Part 5 (2/2)

The Republicans thought they had the perfect candidate, and given the party's situation in 1916, they were right. The fifty-four-year-old Hughes had all the right qualifications. He was from New York, the state with the biggest electoral vote, and he had served two terms as governor, the office that Roosevelt and Grover Cleveland had held and that had supplied two other major-party presidential nominees in the last half century. Hughes had won the governors.h.i.+p in 1906 by defeating someone not just conservatives but also most respectable people feared and loathed-the demagogic newspaper tyc.o.o.n William Randolph Hearst. As governor, Hughes had shown himself to be a strong administrator and an energetic public speaker. He had held his party's bosses at arm's length and pushed through a moderate reform program. He first attracted attention as a potential presidential candidate in 1908 and again as a possible compromise choice in 1912. Best of all, from the Republicans' standpoint in 1916, he had sat on the Supreme Court since 1910. That judicial seat had removed him completely from the party's internecine bloodletting and, therefore, made him acceptable in all quarters.5 For Wilson, Hughes promised to be almost as formidable a foe as Roosevelt had been. As with Roosevelt, the two men had known each other and enjoyed pleasant relations for some years. They had first met nine years earlier, when they shared the speakers' platform at the Jamestown, Virginia, tercentenary celebration, and had enjoyed staying together as guests in the same house; years later, in his autobiographical notes, Hughes remembered Wilson reciting a risque limerick. During the past three years, the two men had met from time to time in Was.h.i.+ngton, and a special bond arose between them because Wilson's son-in-law Frank Sayre was a law school cla.s.smate and close friend of Hughes's son. By coincidence, the Wilsons and the Hugheses had gone to dinner at the McAdoos' the day the president announced Brandeis's nomination to the Supreme Court. Brandeis himself was there too, and Wilson had taken the arm of another of the guests, the irascible and anti-Semitic justice James McReynolds, and said, ”Permit me to introduce you to Mr. Brandeis, your next colleague on the Bench.”6 Personally, the justice and the president had a lot in common. Hughes was also a minister's son with a parent born in England-his father, a Welshman, was a Baptist clergyman with high moral and intellectual standards. Many people who met Hughes compared him to Wilson because he was not a gregarious sort, and professional politicians often found him cold and aloof. Despite those similarities, differences separated them, both physical and intellectual. Hughes had almost as long a jaw as Wilson, but he concealed his with a full beard, which he parted in the middle and combed to the sides. In his earlier years, his rapid-fire delivery and mobile facial expressions on the speaking platform had earned him the nickname of Animated Feather Duster. More recently, his beard had turned gray, giving him a stern look. That look, combined with his reserved manner, earned Hughes such less-fond epithets as ”bearded lady” and ”bearded iceberg” and, from Roosevelt, ”whiskered Wilson.” But unlike the president, he had enjoyed law school and had graduated first in his cla.s.s. He had been a highly successful Wall Street lawyer and had first gained public notice as a special prosecutor in well-publicized investigations of fraud in the insurance industry. As governor, Hughes had sometimes clashed with his state's party bosses but had never battled them in the spectacular way Wilson had battled New Jersey's bosses. Hughes was a warm family man with a well-cloaked sense of humor, but he lacked the playful streak that Wilson showed when he twitted McReynolds at that dinner.

