Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  By all accounts, it was a gala occasion. Much of official Washington came, including cabinet officers, diplomats, and members of Congress. Most of the Wilsons’ extended family were also there, although one sad absence was Ellen’s brother Stockton, who was again hospitalized for depression. A lively reception followed the ceremony. “It was just like a big family party in the South,” said Margaret Howe, the wife of Wilson’s nephew. The Marine Band played dance tunes, including the newly popular turkey trot. Many of the diplomats danced with Margaret, who caught Jessie’s bouquet—an event that did not turn out to be an omen of the next wedding. The belle of the ball, according to the newspapers, was Nell. “You know Nell, as we call Eleanor Wilson, is just crazy about dancing,” Margaret Howe recounted.47 Wilson did not dance, but he looked on and laughed and joked. For him and Ellen, the occasion was also bittersweet, for the first of their children had broken from the family circle.

  Any sadness the father of the bride felt at the time of the wedding would have found some relief at a sporting event four days later. The family went to New York on November 28 to see Frank and Jessie off to Europe on their honeymoon. Wilson and Ellen stayed overnight with the Houses and attended the theater. The next day, Wilson went to the Polo Grounds to attend his first Army-Navy game as president. It was rainy and misty, and Army dominated play, winning 22 to 9. “At the game many people of distinction came to our box to pay respects to the President,” House noted. The dignitaries included Senator O’Gorman, and seeing this sometime nemesis play up to him in front of the photographers may have been particularly sweet for Wilson.48 So, too, may have been memories of another Army-Navy game eight years before, when he had played host and supporting actor to the political star who had since become his greatest rival—Roosevelt.

  Football was not the only athletic contest Wilson enjoyed as president. Living in Washington meant he could often follow baseball, his favorite sport. He gladly continued the custom, begun in 1910 by Taft, of throwing out the first ball at the opening game of the Major League season. On April 10, 1913, he tossed the first ball, and he attended a three-game series later that month. He missed opening day in 1914 because it came two days after the fighting at Veracruz. In October 1915, he would become the first president to attend the World Series, and he threw out the first ball at the second game. In his second term, Wilson would make it to only one game, a Red Cross benefit in 1918. Sportswriters often commented on how well pitched his tosses were.

  Baseball, along with vaudeville shows and movies, offered him welcome respite in the spring of 1914. Matters at home were troubling him. Since February, Ellen had shown signs of ebbing energy, and Margaret often filled in for her mother at social functions. Early in March, Ellen took what Wilson described as “an ugly fall” when she slipped on a polished floor in her bedroom and was “recovering slowly from the shock and general shaking up it gave her.” Her slow recovery concerned her husband so much that he canceled a trip to New York to see House at the beginning of April. At the middle of the month, she spent a week at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, accompanied by Nell and Dr. Grayson. The trip seemed to help.49 She started making arrangements for another summer at Harlakenden, and on April 20 she sat in the gallery of the House chamber, as she always did when her husband spoke to Congress.

  Ellen’s frail health came at a particularly inopportune moment, for a family crisis was brewing, thanks to their youngest daughter’s romantic inclinations. Nell had fallen madly in love with William Gibbs McAdoo, the secretary of the Treasury. She broke her engagement to Ben King in February and told her parents about McAdoo, who was out of town but took up the matter with the Wilsons when he returned. They were much less happy with this fiancé than they had been with his predecessor or with Frank Sayre. The fifty-year-old McAdoo was only seven years younger than Wilson, and he was more than twice Nell’s age. A widower for the past three years, he had seven children from his first marriage, two of them older than Nell. For her, however, any such drawbacks paled in the presence of his dark, burly good looks, superabundant energy, and aura of manly strength. The elder Wilsons could not resist the couple’s being, as Ellen put it, “simply mad over each other,” and they gave their consent. Reporters had been on to the romance for some time, and Washington newspapers announced the engagement on their front pages on March 13.50

