by Smith, Gene;
Hoover and Long had to scour the country to find suitable productions, enlisting the aid of the Hollywood studios. The President did not want to see the risqué comedies and the vamps and sirens, but instead wanted outdoor films, William S. Hart, Tom Mix, William Farnum, horses and the Western deserts and mountains. He would each day nod and try to smile for Long and, the room practically noiseless save for the slight hum of the machine, they would sit and watch—the President, the First Lady, Grayson. Sometimes a few servants would gather behind them, and so in the silent gloom perhaps a dozen persons would be where Abraham Lincoln each New Year’s Day greeted thousands. Long asked if the President would like some musical accompaniment to the films, but the President said he would prefer not, which pleased Grayson’s desire for quiet around the patient. Now and again the President would ask about a film mentioned in a movie magazine the First Lady, read him, and Long would telegraph the movie company involved and get a copy.
The First Lady’s eyes rarely left him for a minute; Long noticed how in the dim flickering light she was constantly glancing away from the screen to look at her husband. But one day when she was quietly talking with someone Long noticed the President’s head gradually falling forward. As everyone else watched the action on the screen, Long saw the President’s head slowly come down so that his chin rested upon his chest. He was utterly unmoving, and the horrified Long was certain that he had just seen the President die. He frantically looked at the First Lady, but she was still talking and had not seen. Long miserably let the film run on, thinking that if he stopped it and the President was not dead it would constitute a shock to him that the film suddenly halted. So for two terrible minutes Long wondered what to do. Then the First Lady looked over and broke off her talk and went to her husband and, oblivious of the people, raised his head and let it rest on her breast while she mothered him and kissed him and gently whispered. The film ended. The next day there was another.
Winter took hold upon Washington and a great dullness fell upon the closed and silent White House. Outside in the city Vice President Marshall was receiving a splatter of letters asking his intervention in the cases of soldiers in trouble and for his aid in getting pardons for Federal prisoners, and now and then a foreign diplomat took it as a duty to call upon him. (Although he would explain he could in no way act for the President, Marshall always had a welcome for the guest—“Glad to see you just the same.”) On Capitol Hill they argued about the League, and somehow the Cabinet members went about their duties, Attorney General Palmer doing the most dramatic work, arresting people right and left and nurse-maiding the country into what would later be called the Great Red Scare. Just before sailing home, Lord Grey spent Christmas with the family of Assistant Secretary of the Navy Roosevelt,* and the fact enraged the First Lady, who remembered Lord Grey’s aide, Craufurd-Stuart.
Into the White House came greeting cards and some of them the First Lady read aloud to the President. One was from a little girl, Fairlie Amistead, who said she was sorry about the President being sick but thought he could recover best if he would come to her Alabama home, where he could have “milk and butter and sausages and spareribs and a good time.” The First Lady answered her that “I know the President would like to be well enough to see some of his little Southern friends who, like you, are interested in his recovery.” Sitting in bed, the President tried to read a little but found it difficult because his nose glasses would slip, so a Philadelphia eye specialist was called in to prescribe spectacles. “I want to look at your pupils,” the doctor said as he bent over the patient, and the ex-professor in the bed got off a weak pun: “You’ll have a long job. I’ve had a great number of them.”
At night when he was asleep the First Lady sat long hours working on official papers and once she pointed to a pile of newspapers and said to a maid, “I don’t know how much more criticism I can take.” In fact the White House staff itself was free with criticism of her, some of the servants saying that now that the descendant of Pocahontas was in charge they were being forced to work for “an Indian.” Their rumors had it that her reluctance to urge his resignation stemmed from fear that this would destroy his will to live. She herself rarely smiled save when she was with him, and the strain told upon the people around her. Edith Benham, her secretary, had a complete nervous breakdown and had to give up her job, and Margaret also broke down and went South to try to recover.
In January there would be a Jackson Day dinner in Washington, and a Presidential letter was expected. Following the Cabinet meeting of January 6, Tumulty said to Secretary of Agriculture Houston that the letter was all prepared and that the Secretary’s opinion of it was wanted. The letter spoke of the United States’ failure to ratify the peace treaty and go into the League and warned that because of this Germany was able to defy the rulings of the Allies and go on the rampage as she had in 1914. Houston read it and pointed out that there was a treaty and a League ratified by almost every other nation in the world and that the German Army was largely disbanded and the Navy either on the bottom of the ocean or in Allied hands. He did not say so to Tumulty, but he did not for a minute believe the President had anything to do with the letter—“I could not understand how he could.” To a friend he said that the President was so ill that “something ought to be done about it.”
The letter as sent tempered down the questionable statements, but it was a shock to those who heard it read out. For it repeated that the President would not accept any reservations: “Personally I do not accept the action of the United States Senate as the decision of the nation … We cannot rewrite this treaty. We must take it without changes which alter its meaning, or leave it.” And the letter said something that frightened the Democrats and hardened the will to resist of the Republicans. For it seemed the President was saying he would want a third term: “If there is any doubt as to what the people of the country think on this vital matter the clear and simple way is to submit it for determination at the next election to the voters of the nation, to give the next election the form of a great and solemn referendum.”