How strong a race Hughes would run in 1916 depended in part on Roosevelt. The Progressives desperately desired their hero to run again-he offered them their only hope of staying afloat as a party. At the Progressive convention, which was meeting in Chicago at the same time as the Republicans, the delegates defied Roosevelt's orders and nominated him a few minutes before the Republicans nominated Hughes. Roosevelt immediately telegraphed to decline, and he added insult to injury by suggesting that the Progressives might nominate a conservative who had opposed their party-Lodge. Angry cries erupted. Delegates took off their Roosevelt badges, threw them on the floor, and stomped out of the hall. Wilson and the Democrats would have preferred to have Roosevelt run again and split the opposition as before, but the bitter taste left by his behavior meant that many Progressives' votes were up for grabs. Roosevelt was already straining to steer them toward Hughes. He announced his endors.e.m.e.nt of the Republican nominee, though he told a friend, ”I do wish the bearded iceberg had acted a little differently during the last six months so as to enable us to put more heart into the campaign for him.”7 By contrast, Wilson's emerging campaign was coming together splendidly. The Democrats' national chairman, the unstable William McCombs, could have posed a problem. Wilson delegated the business of getting rid of him to House. The colonel, in turn, enlisted the help of the financier Bernard Baruch, who extracted a letter of resignation from McCombs, to take effect at the end of the convention. As his replacement, House suggested Vance McCormick, a wealthy newspaper publisher from Pennsylvania, who was prominent among the state's more progressive Democrats. After some hesitation and because several other men declined to be considered, Wilson agreed to McCormick's appointment, and the forty-four-year-old bachelor turned out to be an effective campaign manager. With the a.s.sistance of two able operatives, Robert Woolley and Daniel Roper, he a.s.sembled a large, efficient headquarters in New York. There were also regional offices around the country and divisions that targeted appeals to labor, women, the foreign born, and other interest groups, together with a publicity bureau that produced reams of printed material, sound recordings, and movies.8 House's role in McCormick's selection signaled his temporarily renewed involvement in party affairs. For all his conniving and furtive-ness, the colonel could be a source and conduit for novel ideas. He showed this when Wilson was in New York in May for Grayson's wedding. In a hurried discussion that included both foreign affairs and party matters, House suggested a cabinet appointment for Martin Glynn, a former governor of New York, who was to be the keynote speaker at the Democratic convention. Wilson, House noted, ”thought the country would not approve of his putting a Catholic in the Cabinet.” House disagreed ”and contended that the country would not object in the slightest. What they do object to is having the President's Secretary a Catholic.” To House's surprise, Wilson responded to this slam at Tumulty by asking the colonel to suggest a replacement. ”I asked him, when he would make the change,” House noted, ”and he again surprised me by saying, 'immediately, if I can find the right man. I will offer Tumulty something else.' ”9 Then, after discussing other party affairs, House made a much bolder suggestion-for the vice presidency: We talked of ... whether we should sidetrack Marshall and give the nomination to [Newton] Baker. He felt that Baker was too good a man to be sacrificed. I disagreed with him. I did not think that any man was too good to be considered for Vice President of the United States. I thought if the right man took it, a man who has his confidence as Baker has, a new office could be created out of it. He might become Vice President in fact as well as in name, and be a co-worker and co-helper of the President. He was interested in this argument but was unconvinced that Baker should be, as he termed it, sacrificed. He was afraid he could not educate the people in four years up to the possibilities of this office. He reminded me that no Vice President had ever succeeded a President by election.10 Neither man could know that three years later Wilson would suffer a stroke and thereby precipitate the worst crisis of presidential disability in the nation's history. That crisis might have been handled better if Wilson had responded differently to House's suggestion. Even without intimations of mortality, he could and should have warmed to the idea. House was speaking for other high-placed Democrats when he proposed dumping Vice President Marshall, who had been practically invisible during the preceding three years. Though no dynamo, Marshall was not entirely to blame for his invisibility. Leaders at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue largely ignored him, and Wilson saw him only when he addressed a joint session of Congress or attended official functions. Marshall's home state of Indiana was one the Democrats wanted to carry, but Baker's Ohio offered a much richer electoral prize-second only to New York. A month later, Wilson would soon show how much carrying Ohio was on his mind when he filled the vacancy left on the Supreme Court by Hughes's resignation with an Ohioan. After consulting with Newton Baker and the Democratic former governor of Ohio, he named John Hessin Clarke, a federal judge from Cleveland with a reputation as a progressive and friend of labor.

