When the Cheering Stopped

by Smith, Gene;

  William Gibbs McAdoo was a self-made financial wizard of great drive and force who did much good work in the 1912 Presidential campaign. A widower, he was named Secretary of the Treasury when the new President took office in 1913, and he soon bore a new relationship to the White House: son-in-law. Although he was years her senior and had a daughter practically her age, Nellie Wilson fell in love with McAdoo and married him in a White House ceremony held a few months before her mother’s death.

  Both these men were very clever in a political sense and both had very acute reactions to the activities of their President. In the summer and fall of 1915 those senses and those reactions were moved very strongly by the fact of Edith Bolling Galt’s existence. For stories about the Presidential romance began flying around. (Washington, a city whose only preoccupation is politics, has always been a fertile place for the development of stories concerned with the doings of the occupant of the White House.) And what was being said in Washington in the fall of 1915 was that the President and this Galt woman had conspired long ago to get Ellen Wilson out of the way so that they could marry, and that the loyal Dr. Grayson had poisoned the First Lady. It was also said she died after a beating at the President’s hands. Also that he had scandalously neglected to provide care for her grave in Georgia and weeds were growing all over it, along with cornstalks, but that he was so occupied with his new love that he did not care. Rumor had it that so taken with Edith Galt was he that official business was utterly ignored and stacks of neglected matters were piled high on his desk. Even if these stories could be handled or combated, there was still a political factor in the romance that could not be brushed away: the sympathy the country felt for a recently bereaved President would vanish immediately he married the gay and smiling Mrs. Galt.

  While McAdoo and House worried about these issues, they had even more frightening facts to deal with. The President during his Princeton days took—alone, without Ellen—a trip to Bermuda and there met a stylish, cheerful, good-looking woman vacationer with whom he spent much time; she visited him at Princeton and the White House and received from him more than two hundred letters; as President he sent her $7,500 of his own money; all this was in general known to the President’s political enemies, and—most terrifying of all—it was said this woman was going to play the role of jilted paramour and reveal the whole story if the President married Mrs. Galt.

  The woman, born Mary Allen, had married a Mr. Peck. After his death she married a Mr. Hulbert, and when the marriage ended in divorce she resumed her former married name. Mrs. Peck was now living in California, and rumors were floating east that the letters were up for sale to anyone who wanted to buy them and make their contents known the moment the President remarried.

  McAdoo and House saw political ruin ahead. They, and others, decided the President should not marry. Or if he must do so, then he must at least wait a year, until after the 1916 election.

  The question was, how was the President to be told this? Various candidates were sought out to perform the task, but no one accepted the job. So McAdoo and House worked up a scheme that McAdoo carried out. Lunching with his father-in-law, McAdoo said that an anonymous letter from California had been received. The letter (which existed only in the minds of McAdoo and House) said Mrs. Peck was talking about the $7,500 and showing the President’s letters to all interested comers. The President, as expected, was horrified. He said the letters were of a totally innocent nature, the $7,500 was a loan he gave Mrs. Peck against some mortgages she held, and as far as the relationship being illicit in any way, his late wife had known everything he ever did with Mrs. Peck, and Ellen herself had enjoyed reading the letters replying to his. He was astonished that his friend Mrs. Peck would act in this way, but her doing so meant there was only one thing he could do about his relationship with Mrs. Galt.

  He went to his desk to write a note telling Mrs. Galt that he would not expose her to slander and publicity that would hurt her in a way he could not prevent but also could not ask her to accept. For a long time he sat seeking the right words. Grayson came into the room and saw the President was pale, his lips tightly pressed together. The hand holding the pen shook. He did not write anything for a long time and then he put down the pen. “I cannot bring myself to write this,” he said. “You go, Grayson, and tell her everything and say my only alternative is to release her from any promise.”

  Grayson went to Mrs. Galt. She sat silently when he finished speaking. “What shall I tell him?” Grayson asked. “Tell him I will write,” she said.

