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| Roiling the Mid- Term Waters: Recalling Woodrow Wilson’s Disastrous 1918 Gaffe |
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Barack Obama’s controversial comments to the Latino community
on Univision radio urging them towards a policy of “we’re gonna
punish our enemies and we're gonna reward our friends who stand
with us” certainly ranked among the less savvy political remarks in
the run-up to the 2010 mid-term elections.
But they were hardly without precedent.
In 1918’s mid-term elections, President Woodrow Wilson similarly
stirred a hornets’ nest when he unleashed his own considerable
wrath upon congressional Republicans.
And with similar disastrous consequences.
With America waging war on Imperial Germany and her Central
Power allies, November 1918 witnessed the nation’s first war-time
election of the new century. Republicans had largely supported the
war effort. Their patriotism could not be faulted. In fact, some
Republicans, such as ex-President Theodore Roosevelt and
General Leonard Wood, qualified as (pardon the Germanic
expression) “uber patriots,” having repeatedly urged American
military readiness well in advance of the nation’s April 1917
declaration of war upon Berlin. In 1918 the GOP loudly called for
Germany’s unconditional surrender and derided any negotiated
peace with Berlin.
With victory within reach in late 1918, however, on Thursday,
October 24, 1918, Woodrow Wilson issued an open letter to his
“fellow countryman” urging that Democrats retain their majorities in
the House and Senate and suggesting that a Republican victory
would somehow provide aid and comfort to embattled Kaiser
William II.
Wilson wrote in part:
had impugned their patriotism, and many Americans agreed with
them. “President Wilson has questioned the motives and fidelity of
your representatives in Congress,” said Republican National
Chairman Will Hays. “He has thereby impugned their loyalty and
denied their patriotism. His challenge is to you who elected those
representatives. You owe it to them, to the honor of our great party
and in your own self-respect to meet that challenge squarely, not
only as Republicans, but as Americans. . . .
“Mr. Wilson wants only rubber stamps, his rubber stamps in
Congress. He says so. No one knows it better than Democratic
congressmen.”
Democrats, sensing that their leader had overplayed his hand, and
already sensitive to jibes that the war was being fought “to make the
world safe for Democrats” rushed to his defense. Addressing
Democrats at New Haven, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels
only added fuel to the fire, smearing Wilson’s opponents as
“American Junkers . . . [whose] supreme aim is to seize the arteries
of commerce for their own enrichment, to wipe out tax laws that
touch swollen incomes, and replace them by a tax that burden the
toiler, and to repeal or to emasculate the great measures of social
justice which are the glory at the Wilson Administration.”
“In all the world, outside of Germany, there is but one place where
the President is denounced and his course condemned,” Treasury
Secretary (and Wilson’s son-in-law) William Gibbs McAdoo
charged, “That place is America, and the persons denouncing and
condemning are chiefly those whose leadership has been repudiated
by the American people. Their intemperate language and unqualified
abuse furnish conclusive proof that no mistake has been made in not
inviting them to assist in formulating the policies of our country.
“The result of this election should convince the world that President
Wilson possesses the confidence of his own people in the same
degree that he does of all others.”
“If Republican leaders persist in their present course,” warned
former Texas United States Senator and House Minority Leader
Joseph W. Bailey, “they will not only insure a Democratic majority
in the next Congress but they will also insure the President’s third
election to the Presidency.”
Despite cultivating a populist image, Bailey had resigned from the
Senate in 1911 when his ties to Standard Oil were exposed.
Beyond that, Bailey had physically assaulted fellow United States
Senator Albert J. Beveridge in October 1902. That Wilson’s
defense largely fell to overheated orators such as Josephus Daniels,
disreputable characters like Bailey, and to his own son-in-law
McAdoo, indicates how artless his effort had been.
Yet, Democrats still retained one powerfully effective weapon in
their arsenal, releasing the text of a letter Food Administrator
Herbert Hoover had sent to pro-Wilson New York Republican
Frederic Rapp Coudert. “I am for President Wilson’s leadership
not only in the conduct of the war, but also in the negotiations of
peace, and afterward in the direction of America’s burden in the
rehabilitation of the world. There is no greater monument to any
man’s genius than the conduct of negotiations by the President.”
