In the meantime, four million American workers struck their jobs that year in nearly four thousand clashes between management and labor. The Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers had attempted to organize the steel industry for decades, demanding union recognition; and in September, a national strike shut down half the industry. The violence between unionists on one hand and scabs and police on the other became so great in Gary, Indiana, the United States Army had to declare martial law. Boston faced a more difficult labor situation when much of its police force struck, prompting several nights of looting that required Governor Calvin Coolidge to unleash his State Guard. That action—calling the strikers “traitors”—transformed the Governor into a national figure representing law and order. Wilson called the strike “a crime against civilization,” for the obligation of a policeman was “as sacred as the obligation of a soldier. He is a public servant, not a private employee, and . . . has no right to prefer any private advantage to the public safety.” The racial violence of the Red Summer was no longer in flames but still flickering; September remained quiet until the end of the month, when disturbances broke out in Omaha and a few days later in a small town in Arkansas. Wilson expressed his “shame as an American citizen at the race riots . . . where men have forgot humanity and justice and orderly society and have run amuck.” And the nation was just confronting one of the most peculiar legislative ideas ever to infringe upon American life—Prohibition, which had been ratified as the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution at the start of the year. To implement that amendment, the House originated the Volstead Act that summer, and by September, Congress was preparing to send the law to the President’s desk for his signature.
Elsewhere on the Hill, Senator Hitchcock submitted his minority report to the Foreign Relations Committee, urging ratification of the Treaty without amendments or reservations. Neither side found any give in this tug-of-war. Senator Lodge’s hearings on the Treaty droned on, crescendoing with the appearance of William Bullitt, whose disgruntlement after his resignation from the American Peace Commission still festered. For hours—facing Lodge and five Republican colleagues—Bullitt made no effort to disguise his contempt for the Treaty of Versailles. His comments did little damage, for he was an obviously spurned minor player in the talks. But at the end of his interrogation, enjoying his moment in the sun as he cast a shadow over Wilson, he spoke about the senior members of the American diplomatic team, and how Lansing, Bliss, and White had “objected very vigorously to the numerous provisions of the treaty.” Lodge commented that their objections to the Shantung provision were already known and asked if there was anything else to which they had objected. As though choreographed, Bullitt said, “I do not think that Secretary Lansing is at all enthusiastic about the League of Nations as it stands at present.” With that, he produced a memorandum of a conversation he had with the Secretary on May 19. Bullitt quoted Lansing as having said, “I consider that the league of nations at present is entirely useless. The great powers have simply gone ahead and arranged the world to suit themselves. England and France in particular have gotten out of the treaty everything that they wanted, and the league of nations can do nothing to alter any of the unjust clauses of the treaty.” Upon learning of Bullitt’s testimony, Lansing—about to embark on a fishing trip on Lake Ontario—offered the press no comment.
The President—who heard the news from the press corps aboard the Mayflower—did the same, though Tumulty saw that Wilson was “incensed and distressed beyond measure.” Four days later, Lansing telegraphed the President his version of what he had said to Bullitt, a feeble explanation concluding with his wish to do everything he could to promote ratification of the Treaty. He said he regretted that he ever had any conversation with “the disloyal young man who is seeking notoriety at the expense of the respect of all honorable men.” Wilson summoned Tumulty to his compartment. “Read that,” he said, handing him the wire, “and tell me what you think of a man who was my associate on the other side and who confidentially expressed himself to an outsider in such a fashion?” For months in Paris, suspicions about Lansing had nagged the President. “But here in his own statement,” Wilson said, “is a verification at last of everything I have suspected. Think of it! This from a man whom I raised from the level of a subordinate to the great office of Secretary of State of the United States. My God! I did not think it was possible for Lansing to act in this way.” No task more pressing awaited the President’s return to the White House than demanding Lansing’s resignation.
The same morning that Wilson read Lansing’s telegram, Dr. Grayson observed small drops of saliva at the corners of the President’s mouth. His lips quivered slightly, and more spittle appeared. His face turned white. Grayson examined the rest of the itinerary, hoping to edit it.
