The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page Volume I Part 4

The day came when this loyal group had other things to work with than their voices and their pens; their efforts had attracted the attention of Mr. John D. Rockefeller, who brought a.s.sistance of an extremely substantial character. In 1902 Mr. Rockefeller organized the General Education Board. Of the ten members six were taken from the Southern Education Board; other members represented general educational interests and especially the Baptist interests to which Mr. Rockefeller had been contributing for years. In a large sense, therefore, especially in its membership, the General Education Board was a development of the Ogden organization; but it was much broader in its sweep, taking under its view the entire nation and all forms of educational effort. It immediately began to interest itself in the needs of the South. In 1902 Mr. Rockefeller gave this new corporation $1,000,000; in 1905 he gave it $10,000,000; in 1907 he astonished the Nation by giving $32,000,000, and, in 1909, another $10,000,000; the whole making a total of $53,000,000, the largest sum ever given by a single man, up to that time, for social or philanthropic purposes. The General Education Board now became the chief outside interest of Page's life. He was made a member of the Executive Committee, faithfully attended all its sessions, and partic.i.p.ated intimately in every important plan. All such bodies have their decorative members and their working members; Page belonged emphatically in the latter cla.s.s. Not only was he fertile in suggestions, but his ready mind could give almost any proposal its proper emphasis and clearly set forth its essential details. Between Page and Dr. b.u.t.trick, Secretary and now President of the Board, a close personal intimacy grew up. Dr. b.u.t.trick moved to Teaneck Road, Englewood, where Page had his home, and many a long evening did the two men spend together, many a long walk did they take in the surrounding country, always discussing education, especially Southern education. A letter to the present writer from Dr. Abraham Flexner, the present Secretary of the Board, perhaps sums up the matter. "Page was one of the real educational statesmen of this country," says Dr. Flexner, "probably the greatest that we have had since the Civil War."

And this Rockefeller support came at a time when that movement known as the "educational awakening" had started in the South. In 1900 North Carolina elected its greatest governor since the Civil War--Charles B.

Ayc.o.c.k. A much repeated anecdote attributes Lincoln's detestation of slavery to a slave auction that he witnessed as a small boy; Ayc.o.c.k's first zeal as an educational reformer had an origin that was even more pathetic, for he always carried in his mind his recollection of his own mother signing an important legal doc.u.ment with a cross. As a young man fresh from the university Ayc.o.c.k also came under the influence of Page.

An old letter, preserved among Page's papers, dated February 26, 1886, discloses that he was a sympathizing reader of the "mummy" controversy; when the brickbats began flying in Page's direction Ayc.o.c.k wrote, telling Page that "fully three fourths of the people are with you and wish you G.o.dspeed in your effort to awaken better work, greater activity, and freer opinion in the state." And now under Ayc.o.c.k's governorship North Carolina began to tackle the educational problem with a purpose. School houses started up all over the state at the rate of one a day--many of them beautiful, commodious, modern structures, in every way the equals of any in the North or West; high schools, normal schools, trade schools made their appearance wherever the need was greatest; and in other parts of the South the response was similarly energetic. The reform is not yet complete, but the description that Page gave of Southern education in 1897, accurate in all its details as it was then, has now become ancient history.

IV

And in occupations of this kind Page pa.s.sed his years of maturity. His was not a spectacular life; his family for the most part still remained his most immediate interest; the daily round of an editor has its imaginative quality, but in the main it was for Page a quiet, even a cloistered existence; the work that an editor does, the achievements that he can put to his credit, are usually anonymous; and the American public little understood the extent to which Page was influencing many of the most vital forces of his time. The business a.s.sociation that he had formed with Mr. Doubleday turned out most happily. Their publishing house, in a short time, attained a position of great influence and prosperity. The two men, on both the personal and the business side, were congenial and complementary; and the love that both felt for country life led to the establishment of a publishing and printing plant of unusual beauty. In Garden City, Long Island, a great brick structure was built, somewhat suggestive in its architecture of Hampton Court, surrounded by pools and fountains, Italian gardens, green walks and pergolas, gardens blooming in appropriate seasons with roses, peonies, rhododendrons, chrysanthemums, and the like, and parks of evergreen, fir, cedar, and more exotic trees and shrubs. Certainly fate could have designed no more fitting setting for Page's favourite activities than this. In a.s.sembling authors, in instigating the writing of books, in watching the achievements and the tendencies of American life, in the routine of editing his magazine--all this in a.s.sociation with partners whose daily companionship was a delight and a stimulation--Page spent his last years in America.

