienne
Koch so aptly puts it, been "fending off the British monarchy
and championing France" and suddenly the administration
was faced with "the fear that an unfriendly spirit prevails in
the most important individuals of the [French] government
towards us." 6 Napoleon could not and did not cotton to repub-
lican democracy as represented by Thomas Jefferson. The
egotistical Corsican detested liberty, equality, fraternity. He
considered himself chosen of God to rule not only the Old
World but the New as well.

The fact that Jefferson had been an enthusiastic friend of
French radicals and was currently adored by the leading philo-
sophical minds in France did not help the American cause a
bit. In a penetrating generalization later at Monticello, Jeffer-
son wisely put Napoleon's distrust of the United States this
way: "Bonaparte hates our government because it is a living
libel on his."

Talleyrand was quick to point to America as a splendid
arena for new Napoleonic glory. In March, 1802, the Peace of
Amiens threw open to France and other nations the world's
oceans, which had been British-dominated for generations.
Twenty years before, this pact would have been hailed in the
New World. Now it was regarded with consternation.

These developments deeply worried Jefferson, for no man
was more interested in the welfare of the West than he. So long
as the outlet for the Mississippi basin had been in the careless,
indolent hands of Spain, trouble could be averted. But once
leased to the strongest of European countries under a tyrant
like Napoleon, and with the high seas open to French ships,
the entire United States was in jeopardy.

5. Ralph Henry Gabriel, The Pageant of America, Vol. VIII (New
Haven, Yale University Press, 1927), pp. 209-12.

6. Jefferson to Livingston, October 10, 1802, Writings (Ford), VIII,
173.

THOMAS JEFFERSON

The Spanish government quickly closed the port of New
Orleans on technical grounds that the United States had failed
to apply for an extension of friendly if loose trade privileges
provided for in the Pinckney Treaty of 1795. These privileges
had never been formally renewed and were by now considered
automatic. When Spain acceded to Napoleon and closed the
port of New Orleans, which meant French control of the Missis-
sippi basin, the newly opened West became understandably
dismayed.

All of the West drained into the Gulf of Mexico. Mushroom-
ing trade along the great Ohio, Missouri, and Mississippi rivers
knew but one means of transportation across the great distances
in the West and South in those days: water. Jefferson tried to
solve the Napoleonic enigma by diplomacy but many in Con-
gress called for war. Jefferson wrote to Livingston in Paris
and what he asked Livingston to do was something no Presi-
dent of the United States had yet done or asked a subordinate
to carry out. Jefferson was for the first time the Chief Execu-
tive of the United States taking a bold new presidential step.

Livingston was to begin at once to sound out Napoleon on
American purchase of West Florida and New Orleans. Living-
ston was to impress the Corsican with our determination to
keep the Mississippi open, yet attempt also to gain physical
possession of the vital delta. Jefferson's favorite negotiator, the
tough, wiry James Monroe, was dispatched to Paris to help
Livingston's diplomacy.

From the banks of the Mississippi, Ohio, and Missouri rivers
nothing could have seemed more vital than the success of the
American negotiation. Into the long reaches of the great prairie
basin, the jolting wagons of pioneers had kept pushing the fron-
tier westward in a swelling tide. Settlers seeded their log
cabins mile by mile along river fronts and the newly opened
roads. The Mississsippi River itself was the ultimate commer-
cial highway and New Orleans its destination.

Napoleon had already begun preparing an expedition to his
newly acquired Louisiana; a general of division, three generals
of brigade, five battalions of infantry, two companies of artil-

Buys Louisiana On His Own 41

lery, sixteen pieces of cannon, and 3,000 muskets were allotted
for this purpose and ordered to Dunkirk for departure to the
New World. But, as fast as regiments could be manned and
armed and their generals appointed, they were consumed in a
fiery furnace called Santo Domingo, a hot little island in the
Caribbean that was to mean so much to the future of the
United States and the reputation of Thomas Jefferson. This
island was known to others as "HaytT; it was inhabited chiefly
by African slaves whom the French found impossible to colo-
nize. The principal reason for this could have been the native
leadership of the Haitians by a Negro patriot and martyr, a
self-educated slave named Fran9ois Dominique Toussaint
L'Ouverture. This handsome man had joined the Negro rebel-
lion in 1791. He was its organizational genius. Rapidly rising in
power, Toussaint L'Ouverture combined forces with the Span-
ish and, in a series of lightning thrusts, became known by the
French as "L'Ouverture," a name he gladly adopted. Though
this black knight professed devotion to France, first to the
revolution, then to Napoleon, he was perpetually devoted to
the freedom of his own people.

In 1801, Toussaint conquered the whole of Santo Domingo,
ceded to France by Spain in 1795. Napoleon was forced to send
a task force to subdue him; in 1802, the bloody battle between
two great military figures was joined in the steaming island
jungles of the New World. But Haitian resistance was stub-
born and the natives acquired a powerful natural ally, yellow
fever. In 1802 alone, 50,000 Frenchmen were lowered into
their graves on the island of Santo Domingo, dead of war and
fever, with fever the more deadly. 7

The ultimate success of U. S. negotiations in Paris was un-
deniably aided by this great black, who was later treacherously
seized by Napoleon during an armistice, transported to France,
and disposed of in the dreadful dungeon of Fort-de-Joux in the
French Jura. As at other junctures in American history,
Europe's distresses became America's fortune, and Napoleon

7. Samuel Flagg Bemis, A Diplomatic History of the United States
(New York, Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1950), pp. 126-37.

THOMAS JEFFERSON

was forcefully persuaded to abandon the strategic Caribbean
island on which he had placed such faith as the hub of his
attempt at colonization of the New World.

As a result of Napoleon's losses in Haiti, Louisiana was now
all but useless to him. England moreover was agitating for
another war to unseat the Emperor of France and had strong
new allies on the Continent whose eager armies would outman
Napoleon's. He had nothing to spare with which to staff or
arm fresh expeditions to Santo Domingo, let alone Louisiana.

The scourge of the Continent was increasingly desperate for
money. Louisiana now being less than no value to him as real
estate, and a costly outpost to boot, it also represented quick
money for Napoleon's pocket. Moreover, the Corsican's military
instinct told him to shorten his lines before fresh European
trouble. At the same time he could restore what had been a
most valuable friendship for half a century: American-French
rapport.

In Paris, long weeks of perilous ocean travel away from
Washington, Livingston was summoned suddenly, in April,
1803, to the French foreign office where Frangois Marquis de
Barbe-Marbois, Napoleon's chief negotiator, made him an offer
which must have sent blood to his cheeks. Livingston had
come pleading for the purchase of New Orleans and possibly
West Florida, too. Now Barbe-Marbois officially offered him a
quarter of a continent the whole of the vast Louisiana
Territory. Livingston had badgered the Emperor with written
and verbal warnings, remonstrances, and arguments for months,
intended to prove that the Americans were not empire build-
ers, that Napoleon should invite the Americans to protect
Louisiana from the Canadians, that Florida and Louisiana
consisted largely of barren sand and sunken marshes, that
New Orleans was important to the United States only because
it sat astride the common mouth of a dozen major rivers west
of the Alleghenies. In short, France could care nothing for such
remote, desolate places which, to the American West, meant
a great deal.

Monroe was not to arrive in Paris until late in April, 1803,
and his presentation at the Tuileries was delayed until May i.

Buys Louisiana On His Own 43

By this time, the French had privately told Livingston they
were willing to give up the whole Louisiana Territory, and
three weeks had already been spent haggling over a price. The
very night of Monroe's presentation, he and Livingston had a
postdinner discussion with Marbois, who abruptly made
Napoleon's final offer. Knowing that when Bonaparte offered
a favor, suitors did well to waste no time in acceptance, Mon-
roe and Livingston hastily whispered together, and a bargain
was quickly struck with Marbois for $15,000,000, not all of it
in cash. Weeks were required to draw up final treaty papers in
two languages, but they were dated back to April 30, 1803.

Throughout this top-level haggling, the American negotia-
tors were at the disadvantage of never being able to make
contact with the home office. All they had was Thomas Jeffer-
son's carte blanche, the President's word that what they did,
provided it was within reason, would be ratified when they
returned to Washington. But was the whole of the Louisiana
Territory and the unauthorized sum of $15,000,000 "within
reason"? It was a preposterous sum in those days, the equiva-
lent of a large percentage of the entire American public debt
and much more than the government had spent during John
Adams's final twelve months in office. It was, moreover, an act
both Livingston and Monroe inwardly felt to be un-Constitu-
tional, and it had been Jefferson's philosophy which had so
persuaded them.

On the republican principles of Jefferson, only the states
themselves could authorize incorporation into the union of the
United States. Yet this treaty which Jefferson's authorized
amanuenses were signing provided that "the inhabitants of the
ceded territory shall be incorporated in the Union of the
United States, and admitted as soon as possible, according to
the principles of die Federal Constitution, to the enjoyment of
all the rights, privileges and immunities of citizens of the
United States." This, for one thing, expressly violated the Pres-
ident's last-minute instructions.

Embarrassing as these events and embroideries were, Living-
ston and Monroe knew a fantastic bargain when they saw one,
and promptly signed, Jefferson had written Livingston at the

THOMAS JEFFERSON

height of the negotiations that from the moment of French
occupation of New Orleans <c we must marry ourselves to the
British fleet and nation." Otherwise the little new country called
the United States of America would be forever at the mercy of
Napoleon Bonaparte. This above all burned in the back of
Livingston's mind.

The $15,000,000 was a total price approximately 80,000,000
gold francs. Of this amount, 20,000,000 francs, or $3,750,000,
were to go to American citizens to satisfy wartime claims
against France. These claims were largely from merchants
from Baltimore to Boston whose goods and ships had been
subject to French spoliation and naval action before, during,
and after the Revolutionary War. They were a highly sensitive
issue along the Atlantic seaboard, and their settlement would
help Jefferson sell his bill of goods when the astounding deal
became known at home.

News about the purchase reached America at the beginning
of the summer of 1803. Jefferson was by turns pleased, shaken,
shocked, amazed, and perturbed. The trans-Appalachian peo-
ple were now assured a trade route and freedom of the River.
But acquisition of new territory conflicted with the doctrine of
strict construction of the Federal Constitution on which Jeffer-
son and Marshall had locked horns from the day the third
President had taken office, sworn in by this same antagonist.

Jefferson did not hesitate. He immediately prepared an
amendment to the Constitution to cover the matter. But, ap-
prehension that Napoleon might change his fickle mind, plus
pressure from the rising Western frontier, which now saw
Jefferson as an incomparable hero, caused the Jeff ersonian party
to give up amending the Constitution and swing Congress into
special session. An "illegal" but prodigious achievement had
been accomplished. Now it had to be justified.

No President had yet taken a greater step on his own, and
Jefferson knew it. The Louisiana Purchase would fittingly cli-
max the diplomacy of the revolutionary period; Jefferson was
acutely aware of its historical importance. While news of the
Louisiana Purchase came as a distinct shock to the government

Buys Louisiana On His Own 45

at Washington, it also stirred many an American heart, Jef-
ferson's included, by its imaginative greatness.

Jefferson was certain he had no Constitutional authority to
purchase territory, and republican discussion confirmed this
view. 8 But the stakes were so grand that the President aban-
doned his reservations. No mention was made of Constitutional
anomaly in his message recommending Congressional approval.
His party followed obediently the course he outlined. Liberal,
broad construction of the Constitution something which John
Marshall's logic had never been able to had been forced
upon Jefferson and his followers by the bare fact of the
Louisiana Purchase.

Westerners in Washington closed ranks behind the Adminis-
tration, happily approving what meant life itself for their
constituents. Public approval everywhere was overwhelming
as the news galloped across mountain and swamp and river,
and this approval echoed back to Capitol Hill. The whole thing
flamed the imagination. Americans everywhere could now
envision a new nation from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from
the Great Lakes to the Gulf, a world power in generations to
come. 9

When the Spanish had abrogated the Pinckney Treaty, they
had closed the port of New Orleans to American trade through
the simple method of removing the "privilege of deposit" at
the mouth of the Mississippi. Privilege of deposit meant giving
any citizen of the United States the right of depositing and re-
exporting his property or goods duty free at the Spanish-held
port of New Orleans. Suspension of this right of deposit had
meant personal disaster to settlers along the Ohio, Missouri,
and Mississippi rivers because, in the early nineteenth-century
wilderness, water was the principal means of transporting
goods. The entire valley of the Mississippi from bayou to great

8. Leonard D. White, The Jeffersonians (New York, The Macmillan
Company, 1951), p. 32-

9. Ray Allen BiHington, Westward Expansion (New York, The Mac-
millan Company, 1949), pp. 242-45; see also Edward Channing, A
History of the U. S., Vol. IV (New York, The Macmillan Company,
193S), p. 323-

THOMAS JEFFERSON

lake, from western Pennsylvania to the Dakotas, therefore,
hailed the "Louisiana Procurement/' and spoke of Jefferson as
a male Joan of Arc.

The President summoned Congress on October 17, 1803, to
special session. The Federalists hated Jefferson as they de-
tested no one else in the short history of the country. But these
were patriots, and the delicate point of Constitutional law was
overwhelmed by actual possession. The fact was already ac-
complished. This was a rationale. Louisiana already was
American territory!

Because they had long supported Marshall's view, the Fed-
eralists could not oppose the Louisiana Purchase on grounds
of strict construction. But they could and did oppose the
Louisiana Purchase on grounds of their dislike for the "lordlings
of the South," a natural regional distrust of long standing and
by no means at an end even today.

The treaty to be approved by the Senate provided for ulti-
mate admission of ceded territory into the union "as a state or
states" and this meant a lessening of influences of New England
in government as well as the beginning of the end of tradi-
tional domination of the Federalists in the halls of Congress.

So the canny Federalists advanced a theory that, although
under the Constitution territory could be annexed as a colony,
admission of such a territory as a state would require a Con-
stitutional amendment involving the consent of three-fourths
of the states.

When this proposition failed and the treaty seemed certain of
approval, irreconcilable New Englanders led by Timothy
Pickering and Roger Griswold, both of Massachusetts, advo-
cated secession from the United States and the formation of
a new union of New England states. But other Federalists like
the Adamses, Fisher Ames, and George Cabot discouraged the
idea.

Because of Federalist, especially New England, opposition,
the Louisiana Purchase treaty was not approved simply by a
voice vote. The final tally in the Senate on October 20 was 24
to 7 to ratify the treaty strictly along party lines. The House
gratuitously declared itself in favor of the Louisiana Purchase

Buys Louisiana On His Own 47

on October 25, by a vote of go to 25 also along party lines,
even though it had no jurisdiction in the matter. 10

But the Constitutional legality of the Louisiana Purchase re-
mained questionable for many years until John Marshall came
to Jefferson's moral rescue twenty years after Jefferson had
retired to MonticeUo. France had had no clear title to sell
Louisiana: it had been a Napoleonic aggression. Livingston
and Monroe had bought what was legally nothing more than
"a pretension." 11 Only by propinquity and power was the
Louisiana Purchase finally made a fact, and not until Florida
and the delta country had been swept clear of "foreigners," first
French and Spanish, then the British in the War of 1812. This
final act of "propinquity and power" was under the command of
a Westerner named Andrew Jackson and it later made him
President of the United States.

Albert J. Beveridge's classic Life of John Marshall handles
Jefferson's acts in the Louisiana procurement with something
less than sympathy, but probably comes close to the heart of
the material. 12

The President had been amazed when the news reached
him. He did not want Louisiana nothing was further from
his mind than the purchase of it. The immorality of the
acquisition affected him not at all; but the inconvenience
did. He did not know what to do with Louisiana. Worse
still, the treaty of cession required that the people living
in that territory should be admitted into the Union, "accord-
ing to the principles of the Federal Constitution."

So, to his infinite disgust, Jefferson was forced to deal
with the Louisiana Purchase by methods as vigorous as any
ever advocated by the abhorred Hamilton methods more
autocratic than those which, when done by others, he had
savagely denounced as unconstitutional and destructive of
liberty. The President doubted whether, under the Consti-
tution, we could acquire, and was sure that we could not
govern, Louisiana, and he actually prepared amendments

10. Louis M. Hacker, The Shaping of the American Tradition, Vol. I
(New York, Columbia University Press, 1947), pp. 320-22.

11. Albert J. Beveridge, Life of John Marshall, Vol. Ill (Boston, '
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1929), pp. 146-51.

12. Ibid.

THOMAS JEFFERSON

authorizing the incorporation into the republic of the pur-
chased territory. No such legal mistiness dimmed the eyes of
John Marshall who, in time, was to announce as the decision
of the Supreme Court that the republic could acquire terri-
tory with as much right as any monarchial government.

To add to his perturbations, the high priest of popular
rights found himself compelled to abandon his adored
phrase, "the consent of the governed," upon which he had
so carefully erected the structure of his popularity, and to
drive through Congress a form of government over the peo-
ple of Louisiana without consulting their wishes in the least.

The Jeffersonian doctrine had been that the Union was
merely a compact between sovereign States, and that new
territory and alien peoples could not be added to it without
the consent of all the partners. The Federalists took their
stand upon this indefensible ground, and openly threatened
the secession at which they had hinted when the Federal
Judiciary Act was repealed.

Jefferson was alive to the danger: * Whatever Congress
shall think it necessary to do (about Louisiana)," he cau-
tioned one of the republican House Leaders, "should be
done with as little debate as possible." A month earlier he
had written: 'The Constitution has made no provision for
our holding foreign territory, still less for incorporating
foreign nations into our Union. The Executive . . . have done
an act beyond the Constitution."

Therefore, he declared, "the less we say about constitu-
tional difficulties respecting Louisiana the better. . . . What
is necessary for surmounting them must be done sub silentis"
The great radical favored publicity in affairs of state only
when such a course was helpful to his political plans. On
other occasions, no autocrat was ever more secretive than
Thomas Jefferson. Seemingly, however, the President was
concerned only with his influence on the destiny of the world.

At first the Federalist leaders were too dazed to do more
than grumble. "The cession of Louisiana ... is like selling
us a ship after she is surrounded by a British Fleet," shrewdly
observed George Cabot, when the news was published in
Boston.

Though the United States flag was raised over New Orleans
December 20, 1803, the boundaries of the Louisiana Pur-

Buys Louisiana On His Own 49

chase weren't legally settled for years. The French had come to
regard the Rio Grande and Iberville rivers as the east and west
boundaries of Louisiana, but no such boundaries were set forth
in the treaty. Indeed, Talleyrand had vaguely waved his arm
and suggested that Livingston himself set them. As with so
many facts of history, time, force, and propinquity answered
the final questions.

From the Louisiana Purchase, which increased the national
domain by 140 per cent, were carved all or part of thirteen new
states: Louisiana (which was admitted in 1812), Missouri
(1821), Arkansas (1836), Iowa (1846), Minnesota (1858),
Kansas (1861), Nebraska (1867), Colorado (1876), North
Dakota (1889), South Dakota (1889), Montana (1889),
Wyoming (1890), and Oklahoma (1907).

The constitutionality of the procurement, settled in 1828,
came about through a side issue, 13 often the way with Supreme
Court decisions, in the case of the American Insurance Com-
pany et al. v. David Canter. In his opinion, Justice Marshall
ruled once and for all that the nation had the right, through
implied powers of the Constitution wnich Jefierson had so
bitterly contested, to acquire and govern territory.

These were the facts in the historic case, which is Federally
catalogued as i Peters 511, 1828:

A ship with a cargo of cotton, which had been insured, was
wrecked on the coast of Florida after that territory had been
ceded to the United States and before it became a state of the
Union. The cotton was saved and shipped to Key West where,
by order of a local court acting under a territorial law, it was
sold at auction to satisfy salvage claims. Part of the cotton was
purchased by one David Canter, who shipped it to Charleston,
where the insurance companies libeled it that is, filed a suit
of complaint against it. The libelants contended that the
Florida court was not competent to order the auction sale be-
cause the territorial act was inconsistent with the national
Constitution.

13. It is interesting and perhaps a bit ironical that this vindication
by Marshall came two years after Jefferson's death. He died July 4,
1826, a day which also saw the death of John Adams, his predecessor.

THOMAS JEFFERSON

In the U. S. Supreme Court, the question was: "Was the
territorial act, under which the local court at Key West ordered
the auction sale, valid?"

The answer to the question depended, said Marshall, upon
the relation in which Florida stood to the United States. Since
the national government could make war and conclude treaties,
it folowed that it "possesses the power of acquiring territory
either by conquest or treaty ceded territory becomes a part
of the nation to which it is annexed but the relations of the
inhabitants to each other [do not] undergo any change." Their
allegiance was simply transferred but the law "which reg-
ulates the intercourse and general conduct of individuals
remains in force until altered by the newly created power of
the state." The treaty by which Spain ceded Florida to the
United States assured to the people living in that territory
"the enjoyment of the privileges, rights and immunities of
U. S. citizens." In other words, the power to govern territory
flows from the right to acquire it

The Supreme Court of the United States held that, when the
Federal government was expressly authorized in Articles I and
II of the Constitution to make war and conclude treaties, it was
there given all the powers necessary to carry out either of these
functions. That is, in making war it could conquer and occupy
enemy territory. In making treaties of peace, it could require
the enemy to cede these conquered areas just as fully as it could
require a payment of cash indemnity. The power to make war
and peace therefore included the authority to do whatever
was necessary and proper for war- and peacemaking. This was
where, in Marshall's logic, the Federal government got the
authority to acquire subject lands and peoples by implication,
the vast Louisiana Purchase.

Jefferson had been overwhelmingly re-elected in 1804 on his
newly won popularity in the West, as well as with common,
ordinary people everywhere, including those who were bound
to emigrate beyond the Eastern mountains. Jefferson had been
hailed as our first man of the people and was almost unani-
mously a hero by the beginning of his second term. Yet,
everything he had dreamed and imagined for his country by

Buys Louisiana On His Own 51

the amazing purchase of Louisiana Territory might have come
to naught without John Marshall's liberal, broad interpretation
of the Federal Constitution.

In the end, however, President Jefferson was the man who
took the responsibility for the purchase and who made it pos-
sible. There could have been no judicial interpretation of an
act without the act itself. In giving his representatives in Paris
a free hand and his Presidential blessing, in immediately
recognizing the greatness of the bargain and its glorious mean-
ing to future Americans, our third President took a giant step,
and shouldered the historical consequences, whatever they
might be. Henceforth, the President of the United States would
be in truth Chief Executive, a person of unprecedented power
and leadership in a democratic society. Only a man of great
gifts, of soaring imagination, of boundless faith in the ultimate
wisdom of the common people, could have made such a
terrible, yet wonderful decision. For this reason, with many
others, Thomas Jefferson may well have been the most remark-
able American.

Andrew Jackson

ON THE DAY of Ms inauguration, Andrew Jackson solemnly
declared that Federal institutions would be better for
having civil servants friendly to each incoming administration.
He thus took his cue from William Learned Marcy, to whom
is attributed the phrase "to the victors belong the spoils/' and
established the spoils system which is now a tradition in most
branches of American government, among them the Presidency.
Since the time of Jackson, in fact, no democratic government
has allowed as many majority partisan appointments as does
ours, nor adhered so firmly to the principle that party members
deserve to be rewarded simply because they have been on the
winning team.

For more than four decades after Jackson's term of office,
dispensation of Federal patronage was strictly by party al-
legiance, and the inevitable corruption, as well as inefficiency,
bred in so partisan a system expanded until it reached stagger-
ing proportions under President Grant Disappointed at the
gross disorders in public office, the public demanded a civil
service commission and began to get one in 1871; but civil
service only modified the partisan chapter begun under Jack-
son; it did not erase it completely.

Andrew Jackson had been a backwoods child along the
borderland of the Carolinas both states claim him where
he found himself an orphan at the age of fourteen. Born only
nine years before the Battles of Lexington and Concord, Jackson

3

Invents the Spoils System

nevertheless saw Revolutionary War service and was a prisoner
of the British at Camden, South Carolina.

Jackson's father had been an impoverished Scottish linen
draper from Ulster County in Northern Ireland. He had come
to the Carolinas and cleared the wilderness woods for a farm
on which he died while Andrew was still in his mother's
womb. 1 With Andrew's birth his mother became housekeeper
to a brother-in-law. Andrew Jackson was, consequently, born
in hardship, reared in poverty, dressed in linsey-woolsey, and
rarely overate. Nervous and frail, sensitive and intelligent,
Jackson might well have acquired his inferiority complex and
quickness of temper and his awareness of slight from such
difficult early circumstances. These also explain his lifelong
feeling for the underdog and, probably, his restless ambition.
Certainly they explain his feelings when willful political op-
ponents slandered his guiltless wife Rachel, who loved sippin*
whisky and a corncob pipe of an evening.

The Revolutionary War not only gave Jackson early war
service, but cost him the lives of two brothers and his mother,
who died of prison fever while nursing patriots in Charleston.
At fourteen, then, Andrew Jackson was a war veteran, an
orphan, and the next thing to a neglected public charge.

Politics quickly attracted Jackson, whose Scotch-Irish blood

i. Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager, A Short History of the
United States (New York, The Modern Library, 1945), pp. 170-72.

53

ANDREW JACKSON

pulled him that way and also made him a rough man in the
infighting. He became a member of the Tennessee Con-
stitutional Convention and in 1796 was elected the sole member
from his state in the Federal House of Representatives. There
he at once displayed two political characteristics he never lost:
distrust of the rich, the well-bom, and all Easterners; and a
profound love of the common man, the plain people with whom
he sympathized heart and soul. 2

Jackson's distrust of the East can possibly be explained by
the fact that most of the merchants and bankers of his time
lived either along the Atlantic seaboard or in New Orleans.
They paid the producer of the goods in the frontier West
precious little; more often than not a farmer received worth-
less paper for his product and his sweat. This actually hap-
pened to Jackson in 1798 when he bought $6,000 worth of
goods in Philadelphia, selling Ms land to pay for the goods to
a merchant whose notes went unhonored. Jackson was thus
saddled with a huge debt, through no fault of his own, and
never lost his understandable feeling that the East was made
up of cheats and shysters.

Early in life, Andrew married a woman about his own age
by the name of Rachel Donelson Robards; married her, as it
turned out, before she had secured a legal divorce from her
first husband, Lewis Robards. Though Andrew's marriage
ceremony was later repeated, his enemies made much of the
circumstance and, in the end, the well-publicized scandal
broke the man's heart. He bitterly blamed her early death on
the mud and offal plastered on his marriage in the depraved
political campaigns of 1824 and 1828. She was his one and
only romantic friend; he loved her deeply to the day of his
death, fifteen years before the Civil War.

Rachel Robards had first laid eyes on Andrew Jackson when
he knocked at the door of the Donelson stockade on the
Cumberland River near Nashville. Roth were young, he an
unmarried lawyer, she a married woman whose husband, Lewis
Robards, drank more Kentucky corn liquor than was good for
him and who had a habit of disappearing from time to time.
z. Ibid.

Invents the Spoils System 55

When Robards failed to appear for a longer spell than usual
and Rachel faced starvation, she had returned to her family
home on the Cumberland. Robards eventually turned up again
to sponge off her family, but kter disappeared into Kentucky.

When Rachel, a sensuous, dark-haired young matron as yet
unstirred by romantic love, first saw Andrew Jackson at the
frontier stockade door she was probably taken with his bushy
red hair, piercing blue eyes, an overly large mouth and power-
ful chin, his enormous height, and thin but wiry strength. She
told friends she thought he must be six and a half feet tall, at
least three heads higher than herself. There was a vibrance
about him, a radiance, a glow, a gentle honesty which quickly
began to change her sleeping chemistry. There doesn't seem
to be any doubt that it was for both strong physical attrac-
tion at first sight. From the first, in fact, they were never
very far apart until her tragic death on the eve of his inaugura-
tion.

Jackson is said to have told her he had been living at inns
in Nashville and was sick and tired of the brawling, the drink-
ing, and the greasy food. He wanted a real home to go back to
each night, and since her mother took in boarders occasionally
( all frontier stockade women did there was almost nowhere
else for a stranger to sleep), Jackson wondered aloud if he
might stay with the Donelsons, a request that was readily and
happily granted.

After Jackson had taken up happy residence with the
Donelsons, Lewis Robards returned from one of his drinking
absences in Kentucky. Robards hated the Cumberland Valley
and Nashville and made no bones about it, and by now he
probably detested his marital responsibilities. Quickly he dis-
appeared once more (he told Rachel he was going to Har-
rodsburg, Kentucky, for a few days to see his sick mother)
and Rachel never saw him again. Soon it became obvious to
Nashville that he had deserted her and that their frontier
marriage was finished. Jealous of Jackson, seldom sober, a
bounder in every definition of the word, Robards persuaded a
brother-in-law, one Jack Jouitt, to introduce a bill in the
Virginia legislature to grant him a divorce from Rachel

ANDREW JACKSON

Donelson Robards on grounds of desertion and adultery. The
corespondent named was Andrew Jackson.

None of this information had been disclosed to Rachel until
the legal procedure was a fait accompli. She had not been
present to plead her case before the Virginia legislature; she
had not even been aware of such a case. Her own feelings on
hearing the news must have ranged from anger to consterna-
tion, then to fear and relief, and back to anger at such an
unmanly thing. Yet, since she had long known that her mar-
riage was over, and doubtless had prayed it would legally end,
there was nothing to do but accept the cards as they had been
dealt. In frontier America in the last years of the eighteenth
century no lone woman could have made the impossible wilder-
ness-trek back to Virginia to tell her side of the divorce
proceedings, even had she been aware of them or wished to halt
them. Surely her family and the town of Nashville would
understand she was better off this way, legally branded as
she might be as an adulteress.

In 1791, Jackson and Mrs. Robards took a trip down river to
Natchez, Mississippi, where Jackson had wealthy friends.
There they were married in the summer of 1791, believing that
the legislature of Virginia had granted the jealous "Captain"
Robards a legal divorce, though on fraudulent grounds. It was,
unfortunately, later learned that the Virginia legislature had
merely given Lewis Robards the right to file a suit for divorce,
not a divorce itself. Frontier ignorance, Robard's carelessness,
and the great distances involved had botched the situation.
Jackson, himself a lawyer, should have been aware that a
legislature normally could not dissolve a marriage but merely
permit filing of a bill of divorcement

Actually, therefore, Rachel had for two years been a bigamist
when, in 1793, Lewis Robards got around to the legal act of
final separation from her. When Rachel learned of this new
disaster to her reputation she became extremely despondent
and had to be given sedatives. Jackson, when he heard of it,
immediately procured another license and saw that another
ceremony was performed. But the barn door had been closed

Invents the Spoils System 57

too late. Rachel's reputation was ruined forever, and the de-
famatory consequences in the presidential elections of 1824
and 1828 led to her early death.

There is no consummate evidence that Rachel was unfaithful
or that Jackson was not acting in good faith and in the firm be-
lief that a divorce had been granted to Rachel Robards when
first they became man and wife. Soon after, Cumberland
secured its freedom from North Carolina and became a legal
territory of the Federal government; local events rose to such
a pitch of excitement that local gossip seems not to have been
published in permanent form, as it might have been in quieter
years. We can only guess now; but knowing Jackson's qualities,
his firm belief in right and wrong, goodness and sin, righteous-
ness and iniquity, it is hard to believe that he and Rachel
Donelson Robards knowingly shared a common-law affair
between 1791 and 1793- 3 It simply wasn't in his strait-laced
Scotch-Irish nature.

Jackson's friends and supporters often went out of their way
to record his sympathy and gentleness with children, which
made his childless marriage all the more poignant. Thomas
Hart Benton, the great Senator from the new West, never
tired of relating how he arrived at Jackson's home one "wet,
chilly evening, in February, and came upon him in the twilight,
sitting alone before the fire, a lamb and a child between his
knees" 4

He started a little [Benton wrote], called a servant to
remove the two innocents to another room, and explained
to me how it was. The child had cried because the lamb was
out in the cold, and begged him to bring it in which he
had done to please the child, his adopted son, then not
two years old. The ferocious man does not do that! and

3. A delightful and accurate historical novel "by Irving Stone paints
the tragic romance in far greater detail. Called The President's Lady
(Garden City, Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1959), this fictional ac-
count faithfully matches the known facts in the case and is most per-
suasive of Rachel's innocence as well as Andrew Jackson's.

4. John William Ward, Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age (New
York, Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 197*

ANDREW JACKSON

though. Jackson had Ms passions and his violence, they were
for men and enemies those who stood up against him
and not for women and children, or the weak and helpless:
for all of whom his feelings were those of protection and
support.

The child in Benton's story was, moreover, an Indian boy
orphaned in one of Jackson's campaigns. It had been found
by some Indian women who were about to kill it because its
parents had died at the hands of white men. The Indian boy
became Jackson's ward and grew up with the implausible name
of Lincoyer. The story won the nation more than any of
Jackson's victories had done, reflecting, as a contemporary
said, "more honour on the heart of the General than the entire
glory of the Creek War." This was the child Senator Benton
had seen lying down with the lamb between Jackson's knees,
dismissed embarrassedly from the room by the General.

Rachel's favorite sister, Jane Hays, wrote at presidential
election time with nostalgia for their early Cumberland
stockade home and their good times together;

How does my dear Sister Jackson? I cannot take up my
bonnet and meet you at Sister Betsy's or Sister Mary's . . .
to smoke our pipes, laugh and talk over occurrences of
former days, each one taking the words out of the other's
mouth. ... It was a pleasant neighborhood, . . . You will
regret leaving it Sister Jackson, and your fine farm and
comfortable house, for the City of Washington. . . .

Rachel Jackson couldn't have agreed more with her favorite
Sister Hays. Indeed she never lived to experience life in the
White House, only uncivilized and unceasing slander. Divorce
was bad enough in those days. But to have married a sup-
posedly divorced woman only to find she was a legal adulteress
was to give Jackson's opponents a gratuitous political weapon
with both edges indecently honed. The issue had first been
raised in the lost campaign of 1824 when Henry Clay and
John Quincy Adams had managed to deprive Jackson of the
Presidency through their so-called "corrupt bargain." Clay's

Invents the Spoils System 59

votes had been swung to Adams when there had been found to
be no clear majority in the electoral college, though Jackson
was high man and undoubtedly the choice of the electorate.

From the "Raleigh Register'' of October 12, 1824, had come
the following political statement regarding Rachel Jackson's
virtue: 5 "I make a solemn appeal to the reflecting part of the
community, and beg of them to think and ponder well before
they place their tickets in the box, how they can justify it to
themselves and posterity to place such a woman as Mrs.
Jackson at the head of the female society of the United States."

When the shadow of Andrew Jackson's courtship threatened
the forthcoming campaign of 1828 and the common man with
it, a testy Jackson wrote to Sam Houston in his own inimitable
spelling: 6 "I have lately got an intimation of some of his
[Clay's] secrete movements which if I can reach with possitive
and responsible proof I will wield to his political and perhaps
his actual destruction, he is certainly the bases [t], meanest
scoundrel that ever disgraced the image of his god. . . . Even
the aged and virtuous female is not free from his . . . slander
but anough, you know me. I know how to defend her.' 9

Sam Houston did indeed know his patron, how Jackson had
in the past defended his wife's virtuous name in a duel or two,
for Houston had trained for a recent duel of his own on the
Hermitage grounds under General Jackson's experienced eye.
He knew that any hint of adultery regarding Mrs. Jackson
meant a challenge in that flamboyant era. Duels were fought
by men of honor to maintain honor, a very precious commodity
then.

The next person to attack poor Rachel was Charles Ham-
mond, editor of the Cincinnati Gazette and a staunch con-
servative. Wrote Hammond: 7 <c Gen. Jackson prevailed upon the
wife of Lewis Roberts [sic] to desert her husband and live with
himself."

5. Marquis James, Andrew Jackson, Portrait of a President (Indian-
apolis, The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1940), p. 93.

6. Jackson to Sam Houston, December 15, 1826, Correspondence HI,

325-

7. James, op. tit., p. 155.

ANDREW JACKSON

Then followed a lurid account of the divorce on the shady
testimony of a man named McGary who had loosely used the
word adultery in the proceedings many years before, ignoring
the years the Jacksons had supposed themselves to have been
legally married.

But it remained for Adams's conservative mouthpiece, the
National Journal, to reprint nationally a disreputable handbill
written by a candidate for Congress from Jackson's area in
Tennessee, one Thomas D. Arnold, proclaiming that Andrew
Jackson had spent the principal part of his life "in gambling,
in cock-fighting, in horse-racing . . . and to cap all tore from
a husband the wife of his bosom."

This now made it official and the country knew the tale. The
libel went on: "General Jackson admitted that he boarded at
the house of old Mrs. Donelson, and that Roberts [sic] became
jealous of him but he omits the cause of that jealousy . . .
[namely] that one day Roberts surprised General Jackson
and Ms wife exchanging most delicious kisses. . . /'

The candidate for Congress from Tennessee admitted that
in this case Roberts (Robards) acted a coward's part in that
lie failed to shoot Jackson dead in his tracks. Later, according
to Adams's stalwart journal, Jackson neglected to tell that on
the voyage to Natchez lie and Rachel "slept under the same
blanket" 8

One can well imagine the shock with which such printed
words must have struck bluestocking Back Bay of the early
iSoos. Having the unprintable suggested about a presidential
candidate (and believed as gospel because it appeared in the
official Adams journal) damned his political career forever.

Hammond followed with fresh editorial comment in Cincin-
nati: 9 "Ought a convicted adulteress and her paramour husband
to be placed in the highest offices of this free and Christian
land?*

Old Hickory by now was fighting to control himself: 10 "How

8. Tennessee State Library, Nashville, quoting a broadside by Thomas
B. Arnold, May 24, 1824. >

9. James, op. cit, p. 156.

10. Jackson to General John Coffee, June 2, 1828, Correspondence
HI, 409.

Invents the Spoils System 61

hard it is to keep the cowhide from these villains. I have made
many sacrifices for my country but being unable ... to punish
these slanders of Mrs. J. is a sacrifice too great to be well
endured/*

But Jaclcson had put himself in an impossibly frustrating
position by accepting the candidacy of President of the United
States: an aspirant to the Presidency could no longer fight
duels. Burr's fate had proved it politically, if morals and com-
mon sense had not. Clay had been close enough to Hammond
in Cincinnati to have suppressed the slanders had he wished
to do so. Despite his virtuous disclaimers, Clay, the presidential
candidate who had made the "corrupt bargain" with Adams
and had been paid off as Secretary of State, knew what his
man Hammond was about and gave silent consent to the
slanders; there is little doubt of it as one looks back through
the records.

As for Jackson, he believed to the hour of his death that
Secretary of State Clay and President Adams were thoroughly
guilty of the whole disgusting libel. (It was not by chance
that, when his own two-term Presidency was over, Jackson
declared that his two regrets were ( i ) that he had been unable
to shoot Henry Clay, and (2) hang John C. Calhoun, the high
priest of nullification.) Jackson was of a very different moral
stripe, an instinctive cavalier, a man who felt, like some
medieval knight, that women were pure and sacred and
shouldn't be brought into the political arena. When a gazette
friendly to Jackson came up with a fabrication attributing to
Mr. and Mrs. Adams premarital relations similar to those
alleged against the Jacksons, Jackson hastily wrote the editor
that "female character should never be introduced,'* except by
way of just legal retaliation on the known guilty. In the free-
style personal campaigning of those days, Jackson's shining
chivalry had few if any parallels.

But Jackson had always been such a gallant knight. His
supporters pointed to the way he had defended the beauty of
New Orleans womanhood from the savage lust of British
soldiery. A Jacksonian partisan asked, during the height of
the slanders against Rachel Jackson, how any man who

ANDREW JACKSON

had behaved as Jackson had in New Orleans could feel other
than noble about the women of America: 11

And you, too, my fair and beloved countrywomen whose
first honour is in the gentleness of your nature, will you not
unite your sympathies and tears over the grave of that man,
who, above all others, was the most devoted friend and
admirer, might I not say romantic, that woman ever had?

Who so prompt to defend and protect her rights, or guard
her from injury and insult?

Who ever cherished or exalted more the purity of the
domestic and social virtues, so infinitely more important to
human happiness than all others? Whose valour was it that
protected our mothers, and wifes, and daughters, from the
savage tomahawk, and a licentious soldiery, and one of our
finest cities, with its "beauty and booty" from ruthless in-
vaders?

Whose, but Andrew Jackson's?

Jackson's love of Rachel and his emotional tie with her long
after her death were both pronounced and unconcealable. A
visitor to the White House soon after inauguration found
Jackson crying in his upstairs room: 12 "He was sitting at the
Hide table with his wife's miniature before him, propped up
against some books; and between him and the picture lay an
open book, which bore the marks of long use. This book, I
afterward learned, was her prayer book/'

The tragedy of Jackson's marital situation is by no means
irrelevant to the story of his invention of the spoils system.
Indeed, it seems to have been a fundamental cause of his
feelings which stewed in morose anger, then cooled in retribu-
tion and consequent acts as he took the highest office in the
land. For his beloved Rachel died at Christmastide, 1828, soon
after his election to the Presidency and before his lonely
inaugural in March, 1829. He forever attributed her death
to her slanderers, and Jackson publicly called Clay and Adams
lier murderers. The most natural reaction in the world was,
then, for the new President of the United States to throw out of

11. Ward, op. cit., p. 194.

12. Nicholas Trist, quoted ibid., p. 197.

Invents the Spoils System 63

office every vestige of Clay-Adamsism, every appointee, every
scent of what was emotionally to him a heap of indescribable
filth, and undemocratic filth to boot.

Rachel Jackson's maligning and her subsequent death were,
above all others, debts her husband never forgot or forgave. 13
Marquis James points out that in the end these slanders appear
to have gained the Adams Administration and re-election
campaign no advantage with the electorate: such assaults
seldom do. The end result was only to "lay waste to the joy of
a life, desolating a pious woman whose fortune had been in
youth to be beautiful, to marry a bounder, and, existence with
him becoming intolerable, to win the heart of Andrew Jackson."

The plan had been to leave Kachel in Tennessee until the
inaugural was over and the new administration under way.
This wasn't Andrew Jackson's idea, but Rachel's, and seconded
heartily by Jackson's high political command. Though the
campaign tempest had ceased, Rachel's reappearance among
the ladies of social Washington might well have set it off again,
and a fretful Rachel knew it when she wrote a letter from
Nashville in December of 1828: "I assure you I had rather be
a doorkepper [sic] in the house of God than to live in that
Palace at Washington." She kept repeating this phrase in other
letters and also by mouth to her maid, Hannah. 14

Suddenly, as Christmas neared, Rachel fell ill with one of
those unknown and unmitigated Western fevers common to
early winter of that time. Bleed her as they would, the
physicians could not seem to revive her health. A few hours
before she died she asked the maid Hannah to help her to the
chair by the fire and fill her pipe with tobacco (another per-
sonal problem to Washington society), whereupon she said
to Hannah twice over: "I had rather be a doorkepper in the
house of God than to live in that Palace." The following day,
December 23, 1828, Rachel Donelson Robards Jackson died,
her long flight from fame mercifully over. 15

Andrew Jackson and she had been inseparable man and wife

13. James, op. cit. y p. 158.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid.

ANDREW JACKSON

for thirty-seven years, and from the first he had defended
against all men both her virtue and her pipe-smoking.
Witnesses to the Tennessee funeral wrote afterward that they
wished those who had hastened this mournful scene by their
relentless gossip on an unoffending woman could have been
brought to view this "saddest spectacle that any present had
ever beheld." 16

At the end of the funeral service President-elect Jackson
said aloud: "In the presence of this dear saint I can and do
forgive all my enemies. But those vile wretches who have
slandered her must look to God for mercy/' In such black
Gaelic despair, the new President left Tennessee for Wash-
ington to organize the first true administration of the common
man. Is it any wonder that he clearly and distinctly understood
William Learned Marcy when the latter declared "to the
victors belong the spoils/' or that he adopted the principle as
his own?

Four years earlier, Jackson had polled the greatest number
of popular votes, almost as many as the rest put together, yet
had failed to reach a clear majority in the electoral college.
When he heard that Candidate Clay was seeing Candidate
Adams he had surmised that "bargains and sales are going on in
the monstrous union between Clay and Adams/' He was en-
tirely right, for Adams took thirteen states, Jackson seven, and
Crawford four in the run-off House vote, with states voting as
units. Later, when John Quincy Adams was safely President,
certain Adams men had wanted Clay to withdraw his "corrupt
bargain" and make a generous gift of his great service to Adams.
But Clay, with outward reluctance, had accepted the post of
Secretary of State, then traditionally third in line for the
Presidency should both President and Vice-President die in
office. By now, however, the election of 1828 had wiped away
this old debt. Jackson had won landslide endorsement by 178
to 83 in the electoral college and 647,286 to 508,064 in popular
vote. Adams had, of course, scored heavily in New England
but nowhere else, while Old Hickory's support was by now
widely diffused and his enormous popularity with the average

16. Ibid,, pp. 128-29.

Invents the Spoils System 65

man, "the common man," was similar to Franldin D. Roosevelt's
just over a century later.

So Jackson was coming to power stimulated by better than
two-to-one electoral endorsement and provoked to the kind of
revenge that only a Scotch-Irish soldier with a trigger temper,
a keen sense of right and wrong, as well as strong partisanship
for the average man (together with a memory for personal
hurts ) could bring to the Presidency.

Perhaps it wasn't by chance that Mr. Justice Joseph Story of
the Supreme Court, who had wanted Chief Justice Marshall's
place when Marshall was succeeded by Taney, later wrote of
the Jacksonian democracy: "Though we live under the form
of a republic we are in fact under the absolute rule of a single
man." 17

There was, of course, far more in Jackson's background than
pique, hurt, the slander of his wife, and a prodigious memory
for slights to make him become what he did as President and
to espouse the partisan spoils system. The common men who
rallied behind Jackson were disappointed with aristocrats as
Presidents, men with bloodline, money, and estate. The little
people of a growing country, particularly the expanding West,
were demanding more equal distribution of wealth and greater
responsibility in government Newly enfranchised masses, espe-
cially the foreign-born lately fled from European monarchies
and traditional, despotic family power, needed men in office
who more accurately represented themselves.
^Jackson came from the West, the first President beyond the
Eastern mountains. Up to now, all Presidents had been from
Virginia or Massachusetts. Washington had come as a Virginia

17. Jefferson had said that in Cabinet meetings all grave and impor-
tant matters would be put to a vote "the President counting himself
but one.** Jefferson had soon repudiated this, of course, since he alone
was faced with the consequences of any Cabinet vote. Jackson listened
to his Cabinet, then decided for himself, on grounds that he was the
Chief Executive and must make any final decision. That was Jackson's
bent to do it himself, on his own, and take whatever consequences
arose. Lincoln later found Cabinet meetings so useless he often stayed
away from them. A story went about Washington in Lincoln's day that
in a Cabinet meeting Lincoln asked for a vote, then said: "Ayes one,
Noes seven. The Ayes have it/*

ANDREW JACKSON

gentleman, John Adams a Boston Brahmin, Jefferson a
Virginian of wealth and aristocracy despite his political phi-
losophy, Madison and Monroe also Virginians of good family,
and John Quincy Adams an aristocrat to his dainty Mas-
sachusetts finger tips. But Jackson was a man who had lived
on the Western side of the Alleghenies and was, therefore, the
common man's first indigenous mouthpiece. Not being en-
dowed as all his predecessors had been, he had had to work
hard for a meager living.

Old Hickory, the people's candidate, had had the endorse-
ment of the Workingman's Party in Philadelphia and was also
the hero of the Western farmer. 18 He had had overwhelming
support in the South, which was largely antiurban in make-up
and prejudice. Champion of what John Adams sneeringly called
"the common people," Jackson personified a new democracy;
he was the hero of the "mob" and the "rabble." It was not
without purpose that he called his political party Democrats,
which label has stuck to this day to his political legatees. For
four long years since 1824, Jackson had been able (partly
because the Tennessee legislature had formally endorsed him
as a presidential candidate) to retire West to campaign,
organize, and prepare for 1828. When 1828 had come he was
ready, and so were the votes.

One reason Jacksonian votes were readier in 1828 than they
had ever been was the sudden mushrooming of suffrage. Homer
Carey Hockett, in Political and Social Growth of the American
People, 1 points out that the stark, crude, self-reliant back-
woodsmen of the new Western commonwealth beyond the
Alleghenies had written into their young state constitutions
the democratic codes of the frontier. One of these codes was
enfranchisement of the masses, a rare item in the East.

In early Colonial times voting had been for the most part
restricted to white natives who owned property. 20 In many of
the Thirteen Colonies a man not only had to own property to

18. Stefan Lorant, The Presidency ( New York, The Macmillan Com-
pany, 1951), p. 108.

19. Homer Carey Hockett, Political and Social Growth of the Ameri-
can People (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1946), pp. 524-34.

20. Revolutionary Sources, Pequot Library, Southport, Connecticut.

Invents the Spoils System 67

vote, but he might have to pass other economic and social
requirements as well. In still other areas he was barred if he
had immigrated; religion was a barrier in some areas; race
and color are subtle barriers even now in the South.

Mr. Hockett wisely points out that enfranchisement of
whole layers of new white male voters in the West put pressure
on the older Eastern states to widen their suffrage too. 21 The
trend had been gradually gathering force before Jackson first
ran for the Presidency in 1824. When Jackson's common man
was defrauded in the Adams-Clay "corrupt bargain** of 18524,
a revolution in Eastern suffrage was inevitable. And, instinc-
tively, the new voters of the old states turned to Jackson as a
man of the people in preference to the trained statesmen of
the old school an aristocracy somehow responsible for the
double cross of democracy in 1824. Politicians did not take
long to follow suit, flocking to Jackson's support between 1824
and 1828 as bees to buckwheat Hockett adds:

The broadening of the suffrage throughout the Union en-
franchised thousands of men who had previously been sheer
outsiders in the management of government. Many were
undeveloped, untrained in political thinking, apt to follow
a magnetic leader irrespective of the policies he advocated.
White manhood suffrage introduced a new and incalculable
factor into conduct of public affairs.

The crowds that merged in Washington for Jackson's
inaugural were beyond anything the aristocrat-led Republic
had yet imagined. Daniel Webster said he had never seen
such a mob before: "Persons have come from five hundred
miles to see General Jackson, and they really seem to thinlc that
the country has been rescued from some dreadful danger."

Jackson was staying at Gadsby's, a Washington hostelry over-
flowing with muddy-booted supporters who roamed the hotel
rooms, shook the President-elect's hand, and awaited their
reward.

Jackson was a weary figure, in full mourning for his Rachel,
his whitening hair carelessly disarranged, but still looking, to

21. Hockett, op. cit., pp. 524-34.

ANDREW JACKSON

a British visitor, Tike a gentleman and a soldier if a sad one."
The new President would not allow Henry Clay in his presence,
refused to make a courtesy call on the outgoing Adams, and
had to be notified by messenger that the White House would
be ready for his occupancy on March 4. Adams wrote in his
own diary (he meticulously kept each hour) that Jackson
eventually requested Adams to put himself to no inconvenience
and stay as many days beyond March 4 as the Adams family
needed for unhurried packing. Later, however, Jackson ap-
parently feared for the safety of his followers and also the
safety of Gadsby's s because of the incredible crush of "com-
mon" people there, and he asked Adams if he might go to the
White House immediately after the inauguration. Adams left
on March 3, refusing to be present at the public triumph of
Rachel Donelson Robards Jackson's churlish husband.

In The Age of Jackson, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., reports a
local source which boasted that the Washington of those days
possessed almost a hundred thousand bricks in pavement in an
age of generally unpaved road. But whatever bricks there
were soon got inundated by the mud of January, February,
and early March, i82g. 22 Justice Story termed the Jacksonian
throng "King Mob," but others called it "King Mud." What-
ever its name, it brought much of this sticky debris unhealthily
inside the taverns and hostelries, which made a fortune out of
the great bloodless revolution and those who came to drink to
it. Eggnog and timber doodles, juleps and slings, sherry
cobblers and great drafts of green ale went coursing down
throats to ward off winter ills and the effects of King Mud, and
to toast the common man who would now be truly king.

Others went to hear and see George Washington Dixon
sing in blackface (he would one day popularize "OF Zip Coon"
as he plunked on a discolored banjo and rolled his white man's
eyes for all minstrelsy to imitate). Still others went to see
Thomas Jefferson's library which was being placed on public
exhibition before being auctioned to pay the debts of Jeffer-
son's recent estate. Those who lived nearby or who preferred

22. Arthur M. ScHesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston, Little,
Brown and Company, 1945), pp. 4-6.

Invents the Spoils System 69

to stay at home had the notorious Peggy O'Neale Eaton to
gossip about in whispers over tea. Speaking of promiscuous
Peggy, one New York Congressman wrote Governor Van

Buren in New York about "using a certain household

and then putting it on one's head." 23 The Congressman's
omission was undoubtedly "chamber pot >?

