Wilson

by A. Scott Berg

  Kicking off the election year, the Democratic National Committee had hoped to receive a message from the President at its Jackson Day dinner. Senator Ashurst warned Dr. Grayson that many members no longer wished to hear a demand for ratification of the Treaty without reservations, as it would further split an already divided Senate. Wilson would, of course be unable to attend the dinner, but he asked Tumulty to compose a letter to be read aloud, one that would incorporate his idea of a referendum. Tumulty obeyed, though he wondered if the President was not shooting himself in the foot. He asked Secretary Houston to vet the remarks, and he too pronounced the statement “unwise.” He altered the letters in ways Wilson accepted, and the President even added a sentence of his own, stressing a moral point.

  The party faithful roundly cheered the President’s remarks that night, but one of the evening’s guests of honor, William Jennings Bryan, neutralized their effect when he spoke of the need to come to an immediate agreement within the Senate to keep the Treaty “out of politics,” for fear that it was not a winning issue for them in November. Instead, he argued for ratification of the Treaty without delay, even if that meant compromise.

  The President still would not hear of it. With debate on the Treaty about to begin anew, Wilson had taken nothing from the Republican arguments except the need to dig his heels in deeper. He had released a statement that he had “no compromise or concession of any kind in mind,” but intended that “the Republican leaders of the Senate shall continue to bear the undivided responsibility for the fate of the treaty and the present condition of the world in consequence of that fate.” When Senator Hitchcock pressed Wilson to make peace with their chief adversary, the President snapped, “Let Lodge hold out the olive branch!”

  In exasperation, several Senators from both sides of the aisle formed a bipartisan committee to produce a compromise of its own. Before they reached a final agreement, Tumulty wrote Mrs. Wilson that it behooved the White House to offer its own such document, for fear that a successful Senatorial compromise would preclude the President from having any say at all. He wrote a draft of a letter for Wilson to send to Hitchcock stating his “irreducible minimum” terms. Two days later, he wrote her again to announce that the “psychological moment” was approaching, providing the President “his great opportunity,” perhaps his last. Before the bipartisan conference reached an agreement, the Republican Majority Leader threatened to strip Lodge of his leadership unless he blocked the supercommittee. Lodge told those negotiating that he would not consider further changes to his reservations.

  Just when Wilson seemed as vital as he had been in months, an influenza epidemic descended upon Washington, and the President appeared to be among its victims. Dr. Grayson informed nobody other than Edith and Margaret Wilson of his condition, for fear of what the press and the President’s enemies would do. That proved to be sound thinking, as within two days his flu-like virus had passed. But as had occurred in Paris after he had been similarly stricken, he suffered curious repercussions: frequent mood swings in which he experienced random moments of euphoria and depression, defiance and defeatism. But compromise remained unthinkable.

  Ray Baker—who had just published a book about Wilson in Paris and had become the family’s “court” historian—lunched with Edith Wilson that week. She trusted him as much as anybody outside the innermost circle. And even Baker—a true believer in the Wilsonian cause—used the opportunity to nudge her toward compromise by telling her what people outside the White House were feeling. He spoke of their wholehearted support of the spirit of the Treaty and their hope for a League, but he added that they were “profoundly disturbed” to see it bogged down in politics and semantics. For that, he suggested, people were just as inclined to blame Mr. Wilson as Mr. Lodge. “They think him stubborn,” Edith declared. Baker simply reminded her how much depended on this issue, including the very existence of her husband’s beloved League. “I know,” she said, “but the President still has in mind the reception he got in the west, and he believes the people are with him.”

  Presidents traditionally speak of the isolation of the White House, but none had been as removed as Woodrow Wilson—confined for months to a bed, seeing almost nobody and hearing no direct news. “This sick man, with such enormous power, closed in from the world,” Baker noted in his diary, “& yet acting so influentially upon events!” Edith seemed to be in full accord with Baker’s desire for the President to offer “some great gesture” that would clear the bottleneck and allow passage of the Treaty. “Yet he hardens at any such suggestion,” Baker observed: “yielding anything to the Senate seems to drive him into stubborn immovability.”

