WOODROW WILSON

AN INTERPRETATION

CHAPTER I

THE BEGINNING OF REFORM

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WHEN Woodrow Wilson came to the White House on the fourth of March, 1913, the Democratic party returned to power after sixteen years in opposition. Mr. Wilson's Democratic predecessor, Mr. Cleveland, left as a legacy to his successor war or peace with Spain. That war, fought in the year following Mr. McKinley's inauguration, had far-reaching consequences for the United States: for the first time since it became a nation the United States was the master of oversea dependencies and the ruler of subject races; it became an Asiatic power and its frontier was flung seven thousand miles across the Pacific. In the year following peace the American people were to be witness to another and more costly war when the Boers challenged the power of England; and five years later the American people, in common with the rest of the world, were witness to a still mightier struggle when

Japan took up arms against Russia to decide the mastery of the Far East.

Yet those three wars, important in their political effects to the nations involved, produced little impression upon American national consciousness. The thought of America had turned from war to peace, the great problems that men were grappling with were not military conquest but social reform. A new spirit had entered into men. They were reaching out for something better than they had, they were striving to remove the inequality and injustice of an artificially stimulated social system. This spirit was moving men in all parts of the world, but nowhere perhaps was its force so insistent as in the United States. Humanity was groping and toiling, not sure what it was seeking, and yet quite sure what it sought was to be found; not always wise in its experiments, and yet with faith struggling.

Reform was in the air. The social order was changing; the change had almost come. Men were looking at life with new vision. In the three great Democracies of the world, in England, France and the United States, social experimentation was being tried on a vast scale. Woman suffrage, prohibition, old-age pensions, State insurance, the curbing of the power of monopoly and the arrogance of wealth, these were symptoms of a mental and spiritual rebirth. It was a time of excessive luxury, of great wealth, of intense selfishness; in some respects materialism had a deeper

hold than ever before in the world's history; and yet even those deepest sunk in their materialism, who defended the existing order and resented change, dimly saw that change was inevitable, vaguely felt that justice cried for reform, but hoped only it might be postponed so that their comfort would not be disturbed. To the great mass, not alone the downtrodden and the poor and the illiterate, the day of their deliverance was

near.

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It was fitting these aspirations should be symbolized in the person of the newly elected President of the United States. To Mr. Wilson Democracy was less a political belief than an immanent conviction, and he had given repeated proof of his faith. Imbued in the tenets of his political forefathers, seeing in their code a moral guidance which was also the rule of statesmanship, reposing confidence in the wisdom of the people to govern themselves, rejecting the thought that they were incapable of self-government and must necessarily be directed by a selected class, his sympathies and his intellect made him support the cause of the people against privilege.

He was no noisy champion. He offered no hostages to the great Demos and had no nostrums to bring universal salvation. He had no picturesque or romantic past and had known no long and bitter struggle against adversity. As a boy he had not toiled beyond his

strength, and as a man he had not acquired learning in odd moments snatched from his work. Of gentle birth and with an inherited love of scholarship, he passed through school and college to begin, as he believed, his chosen vocation of the law, and to abandon it forever two years later. It is popular impression that Mr. Wilson divorced himself thus early from his profession because it failed to provide him adequate support, which is generally recognized as valid ground for divorce, but incompatibility of temperament was the real reason for the speedy dissolution of the incongruous union. Mr. Wilson, who began the practice of his profession in Atlanta, was quickly disillusioned when he discovered the depth and slime of the gulf that separated the philosophy of law from its practice. To an imaginative but philosophically matured youth who absorbed the theory of law from textbooks in the seclusion of college or heard the science of jurisprudence expounded in the classroom, its precision and logical foundation must have charmed a mind that clarified thought and was always strongly responsive to a sense of justice; but the law in its practical application came as a shock.

Atlanta at that time was no worse, and certainly no better, than other Southern cities, and its public and professional morality was the standard of its day. At the Atlanta bar there were men of high professional standing whose code was as rigid and narrow as the

sternest critic could demand, but there were also a goodly proportion of "ambulance chasers", tricksters and dishonest advocates who promoted litigation in the hope of gaining fees irrespective of the merits of the cause. The atmosphere disgusted Mr. Wilson. He found himself brought in competition with men of dubious morals; the competition was not to his liking, nor were his surroundings congenial. Deliberately he turned his back on them, recognizing at that early age, and he was only twenty-five, that he could better serve himself and society by writing and teaching the philosophy of the law than by helping its contamination. This was the explanation he made to his friend, Albert Shaw (the present editor of the Review of Reviews), when he came to Baltimore to take a postgraduate course at Johns Hopkins. "There is Blank," mentioning the name of a well-known practitioner who was rapidly becoming rich, he said to young Shaw, who relates the incident, "who has made a success by taking personal injury cases against the railways and other corporations and is none too scrupulous about the character and testimony of his witnesses, and perhaps in time I may be equally successful." But that was not the success he craved or the measure of his ambition. That he had the courage to renounce a profession whose methods were to him distasteful and had the strength of will to take up a new profession for which he felt himself better fitted and one making a stronger appeal to him,