Besides gossiping and drinking, the political society of that
March inauguration also gave serious attention to eating.
When Congressmen and Senators (and their hangers-on) sat
down to dinner, they began late in the afternoon and continued
a very long time. If the menus left for us can be believed, in
succession were regularly put down a heavy meat soup, a fish
course, turkey, beef smothered in onions, a rack of mutton,
ham, pheasant, that jolly new dish "ice cream," jelly, fruit, and
a generous flowing of brown and pale sherry, madeira, and
champagne. Sometimes the diners toasted the crotchety hero
of New Orleans, sometimes the tiny outgoing President, but
more often they drank in quaking hope that the Republic
would somehow survive the cataclysm that had broken open
the past. Daniel Webster said of it all: "My fear is stronger
than my hope."

As they saw the people's President calmly sworn in, black
cravat and a plain black suit setting off flowing white hair and
a lined, weathered face, the inauguration crowd could scarcely
have believed Tory rumors which were greeting the tardy
new Secretary of State, Martin Van Buren. These rumors
stemmed from John Quincy Adams and his believers who had
it that the new administration was feeble unto anarchy and
Van Buren had best flee back to Albany and have nothing to
do with a political toboggan hell-bent for disaster and destruc-
tion. The prolific Adams journal did nothing to deny this possi-
bility. 24

23. Ibid.

24. It is intriguing to read in the fascinating daily memoirs of John
Quincy Adams that, among other things, Adams had heard that Martin
Van Buren was the illegitimate son of Aaron Burr. It may also be worth
noting that when Van Buren presided over the Senate as Vice-President
under Jackson he had so many political enemies he found it necessary
to place a brace of pistols on his desk.

ANDREW JACKSON

The American Daily Advertiser reports Jackson's inaugural
at the Capitol in tie glowing words o one long and giddy
sentence: 25

The scene was a most beautiful and inspiring spectacle: The
building., noble in its size, with its richly sculptured capitals
and cornices, and the fine group in the pediment; the massy
columns (one for each State in the Union); the far-spread-
ing wings and terraces; the grounds and gates, with the
crowd of carriages without; the line of soldiers in the park;
the towering flight of steps, covered with members of
Congress, officers of the army, foreign ministers, ladies
dressed in aU the varying hues of fashion; the President; the
crowd of heads and of innumerable eyes bent on one spot, all
taken together presented to the outward eye an assemblage
of images never to be forgotten.

One eyewitness of democracy's first genuine swearing-in was
a remarkable woman named Mrs. Anne Roy all who had been
defrauded of her widow's fortune at fifty-four and had taken to
writing to keep body and soul together. Happily for posterity,
Mrs. Royall was present and alert when Jackson was sworn in
by the venerable Chief Justice John Marshall, who must have
had misgivings at least equal to those he had had in swearing
in Jefferson. She leaves us this crystal-clear picture of the
people's President: 26

He was dressed in a blue frock coat, with epaulets, a com-
mon hat with a black cockade, and a sword by his side. He
is very tall and slender. . . . His person is finely shaped, and
his features not handsome but strikingly bold and deter-
mined. He is very easy and affable in his manners, and loves
a jest. He told one of our party he was "one of the blue hen's
chickens." He appears about 50 years of age [he was actually
61]. There is a great deal of dignity about him. He related
many hardships endured by his men, in the Army, but never
breathed a word of his own. His language is pure and fluent,
and he has the appearance of having kept the best of com-
pany.

25. Lorant, op. cit. 9 p. 111.

26. Warren S. Tyron, ed., A Mirror for Americans (Chicago, The
University of Chicago Press, 1952 ) , p. 55.

Invents the Spoils System 71

Mrs. Royall's last phrase undoubtedly refers to aristocratic
rumors of the time that Jackson was a murderer (he had Icilled
in duels and in war), a gamhler (he had played high-low in
Natchez), a drinker (he and Rachel had been known to drink
sippin* whisky together of an evening), a bounder (after all, he
had been married for four decades to what Boston considered
a scarlet woman), and a no-good, illiterate Western thief (he
had stolen the Presidency from the wellborn and the tra-
ditional, and had sworn he was about to steal their patronage,
too). Perhaps Mrs, Roy all wished with reason to place on
historical record his appearance of having "kept the best of
company" as an antidote to gossip.

The new President had walked to The Hill from Gadsby's.
After the swearing-in, he mounted his horse and rode down
Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House, "that Palace at
Washington" which the dying Rachel had so abhorred. He was
pursued by a multitude. It was unruly. It was noisy. It was
a mob, some on horseback, many roaring with the strength of
their whisky, all of them shouting and some even shooting into
the air and emitting Indian whoops. As Jackson rode through
the White House gates the mob surged after him, a sight with-
out precedent, so horrifying that when Rostonians later heard
of it they shuttered their windows.

Filthy country boots common boots caked with mud and
manure climbed upon damask and velvet, their owners yelling
and screaming to colored White House servants bearing great
trays of drinks, which went swilling down throats as fast as they
appeared.

Justice Story reported: *1 never saw such a mixture. The
reign of King Mob seemed triumphant. 9 * To other guests the
sight was reminiscent of the Tuileries and Versailles in bloody,
revolting France.

Here was the corpulent epicure, grunting and sweating for
breath the dandy wishing he had no toes the tight-laced
miss, fearing her person might receive some permanently de-
forming impulse. Several thousands of dollars* worth of art
glass and china were broken in the attempt to get at the
refreshments; punch, lemonade, and other articles were car-

ANDBEW JACKSON

ried out of the White House in buckets and pails; women

fainted; men were seen with bloody noses; and no police had

been placed on duty. 27

The President himself was in real physical danger, just as he
had been at Gadsby's. Friends formed a cordon about him,
attempting without too much success to protect him from well-
wishers and office seekers. Completely worn out from the diffi-
culties of the day and probably as much disgusted, the new
President sank into a 'listless state of exhaustion" and ducked
out a back exit, returning to Gadsby's, where he went to bed.
The party soon burst White House seams and was not over
when daylight struck the bottle- and body-strewn executive
palace yard that President Adams had kept so neat

John Quincy Adams had not heard the jubilant voice and
full-throated whisky roar of "the common people" he patron-
ized. Like his father before him, he had already left the town
and the ill-matched mob he now utterly detested. The suc-
cessor's name this time was Jackson, not Jefferson. What John
Quincy Adams, a poor President, did not know on the dusty
road home that historic night was that the noblest part of his
long and devoted public life was yet to come. As a member
of Congress from Massachusetts he would return in 1831 to
remain in the House until he died on its floor in 1848, a
valiant attacker of slavery, a persistent opponent of gag rules,
and a devout scientist who helped create the Smithsonian
Institution.

No American, however partisan to the democratic cause,
should overlook the elemental fact that John Quincy Adams
and Andrew Jackson, close contemporaries, lived on what
might as well have been different planets. Conservative families
like the Adamses could be as patriotically democratic as
the lowliest republican cobbler, yet they were, more often
than not, highborn gentlefolk whose daily routine was far re-
moved from the do-it-yourself frontier. They had servants,
they had leisure and deportment, they were educated, they
were endowed, they were "society" the aristocrats who, under
another political system, would have been America's lords,

27. Lorant, op. cit., p. 113.

Invents the Spoils System 73

dukes, earls, and royalty. For all their patriotism and no
American family has a prouder patriotic record the two
President Adamses, father and son, simply and plainly dis-
trusted men like Andrew Jackson, even hated them. They were
intellectually willing 28 to give the Jacksons of America equal-
ity and freedom under the revered Constitution, which they
had helped create, yet were practically unable as yet to call
the underprivileged of America their brothers.

Jackson was the people's President and the President of the
new West: this was to be a splendid transfusion for the blood-
stream of a growing nation. But Jackson shared many faults
as well as virtues of the frontier and the lowly born of that
rough-living era. He was intolerant and half-educated, and
what he did not know he pooh-poohed as rubbish. Like a
modern public school graduate who scoffs at private schools
as vaguely "un-American," overlooking the good and patroniz-
ing the "egghead," frontier Americans blanketed the educated,
wealthy upper classes with intolerant hatred and distrust not
quite erased to this day.

The new President's first act was to express an ardent desire
to free the Federal civil service of incompetence and corrup-
tion. Men appointed by Washington, John Adams, and Jeffer-
son still held office, not to mention "corrupt bargain"
appointees of the loathed John Quincy Adams. Of corruption
Jackson did not find overmuch for it wasn't a corrupt era, but
rather new and sparkling and crusading; even so, whatever it
was, there was very little money to steal. Of incompetence
Jackson found more than he had feared. Most post office and
other civil service employees had been at the public trough
for a quarter of a century and firmly believed by now that
their Federal appointments had been for life.

As Jackson began his Herculean sweeping, one clerk in the
Auditor's office skshed his own throat from ear to ear, an-
other in the Department of State went mad. Still others franti-
cally wrote to homes they had long since forgotten, begging

28. To Bis dying day, old Jofoa Adams was believed to be opposed to
universal manhood suffrage, though. John Quincy, Ms son, was less rigid
in the matter.

ANDREW JACKSON

employment of any sort, though they liad not been sacked
nor knew for certain they would be. 2 ^ Whether a man was well
suited to a Federal job didn't matter much to Jackson. What
mattered was that the man had supported him, cherished his
cause, and had detested John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay.
Jackson rather oversimplified the requirements of civil service
in his rationale: 'The duties of all public offices are so plain
and simple that men may readily qualify themselves for their
performance."

Nevertheless, being an old soldier himself, Jackson was
always sympathetic to veterans. An aged postmaster in Albany
was about to be sacked; Jackson pounded his fist on the White
House table with, "By the Eternal! I will not remove the old
man. He carries a pound of British lead in his body!" Any
veteran who had lost a leg on the battlefield, even one who had
openly supported Clay or Adams, could therefore be safe from
dismissal. Jackson said to his patronage officer: "If he lost a leg
fighting for Ms country, that is vote enough for me!" As was to
be expected from his blood, background, and impetuous, emo-
tional nature, Andrew Jackson was almost childlike in his de-
fense of men who had served their country in war. They could
do no wrong.

Jackson was also the first President to realize the importance
of being on cordial terms with the newspapermen of the
country. Fifty-six editors of influential papers were appointed
to office under Jackson. No doubt they were of powerful
assistance to him in securing wide publicity and popular sup-
port for his policies, as well as interpreting public opinion at
the grass roots and passing it along to the White House.

Under earlier Presidents, public officials had ordinarily con-
tinued their tenure during good behavior. This was a sort of
unwritten civil service, patterned on the royal courts of Europe
where most government officials stayed on the public pay
roll until the king died and a new set of sycophants or flunkies
were selected to dance attendance, even if they had to neglect
their sworn duties to do so. Jackson's first appointments were
taken, without exception, from members of his own political

2Q. Records of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.

Invents the Spoils System 75

faction and he promptly filled all vacancies in the Federal
honeycomb with none but Jacksonian partisans.

The triumph of democratic dynamism under Jackson paved
the path for the nationalization of the spoils system, long
established inside state and local American government. For
the first time, there was now no official government aristocracy
created largely from the wellborn, the educated, and the en-
dowed. The very concept was repugnant to the common man
who had backed Jackson and whose idea of Tory aristocrats
frankly approximated blueblooded courtiers of Whitehall and
the Tuileries.

Besides, it is clear Andrew Jackson himself felt that the
newly enfranchised masses should be given a chance for
training in the practical conduct of public affairs. As Franklin
P. Adams said it so perfectly a century later, the average
man was, to Jackson, "above average" and could be taught to
govern himself. If a man believed in democracy at all, he
believed that.

Was Jackson's "spoils system'' as drastic as old histories
would have us think? Undoubtedly not. Arthur M. Schlesinger,
Jr., foremost modern authority on Jackson, has stated that tra-
dition considerably exaggerates the extent of Jackson's actual
removals. 30 Schlesinger estimates that modern research cuts
down Jackson's dismissals during eight years to approximately
one fifth to one tenth of all Federal officeholders, "many for
good reason."

Jackson ousted or disposed of a not much greater propor-
tion of officeholders than Jefferson had. Yet it is undeniable
that Jackson established through his partisan appointment
policy the spoils system in national politics. The demand for
reform had to be met head on, and a redistribution of Federal
offices was the swiftest, shrewdest answer a Western Irishman
with good political intuition could possibly have found. The
common man had too long been thwarted by aristocratic in-
difference and Jackson was duty-bound to make the first peo-
ple's administration in truth a government of, by, and for those
who had finally elected him.

30. Schlesinger, op. ctt., p. 47.

ANDREW JACKSON

Van Buren, the Dutch Jim Farley of his time, had been told
by a Pennsylvania politician: "If you wish to keep up the
party, you must induce them to believe that it is their interest.
Some few may adhere to the party from mere conscientious
conviction of doing right but interest is a powerful stimulus
to make them act energetically and efficiently." 31

Redistribution of political posts served urgent political needs.
Political rewards had long beea used effectively in the colonies
and states. They also helped raise funds in the party of the
poor worMngman. As is true today, the conservative or monied
side never needed to look far for large contributions from
wealthy adherents. But the party of the common people had
few resources save patronage at its disposal. If Jackson's im-
pressive mandate was to mean anything at all it had to be
integrated and organized at the roots.

Beyond composing a green political organization of unen-
dowed common men, the spoils system also contributed to the
fundamental objective of restoring faith in a Federal govern-
ment. Mr. Schlesinger says: 32

In the eyes of the people, the bureaucracy had been cor-
rupted by its vested interests in its own power. Jackson told
Congress: "Office is considered as a species of property, and
government rather as a means of promoting individual inter-
ests than as the instrument created solely for the service of
the people. 7 *

Jackson believed that official duties could be made "so
plain and simple that men of intelligence may readily qualify
themselves for their performance. 7 ' His quick action on this
principle meant that the government was no longer "an
engine for the support of the few at the expense of the
many/'

The doctrine of rotation-in-office was thus in a large part
conceived as a sincere measure of reform. Many professional
reformers so regarded it Robert Dale Owen hailed it en-
thusiastically in his radical New York sheet, the Free En-
quirer, and Jeremy Bentham, the great English reformer,

31. Ibid., p. 46. 32. Ibid.

Invents the Spoils System 77

confided to Jackson, as one liberal to another, that he had
held the doctrine of rotation himself since 1821.

In a larger context, which contemporary Americans could
only have dimly apprehended, rotation-in-office possessed
another significance. The history of government has been
characterized by the decay of old ruling classes and the rise
of more vigorous and intelligent ones to replace them. This
process had already begun in America. The "natural aristoc-
racy" of Richard Hildreth the class composed of merchant,
banker, planter, lawyer and clergyman had started to de-
cline after the War of 1812. The rise of the military hero, a
new "natural" aristocrat, hastened the time for a general
breaking-up of the old governing elite. In extreme cases one
ruling order succeeds another by violent revolution, but a
democracy which preserves equality of opportunity may
escape so drastic a solution. The spoils system, whatever its
faults, at least destroyed peaceably the monopoly of offices
by a class which could not govern, and brought to power
a fresh and alert group which had the energy to meet the
needs of the day.

A century later, Franklin Delano Roosevelt proved anew this
truth by destroying the traditional monopoly of those he
termed "economic royalists" and substituting laws made by
officeholders and policymakers from every walk of life, income,
race, creed, color, and religion, many of whom had been pre-
viously barred by a "'gentleman's agreement" among members
of this economic royalty. Fresh ideas, fresh talent, fresh en-
thusiasm immediately surged through the circulation of politi-
cal blood in the 19305, as they had in the 1830$, and reforms
whose advocacy had beaten Greeley and Bryan (and hurt
T.R. and Wilson with intelligent, influential families ) became
law almost overnight. The people were once again ranning the
works, in Carl Sandburg's phrase, as the people had first run.
them after the bloodless Jacksonian revolution.

Until recent years [says Mr. Schlesinger], the study of
the spoils system has been marred by a tendency to sub-
stitute moral disapproval for an understanding of causes and
necessities. There can be small doubt today that, whatever

ANDREW JACKSON

evils it brought into American life, its historical function was
to narrow the gap between the people and the government
to expand popular participation in the workings of democ-
racy. For Jackson it was an essential step in the gradual
formulation of a program for democratic America. 33

After Andrew Jackson, Presidents of the United States found
the office immeasurably more powerful because they now pos-
sessed that most persuasive of authorities: the right to hire and
fire. This victor's privilege expanded until half a century later
when the behavior of General Grant's venal cronies forced the
Congress to modify the spoils system in favor of a permanent
Federal Civil Service at certain (though by no means all)
levels and areas of government.

In spite of modifications, much of Andrew Jackson's rotation
policy remains today, to the great benefit of a modern occupant
of the White House. The profound frustration most Presidents
undergo when their programs and policies either sink into the
slough of what Cleveland called "innocuous desuetude" or
succumb to downright partisan attack is nevertheless allevi-
ated by the Jacksonian power-precedent of removal and ap-
pointment. The American spoils system as it now operates
undoubtedly stems from Jackson. And what reader of U. S.
history can doubt that its volatile inventor was motivated at
least in considerable part by a lifetime devotion to the memory
of his slandered, martyred Rachel, the pipe-smoking woman he
loved?

33- I, p. 47-

Abraham Lincoln

A TERRIFYING specter had arisen to badger the towering,
sad-faced President from the prairie. Devoted since boy-
hood to the personal freedoms of every man, he was now face
to face with the need for a drastic extension of an executive
order which would destroy one of the fundamental freedoms of
all citizens before the law. What was worse, there was no
certainty that he was acting legally within his Constitutional
powers.

Abraham Lincoln had found himself obliged, after the sober-
ing consequences of the military blow to the Northern cause
at BuH Run, to modify one of the fundamental precepts of the
precious document he had sworn as President to defend. 1 He
had had to suspend the traditional writ of habeas corpus, a
precept of free men, in certain cases necessary to the prosecu-
tion of the war and the safety of the Union he would save.
Here and there he had had to abrogate free man's fundamental
premise since the Magna Charta, but he had done it hesitantly
and infrequently, only along the military borders between the
Blue and the Gray.

But it was now 1863 and things men would have hesitated
to accept in a peaceful democratic society had become less
and less important in the glare of the one fundamental fact:
this was the most awful war yet fought on the face of the earth

i. "The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records
of the Union and Confederate Annies." War Department publication
(Washington, D.C., 1902).

So

4

Suspends Habeas Corpus

and it was not going to be won or lost in a few short weeks.
Habeas corpus, the safeguard against indefinite imprisonment
or detention without due process of law, was of less moment
now than the overpowering, overwhelming fact that the
United States of America would cease to exist altogether if
the President's command failed.

There had been disheartening days indeed for the Union
Army. It was now two years of war and there were no vic-
tories worthy of the name. Washington itself might be lying
in ruins under the Stars and Bars had those triumphant at BuU
Run not tried to drink one another under the table in rejoicing.
Each day had brought new depressions and disappointments,
but to the tall, often depressed, ever-harried President who
ate so little at the White House table there was at last a man
with a lantern in the* darkness. His name was Hooker.

Joe Hooker, blond and good-looking, dashing, not yet fifty
years old, a true martial air about him, was the storybook
general, spoiling for a fight and brimming with brave words.
It was always "when* and never "if; Richmond was not in
dubious assault, it was already fallen. Fearful as Mr. Lincoln
was now of optimists and boasters, and aware that Hooker
was a brusque man ("this is the most depressing thing about
Hooker," he told a friend), the President nevertheless cast
his eye upon Hooker's lantern and kept it there as though it
were a ray of hope, for there was a certain splendor about Joe
Hooker.

81

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

It was then that Hooker came to the throne after the unlucky
Burnside, the timorous and maladroit McCIellan, the beaten
McDowell. Forgotten for the moment were the fiasco of Bull
Run, the Peninsula campaign, Fredericksburg, and the stinging
editorials and cartoons that had followed. This was to be the
first move up the ladder out of the muck and mess of slavery,
partition, and war. At last the President seemed to have found
his General.

By the final week in April, 1863, Fighting Joe Hooker had
moved his army to the Rappahannock River and was searching
out General Lee. He had not long to wait. Lee, with 63,000
men, rested and waited for the frontal assault near a clearing
and a few houses called Chancellorsville, halfway between
Richmond and Washington.

On the first of May, Hooker, with what he confidently told
Mr. Lincoln was "the finest army on the planet," moved most
of this regenerated Army of the Potomac across the Rappa-
hannock, a rain-filled northeast Virginia stream, to crush the
rebellion once and for all. A vigilant President had visited this
new army and his often wholly funereal demeanor seemed to
his associates in Washington to lighten into real hope as the
battle was joined.

At about the same time that spring the Federal Navy was
attempting to recapture Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, and
a fleet of ironclad men-of-war, fully and carefully prepared for
the action, set out to crush this symbol of revolt at the very
point of its birth. The nation knew, as the nation always seems
to know, of great events in the making. It was one of those elec-
tric times; and the pale, thin man in the White House, whose
exceeding physical strength was still remembered in the
wooded lands of the Kankakee basin, could do nothing but
pace sleepless and impotent as he waited for the first dis-
patches. He needed more than the thrill of a genuine military
victory at Chancellorsville or the pride of recapture of be-
leaguered Fort Sumter. Not Lincoln's damaged ego, nor his
stature as President and Commander in Chief of the armed
forces, nor his political fortunes alone required shoring up.
To Lincoln, a man of principle above all, the two years of

Suspends Habeas Corpus 83

disastrous war without a victory had forced him into other
painful compromises. A winning Hooker, a victorious Chan-
cellorsville, a recaptured Charleston harbor might make it
possible for him to extract one of the tainted thorns which
hurt him most his enforced decision to suspend the inalien-
able right of habeas corpus in limited frontal areas where he
had to declare suspension necessary for the public safety.

Now in late April, 1863, almost two years after Bull Run,
when apple blossoms burgeoned in unexampled loveliness in
the valley of the Shenandoah, the sensitive President who
wished above all else to preserve the freedoms of the last best
hope of earth awaited news from Chancellorsville and the
boastful Hooker, and from the Navy concerning their attempt
to recapture Fort Sumter. He had not long to wait.

Communiques of the victor usually outspeed the report of
the defeated, who hangs on to scrape up the crumbs of hope.
Long before news came from battlefield and harbor, there
were rumors of defeat everywhere in Washington. Reports
told how Lee had bluffed with 35,000 men and held a Union
force four times its size while General Thomas J. (Stonewall)
Jackson was on his way with 28,000 men on a quick long march
around Hooker's flank, an encirclement which so crumpled
the Union force that Hooker pulled back across the Rappa-
hannock, having used scarcely a third of his troops.

They told how Hooker, who had previously given blow for
blow, bluff and hearty, had suddenly traded dashing offensive
for overcautiousness and had in fact outdone McClellan in this
respect the McClellan whom Hooker had berated to the
President for his tiptoe tactics.

They left little doubt of a Confederate victory far greater
and graver than that at Bull Run and confirmed the compe-
tence of the rebel generals, even though (unknown to the
dispatcher) the incomparable Jackson now lay dying near the
shaded bank of a river.

From the sea had also come ugly news. The great shore
batteries of Fort Sumter had hurled back the ironclad fleet,
sinking or damaging four. Admiral Dupont, who in Lincoln's
words was "everlastingly asking for more gunboats, more iron-

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

clads and [would] do nothing with any," had emulated Mc-
Clellan. Timidity and disaster were the order of the day.

And how did this affect the man who, according to American
school histories, never once faltered? Did this lowest muddy
ebb of Union fortunes uncover doubts and discouragements
yet unplumbed? Without doubt it did, and we have but to
examine the record sketchily to see how much suffering this
lonely human soul must have endured in the ulcerous, despair-
ing days that spring of 1863.

Chancellorsville's debacle and the naval failure to recapture
Fort Sumter meant ominous things in the grand pageantry of
Civil War. Years later, when someone asked Hooker what went
wrong at Chancellorsville, the culpable general knew a rare
moment of humility and remarked, "Well, to tell the truth, I
just lost confidence in Joe Hooker/" 2 Had he been as fortibright
immediately after Chancellorsville, Hooker's uninspired leader-
ship might have been partially forgiven by the President of
the United States, who had a keen sense of humor and an IHI-
derstandable fondness for candor.

But victory at Chancellorsville was now a bloody fraud and
the country knew it; even worse, the President knew that the
country knew it. Copperheads were born with Chancellors-
ville, though spawned at an obscure moment earlier in the war.
It was only when the country began to realize failure with the
shock of a cold wind on May Day in 1863 that the storm began
to break. But break it did by the end of the month.

The Copperheads were the first to sense its proportions.
They loaded their guns with this potent ammunition and the
noise was enormous. An Ohio Congressman, a Democrat
named Clement Vallandigham, spoke out on the floor of the
House that the war for the Union "is in your hands a most
bloody and costly failure." He advised strongly now as he had
hinted before Hooker's defeat and the failure at Fredericks-
burg that the North should "stop fighting make an armistice
accept at once friendly foreign mediation."

After Chancellorsville, Vallandigham made such a violent

2. Brace Catton, Glory Road (Garden City, Doubleday and Company,
Inc., 1954), P- 230.

Suspends Habeas Corpus 85

and offensive series of speeches against the President person-
ally, and against the government' s part in the war, that General
Burnside, who was commanding die troops in Ohio, had him
arrested and court-martialed. Thereupon most of the Demo-
crats in Washington rose up in loud protest.

Lincoln regretted Burnside's action but supported his own
General against the violent agitator. Newspapers of the day
and magazines, too, picked up this incident as a firing pin for
a broadside of unmitigated, libelous, and often treasonable
protest and personal criticism of Lincoln and the administra-
tion (which Carl Sandburg believes has no parallel for personal
insult in all the depressing story of partisan American politics ) .

No one loving Abraham Lincoln could wish to believe that
he alone held up his head on the black day that the boastful
Hooker gave way as all had before him, and Charleston harbor
still was rebel. It is Pollyanna stuff, and grossly unfair, to say
that Lincoln took it calmly and with a steady eye on the ulti-
mate victory. The record does not show it; the record shows a
stricken, brooding human being, dreadfully aware of the shape
of things, striding about the room "piteous, broken and so
ghostlike," clasping his hands behind him and saying as he
walked back and forth: "My God! My God! What will the
country say? What will the country say?"

The country as a whole was not at once awake to this fresh
and deepest disaster for the Lip coin Administration and the
Northern cause. Newspaper headlines then read a good deal
like any war communiques, especially later headlines in the
American press during the French and British rout in the
World War II Nazi breakthrough at Sedan. They were at first
invariably overoptimistic in fact several papers initially called
Hooker's stand a victory, though he retreated the next day.

May First was a day of national fasting. The New-York
Tribune? reported that the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher
in Plymouth Church called for thanks to God for the progress
of things. On page one of several succeeding issues appeared
three- and four-column maps of the territory of the Rappa-
hannock near Fredericksburg, with scarcely a showing of

3. Archives, New York Herald Tribune.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Chancellorsville, and the issue of May 2 carried the prominent
headline, "The Enemy Confounded/' while telling of Hooker's
crossing of the river to engage and destroy the enemy once and
for all. The issue of May 4 reported: "The Enemy Panic
Stricken." And on May 5: "The Enemy in Retreat/' with a
subsidiary headline: "Concentration of Rebels on Our Right
Wing" (what an understatement of Stonewall Jackson's bril-
liant encircling maneuver!).

But on May 6 the correspondent was not as certain of the
completeness of Hooker's "victory" and his dispatch was very
forthright The headlines of the day included: "The Battle
Still Unfinished" and "Bad Behavior of the nth Corps." Next
day the lines read: "Nobody Here Knows Anything" and "Loss
to Enemy Very Large." On May 8 was reported Hooker's "Suc-
cessful Recrossing of the River" and 'Terrible Repulses of the
Enemy." In adjacent columns appeared the first full dispatches
from rebel Richmond, where Lee was announcing the greatest
victory, with accompanying details which history has borne
out. The Tribune was one of the few papers in the North to
carry this sobering dispatch.

The arrest of Vallandigham had indirectly involved the Pres-
ident's abrogation of the writ of habeas corpus. The term
liabeas corpus is Latin for "you may have the body." In law
it is a writ directed by a judge to some person who is detaining
another person. The writ commands that the body of the per-
son in custody be brought to a specific place at a specific time
for a specific hearing. The purpose of the writ of habeas
corpus, one of the great traditions of free men, is to prevent
indefinite imprisonment or detention without due process of
law. It is a safeguard against illegal confinement of any sort,
particularly effective against dictators, who universally ignore
it.

Under Anglo-Saxon tradition a man must be told why he has
been arrested and, within a reasonable time, given a hearing.
He cannot be held incommunicado and he cannot be held in-
definitely without being informed why. If those holding him
have no case against him they must, under traditional British-

Suspends Habeas Corpus 87

American codes, let him go free and not after years o im-
prisonment, but witHn hours or, at worst, days. What springs
him from indefinite imprisonment without formal charges is
the tradition of habeas corpus.

The phrase is mentioned as early as the fourteenth century
in England. It became part of English law as the Habeas
Corpus Act of 1679 and has long been regarded as perhaps
the most fundamental legal freedom we possess. British colo-
nists in America were often denied it. Refusal of stubborn
colonial judges to issue the writ was among the foremost
grievances leading to the Declaration of Independence. The
issue is mentioned specifically in the American Constitution,
and not by chance: "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused
shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an im-
partial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall
have been committed . . . and to be informed of the nature
and cause of the accusation."

To implement this freedom, most natural in the making of a
free society, it is provided in the Constitution that the privilege
of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended "unless,
when in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may
require it"

Mr. Lincoln had, early in the war, authorized General Win-
field Scott, the man originally in charge of Federal military
operations, to suspend the writ of habeas corpus along any
military line between Washington and Philadelphia. This order
of 1861 quickly brought cries of despotism and military dic-
tatorship against the administration, but Mr. Lincoln did not
hesitate to extend it ruthlessly (and did) as he felt the public
safety would require.

Before adjourning in August, 1861, Congress had voted, be-
sides the men and munitions to carry on the war, ex post facto
justification for Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus and
other "illegal" proclamations.

As the President began to tamper with the ancient privilege
of the writ of habeas corpus many of the guarantees of the
Constitution vanished, and Justice Taney, sitting in the circuit
court in Baltimore, had handed down the opinion that the

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

President had no Constitutional power to suspend the writ nor
authorize a military officer to do so. Margaret Leech tells the
story well: 4

The venerable judge had become embroiled in the case
of John Merryman, confined for treasonable activities in Fort
McHenry. The soldiers at the fort would neither yield the
person of John Merryman, nor admit the United States
marshal to serve an order against their commanding general
for contempt. Taney's decision provoked much discussion,
but he was an aged man of Southern bias. The conservative
Attorney General, Mr. Bates, sustained the President. The
majority of loyal men at first accepted the arbitrary arrests
as necessary to the nation's struggle for survival, even when
in September of 1861 General Dix and General Banks
rounded up secessionist legislators of Maryland and clapped
them into prison.

One of the most spectacular instances of military rule, exer-
cised under the suspension of habeas corpus, was the case of
one John Murphy who tried to secure the release of his son
James who had enlisted under the legal age of eighteen. A
Federal judge in Maryland issued the usual habeas corpus
just before Lincoln suspended the writ in the District of
Columbia. The writ was directed to General Andrew Porter
who refused to respect it.

Very quickly, the attorney who had served the writ was him-
self arrested by General Porter, who was provost marshal, and
languished in the guardhouse. Then, the Federal judge who
had issued the writ returned home to find an armed sentinel
at his cloor. The authority responsible was capricious Secretary
of State William H. Seward, who had boasted that he had
but to ring his tiny bell and any man, woman, or child in the
Republic could be imprisoned. The ambitious Secretary was
hated and feared above all others in the Cabinet for exercising
these arbitrary powers as a dictator would. Eventually every-
one involved was set free, but not before the Federal Constitu-
tion had been not only violated but raped repeatedly.

4. Margaret Leech, Reveille in Washington (New York, Harper and
Brothers, 1941), pp. 142-44.

Suspends Habeas Corpus 89

Suspects were carried off to military prisons, often se-
cretly, by night. Their houses were searched, their valuables
seized. In most cases they were not even informed of the
charges against them. They were not permitted to have legal
advice, and no expectation of trial by jury mitigated the dis-
comforts of their detention. . . . They could only hope that
the pressure of their claims might call them to the State De-
partment's attention, and win them a special examination.
Often when this was held, it developed there had been in-
sufficient grounds for the arrest. 3

On the other hand, there was a remarkable amount of seces-
sionist sympathy in the North, particularly in Washington,
Philadelphia, Baltimore, and along the border states. In singu-
lar contrast to the arbitrary arrests and dictatorial conduct of
Seward and his department, there was unusual leniency in
most cases of doubtful Unionists. Often, only in extreme in-
stances were they arrested or imprisoned. Congress had passed
a strong bill requiring all Federal employees to take an un-
usually severe oath to support the Constitution, but many de-
partments had been slack in applying the law because so many
Washington employees were of Virginian and other Southern
origin.

A departmental mail pouch in the War Department was, for
example, freely used by rebel sympathizers for transmission of
information to Richmond. It hung in the hall and anyone
could without question put notes in and take them out.

On assuming office in 1862 as Secretary of War, Edwin M.
Stanton stopped such rebel nonsense and soon was also given
the State Department's jurisdiction over political prisoners,
which meant the handling of habeas corpus. The most obvious
cases of misguided justice under State Department procedures
were set free by Stanton at once. Usually there was no record
of the charges against them, and Secretary Seward's little bell
tinkled no more.

In retrospect, this part of Abraham Lincoln's Administration
is difficult for the most pro-Northern sympathizer to swallow,
context discounted. More than 13,000 persons were arrested

5. Ibid.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

by the War Department alone and no one knows how many
others were detained on despotic grounds. Military trials in
camera and arbitrary arrests developed into a despotic system
the like of which our country has never known before or since.

To this day there are few dungeons with a more evil reputa-
tion than the Old Capitol Prison on First Street in Washington,
where so many victims of the suspension of the writ of habeas
corpus ate their hearts out, and occasionally were beaten until
they died, or sickened out of Me on the vile food and filth and
disease.

President Lincoln's conduct during the Civil War was con-
spicuous by the variety and number of his un-Constitutional
acts. 6 "Yet every one of them" says historian Woodward, "may
be justified on the ground of necessity. The situation clearly
demonstrated the Constitutional weakness of the Chief Execu-
tive power in a time of emergency. Buchanan was right in de-
claring that he could find no Constitutional authority for using
force against a State that had seceded."

Lincoln had personally suspended the right of habeas corpus,
though it would appear from the wording of the Constitution
that Congress alone has that authority. 7 Certainly Article I,
Section 9 is perfectly plain on this point: "The privilege of the
writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in
cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it."

The implication is clearly legislative because Article I of
the Constitution has to do solely with the composition, powers,
and procedures of the Congress. The Presidency is not men-
tioned until the first two words of Article II. Therefore, Lin-
coln's original executive order suspending the writ of habeas
corpus without Congressional assent was undoubtedly unlaw-
ful.

Thousands of Americans were thrown into jail and confined
for months without even being informed of the charges against
them. Stupid military officers had the power to arrest any

6. W. E. Woodward, A New American History ( Garden City, Garden
City Press, 1938), p. 525.

7. In fairness to Lincoln, it should be explained that Congress was
not in session at the time of suspension.

Suspends Habeas Corpus 91

American citizen and put him or her in prison without indict-
ment, warrant, or explanation. As in the case of the Maryland
judge, even persons attached to the law were subject to illegal
whim. Subordinates even raided newspapers and stopped their
publication, once again in defiance of the Federal Constitution,
in this instance contrary to the First Amendment.

Did the end justify the means? Let Lincoln himself say it,
as he so often did, best of all:

Soon after the first call for militia, I felt it my duty to
authorize the commanding general in proper cases, accord-
ing to his discretion, to suspend the privilege of the writ of
habeas corpus, or, in other words, to arrest and detain,
without resort to the ordinary processes and forms of law,
such individuals as he might deem dangerous to the public
safety. ... At my verbal request, as well as by the general's
own inclination, this authority has been exercised but very
sparingly. Nevertheless, the legality and propriety of what
has been done under it are questioned; and I have been
reminded from a high quarter that one who is sworn to "take
care that the laws be faithfully executed'* should not himself
be one to violate them.

Of course I gave some consideration to the questions of
power and propriety before I acted in this matter. The whole
of the laws which I have sworn to take care that they be
faithfully executed were being resisted, and failing to be
executed, in nearly one-third of the States. Must I have al-
lowed them to finally fail of execution, even had it been
perfectly clear that by the use of the means necessary to
their execution some single law, made in such extreme ten-
derness of the citizen's liberty, that practically it relieves'
more of the guilty than the innocent, should, to a very
limited extent, be violated?

To state the question more directly, are all the laws but
one to go unexecuted, and the Government itself go to
pieces, lest that one be violated? Even in such a case I
should consider my official oath broken, if I should allow
the Government to be overthrown, when I might think the
disregarding the single law would tend to preserve it. But
in this case I was not, in my own judgment, driven to this
ground.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

In my opinion, I violated no law. The provision of the
Constitution that "The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus
shall not be suspended unless when, in cases of rebellion or
invasion, the public safety may require it," is equivalent
to a provision is a provision that such privilege may be
suspended when, in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public
safety does require it.

I decided that we have a case of rebellion, and that the
public safety does require the qualified suspension of the
privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, which I authorized
to be made. Now it is insisted that Congress, and not the
executive, is vested with this power. But the Constitution
itself is silent as to which, or who, is to exercise the power;
and as the provision plainly was made for a dangerous
emergency, I cannot bring myself to believe that the framers
of that instrument intended that in every case the danger
should run its course until Congress could be called together,
the very assembling of which might be prevented, as was
intended in this case by the rebellion.

This message was addressed to the Congress on July 4, 1861.
The above version was the first draft in which Lincoln wrote
as if he might be talking with a friend, using *T* and "my." But
by the time the message was delivered to Capitol Hill someone
had prevailed on Lincoln to act more like a President, so he
modified the personal pronouns and inserted legal jargon.

In whatever form it was persuasive. Congress legitimatized
Lincoln's limited executive order in August, 1861, as Congress
had legitimatized Jefferson's purchase of Louisiana after the
fact, and as it was to do again with President Truman when
U. S. troops were sent to aid Korea against Communist aggres-
sion.

The President had moved very slowly in abrogating the cher-
ished writ which he, above anyone, instinctively admired as
fundamental to a free society. In the spring of 1861 he had au-
thorized limited suspension of habeas corpus on a small section
of the Florida coast. In the summer of 1861 he had expanded it
to the military line north of Philadelphia as far as New-York. In
the fall of 1861 he suspended habeas corpus for all military
personnel in the District of Columbia. He hoped against hope

Suspends Habeas Corpus 93

that the war might progress to a point where even these slight
trespasses against freedom could be removed.

It wasn't until the disastrous autumn of 1862, however, that
Lincoln was compelled to deny the privilege of habeas corpus
to all persons imprisoned by military order. Slowly the black
mantle of defeat was falling on military and civilian alike.

Now in 1863, with Hooker's rout at Chancellorsville and the
path wide open for Lee to invade the North (probably at Har-
risburg, Pennsylvania), Lincoln considered a final seal on the
door of Constitutional freedom. Even the great victory at
Gettysburg from July i to 4 failed to lift the extreme eventual
danger, for no one was then sure that Lee would not try again,
perhaps at Philadelphia, Baltimore, or Washington. Gettysburg
was a great Federal victory, but a defensive one. It had stopped
an invasion. It hadn't won a war.

So in the late summer of 1863 Abraham Lincoln received
from Salmon P. Chase, his reluctant Secretary of the Treasury,
the following notation: 8

You, Mr. President, have believed that you have the power
to suspend the writ of habeas corpus without being author-
ized by Congress and in some cases you have acted on this
belief. After much consideration, I have come to the con-
clusion that your opinion and mine are sanctioned by the
Constitution. Whatever doubt there may have been as to
your power to suspend the writ, it has been removed by ex-
press legislation.

Chase urged the President to make the suspension of habeas
corpus national in scope, applying to all civilians as well as all
miHtary personnel. One reason was that the military draft was
making trouble in Northern cities, particularly New-York, and
some sort of enforcement had to be legalized. Suspension of
habeas corpus was as forceful a method as any, for it gave the
commanding general in each district the right to clap into jail
anyone who refused to be drafted (or pay for a legal substi-
tute) without going to the lengths of protracted court proce-
dure.

8. Carl Sandburg, Vol. IT, Abraham Lincoln, The War Years (New
York, Harcotirt, Brace and Company, Inc., 1939), p. 445.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Chase pleaded with the President to make the order sus-
pending tie writ a presidential proclamation so bold and clear
that it would command public confidence if a collision arose
with a state governor or local judge. Lincoln acted at once on
the suggestion.

So, on the same day, September 15, 1863, Abraham Lincoln
issued the fateful nationwide proclamation as finally drafted
by Secretary of State Seward. In what Carl Sandburg aptly
describes as "a solemn vocabulary/* 9 it was made known by
the President that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus
"is suspended throughout the United States" This suspension
would continue until modified or revoked by a later proclama-
tion. The syllables of the document "produced a sonorous pro-
nouncement" that backed up the provost marshal with all the
power at the command of the United States Army and Navy.
It would indeed be a sure and useful instrument with which
to prosecute the war to a successful end.

Readers of history have often wondered why Lincoln, with
Gettysburg and Vicksburg to support him, resorted to universal
suspension of habeas corpus. But two terrible things lingered
in fiie back of his mind throughout the summer of 1863, com-
bining to make necessary his proclamation suspending the
writ of freedom for all Americans.

The first fact was the ghastly pattern of Chancellorsville and
the still-to-be-found general who could take charge and end
the war. Lincoln could only guess after Vicksburg. It would
take the bloody, incredible Wilderness of 1864 and 1865, the
bulldog grinding down of Robert E. Lee's once unmatched
forces to turn the tide Lincoln still could not be certain of,
even after Gettysburg and Vicksburg. The ghost of Joe Hooker
and all the other pitifully impotent generals who had boasted
and failed continually stalked the reaches of the President's
vast mind.

The second fact was draft rioting which broke out in New-
York only ten days after the glorious "victory'' at Gettysburg.
The Union conscription act of March 3, 1863, had provided

Q. Ibid.

Suspends Habeas Corpus 95

that all able-bodied males between twenty and forty-five
were liable to military service. Any draftee wlio gave -the
government $300 or furnished an acceptable substitute for a
fee was excused. It was a dreadfully defective piece of legis-
lation and the most unpopular in America until the Prohibition
Amendment at the end of World War L It was undemocratic.
It placed a premium on wealth, for only the comparatively
wealthy of Civil War days could afford to give the government
$300, or pay some such sum to another to take one's place. The
poor who could not afford these things were clapped into uni-
form.

From July 13 to 16, 1863, the echoes of glorious Gettysburg
still ringing on the front pages, there occurred bloody, large-
scale riots in New- York where Governor Horatio Seymour, a
Democrat, had publicly declared the conscription act un-Con-
stitutional. The tremendous mob, much of it foreign-born and
of the laboring class (which had considerable cause), over-
powered the militia and police and seized the Second Avenue
armory with its guns and ammunition, setting fire to the build-
ing.

Abolitionists and Negroes were singled out for attack in the
unreasoning logic of the New-York mob. Southern sympathizers
worked overtime everywhere in the city to pour insidious gaso-
line on the flames. Business ceased. Looting and murder were
the order of the day. Tammany ran the town then, as now, and
was forced to vote that the city would pay the $300 required
for anyone who might be drafted and did not wish to go to
war.

Meanwhile, the famous Seventh Regiment of New-York,
fresh from the laurels o Gettysburg, was rushed back to Man-
hattan. With the aid of cadets from West Point, the local
police, the militia, and the United States Navy, order was
eventually restored. Casualties may have been as high as a
thousand people, and damage was certainly in the millions,
but no one can ever really know.

Lincoln eventually got Congress to modify the draft act so
that the privilege of buying one's way out of service was limited

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

to conscientious objectors. All others had to go when their
numbers came up, if they were fit, regardless of wealth, station,
influence, or background.

The draft riots deeply impressed the President. Coupled
with the perpetually gnawing fear of Joe Hookers by whatever
name on his general staff and there were still plenty of them
it is little wonder that he issued the fateful proclamation of
September, 1863, widening suspension of the writ of habeas
corpus to apply to all American citizens. To a Chief Executive
who could write the editor of the New-York Tribune, Horace
Greeley, that even slavery could be condoned if it meant pres-
ervation of the Union, the proclamation of temporary suspen-
sion of personal freedom was understandable.

All Presidents feel the greatness of the office, but all Presi-
dents cannot respond to it. That Lincoln knew well the terrible
step he was taking when he suspended the precious right of
habeas corpus no sensible reader of history can for a moment
doubt. Nor can there be the slightest question that only great
Presidents see ultimate goals and sweep all else aside to achieve
them. Taking the grave step he did, the Commander in Chief
of the Union he preserved altered irrevocably the concept of
the Presidency, increased the precedent of presidential power
in a time of national crisis and, however painful to himself,
sanctified the highest office the American people have it in
their power to bestow.

Chester Arthur

WHEN RUTHERFORD B. HAYES 1 became President of the
United States, upsetting Samuel J. Tilden in an election
Tilden had rightly won, he wished particularly to show New
York that honesty would be his policy, for Tilden had been
Governor of New York and every literate American knew that
Hayes and the Republicans had stolen the Presidency. Gover-
nor Tilden had had a substantial popular majority and, in the
original electoral college, a comfortable margin of states as
well. But the prevailing post-Civil War Republican machine
had so finagled the electoral commission that disputed electoral
delegations from Western and Southern states were juggled to
make Hayes President of the United States by a single vote.

President Hayes was, therefore, understandably sensitive
to charges of corruption and malodorous politics when his
salutary new administration spotted smells drifting from the
office of the Collector of the New York Custom House. After
much self-righteous fanfare, Hayes removed a Republican,
one Chester Alan Arthur, the Collector, but left untouched
most of the party's pork-barrel underlings. This and other
Hayes reforms in the late 1870$ were accomplished, however,

i. In 1876, when Rutherford B. Hayes was told that his running mate
would be William A. Wheeler, Hayes replied: "And who is William
A. Wheeler?'* James G. Blaine had had the presidential nomination of
1876 sewed up when suddenly the gas lights failed and the convention
was forced to recess on account of darkness. When the delegates re-
assembled the next day, enthusiasm for Blaine had cooled; thus, Hayes,
not Blaine, became President of the United States.

98

5

Rises to the Occasion

over the violent objection of the New York Republican machine
which was led by Roscoe Conkling, Senator from New York
and fountainhead of New York Republicanism. The need for
civil service reform had been a burning political issue ever
since the Grant scandals, but Conkling cared little or nothing
for public opinion and reformers made him actively ill. So he
broke with Hayes, who had upset Grant's third-term plans, and
got his revenge on Hayes at the Republican Convention of
1880.

By that year President Hayes had so alienated Conkling
that Hayes had no chance for re-election, and besides he was
committed to a single term of office. Moreover, the James G.
Elaine wing of the Republican Party, which hated Conkling,
hated Hayes even more. 2

At the convention of 1880, Conklingites characterized them-
selves as Stalwarts, hewing firmly to the Old Guard and the
conservative approach that thought nothing of waving the
bloody shirt of Southern insurrection to win an election fifteen
years after the Civil War's last gun was silenced. The Elaine
faction, on the other hand, was contemptuously referred to as
Half-Ereeds.

Conkling's Stalwarts came to the convention determined that
General Grant should have a third term in spite of the scandals
and the incompetence. But such was the temper of the common

2. Peter Levin, Seven By Chance (New York, Fairar, Straus and
Company, 1948), pp. 146-76.

99

CHESTER ARTHUR

people that a great resistance began to form against Conkling
and Grant and their well-oiled machines.

A total of 378 votes were needed for nomination, and Conk-
ling claimed 300 to 350 for Grant on the first ballot Elaine's
legions claimed 225 to 285. Other nominees were scattered,
including John Sherman of Ohio who held 90. It seemed
that all the Grant or Elaine managers had to do was bargain
proficiently and their man was in, with Grant the favorite to
take it.

But the unrelenting stubbornness of the opposition, the arro-
gance of the autocratic Conkling, the abiding distrust of Elaine,
and the obstinacy of Sherman to release a single delegate made
it clear even before the convention opened that first-ballot vic-
tory was aU important. 3

By the time the balloting opened, Grant had lost fifty dele-
gates to Half-Breed minorities. Elaine's nomination speeches
were incredibly bad; the chief nominator not only apologized
for Elaine, but got his middle initial wrong. Conkling's oratory
wasn't as puerile as Elaine's, being carefully planned and pre-
pared, but it was bitingly sarcastic, which managed to con-
solidate the alliance against Grant.

Through thirty-three tedious roll calls the two major candi-
dates held without major defection. In the baking heat of a
lake-shore summer in Chicago (there were no air-conditioning
comforts or loud-speakers to stem the humid chaos), Wisconsin
suddenly switched to James A. Garfield, who had placed Sher-
man in nomination. Garfield jumped to his feet to protest, but
was pounded out of order. Elaine and Sherman went immedi-
ately over to Garfield, the new hero. On the thirty-fifth ballot
Garfield had nearly enough votes, and it was all over on the
thirty-sixth, the sudden movement of a new favorite sweeping
the day as it has so often in our national conventions, which
run on the heady fuel of mob psychology. In the end, 306 Stal-
warts still held out for Grant against Garfield, which boded
little good for the new candidate in the campaign. Indeed, the
convention which had repudiated Presidents Hayes and Grant
was quickly made aware by Conkling that the New York Re-

3. Ibid.

Rises to the Occasion 101

publican organization, among others, would simply sit on its
hands at election time unless the political bosses could now
name the vice-presidential candidate.

Garfield hated Conkiiag with all his being, but he knew, as
political leaders from Ohio often knew, that compromise was
the best political course and that Garfield and the Republicans
would lose the election if Conkling's Stalwarts sabotaged the
venture. So the horse-trading began.

First Garfield offered the vice-presidential nomination to
Levi P. Morton, a wealthy and respectable Grant man who
could help finance as well as lift the social level of the cam-
paign. But Morton was advised that Garfield couldn't win, so
he turned down a vice-presidential nomination which would
have made him Chief Executive within months o the in-
auguration. Later Morton did become Vice-President under
Benjamin Harrison, and later still Governor of New York.

However unbelievable it would have seemed before the
event, the unfrocked Chester Alan Arthur of New York was
finally selected to run with Garfield. If Arthur's appointment
by party bosses as vice-presidential candidate on the Repub-
lican ticket appealed to the practical politician and healed
the wounds of the party, it galled not a few others. Though
John Sherman publicly endorsed Garfield, he said privately of
Arthur: "The nomination is a ridiculous burlesque and I am
afraid was inspired by a desire to beat the ticket." To this
recondite observation Sherman added that "it was a rather
scandalous proceeding." 4

Lack of enthusiasm for Garfield's running mate was evident
in the nation's press, especially among the liberal Republicans.
The Democratic press quickly seized upon it, for it gave them
plenty of ammunition. Only General W. S. Hancock's incredible
political ineptness destroyed this and other initial advantages
of a party out of power for twenty increasingly corrupt years.

Few outside New York State knew that Conkling hadn't
especially liked the idea of Arthur on the ticket, and believed
that Conkling had been instrumental in making the deal.
Arthur had never held elective office prior to the election of

4. Archives, Pequot Library, Southport, Connecticut.

CHESTER ARTHUB

1880, but he was patently a Conkling-type politician and had
been so since tibe end of the Civil War. Moreover, it was un-
deniable that Arthur had been removed as Collector of the
New York Customs and, guilty or not guilty, his indictment
was fixed in the American mind. (It is said in the newspaper
business that all a man has to have on his record is a headline
reading "Jones Indicted" and Jones is a criminal in the public's
mind for the rest of his days, regardless of his guilt or inno-
cence.)

