When the Cheering Stopped

by Smith, Gene;

  It was twilight when he went to the hall to sit on a platform in a hard steel chair from which he rose to cry out to the thousands of listeners that “if we keep out of this arrangement war will come soon. If we go into it war will never come.” From the hall they drove to the station, arriving there at nine-fifteen. Crowds gathered by the Mayflower, and when Grayson and the Governor of the state appeared on the platform they were greeted by shouts of “We want Wilson!” He came out to bow and when at eleven the train pulled out the people got another glimpse of him through the window of the car, sitting at his desk in the evening warmth and working on his next speech, typing, typing. The next morning he was up early when the train stopped to kill some time in Independence so as not to get to Kansas City before the scheduled arrival time of eight o’clock. Housewives came running from their homes when word spread that the President was there, most of them wearing big cottage aprons and Mother Hubbards. One apologized, saying they would have dressed up had they known beforehand he would stop in their town, but he said he was glad to see them “just as you are.” They asked if the First Lady would not come out, and she did so and the women burst into applause. In Kansas City at eight the heat was already quite intense and he had to shout at the reception committee in order that his words be heard above the hubbub of the crowd gathered outside the Mayflower. There were flowers for the First Lady—“Oh thank you, they’re beautiful”—and clicking movie cameras. The headache was worse.

  Kansas City, the voice hoarse: “I have come to fight a cause, and that cause is greater than the U. S. Senate!” At noon they were back on the train with its white “special” flags flying from both sides of the locomotive. He turned to the milling crowd behind the police lines and cupped his hands to shout, “I’ve had a great time here!” Between smiles, the reporters noticed, his face wore the most serious of looks; the headache was continuous for most of the hours of the day.

  They hurried north as the second section of the regular train. At St. Joseph they stopped for three minutes and a crowd shouted, “Speech! Speech!” but Grayson asked him to spare his voice, so he only leaned down over the platform rail, almost bending double, and shook some of the dozens of hands thrust up at him. Fathers held their children on their shoulders to see, and a group of Red Cross women got him and the First Lady to sign their roster. Newspaper people from Des Moines came aboard to ride the train into their city, and at eight that night they pulled in to where the reception committee waited—representatives of the Commerce, Trades and Labor Assembly of the city, the Grand Army of the Republic post, the Ladies of the Grand Army of the Republic, the Spanish-American War Veterans, the Rotary, the City Federation of Women’s Clubs, the War Camp Community Service, the Salvation Army, the Red Cross, the Soldiers Fathers League, the League to Enforce Peace, officials of the City of Des Moines and the State of Iowa, the Greater Des Moines Chamber of Commerce, people from the Des Moines News, the Register and Tribune, the Capital. He shook hands all around and went to stand before ten thousand people in the Coliseum and cry out—there were no mechanical devices to project his voice—that “the world is waiting, waiting to see not whether we will take part, but whether we will serve and lead, for it has expected us to lead.”

  That night they slept at the Hotel Fort Des Moines, their first night off the train, and he told his people he felt like taking three baths to wash off the train grime. The next day, Sunday, the reporters went driving and to play golf and tennis while he complied with the rule of his church that there be no work on the Sabbath. But of course there were the forthcoming speeches to be worked on, and when he and the First Lady went to the Central Presbyterian Church there were crowds hoping to shake his hand and, inside, people stretching in their seats to see the visitors. Meanwhile a Missouri priest said the League was a Wall Street plot. The clergyman was echoed by the Socialist Victor Berger of Milwaukee declaring it was a “capitalist scheme” to bring “more wars and more armaments.”

  At midnight they left Des Moines for Omaha. Originally it had been intended to arrive there at five in the morning and for the party to remain sleeping in the rail yards until the reception committee came at nine, but Grayson felt the President would rest better in some quieter place and so the train halted by a siding near Underwood, Iowa, fifteen miles northeast of Council Bluffs. They slept there by a quiet cornfield. At Omaha there were sirens, noisemakers, auto horns blaring to welcome him, and a battery of photographers. “Stand by your guns,” the President said to them, and they in return said, “Please have Mrs. Wilson turn this way and smile.” “I have no control over that little lady,” he answered. He looked better, the reporters traveling with him thought; the quiet Sunday and the night by the cornfield seemed to have done much good.

