About a quarter of the way into this presidential biography by Jean Edward Smith, I came across a quote that I’m taking a moment to reflect upon. It’s the point in the book at which FDR is stricken with polio, in 1921, and he is hospitalized and unable to walk. According to the author, a journalist described the scene when friends visited FDR in the hospital. “Roosevelt gaily brushed aside every hint of condolence and sent them [the well-wishers] away more cheerful than when they arrived,” the journalist wrote. “None of them has ever heard him utter a complaint or a regret or even acknowledge that he had had so much as a bit of bad luck.” The author continues, “FDR saw it as his duty not only to appear in the best of spirits but to bolster the spirits of those about him.”
This passage made me think of my mother, also a polio survivor, who was born in 1932, the year FDR was elected president. I don’t recall my mother ever complaining, not even once, about how the virus had affected her own body, requiring her to use crutches and braces for the rest of her life. She sometimes would recall mistreatment by doctors and teachers at orthopedic school, but she never, not once, bemoaned her situation. To the contrary, she would always be optimistic. She would focus on the many things she could do, and she would often make light of her crutch, and the hand brake she used on her car, with a clever sense of humor.
He tried so hard to pull our country out of the worst economic disaster it ever experienced before or since, what would become known as the Great Depression. Even before the Wall Street crash of October 1929, which came just months after his inauguration, Herbert Hoover knew the stock market was a speculative bubble. He had taken steps to address this, but few would listen. After the crash he immediately called captains of industry to the White House and got them to promise not to implement massive layoffs or pay cuts. He also persuaded union leaders to agree not to stage any labor protests or strikes during this time of crisis. His efforts worked for a while, but soon it became evident that this was more than just a cyclical recession.
It was really a problem with worldwide dimensions. It was brought about by factors that included a massive global trade imbalance, poor international monetary policy, and how governments were maintaining or not maintaining a gold standard. It was all complicated by the massive debts and reparations owed after the war in Europe. The depression was much worse overseas, and in Germany the government was about to collapse. Here at home, Hoover got Congress to agree to a moratorium on German debt and reparations payments. He also called for private relief through organizations like the Red Cross. And he encouraged state and local governments to implement local infrastructure projects to help spur employment.
But when Britain abandoned the gold standard it set off another round of misery here, causing massive bank failures. Hoover gathered the nation’s top banking executives to Washington to establish what would become the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), which was an effort designed to keep credit flowing and banks liquid. Finally, thinking that the economy was soon to improve, Hoover set out to raise taxes and cut spending in an effort to balance the federal budget and thus demonstrate that the government was on solid footing.
When Hoover implemented these measures, the economy would perk up for a few months at a time, only to fall off again. There seemed to be no end in sight to the misery. It’s therefore no surprise that Hoover became a one-term president. In the election of 1932, New York Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt beat Hoover decisively, winning 472 electoral votes vs. 59 for Hoover, and getting 57.4 percent of the popular vote to Hoover’s 39.7 percent.
Today’s book report is on “Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times” by Kenneth Whyte. It’s a fitting title for someone who was active in public life not only during the Great Depression, but also during both World War I and World War II, and the start of the Cold War. At more than 600 pages with thoughtful insight and analysis, I found this book a pleasure to read. It’s certainly one of the best presidential biographies I have yet encountered. I learned so much, not only about Hoover but also about the momentous times in which he lived.
Elected to our nation’s highest office in 1928, Herbert Hoover was our nation’s 31st president. He was a Republican who had never before held elective office. But he was no stranger to the federal government, having served in three previous administrations.
A native of West Branch, Iowa, Hoover was the first president born west of the Mississippi. He was also the first Quaker to be elected president. He was orphaned when he was just 9 years old and was sent to live with relatives in Oregon. His early childhood trauma likely affected his emotional development, leading to lifelong social awkwardness and an inability to connect with others on a human level. He didn’t like “glad handing” or kissing babies as so many other politicians do. He was among the first students to attend Stanford University, where he studied engineering. After college he got a lucrative job working for a British mining company, and he traveled to Australia and China to develop mines. He was really good at this, and he made tons of money for the company and for himself. He eventually settled in London, where he started his own firm.
In business Hoover had developed immense organizational and managerial abilities, and when war broke out in Europe he put these talents to use, first by helping Americans stranded abroad get home safely, and then later by organizing massive humanitarian relief for the people of Belgium, who were starving. After the war, Hoover joined President Woodrow Wilson’s delegation to the Paris peace talks and later organized more humanitarian relief, this time for all of Europe. President Warren G. Harding, who was elected in 1920, gave Hoover a cabinet post — Secretary of Commerce — and he stayed on in that post under Calvin Coolidge after Harding died in office.