  “Was there ever such a situation in our history!” Baker mused on January 23, 1920. “Everything must come through one overstrained woman!” He found himself conjuring images of “this lonely sick man, attacked from all sides” and contrasting them with the same man he had seen just the year before as he was hailed along the great boulevards of Europe. Tumulty wrote Wilson “that our forces are rapidly disintegrating.” A long meeting with supportive Senators Joseph T. Robinson of Arkansas and Carter Glass convinced him that the public was demanding “immediate action,” even if it meant accepting the Lodge reservations.

  The next Sunday night—February 29, 1920—Tumulty joined fifteen members of the Democratic Party’s power elite—Hitchcock and Glass from the Senate, Texan John Nance Garner from the House, a few governmental board chairmen, and more than half the Cabinet: resolute Wilsonians all—for dinner at the Chevy Chase Club. Party chairman Homer Cummings presided over an agenda the first item of which was how to deal with the Treaty situation. He read a letter from Frank I. Cobb, Wilson’s most ardent defender in the press, who advocated acceptance of the reservations. Hitchcock seconded the opinion, expressing a willingness to prolong the fight but a preference to accept its futility.

  “Well, I think we are all of one opinion, which is that the President should accept the reservations and be advised that this is our recommendation,” said Carter Glass at last. “But—”; and, with that, he paused for dramatic effect. “I would like, to know,” he proceeded, “in the present condition of the President’s mind and his state of health, who among us will be willing to go to him and tell him that he should accept the reservations.” Each man sat in silence, waiting for one of the other fifteen to speak.

  Ray Baker was willing to bell the cat, and he arranged an audience with the President during his now daily outing to the South Portico. The issue arose and just as quickly fell with “sad finality,” as Wilson had convinced himself that the opposition was composed of “evil men” hell-bent on destroying the League.

  Carter Glass informed the President that a rewording of Article X endorsed by President Taft had proven acceptable to Lodge, the Mild Reservationists, and a host of “uncompromising friends of the Administration.” Edith Wilson replied that the President felt Taft’s proposed reservation was “not drawn in good faith” and that her husband believed “absolute inaction on our part is better than a mistaken initiative.” When Wilson’s son-in-law discussed the partisan gamesmanship in play, Wilson said, “Mac, I am willing to compromise on anything but the Ten Commandments”—which meant that “there could be no compromise where the moral law or high principle was involved.”

  Spring arrived early, and the President left the White House grounds on March 3 for the first time in five months. From the rear entrance of the White House, he walked with a cane to a waiting motorcar, into which attendants assisted him. For more than an hour, he and Edith and Dr. Grayson rode along the Potomac to Capitol Hill. They passed Senator Borah, who smiled and waved. The drive proved therapeutic enough to become part of Wilson’s regimen once again. He would wear a cape instead of an overcoat, because of the difficulty threading his left arm through the sleeve, and the staff would place him in the contoured front seat, where he could not slide or topple over as he did in the back. Timed with his
return, Agent Starling would organize a group to stand and cheer as the car pulled through the White House gate. When the Secret Service men lifted Wilson from the car after the first of these staged welcomes, the President had tears in his eyes. “You see,” he said to Edith, “they still love me!”

  Realizing that the Senate was in the homestretch of its marathon debate, the President dictated one last letter to Hitchcock about the League—1,400 words full of his familiar phraseology, more fixed in his argument than ever. Over the next few days, he tinkered with the text, and his pencil markings in both shorthand and longhand revealed penmanship only slightly less readable than before his stroke and editorial skills as precise as ever. “Either we should enter the League fearlessly,” he wrote, “accepting the responsibility and not fearing the role of leadership which we now enjoy, contributing our efforts towards establishing a just and permanent peace, or we should retire as gracefully as possible from the great concert of powers by which the world was saved.” The White House sent the letter to Senator Hitchcock on March 8, releasing copies to the major newspapers for publication the next day.