More than short-run political calculations commended replacing Marshall with Baker. The idea of a vice president who might serve as a co-president should have appealed to Wilson. Having spent much of life studying political systems and inst.i.tutions, he was better equipped than anyone else to grasp the merits of this idea. Having an able and trusted vice president such as Baker at his side during his second term could have made a big difference in management and policy, particularly when it became a wartime presidency. Why Wilson's political imagination failed him at this moment is a troubling question. House left a couple of clues as to possible answers. First, he sprang the suggestion at the end of a hurried meeting. Second, in his last remark Wilson made an elementary error of fact: four vice presidents had gone on to be elected president-John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Van Buren, and, most recently and most pertinently, Theodore Roosevelt. ”The President showed some signs of fatigue,” House noted, ”and it was time for him to call for Mrs. Wilson to take her to the wedding.”11 It was unfortunate-perhaps tragic-that such great consequences could hang on such ordinary things as timing, fatigue, and personal engagements. It was unfortunate-perhaps tragic-that such great consequences could hang on such ordinary things as timing, fatigue, and personal engagements.

The Democratic convention that opened in St. Louis on June 14 was all Wilson's show. He instructed the convention managers to stress patriotism. Flags festooned the hall where the Democrats met, and there were lots of patriotic songs. He, along with Tumulty and House, read and approved the keynote speech in advance. Ex-governor Glynn of New York, following instructions, played the patriotic card by using the undefined term ”Americanism” as a refrain, but Glynn's speech took on a life of its own when he declared that the United States would stay out of war. The delegates exploded in applause. From there on, as Glynn recited times in American history when the nation had not gone to war, shouts arose, ”Go on, go on.” As he went on, the crowd would roar, ”What did we do?” and Glynn would shout, ”We didn't go to war.”12 On the second day of the convention, the delegates' enthusiasm soared, and the peace theme got powerful reinforcement. Senator Ollie James of Kentucky, a burly man with a trumpeting voice, touted ”a courage that must be able to stand bitter abuse; a courage that moves slowly, acts coolly, and strikes no blow as long as diplomacy can be employed.” As a s.h.i.+ning example of such courage, James pointed to Wilson's handling of the submarine challenge: ”Without orphaning a single American child, without widowing a single American mother, without firing a single gun, without the shedding of a single drop of blood, he wrung from the most militant spirit that ever brooded above a battlefield an acknowledgment of American rights and an agreement to American demands.” Later in the day, cries arose from the floor, ”Bryan!” ”Bryan!” The Great Commoner was in the press box because enemies among the Nebraska Democrats had denied him a seat as a delegate. The convention suspended the rules to allow him to speak. Literally weeping with joy, Bryan called this convention ”a love feast.” He brushed aside past differences and praised Wilson for having enacted so many important reforms, and he avowed, ”I join the American people in thanking G.o.d that we have a President who does not want this nation plunged into this war.”13 On the third and final day, the delegates dispensed with a roll call and renominated the president and vice president by acclamation. They likewise adopted the platform, to which the committee had added to Wilson's draft the statement: ”In particular, we commend to the American people the splendid diplomatic victories of our great President, who has preserved the vital interests of our Government and its citizens, and kept us out of war.” This was the origin of the campaign cry ”He kept us out of war.”14 In all, Wilson could feel pleased with his party's handiwork at St. Louis. The speakers and the delegates may have beaten the peace drum a bit too hard for his taste, but everything else had gone his way, and he was ready and eager to face the voters. In all, Wilson could feel pleased with his party's handiwork at St. Louis. The speakers and the delegates may have beaten the peace drum a bit too hard for his taste, but everything else had gone his way, and he was ready and eager to face the voters.

