Читать книгу Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements - Frank B. Lord - Страница 5

Table of Contents

Eight Years of the World's Greatest History

Woodrow Wilson took the oath of office as President on March 4, 1913, after one of the most sweeping triumphs ever known in Presidential elections. Factional war in the Republican Party had given him 435 electoral votes in the preceding November, to Roosevelt's 88 and Taft's 8; and though he was a "minority President," he had had a popular plurality of more than 2,000,000 over Roosevelt and nearly 3,000,000 over Taft.

Moreover, the party which was coming back into control of the Government after sixteen years of wandering in the wilderness had a majority of five in the Senate and held more than two-thirds of the seats in the lower house. With the opposition divided into two wings, which hated each other at the moment more than they hated the Democrats, the party seemed to have a fairly clear field for the enactment of those sweeping reforms which large elements of the public had been demanding for more than a decade.

With this liberalism, which was not disturbed at being called radicalism, Mr. Wilson in his public career had been consistently identified. During his long service as a university professor and President he had been brought to the attention of a steadily growing public by his books and speeches on American political problems, in which he had spoken the thoughts which in those years were in the minds of millions of Americans on the need for reforms to lessen those contacts between great business interests and the Government which had existed, now weaker and now stronger, ever since the days of Mark Hanna.

The ideas of Mr. Wilson as to governmental reform, to be sure, went further than those of many of his followers, and took a different direction from the equally radical notions of others. An avowed admirer of the system of government which gives to the Cabinet the direction of legislation and makes it responsible to the Legislature and the people for its policies, he had been writing for years on the desirability of introducing some of the elements of that system into the somewhat rigid framework of the American Government, and in his brief experience in politics had put into practice his theory that the Executive, even under American constitutional forms, not only could but should be the active director of the policy of the dominant party in legislation as well. But a public addicted to hero worship, little concerned with questions of governmental machinery, and inclined to believe that certain parts of the work of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 had been accomplished under divine inspiration, had comparatively little interest in the Wilson concepts of reform in political methods. They regarded him, in the language of those days, as a champion of the "plain people" against "the interests." They had seen in his long struggle with antagonistic influences in Princeton University—a struggle from which he retired defeated, but made famous and prepared for wider fields by the publicity which he had won by the conflict—a sort of miniature representation of this antithesis between the people and big business and they had learned to regard Mr. Wilson as a fighter for democratic principles against aristocratic tendencies and the money power.

This reputation he had vastly expanded during his two years as Governor of New Jersey. His term had been distinguished not only by the passage of a number of reform measures consonant with the liberal ideas of the period, but by a spectacular struggle between the Governor and an old-time machine of his own party—the very machine which had nominated him. In this fight, as in his conflict at Princeton, he had been for a time defeated, but here again the fight itself had made him famous and won him a hundred supporters outside of his own State for every one he lost at home.

At the very outset of his term, he had entered, against all precedent, into the fight in the Legislature over a Senatorial election. Demanding that the Legislature keep faith with the people, who in a preferential primary had designated a candidate for United States Senator who did not command the support of the organization, he had won his fight on this particular issue and set himself before the public as a sort of tribune of the people who conceived it his duty to interpose his influence wherever other officials showed a tendency to disregard the popular will.

In the legislative fight for the enactment of reform legislation, too, the Governor had continually intervened in the character of "lobbyist for the people," and while the opposition of the old political organization, which he had aroused in the fight for the Senatorship, had partially halted the progress of this program, the great triumph in November, 1912, had returned a Legislature so strong in support of the Governor that before he left Trenton for Washington practically all of the measures included in his scheme had become laws. Mr. Wilson, then, was known to the country not only as a reformer but as a successful reformer; and his victories over the professional politicians of the old school had removed most of the latent fear of the ineffectuality of a scholar in politics. In point of fact, the chief interest of this particular scholar had always lain in politics, and it was partly chance and partly economic determinism that had diverted him in early life from the practice of politics to the teaching of its principles and history.

Abroad, where his election was received with general satisfaction, he was still regarded as the scholar in politics, for a Europe always inclined to exaggerate the turpitude of professional politicians in America liked to see in him the first fruits of them that slept, the pioneer of the better classes of American society coming at last into politics to clean up the wreckage made by ward bosses and financial interests. Scarcely any American President ever took office amid so much approbation from the leading organs of European opinion.

