Wilson

by A. Scott Berg

  The Birth of a Nation became a national phenomenon. In less than a year, almost a million people saw it at the Liberty Theatre alone. But the stink of racism clung to the movie, and intensified as time rendered society more tolerant. In parts of the South, however, it played like a recruiting film, sparking a revival of the moribund Ku Klux Klan, which now added Catholics, Jews, and immigrants to its list of enemies.

  “It seems, indeed,” Wilson wrote Mary Hulbert the Sunday before Thanksgiving 1914, “as if my individual life . . . consisted only of news upon which action must be taken.”

  Within a matter of weeks, a man whose worldview hardly extended beyond England’s Lake District faced issues on virtually every continent. The Senate was delaying a treaty Bryan had signed with Nicaragua to stabilize the government. Politics forced the President to refuse to grant financial assistance to a desperate Liberia. Exiled in Tokyo, Sun Yat-sen appealed to Wilson to prevent J. P. Morgan & Company from making a loan to Yüan Shih-k’ai, the despotic self-proclaimed Emperor of China. From England, Ambassador Page wrote of how American commerce was tied to Britain’s naval operations and how the Germans had carpeted the North Sea with so many mines that at least one ship a day was blown up. Page further declared that he could no longer personally finance his required entertaining in the Embassy. Luckily, one letter from Wilson to Cleveland Dodge elicited the necessary $25,000 to keep him as Ambassador; the money was quietly transferred through Colonel House and Page’s son.

  On December 1, the conscientious Secretary Bryan presented a memorandum urging American mediation in Europe. It was early enough in the conflict that Bryan felt “these Christian nations” might get past the pride that started the war and kept it from ending. Now, “when all must confess failure to accomplish what they expected,” Bryan said, “. . . when new horrors are being added daily, it would seem to be this nation’s duty, as the leading exponent of Christianity and as the foremost advocate of world-wide peace,” to bring everybody to the table. For all its good intentions, Bryan’s memorandum made the President wonder if his Secretary of State was suited to his current office. Foreign policy was no longer a simple matter of signing treaties. It required a more sophisticated view of a world in which every country had become enmeshed with every other and whose political workings had become Byzantine. When Wilson asked Bryan to compose a note to the English government protesting their detention of American ships bound for neutral ports, the President found the draft undiplomatic and unliterary. Wilson rewrote much of it, hoping Bryan would improve upon it further. Three days later he found that Bryan had not changed it at all. The President increasingly turned to Colonel House—whose intellect he respected and whose intuition he trusted. Above all, House enjoyed the diplomatic arts—for which Wilson had limited patience.

  Based on his own private conferences, House felt Bryan’s plan showed little understanding of the world. House said that the Allies would consider mediation “an unfriendly act” at that moment, that the United States should not be talking peace with Germany until she had reason to change her aggressive military policy, that even though Austria-Hungary had privately indicated a willingness to negotiate, Germany had already declined to do so. The President believed that House could “do more to initiate peace unofficially than anyone could do in an official capacity.”

  And yet, Wilson did not dismiss Bryan’s memorandum out of hand. Its general concepts reinforced his own evolving thoughts, especially the notion of arriving at some enduring international concord without any nation having to achieve victory. For all his lack of experience, Wilson was hardly blind to America’s potential role in the world. As early as the second week of August 1914, he had told Stockton Axson that he feared Germany’s maritime policies would jeopardize American neutrality.

  Wilson began to sketch his own permanent structure for peace. He believed the days of seizing land to build empires had past; great powers had long exploited small states, but even those nations were entitled to democratic ideas and equal opportunities. Private manufacturers of armaments should not be allowed to urge war, for they stood to profit. The world had become a single neighborhood of nations, wherein it would never again be possible for any country to regard a quarrel between two nations as a private quarrel, and “an attack in any quarter was an attack on the equilibrium of the world.” Wilson then articulated what he believed were four fundamental principles: there “must never again be a foot of ground acquired by conquest”; it “must be recognized in fact that the small nations are on an equality of rights with the great nations”; ammunition “must be manufactured by governments and not by private individuals”; and there “must be some sort of an association of nations wherein all shall guarantee the territorial integrity of each.” Others had considered some of these elements in the past; but nobody had drawn such a bold blueprint.