  The impending vote on the Lodge reservations would probably be the last opportunity to accept some form of the Treaty, yet Wilson was encouraging even his supporters as well as the Treaty’s detractors to kill it. And the public wanted to hear no more discussion of the subject because everything had already been said. As The New York Times indicated, “The gulf between the President and Senator Lodge is unbridgeable”; The Washington Post branded the President an “affirmative irreconcilable.” Even the pro-Wilson New York World chastised him for not realizing that “these reservations at their worst are merely an expression of opinion on the part of a temporary majority of the Senate” and that what “a reactionary Senate under the leadership of Henry Cabot Lodge does a progressive Senate under enlightened leadership can undo.” Remarked Brandegee of Connecticut, “The President has strangled his own child.”

  Lodge offered a minor rewrite of Article X, which afforded the President one final opportunity to compromise. Hitchcock wrote that he assumed Wilson would not accept it, and the President replied, “You are quite right.” After the Senate vote, the next opportunity to consider a Treaty, if indirectly, would be in the upcoming Presidential election, in which the Republicans could run as a party of reconciliation.

  Although Edith and Dr. Grayson continued to shield the President from pessimistic news, they permitted Tumulty to maintain daily visits with him on the South Portico, because sitting alone and sidelined only heightened his anxiety. A few days after the March 8 letter to Hitchcock, Tumulty found him “deeply depressed,” for the inevitability of the Treaty’s defeat was sinking in. After reading aloud his daily report on the situation, Tumulty stepped back from Wilson’s wheeled chair and said, “Governor, you are looking very well to-day.” A doleful Wilson shook his head and said, “I am very well for a man who awaits disaster.” And then he lowered his gaze and wept.

  On March 15 the Senate adopted Lodge’s final language, but Woodrow Wilson’s “ides of March” came four days later. The day dragged on with speeches until six o’clock, when a quorum call drew the Senators to the floor for an immediate vote. Forty-nine favored the Lodge version of the Treaty, while thirty-five opposed—with twelve absent Senators pairing their votes, grouped in a two-to-one ratio because of the two-thirds requirement to pass. For want of seven votes, the Treaty did not pass. Almost as many Democrats voted for ratification as those who remained loyal to the President. Wilson’s dream, commented Senator Lodge with glee, was as “dead as Marley’s ghost.” The United States would neither ratify the Treaty Wilson had carried from Paris nor join the League of Nations. It fell upon Tumulty to break the news to his chief, who received it stoically, saying only, “They have shamed us in the eyes of the world.”

  In an attempt to buoy the President’s spirits, Tumulty reminded him that only the Senate had defeated him and that “the People” would vindicate his course. “Ah,” said Wilson, “but our enemies have poisoned the wells of public opinion. They have made the people believe that the League of Nations is a great Juggernaut, the object of which is to bring war and not peace to the world. If I only could have remained well long enough to have convinced the people that the League of Nations was their real hope, their last chance, perhaps to save civilization!”

  Grayson said the President had never truly believed the Treaty would be rejected, and it induced a depression. When Grayson encountered his patient after receiving the news, Wilson said, “I feel like going to bed and staying there.” But he could not sleep, and Grayson bunked in the White House that night, stopping in the President’s bedroom several times. At three o’clock in the morning, Wilson turned to him and said, “Doctor, the devil is a busy man.” Moments later he asked Grayson to pick up his Bible and read from 2 Corinthians, Chapter 4, Verses 8 and 9, which he did:

  We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair;

  Persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed . . .

  “If I were not a Christian,” Wilson said, “I think I should go mad, but my faith in God holds me to the belief that He is in some way working out His own plans through human perversities and mistakes.”