In reality, however, Hoover too found Wilson’s gambit not only “a
shock . . . but a mystery.”
“I believed,” Hoover would record in his The Ordeal of Woodrow
Wilson, “that this appeal was a mistake and a wholly unwarranted
reflection on many good men”
Other high administration officials shared his unease. Wilson’s
secretary (i.e. chief of staff) Joseph Patrick Tumulty would later
record in his own autobiography: “The President’s appeal to the
country of October 24, 1918, asking for the election of a
Democratic Congress, brought down upon him a storm of criticism
and ridicule. Many leading Democrats who had strongly urged an
appeal by the President as a necessary and proper thing in the usual
war situation which confronted him, as the criticism directed toward
it grew more bitter, turned away from it and criticized what they
said was the ineptitude and lack of tact of the President in issuing
it.”
Attorney General Thomas V. Gregory dictated a private
memorandum that read:
move, but most found it off-putting and inappropriate. The
Hartford Courant dismissed it as “political buncombe.” The
Philadelphia Inquirer observed that “Wilson long ago declared
that ‘politics are adjourned,’ He has demolished his own
declaration. We have no hesitation in saying that he is plunging into
desperate partisan polities and is capitalizing the war as an asset of
the Democratic party.”
From Omaha, Mrs. Margaret A. Henry wrote to Wilson. A
Republican, she had purchased all the Liberty Bonds her husband’s
credit would bear. A hospital operator, she tendered all her
equipment to the government for the duration. Her son had enlisted
and was serving in France. Her over-draft-age surgeon husband
had similarly volunteered and now commanded a base hospital on
the Western Front.
Now Margaret Henry challenged Wilson:
Not surprisingly, Theodore Roosevelt quickly found Wilson’s
comments “the veriest nonsense that even partisanship can conceive
. . .”
Addressing five thousand frenzied fellow party members at
Carnegie Hall on Monday evening October 28, TR charged: “If
Mr. Wilson had really meant to disregard politics he would at once
have constructed a coalition, nonpartisan cabinet, calling the best
men of the nation to the highest and most important offices under
him without regard to politics. He did nothing of the kind.”
“In the positions most vital to the conduct of the war, and in the
positions now most important in connection with negotiating peace,
he retained or appointed men without the slightest fitness for the
performance of the tasks, whose only recommendation was a
supple eagerness to serve Mr. Wilson personally and to serve Mr.
Wilson’s party in so far as such service benefited Mr. Wilson.”
The incident energized Republicans. “Up to this time they had no
great fighting material for their campaign,” recalled Herbert Hoover,
“but this gave them a powerful issue, both in its implications and its
cry of partisanship in the midst of the nation’s greatest crisis. It is
idle talk to speculate about what might otherwise have been the
outcome of the election.”
Attorney General Thomas V. Gregory concurred. “The letter
seemed to stigmatize everyone who was not a member of the
Democratic party,” Gregory wrote, “and it immediately raised an
electoral issue and gave an opportunity to the Republicans which up
to then had been lacking. Previously they had no fight in them. Now
they had good reason to complain of a document which had
injected a partisan issue at a moment when they might claim they
had forgotten everything in order to win the war. Without this issue
the Democrats would have carried the elections easily on the basis
of Wilson’s prestige and the fact that the war had been won.”
Wilson had already lost much of his legislative ground, the solid
majorities that had implemented the first income tax under the
Sixteen Amendment, created the Federal Trade Commission, and
passed the Underwood-Simmons Tariff Act, the Federal Reserve
Act, the Clayton Antitrust Act, and the Seventeenth Amendment for
direct election of United States senators. Concurrent with his
eyelash 1916 re-election, voters elected 214 Democrats and 215
Republicans, but Democrats combined with the Progressive Party’s
three remaining representatives to forge a rare House coalition
regime and retain Democrat Champ Clark of Missouri as Speaker.