  The holidays proved to be a time to grieve and a time to rejoice. Wilson traveled to Williamstown, Massachusetts, for Thanksgiving with the Sayres, and the family reunited at the White House for Christmas. Wilson’s profound loneliness pervaded both occasions. When his friend Nancy Saunders Toy visited in early January, she found the President’s sadness at the dining table as palpable as ever. Jessie, eight months pregnant, remained in Washington, while Frank returned to Massachusetts—only to be summoned weeks later, on the seventeenth of January. By the time he arrived, his son had been born—the President’s first grandchild and the first baby born in the White House since Grover Cleveland’s daughter twenty-one years prior. Wilson was elated but also, as he wrote Mary Hulbert, full of pity “that the sweet, sweet mother could not have been here to share her daughter’s joy!” Wilson would not consent to the seven-pound, twelve-ounce boy being named for him; and so, his parents chose Francis Bowes Sayre, Jr., instead.

  On December 8, 1914, Wilson appeared before Congress to deliver his Annual Message, the primary topic of which was national defense. To recent outcries that America was not “prepared for war,” Wilson granted that the United States was not ready to put a trained military force into the field. What was more, that was how he intended to keep things. “We are at peace with all the world,” he said with pride. Toward maintaining that position, he assured the nation, “We never have had, and while we retain our present principles and ideals we never shall have, a large standing army.” Wilson hoped to hold America to its tradition of relying upon volunteer soldiers. He supported strengthening the National Guard but also feared the maintenance of a large military machine would only encourage its use.

  In January 1915, Wilson began venturing from home, delivering the annual Jackson Day speech at Tomlinson Hall in Indianapolis. Much of his speech was partisan horseplay—calling the Republican Party nothing more than “a refuge for those who . . . want to consult their grandfathers about everything.” But he also reiterated his message of neutrality.

  Standing before a crowd in Middle America reminded Wilson of an often forgotten truism. The United States is actually an electorate composed of a majority of independent voters sandwiched between two minority parties. “You have got us in the palm of your hand,” Wilson told that silent majority. “I do not happen to be one of your number, but I recognize your supremacy because I read the election returns.” Wilson believed the way to attract that voter was not by bowing to him but by standing up taller for his beliefs—for he felt his party offered not only “good society” but also “great emotions.” Wilson himself admitted to Mary Hulbert that the trip got him out of his rut and that it was “good to get my blood moving in a speech again.”

  Wilson saw the war in Europe as an opportunity to expand the crusade he had begun in Mexico—liberating “people everywhere from the aggressions of autocratic forces.” At a time when TR was attacking him for not assuming a more aggressive posture in the matters of Mexico and Belgium—accusing him of “poltroonery”—the President sent Colonel House back to Europe “to ascertain what our opportunities as neutrals a
nd as disinterested friends of the nations at war are in detail with respect to the assistance that we can render, and how those opportunities can best be made use of.” House met with Secretary Bryan to tell him of his mission. “He was distinctly disappointed when he heard I was to go to Europe as the peace emissary,” House noted in his journal. “He said he had planned to do this himself.”

  In a goodbye letter, the President said he hoped the mission might “prove the means of opening a way to peace.” He had no delusions regarding its success, and he was unambiguous in defining House’s role: “You are to act only as my private friend and spokesman, without official standing or authority. . . . Your conferences will not represent the effort of any government to urge action upon another government.” Although Colonel House had never accepted a dime from either a state or the national government for any of his political work, the nature of this trip suggested extraordinary demands at a price beyond his means, and he agreed to a travel and social allowance of $4,000. “Of course you know,” the President wired, “my heart goes with you.”

