When the Cheering Stopped

by Smith, Gene;

  They got up to go, Cox saying to Tumulty that seeing the President as now he was had touched him more deeply than any other experience of his life. They drove away. They left behind a man working at trying to walk and succeeding to the extent that soon, on the arm of an attendant, he would be able to make his slow and painful way to the library, where each night in a dinner jacket he dined alone with the First Lady. The room had rose hangings and upholstery and small colored vases with a single different-color rose in each, and the two sat there alone, he using only his right hand, an almost noiseless figure eating his food so slowly and quietly in the hot summer evening.

  * With what success is another question. Joseph C. Grew found his work as Minister to Denmark difficult because of the State Department’s lack of interest in what he was doing and the paucity of orders about what he should do. All questions and appeals to Washington were left unanswered. “The only constructive criticism I received was: ‘Don’t send in too much stuff.’”

  11

  There were old canal streams in the countryside only fifteen miles out of Washington, and honeysuckle and scattered pines. Along the Conduit Road running toward Great Falls there were reservoirs and hills thick with trees. Rural Virginia was beautiful in the summer, and along the roads country children waited for his slow-moving car; when it came into sight they ran up flags and yelled. One curly-headed little boy, hardly more than a toddler, always had the same greeting: a tiny hand held up in salute and a piping “Hi, Wilson!” For long hours that summer he was driven in the solitary hills and along the Potomac, and always in almost complete silence. He rarely spoke; he was almost totally mute. He did not display interest in the campaign being fought to determine whether Cox or Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio was to be his successor, and when Tumulty suggested he make some effort to aid Cox, he replied that he would do it in his own time and in his own way. He ended by letting months go by before he did anything at all.

  But who he was and what he was dominated the forthcoming election. “The issue which the American people are going to vote upon,” said ex-President Taft, “no matter what Mr. Cox wishes, Mr. Wilson wishes, Mr. Lodge wishes, or Mr. Harding wishes, is whether they approve the Administration of Mr. Wilson.” Harding expressed it perfectly, had it just right, when he said that what the United States wanted was no more parades, no heroics—“return to ‘normalcy.’”*

  It was obvious to all the world that the Republicans were going to win this election, that the country was going to throw out the Democrats with their taxes and war and crusading for the world’s good, but the President could not see that this was so. Secretary Daniels remarked that “of course” Cox had no chance, and the President incredulously asked, “Do you mean it is possible that the American people would elect Harding?” “It is not only possible,” Daniels said, “but they are going to do it.” The President flared out, “Daniels, you haven’t enough faith in the people!” Postmaster General Burleson ventured to predict that Cox would take the worst beating in years, and the President cried, “Burleson, shut up! You are a pessimist!” Stockton Axson, Ellen’s brother, tried to raise the subject of possible defeat several times, but the President would not listen. “You don’t understand the American people,” he said, a sick old man intoning through white lips that it was out of the question that the nation would turn down the candidate who stood for the League of Nations, for the Right, for Truth.

  Axson told Grayson he was worried about the effect of defeat upon the President and that something should be done to ready him for the shock that seemed to be coming. But no one could change the President’s opinion that his country would opt for the League. In another summer, that of 1919, presenting the League to the Senate of the United States, he said it had come about “by no plan of our conceiving but by the hand of God who has led us into this way.” He had said, “We cannot turn back. We can only go forward, with lifted eyes and freshened spirit, to follow the vision. It was of this that we dreamed at our birth. America shall in truth show the way.” It was still true in his mind and in his soul where down beneath the pain and helplessness there lived utter faith, belief, devotion. “I am sure,” he said to Tumulty, “that the hearts of the people are right on this great issue and that we can confidently look forward to triumph.”

  All through those hot months of 1920’s summer, he continued to say that victory was certain. That vindicating triumph became the raft to which he clung—Cox would be his monument—but he ignored all appeals to do something to help the candidate until October came. On the twenty-seventh day of that month, with Election Day a week off, he received a handful of pro-League Republicans in the Green Room. He sat hunched over in his wheel chair under a portrait of Abraham Lincoln and did not rise when they came in. “I must apologize for receiving you like this,” he said. “It is unavoidable and I guess you all understand.”

