Wilson

by A. Scott Berg

  The Wilson Administration wound down, the hours growing longer and quieter. Solicitous letters from friends arrived along with occasional testimonials. One particularly generous encomium from 105 women whose names could be found in the New York Social Register—Eleanor Roosevelt among them—simply wanted to express the belief that “the name of Woodrow Wilson will be added to those of Washington and Lincoln as the men of vision in American history.” On November 15, bells pealed in Geneva, inaugurating the League of Nations—“the first time in the history of mankind,” as Edwin L. James phrased it in The New York Times, that “forty-one nations of the world sat together in common council.” The League opened by sending a message of thanks to President Wilson with the desire that the United States would soon “take her rightful place in the League.” And on December 4, 1920, Albert G. Schmedeman, the United States Ambassador to Norway, informed Wilson in a “strictly confidential” telegram that the Nobel Committee of the Norwegian Parliament intended to honor “his crucial role in establishing the League” with its prize for Peace. Woodrow Wilson became the third American to win the honor—following Theodore Roosevelt and Elihu Root, each of whom had criticized Wilson for dragging his feet before declaring war.

  The better the news abroad, it seemed, the more bitter he became—ill-tempered, angry, even mean. “The President these days is much given to gratifying whatever petty prejudices he has,” noted Charles Swem. He based his approvals of his final appointments upon the Senators in support of the nominees and blackballed everyone on his enemies list. Final bills went signed or unsigned because of similar prejudices. During his daily drives, he grew so intolerant of those who passed his car, he ordered the Secret Service to apprehend them for questioning; he even wrote the Attorney General to ask if the President did not also have the powers of a magistrate, as he wished to fine the speeders a thousand dollars. When an admirer of the President had sent him a particularly bad portrait and later asked if it had been received, Wilson replied that “unfortunately” it had been “received in good shape.” He managed to get one letter off to his old companion Jack Hibben, but with no friendly intent; rather, he wished the Princeton president would send him the big table in the study at Prospect, which he had purchased years earlier with his own money. His bitterest reply came when several classmates asked him to subscribe to the Princeton Endowment Fund and he refused—“because I do not believe at all in the present administration.” He came to accept that part of his problem at Princeton had been in trying “to change old institutions too fast”; he muttered that the place “was bought once with Ivory Soap money.”

  In late January 1921, the red-baiting Attorney General himself presented Wilson with an application for pardon from Eugene V. Debs, complete with legal arguments as well as moral imperatives. “Debs is now approaching 65 years of age,” Palmer wrote. “If not adequately, he has surely been severely punished.” The form required only the President’s signature. Wilson examined the document, grabbed his pen, and then wrote the word “Denied.”

  • • •

  For almost two years, the Wilsons had mused about where they might live upon leaving the White House. Woodrow began rating their top five cities in terms of climate, friends, opportunities, freedom, amusements, and libraries. New York ranked highest, followed by Baltimore, Boston, and Richmond. Washington ran a distant fifth, but that was the city they chose. Although they counted few friends there and it offered “zero” freedom, other factors tipped the scales: the Library of Congress promised the best facilities for researching the book about government that Wilson proposed to write; and the city had long been Edith’s home. In late 1920, she went out each morning at eight—while a valet helped Woodrow prepare for the day—to house hunt.

  By mid-December she had inspected a half dozen places that interested her, including one on S Street, just off Massachusetts Avenue’s Embassy Row, not far from Dupont Circle. After hearing the enthusiasm in his wife’s voice as she described it, Wilson privately called upon her brother Wilmer Bolling to work with the agent in ascertaining the price and searching the title. The day they worked out the details, as Edith recalled, he insisted that she attend a concert, a luxury she had forsaken since his stroke. When she returned to the White House, she found Woodrow sitting by a fire in the Oval Room upstairs, where he handed her the paperwork. He was purchasing the $150,000 house as a gift for her.