Page's independence as an editor, sufficiently indicated in the days of his vivacious youth, became even more emphatic in his maturer years. In his eyes, merely inking over so many pages of good white paper was not journalism; conviction, zeal, honesty--these were the important points.

Almost on the very day that his appointment as Amba.s.sador to Great Britain was announced his magazine published an editorial from his pen, which contained not especially complimentary references to his new chief, Mr. Bryan, the Secretary of State; naturally the newspapers found much amus.e.m.e.nt in these few sentences; but the thing was typical of Page's whole career as an editor. He held to the creed that an editor should divorce himself entirely from prejudices, animosities, and predilections; this seems an obvious, even a trite thing to say, yet there are so few men who can leave personal considerations aside in writing of men and events that it is worth while pointing out that Page was such a man. When his firm was planning to establish its magazine, his partner, Mr. Doubleday, was approached by a New York politician of large influence but shady reputation who wished to be a.s.sured that it would reflect correct political principles. "You should see Mr. Page about that," was the response. "No, this is a business matter," the insinuating gentleman went on, and then he proceeded to show that about twenty-five thousand subscribers could be obtained if the publication preached orthodox standpat doctrine. "I don't think you had better see Mr. Page," said Mr. Doubleday, dismissing his caller.

Many incidents which ill.u.s.trate this independence could be given; one will suffice. In 1907 and 1908, Page's magazine published the "Random Reminiscences of John D. Rockefeller." While the articles were appearing, the Hearst newspapers obtained a large number of letters that, some years before, had pa.s.sed between Mr. John D. Archbold, President of the Standard Oil Company and one of Mr. Rockefeller's business a.s.sociates from the earliest days, and Senator Joseph B.

Foraker, of Ohio. These letters uncovered one of the gravest scandals that had ever involved an American public man; they instantaneously destroyed Senator Foraker's political career and hastened his death.

They showed that this brilliant man had been obtaining large sums of money from the Standard Oil Company while he was filling the post of United States Senator and that at the same time he was receiving suggestions from Mr. Archbold about pending legislation. Mr. Rockefeller was not personally involved, for he had retired from active business many years before these things had been done; but the Standard Oil Company, with which his name was intimately a.s.sociated, was involved and in a way that seemed to substantiate the worst charges that had been made against it. At this time Page, as a member of the General Education Board, was doing his part in helping to disperse the Rockefeller millions for public purposes; his magazine was publishing Mr.

Rockefeller's reminiscences; there are editors who would have felt a certain embarra.s.sment in commenting on the Archbold transaction. Page, however, did not hesitate. Mr. Archbold, hearing that he intended to treat the subject fully, asked him to come and see him. Page replied that he would be glad to have Mr. Archbold call upon him. The two men were brought together by friendly intermediaries in a neutral place; but the great oil magnate's explanation of his iniquities did not satisfy Page. The November, 1908, issue of the magazine contained, in one section, an interesting chapter by Mr. Rockefeller, describing the early days of the Standard Oil Company, and, in another, ten columns by Page, discussing the Archbold disclosures in language that was discriminating and well tempered, but not at all complimentary to Mr. Archbold or to the Standard Oil Company.