It seemed the President had given the final blow to compromise. But still the White House was beseeched with appeals that the reservations be accepted, that anything be accepted that would put the country into the League and make the war worth having been fought. Ray Stannard Baker, the President’s press liaison man at Paris, went to the White House to plead with the First Lady, but found her ungiving on the issue and resentful of the criticism of the President. “They think him stubborn,” she said accusingly; Baker replied, “So much hangs on this issue.” “He believes the people are with him,” she answered, and Baker left, thinking, This sick man, with such enormous power, closed in from the world and yet acting so influentially upon events! He wrote a letter to the First Lady: “People in the future will forget the minor disagreements if the thing itself comes into being.”
Baker had been traveling through all of the country and was sure he was right in saying the President must not stand so solidly upon the letter of what he had brought back from Paris. But the President had other ideas on how to fight. He had the First Lady send Albert Burleson, the typical politician made Postmaster General, a list of some thirty-five Senators with the request that Burleson indicate whether it might be said that these were the men most against ratification. Burleson wrote back indicating which men should perhaps be omitted from the classification and which others should perhaps be added, and the President and First Lady took up the list and wrote a statement to go with it: “I challenge the following named gentlemen, members of the Senate of the United States, to resign their seats in that body and take immediate steps to seek re-election to it on the basis of their several records with regards to the ratification of the treaty. For myself, I promise and engage if all of them or a majority of them are re-elected, I will resign the Presidency.” With difficulty the President was persuaded not to make public the statement.
In Europe there was growing apprehension that the United
States would not come into the League. One of the most prominent Europeans was fearful that this might come to pass and wrote a letter to the London Times saying the reservations attached to American entry would not mean much one way or the other, that they were relatively innocuous and really not terribly objectionable. The writer of the letter was Lord Grey and he ended it by saying the important thing was for the United States to come in on whatever terms were necessary. Only let the Americans come in! When word of the letter reached America the First Lady went to the President’s room and came out with a cold statement she had written in her childish scrawl upon blue-lined notebook paper: “Had Lord Grey ventured upon any such utterance when he was still at Washington as Ambassador, his Government would have been promptly asked to withdraw him.”
February began. It had been four months since the President fell in the bathroom, and in that time the Cabinet continued to meet on a regular basis. As ranking minister, Secretary of State Lansing each week issued a call for the meeting, and after each one the newspapers duly reported what subjects had been discussed. Two Secretaries had resigned and been replaced by men asked to take the vacant posts by the First Lady,* and so each department had its head who offered his opinion at the meetings. Now and then Grayson or Tumulty sat in, the latter often pointing to the conferences as indicative that the business of the country was going on smoothly. More than a score of the Cabinet meetings had been held when on February 7 Lansing received a signed letter from the President:
“My dear Mr. Secretary: Is it true, as I have been told, that during my illness, you have frequently called the heads of the executive departments of the government into conference?”
One can imagine Lansing’s astonishment at being asked such a question. He replied, “It is true.… Shortly after you were taken ill in October, certain members of the Cabinet, of which I was one, felt that in view of the fact that we were denied communication with you, it was wise for us to confer informally together.” The President wrote back, “I am very much disappointed by your letter … I find nothing in your letter which justifies your assumption of Presidential authority in such a matter … I must say that it would relieve me of embarrassment, Mr. Secretary, if you would give your present office up.” Lansing at once sent in his resignation, saying, however, that he could not permit to “pass unchallenged the imputation” that he sought to “usurp” Presidential authority and that he still felt the conferences were in the best interests of the Administration and the country. The President answered that the resignation was accepted.
Lansing then released the exchange of letters to the newspapers and at once a storm of criticism of the President poured forth. The President had not forgotten Lansing’s doubts about the League and Lansing’s questioning of whether Vice President Marshall should not take over the White House, but nothing of this was said in the letters. Instead the President had asked if it was true, “as I have been told,” that something known to all the world was taking place a few hundred feet from his sickroom. The New York Evening Post said the question was incredible: “We have been repeatedly assured by those surrounding the President during his illness that Mr. Wilson at all times has been in perfect mental condition and in touch with what was going on in the land. If this is so, is it at all conceivable that Mr. Wilson never stopped to inquire how the business of the country was being carried on during his illness? Was he ignorant of Cabinet meetings at which coal strikes and Mexican complications were discussed? The indignation at a sudden discovery implied in Mr. Wilson’s letter is incomprehensible.”
Other papers said that if the country had been lied to about how the President was keeping in touch with things, as evidently it had, how could the country trust those who now said the President was in full possession of his mental faculties? “It is unthinkable that a sane man would offer any objection to the department heads getting together,” said the Worcester Evening Gazette. The President was, said the New York Tribune, like the Sleeping Princess, “alive, yet of suspended animation” and desiring “all around him likewise frozen into lifelessness.” Why did he not demand that Congress cease operating also, so as to have a complete shutdown? WILSON’S LAST MAD ACT, headlined the Los Angeles Times.