His radicalism caused no great concern abroad and was regarded with apprehension only in limited circles at home—and even here the apprehension was more over the return to power of the Democratic Party than on account of specific fears based on the character of the President-elect. The business depression of 1913 and 1914 would probably have been inevitable upon the inauguration of any Democratic President, particularly one pledged to the carrying out of extensive alterations in the commercial system of the country. For in 1912 Wilson had been in effect the middle-of-the-road candidate, the conservative liberal. Most of the wild men had followed Roosevelt, and the most conservative business circles felt at least some relief that there had been no re-entry into the White House of the Rough Rider, with a gift for stinging phrases and a cohort of followers in which the lunatic fringe was disproportionately large and unusually ragged.

So Woodrow Wilson entered the Presidential office under conditions which in some respects were exceptionally favorable. His situation was in reality, however, considerably less satisfactory than it seemed. To begin with, he was, in spite of everything, a minority President and the representative of a minority party. He had even, during a good part of the Baltimore Convention, been a minority candidate for the nomination. If the two wings of the Republicans should during the ensuing Administration succeed in burying their differences and coming together once more, the odds were in favor of their success in 1916. Moreover, the Democrats were definitely expected to do something. Dissatisfaction with the general influence of financial interests in public life, a dissatisfaction which had gradually concentrated on the protective tariff as the chief weapon of those interests, had been growing for years past. In 1908 a public aroused by Roosevelt but afraid of Bryan had decided to trust the Republican Party to undo its own work, and the answer of the party had been the Payne-Aldrich tariff. That tariff broke the Republican Party in two and paved the way for the return of Roosevelt; it had also, in 1910, given the Democrats the control of the House of Representatives.

Now, at last the Democrats had full control of both Legislature and Executive, and the country expected them to do something: unreasonably, it was at the same time rather afraid that they would do something. To do something but not too much, to meet the popular demands without destroying the economic well-being which the Republican ascendency had undoubtedly promoted, to insure a better distribution of wealth without crippling the production of wealth—this was the problem of a President who had had only two years in public life, and most of whose assistants would have to be chosen from men almost without executive experience.

The chief peculiarity of President Wilson's political position lay in a theory of American Government which had first come to him in his undergraduate days at Princeton and which had been steadily developing ever since. That theory, briefly, was that the American Constitution permitted, and the practical development of American politics should have compelled, the President to act not only as Chief of State but as Premier—as the active head of the majority party, personally responsible to the people for the execution of the program of legislation laid down in that party's platform. Fanciful as it had seemed when first put forward by him many years before, that concept of the Presidency was now, perhaps for the first time, within the reach of practical realization.

Dissatisfaction with the general secrecy and irresponsibility of Congressional committees which had charge of the direction of legislation, in so far as there was any direction, had been growing for years; and an incident of the revolt against the Payne-Aldrich tariff and the break in the Republican Party had been the internal revolution in the House of Representatives, taking away from the Speaker the power of controlling legislation which he had for some time enjoyed, and which would have been a serious obstacle to Presidential leadership such as Wilson had in mind. Moreover, the activity of Cleveland and Roosevelt had shown the public that even in time of peace an energetic President had a much wider field of action than most Presidents had attempted to cover, and the more recent example of Taft had increased the demand for a President who would act, would not leave action to those men around him who "knew exactly what they wanted."

Early Accomplishments of Administration

Underwood-Simmons tariff, establishing the lowest average of duties in seventy-five years, enacted October 3, 1913.

Federal Reserve act, organizing the banking system and stabilizing the currency, December 23, 1913.

Clayton Anti-Trust law.

Creation of Federal Trade Commission.

Repeal of Panama Canal tolls exemption.

End of dollar diplomacy.

Negotiation of a treaty (never ratified) with Colombia to satisfy the Colombian claim in Panama.