Occasionally Page was summoned for services of a public character. Thus President Roosevelt, whose friendship he had enjoyed for many years, asked him to serve upon his Country Life Commission--a group of men called by the President to study ways of improving the surroundings and extending the opportunities of American farmers. Page's interest in Negro education led to his appointment to the Jeanes Board. He early became an admirer of Booker Washington, and especially approved his plan for uplifting the Negro by industrial training. One of the great services that Page rendered literature was his persuasion of Washington to write that really great autobiography, "Up from Slavery," and another biography in a different field, for which he was responsible, was Miss Helen Keller's "Story of My Life." And only once, amid these fine but not showy activities, did Page's life a.s.sume anything in the nature of the sensational. This was in 1909, when he published his one effort at novel writing, "The Southerner." To write novels had been an early ambition with Page; indeed his papers disclose that he had meditated several plans of this kind; but he never seriously settled himself to the task until the year 1906. In July of that year the _Atlantic Monthly_ began publishing a serial ent.i.tled "The Autobiography of a Southerner Since the Civil War," by Nicholas Worth. The literary matter that appeared under this t.i.tle most readers accepted as veracious though anonymous autobiography. It related the life adventures of a young man, born in the South, of parents who had had little sympathy with the Confederate cause, attempting to carve out his career in the section of his birth and meeting opposition and defeat from the prejudices with which he constantly found himself in conflict. The story found its main theme and background in the fact that the Southern States were so exclusively living in the memories of the Civil War that it was impossible for modern ideas to obtain a foothold. "I have sometimes thought," said the author, and this pa.s.sage may be taken as embodying the leading point of the narrative, "that many of the men who survived that unnatural war unwittingly did us a greater hurt than the war itself. It gave everyone of them the intensest experience of his life and ever afterward he referred every other experience to this. Thus it stopped the thought of most of them as an earthquake stops a clock. The fierce blow of battle paralyzed the mind. Their speech was a vocabulary of war, their loyalties were loyalties, not to living ideas or duties, but to old commanders and to distorted traditions. They were dead men, most of them, moving among the living as ghosts; and yet, as ghosts in a play, they held the stage." In another pa.s.sage the writer names the "ghosts" which are chiefly responsible for preventing Southern progress.

They are three: "The Ghost of the Confederate dead, the Ghost of religious orthodoxy, the Ghost of Negro domination." Everywhere the hero finds his progress blocked by these obstructive wraiths of the past. He seeks a livelihood in educational work--becomes a local superintendent of Public Instruction, and loses his place because his religious views are unorthodox, because he refuses to accept the popular estimate of Confederate statesmen, and because he hopes to educate the black child as well as the white one. He enters politics and runs for public office on the platform of the new day, is elected, and then finds himself counted out by political ringsters. Still he does not lose faith, and finally settles down in the management of a cotton mill, convinced that the real path of salvation lies in economic effort. This mere skeleton of a story furnishes an excuse for rehearsing again the ideas that Page had already made familiar in his writings and in his public addresses.

This time the lesson is enlivened by the portrayal of certain typical characters of the post-bellum South. They are all there--the several types of Negro, ranging all the way from the faithful and philosophic plantation retainer to the lazy "Publican" office-seeker; the political colonel, to whom the Confederate veterans and the "fair daughters of the South (G.o.d bless 'em)" are the mainstays of "civerlerzation" and indispensable instrumentalities in the game of partisan politics; the evangelical clergymen who cared more for old-fashioned creeds than for the education of the ma.s.ses; the disreputable editor who specialized in Negro crime and constantly preached the doctrine of the "white man's country"; the Southern woman who, innocently and sincerely and even charmingly, upheld the ancient tradition and the ancient feud. On the other hand, Page's book portrays the buoyant enthusiast of the new day, the reformer who was seeking to establish a public school system and to strengthen the position of woman; and, above all, the quiet, hard-working industrialist who cared nothing for stump speaking but much for cotton mills, improved methods of farming, the introduction of diversified crops, the tidying up of cities and the country.

These chapters, extensively rewritten, were published as a book in 1909.

Probably Page was under no illusion that he had created a real romance when he described his completed work as a "novel." The _Atlantic_ autobiography had attracted wide attention, and the identification of the author had been immediate and accurate. Page's friends began calling his house on the telephone and asking for "Nicholas" and certain genial spirits addressed him in letters as "Ma.r.s.e Little Nick"--the name under which the hero was known to the old Negro family servant, Uncle Ephraim--perhaps the best drawn character in the book. Page's real purpose in calling the book a "novel" therefore, was to inform the public that the story, so far as its incidents and most of its characters were concerned, was pure fiction. Certain episodes, such as those describing the hero's early days, were, in the main, veracious transcripts from Page's own life, but the rest of the book bears practically no relation to his career. The fact that he spent his mature years in the North, editing magazines and publishing, whereas Nicholas Worth spends his in the South, engaged in educational work and in politics and industry, settles this point. The characters, too, are rather types than specific individuals, though one or two of them, particularly Professor Billy Bain, who is clearly Charles D. McIver, may be accepted as fairly accurate portraits. But as a work of fiction "The Southerner" can hardly be considered a success; the love story is too slight, the women not well done, most of the characters rather personified qualities than flesh and blood people. Its strength consists in the picture that it gives of the so-called "Southern problem," and especially of the devastating influence of slavery. From this standpoint the book is an autobiography, for the ideas and convictions it presents had formed the mental life of Page from his earliest days.