  Wilson stewed over this situation for the rest of his life. He believed the League of Nations represented “the birth of the spirit of the times,” and its foes would be “gibbeted and occupy an unenviable position in history along with Benedict Arnold.” Edith took the news just as hard, bearing her own grudge against the man bent on destroying her husband. Years later she declared her conviction that “Mr. Lodge put the world back fifty years, and that at his door lies the wreckage of human hopes and the peril to human lives that afflict mankind today.” One morning in March 1920, Grayson commented on the balminess of the day. Wilson replied, “I don’t know whether it is warm or cold. I feel so weak and useless. I feel that I would like to go back to bed and stay there until I either get well or die. I cannot make a move to do my work except by making a definite resolve to do so.”

  • • •

  With another year to his term, Woodrow Wilson became the lamest duck ever to inhabit the White House, residing more than presiding for the rest of his days there. As spring arrived, he adopted the comfortable routine of a retiree. At nine o’clock every morning he exerted the greatest effort of his day, laboriously walking from his bedroom to his study, only steps away. At his desk he caught up with paperwork for an hour before an attendant wheeled him to the elevator and outside to the gardens. Around noon, he was wheeled to the East Room for his favorite indulgence—a motion picture. Douglas Fairbanks—the swashbuckling star of the silent screen and a successful film producer, who had actively participated in the Liberty Bond rallies—had sent Wilson in late 1918 a “projecting machine,” hoping it might provide him some amusement. Wilson especially enjoyed Westerns starring William S. Hart.

  At one o’clock, the President would lunch for an hour and then rest in bed for at least an hour. Gradually, a few afternoon appointments were permitted; but he derived the most good from a motor ride, an hour or two into Virginia or Maryland over roads that became so familiar, he and Edith made several friends along the way: two little brothers who would raise the flag when the President passed; a curly-haired tot who saluted and said, “Hi, Wilson!”; an elderly woman who knitted an afghan for the President to place over his knees. During the day’s activities, Edith almost never left his side, especially toward sunset, when she would read to him, if he was not already engrossed in a detective story. Now that he was eating proper meals again, Wilson’s digestion normalized, and he gained twenty pounds. After dinner, he and Edith pulled out decks of cards and played separate hands of canfield. The President was able, at last, to sleep through the night.

  While Wilson evaded slipping into a “second childishness,” much of his newfound happiness could be attrib
uted to the arrival of a new friend, a daily visitor who proved to be the President’s greatest diversion—his physician’s two-year-old son. A precocious little boy, Gordon Grayson became the President’s playmate. Taking a glass of milk in the late morning sun, Wilson would give the accompanying biscuit to his young friend; and if the toddler arrived late, the Wilsons would wait for Gordon to ask for his “tookie.” During the noontime screenings, Gordon would sit on the footrest of the President’s chair and provide his own commentary. Before leaving on afternoon drives, Wilson would call for his “little partner,” and Gordon became a regular passenger, as the President delighted in pointing out places of interest along the way. “His conversation with the little fellow,” Dr. Grayson noted, “seems to please him and cheer him and brighten his spirits.” When the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus came to the capital that spring, Wilson requested that its arrival parade alter its route, detouring from Pennsylvania Avenue to Executive Avenue, behind the White House. As the animals and performers marched by, the President of the United States sat on the roof of the East Wing, with young Gordon at his side holding a yellow balloon.

  Such small pleasures lifted Wilson’s spirits, but the demise of the Treaty would forever weigh him down. At two o’clock in the morning of Tuesday, April 13, 1920, Wilson summoned Dr. Grayson to his bedroom. He needed to talk, which he did for the next two hours. “When I get out of office and my health has recovered,” he said, “I want to devote a good deal of time to showing what a disorganization the United States Senate is.” He spoke of his having “asked our boys to go overseas and to fight in the trenches for a principle,” for which many gave their lives, and how the Senate rendered that fight meaningless. Henry Cabot Lodge haunted him but not as much as those lives lost in vain. “Could any self-respecting man ask our boys to go into another war? Could you expect them to make such a sacrifice,” Wilson asked Grayson, “and then have a crowd in the Senate like this throw away what they had fought for?”