Hoover was an excellent commerce secretary. In an effort to streamline business activity and eliminate waste, he gathered and published immense amounts of data and called for improvements to the nation’s infrastructure as well as preservation of natural resources. He helped get the Radio Act of 1927 signed into law under Coolidge, which regulated and helped organize the nation’s airwaves. Importantly, Hoover also set out to standardize construction materials and consumer products, everything from screws to bricks to automobile tires and even baby bottles. According to the book, Hoover’s standardization of home building materials reduced the price of a new house by a third, making home ownership more achievable for many Americans.
These initiatives all fit in with Hoover’s worldview, that government should help foster business growth and stability without intervening directly. In other words Hoover was not a laissez faire capitalist, nor could be he called a socialist. He was rather a champion of a so-called “third alternative.”
When a great flood of the Mississippi River caused widespread devastation in 1927, Hoover performed the duties of what a good FEMA director would do today, organizing relief efforts and saving many lives and livelihoods. He relied in large part on private donations.
In 1928, after Coolidge declined to seek another presidential term, Hoover received the Republican Party nomination. He won in a landslide, receiving 444 electoral votes to 87 for the Democratic nominee, Al Smith of New York. The popular vote in 1928 was 58.3 percent for Hoover and 40.8 percent for Smith.
When Hoover began his term of office the first thing he did was get in a huge fight with Congress — over tariffs! The Republicans controlled both houses, but Hoover lacked the political savvy and the inside connections needed to get legislation through. In the midterm elections of 1930, the Democrats gained seats in the House but the Republicans maintained control. Then late in Hoover’s term several Republican representatives died, causing power in the House to flip to the Democrats. Interestingly, when this happened Hoover was able to get legislation passed more easily.
Hoover was president during the Prohibition era. Early in his presidency Hoover convened a commission to study the issue, but when it recommended that the Volstead Act, which was the federal government’s enforcement mechanism against booze, be revised, and Prohibition itself be revisited, Hoover did not act. To his credit, Hoover had wisely called Prohibition an “experiment” in the 1928 campaign, but at heart Hoover was more of a “dry.” In the election of 1932 the Democratic Party platform called for outright repeal of the 18th Amendment, and FDR campaigned on repeal. This might have contributed to FDR’s lopsided victory over Hoover.
As a former president, Hoover lived for many more decades and continued to serve his country. He chaired two Hoover Commissions, one under President Truman and one under President Eisenhower, to help eliminate redundancies in the administrative branch and to help make the federal government run more efficiently.
After leaving office Hoover lived for a time in a large house in California, but he eventually moved to New York City, living in a suite at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. He died in 1964 at age 90, outliving both FDR and JFK.
Also after his presidency, Hoover spoke out publicly and privately against FDR. In my view, some of Hoover’s criticism of his successor was sour grapes, but in other respects it was warranted. Hoover thought that FDR should not have let the United States recognize the Soviet Union, and he was infuriated that so many people ended up living under an iron fist after the second world war. Hoover also was troubled by the New Deal, thinking that the federal government was getting too big and interfering too much in industry. According to the book, the elder statesman Hoover became the spiritual godfather of the modern conservative movement, influencing thinkers such as William F. Buckley Jr.
Nevertheless, after the Depression Hoover was branded a failure, and that sentiment lasted for many generations. This may or may not have been fair. I tend to think that it was unfair. In 1932 and in his subsequent presidential campaigns, FDR and his Democratic Party had been especially nasty toward Hoover. As part of a Democratic Party smear campaign, shantytowns during the depression were dubbed Hoovervilles — a term that continued to be used even during FDR’s many years of being president during the Depression.
This blaming the Depression on Hoover even carried over into popular culture. For example, the Broadway musical “Annie” features a song called “Thank you Herbert Hoover,” which is a sarcastic thank you. And in the popular song “I’m Still Here” by Sondheim, from the show “Follies,” a woman of a certain age reflects on her life, remembering living through the Depression and many other ups and downs. “I lived through Herbert and J. Edgar Hoover, that was fun and a half,” she sings. “When you’ve lived through Herbert and J. Edgar Hoover, everything else is a laugh.”
It must have been difficult to be Herbert Hoover, especially during the FDR years. He was unpopular, yet, according to the book, when everyday Americans encountered him they wanted to shake his hand. Sadly, Hoover was not emotionally capable of reciprocating these affections.
Here are some additional facts about Herbert Hoover:
He married Lou Henry, and they had two sons, Herbert Jr. and Allan. Lou Hoover was an extraordinary woman in her own right. She had been a tomboy. In a picture included in the book, she resembles Annie Oakley! She rode horses and drove cars. She even drove coast to coast by automobile through the Rocky Mountains, at a time when there were few paved roads. The trip took a month. She preceded her husband in death by many years.
