President Woodrow Wilson’s audacious plan to resign
This week (Nov. 5) in 1916, President Woodrow Wilson wrote a memorandum unprecedented in the annals of the presidency – a memo that would, if followed, result in his resigning the presidency within weeks, not for health reasons, but for policy reasons. Why he did so necessitates some background.
Before our communications, logistics and transportation capabilities became suitably advanced, it was necessary to wait four months – from the early November election to early in the month of March – to inaugurate our presidents. That time was needed to elect the Electoral College members, record their votes, and allow the official winners to settle their affairs and travel to the nation’s capital (mostly by horseback or horsedrawn carriage) in time to be inaugurated.
But as the years went by and the nation modernized and grew, that four-month time difference became both unnecessary and, increasingly, problematic, because the nation’s domestic politics were more complicated, and its foreign policies were more consequential. In the four months between Lincoln’s election and inauguration, to give one example, seven southern states seceded from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America, which Lincoln was powerless to prevent. Ditto, Franklin Roosevelt, who had to wait four months, until March 4, 1933, before he could institute policies dealing with the Great Depression, which was the main reason he was elected.
But back to November of 1916. Woodrow Wilson was running for reelection and it looked like he would lose. His domestic policies were criticized as being either too progressive or not progressive enough, but his chief vulnerability was his vacillating foreign policy. His Republican opponent, Charles Evans Hughes, had hammered away at Wilson’s simultaneously trying to keep America out of the war then being waged in Europe and hesitantly pursuing a stronger military force.
And so, Wilson, thinking he might lose, decided in his memorandum that he would ask his vice president, Thomas Marshall, and his secretary of State, Robert Lansing, to resign their offices. He would then appoint the elected president, Charles Hughes, as secretary of State, and subsequently he himself would resign the presidency. Why? Because, in 1916, the secretary of State was third in the order of succession to the presidency, so Marshall’s, Lansing’s, and Wilson’s resignation meant Hughes would immediately become president, giving him the power to institute his policies right away, rather than wait four months to be inaugurated. As Wilson said in his memo, “I would have no right to risk the peace of the nation by remaining in office after I had lost my authority.”