Wilson
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Before sealing her note, she rang the President and read the Bishop’s letter and her reply. Woodrow agreed that the Bishop had overstepped but suggested that his position demanded some respect. “No,” Edith told Woodrow, “this letter goes to him right now. I will postpone our wedding rather than be bludgeoned into a thing of this kind.”
“Yes,” replied the President, “I was afraid of that. But, after all, the poor fellow has enough to stand with a wife like that.” Edith called upon the rector of her local church to replace the Bishop.
Two days later, on December 18, 1915, White House usher Ike Hoover took charge of Edith’s house. He emptied the lower floor of all furniture and moved in a team of decorators and caterers. In the recess of the window in the front room, florists created a semicircular bower filled with maidenhair ferns and a canopy lined in Scotch heather, a tribute to the President’s roots. There were many sprays of purple orchids, Edith’s favorites, in the room; and the rest of the space was decorated with palms and American Beauty roses. The prie-dieu that had served in several White House weddings was covered in white satin and adorned with more orchids. Back at the White House, the President worked with his stenographer in the morning and hosted the wedding guests for lunch. Late in the afternoon, he and Edith went for a drive, returning to the White House at six. He presented her with a brooch of white diamonds.
With only his Secret Service escort, Wilson arrived at Edith’s house at eight o’clock and went upstairs to her sitting room. He waited alone for a half hour, until Hoover tapped on the door. The nearly fifty-nine-year-old groom, in a cutaway coat, white waistcoat, and gray striped trousers, looked upon his forty-three-year-old bride, wearing a black velvet gown and matching hat and her brooch. They descended the stairs together as a small string section from the Marine Band played the wedding march from Lohengrin. Downstairs waited their families and a handful of friends, including Tumulty, a few Bolling retainers, Edith’s doctor, her “ward” Altrude Gordon, and, of course, Cary Grayson. There were no attendants; and when the minister asked, “Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?” Edith’s mother stepped forward and placed her daughter’s hand in that of the President of the United States.
A buffet supper followed—oyster patties, boned capon, Virginia ham, chicken salad, caramel ice cream, and a three-tiered wedding cake. While the party was in full swing, Woodrow and Edith slipped upstairs to prepare for their departure. The guests cheered as they left, as did a crowd outside, thrilled to catch a glimpse of the couple as they ducked into the waiting limousine, its Presidential crests covered with pieces of carbon paper. Only the driver and the Secret Service car behind them knew their immediate destination; and they were ultimately able to shake the fleet of newspapermen and the police cars that were in hot pursuit. Several minutes later, they arrived in Alexandria, Virginia. Agent Starling stood at the siding at the edge of the freight yard, where the baggage coach of their special train had already been loaded with luggage and two automobiles, one for the President and one for the Secret Service. As both the White House limousine and the train from Washington pulled up, Starling blinked his flashlight three times and escorted the newlyweds onto their special car virtually unnoticed.
Only then, around midnight, did the engineer receive orders from the officials of the Chesapeake and Ohio directing him to his destination—Hot Springs, Virginia, halfway between Edith’s and Woodrow’s respective birthplaces. About seven o’clock the next morning, the train pulled into the siding of the station in the small resort town. As it came to a stop, Agent Starling went back to the private car, quietly walking the corridor between the bedrooms. Approaching the sitting room, he heard a familiar tune—as there before him stood a man in a top hat, tailcoat, and morning trousers, his hands in his pockets. He was dancing a jig. Unaware that he was being watched, he suddenly clicked his heels in the air. And then Starling heard the President sing, “Oh, you beautiful doll! You great big beautiful doll. . . .”
11
DELIVERANCE
. . . and the king spake and said to Daniel: O Daniel, seruant of the liuing God, Is thy God whom thou seruest continually, able to deliuer thee from the Lyons?
—DANIEL, VI:20
The Presidential limousine drove the honeymooners to the Homestead, a grand but cozy resort dating back to the 1760s. Intending to stay for three weeks, the First Couple checked into a quiet suite—a large living room with a fireplace, two bedrooms and two baths, a dining room, and their own servants’ quarters.
Surrounded by snow-covered mountains, Woodrow and Edith golfed together in the mornings—he shooting around 115, she 200. They took long motor trips in the afternoons. “We do not do anything that needs to be described,” he wrote old family friends Lucy and Mary Smith—just “walk and ride and play golf and loaf and spice it all with a little work, not to forget that there are duties as well as pleasures in the world.” The hotel management trimmed a Christmas tree in their dining room; and three days later, they quietly celebrated Woodrow’s fifty-ninth birthday. “We are having a heavenly time here,” Wilson rhapsodized. “I shall go back to Washington feeling complete and strong for whatever may betide. I am indeed blessed beyond my (or any other man’s) deserts.”
On December 30, 1915, a German U-boat fired a torpedo into the British cruiser Persia off the coast of Crete. The 500 passengers aboard the merchant ship should have been permitted to disembark; but no warning shot had been fired, and 350 passengers died. Days later came reports of two more vessels torpedoed in the Mediterranean, also without warning. “Personally,” Secretary of State Lansing telegraphed the President, “I am very much alarmed over the seriousness of the situation.” Woodrow and Edith reluctantly ended their honeymoon.