On November 5, 1918, however, in the wake of Wilson’s
controversial remarks, Republicans, largely as a result of
Midwestern victories, gained twenty-five seats and finally assumed
House control.
On October 27, 1918, the Washington Post forecast that
Democrats “Are to Hold Senate.” Their November 3 analysis
promised Democrats would “Hold Senate by Four.” But the
Upper House, nonetheless, witnessed a similar Democratic
debacle. Republicans gained seven seats to provide them with a
two-seat majority and to install Wilson’s nemesis Massachusetts’
Henry Cabot Lodge as Senate Leader.
“He demanded a vote of confidence,” Teddy Roosevelt gloated
regarding Wilson’s humiliation, “The people voted a want of
confidence.”
There thus proved to be no coveted third term for Woodrow
Wilson. The next election signaled the end of the Wilson era—and
three terms of Republican rule.
David Pietrusza is the author of 1920: The Year of the Six
Presidents and Silent Cal’s Almanack: The Homespun Wit &
Wisdom of Vermont’s Calvin Coolidge.
on Univision radio urging them towards a policy of “we’re gonna
punish our enemies and we're gonna reward our friends who stand
with us” certainly ranked among the less savvy political remarks in
the run-up to the 2010 mid-term elections.
But they were hardly without precedent.
In 1918’s mid-term elections, President Woodrow Wilson similarly
stirred a hornets’ nest when he unleashed his own considerable
wrath upon congressional Republicans.
And with similar disastrous consequences.
With America waging war on Imperial Germany and her Central
Power allies, November 1918 witnessed the nation’s first war-time
election of the new century. Republicans had largely supported the
war effort. Their patriotism could not be faulted. In fact, some
Republicans, such as ex-President Theodore Roosevelt and
General Leonard Wood, qualified as (pardon the Germanic
expression) “uber patriots,” having repeatedly urged American
military readiness well in advance of the nation’s April 1917
declaration of war upon Berlin. In 1918 the GOP loudly called for
Germany’s unconditional surrender and derided any negotiated
peace with Berlin.
With victory within reach in late 1918, however, on Thursday,
October 24, 1918, Woodrow Wilson issued an open letter to his
“fellow countryman” urging that Democrats retain their majorities in
the House and Senate and suggesting that a Republican victory
would somehow provide aid and comfort to embattled Kaiser
William II.
Wilson wrote in part:
- This is no time for divided counsel or for divided leadership.
Unity of command is as necessary now in civil action as it is
upon the field of battle. . . .
The return of a Republican majority to either house of the
Congress would, moreover, be interpreted on the other side
of the water as a repudiation of my leadership.
Spokesmen of the Republican party are urging you to elect a
Republican Congress in order to back up and support the
President. But, even if they should in this impose upon some
credulous voters on this side of the water, they would impose
on no one on the other side. It is well understood there as
well as here that Republican leaders desire not so much to
support the President as to control him.
The peoples of the allied countries with whom we are
associated against Germany are quite familiar with tile
significance of elections. They would find it very difficult to
believe that the voters of the United States had chosen to
support their President by electing to the Congress, a
majority controlled by those who are not in fact in sympathy
with the attitude and action of the Administration.
had impugned their patriotism, and many Americans agreed with
them. “President Wilson has questioned the motives and fidelity of
your representatives in Congress,” said Republican National
Chairman Will Hays. “He has thereby impugned their loyalty and
denied their patriotism. His challenge is to you who elected those
representatives. You owe it to them, to the honor of our great party
and in your own self-respect to meet that challenge squarely, not
only as Republicans, but as Americans. . . .
“Mr. Wilson wants only rubber stamps, his rubber stamps in
Congress. He says so. No one knows it better than Democratic
congressmen.”
Democrats, sensing that their leader had overplayed his hand, and
already sensitive to jibes that the war was being fought “to make the
world safe for Democrats” rushed to his defense. Addressing
Democrats at New Haven, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels
only added fuel to the fire, smearing Wilson’s opponents as
“American Junkers . . . [whose] supreme aim is to seize the arteries
of commerce for their own enrichment, to wipe out tax laws that
touch swollen incomes, and replace them by a tax that burden the
toiler, and to repeal or to emasculate the great measures of social
justice which are the glory at the Wilson Administration.”