  She sat for many hours, and night came on, and dawn. She wrote:

  Dearest …

  I will stand by you—not for duty, not for pity, not for honour—but for love—trusting, protecting, comprehending love …

  I am so tired I could put my head down on the desk and go to sleep—but nothing could bring me real rest until I had pledged to you my love and my allegiance.

  Your own

  Edith

  All of that day passed with no reply from the White House. The next day and the next brought no answer. She was shattered. It appeared the romance, at his wish, was over. But on the third day Grayson appeared. He did not even shake hands with her before he began to speak. “I beg that you will come with me to the White House. The President is very ill. It is a desperate situation. Neither Miss Margaret nor Miss Bones is here, so I will have to act as chaperon.” She said, “Did the President ask you to come?” “No, I told him I was coming, and he said it would be unfair to you and weak in him to ask it. If you could see him you would not hesitate. He looks as I imagine the martyrs looked when they were broken on the wheel.”

  She asked Grayson to wait and stepped out of the room. Her letter! What had happened to it? What was he doing to her? But she had written, “I will stand by you.” She rejoined Grayson and went with him to the President’s room. He was lying in bed. His face was pale. He held out a hand and it was cold. She took it and clasped it in her own. When she released it the waiting and the doubts and fears were gone forever from them both. Later it would be whispered that she bought off Mrs. Peck with giant sums and that Louis Brandeis was appointed to the Supreme Court because he was the intermediary who carried the money; later it would be said Colonel House took Mrs. Peck to Europe to get her out of the way and that she was on a regular salary from McAdoo’s Treasury Department in order to insure her silence; later it would be rumored Mrs. Peck was about to institute a breach-of-promise suit against the President; later all these things and more would be said and wits would call him Peck’s Bad Boy, but these stories did not touch them because they loved each other and always would. And she would learn, months later, when he confessed it to her, that he had not had the courage to open her letter. He carried it in his pocket until their honeymoon, when he drew it out, the envelope worn and frayed, and read what she had written: “I will stand by you for love.”

  On October 7, 1915, they announced their engagement via Joe Tumulty, who handed out typed sheets to the reporters assigned to the White House. To Ellen’s brother the President said that Ellen told him before she died that she wanted this, and the brother said, “That is just the way she loved you.” An old friend of the family, whose sister the President addressed as “Cousin,” said to him that she had prayed he would be comforted and took this as an answer to those prayers. “What do you think, Cousin Mary?” he asked her sister. “To tell you the truth, I was a little shocked at first,” said the woman. “So was I,” said the President. He wrote another friend, “The last fourteen months have seemed for me, in a world upset, like fourteen years. It is not the same world in which my dear Ellen lived; and one of the last things she said to me was that she hoped that what has happened now would happen. It seemed to me incredible then, and would, I think, have continued to seem so if I had not been brought into contact with Mrs. Galt.” He even wrote Mrs. Peck, saying he knew she would rejoice for him in this “blessing.”

  The afternoon the news was released he went
to call on Mrs. Galt’s mother for the first time, and he asked her, along with a sister and brother of the prospective bride, to come to dinner at the White House. The next day the mother and daughter went with him to Philadelphia for the opening game of the World Series. The crowds cheered her; her dimpled smile was enchanting. On October 10, for the first time he dined with her alone at her home.

  They set the wedding date for December 18. In the remaining two months of their official engagement they talked constantly on a direct telephone line from the White House to her home, went golfing together (she consistently won), and took long walks and drives. The Secret Service men, who, embarrassing though it was, had to follow everywhere, agreed among themselves that she was a stunner with a wonderful figure complete with the prettiest ankles. They also said it was hard to believe the President was almost fifty-nine years old, for he acted like a boy, dancing off the curbs when he walked from the White House to her home and leaping over obstacles on the golf course. He whistled, tapping time with his feet. He was animated and gay; he played the fool for her, bending over with arms dangling to shuffle along like an ape when she put a golf club across his shoulders, and then leaning forward so that it slid over his head, to be caught with a flourish. He was proud to show her off and had his Princeton class of ’79 come to dinner in the White House so they might meet her and, as it turned out, elect her an honorary member. They went to the Army-Navy game at New York’s Polo Grounds and she marched with him across the field at half-time. There was a roar of applause and she thought to herself that everyone was her friend and his.

