When the Cheering Stopped

by Smith, Gene;

  Upon another occasion Grayson and Dr. Young stood by the bed and discussed shaving the President’s face, which had not been touched by a razor since the morning of the fall in the bathroom. Young said that one of the doctors could do it: “You know, in the olden days the doctors were barbers. Doctors were really barbers in those days.” There was a whisper from the man on the bed: “They are barbarous yet.”

  After perhaps two weeks had passed since the thrombosis, it was decided that the President could be lifted out of bed for a few minutes every day and placed in a chair by the window. On October 22, twenty days after the First Lady found him unconscious in the bathroom, he put his signature to four bills sent up by the Congress, and a few days later he vetoed the Volstead Act.* The First Lady placed a pen in his trembling hand and steadied and pointed it as he signed his name where she indicated. The effort completely exhausted him. But the signature was a parody of his usual firm stroke. The o’s of his first name were left open at the top and the slanting of the letters was completely foreign to his former fashion. As soon as the signatures were seen by Senators familiar with his writing, debates in the cloakroom centered upon the question of who had forged the President’s name. Most Senators said it was Tumulty’s work; others thought the First Lady did it. A microscope was obtained to study the writing; a handwriting expert was hired and urged to express an opinion.

  No resolution of sympathy was offered in Congress for him, but one Senator wanted to introduce a bill ousting the President “whenever for any reason whatsoever” he became “unable for a period of six weeks to perform the duties devolved upon him.” Another wanted to give power to determine Presidential inability to the Supreme Court, that body to make an investigation when authorized by concurrent Congressional resolution. Senator Moses, who had written the widely publicized letter about the illness, took the lead in diagnosing the President’s condition and soon his fellow legislators universally addressed him as “Doc.” Senator Albert Fall of New Mexico violently declared in meetings of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the elected President was not in office. He pounded his fist on the table and shouted, “We have petticoat Government! Mrs. Wilson is President!” (He also said the Democrats ought to ask Congress to adjourn until there was a legitimate President in office.) Other people were talking about the First Lady and it began to be said that she was the “Presidentess” who had fulfilled the dreams of the suffragettes by changing her title from First Lady to Acting First Man.

  Perhaps to counter the stories about him, the White House people wanted the President to receive the King and Queen of the Belgians, who, after touring the country incognito in respect for the President’s illness, were now coming to Washington. When the royal couple and their son first planned the American visit, it was planned to have them as White House guests for several days, but now instead they stayed at the home of Breckinridge Long, Third Assistant Secretary of State, with Vice President Marshall (who was very resentful of the cost to him) acting as official host. (During the period of his term as official host, Marshall declined to preside over the Senate, explaining he could not perform the President’s work as entertainer of royalty one minute and the Vice President’s duties as head of the Senate the next. “Too much Jekyll and Hyde for him,” Breckinridge Long wrote in his diary.)

  The Belgians came on the afternoon of October 30, the first outsiders, save for the medical people, to see the President. The First Lady served them tea in the Red Room and then they went up to the President, bearing with them a gift for him, a set of eighteen beautiful plates showing Belgian scenes. They also had a fan, decorated with diamonds and sapphires, for the First Lady.

  The President received them in bed. He wore a dressing gown. The King and Queen must have been surprised to see the President’s white beard—the doctors had decided not to shave him—but the visit went off pleasantly. After a few minutes the First Lady took them out and showed them through the White House. When the tour was over the Queen asked if she could not introduce to the President her son, the seventeen-year-old heir to the throne, who had waited below. So they went up again, to find the President’s dressing gown, clumsy in bed, had been changed for an old gray sweater purchased many years before on a visit to Scotland. The Queen was delighted to find him studying the scenes on the plates through a magnifying glass, and the President in turn greeted the young future King, apologizing for the old sweater.

  At the front door a corps of reporters waited to fall upon the royal couple with questions about the President’s condition. The answers blandly indicated he was fine, and the Queen remarked he had on a worn sweater. The reporters misunderstood and printed the information that the President received in torn clothing. The next day mail poured in from people eager to tell the First Lady she ought to be ashamed of herself for letting the President wear ripped things. Old ladies sent wool, saying she could use it for darning her husband’s clothes.

  One week later, Senator Gilbert Hitchcock of Nebraska, the Democratic Minority Leader, was received. Hitchcock, a newspaper owner, was the not particularly brilliant nor strong leader of a party entirely dominated in the past by its very strong President. Understandably Hitchcock felt timid about his mission, which was to say clearly to the President that the Democrats could not raise even a majority of Senate votes for ratification without reservations, let alone the necessary two-thirds count. He was shown into the bedroom where the President lay propped up in bed, with the First Lady and Grayson standing by. Hitchcock’s first reaction was shock at the long white beard. He falteringly got out his opinion that the Lodge amendments must be accepted. Otherwise, it would be impossible to get the United States into the League, utterly impossible.

  “It is possible! It is possible!” the President gasped out.

  “Mr. President, it might be wise to compromise—” Hitchcock started to say.