Before he could plunge into the campaign, he had some welcome business of governing to attend to. The summer months of 1916 offered him a brief reprise of the first year of his presidency, when he had been able to give greater attention to domestic affairs, particularly legislative leaders.h.i.+p. Thanks to the resolution of the submarine controversy, the country was no longer teetering on the brink of the world war, and the main diplomatic controversies now involved the British. The greater urgency of the submarine controversy had previously offered cover to the leaders in London as they tightened their blockade, and the main advocate of sensitivity and caution toward the United States, Sir Edward Grey, had lost influence. Others in the government who favored a harder line, particularly Lloyd George, maintained that the Americans would submit to any restrictions so long as they made money from the war. Now the British had to face the consequences of their att.i.tudes and actions.

During the summer of 1916, two of their blockade practices drew angry reactions from the American public and the Wilson administration. One was intercepting and opening mail from Americans who were suspected of having ties with the Germans. The British did not respond to diplomatic protests. The second practice was the compiling of a list of businesses suspected of trading with the Germans. This ”blacklist” drew denunciations from the press and objections from the State Department. Wilson shared the widespread disgust with the British. ”I am, I must admit, about at the end of my patience with Great Britain and the Allies,” he told House in July. ”This black list business is the last straw.” Evidently presuming that the colonel would contact Grey, he warned, ”I am seriously considering asking Congress to authorize me to prohibit loans and restrict exportations to the Allies.”15 Compounding those troubles for the British was widespread revulsion in America over what was happening in Ireland. On April 24, 1916, revolutionaries had mounted an armed uprising in Dublin that opened what would become a b.l.o.o.d.y six-year conflict that would lead finally to independence for Ireland. The British army brutally suppressed this Easter Rising and had its leaders shot after summary military proceedings. One incident in particular attracted international attention: the capture and sham trial of the Irish nationalist Sir Roger Cas.e.m.e.nt. Despite appeals for clemency from the pope and a resolution by the U.S. Senate asking that Cas.e.m.e.nt's life be spared, the British executed him. Those acts understandably stirred wrath among Irish Americans, an important Democratic const.i.tuency. More generally, British behavior in Ireland ignited latent Anglophobia that stretched back to the Revolution and the War of 1812 and had flared up periodically since then. The British seemed intent on proving that they were only marginally less brutal than the Germans. Ireland damaged their moral standing in American eyes the way Belgium had done for the Germans.