Chester Arthur's background was far different from what it
appeared to be. There were all sorts of misconceptions about
him, because of his sponsor, his cronies, and his brush with the
Collectorship. Arthur was a gentleman, a man of taste and
breeding, of literary discrimination and polish. He loved
Thackeray and Scott and reread them constantly. His dinner
table conversation was polished, his manners drawing-room
perfect. He wore elegant mutton-chop sideburns which met in
a mustache and his awareness of caste and dress stopped "just
short of foppery," and certainly belied his Baptist minister
father and Vermont origins. It isn't at all surprising that he was
an Episcopalian as an adult, having repudiated the Baptist
faith for one then generally accepted as "more social."

It wasn't by chance that Arthur lived on lower Lexington
Avenue, then the fanciest residence area in Manhattan, had
several servants, married a girl from a fine Virginia family, and
loved good wines and French food. By blood he was fascinated
with politics Irishmen seem to lean naturally that way. He
was a lawyer, but unsuccessful in the courtroom, preferring
negotiations to briefs or questioning. He didn't cotton to issues,
national or local, but rather liked the manipulation, the game,
the action of man-to-man political give and take. He would
rather let someone else write his speeches even deliver them
while he controlled the situation behind the scenes. Mr.
Levin says: 5 "Arthur seldom concerned himself with the whcfc
quality of his fascination; the how quality consumed too much
of his attention. As a politician he bore the same relationship

5. Levin, op. ctt., p. 158.

Rises to the Occasion 103

to a statesman as a mechanic does to a scientist or a printer to
a poet."

This, Mstorians feel, explains in large measure Arthur's
strange career. Essentially he was a private citizen steadily
pursuing a hobby, but he was not a professional in politics.
It was his mistress, not his wife. He ultimately became a con-
summate artist in political control, in what today would be
accomplished by incessant phone calling, but was then done
mostly by messenger or in person. Just the same, he too was
trapped in the quicksand of ambition and, when offered the
vice-presidential spot on a major party ticket, simply couldn't
refuse. Few American males could, then or now.

Although Arthur wasn't in any way a "clubhouse boy/* the
journals of his time tarred him with the Conkling brush, much
as many deserving Democrats from Manhattan have since been
smeared with the transgressions of Tammany Hall. Rather he
was a happy, back-slapping, genial gentleman, but he was a
gentleman, where Conkling's other associates seldom were.

Arthur had been an obscure second-in-command of the
Conkling machine. He now willingly took another second-in-
command, the vice-presidential nomination, since in his own
words even "a barren nomination would be a great honor,"
though Conkling had said, "If you wish for my favor and my
respect you will contemptuously decline it.** 6 ConkHng may
have wanted the Vice-Presidency for himself. In any case he
was a permanent Grant man and a professional politician to
whom the nomination of Arthur was just one more essential
compromise. Anyway, the pact had been signed. New York
nominated Arthur and Ohio seconded foim amid the hisses and
catcalls of reformers and the silence of the Half-Breeds. Pro-
fessional politicians had confirmed the arrangement before the
first roll call.

The campaign was largely one of silence on the part of the
ConHing crowd at first. Garfield needed money for the cam-
paign and New York sat on its hands. Conkling and Arthur

6. Archives, Museum of the City of New York.

CHESTER ARTHUR

literally went fishing, shutting off from Garfield's campaign
funds the tremendous resources of Wall Street and the silk-
stocking New Yorker. Conkling was simply making certain
that his own power would continue in New York, that the
Elaine crowd wouldn't try to move in.

Eventually it became so painful to Garfield and his finances
that a tour of New York was arranged, ending up at the Fifth
Avenue Hotel, which by no coincidence whatsoever turned
out to be Conkling's headquarters. Morton and Jay Gould and
Chauncey Depew were there to make certain the Republicans
would have no money problems. Elaine, Logan, and Sherman
were there to promise party unity. Arthur, Governor Cornell,
and Tom Platt were present to assure the New York State
organization. Only "my Lord Roscoe," as Garfield called him,
was absent. He was, however, ready now to work with the
party and for Garfield, having received genuine patronage
assurances. He and Grant toured Indiana and Ohio in behalf
of Garfield. Other Stalwarts were dispatched as apostles.

The "Treaty of Fifth Avenue" may or may not have sur-
rendered all New York patronage to Conkling: Garfield later
swore it didn't, though Platt swore it did. The fact is it tempo-
rarily settled the feud, at least to Conkling's satisfaction, and
Conkling surely felt he had made a bargain: a pledge to de-
liver New York State in exchange for the state's share of the
Federal patronage, in spite of the fact that Conkling had sup-
ported Grant.

Maine went Democratic in September, auguring bad omens.
But General Hancock, whose nomination had been considered
a master stroke by the Democrats, in imitation of the Repub-
licans* successful military candidacies, turned out to be a
master botcher and bungler. He said things during the cam-
paign, as many military men have said before and since, that
no trained politician ever says. He made enemies by instinct.

Moreover, the Democrats very foolishly forged a letter pur-
porting to show that Garfield favored free immigration of
Chinese to the Western states. But the letter was circulated
too long before Election Day and was easily disproved by the
hour of voting. Even the press sympathetic to a Democratic

Rises to the Occasion 105

President denounced the trick, calling it infamous, and Han-
cock somehow managed to lose the election by a margin of only
four figures, the closest popular presidential vote in the history
of the United States. The final tally was:

James A. Garfield (R) 4,454,416

Winfield S. Hancock (D) 4,444,952

Thus, a difference of only 9,464 made Major General James
A. Garfield President of the United States and Chester Alan
Arthur, Vice-President.

The electoral vote of 214 to 155 was much more decisive,
and the Democrats, who had come so close in 1876 with Sam-
uel J. Tilden, only to be swindled out of the election, had fallen
for the sixth consecutive election. The upstart new Repub-
licans were still undefeated, a remarkable political achievement
for a young party only a generation born.

Garfield had been one of hundreds of politicians Abraham
Lincoln's Secretary of War had somehow fitted into uniform. 7
Many of them had been handed officers' commissions outright
and Garfield, a Congressman at that time, had high hopes in
this direction. Garfield had known, as others knew, the political
value of heroism and participation on the winning side. He
hoped above hope to get an independent command where he
might have the opportunity of associating his name with a
great victory. He seemed quite certain he possessed military
genius, though he had had little or no training in tactics. But
Edwin Stanton, the Secretary of War, was finding it far too
difficult to dig up military plums for all the politicians who
wanted individual command; so when the assignment came
for Garfield it was as Chief of Staff to General Rosecrans of
the Army of the Tennessee, primarily an administrative post
and no place at all to show off military genius.

When the ill-starred Rosecrans engineered a major Union
disaster at Chickamauga he was cashiered, but Garfield,
through a minor heroism, which was blown up out of pro-

7. Carl Sandburg, Vol. IE, Abraham Lincoln, The War Years (New
York, Harconrt, Brace and Company, 1939), passim.

106 CHESTER ARTHUR

portion to the truth, emerged a national hero. It won him a
major general's stars. Thereupon he promptly returned to
politics and his seat in Congress where the two stars were his
most valuable stratagem and eventually helped make him
President of the United States.

Gradually Garfield inherited the Republican leadership,
partly through long tenure, partly through the death of the
detestable Thaddeus Stevens (who had persecuted President
Johnson), the ascendency of Schuyler Coif ax to the Vice-
Presidency under General Grant, and James G. Elaine's elec-
tion from Maine as United States Senator.

When Garfield and Arthur had been elected to the Presi-
dency and Vice-Presidency, Garfield wrote in his journal the
second night in the White House: "I love to deal with doctrines
and events. The contests of men about men I greatly dislike/*

The selection of James G. Elaine as Secretary of State might
have been unfortunate for Garfield, for Elaine possessed a
strong personality, was sharply and unnecessarily partisan, and
was Conlding's mortal enemy. Whether Elaine or Garfield
would have been the real President, had Garfield lived, is
worthy of conjecture. The struggle to fill his Cabinet and other
appointments made Garfield's few months in the White House
completely miserable, caught as he was in the wash of dirty
politics with Elaine on one side and Conkling's New York
cronies on the other. Sometimes there was no way of telling
where anybody stood.

Garfield won the first few rounds. He got his appointments
through the Senate, including a man opposed to Conkling as
the new Collector of New York Customs, as lush a plum as
could be imagined in politics in those days, for the Collector
in New York kept a percentage of everything he collected in
the way of duties and New York was by far the biggest port
of entry. Garfield went even further. He had campaigned on a
platform of honesty, reform, and civil service legislation, and
apparently he meant it. His determination must have given
Boss Conkling and others in the Grant camp uneasy nights.

Garfield's first major reforms involved prosecution of the
"star route" frauds. A star route was a postal route inaccessible

Rises to the Occasion 107

by rail or steamboat. The United States Postal Guide desig-
nated such a route with an asterisk, hence the name.

In the days before Rural Free Delivery, star routes were
numerous and important, to the West in particular. There
was no rail nor water mail route to most Western post offices.
The mail got there by stage, rider, or runner. Private contracts
for these star routes had, therefore, to be made individually
and the bidders were required to be bonded. But the law also
provided easy readjustment of these contracts in view of con-
tinuously shifting Western populations. A town of 200 might
become a city of 2,000 weeks later, then disappear forever.
Readjustment of postal contracts was essential to match the
shifting tides of population movement.

All star route contracts were let through the Second Assistant
Postmaster General, so a great deal depended on that man's
integrity. The Second Assistant Postmaster General under Grant
had been one Thomas W. Brady, who was, to say the least,
not above suspicion. It was suspected that Brady had increased
the compensation of many star route postal contractors who
thereupon kicked back to Brady or his henchmen. Among
these contractors had been a Senator from Arkansas, one
Stephen W. Dorsey, a close friend of Brady's. That there had
been collusion between these two Irishmen no one, not even
Grant, doubted or denied.

All this President Garfield appeared determined to prosecute
as part of his pledge of reform. The star route frauds were
above half a Tallinn dollars. 'They smelled to high heaven.
They were a natural reform field for a man devoted to honest
government. But, just as Garfield moved to prosecute, amidst
harassing office seekers who sensed a chance of appointment
outside ConHing's influence, the President was shot by one
of them.

On the second day of July, 1881, Garfield was to have left
on a New England holiday trip and Blame was to have accom-
panied him. They were deep in conversation as they ambled
toward their train through Pennsylvania Station in Washington
when a crazy man moved out from the crowd that had gathered
to see them off. He fired two shots at point-blank range at the

CHESTER ARTHUR

President, and said something along the order of: "I'm a Stal-
wart and now Arthur is President!" 8

For eleven humid weeks the warrior-executive fought for
his life. Many times it appeared that he would win the exacting
battle. He was only fifty years of age, possessed a strong, army-
trained body, and lasted longer than he might have after a
year or two of exhausting presidential drain.

Vice-President Arthur was lobbying as usual for Roscoe
Conkling in Albany when the news reached the State Capitol
of the assassin's attempt. Arthur went into immediate seclusion.

It was well that he did, for the assassin's implications had
been damaging in the extreme. It appeared to some that Conk-
ling's Stalwarts had engineered the whole thing, which wasn't
true at all. But the public blamed Conkling just the same, and
the death of Garfield ruined Conkling forever. An assassin's
cry in Pennsylvania Station, Washington, had done in four
seconds what the combined forces of decency, reform, and
liberalism had failed to do in a lifetime of continuous political
assault.

Robert Todd Lincoln, the President's son and Secretary of
War in the Garfield Cabinet, reports that never once in the
eighty days between Garfield's wounding and his death did
the Garfield Cabinet meet to transact official business. 9 When
they did occasionally and informally gather at the White House
and nightly, later on, at Franklyn Cottage, they talked about
nothing but the condition of the President. The business of
governing the nation simply went unattended. No one paid the
slightest attention to Chester A. Arthur.

In those days, the New York Custom House had more
than enough jobs to fill the patronage requirements of the most
voracious political machine. In an era when a million dollars
was a lot of money, the New York Customs did a $900,000,000
business annually! This was a sum greater than the entire

8. 'New "York Tribune, July 3, 1881.

9. Robert Todd Lincoln's Cabinet notes and letters as preserved in
the National Archives Building, Washington; see also Bess Furman,
White House Profile (Indianapolis, The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1951),
pp. 231-37.

Rises to the Occasion 109

Federal budget; it stood to reason that some of the collectors
made money on the side and that the man who ran the Custom
House was a powerful and practical politician.

Inside the City of New York, Chester Alan Arthur had,
therefore, "become an acknowledged power in the Republican
Party when his appointment as Collector of the Custom House
had come from Grant. The Collector did not get a salary; he
was paid a percentage of the customs fines he could collect,
not to mention anything under the table. In the poorest year of
his tenure Arthur had made $35,000 and in the best close to
$50,000, an undoubtedly enormous sum in those days, equiva-
lent to a million dollars a year income now, since there were
no income taxes then.

Arthur had learned, in 1872, that one of the richest importing
firms in the country had been understating its customs values
for quite a spell and was liable for $2,000,000 worth of for-
feiture and fine. The company settled for a quarter of a million
dollars. But, after the fine had been paid, the importer found
that his undervaluations hadn't cost the Federal government
nearly as much in lost duties as had been suggested in the law
suit, yet the quarter million dollars had, by law, already been
divided among those who had provided legal advice, Conkling
among them, and top officers of the port. This was investigated
by Congress and the upshot of the matter was to replace the
Collector's percentage income with a fixed salary of $1,000 a
month.

All this apparently had had very little to do with Chet Arthur
personally, for he was never mentioned in the scandal of what
had happened to the quarter-million-dollar settlement, and in
1875 Grant had reappointed him for four more years. Arthur
had kept the pay rolls properly filled, which was his function
in the Conkling machine, and it is certain that he never allowed
the New York Custom House to remain understaffed for long.
Indeed, the Republican machine collected a great deal of
money from annual contributions by Customs workers hired
with this clearly understood. War chests have been so filled
by political machines since time began, and in perfect legality,
if not always with the noblest motive.

CHESTER ARTHUR

The commission appointed to study Arthur's case had found
nothing except the items already mentioned, and little or
nothing involving Arthur personally. But the report was very
unfriendly, though the law, and not the man, was undoubtedly
at fault, and Chet Arthur had gone flying out the front door
to great hand-clapping among New York editors and Demo-
crats, who believed anything of a Conkling man.

Arthur, in all the time people witnessed against him, never
once took the trouble to defend himself or his record or in
any way tried to put the record straight. His seeming diffidence,
his habit of playing politics for the game and not its rewards
or policies explains a little of the deep mystery about him. He
is probably our least-known President and he appears to have
wanted it so, for he destroyed practically all his files on re-
tirement.

That no President has ever come to the White House with
less training or reason for success than Arthur is to understate
the situation grotesquely. Even Harry Truman, forced by
circumstance to succeed at a day's notice a brilliant, dynamic
President at the very climax of the greatest war in history, had
no such albatross as Arthur carried about his fashionably
cravatted neck. Among his own followers, Arthur's sudden rise
to the greatest office within the gift of the American people
caused such shock that one of them said on hearing the awful
news: "Chet Arthur, President of the United States! Good
God!!" 10

The country felt precisely this way about it. A calamity of
the greatest proportions, the fantastic twist of the wheel of for-
tune stunned Republicans and nauseated Democrats. Here was
an unfrocked politician whose very name meant corruption to
many an American and to most of the country's editors. It
would be a matter of time only, thought the country, before
the Treasury would be subject to such havoc as the United
States, now just over a century old, had never imagined pos-
sible, not even under the outrageous wickedness of Grant's
thieving henchmen.

10. As reported by Levin and others from contemporary sources,
none of which identify the shocked follower by name.

Rises to the Occasion in

If Arthur's honesty and methods as Collector of the New
York Custom House were criteria (and the average man had
no way of knowing that they were not a true reflection of
Arthur's moral standards), the nation was doomed. The ugly
word "impeachment" was on many lips. Arthur's incompetence
was manifest.

To make it worse, the Garfield assassin's cry kept bouncing
around in the minds of those who hoped fervently that postwar
Republican corruption had at last been corralled with the
defeat of the Stalwarts and the rise of Republican liberalism.

When Chet Arthur, the dandy from New York, came to the
White House to inspect it before moving in, he said: "I will
not live in a house looking this way. If Congress doesn't make
an appropriation, I will go ahead and have it done and pay for
it out of my own pocket. I will not live in a house like this."

Just how the White House then looked is described by a
Garfield visitor early that year of 1881:

The place is now full of modern abominations in uphol-
stery and garish gilding, and all the rooms look staring, pre-
tentious and Frenchy. The old port-wine colored mahogany
sofas and chairs which were in the State Parlours in Lin-
coln's time were better than anything that has come in their
place. At least they were quiet and dignified.

Arthur was true to his word. Between Garfield's death on
September 19 and Christmas of that year, President Arthur
had the place done over by the artist, Louis Comfort Tiffany,
a name which already meant to New Yorkers taste and jewels,
gold and elegance.

Every evening President Arthur would leave the granite
mansion of his friend, Senator John P. Jones of Nevada, and
inspect what had been done in the White House. Twenty-four
wagonloads of Junky furniture, bric-a-brac, claptrap, and new
items Arthur didn't like were removed and sold at auction.
Washington society dearly loved the tales of this house cleaning
by the dandy new President. One wit said: "Arthur's trap has
caught the rat that ate the suit of clothes of President Lincoln."

CHESTER ARTHUR

Arthur would go from room to room altering to Ms own
taste. Colonel H. W. Crook, a member of the White House
staff from Lincoln to Teddy Roosevelt, reports that the new
President would issue enough orders and tag enough discards
to keep the workmen busy all next day.

When the redecorating was all over, Arthur still didn't like
It and tried to get Congress to build a new executive mansion
across Lafayette Park, where the Hays Adams Hotel is now.
But nothing came of it.

Following is Tiffany's own report of some of the proceedings:

In the East Room, we only did the ceiling, which was
done in silver, with a design in various tones of ivory. The
Blue Room, or Robin's Egg Room as it's sometimes called
was decorated in robin's egg blue for the main color, with
ornaments in handpressed paper, touched out in ivory, grad-
ually deepening as the ceiling was approached. In the Red
Room, the walls were red with a frieze in which the motif
was an interlacing of a design embodying both eagles and
flags. The ceiling was in old gold. The opalescent glass
screen in the hall, which reached from the floor to the ceil-
ing, had also a motif of eagles and flags, interlaced in the
Arabian method.

The glass screen, originally designed to give President Arthur
and his family privacy, was long a fixture in the White House
and the cause of wonder for every visitor who could find no
break in a wall of gkss in which a door would suddenly open.

President Arthur also put in the first elevator and the first
White House plumbing, two bathrooms. Up to then, all the
plumbing had been, as they say, outdoors, or, to be more pre-
cise, by portable chinaware.

When Mrs. James G. Blaine, wife of the Garfield Secretary
of State, dined later in the White House she said, perhaps
cattily, that the dinner was "extremely elegant, hardly a trace
of the old White House taint being perceptible anywhere, the
flowers, the damask, the silver, the attendants, all showing the
latest style and an abandon in expense and taste." This men-
tion of "White House taint" was revealing. She and everyone
else knew how painful the eighty days of Garfield's lingering

Rises to the Occasion 113

had been through the dreadful heat of a Washington summer.

In July, Arthur had been summoned from New York to stand
by in Washington while the hero Garfield faded slowly. He
had gone at once to the White House to see Mrs. Garfield, and
the Cabinet had happened to be there at the time. When the
Vice-President had stood at the door of the Cabinet Room, not
one of Garfield's choices rose to greet him, nor was he asked in.
The Garfield Cabinet simply stared at him like so many cobras
upon a mongoose. While he stood at the door of the Cabinet
Room another visitor came up and the ice was broken; other-
wise, Arthur might well have been left outside without a word.
As it was, perfunctory greetings were exchanged, and soon
thereafter Garfield improved to such a degree that Arthur re-
turned to New York, only to be sworn in as President suddenly
at midnight on September 19, 1881, at his luxurious home on
Lexington Avenue.

Here's the way Arthur's latent champion, Elihu Root, saw
his plight: 11

Surely no more lonely and pathetic figure was ever seen
assuming the powers of government. He had no people
behind him, for Garfield, not he, was the people's choice; he
had no party behind him, for the dominant faction of his
party hated his name were enraged by his advancement,
and distrusted his motives. He had not even his own faction
behind him, for he already knew that discharge of his duties
would not accord with the ardent desires of their partisan-
ship, and that disappointment and estrangement lay before
him. He was alone. He was bowed down by the weight of
fearful responsibility and crushed to earth by the feeling,
exaggerated but not unfounded, that he took up his heavy
burden surrounded by dislike, suspicion, distrust and con-
demnation, as an enemy of the martyred Garfield and the
beneficiary of his murder. Deep and settled melancholy
possessed him; almost despair overwhelmed him. He went
to power walking through the valley of the shadow of death
and ascended the steps to the throne as one who is accused
goes to trial.

11. Elihu Root Papers and manuscript collection, New York Public
Library.

CHESTER ARTHUB

So gloomy was the new Chief Executive, in fact, that he took
the precaution of sending himself a letter which contained a
Presidential Proclamation calling the Senate into special session
to elect a President of the United States pro tempore in the
event of his own assassination en route to the White House. If
he should die, the nation could go on because Chet Arthur had
set it up legally with selfless forethought.

On September 22 in the Presidential Room of the Capitol a
second swearing-in took place. Garfield's whole antagonistic
Cabinet were present. Chief Justice Waite administered the
new oath of office with less than enthusiasm.

The new Cabinet was Arthur's first task. One by one he re-
placed Garfield's men, Secretary of State Elaine being one of
the last to go. This shifting of the Chief Executive's official
family took the better part of what was left of 1881. What
astonished the country most, during this period, was the ab-
sence of Roscoe Conkling from any post at all, unofficial or
official. Cronies simply weren't being appointed, though Arthur
did privately offer his old political boss a seat on the Supreme
Court which Conkling haughtily refused. They were never
close thereafter.

To the utter amazement of everyone, including the press,
the man whose reputation for fraud and corruption smelled
worse than any President in United States history suddenly de-
clared himself in favor of civil service reform, got the bills
started again in Congress, and eventually signed the great Civil
Service Act which put an end to the abuses Grant had allowed
to creep into Jackson's spoils system.

In subsequent months, President Arthur refused point blank
to fill the New York Custom House (scene of his alleged
crimes) with Stalwarts. Senator Conkling, soured on the new
President for this and other imagined slights, was soon referring
to Chester Alan Arthur as "His Accidency," 12 and even former
President Grant broke with him on grounds that he had re-
pudiated Grant's cronies by ignoring their alleged patronage
rights.

12. ArcMves, Museum of the City of New York.

Rises to the Occasion 115

His own Cabinet came eventually, only one of them being a
Garfield holdover Robert Todd Lincoln.

When the delicate matter of high or low tariffs arose, Arthur
anticipated the twentieth century by suggesting reciprocal
trade treaties in the New Deal pattern. These never came to
pass in his time, but he was on sound footing, and only special
interests in gigantic industrial lobbies on The Hill defeated
such a far-seeing policy.

President Arthur did, however, manage to set up a Tariff
Commission which dealt with an annual surplus of $80,000,000
or more piling up in the Treasury as a result of the continuance
of high Civil War tariffs.

He also convinced both houses of Congress that it wasn't
good sense or economy to rebuild Civil War battleships; and
he was truly the founder of the modern United States Navy
which lasted until the age of air. John Spencer Bassett says of
him: 13

Before he became President, Arthur was a typical partisan
of the Conkling group, a friend of the spoilsman and an
opponent of reform. Called to the Presidency by the tragedy
of July, 1881, he seemed to pass through a transformation
and stood out as another kind of man. He took up the reins
of office quietly, he managed them with fairness, and he
went through the period of his power to the general satis-
faction even of the reformers.

The death of a President by the act of a disappointed
office seeker called popular attention to the evil effects of
the spoils system. Suddenly it became possible to pass a bill
of reform. The Pendleton Civil Service Act of 1883 provided
for competitive examinations, a Civil Service Commission
to supervise the execution of the law, and the elimination of
partisan appointments what was known as the "classified
serviced By 1883 the number was 13,924, or about one-
eleventh of the whole government payroll of the nation.

Although Pendleton was a Democrat, the Pendleton Act had
the support of more Republicans than Democrats. By making

13. John Spencer Bassett, The Pageant of America, Vol. IX, Makers of
a New Nation (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1928), pp. 126-27.

CHESTER ARTHUR

it impossible to remove officials without cause, the persons
then in office, chiefly Republicans, would be protected if the
party lost the next election. The Democrats carried Congress
in 1882, and hoped to win the Presidency in 1884 for the first
time since the Civil War. Therefore the Democratic Party had
threatened to delay the Pendleton Act.

But President Arthur stood fast. He upheld the Civil Service
Commission throughout his administration and placed nearly
2,000 employees under the protection of its rules. He laid the
groundwork for Grover Cleveland, who completed the job of
dignifying Civil Service and modifying what his executive
predecessor, Andrew Jackson, had invented.

President Arthur vetoed pork-barrel rivers-and-harbors bills
which were promptly passed over his veto, but the people and
the editorial writers in particular began to take to his honesty
and courage. He was easily efficient, a good administrator
who could delegate authority. Soon the antagonism began to
fade before his political fairness and personal candor. When it
came time for Ms re-election many common people liked him,
and many uncommon, too. Mark Twain, for instance, wrote to
the Chicago Daily News: 1 * "I am but one of 55,000,000; still,
in the opinion of this one-fifty-five millionth of the country's
population, it would be hard to better President Arthur's Ad-
ministration. But don't decide until you hear from the rest."

In the White House, Chet Arthur and his family conducted
themselves as few other presidential families have: in abso-
lute decorum and taste. When his passion for clothes became a
whispering campaign against his renomination, he did not
deny, as Mrs. Elaine had charged, that he had ordered twenty-
five new coats from his tailor early in 1882 for White House
functions. Catty Mrs. Blaine kept insisting, perhaps with self-
interest, that all of Arthur's ambitions centered on his stomach
and other social aspects of the Presidency, but not on its bur-
dens. He never denied that he found it pleasant to have about
him flowers and wine and excellent food, or that it was satisfy-
ing to stroll with a lady on one's arm and a quotation from
Dickens or Thackeray on one's lips. Nor did he repudiate the

14. Files of the Chicago Daily News.

Rises to the Occasion 117

French chef who had served him well in New York and now
brought the first really good food to White House tables.

Faultless in dress, immaculately turned out on every occa-
sion, Chester A. Arthur and his famous sideburns were kept
in perfect trim by the first genuine f ourteen-carat White House
valet, another mark against him when re-election came up. He
had thought he would win (seeming certain of renomination,
as most Presidents had been) on his record alone and the
growing editorial praise for his honest term. Yet he was not so
honored, one of the few Presidents repudiated by his own
party.

Both the Half-Breeds and the Stalwarts had done their best
to disown Arthur from the hour of his Presidency. Reformers
remained wary to the end of his term because his record simply
impelled them to wariness. His demand for civil service reform
heartened some, editors especially. But there was always that
doubt, as there was to be later with a Vice-President named
Richard Nixon. (No matter how much Nixon seemed to have
reformed, there was always his alleged record in the Helen
Gahagan Douglas Senatorial contest and his rationalizing of
liberalism. ) With Arthur, the fact that the office had reformed
him completely, that he had truly risen to the occasion, was
hard to believe even when the public saw it before its own
eyes.

The Stalwarts did not like Arthur because he gave them
little patronage, and also they were tired of the repudiated
Conkling leadership with which they (wrongly) associated
the new Arthur. The term "His Accidency" became common
talk, which did little to help Arthur's reputation, whatever
progress he might make as a human being or Chief Execu-
tive.

He employed no bodyguard and walked freely about Wash-
ington, to the consternation of the Secret Service. He drove
the swankiest dark-green landau in Washington, pulled by
mahogany-colored geldings with blankets monograrnmed "A."
Huge flower orders came weekly from New York to augment
the meager White House conservatory output. Every morning

CHESTER ARTHUB

he placed a bouquet before the photograph of his dead wife,
Ellen Herndon, daughter o the naval hero William Lewis
Hemdon. She had succumbed suddenly to pneumonia just
before his nomination for Vice-President. To this day a stained
glass window in her name decorates old St. John's Episcopal
Church, directly across from the Hay Adams and within sight
of the White House over Lafayette Square.

Naturally, when tales of fancy spending for flowers, elegant
food, French chefs, mahogany horses, dandy coats, striped
pants, and lush parties were circulated by Elaine's men they
somehow became charged to public funds, not private. Mrs.
Elaine once said: "If he [James G. Elaine] cannot himself
be President, no more can any other Republican without his
assent." This was pathetically so, and the "continental liar
from the State of Maine" had not the slightest intention of
supporting President Arthur in 1884.

Rising young Congressman Joe Cannon, though a fellow
party member, put it best when the Republican National Con-
vention of 1884 repudiated the President of the United States.
Said Cannon: "Arthur was defeated by his trousers." (In
similar fashion had an earlier President who liked lovely things
been defeated, though renominated by his own party. Martin
Van Euren had lost because he had ordered some gold spoons
to raise the tone of the White House table. )

The Forty-seventh Congress had been the first in six years to
have Republican majorities in both houses. President Arthur's
requests to it had been very simple, and on the whole more
along the reform taclc than the reactionary. He had asked the
Forty-seventh Congress for a tariff revision, for funds to reno-
vate the Navy, for money to create a modern merchant marine,
for U. S. troops to deal with the Indians in the new Western
territory, for a better presidential succession statute, for re-
duced excise taxes, a balanced budget with a small surplus, and
for a strong civil service law.

To read this presidential message must have been a shock
to the American public, for it was plainly the work of a con-
vert to political honesty, decency in office, and an end to some
of the nation's fears of the most potentially corrupt administra-

Rises to the Occasion 119

tion the country had ever seen. Arthur the politician had de-
parted; Arthur the President had risen to the occasion, and in
doing so had molded further the dignity and prestige of the
highest elective office in the civilized world.

But at the next biennial election, the Democrats swept the
country and early in 1883 took control of the House again:
with it went Arthur's last lingering hope of making an endur-
ing record as President of the United States. Between that
date and March 4, 1885, ^ e Democrats did very little but hold
Congressional investigations designed to bring before the next
presidential campaign the stench of unchallenged Republican-
ism and Stalwart corruption. Arthur had no chance in the
circumstances, and the fact that his naturally florid complexion
gave constant reminder that he must be a drunkard as well as
a political thief did not help his cause. Even the flowers he set
daily before his dead wife's picture somehow came in the
public mind to be an alliance with one of the Secretary of
State's daughters, many years his junior. Now he was a repro-
bate as well.

Political party control invariably gets settled in the state
capitols, usually while the legislature is in session. But the
struggle at Albany had left no doubt whatsoever of the stench
inside the Republican Party and its undoubted effect on the
occupant of the White House, an unfrocked politico from the
rocks and crevices of the New York Custom House. It is little
wonder that the country gave the Democrats almost two-thirds
control of the House in 1883.

It is little wonder, too, that James G. Blaine should emerge
as the President's chief rival for control of the Republican
Party, for Blaine had little else to do, now that he was an ex-
Secretary of State and a thoroughgoing Arthur-Conkling hater.
Blaine's every act now involved the nomination for President
in 1884. Coming into the convention of 1884, President Arthur
stood for nomination on his record, but the reform element
combined with Blame's Half -Breeds and many an old Stalwart
now thoroughly disenchanted with Conkling and his Albany
odors. So even on the first ballot Arthur was second to Blaine,
who won on the fourth.

CHESTER ARTHUR

It is conceivable that Chester Alan Arthur was not only an
accident in the Presidency but literally ineligible for the office.
In 1884, the, year Arthur would have been up for re-election
had his own party not disowned him, one A. P. Hinman pub-
lished a tiny booklet in New York attempting to prove that
Arthur had not been born in the United States, as was claimed,
but in reality came into the world beyond the Canadian border
of Vermont. Hinman's little known book is entitled "How a
British Subject Became President of the United States," 15 un-
deniably a political tract inspired by the forces of James G.
Blaine, who would have done (and did) just about anything
to seize the presidential nomination.

The Constitution requires that the President and the Vice-
President shall be natural born citizens. Article II reads: "No
person except a natural born citizen . . . shall be eligible to
the office of President," and the Twelfth Amendment reads:
"But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of Presi-
dent shall be eligible to that of Vice President of the United
States."

The question raised by Hinman at the urging of Blaine or
Conkling or Sherman (or any one of a dozen jealous politicians
of the time) was whether Arthur, being in their eyes Canadian-
bom, was legally eligible for the office of Vice-President under
Article XII of the Amendments. If he was ineligible for Vice-
President he was, under the Constitution, ineligible to succeed
Garfield.

Hinman's book claimed that Arthur, when nominated for the
Vice-Presidency, was, at first, unable to name his birthplace.
After diligent search, during what was said to be a fishing trip
to Canada immediately following his nomination, Arthur found
no existing record of his Canadian birth; so he was, in Hinman's
words, "safe in naming some out-of-the-way place in the United
States." He chose Fairfield, Vermont, where a deceased brother
had been born.

15. A. P. Hinman, "How a British Subject Became President of the
United States** (New York, 1884), now in the possession of Theodore
Carlson, Wilton, Connecticut.

Rises to the Occasion 121

The encyclopedias and almanacs list the birth date and birth-
place of the twenty-first President as October 5, 1830, and
either "Vermont" or "Fairfield, Vermont/' The fact is that there
is no known record of President Arthur's birth, either in Ver-
mont or anywhere else, but that's not surprising. There are no
official records of the births of most Americans who were born
in the early nineteenth century. Records, when they were kept
at all, had a way of disappearing and dissolving in frontier
America. Nobody cared, for the most part, anyway. The family
knew their child had been born, relatives knew, the town knew,
and it didn't make much difference whether an ill-paid, part-
time records clerk in northern New Engknd took the trouble
to put down a vital statistic for posterity, the clerk being un-
able to foresee which baby would grow up to be President.

In the month of October, 1830 ( when Chester was supposed
to have been born), William Arthur, his father, obtained em-
ployment as a teacher in Stanbridge, Canada, across the border
from Vermont. Mrs. Arthur did not accompany her husband
but remained in North Fairfield, Vermont, where a son was
born in November, 1830, who was named, according to Mr.
Himnan's documents, Chester Abell Arthur in honor of Dr.
Chester Abell, a boon companion of William Arthur and who
attended Mrs. Arthur's confinement and delivery. The child
died in the summer of 1831 at Burlington while Mrs. Arthur
was on a visit to friends.

The unofficial prosecutor's charge is, therefore, that Chester
Alan Arthur, whenever he was born or where, took his dead
brother's birth certificate as his own because he himself was
Canadian-born, therefore ineligible to become President of the
United States or, for that matter, even Vice-President.

Records indicate that on September 5, 1845, Chester Alan
Arthur matriculated at Union College, entering the sophomore
class and stating that he was then sixteen years of age. He was
graduated in July, 1848. Mr. Himnan's tract claims that this is
a true statement of his age and birth. It would place his birth
date somewhere in the neighborhood of 1828-1829, at which
time Mrs. Arthur did bear a son named William Chester Alan
Arthur (Hinman says), but not in North Fairfield, Vermont.

CHESTER ARTHUR

Mrs. Arthur's parents liad lived some years at Dunham Flats,
Quebec, her childhood home, and she was visiting neighboring
Dunham Flats when her eldest son caine into the world, if we
are to believe Hinman's tract. The exact birth date isn't secure.

But the eldest Arthur boy, William (Chester Alan Arthur is
said to have dropped this name because it caused confusion
with his father), was born either March 16 or 18, 1828; his
grandfather remembered saying at the time that William, Jr.,
was lucky he came a day too early or a day too late, otherwise
he would have been called Patrick, having considerable Irish
blood.

Later, during Mr. Hinman's exhaustive inquiry on local
ground, many friends, relatives, and neighbors remembered
the oldest boy, called "Chet," on the sidewalks of WiUiston,
Vermont, being trundled along in a hand cart in 1833 at the
age of five, which would square with the birth date. Precisely
why the Arthur family, or more exactly Chester A. Arthur,
should go to the elaborate trouble of trying to get the public to
believe he was his dead brother, Chester Abell Arthur, isn't
clear except to verify Hinman's accusation.

Hinman of course claims that Chet Arthur knew he was
Canadian-bom (of American parents) and, when necessity
required it, he simply took the Vermont birth certification of
his dead brother whose name his closely resembled. 16

But Hinman's complicated and thoroughly documented
hymn of hate will always appear beside the point. The Consti-
tution words the birth requirement "natural born citizen.'* It
doesn't say "notice bom." It may weE have meant, in spite of
partisan opinions on the subject from time to time, precisely
what it has come legally to mean when two American citizens
have a child on foreign soil that the child is truly an Ameri-
can citizen.

So, whether (William) Chester Alan Arthur was delivered at
the home of his grandparents in Dunham Flats, Quebec,
Canada, on or near St Patrick's Day, 1828, or in Fairfield, Ver-
mont, on October 5, 1830, may not be terribly important,
though a case of this sort has never yet been brought to the

16. Ibid.

Rises to the Occasion 123

Supreme Court for final interpretation of the wording o
Article II. This fugitive semantic will undoubtedly arise one
day when an American child born on foreign soil gets a major
party nomination to the Presidency or Vice-Presidency. Arthur's
case is closed and nothing the Supreme Court or anyone else
can do will alter the fact that, during his lifetime he was, by
the people who had elected him, accepted as President of the
United States.

What does matter to the office of the Presidency is that a
man of undoubted slack reputation and dubious association
was thrust by fate into the White House for almost a full four-
year term, yet so comported himself that the dignity of the
office was exalted. "His Accidency" Chet Arthur rose to the
occasion, despite his past and the fears of Ms constituents, and
in so doing molded the Presidency as other Presidents had
before hfun or would do again in the shadows ahead.

Grover Cleveland

THE PRESIDENTIAL election of 1884 between James G.
Elaine, the Plumed Knight" of the Republican Party, and

Grover Cleveland, young hero Governor from New York and
the Democrats* latest postwar tope, was undoubtedly the
dirtiest of all U. S. quadrennials. This is saying a good deal.
Andrew Jackson weathered merciless sknders against his
beloved wife. Franklin D. Roosevelt was involved in at least
two of the vilest slime-throwing campaigns this country's ballot
has known. But Elaine-Cleveland outranks them all.

In the first place, the Republican Party early uncovered the
fact that Grover Cleveland had undoubtedly sired an illegiti-
mate child in his youth, which Cleveland tacitly admitted.
Then the Democrats dug up what American history calls the
"Mulligan letters/' on the back of one of which the unfortu-
nate Republican candidate had had the witlessness to write
"Bum this letter!."

Thereafter the manure flew in Herculean proportions. The
^Plumed Knight/' coining as he did after the besmirched Grant
and the unlucky Arthur, had campaigned for the nomination on
reform grounds. But his penchant for gaining payments and
commissions from unscrupulous and ambitious promoters who
wished to use his political office to insure their favors was
thoroughly aired and debated. The Democrats wrote a little
jingle still familial to most school children:

Blame, Blaine, James G. Blaine,

The continental liar from the State of Maine!

124

6

Dignifies the Presidential Veto

The Republicans, not to be outdone, wrote a ditty of their

own:

Ma, ma, where's my pa?

He's goto.' to the White House, ha, ha, ha!

Unfortunately for Elaine, the careless recipient of the most
damaging of the Mulligan letters did not fulfill Elaine's request.
Blaine also had appeared at a fabulous millionaire dinner at
Delmonico's, soon known on the Main Street of America as
"Belshazzar's Feast." His unsavory connection with the male-
factors of great wealth, as a Roosevelt was later to call them,
damned him with a large segment of the intelligentsia and the
working class, especially the important new foreign-horn elec-
torate now flooding U. S. cities.

To make Elaine's case worse, an unthinking Republican
clergyman called the Democratic Party the party of "Rum,
Romanism, and Rebellion.* 7 Rebellion was now a generation
dead and the South bitterly resented the bloody shirt being
waved in political debate. "Romanism** offended the enormous
Irish Catholic population of New York City and helped Elaine
lose that pivotal state by only a thousand votes out of hundreds
of thousands. By losing New York, Elaine lost the Presidency.

Cleveland had, to say the least, liked a drink now and then,
and when he tacitly admitted parenthood to an illegitimate
child of the days of his wild oats he had given to the Victorian
households of the time their most powerful political weapon.

GROVER CLEVELAND

Sex just wasn't nice in the late nineteenth century. But his
transgression had come to light sufficiently early in the presi-
dential campaign to be explained and discounted. Also, he was
painfully honest about his sins. Elaine wasn't, because he
couldn't be.

When James G. Elaine had been relieved as Secretary of
State under President Arthur and replaced by Frederick
Frelinghuysen, a far more conservative statesman, Elaine was
given all the time in the world to pkn and work for his own
presidential nomination in 1884. As Secretary he had been
pretty much of a jingoist, and had especially given Great
Britain a difficult time, much to the delight of the American
press. The country was feeling its oats, it was adolescent, but
moving toward manhood; it liked Elaine's bold approach to
foreign affairs. Frelinghuysen's unexciting three and a half
years gave Elaine, therefore, the best possible ammunition to
fire at President Arthur, who would inevitably be Elaine's chief
antagonist for the upcoming Republican nomination.

Elaine also began to write a two-volume biographical work
called Twenty Years of Congress which was sold at private
subscription (a great many politically minded men coughed up
large checks for their copies) and gave Elaine a greater in-
come between 1881 and 1884 than any other public figure
except a President. He made speeches and was paid for them,
and he was consulted on legal matters and received fees which
went into the campaign fund: object the 1884 nomination for
President

Elaine lived in a house across the street from the state capitol
in Augusta, Maine, and the Republican world beat a path to
his door in those three years. 1 President Arthur's stands on
various issues were debated on the floor of Congress and in
the public press, but they were usually first aired in the Elaine
parlor. Arthur, for example, wanted to apply a not inconsider-
able surplus to reducing the huge Civil War debt, which ran
into the billions, and to replacing obsolete Civil War ships

i. Peter Levin, Seven ~by Chance (New York, Farrar, Straus and
Company, 1948), p. 174-

Dignifies the Presidential Veto 127

with new designs. Blaine went back to Henry Clay's theory of
distributing excess tax receipts to the several states. He was
against lowering those wartime tariffs which were flooding the
Treasury with an embarrassment of riches.

Blaine never talked issues for long, however. The candid
conversation almost always switched to personalities and 1884.
John Alexander Logan 2 seems to have been promised the vice-
presidential nomination for assuring he could deliver Illinois
at the convention and the subsequent election. Tom Platt, who
had been caught in a hotel bed with a lady of easy virtue and
had as a result lost out in New York, came back on the Re-
publican scene by waving a banner for Maine's Blaine, the
"Plumed Knight."

By summer, 1884, therefore, the upshot of the matter was
that Arthur had lost any chance of renomination. Coming to
the convention on his amazing record for progressive ad-
ministration, Arthur could nevertheless not quite match the
more practical mathematics of one of the most carefully laid,
long-term campaigns for a Republican presidential nomination.
No other matches it in U. S. history except Thomas E. Dewey's
^incessant campaigning between 1936 and 1948.

No hour of a day went by without some action being taken,
usually in Augusta, with that end in view. Arthur had, it is
true, Southern delegations which could be bought overnight,
and he did fairly well with Republican businessmen and the
banking interests, who had been amazed at his clean White
House record. A few Stalwarts backed him still, but Grant had
become embittered at Arthur's independence and unwilling-
ness to favor the former President-hero's cronies. 3

The reform crowd, hypocritical as always, repudiated Arthur
despite his splendid conversion. A public letter reminded the

2. James G. Blaine and John Alexander Logan may have been a
balanced team politically as the Republican ticket of 1884, but they
were bitter personal enemies. One rhyme of the day, in a campaign
o doggerel, put their partnership this way:

We never speak as we pass by
Me to Blaine nor Blaine to I.

3. Levin, op. cit. 9 p. 175.

GROVER CLEVELAND

party that "Guiteau [GarfielcTs assassin] was the original
Arthur man." 4 Two top reform Senators from New England
had been turned down on collectorship appointments when
Arthur had put a nonpolitician into the port of Boston, and
he had vetoed a juicy rivers and harbors bill smelling to heaven
of pork. These reformers had been aided and abetted by a
wild-eyed young man with a pince-nez on a string, a bristling
mustache, energy to burn, and a noisy high voice which he
used at top volume while standing upon a chair. This young
man's name was Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. He came from New
York, was son of the man who had once been selected to re-
place Chester Alan Arthur as Collector of the New York Cus-
tom House. All of these reform politicians, young Roosevelt
included, descended upon Arthur, without overmuch reason
considering his administrative marks, and gave the nomina-
tion nod to James G. Elaine.

President Arthur, therefore, had no chance. He played with
a stacked deck. After the second ballot, Arthur's support fell
rapidly away; on the fourth it was all Elaine, much to the
disgust of Grant's and Conkling's Stalwarts and the just news-
paper editors of the day. Arthur, loyal organization man to his
buffed finger tips, gracefully gave in, made a speech offering
his unquestioned support of die new nominee, and congratu-
lated Elaine before tie multitude. It was Elaine's shining hour,
and Mrs. Elaine's too. Few political wives, except perhaps
Florence Harding and Mary Todd Lincoln, have been as am-
bitious for their husbands. And Harriet Stanwood Elaine might
well have been First Lady had it not been for the diabolically
damaging Mulligan letters.

James Gillespie Elaine, seven years Cleveland's senior, was
"himself only fifty-four when nominated for President. This
made it one of the youngest elections in American history up to
that time, and Cleveland one of the youngest Presidents, at
forty-seven. Elaine was a Pennsylvanian by birth and had
studied kw while teaching at the Pennsylvania Institute for
the Blind. When he was twenty-four, he had gone to Augusta,

4- Ibid.

Dignifies the Presidential Veto 129

Maine, where he became an influential editor by buying an in-
terest in the Kennebec Journal. When the Republican Party
arose from the ashes of Whiggism, Blaine helped organize it
in Maine and was delegate to the first Republican National
Convention just before die Civil War. He remained Republi-
can leader of Maine most of his Me.

At thirty-three, he was elected to the House of Representa-
tives where he stayed until 1876; his last six years he was
Speaker of the House. In the House he became a close friend of
James A. Garfield of Ohio and other Westerners whose support
he would need if he were to run for national office, his lifelong
ambition. Opposing Grant on more than one issue, Blaine could
not help become the mortal enemy of Roscoe Conkling of New
York, who thought Grant should have not only two but three
terms as President and detested anyone who spoke otherwise.
Conkling's Stalwarts were, therefore, natural political oppo-
nents of Elaine's Half-Breeds, a name contemptuously be-
stowed upon them by Grant's followers, meaning that they
were neither Republicans nor Democrats, but mongrel politi-
cians.

With the assassination of Garfield and the assumption of
Arthur (and assumption is as good a word as any, in the cir-
cumstances), the Republican Party had become more and more
divided against itself. One of the reasons for its difficulties was
the 1884 presidential nomination of James G. Blaine, who was
Garfield's Secretary of State and later became Benjamin Har-
rison's also. (History reports with the accuracy of 20-20 hind-
sight that Blaine was an excellent Secretary of State, one of the
very few really top Secretaries of State in the history of Ameri-
can foreign relations. But he proved to be a highly vulnerable
candidate for President)

The chief reasons for his remarkable vulnerability were the
"Mulligan letters," but of course there was more to it than that
The flaw lay in Elaine's very nature. Ambition seared him,
gnawed at his vitals, made him, (and Mrs. Blaine) vindictive
and stupidly arrogant when they should have been humble and
compassionate. The voters were not fooled.

GROVER CLEVELAND

These letters were so called because one James Mulligan of
Boston had kept some books for Warren Fisher, Jr., of the
Little Rock & Fort Smith Railroad, and still held much of
Elaine's correspondence. The letters Mulligan possessed and
eventually publicized made it painfully clear to the public
that Blaine, after having granted favors for the railroad, called
railroad officials' attention to his favors and soon after received
the privilege of selling the road's bonds for a secret and gener-
ous commission.

The selection of Blaine, with his dubious railroad fees, his
private belief that the spoils system was infinitely superior to
Civil Service, his propensity for waving the bloody shirt, sent
many Republican liberals, editors, and independents out of the
party and into the arms of Cleveland. Carl Schurz bolted,
Henry Ward Beecher bolted. President Eliot and most of the
Harvard faculty publicly condemned the author of the Mulli-
gan letters and supported Cleveland.

Old and less sensational Mulligan letters had already been
surveyed and discounted through Congressional hearings.
When the Democratic hierarchy went back to them at the
outset of the 1884 campaign, many thought it a mistake to
revive so dead a horse. But the animal was far from dead. New
Mulligan letters were soon made public from the apparently
inexhaustible files of the Little Rock line. Blaine's disclaimer
in the Kennebec Journal, wherein he stated that there wasn't a
word in these letters not entirely consistent with the "most
scrupulous integrity and honor," didn't cut ice with discerning
voters, though many a Republican editor either suppressed
the letters or gave misleading summaries of their contents.

One Blaine letter had a particularly stunning effect. For
greater secrecy, the letter had been mailed to the Parker House
in Boston and Blaine had then telegraphed an old business
associate to pick it up there, though he knew full well that the
associate lived at the Commonwealth Hotel. The letter enclosed
the draft of a letter Blaine wanted the associate to write and
sign, exonerating Blaine. Then Blaine signed his own warrant:
"Regard this letter as strictly confidential. Do not show it to
anyone.'* And on the back were the words: "Burn this letter!"

Dignifies tJie Presidential Veto 131

Reformers fell upon the letter with joy and delight. 5 Carl
Schurz, liis keen German mind functioning at top performance,
gave a series of speeches as unrelenting and merciless as the
logic of Elaine's misdeeds. There wasn't the slightest doubt by
the time he had finished that Elaine had used his Speakership
to multiply his own railroad interests and had profited hand-
somely from them.

One speech Schurz made in Brooklyn on August 5, 1884, was
so searching and sarcastically logical that Elaine was forced to
sue him for libel, but, of course, the suit never came to trial.
The Nation and Harper's Weekly followed Schurz's lead, and
soon the country's intellectuals were almost wholly in Cleve-
land's camp, and a winning camp it proved to be.

Grover Cleveland's first name was Stephen; Grover was his
middle name. He was born in Caldwell, New Jersey, the son of
a poorly paid Presbyterian minister, and once considered the
ministry as his own career. Law lured him, however,, and he
practiced it from 1859 to 1881, beginning when he was twenty-
two years old. In this period he was assistant district attorney
and sheriff. He became Mayor of Buffalo in 1881 and his great
reform administration soon attracted national attention in a
time when the magic word "reform* 7 was on every conscious
voter's tongue, and with good reason.

The New York State Democratic leader, Dan! Manning,
early saw qualities in Grover Cleveland that would make him a
fine vote-getter in New York State, for Cleveland had given the
City of Buffalo no lick-and-a-promise cleansing, but a drastic
reform which had earned Cleveland the title of the "Veto
Mayor." Elected Governor of New York, Cleveland kept right
on vetoing. He battled Tammany Hall to a standstill, incurring
the cheerless wrath of one John Kelly, New York City's Demo-
cratic boss. In the subsequent battle for political control of
the Democratic delegation in New York State, Cleveland won
out. The Democratic delegation to the 1884 National Conven-
tion was then Grover Cleveland's.

5, Allan Nevins, Grover Cleveland, a Study in Courage (New York,
Dodd, Mead and Company, Inc., 1932), pp. 162-65.

GBOVER CLEVELAND

Teddy Roosevelt had been trying to reform the municipal
government of New York and received Cleveland's full co-
operation, though Roosevelt was a Republican and Cleveland a
Democrat. This helped Cleveland's popularity with Republican
and independent voters whom any Democratic candidate for
President had to win over following twenty-four consecutive
years of Republican presidential victories. In those days the
Democrats were a distinct minority.

Cleveland was, therefore, a national figure by the time the
Republicans had assembled to select their presidential candi-
date. The Republicans did Cleveland, the man whose name
was synonymous with reform, quick political service by nam-
ing James G. Elaine as their standard-bearer. Cleveland also
gained an advantage from the enmity of Tammany Hall, for
the "mugwump" or reform element in the Republican Party
liked anti-Tammany candidates and would cross party lines to
vote for one.

