Wilson

by A. Scott Berg

  Several days later, Dr. Grayson asked Wilson whether he had had a good night, and he said no. “I am not worrying about the Tumulty incident,” he told his doctor. “If Tumulty had been my son and had acted as he did, I would have done the same thing.” But it clearly weighed on his mind, heavily enough for Edith to suggest that Wilson air their full correspondence in the press. “No,” he said, “let the unpleasant affair fade out. Tumulty will sulk for a few days, then come like a spanked child to say that he is sorry and wants to be forgiven.” Days later, Grayson expressed regret that Wilson had severed relations with Tumulty. Wilson snapped that the doctor did not know what he was talking about and that it was none of his business. During a house call a few days later, Wilson asked his wife and attendant to leave the room, so that he could discuss a private matter with Grayson. “I want to apologize for the way in which I spoke to you the other day,” he said. Thereupon he showed Grayson the correspondence detailing the entire affair, which had culminated in Tumulty’s evasive apology. For his part, the doctor never thought ill of his patient, always understanding his frustration. As Grayson explained one day to Axson, “He has to hate somebody.”

  Despite his mixed feelings for Tumulty, Wilson never questioned his loyalty nor forgot his service. He would even encourage New Jersey leaders to back him for the Senate because of his extensive political training. But Joseph Tumulty all but retired from politics, devoting the rest of his career to a successful law practice. Woodrow Wilson never saw him again.

  In truth, more had contributed to this severance than had met the eye. Once he had moved to Kalorama, Wilson’s political itch had flared up, and Tumulty’s actions had encouraged it further. As was known to but a handful of people, Wilson had been preparing a white paper for months, a refreshening of progressive principles for the new decade. In June 1921, he approached the chief architect of the New Freedom, Louis Brandeis, and found him willing to collaborate on this manifesto, despite its blatantly political nature. Either out of gratitude that Wilson had elevated him to the Supreme Court or perhaps because his contributions were meant to be unofficial, he actively participated, certainly eager to advance his own progressive ideas. Wilson did not mention that he planned to offer this statement as a platform for the Democratic Presidential nominee in 1924, but as he called upon such members of his administration as Colby, Houston, Baruch, and Norman Davis, and party supporters Thomas Chadbourne and Frank I. Cobb, to help him shape a casual collection of opinions into a systematic set of issues, one could hardly imagine any other purpose for their work.

  “The Document,” as the collaborators called it, contained nineteen points. They included the necessity to reconstruct the progressive countries of the world and the belief that a broad-minded, liberal agenda could best provide reform. Furthermore, the policy statement demanded the immediate resumption of America’s international obligations as established in the Treaty of Versailles, and it condemned the group of men who catalyzed the current “evil results as the most partisan, prejudiced, ignorant and unpatriotic group that ever misled the Senate of the United States.” Despite Republican control of the government, the Document pointed out that the Republican Party had not enacted a single piece of ameliorative legislation in the last three years. It also demanded a revision of the tax laws that would impose less upon the lower and middle classes; and it advocated a new Cabinet member, a Secretary of Transportation, who could untangle the complex skein of local and national laws to improve the flow of people and goods. “The world has been made safe for democracy,” the Document read, “but democracy has not yet made the world safe against irrational revolution.”

  Over the next two and a half years, Wilson reworked the Document. With his longtime belief in the co-operation of government between the branches, he added a paragraph that the President and the members of his Cabinet should be accorded a place on the Congressional floor whenever the legislature was discussing affairs entrusted to the executive branch. The President should take part and be held accountable. With such matters occupying his thoughts, Wilson did nothing to suggest that he supported Cox for the 1924 nomination, because he had set his sights on his own nominee—once again, the only man who could reassert those programs that were “the best assurance for the promotion of social welfare, of justice, and of individuals and of national prosperity.”

  Support for his own candidacy presented itself almost every day, as the house on S Street became a mecca for liberals. In April 1922, for example, the League of Women Voters held an international conference in Baltimore to discuss world peace and social reform, gathering delegates from twenty-two nations of the Western Hemisphere. On the twenty-eighth, a thousand of them descended upon Wilson’s house, merely to pay tribute to a man who had championed both peace and women’s rights. Dressed in a frock coat and silk hat, he greeted them at his front door, looking especially frail that day and explaining that he was unable to make an address. He favored them instead with a limerick. The women responded with a chorus of “America,” “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” and a lusty cheer for the League of Nations. Throughout the spring, Wilson maintained a substantive correspondence with Cordell Hull, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, who sought his advice about mobilizing the party during the upcoming midterm elections. Even Vice President Coolidge paid homage to the League of Nations that June in a commencement address, praising its “noble aspiration for world association and understanding,” its imperfections notwithstanding.

