When the Cheering Stopped

by Smith, Gene;

  Together with Roosevelt, Lodge had conspired, even as the President sailed to Europe, to defeat any League of Nations that might be brought back. Frustrated and bitter, his death but weeks away, Roosevelt lay on his sickbed and with Lodge sitting by planned that defeat. Even earlier, before the President left, Lodge handed Henry White, the only Republican member of the Peace Commission, a memorandum saying that the American people and Senate were against the planned League. White was secretly to give this memorandum to the Europeans, Lodge explained; it would strengthen their own doubts about the League. (White did not do as Lodge asked.)

  While the President was in Europe, Roosevelt died. But when the President returned, Lodge was waiting. He had said that he never expected to hate anyone as he hated the President. The President could match him. He held the Senators opposing him, particularly Lodge, to be “contemptible … narrow … selfish … poor little minds that never get anywhere but run round in a circle and think they are going somewhere … I cannot express my contempt … If I said what I think about those fellows in Congress, it would take a piece of asbestos two inches thick to hold it.”*

  These, then, were the two forces which must merge and agree before the United States would enter the League of Nations. The President held that the Senate must ratify what he had brought back without changing a word of it; the majority of Senators took the position that changes were needed and that they would put them in before they ratified anything. Senator Lodge worked out a series of stipulations as to what conditions the United States would demand before entering the League, and his backers said those amendments or reservations would guard American rights and sovereignty. The President refused to budge on the rules and regulations worked out in Paris. He pointed out that if the United States entered only under special stipulations every country would also have the right to attach its own conditions and that the result would be chaos. He had signed his name as President, he said, and had given his word in the name of the American people. He could not take back that signature nor rescind that word. Colonel House counseled compromise, but his words no longer held any influence. The President told House you get nothing worthwhile in this world without fighting for it and he would fight for the League.

  Washington’s summer of that year saw the President try to convince individual Senators to come over to his side. He was not yet ready to fight. Son-in-law McAdoo said the speech presenting the treaty and Covenant to the Senate was noble but that it was a case of “casting pearls before swine,” and although the President may have agreed, he tried face-to-face meetings in an attempt to elicit senatorial promises to vote for the League as it stood. But the endeavor did not appear to be succeeding and meanwhile Senator Lodge, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee as well as Majority Leader, gathered headlines as his group considered what to do. He began his committee hearings by reading aloud, personally, the entire text of the treaty and Covenant. The task took him two weeks, his voice droning on in a committee room entirely empty save for one clerk who had to take down what he said. After that the committee had before it witness after witness to paint black pictures of what the League would do to the formerly free and independent United States.

  Realizing he was not doing well with his conferences with the individual Senators, the President turned to the idea that the men in the Capitol, the politicians, would not do the right thing unless they were bludgeoned into it, and that the only force capable or able to do that job was the united voice of the American people. He had always said that most of the Senators in Washington did not know the real thoughts of their constituents anyway. He began more and more to speak of taking a speech-making trip across the country to the West Coast to arouse the people’s opinions and voices that would brush away senatorial objections and put the United States, unencumbered, into the League meant to bring peace to the world for all time to come.

  While he considered such a move, he tried to relax and recuperate from the exertions and sickness and tenseness of Paris. There were still deep lines of exhaustion in his ravaged and weary face, and Grayson and the First Lady worked to smooth them away. They took him to play golf every day, and in the hot Washington evenings they went with him for long slow drives. Constantly he was still meeting with Senators, but the trend was against him and he grew impatient. In Europe the Rumanians were invading Hungary and the Armenians were battling Soviet and Turkish troops advancing from opposite directions, and the Poles were fighting the Ukrainians, and still his United States was not in the League nor hurrying to get into it. In the power and machinery of the League lay the cure for every injustice, he said—but the Senators kept talking.

  The President began to speak as though his tour were inevitable, calling it the “appeal to Caesar”—the people. And increasingly it appeared that the tour would be necessary. For above the Senate, and above Lodge’s level Brahmin voice in the committee room, there lived in the country the American fear and contempt for the Europeans and their everlasting wars and intrigues. The essence, the very life, of American diplomacy for two centuries had been aloofness from European involvement. In the little towns where the paving ended at the limits where the trolley made its turn-around, and in the cities lying inland from the Eastern seaboard all the way to the Pacific, Europe was strange, foreign, different—bad. The President once said that it was the men talking in the grocery stores of a thousand towns who formed American public opinion, and now he knew those men were saying that America had made the world safe for democracy and perhaps that was all America should be expected to do. In the White House the President of those men and their families said America must do more, and that the men in the grocery stores must know that and understand it and endorse it.

