The Closest Calls: 1916 How a close victory by Republican Hughes might
have helped the US make serious progress.

from
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/08/06/1916-election-hughes-wilson-00108288

The Closest Calls: How America Nearly Forged a Different Path in 1916
An accidental snub changed history.

A photo collage illustration of candidates from the 1916 election and
other characters from the story.
Illustration by Eleanor Shakespeare for POLITICO

By JEFF GREENFIELD

08/06/2023 07:00 AM EDT

Jeff Greenfield is a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst
and author.

Welcome to the first piece in a series we’ve named “The Closest Calls,”
where we dive into some of the most narrowly decided presidential
elections and explore how small changes in the race would have altered
the outcome — and American history.

Even if you’re not a sharp observer of politics, you likely know that
the last two presidential elections were two of the closest in American
history.

In 2016, with almost 150 million votes cast nationwide, a shift of
77,000 votes in three states — Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan —
would have put Hillary Clinton in the White House. Four years later,
with almost 160 million votes cast across the nation, a shift of just
44,000 votes in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin would have resulted in a
269-269 tie, throwing the election into the House of Representatives,
which would almost surely have given Donald Trump a second term.

But going farther back through the years reveals how many other
elections came down to a tiny fraction of votes; the slightest shift in
one or two or three states would have produced a hugely significant
shift in the outcomes. And that would have led to a radically different
political history.

The upshot? Leadership matters. The personality and political values of
the president can shift the direction of the country. Political analysts
tend to draw sweeping conclusions about the state of our politics based
on election outcomes, no matter how narrow the result among the
electorate. But sometimes a handful of votes or the quirk of history can
make all the difference.

In a new series for POLITICO Magazine, the journalist and author Jeff
Greenfield takes a close look at what might have been. He begins with a
contest in which an accidental snub changed the course of America’s
racial history.

It had never happened before: a sitting justice of the United States
Supreme Court stepping down to run as his party’s presidential nominee.
But in 1916, for a Republican Party desperately looking for someone to
heal the lacerating wounds of the last campaign, the choice of Justice
Charles Evans Hughes made a lot of sense.

The root of the party’s crisis began with the fractured relationship
between Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. After serving as
president from 1901-1909, Roosevelt anointed his close Republican ally
Taft to succeed him. But Roosevelt soon soured on Taft’s more
conservative presidency, and when Roosevelt couldn’t win back the GOP
nomination in 1912, he launched a third-party challenge as the candidate
of the Progressive (“Bull Moose”) Party against Taft and Democrat
Woodrow Wilson. Roosevelt ended up winning the largest share of the
popular vote (27 percent) and Electoral College (88 votes) of any
third-party candidate, even outpacing Taft’s haul. But Wilson won the
presidency.

Now in 1916, Republicans were eager to deny Wilson a second term. To do
so, it was imperative to find a candidate who was acceptable to both the
traditional and progressive wings of the party, someone who had not been
embroiled in the 1912 GOP civil war.

And no one fit that need better than Charles Evans Hughes. People may
not remember him much now, but he was a major political figure at the time.

A group portrait of the Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court sitting on
the bench in 1911, including Charles Evans Hughes.
Charles Evans Hughes (second from right) began serving as a U.S. Supreme
Court justice in 1910, until he stepped down to run for president in
1916. | Library of Congress

Charles Evans Hughes sitting for a portrait.
Hughes was very reluctant to enter the race at first. | Harris and Ewing
via the Library of Congress

He’d become a political star in New York State by leading investigations
into the shady operations and consumer practices of insurance companies
and public utilities. He’d been elected governor of New York in 1906,
defeating newspaper publisher and Congressman William Randolph Hearst,
despite a Democratic wave in the state. He’d demonstrated his political
independence by defying Republican leaders on everything from patronage
appointments to consumer protection laws and had won a second two-year
gubernatorial term in 1908. Hughes had, in other words, demonstrated
“electability.” But more important, his place on the Supreme Court
starting in 1910 removed him from any involvement in the Roosevelt-Taft
battle of 1912.

