Wilson

by A. Scott Berg

  Wilson’s health finally improved enough for him to evaluate his physical condition and consider his obligations. “My personal pride must not be allowed to stand in the way of my duty to the country,” he said. “When I am well, I feel eager for work. I judge my condition because now I do not have much desire for work.” Grayson suggested that Wilson call a Cabinet meeting, so that he might talk to his advisers and determine exactly how much leadership he was exerting. “If you will do this,” said Grayson, “I am confident that you will find that you are doing more than you realize. You are running your office by correspondence and this naturally makes you feel greatly out of touch with things. Moreover, it gives you the impression that you are inefficient.”

  A little before ten o’clock the following morning, April 14, a perfectly groomed President sat at his desk in his study, awaiting the arrival of the Cabinet for his first meeting with them since September 2. To many of the new members, Wilson did not appear sickly. His face looked full—thick and jowly even—and he exuded cheer. But each of the returning members shuddered. In a break from tradition, Ike Hoover announced each of the entrances, which bewildered them, and Wilson’s failure to rise from his chair troubled them. David Houston, newly installed at Treasury, was aghast. “The President looked old, worn, and haggard,” he recalled. “It was enough to make one weep to look at him.

  One of his arms was useless. In repose, his face looked very much as usual, but, when he tried to speak, there were marked evidences of his trouble. His jaw tended to drop on one side, or seemed to do so. His voice was very weak and strained.

  True to form, Wilson opened the meeting with jovial banter, but Houston found it little more than a “brave front.” Silence descended, and the department heads realized the President could barely initiate serious conversation.

  The ranking Cabinet officer might logically have spoken up in that moment, but the Secretary of State had the least experience of anybody in the room—only three weeks on the job. Most people in the Administration had presumed Robert Lansing’s Undersecretary, Frank L. Polk—who possessed the writing skills and foreign affairs experience the President sought—would have been the natural successor. Instead, Wilson had chosen a fifty-year-old New York attorney named Bainbridge Colby. Because he had little experience with international matters, the selection surprised the nominee as much as diplomatic Washington—which allowed Senate Republicans to re-question the President’s capability. But Colby was hardly a man without merits. His résumé included a term in the New York State Assembly and two unsuccessful runs as a Progressive candidate for the United States Senate, anti-trust work as a special assistant to the United States Attorney General, and membership on the Shipping Board, which resulted in his participating in the 1917 Inter-Allied Conference in Paris. In his efforts to strengthen the merchant marine, Wilson had found Colby in command of his information. Above all, from the moment Colby had left the Progressive Party in 1916 to support the Democrats, Wilson had valued his loyalty. With Colby by his side, he believed he would never have to wonder if somebody had his back.

  With legal issues dominating the news, the Attorney General stepped in to direct much of the discussion that morning. Strikes had broken out across the country—involving elevator operators, truckers, and railroad workers—much of which Mitchell Palmer attributed to the Bolsheviks and the IWW. Labor Secretary Wilson blamed the unrest on economic conditions and the HCL. The two argued, largely over Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis F. Post, who had summarily dismissed most of the cases that stemmed from the Palmer raids simply because he did not believe membership in the Communist Party should mandate deportation. Palmer claimed that Post had released “alien anarchists” and ought to be relieved of his office, that his removal would be enough of a threat to end the strikes. Secretary Wilson said such action would aggravate the situation. “The President seemed at first to have some difficulty in fixing his mind on what we were discussing” and said little, David Houston observed. Indeed, this was apparently the first the President had heard of Palmer’s fanatical operations with J. Edgar Hoover.

  After an hour, Dr. Grayson poked his head into the study, a signal prearranged with the President to bring the meeting to a close. Wilson shook his head, indicating that he did not wish to be interrupted. Fifteen minutes later, Grayson returned, only to be dismissed a second time. At 11:30, the doctor entered with Mrs. Wilson, who said, “This is an experiment, you know.” And the President adjourned the meeting. Grayson deemed the experiment a success, but one White House visitor reported that Wilson remained “a very sick man”—with a drooping jaw, vacant eyes, and a fixed scowl.

  Based on the information they gathered for their psychological autopsy, William Bullitt and Sigmund Freud would later present an even bleaker picture. They pinpointed the breakdown outside Pueblo, Colorado, as the virtual death of Thomas Woodrow Wilson, because from that moment forward, he was “no longer an independent human being but a carefully coddled invalid.” He was at the mercy of unpredictable, often illogical synapses, a neurological system gone haywire. “The Woodrow Wilson who lived on,” they determined, “was a pathetic invalid, a querulous old man full of rage and tears, hatred and self-pity.”

  The President’s worst moments came at night, when he was alone with his thoughts. One evening, he again summoned Dr. Grayson and asked the nurse to leave them alone. “I have been thinking over this matter of resigning and letting the Vice-President take my place,” he divulged. “It is clear that I should do this if I have not the strength to fill the office.” He said that he would quit the moment he realized that his sickness was causing the country any ill effects. The declaration, of course, begged the larger question of whether a man in his mental state was in any position to judge. Even more revealing was the bathetic manner in which the rest of Wilson’s scenario unspooled:

  I shall summon Congress in special session and have you arrange to get me wheeled in my chair into the House of Representatives. I shall have my address of resignation prepared and shall try to read it myself, but if my voice is not strong enough I shall ask the Speaker of the House to read it, and at its conclusion I shall be wheeled out of the room.

