by Smith, Gene;
They went out, he trying to stand as straight as possible. The policemen looked to the photographers as he was all but picked up and bodily lifted into the car. He took off his high hat and held it in his gloved hand until the President-elect had walked around the car and gotten in and seated himself; then the hat went back on his head. Harding sat by him; Senator Philander C. Knox and Representative “Uncle Joe” Cannon of the Congressional Committee sat on the open limousine’s jump seats. Behind them in the next car, Mrs. Harding was waving to the reporters. “My boys!” she said to the First Lady, whose once-dark hair had in the months of sickness and ruin developed gray streaks, and whose skin had an unhealthy pallor and whose very flesh seemed to sag on her chin and neck.
They got under way and went out of the White House grounds and into Pennsylvania Avenue to the bands and the troopers with white gloves holding aloft red-and-white guidons; to the cavalry horses, the soldiers in puttees; to soup-bowl helmets, pounding drums, sounding bugles, the sailors, the Legionnaires. Down the Avenue on the other side of the Capitol the American flag, at half staff for the death of Representative Champ Clark two days before, went up to the top of the staff and a transmitter played music above the sounds of the bands tuning up. In front of the Capitol a heavy Negro with a broom came along and swept the spot where Harding would be as he delivered his inaugural address, and youthful pages from the Congress hung wreaths along the front of the stand. Disabled soldiers in wheel chairs sat in the front lines. A flutter of excitement went through the massed thousands at the word that they were coming.
In the car the men in their top hats sat in silence as the first cheers of the people lining the street came rolling to them. Harding took off his hat and waved and smiled his handsome smile, but the President’s hat remained on and he looked straight ahead. They were moving very slowly, no faster than the troops marched, and the Secret Service man Starling could hear the comments of the people on the curb: “Doesn’t the new President look fine and healthy? Poor President Wilson—this will kill him!”
Between waves and smiles Harding began a discussion of White House pets, mentioning his Airedale, Laddie Boy. He went on to remark that he had always wanted to own an elephant and the President said, “I hope it won’t turn out to be a white elephant!” Harding smiled his big and generous politician’s smile and, grateful for finding a subject of conversation, launched into discussing an experience of his sister, a former missionary in the Orient, who knew of a dying elephant that moaned piteously for his native keeper. When the keeper came the elephant wound his trunk around the man and pressed and hugged him and so peacefully passed away, happy that his friend was with him. When Harding finished the story he looked over at the President and saw to his horror that the President was crying, great tears rolling down his face. They were approaching the Capitol and in a moment the car would be halted and people would be gathering around, and Harding wondered if he ought to wipe away the President’s tears. He was actually still in doubt when the President got hold of himself and took out a handkerchief and did the job himself.
They stopped in front of the Capitol. It had been arranged for the President to enter the building through a little-used freight entrance in the Senate wing; Harding got out and vigorously walked up the steps, waving his hat. The car drove the short space to the door the President would use and there it stopped. While cavalry mounts screened him off, the President was lifted out of the car. Without assistance, head bent down, cane tapping, he went in and took an elevator up to the President’s Room. Senators, Cabinet members and friends stood waiting for him there. They gathered around him and took off his coat. Slipping his right arm out of the sleeve, he was for a moment deprived of the support of the cane which he had hooked into an upper pocket of the coat, and former Mayor John Fitzgerald of Boston* held him and steadied him. The President limply sat down at a desk and for a moment fidgeted with his hands and looked aimlessly about before setting out to sign the last bills of the Congress which would in a few minutes be adjourning. The first measure he signed authorized more money for hospitalization facilities for wounded soldiers.
Every now and then he interrupted his work to greet people who came in to shake his hand. “Excuse me, General, for not rising,” he said to Pershing. He signed bills relating to appropriations for fortifications, water power, agricultural needs. Senator Knox stepped in and asked if he would come into the Senate Chamber to see the swearing-in of Vice-President-elect Coolidge. Referring to the three stone steps leading to the Chamber, the President said that perhaps he had better not do it: “The Senate has thrown me down, but I don’t want to fall down.”
Colby, Burleson, Baker, Daniels, the others—all stood by and there was quiet chatter in the room, each man wishing him luck, he saying “Thank you” and calling each man by name. He said, “Well, I think I had better scoot now,” but at that moment a complete hush fell upon the room. Someone touched him on the arm to indicate that the committee from both Houses of Congress had arrived to ask permission to adjourn. “This committee begs to inform you that the two Houses have completed their work and are prepared to receive any further communications from you,” said a sharp, dry voice, that of the head of the committee.
The voice was that of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge.
For a moment Joe Tumulty thought the President was going to say something violent, something terrible, but the President’s face appeared to be about to fall into a bitter lopsided smile and then it froze and he said, “I have no further communication. I would be glad if you would inform both Houses and thank them for their courtesy.” He turned his head and looked off into thin air. “Good morning, sir.” Senator Lodge silently bowed and went out.