There were, however, two great obstacles to the operation of Mr. Wilson's theory. The first was constitutional. In Europe the Premier who directs the legislative policy of the Government is answerable not only in Parliament but to the people whenever his policy has ceased, or seems to have ceased, to command public confidence. The President of the United States finishes out his term, no matter how bad his relations with Congress or how general his unpopularity among the people. The check upon his leadership, as Mr. Wilson presently realized, could come only at the end of his term, when the President as a candidate for re-election came before the public for approval or rejection. So, even before his first inauguration, Mr. Wilson had written to A. Mitchell Palmer, then a Congressman, expressing disapproval, quite aside from any personal connection with the issue, of the proposal to restrict the President to a single term. That had been a plank in the Democratic platform of the year before; already it was apparent that this phase of the party's program would have to be sacrificed in order to make the party leader responsible in the true sense for the program as a whole. But that plank had not been seriously intended, and by 1916 the march of events had made it a dead letter.

A more serious difficulty, in March, 1913, lay in the fact that the President was not the party leader. There was an enormous amount of Wilson sentiment over the country, and there were many enthusiastic Wilson men; but a good many of these were of the old mugwump type, or men who had hitherto held aloof from politics. In 1912, as later in 1917 and 1918, there was seen the anomaly of a leader who was himself an orthodox and often narrow partisan, yet drew most of his support from independent elements or even from the less firmly organized portions of the opposition. And not only were most of the Wilson men independents or political amateurs; a still greater stumbling block lay in the fact that very few of them had been elected to office. In the great Democratic landslide of 1912 the Democrats who had got on the payroll were mostly the old party wheel-horses who had been lingering in the outer darkness of opposition for sixteen years past, or more or less permanent representatives of the Solid South.

In so far as the party had a leader at that time, it was Bryan. Bryan had played the leading part in the Baltimore Convention. If he had not exactly nominated Wilson, he had at least done more than anybody else to destroy Wilson's chief competitors. There were not enough Bryan men in the country to elect Bryan, not even enough Bryan men in the party to nominate Bryan a fourth time; but there were enough Bryan Democrats to ruin the policy of the incoming President if he did not conciliate Bryan with extreme care.

So the first efforts of the new Administration had to be a compromise between what Wilson wanted and what Bryan would permit. This was seen first of all in the composition of the Cabinet, which Bryan himself headed as Secretary of State. Josephus Daniels, who as Secretary of the Navy was to be one of the principal targets of criticism for the next eight years, was also a Bryan man. Of the "Wilson men" of the campaign, William G. McAdoo was chosen as Secretary of the Treasury, not without some grave misgivings as to his ability, which were not subsequently justified by his conduct of the office. The rest of the Cabinet was notable chiefly for the presence of three men from Texas, a State whose prominence reflected not only its growing importance and its fidelity to the party but also the influence of Colonel Edward Mandell House, a private citizen who had risen from making Governors at Austin to take a prominent part in the making of a President in 1912. At the beginning of the Administration and throughout almost all of President Wilson's tenure of office he was the President's most influential adviser, a sort of super-Minister and Ambassador in general; and his position from the first caused a certain amount of heartburning among the politicians who resented this prominence of an outsider who had never held office.

Perhaps because many of his official aids and assistants were more or less imposed upon him, the President showed from the first a tendency to rely on personal agents and unofficial advisers. And this was to become more prominent as the years passed, as new issues arose of which no one would have dreamed in the Spring of 1913, issues for which the ordinary machinery and practice of American Government were but little prepared.

For the eight years which began on March 4, 1913, were to be wholly unlike any previous period in American history. An Administration chosen wholly in view of domestic problems was to find itself chiefly engaged with foreign relations of unexampled complexity and importance. The passionate issues of 1912 were soon to be forgotten. Generally speaking, the dominant questions before the American people in 1912 and 1913 were about the same as in 1908, or 1904, or even earlier. But from 1914 on every year brought a changed situation in which the issues of the previous year had already been crowded out of attention by new and more pressing problems.

No American President except Lincoln had ever been concerned with matters of such vital importance to the nation; and not even Lincoln had had to deal with a world so complex and so closely interrelated with the United States. Washington, Jefferson and Madison had to guide the country through the complications caused by a great world war; but the nation which they led was small and obscure, concerned only in keeping out of trouble as long as it could. The nation which Wilson ruled was a powerful State whose attitude from the very first was of supreme importance to both sides. And the issues raised by the war pushed into the background questions which had seemed important in 1913—and which, when the war was over, became important once more.