Speaking of the song mentioned above, Herbert Hoover was not related to longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.
Those who are old enough might also recall Hoover being affectionately recalled in “Those Were the Days,” the theme song for the long-running TV show “All in the Family.”
He had a brother and a sister.
He was a hard worker.
He smoked lots and lots of cigars.
He was bad at spelling.
He had a habit of jangling coins in his pocket.
He enjoyed fishing in the Florida Keys, always while wearing a jacket and tie!
Also not related to longtime White House usher Ike Hoover.
Also, there was no connection to the vacuum cleaner.
But the Hoover Dam, however, is named after the 31st President.
He founded the Hoover Institution at Stanford.
He also invented a game, called Hooverball, in which he would throw a medicine ball with colleagues on White House grounds, for exercise.
He was in China during the Boxer Rebellion.
He was not implicated in any of the scandals that befell the Harding administration.
He was uncomfortable with ceremonial duties, and he was not good at face-to-face interactions with the general public, or at working crowds.
He wrote many books, the most notable of which included “The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson,” about the Paris peace conference after World War I.
And that’s Herbert Hoover. Before reading Whyte’s excellent biography, I knew almost nothing about the man. I found his life to be absolutely fascinating. As the author pointed out, Herbert Hoover knew every president from Theodore Roosevelt to Richard Nixon and served under five of them, both Democratic and Republican, in addition to his own term in the White House.
Even more importantly, the author estimates that during his lifetime Hoover saved 100 million lives, through his humanitarian work during and after World War I and later after the Mississippi flood of 1927. That’s something to admire. I am so glad I took the time to learn more about this important American and his many achievements.
Herbert Hoover (Library of Congress photo)
The electoral college results in 1928 show Hoover winning in a landslide over Smith.
The electoral college results in 1932 show Hoover defeated in a landslide by FDR.
Imagine living in an era in which there is rampant speculation in the stock market, which keeps going up and up. There is almost no government regulation, which allows “stockjobbers” to concoct various get-rich-quick schemes, while investors are allowed to place large trades on margin. The economy seems to be doing well, yet interest rates are being lowered and tariffs are being increased, causing an imbalance in global trade. In just four years, there have been three rounds of massive tax cuts. The rich keep getting richer, and everyone else — well, they get to reap the benefits of trickle-down economics. Among the most vulnerable are the nation’s farmers, who are saddled with debt while crop prices fluctuate wildly. But hey, look at that stock market! It keeps going up and up and up! What could possibly go wrong?
Calvin Coolidge, a Republican, was the 30th President of the United States, serving through much of what is now known as the Roaring Twenties. One of his nicknames was “Silent Cal,” because he was sort of a do-nothing president who didn’t seem to care for much more than keeping up appearances. He was not an activist leader who roused people to action. He is what would be called today a small-government conservative. When the Mississippi River flooded in 1927, causing widespread devastation and suffering, the Coolidge administration did almost nothing to help. Coolidge occasionally spoke out in favor of civil rights, but he did not do anything heroic. To his credit, he is not known to have appointed any overt racists to positions of power.
In 1928 Coolidge attended a Pan-American conference in Cuba, where he encountered much resentment toward the United States over intervention in Nicaragua, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. He attempted to normalize relations with Mexico, which was undergoing revolution and much political upheaval. Coolidge approved the Dawes Plan, which was designed to defuse the German debt crisis that had lingered after World War I. In coming years Germany would fall into an economic tailspin of its own, with devastating consequences for the entire world.
Coolidge, a lawyer, got his start in local politics in Massachusetts in 1909, when he was elected mayor of Northampton. He then became lieutenant Governor and then Governor of Massachusetts. Shortly after he became governor, the police officers in Boston went on strike and Coolidge fired them all. This action brought Coolidge to national prominence as an enforcer of law and order and as one who would stand up against communism. The Bolshevik revolution had just taken place in Russia, and there was already a “red scare” in the United States!
Coolidge’s newly minted national reputation landed him on the Republican ticket in the election of 1920, as Warren G. Harding’s running mate, and he became president in 1923 when Harding died in office. Coolidge was elected to a full term in his own right in 1924, with 54 percent of the popular vote. He declared that he did not think anyone should serve more than two terms as president and declined to seek re-election in 1928. Just six months after he left office in 1929, with Republican successor Herbert Hoover in the White House, the economy began to unravel, ushering in the worst economic crisis our nation had ever experienced. Coolidge died in 1933 at age 60.
Here are some additional facts about Calvin Coolidge:
He was born in Vermont.
He was religious.
He married Grace Goodhue and they had two sons, John and Calvin Jr., the younger of whom died while Coolidge was in office, after getting a blister while playing tennis on White House grounds. The blister became infected, and antibiotics had not yet been developed for treatment of infections.