The men up on Capitol Hill had their opinions to add. Senator George Norris of Nebraska told reporters the letters showed two things: “First, the President was incapacitated and it was necessary for someone to look after the Government; second, that the mental expert that has been employed at the White House has been discharged too soon.”* Representative George Holden Tinkham of Massachusetts was even blunter: “Whom the Gods would destroy they first make mad.” The Baltimore Sun voiced what many Senators and Representatives were thinking: “They ask in stage whispers at the Capitol whether this is not the work of the enigmatical villain of the play, the dark and mysterious Mr. Tumulty, or, more sinister still, must we look for the woman in the case?”
Actually Tumulty desperately fought against the firing of Lansing, but the President told him “disloyalty” must be “spiked.” The First Lady’s reaction was different. “I hate Lansing,” she said, her bitterness shocking to Secretary Daniels, who found equally frightening her violent anger at Franklin Roosevelt because of his Christmas spent with Lord Grey. Daniels was baffled; all of the President’s friends were baffled. The wife of Charles Sumner Hamlin of the Federal Reserve Board asked Secretary Houston’s wife how it could have come about that the President would do such a thing, and Mrs. Houston said, “There is only one explanation—he is not in his right mind.” The journalist Raymond Clapper, before noting in his diary that he and his wife had both had wisdom teeth removed, wrote of what he had heard the day the letters were printed in the papers: “Many believe he is on the verge of insanity. No one can understand it.” Even the friendly New York World the next day reinforced this impression of its description of how, when Tumulty appeared bearing newspapers with “glaring headlines” about the firing, the President “with the glee of a boy reached out his cane, grasped a railing, and swung his wheel chair in circles, at the same time admonishing Mr. Tumulty to ‘see how strong I am!’”
As Tumulty remembered it later, the President said that the whole thing would blow over and nothing would be recalled save the “disloyalty” of Lansing. But the World was right in thinking the President was growing stronger, for within a short time, on a warm day in March, Grayson judged the patient capable of withstanding the strain of an auto ride. A platform was put up at the south entrance of the White House so that the wheel chair could be rolled to a position level with the waiting car, and three or four Secret Service men lifted the President to his feet and held him in their arms and put him into the car’s rear right-hand corner—the right side in order that the paralyzed left side of his face would not show to the people in the street—and braced him up so that he might not topple to the floor when the car started, and adjusted his cape (he could not wear a coat; it was too difficult to get the inert left arm into a sleeve) and set his hat square on his head. And so he was driven through Washington, his face devoid of all color, grayish white, thin, waxlike, a bright-eyed old man trying to smile, the lips revealing the teeth only on the right side, the eyes protuberant, a thin face on a thin neck ducked down so as to hide the paralyzed side.
There was to him something cruel and terrifying in the faces of the people who looked at him as the car went by; they did not cheer, but stared as if to see if it was all true what they had heard: that the car held a madman. When they came back to the White House policemen were waiting, and when the car pulled up to a remote rear gate all traffic was halted and they drove quickly into the grounds. As they went in, a small group of people by the gate threw into the thin March sunshine a faint cheer. They were backstairs White House workers whose faces the President would not know, and friends and relatives of Secret Service men, and they had been recruited just for this reason: so that on his ride there might be for him one bit of applause. When the car stopped and the men wen
t to lift him out and carry him to the wheel chair there were tears in his eyes and he was saying, “You see, they still love me.” The First Lady left him for a moment and went to stand by herself so that he would not see that she wept.
But he was strange on the succeeding drives. He got it into his mind that any car that passed his own was going dangerously fast, although at his orders the chauffeur rarely went faster than fifteen or twenty miles an hour. Whenever a car went by he would order that the Secret Service vehicle overtake it and bring back the driver for questioning. Miserably trying to give him the impression that his instructions were perfectly logical, the Secret Service car would chase after the offending auto, always to return with the excuse that the speeder was going too fast to be overhauled. He brooded over this and wrote to Attorney General Palmer asking if the Presidency carried with it the powers of a justice of the peace; if it did, he told his people, he was going to make sure the speeders were caught and himself try their cases there by the roadside. (The Secret Service men desperately killed the plan by saying to him that the idea was beneath his dignity.)
Even the First Lady fell afoul of him when she arranged for him to go on a ride in a Secret Service Cadillac when his own favorite Pierce-Arrow was sent to a garage for repair work. He said he would not have it that he not be consulted on the matter and declared he would not ride in the Secret Service car. Instead he would use a horse-drawn carriage until his own car was ready for use. He was the President and those were his orders, so he went forth in an open victoria. The offending Cadillac idled along behind him, out of sight but ready at hand if it should be needed.