THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 3, 1996 TAG: 9611010707
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: GEORGE TUCKER
LENGTH: 68 lines
I had just turned seven when I experienced my first presidential election. It was the cliffhanger of November 1916 between Woodrow Wilson, the Democrat who had been in the White House since 1913, and Charles Evans Hughes, a former associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, who had stepped down from the bench earlier the same year to serve as the Republican candidate.
Incidentally, Wilson had visited the Norfolk area in 1907 during the Jamestown Exposition. Later, he had been hailed as ``the next president of the United States'' when he addressed the Pewter Platter Club, a group of prominent Norfolk area Democrats, at a banquet at the Monticello Hotel in April 1911. As a Virginia-born Democratic president, he was my father's political idol.
On election night in 1916, when Wilson was running for a second term, my father and I came over to Norfolk from Berkley in order to get the returns at first hand. At that time The Virginian-Pilot was located on Tazewell Street opposite the Colonial Theater. Arriving there, we discovered an enormous crowd in front of the building gaping upward at an overhead screen on which the returns were being flashed as they came in over the wires.
I vividly recall my father's disappointment when it appeared that Hughes was beginning to trounce Wilson at the polls. Even so, he didn't give up hope since it had been announced earlier that the Pilot intended to continue to keep the community at large posted later with aerial signals throughout the evening.
The battleship Nevada, then berthed at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard, was scheduled to flash one fixed searchlight beam upward if the vote swung to Wilson. If Hughes continued to win, the same battlewagon was to flash two beams. In addition to these signals that were intended to be seen for miles away throughout the Norfolk area, the Pilot also arranged for two white bomb flares to be exploded from the top of the Royster Building in downtown Norfolk to indicate that Wilson was winning or two red ones to indicate that Hughes had carried the day. For some unknown reason the signals got mixed up causing the Pilot to apologize the next day.
Meanwhile, unaware of this, my father and I huddled with our fingers crossed in the cold along with several other Berkleyites near the Chestnut Street ferry dock after we had recrossed the river. Around 10 p.m., a dual stream of light began to describe an enormous arc in the sky overhead, indicating Hughes was winning and eliciting a groan from the crowd. Shortly thereafter, the two red bomb flares, that the paper later reported had been seen as far northward as Willoughby Spit, lit up the night from the top of the Royster Building. With two strikes against us, my father and I walked home in silence.
Even so, my father did not give up hope, for the next morning's paper conceded that the election was still in doubt with Wilson steadily gaining. Then a miracle happened.
On Nov. 10, 1916, after a long and anxious wait, we learned that Wilson had won the California vote when the Pilot ran a front page headline reading: ``President Wilson Re-Elected When California Swings Into Democratic Column.''
I can still remember the gleam of triumph in my father's eyes when he later read in the paper the following telegram from Hughes to Wilson conceding defeat: ``Because of the closeness of the vote I have awaited the official count in California and now that it has been virtually completed, permit me to extend to you my congratulations upon your re-election. I desire also to express my best wishes for a successful administration.''
Like all loyal Democrats, my father was not only jubilant at the news, he lost no time unfurling a big American flag from a second story window over the front porch of our house on Mulberry Street. But President Wilson's reaction to Hughes' telegram was a bit more laconic.
According to August Heckscher's ``Woodrow Wilson: A Biography'' (1991), the re-elected president read the wire then turned to an aide and quipped, ``It was a bit moth-eaten when it got here.'' by CNB