  The wedding was to be at her house and they did not send invitations, feeling this would make it clear to all public officials and others that no gifts were to be given them. But when the State of California sent a gold nugget with the request that the wedding ring be fashioned from it, they accepted the present and had a plain band made. A minister from his Presbyterian church and an Episcopalian from hers would perform the ceremony and only a very few old friends and servants would join the families as witnesses. The head usher of the White House, Ike Hoover, took over the decorating of her home and arranged the catering of the buffet supper with an outside concern. Hoover had all the furniture removed from the lower floor of her home and in the drawing room, where the ceremony would be, he put in a wedding bower made of a background of farleyense and maidenhair fern extending from the floor to the ceiling, with overhead a canopy of green arranged in the form of a shell, Scotch heather forming the inner side. There was a mirror framed with orchids and the corners of the canopy were also caught up with orchids—Dendrobium phalanopsis, Vanda coerules and Laelia anceps alba. Above the mirror were South American Cattleya trianae, and sheaves of long-stemmed American Beauty roses were on both sides of the canopy. In the dining room there were roses and ferns; a small band of U.S. Marine musicians would furnish the music.

  December 18 was clear, crisp and bracing. At eight in the evening the President came to Mrs. Galt’s sitting room, alone save for a Secret Service man, and a while later Hoover tapped on the door and said, “Mr. President, it is eight-thirty.” Bride and bridegroom smiled and both called out, “Thank you,” and they went downstairs together. Margaret, Jessie and Nellie were there, of course, and both sons-in-law, and Aunt Annie and her daughter, and Ellen’s brother and Altrude and Grayson. Some of Mrs. Galt’s relatives by her first marriage were there, and all of her brothers and sisters with their wives and husbands. She wore a black velvet gown with a velvet hat trimmed with goura; her only jewelry was a brooch of diamonds the groom gave her. The President wore a cutaway coat and grey striped trousers.

  When the minister asked, “Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?” Mrs. Galt’s mother took the hands of both of them and put them one in the other. And so they were married. The buffet supper was served and then they left for their honeymoon at The Homestead in Hot Springs, Virginia. They went out of her house past aged Negro servants of both families standing in the hall calling, “God bless you, Miss Edith and Mr. President.” Her mother’s old cook, who as a slave had belonged to her grandfather, cried out, “Take Jesus with you for your doctor and your friend!”

  Twentieth Street was roped off and they slipped into a car and with only Secret Service men along drove to the Alexandria station instead of Washington’s Union Station in order to avoid possible crowds. Snow from the previous day’s fall was still on the ground and they thought it lovely in the clear moonlight. At Alexandria a private car was waiting filled with flowers, and some sandwiches and fruit stood on a table. Around midnight the train pulled out.

  The next morning at seven one of the Secret Service men, Edmund Starling, stepped into the car as the train came into Hot Springs. As Starling went into the narrow train corridor a figure came out of the car’s sitting room. It was the President, in top hat, tail coat, and grey morning trousers. He was facing away from the Secret Service man. As Starling watched in silence, the President’s hands went into the pockets of his trousers and his feet came flashing up in the air to click heels. He began to whistle a popular song. The heels came leaping up to click again and the whistling changed into outright singing:

  “Oh, you beautiful doll, you great big beautiful doll; oh, oh, oh, oh, OH, YOU BEAUTIFUL DOLL!”

  3

  At thirty years of age he was teaching history and political science to the girls at Bryn Mawr College. He did not enjoy his work, for the students could not be expected ever to vote or play a part in the governing of the nation, and their girlish ways did not stimulate him to do his best lecturing. They admired him and faithfully wrote down his jokes in their notebooks, but their response to constitutional law was limited.

  He threw himself into the writing of a college textbook, The State, and supplemented his $1,500 a year salary by delivering lectures at Johns Hopkins. But when Wesleyan College asked him to join its faculty, he was happy to leave Bryn Mawr; he was “hungry for a class of men,” he wrote a friend. In his new post he taught political economy, the histories of France, England and the United States. In 1890, getting on to thirty-five, he returned to his alma mater, Princeton.

