Wilson

by A. Scott Berg

  Grayson summoned the family, and Wilson held her hand as their daughters sat vigil with him. At five o’clock that afternoon, Ellen drew her last breath. She was fifty-four. Tenderly, Woodrow folded her hands across her breast and wandered to the window, where he broke down and cried.

  “It is pathetic to see the President,” Frank Sayre wrote his mother that weekend; “he hardly knows where to turn.” Fortunately, the White House was prepared to make all the arrangements on behalf of a traumatized President. A heavy band of black crepe was hung on the bell-knob at the front door of the White House, and the flag above was lowered to half-mast. A funeral was held at two o’clock on Monday the tenth in the East Room, where America’s three assassinated Presidents and President Benjamin Harrison’s deceased wife had all lain in state. The service could not have been simpler, with as few people beyond family as protocol required—Cabinet members and their wives, Supreme Court Justices, a Senate delegation headed by Vice President Marshall, and a Representative from each of the forty-eight states. After a few words of Scripture and a prayer, Wilson and his family left the room and then the officials took their leave. An hour later, six policemen who had served in the White House bore the coffin from the East Room to the horse-drawn hearse in front of the mansion. The family, staff, and Secret Service followed in motorcars to Union Station, where the cortege boarded a special train to take Ellen home.

  They arrived in Rome, Georgia, at 2:30 the next afternoon, the sleepless President having sat by the casket almost the entire journey. Thousands of people flocked to the station to pay their respects. Every store in town closed that day; and all the church bells tolled as the funeral procession wended through the streets. Eight hundred mourners sat inside the First Presbyterian Church, where Ellen had first heard her father preach; thousands more—including schoolgirls dressed in white, each holding a myrtle branch—stood on the road as the procession moved from the service to the Myrtle Hill Cemetery. A light rain turned torrential as the Wilsons and Axsons stood under a tent for the final prayers before Ellen’s coffin was lowered into the ground next to her mother and father. While those around him quietly wept, the President made no effort to conceal his grief. His body shook, and he sobbed openly.

  • • •

  “The days . . . that followed were heartbreaking,” recalled Dr. Grayson, committed to honoring Ellen Wilson’s deathbed wish. This was no simple task, for he knew his patient’s history of prostration when under pressure. As Wilson himself had written Mary Hulbert the day after his wife died, “God has stricken me almost beyond what I can bear.”

  But not beyond. A few weeks later, the President reported, “In God’s gracious arrangement of things I have little time or chance to think about myself.” With the destruction of his universe, he found strength in the collapse of the world. And like most Americans, he thanked God for the isolation the Atlantic Ocean provided.

  Germany activated a modified version of its two-front Schlieffen Plan—which had been sitting in a drawer for a decade—invading France by overwhelming Belgium and Luxembourg and attacking Russia through East Prussia, while Austria-Hungary attacked Serbia. “My own attitude towards the conflict was . . . simple and clear,” one young German volunteer would later write in his book Mein Kampf. “I believed that it was not a case of Austria fighting to get satisfaction from Serbia but rather a case of Germany fighting for her own existence. . . . And if this struggle should bring us victory our people will again rank foremost among the great nations. Only then could the German Empire assert itself as the mighty champion of peace.” He spoke for millions of his countrymen.

  The opening salvos had created the gravest international situation in history. During the five-day Battle of Tannenberg on the Eastern Front, the Russians suffered 30,000 casualties; the three-day Battle of Cer in Serbia resulted in 18,500 Austro-Hungarian victims; and in ten days in August, France endured 150,000 casualties—half the numbers of the yearlong Franco-Prussian War. And more than lives were lost. In late August, German troops pulverized the Belgian city of Louvain, for five centuries the intellectual capital of the Low Countries, firebombing its church of St. Pierre, the markets, the university, and its famous library.