Hughes had, at first, been reluctant to move back into the political
arena. As he wrote in notes he’d written for an autobiography, “the idea
of a Justice of the Supreme Court taking part in politics … was
abhorrent to me. I strongly opposed the use of my name and the selection
or instructions of any delegates.” But, he wrote, “there was an
insistent and growing demand for my nomination. It was thought that I
was the only one who could unite the factions of the Republican Party
and restore it to the place it had before the rupture in 1912, and that
this restoration was essential to the working of the two-party system.”

With the encouragement of some of his fellow Supreme Court justices,
Hughes accepted the appeals of the GOP and was nominated on the third
ballot at the Republican convention. But, as Hughes would learn, the
divisions of 1912 had by no means healed. And nowhere was that more
evident than in California.

Hiram Johnson had been elected governor in 1906 as a Republican and
Progressive, championing efforts to open the political process with
referenda and recalls and challenging the power of the Southern Pacific
Railroad. His fights against monopoly power did not endear him to the
conservative elements in the party, but what was more enraging was he
had run as Roosevelt’s vice-presidential nominee in 1912, helping the
ticket carry the state. Now, in 1916, he was running for senator in the
GOP primary against a conservative foe, William Booth.

For Hughes, the challenge was to appeal to both wings of the California
Republicans, endorsing neither Johnson nor Booth and making sure to
embrace both sides of the party.

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Hiram Johnson sitting in a chair while petting a dog.
Hiram Johnson had been elected governor in 1906, championing efforts to
open the political process with referenda and recalls, and challenging
the power of the Southern Pacific Railroad. | Library of Congress

And that’s why what took place next was so important. In late August,
Johnson was staying at the Virginia Hotel in Long Beach, California.
Hughes happened to be at the same hotel, but had no idea that Johnson
was there as well and so made no effort to meet up for even a brief
chat. Johnson, however, knew of Hughes’ presence and assumed the radio
silence was meant as a snub — to him and the party’s progressives.

After leaving the hotel and learning of Johnson’s displeasure, Hughes
immediately tried to make amends, sending his campaign chief to meet
with Johnson, inviting him to preside at a campaign event, and
suggesting an exchange of “courteous telegrams.”

(Hughes later wrote that he had been unaware of Johnson’s presence and
regretted the missed encounter: “I had been very desirous of meeting
him, and had I known that he was at Long Beach when I was there, I
should have seized the opportunity to greet him.”)

Johnson, who had a “Yosemite Sam” temperament, refused all such
entreaties, stating in a telegram to Hughes’ campaign manager that “the
men surrounding Mr. Hughes in California and who have been in charge of
his tour, are much more interested in my defeat than in Mr. Hughes’
election.” As far as Johnson was concerned, Hughes had thrown in his lot
with the conservatives; there would be no rapprochement. And that meant
Johnson and his California progressives would not lift a finger to help
Hughes carry the state in November.

On Election Day, Hughes took a substantial lead in the early counting —
leading in the electoral vote while trailing in the popular vote. The
New York Times declared him elected. But the Times had gone to press
before California’s vote was tallied; with nearly a million votes cast,
Wilson won with a margin of just 3,773 votes — and California’s 13
electoral votes gave Wilson a second term. (When a reporter called
Hughes at home, his butler said, “The president has retired for the
night.” As legend has it, the reporter responded, “Well when he wakes
up, tell him he’s not the president.” Johnson, meanwhile, ended up
winning his Senate primary and the general election.)

Hughes then went into private practice as a lawyer, but his public
career was far from over. In 1921, President Warren Harding made him
secretary of State. In 1930, President Herbert Hoover returned him to
the Supreme Court and named him chief justice, where he served for more
than a decade. Meanwhile, after being reelected president, Wilson led
the United States into World War I and then launched a fruitless effort
to bring the U.S. into the League of Nations. His efforts led to an
incapacitating stroke; in his last year in office, his wife and a White
House aide essentially governed the country.

Top: The Virginia Hotel in Long Beach, California, shown between
1905-1915. Bottom: A group of women standing on the Women's Campaign
Train for Hughes in 1916.
A single missed meeting between Hughes and Johnson at the Virginia Hotel
in Long Beach, Calif. (top) may have caused Hughes' loss in 1916. |
Library of Congress

The obvious “what ifs” about a Hughes presidency revolve around whether
he would have encouraged the U.S. to enter World War I (likely yes) and
whether he would have compromised with the Senate to gain support for
the Treaty of Versailles and entry into the League of Nations. (He wrote
in his autobiographical notes that he would have.)

