For days the Suffragists had picketed the White House with their unfurled banners silently pleading their cause in their efforts to win presidential support. On this amendment the President had steadfastly refused to commit himself, although besieged publicly and privately. At one reception soon after his marriage, a prominent suffrage leader went through the line with her set suffrage appeal all ready to recite to the President when she should be presented. Instead, when she reached him and his wife, she gazed at Mrs. Wilson a minute and exclaimed enthusiastically: “Oh! Mrs. Wilson, you are so much more beautiful than your pictures!” The speech was forgotten in the beaming smile she received from the President, who fully appreciated her statement and, turning to his wife, said triumphantly, “I told you so.” She always claimed that, in the end, the compliment was more effective than the speech would have been, although the next suffrage leader in line was able to say her bit without interruption.
In February, 1916, Lindley M. Garrison, resigned his post as Secretary of War because of his dissatisfaction over the President’s attitude toward defense legislation.
As Inauguration time approached, the issues of the campaign were still sending their echoes throughout the country. The upheaval of Europe was being felt in America.
Students of the World War and its progress cannot fail to be impressed with the extremely difficult position of the United States as the principal neutral power. From the moment the Austrian tragedy unloosed the tempest, in the summer of 1914, embroiling all of Europe, down to the time of the destruction of the Lusitania, the volume of American sentiment had been swinging steadily, though more or less unconsciously, toward a demand that the horrors of the European type of warfare be terminated. Our own participation to force this end was a possibility that was pushed into the remote background of dreaded, unadmitted probabilities, despite the fact that the loudest clamour for continued neutrality found its expression in the campaign slogan of approval of Wilson’s policy, “He kept us out of war,” and brought him his reëlection.
How closely the two great tides of public opinion were paralleling each other was proved by the closeness of the election in which preparedness and anti-preparedness were paramount campaign issues. Neutrality won the election, but it took only the announcement of the German policy of unrestricted submarine warfare in January, 1917, to clarify the public vision of its cobwebs of reluctance and fear and bring the reëlected President, just a month prior to his inauguration, to sound the first war tocsin for America in his curt note to Germany and his appeal to Congress to sever all relation with her.
So swiftly had the succession of events swung the United States into the great struggle that the public accepted, with dignity and characteristic patriotism, President Wilson’s statements—“Neutrality is no longer feasible or desirable where the peace of the world is involved and the freedom of its peoples,” and “The world must be made safe for Democracy.”
CHAPTER XVI
SECOND ADMINISTRATION OF
WOODROW WILSON
March 4, 1917, to March 4, 1921
ON SUNDAY, March 4th, Woodrow Wilson went to the Capitol, and in the President’s room, in the presence of a small group of officials, took again the oath of office, reconsecrating himself to its obligation. The Bible he used was the one on which he had been sworn in as Governor of New Jersey and as President of the United States at his first inauguration.