  The President of the United States had issued a formal proclamation of neutrality on August 4. It forbade any American citizen from accepting and exercising a commission in service of any of the belligerents, and it proclaimed that American waters and ports would not provide a haven for any of the belligerents’ ships of war. Two weeks later—while acknowledging hundreds of condolence letters—Wilson reminded the people of the United States that they were “drawn from many nations, and chiefly from the nations now at war.” It was, therefore, natural that each American would want to choose sides. But such division within the nation, he cautioned, “might seriously stand in the way of the proper performance of our duty as the one great nation at peace.” And then he suggested the seemingly impossible: “We must be impartial in thought as well as in action, must put a curb upon our sentiments as well as upon every transaction that might be construed as a preference of one party to the struggle before another.”

  Ambassador Page in London adhered to Wilson’s policy but could not disguise his own feelings. “A government can be neutral,” Page wrote his brother, “but no man can be.” And Charles W. Eliot, former president of Harvard, confidentially urged Wilson to combine the British Empire, France, Japan, Italy, Russia, and the United States in both “offensive and defensive alliance to rebuke and punish Austria-Hungary and Germany for the outrages they are now committing, by enforcing against those two countries non-intercourse with the rest of the world by land and sea.” Even Woodrow Wilson—the man who worshipped Bagehot, Bright, and Wordsworth—was not above personal predilection. While his public statements remained neutral, his private conversation revealed contempt for the German people and their leaders. He said that “German philosophy was essentially selfish and lacking in spirituality.” The destruction of Louvain moved him deeply; and he condemned the Kaiser for the rise of militarism. But Wilson sustained his public position, writing Eliot that he favored neither an alliance nor entrance into the war; and, he suggested, public opinion would not support such actions. Even the bellicose Teddy Roosevelt backed the President—for a while. But the Republican leader Henry Cabot Lodge took issue with Wilson from the start, agreeing that American neutrality should be “rigidly honest and fair” but complaining that the demand was “a perfectly unsound as well as utterly impractical position to take.”

  Sinking into a depression, Wilson tried to maintain the routine of his married life as much as possible. He insisted that his family take advantage of Harlakenden by spending at least the last weeks of summer there, and he would steal as many days in Cornish as he could. But back in the White House, Wilson was wracked by loneliness and guilt. “I sometimes feel that the Presidency has had to be paid for with Ellen’s life,” he confessed to Dr. Grayson; “that she would be living today if we had continued in the old simple life at Princeton.” Stockton Axson did not disagree, but insisted that “she would rather have died when and where she died than have lived at the cost of any diminution of the career in which her husband realized to the fullest his talents and his powers.”

  “I never understood before what a broken heart meant, and did for a man,” Wilson wrote Mary Hulbert in late August. “It just means that he lives by the compulsion of necessity and duty only.” Although he was operating on willpower alone, Wilson accepted Dr. Grayson’s recommendation that he spend the occasional morning in bed. When Grayson went in to check his condition one day that month, he found the President lying there, tears streaming down his face. “It was a heart-breaking scene,” the doctor later recounted to a friend.

  At the end of the month, doctor and patient traveled to Cornish, where Harlakenden exuded none of the mirth of previous visits. Colonel House—recently back from an extended European tour, where he had met
mostly with diplomats in London and Berlin, and with the Kaiser as well—joined Wilson for two days. One of House’s goals had been to discuss disarmament with the Germans, but he encountered mostly contempt and distrust. German Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs Arthur Zimmermann had claimed that the Kaiser’s “strong and sincere efforts to conserve peace” had collapsed because Russia had mobilized, destroying any possibility of an understanding.

  Wilson hung on House’s every word. For the first time he was considering geopolitics tactically, not historically. This war was already challenging the idealistic hopes he had for the future, as he feared a German victory would force the United States into becoming “a military nation.” Whoever won, he predicted the war would “throw the world back three or four centuries” and that the future would hold two superpowers—Russia dominating Europe and part of Asia and the United States dominating the Western world. House agreed but added a third superpower: China, he suggested, would dominate Asia.