The people in the room started moving out to the stand where Harding would soon be making his inaugural address. Harding himself came in and bent over the seated President in a kindly way—for he was, above all things, a kindly man—and said that he would in no way regard it as a discourtesy if the President did not come out, that the President must do nothing to tax his strength. “I guess I had better not try it,” the President said. “I’m afraid I shall have to beg off.” Harding said he thoroughly understood. “All the luck in the world,” the President said, and Harding went out.
The Capitol clocks were being put back so that, officially, it was not yet twelve noon, but in the President’s Room a big clock in the corner started to toll out the hour. Joe Tumulty counted under his breath, One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. The clock fell silent. The man at the desk reached for his throat and took off a scarf pin with the Seal of the President of the United States on it. It was made from the same gold nugget which the State of California had given him and his bride upon the occasion of their marriage in 1915. From the nugget also came their wedding rings. Outside, faintly, there was heard the sound of the U.S. Marine Band playing “Hail to the Chief” for Harding. There were very few people in the President’s Room now, only a handful. He got up on his feet and struggled into his coat and went to the elevator, the stick tapping on the flagstone, the few people in the hall who saw him murmuring at the slow, slow pace.
He emerged from the building to where the car was, head bent down but eyes up, trying to smile into the sunshine, and more feeble, weaker, than he had been when he got out of the car, he stood before it while Starling got in first and pulled him up into it. Very few people saw him; everyone was watching Warren Harding begin his inaugural speech. The car went about three lengths before it was noticed at all, and then a feeble cheer rose in its wake. Chauffeur Francis Robinson drove down Pennsylvania Avenue, which on this day was as empty and deserted as it would be on a Sunday morning. There was no escort for him who had known escorts for eight years of his life. They drove in absolute silence, he and his wife, Grayson, Tumulty, Starling, the valet Arthur Brooks. Grayson wondered if he was thinking of the crowds and the noise and glamour of his ride with Harding to the Capitol, or of the roaring mobs in Paris,
London and Rome, of the banners HAIL THE CRUSADER FOR HUMANITY, WELCOME TO THE GOD OF PEACE. They went into Jackson Place and for a moment the wife turned her head and looked back at the White House. Her husband looked away, off at Lafayette Park and the statue there.
They went up New Hampshire Avenue, into Massachusetts Avenue, and to S Street. To their surprise there were people gathered before the house, and they burst into applause for him. He was taken out of the car, put into the waiting wheel chair, wheeled into his home. Edmund Starling and the valet and the chauffeur saw him to the elevator and he thanked them for their services. Starling turned to go to the car and saw the wife and she shook his hand. Margaret came up to Starling, weeping, and put her young arms around him, and her lips sought his cheek. Starling got into the car and sat in front with the chauffeur and they went back to the Capitol and parked at the head of the procession, waiting upon the man speaking from the stand on the Capitol steps.
In S Street, Joe Tumulty told several White House reporters that they might come in and greet the man whose activities they had covered. They came in and took his hand as he stood, absolutely mute, at the head of the stairs of his home. He did not say one word. They went out, and the people in the street raised a cheer for the house’s occupant. He came to a window of the second-floor drawing room and waved his good hand. They wanted him to speak to them, but he pointed to his throat as if to say that he was too choked up to get the words out. He stepped back behind a curtain, but the cheers—perhaps two thousand voices cried for him—drew him back, and once again he mutely pointed to his throat.
Secretary Daniels came in his car and had to get out a block from the house. The car could not possibly get through the people. Daniels walked up to the door and it opened for him and some others—Carter Glass, Cordell Hull, James F. Byrnes—and they went in to talk with him for a few minutes. As they spoke, wishing him well and admiring the flowers which people had sent, some women outside began to sing, “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Once more he went to the window. Then lunch was served. When it was over, Cary Grayson began to say that he thought it would be best if his patient went to bed now, but the doctor got out only two words before he was interrupted: “Mr. President—” “Just Woodrow Wilson.”
* The First Lady took the word as a personal insult to herself, saying that she had done her best to keep things normal.
* The purchase price was in the vicinity of $150,000, an extremely large sum by 1920 standards. The President was aided in the purchase by ten friends who contributed $10,000 each to assure him a proper residence. One of the ten, Bernard Baruch, seeking to insure privacy for him, also bought the lot next door and allowed Nature to have her way with it, which resulted in an attractive woods-like setting.
* Whose daughter Rose Kennedy had four years earlier given birth to a boy named for her father.
PART THREE
S Street
That we shall prevail
12
First there were the Presbyterian manses in the South and Tommy and then school and Thomas W. Wilson, T. W. Wilson and, finally, Woodrow Wilson, and then there was Attorney-at-Law and Dr. and Professor Wilson, and Governor, and at the end Mr. President. With it all went the small houses and the little girls growing up, and Prospect, the home of the president of Princeton University, and the White House.
Now came S Street.