Cleveland's own political cross was the charge of having sired
an illegitimate child. 6 Maria Halpin was an obscure young
widow from a Pennsylvania family who, leaving two children
behind her, moved from Buffalo to Jersey City in 1871 and
began work as a collar-maker, then as a drygoods clerk for
Flint and Kent, where she eventually came to be given charge
of the cloak department. In the years ahead many a story and
play would revolve about her prototype: "NeEy, the Beautiful
Cloak Model."

Maria Halpin was a pretty widow, pleasant mannered, and
spoke a foreign language, French, which gave her a certain
social standing in Jersey City despite her occupation and a
tendency to alcohol. She attended fashionable St. John's
Episcopal Church, and had suitors galore, among them young
Cleveland, thirty-seven, one year her senior.

In 1874, on September 14, a son was born to her. She named
the child Oscar Cleveland and charged Grover with the pa-

6. The succeeding information is based on exhaustive research by
Allan Nevins and otEers and comes from study of the Buffalo press from
1876 to 1884, of many Cleveland letters, of a carefully prepared Demo-
cratic pampHet, and pertinent files.

Dignifies tlie Presidential Veto 133

ternity. Although, as he wrote to a Boston friend when Presi-
dent, he didn't really know whether the child was his or not,
Cleveland made provision for the boy. 7 Those who appeared
to know most about the case and were as neutral as it was
possible to be in the circumstances were of the opinion at the
time that Maria Halpin had no real idea who was in fact the
father of her child. She had fixed upon Grover Cleveland be-
cause he alone of her suitors was then unmarried; she hoped
thus to induce him to marry her.

The mother soon began neglecting her offspring and took
heavily to drink. Eventually she was taken to the Providence
Asylum, an institution for the mentally deficient run by the
Sisters of Charity. Meanwhile, her boy was committed by the
Overseer of the Poor to the Protestant Orphan Asylum on Main
Street, Jersey City. When the mother had regained her sanity
she attempted to get her child back by kidnaping him on April
28, 1876, from the orphanage. But he law soon intervened.
The boy was finally committed to the orphanage at the usual
board rate of $5.00 a week, which Cleveland paid, and eventu-
ally adopted formally by one of the best families in western
New York, becoming a distinguished professional man under
another name never revealed to Cleveland or the outside world.

Cleveland gave Mrs. Halpin money to start her own business
in Niagara Falls, but she quickly disappeared. Twenty years
later, during Cleveland's second term as President, she threat-
ened the President in two letters. One asked for money; the
other threatened to publish facts in her possession. Neither
letter produced action on Cleveland's part, for he must have
been heartily sick of her by now. In Alexander Hamilton's
candid words after his own affair with Mrs. Reynolds: "I have
paid pretty dearly for my folly." Similarly, Cleveland had
acted a man's part, as had Hamilton, denying nothing and
making no attempt to evade a responsibility which could not
certainly be his in the circumstances.

When the flabbergasted Democratic Party heard this accusa-
tion against its presidential standard-bearer on July 21, 1884,
Cleveland was asked by letter what the party should do. Cleve-

7. Cleveland Papers,

GBOVER CLEVELAND

land's reply is probably the best measure of the man. He simply
said: Tell the truth."

It was a common-sense decision, for from the truth he had
very little to be afraid. Had the scandal been disclosed during
the convention in Chicago there is little doubt that Cleveland
would not have been nominated. No modern presidential candi-
date could survive such a tag in Cleveland's time the scandal
was, if anything, harder on a candidate because of hypocritical
Victorian sex standards.

Had the illegitimacy issue been brought to light in the last
weeks of the campaign, Cleveland would undoubtedly have
lost the election. 8 There would have been no time to discount
the story and explain it by telling the true facts. As it was, the
period from July to November was sufficiently long to enable
Grover Cleveland to survive his culpability in personal rela-
tions, whereas Elaine's delinquency in public life came too late
for sufficient rebuttal, if indeed there ever was an opportunity
for one.

Cleveland's campaign was cleverly handled by William C.
Whitney, a brilliant Wall Street attorney and financier. Whit-
ney's greatness lay in his combining reform with practical
politics he wasn't afraid to go out and buy blocs of votes with
promises to minorities. Thomas A. Hendricks of Indiana gave
the ticket balance. Cleveland, a naturally friendly man, helped
enormously by his candor in the illegitimate child accusation
and his patent honesty as reform Mayor of Buffalo and Gov-
ernor of New York.

Cleveland was physically unimpressive, short and dumpy,
unduly plump; but somehow he gave the public a portrait of
power and immovably honest stolidity. 9 He was heavy-handed

8. Nevins, op. cit., pp. 164-68.

9. Ike Hoover writes in Forty-two Years in the White House ( Boston,
Houghton MifHin Company, 1934), p. 13: "President Cleveland, natur-
ally a hard-working individual, seemed to be the most laborious of all
the Presidents under whom I served [he served under ten]. Breakfast at
nine, lunch at one-thirty, dinner at seven-thirty, were almost the only
breais in his day. It appeared as if the President for some reason worked
much harder to accomplish the same results than other men who have
occupied the office. He dictated but little, preferring to write practically
everything with his own hand. It was no uncommon thing for him to

Dignifies the Presidential Veto 135

and unimaginative and literally found honesty to be the best
policy. Sometimes this led to ticklish situations where bad
timing and refusal to compromise hurt him; yet he seemed to
make up for this among the independent voters, who were
always attracted to his candor and straightforwardness.

It may not have been sound philosophy nor always sound
politics to run a presidential campaign this way, but as the
newspapers said, "it was magnificent." 10 In his public relations,
Cleveland's honesty often appeared as "stubbornness, tactless-
ness, suspiciousness, and irritability, but these qualities were
attractive to those citizens who were tired of the specious gloss
of the Tlumed Knight/" 11

One Boston newspaperman (Cleveland had long been a
favorite of the newspapermen because of his candor) prob-
ably was keeping Cleveland's converted Harvard audience in
mind when he wrote the following endorsement for his Re-
publican paper, the Boston Advertiser:

Cleveland is stout, has a well-fed look, is indeed a good
liver, has the air of a man who has made up his mind just
how he ought to behave in any position where he may find
himself. He is getting bald; he is getting gray though his
white hair does not show conspicuously, since his complexion
is sandy. He dresses well, carries himself well, talks well
upon any subject with which he is familiar, and upon sub-
jects with which he is not familiar he does not venture to
talk at all. He has the happy faculty of being able to refuse
a request without giving offence. It has been my fortune to
see him several times during the past winter upon business
in connection with some of the State institutions. He has
impressed me always as one heartily desirous of getting at
the bottom of any matter he may have in hand, and of acting
wisely in it

remain in Ms office until two or three o'clock in the morning, diligently
laboring on some important document. On various occasions he was
known to remain there the entire night working on a message to Congress
or something of the sort he considered unusually urgent."

10. Leland D. Baldwin, The AduWs American History (West Eindge,
New Hampshire, Richard R. Smith, Inc., 1955), P- 349-

11. Ibid.

GKOVER CLEVELAND

Partly through candor and apparent rudeness, Cleveland was
to lose re-election in 1888, only to win back the Presidency in
1892 on his third try, the only President we've had whose two
terms were not consecutive. Indeed, Cleveland's growth and
development are plain in the differences between Cleveland as
President from 1884 to 1888 and Cleveland as President from
1892 to 1896. In the first term he regarded the Presidency, as
did most of his contemporaries, as a policeman's beat, with the
social forces about him entirely free to battle among them-
selves. In his second term he used government as a creative
social force.

The Republican Party had, quite naturally, dominated Amer-
ican politics since the Civil War because the Democratic Party
was identified, not without some justice, as the party of slavery,
disunion, and defeat. The waving of the bloody shirt of war
and rebellion was by itself nearly sufficient to elect and re-elect
for President one Republican candidate after another between
Lincoln and Arthur. One whole generation was born and grew
to manhood without knowing a Democrat in the White House.
In reverse, a whole generation was to be conceived and grow
to manhood between 1932 and 1952 without the experience of
a Republican President. As at the end of the New Deal-Fair
Deal chain of undefeated Democrats, corruption from too many
consecutive years in office and overconfidence linked arms to
defeat the Republicans of the mid-eighties. No political party
could be entrenched for a whole generation and not show the
consequences inside its organization. The Republicans of the
i88os were no exception, any more than were the Democrats
seventy-two years later.

James Buchanan had been the last Democrat to win the
Presidency, in 1856. He was perhaps our weakest President
He had done nothing at all in four dreadful years of increas-
ingly critical debate and political inaction over slavery. Like
Pilate, Buchanan had washed his hands of the unsavory affair
and looked the other way. This had given the Republican Party
its reason for being: within a short span of two years, 1858
to 1860, the upstart Republicans had come from a gleam in the

Dignifies tJie Presidential Veto 137

founders* eyes to the White House, there to stay through six
consecutive quadrennial elections covering twenty-four years.

Lincoln, of course, Bad been its first hero. His martyred
memory helped the Republican cause more than any other
single factor in the continuous re-election of Republicans as
President. His name was political magic for the Republican
Party and still is.

Lincoln had beaten General George B. McClellan when time
came for re-election, iiien was shot dead a few weeks after his
second inaugural. Vice-President Andrew Johnson was next
President and came within a vote of being our only Chief
Executive to be impeached. General Grant, a fourteen-carat
war hero, could hardly have escaped election and re-election
in the next eight years, defeating Horatio Seymour in 1868
and Horace Greeley and a host of other candidates (most of
them reform Republicans) in 1872.

Then had come the disgusting Hayes-Tiden election in
which the Democratic Governor from New York had not only
outpolled the Republican candidate in popular vote, but, if
truth were known and it was never allowed to raise its voice
in the electoral college in the electoral vote by states as well.
A rigged (Republican) majority in the investigating commis-
sion had finally decided the contest, just before Inauguration
Day, 185 to 184, in favor of Rutherford B. Hayes. Governor
Tilden, not wishing to rend his country twice in a generation,
withdrew, although he and most literate people knew he had
been properly elected President, popularly and by states.
* The Democrats had, then, not placed a man in the White
House in five consecutive tries when General Garfield met
General Hancock on the field of political ballot in 1880. But
Hancock proved to be the most inept campaigner of the
nineteenth century (Alf Landon probably wins it for the
twentieth century); somehow, the ground Governor Tilden had
gained was relinquished by the Democratic Party. Garfield
won easily in the electoral totals 214 to 155, though only 9,464
votes out of almost 9,000,000 separated the two men in total
popular vote.

The Cleveland-Blaine campaign of 1884 was, therefore, a

GROVER CLEVELAND

true milestone in American history. Cleveland probably owed
his nomination and election in part to the underlying appetite
o his day that reform and change were not only essential and
overdue, but downright tasty. The preponderance of the in-
telligentsia were sick of unending Republican victories and
corrupt dictatorship. As in 1952, a cry arose from many who
would never have voted against their own party except as a
gesture toward a true two-party system, healthy for the Ameri-
can body politic. And while both candidates in 1884 w re
involved with scandal in the filthiest of all our political ex-
travaganzas, this overwhelming desire for a change undoubt-
edly was the prevailing factor.

Precious little high-level campaigning was done on either
side, in the circumstances. An emotional binge, it would have
been worse had radio and television been available then. As
it was, each voter read of the campaign's progress, its speeches,
accusations, charges, countercharges, political proposals, and
promises only in the newspaper of his own political choice
(there were a Democratic paper and a Republican paper in
Just about every city in the land in those days) and nowhere
else, except perhaps in Harpers Weekly or a similar organ
tuned to national issues.

The party platforms, as usual, read about the same, but
liberal Republicans, led by the influential Harpers, supported
Cleveland when the tart new Mulligan letters were made pub-
lic. Cleveland was, moreover, thoroughly supported by con-
servative businessmen for he was, to some, "sounder" than
Elaine. In the words of a business journal of the time it really
didn't matter which man won because "a good President can-
not make the country; a bad President cannot ordinarily
mar it** 12

With "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion" ringing in their un-
washed ears, just enough Irish Catholics in New York City
swung to Cleveknd to give him electoral victory. The total
popular vote was:

12,. W. M. GeweBr, ed., American Civilization: A History of the
United Stales (New York, McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1957),

p. 314-

Dignifies the Presidential Veto 139

Grover Cleveland (D) 4,874,986
James G. Blaine (R) 4,851,981

Yet tibis margin, small as It was, was far greater than tlie
9,000 by which Garfield had beaten Hancock; it meant true
resurgence of the Democratic Party and the two-party system
of American government, the first such emergence in a quarter
of a century. In the electoral college, Cleveland won by 219
to 182, entirely chargeable to New York State which went
Democratic by a thousand votes, undoubtedly Irish Catholic in
majority.

The revolt of liberals in the Republican Party, known to his-
torians as "mugwumps," the defeat of Blaine by a handful of
votes in pivotal New York State, and the first election of a
Democratic President in twenty-four years meant that the de-
moralizing shadow of the Civil War was passing, that it was
no longer good politics to depend on the bloody shirt and a
genuine handicap to be against reform.

Cleveland had been a notable reformer in New York State.
But when he had become the first Democrat to take over the
White House since James Buchanan, he was faced with a
plainly voracious political party, a party which had had no ad-
ministrative political patronage for a generation. Ravenous for
jobs, spoilsmen badgered Cleveland almost beyond endurance.
During the campaign, a Republican Senator had taunted Cleve-
land, TTou cannot serve both God and the Democrats at the
same time"; now that appointments had to be made he would
do his best, which was very good indeed, to make the Republi-
can a liar.

Cleveland quickly appointed two former Confederates to
his Cabinet, which rarfded the G.A.R., as a wartime enemy
might rankle with the American Legion today, though the
American Legion has never held a shadow of the power the
Grand Army of the Republic and its veterans wielded in post-
Civil War years. To irritate the heroes of blue still further, the
new President tried to return captured Confederate battle flags.
There was also the almost daily matter of veterans* bonuses,
and it was here that Cleveland dignified the power of the

GROVER CLEVELAND

veto, 13 The veto is one of the oldest of democratic checks and
balances. It consists of an action by the Chief Executive in
withholding his approval of a law already passed by the leg-
islative branch. In a sense the United States Supreme Court
maintains its own veto in the form of judgment as to the Con-
stitutionality of any law, but only in the case of the Chief
Executive is this nullifying action called precisely "veto/'

Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution gives the President
of the United States veto power, but it is a qualified or limited
veto, not as absolute as monarchs and dictators have known
it in history. From them there has been no recourse in the
legislative branch; from the presidential veto there is. For he
may be overridden and the vetoed act become the law of the
land through a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress.
The veto doesn't apply to proposed Constitutional Amend-
ments, questions of adjournment, or concurrent resolutions.

Veto power goes back to Roman law and the word is in the
Roman language; veto literally means "I forbid" in Latin. Eng-
land still has a royal veto on its law books, but no British
monarch has used his or her veto power over acts of Parlia-
ment since Queen Anne in 1707. Most countries don't allow
their chief executives as much say in legislation as Americans
do, and the veto is a potent weapon, indeed sometimes the
only weapon a President has when one or both houses of
Congress has a majority of the opposing party. President Eisen-
hower, for example, used Ms veto successfully hundreds of
times and wasn't overridden until his seventh year in office,
despite huge Democratic majorities.

Edward S. Corwin points out in The President Office and
towers 1 * that the early talent Americans revealed for conjur-
ing up Constitutional limitations and balances moved like a
bee to buckwheat toward the veto power. It meant for those
who framed the Constitution yet another weapon for making
certain that no one power legislative, judicial, executive in

13. Horace Samuel Merrill, Bourbon Leader: Grower Cleveland and the
Democratic Party (Boston, Little, Brown and Company, 1957), PP-
41-42.

14. Edward S. Corwin, The President Office and Powers (New York,
New York University Press, 1940), pp. 337-46.

Dignifies the Presidential Veto 141

particular could take control of the country at any time in
any situation without a check from one or both of the other
two powers. Corwin writes: 'The veto was solely a self -defen-
sive weapon of the President; it was the means furnished the
President for carrying out his oath to 'preserve, protect and
defend the Constitution' and was not validly usable for any
other purpose."

To give the President even more power through the veto, the
framers of the Constitution worded this passage to make it
read that the President would have ten, days from presentation
rather than passage of a bill in which to disapprove of it. This
would make it possible for a President, even in the days of
slow travel and faulty communications, to move about the
country, indeed to roam the world without fear that the legis-
lative would put over something in his absence. Through care-
ful wording of the veto section, presentation and not passage
became an added check on uncontrolled legislative domination
and power.

Furthermore, as Corwin points out, by withholding their
signatures from bills passed by both houses, the presiding
officers of those bodies can lengthen the period between actual
passage of a measure and its presentation to an absent Presi-
dent, so that on his return he will not be swamped with such
measures. With this Constitutional precedent, Franklin D.
Roosevelt signed a bill on July 13, 1936, no less than twenty-
three days after the adjournment of the Congress.

For years, Presidents have urged that Congress make Con-
stitutional provision for itemized veto of bills, but nothing
along this line has gotten very far in an organization dedicated
to helping the members* political problems through legislative
logrolling. If a President could veto item by item he could
reduce or eliminate specific sections particularly in appropri-
ation bills with extraneous riders without destroying the good
features he felt should be enacted into law. The Senate has
always been the roadblock against giving the President item
veto power, for the Senate insists that the reform would re-
quire a Constitutional Amendment, two-thirds of both houses
and three-fourths of the states assenting within a given period,

GROVER CLEVELAND

This has, so far, been too much for such, a controversial meas-
ure, which nevertheless makes sense in rapid, complicated
modern legislation and life.

The President's veto can almost certainly be ascribed to the
framers' fears that without it the executive third of our govern-
ment would soon sink into nonexistence. 13 Almost to the hour
of its final adjournment, the Constitutional Convention shifted
back and forth between requiring two-thirds and three-quarters
vote in both houses for overriding a veto. Those who wished
it to be three-quarters felt that the executive was already too
greatly weakened and needed shoring up. Those who wished
the overriding to take place at two-thirds sought to limit the
presidential power over the direct voice of the people their
legislature; and two-thirds was closer to a majority of one than
was three-quarters, ordinarily a difficult number to obtain in
any serious legislative vote.

In any case, Presidents used the veto sparingly at first, more
and more as the years and precedent stabilized fears of domi-
nant executive power. The pocket veto, by which a President
can postpone veto until after adjournment, thereby stifling any
overriding vote, was one ruse soon learned at the other end of
Pennsylvania Avenue from The Hill.

Cleveland's first brush with the power of veto had come
when he was Governor of New York. Cleveland's veto of
Teddy Roosevelt's tenure of office bill had caused some eye-
brow raising in New York State, as well it might. The bill had
been aimed at ridding the New York City government of
Hubert O. Thompson, whose corrupt conduct as Commissioner
of Public Works had aroused public and editorial condemna-
tion regardless of party. Even the Democratic New York Times
wanted Cleveknd to sign the bill, which authorized the next
elected Mayor of New York to appoint a fresh public works
commissioner before Thompson s term expired. But Cleveland
vetoed the bill a week before the legislature adjourned. He
called it the most carelessly written legislation ever sent to
him for signature. Cleveland went on so in his veto message

15. Ibid., p. 338.

Dignifies the Presidential Veto 143

that the state could well say It thought "he protested too
much."

Reformers were disappointed in "Him and said so. They were,
naturally, deeply interested in what motivated Cleveland's veto
and they hadn't far to look. For Cleveland's veto of the Theo-
dore Roosevelt reform, measure abruptly ended a break be-
tween Cleveland and Tammany Hall, indeed patched it so well
that Hubert Thompson's power to select Tammany delegates
to the 1884 Democratic National Convention appeared to be
a decisive factor. There's not the slightest question that Cleve-
land was highly delegate-conscious at this time and that he
had already been approached at top level with the White
House in view. Teddy Roosevelt was among many who
screamed that Cleveland's veto action had more to do with
ambition than an innate feeling for reform.

It was as President of the United States that the power of
the veto began to appeal to Cleveland as a weapon for the
public good. 16 Presidential vetoes in that era required a lion's
courage, for veterans* pensions and patronage had long been
whips and powerful ones in the hands of the Republican Party
and the Grand Army of the Republic. The Republicans had
been bent on demonstrating that they and they alone were the
only true friends of Civil War veterans. They had campaigned
long and lustily that the advent of a Democrat in the White
House would mean the beginning of the end of veterans' pork-
barrel pension bills and bonuses. When Cleveland therefore
failed to ask the Congress for the usual pension largess, the
G.A,R. and their Republican allies screamed from the new
West to Maine and from Michigan to Maryland.

Cleveland had adopted a system of applying the principle
of veteran's preference in removals and appointments only to
disabled G.A.R.S. (Naturally, no Confederate veteran had the
slightest chance of government aid in those days.) Suddenly

16. Carl Sclmrz, a maverick Republican liberal and confirmed mug-
wump, became one of Cleveland's Cabinet and stated later that Cleve-
land cMded fa' with, these words: ""What's die use of being elected and

re-elected if you don't stand for something?"

GROVEK CLEVELAND

a flood of private pension bills drowned the House and Senate
hoppers and Cleveland vetoed almost every one of them.
Cleveland now pleaded that the pension system be made
fairer, more honest, more efficient, and more up-to-date. The
G.A.K would have none of it and appeared outraged. Veterans
had been at the public teat for a whole generation and they
weren't going to lose their hold easily on such a succulent and
nourishing breast.

As the accumulating battle between Cleveland and the
G.A.R. spread to new veterans for whom private pension bills
had been arranged in every Northern state, Cleveland's veto
messages became more and more sarcastic. 17 His irritability in-
creased. His language hardened, became caustic. He placed
himself on more than one occasion in the untenable political
situation of being an economic enemy of men who had saved
the Union. When Cleveland had to point out that many a
Congressman was voting for bills based on fraudulent claims,
and in doing so used sarcastic and searing language, the wrath
of Democratic and Republican political bosses alike descended
*in white tongues of flame upon the first Democratic President
since the Civil War.

Early in 1887, a long-pending bill actually offered pensions
to all disabled veterans who had served for three months in
the Union cause and had no known friends or relatives to
support them. Congress passed the bill quickly and without
much care in the wording. Old age was to be regarded as
disability; other nonmilitary causes were sufficient to qualify
for a life pension. Known as the "pauper's bill/' this amazing
measure went so far as to include the dependent parents of
soldiers who had died in the service of the North. 18

Cleveland took a deep breath and promptly vetoed the
parody. His veto was the very mark of a courageous, candid
man. It was wrong, he argued in his veto message, to place
mere charity cases on the Federal pay roll. He reminded the
Congress what such a precedent would eventually mean to the
United States Treasury. If dependent parents of dead veterans

17. Merrill, op. cit. f pp. 106-34.

18. Ibid. 9 pp. 105-7.

Dignifies tJie Presidential Veto 145

were now accepted, their brothers, sisters, cousins, and aunts
might be included in the next bill. Pretty soon every family
north of the Mason-Dixon Line would be on the Federal pay
roll, and that was something the "businessman's President"
couldn't swallow. The veto's logic stuck.

The political losses Cleveland sustained among Civil War
veterans and their puppet politicians from this and other veto
messages were more than made up for by citizens who shared
Cleveland's acute indignation at dishonesty and corruption in
government. But Cleveland failed to get through the Congress
a decent substitute pension bill, and in this his own temper
was a factor. The pension problem remained when he left the
Presidency. Where he might have treaded gingerly in his rela-
tions with The Hill and the G.A.R., powerful voices in the
America of the late iSoos, Cleveland seemed forever to jump
squarely with both feet into the heart of the wasp's nest of
Civil War memories and sentiment.

Grover Cleveland vetoed more bills than any President be-
fore him. But most of the bills he vetoed were for private
pensions in which each man or group of men up for pension
constituted an individual bill, repeated ad nauseam. Cleveland
promptly upbraided and vetoed each bad bill as it came to
his groaning desk.

Actually, Franklin D. Roosevelt vetoed the greatest number
and variety of measures of any President. 19 It was calculated
at Roosevelt's death that he and Cleveland were, between
them, responsible for two-thirds of all the vetoes cast since
Washington first employed the presidential veto power in
1792. 20

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., suspects that Franklin Roosevelt

19. Dwight D. Eisenhower later was to give the veto new armor
through his amazing power to make vetoes stick. In his first six years as
President, Eisenhower was never once overridden by the required two-
thirds vote of both houses of Congress, though they were usually
Democrat-controlled. In 1959, when his record was finally broken, it
had to be on pork-barrel legislation, the sort of local self-interest bill
which had plagued Grover Cleveland and caused him to dignify the veto
as a presidential prerogative.

20. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Coming of the New Deal (Boston,
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1959), p. 555-

G R O V E R CLEVELAND

later used the veto purposefully to enforce respect for the
President's policies and titular position. 21 It seemed sometimes
as though Roosevelt were casting about for bills to veto simply
to flex Ms executive muscles and show his power. Cleveland,
however, never invoked the veto in this way. He was far too
candid and direct. He was incapable of dissembling or of
puddshness. He dignified the veto as a presidential instrument,
using its unique power to maintain fiscal integrity against an
almost insane, emotional veterans' lobby which was, beyond
doubt, the most venal and powerful legislative minority ever
to haunt the cloakrooms of The Hill.

Indeed, President Cleveland vetoed 301 bills in his first
term, almost all of them private pension bills. Allan Nevins
says that the general evil of giving every needy ex-soldier
pensions, and quite a few not so needy, was tolerated by "that
immense good nature which is rather an American vice than a
virtue." 22

Almost a quarter of a million pensioners had already been
placed on the public pay roll, but this number began to de-
cline as veterans died off with greater rapidity. To check this
decline, the veterans* lobby had then pushed through Congress
the famous "arrears of pensions" act which President Hayes
had cheerfully signed. This act was intended to do justice to
veterans who had incurred illnesses as a result of war injuries
or whose wounds had eventually caused them disability.

President Hayes had been a thoroughgoing, even willing,
veterans' man. President Cleveland felt as deeply as the next
for ill, wounded, disabled veterans in real want he signed
1,453 private pension bills in his first four years as President!
But an obvious racket was wrong and dishonesty something
so repugnant to this first postwar Democrat that he simply
could not bring himself to hoodwink or bankrupt America.
Dr. Nevins reports as follows: 23

There were thousands of "invalid" pensioners who were
robust and able-bodied. There were other thousands pen-

31. Ibid.

32, Nevins, op. <M. 9 p. 326.
23, Ibid., 326-32.

Dignifies the Presidential Veto 147

sioned for diseases really incurred in civilian life. There
were "dependent relatives" who were quite independent,
and "widows'' who had long ago remarried. There were still
more glaring cases of successful fraud by swindlers who
impersonated dead pensioners and continued to receive their
checks. The system had been at fault in three principal ways.
The evidence upon which pensions were granted was ex
parte, being furnished by comrades and neighbors, the ex-
amining surgeons were local physicians, often glad to help
a friend and bring more money into the community; and
the gauge of a pensioner's disability was his unfitness to do
manual labor without regard to his mental capacity or pri-
vate income.

It was Cleveland's object to call sharp attention to the
carelessness of the system; and in a special veto message of
May 8, 1886, he unlimbered his artillery against the most
careless feature of all the host of special pension bills
which Congress had fallen into the habit of passing without
any real consideration. He complained that Congress had
recently sent him in one day 240 special bills, of which 198
covered claims already rejected by the Pensions Bureau. Any
veteran whose claim was too silly or impudent to get past
the pension authorities was at liberty to take it to his Rep-
resentative or Senator. The resulting bills became thick as
autumn leaves in Vallombrosa. The House had set aside Fri-
day evenings for enacting them with a jubilant whoop, while
the Senate, in a single field-day (April 21, 1886) voted some
four hundred of them. As Cleveland said, many of them
were the result of nominal sessions held for their express
consideration and attended by a small minority of the mem-
bers of the respective houses.

The principle involved was simple: The nation had in its
Pensions Bureau a virtual pensions court, hearing cases fairly
and interpreting the laws in a liberal spirit. Congress was
setting itself up as a rival pensions court, and reversing
hundreds of decisions made by the proper tribunal. It is
not too much to say that three out of four of the special
bills were flagrantly bad. The President's method of dealing
with them was to send back measure after measure with
brief and sarcastic messages of exposure. He approved many
several times as many as he rejected; but by the middle

GHOVER CLEVELAND

of August, 1886, he had penned more than a hundred vetoes.
He thus fixed the eyes of the country upon a gross perver-
sion of Congressional energy, which combined robbery of
the Treasury with a vicious time-wasting habit of attention
to special and local bills. As he pointed out, Congress should
either rely upon the Pensions Bureau, or reorganize it to
make it reliable. If it really constituted itself a supreme
court to deal with claims, in justice to the veterans it would
have to attend to all that were offered. Indeed, the number
of private bills was increasing by leaps and bounds; Rep-
resentative Warner showed that in about six months 4,127
pension bills had been introduced in the House, and a larger
number in the Senate enough if given ten minutes apiece,
to consume four months of Congressional time. No earlier
President had ever vetoed one of these bills! Cleveland
signed far more than he vetoed, and far more than any
previous President had ever signed; but he took a stand
against the enactment of an indiscriminate and unconsidered
mass of legislation.

His brief, pointed veto messages were so good that it was
a pity he weakened their effect by occasional gibes or ridi-
cule. It was easy to find objects for his humor. One claimant
explained that he had been registered "at home'* and had
set out on horseback intending to complete his enlistment,
that on the way his horse had fallen on his left ankle and
that he was thus entitled to a cripple's pension. A widow
whose husband had been killed by a fall from a ladder in
1881 traced this to a slight flesh-wound in the calf in 1865!
A Louisville policeman demanded a pension for the death
of his son ten months after desertion from the army. A simi-
lar claim was made by the family of a Pennsylvanian who,
after deserting, had been drowned in a canal six miles from
home. An Illinois soldier who had been captured and re-
leased on parole had been injured at his home in 1863 by
the explosion of a Fourth of July cannon, and now in 1886
asked for a special pension. The widow of a captain who had
died in 1883 ^om cerebral apoplexy swore that it was the
result of a hernia contracted in 1863. One gallant private
claimed that a disease of the eyes had resulted from army
diarrhea.

Dignifies the Presidential Veto 149

To nonsense like this, Grover Cleveland applied the un-
sparing veto as an instrument of permanent executive policy.
He did so without apology and without regret. By the end

of his first term, Cleveland had made enough enemies through
private pension bill vetoes alone to assure his defeat for re-
election. The recipe was simple: Stir in natural four-year de-
fection of once loyal voters, hard times, native anti-Democratic

sentiment still current as a result of war, and the President's
inability to teU anything but the unvarnished truth, and you
have a formula unlikely to return anyone to the White House.

But Benjamin Harrison, who beat Cleveknd in their first
encounter, created enemies and hard times of his own between
1888 and 1892; Cleveland was then returned to office, where-
upon he continued to veto whatever he believed to be not in
the public good.

Indeed, many an encyclopedia and history book refer to
Cleveland as "The Veto President," not because he used the
veto more often than any other Chief Executive, but because
he dramatized and realized its potential Cleveland pioneered
massive use of the veto as had no other President before him.
He had visualized in the veto a powerful force in the constant
changes of executive-judicial-legislative power balance. He
had made the veto an instrument of national policy. He had,
through sheer honesty and blunt resolve, implemented and
dignified it, given it a luster it had not had before, and in
doing so strengthened the powers and the office of President
of the United States.

Theodore Roosevelt

MANY words in many languages define many different kinds
o trade restraint or other arrangement involving mo-
nopolistic practices in the market place. In continental Europe,
the word frequently used is of French-German origin, "cartel."
To most Americans this translates as "monopoly . w And "mo-
nopoly" has often been called "trust'' in the philosophical writ-
ings of those who have sought to prove that monopolistic
practices contribute to the discomfort of the common man
and are contrary to the general welfare. All three words, "car-
teV* "monopoly," and "trust," are aldn and, to historians, prac-
tically interchangeable.

There are two types of trusts in the classic definition: hori-
zontal and vertical trusts. While both have to do with un-
natural monopolies, each has its own distinct shape, size, and
structure. A horizontal trust is a combination of corporations
or businesses engaged in the same line or product; a vertical
trust is an organization which, within itself, controls every-
thing necessary to its own line of operation from raw material
and transportation to final packaging. In the United States,
both lands of trusts are illegal when in restraint of trade.

Competing drag firms manufacturing a new medicine will
charge $4.50 for it, though it may have cost them $0.23 to
process and package. The government conducts an inquiry,
charging they are a horizontal trust They have agreed among
themselves to fix the price in restraint of free competitive trade
to the detriment of the public. They have done so, of course,
150

7

Trust-Busts Changes in the
Presidency

to insure their profits, prevent price-cutting, and maintain a
solid front against what they consider unnecessary competitive
risk.

Automobile companies, on the other hand, are often sued
as vertical trusts, since many of them not only own the ores
and other raw materials from which they produce their autos
but manufacture their own steel, operate their own railroads,
and make the end product these railroads haul to market.

The original Standard Oil Company, for example, was once
a sprawling trust which almost completely controlled the sup-
ply, manufacture, and distribution of petroleum products in
vast areas of the United States. Standard Oil in John D. Rocke-
feller's heyday induced various stockholders in supply enter-
prises to assign their stock to a common board of trustees for
which they received dividend-bearing trust certificates in ex-
change. The oil trustees were thus able to manage what should
have been competing supplier firms, fix prices at both whole-
sale and retail levels, throttle competition at its supply source,
dictate freight rates, control profits, and otherwise perform in
the classic vein of the "combination in restraint of trade."

The Sherman Anti-Trust Act, passed by Congress in 1890,
has often been invoked in similar cases because it makes illegal
any attempt to monopolize an industry or to restrain the
normal competitive capitalistic system to the detriment of the
general welfare. Nowadays there is no one Standard Oil Com-
pany. There are Standard Oil of Ohio, Standard Oil of Indiana,

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Standard Oil o California, Standard Oil of New Jersey, etc.
Each is a separate company and, broken up, Standard Oil now
has nowhere near the unholy restraining power, the huge
monopoly once within the grasp of its trustees and officers.

Why are monopolies bad for the public? Simply because
the human beings who operate them profit exorbitantly at the
public's expense and prices stay artificially high. There is no
free flow of competition which, in capitalism, is the life of
trade. When the supply of a finished product or raw material
is controlled so that its purchasers cannot buy it anywhere
else and are forced to meet the arbitrary terms of sale laid
down by the restraining combination, the result is monopoly.

Except for temporary monopolies in times of stress, such as
war, none of the non-Marxist nations will long tolerate mo-
nopolies or trusts or cartels under the democratic political
system. Laws are quickly passed to relieve the public. In com-
munist countries, of course, everything is monopolistic: the
government controls, prices, distributes, and withholds at its
own discretion and for its own purposes, in spite of the fact
that Karl Marx's foremost philosophical enemy was the mo-
nopolist who was, he said, chief of the workingman's devils.

The Sherman Anti-Trust Act took its name from Senator
John Sherman of Ohio. Monkey business in high places in the
mushrooming mergers of the late nineteenth century caused
the act to be passed. Increasingly the public opposed un-
bridled impudence in its royalty type economic structure. In
an era devoted to long overdue reform in politics, it was most
natural to regard industrial combinations and mergers in re-
straint of free trade as an evil thing. So the public acted.

Demand for restrictive legislation against trusts, cartels, and
monopolies rose to such a pitch by Cleveland's time that it
became a political issue no major candidate could avoid,
though many tried. In 1890 an antitrust measure finally passed
both houses of Congress and was signed by President Benjamin
Harrison ( grandson of President William Henry Harrison, the
hero of Tippecanoe). The act was a simple one; it was based
on the Constitutional power of Congress to regulate interstate
commerce.

Trust-Busts Changes in the Presidency 153

The Sherman act declared illegal every combination, cartel,
monopoly, trust, contract, or conspiracy in restraint of trade,

either interstate or foreign. The act set up a fine of $5,000 and
imprisonment for one year as maximum penalties for viola-
tion. But, in the first decade of its life, the Sherman Anti-Trust
Act had the wind taken out of its sails by the Supreme Court,
which watered down its powers and jurisdiction, chiefly
through its decision in the E. C. Knight Company case of 1895.

What the act needed, in the long run, was not legal wording
or interpretation but a man who believed trusts, combinations,
mergers, cartels, monopolies, contracts, and conspiracies in re-
straint of trade to be truly against the public interest, and to
do something about same. That man became President of the
United States quite by accident on September 14, 1901, at the
age of forty-two. To understand why he was an accidental
President and what his accession meant to the prosecution of
monopolistic trusts, one has to go back to the renomination
of William McKinley, ardent friend of business and the status
quo.

McKinley's love of unbridled capitalism and faith in it has
no parallel among modern American Presidents. Usually a
President has displayed somewhere a feeling for the industrial
underdog, the downtrodden woridngman, the man who 'labors
so others may profit."* But not the twenty-fifth President of the
United States. He supported every manufacturers' measure
proposed by his backers, among whom was the powerful capi-
talist-politician Marcus A. Hanna, from McKinley's state of
Ohio.

Not only did McKinley endorse the gold standard and abhor
free silver but he championed a protective tariff so high that
foreign trade began to dwindle dangerously. Isolationist and
conservative by nature, McKinley became nevertheless a war
President, if the Spanish- American affair can be called one.

Banna had wangled the Ohio Governorship for McKinley,
an undistinguished Republican Congressman. In 1895, Hanna
began to move toward McKinley's presidential nomination.
Through as adroit and skillful a campaign as any ever handled
in U. S. politics, Hanna made McKinley not only candidate

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

but President He easily defeated William Jennings Bryan, the
Democrat, regarded by Ms time as a radical, labor's champion,
and no friend of the economic royalist.

McKinley's first term was placid, except for the Spanish-
American disturbance, which was confined to the year 1898
and two memorable events: the sinking of the battleship
Maine, and the dramatic charge up San Juan Hill. America
remembered the Maine and glorified its victorious war Presi-
dent who was thereupon assured of renomination. But the
reform element of the Republican Party was progressively
lukewarm and the 1900 ticket needed a liberal reformer to
win back those postwar recalcitrants who disliked McKinley's
big-business bias. That man was Theodore Roosevelt By nomi-
nating him for Vice-President, the Mark Hanna-TBoss" Platt
combine thought they had shelved Teddy Roosevelt forever
and deprived him of the Governor's chair at Albany. They
reckoned with everything but fate.

Teddy Roosevelt had become a national war hero, partly
because he was supposed to have led the heroic charge up
San Juan Hill, which is at least debatable. At any rate, Teddy
Roosevelt came back home a candidate for everything, He had
had a splendid record in the New York State legislature from
1881 to 1884. Then he had backed James G. Elaine and lost
Ms own reform following. Disgusted with politics and the
effete East, Theodore Roosevelt had gone West where he failed
as a rancher but learned much of value to him later as Chief
Executive of a nation progressively aware of its frontier. His
political repudiation and the deaths of his beloved wife and
mother within the same twenty-four-hour period had very
nearly broken his health. The West restored it.

T.R. came back from Dakota Territory in 1886 and inevita-
bly plunged at once into politics. He was defeated for Mayor
of New York but the Republican Party was beginning to
notice him again, and in 1889 President Harrison appointed
Mm to the Civil Service Commission, where he stayed for
six years. Civil Service as this country knows it today owes
much to Teddy Roosevelt's vigor and honesty in that office.

From 1895 to 1897, T.R. was head of the civilian board

Trust-Busts Changes in the Presidency 155

which ran the New York City Police Department. Few poli-
ticians ever nibbed more crooked ward heelers the wrong way
or made more personal enemies in the name of reform, for
T.R. vigorously and continuously called a spade a spade. But
his name was beginning to shine, his reputation to widen, his
word to count for something when, in 1897, President Mc-
Kinley appointed him, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, a post
his presidential cousin FranHin also held at a later date.

When the war with Spain broke out ? Teddy Roosevelt re-
signed to organize witE^Eeonard Wood the volunteer regiment
known to history as the Rough Riders. No such glamorous
cavalry troop had galloped across the American mind since
J.E.B. Stuart's, and Stuart had been an unspeakable Rebel.

T.R. was, therefore, a genuine, fourteen-carat popular hero
by war's end. It was inevitable that he should be a foremost
candidate for the Republican nomination for Governor of his
home state, New York, a fact which galled Thomas C. ("Boss'*)
Platt and disturbed the sleep of many another entrenched Re-
publican politician. So Platt, after consultation with Mark
Hanna and, of course, William McKinley, made an apparently
clever move. He began beating the drums for Teddy Roosevelt
as McKinley's running mate on the next national ticket* The
vice-presidential nomination had buried political hopes before.
It seemed a sure-Bre scheme for ridding New York of one of
its most pesky and successful reform politicians, a type "Ross**
Platt loathed.

Teddy Roosevelt tells in his own words the first inklings he
had had that some liberals in the Republican Party genuinely
wished him, to be Governor of New York: 1

It was Mr. L. E. Quigg [an independent Republican
leader] who called on me at Montauk Point to sound me
about the Governorship; Mr, Platt being by no means en-
thusiastic over Mr. Quigg's mission, largely because he dis-
approved of the Spanish War and of my part in bringing it
about. Mr. Quigg saw me in my tent [at headquarters of
the First Volunteer Cavalry the Rough Riders] . . . and

i. The Autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt, Centennial Edition (New

York, diaries Sciibner's Sons, 1958), pp. 147-69.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

spoke very frankly to me, stating that he earnestly desired
to see me nominated and believed that the great body of
Republican voters in the State so desired, but that the organ-
ization and the State Convention would finally do what
Senator Platt desired. He said that county leaders were al-
ready coming to Senator Platt, hinting at a close election,
expressing doubt of Governor Black's availability for re-elec-
tion, and asking why it would not be a good thing to nomi-
nate me; that now that I had returned to the United States
this would go on more and more all the time, and that he
[Quigg] did not wish that these men should be discouraged
and be sent back to their localities to suppress a rising senti-
ment in my favor.

For this reason he said that he wanted from me a plain
statement as to whether or not I wanted the nomination,
and as to what would be my attitude toward the organiza-
tion in the event of my nomination and election, whether or
not I would "make war" on Mr. Platt and his friends, or
whether I would confer with them and with the organiza-
tion leaders generally, and give fair consideration to their
point of view as to party policy and public interest. He said
he had not come to make me any offer of the nomination,
and had no authority to do so, nor to get any pledges or
promises. He simply wanted a frank definition of my attitude
toward existing party conditions.

To this I replied that I should like to be nominated, and
if nominated would promise to throw myself into the cam-
paign with all possible energy. I said that I should not make
war on Mr. Platt or anybody else if war could be avoided;
that what I wanted was to be Governor and not a faction
leader; that I certainly would confer with organization men,
as with everybody else who seemed to me to have knowledge
of and interest in public affairs, and that as to Mr. Platt and
the organization leaders, I would do so in the sincere hope
that there might always result harmony of opinion and pur-
pose; but that while I would try to get on well with the
organization, lie organization must with equal sincerity
strive to do what I regarded as essential for the public good;
and that in every case, after full consideration of what every-
body had to say who might possess real knowledge of the
matter, I should have to act finally as my own judgment

Trust-Busts Changes in the Presidency 157

and conscience dictated and administer the State govern-
ment as I thought it ought to be administered.

The Republican Committeemen soon realized they needed
a man of T.R.'s courage and drive to win the 1898 Governor-
ship and, accordingly, their leaders were in what T.R. himself
called "a chastened mood*' and ready to accept any candidate
with whom they thought they had a chance of winning. 2
Senator Platt finally picked T.R. He was, said Roosevelt later,
entirely frank in the matter, making no pretense that he liked
him, but deferring to the judgment of those who insisted that
Teddy was the only man who could win the election. His
judgment was confirmed when T.R. squeaked through by only
18,000 votes over Augustus Van Wyck.

There had always been considerable opposition to the Re-
publican machine and "Boss" Platt but, as T.R. pointed out in
Ms autobiography, 3 reform leadership was "apt to be found
only among those whom Abraham Lincoln called the 'silk-
stockings.* " Much as reform excited the leadership of the silk-
stocking districts, it seemed in those times to result in derision
among the plain people approximately equal to their anger or
dislike of machine politics. Teddy Roosevelt puts it very
nicely: 4

When reformers of this type attempted to oppose Mr.
Platt, they usually put up either some rather inefficient,
well-meaning person, who bathed every day, and didn't
steal, but whose only good point was "respectability/* and
who knew nothing of the great fundamental questions loom-
ing before us; or else they put up some big business man
or corporation lawyer who was wedded to the gross wrong
and injustice of our economic system, and who neither by
personality nor by programme gave the ordinary plain peo-
ple any belief that there was promise of vital good to them
in the change.

T.R. was silk-stocking, all right; but he was much more. Of
a prosperous and distinguished family, T.R. had been edu-

2. Ibid. 9 p. 147.

3. Ibid., p. 151.

4. Ibid.

THEODOBE KOOSEVELT

cated by private tutors, graduated from Harvard, and had
studied law at Columbia. Every move he made was made with
hyperglandular vigor and self-righteous sroreness. He was
barely forty when the nation hailed him for his war exploits
and elected him Governor of New York. Indeed, his egotism
shone through every page he wrote and Mr. Dooley said of
him that his widely read story of the Rough Riders lacked a
subtitle: "Alone In Cuba"

But self-confident and silk-stockinged as he undeniably was,
Teddy Roosevelt was made up of other qualities more im-
portant to the offices he held and the people he served. He
was a thoroughgoing democrat; he possessed deep religious
feeling for the underdog, social or economic. Roosevelt was
above all things impetuous. In the popular mind, the boyish,
boisterous quality of T.R.'s outbursts "gave the appearance of
sheer energy turned loose without benefit of sober thought." 5

This explosion of boundless vitality was likely to attract at-
tention, but his impulsive and emotional nature wasn't likely
to wean sober businessmen to his standard. Yet the business-
men were wrong. T.R. was no temperamental schoolgirl; his
own moral standards were far above the standards of his day,
and he was absolutely appalled at the amoral atmosphere in
which public and private business were transacted. Honest to
the core, T.R. believed others should be honest, too not
honest in the traditional business sense, but completely,
openly, painfully honest Honest in the Lincoln tradition of
walking miles to return a 6^ overcharge; honest to a point
where his admirers, long tired of the novelty of a moral issue
and perhaps even threatened with inconvenience or financial
loss, could say with feeling that he had gone too far in his
exuberant, egotistical crusades. Once embarked, T.R. never
turned back, continuing lie hammer blows against evil until
the plague spot was fully eradicated. 6

Henry F. Pringle, one of Teddy Roosevelfs most successful
and perceptive biographers, points out that his military repu-

5. Peter R. Levin, Seven By Chance (New York, Farrar, Straus and

Company, 1948), p. 179.

6. Ibid.

Trust-Busts Changes in the Presidency 159

tation never impressed Army men. 7 One reason for this was
an unforgettable picture of a tactician who measured his battle
successes by the length of the casualty lists. As in much of
T.R/s scholarship and learning > his references and reasons
were often spotty and his conclusions warped through monu-
mental bias and self-righteousness. He preferred to prove a
thesis, to rationalize his own stand, rather than lead up to
logical conclusions. This professional military men simply
couldn't abide; and of all the weaknesses of Theodore Roose-
velt (and he had more than his share for a man constantly
in the limelight) rationalization was undeniably the most
flagrant and unappetizing. Yet the very breadth of his inter-
ests, the scope of his vision, his catholicity of taste, and the
general warmth with which he approached anything or anyone
somehow helped his time and history to forgive his flaws.
Deeper concentration, Peter Levin feels, in any one subject,
"may well have cost him his amazing touch.* 8 This is undeni-
ably and perceptively accurate. Indeed, the wideness of T.R.'s
fabulous horizon is matched in the Presidency only by Jeffer-
son and T.R/S young cousin, Franklin.

T.R/S very appearance set off deeply grounded loyalties and
hatreds. There were those close to him who glowed under his
compliments and would swear he loved them and all the
world. Yet there were always those for whom his personality
was an antagonizing red flag. Though T.R., to his perpetual
credit, admitted that he possessed only an ordinary mind
encased in an endlessly energetic body, his sententiousness
appalled many sober people, liberals and conservatives alike.
These became his perpetual adversaries, citizens he could
never convert, even to the best of purposes. Levin writes: 9

To them, the crackling epithets and pithy sentences were
infuriating. His famous teeth and the drooping moustache
useful in producing a wide grin or an expression of ferocious
anger were hostilely thought the mask of a poseur. The

7. Henry F. Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt, a Biography (New York,
Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931), passim.

8. Levin, op. c&., p. 181.

9. Ibid., p. 182.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

furious gestures merely emphasized an absence of construc-
tive thinking and the man's incredible narrowmindedness.
And Roosevelt's part in the creation of these hatreds was
considerable. His opponents were never to be reconciliated;
they were to be damned. Impkcably he went after them; a
mistaken opinion became an arrant sin; a criticism or a re-
jection a personal affront. In "malefactors of great wealth/*
in "muckrakers,** in "reformers," and in "anarchists" he found
little to commend. Their disagreement with him or with his
methods he answered with all the picturesqueness of his
vocabulary.

For such a man, close-mouthed conservatives like "Boss"
Platt and Mark Hanna could come to have only fear and con-
tempt fear that their neat little apple carts would suddenly
be dumped over, contempt for self-righteous ego and infuri-
ating temperament It was not long after T.R. became Gov-
ernor that Platt wholeheartedly regretted what he had
reluctantly agreed to. As fear and contempt turned in the
boss's mind to outrageous anger at the new Governor, smoke-
filled meetings began to take place with the national election
of 1900 ever higher on the agenda. Some means simply must
be found to rid New York State of the menace of Colonel
Roosevelt. The Vice-Presidency seemed a logical sidetrack.

Two years of sorrow had followed T.R.'s election to Albany.
The Governor rapped the knuckles cf New York City traction
interests that "Boss" Platt adored; the Governor held a tight
rein on political patronage; the Governor opened salvo after
salvo at corruptions so close to home that Platt and his cronies
could scarcely bear to open the morning papers. Something
creative simply had to be done, particularly in view of the
fact that T.R. soon told Platt he wanted a second two-year
term in 1900 and would pursue it with all his considerable
energy. Re-election would inevitably put Governor Roosevelt,
as chief of the country's most populous and prosperous state,
directly in line to succeed President McKinley in 1904.

Platt persisted; it was too great a poker pot to give up. And
little by little the ambitious Colonel began to take seriously
what had originally been in Platt's Machiavellian mind only a

Trust-Busts Changes in the Presidency 161

clever maneuver to sidetrack a dangerous and unappetizing
Republican hero. Roosevelt at first told friends that he couldn't
see himself presiding over the Senate and keeping his opinions
to himself, as he would have to do, except in case of a tie.
John Hay, now head of the Department of State, and a warm
friend of T.R., offered sensible advice: he told the Governor
that no Vice-President had ever been "elected by violence.**
But if T.R. didn't go after the vice-presidential spot under
McKinley he might find himself in the position of being
drafted by the bosses and beholden to them. Platt might
manipulate the convention delegates and put T.R. on the ticket
in spite of himself, knowing the loyal Colonel would never
refuse to serve his country if nominated and elected.

Something else made the energetic young Governor take the
vice-presidential gambit seriously. Platt still had immense
power among those who would nominate the Republican can-
didate for Governor in 1900. If Platt dictated his own candi-
date for the Governorship, T.R/s elective career was probably
at an end. Positions on government pay rolls he might still
secure he might even be appointed Secretary of the Navy as
a sop from. Platt. But the Presidency was not an appointive
office though it was in those days a hand-picked Domination,
and those who picked and chose were men like "Boss" Platt.
When they had chosen, on both sides, the people voted, but
the people voted only on presidential candidates the profes-
sional bosses had picked to oppose one another.

Soon, fewer and fewer disclaimers came from Albany as to
a place on the national ticket. Mark Hanna may have wanted
to succeed McKinley himself, but in any case he relished king-
making more. When he learned of Platt's maneuver to place
T.R. in the Vice-Presidency and thus remove hina not only
from Albany but as a threat in 1904 (the Vice-Presidency was
more of a political sidetrack in those days than it is now),
Hanna cried out prophetically, "Don't any of you realize that
there is only one life between that madman and the Presi-
dency? What harm can he do as Governor of New York com-
pared to the damage he will do as President if McKinley
should die?"

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Although Hanna was reluctant and wary, he gave in finally,
and the Republican Convention of 1900 screamed itself out for
the Rough Rider, the vital and outspoken Colonel who ap-
pealed to commoner and patrician alike but who made an
almost equal number apprehensive. There was no middle
ground with Teddy Roosevelt he had the sort of personality
you either loved or despised. It was, moreover, in violent con-
trast to President McKinley's.