  The two men discussed every policy under the sun, foreign and domestic—including a new vacancy on the Supreme Court. Upon the death of one of Taft’s six appointees, Wilson reflexively appointed his Attorney General, James McReynolds, who still carried trust-busting credentials. An unpredictable malcontent who never blended with the rest of the Cabinet, McReynolds quickly revealed himself to be one of the most disagreeable Justices in the Court’s history, a cantankerous bigot whose prejudices led him to take archconservative positions utterly at odds with Wilson’s belief that constitutions “are not mere legal documents: they are the skeleton frame of a living organism.” To take his place in the Cabinet, Wilson promoted Thomas W. Gregory, another Southern Presbyterian, an Austin attorney who had served as a special assistant to McReynolds and was part of House’s Texas posse. But however the conversations between Wilson and House began, they always ended by remembering Ellen.

  Except for the steady presence of Dr. Grayson and cousin Helen Bones, who served as his hostess when Margaret was not in town, Wilson returned from his brief vacation to a big empty house. His spirits steadily declined that autumn, though he maintained a “steady front” for the world. “My loss has made me humble,” Wilson wrote Mary Hulbert in September. “I know that there is nothing for me in what I am doing. And I hope that that will make me more serviceable.” Into October he performed his required duties but little more, descending into deep lassitude on Sundays—sleeping all morning, and dozing during his motor rides around the city in the afternoon. “I want to run away,” he wrote his friend Nancy Saunders Toy, an academician’s wife in Boston, that November. “All the elasticity has gone out of me,” he added in December. “I have not yet learned how to throw off the incubus of my grief and live as I used to live, in thought and spirit, in spite of it. Even books have grown meaningless to me. I read detective stories to forget, as a man would get drunk!”

  With Dr. Grayson enforcing a strict physical regimen, the President at least looked healthy. Tan, clear-eyed, and weighing a lean 176 pounds, Wilson dictated letters to Swem in the house after breakfast, received visitors in the Oval Office from ten until one, allowed a few formal visits after lunch, and then changed into his golfing togs for afternoons on the links. He would find himself with but a few minutes to dress for dinner, after which he might permit a few consultations before secluding himself for the solitary state business of reading and writing. Washington felt like a penitentiary to him. “There is no human intercourse in it,” he said, “—at any rate for the President.”

  One night Wilson restlessly jumped the prison wall, traveling by train with Margaret and Dr. Grayson to New York City. They breakfasted with Colonel House in his apartment at 115 East Fifty-third Street. After a round of golf with the Colonel’s son-in-law, Gordon Auchincloss, at Piping Rock Club, Wilson spent the late afternoon alone with House discussing an American relief effort for Belgium. At nine o’clock they walked from House’s apartment just east of Park Avenue to Seventh Avenue, and then down Seventh to Broadway. Periodically they would stop, but once discovered they quickened their pace. By the time they had reached Herald Square, a throng had formed in their wake. They dashed into the Thirty-fourth Street door of the old Waldorf-Astoria, went up in the elevator, crossed to the Thirty-third Street side, and continued their quiet walk down Fifth Avenue to Twenty-sixth Street . . . where they boarded a motor bus back to Fifty-third Street. For the first time in a long time, Wilson seemed to breathe more easily; but when they returned to the apartment, House recalled, the President said “he could not help wishing when we were out tonight that someone would kill him.”

  The President was not suicidal. But House clearly understood him to say “he had himself so disciplined that he knew perfectly well that unless someone killed him, he would go on to the end doing the best he could.” Wilson never doubted his faith. “There are people who believe only so far as they understand,” he said, “—that seems to me presumptuous.” The power of religion, he insisted, made his life “worth living.”

  • • •

  Autumn 1914 brought the first test of the nation’s faith in Woodrow Wilson’s Presidency—the midterm elections. “The successful leader ought not to keep too far in advance of the mass he is seeking to lead, for he will soon lose contact with them,” Wilson had once said by way of dismissing TR as a President who had promised Heaven without delivering it. Because Wilson considered the tariff and the currency at the heart of the movement for enduring reform in America, he thought the Democrats could successfully run more on their program than on their promises. When Frank Doremus, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, invited the President to take an active role in the campaign, Wilson replied that his administration had been “more fruitful in important legislation of permanent usefulness to the country” than any within memory. With the world in crisis, Wilson felt he could not “turn away from his official work even for a little while” in order to campaign.