  But there was the question of his health. His wife and doctor, with all their strength and fear, fought against the picture of a jolting train and poor sleeping arrangements, of irregular hours and endless parades and talks and receptions, the heat of summer and the pumping hands of admirers, the noise, the excitement. The President went so far as to say he would go in August, but Grayson persuaded him to cancel the idea temporarily. All through the hot and terrible summer of Washington the President kept returning to the idea of rallying the moral opinion of the country to the League. He had Senator Watson of Indiana in and asked him, “Where am I on this fight?” and Watson replied, “Mr. President, you are licked. There is only one way you can take the United States into the League of Nations.” “Which way is that?” “Accept it with the Lodge reservations.” Fire came into the President’s eyes and he said, “Lodge reservations? Never! I’ll never consent to adopt any policy with which that impossible name is so prominently identified.” Watson left, the President’s last words staying with him: “I’ll appeal to the country.”

  The journalist H. H. Kohlsaat came to see him in the Blue Room one morning and found him looking unwell and weak as he talked of his proposed tour. “You are too ill to take that long trip,” Kohlsaat said. “The heat will be intense in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska. You will break down before you reach the Rockies.” The President seemed to be trembling. “I don’t care if I die the next minute after the treaty is ratified,” he said.

  Finally it seemed as if he had decided in his mind that it must be done. Grayson went to see him to make the final appeal of a doctor telling his patient that he could not be responsible for the consequences. He walked into the President’s study and found him writing there. The President looked up. “I know what you have come for,” he said. “I do not want to do anything foolhardy, but the League of Nations is now in its crisis and if it fails I hate to think of what will happen to the world. You must remember that I, as Commander in Chief, was responsible for sending our soldiers to Europe. In the crucial test of the trenches they did not turn back—and I cannot turn back now. I cannot put my personal safety, my health, in the balance against my duty.

  “I must go.”

  Grayson bowed and left the room.

  * Grayso
n at this time held the rank of Rear Admiral, promoted by Presidential request despite complaints from certain anti-Administration Congressmen.

  * Senator Borah

  † Senator Sherman

  ** Senator Reed

  *** Senator Penrose

  ‡ Senator Johnson

  § Senator Knox

  * He also summed up his view of the President’s intellectual attainments by saying: “Not a scholar in the true sense of the word.”

  * In the years since 1919, many people have come to believe that the President termed the League enemies a “little group of willful men.” But the remark was made years earlier and concerned senatorial opponents of a ship-arming bill.

  5

  On Wednesday, September 3, 1919, at six-forty in the evening, they left the White House to go to Union Station—the President, the First Lady, Grayson, Tumulty. Two dozen reporters would be with them, eight Secret Service men, a corps of aides and a valet for him, a maid for her, a double train crew. The train was seven cars long; the President’s blue car, the Mayflower, last in line. They would be traveling 9,981 miles, almost to the Canadian border, almost to the Mexican. Every state west of the Mississippi except four would be visited, and it would take twenty-seven days, with twenty-six major stops and at least ten rear-platform speeches a day. All through the planning stage Grayson and the First Lady pleaded that some rest days be scheduled—perhaps a week at the Grand Canyon—but the President would not allow it: “This is a business trip, pure and simple.”

  Tumulty was also concerned about the omission of any relaxation periods, thinking to himself as they stood on the railroad platform just before getting under way that never had he seen the President—“Governor” to Tumulty since their New Jersey statehouse days—look so weary. In those Trenton years, in his secretary’s eyes, he was vigorous, agile, slender, an active man with hair only slightly streaked with gray. Now he was an old man, gray and grim, to Tumulty’s mind like a warrior determined to fight on to the end. The President said to him, “I am in a nice fix. I have not had a single minute to prepare my speeches. I do not know how I shall get the time, for during the past few weeks I have been suffering from daily headaches. But perhaps tonight’s rest will make me fit for the work of tomorrow.”

  The three men and the woman went into the Mayflower’s sitting room and ordered cool drinks. Out to serve them came a tiny Negro White House servant, “Little” Jackson (sometimes “Major” Jackson), wearing a gigantic mushroom-shaped chef’s hat almost as big as he. It sheltered him like a toadstool, the First Lady thought. They all burst into laughter—which pleased Tumulty, who had gone to some trouble to get the hat made.

  They halted for a moment in the Baltimore train yards and some Red Cross workers gathered around to wish them luck and offer cigarettes and sandwiches. The cigarettes the President declined by saying he never smoked; he also said he wouldn’t take any food as they had just dined on the train and he was “about filled up.” Shortly after, they all went to bed. In the morning the reporters came for a press conference, but they distressed the President. “They ask me such foolish questions,” he sighed. They stopped for a few minutes at Dennison, Ohio, where a new locomotive was attached to the train, and some thirty or forty persons gathered beneath the Mayflower’s rear platform to hear the President say good morning, glad to see you, how are you, as he shook hands all around. An old man looked up and said, “I wish you success on your journey, Mr. Wilson. I lost two sons in the war; only got one left and I want things fixed up so I won’t have to lose him.” The people broke into applause.