But the far more consequential difference between a Wilson and Hughes
presidency lies in the area of civil rights and civil liberties.

The Virginia-born Wilson was a white supremacist down to his core. He
oversaw the resegregation of much of the federal government and hosted
the film Birth of a Nation — which celebrated the Ku Klux Klan — at a
White House screening.

In the days during and after World War I, Wilson also presided over some
of the most flagrant assaults on civil liberties in U.S. history. As
Adam Hochschild’s American Midnight details, this effort included the
expulsion of elected members of Congress and state legislatures because
of their political views; the suppression of magazines and newspapers
and the arrest of their editors; mob violence, with official support,
against labor unions and dissident political groups; and the “Palmer
Raids” arresting, imprisoning or deporting thousands of individuals,
most of whom were innocent of any crime but suspected of being leftists.

Charles Evans Hughes, by contrast, may have been the most progressive
major politician on racial matters of either party, and he was a
longtime defender of civil liberties.

Students working in a science laboratory at the Tuskegee Institute.
Students work in a laboratory at the Tuskegee Institute, which Hughes
raised money for, in Alabama in 1902. | Benjamin Frances Johnston via
the Library of Congress

In his autobiography, Hughes wrote about an occasion in the early 1900s
when he invited Booker T. Washington, the prominent Black political and
education leader, to speak at a meeting of the Baptist Social Union in
New York City.

“And to my surprise, some of the good Baptists were critical of my
action and especially of our escorting Mr. and Mrs. Washington to seats
at the guest table,” Hughes wrote. “I thought this criticism ridiculous
and ignored it.”

In 1906, Hughes became the first statewide candidate in New York to
speak at a Black church, when he told the congregation at Bethel A.M.E.
Church in New York City, “I stand ever against unjust discrimination
against any man on account of his color, on account of his race or on
account of anything.”

He raised money for the Tuskegee Institute (a preeminent educational
institution for Black Americans) and argued for a federal anti-lynching
bill. During rampant racist and political violence against Black people,
he said, with a nod to World War I, “We have not destroyed the menace of
force because we have licked the kaiser; the menace of force resides in
every community.”

As a private citizen, he opposed the expulsion of socialist members from
the New York legislature for their anti-war views. And in his two stints
as a Supreme Court justice, he was overwhelmingly on the civil liberties
side, arguing for the “incorporation” of the Bill of Rights against
state laws, arguing for the right of Jehovah’s Witnesses not to salute
the American flag, and helping to move the court toward protecting the
civil rights and liberties of individuals.

President Woodrow Wilson and his wife, Edith Bolling Galt Wilson,
standing on a balcony surrounded by American flags.
President Woodrow Wilson and his wife, Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, at an
event in 1916. | National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Now try to imagine that philosophy in the White House in 1916.

There would have been a president who had little, if any, sympathy for
the plague of repressive laws and actions that characterized Wilson’s
second term. There would have been no Attorney General Mitchell Palmer
as head of the Justice Department, nor would there have been an
ambitious young aide to Palmer named J. Edgar Hoover to begin his
decades-long career at the FBI.

A President Hughes also would have owed no political debt to the
Southern states and politicians and could have offered federal support
to the beginnings of a movement toward racial justice decades before it
finally began to happen. (At minimum, he might well have worked to pull
down the social barriers between Black and white people in what was
essentially a segregated Capital city. After President Theodore
Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to dinner in 1901, it triggered
years of abuse and threats and no Black guest was invited to a White
House dinner for decades. It’s hard to imagine Hughes “honoring” that
custom).

Yes, we are talking about probabilities, not certainties. Maybe a
President Hughes would have been swept along by the nativist and racist
sentiments that flourished during and after World War I. But it’s much
more likely that a missed meeting at a Long Beach hotel had a cost to
the nation far beyond a single election: the perpetuation of officially
sanctioned racial supremacy that lasted another half-century.

FILED UNDER: ELECTIONS, WORLD WAR I, WOODROW WILSON, HISTORY DEPT., RACE
IN AMERICA
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