When the Cheering Stopped (5 page)

Head of the university, he gave up his writing and teaching and turned to administrative duties, but still he remained extremely popular with the students. He told
them he was not to be addressed as Professor or Doctor
*
but simply as Mister. He performed well at one of the most important tasks—getting money from the alumni—and he revised and strengthened the curriculum, modernizing it and making it far more demanding. The old Princeton way of gracious living vanished; one disgruntled student wrote home the place was “getting to be nothing but a damned educational institution.” That was what the plan had been.

The preceptorial system was instituted at the university. Fifty young men, preceptors, were hired to work with students in an intimate and personalized manner. The standards of the university rose even higher, and many inadequate students fell by the way. One such boy was expelled for cheating, and his mother came to plead for his reinstatement with the man who had passed upon the expulsion. She said she was undergoing serious medical treatments and that the shock of having her boy expelled might well bring those treatments to naught. The answer was, “Madam, you force me to say a hard thing, but if I had to choose between your life or my life or anybody's life and the good of this college, I should choose the good of the college.” But he could eat nothing at luncheon that day.

Hazing bothered him; he came upon some sophomore forcing a freshman to pick up twigs with his teeth and acidly said, “Isn't that a fine occupation for a gentleman?” The rather snobbish fraternity-like eating clubs of the university also bothered him. He proposed to abolish the clubs and their anti-intellectual approach in favor of a plan which would have the students of all backgrounds eat, study and live together in dormitories. Princeton graduates loyal to their old eating clubs fought the proposed move, but to the public at large which became aware of the controversy, it seemed as if the head of the university were fighting the battle of democracy in his attempt to shatter the citadels of Princeton's socially elect. He failed in the battle, but popular opinion in New Jersey and elsewhere translated him into the champion of the poorer boys struggling with the richer.

Another argument began. It concerned the graduate school. The university's head wanted the graduate students to work and study on the campus itself and not, as some others desired, in separate buildings some distance from the heart of the campus. The first idea became associated with the conception of a democratic mingling of the graduates and undergraduates, the second idea with that of a standoffish aristocracy.

The question was fought with violence. The head of the university lost. He resigned his post. But he left with the aura of a man who fought for the democratic way. It was 1910, and faced with a gubernatorial election, the New Jersey political bosses chose him to run on the Democratic ticket. He seemed to be very much the college professor; to the politicos he looked to be malleable. They saw him as a dupe, but he saw himself as the agent of Reform. After the bosses of Jersey City and Newark pushed through his nomination, he went campaigning, saying to the people who heard him, “If you give me your votes I will be under bonds to you—not to the gentlemen who were generous enough to nominate me.” He was elected and to the disillusionment of the politicians proved that he meant what he had said. They termed him an “ingrate,” but it did not matter. As Governor he pushed through reform measures to destroy the boss system and end corruption in state elections. He set up a public utilities commission to establish fair rates for transportation and communications, and laws were passed regulating the work of children and women, the handling of food, the schools. New Jersey had been the very symbol of the complacently corrupt turn-of-the-century business corporation's fief; now the bosses were driven away and the corporations tamed.

In 1912 he was nominated for the Presidency. His election was a certainty, for the Republicans were split, with the incumbent President, Taft, running on the regular party ticket, and the former holder of the office, Roosevelt, campaigning as a Progressive on the “Bull Moose” ticket. The returns in, the President-elect went vacationing to Bermuda. He went bicycle riding with his daughters and turned his head sideways to look at the ocean because someone told him the view was best from that angle. The
cable system to the United States was out of order for five days, and he said that made him happy, for he needed peace to think. But he was a public figure now, and reporters dogged his footsteps. He came back from a ride with Jessie and asked the photographers not to take her picture while she was wind-blown from the exertion; when a camera popped he rushed at the man who ignored him and raised his fists as he threatened to chastise him physically.

Back at Trenton, he received a steady stream of visitors seeking appointment to high posts, but he kept his own counsel and refused to be hastened into making known his selections for the Cabinet. (Those who came, however, were generally ignored when the time came for him to announce his choices. He did not think it seemly that men should so nakedly seek power.) In the end his Cabinet was generally marked down as a weak one.

As President he did not consult with the Senators and Representatives. When he wanted to tell them something, he sent for them. There was little give-and-take when they appeared. He explained what was desired, and dismissed callers. When men offered information he already possessed, he cut them off by saying, “I know that.” He could not abide callers who meandered about without coming to the point; they wearied him with their palaver and proffered good-fellowship. With his Cabinet he was pleasant and even affable, but he did not care for long extended discussions, preferring written memorandums. At the Cabinet meetings he offered cigars—although he did not smoke himself—and told jokes, but did not get involved in the minor problems of the various departments. When something important came up, he digested the memorandums on the subject with remarkable speed, sent for the Secretary in question, analyzed the problem in a few sentences, and recommended a solution. No one ever had trouble understanding him, and no one had to wait long for a written reply to a written question. (It rarely took more than a day for a Secretary to get an answer to a query.) No one ever dictated to a stenographer faster and more surely than the President. Few of these dictated replies ever needed doing over, for everything he said was right the first time. He was like that in his verbal habits
also. Each sentence was gotten out correctly; there was never any stumbling or beginning again. He could not conceal his impatience with men who began to say something, stopped, and took off in a new direction.

