(signed)
Woodrow Wilson
Hon. Joseph P. Tumulty
Washington, D.C.
This letter reveals the warm personal relations between the President and his secretary.]
He listened with keen attention and then modestly remarked: "I value very highly this tip and you may rest assured I shall cover these matters in my next speech. I meant that speech to be general."
In my ignorance of things past I did not know that the candidate had himself written the platform adopted by the Trenton Convention, and in my ignorance of the future I did not then know that one of the boldest and most remarkable political campaigns in America was to be conducted on that platform, and that after the election and inauguration of the nominee the chief business of the legislation was destined to be the enactment into law of each of the planks of the platform, a complete and itemized fulfilment of preëlection promises, unusual in the history of American politics. At the time of my first conversation with the nominee I only knew that the Convention had been dominated by the reactionary elements in the party, that under this domination it had stolen the thunder of the progressive elements of the party and of the New Idea Republicans, and that the platform had been practically ignored by the candidate in his first campaign speech. In these circumstances, and smarting as I was under the recollection of recent defeat, it is not strange that I thought I detected the old political ruse of dressing the wolf in sheep's clothing, of using handsome pledges as a mask to deceive the gullible, and that I assumed that this scholarly amateur in politics was being used for their own purposes by masters and veterans in the old game of thimblerig.
The candidate soon struck his gait and astonished me and all New Jersey with the vigour, frankness, and lucidity of his speeches of exposition and appeal. No campaign in years in New Jersey had roused such universal interest. There was no mistaking the character and enthusiasm of the greeting the candidate received every place he spoke, nor the response his thrilling speeches evoked all over the state. Those who had gathered the idea that the head of the great university would appear pedantic and stand stiff-necked upon an academic pedestal from which he would talk over the heads of the common people were forced, by the fighting, aggressive attitude of the Doctor, to revise their old estimates. The campaign had only begun when the leading newspapers of the country, particularly the large dailies of New York, were taking an interest in the New Jersey fight.
Those of us who doubted Woodrow Wilson's sincerity and his sympathy for the great progressive measures for which we had been fighting in the New Jersey Legislature were soon put at ease by the developments of his campaign and his sympathetic attitude toward the things we had so much at heart.
No candidate for governor in New Jersey had ever made so striking and moving an appeal. Forgetting and ignoring the old slogans and shibboleths, he appealed to the hearts and consciences of the people of the state. His homely illustrations evoked expressions of delight, until it seemed as if this newcomer in the politics of our state had a better knowledge of the psychology of the ordinary crowd than the old stagers who had spent their lives in politics. His illustrations always went home.
For instance, speaking of progress, Doctor Wilson said that much depended upon the action of the one who is supposed to be progressive. "I can recall," he would say in trying to make his point, "the picture of a poor devil of a donkey on a treadmill. He keeps on tramping, tramping, tramping, but he never gets anywhere. But," he continued, "there is a certain elephant that's tramping, too, and how much progress is it making?" And then, again, he would grow solemn when he spoke of the average man. Turning aside from the humorous, he would strike a serious note like this one:
You know that communities are not distinguished by exceptional men. They are distinguished by the average of their citizenship. I often think of the poor man when he goes to vote: a moral unit in his lonely dignity.