Everywhere Theodore Roosevelt went during the presi-
dential campaign and he made more political speeches than
any vice-presidential candidate had ever made before Re-
publicans flocked to hear birr* rip and tear at William Jennings
Bryan for the Great Commoner's "doctrines of anarchy." Mc-
Kinley, by contrast, scarcely made a speech. He simply issued
solemn bulletins from Canton, Ohio, or from the White House,
the prototype of the front-porch campaign.

On November 6, 1900, T.R.'s magic showed in the ballot;
Bryan proved even less popular than he had been in 1896.
McKinley picked up almost a quarter of a million votes while
Bryan lost more than 100,000 in the popular total. McKinley
had won by 271 to 176 in the electoral college four years previ-
ously. With T.R. Ms running mate, McKinley's electoral ma-
jority swelled to 292 to 155.

If anything about the hyperconservative inauguration on
March 4, 1901, could be called sensational it was the volume
of publicity that a Vice-President of the United States was
being accorded for the first time. T.R. felt he had made a wise
decision in leaving New York, and "Boss" Platt privately con-
gratulated himself for having conjured it up. Albany was his
once again.

To imagine the impetuous T.R. sitting still hour after hour,
as all Vice-Presidents must do as presiding officers of the
United States Senate, strains and taxes the imagination. Cer-
tainly it would have irked Roosevelt beyond endurance had
he continued for long in the unfamiliar sedentary role. He con-
fided in family and friends that he might take a job in a
nearby university teaching history to pass the time when the
Senate was not in session. It simply wasn't done in those days

Trust-Busts Changes in the Presidency 163

for a Vice-President to be as active politically or ceremonially
as Richard M. Nixon in his two terms under Eisenhower.

T.E, also considered studying more law so he might have
some profession if Ms star grew dim. By midsummer 1901, with
fewer than six months o the Vice-Presidency behind him, he
seems to have kept Ms sanity and hope only because certain
newspaper editors wished to maintain his name in the public
eye, with, a view to 1904 when McKinley would not be eligible
again. A series of American speaking tours was suggested, and
Teddy Roosevelt leaped to the lure like a trout to a royal
coachman. He never had time to fulfill the tour. For, on Sep-
tember 6, President McKinley absorbed his fatal wound while
speaking in Buffalo. A week and a day later McElnley was
dead, 10 gracefully accepting his fate by a faltering recital of
"Nearer My God to Thee." Platt's best laid plans had exploded
in his face.

A brash political youngster was now, suddenly, at forty-two,
President of the United States, our youngest White House in-
cumbent. William Allen WMte recalls in his Autobiography 11
that what seemed most worrisome to the new President was
not the sudden burden of office, wMch he absorbed as though
bom to it, but the depressing thought that, even if re-elected
in 1904, over Hanna's certain opposition, he would be barely
fifty-one when he would have to retire from the Presidency.
As things worked out he had a right to fret. Meddlesome by
nature, TJEL's years of "retirement" never kept him far from
the national spotlight and gravely affected the lives of William
Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson, among uncountable
others.

Up to now, Teddy Roosevelt had been a sort of brash po-
litical joke, amusing to some, nauseating to others. Now, older
and more stable figures Elihu Root, John Hay, and Mark
Hanna did not know precisely what to call him in private
and ended up using "Theodore," "Teddy," and occasionally

10. Leon Czolgosz was executed on October 29 for McKInley's
murder, and the Secret Service was at last given a fair chance at keeping
safe the most precious man in the United States government.

11. William Allen White, Autobiography (New York, The Macmillan
Company, 1946), p. 339.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

"Mr. President" if a third person was around. Mark Hanna
swallowed Ms suspicions and Ms pride, Ms dread fear that
the talkative cowboy would unthinkingly turn the world up-
side down. Indeed, Hanna gently suggested to the upstart
President that he go slow, take things easy for a wMIe, not
only for his own political sake but for the sake of a country
shocked to the core at the third presidential assassination in
thirty-six years. Conservatives seconded Hanna. Listen to
everyone, make no snap Judgments, be certain when you fi-
nally move this, Hanna told the young man, made more sense
than any other course of action. Roosevelt gratefully received
every conservative leader in both houses of Congress, at his
own invitation.

Nothing in the first messages to Congress suggested that
President Roosevelt was further to the left than McKinley had
been. 12 Indeed, conservatives on the whole were relieved and
foresaw seven more years of "McEanleyisnT: Mgh tariffs, cor-
poration mergers, standpat legislation, accumulation of enor-
mous wealth by the select industrial few, no new tax measures,
hard money,, little or no reform. The American public didn't
seem to care much. It was relieved that no great sociological
crises were imminent and was fascinated by tie strenuous new
occupant of the WMte House whose athletic feats, epigram-
matic language, youthful vigor, and political color were a
vaudeville show in themselves.

Just when or why Teddy Roosevelt became the trust buster
we know Mm to be Mstorically cannot be pinpointed to an
hour or a day. All that can be accurately determined is the
date of Ms first essay into the battle against the economic
royalist, soon after J. P. Morgan had the Northern Securities
Company incorporated in November, 1901, for purposes of
ending tie competition between the Great Northern, Bi.ir1i.ng-.
ton, and Northern Pacific Railroads.

Why did Teddy Roosevelt attack as he did? To begin with,
he found WasMngton, Jackson, and Lincoln stimulating Pres-
idents, men who had used the Presidency as a tool, who had
been creative in legislation, not constantly operating in the

12,. Theodore Roosevelt Papers.

Trust-Busts Changes in the Presidency 165

passive voice. Washington had leaned toward Alexander
Hamilton's theory of a strong central government and, while
refusing monarchy for himself, strongly endorsed the view
that the President of the United States was the President of
the United States, not simply a social figurehead but the repre-
sentation of the flag, the Republic, and the people as well as
chief executive officer of prevailing political opinion. In no
other large country, T.R. knew, were all of these functions
wrapped up in a single office. The British had their kings and
queens and a "Prime Minister besides. The French had a Pre-
mier as well as a President In the American Presidency alone
both offices were combined into a single personality,

Teddy Roosevelt heartily disliked die memory of Thomas
Jefferson, in spite of the Virginian's belief in the common man.
Of Jefferson, T.R. once said that bis worship as founder of
the Democratic Party was a ^discredit to my country." Besides,
Jefferson's doctrine of local and state's rights (repudiated when
he purchased Louisiana on Ms own) was anathema to a vital,
strenuous forty-three-year-old now beginning to enjoy every
moment of power.

Jackson fascinated Teddy Roosevelt, perhaps because Jack-
son was the most outrageous President before him. Nothing
could be innately wrong with wielding enormous personal
power if that power were directed to the good of plain people.
A President was no office boy to Congress, but a "steward of
the people," responsible directly to them since they had per-
sonally voted the President into office. It mattered not that not
one American had cast a ballot in 1900 for Theodore Roosevelt
as President of the United States. Now that he was President
he meant to use his enormous vitality in behalf of the plain
people: creatively, actively, powerfully, as Lincoln had done.
The precedent of the founder of the Republican Party was
for T.R. more than enough to go on. The people simply had
to have a champion and the President had to be that man.
There was no other in the plain man's corner.

Men often admire other men they wish they were. Qualities
in one man which appeal to another often parallel the capabili-
ties, background, hopes, and potential of the admirer. So it

THEODORE BOOSEVELT

was with Teddy Roosevelt: a vigorous Iranian being, he ad-
mired vigor and creativity. He could not possibly have hero-
worshiped the do-nothing James Buchanan, yet was hopelessly
attracted to the forceful Jackson and the strongly moral
Lincoln. Egotistical and self-assured, Theodore Roosevelt
found things admirable in Napoleon which Thomas Jefferson
had not.

If Mark Hanna or those conservatives in business and indus-
try whose fears had been quieted had known that all this was
still very much a part of the Eoosevelt personality, their faith
in the future would surely have been shaken. Though President
Roosevelt had promised faithfully to continue "absolutely un-
broken" McKinley's policies and disposition of the Presidency,
the economic royalty of his time should have hesitated to be-
lieve such a metamorphosis. Little in T.R/s past as civic re-
former, naval administrator, soldier, or Governor could have
deluded any logical person for long that spots would change
with a new oath of office. Big business was used to getting
its own way. Truly it was the royalty of the economy. And, as
so often happens to royalty of any sort, continuous power was
not only corrupting but self-deluding.

Levin feels that Theodore Roosevelt's reputation for radical-
ism is overblown. 18 His trust-busting, his friendliness with
organized labor, his fight to conserve the nation's natural re-
sources., the reactionary nature of his enemies, his forthright
and picturesque speech and manner, his running again for
President as an independent Bull Mooser in 1912 have created
a legend that is false, for T.R, was close to the middle of the
road in almost every act as President. But what was the middle
of the road to the people and Theodore Roosevelt in 1901 was
dangerously radical nonsense to the contemporary industrial
monopolist who had, until then, escaped much of the punishing
social legislation long a legal fact in Europe. Levin goes on: 14

Exactly when he took cognizance of the progressivism that
was boiling beneath the McKinley prosperity is difficult to
determine. Before his ascent to tie White House he had

13. Levin, op. cit. f p. 317.

14. Ibid.

Trust-Busts Changes in the Presidency 167

displayed leanings toward reform and the correction of some
of capitalism's grosser abuses; but he had always been pulled
back to the Republican line when party leaders waxed less
enthusiastic than did he. The Presidency, however, had made
Kim leader of his party. Where a young assemblyman could
be forced to subside and an unruly Governor shelved in the
Vice-Presidency, a Chief Executive could not be fought by
his nominal backers with impunity.

Conservatives were as yet unaffected by an almost universal
journalistic assault on big business and monopoly. Although
the Sherman Anti-Trust Act had languished on the statute
books for a decade, almost totally abandoned by Presidents
Harrison and McKinley, its effectiveness had been further re-
duced as a result of the Supreme Court's 1895 rulings. In this
context it is not surprising that when T.R. opened fire on J.P.
Morgan's railroad consolidation in November, 1901, big busi-
ness was shocked to the core. Morgan tried to negotiate in
Washington but his mission failed. Theodore Roosevelt had
charted the ship of state on a new and vital mission: the
busting of trusts inimical to the interests of the plain people.
This venture was formalized in St. Paul, Minnesota, on March
io s 1902, when suit was filed against the merger by the Fed-
eral attorney for the Minnesota district.

President Roosevelt was quickly assailed by once friendly
businessmen and political conservatives. He was now a Judas,
a disrespecter of adjudicated law, turncoat, and hypocrite.
There was no choice in his vigorous soul but to take his cru-
sade to the people, and take it he did. He made one speech
after another, pleading in every section of the land for sup-
port to his crusade. How many millions heard him no sensible
man could guess and it is well to remember that the loud-
speaker, radio, and television were still in the future. Speeches
to multitudes were strenuous physical facts in T.R/S strenuous
time.

The President made three points plain everywhere he spoke:
he was overwhelmingly in favor of capitalism and free-enter-
prise economics; he was not opposed to corporations but he
held them accountable to government; and again and again

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

be made the point of distinction between good business prac-
tice and bad, men who kept the public good in mind and evil
men who damned the public. Had the phrase "malefactors of
great wealth** been coined he would surely have used it T.R.
didn't think of it until 1907.

The common man came to hear him everywhere. He was
cheered to the echo by liberals heartsick at America's humiliat-
ing disregard of the trust evil. Labor unions made Mm their
champion. To many a working man in the era of the twelve-to-
fourteen-hour day, bad wages, dangerous machinery, nauseat-
ing child labor, and bleak old age, here was a genuine Messiah.

Union League clubs shuddered as they listened to his logic,
couched in more moderate terms on Chestnut Street than in
Union Square. It was said at the time that the President used
the White House only to come back to for fresh linen. News-
paper writing verged on hysteria, divided between those who
foresaw anarchy and Bolshevism and those who hailed the
prophet of long overdue enlightenment

The Northern Securities Company case took more than two
years to make its frustrated way through the labyrinth of lower
Federal courts. On March 14, 1904, it reached the decisive
stage in the Supreme Court. Four of the eminent justices ruled
that the Sherman Anti-Trust Act had been enacted to forbid
all combinations in restraint of trade, whether reasonable or
unreasonable. One justice argued that those who wrote the
law had had in mind only unreasonable combinations, but he
voted to order the Northern Securities Company dissolved be-
cause he found it unreasonably in restraint of trade. A witticism
of the time had it that Teddy had won his case 41 to 43L It is
an interesting sidelight that Oliver Wendell Holmes, long re-
garded as one of our most liberal justices, voted for J. P.
Morgan and Big Business against the President in a highly
sarcastic dissenting opinion.

But the President was satisfied, as well he might have been.
His wide-ranging speaking tour was now justified. He had
championed the cause of die common man and been cheered
to the rafters by him, and he and the people had won. The
narrowness of the vote meant nothing in view of the court's

Trust-Busts Changes in the Presidency 169

vindication of presidential executive power. In many ways T.K.
was to regard this as "one of the great achievements" o his
first term, 15 one of the few understatements Theodore Roosevelt
ever uttered.

President Roosevelt had asked for a Department of Com-
merce and Labor. Congress had overlooked his request until
a vice-president of Standard Oil made the mistake of lobbying
against the idea by sending mcraninating telegrams to The
Hill instead of the usual verbal persuasions. T.R. smelled his
chance, called in the press, informed them of the telegraphic
barrage, and arbitrarily changed the sender to John D. Rocke-
feller, whose name alone was enough to inflame the tmst-
conscious public. Within a week T.R. had his new Department
of Commerce and Labor and, most important, a Bureau of
Corporations with unprecedented powers of Federal inquiry
and investigations.

It has been said of the Roosevelt Presidents that they and all
their tribe had an extra gland. It has also been said that they
were born with political antennae which gave them unerring
instincts when to act and also when not to act. Theodore Roose-
velt, having proved the first statement by his limitless and
energetic demonstration of presidential power, now set out to
prove the second. He became suddenly aware of the presi-
dential campaign of 1904 and its financial requirements.

Until after Ms re-election, T.R. made no major moves to
implement the trust information his new Secretary of Com-
merce and Labor, George B. Cortelyou, had been piling up
for almost two years. Only when the political war chests had
been filled by placated industrialists and corporations and T.R.
had become President in his own right did he return to the
battleground on which he was to say that even the most power-
ful men in the United States were held accountable before
the law.

The new Department of Commerce and Labor was at first a
very inoffensive body. 16 Any investigations and inquisitions so
feared by big business were not to begin until after Election

15. Theodore Roosevelt Papers.

16. Piingle, op. eft,, p. 342,

THEODORE KOOSEVELT

Day T.R. saw to that with unerring instinct. No doubt can
exist, says Henry Pringle, that Theodore Roosevelt, as the 1904
convention drew near, was playing politics in his own behalf. 17
Expediency dictated some o his appointments and he was
trimming sail on the trust-busting tack for months before the
convention,

T.R. cleverly ignored Mark Hanna's growing signs of cor-
diality, finally writing his son Ted: "Senator Hanna . . . has
been intoxicated by the thought that perhaps he could be
nominated himself, or at least dictate the nomination." 18

The President was progressively unkind to the aging Hanna,
whom he detested politically and who was in an increasingly
difficult position as to 1904. Roosevelt said in May, 1903, in
the state of Washington: "I have not asked any man for his
support. I have had nothing whatever to do with raising the
issue as to my endorsement. Sooner or later it was bound to
arise, and, inasmuch as it has now arisen, of course those who
favor my administration and nomination will endorse them,
and those who do not will oppose them."

Through the spring of 1903, Roosevelt kept making it ap-
pear that Hanna opposed his nomination; step by step Hanna
had to retreat from the point of one who had opposed T.R/s
re-election and perhaps even wanted the nomination for "him-
self to a humiliated supporter of a second term. Happily for
the Republicans, the two men came together before tie year
1904 began, for Hanna, who was by now sixty-six, became
seriously ill in February and died on the 15th of that month.
The honeyed obituary notices published in Republican papers
had little to say about Mark Hanna's traditional wickedness,
of his dalliance with despotic wealth, of the corruption often
kid to his door in the raising of campaign funds. Even T.R.
penned a fond obituary notice, pointing out how Hanna had
supported him without question after McKinley had died. "He
was a big man in every way," T.R. wrote. 19

The renomination of Theodore Roosevelt had now been

17. Ilrid. 9 passim.

18. Theodore Roosevelt Papers,

19. Ibid.

Trust-Busts Changes in the Presidency 171

made certain but Ms re-election had not. Being President,
T.R. could not in those days go on the stump. This tradition
has long since been shattered by another Roosevelt, but it was

then ironbound. The New Jork World destroyed the cam-
paign's lethargy with an eight-column editorial signed by Jo-
seph Pulitzer on October i complaining that in the year and a
half o its existence the Bureau of Corporations of the new
Department of Commerce and Labor had done absolutely
nothing and, by a funny coincidence, Mr. Cortelyou, the de-
partment head, was the new Republican National Chairman
succeeding Hanna. Pulitzer suggested that the big corpora-
tions pouring money into the Republican campaign assumed
they were buying protection from Mr. Cortelyou's inquiries.
It was too pat, said Pulitzer: the sudden cessation of trust-
busting simultaneous with a perfect flood of big corporation
funds to be placed at the disposal of the man the President had
picked to break up monopolies, mergers, cartels, trusts, and
other combinations in restraint of trade against the public weaL
Oddly enough, Alton B. Parker, the Democratic candidate,
did nothing with Pulitzer's editorial charges for more than a
month. Naturally, T.R. didn't acknowledge them, since Parker
hesitated. But when Parker made the mistake on November
3 of baldly calling the corporation donations "blackmail/*
made in return for silence in regard to damaging facts collected
in the trust and merger surveys of the Bureau of Corporations,
the President was quick to reply. Parker had lost the election
then and there, if indeed he'd ever had a chance of winning,
which is doubtful Roosevelt said: 20

That contributions have been made ... is not the ques-
tion at issue. . . . Mr, Parker's accusations against Mr. Cortel-
you and me are monstrous. If true they would brand both

of us forever with infamy; and inasmuch as they are false,
heavy must be the condemnation of the man making them.
. . . The assertion that Mr. Cortelyou had any knowledge,
gained while in an official position, whereby lie was enabled
to secure and did secure any contributions from any corpor-
ation is a falsehood. The assertion that there has been any

20. Presidential Addresses, Vol. Ill, pp. 97-100.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

blackmail, direct or indirect, by Mr. Cortelyou or by me is
a falsehood. The assertion that there has been made any
pledge or promise or that there has been any understanding
as to future immunities or benefits, in recognition of any
contribution from any source, is a wicked falsehood.

Since everyone knew and believed in T.R/s explicit honesty,
painfully blunt at times but a beacon in the wilderness of
political hypocrisy and cant, and since the complete and
unequivocal denial rang true with the known facts and the
character of both T.R. and Cortelyou, Parker issued no further
communications. It had been an ill-starred venture and the
Democrats did not thank Pulitzer for it. Indeed, the famous
publisher was in the political doghouse as a result of a truth-
ful editorial.

The President was elected on November 8 to his own first
four-year term; now he was at last in truth the people's choice.
He swamped the Democrats by 336 to 140 in the electoral
college and by a popular majority of more than two and a half
million, most decisive of all Republican victories up to that
time. Pringle points out that "in his ecstasy of joy ... he
issued a statement that was to cause him poignant regret" in
the years to come: "On the 4th of March next I shall have
served three and a half years and this . . . constitutes my first
term. The wise custom which limits the President to two terms
regards the substance and not the form; and under no circum-
stances will I be a candidate for or accept another nomina-
tion." 21

But Pulitzer had had a point, as it turned out. T.R. had in-
deed been trimming sail on the trust tack with election storm
clouds on the horizon. There was a gift of $125,000 from Stand-
ard Oil, $48,000 from New York Life Insurance Company, and
equivalent amounts from Mutual and Equitable. E. H. Harri-
dan, the railroad baron, had donated $50,000 and collected
$100,000 more for T.R/s campaign funds. In fact, it became
public knowledge later that almost three-fourths of the $2,-
195,000 collected for Theodore Roosevelt's 1904 campaign had
come from corporations. J. P. Morgan had personally given

21. New York World, November 9, 1904.

Trust-Busts Changes in the Presidency 173

$150,000, all of it in casli, while Edward T. Stotesbury, whose
bank in Philadelphia had close connections with Morgan's,
had collected $165,795.60 for the campaign. The New York,
New Haven and Hartford Railroad had come through with
$50,000; General Electric with $3,000; James Hazen Hyde with
$25,000; H. C. Frick with $50,000; James Speyer with $25,000;
James Stillman with $10,000. The list was endless. It also in-
volved the worst investment any of these shrewd industrial
and banking giants ever made. For, the day before his inaugu-
ration, T.R. is supposed to have declared: "Tomorrow I shall
come into my office in my own right. Then watch out for me!" 22
T.R/s message to the new Congress was utterly innocuous in
regard to trust-busting and merger-dissolving. There were re-
assuring platitudes and a suggestion that Congress supervise
insurance company transactions, then a developing scandal
which was to bring the not inconsiderable talents of Charles
Evans Hughes to the forefront. It remained for an address be-
fore a dinner of the Union League Club in Philadelphia for
T.R. to show the shape of things to come. The wealthy and
substantial men of banking and industry who attended must
have been shaken out of their brandy-and-cigars lethargy to
hear the following quotation from the man whose successful
campaign they had just financed:

. . . the great development of industrialism means that
there must be an increase in the supervision exercised by the
Government over business-enterprise. . . . Such men as the
members of this club should lead in the effort to secure
proper supervision. . . . Neither this people nor any other
free people will permanently tolerate the use of the vast
power conferred by vast wealth , . . without lodging some-
where in the Government the still higher power of seeing
that this power is used for and not against the interests of
the people as a whole.

The newly elected President went on that the business of
the United States was by now conducted in a way the founders
of the nation could not possibly have anticipated, that all busi-
ness transacted anywhere by a large corporation was in truth

22. New York World, March 5, 1905.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

interstate and that the Federal government, not helpless state
governments, would have to step in to control same. As for
the venal railroads, they must be particularly policed by the
national government. T.R. went on:

... in temperate, resolute fashion there must be lodged
in some tribunal the power over rates, and especially over
rebates . . . which will protect alike the railroad and the
shipper on an equal footing. . . . We do not intend that this
Republic shall ever fail as those republics of olden tiines
failed, in which there finally came to be a government by
classes, which resulted either in the poor plundering the
rich, or in the rich . . . exploiting the poor. 23

The New Yorfe World immediately remarked: 24

... an open almost a defiant challenge to the railway
interests that opposed Federal regulation of rates and to the
Republican leaders that have aligned themselves with the
great corporate interests. . . . The President's speech shows
that he has no intention of compromising with the corporate
influences in his party.

The annual message to Congress was less than two months
cold, yet the fearful specter of broad-scale Federal interven-
tion in private business was being raised anew by a man the
Union League clubs of America had helped elect with their
not inconsiderable influence and considerable monies. When
William Jennings Bryan, anathema to any Union Leaguer,
praised the speech as "perfectly sound,** the gage was cast for
keeps.

The Sherman Anti-Trust Act had been validated by Roose-
velt's victory in the Northern Securities case, but T.R. felt,
with justice, that the kw still wasn't adequate to protect the
public against the unlimited power of the corporation octopus.
One idea cropped up from a rereading of Bryan during a prior
presidential campaign: Federal licensing of corporations. Elihu
Boot advised Roosevelt not to do it because, said Root, licens-
ing involved evils "far greater than its benefits." T.R. listened

23. Presidential Addresses, Vol. HI, pp. 21724.

24. New York World, January 31, 1905.

Trust-Busts Changes in the Presidency 175

to many another proposal for strengthening his antimonopoly
forces but always came back to the sensible remedy he had
proposed first as Governor of New York. The best corporation
policy, he said again, lay in generous publicity of capitalization,
earnings, and interlocking directorships.

At Chautauqua, New York, on August 11, 1905, T.R. put it
this way: 25

I believe that all corporations engaged in interstate com-
merce should be under the supervision of the national
Government. ... It may be that we shall . . . require all
corporations to produce proof . . . that they are not parties to
. . . any violation of the anti-trust law and that . . . [they]
shall agree, with a penalty of forfeiture of their right to en-
gage in such commerce, to furnish any evidence of any kind
as to their trade between the States whenever so required.

To understand this point of view it is necessary to under-
stand Theodore Roosevelt's fundamental precept that the Fed-
eral government was sovereign and the President of the United
States master of the ship. This viewpoint had by no means
been shared by all other Presidents and in taking so strong a
stand on it Theodore Roosevelt irrevocably changed the con-
ception and powers of the Presidency. When in his message to
Congress in December, 1905, T.R. said that U. S. corporations
were "subjects without a sovereign" he added that a national
license law might be a solution. By 1907 he was advocating
such a statute because, as he put it, it wasn't a matter of de-
stroying the free enterprise capitalistic system but simply "look-
ing facts in the face.** 26

To be accurate, Theodore Roosevelt did not personally bust
many trusts. What he did was to set in motion the machinery
for trust-busting, to create a climate in which mergers and
monopolies contravening the public welfare could be dissolved
and Federal laws enacted through which the common man
might be protected from the evils of illegal combination. It is
true that suits were begun against the tobacco and packing

25. Presidential Addresses, Vol. IV, pp. 451-52.
2,6. Theodore Roosevelt Papers.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

trusts, and tie New York Central Railroad was fined for
giving huge rebates to the American Sugar Refining Company
in restraint of free trade. But it wasn't until William Howard
Taft was President of the United States that the Federal gov-
ernment was able to order the American Tobacco Company
and Standard Oil Company finally dissolved.

T.R.'s title as "trust buster" was, lie would have been the first
to admit, a technical misnomer. Taft instituted forty-five pro-
ceedings leading to indictments under the Sherman Anti-Trust
Act; Roosevelt instituted only twenty-five. But, says Pringle,
"the significance of Roosevelt's corporation activities lay in what
he said rather than what he did^

This is undeniably accurate. What Roosevelt accomplished
was to progress against the "malefactors of great wealth*" 28 in
order to head off the average man's unrest and uneasiness and
forestall something he detested worse than his hatred for the
economic royalist: socialism.

He could complain to Ms friend Taft in 1906: tt l do not like
the special conditions at present . . . the dull, purblind folly of
the very rich men; their greed and arrogance . . . and the
corruption in business and politics . . . [tending] to produce
a very unhealthy condition of excitement and irritation in the
popular mind, which shows itself in the great increase in the
Socialistic propaganda.** 29 The at-home policies of President
Roosevelt's second term were based chiefly on this growing
fear which, time and again, he voiced in letters and speeches
boiling down to the proposition that, in his opinion, the growth
of the "Socialistic party is far more ominous than any Populist
or similar movement in times past.**

It is to T.R/s eternal credit that he, a patrician, realized with
genius undeniably intuitive that there were evils in an un-
fettered free enterprise capitalistic system then taken for
granted in the United States and that, if these evils were not
rooted out, the system itself might succumb and American
democratic society with it. But Roosevelt's gifts for publicity

27. Pringle, op. tit., p. 427.

28. Presidential Addresses, VoL VI, pp. 1351-66.

29. Letter from T.R. to Taft, March 15, 1906.

Trust-Busts Changes in the Presidency 177

and his flair for arousing the average man to insist that some-
thing be done to correct an evil were unfortunately not
matched by sound knowledge of economics. Like his Presi-
dential cousin Franklin, economics and business details bored
him. He lived and worked in a world of ideas, morals, philos-
ophy, ego, and politics. He and F.D.R. had to learn their
economics lessons in the White House, painfully but, in the
end, well enough. To contemporaries, Theodore Roosevelt's
abysmal lack of business training and intelligence in matters
economic verged on ignorance.

Yet smart men of his time Speaker Cannon and Senators
Allison, Aldrich, Spooner, Foraker, and many more who knew
their Adam Smith to the least comma had fewer forebodings
of class war than did T.R., to whom such an event was not
only possible but perhaps imminent On the other hand he
could not, he knew by instinct, go too far. If he did he might
cause a business slump (the panic of 1907 made a terrific im-
pression on him) which would end in the dread Socialism he
feared more than he hated the monopolist and merger-man.
If he went so far as to alienate his own party he might turn
over the reins of government when he retired in 1909 to the
Democrats, an event which in his mind came near the top of
the worst imaginable dangers to the country.

Of Theodore Roosevelt's economic service to the average
American, his war against railroad monopoly, illegal rebates,
fixed rate charges, corruption, interlocking directorates, and
public-be-damned philosophy in high places was, in the end,
the most valuable and lasting.

The Interstate Commerce Commission received new powers
through the controversial Hepburn Act of 1906, a forward step
which would never have become kw without Roosevelt's direct
intervention and driving energy. By the Hepburn Act, tbe ICC
now had jurisdiction over express, Pullman operations, storage,
refrigeration, pipe lines, widened ratemaldng, and all other
items covered by the tenuous phrase "transportation across
state lines.** Rates theoretically had been a function of ICC.
Now its police powers were strengthened to enforce its edicts.
Honest accounting required under the new regulations ended

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

in honest rate and rebate practices, to the glory and advantage
of the average consumer, who for the first time had an ener-
getic advocate in the White House.

By Inauguration Day, 1909, when his friend William Howard
Taft succeeded him (only to become his political enemy by
1912)5 Theodore Roosevelt had set the stage for trust-busting.

In doing so, T.R. had irrevocably altered the tradition of
President of the United States and brought to the office a new
and deep-rooted precedent that the occupant of the White
House was to be thenceforward the people's champion and
lobbyist, since they had no other. It was mandatory in Teddy
Roosevelt's view that he be truly the Chief Executive in all
matters, including that once forbidden land, the business-
industrial world and its relationships with the public. Through
the Federal government's first serious regulation and inter-
vention under T.R., the immunity which economic royalists
had perpetually taken for granted would never be the same
again. A man who led a strenuous life had been in the White
House and he expected his successors to emulate him.

Woodrow Wilson

THE TEACHING profession does not as a rule participate ac-
tively in American politics. Contrary to prevailing opinion,
people who teach are apt to be extremely practical people:
they have to be to exist on the money they earn. The reason
for their political nonpartieipation, therefore, isn't impractica-
bility or woolly-headedness, or disinterest in the real world
about them, or a taste for the theoretical in preference to the
pragmatic. What they traditionally lack are two fundamental
elements every man must possess in almost unlimited quantity
if he is to run for public office: time and money. The teaching
profession rarely has a sufficiency of either.

Thomas Woodrow Wilson 1 was one of the rare exceptions,
a university professor who possessed neither the time nor the
money to run for public office, yet ran so successfully that he
became Governor of New Jersey and President of the United
States. As though to prove the rule, Wilson as Governor and
President pushed through reforms in each body politic that
were not only long overdue but seemed miracles of accomplish-
ment. It was as though, having achieved the impossible by
getting elected at all, the brilliant Princetonian could continue

i. When Ike Hoover, (me of the chief ushers in the White House, went
to Princeton to arrange for removal of the President's effects to Wash-
ington, he noted that Wilson had autographed his own books in various
ways: Thomas W. Wilson, Thomas Woodrow Wilson, T. W. Wilson,
T. Woodrow Wilson, and Woodrow Wilson, as though, at various times,
he hadn't made up his mind which by-line to use for which purpose.

180

8

Ignores the Senate and
Loses His Dream

performing miracles indefinitely in an arena seldom if ever
assailed by those who teach and theorize.

Yet, in the end, when the miracle dissolved, Woodrow Wil-
son had only himself and his extraordinary individualism to
blame. He had done it on his own, without unlimited funds
and with only the time he could set aside from constant
teaching or writing. He had done it, in Trenton and Washing-
ton, without overmuch help from the professional politician.
In the end, his dream of a League of Nations was shattered
because, having been kissed by fortune throughout an amazing
voyage, he fell to depending upon himself and fortune alone.
He ignored those who sought to advise him, repudiating the
democratic muddling-through he should have known existed
at all levels of political procedure and simply could not be
ignored. He failed to take a delegation of Senators versed in
foreign relations with him to the Paris peace conference. He
left a former friend, Henry Cabot Lodge, cooling his heels for
hours in an outer room of the White House and, in the end,
Lodge, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Commit-
tee, dynamited Wilson's precious project.

Had Wilson come up the normal way, through local and
state committees, through cloakroom bargains and daily poli-
ticking at the precinct level, he would not have ignored the
leaders of either political party, particularly Senators in whose
hands the ultimate fate of any peace treaty must rest. Yet this

181

WOODBOW WILSON

is precisely wliat happened. Ignore them he did and, as the
years went on, he became more and more the idealistic recluse
who depended less and less on advice and the necessary re-
quirements of political bargaining and more and more on his
own (and Colonel House's) intuitive judgment. It cost him
his dream.

Wilson was a Virginian, a Princeton graduate and a lawyer
first, before moving to Johns Hopkins to teach political science.
After winning his Ph.D. there he taught history and political
science for a while at Bryn Mawr and Wesleyan University
and then at Princeton.

He had akeady begun to write, in that severe yet beautifully
clear and no-nonsense style so characteristic of his work. A
volume called Congressional Government appeared in the book
stalls the year before he took his doctorate in Baltimore. Divi-
sion and Reunion, George Washington, A History of the Amer-
ican People (in five volumes), and Constitutional Government
in the United States followed from year to year and gave
him a wide reputation as an authority on constitutional history,
jurisprudence, and political science. By the time he had been
at Princeton long enough to he considered for its presidency,
Woodrow Wilson was also one of the best known orators in
the college. Teddy Roosevelt, no colorless personality himself,
had to admit that Wilson made a fine figure on the platform. 2

Princeton was in those days thoroughly wedded to the Pres-
byterians who had founded it and Wilson was descended from
Presbyterian ministers on both sides. Popular with the students
and the more progressive faculty, Woodrow Wilson became in
1902 Princeton's first nonclerical head. He had not been the
university's executive officer a semester when controversy en-
gulfed him.

A man of pronounced democratic feelings, keenly conscious
of equality, with a Scof s cold logic and Robert Burns's un-
compromising philosophy of brotherhood in his bloodstream,
Wilson staggered old-line Princetonians by his democratic
sentiments and acts. To the horror of traditionalist alumni and
reactionary faculty, the new president set off salvo after salvo

2. Theodore Roosevelt Papers.

Ignores the Senate and Loses His Dream 183

against an age of snobs and the very core of educational snob-
bery, the wealthy Princeton clubs. Dean Andrew F. West
quickly and forcefully opposed bis democratization of the
college, particularly at its social and tutorial levels, and in the
end Dean West won and Wilson lost. But by this time Wilson
was nationally known.

In 1910, soon after Wilson had resigned as head of Prince-
ton, George B. M. Harvey, a New York publisher with Demo-
cratic Party interests, came to him and persuaded him to run
for Governor of New Jersey on the Democratic ticket. Sup-
ported reluctantly by professional politicians, Wilson amaz-
ingly won in a state then traditionally Republican. No sooner
was he seated in his Trenton office than he began upsetting
applecarts again, this time breaking quickly with party leaders.

Governor Wilson's success in battling the entrenched New
Jersey politicians won him increasing attention nationally.
He obtained a direct primary election law, an employer's lia-
bility law, a corrupt practices act, put new life in the state
public utilities commission, and began enforcing social welfare
laws already on the statute books but lying fallow. This sort of
gubernatorial record was bound to push him into the 1912
nomination picture, though Champ Clark was far in front as
the leading Democratic candidate.

Clark had been a lawyer, newspaper editor, and political
leader in Missouri and eventually served his Congressional
District as its Representative for twenty-six years. In 1907 he
had become Democratic leader of the House and, the year
Wilson became Governor of New Jersey, Champ Clark led a
battle to reduce the dictatorial powers of Speaker Joseph G.
Cannon. Clark became Speaker of the House the following
year. With Uncle Joe Cannon's scalp dangling from his belt,
few professional politicians dared oppose Clark for the Demo-
cratic presidential nomination at Baltimore in 1912.

But Woodrow Wilson was not a professional: this was part
of his charm with the electorate. Champ Clark fell short of the
required votes on the first ballot and the upstart Wilson began
to gain support from an unusual quarter, William Jennings
Bryan. Bryan himself had run and lost in 1896, 1900, and 1908,

WOODROW WILSON

as Democratic standard-bearer (carefully ducking a race with
Theodore Roosevelt in 1904). Bryan was still silver-tongued,
still represented the voice of the poor and downtrodden, as
professional logrollers like Champ Clark never had. During
the convention Bryan also came under the influence of a most
unusual personality, Colonel Edward Mandell House.

Colonel House came from Houston, Texas, and was a Cornell
graduate. He was no United States Army Colonel: his "Col-
onel" was a Texas state title. Like many another Kentuckian
and Texan he wore it proudly all his adult life. Important in
Texas politics, Edward M. House's star rose with Woodrow
Wilson's. His greatest coup was persuading Bryan to swing his
powerful support to the New Jersey Governor in an effort to
defeat Champ Clark and Tammany Hall. Wilson became the
Democratic candidate, a nomination thought to be of little
value early in 1912 because of President Taft's promising pros-
pects for re-election and the Republican Party's traditional
predominance. But, as so often happened during his time,
Theodore Roosevelt's explosive personality intervened, Roose-
velt soon repudiated his own ecstatic postelection declaration
of 1904 that he would never run again for the Presidency.

Slamming into his erstwhile friend, William Howard Taft
and all that Taft had, in his opinion, failed to stand for
Roosevelt bolted the regular Republicans and formed the Pro-
gressive Party. Taft was nominated as regular Republican
candidate. The unprecedented Republican split elected Wood-
row Wilson, dark horse amateur, President of the United
States. 3 Wilson received 435 electoral votes, Roosevelt 88, and
President Taft only 8 (Utah and Vermont). The combined
Republican-Progressive vote would have elected a Republican

3. The Democratic Convention of 1912 had been one of the wildest
ever. The delegates required forty-six ballots to nominate, and at one
point Wilson sent a telegram withdrawing his candidacy. William Gibbs
McAdoo, his strategist and son-in-law, tore up the telegram and per-
suaded the Governor of New Jersey not to quit. Champ Clark, the
favorite, finally lost his heavy support and William Jennings Bryan
swung his own strength to Wilson, who then won the nomination. Had
he had his own way, Wilson would have long since released his delegates.

Ignores the Senate and Loses His Dream 185

candidate, 7,604,518 popular votes to Wilson's 6,293,454, al-
though many who might have voted for Wilson cast their bal-
lots for the new Progressive Party and the ever-popular if
turncoat Theodore Roosevelt.

As he had done before while chief executive at Princeton
and Trenton, Wilson as President wasted no time in shattering
precedents in Washington. Reviving a custom dropped after
John Adams in 1801, the new President appeared in person
before Congress to deliver his State of the Union message. It
was stylishly if severely written, as was all Wilson's writing,
for he was a professional writer with millions of published
words to Ms credit. He held the new Congress spellbound with
his famed oratory. He called for a series of reforms which,
during the campaign, he had named the "New Freedom," as
his friend Franklin D. Roosevelt was to call his later reforms
the "New Deal."

Congress and the country responded wholeheartedly. Here
was the first Democratic President since Cleveland and only
the second since the Civil War. His program seemed to be a
necessary antidote to generations of high-tariff, pro-bourbon
legislation. Only T.R. had been an exception, and even the
Rough Rider had been a high-tariff Republican working with
a business-dominated Republican Congress.

With such a start, the wonder is that Woodrow Wilson's
new broom did not sweep all before it Surely the country was
disappointed with President Taft and would have welcomed
a prolonged change of direction. But, as his career made pain-
fully obvious, Woodrow Wilson was a political freak, an
amateur > an academician. He had never been to a county con-
vention until nominated for Governor. He had never been in-
side his own state capitol until the day he was sworn in at
Trenton, He Bad never been inside the White House until he
came there to live.

What sort of man was this political sport? William Allen
White, one of his warmest biographers, says: "Probably no
other American ever learned so much politics in 22 months as
Woodrow Wilson learned from the Irish of New Jersey be-

WOODROW WILSON

tween September, 1910, and the spring of igia." 4 The fact is
that, as Governor of New Jersey, Wilson had actually turned
over most of his patronage to his two good Irish friends, Joe
Tumulty and James Kerney. Tumulty was his private secretary
and Kerney a newspaper editor who had long advocated his
candidacy. The pair were slightly appalled, yet flattered and,
of course, delighted with a responsibility which gave them re-
markable power in Jersey politics at no cost to themselves.
They wrote later that Wilson appeared to care little about the
things that interested organization politicians.

Indeed patronage continued to irk Wilson after he became
President. He considered it a 'left-handed job" and practically
farmed out the selection of his first Cabinet. The appointment
of William Jennings Bryan as Secretary of State came against
the instinctive judgment of Mrs. Wilson who distrusted Bryan's
personality, windiness, and intellectual prowess, though she
trusted his goodness. But Bryan had swung to Wilson in the
1912 convention and overturned Champ Clark, and Wilson's
Irish gratitude cottoned to him. Wilson told his wife he
thought he could handle Bryan's wild swings and extravagant
statements.

The President* s gross inexperience in the business of national
politics was a terrible handicap. He did not even know the
names of top Congressional leaders, much less their charac-
ters, personalities, positions, or potentialities. His vast indif-
ference to patronage. White believes, and the assumption he
too often made of his university professor's superiority of mind
over others continuously led him into difficulty.

Having written voluminously on the theory of Federal gov-
ernment, particularly the legislative branch, he became, in his
own inimitable way, more of a Premier than a President. That
is, he led Congress along the road to legislation rather than
simply enforcing its acts or remaining aloof from the actual
business of lawmaldng. White feels Wilson had legislative
rather than administrative leadership, which probably stemmed
from an amazing ego and an academic background in which,

4. William Allen White, Woodrow Wilson (Boston, Houghton Mifflin
Company, 1924), p. 244.

Ignores the Senate and Loses His Dream 187

as is natural in university circles, tie had rarely if ever been
edited by a subordinate student body. Up to the time of the
presidency of Princeton it is doubtful if Woodrow Wilson's
judgment had ever been severely questioned by anyone. Cer-
tainly he had come to be a sort of parochial monarch with
absolute authority and little or no reason to consult anyone.
Books (and students) didn't talk back. But Washington poli-
ticians did.

As Governor of New Jersey, Wilson had been a leader of
the legislature and the people an exalted schoolmaster. When
he came to the White House he was forced away from all the
dear associations of town and gown, never to return. The man
who had said at Princeton *T11 not be president of a country,
club" wasn't likely to look upon high tariffs and child labor
with anything but loathing, but he was also not likely to
have the patience or the political skill to get corrective legis-
lation through smoke-filled bargaining. It had to be done, for
him, through personal leadership and intervention and appeals
to the public. By instinct and personality alone he seems to
have won his way in those first fecund, prewar years. The
country was, of course, overripe for reforms. This helped his
causes.

Wilson often defended Theodore Roosevelt's theory that the
Presidency carried with it Congressional leadership. He once
said: "Whatever else we may think or say of Theodore Roose-
velt, we must admit that he was an aggressive leader. He led
Congress he was not driven by Congress. We may not ap-
prove his methods, but we must concede that he made Con-
gress follow him." 5

A man who had lived in the intellectually fertile, gentle
atmosphere of Princeton for twenty-six years, as student, pro-
fessor, university president, and Governor, could not easily
be transplanted to the muck and noise of Pennsylvania Avenue.
He had commuted from Princeton to Trenton when he was
Governor of New Jersey. He could not commute to Washing-
ton or he would surely have done so.

Personal habit sustained him for a time in his transplanta-

5. Ibid., p. 270.

WOODROW WILSON

tkm. The Wilsons had been openly democratic at Princeton,
stopping their horse and surrey along the college roads to
pick up a neighbor, a washerwoman with her burden, a car-
penter en route home, a messenger on his journey. Since this
was impossible in the Presidency, Wilson's democracy took
other outward forms after he moved to 1600 Pennsylvania
Avenue. He refused to join the Chevy Chase Golf Club, play-
ing when he could on a public course. 6 He went regularly to
the Keith Vaudeville house and roared at its common rou-
tines.

Wilson and his family often played the piano and sang. The
magic of music changed cold White House marble to Princeton
fireside for an hour or two each week, and nothing the fastid-
ious new President did for recreation filled the exhausted cup
of energy as quickly or perfectly. Wilson sang tenor and sang
it very well indeed, if a bit on the Irish side. He was also a
magnificent talker, but not to strangers. He liked nothing better
than to speculate on great topics and unique ideas, academi-
cally of course.

As he began his Presidency, Woodrow Wilson was slightly
above medium height and slightly below medium weight, a
frail body with large, glowing eyes which sometimes seemed
to be shifty, even untrustworthy. His hair was now graying,
but it had once been blond, then brown. He walked with a
firm step, the very epitome of self-confidence. 1

But he was forever burdened with the body of a nonathlete,
an engine inadequate to the needs of his agile mind, and, of
our finest Presidents, Wilson probably required the most sleep.
Nine hours in bed was an absolute minimum to make Mm feel
well. He took no exercise besides golf and walking, and at
fifty-six his stomach could scarcely keep down what little food
Wilson ate. Indeed, he brought with him to the White House
a stomach pump which, it is said, he used almost daily.

6. Wilson never attempted proficiency at golf, but regarded it as a
chance to get out in the open. He seldom kept score. Good weather or
bad was all the same to him. If there was snow on the ground, the
President would have his golf balls painted red. He played at all hours,
sometimes at five in the morning, hut oftener kte in the afternoon.

7. White, op. cU t> p. 275.

Ignores the Senate and Loses His Dream 189

Wilson was an incredibly uxorious man, needing a wife as
few other Presidents have needed constant womanly compan-
ionship. When Ellen Axson Wilson died on August 6, 1914, it
very nearly broke the President Yet it is not surprising that
he married again on December 18, 1915, and his quick second
marriage to Mrs. Edith Boiling Gait, 8 a handsome widow, had
nothing whatever to do with disloyalty to his dearest Ellen. He
needed a woman around as he needed air to breathe, and Mrs.
Gait was not only a looker ("She's a looker, and he's a goner,"
said a friend) but a perfectly matched personality for his.
She exuded high spirits, devotion, humor, joy of living, beauty,
gaiety. 9

Wilson had written of Ellen Axson soon after her untimely
death: "She was the most radiant creature I have ever known.
Something like an aura of light always surrounded her." 10 Of
Edith Boiling Gait, the young widow who took her place in his
innermost heart, the President might well have written the
same words at the end of the nine years they lived together.
She and Ellen were essences in the Wilson story though, as
William Allen White wrote it, "no man ever can restore a life's
companionship which goes.'*

This is the essential Wilson on whom years later the fate of
the peace conference rested. History often shows him as a
severely stubborn martinet addicted to a pince-nez, irrita-
ble, nervous, loaded with jaw. Yet in truth he was a warm-
hearted, musically Irish male with more than the average
man's love of the touch, companionship, and warmth of the op-
posite sex, seldom an ogre (until his final illness), and to Ms
dose friends, especially women, a dear person. He loved women
and women loved him in return. His true nature was in violent

8. Wilson had a private wire installed between his room in the White
House and her home, prior to their marriage, and spent hours each, day
composing letters to her. She received flowers daily, and orchids appear
to have had special significance. In those days, Washington flower shops
were sometimes hard pressed to find orchids of the color and quantity
Woodrow Wilson demanded.

9. Ike Hoover wrote later that President Wilson sent so many love
notes to Mrs. Gait that "the Library of Congress was put to a test to
find quotations to express his feelings/*

10. White, op. cit., p. 284.

WOODROW WILSON

contrast to the severity his face and personality seemed to
leave as a public impression.

Soon after his inaugural in 1913 Wilson demanded that the
tariff be reduced, and Congress responded with a drastic
downward revision. Banking desperately needed a kind of
flood control system and Wilson supplied it with the Federal
Reserve Act and other reforms the same year. In 1915, the La
Follette Seamen's Act regulating labor conditions aboard Amer-
ica's merchant marine ended scores of abuses traditional to
the mariner. The Federal Farm Loan Act of 1916 provided
loans for co-operatives ("Socialism!" screamed the Republican
press). The Adamson Act that same year limited railroad work-
ers to an eight-hour day, though most of heavy industry still
worked ten to twelve hours daily, often six days a week. The
new President also created a body with additional monopoly-
curbing powers, the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC
immediately began to expose and investigate unfair practices
of corporations, especially the claims for their products, a
particularly pertinent inquiry in the field of patent medicine
ads then flooding even the most respectable newspapers. An-
other antimonopoly measure was the Clayton Anti-Trust Act
which, with existing legislation, was responsible for more than
a hundred new antitrust suits.

The new President had, as Governor of New Jersey, insti-
tuted the direct primary. He now carried this theory to the
nation, asking that United States Senators be elected directly
by the people instead of by state legislatures, as the Constitu-
tion had always provided. The Seventeenth Amendment was
soon passed by the Congress and quickly ratified by the States
and, for the first time in American history, Senators were now
elected the same way as Congressmen directly by the people.
The Eighteenth Amendment, making Prohibition legal, and
the Nineteenth Amendment, by which all U. S. women twenty-
one or over received the vote, also were added to the Federal
Constitution during Woodrow Wilson's Presidency. It was,
indeed, a time of domestic reform and Wilson, the political
accident, the reformer.

The United States from 1912 to 1916 was not yet a world

Ignores the Senate and Loses His Dream 191

power, but an isolationist adolescent whose chief editorial
writers constantly referred to Washington's farewell admoni-
tion to beware of foreign entanglements. 11 The nation west
of the Alleghenies shuddered at the blood bath which was
Europe, and in 1916 the Democrats' campaign slogan for Wil-
son's re-election was "He Kept Us Out of War." It proved
highly successful, though the decision which rested on the
returns from the last Western state to report was as narrow as
it is possible for a presidential election to be.

The vote of California seesawed during election night, with
Charles Evans Hughes apparently elected by dawn, Eastern
Standard Time. In fact, Hughes went to bed late thinking he
was President. A New York Herald reporter, hearing that final
but unofficial returns had squeaked Wilson in by fewer than
4,000 votes, came to the Hughes house and demanded to see
the Republican candidate for a statement. Hughes's son came
to the door and said: "The President has retired and cannot be
disturbed." 'Well," said the newspaperman, "when he wakes
up, tell him he ain't President."

Hiram Johnson, as steadfast and bitter an isolationist as ever
breathed American air, was ironically responsible for Hughes's
defeat in California and Woodrow Wilson's re-election. A fan-
cied slight during the Republican campaign was the pretext,
though it is more than likely that Hiram Johnson, himself a
frustrated Republican presidential possibility, simply could not
stand the thought that a liberal, international-minded New
Yorker was likely to be President of the United States, and a
war blazing in Europe to boot! So, the man who had "kept
us out of war" went back to the White House for four more
years: 277 to 254 in the electoral college and, more easily,
9,129,606 to 8,538,221 in popular vote.

But if Hiram Johnson and the Chicago Tribune held notions
that they had saved the country from foreign entanglements
they were to be quickly disillusioned. American public opinion
had caught fire against Kaiser Wilhelm. On May 7, 1915, the
Lusttarua had been torpedoed without warning off the Irish
coast 1,200 persons, a hundred of them Americans, had died

11. Files of the Chicago Tribune, passim, 1912-1916.

WOODROW WILSON

frightful deaths. Immediately after re-election, Wilson tried to
mediate the European war, but without the slightest success.
When Germany renewed unrestricted submarine warfare, and
all U. S. ships and passengers were now in jeopardy, Wilson's
temper changed, reflecting a swelling tide of American fear
and hatred of Germany.

The German announcement of renewed unrestricted U-boat
warfare came January 31, 1917, less than three months after
Wilson's re-election and only five weeks before his second in-
augural By April , 1917, the President was asking the Con-
gress to declare war on Germany to "make the world safe for
democracy,** and because the "right is more precious than the
peace." His ideal was 'ultimate peace of the world" and "the
liberation of its people." As before, Woodrow Wilson's gift
for words and oratory united American opinion behind a
principle, an ideal worth fighting for, and on April 6, 1917,
the Congress declared that a state of war did indeed exist
between the United States and the powers of darkness led by
the cocky little Prussian with the stunning mustaches and the
withered arm.