  Omaha: “I predict there would be another world war within a generation if no pains were taken to prevent it. If this guarantee is not lived up to, I want to say that in another generation or two we must have another and far more disastrous war. If I felt that I stood in the way of this settlement of the world’s affairs, I would be glad to die that it might be consummated.” After his talk people came rushing up past the guards and jumping over the press table to grab his hand. At the train a crowd was yelling “We want Wilson,” and he told the Secret Service men to form them up into a line so that he could shake hands with several hundreds of them. By noon they were on their way north to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, stopping along the way, as always, for him to make brief talks from the rear platform.

  They spent two hours in Sioux Falls: out of the train; the motorcade with the cheers and his responding wave; the speech: “America may have the distinction of leading the way!… I sometimes think, when I wake up in the night, of the wakeful nights that anxious fathers, mothers, and friends spent during the weary years of the awful war, and I hear the cry of the mothers of the children, millions on the other side and thousands on this side: ‘In God’s name give us security and peace and right’”—and then they were again in the lurching autos and back to the train and going on. He tried to sleep as they went through the night to St. Paul, but it was difficult for him. In the morning at the St. Paul station fifteen hundred girls of the War Camp Community Service waited, and as soon as he appeared on the Mayflower’s platform they burst out into a nonsensical get-up-in-the-morning war song: “Good morning, Mr. Zip-Zip-Zip, with your hair cut just as short as mine, rise up and shine, good morning, Mr. Zip-Zip-Zip, you’re surely looking fine.” He stood with a fixed smile on his face and then went to the cars standing behind troops of the 4th Minnesota National Guard who led him to the state capitol.

  After that it was Bismarck, North Dakota, crying “The whole world is waiting on us,” and an auto tour of the city. During the day they stopped for a few minutes to walk from the train a short distance to where there was a wonderful view of some waterfalls. It was the first, literally the first, quiet exercise of any kind since Washington.

  When they returned to the siding the Secret Service men made their usual check of the train and flushed out two hobos who were planning to hitch a ride under one of the cars. When the men found out whose train this was, one asked a Secret Service man, “Do you think he would shake hands with fellows like us?” The President stepped forward and did so, and even offered a lift. But the hobos said no, they would not trouble him, he had troubles enough, and they would wait for the next train coming through. The First Lady shook hands with them and then the train pulled away. Looking back, the President waved to the two and they bowed and waved their shabby hats in return. Edmund Starling glanced at the President and, seeing a wistful smile, thought to himself, He envies them.

  And indeed there was much about the two tramps that the President could envy. For it was likely they slept well at night and were free from a constantly more severe headache and free also from the sneezing and coughing that resulted from the train fumes and the cigar smoke blown up at him in the crowded halls where he spoke, and from the serious asthma attacks the high altitudes were
bringing on in spite of the sprays and medications Grayson gave him. The President’s poor appetite in the murderous September heat also worried the doctor, and he prescribed predigested foods and lots of fluids to help his patient, but the reporters could not help but notice that although the President in public smiled and waved he seemed to sag as soon as he was out of sight of the crowds. They also noticed the serious, intent look that rarely left the face of the usually cheery First Lady and the tense, worried appearance of Grayson.

  Billings, Montana: “I am just as sure what the verdict will be as if already rendered, and what has convinced me most is what plain people have said to me, particularly what women have said to me. When I see a woman dressed with marks of labor upon her and she says, God bless you, Mr. President, and God bless the League of Nations, then I know the League of Nations is safe. I know the League of Nations is close to those people. A woman came to me the other day and took my hand and said, God bless you, Mr. President, and turned away in tears. I asked a neighbor, What is the matter? and he said, She was intending to say something to you but she lost a son in France. That woman did not take my hand with the feeling that her son should not have been sent to France. I sent her son to France. She took my hand and blessed it but she could not say anything more because a whole world of spirit came up in her throat. Down deep in the heart of love for her boy she felt that we had done something so that no other woman’s boy would be called upon to lay his life down for a thing like that.”