  The wedding took place at the White House on the evening of May 7, 1914. It was a small affair held in the Blue Room. Fewer than 100 guests were present, mostly family members. The official reason for their not having a larger, more festive event, according to The New York Times, was that “[t]hese days are burdened with grave responsibilities for the President; public business of great and growing importance presses upon him.” Wilson felt even sadder at this breach in his family circle. “Ah! How desperately my heart aches that she is gone,” he wrote three days later to Mary Hulbert. “She is simply part of me, the only delightful part; and I feel the loneliness more than I dare admit to myself.” He did not embellish his grief. Of his daughters, Nell was his favorite. She shared her father’s playful streak and sense of fun, and she was the one who could always make him laugh.51

  Besides losing his favorite daughter, Wilson was gaining a problematic son-in-law. McAdoo was the most dynamic member of the cabinet, and the president owed him debts of gratitude for the role he had played in 1912. He would call his new son-in-law Mac, but he would never feel entirely comfortable with him. In his memoirs, published after Wilson’s death, McAdoo recounted how he had once told Wilson a joke about an old black man who said, when a circus performer landed a balloon in his field, “Howdy do, Marse Jesus; how’s your pa?” Wilson, as McAdoo recalled, did not like the joke, but not because of its racism: He “did not laugh; he did not even smile. He looked at me silently for a moment, and then said: ‘Mac, that story is sacrilegious.’” Another time, McAdoo recalled, Wilson was reading something he had written and asked, “Mac, why do you write under the circumstances?” He then explained gently that circum refers to an enclosure: “You can be in a circumstance but not under it. The correct expression is ‘in the circumstances.’ ”52

  It did not help relations between the two men that, unlike others in the family, McAdoo failed to respect the sharp line his father-in-law drew between work and private life. Without naming him, Stockton Axson was describing McAdoo when he later wrote:

  Now, suppose a member of the family, a dear and valued relative, also full of his schemes, his plans, which he sees as the businessman, the man of affairs, the man of action—not the man of meditation, not the artist, not the literary man; suppose he insists on talking business. … It rasps the older man, the literary man—why can’t we drop business? At first he answers graciously by trying to avoid the topic. Then his tone takes a little edge on. Then he adopts the worst of all his defenses—silence. The silence of Woodrow Wilson is worse than the oaths of some men, more withering.53

  The tension was not lost on McAdoo. In his memoirs he claimed he had known the president, whom he continued to call Governor, better than any other member of the cabinet. “But in another sense I hardly knew him at all. There were wide and fertile ranges of his spirit that were closed to me; and, I think, to everyone else except the first Mrs. Wilson. As far as I am aware, she was the only human being who knew him perfectly.”54

  He was about to lose that source of love and understanding. The real reason for Nell’s small and simple wedding was Ellen’s health. The apparent upturn in her condition did not last. Grayson urged her to go to Harlakenden, and Wilson asked Jessie and Frank to get the house ready for the family to arrive later in the summer. Although she seemed to rally a few times, Ellen was dying. She had Bright’s disease, a condition related to tuberculosis that was destroying her kidneys. It is not clear when her doctors made the diagnosis, but they did not tell her or her husband. On July 12, Wilson wrote to Mary Hulbert, “Ellen is slowly (ah, how slowly!) coming to her strength again.” It was a false hope. By late July, Grays
on was attending her constantly. Woodrow sat by her bedside every night. The news that Jessie was expecting her first child cheered Ellen, who managed to fuss about whether her daughter was taking proper care of herself. On August 3, Grayson informed the president that he should gather the members of the family. Margaret came at once, and Frank and Jessie arrived two days later. Sadly, neither Ellen’s sister, Madge, nor her brother Stockton, who were on the West Coast, where they were both living, arrived in time.55

  Ellen knew the end was near. In the morning of August 6, she asked her husband if he could get Congress to act on her project to clean up Washington’s alleyways. Tumulty took the request to the Capitol, arranged for immediate passage by both houses, and brought back the news early in the afternoon. Ellen was drifting in and out of consciousness. In the morning, Woodrow had told her, “Jessie has arrived.” She smiled and replied, “I understand.” Several times, she awoke and asked, “Is your father looking well?” In the afternoon, when the news about her bill arrived from Capitol Hill, Ellen smiled again. She motioned to Grayson and said, “Doctor, if I go away, promise me you will take good care of my husband.” Those were her last words. She lay unconscious while Margaret, Jessie, and Nell sat beside her bed and Wilson held her hand. At five o’clock, her breathing stopped. With tears streaming down his cheeks, her husband asked, “Is it over?” Grayson nodded. Wilson got up and went to an open window. “Oh, my God,” he cried out, “what am I to do?”56