  “Let Lodge compromise!”

  “Well, of course, he must compromise also. But we might well hold out the olive branch.”

  “Let Lodge hold out the olive branch!”

  Hitchcock was shown out.

  On November 13 there was another visitor: the Prince of Wales, later King Edward and Duke of Windsor, who was touring Canada and America. The Prince arrived ten minutes late for his appointment and apologized to the First Lady by explaining he had just come from visiting Mount Vernon, where he was detained by a “very charming young lady” who gave him flowers and engaged him in conversation. Actually the Prince was being gallant in describing the lady as “young,” for she was a woman who insisted on telling him of his grandfather’s tour of America half a century before, at which time, she said, the grandfather gave her a kiss. The attractive young Prince made the First Lady laugh with his explanation and after tea in the Blue Room they went up to see the President.

  Prince Edward, little more than a boy, and boyish in his ways, came bouncing into the room. “I am very glad to see you again, Mr. President,” he began, referring to their meeting in London during the President’s visit there. There was silence. The Prince sat down by the bed and tried to find something to say. “My, what a magnificent bed this is, Mr. President,” he got out. The President smiled with the right side of his face. But he was having great trouble with his speech that day. “This—is—the—bed—that—Abraham—Lincoln—” he said slowly, word by word, and talked about the bed while the Prince nervously pleated his trousers. The President mentioned the visit of the Prince’s grandfather, the later Edward VII, and said the grandfather had slept in the Lincoln bed and one night slipped out the window for a social event not on his official program. This gave Prince Edward a chance to jump up and look out the window. “Do you think it was this window, sir?” The President said he unfortunately did not know.

  The visit had important implications. They stemmed from the fact that the Prince, and only the Prince, was invited to call. For the British Ambassador had been desperately trying to see the President. The Ambassador was Viscount Grey of F
alloden, who as British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey had written the President a touching letter when Ellen Wilson died. Now old, sick, half blind, Lord Grey had come out of retirement to travel to America and lend his efforts toward getting the United States into the League of Nations under any conditions necessary. He arrived just as the President fell ill and, undergoing treatment for his eyes at Johns Hopkins in the interim, waited for the President to meet with him. He had no reason to think he was in personal disfavor with the President—or the President’s wife—and of course before his appointment the British Government had asked if he was acceptable to the President and had been told he was “entirely” so.

  But when Lord Grey arrived in America it was discovered that he had brought with him a British Army officer, Major Charles Kennedy Craufurd-Stuart, who had been secretary to the preceding British Ambassador, Lord Reading. Craufurd-Stuart was a musically gifted man of the world who composed songs (“At Gloaming Tide,” “Make-Believe Land”) and played the piano. He was very much up on gossip and he did not care much for Americans. During the last days of Lord Reading’s reign as Ambassador, in late 1918, just before the President went to Europe, Craufurd-Stuart at a party, between piano renditions, combined love of gossip and distaste for at least one American and spoke very recklessly about the First Lady. The extremely knowledgeable Washington hostess Mrs. J. Borden (Daisy) Harriman marked him off as a crazy man, and so did other people, but word of his remarks about the First Lady—with all ramifications of the stories about her buying off Mrs. Peck—quickly reached the White House.

  Lord Reading was asked to send Craufurd-Stuart home. When Craufurd-Stuart heard his chief had been asked to send him back to England, he at once went to the home of Secretary of State Lansing and begged that the Americans not insist on his banishment—it would destroy his career. Lansing told him he should be more discreet in his talk, and the pressure for his recall relaxed. Then the President went to Europe and Lord Reading gave up the ambassadorship and went home, accompanied by Craufurd-Stuart. That seemed to be the end of any American service for Craufurd-Stuart. It was a surprise when Lord Grey brought him back to Washington.

  As soon as Craufurd-Stuart arrived with Lord Grey, the White House sent word through the State Department that the man was not wanted in America. Lord Grey asked why and got no reply. He insisted on an explanation and was told that Craufurd-Stuart had slandered the First Lady. Lord Grey did not believe the demand for the dismissal came from the President, and he did not send Craufurd-Stuart packing. State Department men from the Secretary down went to see Lord Grey, asking Craufurd-Stuart’s dispatch home, and Cary Grayson appeared to say he should go on “an early steamship.” Lord Grey refused, and the State Department, under heavy pressure from Grayson, threatened to declare the man persona non grata. Lord Grey countered by notifying the State Department that he was changing Craufurd-Stuart’s status from British attaché accredited to the American Government to mere member of the Ambassador’s household—a position not subject to dismissal proceedings brought by the Americans. Grayson gave up, but he noted in the First Lady’s attitude something which indicated she did not think Lansing had tried hard enough to get rid of her alleged slanderer. Craufurd-Stuart stayed, but when Prince Edward went by invitation to the White House, he went alone. Lord Grey began to meet for talks about the League with Senators—including Senator Lodge.