  Nobody knew how the war abroad would affect the economy at home, but there were already early signs that neutrality would not necessarily protect American commodities. The Governors of the New York Stock Exchange had met just before the war was declared to discuss the possibility of closing the Exchange. Before the meeting, J. P. Morgan himself called Secretary McAdoo for his advice. Whether it was simply a pre-emptive action to avert a panic or because he did not want to disrupt the establishment of the Federal Reserve System, which was meant to protect banks from such panics, McAdoo recommended shutting down. The Exchange did—for the next four and a half months, the longest closure in the history of the market.

  Entering the twentieth month of its recession, the United States confronted a new reality in international commerce: America transported virtually none of the nation’s product. Now, with all the major countries of Europe pressing most of their ships into military service, America’s stream of maritime commerce dried up. Eight million bales of cotton, to name but one significant export, sat on its wharves and in its warehouses. The excess glutting the market, cotton’s price plummeted from 13.5¢ per pound to 6¢, while the cost of shipping what cotton could be stuffed into a cargo ship soared.

  The laws of capitalism should have suggested that private enterprise would find a way to profit from the great demand abroad. But, as Treasury Secretary McAdoo observed, “Private initiative becomes extremely timid in times of peril and uncertainty.” With a faraway war of indefinite length, American business withdrew from risky investments. McAdoo opposed government ownership of business enterprises—except, he said, “in extraordinary circumstances where the intervention of the government is urgently demanded in the interest of the public welfare.”

  Lying in bed early one morning, pondering these extraordinary circumstances, McAdoo had an idea. He grabbed a pad and pencil and dashed off a “ship purchase” bill before breakfast—a radical concept of “a shipping corporation of which the American government would own all, or a major part, o
f the capital stock.” Later that day, he presented the idea to Wilson. The President liked it but wanted to sleep on it, as no matter how desperate the need for merchant ships, such a bill was sure to arouse the hostility of every reactionary in the country and the opposition of every powerful business interest. He said they would dismiss the idea as “socialistic.”

  A short time later, Wilson handed the proposal back to McAdoo and said, “We’ll have to fight for it, won’t we?” McAdoo said yes. And the President replied, “Well, then, let’s fight.” Neither could have predicted the invective of the ensuing partisan battle. “Anyone who did not know the political motives behind our opponent’s words would have thought that we had set out deliberately . . . to destroy legitimate commerce, and that our shipping plan was the first step on the road to national ruin.” The bill sailed through the House; but the Senate fought against it for almost two years. Much of the resistance came from its fear of Wilson’s advancing too far ahead of the public. That September, Congress passed the War Risk Insurance Bill, a measure the Administration backed when the marine insurance companies refused to indemnify against such new perils as mines and torpedoes. That bill seemed just as socialistic but encountered less opposition, McAdoo believed, because businesses calculated that there was no money for them to make in such a venture; it seemed best to allow the government to suffer the loss.

  Although the struggle over the ship purchase bill had hardly begun by the time of the midterm elections, the people got the strong sense of the President’s passion for it. Republicans used the bill to reunite and challenge the Administration. Even after seven Democratic Senators defected, it appeared that the bill still had enough votes. That prompted the Republicans to resort to one of their most obstructive weapons—the filibuster, the right of one or a series of Senators to hold the floor as long as he could stand and speak. Cots were rolled into the Senate cloakrooms as tag-team speeches—including Ohio’s Senator Theodore Burton holding forth for thirteen hours—evolved into the longest continuous session in the history of Congress: fifty-four hours and eleven minutes. It effectively prevented passage of the bill for almost two years, at which point a version of it was voted through. McAdoo reckoned that the Senate delay cost a billion dollars, as the cost of ships rose dramatically while the war persisted. The war risk insurance during that time returned better than a 35 percent profit.