  By summer, Wilson believed the Democrats would return to power, finding themselves with “the greatest opportunity for service that has ever been accorded it.” He believed the Harding Administration, with its attempt to “reestablish all the injustices of the past,” had disenchanted the electorate, resisting “progress” with its chatter of getting back to normalcy. When the Council of the League of Nations confirmed the British mandate of Palestine in July, Zionist organizations remembered with gratitude Wilson’s “distinguished and unselfish cooperation” on their behalf. When Supreme Court Justice John Hessin Clarke announced his retirement that September, he told Wilson that with his remaining strength, he intended to do all he could to promote American entrance into the League. “To me,” he said, “it is the indispensable as well as the noblest political conception of our time and, very certainly, to have launched it as you did makes secure for you one of the highest places in history.” And when Emily Newell Blair, a former suffragist and founder of the League of Women Voters, realized that women were not voting as a reliable bloc, she took it upon herself to organize them as Democrats. She did this, she wrote Wilson in October, “because of the debt the American women owe you, not only for the suffrage but for the fight you made for ideals.” By autumn a Democratic sweep in the midterm elections was in the air, and with it even the growing possibility that the senior Senator from Massachusetts would be unseated.

  Henry Cabot Lodge won his sixth term, eking out a victory by a few thousand votes. Wilson wrote his daughter Jessie that he hoped the election results at least “gave him a jolt which may make even him comprehend the new temper of the voters.” The Democrats did not recapture either chamber, but they did enjoy considerable success—gaining five seats in the Senate and seventy-six seats in the House, putting legislative control within their reach. Members of the Farmer-Labor Party found greater kinship among Democrats, as the agrarian Midwest and the members of the American Federation of Labor no longer saw the Republican Party sensitive to their needs. Immigrants in the big cities became firmly Democratic. Two years earlier, New Yorkers had swept Governor Alfred E. Smith out of office. Now they apologized by awarding him a landslide victory over his replacement. Across the country, Democratic victories rebuked two years of Harding and his policies—especially the tariff—and he was already being talked about as a one-term President. On the midterm Election Night, tens of thousands of people milled outside newspaper offices in Washington, and when one paper projected a pictu
re of Woodrow Wilson on a screen, the crowd cheered lustily. Daniel C. Roper, Wilson’s manager from the 1916 campaign, sent congratulations to his former candidate; and without divulging any private plans, an encouraged Wilson wired back, “Twenty four will complete the result which twenty two had begun.”

  Four days later, five thousand admirers flocked to S Street for what had come to be called “the annual Armistice Day pilgrimage.” Wilson totemized the World War’s hopes for a peaceful future, and this year such luminaries as former Ambassador Morgenthau, University of Virginia President Alderman, and former Secretary of Agriculture Meredith joined the exuberant throngs. Streetcar lines added extra cars to transport the worshipful to Kalorama. Wilson appeared, with a big malacca cane in one hand and looking healthier than he had in years. Festivities began outside his front door with a medley of Southern songs. Then Morgenthau spoke, referring to the election results as a rejection of “materialism and selfishness.” A few heard Wilson exclaim, “Hear, hear!”

  Hooking his cane in the upper pocket of his coat, Wilson stood on his own two feet. He spoke for several minutes, delivering his longest address since Pueblo. With all his old passion, he spoke of that “group in the United States Senate who preferred personal partisan motives to the honor of their country and the peace of the world.” He reminded the crowd, “Puny persons who are now standing in the way will presently find that their weakness is no match for the strength of a moving Providence.” Wilson retreated inside the house, only to reappear in a second-story window, with Edith at his side. For ten minutes the fans cheered. And then the sea of people parted, forming two long lines on either side of S Street, so that the Wilsons could ride through for their daily outing. Block after block, he acknowledged the roaring crowd, smiling and raising his hat.

  Upon turning sixty-six, Wilson received two unexpected tributes. On December 27, 1922, Franklin Roosevelt informed him that in little more than a year, the organizers of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation had raised $1 million. The fund’s income would be used, Roosevelt said, to prompt public welfare, democracy, and peace through justice. The next day, Wilson’s birthday, he welcomed four of the Foundation’s board members and learned that most of their funding had come not from wealthy benefactors (such as Henry Ford, who had contributed $10,000) but from thousands of ordinary citizens, each of whom supported his vision with a dollar. The delegation left Wilson virtually speechless. “I wish I could have controlled my voice so I could really have expressed what I felt,” he told Edith afterward; “but I could not trust myself lest I break down and cry.” Despite a cold downpour that day, more than a hundred people waited in the rain, hoping for a glimpse of Wilson.

  The second extraordinary gesture came from the United States Senate, an expression of “pleasure and joy” upon hearing of the former President’s continued recovery to good health. “When all of us are forgotten,” said Senator William J. Harris of Georgia in introducing the resolution, “the name of Woodrow Wilson will be remembered as the greatest of the century.” While many of the Republicans appeared to be busy during the actual vote, there was no debate and the resolution passed with a hearty chorus of “ayes.” Vice President Coolidge appended his own personal greeting in a letter that accompanied the message that was sent to S Street. Wilson told Dr. Grayson, “Think of them passing it and not meaning it. Of course, I do not mean to say that all who voted for it were not sincere, for I know many were sincere, but I feel sure some of them were not. I would much rather have had three Senators get together and draw up a resolution and have it passed with sincerity than the one that was passed today.”