  They remained standing grouped about him as he began to read a statement. Although they numbered little more than a dozen persons, the tone of his remarks was that of an address made to a great multitude. “My fellow countrymen: it is to be feared that the supreme issue presented for your consideration in the present campaign is growing more obscure rather than clearer …” His voice began strong with each paragraph of this his first speech, his first public appearance, since Pueblo, but it gradually grew weaker, particularly if the paragraph was long, until at the end he would be whispering. Mrs. Schuyler N. Warren of New York saw tears in the eyes of many of the listening men and herself felt crushed and broken to see the President as he was, converted in her eyes from the comparatively young person she had seen some time before into an old, old man. She thought to herself that he in his chair was tragic and glorious—it was tragic that he suffered so; glorious that America had produced such a man.

  “… The nation was never called upon to make a more solemn determination than it must now make. The whole future moral force of Right in the world depends upon the United States.” His whispering voice, like that of a man praying to himself, lent the air of a religious ceremony to the scene. It did not seem he would be able to finish and the Reverend Arthur J. Brown thought to himself that this was in the nature of a farewell address, that before them was a dying man speaking his last wishes.

  “… I suggest that the candidacy of every candidate for whatever office be tested by this question: Shall we or shall we not redeem the great moral obligations of the United States?” He had finished. Haggard, breathing with difficulty, eyes closed, trembling, he was wheeled away. Once upon a time when he spoke he leaned forward with eyes narrowed and muscles taut, his fingers closed into a tight fist, and reminded those who saw him of a man about to begin a race.

  On November 2 there was a Cabinet meeting. One of the men said he was apprehensive about Cox’s chances, but the President interrupted. “You need not worry,” he said. “The American people will not turn Cox down and elect Harding. A great moral issue is involved. The people can and will see it.” Harding that day scored the most one-sided electoral triumph since the election of James Monroe just one hundred years before. He carried every state in the Union save those of the former Confederacy. “We have torn up Wilsonism by the roots,” exulted Senator Henry Cabot Lodge.

  During that day, Election Day, as the people went to the polls, the President labored to climb a series of two or three steps Grayson had constructed for him, but he simply could not lift his left leg. In the early evening Tumulty tried to find a few bright reports in the election picture, but there were none to be found. The President had planned to stay up two hours past his nine o’clock bedtime in order to hear the results, but by nine it was clear that Cox was to lose, and so he went to sleep.

  In the morning when he awoke the scope of the debacle was clear and also the meaning of that debacle. When the Senate turned down the League it had been in the President’s eyes the work of politicians, of the Lodges and Falls—of the Warren G. Hardings. Now it was the people, the people, the people themselves. They
had turned on him and he was alone. He made no public comments, issued no statements, but, hurt and bewildered, sank into a terrible isolation from his country and its mood and even perhaps its ultimate meaning. Once he had thought there was an almost magical relationship between himself and the American people he believed the most generous, the best, the most idealistic of all the world, and that in that relationship it had been given to him to speak the deepest thoughts of that people. He had known that people. They were his; he theirs. Now they had thrown him out. He was alone. Or almost alone. The Secret Service man Edmund Starling came to him with a message from a friend of Starling’s whom the President had met a few times: “Mr. Barker wants you to know that he is still with you and he will follow you anywhere you want to go.” The President turned away to try to hide his quick tears, and blinked them back and looked at Starling and said, “Tell Barker I thank him, but there is nowhere now to go.”