And these were the things that hurt. Yet the stories of the anger caused by "The Southerner" have been much exaggerated. It is said that a certain distinguished Southern senator declared that, had he known that Page was the author of "The Southerner," he would have blocked his nomination as Amba.s.sador to Great Britain; certain Southern newspapers also severely denounced the volume; even some of Page's friends thought that it was a little unkind in spots; yet as a whole the Southern people accepted it as a fair, and certainly as an honest, treatment of a very difficult subject. Possibly Page was a little hard upon the Confederate veteran, and did not sufficiently portray the really pathetic aspects of his character; any shortcomings of this sort are due, not to any failing in sympathy, but to the fact that Page's zeal was absorbingly concentrated upon certain glaring abuses. And as to the accuracy of his vision in these respects there could be no question. The volume was a welcome antidote to the sentimental Southern novels that had contented themselves with glorifying a vanished society which, when the veil is stripped, was not heroic in all its phases, for it was based upon an inst.i.tution so squalid as human slavery, and to those even more pernicious books which, by luridly portraying the unquestioned vices of reconstruction and the frightful consequences which resulted from giving the Negro the ballot, simply aroused useless pa.s.sions and made the way out of the existing wilderness still more difficult. So the best public opinion, North and South, regarded "The Southerner," and decided that Page had performed a service to the section of his birth in writing it.

Indeed the fair-minded and intelligent spirit with which the best elements in the South received "The Southerner" in itself demonstrated that this great region had entered upon a new day.

V

Nor was Page's work for the South yet ended. In the important five years from 1905 to 1910 he performed two services of an extremely practical kind. In 1906 the problem of Southern education a.s.sumed a new phase. Dr.

Wallace b.u.t.trick, the Secretary of the General Education Board, had now decided that the fundamental difficulty was economic. By that time the Southern people had revised their original conception that education was a private and not a public concern; there was now a general acceptance of the doctrine that the mental and physical training of every child, white and black, was the responsibility of the state; Ayc.o.c.k's campaign had worked such a popular revolution on this subject that no politician who aspired to public office would dare to take a contrary view. Yet the economic difficulty still remained. The South was poor; whatever might be the general desire, the taxable resources were not sufficient to support such a comprehensive system of popular instruction as existed in the North and West. Any permanent improvement must therefore be based upon the strengthening of the South's economic position. Essentially the task was to build up Southern agriculture, which for generations had been wasteful, unintelligent and consequently unproductive. Such a far-reaching programme might well appall the most energetic reformer, but Dr. b.u.t.trick set to work. He saw little light until his attention was drawn to a quaint and philosophic gentleman--a kind of bucolic Ben Franklin--who was then obscurely working in the cotton lands of Louisiana, making warfare on the boll weevil in a way of his own. At that time Dr. Seaman A. Knapp had made no national reputation; yet he had evolved a plan for redeeming country life and making American farms more fruitful that has since worked marvellous results. There was nothing especially sensational about its details. Dr. Knapp had made the discovery in relation to farms that the utilitarians had long since made with reference to other human activities: that the only way to improve agriculture was not to talk about it, but to go and do it. During the preceding fifty years agricultural colleges had sprung up all over the United States--Dr. Knapp had been president of one himself; practically every Southern state had one or more; agricultural lecturers covered thousands of miles annually telling their yawning audiences how to farm; these efforts had scattered broadcast much valuable information about the subject, but the difficulty lay in inducing the farmers to apply it.