  On January 30, 1915, Colonel and Mrs. House boarded the largest, fastest, and poshest ship afloat—the Cunard Line’s RMS Lusitania. The voyage launched a new phase in American foreign policy, that of an unofficial American diplomat operating with carte blanche. Then, on February 4, while House was still at sea, Germany declared the waters surrounding the British Isles a war zone and warned civilian travelers that they crossed the ocean on belligerent nations’ passenger ships at their own risk. The next day, as the Lusitania approached the Irish coast, the captain raised the flag of the United States, feigning neutrality.

  Upon his arrival in London, House was granted an hour-long audience at Buckingham Palace with King George V, whose contempt for his first cousin the Kaiser prevented any talk of peacemaking. Meetings with British diplomats ensued, including numerous conversations with Sir Edward Grey, an Oxford-educated Liberal Member of Parliament and longtime Foreign Secretary. After a month, House crossed the Channel to France—passing a floating mine along the way—and then proceeded to Berlin, where he met Undersecretary Arthur Zimmermann. All parties showed indifference toward settling the war.

  Only months earlier, Ambassador Morgenthau in Constantinople had written that the Ambassadors of England, Russia, and Germany all looked to Wilson to step in as “Peacemaker,” that they recognized the folly of this war. But now, each nation was convinced it was winning. Britain’s and France’s lists of contraband deeply troubled the United States. Britain further declared the North Sea a war zone and began taking into custody ships trading with Germany. This blockade—even of necessities from neutral nations—spurred Germany to expand the war zone to include all waters surrounding the British Isles and to declare that all enemy merchant ships in those waters would be destroyed. On February 10, Bryan notified Germany that he expected assurances that American citizens and vessels would not be in danger even if their ships traversed the war zone; and he said the United States government would hold Germany accountable for inflicting damage upon American citizens or vessels. The British government was warned against deceptive use of the American flag.

  In January 1915, Germans destroyed the William P. Frye, an American ship transporting wheat from Seattle to England; in March, they torpedoed the British ship Falaba, taking the life of an American passenger; in April a German airplane attacked the American steamship Cushing; and on May 1, a German submarine torpedoed the American tanker Gulflight. Wilson wanted to call the German government to account for its repeated attacks. Bryan felt the President should warn the American people before taking on the Germans, saying that while under international law Americans had a technical right to go where they pleased, there was “a moral duty which they owe to their government to keep out of danger . . . and thereby relieve their government from responsibility for their safety.” It was not difficult to depict the Germans as the devils in this struggle, but the British were no angels. Germans wondered why there was so much outrage over the loss of a few innocent American lives when a blockade was starving an entire nation.

  “I go to bed every night absolutely exhausted, trying not to think about anything,” Wilson wrote Mary Hulbert. He found time to maintain his few correspondences with his women friends; but the President had to resign himself to the fact that there was little hope for a widower of his age to have another stab at romance, especially while he was incarcerated in the White House. There was “a void in his heart,” Dr. Grayson recalled. He knew that “however bravely he smiled upon the world he was lonely.” As Wilson himself put it in a letter to his daughter Jessie at the end of winter, “My heart has somehow been stricken dumb.”

  • • •

  In the spring, Cary Grayson fell in love, and he hoped his feelings might be contagious. He had become smitten with a beautiful young heiress in Washington named Alice Gertrude Gordon, whose friends called her Altrude. Before his death, Altrude’s father—a wealthy mining engineer—had prevailed upon a longtime friend, Edith Galt, to “look out for” his motherless teenaged daughter. Mrs. Galt knew her only slightly; but, recently widowed, she agreed to serve as an unofficial guardian. A five-month trip to Europe together bonded the two lonely women; and, as it happened, Mrs. Galt was also friendly with Cary Grayson. One day, while he and the President were motoring through town, they passed her on the street and Grayson bowed in salutation. “Who,” the President asked, “is that beautiful woman?”