  Wilson thought of reentering the public arena as he had entered years ago—through the written word. He conceived an ambitious book, which he was calling The Destiny of the Republic. It would “set forth . . . the ideals and principles which have governed my life, and which have also . . . governed the life of the nation.” He tried typing with his one good hand, and when that proved too awkward, he dictated passages to Edith.

  The opening lines of his text articulated the basis of what his successors would call “Wilsonianism”:

  Unlike the government of every other great state, ancient or modern, the government of the United States was set up for the benefit of mankind as well as for the benefit of its own people,—a most ambitious enterprise, no doubt, but undertaken with high purpose, with clear vision, and without thoughtful and deliberate unselfishness, and undertaken by men who were no amateurs but acquainted with the world they lived in, practiced in the conduct of affairs, who set the new government up with an ordiliness [sic] and self-possession which marked them as men who were proud to serve liberty with the dignity and restraint of true devotees of a great ideal.

  Wilson never wrote much more than a few paragraphs of the book. As with his prior attempts, his lavish dedication to Edith was its most realized passage.

  A year passed before he could tease any of his thoughts into even a short essay, which he did in “The Road Away from Revolution.” Wilson pecked out a thousand words on his typewriter with his right hand, arguing that the Russian Revolution had been an attack against capitalism, a system that was not above reproach. Sometimes he worked late at night, insisting he could not sleep until he had committed his thoughts to paper. He said civilization could not survive materially unless it were redeemed spiritually, that it could be saved “only by becoming permeated with the spirit of Christ and being made free and happy by the practices which spring out of that spirit.”

  Former propaganda chief George Creel had once volunteered to act as his representative in placing any of his writing. In April 1923, Wilson asked him to consider handling this essay. But upon reading the piece, Creel felt the best he could do for Wilson was to suppress it. In gentle but frank terms, he wrote Edith that its publication—what would be Wilson’s first public document since his collapse—would not live up to the people’s expectations. While strongly advising against printing it for the public, he realized such advice would crush Wilson’s confidence and might push him back into depression.

  The Wilsons could have used the money that newspaper syndication of the article would pay, but Creel put his client’s psychological needs before the financial. He spoke to an editor friend who offered $2,000 for the rights to publish it in Collier’s, where it could appear with dignity and without exaggerating its importance by turning this trifle into a media event. Creel wrote up a second letter for Edith to show her husband, a recommendation to accept the less lucrative deal because syndication would entail “a huckstering campaign that will undoubtedly have many disagreeable reactions.” Edith considered how best to approach Woodrow.

  Days later, in the Pierce-Arrow, with Stockton Axson there for moral support, she screwed up enough courage to say that somebody had read the piece and did not think it did justice to him. His temper flared—not with Edith necessarily, but with all the people who had been urging him for months to write something. “They kept after me to do this thing,” he said in irritation, “and I did it.” Edith tried to mollify him, telling him not to get on his “high horse about this.” She simply wanted to forward the suggestion that he expand the piece by amplifying his argument. He read between the lines. “I have done all I can, and all I am going to do,” Wilson insisted. “I don’t want those people bothering me any more.” When they returned home, Wilson went upstairs to his bedroom, and Axson sat in the dugout. After a few minutes, Axson heard a peculiar sound—Edith, in the hallway, was sobbing. He went to console her in this, one of the few times anybody ever saw her break down. “All I want to do is just to help in any way I can,” she insisted. “I am not urging him to do things he doesn’t want to do. I just want to help and I just don’t know how to help.”

  Axson examined the article and suggested cutting, not lengthening—thus lessening it from a significant treatise to a simple pronouncement. Edith asked if he would present his findings to her husband, which he did. �
��Why, you see exactly the point,” Wilson said. “Fix it.” After Axson had excised a few paragraphs and retyped the article, Wilson submitted it himself to The Atlantic Monthly, which had published his essays in the past. Editor Ellery Sedgwick gratefully accepted the piece for $300. It reached a fraction of the audience it might have, and the author abandoned all further literary efforts.

  Wilson recognized the silent strain under which Edith had functioned over the last five years. For a while he inquired about the cottages at the Grove Park Inn, a popular resort in Asheville, North Carolina, where he imagined they might spend a few months. As he never proceeded in his negotiations with the hotel proprietor, the junket met the same fate as the renewal of his law practice, the writing of his book on political theory, and his third run for the Presidency—though he did go so far as to make notes for his acceptance speech and his third inaugural address. Then, thinking his real contribution to society had been in education, not politics, Wilson contacted a former student, then at the Rockefeller Foundation, to investigate the possibility of his becoming a university president once again—only this time at a new school, one willing to accept his innovative teaching concepts. All these gauzy visions allowed him to maintain that fine line between illusion and delusion—to imagine such exploits without having to confront the hard facts that they were beyond his capability. Indeed, for all the liveliness of Wilson’s dreams, he remained prone to exhaustion and mood swings, a stroke victim with advancing arteriosclerosis who was unable to navigate a flight of stairs, a handicap then considered a fatal political liability.