Dr. Knapp had a new method. He selected a particular farmer and persuaded him to work his fields for a period according to methods which he prescribed. He told his pupil how to plough, what seed to plant, how to s.p.a.ce his rows, what fertilizers to use, and the like. If a selected acreage yielded a profitable crop which the farmer could sell at an increased price Dr. Knapp had sufficient faith in human nature to believe that that particular farmer would continue to operate his farm on the new method and that his neighbours, having this practical example of growing prosperity, would imitate him.

Such was the famous "Demonstration Work" of Dr. Seaman A. Knapp; this activity is now a regular branch of the Department of Agriculture, employing thousands of agents and spending not far from $18,000,000 a year. Its application to the South has made practically a new and rich country, and it has long since been extended to other regions. When Dr.

b.u.t.trick first met Knapp, however, there were few indications of this splendid future. He brought Dr. Knapp North and exhibited him to Page.

This was precisely the kind of man who appealed to Page's sympathies.

His mind was always keenly on the scent for the new man--the original thinker who had some practical plan for uplifting humankind and making life more worth while. And Dr. Knapp's mission was one that had filled most of his thoughts for many years; its real purpose was the enrichment of country life. Page therefore took to Dr. Knapp with a mighty zest. He supported him on all occasions; he pled his cause with great eloquence before the General Education Board, whose purse strings were liberally unloosed in behalf of the Knapp work; in his writings, in speeches, in letters, in all forms of public advocacy, he insisted that Dr. Knapp had found the solution of the agricultural problem. The fact is that Page regarded Knapp as one of the greatest men of the time. His feeling came out with characteristic intensity on the occasion of the homely reformer's funeral. "The exercises," Page once told a friend, "were held in a rather dismal little church on the outskirts of Washington. The day was bleak and chill, the attendants were few--chiefly officials of the Department of Agriculture. The clergyman read the service in the most perfunctory way. Then James Wilson, the Secretary of Agriculture, spoke formally of Dr. Knapp as a faithful servant of the Department who always did well what he was told to do, commending his life in an altogether commonplace fashion. By that time my heart was pretty hot. No one seemed to divine that in the coffin before them was the body of a really great man, one who had hit upon a fruitful idea in American agriculture--an idea that was destined to cover the nation and enrich rural life immeasurably." Page was so moved by this lack of appreciation, so full of sorrow at the loss of one of his dearest friends, that, when he rose to speak, his appraisment took on a certain indignation. Their dead a.s.sociate, Page declared, would outrank the generals and the politicians who received the world's plaudits, for he had devoted his life to a really great purpose; his inspiration had been the love of the common people, his faith, his sympathy had all been expended in an effort to brighten the life of the too frequently neglected ma.s.ses. Page's address on this occasion was entirely extemporaneous; no record of it was ever made, but those who heard it still carry the memory of an eloquent and fiery outburst that placed Knapp's work in its proper relation to American history and gave an unforgettable picture of a patient, idealistic, achieving man whose name will loom large in the future.

During this same period Page, always on the outlook for the exceptional man, made another discovery which has had world-wide consequences. As a member of President Roosevelt's Country Life Commission Page became one of the committee a.s.signed to investigate conditions in the Southern States. The sanitarian of this commission was Dr. Charles W. Stiles, a man who held high rank as a zoologist, and who, as such, had for many years done important work with the Department of Agriculture. Page had hardly formed Dr. Stiles's acquaintance before he discovered that, at that time, he was a man of one idea. And this one idea had for years brought upon his head much good-natured ridicule. For Dr. Stiles had his own explanation for much of the mental and physical sluggishness that prevailed in the rural sections of the Southern States. Yet he could not mention this without exciting uproarious laughter--even in the presence of scientific men. Several years previously Dr. Stiles had discovered that a hitherto uncla.s.sified species of a parasite popularly known as the hookworm prevailed to an astonishing extent in all the Southern States. The pathological effects of this creature had long been known; it localized in the intestines, there secreted a poison that destroyed the red blood corpuscles, and reduced its victims to a deplorable state of anaemia, making them constantly ill, listless, mentally dull--in every sense of the word useless units of society. The encouraging part of this discovery was that the patients could quickly be cured and the hookworm eradicated by a few simple improvements in sanitation. Dr. Stiles had long been advocating such a campaign as an indispensable preliminary to improving Southern life. But the humorous aspect of the hookworm always interfered with his cause; the microbe of laziness had at last been found!