  He stayed there twenty years. As a professor, he was one of the most popular in the university’s history, and the highest-paid of his day. He was a wonderful classroom orator, precise, artful, knowledgeable. He related his lectures to the doings of the times as he illustrated the developments of political institutions, and his jokes and dramatizations were marvelously apt. Often the students applauded and stamped their feet at the end of the class. He worked with the boys on extra-curricular activities, coaching the debating societies and helping out with the football team. At home during his free hours he wrote extensively—essays, political treatises. Also short stories. (Everything else sold well, but his attempts at fiction brought only rejection slips.) He wrote books about the political history of the country, a life of George Washington, a five-volume history of the American people. He rode a bicycle from his home to his classes. At home were the three little daughters growing up, and in the classrooms were hundreds of young men who would leave Princeton thinking him the finest teacher they had ever seen. When in 1902 the head of Princeton resigned, the university trustees unanimously picked as replacement the head of the Department of Jurisprudence and Political Economy.

  Head of the university, he gave up his writing and teaching and turned to administrative duties, but still he remained extremely popular with the students. He told them he was not to be addressed as Professor or Doctor* but simply as Mister. He performed well at one of the most important tasks—getting money from the alumni—and he revised and strengthened the curriculum, modernizing it and making it far more demanding. The old Princeton way of gracious living vanished; one disgruntled student wrote home the place was “getting to be nothing but a damned educational institution.” That was what the plan had been.

  The preceptorial system was instituted at the university. Fifty young men, preceptors, were hired to work with
students in an intimate and personalized manner. The standards of the university rose even higher, and many inadequate students fell by the way. One such boy was expelled for cheating, and his mother came to plead for his reinstatement with the man who had passed upon the expulsion. She said she was undergoing serious medical treatments and that the shock of having her boy expelled might well bring those treatments to naught. The answer was, “Madam, you force me to say a hard thing, but if I had to choose between your life or my life or anybody’s life and the good of this college, I should choose the good of the college.” But he could eat nothing at luncheon that day.

  Hazing bothered him; he came upon some sophomore forcing a freshman to pick up twigs with his teeth and acidly said, “Isn’t that a fine occupation for a gentleman?” The rather snobbish fraternity-like eating clubs of the university also bothered him. He proposed to abolish the clubs and their anti-intellectual approach in favor of a plan which would have the students of all backgrounds eat, study and live together in dormitories. Princeton graduates loyal to their old eating clubs fought the proposed move, but to the public at large which became aware of the controversy, it seemed as if the head of the university were fighting the battle of democracy in his attempt to shatter the citadels of Princeton’s socially elect. He failed in the battle, but popular opinion in New Jersey and elsewhere translated him into the champion of the poorer boys struggling with the richer.

  Another argument began. It concerned the graduate school. The university’s head wanted the graduate students to work and study on the campus itself and not, as some others desired, in separate buildings some distance from the heart of the campus. The first idea became associated with the conception of a democratic mingling of the graduates and undergraduates, the second idea with that of a standoffish aristocracy.

  The question was fought with violence. The head of the university lost. He resigned his post. But he left with the aura of a man who fought for the democratic way. It was 1910, and faced with a gubernatorial election, the New Jersey political bosses chose him to run on the Democratic ticket. He seemed to be very much the college professor; to the politicos he looked to be malleable. They saw him as a dupe, but he saw himself as the agent of Reform. After the bosses of Jersey City and Newark pushed through his nomination, he went campaigning, saying to the people who heard him, “If you give me your votes I will be under bonds to you—not to the gentlemen who were generous enough to nominate me.” He was elected and to the disillusionment of the politicians proved that he meant what he had said. They termed him an “ingrate,” but it did not matter. As Governor he pushed through reform measures to destroy the boss system and end corruption in state elections. He set up a public utilities commission to establish fair rates for transportation and communications, and laws were passed regulating the work of children and women, the handling of food, the schools. New Jersey had been the very symbol of the complacently corrupt turn-of-the-century business corporation’s fief; now the bosses were driven away and the corporations tamed.