Wilson re-elected president

On 7 November 1916 the presidential election was held in the United States. The Democrat Woodrow Wilson, seeking a second term, defeated the Republican candidate, Charles Evans Hughes, in one of the closest elections in the country’s history. Wilson won about 9.1 million votes (49.2%) and Hughes about 8.5 million (46.1%). In the Electoral College the margin was narrower still: 277 electoral votes to 254, with 266 needed to win. Thomas Marshall remained vice-president. The British chronology of the war records the re-election under the date of the vote, but the final result was not known for another two days.

A campaign in the shadow of war

The Republicans, who had lost in 1912 because of the split between the conservatives and the supporters of Theodore Roosevelt, this time chose a compromise candidate. Hughes, a former governor of New York, had sat on the Supreme Court since 1910 and for six years had stayed out of political disputes. After his nomination in June he resigned from the bench. Roosevelt declined to run on the ticket of the Progressive Party and endorsed Hughes, and his party practically ceased to exist. Hughes’s running mate was Charles Warren Fairbanks. At the start of the campaign Hughes was considered the favourite, because the Republicans were then the majority party.

The main issue was the war in Europe. The Democrats, who nominated Wilson in June at their convention in St. Louis, campaigned under the slogan “He kept us out of war” and warned that a Republican victory would mean war with Germany and Mexico. Wilson could point out that after the note on the Sussex Germany had given way in May and restricted submarine warfare. Hughes called for better preparation of the country for war and a firmer defence of American rights, but at the same time professed neutrality, so that his position seemed unclear to many voters. He also criticised Wilson’s interventions in Mexico and the eight-hour day law for railwaymen. Roosevelt toured the country on his behalf and called the Democratic slogan “a coward’s phrase”, but according to some historians his bellicose tone rather drove away from the Republicans voters who feared war. A month before the vote the campaign was inflamed by the raid of U-53 off the coast of the United States.

Election night and California

On the evening of 7 November the first results from the east looked bad for Wilson. Hughes won New York and the president’s home state of New Jersey, almost the whole of the North-East and several large states of the Midwest, such as Illinois. On the morning of 8 November some New York newspapers announced the Republican’s victory. An anecdote repeated later has it that when a journalist telephoned Hughes, he was told that “the president is asleep” and replied: “When he wakes up, tell him he is no longer president.” The story is probably invented, but it captures the mood of those days well.

As the votes from the west and the south were counted, the balance tipped towards Wilson. The president won the entire South and most of the western states, where the peace slogan appealed to farmers and workers and some of Roosevelt’s former supporters backed his social reforms. On the evening of 8 November, according to the newspapers, he had 254 electoral votes and needed California or Minnesota to win. In California the votes from remote farming districts came in slowly. On the afternoon of 9 November the Democrats claimed victory there, and in the evening the California Republicans conceded, although the result was still being confirmed by further tallies on 10 November. Wilson carried California by a margin of 3,773 votes out of nearly a million cast. It is thought that Hughes lost the state partly because during the campaign he relied on the conservative party organisation and failed to win over the progressives of Governor Hiram Johnson. Hughes won Minnesota by a mere 392 votes, and in New Hampshire Wilson won by a margin of 56 votes.

Hughes waited for the official count in California. Only on 22 November did he send Wilson a telegram of congratulations. In doing so he rejected the ideas of some Republicans to contest the result on the grounds of alleged fraud. Years later it emerged that Wilson had prepared for defeat: in a letter to Secretary of State Robert Lansing, written on 5 November, he planned that if he lost he would appoint Hughes secretary of state and then resign himself together with the vice-president. Hughes would then have become president at once, not only in March 1917, and the country would have been spared four months of government by a weak, defeated president at a time dangerous for its security.

Significance for the war

Congress was also elected on the same day. The Democrats kept their majority in the Senate, and in the House of Representatives the two parties won almost equal numbers of seats. Jeannette Rankin was elected to the House of Representatives from Montana, the first woman in Congress. The Americans were so absorbed by the counting of votes that, according to the American chargé d’affaires in Berlin, the speech of the German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg of 9 November, in which he spoke of the possibility of setting up an international tribunal after the war, went almost unnoticed in the American press.

In Europe both sides followed the election closely. Wilson’s victory meant continuity: continued neutrality of the United States, but also continued pressure on Germany over submarine warfare and on Britain over the blockade. Wilson, strengthened by a new mandate, decided that he could now attempt mediation. In December 1916 he called on the belligerents to state their peace terms, and in January 1917 he spoke before the Senate of “peace without victory”. Soon afterwards Germany announced unrestricted submarine warfare, and in April 1917 the president who had won the election on a peace slogan asked Congress to declare war on Germany.