  The sum represented more than half the money from his life savings, most of it squirreled away from his generous Presidential salary. Fortunately, the $40,000 honorarium that accompanied the Nobel Prize had just arrived. On top of that came an unexpected $100,000 windfall, when Grayson rallied ten of Wilson’s dearest friends—including Cleveland Dodge, Cyrus McCormick, Jr., and Bernard Baruch—to contribute toward the house’s purchase. The Wilsons would take ownership on January 31, 1921.

  Since 1912, Congress had considered granting annual pensions to retired Chief Executives, but it would not enact the Former Presidents Act until 1958. Wilson felt he still had to earn a living, to say nothing of spending his time constructively. Colleagues urged him to write a history of his eight years in the White House, but he refused, thinking there was little to add to what he considered a transparent administration. Publishers invited him to write everything from an elementary history of the United States to a biography of Jesus. To the demand for his memoirs, Wilson emphatically said, “There ain’t going to be none.” One day Edith found Woodrow alone in his study, at his typewriter. She was thrilled to see him in his familiar place, even more so when he announced that he had written the dedication to his book on government, which he now had the leisure to compose. With that, he pulled from the machine a slip of paper. The paragraph-long dedication to “E. B. W.” explained that this was a book “in which I have tried to interpret life, the life of a nation, and she has shown me the full meaning of life.” The rest of the page expressed his love for her in clauses rhapsodic enough to suggest writing the dedication meant more to him than writing the book. That proved to be the case, as that was the only page he would complete.

  Toward the end of February 1921, Cabinet members visited the President individually to pay their final respects. Bainbridge Colby—who had performed admirably in his position, notably during a recent trip to Latin America—spoke graciously of the honor Wilson had bestowed upon him. Pleased with their association, the President said, “Well, Colby, what are you going to do?” The Secretary of State said that he would probably return to New York and “open a musty law office again.” After his current experience, that sounded dreary, he admitted, “but I must make a living.”

  “Well, I, too, must make a living,” Wilson said. “As I was once a lawyer, why not open an office together here in Washington?” Colby asked if he really meant that. Wilson said yes—“I can’t face a life of idleness; besides, I must so something to add to my income.” The next day, Edith had occasion to see Colby, who asked about the seriousness of the President’s offer. She said that he had blurted it impulsively. When he asked what she thought of the prospect, she said that she was ambivalent—“that his mind must have something to feed on” but that she did not see how he could actively participate in a practice. Intrigued, Colby said he could arrange the business in such a way as to obviate any objections.

  On Tuesday, March 1, 1921, the Cabinet returned to the executive offices of the West Wing for its last official meeting. David Houston had arrived early and saw the President approach, walking with great difficulty across the White House grounds. It was a “brave” endeavor, he recalled, one so tragic that he looked away and waited in a nearby room in order for Wilson to situate himself without embarrassment. The President spent the bulk of the meeting reviewing the Administration’s accomplishments. After tying up loose ends, the Cabinet members asked about his prospects for the future. “I am going to try to teach ex-presidents how to behave,” he said. He could not help himself from adding, “There will be one v
ery difficult thing for me, however, to stand, and that is Mr. Harding’s English.”

  Their business behind them, Secretary Colby expressed on behalf of his colleagues the great distinction they all felt serving him “in the most interesting and fateful times of modern history.” They promised to watch his progress toward better health and pray for his complete recovery. As David Houston, one of the three Cabinet members to last the entire Administration, prepared to speak, he noticed the President struggling with emotion. His lips trembled, and in his attempts to talk, tears rolled down his cheeks. “Gentlemen,” he said after a pause, “it is one of the handicaps of my physical condition that I cannot control myself as I have been accustomed to do. God bless you all.” They all rose, and each shook hands with him, saying a quiet goodbye. As a parting gift, the Cabinet members chipped in to purchase the President’s chair from the government. It would join his furniture that was being pulled from storage and moved to S Street.

  On March 3, the Wilsons invited the Hardings to tea. They met in the Red Room, where the President-elect sat with one of his legs slung over the arm of his chair.