One American felt particularly acute pain at this turn of events. In August, Amba.s.sador Walter Page came home for the first time in three years, hoping to smooth the waters. In Was.h.i.+ngton, he found negative feelings toward Britain. After several frustrating encounters at the State Department and repeated delays, Page wrangled a private talk in September with his old friend Wilson. It was a painful meeting. Wilson said that he had ”started out as heartily in sympathy as any man [could] be,” Page recorded immediately afterward. Then, however, England ”[h]ad gone on as she wished,” ignoring ”the rights of others,” and that had hurt America's ”pride,” which was also Wilson's pride. Page also wrote, ”He described the war as a result of many causes-some of long origin. He spoke of England's having the earth and Germany's wanting it.” For such an impa.s.sioned champion of the Allies, these revelations of Wilson's thinking were disheartening. For Page personally, the encounter marked a parting of the ways in a friends.h.i.+p that dated back more than thirty years, to the time when they had been a pair of ambitious young southerners yearning to make their mark in the world.16 Actually, diplomatic friction with the British did not rank high among Wilson's concerns. Besides his reelection campaign, he cared most about the reform measures that would round out the second installment of the New Freedom. First on the legislative agenda were child labor and workmen's compensation laws. In February, the House had easily pa.s.sed a child labor bill, but in the Senate, Democrats stalled action on Robert Owen's version. A measure to provide workmen's compensation for federal employees pa.s.sed the House virtually without opposition but also languished in the Senate. The Republicans were using the failure to act on those bills in their campaign propaganda. Wilson broke the stalemate by going to the Capitol, where he met with Democratic senators in the President's Room and urged pa.s.sage of the bills both because they merited pa.s.sage and because they would honor pledges in the party's platform. The Senate pa.s.sed the workmen's compensation bill without a recorded vote. Some southern Democrats continued to oppose the child labor bill as an intrusion on state rights and as a blow to their region's cheap labor, but they did not resort to a filibuster, and the bill pa.s.sed by a vote of 52 to 12. Wilson signed it into law at a White House ceremony on September 1, declaring, ”I want to say that with real emotion I sign this bill, because I know ... what it is going to mean to the health and to the vigor of the country, and also to the happiness of those whom it affects.”17 Two other pieces of legislation enacted in 1916 were becoming flash points of conflict in the presidential campaign. One was the Revenue Act of 1916, whose curious history involved Wilson only marginally. It stemmed from the preparedness program, which was going to cost $300 million in new spending. The Treasury Department proposed to raise most of that money through excise taxes, which would fall most heavily on middle- and lower-income Americans. Bryanite Democrats on Capitol Hill rose up in revolt, charging that this tax burden was unfair, and besides, the rich and big business should pay for the military spending because they were the ones who were pus.h.i.+ng for it. In the House, Claude Kitchin's position as both majority leader and chairman of the Ways and Means Committee gave him the opportunity to write such views into law with a revenue bill that doubled the income tax rate, raised the surtax on high incomes, and levied the first federal inheritance tax. The bill also included a special tax on the profits of the munitions industry. McAdoo pressed Wilson to try to get changes, but the president stayed out of the conflict. In heated debate on the House floor, Republicans denounced the bill as a raid by southerners and westerners on the hard-earned, well-deserved wealth of the Northeast and Midwest; they were raising a sectional argument that would become one of their favorite battle cries in the campaign. On July 10, the House pa.s.sed the revenue bill by a largely partisan vote of 240 to 140.18 In the Senate, La Follette led the fight to keep the revenue bill in the form pa.s.sed by the House. Acting with Democrats, he succeeded and also got the surcharge on high incomes raised further and the inheritance tax doubled. In angry floor debate, a Democrat and a Republican nearly got into a fistfight, but the bill pa.s.sed on September 5, by a vote of 42 to 16. All thirty-seven Democrats voting were in favor, and all the negative votes came from Republicans. Also supporting the bill were five Republican insurgents: La Follette, George Norris, Albert c.u.mmins, William Kenyon of Iowa, and Moses Clapp of Minnesota. Wilson involved himself only once, when he got Democratic senators to add amendments empowering the president to retaliate against nations that restricted American trade-a measure aimed at Britain's blockade. Final pa.s.sage came on September 7, and Wilson signed the bill into law the next day. The debates and votes on the Revenue Act in both houses again showed how party lines continued to be redrawn over progressive issues, as both parties appealed to their sectional core const.i.tuencies.19 The other piece of legislation that fed conflict in the campaign mandated an eight-hour day for workers on interstate railroads. The eight-hour day had been organized labor's holy grail for nearly half a century, and it was the main demand of railroad unions in negotiations in the summer of 1916. Management refused to consider it, and Secretary of Labor William Wilson tried to mediate. When the secretary's efforts failed early in August, President Wilson met separately with union leaders and railroad presidents. Neither side would budge, and the unions called a strike to begin on September 4. Such a strike spelled disaster for the economy and posed a threat to national security. After conferring briefly with Democratic congressional leaders, the president went to the Capitol on August 29 to address a joint session of Congress. Observers noted that the president seemed informally dressed for such an occasion: he wore a blue jacket and white flannel trousers. In fact, he meant his attire to suggest national security considerations: it was the same outfit he had worn when he marched in the preparedness parade on Flag Day. He told the congressmen and senators that management's intransigence forced him to ask them to establish an eight-hour day for railroad workers by law. He also asked for stronger federal mediation powers, greater ICC oversight of railroads, and presidential authority to take over and run the railroads in the event of military necessity.20 Democratic congressional leaders, though generally approving, balked at anything beyond the eight-hour day, and Wilson reluctantly agreed to a stripped-down measure. Bearing the name of the chairman of the House Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee, William C. Adamson of Georgia, it quickly pa.s.sed, by a vote of 239 to 56, again mainly along party lines. In the Senate, Republicans denounced the measure as cla.s.s legislation and a craven surrender to union threats-charges that would become another favorite campaign cry-but it pa.s.sed quickly by a vote of 43 to 28, even more clearly along party lines. Among Democrats, forty-two favored the bill and only two-both southerners-opposed it. Among Republicans, only one, La Follette, voted in favor, and twenty-six voted against, including such insurgents as George Norris, Albert c.u.mmins, and William Borah. The next day, Wilson signed the Adamson Act into law aboard his private railroad car at Was.h.i.+ngton's Union Station. The location was symbolic, as was the timing: Wilson was returning from giving his acceptance speech for the Democratic presidential nomination.21 The Adamson Act marked the biggest extension of government power that Wilson ever asked for in peacetime and was the boldest intervention in labor relations that any president had yet attempted. It offered a fitting capstone to the second installment of the New Freedom. None of the measures enacted in 1916 was as monumental as the Federal Reserve, but most of them rivaled tariff revision and the anti-trust law in their lasting significance. Significant income tax rates and the inheritance tax of the Revenue Act would remain in place for the rest of the twentieth century. Aid to farmers and the s.h.i.+pping and tariff boards would likewise remain and pave the way for further action in those areas two decades later under the New Deal. A controversial Supreme Court decision would strike down the child labor law two years later, but that law would serve as the model for a permanent prohibition of child labor, also under the New Deal. Furthermore, the elevation of Brandeis to the Supreme Court rewarded the chief architect, besides Wilson, of the New Freedom, and it gave the Court one of its great justices, one who would open the way for more liberal and more flexible jurisprudence.