  Wilson developed his own routine for dissolving his night frights. He kept a small flashlight on a stand by his bed, and whenever he was too distressed to sleep, he shone it upon Fred Yates’s pastel portrait of Ellen. Night after night, he would stare into his late wife’s eyes until he calmed down. He made plans for the following spring to visit the Lake District.

  In the meantime, much of Washington continued to buzz about the second Mrs. Wilson. The cantankerous Justice McReynolds, for one, had remained friendly with Vice President Marshall, Colonel House, and Dr. Grayson, and he thought Marshall should have demanded a medical opinion under oath from the President’s physicians as to his true condition and then presented that opinion to Congress, which could have declared the President disabled and spared the country several “disastrous months.” Grayson also wished to let Marshall serve and said as much to McReynolds and others. But Mrs. Wilson objected. He had told the First Lady that the President had raised the subject and would have stepped aside; but Edith, more concerned with her husband’s constitution than the nation’s, refused to listen. “If he had resigned, the entire current of recent history might have been changed,” House mused in his diary in the late spring of 1920. And even if he did not, he would have saved his treaty—“had he not been so stubborn.”

  Wilson never raised the subject of resignation again. He believed what Grayson considered true, “that he had the strength to administer the office capably.” Reading newspapers once again, Wilson noted talk of the Senate’s declaring peace on its own and wondering if he would veto such a resolution. Wilson told Grayson he would take no executive action, other than writing an excoriating message, one so distasteful that he had no doubt the Senate would try to impeach him for it. “If I were well and on my feet and they
pursued such a course,” he told Grayson, “I would gladly accept the challenge, because I could put them in such a light before the country that I believe the people would impeach them.” Wilson the historian said the Senate had never been as unpopular as it was in that moment; and with the approach of the national conventions, he daydreamed of taking a referendum for his treaty to the people. In idle moments he drafted a series of questions for the electorate—did they wish to make use of his services as President, did they approve of the way in which the Administration conducted the war, did they wish the Treaty of Versailles ratified? Tumulty recommended to the First Lady that the President declare publicly that he would not run for a third term. He believed it would depoliticize the future of the Treaty. Wilson saw nothing to be gained from such a gesture. It would only hand the leadership of the party to William Jennings Bryan; and he felt it presumptuous to decline something that had not been offered.

  There was one other factor. No President of the United States had ever defied George Washington’s tradition of leaving office after two terms. But along with other talk that sounded slightly deranged, Wilson told his physician that he was considering it. Even though he said, “Everyone seems to be opposed to my running,” Wilson had conjured a plot in which the Democratic Convention would find itself in a “hopeless tie-up,” and, with the world in so much turmoil, the Peace Treaty with its League of Nations would become the dominant issue. Then, Wilson said, “there may be practically a universal demand for the selection of someone to lead them out of the wilderness.” The only person he could envision, of course, was himself. He roughed out a new Cabinet.

  Grayson was glad the President did not ask for his opinion, medical or otherwise, because he did not want to tell him the depressing truth—“that it would be impossible for him to take part in such a campaign.” Nor did Grayson wish to delude him, because he feared the inevitable letdown would affect the President physically as well as psychologically. Wilson believed that the man elected that fall would determine “whether the United States will be the leader of the world or back among the stragglers.” He had no intention of backing any Democrat for the nomination. Like a broken-down fire horse, he waited for the sound of the bell.

  While a hostile Congress, an inexperienced Cabinet, and his own compromised health prevented any real progress, Wilson gave the appearance of being back in action. With strikes and runaway inflation commanding most of the headlines, Wilson once again issued statements and performed the ceremonial duties of his office. Regular Cabinet meetings resumed, the President chairing his second meeting two weeks after the first. Foreign diplomats who had been queuing for months finally got to parade through the White House to present their credentials, and the President begin filling his long vacant ambassadorships. In the summer of 1920, Secretary Colby articulated America’s position on Russia, reminding the world that the United States was the first government to acknowledge the validity of the revolution and recognize Russia’s provisional government. Since that time, however, the rulers had ceased to govern by the will or the consent of the people.

  Many in the Administration resented Colby, not only for being ill prepared but also for toadying to the President. Admiring the way he thought and wrote, Wilson made him the teacher’s pet. At the President’s direction, Colby wrote a note on the Polish situation that became the American doctrine toward Russia well into the next decade. He declared, “It is not possible for the Government of the United States to recognize the present rulers of Russia as a government with which the relations common to friendly government can be maintained. This conviction has nothing to do with any particular political or social structure which the Russian people themselves may see fit to embrace.” In short, Colby concluded, “We cannot recognize, hold official relations with, or give friendly reception to the agent of, a government which is determined and bound to conspire against our institutions; whose diplomats will be the agitators of dangerous revolt; whose spokesmen say that they sign agreements with no intention of keeping them.” An “iron curtain” was already being drawn between Russia and the non-Bolshevik world. Wilson found Colby’s white paper “excellent and sufficient.”