  As the train pulled away from the station some little boys came running after it. One had an American flag and he reached up to the rear platform of the Mayflower and handed it to the First Lady. “Give it to him,” he said. A boy running by his side had no flag, but he reached down into his pocket and then stretched out his hand with something in it. The child was running as fast as he could, holding out his hand, and Starling hooked a leg through the platform railing and leaned out to reach him. “Give him this,” the boy panted. Starling opened his hand. A dime lay in his palm.

  They kept going, up into the Northwest. Meanwhile, back in Washington, Senator Lodge dispatched men to speak out against the League, “that evil thing with the holy name.” Senators Johnson, McCormick and Borah went to Chicago. Johnson cried to a crowd of ten thousand sitting with coats off and ties loosened in the steaming Coliseum, “I have heard of men placing themselves in the hands of their creditors, but never have I heard of a man placing himself in the hands of his debtors. The United States is the greatest solvent power on earth and they ask us to enter into partnership with bankrupts!” Borah hooked his thumbs under his arms and stalked across the stage. “Is there an American who wants a foreign nation to say when and where the Monroe Doctrine should apply?” he asked. “No, no,” the crowd yelled. “England has suggested—all England has to do now is to suggest—that we send 100,000 men to Constantinople,” the Senator said. “Don’t let ’em go,” the crowd cried back. Who betrayed the American soldier and the American ideals? the Senator asked. “Wilson! Impeach him! Impeach him!” roared the crowd. Johnson the next day went on to Indianapolis to say the Europeans were filled with “duplicity unequaled in the history of the world. But when the President seeks to keep up the duplicity by binding our sons to guarantee it, I say it shall not be!” “No!” roared the crowd. In the Senate at Washington, Senator Sherman stood to say, “He is no longer Wilson the American President of the United States. Now he is Wilson the internationalist, aspirant for first President of the World’s League of Nations.” Senator Reed, a Democrat, went into New England and waved a sheet of paper over his head, crying that it was the Covenant of the League. “I have it here and I seem to see the bloody footprints of John Bull tracking all over the dastardly document.”

  The train went on: Helena, Coeur d’Alene … Outside Coeur d’Alene, Borah’s town, a woman held up a baby for the President to see. The First Lady leaned over the platform railing and took the child. “It’s a boy,” the infant’s father proudly said, “and his name is Wilson.” They went on to a circus tent, cowboys in Western regalia riding before, and he told the people, “My fellow countrymen, we are facing a decision now in which we cannot afford to make a mistake.”

  The crowds were getting more enthusiastic now with every stop, but at night in the hot dry air the President could hardly breathe. It became necessary for him to try to sleep sitting up in an easy chair of his compartment in the jolting and swaying train; that way, it was not as difficult for him to catch his breath. Fighting the splitting headaches, he would sit with his forehead resting on the back of another chair and dictate by the hour to his stenographer, Charles Swem.

  Tumulty kept coming in from each stop with a stream of telegrams sent on from the White House and dealing with the Russian situation, the actions of U.S. troops on occupation duty, petitions about the high cost of living, the question of what American decoration should be awarded the King of the Belgians, who would soon be coming to the country on a state visit, and the labor disturbances breaking out all over the country—including the police strike in Boston, which saw mobs free of interference breaking windows, shooting craps on Boston Common, molesting women in the street. The telegrams had to be dealt with even as he planned ahead for his next speech.