“In all the world, outside of Germany, there is but one place where
the President is denounced and his course condemned,” Treasury
Secretary (and Wilson’s son-in-law) William Gibbs McAdoo
charged, “That place is America, and the persons denouncing and
condemning are chiefly those whose leadership has been repudiated
by the American people. Their intemperate language and unqualified
abuse furnish conclusive proof that no mistake has been made in not
inviting them to assist in formulating the policies of our country.
“The result of this election should convince the world that President
Wilson possesses the confidence of his own people in the same
degree that he does of all others.”
“If Republican leaders persist in their present course,” warned
former Texas United States Senator and House Minority Leader
Joseph W. Bailey, “they will not only insure a Democratic majority
in the next Congress but they will also insure the President’s third
election to the Presidency.”
Despite cultivating a populist image, Bailey had resigned from the
Senate in 1911 when his ties to Standard Oil were exposed.
Beyond that, Bailey had physically assaulted fellow United States
Senator Albert J. Beveridge in October 1902. That Wilson’s
defense largely fell to overheated orators such as Josephus Daniels,
disreputable characters like Bailey, and to his own son-in-law
McAdoo, indicates how artless his effort had been.
Yet, Democrats still retained one powerfully effective weapon in
their arsenal, releasing the text of a letter Food Administrator
Herbert Hoover had sent to pro-Wilson New York Republican
Frederic Rapp Coudert. “I am for President Wilson’s leadership
not only in the conduct of the war, but also in the negotiations of
peace, and afterward in the direction of America’s burden in the
rehabilitation of the world. There is no greater monument to any
man’s genius than the conduct of negotiations by the President.”
In reality, however, Hoover too found Wilson’s gambit not only “a
shock . . . but a mystery.”
“I believed,” Hoover would record in his The Ordeal of Woodrow
Wilson, “that this appeal was a mistake and a wholly unwarranted
reflection on many good men”
Other high administration officials shared his unease. Wilson’s
secretary (i.e. chief of staff) Joseph Patrick Tumulty would later
record in his own autobiography: “The President’s appeal to the
country of October 24, 1918, asking for the election of a
Democratic Congress, brought down upon him a storm of criticism
and ridicule. Many leading Democrats who had strongly urged an
appeal by the President as a necessary and proper thing in the usual
war situation which confronted him, as the criticism directed toward
it grew more bitter, turned away from it and criticized what they
said was the ineptitude and lack of tact of the President in issuing
it.”
Attorney General Thomas V. Gregory dictated a private
memorandum that read:
The letter was not merely the worst political mistake that he
could make, but it was utterly un-Wilsonian. For more than a
year there has been in Washington thousands of loyal
Republicans, working under Wilson’s leadership for the
country, at $1.00 a year, and sacrificing their private interests
and forgetting their political affiliations. There were scores of
Republicans in the Senate and House who had voted
consistently for Wilson’s policies and held up his hands
during the struggle, at a time when many of his own party
were hamstringing him. . . . None of us knew anything of the
letter until it appeared. I myself read it with horror in the
morning paper. It seems probable to me that Wilson decided
to write the letter in a moment of extreme weariness, for
these were harrowing days, at the end of a long session when
his nerves were taut and his intellectual sentinels were not on
the lookout for danger. Otherwise I cannot conceive of his
writing the letter, which, as I have said, is so thoroughly un-
Wilsonian.
move, but most found it off-putting and inappropriate. The
Hartford Courant dismissed it as “political buncombe.” The
Philadelphia Inquirer observed that “Wilson long ago declared
that ‘politics are adjourned,’ He has demolished his own
declaration. We have no hesitation in saying that he is plunging into
desperate partisan polities and is capitalizing the war as an asset of
the Democratic party.”