  They headed for Columbus and his first speech and before noon they were there. The COLUMBUS WELCOMES YOU sign at the railroad station was enlarged to include OUR PRESIDENT, and the city’s school children had been dismissed from classes for the day. On Broad Street hundreds of them were assembled to wave American flags. They broke ranks and came running through the police lines and Army band that led the slow-moving automobile parade to trot along beside his car, where he stood wearing a straw hat although Labor Day was past. Airplanes from Ohio State University’s landing field zoomed overhead and dropped flowers on the crowd. At the hall where he would speak he waited backstage for a moment while the First Lady, in blue dress and Russian sable scarf and with a checked coat over her arm, went out before the people. There was considerable applause for him when he appeared, but it was not the applause he had heard in Paris, London and Rome months before.

  “My fellow citizens,” he began, “it is with great pleasure that I greet you. I have long chafed at confinement in Washington and I have wanted to report to you and other citizens of the United States. It has become increasingly necessary that I should report to you.” He spoke with no notes, saying, “This is what the League of Nations is for: it is to prove to the nations of the world that the nations will combine against any nation that would emulate Germany’s example. When you are told that the League of Nations is for any purpose but to prevent war, tell them that it is not so.” He smacked his hands together when he spoke of the war and said, “The League of Nations is the only thing that can prevent the recurrence of this tragedy and redeem our promises. And when this treaty is accepted, as it will be accepted, men in khaki will not have to cross the seas again!”

  Outside the hall his car was halted for a few minutes while escorting Army troops fell into line. People jammed up against the vehicle. He stood up and waved his hat and the crowd clapped hands, but the reporters thought the applause relatively restrained. And the crowds were not as large as expected. Perhaps it was because the Columbus trolleymen were on strike and the streetcars from the outlying areas were not running, but perhaps also it was because all over America that September railroad men, plumbers, rubber workers, machinists, cigar makers, chorus girls, potters, shoe workers, electrical workers, all these and others were on strike and there were people in Columbus (and elsewhere) who felt that a President ought to be doing something about the worst labor situation in the country’s history instead of gallivanting about, talking of the troubles of far-off places and (in the eyes of some) laying the groundwork for his Presidency of the World or of the United States for a third term.

  Just two hours after they arrived they left Columbus, ten minutes of their time having been spent beside the waiting train greeting the local dignitaries presented by the Mayor and a former Governor. An Army veteran told the reporters he had been in Paris when the President entered the city: “I never will forget that day. All Americans were princes and Woody was King.” But the man also thought the President looked a lot older now.

  They headed for Indianapolis, halting for a few minutes at Urbana, Ohio. “You will beat them,” a man called out. “Their case is so weak they are not hard to beat,” the President answered. They went on. Earlier the day had been overcast, but now the sun came out, baking both the lush fields around them and the jolting cars of the rolling train. At Richmond, Indiana, he spoke from the rear platform for six minutes: “Shall we or shall we not sustain the first great act of international justice? The thing wears a very big aspect when you look at it that way, and all little matters seem to fall away and one seems ashamed to bring in special interests, particularly party interests.” The Secret Service men were in a semicircle, holding the people back, and he was up on the platform crying, “What difference does party make when mankind is involved?”

  Outside Indianapolis a local reception committee came aboard to ride in on the Mayflower, and he talked with them in the lounge compartment. They pulled into the station at six in the evening and went at once in a motorcade to the Indianapolis Coliseum. The Indiana State Fair was in session and people came streaming in from the midway, deserting the prize cattle and the exhibits to jam the arena. The crowd was unruly and seemed, in the eyes of the reporters, to view the President and First Lady—she in a gown with a gray georgette bodice and a dark blue velvet skirt—as simply an added attraction to the fair. The Governor of the state began an introductory
speech, but the crowd did not quiet down even when the Mayor of Indianapolis got up to ask that they do so. Finally the President arose. “I am making this journey as an American and as a champion of the rights which America believes in—” But still the crowd was noisy and those in the back, unable to hear him, made for the doors, which added to the clamor. A state official got up and told those who wanted to leave that they should do so at once; afterward police would bar the doors. Several thousand people in the rear walked out and his speech went on: “If it is not to be this arrangement, what arrangement do you suggest to secure the peace of the world? It is a case of put up or shut up.”

  They left at ten and went on to St. Louis, a pilot engine running two minutes in front of them. They arrived at four in the morning and at eight a dozen youths of the Junior Chamber of Commerce came to volunteer to carry baggage or do anything needed. Behind them came a reception committee to greet him with yells when at nine he came down from the train in a straw hat. He went to the Hotel Statler in a motorcade, waving. But the cheers were not boisterous and there were no children: school was open in St. Louis that day. In the hotel lobby there was a band that burst into The Star-Spangled Banner as he entered, and he came to attention for it and then went up in the elevator to a room where he met with members of the reception committee brought in by twos and threes to pump his arm up and down and hear him say that St. Louis was a wonderful city and he was charmed to be there. He went downstairs to a businessmen’s luncheon in the hotel ballroom where he spoke of his Senate opponents, saying they were “contemptible quitters” did they “fail to see the game through.” Cigar smoke drifted up to him from the thousand men and made more intense the headache he had had all day. He cried, “America was not founded to make money; it was founded to lead the world on the way to liberty.” At the end there was a dash to get on line so that every man could tell his children he shook hands with the President, and then he went upstairs to work on the speech he would give that night.