William Jennings Bryan had resigned in 1915 as Secretary
of State. Bryan had scrupulously favored neutrality and his
clashes with Wilson had made him feel politically insecure
and uncomfortable. Besides, Bryan had enormous limitations
as Secretary of State in charge of the foreign affairs of a coun-
try emerging as a world power. Robert Lansing, who replaced
him, was more of an internationalist with better grounding in
international law. Also, whereas Bryan had been a politician,
Lansing, Bke Wilson, was almost academic in his approach
to policy.

The war helped consolidate in Woodrow Wilson a false
sense of the rightness of his own intuition and judgment. As a
war President, he asked for and received powers of decree un-
tapped since the days of Abraham Lincoln. There lad been
no major war since Lincoln's time; therefore, no other Presi-
dent had needed dictatorial prerogative nor had Congress of-
fered it. But war goods production, preservation of the sources
of raw materials, the draft, the training of millions of amateur

Ignores the Senate and Loses His Dream 193

soldiers, the taking over of U. S. railroads, the enormous sale
of Liberty bonds to finance America's first military venture
overseas required ukase. Wilson asked for power and promptly
got it.

Emergency war measures in 1917 and 1918 revolutionized
U, S. commerce, industry, and private life. The Federal gov-
ernment took over the nation's railroad management and regi-
mented labor, agriculture, and industry as they had never been
regimented before. It was America's baptism in total war
and in economic centralization. Both factors left lasting marks
and established presidential precedents useful later to Frank-
lin D. Roosevelt. And their effect on the man now in the White
House was no less evident. They gave him, quite possibly,
delusions that he and he alone could run the country its
domestic difficulties and its foreign policy without overmuch
consultation of anyone. It was an unfortunate intensification of
Wilson's very nature and method. Had war not then involved
the United States, Wilson's personal-decision system would
surely have been exposed to greater and greater editing as his
second term wore on. As it was, war and the dictatorial over-
tones of war affected the President himself to a marked degree.

Less and less did he seek the advice of his Cabinet in matters
pertaining to the conduct of the war and its inevitable peace
terms. As early as January 8, 1918, not quite a year since war
had been declared by the United States, Woodrow Wilson
suddenly proposed peace on the basis of fourteen points which
had, for the most part, been of his own creation and phraseol-
ogy. He was no longer simply a national figure; he now had
world dimensions, and it is possible they went to his head.

The President's special message to the Congress on January
8, 1918, was thoroughly idealistic, matching his unique private
idealism. Yet it had pragmatic overtones. It was intended to
tell the Allied political leaders that the United States would
have no part of a selfish peace, that the postwar treaty would
have to measure up to new democratic liberalism which Amer-
ica's war entry had introduced into world power politics.

The first five of the historically famous "Fourteen Points"
were by nature general and idealistically philosophical. They

WOODROW WILSON

were intended by their author to create in wartorn Europe
and untouched America a new moral climate which would
unite public opinion behind a democratic peace treaty. They
immediately gave Woodrow Wilson a position of pre-eminent
moral leadership in whatever peace conference would be held
at war's end. Unselfishness, Christian magnanimity toward the
conquered, hope for ethnic groups long engulfed in overpower-
ing and antagonistic majorities, freedom for colonial peoples
were all at the core of Wilson's idealistic proposals. 12

The first five points began with an insistence on "open
covenants openly arrived at." Here was a thoroughgoing
shocker to traditional European diplomacy, conducted since
the Roman era behind closed doors and never once in all the
intervening centuries "openly arrived at." The New World
had for the first time become a conscience to its parents, and
the common man in both Old World and New first gasped at
its audacity, then applauded its fresh, optimistic viewpoint.
Whether the final European peace treaty would in truth be
an open covenant openly arrived at was, to say the least, de-
batable in the context of traditional smoke-filled peace confer-
ence procedure. Yet here was a wind fresh enough to rout stale
old smells and bring to the diplomacy of the Western world
the ozone of true democratic discussion: "open covenants
openly arrived at,"

Point two was not as startling, yet again a fresh approach to
ancient problems: it demanded complete freedom of the seas
in peace and war. If this were accepted by the great powers,
no longer could a nation declare unrestricted U-boat warfare
on helpless, unwarned ships at sea, either belligerent or neu-
tral. Freedom of the seas had been a traditional American cry
since the War of 1812 when the British navy had mercilessly
halted U. S. ships and kidnaped ("impressed" was then the
phrase) American sailors for service on British vessels. Not
only was the second point directed at the German U-boats'
destruction of anything that floated without warning and
without regard for life or national flag but it was also aimed
at British sea snobbery, and the whole world knew it.

12. Woodrow Wilson Papers, Princeton, New Jersey.

Ignores the Senate and Loses His Dream 195

Point three was again a startling proposal in Wilson's time:
removal of economic barriers between nations for the freer
flow of the world's goods and the economic betterment of
mankind. Here was an unmistakable salvo at high tariffs and
traditional border duties, which, during Wilson's Administra-
tion, had begun to fall in the United States for the first time
since the Civil War. The President was talking not only to
his military adversaries; he was talking not only to America's
allies; he was now talking to America herself. And he had done
all this without the advice and consent of the proud Senate
whose Constitutional power to ratify encompassed all foreign
treaties.

The next point involved reduction of world armaments to a
level of simple domestic defensive needs. More startling dis-
armament proposals had been made at other European peace
conferences, but there was one difference: Woodrow Wilson
meant it! He wanted an end to traditional European arma-
ment, particularly armament for offensive war. If offensive
armament did not exist, war itself might be made impossible.
It was terribly logical in its simplicity and terribly effective at
the moral level.

But, of the first five points, the fifth was the most powerful
and, to America's allies, the most impertinent. It asked that
the claims of colonial peoples be given immediate attention
with special regard for local populations. It also asked that
rival colonial claims, even prior claims, be redressed where
there were clear cases of territorial banditry.

The effect of such an upstart proposal upon the British, the
French, the Italians, the Germans, and all other traditional
colonial powers can easily be imagined. The British Empire
was then intact; it covered a quarter of the world's population
and stretched from Australia and Singapore and Hong Kong
and India in the East; Canada and Bermuda and the Barbados
in the New World; to a dozen spots marked in red on the
geography of Africa and the Middle East. Here was the chief
executive of a former British colony daring to suggest that
its dearest wartime ally painfully but honestly re-examine her
vast colonial holdings not always acquired with the consent of

WOODROW WILSON

the governed and quite often through undeniably naked ag-
gression.

Though subtly pragmatic, the first five of the Fourteen
Points reflected the very core of democratic philosophy on
which the New World had been founded, unalterably an in-
gredient of the American Constitution and way of life. But
policymakers in Europe were not yet wholly taken with the
democratic system. The British had a king, the Germans had a
king, the Austro-Hungarians had a king, the Italians had a
king; there was nepotic monarchy in Scandinavia, Eussia,
Spain, Greece, the Netherlands, and Belgium, indeed almost
everywhere on the European Continent except France. In such
a context, Woodrow Wilson's five-point preamble had a shock-
ing but magnificent popular effect. It gave him, and the fresh-
man United States, undeniable moral leadership for the
inevitable peace conference ... or would have, had Wilson
consulted the Senate or the [Republican Party or even his own
advisers- as Presidents should.

But the fact is that Woodrow Wilson did not have adequate
intercourse with either the leaders of the Senate and the House
or the Republican and Democratic organizations prior to the
dramatic issuance of his unprecedented Fourteen Points. Her-
bert Hoover writes about it in a footnote to a page of The
Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson:^ "Mr. Wilson had no ghost
writer. He composed the first draft of his addresses on his own
typewriter. He sometimes submitted them to his colleagues for
their opinions but he seldom adopted changes in his funda-
mental ideas.**

How much did Colonel House have to do with the Fourteen
Points? The Colonel had a tendency to assume latent credit for
inspiring Wilson's major speeches, particularly the Fourteen
Points address. But Mr. Hoover, who knew them both and
knew them well, doesn't accept this claim. He points out that
the ideas President Wilson proposed in the Fourteen Points
can be found in Professor Wilson s teachings, whereas Colonel
House nowhere in his own volumes shows such powers of ex-

13. Herbert Hoover, The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson (New York,
McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1958), footnote to p. 19.

Ignores the Senate and Loses His Dream 197

pression, historical background., or philosophical direction.
Some of the Fourteen Points, Mr. Hoover reminds us, are
echoed expressions of the American Revolution and the Con-
stitution, even to their wording. He goes on: "Colonel House
was a useful adviser and a most capable negotiator for the
President. But Woodrow Wilson was no Charlie McCarthy." 14

It might have been better for him had he listened to the
considered thoughts of others. Politically, he might even have
saved his League of Nations, though the world, America in
particular, wasn't yet ready for such a progressive concept of
world government. Maybe it still isn't. At any rate, friends like
Secretary of State Lansing; Bernard Baruch, Chairman of the
War Industries Board; Frank I. Cobb, editor of the New York
World; Dr. Harry Garfield, Fuel Administrator; and Vance Mc-
Cormick, Chairman of the War Trade Board, urged Wilson
later not to go to Paris in person, but to send a delegation
composed of members of the Congress, the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, the Cabinet, and any other personal rep-
resentation he might select. Mr. Hoover himself urged the Pres-
ident to think seriously about his decision to head the U. S.
delegation personally, for Hoover was convinced that "Mr.
Wilson's New World idealism would clash seriously with the
Old World concepts of the Allied statesmen, and I feared that
the President's dominant voice in creating world opinion would
be stilled if he became involved in the inevitable restraints of
personal negotiation." 13

But the headstrong, willful personality traits that had gotten
Woodrow Wilson quickly into deep trouble as president of
Princeton and had made him, as he went it alone, the very
prototype of the amateur politician, dictated that he go in
person to any peace conference which might follow the not-
yet-ended conflict in Europe. 16 Asking him not to go was like

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid., p. 61.

16. Though Wilson is often said to have cared nothing for politics,
the fact is that he got through Congress more reform legislation in his
first term than had Been pushed through that sometimes too deliberative
body in the previous century, Wilson accomplished this, however, chiefly
through skillful use of public opinion, by going directly to the people.

WOODROW WILSON

asking Babe Ruth to tell the manager to send someone else
up to bat with the bases fuU.

The first five and the last of the Fourteen Points were, in
the long run, most important because they were chiefly philo-
sophical and outrageously new to European politics. There is
no doubt in the minds of his contemporaries that they did
much to bring about the effective defeat of the enemy and its
disarmament, for his speech of January 8, 1918, and several
subsequent addresses, before the peace table had so much as
been arranged, firmly established terms of peace with both the
Allies and the enemy.

All but one of the remaining nine points were specific sub-
divisions of the first five principles. They involved territory
held by Russia and future relations with Russia, in the throes
of violent Bolshevik revolution; preservation of Belgian sov-
ereignty; settlement of the question of Alsace-Lorraine; re-
drawing of Italian boundaries with regard to ethnic minorities;
a similar division of Austria-Hungary into its sub-nationalities;
the redrawing of Balkan minorities into formally established
national states; free navigation through the Dardanelles and
drastic reduction of the Turkish empire; the establishment of
an independent Poland with access to the sea; and, finally, pro-
vision for "a general association of nations."

It was, of course, point fourteen that hurt Wilson most
deeply in his own country. In those days of slow communica-
tion a man living in Chicago had more than a thousand miles
of defendable American soil between him and the Atlantic
Ocean, and then the vast ocean beyond to Europe. These
thousands of miles of geographical buffer made for natural
isolation and violent pro-Americanism. Led by the Chicago
Tribune and other anti-British, anti-internationalist publica-
tions, the parochial, pro-American philosophy of the West
could not have been anything but what it was a predominant
emotion of an enormous segment of the American electorate.

When the fourteenth point bit the headlines the gage was
cast and the Chicago Tribune was only one of many to take
immediate issue. Since Wilson had consulted few elected rep-
resentatives in the House or Senate as to the wording or philo-

Ignores the Senate and Loses His Dream 199

sopMcal merit of his startling proposals, friend and foe alike
were unprepared. In such circumstances, his opposition was
off to an unbeatable headstart.

Reading his books and perusing his startling legislative
record in Trenton and Washington, the objective reporter is
forced to conclude that Woodrow Wilson heartily welcomed
America's abandonment of her traditional isolation through her
first European war, bloody and terrible though it must have
been to the sensitive humanitarian in the White House. The
Chinese have many words with two meanings: one of these is
crisis which is also the word for opportunity. Woodrow Wilson
saw in the crisis of America's political adolescence the oppor-
tunity for America's political manhood. And to him political
manhood had to include a League of Nations, with America its
standard-bearer in a new and democratic world society.

It is interesting to note that Wilson had long hesitated an-
nouncing his Fourteen Points before January 8, 1918, fearing
antagonisms overseas. He was eager to put out his manifesto
before Lloyd George of Britain and Clemenceau of France
could sabotage or forestall it. 17 The timing of the release of
the Fourteen Points called for cables to both governments and
to America's other allies. Then, suddenly, on January 5, as Wil-
son was discussing the timing of his Fourteen Points speech
with Colonel House, Lloyd George broke the story, so to speak,
with an address on British war aims to a trade union delega-
tion in London. Wilson wasn't notified. It made him furious.
Arthur Walworth writes of it: 18

When Wilson learned that Lloyd George had spoken with-
out consulting him, both his morality and his pride were
offended. Not only had the prime minister differed in prin-
ciple by insisting that Germany pay reparations, but by pro-
posing almost all of the President's Fourteen Points he
seemed to have pirated the ideas that Wilson had set down
with great pains. Wilson, the man of literary property,
seemed to forget the biblical truth that his father had

17. Arthur Walworth, Woodrow Wilson (New York, Longmans,
Green and Company, 1958), p. 150.

18. Ibid., p. 151.

WOODROW WILSON

preached but had often overlooked that no servant of the
Lord had light of his own, but merely bore witness to the
""heavenly light," The ambition to seize the pulpit of peace
for himself and to give leadership to his own people in
serving the world still burned strongly in the prophet in the
White House. He was no more inclined than he had been
at the age of thirty to be any man's follower in a matter on
which he felt that he had qualified himself to speak.

Wilson had thought that it would in consequence be im-
possible for him to make his Fourteen Points public, but Colo-
nel House argued that Lloyd George had simply cleared the
air and made it the more necessary to speak.

This explains in part why Wilson appeared to be so pre-
cipitous in his famous pronunciamento. It is possible that, had
Lloyd George not spoken in London on January 5, Wilson
might have consulted more Republican leaders, more Demo-
cratic members of the Foreign Relations Committee, more
political figures in both houses and parties before making his
Fourteen Points, which might, in consequence, have been
edited and altered. But when the Prime Minister threatened
to steal his thunder, Woodrow Wilson the man could wait no
longer. It wasn't in his nature to take back seats, particularly
in the field of idealistic statesmanship. Yet, while the isolation-
ist press either snubbed his utterances or decried them, their
immediate practical effect in Europe and in America was
slight, though their historical significance was immense.

Theodore Roosevelt soon went to war against the Fourteen
Points, for he realized at once that they constituted a campaign
document of incalculable importance. Congress was up for
re-election in November, 1918; the Republicans eventually
won majorities in both houses. That Wilson's Fourteen Points
Influenced the Congressional vote of isolationist mid-America
there cannot from the record be the slightest doubt.

Wilson said in October that a Republican victory would be
interpreted on the other side of the water as a "repudiation of
my leadership." 19 Theodore Roosevelt immediately sent tele-

19. Ibid., p.

Ignores the Senate and Loses His Dream 201

grams to influential Senators urging that the Senate declare
itself against adopting the Fourteen Points and even wrote to
Senator Henry Cabot Lodge: "I am glad that Wilson has come
out in the open. I fear Judas most when he can cloak his ac-
tivities behind treacherous make-believe of nonpartisanship/* 20
The old Republican warrior then made several public speeches
in which he charged that Wilson was placing support for him-
self above loyalty to the nation, that this was not "the Presi-
dent's personal war," a topic on which T.R., of all then living
statesmen, was the undoubted expert. The Fourteen Points
even united Roosevelt and Taft, who made a joint statement
on the evils of partisanship in the prosecution of any military
campaign and the disloyalty of any President who would do
such a wicked thing.

Unknown to the Allied side, the German General Staff had
on August 14, 1918, confessed to their Kaiser that the father-
lands cause was forlorn, that the Austrians were on the verge
of suing for a separate peace, that even the departure of Russia
from the Allied ranks (because of the Bolshevik revolution)
could not long forestall the end. Morale grew so low in the
German army that by September General von Hindenburg
voiced the opinion that the need for peace negotiation was
"immediate."

Colonel House was dispatched by Wilson to Europe as soon
as these facts had become obvious even to the Allies, and the
good Colonel went about the Continent making personal
friendships, soothing suspicions, allaying fears, sensing cur-
rents of ambition, greed, jealousy, and aggrandizement that
flowed among Allied statesmen.

In Europe it immediately became obvious to Colonel House
that the Fourteen Points, when laid before the Allied premiers
for discussion, could not be pulled through by diplomatic
trading alone. 21 Lloyd George had already stated serious reser-
vations to two of the fourteen; Clemenceau was about to dis-
close France's objections to others. So Colonel House whose

20. Ibid., p. 203.

21. Ibid., p. 181.

WOODROW WILSON

shrewd Texas statesmanship usually inhibited such bluntness
did what he seldom did in public life. He stated baldly to his
friend Clemenceau that, if the Allied leaders in Europe ob-
jected wholeheartedly to Wilson's principles, he would im-
mediately advise the President to lay all the facts before the
American Congress in a hearing open to the press and ask
whether the American people should continue to fight for old
European peace terms or mate a separate peace with the
Kaiser. 22

The effect on Wilson's allied counterparts was electric and
delighted Wilson who cabled House: **I am proud of the way
you are handling things" The effect on Germany was equally
potent, for it soon became public knowledge that Wilsons
liberal approach to peace now had brought the offensive to
the Western side. Although the Allies would eventually have
been able to liquidate or erode the German military force, still
incredibly formidable after four years of butchery, the Presi-
dent's Fourteen Points quickly vitiated much of the German
will to persevere. 23

On October 6, 1918, with the reluctant consent of the Junkers
generals, a new German chancellery dispatched a note to the
President accepting the Fourteen Points as a basis for peace
negotiations and privately suggesting an armistice. In the ex-
change that followed, the President struck a posture charitable
enough to lead the Germans on, yet force them to total sur-
render. 24 With each new response in the exchange, Woodrow
Wilson's world stature rose; the old cliche of European power
politics shuddered from the idealistic dreamer's New World
assault. As the British had gagged at freedom of the seas and
the French at the absence of reparations payments, the entire
European diplomatic community was taken aback at the
audacity of an upstart American practically negotiating single-
handed an armistice with the detestable Hun. Yet this approxi-
mated the truth; and when, on November 11, the Armistice

22. Ibid., p. 195.

23. John Morton Blum, Woodrow Wilson and the Politics of
Morality ( Boston, Little Brawn and Company, 1956), p. 149.

24' ibid.

Ignores the Senate and Loses His Dream 203

was announced by the Western powers, they pledged to make
a peace based on those selfsame Fourteen Points, with the res-
ervations noted.

During the war, the coalition which was the Democratic
Party (it has sometimes been a preposterous and precarious
coalition in U. S. history) had begun to crumble and eventually
to fall apart completely. The liberal dynamite of 1912 was
gone, the progressivism of 1916 had all but vanished, the mid-
dle ckss groaned under high war taxes, the Midwestern farmer
thought he was getting too little for his wheat, the cities missed
their beer and detested the draft, the intellectual fussed about
Wilson's disappointing performance in civil liberties, the Re-
publicans under Will Hays were beginning to close ranks, and
wheatless, meatless, sugarless days were becoming downright
distasteful in a spoiled young nation that had never had to
worry for long about overflowing food and comfort since the
Civil War, which few living could remember. Families without
men around were yet another irritating thorn.

But worst of all for the Democratic Party was the person-
ality habit pattern of the President. A political egotist, a
'loner/' an idealist, habitually willful, more than ever impatient
with local politics and the insipidly stupid but necessary proto-
col, Wilson had publicly stated with gross inaccuracy and
condescension that politics was adjourned. The Republican
Congressional victory of November, 1918, and its subsequent
assault on Wilson's foreign policy changed the President's
mind. He had refused to campaign, to endorse Democratic
candidates from coast to coast with his prestige and personality
at a time when he thought other items more important. He
could not now have made a worse mistake. He was becoming
partisan too late.

The Republicans immediately began to assault his entire
foreign policy on grounds that he alone would be responsible
for a "peace without victory." This sentiment, echoed of course
in London, Paris, and Rome, which were understandably
thirsty for revenge and total triumph, had the effect at home
of questioning Wilson's entire political leadership, domestic as

WOODROW WILSON

well as foreign. Teddy Roosevelt demanded that peace be dic-
tated to the defeated through Tbammering guns . . . not click-
ing typewriters." Democrats in Congress soon picked up the
refrain; next the Cabinet; then the Democratic National Com-
mittee; finally the press of the nation joined in the "hate Ger-
many" obsession.

The President tried his best to make a concession to under-
standable war's-end emotions by increasing the severity of his
notes to Berlin, yet he never asked for the unconditional, pros-
trate surrender with staggering reparations and total dismem-
berment of Germany that frightened Democrats demanded.
To his credit he did not give in or temporize. His splendid
purpose, his exquisite idealism, his hope for a world made safe
for democracy which must now surely germinate in the king-
doms of Europe never for an instant wavered at a time when
a lesser man might well have caved in. He could write: "God
has in His good pleasure given us peace. It has not come as
a mere cessation of arms, a mere relief from the strain and
tragedy of war. It has come as a great triumph for right/' He
had believed from the day of Ms first faith in man's ability to
govern himself that Christian democracy was a viable principle
by which to live, not a welcome mat to be taken in with the
first few drops of rain. He had believed in it in the beginning;
he believed it still without compromise.

John Morton Blum says a penetrating and remarkable thing
about the Wilson mind of 19181919 : 2&

Fixed on its notable end, the one-track mind sensed less
and less its growing isolation. Election Day in 1918 left no
impression. Increasingly thereafter conscience made a cow-
ard of resilience. The pace, already faltering, was broken.
The President went one way; Ms Congress, his constituency,
indeed his world, another, until he stood at last alone.

With the Armistice signed, Wilson faced twin tasks more
difficult than any he had ever faced before, and with less
physical strength and political backing to sustain him. 2S First

25. Blum, op. cit. y p. 158.

26. Col. Edmund W. Starling wrote, with the late Thomas Sugrue, a
book about life in the White House, where Starling was on the security

Ignores the Senate and Loses His Dream 205

lie must cope with America's wartime allies, nations deci-
mated, tortured, hurt by and angry at an aggressive, brutal
enemy of four bloody years of interminable trench warfare.
Whatever he might be able to do with the crafty old statesmen
of ancient and now victorious states he would then have to get
somehow ratified by a two-thirds vote of the United States
Senate, now in Republican hands.

When he said that the war had been won solely by the
inspiration of democratic ideas he was talking errant nonsense,
so far as Britain and France were concerned. Nor would the
rest of the Western world agree with him that there was "a
great wind of moral force moving through the world, and every
man who opposes . . . that wind will go down in disgrace."
This was patronizing gibberish to men like Lloyd George,
Clemenceau, Orlando, and the traditional governments they
reflected.

A man capable of saying wonderfully naive things on the
eve of a world peace conference would also be capable of
amazing pragmatic error; and Wilson was capable of both.
He chose neither a member of the United States Senate, with-
out whose consent no treaty could be ratified, nor any active
member of the opposition party to accompany him to Paris.
He would brook no slightest dissent, mild as it might be, from
his master plan. He could not forgive Theodore Roosevelt nor
the Republicans for attacking his foreign policy during the
recent campaign. He began to believe that the peace confer-
ence to which he was moving in person was peculiarly his own
and had little or no relationship with anything or anyone else.
It is perhaps not too much to say that his public statements
of 1918-1919 suggest an aberration that he had invented de-
mocracy and wanted no one else's advice on or claim to its
origins.

staff, called Starling of the White House (New York, Simon and
Schuster, Inc., 1946), in which Starling says that Wilson's temper was
becoming increasingly short at this time. Once, on a golf course, a
boy nearLy cupped Ms hands to his mouth and yelled like an Indian
just as Wilson was addressing his ball. Disgusted, the President said:
"That boy must be training to be a Senator. He's always making a noise
with his mouth and not saying anything."

WOODROW WILSON

Who might have gone to Paris with Woodrow Wilson? The
newly constituted Republican Senate had chosen Senator
Henry Cabot Lodge as its Foreign Relations Committee chair-
man but Lodge was, of all people, least eligible in Wilson's
mind to accompany him anywhere. It is said that he left the
Senator cooling his heels for hours in a White House waiting
room and that Lodge eventually got up and left without seeing
the President at a time when Wilson needed every ounce of
support he could muster for his pet project. Lodge had lately
been an acidulous critic of Wilson's internationalism, a close
friend of T.R. 3 a thoroughgoing economic conservative, and to
Wilson, an intolerant partisan. Yet Senator Lodge might have
been friendly to ratification of peace terms he had helped to
frame; as chairman of the powerful Foreign Relations Com-
mittee he was precisely the last man in Washington a Chief
Executive should have snubbed in the circumstances.

But if Lodge had been impossible for Wilson to swallow,
there were others who might have helped modify the adamant
position the Republican-controlled Senate eventually took on
the peace treaty. There was a possibility in the brilliant Elihu
Root, once Secretary of State under T.R. and a patriot of less
partisanship than most, a former Senator from New York with
plenty of friends in the Senate chamber, a famous international
lawyer and a specialist on world arbitration. Yet Wilson
spurned him, apparently dismissing him in such patronizing
terms that the President's faint praise eventually found its way
to Root himself and set up yet another needless roadblock to
ratification.

There was also William Jennings Bryan, Wilson's first Sec-
retary of State, whose training in international law was, to say
the least, questionable but who still possessed a certain politi-
cal magic on The Hill. Or William Howard Taft, ex-President
and Supreme Court Justice, a man of deep integrity, a fine legal
mind, and an outspoken advocate of an active international
community of nations to insure the peace. But Taft was a
Republican and had said, Wilson thought, some nasty things
during the 1918 campaign. Wilson simply wouldn't have Taft
on his team.

Ignores the Senate and Loses His Dream 207

There were a few others, among them astute and friendly
Senators, not in any way inimical to the tremendous new idea
of a world co-operation and undoubtedly eager to cash in on
whatever headlines Wilson would make abroad. But the Pres-
ident couldn't see them and, in point of fact, rarely spoke about
such matters with anyone now except Colonel House and Sec-
retary of State Lansing.

Woodrow Wilson quickly settled upon associate delegates
from whom he could expect little more than sycophancy, or at
least this was the way his Paris delegation appeared to the
Republicans. Colonel House and Secretary Lansing would, of
course, be there. House was indispensable. Lansing could not
be overlooked because he was technically the President's ad-
viser on foreign policy and his advice could, of course, be
disregarded since he owed his tenure to the man he was ad-
vising. Henry White would go along, a quiet, gentlemanly
career diplomat whom Wilson trusted and who was, at least
nominally, a Republican, though he had taken little or no part
in domestic politics. General Tasker H. Bliss, a military expert
of untapped but formidable talent, joined the party. And, sec-
retaries and aides aside, this made up Wilson's delegation!

John Blum points out that the President's disdain of public
opinion equaled his aloofness from The Hill and pragmatic
politics. 27

Only the newspapers could continuously interpret his ne-
gotiations in Europe to the American people; he had, as he
knew, no facility in dealing with the press; but for his official
press representative in Paris he chose George Creel, whose
wartime work had seemed to many journalists a form of
censorship. Wilson had to agree, furthermore, to holding tie
important meetings of the conference in secret. This dis-
turbed the journalists, who had mistakenly assumed that
open diplomacy meant public negotiation. Unwilling to dis-
cuss his unsuccessful opposition to the secrecy imposed,
Wilson further alienated the press by making consistently
uninformative his official news releases. He simply saw no
need to explain or justify himself.

27. Blum, op. cit., p. 161.

WOODBOW WILSON

The Treaty of Versailles was, then, molded from the Amer-
ican point of view almost single-handed by a naive professor
of political science who had neglected to take Congressional
representatives with him. It was created in an atmosphere o
personality politics from the ego of one American mind.

The spirit of his Fourteen Points was to be occasionally
discernible in the Treaty of Versailles. The Treaty would
eventually define as nearly as it could ethnological groupings
on the map of Europe. With minor reservations, Wilson's hope
for the self-determination and independence of small, indige-
nous nations carved from kingdoms was fulfilled. As he had
forecast, the Covenant of the League of Nations would be an
indispensable part of the Treaty and, to him, "the hope of the
world."

The Treaty of Versailles was one of five peace treaties end-
ing World War I, but it was the most important because it
dealt largely with Germany whereas the other four disposed
of Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey. Germany was
never consulted openly during the making of the Treaty of
Versailles and, when it had been written, the Germans were
told simply to sign it or else.

Although Wilson's Fourteen Points were essentially sacri-
ficed to Old World hates and precedent, to power politics far
beyond the strength of the President to withstand, his main
objective a League of Nations became part and parcel of
the Treaty. Reparations payments by Germany, the most
ruinous demands of the Treaty, were to be suspended in 1931
largely at the insistence of President Hoover. And many hun-
dreds of volumes have been written to say that the Treaty was
either too harsh, too soft, or relatively just in its dealings with
the defeated and the long downtrodden. No one can ever come
near the truth of it

The League of Nations, then, became the focal point for
hardening Republican opposition to Wilson and all his works.
It was on this ground, with growing isolationist support, that
the great post-Treaty battle was fought out.

On a quick trip back to the States early in 1919 to attend
to domestic affairs, the President was confronted with a dev-

Ignores the Senate and Loses His Dream 209

astating document, the handiwork chiefly of Henry Cabot
Lodge. Senator Lodge revealed the day before Wilson was to
return to Paris a resolution signed by thirty-seven Republican
Senators, four more than the thirty-three votes needed to sabo-
tage ratification of any foreign treaty.

The resolution or memorandum or "round robin,** as it was
variously called, declared that the Covenant as it stood was
unacceptable to the Republican Senators and that major reser-
vations would have to be adopted before these thirty-seven
Senators could see their way clear to ratifying any treaty con-
taining the Wilsonian brand of League. It was too late now to
compromise, though Wilson desperately tried. His was an un-
popular cause in isolationist America; he had played his cards
very badly indeed.

In the two months of his first stay in Europe, Woodrow Wil-
son had been acclaimed its savior. His picture had hung every-
where with American bunting draped about it: "Vive Wilson V
had welcomed him in every language in every city of Western
Europe. He had had a Messiah's welcome when he first came.
Now he was returning to cruel reality.

The torment began when he was in Washington. First there
was Senator Lodge's defiant "round robin,** which was still to
be met. Then there were reports from Paris that his staff had
conspired in his absence to separate the Covenant from the
Treaty, the League of Nations from peace with Germany. He
had insisted they were inseparable and could not be negotiated
apart. In his absence, Clemenceau and Lloyd George (or as
Colonel House called him, "George") had reverted to type.
Orlando of Italy was making imperialistic demands. The
French were insisting on an independent republic of the Rhine-
land., French rights in Syria, and other geographical conces-
sions. The British wanted most of the other Arab states, and
the Italians were anticipating possessions promised them in
the secret Pact of London.

This Pact of London ( often mistakenly called the Treaty of
London) was one more diabolical roadblock against Wilson's
idealism. A maze of secret arrangements and treaties had been
entered into by the Allied forces prior to America's entry into

WOODROW WILSON

the war. If these treaties were to be respected, Wilson's Four-
teen Points would be all but nullified. One of these secret
treaties was the Pact of London, signed privately in 1915 by
Britain, France, and Italy, assuring Italy that, if she entered the
war on the Allied side, the Trentino, the Brenner Pass, Istria,
Trieste, parts of Dalmatia, some Adriatic islands, and a share
of Anatolia would be hers. These territories were defined and
delimited in the Pact of London with what Herbert Hoover
calls "the precision of a New England farm." 28

The secret treaties., particularly the Pact of London, now
rose to haunt Wilson, for Italy had, in his absence, insisted
privately that the secret contract of 1915 be implemented and
if France and Britain lived up to its terms, as they were legally
bound to do, self-determination of the Adriatic peoples the
Yugoslavs was a dead issue. America had not, of course,
been a signatory to any of the secret treaties which had been
agreed to long before U. S. entry. It is even possible that the
precise contents of the Pact of London were unknown to Wil-
son, though U. S. intelligence services were undoubtedly aware
of it. Added to this dilemma was fresh insistence, in Wilson's
absence, on the heaviest of reparations from the Germans,
something the Fourteen Points had promised would not
happen.

As the President's ship, the George Washington, reached the
French coast, Colonel House came aboard and talked until
midnight. Mrs. Wilson reports the effect on her already ap-
prehensive husband: 29

I heard my husband's door open and the Colonel take his
leave. I opened the door connecting our rooms. Woodrow
was standing. The change in his appearance shocked me. He
seemed to have aged ten years, and his jaw was set in that
way it had when he was making super-human effort to con-
trol himself.

I asked, "What's the matter? What has happened?" He
said: "House has given away everything I had won before
we left Paris. He has compromised on every side, and so I

28. Hoover, op. tit. t p. 78.

29. Ibid., p, 196.

Ignores the Senate and Loses His Dream 211

have to start all over again and this time it will be harder . . .

he has yielded until there is nothing left."

From the hour o his return to Europe, Wilson's health and
hope began to go downhill. Negotiations went from bad to
worse, from worse to hopeless, then climbed tantalizingly up
the glass hiU again, only to slide back. Old European hatreds
rose like cork to the surface, refusing to stay down.

On April 3, after a fortnight of atmospheric malignancy, the
President came down with the flu. It soon infected his prostate
and bladder, although on the word of his physician, Admiral
Grayson, it was in no way connected with his paralytic stroke
five months later. Under the terrible strain of anxiety and un-
ending frustration, fatigue beyond human limits, the man who
had brought a stomach pump to the White House, whose frail
body had never been able to function properly on less than
nine hours' rest per night, broke in health, never fully to re-
cover.

Early in April the ill President called for the George Wash-
ington to take him home again. When this became public
knowledge, the high hopes he had held for a democratic
Europe melted like sand castles in the surf. Though his health
improved sufficiently to cancel the April sailing, tike President
was never able to regain the tactical stature he had had on his
triumphant first arrival.

A further woe now struck his idealistic statesmanship. The
treaty was harsh and scarcely the democratic instrument he
had forecast. But to make things worse, Clemenceau and
Lloyd George were now insisting that the blockade of Ger-
many be renewed until the Germans were forced by starvation
and economic despair to sign the peace treaty as it stood. This
bloodthirsty coercion, understandable in men whose sons and
gold had perished by the millions against the tyranny of a
repeating aggressor, Wilson could not stomach. Yet, in the
end, he was forced to sign his name to a compromise com-
munique of the Supreme Council of Allied Powers stating that
resumption of the blockade would not be made "without a
decision from the Council." It must have been the most galling
of his many compromises.

WOODROW WILSON

The German delegation was bluntly told that, for all practi-
cal purposes, it must sign or suffer the consequences. The
Germans replied, after careful perusal, that they could not in
all conscience sign something as degrading as the terms
handed them; that they had appealed for an armistice on the
President's false promises of fair, democratic treatment. Rather
than become traitors to the fatherland, the German delegation
resigned en masse on June 20.

But a new German delegation appeared on June 28 and this
new set of ministers came to the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles
and signed away tens of billions of dollars in reparations pay-
ments, all of Germany's overseas possessions and mandates, as
well as what was left of her strength and honor. The Hun had
had it coming; now the Hun was getting it, old-style. The only
fragment of the mirror of democracy lay in the formation of
the President's dream: a League of Nations. This he must now
return to his native land to defend and save from domestic
politics.

Wilson left France forever on June 28, 1919, arriving in New
York on July 8. When he landed he began at once to plan a
nation-wide crusade to ratify a treaty over which the Senate
was already in full and acrimonious debate.

While formal submission of the Treaty to the Senate took
place July 10, Wilson's major effort began in September when
he undertook his cross-country battle for ratification. He would
take it to the people, for he had always believed in the com-
mon sense of the common people; they would now sustain him
if their elected representatives would not. Stubborn to the end,
the Scotch-Irish blood had one more battle left; it would be the
most stirring, the most courageous, and the most pathetic battle
of his fading life, which it was to cost him.

The League of Nations was continuously and violently at-
tacked on the floor of the Senate throughout the spring, sum-
mer, and early fall of 1919. Lodge was a ringleader; as his team
seemed more and more likely to win the final vote he slowly
gained adherents, even among Democrats. They could feel the
country's progressive antagonism to Wilson, to internationalism
and all its works; it was a reaction against f ar-from-dead power

Ignores the Senate and Loses His Dream 213

politics and secret diplomacy of Europe, which had won the
decisive rounds at Paris. Isolationism, traditional in America,
was reasserting itself: Wilson was playing for his life's highest
stakes with a stacked deck.

On September 25, 1919, the President was making his cru-
sade back from the Pacific Coast when suddenly he collapsed
at Pueblo, Colorado. The courageous battle was over. Unlike
the candor attached to President Eisenhower's later heart at-
tack, ileitis, and stroke, President Wilson's doctor and press
secretary did not take the public into their confidence. Mys-
tery, confusion, misunderstanding, and even misrepresentation
marked the paralytic stroke with which the slight old man was
now seized.

Colonel House wrote in his diary on October 21, 1919* th at
the President's condition was such that no one was seeing him
except his physician and Mrs. Wilson. 30 This date was almost
a month alter the stroke; yet no mention of the true nature
of the illness had yet been made to a hushed but inquisitive
press and an even more curious Senate. The President's entire
left side was now all but useless.

Three months after the seizure, House was to write privately
again that the President "is much sicker than the public is led
to believe." A Thanksgiving proclamation went into the sick
room via Mrs. Wilson and came back with a signature almost
illegible. David Lawrence states that the sick man extracted
a promise from those closest to him that his condition would
never be made public so long as he was President of the United
States. 31 In the context this was an impossible assignment.

Incredibly, the true severity of his illness did not become
public knowledge until long afterward and not official until
Wilson was no longer in the White House. Woodrow Wilson

30. Col. Starling later wrote: "When lie was to go for a ride, some
of us [Secret Service] organized a group to stand at the gate as he
returned, and we told them to cheer as he passed through. The first
time it happened, when we went to lift him from the car after driving
around to the baclc, there were tears in his eyes. *Yon see/ he said to
Mrs. Wilson, 'they still love mef "

31. David Lawrence, The True Story of Woodrow Wilson (Garden
City, Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1924), p. 290.

WOODROW WILSON

never recovered from the stroke. He lingered in the torment
of frustration, physical and mental, until February 3, 1924.

The Senate voted on the Treaty of Versailles on November
19, 1919; the motion for unconditional ratification failed by
seven votes of the necessary two-thirds. 32 Another vote on
March 19, 1920, changed little, even with Senatorial reserva-
tions abhorrent to the stricken President. The Senate never
ratified the Treaty, the only nation of any consequence to
refuse.

On January 10, 1920, the League of Nations opened for busi-
ness in Geneva without the United States, and on April 18,
1946, it disbanded, replaced by a stronger and more practical
policing organization, the United Nations. It is doubtful if the
UN as it is today could have existed without the idealistic
dream and its partial fulfillment in the League. Yet the one
major power to repudiate that dream was Woodrow Wilson's
own country.

That the President himself was deeply responsible cannot
be denied. For he had overlooked a fundamental tenet of the
Presidency as true as any other that a President does not
work in an executive vacuum but in a complicated relationship
between the people on the one hand and the legislature on the
other; that politics, an irrevocable part and parcel of the presi-
dential office, is a fact painfully and perennially true, whether
the man in the White House likes it or not.

32. Looking back to the time, tike wonder is that ratification came as
close as seven votes, a tribute to Wilson's personal standing.

Franklin Roosevelt's

MABCH 4, 1933, was a Saturday, misty and raw with a
seasonal wind and sullen sky. But sky and wind were
nowhere as forbidding as the state of the nation. Panic gripped
the financial community. No one's money seemed safe. So
many millions were out of work that one family in two was
directly affected. Trade was as close to a complete standstill
as trade can get, the United States as near economic collapse
as a growing young country can become and not find itself in
physical revolution. This was indeed a cold and forbidding
inauguration of a President of the United States.

With the economic and social motors groaning toward a
breakdown, there were few Americans indeed who could fore-
see what it would mean to swear in the good-looking man who
had to wear steel braces to stand for his inaugural. What the
country could not know was that this man who now took the
sacred oath was to accomplish his own kind of bloodless revo-
lution, far more effective and drastic than anything America
had seen in her short term of almost uninterrupted capitalistic-
industrial expansion. What the terrified capitalist-financiers
pleading with the new President could not possibly imagine
was how this one individual would irrevocably and drastically
change their world, without ignoring a single democratic rule
or precept during the unprecedented legislative process. What
no one, not even Franklin Dekno Roosevelt himself, knew at
this historic moment was that his first hundred days in the
White House would be the most amazing, prolific, fecund,
216

9

Amazing Hundred Days

and revolutionary period of concentrated social and economic
reform in the history of his people. After his tenure as Chief
Executive, his country would never be the same again.

March 4, 1933, was the last of the traditional March inaugu-
rals. January 20 would soon replace the later date, as the lame
duck Congress would soon be replaced as an antique. The new
President was saying to the traditional ceremony: "The only
thing we have to fear is fear itself r This was undeniable. Like
the old children's card game in which there used to be two
cards in the same set, one marked "Confidence Impaired" and
the other "Confidence Restored," the tall, handsome orator was
now saying that prosperity or depression were largely matters
of confidence. Wealth was in one way only the rapidity of
circulation; the number of times money changed hands in a
calendar month showed how freely it was being spent and
whether there was or wasn't confidence in the future. Con-
fidence had been impaired; the new President knew that
somehow confidence must now be restored to lubricate the
machinery and start the wheels turning again.

If impaired confidence could be changed to restored con-
fidence, the lubrication of hope might set people to buying
again, taking normal business risks, stop their hoarding of gold.
The business cycle might begin to improve after three and a
half ghastly Depression years.

"This nation asks for action, and action now . . ." rang the
voice. A cheer went up from those present and a small warmth

217

FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT S

stirred in the nation shocked to economic immobility, frozen
by impaired confidence and fear.

Throughout the United States, millions of Americans were
listening to an inauguration over a crazy gadget called the
radio, in its adolescence but soon of enormous political use
to the very voice they were now hearing. His fireside chats
would usher in a whole new means of admirable political com-
munion, -The golden baritone, the impeccable delivery, the in-
gratiating command of spoken language (though his speeches
would not read as well as they sounded) were already begin-
ning to provide a lubrication of hope in a stricken, frozen,
almost completely paralyzed American economy as near vio-
lent revolution as capitalistic countries can get before someone
declares martial law/ Indeed, martial law had already been
declared among normally prudent Midwestern farmers who
would rather dump their milk than sell it for a few pennies
a gallon.

Half a million of those who listened by radio to the new
President or read in the papers of his promise of action now,
after months and months of rank inaction, sat down in the next
few hours and wrote him personal letters addressed to the
White House. Eleanor Roosevelt found the inaugural "very
very solemn and a little terrifying" but those 500,000 who
wrote the new President letters were for the most part less
realistic since they knew less about the man they had elected
who was, as most Presidents are in their maiden months, a
new leader not yet unfrocked by time and record.

"In this dedication of a nation we humbly ask the blessing
of God," said the golden voice over the radio. "May He pro-
tect each and every one of us. May He guide me in the days
to come."

While the trumpets* flourish was still fresh in memory and
the huge inaugural parade was being shown in the nation^
newsreels, these letters from American humanity kept pouring
in to the White House by trucksful:

Yours is the first opportunity to carve a name in the halls
of immortals beside Jesus.

Amazing Hundred Days 219

Peogle_are looking to you almost as they look to God.

It seemed to give the people, as well as myself, a new hold
upon life.

Your human feeling for all of us in your address is just
wonderful

God bless you and yours. We are now on the road again.
At last we have a leader who knows what it is to lead.
It was the finest thing this side of heaven.

Eleanor Roosevelt shuddered that her husband got his big-
gest hand when he said he might have to assume wartime
powers to solve the nation's fantastic economic problems. She
knew her husband's strengths and weaknesses, his vast lack
of pragmatic economic knowledge (he had failed in several
busines enterprises), and her Theodore Roosevelt blood gave
her a conservative reverence for the democratic process not
even desperate economic panic could entirely erase.

Who was the man who now stood on the inaugural platform?
What sort of person, what kind of background, what roots of
precedent were there to bend the twig? Franklin Delano
Roosevelt was a relative of T.R. (as was his wife), a man of
Dutch ancestry, a native of Hyde Park, New York, where his
family had been landed gentry ever since Dutchess County
had been so properly named. An only child, Franklin had been
born when his father was fifty-four years of age, twenty-six
years older than his mother; young Franklin was, consequently,
so thoroughly spoiled that in Groton he was to many of his
young associates a downright prig. Harvard followed, then
kw school, during which period he had married the scarcely
beautiful but bright Eleanor Roosevelt, his cousin.

The Roosevelts had been unhesitatingly drawn to politics.
From the first they lived in an atmosphere of the idea, par-
ticularly the political idea. In 1910 Franklin was elected to the
New York State Senate, where he led one battle after another
against Tammany Hall and soon found himself a leader of the
independent Democrats in New York State. He fought for
Woodrow Wilson's candidacy in 1912, and Wilson appointed

FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT S

him Assistant Secretary of the Navy. He became the Demo-
cratic candidate for Vice-President in 1920 with James Cox of
Ohio. They lost badly to Harding's tidal wave of Republican
"normalcy," a reaction against war, the internationalist Wilson,
and his bloody battle for the League of Nations.

The following August at Campobello, New Brunswick,
Canada, F.D.R. was suddenly stricken with infantile paralysis
which paralyzed him from the hips down. Only by courageous
and determined effort did he regain some use of his legs; but
he never again walked unaided. At the 1924 and 1928 Demo-
cratic National Conventions he placed the name of Alfred E.
Smith, the Governor of New York, in nomination. Smith made
it in 1928 only to lose to Herbert Hoover, at least in part be-
cause Smith was a Catholic and an anti-Prohibitionist. But
while Smith was losing nationally, Franklin Roosevelt was
winning the Governorship of New York as Smith's successor.
He was re-elected in 1930; by 1932 he was himself a foremost
candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, though
his record as Governor was relatively undistinguished until the
legislative hearing of charges of Tammany corruption which
led to the resignation of Jimmy Walker as Mayor of New
York

As Governor, Roosevelt presided over the Walker hearing
and it seemed at first that the Governor feared Tammany's
power in an election year, for little or no aid and comfort was
given those who sought to expose Walker or Tammany's patent
misrule. Suddenly, however, the dapper little New York Mayor
admitted that he had as much as misappropriated certain funds
for which he could not account and Roosevelt asked him if
he didn't think that was wrongdoing.

*Well, w Mayor Walker admitted, "it may have been un-
ethical"

*But Mr. Mayor," said Franklin D. Roosevelt, "what is un-
ethical is wrong"

Walker resigned that night, September i, 1932. The Gover-
nor had defied Tammany. From that moment on F.D.R. was
a man marked for destiny. He had arrogantly snubbed the
power of Tammany Hall, which had controlled almost a hun-

Amazing Hundred Days 221

dred votes in that summer's Democratic National Convention.
He had stood on the side of the angels and he had won.

Like Cleveland and T.R. before him, his reform record in
the face of Tammany Hall as a Democratic Governor of New
York had shot him to the top as a favorite for larger matters.
(William G. McAdoo, Woodrow Wilson's son-in-law, had
switched from John N. Garner of Texas to F.D.R. at the con-
vention, and Smith had fumed while Roosevelt was nomi-
nated. )

It is difficult to keep remembering always that Franklin D.
Roosevelt was a cripple from his early manhood and that he
never walked unaided after 1921. For his amazing energy
began to show itself to the nation in the hour of his nomina-
tion when he flew to Chicago to accept the honor, rather than
be notified officially at home, as had been the custom. He was
the first presidential nominee to fly in a plane.

The Wall Street stock crash of October, 1929, had by the fall
of 1932 fused a far deeper business depression than America
had ever undergone before. Since Herbert Hoover had been
President throughout this period, he was blamed for most of
it at an emotional pitch seldom reached by the ordinarily
placid American. To put it bluntly, a large segment of the
country hated Herbert Hoover with all its being and did not
hesitate to tell him so. This was not a partisan matter, more-
over; if a Republican in Centerville, Illinois, had lost his life
savings and his livelihood, he could scarcely be blamed for
believing that President Hoover was less than a genius and
for becoming caustic about it.

In addition, Hoover kept referring to Prohibition of legal
liquor, including light wines and beer, as "that noble experi-
ment," but by no means promised to repeal it if re-elected.
Roosevelt, on the other hand, made no bones about his dislike
for Prohibition and forecast its quick repeal after November. If
any political weight had been required to tip the scale in his
behalf this was more than enough. The Iowa Quaker simply
couldn't have won in the circumstances. Every move he made
seemed inept and gauche.

FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT S

With victory inevitable, Roosevelt did not campaign as
vigorously as contemporary memory would have us believe.
Looking back at the printed record, he seems to have taken
few renegade stands on big issues of the day, preferring in-
stead to generalize on his "New Deal/' a persuasive appeal to
the unfortunate, the underdog, the "average man" (whoever
he was) 3 the disenchanted, and the thirsty.

The rank smell of rot and stagnation deepening over the
capitalistic system of free enterprise in America and the West-
ern world progressively reduced President Hoover's chances.
He had the misfortune to be working with a hostile Demo-
cratic Congress from 1930 on. He was also the victim of his
own training and personality. Intelligent and well educated,
Hoover possessed an engineer's mind and a wealthy man's
economic outlook. Since his wealth had been earned (while
Roosevelt's had been handed to him), the ironically perverse
logic of human nature decreed that F.D.R. would have more
regard for those who earned their living than would the self-
made Hoover, who was incapable of apostasy.

Whatever kindliness and friendship had ever existed between
President Hoover and F.D.R. quickly fell apart as the cam-
paign progressed. 1 The two had known each other for many
years, in a joint crusade during World War I and the recon-
struction of Europe that had made Hoover a world-famous
humanitarian. Admiration which had led F.D.R. to advocate
Herbert Hoover for President in 1920 was by 1932 thoroughly
vitiated. Governor Roosevelt had, however, a very private
reason for disliking the man now President of the United
States and his election opponent, or he thought he had.

In the spring of 1932, President Hoover had invited the
annual Governor's conference at Richmond to dine at the
White House. The spring of 1932 had been Roosevelt's critical
time in the search for Chicago delegates, and one of the chief
arguments against Ms candidacy was that he had had polio
and wasn't physically up to the demanding job of being Presi-
dent, Knowing how long it took F.D.R. to move from an auto-

i. Frank B. Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Vol. Ill (Boston, Little,
Brown and Company, 1956), p. 323.

Amazing Hundred Days

mobile, up steps, or any distance at all under his own
locomotion, the Roosevelts arrived quite early at the White
House. With Mrs. Roosevelt on one arm, grasping a cane with
the other, F.D.R. managed to make the East Room under his
own power, but the effort exhausted him. His crippled lower
limbs ached and throbbed for relief.

Protocol required that all guests stand until President Hoover
and his wife should appear to greet them, but the Hoovers
did not appear for a very long time. On several occasions,
Roosevelt was offered a chair, but always declined for fear
the whispering campaign about his polio disability might be
somehow intensified. For almost forty minutes he stood there
in absolute torment, the steel braces cutting into his legs and
beads of perspiration dotting his face, which never ceased
to smile. Frank Freidel rightly points out 2 that a man as essen-
tially decent and humane as Hoover could never have been
as deliberately cruel. Yet F.D.R. never ceased to be suspicious,
and things were never quite the same between the two former
friends.

Personalities aside, the Republicans faced grass roots re-
volts from every quarter. William Allen White observed that
"only the Democrats will save Hoover. . . . How, I don't know,
but they are versatile and can find some way in crises." The
Republicans hoped and prayed for the usual Democratic split
in what had been a loose political coalition since the Civil
War. None came. The Republicans hoped and prayed for a
spectacular return to prosperity. The Depression only deep-
ened. The Republicans hoped and prayed that candidate
Roosevelt would eventually make a fool of himself, stumble
into egregious error in the heat of a skinnish, lose the confi-
dence of certain Eastern business and financial elements whose
support he had to have to win. But no campaign error was
made. The Republicans hoped and prayed that the agrarian
revolt of the solid Republican central West would somehow
dissolve and "normalcy" return. But the agrarian revolt pro-
liferated.