Tumulty disagreed. He knew that the Treaty’s great broker was also its most convincing speaker, and Wilson had another five thousand miles of territory to cover in which he could rally support. By the time he had reached Spokane on September 12, his voice had weakened and, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported, “there was a suggestion of a man very much fatigued in his delivery.” He instinctively pumped his speeches with more emotion and vivid imagery. He spoke of the unconquerable nature of truth, even if you “blind its eyes with blood.”
Before almost seven thousand in the Portland Auditorium, he brought the house down when he insisted that “peace can only be maintained by putting behind it the force of united nations determined to uphold it and prevent war.” And then he revealed that he had just read them a quotation from Henry Cabot Lodge in 1915. He earned a second round of laughter and applause when he said, “I entirely concur in Senator Lodge’s conclusion, and I hope I shall have his cooperation in bringing about the desired result.”
Grayson insisted the President walk for half an hour before the train departed, but the staff squeezed an interview into those few minutes instead. A local reporter asked if the tremendous enthusiasm for the President was not lopsided, with the “adventurous” West leaning more favorably in his direction than the East. Wilson said the West was more demonstrative but that he believed approval of the League was just as strong everywhere. “I am confident,” he said before boarding the Mayflower, “that I shall not appeal in vain to the conscience of the American people.”
The next leg of the trip was the longest—772 miles on the Southern Pacific Railroad to San Francisco. It allowed the President to rest his voice and enjoy the magnificent scenery, which included loyal supporters all along the route. It troubled Dr. Grayson to learn the next morning in Oakland that Wilson’s head was pounding. For Tumulty, California was all-important, as the forward-thinking state of rival Hiram Johnson had scheduled more speeches than any other.
Wilson soldiered through two full days in the Bay Area. On Thursday the eighteenth, he addressed 1,500 members of the Associated Business Men’s Clubs of San Francisco, 10,000 people at the outdoor Greek Theatre at the University of California, Berkeley, and more than 12,000 in the Oakland Municipal Auditorium. “I believe in divine Providence,” Wilson had said at breakfast. “If I did not, I would go crazy. If I thought the direction of the disordered affairs of this world depended upon our finite endeavor, I should not know how to reason my way to sanity. But I do not believe there is any body of men, how ever they concert their power or their influence, that can defeat this great enterprise.” His day finished with a six-hundred-mile ride south.
Under the California sun, support for Wilson and his treaty kept growing. Thirty thousand people awaited him in the San Diego Stadium, where he experimented with a new electrical device that Grayson called a “voice phone.” On the speaker’s platform at one end of the bowl stood three sides of a twenty-square-foot glass room; the “fourth wall” featured a table with megaphones, from which electrical wires carried the voice to “resonators” at various points in the stadium. Boxed in and dependent upon a mechanical contrivance, Wilson
said it was the most difficult speech he ever delivered. But, except for one badly wired spot, all thirty thousand attendees could hear his seventy-minute presentation, a favorite part of which was not only the old Lodge quotation supporting a league but one from TR supporting such an organization as well. It was tempting to think that orators could thenceforth address entire coliseums at once. If only the time had come when a President could use the radio to deliver fireside chats right into people’s homes, Wilson could have conducted an even more effective campaign without any of the physical duress.
After dinner that night, former President McKinley’s Secretary of the Treasury, Lyman J. Gage, a dyed-in-the-wool Republican, introduced Wilson to a much smaller assembly, assuring everybody in the room that if McKinley were still alive, he would not only endorse the President’s actions but he would also say, “God bless you, Woodrow Wilson.”
