CHAPTER VIII
MY ENTRANCE INTO NATIONAL POLITICS
“CONSCIENCE doth make cowards of us all.” Not mine—mine made me a politician. At fifty-five years of age, financially independent, and rich in experience, and recently released from the toils of materialism, it ceaselessly confronted me with my duty to pay back, in the form of public service, the overdraft which I had been permitted to make upon the opportunities of this country. Repayment in money alone would not suffice: I must pay in the form of personal service, for which my experience had equipped me. And I must pay now, or never.
It was a great surprise to my friends when, in 1912, I suddenly entered politics, and threw myself heart and soul in the enterprise of securing the Presidential nomination for Woodrow Wilson. “Why,” they asked me, “should a man like yourself, whose whole active life has been spent in the thick of the battle for wealth, embark on the untried sea of politics? And why, if you are determined to take the risks of this experiment, do you choose so forlorn a hope, as the cause of the least likely of all the candidates, for the nomination of the party that has elected only one President since the Civil War?”
The answer was as simple to me as it was strange to them. My life had been an intense struggle between idealism and materialism. In youth I had burned with an enthusiasm for the ideal, which had fed alike upon the teachings of the Reverend Dr. Einhorn in my boyhood, the inspiring association which I had enjoyed with a saintly Quaker doctor in New York, the noble messages to which I had listened from Christian ministers, and the austere and lofty ethical philosophy of Dr. Felix Adler.
In early manhood, however, the temptation of materialism had beset me in a familiar form. Shortly after my marriage I had some financial disappointments; and I was compelled to devote more time than I had expected to providing for my family. My intention was to make their future modestly secure, and then to resume my idealistic avocation. I soon found, however, that I had a special gift for making money. By the time I had attained the competency which had been my ambition, I had become fascinated with money-making as a game. Before I realized it, I was immersed in a dozen enterprises, was obligated to a hundred business friends, and, like all my associates, was deeply absorbed in the chase for wealth.
Fortunately, in 1905, the prospect of disaster brought me to my senses. I foresaw the Panic of 1907; and, while others all around me plunged onward toward the brink, I paused and took stock of my future. I began to sever my financial connections. This process of slowing down my business pace gave me time for other introspection; and I realized, with astonishment and dismay, how far the swift tide of business had swept me from the course I had charted for my life in youth. I was ashamed to realize that I had neglected the nobler path of duty. I resolved to retire wholly from active business, and to devote the rest of my life to making good the better resolutions of my boyhood.
It took me some years to divest myself of my business obligations on one hand, and, on the other, to find a practical field for social service. During this period, in which I was “finding myself,” I was attracted to the career of Woodrow Wilson. I admired the courage with which he was fighting the battle of democracy at Princeton. And, in the early months of 1911, I was even more delighted to watch his progress as Governor of New Jersey: the splendid fight he was making there to overthrow the rule of the bosses, and to write into the statutes of the state those seven measures of practical reform which his enemies derisively dubbed the “Seven Sisters.”
“Here,” I said to myself, “is a man who does not merely preach political righteousness; here is a practical reformer. This man has Roosevelt’s gift for the dramatic diagnosis of political diseases; he has Bryan’s moral enthusiasm for political righteousness. But he has qualities which these men lack: these are, the constructive faculty, the imagination to devise remedies, the courage to apply them, and the gift of leadership to put them into effective action.” I wished to know more of this new and promising character. I resolved to find an occasion for meeting him.
Such an opportunity came a few weeks later. As president of the Free Synagogue in New York City, I invited Governor Wilson to be a guest of honour at the dinner in celebration of the fourth anniversary of its foundation. As I presided at the dinner, and as the Governor was seated at my right, it gave me a chance to get acquainted. I found in him at once a congenial spirit, and in that one intense conversation I got more from him than I could have gotten from half a dozen casual meetings.
On my left was the other guest of honour, Senator Borah of Idaho. He and Wilson proved instantly antagonistic. The air was electrical with the clash of their dissimilar temperaments. How startled I would have been, that evening, could I have realized that this discordance of their natures, of which I was at that moment acutely conscious, had in it the seeds of a future battle—an epic struggle, with the White House and the Capitol for its headquarters; the world for its audience; and the destiny of the nations, following the greatest war in history, the prize that was staked on the issue.