Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him

by Joseph P. Tumulty

This same moral courage was given free play on many an occasion during our intimacy. It was made manifest in the famous Panama Tolls fight, at a time when he was warned that a fight made to rectify mistakes in the matter of Panama tolls would destroy his political future.

He was always a fair fighter and a gentleman throughout every contest he engaged in. Many unkind and untrue things were said about Woodrow Wilson from the time he entered politics, but there is one charge that has never been made against him and that is the charge of untruthfulness or "hitting below the belt." No one in the country during his eight years at the White House ever charged him with making an untrue statement. No politician or statesman ever said that Wilson had broken a promise, though many have complained that he would not make promises.

In the matter of promises I never met a man who was so reluctant to give a promise, especially in the matter of bestowing office upon willing candidates. I have known him on many occasions to make up his mind for months in advance to appoint a certain man and yet he would not say so to his most intimate friends who urged it. Speaking to me one day about the matter of promises, he said, "The thing to do is to keep your mind open until you are bound to act. Then you have freedom of action to change your mind without being charged with bad faith."

One reason for the charge made against him of coldness and "political ingratitude" was that he steadfastly refused to barter public offices for political support. He is by instinct, as well as by conviction, utterly opposed to the "spoils system." He considers government the people's business to be conducted as such and not as a matter of personal exchange of political favours. Nor can those who failed to get from him what they fancied their political services earned, complain truthfully that they were deceived by him into supposing that he shared their own opinion of their deserts. Frequently they had explicit warning to the contrary. There was the case of Jim Smith and the New Jersey machine, for instance. When those gentlemen paid the president of Princeton University an unsolicited call to suggest that he be candidate for the Democratic nomination for the governorship of New Jersey, Mr. Wilson, after thanking them for the compliment, with disconcerting directness asked, "Gentlemen, why do you want me as the candidate?" They replied, because they believed he could be elected and they wanted a Democratic governor. He asked why they believed he could be elected, he who had never held any public office. They answered that the people of New Jersey would have confidence in him. "Precisely," said Mr. Wilson; "they will have confidence in me because they will believe that I am free of the political entanglements which have brought distress to New Jersey, because they are tired of political bargain and sale, because they want their government delivered back into their hands. They want a government pledged to nobody but themselves. Now, don't you see, gentlemen, that if I should consider your flattering suggestion, I must be what the people think I am. I must be free to consider nothing but their interests. There must be no strings tied to your proposal. I cannot consider it an obligation of returned personal favours to any individual. We must clearly understand that we are acting in the interest of the people of New Jersey and in the interest of nobody else." If the self-constituted committee thought this merely handsome talk without specific meaning, they had only themselves to thank for their subsequent predicament. They found he meant exactly what he said.

There has never been a public man in America with a profounder faith in popular government, or a stronger conviction that the bane of free government is secret bargaining among those ambitious to trade public office for private benefits. Mr. Wilson could no more pay for political support from public offices than he could pay for it from the public treasury. He abhors all forms of political favoritism including nepotism. He not only would not appoint kinsmen to office; he would discountenance their appointment by others. He resisted the efforts of well-meaning friends to have his brother, Mr. Joseph R. Wilson, Jr., who had rendered a substantial service to the 1912 campaign by his effective work as a trained journalist, elected secretary of the United States Senate, saying that his brother in this position would inevitably be misunderstood, would be thought a spy on the Senate to report matters to the President. His son-in-law, Mr. Francis B. Sayre, is by profession a student of international law, a professor of the subject in Harvard University, and as such was employed by Colonel House on the research committee preparatory to the Paris Conference. Mr. Sayre assumed he was to go to Paris, but the President set his personal veto on this, saying that it would not do for the President's son-in-law to be on a list of those who were going abroad at the public expense. When Mr. Sayre asked if he could not go and pay his own expenses, the President replied, "No, because it would not be believed that you had really paid your own expenses." Mr. Sayre, respecting the President's views, did not press the claim.

If it has appeared that the President has sometimes "leaned backward" in these matters, it is because of his strong conviction that politicians have leaned too far forward in using public office for private rewards, a bad system toward which the President's attitude may be stated in Hamlet's impatient injunction to the players, "Oh, reform it altogether!"

My experiences with him, where one could witness the full play of the Scotch and Irish strains in him, came particularly in the matter of the numerous pardon cases and the applications for Executive Orders, placing this man or that woman under the classified civil service. The latter were only issued in rare instances and always over the protest of the Civil Service Commission. In many of these applications there was a great heartache or family tragedy back of them and to every one of them he gave the most sympathetic consideration.

I remember his remark to me one day when I was urging him to sign an Executive Order in behalf of a poor woman, the widow of an old soldier. After I had argued with him for a time he turned to me and said, "Every unfortunate person in distress seems to come to me for relief, but I must not let my sympathies get the best of me, it would not be right to do these things upon any basis of sympathy." Although I stood rebuked, the order was signed. It was a thing urged against him in the last campaign, that he held the record for the number of Executive Orders issued by him. His Scotch nature would also assert itself on many occasions. While I was living with the President at the White House one summer, on a night after dinner we engaged in the discussion of an article which appeared that month in one of the popular magazines of the country. In this article Woodrow Wilson was portrayed as a great intellectual machine. Turning to me, he said, "Tumulty, have you read that article? What do you think of it?" I said that I thought in many respects it was admirable. "I don't agree with you at all," he said. "It is no compliment to me to have it said that I am only a highly developed intellectual machine. Good God, there is more in me than that!" He then said, rather sadly, "Well, I want people to love me, but I suppose they never will." He then asked me this question, "Do you think I am cold and unfeeling?" I replied, "No, my dear Governor, I think you are one of the warmest hearted men I ever met."

And when I say this of Woodrow Wilson I mean it. I hope I have all of the generous tendencies of my race and that I know a great heart when I see its actions. I could not have been associated with him all these years, witnessing the great heart in action, without having full faith in what I now say. No man of all my acquaintance, with whom I have discussed life in all of its phases and tragedies, at least those tragedies that stalked in and out of the White House, was more responsive, more sympathetic, and more inclined to pity and help than Woodrow Wilson. His eyes would fill with tears at the tale of some unfortunate man or woman in distress. It was not a cheap kind of sympathy. It was quiet, sincere, but always from the heart. The President continued talking to me—and now he spoke as the canny Scot—"I am cold in a certain sense. Were I a judge and my own son should be convicted of murder, and I was the only judge privileged to pass judgment upon the case, I would do my duty even to the point of sentencing him to death. It would be a hard thing to do but it would be my solemn duty as a judge to do it, but I would do it, because the state cannot be maintained and its sovereignty vindicated or its integrity preserved unless the law is strictly enforced and without favour. It is the business of the judge to uphold it and he must do it to the point of every sacrifice. If he fails, justice fails, the state falls. That looks cold- blooded, doesn't it? But I would do it." Then his voice lowered and he said, "Then, after sentencing my own son to death, I would go out and die of a broken heart, for it would surely kill me."

That is one key to the character of the man that was revealed before my own eyes in the years of our intimacy.