It was not until Dr. Stiles, in the course of this Southern trip, cornered Page in a Pullman car, that he finally found an attentive listener. Page, of course, had his preliminary laugh, but then the hookworm began to work on his imagination. He quickly discovered that Dr. Stiles was no fool; and before the expedition was finished, he had become a convert and, like most converts, an extremely zealous one. The hookworm now filled his thoughts as completely as it did those of his friend; he studied it, he talked about it; and characteristically he set to work to see what could be done. How much Southern history did the thing explain? Was it not forces like this, and not statesmen and generals, that really controlled the destinies of mankind? Page's North Carolina country people had for generations been denounced as "crackers," and as "hill-billies," but here was the discovery that the great ma.s.s of them were ill--as ill as the tuberculosis patients in the Adirondacks. Free these ma.s.ses from the enervating parasite that consumed all their energies--for Dr. Stiles had discovered that the disease afflicted the great majority of the rural cla.s.ses--and a new generation would result. Naturally the cause strongly touched Page's sympathies. He laid the case before the ever sympathetic Dr. b.u.t.trick, but here again progress was slow. By hard hammering, however, he half converted Dr. b.u.t.trick, who, in turn, took the case of the hookworm to his old a.s.sociate, Dr. Frederick T. Gates. What Page was determined to obtain was a million dollars or so from Mr. John D. Rockefeller, for the purpose of engaging in deadly warfare upon this pest. This was the proper way to produce results: first persuade Dr. b.u.t.trick, then induce him to persuade Dr. Gates, who, if convinced, had ready access to the great treasure house. But Dr. Gates also began to smile; even the combined eloquence of Page and Dr. b.u.t.trick could not move him. So the reform marked time until one day Dr. b.u.t.trick, Dr. Gates, and Dr. Simon Flexner, the Director of the Rockefeller inst.i.tute, happened to be fellow travellers--again on a Pullman car.

"Dr. Flexner," said Dr. b.u.t.trick--this for the benefit of his incredulous friend--"what is the scientific standing of Dr. Charles W.

Stiles?"

"Very, very high," came the immediate response, and at this Dr. Gates p.r.i.c.ked up his ears. Yet the subsequent conversation disclosed that Dr.

Flexner was unfamiliar with the Stiles hookworm work. He, too, smiled at the idea, but, like Page his smile was not one of ridicule.

"If Dr. Stiles believes this," was his dictum, "it is something to be taken most seriously."

As Dr. Flexner is probably the leading medical scientist in the United States, his judgment at once lifted the hookworm issue to a new plane.

Dr. Gates ceased laughing and events now moved rapidly. Mr. Rockefeller gave a million dollars to a sanitary commission for the eradication of the hookworm in the Southern States, and of this Page became a charter member. In this way an enterprise that is the greatest sanitary and health reform of modern times had its beginnings. So great was the success of the Hookworm Commission in the South, so many thousands were almost daily restored to health and usefulness, that Mr. Rockefeller extended its work all over the world--to India, Egypt, China, Australia, to all sections that fall within the now accurately located "hookworm belt." Out of it grew the great International Health Commission, also endowed with unlimited millions of Rockefeller money, which is engaged in stamping out disease and promoting medical education in all quarters of the globe. Dr. Stiles and Page's a.s.sociates on the General Education Board attribute the origin of this work to the simple fact that Page, great humourist that he was, could temper his humour with intelligence, and could therefore perceive the point at which a joke ceased to be a joke and actually concealed a truth of the most far-reaching importance to mankind.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Walter H. Page (1899), from a photograph taken when he was editor of the _Atlantic Monthly_]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Dr. Wallace b.u.t.trick, President of the General Education Board]

Page enjoyed the full results of this labour one night in the autumn of 1913, when Dr. Wickliffe Rose, the head of the International Health Board, came to London to discuss the possibility of beginning hookworm work in the British Empire, especially in Egypt and India. Page, as Amba.s.sador, arranged a dinner at the Marlborough Club, attended by the leading medical scientists of the kingdom and several members of the Cabinet. Dr. Rose's description of his work made a deep impression. He was informed that the British Government was only too ready to cooperate with the Health Board. When the discussion was ended the Right Honourable Lewis Harcourt, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, concluded an eloquent address with these words:

"The time will come when we shall look back on this evening as the beginning of a new era in British colonial administration."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 5: A memorandum of an old _Atlantic_ balance sheet discloses that James Russell Lowell's salary as editor was $1,500 a year.]