Coolidge mastered the art of the photo opp, appearing frequently in newspapers, magazines and newsreels. Edward Bernays, who would become known as the “father of public relations,” was an advisor, as was Bruce Fairchild Barton, an advertising executive.
Coolidge was the first president to appear talking on film.
During the Coolidge presidency Charles Lindbergh made his historic solo flight across the Atlantic, returning home and hailed as a hero.
With radio broadcasting an emerging technology, Coolidge signed legislation regulating the nation’s airwaves.
As president, Coolidge also signed anti-immigration legislation into law.
In the aftermath of the Great Depression, Coolidge’s economic philosophy (if you could even call it that) would be discredited for many decades, only to be resurrected by Ronald Reagan, who admired Coolidge and hung up his portrait in the White House.
Today’s book report is on “Calvin Coolidge” by David Greenberg, another in the American Presidents series. This was a quick, concise read. I would have preferred a longer book, but I was not able to find a better one. After reading the introduction to the best-selling biography by Amity Shlaes, I had to put it down because it was so over-the-top laudatory (in my view) that I wanted to barf.
Despite the short length of the Greenberg biography, I did find that it covered the bases quite well. I was particularly impressed with Greenberg’s thoughtful analysis at the end, in which he points out the various economic warning signs that existed during Coolidge’s administration. But he also concedes, quite fairly, that nobody back then, not even the president, could have predicted the future.
On a week’s vacation from work, I decided to rent a car and go upstate. First stop Kinderhook — home to Martin Van Buren, our nation’s eighth president.
Lindenwald, Van Buren’s home and farm, is a national historic site and is open to the public. I stopped by the visitors center and watched a short film, and then I took a ranger-guided tour of the house itself. The interior is very well preserved, with many original furnishings and wall coverings. No photographs were allowed inside. The ranger was knowledgeable and personable. He spoke a great deal about Van Buren’s life and times, pointing out that he was in large part responsible for creating the Democratic Party.
Before he became president, Van Buren was very briefly governor of New York state, then he was called to Washington to serve as secretary of state under President Andrew Jackson. In Jackson’s second term, Van Buren was vice president. In 1836 Van Buren was elected president, but the economy crashed and he failed to be elected to a second term. He would run for president twice more, unsuccessfully, in 1844 and 1848. Van Buren had large sideburns, and he is credited with having come up with the word “OK”!
After the historical site visit, I also visited Van Buren’s grave, which is a short drive away at the Kinderhook Reformed Church Cemetery.
Click any of the pictures below to see them bigger:
Our nation’s 29th President was Warren G. Harding, a Republican. He was the immediate successor to Woodrow Wilson. Harding died in office, and Vice President Calvin Coolidge succeeded him. A number of scandals engulfed Harding’s presidency, most of which did not come to light until after his death. One of the scandals involved the Veterans Bureau, but the most notorious came to be known as the Teapot Dome affair.
Teapot Dome was an oil well in Wyoming. Harding’s Interior Secretary, Albert B. Fall, was convicted of accepting bribes and ultimately served a year behind bars. Fall became the first cabinet secretary to do time after being convicted of wrongdoing. As a result of the Teapot Dome scandal, a number of Congressional oversight norms were established, including the ability of House and Senate committees to issue subpoenas compelling members of an administration to testify, and the ability of Congress to have access to any person’s tax returns. It should be noted that these oversight functions remained in place for the better part of a century — until the current administration began to openly defy them. It remains to be seen whether the courts will ultimately uphold these oversight functions of Congress or defer to the executive branch.
Anyway, let’s go back to the 1920s for a moment, and to the Harding presidency. Warren G. Harding was among a long line of presidents to come from Ohio. Before Harding got started in politics, he was a successful editor and publisher who owned his own newspaper, The Marion Star. He served as a state Senator in Ohio and later as lieutenant governor. In 1910 he ran for Governor of Ohio but lost. In 1914 he was elected to the United States Senate, where he served throughout World War I while Wilson was president. In 1920 he was elected President, defeating the Democratic candidate James M. Cox, also of Ohio. Franklin D. Roosevelt was Cox’s running mate!
Warren G. Harding portrait by Harris & Ewing (public domain)
As president, Harding kept the United States out of the League of Nations and negotiated separate postwar peace treaties with Germany, Austria and Hungary. He presided over a global disarmament conference in Washington, which at the time meant building fewer warships. On the domestic front, Harding sought lower taxes, higher tariffs, and budget cuts. He vetoed a cash bonus to World War I veterans because he felt it would balloon the federal budget deficit. There was also widespread labor unrest during this era. Harding largely sided with management over labor, although the eight-hour workday became standard under his watch.