Actually, there were some indications of improved economic

2. Ibid.

FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT S

status by the fall of 1932. The New York Times index of busi-
ness activity, made up of steel production, electric power, auto,
grain, and lumber prices, car loadings and similar funda-
mentals, rose from 66 per cent, or two-thirds of normal activity,
to 74 per cent, or almost three-fourths, by the end of the year.
Herbert Hoover has always insisted that, had 1932 not been
a presidential election year, the nation's economy would have
righted itself. Hoover always felt that the bottom of the De-
pression came in August, 1932, and that the Times business
index, which rose from that base, was mathematical proof of
it. But whatever vestige of true recovery had begun, Hoover
felt, was destroyed by the politicking of Franklin D. Roose-
velt and vote-hungry Democrats.

Roosevelt, on the other hand, agreed with Claude Bowers, 3
a historian and an ardent editorial writer, who wrote the
Democratic candidate that the Republicans would attempt to
inflate wheat prices through manipulating the commodity
market. They would then have a persuasive case that prosper-
ity was "just around the corner." F.D.R. replied to Bowers
that he agreed about the Republican game and that their
strategy was now "perfectly plain.**

In any case, bullish sentiment in either Wall Street or news-
paper business indexes did not soak down to the mass of the
voting public, least of all the huge armies of city unemployed
and farm malcontents. Milk was bringing Iowa farmers only
61 ( a hundred pounds and one of Governor Roosevelt's con-
stituents sent him a voucher showing that she had netted but
39^ on the sale of a month-old calf. It was simply ridiculous,
or would have been had it not been so tragic.

Then there was the drama of the so-called Bonus Army in
Washington. More than 10,000 unemployed war veterans were,
by the summer of 1932, encamped in the nation's capital, many
of them in a shantytown along the Anacostia. They wanted a
bonus for their war duty and -they were undoubtedly a danger-
ous lobby and certainly an eyesore in the political show window
of America. President Hoover investigated, offered them their
rail fare home, was rebuffed, then instructed the United States

3. Ibid., p. 326.

Amazing Hundred Days 225

Army to evict them. Many, as it turned out, were in truth Com-
munist agitators and fewer than half were actual war vet-
erans.

Unfortunately for Hoover and the Republicans, however,
the Army Chief of Staff at that hour was General Douglas Mac-
Arthur who, dazzling in medals and self-righteously vigorous
in new uniform, brought out tanks and soldiers with gas masks
and fixed bayonets, as though the ugly encampment were a
host of German snipers.

In its enthusiasm under MacArthur, the Army greatly ex-
ceeded Hoover's order to evict. It may well have been a neces-
sary executive move, but as executed it was abysmally bad
politics. Nothing could have been better calculated by the
Democrats to increase so expertly President Hoover's mount-
ing unpopularity. Resplendent General MacArthur had, in
less than an hour, dramatized as no Democrat had been able
to dramatize, the desperation, degradation, and danger of the
economic ill health of a nation as close to revolution as it had
ever been.

But MacArthur's conquest of the Bonus Army alone would
not have defeated Herbert Hoover. The Bonus Army simply rep-
resented in microcosm the times and stresses, unprecedented
in their severity, range, length, and depth. Controls over giant
corporations had been relaxed in the reaction against Wilson-
ian democracy and reform. Rugged individualism had com-
bined with new, high protective duties, and consequent post-
war overproduction had shot America's prosperity to dizzy
heights. The powerful engine had been running at top speed,
but no one had thought to check the brakes.

The October, 1929, collapse of the stock market, where
every other businessman and many a housewife had had a
tenuous margin account, had broken the bubble. Boom pros-
perity collapsed with startling rapidity, bringing with it the
worst Depression the country had ever known. This was no
local bank panic, to be quickly recovered. It was a long-term
disease in the body economic, and radical measures were
needed to cure it. They were not forthcoming under the Re-
publicans.

FRANKLIN BOOSEVELT S

In the beginning of 1929, peak year of the Hoover prosper-
ity ("two chickens in every pot, two cars in every garage"),
only 3 per cent of the population had been unemployed. By
1930 this figure had risen to 9 per cent, tripling in one year.
By 1931 the unemployed of the country were 16 per cent of
its working force and by 1932 one breadwinner in four was out
of work and many of the employed were teetering or nearly
bankrupt. On the Saturday that Franklin D. Roosevelt was
sworn in, it was likely that almost 30 per cent of the employ-
ables of the United States were without regular jobs. No one
will ever really know.

The consequent effect of such a disastrous shortage of in-
come was nowhere more dramatic than in the businesses of real
estate and farming. Mortgages were now being repudiated so
rapidly that some banks could not keep up with the clerical
paper work involved in foreclosing, which was often delayed
because there was no one to whom the house could be sold,
anyway. Similarly, the American farmer couldn't sell his pro-
duce for what it cost him to raise it. He would never starve,
as his urban contemporary might and did, but he was as near
to true revolt as a conservative American fanner can get and
remain law-abiding. In the circumstances, only the fortuitous
appearance of Eoosevelt and the hopes he engendered pre-
vented a farmer-labor political coup, or worse.

On October 25 at Baltimore, candidate Roosevelt let go
with one final blast against Hoover and the "Four Horsemen
of the present Republican leadership; the Horsemen of De-
struction, Delay, Deceit, Despair/' It was an interesting speech
from many points of view. It was Roosevelt* s most belligerent
campaign document and into it the Democratic candidate ad
libbed an implied criticism of the Supreme Court which, he
said in passing, was controlled by reaction, like the Presidency
and the Congress.

Hoover replied bitterly; but F.D.R. controlled Ms temper,
and his election eve broadcast, a moderate and statesmanlike
fireside chat from Poughkeepsie, was a classic upon which all
politicians might well base their final nonpartisan utterances.
That Bight he was talking like a President of the United

Amazing Hundred Days 227

States, and Hoover was like a desperate and overmatched con-
tender. The nation sensed it, too, and there is not the slightest
doubt that the quiet confidence, the supple philosophy, the
warmth and intimacy of one contrasted so sharply with the
waspish finale of the other that F.D.R. gained many a voter
the night before the prostrate, angry nation went to the
polls.

Was President Roosevelt regarded as a potential great from
the moment of his election? Far from it. Walter Lippmann, one
of the shrewdest observers, who later became his champion,
wrote to the independent Republican Senator William E.
Borah, who had repudiated Hoover: 4

It'll be a great relief to have the election over, and to
me at least, though I have the deepest reservations about
Franklin Roosevelt, a relief to be rid of the present
administration. It's so utterly discredited that it no longer
has any usefulness as an instrument of government. And
even assuming that Roosevelt isn't any better than Hoover,
a new man for a little while will be better than a man
who's worn out and used up.

This, beyond doubt, was what many millions of Americans
felt as Franklin Delano Roosevelt stood to take the oath of
office on the misty, raw Saturday which was March 4, 1933.
Forgotten now was the monumental landslide of November 6,
in which the Democrat had ravaged the incumbent Republican
by 472 votes to 59 in the electoral college and 22,821,857 to
15,761,845 in total popularity. That this electorate now ex-
pected something more creative than what it had been getting
in the White House needed no proof. Just what that something
would be no man in his right mind could have accurately
forecast in the blackest inauguration since Abraham Lincoln's
first in 1861.

Fundamental problem for every reasoning citizen on March
4, 1933, was the collapsing banking system of the United States.
Before anything else could be coped with, a radical incision
had to be made to open the fester that was blocking and

4. Letter from Lippmann to Borah, November 3, 1932.

FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT S

polluting the flow of currency. The infected economic blood-
stream of the nation had slowed to a dangerous level. It might
well halt altogether if "confidence impaired" wasn't quickly
exchanged for "confidence restored." It was, most men knew,
largely a matter of confidence.

Hoover had asked in February that the President-elect come
to a White House conference on the spreading bank runs and
their resultant panic and chaos. But Hoover had hastened to
make it plain that the conference was to be on his own terms,
on measures he had already proposed and wanted Democratic
sanction for. He seemed to want the new President to repudi-
ate the "New Deal" before it had begun, and the foremost
New Dealer would have none of it. What Roosevelt wished
above all else was to avoid responsibility without power; he
was smart enough politically to refuse the conference and yet
be held blameless by an adoring constituency which had just
given him the greatest political majority in U. S. history.

A string of newly nationalized banks in Ohio and Michigan
had just closed their doors and the flow of money in the great
Cleveland-Detroit-Chicago industrial area was by now almost
completely frozen. What banks were not affected were never-
theless in danger of runs. But a run on a bank was nothing new
in itself. There had been contagious runs on banks as long as
there had been U. S. panics, which was about once every
generation. What made this situation unique was the solidity
of the frost and its widespread effect. Something had to be
done and done immediately to induce a thaw in the frozen
assets of a good share of the nation's banking institutions. Until
that thaw set in, little would move in the normal currency
circulation of commerce, industry, or finance. Fear was the
catalytic agent in the frost. Fear had first to be removed before
there could be any glimmering hope of better economic
health.

President Roosevelt had already decided on two main lines
of attack before coming to Washington for the inaugural. These
two points boiled down to the removal of tbe catalytic agent,
fear. To accomplish this, F.D.R. proposed to call an immedi-
ate special session of the Congress, then declare a national

Amazing Hundred Days 229

bank holiday that is, to close all the banks in the country so
that no more would fall to the gathering panic of bank runs.
The President also planned to invoke a forgotten provision of
a wartime act known as "trading with the enemy." This act
had never been repealed. Under its provisions, a President had
the right to control gold, which was by now being hoarded at a
frightening rate because people were instinctively afraid of
paper money.

The special session was called for Thursday, March 9, and
William H. Woodin, the new Secretary of the Treasury, a mar-
velous guitar-playing imp of a man with an extraordinary sense
of humor and courage far in excess of his physical frailty,
promised faithfully to have the emergency banking measure
written up in time for Congressional action. Woodin began
working on it half an hour after the inauguration on Saturday.
He worked at it for three days and nights without much sleep
and almost no food, which held little interest for him even in
normal circumstances.

On Sunday, after lunch, the new Cabinet met. Within four
hours, Roosevelt issued the first two of many emergency meas-
ures designed to thaw the icy grasp of fear in which Amer-
ica's hope was encased. Before sundown Sunday, a special
session had been summoned and, more important because it
bought a week's precious time, the bank holiday had been
proclaimed.

To their credit, Hoover's departing bank experts stayed on
to help. Ogden Mills, Woodin's predecessor, told the group of
financial brains who now assembled in the Treasury to produce
a workable program to save the nation's banks and, said Mills,
"if they can't, let the President and Mr. Woodin tell us to get
the devil out of here and get some men who can/' 5 Raymond
Moley put it best: "We'd forgotten to be Republicans or Demo-
crats. We were just a bunch of men trying to save the banking
system."

Since Moley had been one of the chief brain trusters during
the campaign and was now Assistant Secretary under Woodin

5. From personal conversation with Ogden Mills soon after the crisis
week.

FHANKLIN ROOSEVELT S

who was himself the bogyman of "socialism" the first
moments of the New Deal in office appeared pretty silly all
around. From an objective point of view, Franklin D. Roose-
velt's early, initial steps in the remarkable "Hundred Days"
could not nave been closer to the tenets of free enterprise
capitalism if Adam Smith himself had taken them. It was by
common necessity a national crusade, with the temper of
America similar in many respects to that in wartime nonparti-
sanship. The banking system was at the core of capitalism
and its present trauma affected every nerve and muscle of an
American economy indisposed to radical measures.

Many progressives felt there was now a golden opportunity
to create the first true national banking system the country
had ever had. Senators Costigan of Colorado and La Follette of
Wisconsin paid a White House call the night before the special
session opened and begged the new President to go all the
way while he had the chance. Most of Congress was convinced
that the New Deal would, then and there, seize such a golden
opportunity. Senator Cutting of New Mexico believed that a
national bank could have been proclaimed without a word of
protest and the frustrating decades of progressive hope might
at that very moment have been consummated. But, La Follette
said afterward, Roosevelt's mind was made up and could not
be changed. He stilled his visitors: That isn't necessary at
all. I've just had every assurance of cooperation from the
bankers/'

These aren't the words of an apostate flirting with opportune
radicalism. They are the words of a man born to capitalistic
free enterprise and loath to rend it or toss it overboard without
a better substitute. They give an entirely different picture of
Franklin D. Roosevelt from the admittedly biased editorial
pages of Ms time. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., says of this amazing
period of the bank holiday: 6 "The very moneychangers, whose
flight from their high seats in the temple the President had
so grandiloquently proclaimed in his Inaugural address, were
now swarming through the corridors of the Treasury."

6. Arthur M. ScHesinger, Jr., The Coming of the New Deal (Boston,
Houghton Miffiin Company, 1959), p. 5.

Amazing Hundred Days 231

What the bank holiday did was far more than halt a run on
what was left of the country's deposits. It was as though the
week without banks put a period after the word "panic/' By
the end of three days, few Americans could or would change
a twenty-dollar bill and nobody seemed to care. The country
was in becoming holiday mood. Fear was disappearing. It was
as though a great weight had been lifted. Psychologically
nothing else would have worked as well.

The bank holiday closed the door on the ugly past. When the
banks reopened the following week, it was as though an ex-
pert new driver were behind the wheel, which truth was to
be made crystal clear to all by summertime. A newsman from
the New York Herald Tribune went in to see Woodin the
night before Congress was to convene. He asked the Secretary
of the Treasury if the new banking bill were finished. The Sec-
retary was sitting on the front edge of his desk, strumming
his guitar and singing in a squeaky croak, because he'd had
little or no sleep for half a week.

"The bill is finished/ said the musical Secretary, swinging
his legs in rhythm, "and my name is Bill, and I'm finished
too."

The following noon the special Congress assembled, less
than one week after inauguration. Only one copy of Mr.
Woodin's bill was available. There had been no time to print
it, for Roosevelt was making pencil corrections right up to
noon.

By unanimous consent, House debate was limited to one
hour. At 4:00 P.M. the measure passed unanimously without a
roll call. Scarcely a handful of those present had seen the bill
and almost no one really comprehended it. In the Senate,
windy Huey Long from Louisiana pressed for amendments and
was shouted down. At 7:30 P.M., by a vote of 73 to 7, the most
remarkable piece of quick banking legislation in U. S. history
was passed. It was immediately motorcycled to the White
House, where it was promptly signed in the fading light of the
same afternoon in which it had been born, a truly remarkable
tribute to the democratic process under stress.

It was thought better to let the public adjust to the new

FKANKLIN KOOSEVELT S

measure over the weekend, so the banks didn't open on Friday,
March 10, but on Monday, March 13. There was an orderly,
almost festive air to business that day; and from then on the
circulation of the body financial improved in geometric pro-
portion, with consequent improvement in business as icy fear
melted. The danger of total panic had been averted. The new
President, thought by many to be more radical than any since
Jackson, had done it with old-fashioned capitalistic methods.
But he had also done it with a sure legislative hand. He was
a man in control. Here was a steerer, an accomplishes not a
drifter or bright but vague wisher.

New Deal strategists had first proposed that the special
session of Congress be summoned to liquidate the banking
emergency only, then sent home. But the new-found spirit of
accomplishment, the momentum and eagerness already plainly
exciting the nation seemed to the new resident of the White
House too great an opportunity, too exhilarating a forward
motion to waste.

For one thing, F.D.R. had pledged during the election cam-
paign to cut all Federal expenditures by 25 per cent in order to
help revive the fading American economy. Led by the Scotch-
blooded budget director, Lewis W. Douglas, Roosevelt now
sought to balance the budget, badly dislocated by the "spend-
thrift Hoover," who had taken emergency steps to prime the
economic pump and get the stream of U. S. currency moving
again. Roosevelt said, perhaps prophetically: "Too often in
history liberal governments have been wrecked on the rocks
of loose fiscal policy."

Within a week, against the strongest left-wing liberal oppo-
sition in Congress, Roosevelt's budget was balanced, largely
through reduction of veterans' pensions, salary cuts of 25 per
cent for all Congressmen and other Federal employees, and
trimming of every frill and frosting from the Federal cake.
Since left-wing liberal Senators in particular owed many a
political obligation to the powerful veterans' and civil service
lobbies, as well as to union labor, a 25 per cent salary cut was
not taken lying down and the wonder is it went through at all.

But F.D.R. won his point, and in the end cut $510,000,000

Amazing Hundred Days 233

from Federal expenses and balanced the budget. This was
done largely on the passionate urging of economy-minded Lew
Douglas, who had accomplished this unique balancing act
without any increase in taxes. Roosevelt said to Moley: "In
twelve years hell be a good Democratic candidate for Presi-
dent." But by the end of twelve years both budget balancing
and Lew Douglas were dead issues and Moley was an anti-
New Deal columnist.

The second Sunday of the Roosevelt Administration found
chief magician Louis McHenry Howe and the President sipping
their coffee and chain-smoking in an atmosphere of badinage
at their evening meal. Suddenly Roosevelt looked at his friend,
the political wizard who as much as any other man had made
F.D.R. President of the United States, and said: "I think, Louis,
this would be a good time for beer." Howe snorted in delight,
left the table, returned with a copy of the Democratic cam-
paign platform, and between them they then and there wrote
on the dining-room table a brief message to Congress favoring
immediate modification of the Volstead Act to legalize light
wines and beer.

The following morning, Monday, March 13, the special ses-
sion of Congress received the beer message. On Tuesday, ig-
noring a covey from the Woman's Christian Temperance Union
and the Anti-Saloon League, the House voted for beer with
3.2 per cent alcoholic content. ( Some German beers approach
10 per cent alcohol by volume, but the avid American public
didn't remember and didn't care anyway, so long as it had
something legal to slake its long thirst. ) The Senate agreed on
Thursday, with only a pretense of a hearing for the Dry lobby.
Within a week's time, the two most powerful lobbies on The
Hill the veterans and the prohibitionists had been utterly
routed by this increasingly incredible New Deal.

It was little wonder that a new Treasury bond issue was
oversubscribed before lunch time the next day. Nor was it
amazing that the nation's security and commodity markets in
Wall Street, where the vast trouble had first started, immedi-
ately showed a pronounced bullish mood on reopening follow-
ing the bank holiday hiatus. Confidence and buoyance were

FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT S

contagious throughout the land. Banks were for the first time in
months taking in more money than was being withdrawn. The
disastrous runs and danger of new runs had all but ceased.
Walter Lippmann could write: 7 "At the beginning of March
the country was in such a state of confused desperation that
it would have followed almost any leader anywhere he chose
to go. In one week, the nation, which had lost confidence in
everything and everybody, has regained confidence in the gov-
ernment itself."

The President added the open press conference and the
fireside chat to his widening techniques, speaking directly to
the people as he had to the Congress. The press conference
was an amazing idea in itself. Up to then there had usually
been the traditional "White House spokesman" who stood
between newspapermen and the President. Now only a desk
cluttered with mementos, most of them marine, some of them
boyish, stood between them.

F.D.R. told his first White House news conference of more
than 100 excited newsmen that he had been warned that what
he was about to try would be impossible, but he was going
to try it just the same. The first news conference came during
the banking crisis, on the eve of the opening of the special
session. It was so fresh, so frank, so friendly, such a break
with precedent, such a step toward true democratic give and
take, that when it was over the hardened news people broke
into sharp, spontaneous applause. As an institution, the presi-
dential press conference was here to stay.

Then, on Sunday night, March 12, the President gave the
entire nation the first of his fireside chats by radio. It was an
explanation in amazingly simple language of the bank crisis,
why it had happened, why the banks had been closed, why they
were being opened. Will Rogers said that F.D.R. made every-
body understand the highly complicated subject, "even the
bankers." Republicans who had feared F.D.R. now sent him
ecstatic letters and telegrams. Hearst wrote: "I guess at your
next election we will make it unanimous I" A New York Times
reporter wrote: "There is no more resemblance between the

7. "Review of Reviews,** May, 1933.

Amazing Hundred Days 235

citadel of aloofness Mr. Hoover built and the friendly, welcom-
ing air of the executive offices now than there would be be-
tween a formal embassy tea and old-home week at Hyde
Park" 8

The fireside chats were an immediate success because Roose-
velt was an absolute master of public speaking technique, par-
ticularly radio technique. He projected. He was a pleasure to
listen to. He put complex things into plain language. He was
thoroughly at home in front of a microphone, the first and only
contemporary to be so, for Truman and Eisenhower never
mastered either radio or TV delivery, and radio broadcasting
absolutey petrified Hoover.

But the most striking contrast was between the Hoover
approach and Roosevelt's to the bonus veterans in Anacostia.
Hoover had sent the army. Roosevelt sent his wife. The vet-
erans were offered three meals a day; dentists and doctors
came and ministered to them; the President saw their delega-
tions; a large convention tent was put up by F.D.R. for their
meetings; and Louis Howe drove Eleanor out there one muddy
afternoon and, after a long walk through shin-deep mud, Mrs.
R. led them in the singing of "There's a Long Long Trail a-
Winding," though of recent presidential wives she had the poor-
est musical ear. Within ten days, most of the Bonus Army had
been absorbed into the Civilian Conservation Corps and
Roosevelt's skill at handling difficult situations was once again
crystal clear.

But the most important point of all was that what Roosevelt
had done legislatively he had done through existing Constitu-
tional means. Hamilton Fish, no left-wing liberal, called the
Roosevelt Administration "an American dictatorship based on
the consent of the governed without any violation of indi-
vidual liberty or human rights/' He could not have defined
F.D.R.'s metier more clearly. Here was a President using
the Presidency in a new way. Here was a Chief Executive who
seemed to be saying to the duly elected representatives of the
people: "I ask for dictatorial powers never before granted in
peacetime. I ask for them because this isn't any ordinary,

8. New York Times, March 19, 1933.

FRANKLIN KOOSEVELT S

routine adversary this is The Great Depression, and we must
use extraordinary measures to reduce it/*

Up to mid-March, the President had done nothing at all
along the lines of the New Deal reforms he had hinted at dur-
ing his campaign. On Thursday, March 16, however, less than
two weeks after his inauguration, Roosevelt asked the Congress
for a new Federal concept for the American farmer national
planning for U. S. agriculture.

This was but the first of a long series of fundamental changes
in the American economic system and the government's role of
prying into the private business, even the private lives, of its
citizens. As T.R. had felt, it was the government's business to
step in when a company got too big for its breeches, so F.D.R.
opened now the greatest barrage in U. S. history on capitalistic
license and snobbery. The great agricultural planning reorgan-
ization was simply the first, and it was a shock to many a
conservative when it came.

With this and other impending New Deal reform and plan-
ning measures came a kind of public servant wholly new to the
Capitol. Hard times had made available tremendous pools of
talent in law, engineering, and education men who operated
at the theoretical level of thought. Government had seldom
wanted them before; now it needed them by the thousands to
help blaze the New Deal's wilderness trails and by the thou-
sands they came. Arthur Schlesinger says: "Each prominent
New Dealer acted as his own employment agency," and Wash-
ington was soon bubbling with intellectual ability and bright
young minds the like of which it hadn't seen since the Jack-
sonian revolution.

Washington had never seemed to be much like a real city,
said Anne O'Hare McCormick of the New Jork Times. Now
it had been "annexed to the United States." Raymond Tucker
wrote in Colliers: "They [the New Dealers] have transformed
it from a placid, leisurely Southern town, with frozen faces and
customs, into a gay, breezy, sophisticated and metropolitan
center." Arthur Krock found this bright, merry group of sing-

g, "National Air," Collier's, 93:22 (January 27, 1934).

Amazing Hundred Days 237

ing, drinking, uninhibited public servants 'Tiearty eaters and
colossal workers." Krock also wrote what everyone In Wash-
ington soon knew: "The President is the boss, the dynamo,
the works." 10

F.D.R. had been inaugurated on Saturday, March 4. Between
that hour and the adjournment of the Seventy-third Congress
on June 16, 1933, the people and their elected legislators had
been subjected to an unceasing barrage of fresh ideas from
the President of the United States, the like of which had never
been seen before in Washington. In the fantastic Hundred
Days of the special session, both houses of Congress were sent
legislation so radical in concept that even now their ready
accomplishment defines the unbelievable.

Many at the policy-making levels of the nation, especially on
the liberal-progressive side of political thought, had known
Franklin Delano Roosevelt all his adult life and thought they
had his measure. They were mistaken, and they did not hesi-
tate to say so. For in the incredible Hundred Days this same
Roosevelt they thought they knew had made ten major
speeches, sent fifteen legislative messages to Congress, and
received for signature in record time fifteen pieces of major
legislation almost precisely as he had demanded them.

Had he been a dictator, his will could not in a hundred days
have been more perfectly accomplished. He was using the
Presidency for the first time as the powerful instrument some
of the nation's founders had foreseen it a century and a half
before.

Raymond Moley, who was there, says it was a trying time,
however, for subordinates. 11

None of us close to FDR lived normal lives. Confusion,
haste, the dread of making mistakes, the consciousness of
responsibility for the economic well-being of millions of
people made mortal inroads on the health of some of us,
like Rill Woodin and Joe Robinson (who soon died), and
left the rest of us ready to snap at our own images in the

10. New York Times, March 12, 1933.

11. Raymond Moley, After Seven Years (New York, Harper and
Brothers, 1939), p. 191.

FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT S

mirror. Only Roosevelt preserved the air of a man who'd
found a happy way of life.

Moley adds that there was **a vastly greater amount of give-
and-take in his attitude toward the 'Hundred Days' Congress
than the country realized." And it is nonsense to suppose that
as sensitive a human being as FranHin D. Roosevelt did not
lose sleep on occasion when he considered what he alone had
done to his country and what fantastic powers he had now
accepted as virtual dictator of the economic system.

For, in the course of just over three months, the President's
"rubber stamp Congress" passed the following major measures:

March 9: Emergency Banking Act

March 16: Legalized beer

March 2,0: Government Economy Act

March 31: Civilian Conservation Corps

April 19: Abandoned gold standard

May 12: Agricultural Adjustment Act

May 12: Emergency Farm Mortgage Act

May 12: Federal Emergency Relief Act

May 18: Tennessee Valley Authority Act

May 27: Truth-in-Securities Act

June 13: Home Owners Loan Act

June 16: National Industrial Recovery Act

June 16: Glass-Steagall Ranking Act

June 16: Farm Credit Act

June 16: Railroad Coordination Act

Roosevelt bad repudiated the traditional gold standard and
the traditional marriage between investment banking and de-
posit banking. He had regulated stock buying. He had put the
government's name behind virtually all the bank deposits in
the country, guaranteeing them under the Glass-Steagall act.
He was in a position to wreck permanently every precept of
free enterprise, and some would say in the end that he had
accomplished it, to serve his own political ambitions. It re-
quired, as Moley put it, "no neurotic temperament to see that

Amazing Hundred Days 239

these unprecedented monetary and credit controls could be
utilized so unwisely as to throw the economic system com-
pletely out of kilter for the same human reasons that they
might be utilized so skillfully as to help stabilize it.*" 12 Long
steps had been taken toward the exercise of credit control,
monetary control, and the unification of the state and national
banking systems.

Usually in national crises in American history, the power of
the executive has faded into an amalgam of national patriotic
effort in which the legislative has suddenly come alive and
public opinion has stoked the fire quite nicely. This was so as
F.D.R. came to power; the events helped make the man, though
it had to be the right man in the right pkce at the right time.
And F.D.R. was surely the one.

Just the same, there's no evidence that Roosevelt looked upon
his suddenly granted dictatorial powers as permanent, despite
screams in the enemy camp. He regarded what he must do as
a desperate measure and his dictatorship of the Hundred Days
as the best and only means of riding out the storm. He could
not have done it in a different aura or context.

Through the emergency banking acts he had, however, per-
manently altered the concept and practice of the handling of
money in this country and of gold as its god. Through legaliza-
tion of beer, and later full repeal of the Eighteenth Amend-
ment, he began to bring the nation back to its senses in its
regard for law, though the bloody gang tradition engendered
by Prohibition has never fully left us. Through the economy
acts he fulfilled for a time one of the strangest political planks
that could be imagined in association with the New Deal, for
deficit financing and unbalanced budgets soon became the
rule of his long tenure and the stamp of his policy.

But beginning in May all of the quick remedies were over-
shadowed by the first of the great reform bills which had
more to do with fundamentals than with palliatives. The sud-
den throbbing of the nation's circulation now enabled the
President to carry over some of this momentum into permanent

12. Ibid. p. 279.

FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT S

changes that had been coming for generations, among them
American social security measures and economic protections
and restrictions bordering on Socialism long accepted as part
o European life. The first of these had to do with agriculture
and real estate.

Through the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, F.D.K.
now began to conduct a vast experiment in controlling the pro-
duction of the farm and the prices farmers got for their pro-
duce. The President proposed to tax the consumer for the
benefit of the producer. The farmer would for the first time
in history be practically guaranteed a minimum income and
the eating nation would pay for it. Gone forever, it would seem,
was pure supply and demand. With it, hoped F.D.R. and Henry
Wallace, the theorizing farm lieutenant, there would be an end
to the unmanageable surplus which annually depressed the
market at the very moment the farmer harvested it.

Mortgages, especially farm mortgages, were next examined.
The Federal Home Owners Loan Act soon made the govern-
ment of the United States the largest mortgage banker in the
world. It also saved for millions of Americans, farmers in par-
ticular, their firesides and their life savings.

Then there was Federal relief, proposed on a gigantic scale
for the first time. Up to now relief had been a local matter.
Through his nationwide relief program, F.D.R. gave sanction
to the philosophy that the "Federal government must assure
all its citizens a minimum livelihood/* 13 Combined with later
social security measures this giant step was perhaps the most
radical departure ever taken by an American President. Cer-
tainly it was among the most far-reaching and probably the
most shocking to the sentient traditionalist, though there were
many still unaware of its awesome dimensions.

Next came the controversial yardstick for electric power,
the Tennessee Valley Authority, which put government
squarely into the private power business with the taxpayers*
money. Not only did the TVA act of May 18, 1933, set up a
public vs. private power argument that hasn't come near settle-
ment, even now, but it also involved flood control, creative

13. Franklin D. Roosevelt Papers.

Amazing Hundred Days 241

conservation, regional planning, and homesteading for one
area at the expense of millions who would never see or benefit
from its vast experiment. The private "public utility" would
be engaged in the fight of its life; public competition with
private power was now a hideous and seemingly permanent
fact.

But it took the National Industrial Recovery Act, parent of
the NRA blue eagle, to shatter whatever comforting illusions
remained about F.D.R. in conservative minds. In the NRA,
Roosevelt was recognizing the hazards of unfettered production
and competition, experimenting as no American before him
had experimented in the interests of the wage earner, the con-
sumer and, in theory at least, the employer. Social exploration
at such stratospheric heights might have given pause to a hard-
ened President in the latter part of his second term. Coming in
the first hundred days of Roosevelt's first administration it was
all the more wonderful and fantastic. Discretionary powers in
the hands of the man in the White House were now too stag-
gering to be understood or comprehended by the average
voter. Yet somehow they suited Roosevelt, whose courage, said
a contemporary, was "absolute." 14

The Glass-Steagall Banking Act not only secured the people's
money but committed the government to cracking down (an
NRA cliche) on irresponsible securities and promotions, and
regulation of the primary capital markets, such as Wall Street,
where the Securities and Exchange Commission soon became
a financial policeman.

Through the Farm Credit Act and the Railroad Coordination
Act, Roosevelt moved to show the power of centralized govern-
ment in a shrinking world; unification and co-operation would
henceforth replace disinterest and dispersal as national policy,
even after he was gone. The Federal government was now in
everybody's business.

Although F.D.R. co-operated with members of his party and
his own official family and was more keenly aware of the
importance of political mechanics than any President but Lin-

14. From conversation with Mrs. Frances Perkins, FJD.R/s Secretary
of Labor.

FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT*S

coin, his native tendency to be independent made itself pain-
fully evident every now and then. Things could look altogether
different from one day to the next from where the President
sat, whereas they might seem to be relatively changeless to a
man like James A. Farley, Postmaster General and patronage
boss of tie Democratic Party in those early years. Farley
later complained bitterly that Roosevelt did not keep his word
as President and as leader of his party. But Edward J. Flynn,
a New York political leader, wrote something all politicians
ought to read on the subject of commitment and failure to
keep one's word when President of the United States: 15

The office of President, as everyone knows, is one of great
power, but it also has been pointed out that no President can
keep all the commitments he makes. This is readily under-
standable in President Roosevelt's case. He did make com-
mitments that in many cases he did not keep. It is only fair
to say that in most instances there was a good explanation
for this failure. What might be wise to do one week might
not he wise in the next. The President's judgment in such
matters has to be taken.

The point involves much more than patronage and private
political commitment in the story of F.D.R/s Hundred Days.
He had campaigned on comparatively conservative ground;
his early handling of the banking crisis had been along most
orthodox, capitalistic lines. Yet as the special session opened
vast opportunities for him to make permanent changes in the
American system, many of them generations overdue, he did
not fail to repudiate the past, forget his campaign promises
(the balanced budget is a good example), break with leaders of
his own paxty, and, in some cases, replace them with men who
were more keenly aware of the vast revolution that had be-

Revolution it was! A rereading of the contemporary story of
the Hundred Days does nothing to destroy the amazement
one feels at how much was accomplished, for good or ill de-
pending on the reader's point of view, between March and

15. Edward J. Flynn, Jou're the Boss (New York, The Viking Press,
1947), p. 164.

Amazing Hundred Days 243

June, 1933. Walter Lippmann put it this way: "In the Hundred
Days from March to June we became again an organized
nation confident of our power to provide for our country and
to control our own destiny/' 16

A year and a half later, when many an intelligent American
still did not grasp the scope and vision of the Roosevelt revo-
lution, Winston Churchill wrote in an American magazine: 17

The courage, the power and the scale of [Roosevelt's]
effort must enlist the ardent sympathy of every country, and
his success could not fail to lift the whole world forward
into the sunlight of an easier and more genial age. Roosevelt
is an explorer who has embarked on a voyage as uncertain
as that of Columbus, and upon a quest which might con-
ceivably be as important as the discovery of the New World.

This is the professional historian speaking, the man who has
read all there is to read about the past and who will make
history himself in the bloody years just ahead, part of them in
friendly partnership with the same Roosevelt he now assesses.
It is doubtful if, in the history of any country, one hundred
days ever encompassed as many permanent changes in the
fundamental structure and pattern of a nation's way of life
as took place between the inauguration on a misty, cold Sat-
urday in March and the sticky hot June recess day, 1933, when
the great flowering came to an end, though other blossoms
would appear.

Certainly, as Churchill said later of Franklin Roosevelt,
"his life must ... be regarded as one of the commanding
events in human destiny." 18 His incalculable effect on the
Presidency is proved, if in no other way, by the fact that, as
with Lincoln and Washington, the Roosevelt legend is not
based strictly on fact, but on what the people want to believe
of him.

As he said himself, his generation had "a rendezvous with
destiny." No man ever sat in the White House more aware of

16. As told to the New York Herald Tribune Forum, 1933.

17. "While the World Watches," Collier's, 94:24-25 (December 29,
1934).

18. As quoted in the New York Herald Tribune.

FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT

that rendezvous nor more capable technically of using his
office to steer an unwavering course toward its fulfillment,
though to accomplish the end meant asking for and being
granted dangerous dictatorial powers no President had ever
asked nor been granted before his time.

Harry Truman

New Yorker said of Harry Truman that there was some-
JL tiling comforting and homely about his face, as though you
were looking down at a bespectacled shoe salesman in your
home town. That this observation has some truth, no one can
doubt, for the nation's press and radio scarcely took any
notice of Truman during the first agonizing hours of his Presi-
dency. A giant had succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage in
Warm Springs, Georgia, and the giant's equal would not be
seen again. Certainly there were few Americans who could
connect the word "President" with this obscure former Senator
from Missouri named Harry S. (for nothing at all) Tru-
man. He seemed to be an enigma by comparison with the al-
ready legendary hero of depression and war, the man with
the golden voice and the impertinent cigarette, for whom more
people had voted than for any other human being in history.

Time described Truman, when he was nominated for Vice-
President, as "a gray little man," "mousy-looking," "a likeable
plodder," "a drab mediocrity." But perhaps the fiery Truman,
whose father had had red hair and a violent temper, described
himself best of all. At Kansas City, during the 1944 campaign,
Senator Truman had said of himself: "A statesman is only a
dead politician. I never want to be a statesman."

This "drab mediocrity," this "mouse" was now President of
the United States. He was in charge of the war that was almost
over in Europe but had only just begun to turn against the
Japanese in the Pacific. There was no telling how long it would
246

10

Commits His Country to War

take the foot soldier to capture Oriental islands inhabited by
tens of millions of people trained since birth to die fanatically
and willingly for their Emperor-god) The peace conference
Franklin D. Roosevelt had so eagerly anticipated and prepared
for in the Wilsonian tradition would now be attended by a once
party-bossed Midwesterner who by his own admission knew
less about the inner workings of F.D.R/s White House policy
than he knew about Sanskrit. Roosevelt simply hadn't taken
Truman into his awesome confidence, even though Truman
was his Vice-President,

Franklin D. Roosevelt was not one to present a blueprint
of his plans. He still vividly remembered the treatment Wood-
row Wilson had received at the hands of his fellow country-
men after announcing in advance his rigid Fourteen Points.
F.D.R. had, therefore, left Harry Truman little or nothing to
go on over the long course. F.D.R. had liked the visionary, the
idealistic, the general statement ("Four Freedoms/' "Economic
Bill of Rights," etc.) in preference to specific blueprints. This
the new President quickly and painfully knew to his own dis-
advantage.

On this point, President Truman was to write later that his
first three hectic months in the White House were a nightmare
of exhausting policymaking by day and grinding homework
until midnight each night, for weeks on end, in an attempt
simply to catch up on secret, supersecret, and super-supersecret
information the President of the United States must possess as

6*7

HARBY TRUMAN

Commander in Chief of the armed forces and titular political
leader of a hundred and fifty million human beings.

President Roosevelt had died on April 12; on May 8 Presi-
dent Truman announced the end of the war in Europe, pro-
claiming "V-E Day." The little Missourian with the nasal voice
and the petulant hands that chopped as he spoke had scarcely
caught his breath or finished his homework by midnight oil
when he was faced with a dramatic and important journey to
a town near Berlin, Potsdam by name, for the first postwar
peace talks with Churchill and Stalin. He knew neither man
and neither man knew him. To make things completely awk-
ward, Churchill's party was defeated in a general election
back home just as the conference sat down. A new Prime
Minister, Clement R. Attlee, now took the place of the most
famous living man on the Western side. Attlee did not know
Stalin, Stalin did not know Attlee, and Truman knew neither
one.

On the agenda were future relations with conquered coun-
tries, vital postwar territorial claims and reparations, and the
intricate peace treaties themselves. With Stalin, the senior
representative, firmly in the driver's seat, little could be ac-
complished. The best that could be done was to refer all
peace treaty and territorial problems to a council of foreign
ministers; to agree that there should be a public trial for all
German and Japanese "war criminals"; to dissuade the Krem-
lin from insisting on Clemenceau-like reparations from a pros-
trate foe. Most important, however, was an ultimatum to Japan
to surrender unconditionally or suffer the consequences of all-
out war at the hands of every other nation on earth.

Less than a fortnight later, the new President was called
upoii to make the first of many grave and great decisions in
the field of foreign policy. Once again, as so often happens
in history, events were making the man but the fact remained
that the man, however unlikely it had seemed, was apparently
capable of understanding the requirements of greatness when
greatness was required.

On August 6, 1945, therefore, at the new President's specific

Commits His Country to War 249

order, the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, killing
or maiming forever at least 150,000 Japanese civilians. Their
country had defied the civilized world. The Emperor-god's
subjects would feel the consequences. These wholly unpro-
tected civilians were now guinea pigs in the most horribly
potent experiment in the history of warfare, an atomic ex-
plosion equal to the force of 21,000 tons of TNT. It had been
a terrifying, an awesome decision for a. new President to make
less than four months after taking up the mantle of an
undoubted, undeniable hero who could do no wrong in
history.

Seeing that Japan was doomed by the atomic bomb, Stalin
immediately declared war on Japan. His troops entered Man-
churia; by Japanese surrender on August 10 they were at the
fringes of Korea, which was being abandoned by defeated
occupying Japanese. The Emperor had been allowed to keep
his throne but he would have to tell his people, as they looked
him in the face for the first time, that he was not their god and
must not henceforth be so regarded.

Harry Truman pronounced August 15 "V-J Day"; two weeks
later General MacArthur landed in Japan and began an occu-
pation which created the greatest imaginable change in a
nation's way of Me. Japan was altered from hidebound tradi-
tionalism to mid-twentieth century democracy in a matter of
months. It would never go back to feudal Orientalism, and
its women would for the first time be recognized as human
beings instead of chattels. This, too, was a remarkable decision
for the green, untried President.

A decision to create a workable world congress had been
approached at Yalta, the last major act of Roosevelt's life. A
conference had gathered for the first time in San Francisco
on April 25, 1945, and two months later the final draft of the
Charter of the United Nations had been approved. Wilson's
dream of a world assembly had come true; the Senate of the
United States, which had repudiated its author, now approved
his brain child by an overwhelming vote, 89 to 2. On January
10, 1946, the first meeting of the General Assembly of the

HARRY TRUMAN

United Nations met in London to tackle peace problems on a
global basis.

But soon a new antagonist raised its head; its name was not
Germany nor Japan, but the Union of Soviet Socialist Repub-
lics. Soviet Russia had been a great wartime ally. But days
of Western wonder and awe at Soviet courage in stemming the
Nazi tide at Stalingrad had long since faded into disgust at
Kremlin aggression and duplicity. Churchill was the first to
say it aloud. In Missouri in 1946 he talked openly about the
impenetrable "iron curtain" that the postwar Soviets had
erected between East and West. By March, 1947, Truman had,
slowly and reluctantly, begun to adopt a very different attitude
toward the giant world power, once America's friend in battle.

The form of this change came gradually; it came officially
in what history calls die Truman Doctrine. This boiled down
to a policy of containment of Soviet Russia, already making
threatening gestures at Western Europe, the Middle East, and
the Orient.

The President first called upon Congress to pledge immedi-
ate American economic and military aid to Turkey, Greece,
and other eastern Mediterranean friends of democracy. Tru-
man said that henceforth every force available to the United
States would be exerted to contain the Soviet Union in its ob-
vious plan of world aggression. This statement that the United
States would do all in its power to contain Soviet aggression
was the key. Any free people resisting Soviet aggression could
hereafter count on military and economic aid from the United
States.

But Truman did not limit his country to the negative role of
Communist containment. 1 In Cambridge, Massachusetts, on
June 5, 1947, Secretary of State General George Marshall, for-
merly Chief of Staff of all U. S. armed forces, invited European
countries in particular to survey their economic and military
needs and come to Washington with specific, concrete pro-
posals for help.

i. Marshall Smelser and Harry W. Kirwin, Conceived in Liberty
(Garden City, Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1955), p. 661.

Commits His Country to War 251

The invitation, anyone remembers, became known as the
Marshall Plan; it is unlikely if postwar Western Europe could
have survived the Communist threat had there been no Mar-
shall Plan. What scarcely anyone remembers is that General
Marshall had the wit to offer reconstruction aid to Soviet
Russia as well, though Marshall fully realized the invitation
would not be accepted.

The Marshall Plan quickly combined with the Truman
Doctrine to place a very different light on America's new world
leadership, something she hadn't wanted and for which she was
totally unprepared by nature or education. The vacuum cre-
ated by the dissolution of the British Empire, for years the
world's policeman, was at last being filled by the concrete
proposals of a "mousy" President. The Marshall Plan alone
would in the end cost the United States $30,000,000,000, or
between 5 and 10 per cent of America's entire national income.
It was cheap insurance. It worked; and it saved the West from
Communism.

By the end of the winter of 1947-1948, Soviet intentions
were painfully apparent to all. Czechoslovakia seemed ready to
cast its lot with the West: so the Communists quickly seized
control and, Hitler-like, obliterated every opposition leader.
A Wilson-created nation of American friends was sealed off
from the West Churchill's phrase, "iron curtain," daily ex-
pressed more terrible meaning.

On the heels of the seizure of Czechoslovakia by the Com-
munists, a Republican newspaperman in the United States
Senate stood up and delivered himself of one of the most im-
portant editorials any journalist-statesman ever wrote. The
Vandenberg Resolution asked that the United States develop
regional commitments with nations outside the Western
Hemisphere in order to aid in a system of collective de-
fense.

Senator Vandenberg pointed out, in his logical Dutch way,
that such regional understandings and defense units were
perfectly legal under the United Nations Charter and that the
time seemed propitious for such a move on America's part.
The Senate quickly voted 65 to 4 in favor of this unparalleled

HARRY TEUM AN

departure from traditional U. S. isolation and its perennial
avoidance of entangling military alliances.

The resolution had no legal status whatsoever it was merely
an expression of the will of the Senate of the United States.
But Arthur Vandenberg was the Republican spokesman on
foreign policy and, since the Republicans had won both House
and Senate in 1946, he was now senior Senator on overseas
affairs, though the man in the White House was a Democrat.
What this bipartisan resolution said in effect was this: the
experience of two world wars "suggests that the best deterrent
to aggression is the certainty that immediate and effective
countermeasures will he taken against those who violate the
peace/' This could only mean a United Nations police force
and regional defense pacts such as NATO against Soviet
aggression.

The Kremlin, meanwhile, continued to trouble Harry Tru-
man with a war of nerves over Berlin. In the summer of 1948
the Soviets placed a total blockade on all traffic between Berlin
and Western Germany, but the Reds did not reckon with
Western endurance and ingenuity. Indeed, the trickery on
Berlin solidified the Western front as nothing else had. For
almost one full year, the Western powers spectacularly sup-
plied the needs of more than two million Berliners entirely
by air, It was an amazing demonstration of Allied air strength,
technical prowess, solidity, and stubborn insistence on protect-
ing friends of freedom and democracy. But it had an even
more important result.

When the West formally protested the Berlin blockade in
the Security Council of the United Nations, the Kremlin
promptly vetoed each proposal. Few acts could have so
dramatized Russian contempt for justice and fair play. Until
the later revolt in Hungary, put down by bloody force and
duplicity, nothing succeeded as well in demonstrating to the
uncommitted world what the Berlin airlift and its causes
made ominously clear. The Truman Doctrine, the Marshall
Plan, and the Vandenberg Resolution gained increasing stature
in world diplomacy. And, in their way, these three declarations
helped elect President Truman to a term of his own in Novem-

Commits His Country to War 253

ber ? 1948, despite the fact that every political forecaster had
predicted an overwhelming victory for Thomas E. Dewey,
the Republican candidate.

With the confidence of the people now clearly behind him,
the little haberdasher from Missouri plunged with sureness
into world affairs. The first of these creative acts was NATO,
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization formed by twelve
nations of the Western bloc in the spring of 1949. The treaty
obligated its signatories to rearm, to settle their individual
disputes peaceably if possible, but by joint military or economic
action if impossible. An armed attack on one was to be con-
sidered an armed attack on all. The name "Soviet Russia" ap-
peared nowhere in the treaty; it did not have to. Truman won
Senate approval by a vote of 82 to 13 after considerable debate
about avoiding entangling alliances. 2

The first pronounced result of NATO was the end of the
Berlin blockade, which had been one of the chief causes of
the creation of NATO. The second immediate result was a
turning of Communist interest to the Asian rather than the
European sphere, though Europe and the Middle East were
never completely free of Kremlin irritations. This fact was to
lead America into the only war she ever failed to win Korea.

By the end of 1949, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek had been
forced to move the ragged remnants of his Nationalist army
off the mainland of China to the island of Formosa. After five
years of civil war, Communism was now completely triumph-
ant in China, whose loss shocked the American people as they
had seldom been shocked, for the gentle, anti- Japanese Chinese
were traditional friends of America. Communist doctrine now
ruled half of the land area of the world and one-third of its
population. No longer could American liberals pretend to be
friendly to Soviet aims: the aggressions and conquests had
become too naked; and their nakedness strengthened the
creative foreign policy of President Truman.

The peninsula of Korea had been overrun by foreign in-
vaders on so many occasions few historians could remember

2. Washington's farewell address warns throughout against foreign
entanglements, but Jefferson used the words, "entangling alliances.**

HARRY TRUMAN

them all. Korea was the Poland of the Orient; her latest rape
had been by Japan. Now that the Japanese were out of power,
Korea appealed to the United States in particular to help her
to her freedom. At Cairo in 1943, Churchill, Roosevelt, and
Chiang Kai-shek had announced a determination that Korea
should in due course become free and independent. But in
the hurry-scurry of war no formal Allied plan was made for
Korean independence.

The Kremlin, on the other hand, had known exactly what it
would do. As soon as Russia had declared war on Japan,
shortly before the end of the Japanese aggression, Russian
troops were sent to occupy northern Korea, which was con-
tiguous to Manchuria, now in Communist hands. Three weeks
later, U. S. troops were landed in the south and, for military
convenience, Korea was divided at the 38th parallel. This was
supposed to be but a temporary arrangement and it was taken
for granted that all foreign troops would leave when the Jap-
anese peace treaty had been signed. The United Nations would
then take over under a trusteeship until Korea was ready for
self-government.

But the Soviets (pietending to act for the Korean Reds) re-
fused to leave when the appointed day came. They claimed
that there had already been established a "People's Republic'*
at Pyongyang and it was no longer sensible to leave the gov-
ernment of Korea to a UN trustee. Suddenly, at the end of
June, 1950, after excessive and fruitless talk in the UN over
what precisely to do about the stubborn Korean "People's
Republic," these same Communists again took the initiative.
Their North Korean army crossed the 38th parellel and began
a military blitz of the entire nation, in which American ( and
a few other) forces of occupation loosely patrolled the country-
side. The relaxed U. S. troops were overwhelmed.

President Truman was now faced with disaster to the key-
stone of his foreign policy, his Truman doctrine of containment
of Soviet aggression, Already he had lost considerable face
with the capitulation of Chiang Kai-shek and the whole of
China to Communism. Tune even hours might be vital to
the entire future of the democratic West and to United Nations

Commits His Country to War 255

prestige. But there were problems. For the Federal Constitu-
tion clearly states that no President can declare war by himself.
The framers of that farseeing document reserved to Congress
alone the right to declare war.

The Federal Constitution, in Article II, Section 2, states that
the President "shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and
Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several
States, when called into the actual service of the United
States." In other words, besides running the regular Army and
Navy, the President runs the state military when these forces
are involved in federalized and not local activity. And what
is federalized activity? It must be an act involving the whole
United States in concert. In other words, war; war involving
the whole country against another.

But the President himself does not possess the power to
declare war. This power is clearly delineated in the Constitu-
tion. Article I begins with these words: "All legislative powers
herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United
States, which shall consist of a Senate and a House of Repre-
sentatives." In Section 8 of the same Article, Congress and
Congress alone exclusively retains certain general powers
which include:

11. To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal,
and make rules concerning captures on land and water.

12. To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of
money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years.

13. To provide and maintain a Navy.

14. To make rules for the Government and regulation of
the land and naval forces.

15. To provide for calling forth the militia to execute the
laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions.

16. To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the
militia, and for governing such part of them as may be em-
ployed in the service of the United States, reserving to the
States respectively the appointment of the officers, and the
authority of training the militia according to the discipline
prescribed by Congress.

HARRY TRUMAN

It would be difficult to imagine a more specific document in
regard to the declaration of war, raising armies, paying for
them, and training, arming, disciplining, or regulating them.
Those who drew up the Constitution wanted it clearly under-
stood that not the executive (they were inevitably thinking
about monarchy) but the people, and the people alone, should
have the power to declare war, raise armies, and pay for the
fighting. If the Constitutional Convention could help it, war,
the monarchial "sport of Icings," would not be for any U. S.
Chief Executive.

The Constitution goes further. It strictly forbids the Presi-
dent (the elected monarch of the people) or any individual
state from declaring war, or raising its own armies, or play-
ing them as on a chess board, or collecting money to pay for
them. These powers are reserved for Congress. In Section 10
of Article I, under the title "Further Restrictions on Powers of
States,** the Constitution reads:

No State shall, without the consent of Congress, lay
any duty of tonnage, keep troops or ships of war in time of
peace, enter into any agreement or compact with another
State, or with a foreign power, or engage in war, unless
actually invaded, or in such imminent danger as will not
admit of delay.