[Footnote 6: A member of the firm of Houghton, Mifflin & Company.]

CHAPTER IV

THE WILSONIAN ERA BEGINS

I

It was Page's interest in the material and spiritual elevation of the ma.s.ses that first directed his attention to the Presidential aspirations of Woodrow Wilson. So much history has been made since 1912 that the public questions which then stirred the popular mind have largely pa.s.sed out of recollection. Yet the great rallying cry of that era was democracy, spelled with a small "d." In the fifty years since the Civil War only one Democratic President had occupied the White House. The Republicans' long lease of power had produced certain symptoms which their political foes now proceeded to describe as great public abuses.

The truth of the matter, of course, is that neither political virtue nor political depravity was the exclusive possession of either of the great national organizations. The Republican party, especially under the enlightened autocracy of Roosevelt, had started such reforms as conservation, the improvement of country life, the regulation of the railroads, and the warfare on the trusts, and had shown successful interest in such evidences of the new day as child labour laws, employer's liability laws, corrupt practice acts, direct primaries and the popular election of United States Senators--not all perhaps wise as methods, but all certainly inspired with a new conception of democratic government. Roosevelt also had led in the onslaught on that corporation influence which, after all, const.i.tuted the great problem of American politics. But Mr. Taft's administration had impressed many men, and especially Page, as a discouraging slump back into the ancient system.

Page was never blind to the inadequacies of his own party; the three campaigns of Bryan and his extensive influence with the Democratic ma.s.ses at times caused him deep despair; that even the corporations had extended their tentacles into the ranks of Jefferson was all too obvious a fact; yet the Democratic party at that time Page regarded as the most available instrument for embodying in legislation and practice the new things in which he most believed. Above all, the Democratic party in 1912 possessed one a.s.set to which the Republicans could lay no claim--a new man, a new leader, the first statesman who had crossed its threshold since Grover Cleveland.

Like many scholarly Americans, Page had been charmed by the intellectual brilliancy of Woodrow Wilson. The utter commonplaceness of much of what pa.s.ses for political thinking in this country had for years discouraged him. American political life may have possessed energy, character, even greatness; but it was certainly lacking in distinction. It was this new quality that Wilson brought, and it was this that attracted thousands of cultivated Americans to his standard, irrespective of party. The man was an original thinker; he exercised the priceless possession of literary style. He entertained; he did not weary; even his temperamental deficiencies, which were apparent to many observers in 1912, had at least the advantage that attaches to the interesting and the unusual.

What Page and thousands of other public-spirited men saw in Wilson was a leader of fine intellectual gifts who was prepared to devote his splendid energies to making life more attractive and profitable to the "Forgotten Man." Here was the opportunity then, to embody in one imaginative statesman all the interest which for a generation had been acc.u.mulating in favour of the democratic revival. At any rate, after thirty years of Republican half-success and half-failure, here was the chance for a new deal. Amid a mob of shopworn public men, here was one who had at least the charm of novelty.

Page had known Mr. Wilson for thirty years, and all this time the Princeton scholar had seemed to him to be one of the most helpful influences at work in the United States. As already noted Page had met the future President when he was serving a journalistic apprenticeship in Atlanta, Georgia. Wilson was then spending his days in a dingy law office and was putting to good use the time consumed in waiting for the clients who never came by writing that famous book on "Congressional Government" which first lifted his name out of obscurity. This work, the product of a man of twenty-nine, was perhaps the first searching examination to which the American Congressional system had ever been subjected. It brought Wilson a professorship at the newly established Bryn Mawr College and drew to him other growing minds like Page's.

"Watch that man!" was Page's admonition to his friends. Wilson then went into academic work and Page plunged into the exactions of daily and periodical journalism, but Page's papers show that the two men had kept in touch with each other during the succeeding thirty years. These papers include a collection of letters from Woodrow Wilson, the earliest of which is dated October 30, 1885, when the future President was beginning his career at Bryn Mawr. He was eager to come to New York, Wilson said, and discuss with Page "half a hundred topics" suggested by "Congressional Government." The atmosphere at Bryn Mawr was evidently not stimulating. "Such a talk would give me a chance to let off some of the enthusiasm I am just now painfully stirring up in enforced silence."