Two hundred thousand people greeted Wilson on the streets of Los Angeles (population: 503,812) the next day—one of the most enthusiastic demonstrations in the city’s history. A capacity crowd filled the Shrine Auditorium to hear him that Saturday night, and the local press was almost unanimously supportive. Veteran newspaperman Charles H. Grasty wrote in The New York Times, “This is Woodrow Wilson country now, as Senator Johnson will find out when he returns.” Even Harry Chandler, the fiercely Republican publisher of the Los Angeles Times, admitted that the majority of Southern California was pro-League, by as much as 6 to 1. More compelling, Chandler said, was that “we have come to a point where it is a question of partisanship or patriotism,” and the League “is not our politics now but our religion.” General consensus among the press was not just that Los Angeles had been the climax of the tour but that the President had swung the national debate in his favor.
In anticipation of the punishing itinerary home, Edith Wilson had hoped for a quiet Sunday entirely to themselves. But Woodrow had planned a nostalgic reunion. From the Presidential Suite of the Alexandria Hotel, he typed a luncheon invitation to Mary Allen Hulbert. She was living in a little house in Hollywood in reduced circumstances. Scintillating dinner parties in Bermuda, hosting the likes of Mark Twain and a Princeton president contemplating a run for public office, had become distant memories. She rode a streetcar downtown for her 1:30 engagement, and the First Lady waited at the door of the suite to greet her. “Because of the work scandalmongers had done to make an intrigue of that friendship,” Edith later recorded, “I was glad to receive her, and show my disdain for such slander.” In an instant Wilson and Dr. Grayson joined them, and the four withdrew for lunch and stilted small talk.
The two women sized each other up, offering faint praise for each other in their respective memoirs. Mrs. Hulbert would devote ten pages to the encounter, Mrs. Wilson fifteen lines, in which she referred to her guest as Mrs. Peck. Edith described “a faded, sweet-looking woman who was absorbed in an only son.” Mary saw somebody unlike her photographs in the newspaper—“much more junoesque, but handsome, with a charming smile that revealed her strong, white teeth.” After lunch the President insisted upon hearing the details of Mary’s life during the last four years. The story of her decline consumed much of the afternoon. She spoke of the President’s enemies and how they had slandered her and offered exorbitant amounts of money for his letters. As both of them had survived the ordeal, they laughed; but Wilson brought the story to a close saying, “God, to think that you should have suffered because of me!”
When the President had to leave the room for a quick conference, Edith thought Mary might take that as a cue to depart, but she seemed oblivious to the preciousness of the President’s time. “Poor woman,” Edith recalled, “weighed down with her own problems, of course she did not understand. Darkness had fallen when she finally rose to go.” Before leaving, Mary asked her old friend why he was the recipient of so much “venomous personal animosity.”
“That’s just it,” Wilson said, with a flick of his hand. “If I had nothing to do with the League of Nations, it would go through like that.” He said that Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and Orlando had all failed him. And in that moment, Mary Hulbert noted later, her personal troubles faded as she found herself looking into the face of “tragedy.” Placing his hand on that of his wife, the President asked if there was anything he could do for Mary. Nothing for her, she said nobly, but he might consider helping her son. Edith walked their guest to the elevator, which the latter said “quickly dropped me out of the life of my friend Woodrow Wilson—forever.” A wistful “Mrs. Peck” boarded a streetcar back to her bungalow.
A few hours later, Woodrow Wilson began his journey back to the White House, via Sacramento, across the Sierra Nevada, from one station to the next. While he was suffering from asthma and headaches, the six hundred miles of tracks that day cut through forest fires and burrowed through tunnels in which smoke mingled with train exhaust. At the other end, changes in pressure further attacked Wilson’s respiratory system. By day’s end, his head throbbed and his face twitched. In Reno, Nevada, he spoke for well over an hour, his remarks funneled to several remote venues through telephone receivers placed near megaphones. Then it was back onto the train for another 576 miles, stopping in Ogden, Utah, the next day for a few remarks before proceeding to Salt Lake City.
By then, Dr. Grayson considered his patient’s fatigue a serious condition, which recurring headaches and coughing spells exacerbated. Throat irritation interfered with what little sleep he was getting, and the latest news from Washington was sure to ruin the rest. Senator Lodge had invited his Republican colleague Porter J. McCumber, a Mild Reservationist from North Dakota, to lunch at his house. By the time the meal ended, McCumber had agreed on a significant reservation to Article X of the Covenant, one that several Democrats came to support as well. The President fumed.