At table there was never any business discussed, and never any guests who would talk of public matters. All the conversation was erudite and cheerful. In the Congress they criticized him for this and said that what he wanted was a few tough-minded sons instead of the gay and easygoing daughters. The sons would throw things back in his teeth, Senators told each other, and make the President less inclined to ignore the advice of other people. On the golf course, also, there was no business talk. No Senators or Representatives went along on the auto rides, for the rides were for relaxation. The President said he had a certain amount of energy and was not going to squander it by taking up business matters when he was not in his office during working hours.

In his first year he did more than most of his predecessors had done in complete terms. Tariffs were lowered, the Federal Reserve System was born, and the Federal Trade Commission and a strong anti-trust law. Personal income taxes were levied to make up for the losses in tariff revenue. The rights of laboring men were strengthened, and vocational schools were given federal assistance. At his inauguration he had motioned to an empty space in front of the Capitol and, indicating the men and women held back by police, said, “Let the people come forward.” That was the theme of his administration; that was the meaning of the New Freedom.

In 1916 he was renominated. In order to receive his formal notification on a spot not the property of the government, he rented a New Jersey estate and was there through Election Day, when it seemed that Charles Evans Hughes was the winner. The apparent loss did not ruffle the President; he went to bed early after remarking that it seemed his programs had not been completely understood by the voters. The morning after (legend has it) a reporter calling at the Hughes home was told that President Hughes could not be disturbed. The tally was that close. It came down in the end to how California would go, and when the last
returns from the mountain polling places were in, the state was in the Democratic column.

By then, by 1916, the domestic program was in the background, for the talk was all of whether the United States would go to the war. A Democratic slogan, “He Kept Us out of War,” was credited with the President's victory, but he knew best of all that a German lieutenant looking through a submarine periscope could make nonsense of the slogan.

The Americans did not want to fight, not in the main. Nor did their President, who remembered from his youth what Sherman had done to the South. From the White House went unending notes to the contesting British and Germans as the President twisted one way and then another in his attempts to avoid the war. During the first half of his first term there had been a skirmish between American marines and some Mexicans at Vera Cruz, and when the handful of American deaths was reported to the President he whitened and staggered. To go to France in force would mean dead men in their tens of thousands. In the President's eyes the soldiers he would have to send to face machine guns and artillery shells were akin to his boys back at Princeton. That is what he usually called them—“boys,” not “soldiers” or “men.”

But the war, it seemed, could not be avoided. He sat before dawn one day in April on the South Portico, and the First Lady awakened and came to him with an overcoat, some biscuits, a glass of milk. In the rain of an April evening he went with the words he had written to the House Chamber of the Capitol. His fingers trembled as he turned the pages, and in the silences between his sentences the sound of drops could be heard hitting upon the roof. He said, “It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace …”

On the plaza outside, cavalry Regulars from Fort Myer sat their horses to keep the crowds back and guard against disturbances of the kind which earlier in the day saw an anti-war pacifist strike Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts in the face. (Lodge hit back before the pacifist
was dragged away.) Soon the Regulars would be indistinguishable from the farmers and clerks, the college boys and mechanics, and in the Oval Room of the White House the President would give off singing the nonsense songs of Princeton in favor of “Over There” and “There's a Long, Long Trail A-Winding.”

“… and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts—for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.”

(Something would have to come of it. America would bring the justice and peace of a just and peaceful nation to the world.)

“To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged …”

(Else what would it all be for, the dying boys and the sunken ships?)

“… to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured.

“God helping her, she can do no other.”

There was a moment of silence. Then a great roar of applause rolled up to him. Mixed in it were the high rebel yells of Southerners. The troops of cavalry formed up, and with Cary Grayson, Joe Tumulty and the First Lady he drove in silence back to the White House past the crowds of cheering people. “My message today was a message of death for our young men,” he said. “How strange it seems to applaud that.”

The Americans went to France and Pershing and his staff to a grave where an officer said, “Lafayette, we are here!” The way it got back was that the handsome and soldier-like head of the American Expeditionary Force said it himself, and that was right, because it was what he
should
have said. There was something different about the soldiers the Americans sent abroad under him in that
AEF. Such soldiers, perhaps, were never seen before. They sang. They laughed a great deal. They believed in themselves, their country, their way. They were young, confident and open; to the Europeans it seemed that they were indeed godlike, untouched, sure of the sacredness of their mission, which was to give the world a new order and make the world clean and right.

And the war was fought and won. The New World had come to redeem the Old, and when it came time to ask for peace the enemy applied to the leader of that New World. And the guns stopped. That the night ended meant there must be a dawn, and that the dawn must compensate for the dead in their millions, for the girls who would get old and older and who would die as old maids whose lovers-that-should-have-been lay, forever young, in Flanders or Mesopotamia or Gallipoli. In parts of France the poison gas would cling to the roofs of caves for twenty years; the trench-system outlines under the fields could be seen from airplanes forty years later. The Sacred Way up to Verdun, the Lost Battalion, the Chemin des Dames, the Australians coming off their transports past the sunken
River Clyde,
the British boys in their 174 cemeteries crammed into the Ypres Salient, the Italian artillerists dueling with the Austrians in the snow; the English staff general going up forward for the first time and crying, “Good God, did we really send men to fight in that?”, the Yank non-com with “Come on, you sons of bitches! Do you want to live forever?”, the mules drowning in the shell holes, “Madelon”—it all had to be paid for, something must come out of it, it could not have all been done for nothing. The world was crying out for the price to be paid.