  Colonel House from his New York home viewed all this with apprehension. He wrote in his diary that the agitation against Craufurd-Stuart was the work of the First Lady, not the President. The President’s illness of course made House very uneasy, and his discomfiture was increased when in response to his offers to be of any aid whatsoever the First Lady coldly wrote she could think of nothing for him to do. (His was one of the few letters to the White House that got an answer, and it was an answer the First Lady must have grimly enjoyed writing. She had not forgotten who it was that tried to stop her marriage to the President.) House was not entirely discouraged and, without any inside information, seemed to assume the cheering bulletins were accurate. He wrote again to the President and then sent his views about the League to the President, care of the First Lady: “Of course the arguments are all with the position you have taken and against that of the Senate, but, unfortunately, no amount of logic can alter the situation … Let Senator Hitchcock know that you expect it to be ratified in some form … Its practical workings in the future will not be seriously hampered … and time will give us a workable machine.

  “To the ordinary man the distance between the treaty and the reservations is slight.”

  To these letters House received no reply, and the fact shook his faith in the bulletins indicating everything was quite in order at the White House. He had been accustomed to being called “dearest friend” by the President, and this new and sudden silence made him wonder who was in charge of his friend’s household. Uneasily saying that it was possible a “bedroom circle” was keeping him from the President, he wondered if the First Lady even let the President see the letters. Actually he might have saved himself the trouble of writing at all, for some of his letters were never opened at all until the President’s correspondence was deposited in the Library of Congress. That was in 1952, more than three decades later.

  Early in the Senate battle over the League, the Republican Senator James Watson of Indiana said to Senator Lodge, “I don’t see how we are ever going to defeat this proposition. I don’t see how it is possible to defeat it.” Lodge replied, “Ah, my dear James, I do not propose to try to beat it by direct frontal attack, but by the indirect method of reservations.” In mid-November, visiting Lodge at his home, Watson said, “Suppose the President accepts the treaty with your reservations. Then we are in the League.” Lodge smiled—a very confident smile, Watson thought. Lodge spoke of the hatred the President felt for him personally. “Never,” Lodge said, “under any set of circumstances in this world could he be induced to accept a treaty with Lodge reservations appended to it.” Watson was doubtful. “That seems to me to be a rather slender thread on which to hang so great a cause,” he said. “A slender thread!” Lodge exclaimed. “Why, it is as strong as any cable with its strands wired and twisted together.”

  In the Senate there were those who came to agree with Lodge in this estimate of the President’s likely reaction, but there were those who also said that if the President’s scholastic career had not been more distinguished than the Senator’s everything would turn out all right. But still there was a chance something could be worked out. Colonel House tried one last time. He asked Stephen Bonsai, an aide of his during the Peace Conference, to talk to Lodge and get some sort of private promise on what Lodge would accept as final amendments. It was in House’s nature to pacify—“The Yes, Yes, Man” was what the First Lady called him—and he thought that if the President would agree to accept terms privately given by Lodge, Lodge would accept this sop and let the League be passed. Bonsai got Lodge to write down what he would want in less than one hundred words of signed statement. Bonsai took it to the White House. It was never heard of again. Colonel House said the First Lady either destroyed it or did not bring it to the President’s attention. Lodge, of course, took the White House silence as the final slap in the face.

  As the time for a vote approached, Senator Hitchcock found there was utterly no possibility of carrying out the task the President had assigned him. The Senate simply did not contain enough men willing to follow blindly the dictates of the President. There were the “Irreconcilables,” who would not vote for the League under any circumstances, and it was of no use to talk to them. But there were also the “Mild Reservationists,” who wanted the United States in the League just so long as certain safeguards were taken, safeguards generally described as aimed at preventing too free use of American troops in policing the world. If these men could have their reservations, the United States would be in the League. But denied their reservations, they would vote nay. Other men outside the Senate knew this,
and each day letters and telegrams poured into the White House begging the President to swallow the reservations and get the country into the League. Few if any of these pleas reached the man they were intended for. Joe Tumulty constantly sent up notes begging for compromise but got no reply beyond the First Lady’s statement that no compromise could be permitted. Finally admitted to the sickroom to present his case for acceptance of the reservations, but warned not to excite the President, Tumulty was kept by the First Lady’s glare from getting too emphatic.

  On November 17, Hitchcock came again. All the men who had been at Paris were for acceptance of reservations; Bernard Baruch was for them, Herbert Hoover, almost every man in the Cabinet. It fell to Hitchcock to try to convince the President. “You haven’t come to talk compromise, have you?” the First Lady said to him outside the sickroom. Hitchcock began to plead with her. Defeat would bitterly shake the President, the Senator pointed out. Wasn’t it best to get at least half a loaf? She told him to wait and went into her husband’s room. “For my sake,” she said, “won’t you accept these reservations and get this awful thing settled?”

  He turned his head on the pillow. He took her hand. “Little girl, don’t you desert me; that I cannot stand. Can’t you see I have no moral right to accept any change in a paper I have already signed? It is not I who will not accept; it is the Nation’s honor that is at stake.” His eyes were gleaming. “Better a thousand times to go down fighting than to dip your colors to dishonorable compromise.”