On civil rights, Harding was less than heroic. He had been elected with the support of many blacks in the South and as president he spoke out against lynchings, but beyond that he did not do much. He signed legislation that imposed quota restrictions on immigration. Harding pardoned about two dozen political prisoners, including Eugene V. Debs, a former Socialist candidate for President whom Wilson had thrown in jail for speaking out against the war.
Harding was on a trip to the West Coast in 1923 when he died of a heart attack in a hotel room in San Francisco. At the time of his death, Harding was popular. His body was returned to Washington, where he received a large funeral. He was buried in an elaborate tomb in Ohio.
Here are some additional details about Harding:
He was the sixth president to die in office and the third to die of natural causes. Three others had previously been assassinated.
The G is for Gamaliel.
Some of Harding’s political opponents spread rumors that he was black.
He had at least one extramarital affair, and after his death a woman wrote a book in which she claimed to be Harding’s illegitimate daughter.
Harding is the first president elected in an election in which women were allowed to vote.
Harding appointed former President William Howard Taft as Chief Justice of the United States.
At the 1912 Republican national convention, Harding delivered the nominating speech for Taft.
Harding was the first sitting U.S. Senator to be elected President. Kennedy and Obama were the only others to be elected to the presidency while serving as Senators.
Future president Herbert Hoover was Harding’s Commerce Secretary.
Harding gave long-winded speeches with complex language that was heavy on alliteration. He self-deprecatingly referred to this speaking style as “bloviating.”
Harding was president when the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated on May 30, 1922.
According to John W. Dean, author of the biography “Warren G. Harding,” part of the American Presidents series, Harding was unfairly tarnished after his death for scandals that he was not responsible for. Yes, this is the same John W. Dean who was Richard Nixon’s White House counsel, the guy who famously told the Watergate committee that he had told his former boss that there was “a cancer growing on the presidency.” I am open to Dean’s interpretation, but I feel he did not make a very strong case.
If I were to give Dean’s book a letter grade, I would give it a C-minus. In my view, if Dean wants to rehabilitate Harding’s image, he needs to make a stronger argument. A skimming of the bibliography lists mostly previously published biographies and very few references to original source material. Dean also uses imprecise language. For example, Dean writes that in 1919 President Wilson “lay in a coma, partially paralyzed.” While Wilson had indeed been incapacitated while still in office, there is no evidence that he was ever in a coma, and if he had been in a coma he would have been completely paralyzed, not partially.
Further, Dean speculates that Harding was largely blameless not only for the Teapot Dome but also for a Veterans Bureau scandal, but he overlooks the fact that Harding allowed the perpetrator of that outrage, Charles R. Forbes, to flee to Europe before he could be held accountable. Forbes later returned to the United States, where he was convicted of conspiracy and sent to prison! Toward the end of the book, Dean also speculates that Harding probably did not father the illegitimate child, but according to the Wikipedia page for Harding, DNA testing later confirmed that he had. Or as Maury would have said to the president: “You ARE the father!”
Chief Justice William Howard Taft, President Warren G. Harding and Robert Todd Lincoln, at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial on May 30, 1922. (National Photo Company, public domain)
Today after work I visited the New York Public Library, where an original manuscript of the Declaration of Independence was on display. This is a rare, handwritten copy in Thomas Jefferson’s own hand, one of only four in existence. Congress had removed passages from the original proposed text condemning the slave trade, and Jefferson wanted to preserve his original version. So, after the Declaration was adopted on July 4, 1776, Jefferson hand wrote several copies to send to some of his friends. These documents, part of the library’s permanent collection, are so priceless that they are only on display two days each year. I waited in line for two hours to just view and to take these pictures — which I color-corrected in Photoshop, as the lighting inside was dimmed.
Woodrow Wilson was our nation’s 28th president. He was in office through all of World War I. He devoted the final years of his presidency — and his life, essentially — to fight for ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, which included the establishment of his League of Nations, a global body that Wilson hoped would prevent future war. Wilson’s fight for the treaty and U.S. entry into the League would ultimately prove to be unsuccessful.
The photo on the book cover is of Wilson returning from the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. (Photo: Associated Press, public domain)
His life story is told in “Wilson,” a biography by A. Scott Berg. (Thanks to cousin Traveler Blue for the gift!) At nearly 750 pages of text it’s quite a lot to get through. But it was an easy read. Photographs from the era enhanced the narrative. I enjoyed Berg’s writing style, and I appreciated that he expounded not only upon the subject’s many successes but also his many contradictions as a person and shortcomings as a politician. If there is one gripe I have about Berg’s “Wilson,” it’s that the author spent little time explaining how this wartime president interacted with the military during the war itself.
