Woodrow Wilson by John Milton Cooper Jr

Author:John Milton Cooper, Jr. [Cooper, Milton John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
ISBN: 9780307273017
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-01-09T23:00:00+00:00

On November 7, when the returns came in, Wilson thought he might have to implement the plan. On election day, he and Edith drove to Princeton, where he voted once more at the fire station and joked with students and reporters. Back at Shadow Lawn, they spent a quiet afternoon and had dinner with his daughter Margaret, son-in-law Frank Sayre, and cousin Helen Bones, Edith’s brother and sister-in-law, and Grayson. They played twenty questions until ten o’clock, when a telephone call from New York brought bad news: The New York Times was declaring Hughes the winner. As Edith later recalled, Margaret declared indignantly, “Impossible. They cannot know yet. In the West they are still at the polls.” A call to the White House found a gloomy Tumulty repeating the same bad news. According to Edith’s recollection, her husband remained calm. He agreed with Margaret that everything was not settled yet, but he was not sanguine. “There now seems little hope that we shall not be drawn into the War,” Edith remembered him saying, “though I have done everything I can to keep us out; but my defeat will be taken by Germany as a repudiation of my policy. Many of our own people will so construe it, and will try to force war upon the next Administration.” Wilson asked for a glass of milk, and as he left the room to go upstairs to bed, he said, “I might stay longer but you are all so blue.”44

They were blue at Shadow Lawn and the White House and Democratic headquarters. The returns appeared to be bearing out their worst fears. In the Northeast, the Republican tide swept every state except New Hampshire, which seesawed before finally going to Wilson by 52 votes. In the Midwest, the Republicans did almost as well, although they lost Ohio, and Minnesota remained in doubt. The Democrats’ gloom began to brighten during the early hours of the next morning. A tide of their own began to sweep the West, where only South Dakota and Oregon clearly went to Hughes. By noon on November 8, the president had a lead of 4 electoral votes among the declared states. Four states—with a total of 33 electoral votes—remained out: California, with 13; Minnesota, with 12; North Dakota, with 5; and New Mexico, with 3. By noon on November 9, it was clear that Wilson had carried three of those four states; only Minnesota went for Hughes—by 392 votes. Wilson was the winner, with 277 electoral votes to Hughes’s 254. In the popular tally, he led by nearly 600,000 votes: 9,129,606 to 8,538,221. Hughes would not formally concede for almost two weeks; after his telegram arrived, the president joked to his brother, “It was a little moth-eaten when it got here but quite legible.”45

Wilson was the first Democrat since Andrew Jackson to win a second consecutive term. He had increased his popular tally from four years earlier by nearly 3 million votes and his share of the total by a little under eight percentage points.

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