Wilson played a different part in pa.s.sing these measures than he had played in the pa.s.sage of the first New Freedom legislation. This time, he did not create a program in advance, and he did not involve himself as much in shepherding its parts through Congress. Much of the initiative came from progressive Democrats on Capitol Hill, and Wilson's contribution often lay in giving them their head or stiffening their resolve. Even so, he played a critical role. As before, he kept his congressional supporters at their tasks and on course. Moreover, he had to overcome new obstacles, in addition to the distractions of foreign affairs. Democrats now had a sharply reduced majority in the House, and Bryan no longer stood at the president's side to serve as chief lobbyist and legislative liaison.

Like its predecessor, this installment of the New Freedom was also a party program. Except for La Follette, Republicans did little to help frame, and increasingly opposed, these measures. Some of that was probably unavoidable, given the conservatives' firm control of the party and the collapse of the Progressives. In all, Wilson could take great pride in this second round of legislative accomplishment. The New Freedom was alive and well.

Wilson's looming campaign for reelection made the summer of 1916 different from the preceding months of his presidency. Both he and Hughes, unlike Roosevelt earlier, observed the old custom of waiting for the notification ceremony to deliver their opening speeches. The challenger got a month's head start, giving his acceptance speech on July 31 to an audience of 3,000 at Carnegie Hall in New York. What should have been a rousing opener to Hughes's campaign fell flat as the candidate droned on, delivering carping criticisms of the Wilson administration and offering few positive alternatives. In foreign policy, he sounded tough but vague; on the league of nations idea, he sounded like Wilson when he called for ”the development of international organization” and affirmed that ”there is no national isolation in the world of the Twentieth Century.” Most observers were disappointed with the speech, but one was delighted. Wilson told Bernard Baruch he was following ”the rule never to murder a man who is committing suicide.” Later, he softened a bit, saying he felt sorry for Hughes: ”He is in a hopelessly false position. He dare not have opinions: He would be sure to offend some important section of his following.” Remembering the Animated Feather Duster, some commentators expressed amazement that Hughes could give such a limp performance. He later explained that his campaign skills had grown rusty after six years on the Supreme Court.22 Things got better for the Republican candidate when he made a tour in August that took him to the West Coast and back. Hughes made a bold move of his own by going beyond the Republican platform's vague language on woman suffrage to endorse a const.i.tutional amendment. He also recovered some of his wonted vigor as he lambasted Wilson for weakness toward Mexico, and he sometimes made a good personal impression. ”Gos.h.!.+” one North Dakota farmer reportedly exclaimed. ”He ain't so inhuman after all.”23 When the campaign train reached California, however, the trip turned into a comedy of errors. The local managers, who were conservative Republicans, did not serve Hughes well. In San Francisco, they scheduled an event at a hotel where the workers were on strike, and they refused to move to another location. As a result, Hughes wound up crossing a picket line and offending the city's strong union movement. When the campaign train reached California, however, the trip turned into a comedy of errors. The local managers, who were conservative Republicans, did not serve Hughes well. In San Francisco, they scheduled an event at a hotel where the workers were on strike, and they refused to move to another location. As a result, Hughes wound up crossing a picket line and offending the city's strong union movement.