In other words, no individual or state can fight a private
war, as no President can declare one without the express con-
sent of both Houses of Congress. War is too dangerous a
game to be left to individual whim; the whole people, through
their elected representatives, can alone declare and prosecute
it, though the Commander in Chief will by law be their Presi-
dent.

When the Communist forces of North Korea crossed the
38th parallel and threatened to engulf the whole Korean penin-
sula on June 25, 1950, President Truman was faced with an
untenable and unprecedented situation. The consequences of
a blitzkrieg attack could be momentous, not only in the United
States but throughout the world. The UN was the legitimate
brain child of an American President; it had been phys-

Commits His Country to War 257

ically born on American soil at San Francisco; its permanent
headquarters were in New York. And without quick, sure
action on this Korean crisis the UN was doomed, and Truman
knew it. Only bold reply would now save the United Nations
from sharing a common grave with the League of Nations.

When Truman had sent American troops to Europe to give
NATO a transfusion, when he had vitiated the crisis of the
Berlin blockade with immediate air action which, nevertheless,
lacked Congressional consent, he had been acting as Com-
mander in Chief as the Constitution provided. There had then
been heated argument in Congress whether Truman was
within his rights to send American soldiers and equipment to
Europe in peacetime in support of Berlin and NATO; some
isolationist newspapers called for a "Great Debate," and his
political opponents tried to tie his hands by cutting off the
money to pay for the troops and planes and ammunition. But,
says David Cushman Coyle, "the struggle was more political
than legal/' Mr. Coyle continues: 3

According to the Constitution, the Congress has the power
to declare war, and presumably the intention was to let
Congress decide whether to go to war or not. But in fact any
powerful element in the country may be in a position to get
the United States into a war. Even the San Francisco Board
of Education, responding to a widespread feeling in the
State of California in 1906, ordered that Japanese children
should be segregated from white children in the schools.
This action set off a dangerous outburst of feeling in Japan.
President Theodore Roosevelt sent a member of his cabinet
to San Francisco, not that he had any power to force the
Board to withdraw its order, but to satisfy the Japanese that
he had tried to undo the insult.

The President can bring on a war by taking actions that
are within his power and that create a war situation. Wood-
row Wilson, for instance, protested against British and Ger-
man violations of neutral rights in terms that showed the
gradual shift of American opinion from neutrality to an
anti-German position. When he asked Congress for a declara-

3. David Cushman Coyle, The United States Political System (New
York, New American Library, 1954), p. 48.

HARRY TRUMAN

tion of war, it was too late to refuse. On the other hand, in
1812 the majority o Congress hotly desired war with Eng-
land. Some historians have thought that President Madison
was unwillingly dragged into the War of 1812.

If the Soviet Union had not been instantly and vigorously
countered by Truman in Berlin and Korea, both probing raids
might have been fatal to the United Nations and indeed to
the free world. These were severe and premeditated testings;
had the West been tested and found wanting, as at Munich,
the whole world might have been on the slide leading to World
War III. Harry Truman instinctively knew all this and he
acted; and he alone of all the leaders in the free world was
in a position to do so.

The Republic of Korea was invaded by as many as 60,000
Communist troops, most of them North Koreans and Man-
churians spearheaded by a hundred Soviet-built tanks and
protected by Soviet aircraft, some of which were not even
camouflaged. The first act on the part of the United Nations
came in the Security Council, set up to meet the emergency
of such aggressions. The Security Council demanded with-
drawal to the 38th parallel and immediate cessation of hostil-
ities while more peaceful solutions could be applied.

But the Reds did not even reply. They simply kept marching
toward Seoul, capital of South Korea. They took it two days
after President Truman, acting as Commander in Chief of
U. S. forces, had on June 27 ordered General Douglas Mac-
Arthur to come to the aid of the young South Korean Republic.
The U. S. yth Fleet was simultaneously ordered by the Presi-
dent to protect Formosa and likewise to keep the Chinese Na-
tionalists there from attacking the mainland and spreading the
Korean "police action" into general war. The phrase "police
action" was Truman's, a conscious rationalization of his Con-
stitutional limitations.

Let the President himself tell what it felt like to be shaken
awake from the false dream of peace. 4

4. Harry S. Truman, Memoirs, Vol. II (Garden City, Doubleday and
Company, Inc., 1956), pp. 331-34-

Commits His Country to War 259

On Saturday, June 24, 1950 (it was June 25 in. Korea), I
was in Independence, Missouri, to spend the weekend with
my family and to attend to some personal family business.

It was a little after ten in the evening, and we were sitting
in the library of our home on North Delaware Street when
the telephone rang. It was the Secretary of State calling
from his home in Maryland.

"Mr. President," said Dean Acheson, "I have very serious
news. The North Koreans have invaded South Korea."

My first reaction was that I must get back to the capital,
and I told Acheson so. He explained, however, that details
were not yet available and that he thought I need not rush
back until he called me again with further information. In
the meantime, he suggested to me that we should ask the
United Nations Security Council to hold a meeting at once
and declare that an act of aggression had been committed
against the Republic of Korea. I told him that I agreed and
asked him to request immediately a special meeting of the
Security Council, and he said he would call me to report
again the following morning, or sooner if there was more
information on the events in Korea.

Acheson's next call came through around eleven-thirty
Sunday morning, just as we were getting ready to sit down
to an early Sunday dinner. Acheson reported that the U.N.
Security Council had been called into emergency session.
Additional reports had been received from Korea, and there
was no doubt that an all-out invasion was under way there.
The Security Council, Acheson said, would probably call
for a cease-fire, but in view of the complete disregard the
North Koreans and their big allies had shown for die U.N.
in the past, we had to expect that the U.N. order would be
ignored. Some decision would have to be made at once as
to the degree of aid or encouragement which our govern-
ment was willing to extend to the Republic of Korea.

I asked Acheson to get together with the Service Secre-
taries and the Chiefs of Staff and start working on recom-
mendations for me when I got back. Defense Secretary Louis
Johnson and Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff General Omar
Bradley were on their way back from an inspection tour of
the Far East. I informed the Secretary of State that I was
returning to Washington at once.

HARRY TRUMAN

The crew of the Presidential plane Independence did a
wonderful job. They had the plane ready to fly in less than
an hour from the time they were alerted, and my return trip
got under way so fast that two of my aides were left behind.
They could not be notified in time to reach the airport.

The plane left the Kansas City Municipal Airport at two
o'clock, and it took just a little over three hours to make the
trip to Washington. I had time to think aboard the plane.
In my generation, this was not the first occasion when the
strong had attacked the weak. I recalled some earlier in-
stances: Manchuria, Ethiopia, Austria. I remembered how
each time that the democracies failed to act it had encour-
aged the aggressors to keep going ahead. Communism was
acting in Korea just as Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese
had acted ten, fifteen, and twenty years earlier. I felt cer-
tain that if South Korea was allowed to fall, Communist
leaders would be emboldened to override nations closer to
our own shores.

If the Communists were permitted to force their way
into the Republic of Korea without opposition from the free
world, no small nation would have the courage to resist
threats and aggression by stronger Communist neighbors.
If this was allowed to go unchallenged it would mean a
third world war, just as similar incidents had brought on
the second world war. It was also clear to me that the foun-
dations and the principles of the United Nations were at
stake unless this unprovoked attack on Korea could be
stopped.

What President Truman carefully emphasizes here in his
Memoirs is the point of view taken instinctively by Secretary
of State Acheson that this was a matter specifically for the
United Nations Security Council; that the Soviet aggression
against the Republic of Korea was an aggression against the
whole United Nations organization, the entire free world, not
simply the United States whose troops happened to be in great
majority as Korean occupation forces.

It is clear that the State Department and the Truman Cab-
inet felt from the first that the President would be on firmer
legal and political ground if he moved the target of the

Commits His Country to War 261

Korean aggression from the United States to the United Na-
tions. As a common defender of Korea through the UN, the
United States could justify many adventures, among them
swift military and naval reaction by U. S. forces without the
specific consent of Congress.

On any other ground the President would be going con-
trary to Article I, Section 8 of the Federal Constitution, giving
Congress and Congress alone the right to declare war. With
isolationism on the rise again, particularly in the Midwest,
the President simply could not be placed in the position of
appearing to commit his country to war without the consent
of Congress. The United Nations Security Council provided
a handy, legitimate escape hatch. 5

Emergency meetings of civilians and military were held
every few hours. On Sunday night in New York, the Security
Council, by a vote of 9 to o, the USSR not voting, approved
a resolution declaring that "a breach of the peace" had been
committed by the North Korean action, and ordering the Reds
to cease this action and withdraw at once. Technically, the
UN resolution took the President off the hook, although U. S.
troops already had been in Korean combat by that hour.

One of these weekend emergency meetings boiled down
to an undeniable, outstanding truth in Truman's mind, 6

. . . the complete, almost unspoken acceptance on the part
of everyone that whatever had to be done to meet this ag-
gression had to be done. There was no suggestion from
anyone (both Republican and Democratic leaders were
present) that either the United Nations or the United States
could back away from it. This was the test of all the talk
of the last five years of collective security.

No better justification for the Korean "police action" has ever
been offered by anyone, or need be. As Lincoln had logically
justified suspension of the writ of habeas corpus to save a
greater freedom, Truman clearly saw in quick military reac-
tion to naked Communist aggression "the test of all the talk."

5. From a study of the New Jork Herald Tribunes Washington dis-
patches from June 26 to August 10, 1950.

6. Truman, op. cit., pp. 334-35-

HARRY TRUMAN

It was now or never: from here on, the United Nations would
be simply another toothless League, a Continental Congress;
or It would be a true force for peace and security, a Constitu-
tion with powers of enforcement.

By carefully placing the onus where it belonged, by insisting
that the Soviet crime was a crime against all and not one only,
by immediately placing U. S. troops "at the disposal of the
United Nations," the President could legitimately sidestep the
Constitutional restrictions mentioned in Section 8 of Article I,
albeit no such far-reaching military action as Truman's had
ever before been taken by an American President on his word
alone.

But there was from the first another side to it. Perhaps this
can best be dramatized by the perceptive Congressional
Digest for January, 1951. Senator Tart of Ohio was, of course,
the opposition spearhead. He was a thoroughgoing isolationist
and he wanted to be President in 1952. He could taste the dis-
satisfaction of a large segment of the nation with Truman's
precipitate action in Korea (soon a losing cause) and he meant
to make the most of it politically.

During the "Great Debate,** Taft called Truman to account
for the extent of the legal authority of the President as com-
pared with the legal authority of Congress to commit troops
abroad. Said Taft on January 5, 1951, on the floor of the
Senate: 7

As a matter of fact, he [Truman] had no authority what-
ever to commit American troops to Korea without consulting
Congress and without Congressional approval. He could not
commit our armed forces to the support of the United Na-
tions under the terms of the U.N. participation act which
was passed by Congress, for that act only recognized the
commitment of troops in the event of the negotiation of a
special military agreement with the Security Council "which
shall be subject to the approval of the Congress by an ap-
propriate act of joint resolution." The Russians have pre-
vented the conclusion of any such agreements. Congress has,
therefore, never acted. The President simply usurped author-

7- Congressional Digest, January, 1951, p. 54.

Commits His Country to War 263

ity, in violation of the laws and the Constitution, when he
sent troops to Korea to carry out the resolution of the U.N.
in an undeclared war.

The Senator from Ohio admitted it might be argued that
Congress, by appropriating money for additional Korean ac-
tion, had ratified Truman's executive act, ex post facto, but,
said Taft, "the war was on and we had no choice but to back
up wholeheartedly the boys who were fighting in Korea/'

The isolationist press had been screaming as much for
months. The New York Daily News and Chicago Tribune led
the attack, along foreordained lines, and a contemporary jour-
nalist correctly reported as follows: 8

A second view held by one Congressional bloc is that as
a matter of simple common sense and in the name of unity
the President would do well to obtain Congressional approval
before engaging in any further major decisions of foreign
policy (sending troops abroad). These decisions have had
critical results on a scale far surpassing expectations.

The correspondent reported severe Senate criticism of Tru-
man's unique action. 9

Upon what authority, then, has the President been operat-
ing in the case of Korea? There appears to be but one an-
swer. His authority as Commander-in-Chief of the armed
forces of the United States. The White House has never
specifically designated the exact authority it has in mind.
But it is significant that no Administration spokesman has
undertaken to refute the legal situation outlined in the
foregoing. Queries put to the White House by "The Digest"
have resulted in "no comment" and the only power now men-
tioned when the question is put is the power of the President
under the Constitution that is, the Commander-in-Chief
power.

But even Truman's enemies, and they were hungry, bitter
men, out of power since 1932 and smelling victory, conceded
that he had some precedent. The presidential power was, they

8. Ibid., p. 35.

9. Ibid., p. 46.

HARRY TRUMAN

admitted, a broad one, and there appeared to be no doubt of
a President's authority to send American armed forces abroad
in times of peace on certain "police actions."

Jefferson had done so against the Barbary pirates. Polk
had sent Taylor into Mexico. Pierce had ordered the Navy to
bombard Nicaragua. McKinley had sent 5,000 troops to China
during the Boxer Rebellion. Teddy Roosevelt had intervened
in Haiti, Nicaragua, and Honduras. Wilson had ordered
Pershing to Mexico and had fired upon Veracruz. F.D.R. had
authorized attack on any unidentified submarine that wouldn't
answer U. S. challenges off our coastal waters. There had been
dozens more such acts in U. S. history.

But each of these examples, contemporaries pointed out,
might be distinguished from the present situation in at least
two ways: (a) the enormous scale of operations (10,000 U. S.
soldiers in Korea were dead in the first half year), and (b)
the fact that this was a citizen army, whereas before, the
President had always used professional soldiers who had volun-
teered for military service and whatever police actions came
their way.

"The power to send troops abroad is Constitutionally only
an implied one/' the Digest correspondent went on, reporting
opposition moves "limited by precedent and judicial sanction.
There is no honest precedent for the situation today. So unless
the approval of Congress is sought and obtained, it is difficult
to escape the conclusion that the Executive, at best, is operating
with an assumed legal authority. The question now seems to
be whether one man should be asked or allowed to make the
decisions which the times are demanding of America." 10

The "Great Debate" was joined, therefore, on an issue of
far greater permanence than the outcome of the Korean
"police action/' Constitutional argument went on for weeks
on the floors of both House and Senate during January, 1951,
over the extent of the legal authority, in the atomic age, of tie
President alone and of Congress to commit U. S. troops abroad.
The flowering opposition took the form of the Coudert-Wherry
Resolution, named after a Congressman from New York and a

10. Ibid.

Commits His Country to War 265

Senator from Nebraska, both of them staunch Republicans of
strong nationalist leanings.

The fertile brain of Senator Taft actually fathered the
Coudert- Wherry Resolution. Kenneth S. Wherry was Senate
minority leader (the Republicans had managed to lose their
Senate majority) and even more isolationist than the gentle-
man from Cincinnati. He was happy to comply with Taft's
dictation which sought to put the Senate on record "against
sending U. S. troops abroad without Congressional approval."
The Republican supranationalist bloc saw to it that Frederic
R. Coudert, Jr., introduced a similar resolution in the House.
Eventually they were joined and immediately sent to commit-
tees.

While the committees were debating the Coudert- Wherry
Resolution, Senator William E. Jenner (Republican, Indiana)
launched into the most violent and virulent attack yet made
on Truman's lonely executive act in sending troops abroad.
On January 8 Jenner bitterly accused Truman of having
"blundered, tricked or betrayed us into a war." 11 Congress
must issue Truman an ultimatum, said Jenner, demanding
either a declaration of war against Red China or total with-
drawal of our forces from Korea. The usual platitudes against
UN ineffectiveness ( an inconsistent line in Jenner's case) closed
the polemic. It had succeeded in opening the wound of isola-
tionism vs. internationalism that the heroisms of World War II
had all but healed.

Whatever the inconsistencies of the Taft-Wherry-Jenner
forces in the Senate, the total impact of their criticism of U. S.
foreign policy was to deprive the administration of maneuver-
ability and any great degree of diplomatic sanction or free-
dom. 12 Increasing inflexibility had been apparent in right-wing
Republicans since Dewey's nomination over Taft in 1948. The
fateful (for Taft) last chance of 1952 loomed large. He was
"Mr. Republican" to the country's press. He represented the
"outs"; he also represented a most natural revulsion to more

11. "Facts-on-File," 1951, p. 4 and passim.

12. John W. Spanier, The Truman-MacArthur Controversy (Cam-
bridge, Harvard University Press, 1959), p. 162.

HARRY TRUMAN

casualty lists. America had had enough since 1941. In this
context, any act of President Truman was suspect.

The initial North Korean Communist drive south had been
blunted by a brilliant landing of U. S. Marines at Inchon in
titie fall of 1950. The North Korean capital of Pyongyang had
been taken October 20 and the U. S. yth Division had reached
the Manchurian border on November 20.

But just before the "Great Debate'* reached its peak and
the Coudert-Wherry Resolution was presented to the Congress
as a means of restraining the war-making powers of the Presi-
dency, 200,000 Chinese Communist "volunteers" counterat-
tacked the UN forces. These "volunteers" crossed the Yalu
River and pushed back 100,000 UN troops from a score of
nations, chiefly U. S. soldiers and armor. The Chinese Reds
kept right on going, crossed the 38th parallel, and went seventy
miles inside South Korea before a desperate UN defensive
stand halted 600,000 of them at Eastertide, 1951.

From the outset, General MacArthur had been handicapped
by being unable to use certain modern weapons of war, among
them atomic explosives, and having to avoid bombing Red
ammunition depots and marshaling yards beyond the border.
MacArthur was a professional soldier who did not relish defeat
at the hands of swarming Orientals when his own force was
hamstrung by the gentlemanly code of the West.

MacArthur, who detested Truman anyway, let no oppor-
tunity go by to reach the American people directly through
the press and via friendly voices like Taffs, Wherry's, and the
Chicago Tribune's. For a time there seemed to be two com-
manders in chief in Korea, President Truman and General Mac-
Arthur. It was an anomalous situation which could not go on
forever; Truman ended it abruptly on April 11, 1951, by re-
placing the great Pacific hero with General Matthew B. Ridg-
way. Peace negotiations began two months later.

MacArthur came home in utter triumph. Millions cheered
him. He told a packed joint session of the Congress tearfully
that "old soldiers never die, they just fade away," and was then
the star of a seven-week Senate inquiry largely engineered by
Taft, Wherry, and other anti-New Deal-Fair Deal Senators.

Commits His Country to War 267

In the end, MacArthur was found not to have been insub-
ordinate, but simply to have disregarded the presidential order
to clear policy statements through the Defense Department.

Sporadic fighting continued for more than two years while
peace negotiations stalled under expert guidance of the Krem-
lin. By the election of 1952, Korea was so sore a carbuncle that
D wight D. Eisenhower actually made political capital from a
campaign statement that if he won the Presidency his first act
would be to fly to Korea and "clear up the mess."

On July 27, 1953, six months and a week after General
Eisenhower had been sworn in to succeed Harry Truman, an
armistice was signed and all fighting ended in the only major
war the United States had ever entered and failed to win.
Returned U. S. prisoners eventually told such fearful stories of
Chinese Communist inhumanity and torture that all thoughts
of MacArthur, of presidential campaign promises, of Senate
resolutions, or of executive power to declare war were tempo-
rarily overwhelmed in a sea of American revulsion. Since
Truman had been the righteous leader against such inhuman
barbarism, his cause did not suffer in the long run and the
chirping against him fell away gradually as Taffs star declined
and finally expired.

Truman always felt justified in sending U. S. troops on this
superpoHce action. He said on many occasions that his view of
the Presidency was the modern view in an atomic world of
split-second timing. He later wrote: "The President must have
the unfettered right to be in a position to act promptly when
an emergency arises. He must, therefore, have the broadest
powers, limited only by the Constitution and his term of
office." 13

Efforts to hamper and restrict the office of the Presidency,
Truman felt, usually fell into two categories attempts to cause
him to lose prestige and attempts to contract the inherent
powers of the President. In the first case, those opposed to
quick presidential action in a specific case are often politically
opposed to the action itself. They would be against its approval

13. "My View of the Presidency/* Look, 22:25-31 (November 11,
1958).

HARRY TRUMAN

even by Congress. This takes political forms, as he pointed
out. By holding a President's executive actions up to criticism
and scorn, even ridicule, the opposition can cause him and
his party to lose prestige, and perhaps the next election. As
to hampering and restricting the office of the Presidency, many
American legislators have honestly felt that the President of
the United States should be more of a figurehead than a polit-
ical leader and statesman; that encroachment by Presidents
who take initiative and power into their own hands must at
all times be thrust back into what is, for them, literal Consti-
tutional limitation.

But, as Truman pointed out, the Constitution is a flexible
instrument. If it weren't, it would have little or no value in an
age that has replaced the horse with motors and jets, the
messenger with electronic communication, and gunpowder
with nuclear holocaust. The former President wrote: 14

It is nothing short of a miracle, when you think of it, that
the framers of the Constitution had the genius to create an
office, the Presidency of the United States, which can func-
tion as responsively and as easily in this rocket and atomic
age as it did in the age of the stagecoach, the sailing ship,
and the powdered wig.

Most of the powers that a President exercises today are
authorized by the Constitution. Other powers have been
built up by custom created by time and by events in emer-
gencies met by our stronger Presidents. I have deep admir-
ation for our strong Presidents who clearly understood their
powers and acted to meet difficult situations as they arose.
Grover Cleveland said in one case, "We are faced with a
condition and not a theory." He met the condition.

This is precisely what Harry Truman, the man who looked
like a shoe salesman and a mouse to contemporary journalists,
did when he courageously committed U. S. troops to a foreign
field without the consent of Congress. He was faced with a
condition, not a theory, and he met the condition vigorously.

In doing so, President Truman irrevocably widened the con-
cept of the power of the Presidency. From his term on, no

14. Ibid.

Commits His Country to War 269

President could hesitate to quell a modem blitzkrieg on
grounds that Congress would first have to debate and vote
file issue. By the time such debate had been placed on the
calendar, in the critical atomic equation half of America might
lie in radioactive rains and our democracy with it.

POPULAR AND ELECTORAL VOTES FOR PRESIDENTS

Party

Federalist

Federalist

Popular Electoral
Votes Votes

Unknown
Unknown

Jear Candidate

1789 George Washington
No opposition

1792 George Washington
No opposition

1796 John Adams

Thomas Jefferson

1800 Thomas Jefferson*
Aaron Burr

1804 Thomas Jefferson
Charles Pinckney

1808 James Madison
Charles Pinckney

1812 James Madison
De Witt Clinton

1816 James Monroe

Ruf us King
1820 James Monroe

John Quincy Adams
1824 John Quincy Adams**

Andrew Jackson

Henry Clay

William H. Crawford
* Elected by House of Representatives due to tie vote.
** Elected by House of Representatives (no candidate having polled a
majority).

69

132

Federalist Unknown
Democrat-Republican Unknown

7*
68

Democrat-Republican Unknown
Democrat-Republican Unknown

73
73

Democrat-Republican Unknown
Federalist Unknown

162
14

Democrat-Republican Unknown
Federalist Unknown

122

47

Democrat-Republican Unknown
Federalist Unknown

128
89

Democrat-Republican Unknown
Federalist Unknown

183
34

Democrat-Republican Unknown
Democrat-Republican Unknown

231
i

National Republican 108,740
Democrat 153>544
Democrat-Republican 47*136
Democrat-Republican 46,618

84
99

37

41

271

POPULAR AJSTD ELECTORAL VOTES FOR PRESIDENTS

Year Candidate

Party

Popular Electoral
Votes Votes

1828 Andrew Jackson
John Quincy Adams

Democrat
National Republican

647,286
508,064

178
83

3.832 Andrew Jackson
Henry Clay

Democrat 687,502
Democrat-Republican 530,189

219
49

1836 Martin Van Buren
William H. Harrison

Democrat
Whig

762,678
549,000

170

73

1840 William H. Harrison
Martin Van Buren

Whig
Democrat

1,275,016
1,129,102

^34
60

1844 Jaoies K. Polk
Henry Clay

Democrat
Whig

1,337,243
1,299,062

170
105

1848 Zachary Taylor
Lewis Cass

Whig
Democrat

1,360,099
1,220,544

163

127

1852 Franklin Pierce
Winfield Scott

Democrat
Whig

1,601,274
1,386,580

254
42

1856 James C. Buchanan
John C. Fremont

Democrat
Republican

1,838,169
1,341,264

174
114

1860 Abraham Lincoln
Stephen A. Douglas
John C. Breckinridge
John Bell

Republican
Democrat
Democrat
Const Union

1,866,452
1,375,157
847,953
590,631

180

12

72

39

1864 Abraham Lincoln
George McClellan

Republican
Democrat

2,213,665
1,805,237

212
21

1868 Ulysses S. Grant
Horatio Seymour

Republican
Democrat

3,012,833
2,703,249

214
80

1872 Ulysses S, Grant
Horace Greeley

Republican
Democrat-Liberal

3,597,13*
2,834,125

286

1876 Rutherford B. Hayes
Samuel J. Tilden

Republican
Democrat

4,036,298
4,300,590

185
184

1880 James A. Garfield
Winfield S. Hancock

Republican
Democrat

4,454,416
4,444,952

214
155

1884 Grover Cleveland
James G. Blaine

Democrat
Republican

4,874,986
4,851,981

219

l82

POPULAR AND ELECTORAL VOTES FOR PRESIDENTS

273

Year Candidate

1888 Benjamin Harrison
Grover Cleveland

1892 Grover Cleveland
Benjamin Harrison
James B. Weaver

1896 William McKinley
William J. Bryan

1900 William McKinley
William J. Bryan

1904 Theodore Roosevelt
Alton B. Parker

1908 William H. Taft
William J. Bryan

1912 Woodrow Wilson
Theodore Roosevelt
William H. Taft

1916 Woodrow Wilson
Charles E. Hughes

1920 Warren G. Harding
James M. Cox

1924 Calvin Coolidge
John W. Davis
Robert M. La Follette

1928 Herbert Hoover
Alfred E. Smith

1932 Franklin D. Roosevelt
Herbert Hoover

1936 FranHin D. Roosevelt
Alfred M. Landon

1940 Franklin D. Roosevelt
Wendell Wfflkie

1944 Franklin D. Roosevelt
Thomas E. Dewey

Party

Popular Electoral
Votes Votes

Republican
Democrat

5,439,853
5,540,309

233
168

Democrat
Republican

Populist

5,556,918
5,176,108
1,041,028

277
145

22

Republican
Democrat

7,104,779
6,502,925

271

176

Republican
Democrat

7,207,923
6,358,138

292

155

Republican
Democrat

7,623,486
5,077,911

336
140

Republican
Democrat

7,678,908
6,409,104

321
162

Democrat
Progressive
Republican

6,293,454
4,119,538
3,484,980

435
88
8

Democrat
Republican

9,129,606
8,538,221

277
254

Republican
Democrat

16,152,200
9,147,353

404
127

Republican
Democrat
Progressive

15,725,016
8,386,503
4,822,856

382
136
13

Republican
Democrat

2i>39i,38i
15,016,443

444
87

Democrat
Republican

22,821,857
15,761,845

472
59

Democrat
Republican

27,751,597
16,679,583

523
8

Democrat
Republican

27,244,160
22,305,198

449
82

Democrat
Republican

25,602,504
22,006,285

432
99

POPULAR AND ELECTORAL VOTES FOR PRESIDENTS

Jear Candidate

Popular Electoral
Party Votes Votes

1948 Harry S. Truman Democrat
Thomas E. Dewey Republican
J. Strom Thurmond States' Rights
Henry A. Wallace Progressive

24,105,695
21,969,170
1,169,021
1,156,103

303
189

39

1952 Dwight D. Eisenhower Republican
Adlai E. Stevenson Democrat

33,778,968
27>3i4,992

442
89

1956 Dwight D. Eisenhower Republican
Adlai E. Stevenson Democrat

35,581,003
26,031,322

457
73

1960 John F. Kennedy*** Democrat
Richard M. Nixon Republican

34,221,485
34,108,684

303
219

*** Senator Harry F. Byid of Virginia received fifteen electoral votes.

PRESIDENTS AND VICE-PRESIDENTS
OF THE UNITED STATES

President Native of Inaugurated Vice-President

George Washington
John Adams
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
James Madison
James Monroe
James Madison
James Monroe
John Quincy Adams
Andrew Jackson
Andrew Jackson
Martin Van Buren
William H. Harrison
John Tyler
James K. Polk
Zachary Taylor
Millard FiHmore
Franklin Pierce

Virginia

Apr. 30, 1789

John Adams

Massachusetts

Mar. 4, 1797

Thomas Jefferson

Virginia

Mar. 4, 1801

Aaron Burr

Virginia

Mar. 4, 1805

George Clinton

Virginia

Mar. 4, 1809

George Clinton

Virginia

Mar. 4, 1813

Elbridge Gerry

Virginia

Mar. 4, 1817

Daniel D. Tompkins

Virginia

Mar. 5, 1821

Daniel D. Tompkins

Massachusetts

Mar. 4, 1825

John C. Calhoun

South Carolina

Mar. 4, 1829

John C. Calhoun

South Carolina

Mar. 4, 1833

Martin Van Buren

New York

Mar. 4, 1837

Richard M. Johnson

Virginia

Mar. 4, 1841

John Tyler

Virginia

Apr. 6, 1841

North Carolina

Mar. 4, 1845

George M. Dallas

Virginia

Mar. 5, 1849

Millard Fillmore

New York

July 10, 1850

New Hampshire

Mar. 4, 1853

William R. King

275

President

James Buchanan
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln
Andrew Johnson
Ulysses S. Grant
Ulysses S. Grant
Rutherford B, Et
James A. Garfield
Chester A. Arthur
Grover Cleveland
Benjamin Harrison
Grover Cleveland
William McKinley
William McKinley
Theodore Roose\
Theodore Roose\
William H. Taft
Woodrow Wilson
Woodrow Wilson
Warren G. Hard
Calvin Coolidge
Calvin Coolidge
Herbert Hoover

PRESIDENTS AND VICE-PRESIDENTS OF THE UNITED STATES

Native of

Inaugurated Vice-President

an Pennsylvania

Mar. 4, 1857 John C. Breckinridge

oln Kentucky

Mar. 4, 1861 Hannibal Hamlin

oln Kentucky

Mar. 4, 1865 Andrew Johnson

on North Carolina

Apr. 15, 1865

mt Ohio

Mar. 4, 1869 Schuyler Colfax

mt Ohio

Mar. 4, 1873 Henry Wilson

Hayes Ohio

Mar. 3, 1877 William A. Wheeler

ield Ohio

Mar. 4, 1881 Chester A. Arthur

thur Vermont

Sept 20, 1881

and New Jersey

Mar. 4, 1885 Thomas A. Hendricks

rison Ohio

Mar. 4, 1889 Levi P. Morton

land New Jersey

Mar. 4, 1893 Adlai E. Stevenson

tnley Ohio

Mar. 4, 1897 Garret A. Hobart

onley Ohio

Mar. 4, 1901 Theodore Roosevelt

>sevelt New York

Sept. 14, 1901

>sevelt New York

Mar. 4, 1905 Charles W. Fairbanks

aft Ohio

Mar. 4, 1909 James S. Sherman

(son Virginia

Mar. 4, 1913 Thomas R. Marshall

[son Virginia

Mar. 5, 1917 Thomas R. Marshall

arding Ohio

Mar. 4, 1921 Calvin Coolidge

ge Vermont

Aug. 3, 1923

ge Vermont

Mar. 4, 1925 Charles G. Dawes

f er Iowa

Mar. 4, 1929 Charles Curtis

loosevelt New York

Mar. 4, 1933 John N. Garner

loosevelt New York

Jan. 20, 1937 John N. Garner

loosevelt New York

Jan. 20, 1941 Henry A. Wallace

loosevelt New York

Jan. 20, 1945 Harry S. Truman

PRESIDENTS AND VICE-PRESIDENTS OF THE UNITED STATES $77

President Native of Inaugurated Vice-President

Harry S. Truman Missouri Apr. 12, 1945

Harry S, Truman Missouri Jan. 20, 1949 Alben W. Barkley

Dwight D. Eisenhower Texas Jan. 20, 1953 Richard M. Nixon

Dwight D. Eisenhower Texas Jan. 21, 1957 Richard M, Nixon

John F. Kennedy Massachusetts Jan. 20, 1961 Lyndon B. Johnson

I NDEX

Abell, Chester, 121

Abolitionists, 95

Acheson, Dean, 259, 260

Adams, Franklin P., 75

Adams, John, 26, 35, 66, 185

Adams, John. Quincy, 36, 58, 61-
69 pass., 72, 73, 74

Adamson Act, 190

Age of Jackson, Schlesinger, 68

Agricultural Adjustment Admin-
istration, 240

American Datty Advertiser,
quoted, 70

American Insurance Company
et al. v. David Canter, 49

Ames, Fisher, 46

Amiens, Peace of, 39

Arnold, Thomas D., 60

Arthur, Chester Abell, 121, 122

Arthur, Chester Alan, 98-123,
126, 127, 128

Arthur, William, 121, 122

Articles of Confederation, 18, 22,
28

Atomic bomb, 249

Attlee, Clement R., 248

Autobiography, White, 163

Bank holiday, declared by
F.D.R., 229, 230, 231

Barb6-Marbois, F., 42, 43
Bassett, John Spencer, quoted,

H5

Beecher, Henry Ward, 85, 130
Benton, Thomas Hart, quoted,

57-58

Berlin airlift, 252, 257

Beveridge, Albert ]., quoted, 47-
48

Billings, Nathaniel, 27

Blaine, Harriet Stanwood, 128

Blaine, James G. 99, 100, 104,
107, 119, 120, 124, 129; in
campaign v. Cleveland, 124-
32 pass., 134, 139; as Secre-
tary of State, 106, 114, 126,
129

Blaine, Mrs. James G., 112, 116,
118

Bliss, Tasker H., 207

Blum, John Morton, quoted, 204
and n., 207 and n.

Bonus Army, 224-25, 235

Borah, William E., 227

Boston Advertiser., 135

Bowers, Claude, 224

Brady, Thomas W., 107

Bryan, William Jennings, 154,
162, 174, 183, 184, 186, 192,
206

Buchanan, James, 136, 139, 166
Bull Run, Battle of, 81, 83
Burnside, Ambrose E., 82, 85

Cabot, George, 46

Calhoun, John C., 61

Gannon, Joseph G., 118, 177,

183

Canter, David, 49
Carleton, Guy, 16, 17
Carlyle, Thomas, 27
Chancellorsville, Battle of, 82,

83, 84, 86, 93, 94
Chase, Salmon P., 94; quoted,

93

Chiang Kai-shek, 253, 254
Chicago Daily News, 116
Chicago Tribune, 191, 198, 263,

266

China, 253
Churchill, Winston, 248, 250,

254; quoted, 243
Cincinnati, Society of the, 26
Cincinnati Gazette, 59
Civil Service, Federal, 73, 78
Civil Service Act, 114, 115, 116
Civilian Conservation Corps, 235
Clark, Champ, 183, 184, 186
Clay, Henry, 58, 61, 62, 63, 64,

67, 68, 74, 1*7
Clayton Anti-Trust Act, 190
Clemenceau, Georges, 199, 201,

202, 205, 209, 211
Cleveland, Grover, 116, 124-49
Cleveland, Oscar, 132
Cobb, Frank L, 197
Colfax, Schuyler, 106
Cottiers, 236
Congress, Continental, 15, 16,

18-22 pass., 28
Congressional Digest, quoted,

262-63, 264
Conkling, Boscoe, 99, 100, 101,

103, 104, 106, 107, 108, 109,

114, 117, 119, 120, 129

Index

Conscription (1863), 94-95

Constitution, Federal, 36, 43, 44,
46, 49, 88, 91, 140, 141, 190,
268; and declaration of war,
255-56, 257-58, 261; and ha-
beas corpus, 87, 90

Constitutional Convention, 27,
29, 142, 256

Continental Army, 14-15, 17-18,

23
Continental Congress, 15, 16,

18-22 pass., 28
Copperheads, 84
Cornwallis, Lord, 14
Cortelyou, George B., 169, 171,

172
Corwin, Edward S., 140; quoted,

141

Coudert, Frederic R., Jr., 265
Coudert- Wherry Resolution,

264-65, 266
Cox, James, 220
Coyle, David Cushman, quoted,

Creel, George, 207
Crook, H. W., 112
Custom House, New York, 108-

09, 111, 114
Czechoslovakia, Communist sei-

zure of, 251
Czolgosz, Leon, 16311.

Declaration of Independence,

26, 87

Depew, Chauncey, 104
Depression, Great, 37, 217, 221,

223, 224, 225, 236
Dewey, Thomas E., 127, 253
Dixon, George Washington, 68
Dorsey, Stephen W., 107
Douglas, Helen Gahagan, 117
Douglas, Lewis W., 232, 233

Eaton, Peggy O'Neale, 69

Index

Eisenhower, Dwight D., 140,

14571., 163, 267
Electoral college, 64
Eliot, Charles W., 130

Farley, James A.,
Farm Credit Act, 238, 241
Farm Loan Act, 190
Federal Reserve Act, 190
Federal Trade Commission, 190
Federalists, 35, 36, 46, 7*
Fish, Hamilton, 235
Fisher, Warren, Jr., 130
Florida, purchase of, 40, 42, 50
Flynn, Edward J., quoted, 242
Foreign Relations Committee,

181, 200, 206
Forty-two Years in the White

House, Ike Hoover, quoted,

134*1., I35n.
Fourteen Points, Wilson's, 193-

203 pass.., 208, 210
France, Louisiana Territory

ceded to, 38, 40
Fredericksburg, Battle of, 82,

84,85
Freeman, Douglas Southall, 22,

24

Freidel, Frank B., 222n., 223
Frelinghuysen, Frederick, 126
Frick, H. C., 173

Gait, Edith Boiling, 189 and n.
Garfield, Harry, 197
Garfield, James A., 100, 101,
103-08 pass., 111, 113, 128,

129, 137

Garner, John N., 221
George III, 15, 16, 18, 23
Gettysburg, Battle of, 93, 94, 95
Gibbons v. Ogden, 34, 37
Glass-Steagall Banking Act, 238,

241
Gould, Jay, 104

281

Grand Army of the Republic,

139, M3, 144> 145
Grant, Ulysses S., 52, 78, 99,
100, 104, 106, 107, 114, 127,

129, 137

Greeley, Horace, 96, 137
Greene, Nathanael, 26
Griswold, Roger, 46
Guiteau, 128

Habeas corpus, Lincoln's sus-
pension of, 80, 81, 83, 86, 87,
88, 90, 91-93, 94, 96

Haiti, 41, 42

Half-Breeds, Blaine's, 99, 100,
103, 117, 119, 129

Halpin, Maria, 132, 133

Hamilton, Alexander, 133, 165

Hammond, Charles, 61 ; quoted,
59, 60

Hancock, Winfield S., 101, 104,

105, 137
Hanna, Marcus A., 153, 154,

155, 160, 162, 163, 164, 166,

170

Harding, Florence, 128
Harding, Warren G., 220
Harper's Weekly, 131, 138
Harriman, E. H., 172
Harrison, Benjamin, 101, 129,

149, 152, 154

Harrison, William Henry, 152
Harvey, George B. M., 183
Hay, John, 161, 163
Hayes, Rutherford B., 98 and

n., 99, 100, 137, 146
Hays, Jane, quoted, 58
Hays, Will, 203
Hendricks, Thomas A., 134
Hepburn Act, 177
Herndon, Ellen, 118
Herndon, William Lewis, 118
Hinman, A. P., 120 and n., 121,

122
Hiroshima, 249

Hockett, Homer Carey, 66, 67;

quoted, 67

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 168
Home Owners Loan Act, 238,

240

Hooker, Joe, 81-86 pass., 93, 94
Hoover, Herbert, 208, 210, 220,

222, 228, 232; in campaign

v. Roosevelt, 221, 223-27;

quoted, 196 and n., 197
Hoover, Ike, i8on.; quoted,

13471., i35n., 18971.
House, Edward M., 184, 196,

197, 199, 200, 201, 207, 210,

213
Houston, Sam, Jackson's letter

to, 59
Howe, Louis McHenry, 233,

Hughes, Charles Evans, 173,

191
Hyde, James Hazen, 173

Interstate Commerce Commis-

sion, 177
Isolationism, 191, 198, 200, 208,

213, 262, 265

Jackson, Andrew, 47, 52-78, 114,

124, 165
Jackson, Rachel, 58-63 pass., 71;

see also Robards, Rachel
Jackson, Thomas J. (Stonewall),

83, 86

James, Marquis, 63
Japan, 249
Jay, John, 26; Washington's let-

ter to, 29
Jefferson, Thomas, 27, 29, 32-

51, 66, 165

Jenner, William E., 265
Johnson, Andrew, 137
Johnson, Hiram, 191
Jones, John P., 111
Jouitt, Jack, 55

Index

Kelly, John, 131

Kennebec Journal, 129, 130

Kemey, James, 186

King George III, 15, 16, 18, 23

Koch, Adrienne, 39

Korea, 253-54, 256, 257, 258

Korean War, 37, 92, 258-67

Krock, Arthur, 236, 237

Lafayette, Marquis de, 38
La Follette, Robert M., Jr., 230
La Follette Seamen's Act, 190
Landon, Alfred M., 137
Lansing, Robert, 192, 197, 207
Lawrence, David, 213 and n.
League of Nations, 181, 197,

199, 208, 209, 212, 214
Lee, Robert E., 82, 83, 93, 94
Leech, Margaret, quoted, 88

and n.
Levin, Peter, 159; quoted, 102-

03, 159-60, 166-67
Life of John Marshall, Beveridge,

quoted, 47-48

Lincoln, Abraham, 80-96, 137
Lincoln, Mary Todd, 128
Lincoln, Robert Todd, 108, 115
Lincoyer, 58
Lippmann, Walter, quoted, 227,

*34> 243
Livingston, Robert R., 16, 42,

43> 47; Jefferson's letter to,

38, 39, 40
Lloyd George, David, 199, 200,

201, 205, 209, 211
Lodge, Henry Cabot, 181, 201,

206, 209, 212; quoted, 27
Logan, John Alexander, 127 and

n.

Long, Huey, 231
Louisiana Purchase, 32, 35, 44-

50 pass.
Louisiana Territory, 34, 38, 42,

43, 51
Lusitania, sinking of, 191-92

Index

McAdoo, William G., 221
MacArthur, Douglas, 225, 249,

258, 266, 267
McClellan, George B., 82, 83,

84, 137

McCormick, Anne O'Hare, 236
McCormick, Vance, 197
McCulloch v. Maryland, 34, 37
McKinley, William, 153, 154,

155, 160, 161, 162, 163
Madison, James, 36, 66
Magna Charta, 80
Maine, sinking of, 154
Manning, Danl, 131
Marbury v. Madison, 34, 37
Marcy, William Learned, 52, 64
Marshall, George, 250, 251
Marshall, John, 33-38 pass., 44-

51 pass., 65, 70
Marshall Plan, 251, 252
Mills, Ogden, 229
Moley, Raymond, 229, 233;

quoted, 237-38, 239
Monroe, James, 36, 40, 42, 43,

66
Morgan, J. P., 164, 167, 168,

172, 173

Morris, Gouverneur, 26
Morton, Levi P., 101, 104
Mugwumps, 139
Mulligan, James, 130
Mulligan letters, 124, 128, 129,

130, 131, 138
Murphy, John, 88

Napoleon Bonaparte, 38, 39, 40,

42, 43, 44, 166
Nation, 131
National Industrial Recovery

Act, 241

National Journal, 60
Nevins, Allan, 146; quoted, 146-

48
New Deal, 185, 222, 228, 230,

236, 239

283

New Freedom, 185

New York Custom House, 108-

09, 111, 114

New York Daily News, 263
New York Herald Tribune, 231
New York Times, 142, 224, 234,

236

New York Tribune, 85, 86, 96
New York World, 171, 197;

quoted, 174
New Yorker, 246
Nicola, Lewis, 23, 24, 26;
quoted, 20, 21, 22; Washing-
ton's letter to, 25
Nineteenth Amendment, 190
Nixon, Richard M., 117, 163
North Atlantic Treaty Organiza-
tion, 252, 253, 257
Northern Securities Company,
164, 168, 174

Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson,
Herbert Hoover, quoted, 196
and n., 197

Orlando, Vittorio E., 205, 209

Pact of London, 209, 210
Paine, Thomas, 27, 29
Parker, Alton B., 171, 172
"Pauper's bill/' 144
Pendleton Civil Service Act, 114,

H5> n6

Pickering, Timothy, 46
Pinckney Treaty, 40, 45
Platt, Thomas C., 104, 127, 154-

57, 160, 161, 162, 163
Pocket veto, 142
Porter, Andrew, 88
President Office and Powers,

Corwin, 140
Pringle, Henry F., 158, 170,

172, 176
Progressive Party, formed by

Theodore Roosevelt, 184, 185

Prohibition Amendment, 95, 190,

2,2,1; repeal of, 239
Pulitzer, Joseph, 171, 172

Quigg, L. E., 155, 156

Railroad Coordination Act, 238,

241

Ridgway, Matthew B., 266
Robards, Lewis, 54, 55, 56
Robards, Rachel, 54, 55, 56, 57;

see also Jackson, Rachel
Rockefeller, John EX, 151, 169
Rodney, George, 17
Rogers, Will, 234
Roosevelt, Eleanor, 218, 219,

235

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 37,
65, 77, 124, 141, 155, 177,
185, 193, 247, 248, 254; in
campaign v. Hoover, 221,
222-27; first hundred days in
administration of, 216-19,
227-44; Tammany defied by,
220, 221; vetoes by, 145-46

Roosevelt, Theodore, 128, 132,
142, 143, 150-78, 184, 185,

187, 200, 204

Root, Elihu, 163, 174, 206;

quoted, 113

Rosecrans, William S., 105
Rough Riders, 155, 158
RoyaQ, Anne, 71; quoted, 70

San Ildefonso, Treaty of, 38

Sandburg, Carl, 77, 85, 94

Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr., 68,
75, 145 and n., 236; quoted,
76-77, 78, 230 and n.

Schurz, Carl, 130, 131, 143*1.

Scott, Winfield, 87

Securities and Exchange Com-
mission, 241

Senate Foreign Relations Com-
mittee, 181, 200, 206

Index

Seven Ages of Washington, Wis-

ter, 24

Seventeenth Amendment, 190
Seward, William H., 88, 89, 94
Seymour, Horatio, 95, 137
Sherman, John, 100, 101, 104,

120, 152
Sherman Anti-Trust Act, 152,

153, 167, 168, 174, 176
Silk-stockings, 157
Smith, Alfred E., 220, 221
Smithsonian Institution, 72
Society of the Cincinnati, 26
Soviet Russia, 250-54 pass.
Spain, 38, 39, 40, 45, 50
Spanish-American War, 155
Speyer, James, 173
Spoils system, 52, 62, 65, 76, 78,

114

Stalin, Joseph, 248, 249
Stalwarts, ConkMng's, 99, 100,

101, 108, 111, 117, 119, 127,

128, 129
Standard Oil Company, 151-52,

169, 172, 176

Stanton, Edwin M., 89, 105
"Star route" frauds, 106-07
Starling, Edmund W., 204*1.,

20571., 2i3n.
States* rights, 37
Stevens, Thaddeus, 106
Stillman, James, 173
Story, Joseph, 65, 68, 71
Stotesbury, Edward T., 173
Stuart, J.E.B., 155
Supreme Court, 36, 49, 50, 140,

167, 168

Taft, William Howard, 163, 176,
178, 184, 201, 206, 262, 263,
265, 266, 267

Talleyrand, 39, 49

Tammany Hall, 103, 131, 132,
143, 219, 220, 221

Taney, Roger Brooke, 65, 87

Index

Tariff, Arthur's policy on, 115
Tennessee Valley Authority, 240
Thompson, Hubert O., 142, 143
Tiffany, Louis Comfort, ill;

quoted, 112

Tilden, Samuel J., 98, 105, 137
Time, quoted, 246
Toussaint L'Ouverture, Francois

Dominique, 41
Truman, Harry S., 37, 92, no,

246-69

Truman Doctrine, 250, 251, 252
Trust, horizontal, 150; vertical,

151
Trust-busting, by Theodore

Roosevelt, 167-68, 173-76,

178

Tucker, Raymond, quoted, 236
Tumulty, Joe, 186
Twain, Mark, 116
Twenty Years of Congress,

Elaine, 126

Union League Club, 173, 174
United Nations, 214, 249, 250,
251, 254, 256-62 pass.

Vallandigham, Clement, 84, 86
Valley Forge, 14, 15
Van Buren, Martin, 69, 76, 118
Van Wyck, Augustus, 157
Vandenberg, Arthur, 251, 252
Vandenberg Resolution, 251, 252
V-E Day, 248

Versailles Treaty, 208, 211-12,
214

285

Veto, presidential, 140, 141, 142
Vicksburg, 94
V-J Day, 249

Walker, Jimmy, 220
Wallace, Henry, 240
Walworth, Arthur, quoted, 199-

200

War of 1812, 47, 194
Washington, George, 14-30, 165
Webster, Daniel, quoted, 67, 69
Weems, M. L., 23 and n., 24
West, Andrew F., 183
Wherry, Kenneth S., 265, 266
White, Henry, 207
White, William Allen, 163, 186,

223; quoted, 185-86, 189
Whitney, William C., 134
Wilson, Ellen Axson, 189
Wilson, Woodrow, 163, 180-214,

219

Wister, Owen, 24
Wood, Leonard, 155
Woodin, William H., 229, 231
Woodward, W. E., quoted, 90
Workingman's Party, 66
World War I, U. S. participation

in, 192-93* 201-02
World War H, 246-49

XYZ Affair, 35

Yalta, 249

Yorktown, British surrender at,
14

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Richard L. Tobin began working for the New York Herald Tribune
the day after he graduated from the University of Michigan and
during the next twenty-four years covered, among other things,
every aspect of local, state, and national politics. His special assign-
ments during that period included the famous Lindbergh case, the
meteoric rise of Fiorello La Guardia, wartime foreign correspond-
ence from Europe, and news of the White House, which the author
visited regularly during the administrations of Presidents Roosevelt,
Truman, and Eisenhower. Mr. Tobin was also Director of Radio
and Television News for the Herald Tribune and Public Affairs
Director in charge of its annual forum.

For thirteen years, beginning in 1940, Mr. Tobin was on the
faculty of the Pulitzer School of Journalism, Columbia University.
During the same period he was also a news broadcaster and com-
mentator, both in the United States and in Europe.

In 1958, Mr. Tobin was appointed Executive Editor of the
Famous Writers School, a post which he left in 1960 to become
Communications Editor of the Saturday Review,

In both 1956 and 1960, Mr. Tobin participated actively in na-
tional politics as an advisor and publicity manager for Dwight D.
Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon in their campaigns for the
American Presidency.

Mr. Tobin's former books include Invasion Journal (1944),
Golden Opinions (1948), and The Center of the World (1951).
He has contributed to numerous national magazines and lectured
extensively around the country on current events.

THIS BOOK WAS SET IN

BASKEHVILLE AND CALEDONIA TYPE,

FEINTED, AND BOUND BY

THE HADDON CRAFTSMEN.

IT WAS DESIGNED BY ANDOR BRAUN

( continued from jronr jiapj
opposing almost overwhelming political
pressures of the ambitious and the venal,
the second by dignifying the power of
the Presidential veto, and the third by
using Presidential initiative to control
commercial combines and trusts harmful
to the public interest.

Mr. Tobin describes Woodrow Wilson's
inspired battle to bring the United States
into the family of nations a battle which
was temporarily lost to political combina-
tions opposing Wilson, but eventually
won in America's entry into the United
Nations, He also presents a memorable
picture of F. D. R.'s first hundred days
of Presidential power. And he describes
the role of Harry Truman, who, working
through the United Nations, personally
committed his country to war in Korea.

From Mr. Tobin's dramatic presenta-
tion of our evolving Presidency, we get
a clearer idea of the responsibility and
the challenge of the greatest political
office in the free world today. From his
faithful picture of outstanding men who
held the office, we become more fully
aware of the glory, as well as the promise,
of our national traditions.

The World Publishing Company

CLEVELAND AND NEW YORK

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