  In one of the few interviews he granted a journalist that year, Wilson said, “I do not fear Bolshevism, but it must be resisted. . . . If left alone, it will destroy itself. It cannot survive because it is wrong.” In fact, he had suggested as much at his first meeting with the new Cabinet, when he buttonholed Mitchell Palmer and told him “not to let the country see red.” As that was an apparent call for extra vigilance more than further violence, the Attorney General’s infamous raids came to an end.

  Meanwhile, an undaunted Louis Post at the Labor Department persisted in undoing the results of Palmer’s recklessness, dismissing cases left and right. As a result, he became the target of a witch hunt himself—secretly investigated by Hoover at the Bureau of Investigation and publicly attacked by the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. Several Congressmen as well as the American Legion called for his dismissal. Strongly anti-Communist though the President was, he supported his Secretary of Labor, who backed his subordinate on constitutional grounds, praising him for resisting what would prove to be one of the most egregious miscarriages of justice in American history. “We will not deport anyone simply because he has been accused or because he is suspected of being a Red,” the White House asserted. “We have no authority to do so under the law. . . . Mr. Post . . . I am satisfied ranks among the ablest and best administrative officers in the Government service.”

  One agitator, however, would receive no mercy from the President. Eugene V. Debs had been a thorn in Wilson’s side for years now. Having served over a year in prison and with his health failing, he had more petitioners than ever pleading for lenience—not only liberal intellectuals but also labor leaders, including Samuel Gompers and Secretary Wilson. At one meeting of the Cabinet, Payne and Daniels and even Mitchell Palmer himself all advocated clemency. Tumulty agreed to meet with a committee of Socialists presenting a petition for Debs’s pardon, only to read before their meeting that the National Convention of Socialists included several radical speeches favoring the Soviet form of government and attacking Wilson. At last, the President put the matter to rest. “I will never consent to the pardon of this man,” he told Tumulty.

  I know that in certain quarters of the country there is a popular demand for the pardon of Debs, but it shall never be accomplished with my consent. . . . While the flower of American youth was pouring out its blood to vindicate the cause of civilization, this man, Debs, stood behind the lines, sniping, attacking, and denouncing them. Before the war he had a perfect right to exercise his freedom of speech and to express his own opinion, but once the Congress of the United States declared war, silence on his part would have been the proper course to pursue.

  Wilson knew his refusal to pardon Debs would be denounced. “They will say I am cold-blooded and indifferent,” he recognized, “but it will make no impression on me. This man was a traitor to his country and he will never be pardoned during my administration.”

  Although many of his recent decisions seemed sclerotic in nature, Wilson had not become completely hard-hearted. That year alone, he granted stays and pardons for crimes far more serious than political dissent. Elizabeth Stroud had written Edith Wilson, pleading for the President to consider the plight of her son, Robert, a convicted murderer whose case had undergone a tortured journey through the courts. Wilson commuted his death sentence to life imprisonment in solitary confinement—first at Leavenworth and then at Alcatraz, where he became a renowned ornithologist.

  Wilson also continued to demonstrate his sensitivity toward women, as the war had catalyzed a reconsideration of their role in society. That spring, he nominated Helen Hamilton Gardener—longtime activist in NAWSA—to fill a vacancy on the Civil Service Commission. Upon Senate approval, she became the first female to hold such a high federal position. Women
realized that the government’s glass ceilings could be shattered. In the fourteen months since the proposal to amend the Constitution and enfranchise women had passed in both houses of the Congress, Wilson had steadily lobbied state legislatures to ratify. The tally got stuck at thirty-five approvals, one short of the three-quarters necessary. Then, on August 18, 1920, the Tennessee House of Representatives came around, thereby enacting the Nineteenth Amendment. For the first time, any American over the age of twenty-one—regardless of gender or race—qualified to vote.

  The election of 1920 promised to be historic in other ways as well. With Vice President Marshall having shied away from higher office, the upcoming campaign was the first since 1896 in which both the Democratic and Republican Parties would presumably nominate party leaders who had never run on a national ticket. President Wilson, however, continued to fool himself into believing he would run for a third term, and some surrounding him nursed the delusion. So began the most surreal few weeks in the Wilson Presidency, a moment when nobody could bring himself to tell the emperor that he was not wearing any clothes.

  “I saw the President the other day and found him a very old-looking tired man,” the new British Ambassador, Sir Auckland Geddes, reported to Lloyd George. “He is not really able to see people and ought to be freed from all cares of office.” And yet, even with a side of his body rendered useless, he was not ready to let go. Both Dr. Grayson and Edith believed another run for office would kill him, but each knew even suggesting as much reflected a disloyalty the President could not tolerate. She anxiously placated him while the doctor worked behind the scenes doing everything he could to keep the possibility of a nomination from even arising.