The President returned to the White House—and the start of an election year, a phenomenon that exaggerates even the pettiest issues. Remaining focused on but one objective—keeping his country from war—Wilson was in for some of the angriest discord ever to come a President’s way. Isolationists and pacifists felt he had been too aggressive in response to the German attacks, and the jingoes felt he had been too passive. Even though all the facts regarding the Persia were still not known, Tumulty argued for “vigorous action.” When he reported that a growing constituency in the country suggested a lack of leadership, Wilson stiffened in his chair. “Tumulty,” he said, “you may as well understand my position right now. If my re-election as President depends upon my getting into war, I don’t want to be President.
. . . I have made up my mind that I am more interested in the opinion that the country will have of me ten years from now than the opinion it may be willing to express today. Of course, I understand that the country wants action . . . but I will not be rushed into war, no matter if every damned congressman and senator stands up on his hind legs and proclaims me a coward.
This renewal of German attacks, in clear violation of naval law and international treaties, demanded an escalated response. The United States could not keep sending admonitory notes, protesting one naval incident while coming to terms on another. Severance of diplomatic relations, which Wilson considered the “forerunner” of war, would be the next logical step. Ambassador Page in England wrote Wilson that the British thought the United States was being “hoodwinked” by the Germans and that America’s response was laughable. He said Londoners were referring to Americans as “Too-prouds” and that they hissed when an American image appeared on their moving-picture screens. Colonel House conferred with the new Minister of Munitions, David Lloyd George, and several other Cabinet members, the consensus being that only Wilson’s intervention could stop the war. Toward that end, House echoed Lloyd George’s feelings that it would enormously strengthen Wilson’s hand if he would start building an impressively large Army and Navy.
Such comments meant little to Wilson. He did not work for Great Britain, he reminded Tumulty. “I believe that the sober-minded people of this count
ry will applaud any efforts I may make without the loss of our honor to keep this country out of war.” Constantly weighing his military options against the diplomatic, Wilson believed it was time for both—readying America for battle, all the while grasping at solutions to resist it.
After conferring with several leaders on the Continent, House returned to England, where he dined on Valentine’s Day 1916, with past, present, and future Prime Ministers Arthur James Balfour, H. H. Asquith, and Lloyd George, along with Foreign Secretary Lord Grey. Although their constituents were far from ready to lay down arms to negotiate, the statesmen all agreed to discuss the matter; and, a week later, House confided in Lord Grey the possible terms for a sweetheart deal, which the latter recorded in what became known as the House-Grey Memorandum. House had said that Wilson was ready to propose a conference that would summon the Allies and the Germans together; and he noted, “Should the Allies accept this proposal and should Germany refuse it, the United States would probably enter the war against Germany.” Furthermore, the memorandum said, “if such a Conference were held, it would secure peace on terms not unfavourable to the Allies; and, if it failed to secure peace, the United States would leave the Conference as a belligerent on the side of the Allies, if Germany was unreasonable.” Among its terms would be the restoration of Belgium, the transfer of Alsace and Lorraine to France, and the acquisition by Russia of an outlet to the sea in the south.
Wilson approved this peculiar document, which had little value. He did not support secret covenants, and its vagueness suggested that it was little more than an exercise in mediation. House, of course, was not empowered to speak for the United States; and, indeed, the President himself was limited in what he could promise regarding wars and treaties as he was constitutionally restricted by the will of the Senate. Even so, Wilson saw value in keeping diplomatic channels open, and the memo marked the Administration’s first official abandonment of isolationism.
Closer to home, on January 10, 1916, a band of Francisco “Pancho” Villa’s men held up a train outside Chihuahua City, Mexico, robbing and executing seventeen Americans. The victims were associated with an American-owned company about to reopen a mine, and now many Americans demanded the heads of the murderous Villistas. Wilson restrained himself, reminding Congress and the public that the State Department had warned Americans against traveling in Mexico at that time; and while the President sought justice, the Carranza government retained jurisdiction. As Wilson’s cooperation with Carranza had triggered the assault, he hoped this might prove to be an isolated incident, Villa just letting off steam. Wilson continued to commit America to nonintervention—giving the belligerents in Europe and the bandits in Mexico a chance to cool off and come to terms, if not their senses.
The President and Secretary Garrison discussed plans to enlarge the Army and Navy. It meant suggesting war to an isolationist country with no declared enemies and buffered by two oceans. Theodore Roosevelt had been bugling for such action for years—urging a summer training camp for officers that his fellow Rough Rider, General Leonard Wood, had organized in Plattsburgh, New York. There 1,500 volunteers who were not “too proud to fight” could start learning military drills. Members of Wilson’s own party, especially in the Congress, opposed expansion of the armed forces. But, as The New York Times editorialized, Wilson’s “powers of temperate, convincing statement and triumphant suasion are famous.” His character now demanded that he “go to the country and inform them of the possibility that we might be drawn into the conflict in Europe, and of the necessity of preparing for it.” In two dozen speeches between late January and the end of February 1916, Wilson articulated ideas that would crystallize into the foreign policy that would extend through the next century. He officially kicked off “the President’s Preparedness Campaign” at the annual dinner of the Railway Business Association at the Waldorf-Astoria on January 27.