  The Wilsons rose early on the fourth, and by nine o’clock the Congressional leadership, Cabinet officers, and numerous aides had gathered for the arrival of the Hardings and the Coolidges. As they approached, Edith went upstairs to offer her husband any last-minute help, only to find him completely dressed in his morning coat and gray trousers. Brooks, the valet, held his top hat and gloves and handed him his cane. They took the elevator down and went to the Blue Room, arriving just as the Hardings entered. They proceeded to the porte cochere, where several cars waited—marking the first time that automobiles and not horse-drawn carriages would convey a President-elect to his inauguration. Still and motion-picture photographers captured the event.

  Wilson had fully intended to observe the great traditions of the day, especially that most symbolic moment of orderly transition—accompanying his successor to the platform on the East Portico of the Capitol and watching him take the oath of office. But prior to Inauguration Day, Dr. Grayson had inspected the structure and discovered that reaching the platform would demand the President’s climbing long, steep stairways, which he could not do.

  Wilson and Harding drove together to the Capitol, behind a squadron of cavalry at a brisk trot, as all of Washington seemed to line the route. Wilson looked straight ahead, never acknowledging the crowds, for he insisted they had shown up to salute the new leader. The Presidential car arrived at the main entrance of the great domed building, where the fifty-five-year-old man of the hour sprang up the steps, leaving President Wilson to proceed alone to a small, private lower door around the corner—often used as a freight entrance—where an attendant with a wheelchair would take him inside. Edith, in a car right behind them, fumed over Harding’s thoughtlessness. As Alice Roosevelt Longworth would later comment: “Mr. Harding was not a bad man. He was just a slob.”

  Dr. Grayson and Edith accompanied Wilson to an elevator that brought them to the second floor of the Senate, where he entered the President’s Room for the last time. He had more than a half hour in which he signed a few bills and received the many dignitaries who had come to pay their respects, General Pershing and the Cabinet among them. Harding arrived with Coolidge and asked if Wilson wished to enter the Senate chamber for Coolidge’s swearing in, but he declined, as his continued presence would only impede the day’s program.

  Shortly before noon, Senator Lodge entered, and Wilson’s smile dissolved. “Mr. President,” he said, “as Chairman of the Joint Committee I beg to inform you that the two houses of Congress have no further business to transact and are prepared to receive any further communications you may care to make.”

  “Tell them I have no further communication to make. I thank you for your courtesy,” he replied in his most formal tone. “Good morning, Sir.”

  With that, it was time to inaugurate the twenty-ninth President of the United States. Harding and Coolidge approached Wilson, the former asking in a whisper if he would remain for the swearing in. “I’m sorry, Mr. President,” Wilson said, “it cannot be done.” The steps still daunted him. Turning to Senator Knox, he said, “Well, the Senate threw me down before, and I don’t want to fall down myself now.” The dignitaries all moved toward their places for the ceremonies, and the outgoing President and his wife and doctor slipped away.

  The Marine Band played “Hail to the Chief,” and the eyes of the world turned to the convivial Midwesterner on the East Portico of the Capitol raising his right hand. Few saw the hobbled figure struggling into the White House limousine, which then pulled away through the dead-quiet city streets. The New York Times could not refrain from characterizing Wilson’s unheralded exit from the public stage as “tragic.” Following two policemen on motorcycles, the car sped past 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and then veered toward Massachusetts Avenue. There was silence in the limousine until Edith, resentful of Harding’s discourtesy in leaving her husband to enter the Capitol on his own, could restrain herself no longer. She criticized him with all her fury.

  And as the car turned onto tranquil S Street, Woodrow Wilson laughed.

  17

  RESURRECTION

  . . . and loe, I am with you alway, euen vnto the end of the world . . .

  —MATTHEW, XXVIII:20

  At 12:15 the White House limousine reached 2340 S Street NW.

  Only the most faithful had come to pay homage—too few onlookers to warrant extra police to patrol that section of town known as Kalorama. The secluded suburban enclave of large gracious houses—perched above much of the city—stood in stately silence. For the first time since his days as a college professor, Woodrow Wilson came home to a house that he actually owned.