As the author explains, Wilson was a Southerner by birth and by disposition. He was born in Virginia, the son of a Presbyterian minister who moved the family frequently from congregation to congregation. Wilson grew up in Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. He worked as a college professor and later became president of Princeton University. In 1910 New Jersey’s Democratic Party bosses got Wilson to run for governor, thinking he would be their puppet. After winning the governors race, Wilson defied the party bosses by passing a number of reforms aimed at rooting out government corruption. Against long odds he also pushed through a bold progressive agenda for the state that included labor protections and educational reform. But this would all prove to be just a brief springboard to the Democratic presidential nomination in 1912.
This was the election in which Theodore Roosevelt challenged his Republican successor, William Howard Taft, for the GOP nomination and when he failed ran as a third party “Bull Moose” candidate. TR turned out to be a spoiler for the Republicans. Despite receiving less than 42 percent of the popular vote, Wilson won the election in an electoral-college landslide. He became the first southerner elected president since before the Civil War.
Wilson giving his first State of the Union address, the first such address since 1801. (Photo: Library of Congress, public domain)
As president, Wilson’s domestic agenda was sweeping and progressive. It included a reduction of high tariffs, a personal income tax on the rich, an estate tax, antitrust legislation, labor protections, and farm subsidies. Wilson also signed into law legislation establishing the Federal Reserve. But Wilson’s record on civil rights for blacks was poor. He packed his Cabinet with southerners who sympathized with the Confederacy of old, and when these department heads decided to segregate the federal work force, Wilson went along with it. Wilson also allowed a screening of D.W. Griffith’s racist film “The Birth of a Nation,” which glorified the Ku Klux Klan, to take place in the White House.
During Wilson’s first term, World War I broke out in Europe. Wilson managed to keep the United States neutral for several years, despite Germany’s sinking of a number of ships carrying American passengers, including most famously the Lusitania.
In the election of 1916, Wilson faced off against Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes, narrowly defeating him by a handful of electoral-college votes. The popular vote was 49 percent for Wilson and 46 percent for his republican opponent. The outcome was in dispute for about a week after election day.
Wilson won re-election in 1916 under the slogan “He kept us out of war,” but by early the next year the Germans had escalated their attacks on transatlantic shipping. In April 1917 Wilson went to Congress and asked for a war declaration, stating famously, “The world must be made safe for democracy.” It would take the United States many months to mobilize for war, but when the Americans did finally enter the war it was in a big way. A draft was established, bringing close to 3 million men into the military! Black soldiers were drafted as well as whites, but they were segregated into different units for training and combat. Under the command of General Pershing, the United States turned the tide of the war in Europe, and by the end of 1918 an armistice was declared. But not before untold millions of soldiers had died, including more than 100,000 Americans. Countless millions more died in a deadly global influenza epidemic.
Official presidential portrait of Woodrow Wilson, 1913. (Photo: Frank Graham Cootes, public domain)
After the war Wilson traveled overseas to negotiate the peace treaty. Before talks started, he was welcomed by masses of people lining the streets to catch a glimpse of him. In Paris, he negotiated personally with French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and others, for what would become the Treaty of Versailles. Wilson had brought with him as the basis for negotiations his “Fourteen Points,” which was his vision of how the world should be organized. The final and most important of these points was Wilson’s desire to form a League of Nations, which he got the others to agree to, a bit reluctantly. The French and British were more interested in punishing and humiliating the Germans for the war and wanted harsh remedies, including making the Germans pay reparations. Wilson wanted a more balanced approach, but having expended so much of his own political capital on getting them to agree to the League, he ultimately went with the plan. They also re-drew the map of the world, changing boundaries of many countries and creating new nations, mostly out of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire.
When Wilson returned to the United States with the Treaty of Versailles — which included the League of Nations — the Republicans in the Senate, led by Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, refused to ratify it. They might have approved a modified version had Wilson agreed to let them make changes, but instead Wilson went on a tour of the country, in which he intended to take his case directly to the American people. This would prove to be futile. He barnstormed via train, in which he gave dozens of speeches, mainly in the Western states. But on this trip his health deteriorated, and after a speech in Pueblo, Colorado, in September 1919, he suffered a complete physical breakdown. He was brought back to the White House, where several days later he had a debilitating stroke that left half his body paralyzed. He remained incapacitated for the rest of his presidency. Congress and the general public were not informed about the true extent of his condition.
Here are some additional facts about Wilson and his presidency:
Wilson was the first two-term Democrat since Andrew Jackson.
He went by Tommy Wilson until adulthood, when he decided Woodrow sounded more academic.
He had three daughters, one of whom was married in the White House. Another daughter married his Treasury Secretary!
Wilson is the first president to hold White House press conferences, in which assembled reporters could ask questions on any topic, on the record.
He was also the first president since John Adams to present his State of the Union address in person, to a joint session of Congress. In addition to his annual message, Wilson also addressed Congress in person dozens of other times, on a wide range of topics.