  The question startled Grayson, for it was one of the President’s few spontaneous comments in months and his first romantic flutter since Ellen’s death. He wondered how he might arrange a meeting. He called upon Mrs. Galt and cleverly asked for her help in dealing with a sick friend—Helen Bones. The President’s sometime hostess and longtime houseguest was just then recovering from a serious illness, he said; and, with the White House still devoid of any social life, Helen Bones desperately needed companionship and exercise. “My dear Doctor,” Mrs. Galt said by way of refusing, “as you know I am not a society person. I have never had any contracts with official Washington, and don’t desire any. I am, therefore, the last person in the world able to help you.”

  Trying another approach, Dr. Grayson telephoned Mrs. Galt one morning, asking if he might call upon her. He arrived in a White House car, along with Nell McAdoo and Helen Bones. As it was a beautiful day, Mrs. Galt agreed to join them for a drive. The women delighted in each other’s company and arranged to see each other again; and they quickly became friends, exactly as Grayson had hoped. Mrs. Galt—famously the first woman in Washington to drive her own automobile—would take Helen in her electric car out to Rock Creek Park, where they walked along the bridle paths before returning to her house for tea.

  She was born Edith Bolling on October 15, 1872, in Wytheville, Virginia—150 miles southwest of Staunton—the seventh of eleven children of William Holcombe Bolling and the former Sallie White. Her ancestors were among the first families of Virginia—predating them, in fact, as she was a direct descendant of the Indian princess Pocahontas. The Bollings lived on a plantation in eastern Virginia until the Civil War destroyed their life of “slaves and abundance.” A graduate of the University of Virginia Law School, William Bolling moved to Wytheville, where he established a practice and became a Circuit Court Judge.

  His big brick house in the center of town was filled with several generations of the family, plus an old freed slave who had insisted on remaining with them. With so many mouths to feed, they lived modestly. Edith was thirteen before she got past the town limits of Wytheville; and she spent most of her time tending to her father’s mother, a sharp-tongued semi-invalid who seldom left the house, her condition the result of a riding accident in her youth. Always dressed in black, Grandmother Bolling taught Edith how to read and write, and then she added French, Bible studies, and all the needle arts. Although tough-skinned, Edith was tender toward those in need. She adored her father, who read the great
books aloud at night and the Good Book on Sundays as the lay reader at the Episcopalian Church.

  Edith received a boarding school education for a few years, until the limited family funds had to be spent on her younger brothers. By that time, she had shot up to her adult height, a striking five feet nine inches. While hardly well educated, she was a capable young woman—exuberant and domestic. She developed a shapely figure and carried herself with regal bearing.

  Edith’s oldest sister, Gertrude, had married a man named Alexander Hunter Galt and moved with him to Washington. The winter after her schooling ended, Edith stayed with them for four months and was introduced to a world of culture. Returning one night from a concert to the house on G Street, she found the Galts dining with Alexander’s cousin Norman. A decade older than Edith, the lonely bachelor lived with his father in a gloomy brownstone and worked in the family business—“Galt & Bro., Jewellers,” established in 1801, the city’s leading emporium for silver, timepieces, and fine stationery. Edith Bolling made an immediate impression upon him.

  Norman sent her flowers and candy, visited her in Wytheville, and was often at his cousin’s house when Edith returned to Washington the following winter. He became so much a part of the family that it never crossed her mind that he would want to marry, especially as she luxuriated in her independence. But at twenty-four, with no plans for a career, she accepted his proposal.

  It was a union without passion, but not unhappy. Edith moved into her father-in-law’s house until she and Norman could afford a small place of their own. Within a few years, Norman’s father, brother, and brother-in-law died, as did Edith’s father. In 1903, at age thirty, she gave birth to a son, but complications quickly developed: she would not be able to conceive again; and the infant died after three days. Edith and Norman drifted apart. He became the sole owner of the family business, providing positions for Edith’s brothers. Yearning for gaiety, she traveled to New York, attended theater, and shopped for fashionable clothes. In 1908, two years after the couple moved into a larger house at 1308 Twentieth Street NW just off Dupont Circle, Norman died.