  Waddy Butler Wood, a popular Washington architect, had designed the Georgian Revival house in 1915 for a Boston businessman and lobbyist who resided there during Congressional sessions. Edith had immediately recognized that it “fitted to the needs of a gentleman’s home”—offering dignity without pretension and comfort without extravagance. The red-brick edifice, trimmed in limestone, sat back from the road and stood four stories high. A triptych of huge Palladian windows on the second floor dominated the façade of the house, while a modest two-pillared portico, crowned with a wrought-iron railing, encased the front door. Before moving in, Edith had commissioned Wood to modify the house to accommodate its new tenants. He added a gated automobile entrance and a side door from the driveway to provide wheelchair access. Inside, the Otis Elevator Company installed an electric elevator.

  The ex-President’s car pulled into the new entrance, and Secret Service agent Starling assisted him from the vehicle to his chair, which he rolled into the elevator. Wilson thanked Starling for his years of loyal service. Edith shook his hand and offered her gratitude. The chauffeur drove Starling back to the Capitol, where he immediately began serving his next President, as he would three more after that. But as the limousine pulled away, Starling would later note, “Our hearts were behind us, where we had left a great man and a great woman.”

  Wilson ascended to the second floor, where a new team of servants—the late Mr. Galt’s family retainers, Isaac and Mary Scott, whom Edith called “the best of the old-time coloured Virginia stock”—served luncheon in the dining room. The moment the meal had ended, Grayson suggested his patient excuse himself and rest. “Mr. President—,” he said, only to be interrupted by the man himself, who corrected him: “Just Woodrow Wilson.”

  Although Edith fretted over all the abrupt changes Woodrow had to face, her immediate concerns faded the moment he left the elevator on the third floor and stood leaning on his cane at the threshold of his bedroom. Every personal article from his room at the White House had been placed in the same relative position on S Street. Edith had ordered a bed to match the dimensions of the Lincoln Bed—eight feet six inches by six feet two inches; footrests and easy chairs and pil
lows and tables and lamps were all situated exactly where Wilson would expect to find them. A favorite wartime banner and a Red Cross poster adorned the walls, and the brass shell from the first American bullet fired in the World War sat on the mantel. His familiar wooden shaving stand—complete with bowl, mirror, razor, and strop—stood near the south window. Edith was especially glad to see Ruth Powderly, the Navy nurse who had been attending him in the White House. Technically no longer attached to the former Commander in Chief, she had insisted on staying with him at least until he got settled. Touched though he was by her devotion and eager to retain her, he insisted that she keep her stay brief, as the government employed her, not he.

  Wilson did allow himself one government perquisite. Upon Warren Harding’s becoming President, Dr. Grayson’s White House detail officially ended, subjecting him to reassignment. In an act of unexpected generosity, Harding had issued an unrequested order that Dr. Grayson be assigned to Washington, where “his services would be available to Mr. Wilson and that in no circumstances was he to be ordered elsewhere without the President’s consent.”

  By the time Wilson had risen from his nap, Warren Gamaliel Harding’s inauguration had ended. Seldom in the nation’s history had the change in government swung so far in the opposite direction, as evidenced by the new President’s stiff address. Twice the length of either of Wilson’s inaugural addresses—and larded with “gamalielese,” as H. L. Mencken referred to his pompous circumlocutions—Harding’s speech exhorted Americans to “strive for normalcy” and to shun military, economic, or political commitments to any authority other than their own. The address set European ministers on edge. The venal arrogance and anti-intellectual tone appeared even starker alongside the hearty praise of Wilson that flooded the press that week. Jan Smuts of South Africa spoke for many foreign leaders in an article that ran in the New York Evening Post and was syndicated widely. Wilson had not failed in Paris, Smuts asserted, but humanity itself had let the world down. He maintained that the Covenant that Wilson had protected was “one of the great creative documents of human history” and that one day all nations would march behind its banner. Despite his legislative failure, Wilson had already “achieved the most enviable and enduring immortality,” and future Americans “will yet proudly and gratefully rank him with Washington and Lincoln, and his fame will have a more universal significance than theirs.” Smuts added that hundreds of years hence, “Wilson’s name will be one of the greatest in history.”