Wilson’s first wife, Ellen, died during his first term. He remarried shortly thereafter, to Edith Bolling Galt, a widow whose first husband had died and left her a jewelry store.
After Wilson’s debilitating stroke, Edith ran interference for her husband and liaised on his behalf with members of his Cabinet. Some have even gone so far as to call Edith our nation’s first woman president!
His first wide, Ellen, was a talented impressionist painter.
Wilson also had an “other woman” in his life — Mrs. Peck — with whom Wilson had some sort of illicit relationship earlier in his life. This never turned into a full-fledged scandal, in part because Teddy Roosevelt thought exposing it might actually help Wilson in the election of 1912.
Wilson is the only president with a PhD.
He authored a number of books on government and political science.
He was an excellent orator. According to the author, he wrote all of his own speeches, often using shorthand for early drafts.
Physically, he was tall and slender.
He played golf almost every day, on the advice of his physician, Dr. Grayson.
He also went on lots of automobile rides.
He was stubborn, and he tended to carry grudges. If someone crossed him, he would often eliminate that person from his life forever.
Wilson received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919, in recognition for his peace-making efforts after the war.
Also during Wilson’s presidency, FOUR amendments to the U.S. Constitution were ratified:
The 16th Amendment allowed Congress to impose income taxes.
The 17th Amendment established direct election of U.S. Senators by popular vote. Before this time, legislatures of each state selected their Senators.
The 18th Amendment was the Prohibition amendment. Congress passed the Volstead Act to enforce Prohibition, but Wilson vetoed it and Congress overrode the veto. The federal ban on alcohol thus began in January 1920.
The 19th Amendment granted women the right to vote. At first Wilson was opposed to the amendment, but during his presidency he “evolved” on the issue. The 1920 presidential election thus became the first in which women could vote in every state.
Wilson left office in 1921, but he and his wife remained in the nation’s capital. He opened a law office with a partner but never had any paying clients. One of his last public appearances was to attend the funeral of his successor, Warren G. Harding. Wilson died in 1924 and was entombed in Washington National Cathedral.
William Howard Taft, our country’s 27th President and its 10th Chief Justice, believed in the Constitution and its system of checks and balances. He is most often remembered for being fat, which is a shame because his advocacy for the judicial branch of government was his real legacy. Taft is also responsible for a number of long-lasting physical changes to our nation’s capital, including the construction of the Supreme Court Building (more on that in a moment).
Before he became President, Taft served as a state judge in his home state of Ohio, as Solicitor General of the United States, and as a federal judge. In 1900 President William McKinley persuaded Taft to step down from the bench to oversee the United States occupation of the Philippines, where he became civil governor a year later. After McKinley was assassinated, Taft continued to serve in the Philippines under President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1904 Roosevelt named Taft Secretary of War. Taft visited Panama during the construction of the canal and later served as temporary provisional governor of Cuba.
In 1908, when Theodore Roosevelt declined to seek another term, Taft received the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, and — with TR’s full blessing and support — he went on to defeat the Democratic nominee, William Jennings Bryan, by a wide margin. As President, Taft focused on revising the nation’s complicated system of tariffs and breaking up large trusts. He also dealt with foreign policy crises with Mexico, Cuba, Santo Domingo and Nicaragua.
But Taft’s conduct in office was not to the liking of Theodore Roosevelt, whose criticism of his successor became more and more vituperative. In an unprecedented move, Roosevelt challenged Taft for the Republican nomination in 1912. When TR lost the nomination, he claimed that the system was rigged and formed a third political party, which became known as the Bull Moose Party. Roosevelt ran against both Taft and the Democratic nominee, Woodrow Wilson, who would go on to win the presidency in an electoral college landslide despite capturing only 41.8 percent of the popular vote. Roosevelt got 27.4 percent and Taft 23.2 percent. After leaving the Presidency, Taft taught law at Yale and authored several books. During World War I he served as co-chairman of the National War Labor Board.
In 1921, President Warren G. Harding appointed Taft Chief Justice of the United States, where he would serve for nine years. As Chief Justice Taft sought consensus, and he wrote and participated in many important decisions. Taft stepped down from the Supreme Court in February 1930 for health reasons, and he died a month later.
While serving as Chief Justice Taft also successfully persuaded Congress to allocate funds for the Supreme Court to have its own building, as up until this time the justices had been meeting in the basement of the Capitol. Taft selected Cass Gilbert as architect for the building. It was completed in 1935, five years after Taft’s death.