A still worse misstep in California involved internal party strife. The Republicans' split in 1912 had hurt them there badly because Governor Hiram Johnson, who was the Progressive vice-presidential nominee, had kept Taft and the regular Republicans off the ballot. In 1914, California was the only place where the Progressives did not collapse. Now, in 1916, the pugnacious governor grudgingly followed Roosevelt back into the Republican fold, and he was running hard for the party's nomination for senator. That situation posed a dilemma for Hughes. He did not think he could endorse Johnson's senatorial bid, but he desperately wanted the governor to share the campaign platform with him. Between Johnson's notoriously p.r.i.c.kly personality and the machinations of conservatives, no joint appearance or even a meeting came off. Worst of all-in the most notorious incident of the campaign-the nominee and the governor spent several hours on the same day in the same hotel in Long Beach without seeing each other. When he learned of the fiasco, Hughes immediately apologized, but the damage was done. Stories about his ”snub” of the governor raced around the state, and Johnson declined all requests for a meeting. The governor won the senate primary and dutifully endorsed the Republican ticket. Hughes later believed that the incident cost him the state-and the election.24 Wilson's campaign got off to a later start because he had to stay in Was.h.i.+ngton to attend to public business, yet the delay gave him an advantage. The last measures of the New Freedom helped his reelection prospects much more than any speeches or tours. Moreover, because he was president, Wilson could speak out in ways that ostensibly were non-political but really advanced his campaign. On July 4, he dedicated the new American Federation of Labor building, and with Gompers and other union leaders present, he lauded labor over capital for being ”in immediate contact with the task itself-with the work, with the conditions of the work.” Two weeks later, he dropped the nonpartisan mask when he told a convention of patronage-appointed postmasters, ”The Democratic party is cohesive. Some other parties are not.”25 Those speeches and his remarks when he signed the rural-credits and child labor laws served as warm-ups for his acceptance of the Democratic nomination. To reestablish his political base in New Jersey, he rented an oceanside estate at Long Branch, called Shadow Lawn, where on September 2, in a setting reminiscent of Sea Girt four years before, he met the delegation from the Democratic convention and delivered his acceptance speech. Those speeches and his remarks when he signed the rural-credits and child labor laws served as warm-ups for his acceptance of the Democratic nomination. To reestablish his political base in New Jersey, he rented an oceanside estate at Long Branch, called Shadow Lawn, where on September 2, in a setting reminiscent of Sea Girt four years before, he met the delegation from the Democratic convention and delivered his acceptance speech.

As expected, Wilson praised the party's accomplishments and declared that the Democrats had kept the promises they had made in 1912. He also pitched a frank appeal to Roosevelt's erstwhile followers: ”This record must equally astonish those who feared that the Democratic Party had not opened its heart to comprehend the demands of social justice. We have in four years come very near to carrying out the platform of the Progressive Party as well as our own; for we also are progressives.” Most o

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