  Ellen’s death dealt him a cruel blow. For more than thirty years, Ellen had been his closest, wisest adviser. She had exercised a stronger, more salutary influence over him than anyone else. She had rarely let her family-inherited disposition toward severe depression affect him or their daughters. She had seen Wilson through and forgiven him for his infatuation with Mrs. Peck. Ellen had given him so much, and he was a far better man for her gifts. He had gone further and accomplished more in the worlds of scholarship, education, politics, and government than he could have done without her. And he knew it. Five years later, when he himself lay in a bed in the White House after suffering a stroke, Nell was reading to him and thought he had gone to sleep. As she later recalled, “Suddenly, he opened his eyes and smiled at me, the live, happy smile of the old days.” After some reminiscences, he said to her, “I owe everything to your mother—you know that don’t you?” He talked about their lives together, and Nell said to him, “I wish I could hand her torch to my own children.” Her father answered, “You can—tell them about her. That is enough.”57

  Now Ellen was gone. Wilson had lost her at the moment when the world was cascading into the most terrible war yet in history. His only other recorded words at the time are in a note he typed the next day to Mary Hulbert: “God has stricken me almost beyond what I can bear.”58

  13

  IRONY AND THE GIFT OF FATE

  The guns of August 1914 began to boom as Ellen Wilson lay dying. The news from Europe startled and shocked Americans. To some, the war looked like a great natural disaster. Henry James called it the “plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness,” while Theodore Roosevelt said it was “on a giant scale like the disaster to the Titanic.” Others reached for their Bibles, dubbing the war Armageddon, after the final nation-shattering miracle in the book of Revelation. Woodrow Wilson felt devastated by grief after his wife’s death, but he had to snatch moments from his mourning to respond to this world calamity. Now his inner anguish added to his sense of a lack of preparation to make his having to deal mainly with foreign affairs “an irony of fate.”1

  Ellen’s funeral, on August 10, 1914, was a simple service in the East Room of the White House—the scene of Jessie’s wedding nine months before—conducted by Dr. Beach of Princeton and Dr. James Taylor, pastor of Washington’s Central Presbyterian Church. The service included prayers and readings from scripture but no music. Only family members, the cabinet, and a delegation from Congress were invited. After the service, Wilson; his brother, Joseph; his nephew George Howe; and Stockton Axson accompanied the casket to Union Station, where other family members joined them. Wilson and their daughters had decided that Ellen should be buried in the Axson family plot in Rome, Georgia. As the train made its way through Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia, people lined the tracks to watch. At Rome, six of Ellen’s cousins and the husbands of two others carried her casket into the church where her father had preached. The service included her favorite hymns and a eulogy by the pastor. At the grave site, a thunderstorm broke as the service began, and Wilson wept as his wife’s body was lowered into the ground.2

  Except for those tears, he bore himself stoically during the funeral services and burial. Privately, he confessed to Mary Hulbert, “I never understood before what a broken heart meant, and did for a man. It just means that he lives by the compulsion of duty only. … Every night finds me exhausted,—dead in heart and body.” That “compulsion of duty” helped him shoulder his burden of grief. The most pressing duties arose from the war in Europe. The nation’s diplomatic response was to proclaim neutrality, but there were urgent problems involving travel and trade. Thousands of Americans stranded across the Atlantic clamored for assistance getting home, and the president asked Congress for money to help cover their expenses. In London, Ambassador Page enlisted the services of an American businessman living there, Herbert Hoover, and the efficient way in which Hoover tackled the job launched his public career. Yet for most Americans, this war was a calamity that was happening to somebody else far away. Page, who would soon sing a different song, wrote to Wilson, “Again and ever I thank Heaven for the Atlantic ocean.”3

  The president did not share those feelings of remoteness from the war. In a statement to the press on August 18, he warned his countrymen not to become “divided in camps of hostile opinion, hot against each other,” because of their ties to the nations at war. He urged instead, “The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name during these times that are to try men’s souls. We must be impartial in thought as well as in action, must put a curb upon our sentiments.”4 As he implied when he talked about curbing sentiments, he was speaking from his own inner turmoil, and he was also evoking the vision of his Fourth of July speech. The twin tragedies of the war and his wife’s death made his designs for America’s role in the world deeply personal and heartfelt.