The _Forum_ and the _Atlantic Monthly_, when Page was editor, showed many traces of his interest in Wilson, who was one of his most frequent contributors. When Wilson became President of Princeton, he occasionally called upon his old _Atlantic_ friend for advice. He writes to Page on various matters--to ask for suggestions about filling a professorship or a lectureship; and there are also references to the difficulties Wilson is having with the Princeton trustees.

Page's letters also portray the new hopes with which Wilson inspired him. One of his best loved correspondents was Henry Wallace, editor of _Wallace's Farmer_, a homely and genial Rooseveltian. Page was one of those who immensely admired Roosevelt's career; but he regarded him as a man who had finished his work, at least in domestic affairs, and whose great claim upon posterity would be as the stimulator of the American conscience. "I see you are coming around to Wilson," Page writes, "and in pretty rapid fashion. I a.s.sure you that that is the solution of the problem. I have known him since we were boys, and I have been studying him lately with a great deal of care. I haven't any doubt but that is the way out. The old labels 'Democrat' and 'Republican' have ceased to have any meaning, not only in my mind and in yours, but I think in the minds of nearly all the people. Don't you feel that way?"

The campaign of 1912 was approaching its end when this letter was written; and no proceeding in American politics had so aroused Page's energies. He had himself played a part in Wilson's nomination. He was one of the first to urge the Princeton President to seize the great opportunity that was rising before him. These suggestions were coming from many sources in the summer of 1910; Mr. Wilson was about to retire from the Presidency of Princeton; the movement had started to make him Governor of New Jersey, and it was well understood that this was merely intended as the first step to the White House. But Mr. Wilson was himself undecided; to escape the excitement of the moment he had retired to a country house at Lyme, Connecticut. In this place, in response to a letter, Page now sought him out. His visit was a plea that Mr. Wilson should accept his proffered fate; the Governorship of New Jersey, then the Presidency, and the opportunity to promote the causes in which both men believed.

"But do you think I can do it, Page?" asked the hesitating Wilson.

"I am sure you can": and then Page again, with his customary gusto, launched into his persuasive argument. His host at one moment would a.s.sent; at another present the difficulties; it was apparent that he was having trouble in reaching a decision. To what extent Page's conversation converted him the record does not disclose; it is apparent, however, that when, in the next two years, difficulties came, his mind seemed naturally to turn in Page's direction. Especially noticeable is it that he appeals to Page for help against his fool friends. An indiscreet person in New Jersey is booming Mr. Wilson for the Presidency; the activity of such a man inevitably brings ridicule upon the object of his attention; cannot Page find some kindly way of calling him off? Mr. Wilson asks Page's advice about a campaign manager, and incidentally expresses his own aversion to a man of "large calibre" for this engagement. There were occasional conferences with Mr. Wilson on his Presidential prospects, one of which took place at Page's New York apartment. Page was also the man who brought Mr. Wilson and Colonel House together; this had the immediate result of placing the important state of Texas on the Wilson side, and, as its ultimate consequence, brought about one of the most important a.s.sociations in the history of American politics. Page had known Colonel House for many years and was the advocate who convinced the sagacious Texan that Woodrow Wilson was the man. Wilson also acquired the habit of referring to Page men who offered themselves to him as volunteer workers in his cause. "Go and see Walter Page" was his usual answer to this kind of an approach. But Page was not a collector of delegates to nominating conventions; not his the art of manipulating these a.s.semblages in the interest of a favoured man; yet his services to the Wilson cause, while less demonstrative, were almost as practical. His talent lay in exposition; and he now took upon himself the task of spreading Wilson's fame. In his own magazine and in books published by his firm, in letters to friends, in personal conferences, he set forth Wilson's achievements. Page also persuaded Wilson to make his famous speechmaking trip through the Western States in 1911 and this was perhaps his largest definite contribution to the Wilson campaign. It was in the course of this historic pilgrimage that the American ma.s.ses obtained their first view of a previously too-much hidden figure.