None of this, of course, could have been predicted on March 4, 1913. A new man with a new method had been elected President and intrusted with the meeting of certain pressing domestic problems. At the moment the public was more interested in the man than in his method; and not till the crisis had been successfully passed did popular attention concentrate on the manner of accomplishment rather than on the things accomplished.

Problems at Home, 1913–1914

One of the passages of President Wilson's inaugural address contained a list of "the things that ought to be altered," which included:

A tariff which cuts us off from our proper part in the commerce of the world, violates the just principles of taxation, and makes the Government a facile instrument in the hands of private interests; a banking and currency system based upon the necessity of the Government to sell its bonds fifty years ago and perfectly adapted to concentrating cash and restricting credits; an industrial system which, take it on all sides, financial as well as administrative, holds capital in leading strings, restricts the liberties and limits the opportunities of labor, and exploits without renewing or conserving the natural resources of the country; a body of agricultural activities never yet given the efficiency of great business undertakings or served as it should be through the instrumentality of science taken directly to the farm, or afforded the facilities of credit best suited to its practical needs.

The items had been set down in the order of their immediate importance. First came the tariff, for the tariff had come to be in the minds of many Americans a symbol of the struggle between the "plain people" and "the interests." The Payne-Aldrich tariff, enacted by a party pledged to tariff revision, had been not only an injury but an insult, and if any American Presidential election could ever be interpreted as a popular referendum on any specific policy the election of 1912 meant that the Payne-Aldrich tariff must be revised. At the time of the enactment of that bill Mr. Wilson had written a critical article in The North American Review which expressed a widespread popular sentiment in its criticism of "the policy of silence and secrecy" prevalent in the committee rooms when this and other tariffs had been drawn up and a demand for procedure in the open where the public could find out exactly who wanted what and why. Joined with this objection to the methods of tariff making were some observations by Mr. Wilson on the principles of tariff revision. He saw and said that a complete return to a purely revenue tariff was not then possible even if desirable, and that the immediate objective of tariff reform should be the adjustment of rates so as to permit competition and thereby necessitate efficiency of operation.

The ideas which in March, 1909, were merely the criticism of a college professor had become in March, 1913, the program of the President of the United States, the leader of the majority party, determined to get his program enacted into law. Congress was convened in special session on April 7, and the President delivered a message on the one topic of the tariff. Going back to the precedent of Washington and Adams, broken by Jefferson and never resumed again, he read his message in person to the Congress as if to emphasize the intimate connection between the Executive and legislation which was to be a feature of the new Administration. The principle of tariff reform laid down in that bill was a practical and not a theoretical consideration, the need of ending an industrial situation fostered by high tariffs wherein "nothing is obliged to stand the tests of efficiency and economy in our world of big business, but everything thrives by concerted agreement. … The object of the tariff duties henceforth laid must be effective competition, the whetting of American wits by contest with the wits of the world."

The measure which Democratic leaders had already prepared for that purpose and which eventually became known as the Underwood-Simmons Act was intended to accomplish its end only gradually. Notoriously outrageous schedules of the Payne-Aldrich Act, such as that dealing with wool, were heavily reduced, and the general purport of the bill is perhaps expressed in the phrase of Professor Taussig, that it was "the beginning of a policy of much moderated protection." It went through the House without much difficulty, passing on May 8, and then it struck the Senate committee rooms, from which no tariff bill had ever emerged quite as innocent as it entered. The usual expeditionary forces of lobbyists concentrated in Washington and the Senate talked it over, while Summer came on and Washington grew hotter and hotter. In course of time Senators began to come to the President and tell him that it was hopeless to get the bill through at that session and that Washington was getting pretty hot. The President replied that he knew it was hot, but that Congress would have to stay there till that bill was passed. Already he had given the lower house something to keep it busy while the Senate wrestled with the tariff.