  Disrupted trade presented the first serious confrontation with the war’s ramifications. Heavy selling by Europeans caused the biggest losses on the New York Stock Exchange since the panic of 1907, and McAdoo allowed the exchange to close temporarily. Equally heavy selling of debt instruments held by Europeans caused a fall in the dollar’s exchange value and set off a run on gold. Wilson encouraged McAdoo to issue emergency currency, thereby averting all but a handful of bank failures. In the broader economy, they sought to forestall undue interruptions in the flow of exports, as interruptions could hurt such vital Democratic constituencies as southern cotton growers and western lead and copper miners. A shortage of ships appeared to pose a special danger, and the administration proposed to buy German vessels stranded in American ports to fill the predicted shortfall. This “ship-purchase” plan roused objections from the British, who saw it as a breach of neutrality, and it ran into roadblocks on Capitol Hill, where sour feelings at the end of the congressional session prevented bills from reaching the floor in either chamber.5

  Yet the horrendous cloud of carnage had a silver lining for the United States. Financial dislocations and export uncertainties at the war’s outbreak worsened the already bad state of the economy, but only in the short run. By the end of 1914, massive orders from warring nations for munitions and other military-related products and agricultural commodities would begin to reverse the yearlong recession and fuel a boom that would last into the next decade. Because the British dominated on the seas, only the Allies were able to buy from America, a situation that would later bring unanticipated dangers and add fuel to the economic boon. The boost to the economy almo
st failed to come to pass, however, thanks to a well-meant gesture. In anticipation of big war orders, the British and French governments engaged J. P. Morgan and Company to float a $100 million loan for them. The move raised Bryan’s hackles. He reflexively distrusted anything involving Morgan or other big Wall Street firms, and he had long believed that lending money to nations at war was immoral and unneutral. “Money is the worst of all contrabands because it commands everything else,” he told Wilson and argued that refusing to lend to the belligerents would shorten the war and set a noble example. Wilson assented, and on August 15 Bryan declared to the press, “[I]n the judgment of this government loans by American bankers to any foreign nation which is at war is inconsistent with the true spirit of neutrality.”6

  Why Wilson went along with Bryan’s policy is not entirely clear. He did not discuss the matter with Bryan face-to-face, although they probably talked about it over the telephone. He may have been showing his usual deference toward a cabinet member in that man’s area of responsibility, and he may have shared a fellow progressive’s distrust of the influence of Wall Street. He may also have agreed with Bryan’s intuition that loans to belligerents could have untoward consequences and likewise wanted to do something that might promote peace. Yet such a sweeping gesture and expression of faith in influence through example were not in character for him, and he had learned hard lessons during the previous year and a half about the difficulty of influencing other people and their governments. The distractions of grief may have affected Wilson’s judgment.

  The ban on loans did not stand for long. Credit is the lifeblood of international trade, and the Allied governments were not about to let it be cut off. In September, France proposed a $10 million loan through a different Wall Street firm, Frank Vanderlip’s National City Bank of New York. The French ambassador, Jean-Jules Jusserand, approached Bryan personally and told him the loan ban was prejudicial toward his government and its side in the war. As Vanderlip later recalled, Jusserand’s argument shook Bryan, and in ensuing negotiations he agreed to call the loan a “commercial credit” and let it go forward so long as there was no publicity. Reporters soon got wind of the change, however. When they questioned the president at a press conference on October 15, he refused to discuss the matter and claimed nothing had changed. Wilson was employing the same sophistry Bryan had bought into, and that was the end of the loan ban. By early 1915, major financial houses were floating multimillion-dollar loans to belligerent governments and initiating an ever-tightening financial entanglement with the world war.7