  They made their way up to the State of Washington, moving slowly through wooded mountain country and under a drizzle and low-lying mist that turned the atmosphere suddenly cold. It was the chilliest spell for that season that the area had experienced in years, and for the first time the heat in the train was turned on. At Rathdrum, Idaho, the train stopped for a few moments to change engines and a band appeared to play for him. He went out on the platform very much bundled up against the penetrating damp cold and spoke for a few minutes to the people, some of them Indians, standing by their muddy trucks. “A League of Nations will not make war impossible but it will help to prevent war. You do not want war. You want world peace.…” A mounted policeman put his horse through a bucking exhibition.

  In Spokane two hours later the weather was boilingly hot; the reporters came from the train in panamas. The crowds were, despite the heat, the most enthusiastic of the entire trip. Marching troops of the 21st Infantry led the motorcade through twenty-three blocks filled with people, some sitting atop big delivery vans parked in the side-street intersections. Flags hung across the hot streets and a canopy of white and red dahlias woven into a wire screen stretched above the main thoroughfare. Bouquets sailed out of the crowd toward him, and the Secret Service men on the running boards leaped high to catch them. At each side of his nose there were heavy dark lines leading down to his mouth, and when he stood up in the car to wave his hat the people noticed that the First Lady, in navy-blue jersey cloth and a small toque of dark gray velour, reached up her hand to steady him.

  They went to a park to be seen by hundreds of massed school children, and then to his speech: “Isn’t 10 per cent insurance against war a pretty good thing?” “You bet it is,” a man called out. “Well, the League of Nations will give you 98 per cent insurance against war.” Two hours after arriving at Spokane they pulled out. A policeman asked him how he liked the city and he said, “Fine! Fine! I have always wanted to visit Spokane, I have heard so much about it. This is the first opportunity I have had.” His headache made him actually see double. The policeman held up a child to shake his hand.

  They made for Tacoma and paused for a moment at Pasco, Washington, so that he might say a few words. After his talk he remarked to the little throng that theirs was a dusty area. Someone joked, “Yes, we have to have a lot of grit to live here.” As the train pulled out a man came dashing down the track. The President looked at him curiously. “Don’t mind me,” gasped the man. “I only promised to get the last look at you from Pasco and now I’ve done it.”

  Tacoma’s crowds were enormous and uproarious: TACOMA GREETS AMERICAN LEADER. “… If it fails every woman should weep for the child at her breast who when he grows to manhood will have to go forth to fight …�
�� He talked about the little boy who had given him the dime: “I would like to believe that dime has some relation to the widow’s mite—others gave something; he gave all that he had.”

  At Seattle they found Secretary of the Navy Daniels and his wife, back from a trip to Hawaii, ready to take them at once to a formal review of the Pacific Fleet in Puget Sound. The street crowds unleashed deafening cheers; at Union Street the employees of a store had constructed a confetti gun, and when they fired it he and the First Lady, who held him with one white-gloved hand, disappeared from view in the paper pouring down on them. Japanese school children waved flags and shrieked while auto horns blared.

  He was standing up in the car waving a high silk hat—it was the first time on the trip he had worn one—when with terrifying suddenness all the noise and cheering ended. Standing by the curb in long lines were men in blue denim working clothes. Their arms were folded and they stared straight ahead, not at the President, but at nothing at all. They did not hiss or boo but motionless, noiseless, simply stood there. In their hats they wore signs saying RELEASE POLITICAL PRISONERS. They were members of the International Workers of the World—the Wobblies—gathered from all over the state to demonstrate their anger at the imprisonment of radical leaders on sedition charges and to embarrass Seattle’s Mayor Ole Hanson, their sworn enemy. They lined the building fronts to the curbs, and only a few children pushed and yelled for the President, making the silence and immobility of the men even more awesome. From the streets over which the motorcade had come there were heard the bands playing and the crowds noisily breaking up, but where the IWW’s were there was not a sound but the put-putting of police motorcycles. The President was standing and smiling when he first reached the IWW’s, but in a flash the smile vanished and a flabbergasted look came over his face. He stood in the terrible silence for two blocks, the hand holding his hat hanging by his side, and then he sank down onto the car seat beside the First Lady. He put his tall hat on his head, a little to one side, and it seemed that he sat in a crumpled-up way. His face was white.