From Omaha, Mrs. Margaret A. Henry wrote to Wilson. A
Republican, she had purchased all the Liberty Bonds her husband’s
credit would bear. A hospital operator, she tendered all her
equipment to the government for the duration. Her son had enlisted
and was serving in France. Her over-draft-age surgeon husband
had similarly volunteered and now commanded a base hospital on
the Western Front.
Now Margaret Henry challenged Wilson:
- Can you be surprised then that I am dumb with astonishment
at your letter which would have me believe that it is
disgraceful and disloyal to vote for a Republican?
If my husband and son are good enough patriots to fight the
battles of their country and risk their lives for us who stay at
home, would they if one were a candidate for Congress be
less patriotic and less to be trusted because they are
Republicans?
If I lived in a State where I could vote, would I be
manifesting a disloyalty that would embarrass you if I voted
for my husband as a Republican, believing he could serve his
country as well at Washington as in France?
Not surprisingly, Theodore Roosevelt quickly found Wilson’s
comments “the veriest nonsense that even partisanship can conceive
. . .”
Addressing five thousand frenzied fellow party members at
Carnegie Hall on Monday evening October 28, TR charged: “If
Mr. Wilson had really meant to disregard politics he would at once
have constructed a coalition, nonpartisan cabinet, calling the best
men of the nation to the highest and most important offices under
him without regard to politics. He did nothing of the kind.”
“In the positions most vital to the conduct of the war, and in the
positions now most important in connection with negotiating peace,
he retained or appointed men without the slightest fitness for the
performance of the tasks, whose only recommendation was a
supple eagerness to serve Mr. Wilson personally and to serve Mr.
Wilson’s party in so far as such service benefited Mr. Wilson.”
The incident energized Republicans. “Up to this time they had no
great fighting material for their campaign,” recalled Herbert Hoover,
“but this gave them a powerful issue, both in its implications and its
cry of partisanship in the midst of the nation’s greatest crisis. It is
idle talk to speculate about what might otherwise have been the
outcome of the election.”
Attorney General Thomas V. Gregory concurred. “The letter
seemed to stigmatize everyone who was not a member of the
Democratic party,” Gregory wrote, “and it immediately raised an
electoral issue and gave an opportunity to the Republicans which up
to then had been lacking. Previously they had no fight in them. Now
they had good reason to complain of a document which had
injected a partisan issue at a moment when they might claim they
had forgotten everything in order to win the war. Without this issue
the Democrats would have carried the elections easily on the basis
of Wilson’s prestige and the fact that the war had been won.”
Wilson had already lost much of his legislative ground, the solid
majorities that had implemented the first income tax under the
Sixteen Amendment, created the Federal Trade Commission, and
passed the Underwood-Simmons Tariff Act, the Federal Reserve
Act, the Clayton Antitrust Act, and the Seventeenth Amendment for
direct election of United States senators. Concurrent with his
eyelash 1916 re-election, voters elected 214 Democrats and 215
Republicans, but Democrats combined with the Progressive Party’s
three remaining representatives to forge a rare House coalition
regime and retain Democrat Champ Clark of Missouri as Speaker.
On November 5, 1918, however, in the wake of Wilson’s
controversial remarks, Republicans, largely as a result of
Midwestern victories, gained twenty-five seats and finally assumed
House control.
On October 27, 1918, the Washington Post forecast that
Democrats “Are to Hold Senate.” Their November 3 analysis
promised Democrats would “Hold Senate by Four.” But the
Upper House, nonetheless, witnessed a similar Democratic
debacle. Republicans gained seven seats to provide them with a
two-seat majority and to install Wilson’s nemesis Massachusetts’
Henry Cabot Lodge as Senate Leader.
“He demanded a vote of confidence,” Teddy Roosevelt gloated
regarding Wilson’s humiliation, “The people voted a want of
confidence.”
There thus proved to be no coveted third term for Woodrow
Wilson. The next election signaled the end of the Wilson era—and
three terms of Republican rule.
David Pietrusza is the author of 1920: The Year of the Six
Presidents and Silent Cal’s Almanack: The Homespun Wit &
Wisdom of Vermont’s Calvin Coolidge.