Whether or not the United States would ever enter the war as a combatant, Wilson believed the country could no longer stand as an island. “America does not constitute the major part of the world,” he reminded his audience. “We live in a world which we did not make, which we cannot alter, which we cannot think into a different condition from that which actually exists. It would be a hopeless piece of provincialism to suppose that, because we think differently from the rest of the world, we are at liberty to assume that the rest of the world will permit us to enjoy that thought without disturbance.”
Wilson had said in late 1914 that the question of military preparedness was not pressing. “But more than a year has gone by since then,” he observed in his long speech, “and I would be ashamed if I had not learned something in fourteen months. The minute I stop changing my mind as President, with the change of all the circumstances in the world, I will be a back number.” Indeed, with so much of the world in flux, Wilson relied on flexibility, which struck his opponents as weakness. In truth, Wilson was pursuing a steady—albeit slow—path to war.
At this pivotal moment—when the majority of Americans had migrated from rural areas to urban centers—Wilson began erecting the machinery for the United States to prepare itself for war. He explained that that included not only the creation of a standing army “for the purposes of peace” but also “a great system of industrial and vocational education under federal guidance and with federal aid, in which a very large percentage of the youth of this country will be given training in the skillful use and application of the principles of science in manufacturing and business.” Wilson envisioned a society of productive citizens who stood ready to serve as soldiers.
Two nights later, before four thousand people in Pittsburgh, he advanced his argument, explaining the difficulties of reading the constant flow of international dispatches and maintaining the peace. “It amazes me to hear men speak as if America stood alone in the world and could follow her own life as she pleases,” he said. The dangers in the world had become “infinite and constant,” and he said that he would be negligent if he did not start warning his countrymen that “new circumstances have arisen which make it absolutely necessary that this country should prepare herself, not for war, not for anything that smacks in the least of aggression, but for adequate national defense.” A generation later, Wilson’s Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, would famously declare, “I hate war”; he no doubt recalled Woodrow Wilson’s telling this audience in 1916, “I love peace.” And the price for that peace, Wilson said, required “a great plan for national defense of which we will all be proud and which will lead us to forget partisan differences in one great enthusiasm for the United States of America.”
Wilson’s speech in Cleveland marked a turning point in his campaign for preparedness. David Lawrence, who was part of the touring press corps, discerned a shift in the President’s rhetoric—as the long poetic sentences yielded to a punchier delivery. “The President talked,” Lawrence observed, “. . . like a man who had really convinced himself.” And in so doing, he recovered the unvarnished sincerity that had uplifted people when he first ran for office.
In vast auditoriums and from caboose platforms, Wilson addressed citizens in five Midwestern states, scaffolding the argument that he would later build for America’s increasing involvement in the world. In Chicago on January 31, he said it was “a very terrible thing . . . to have the honor of the United States entrusted to your keeping,” especially with the great task that had been assigned to his nation—“to assert the principles of law in a world in which the principles of law have broken down.” The war, he said, “was brought on by rulers, not by peoples, and I thank God that there is no man in America who has the authority to bring war on without the consent of the people.”
Three American Presidents had been assassinated in Wilson’s lifetime, as had been a dozen international leaders. Although the incident was kept from the public and even from the President himself, a man tried to take Wilson’s life during his preparedness tour. After
his speech in Chicago, Wilson had retired to his suite at the Blackstone Hotel for the night. Dr. Grayson went to a supper party, and, upon returning to the Blackstone, discovered the entourage of Secret Service detail in a state of high excitement. “A man had tried to get to the President threatening to kill him,” Grayson wrote his fiancée late that night. He turned out to be an unstable “crank,” who had written a note saying that he was going to sneak into the President’s room and stab him to death with a pair of scissors. The would-be assassin never got closer than a few floors above the Presidential suite before jumping to his death. Wilson slept through the entire incident, until Dr. Grayson entered his room on another pretense, so that he could lock the window, ensuring that everybody else might sleep as soundly as Wilson. Security for the President was subsequently beefed up to prevent any such event from recurring. On February 3, in St. Louis, the President insisted that America was at peace with all the world “because she entertains a friendship for all the nations of the world.”
In speech after speech, he turned the argument of national safety into one of “national dignity” and, ultimately, one of forging a new national identity. The trip left Wilson inspired, reminding him of the importance of getting out of Washington, to hear the real voices of America. Upon returning to the White House, however, Wilson found himself listening to just one.
No President and First Lady spent as much of their time together as the Wilsons did, as neither wished to revisit the loneliness each had experienced. Even the possessive Wilson daughters delighted in their stepmother, seeing in her, observed Dr. Grayson, “the deliverer of their father from sadness into joy, and she, in turn, always showed the utmost consideration and affection for them.”