  For what was Barker’s support when the electoral vote was 404 to 127? Those close to him tried to help—but it was useless. Nothing could help. They tried. Nellie wrote: “Darling, darling Father—I just want to send a line to tell you that I know this is not a repudiation of the League.… Nothing can destroy what you have done—nothing in the whole wide world. I love you so much and I want so much to see you—can I go down soon, darling? With all my love to you both, Your adoring daughter.” Jessie wrote: “On election night when I couldn’t sleep I picked up a life of Joan of Arc and read it through. It comforted me just a little because though they burned her, and her life seemed stultified and frittered away by intrigues and politicians, it went on inevitably for she had made it alive. With a heart overflowing with love, Your adoring daughter.” Secretary Colby: “You have spoken the truth. You have battled for it. You have suffered for it. Your crown will be one of glory, and the heathen who have imagined vain things will some day creep penitently to touch the hem of your garments.” Alfred S. Niles of Baltimore: “My dear Wilson: It is impossible for me, as your classmate of ’79, to refrain from telling you that some of us (including myself) are now, in the time of the apparent defeat of the principles for which you have stood, more proud than ever of you and your record.”

  A few days later when he went driving with George Creel along as passenger, he shrank back from a handful of sightseers standing by the White House gate, ducking like a man avoiding a blow. “Why, what is the matter, Mr. President?” asked Creel. “Didn’t you see them?” whispered the President. “Of course, sir. But what about it? I saw only respect and devotion.” “No. Just curiosity.”

  One day Ray Stannard Baker was invited for lunch, and the First Lady suggested he come early so as to see the morning’s film. Baker came and waited in a parlor where the servants lifted and put aside a heavy red rug so that the President might walk with greater ease upon the bare floor. He came shuffling along slowly, heavily, his left arm hanging straight down. Very few people had seen him walk at that time, and it was a terrible shock to Baker to see the leaden steps in place of the alert and active movements of former days. Baker felt a surge of intense compassion, but it gave way to admiration when he saw the President’s determination to persevere shine from the gleaming eyes. The handshake was a mustered-up show of strength. Baker thought to himself, The will is unconquerable; the life untamable. They went slowly down the hall into the East Room empty of all save for a few chairs grouped in the middle. The room was unlighted and their steps echoed. They took seats, Baker, the President, the First Lady, a niece of hers, Grayson. The projector clicked and sputtered and the film began. They were having a pre-release showing of a film on the President’s visit to Europe. By magic, Baker remembered later, “we were in another world; a resplendent world, full of wonderful and glorious events. There we were, sailing grandly into the harbor at Brest, the ships beflagged, the soldiers marshalled upon the quay, and planes skimming through the air. There was the President himself, smiling upon the bridge, very erect, very tall, lifting his hat to shouting crowds.

  “By magic we were transported to Paris. There he was again, this time with the President of France, driving down the most famous avenue in the world, bowing right and left. In the distance we saw the Arc de Triomphe, symbol too of this latest triumph, and caught a glimpse of the great Napoleon guarding its dimmed glory.”

  The President bent forward, looking at 1918 in the great empty East Room in 1920. He was absolutely silent. The film showed the trip to England, the warships in the Channel, London. “Were there ever such marching regiments of men, such bowing dignitaries, so many lords and their ladies! And there was the President, riding behind magnificent horses with outriders flying pennants, and people shouting in the streets, coming down from Buckingham Palace with the King of England.” It was over. “It was only a film. All that glory had faded away with a click and a sputter.” They sat for a moment in the dark room and Baker looked over at a stooped, seated figure: the President, immobile. Someone came out of the darkness and put a foot against the President’s foot so that he might not slip as he rose from the chair, and he got up and turned slowly and shuffled out of the room without looking aside and without speaking. In later years Baker found his memory of that moment to be an intolerable thing.

  He would have four more months as President, and he tried to pull himself together to get them done with. Writing a Thanksgiving Day proclamation with the result of the election fresh in his mind was too much for him and he asked Colby to do it—“though I have no resentment in my heart.” He worked to walk and began to take meals regularly downstairs and to receive frequent visitors. But they saw a timidity in him, an apologetic cast to the slipping smile, the request to be excused from rising, the very manner of speaking: “You will pardon me if I put on my hat. I like to keep my hat on.” Sewing by his side or with her hand on his, a quick “my darling” for him upon her lips, the First Lady seemed to offer a contrasting cheeriness mixed with an attitude that made visitors feel she was now the captain of their destiny, hers and her husband’s. Stockton Axson, Ellen’s brother, thought to himself it was well that this First Lady, and not the preceding one, was there to meet the crisis—this one was a far better warrior.