As for the lobby, the President had his own method of dealing with that. On May 26 he issued a public statement calling attention to the "extraordinary exertions" of lobbyists in connection with the tariff. "The newspapers are being filled," he said, "with paid advertisements calculated to mislead not only the judgment of the public men, but also the public opinion of the country itself. There is every evidence that money without limit is being spent to maintain this lobby. … It is of serious interest to the country that the people at large should have no lobby and be voiceless in these matters, while the great bodies of astute men seek to create an artificial opinion and to overcome the interests of the public for their private profit." The outraged dignity of Senators and Representatives, not to mention lobbyists, rose to protest against this declaration. A Republican Senator even declared that the President, who had been actively urging his views on legislators just as he had done in New Jersey, was himself the chief lobbyist in connection with the Tariff Bill. A Senate Committee was appointed to find out if there had been any lobbying, and discovered that there had. Meanwhile the bill was being argued out in the Senate, and the President stood firm against any substantial modification. It was finally passed on Oct. 3.

It was a vindication of the platform promise and a fulfillment of the duty with which the party had been charged in the last election, and it was a notable triumph for the personal policy of the President-Premier, who more than anybody else had literally forced the bill through Congress. The tariff had taken such a prominent place in the fight against business influence in the Government that the passage of a bill which made a material reduction in rates was a moral victory for progressivism at large, and for President Wilson in particular.

The actual effect of the tariff, or rather the actual effect that it might have had, is something impossible to estimate at this time. Before it had been in operation a year, before the country had had a chance to study the new conditions brought in by the legislation of the first year of the Wilson Administration, the war broke out in Europe. The conditions which had prevailed through half a century of tariff making had ceased to exist. They have not yet returned. A subsidiary feature of the Underwood-Simmons Act, however, was to attain enormous importance in the course of the Wilson Administrations. To supply the deficiency in revenue which the lowered duties might be expected to produce there was added an income tax law, which had recently been permitted by constitutional amendment. Even the light duties of the first year, with their $3,000 exemption, were denounced by conservatives as a rich man's tax; but within four years more the exemption was to be lowered to $1,000, and the peak of the tax raised to tenfold its original height.

So long as the Wilson Administration was reducing the tariff, it was carrying out the traditional policy of the Democratic Party; but the next task which the President laid before Congress was much more delicate and much more important. As the event showed, the result was to be of infinitely greater benefit to the nation. Reform of the currency had long been an evident necessity, and the panic of 1907 had recently called attention to the dangers of the system based on emergency measures of the Civil War period. Mr. Wilson himself had said much of the necessity of freeing business from unnatural restrictions, among which the makeshift currency system was included. During the previous Administration Senator Aldrich's plan for a centralized reserve bank had been widely discussed, and innumerable modifications had been suggested. Democratic leaders were already working on plans for currency reform when the new Administration came in, and on June 26 a bill was introduced in the House by Carter Glass and in the Senate by Robert L. Owen.

It took six months of hard work to get this adopted, but it was a marvelous achievement to get it adopted at all. For a large faction of the Democratic Party, including its most influential leader, still represented the old hostility to the "money power," which regarded the overthrow of the United States Bank as the great triumph of the American Democracy. The Glass-Owen bill differed from Senator Aldrich's scheme largely in the direction of decentralization and giving more control to the Government and less to the banks, but, even so, it was a suspicious document to those numerous Democrats whose economic ideas were obtained from the Greenback and Populist Parties of former years. And it was not satisfactory to the majority of the articulate bankers of the country, who wanted a central bank instead of the regional division of the reserve functions, and who thought that the banks should have a good deal to say about appointments to the Federal Reserve Board.

As late as the beginning of December there were still three separate bills before Congress, but the party organization under the President-Premier held together, and on December 23 the Glass-Owen Bill, with some modifications acquired en route, was signed by the President. The pressure on the White House during that struggle was perhaps the hardest which President Wilson encountered during his entire eight years. Many an honest Democrat thought the fundamental principles of the party were being betrayed, and many a Senator or Representative who regarded the reserve banks with profound alarm felt, nevertheless, that if the iniquitous things were going to be established there ought to be one in his home town. When Paul M. Warburg, a Wall Street banker, was appointed as one of the members of the Federal Reserve Board, there were more protests from politicians who professed to believe that the nation was being delivered over to the money power, while the complaints of bankers who thought that the banks were being given over to politicians had not yet died down. But when the act once went into operation criticism almost disappeared; and in the course of a few months the unprecedented financial strain attendant on the outbreak of the European war made it plain to almost anybody that without this timely reform of the banking system 1914 would have seen a disaster far worse than that of 1907.