Hours before his speech that warm night in Salt Lake City, more than fifteen thousand people packed the Mormon Tabernacle, while thousands more gathered around the temple. Inside the unventilated hall, the air turned so thick that Edith Wilson took a whiff of lavender salts to keep from fainting and doused a handkerchief in the potion for her husband to take with him to the rostrum. He railed against that day’s reservation, inaccurately explaining that it would mean reopening negotiations with all the nations that had been present at Versailles, including Germany. This reservation, he contended, was nothing less than taking a knife to the Treaty and cutting out “the heart of this Covenant.” For ninety minutes he sermonized feverishly, and Edith saw that perspiration had soaked through his coat. Back at their hotel, Wilson changed clothes, only to saturate the fresh garment in a matter of minutes. Back on the train, Grayson spoke of a “nervous condition.”
The next afternoon in Cheyenne, Wyoming, the President conceded that he was ill, but he delivered his longest speech yet, often wandering from subject to subject, sounding as tired as he looked. He reboarded the Mayflower to go to the next station. In their room at the Brown Palace Hotel after their late-night arrival in Denver, Edith suggested a break in the schedule for a few days of rest. “No,” Woodrow replied, “I have caught the imagination of the people. They are eager to hear what the League stands for; and I should fail in my duty if I disappointed them.” So obvious was Edith’s dismay, he assured her, “This will soon be over, and when we get back to Washington I promise you I will take a holiday.” Dr. Grayson was counting the days.
The next morning, the President delivered a rousing speech to twelve thousand people; and before lunch, the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway was transporting him to Pueblo, a city of fifty thousand, for a two-hour visit. As they approached the city, the President relaxed on the rear platform and asked to review that afternoon’s arrangements. An aide told him he would visit the Fair Grounds, where he would greet the crowd before proceeding to the auditorium. “Who authorized such an idiotic idea?” he asked. When the aide said the visit had always been part of the day’s plans, he demanded to see Tumulty and the origina
l program. Tumulty appeared with the document, signed with Wilson’s trademark “Okeh, W. W.” The President snickered and said, “Any damn fool who was stupid enough to approve such a program has no business in the White House.” He sent word that he would not appear at the Fair Grounds but changed his mind upon reaching Pueblo, when the reception committee informed him that ten thousand people had already assembled there. He agreed to ride around the racetrack of the fair and wave his hand. He disappointed many, especially those who had traveled from outlying towns hoping to hear him speak, but Wilson felt he had to conserve his strength for the main address in the city’s new Memorial Hall.
“It seemed like we would suffocate in there,” recalled one former seventh-grader who had been among the three thousand people packed into the brick building. Agent Starling accompanied the President from the car to the auditorium, and Wilson stumbled on the single step at the entrance. Starling caught him and kept his hand on his arm as he all but lifted him up a few more steps to the speaker’s platform. Wilson did not object—which surprised Starling, as the President had always refused even the suggestion of physical assistance. “This will have to be a short speech,” Wilson indicated to the gang of newspapermen who were about to hear variations on his themes for the fortieth time. “Aren’t you fellows getting pretty sick of this?”
The big horseshoe balcony with its shiny brass rail embraced the President as he rose to speak. After a raucous welcome, he delivered a heartfelt speech, remarkable in many ways. The intimacy of the hall allowed for a more personal address, something almost conversational; and in delivering it, Wilson touched upon all the main points he had refined over the past three weeks. His weariness showed, especially in the weakness of his voice, but his frailties only enhanced the emotion of his message. For the first time, the reporters heard him falter on a line, having to restart it more than once; and unexpected pauses suggested both mental confusion as well as physical exhaustion. Starling was so concerned, he remained poised to catch the President should he collapse. He recalled Wilson’s passion on this occasion, his working himself to tears.
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