The Supreme Court Building of the United States. Photo by Joe Ravi, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16959908
Taft’s career and his many significant contributions to our nation are summarized in the short and concise “William Howard Taft” by Jeffrey Rosen, part of the American Presidents Series. According to the author, President Taft protected more land and was more successful in breaking up trusts and monopolies than his predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt. And as Chief Justice, the author says, Taft’s greatest accomplishment was to solidify the federal judiciary as a coequal branch of government.
Here are some additional facts about William Howard Taft:
He was one of many presidents to hail from Ohio. Others included Hayes, Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, McKinley and Harding.
His wife, Helen, who went by “Nellie,” suffered a stroke when he was President.
As mentioned, Taft was heavy. He gained and lost weight over the years. According to the book, he was at his heaviest — and his unhappiest — during his presidency.
His heroes were George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall (fourth Chief Justice of the United States).
President Taft appointed six justices to the Supreme Court, the most of any president except George Washington and Franklin D. Roosevelt! He would later serve alongside some of the justices he had appointed.
In addition to being responsible for the construction of the United States Supreme Court Building, Taft was also president of the Lincoln Memorial Commission and presided over the monument’s dedication in 1922. Taft also had the first Oval Office built in the West Wing of the White House. And we can also thank Taft for the cherry blossoms in Washington, D.C., as first lady Nellie Taft planted the very first cherry blossom trees, which were a gift from Japan.
Cherry blossoms in Washington, D.C., USDA photo by Scott Bauer – United States Department of Agriculture, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44873
Before moving on to Taft, here’s another book about Teddy. This one is about his perilous journey with a group of explorers down an unmapped river in Brazil. “River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey” takes place in 1913, a year after the bespectacled former president had lost his insurgent third-party run for what would have been an unprecedented third term.
Roosevelt teamed up with a number of naturalists and explorers for a trip that lasted several months, through an unknown section of the Brazilian rainforest. Roosevelt’s second oldest son, Kermit, was part of the expedition. Along the way, there were many hardships. It took the men more than a month just to get to the river, and once they got started downstream in their canoes they were not exactly sure where they were going. They were hoping to eventually reach the Amazon. Once on the River of Doubt — that was the name of the river, but it was later renamed after Roosevelt himself — there were dangerous fish and snakes. Food was scarce, and the mosquitoes, ants and termites made everyone miserable. When rapids or waterfalls made navigating the river impossible, they had to portage all their supplies around the obstacles, causing excruciating delays that often took many extra days.
At one point before a difficult portage one of the men was swept down the river to his death, in an incident that was Kermit’s fault. Later another of the men committed murder by shooting one of his compatriots, then vanishing into the forest. Roosevelt himself came close to death after succumbing to an infection resulting from cutting his leg on a rock.
The co-leader of the expedition was a legendary native Brazilian explorer named Colonel Candido Rondon, who had dedicated his life to mapping the Amazon and who was a fierce defender of the native Indians. He had famously instructed his men who might encounter the Indians, “Die if you must, but never kill.”
This book is by Candice Millard, who is also author of a similarly gripping book called “Destiny of the Republic,” about the assassination of President James Garfield. “River of Doubt” is skimpy on maps but has plenty of helpful pictures. For me, the most interesting sections were Millard’s descriptions of the animal and plant life of the Amazon rain forests. She describes how South America was formed over millions of years and how living things evolved by carving out specialized niches. She also describes the various native Indian tribes, who were largely unseen. They could have killed the intruders at any time but chose not to.
Theodore Roosevelt pointing towards the area explored during the Roosevelt-Rondon expedition. (Credit: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images)
Here’s an update on the goal of reading at least one biography of each president, in order. It all started in 2017 with George Washington, and the most recent is a three-volume series on Theodore Roosevelt.
Biographies of Presidents Washington through Theodore Roosevelt are on the shelf. Some of the biographies are longer than others — and not all the books I’ve read are shown here!
Three recently completed books on Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris cover his early years, his presidency and his post-presidency, respectively.
The top row (those serving from 1789 to 1877) are Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Jackson, Van Buren, William Henry Harrison, Tyler, Polk, Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan, Lincoln, Andrew Johnson and Grant.
The bottom row on the bookshelf of presidents (in the featured image above) includes biographies of those who served as president from 1877 through 1909. From left: Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt.
About a quarter of the way into this presidential biography by Jean Edward Smith, I came across a quote that I’m taking a moment to reflect upon. It’s the point in the book at which FDR is stricken with polio, in 1921, and he is hospitalized and unable to walk. According to the author, a journalist described the scene when friends visited FDR in the hospital. “Roosevelt gaily brushed aside every hint of condolence and sent them [the well-wishers] away more cheerful than when they arrived,” the journalist wrote. “None of them has ever heard him utter a complaint or a regret or even acknowledge that he had had so much as a bit of bad luck.” The author continues, “FDR saw it as his duty not only to appear in the best of spirits but to bolster the spirits of those about him.”