The work of "striking the shackles off business" was continued in 1914 by the introduction of bills to carry out the President's recommendations for prohibiting interlocking directorates, clarifying the anti-trust laws, establishing an Interstate Trade Commission, and supervising the issue of railroad securities. The chief results of this discussion were the creation of the Trade Commission, a body of which much more was expected at the time than it has accomplished, and the passage of the Clayton Anti-Trust Act, which exempted farmers' combinations and labor unions from the anti-trust laws, and wrote into the statutes the declaration that labor is not a commodity. The La Follette Seamen's Bill, drawn by Andrew Furuseth of the Seamen's Union, was introduced in 1913 and not enacted until much later. Its friends declared that it would at least establish decent living conditions for sailors, and its opponents, including nearly all the shipping interests, asserted that, so long as foreign ship owners were not under similar restrictions, the bill would ruin the American Merchant Marine. Of the actual workings of this law there has really been no fair test, as conditions which arose during the war unsettled the entire shipping situation.

The domestic program of the first year and a half of the Wilson Administration comprised, then a long-needed and immeasurably valuable reform of the banking and currency system, a revised tariff, which was at least a technical victory for Democratic principles, and a number of minor measures which seem less important in retrospect than they did at the time. The program neither completely unshackled business nor opened the door to a new era of coöperation and human brotherhood, but it was a large and on the whole decidedly creditable accomplishment, and it was above all the work of President Wilson, who had led the fight that carried the Administration measures through Congress, quite as any Prime Minister might have done. He had not done it without exposing himself to severe criticism. Ex-Senator Winthrop Murray Crane, for example, declared that he had "virtually obliterated Congress." But he had got most of what he wanted, and by the end of his first year in office Mr. Bryan was no longer the most powerful individual in the Democratic Party.

Foreign Policies, 1913–1914

In The North American Review for March, 1913, edited by Colonel George Harvey, the original Wilson man, who had mentioned Wilson as a Presidential possibility back in 1904, when such a suggestion was regarded as only a playful eccentricity, who had begun to work hard for him in 1911, and who had finally been asked by Wilson himself to give up his activity because the connection of one of Harvey's magazines with J. P. Morgan & Co. was hurting Wilson in the West—there appeared an article entitled "Jefferson—Wilson: A Record and a Forecast." It consisted of eight pages of quotations from Wilson's "History of the American People," dealing with the beginning of Jefferson's Administration. The reader's attention was arrested by the startling parallel between the division in the Federalist Party and the quarrel between Hamilton and Adams that facilitated Jefferson's election, and the situation which led to Wilson's victory in November, 1912. Wilson, writing a dozen years before the fight between Taft and Roosevelt, had unconsciously drawn a parallel closer perhaps than the facts warranted; and the reader who had been attracted by this similarity read on into Wilson's characterization of Jefferson an introduction to the achievements of his Administration with a growing hope—if he happened to be a Wilson man—that after as before election Wilson's record would duplicate Jefferson's.

Colonel Harvey was as good a prophet in 1913 as in 1904. Wilson's achievement in domestic affairs in the first year of his Administration was not likely to suffer much by comparison with Jefferson's. But it could not have crossed anybody's mind in March, 1913, that complications of international politics such as had almost ruined the country under Jefferson would in the latter part of Wilson's first term expose him to as much criticism as Jefferson, and for the same reasons.

America was still new as a world power, but was beginning to feel more at home. In Taft's Administration, with Philander C. Knox as Secretary of State, there had been for the first time the beginnings of what might fairly be called a consistent foreign policy. True, it was not a very lofty policy, nor was it by any means generally approved in America. It was called by its friends "dollar diplomacy," meaning the promotion of American commercial interests by diplomatic agencies. It had been exemplified principally in Central America, where its operations had not always commanded admiration, and in China, where Knox had made a well-intentioned but not very skillful effort to prevent the absorption of Manchuria by Russia and Japan.