  Almost every morning now the First Lady went house-hunting in the District or in Virginia. They had decided to live in the Washington area after long discussions of possible other sites, and had made up a chart listing the ratings of five cities according to Climate, Friends, Opportunities, Amusements, Libraries and Freedom. (New York got the highest rating in Climate and Amusements, tying with Boston and Baltimore in Opportunities; Richmond and Baltimore tied in Friends; and although Washington got the lowest score for Freedom, the Library of Congress and the fact that it was the First Lady’s real home carried the day.) Their finances, merged when they married, totaled something like $250,000, and they felt he would be able to make money by writing books and articles. In fact he began the book on government which for decades he had said he was going to write. He did so by typing with his one good hand the first page:

  A Dedication.

  To

  E. B. W.

  I dedicate this book because it is a book in which I have tried to interpret life,’ the life of a nation, and she has shown me the full meaning of life. Her heart is not only true but wise; her thoughts are not only free but touched with vision; she teaches and guides by being what she is; her unconscious interpretation of faith and duty makes all the way clear; her power to comprehend makes work and thought alike easier and more near to what it seeks.

  It was the first and the last page.

  The cold weather came and in December he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the American Minister to Norway representing him at the ceremonies. In December, President-elect Harding came to Washington and the First Lady sent a note to Mrs. Harding asking her to call. Mrs. Harding wrote back on the stationery of Mrs. Evalyn Walsh McLean—she of Hope Diamond fame—accepting the invitation and asking if Mrs. McLean might not accompany her. The First Lady answered th
at as the Washington Post, owned by Mrs. McLean’s husband, had opposed the President, Mrs. McLean would not be welcome. On her husband’s United States Senate stationery Mrs. Harding wrote that she would come alone. She wore a dark dress and a hat with blue feathers and a black mesh veil fastened tightly over her face. (The First Lady noted, however, that her successor-to-be wore rouge upon her cheeks.) The First Lady also found her too nervously talkative, too pushy, too effusive. But it was not likely she would approve of any woman whose husband had so decisively destroyed the hope of a happy end to her own husband’s work.

  They took tea together alone and after half an hour the First Lady managed to “stem the torrent of words” (so she put it) in order to introduce Mrs. Jaffray, the housekeeper, who would show Mrs. Harding the White House, every room save for one in which the President was resting. Mrs. Harding put on a pair of eyeglasses over the mesh veil, did not shake hands with Mrs. Jaffray, and went off with her for the tour. The First Lady said good-by and went out on an errand, returning some hours later. She found Mrs. Harding still there, down in the kitchen talking with the cook. It was not until after eight o’clock that she finally left.

  At Christmas they held a little family dinner party and got together small gifts for the children along the country roads. They at first considered building a home, and the President spent much time looking through architectural magazines, but as time grew short they gave up the idea and sought an already-constructed one. They looked very seriously at a house near Alexandria and at one in Massachusetts Avenue Park, and at one situated upon twenty-six wooded acres through which a quiet stream ran, but the plans for purchase did not work out. One morning she went to see two possible places in S Street—one of them would shortly be purchased by Herbert Hoover—but neither met their needs. She was about to leave S Street, which in Washington in 1920 was the point at which country began to take over from city, when the agent with her asked if she would not look at a third house on the block, Number 2340. She did so and decided the house was perfect. She returned to the White House and told the President that she thought this was the place. That afternoon she went to a concert by the touring New York Philharmonic and when she returned he was in the Oval Room with the deed to the house in his hand.* The President had not seen the house at all, but the next day they went to it together. At the door the President’s valet, at his instruction, dug out a small piece of sod and with a key to the door gave the earth to the First Lady; it was an old Scottish custom.