There had been 1912 and his election, and 1916 and his election—he thinking the day after that he had been defeated, Margaret coming to the door of his bathroom and calling in that the New York Times said the result was in doubt, he yelling back, “Tell it to the Marines!”—and then came the war and the Armistice. He went to Europe, and in Europe they hailed him as a god and he took off his hat to the crowds, waved to the crowds, ended by throwing kisses to the crowds. When he came back New York’s streets were filled with people waiting for him and Margaret threw her arms around him and cried, “Oh, darling, wasn’t it wonderful? All those thousands of people crying, waving their hats in the air, yelling—all for you! There never was such a triumph, such a homecoming!” And he looked at her and said—and she would never forget the look on his face—he said, “Wait until they turn.”
And they did turn—the Senate, the People. The Senate wanted a part in determining what the peace would be about, and the League, but he upon his sickbed would not, could not, compromise. The People wanted cars, money, liquor from the bootlegger, higher skirt lines, forgetfulness from glory and the marching men and the war to end war. The League went down because he could not meet the Senate’s terms; Democratic candidate Cox went down because the People were tired, sick and tired, of their President.
Now came S Street. In S Street’s dining room his servant Isaac Scott held him up on his feet, and his lips moved and almost soundlessly he said grace. In S Street’s bedroom he lay upon a duplicate of the Lincoln bed of the White House. Above him hung a large picture of the American flag. An old mahogany desk from Princeton days was in the corner with a secret drawer made to look like a book, The Life of Washington. On the mantel above the fireplace was a tarnished brass shell casing that once held the first shell fired by the American artillery against the enemy in 1917. There was a Hobart Nichols painting of a wood cutter working by a snow-covered road in the forest, a thermometer, pictures of the girls and the grandchildren, a vase of coconut trimmed with silver. He did not like the dark and so he rarely spent the night without having at least one light turned on, and on a little stand by his bed was an electric spotlight. He could play it on the mantel’s clock; with it he could hold off the dark. His old worn Bible was with him and each day he read from it—the Old Testament, the Psalms, the Book of Job.
In S Street’s library was a giant old oak table brought down from Princeton; in S Street’s library were pictures: the President of the United States and Mrs. Woodrow Wilson standing with the King and Queen of England. In the drawing room there hung upon one wall the Gobelin tapestry that had been the gift of the French people in 1918 to the First Lady of America. It was so large that its bottom half was rolled up and lying on the floor. In the garage was a Pierce-Arrow berline, once the favorite car of the President of the United States, which now, purchased from the government and with the President’s Seal painted over, served every afternoon to take S Street’s owner for a drive. A tiny Princeton tiger sat on the car’s radiator.
His routine was this: He ate breakfast in his bedroom with his wife, or in the second-floor solarium between the library and dining room. Both bedroom and solarium faced south and on sunny days were lighted and alive with the sounds of the garden birds. Over the trees could be seen the tip of the Washington Monument. When breakfast was over he went in robe and slippers to the Otis electric push-button elevator and down to the first floor, where in one of the rooms facing the street John Randolph Bolling, his brother-in-law and his secretary, told him of the day’s mail and received instructions on how the letters were to be answered. He took a walk back and forth across the hall and went upstairs and slowly shaved himself with his good hand. Lunch was usually taken in his room and sometimes there would be a guest to sit with him while he ate. But often he was alone with Edith, she literally feeding him although she could have just as well left that work to Scott. After he ate she went below to the dining room and took her own lunch while he slept. In the afternoon there might be a guest if there had not been one for lunch—Grayson said there must be only one guest a day, and the visit must not exceed half an hour—and then he went for the ride. Dinner was generally off a tray by the library fire, he again in gown and slippers with his wife reading to him. Sometimes after he finished they would have a film, using a windowshade-like roller for the screen. By nine it was time for his male nurse to give him a massage and then he got into bed. She sat with him, the two of them playing Canfield, or she reading aloud, until he slept.
She was with him, in fact, at all times, her few social engagements or errands rigorously limited to the hour or so he spent with John Ra
ndolph Bolling and the mail. When she had guests in for dinner it was understood that she must leave as soon as she finished in order to go upstairs and read to him or simply be with him until he felt ready to sleep. Then she would rejoin the guests for cards or billiards. There was no housekeeper. She ran the house herself. She seemed to those who saw her to be happy and younger-looking than she had been in the White House. Never had she seemed so beautiful, and often as she walked around the house she whistled like a boy. Ray Stannard Baker came for lunch one day and the invalid looked up at his wife and then at Baker and said, “You see how well I am cared for!” She smiled and patted her husband on the head.
They had not been in S Street one day when a flood of mail began. Some of the letters were from friends such as Cleveland Dodge, a classmate of the Class of ’79, who wrote that now for the first time in eight years he would not begin with “My dear Mr. President” but would go back to “My dear Woodrow”—and it felt “rather funny.” Others were in the uncertain writing of very old persons and the salutation would be “My dear Tommy.” (But there were not many left who called him that.) There were also, of course, the hate letters: “Hello, you syphilitic old son of a bitch … To the Valet of His Britannic Majesty, Dear Judas: The Lord has stricken you for your wickedness.…” But mostly the letters were from people who wanted something. A man wrote saying his father had disappeared when he was a boy. Could Mr. Wilson help him find his father? Bolling, new then to his job, wrote back saying Mr. Wilson knew of no way to aid the man’s search. (Later such letters would be faithfully filed away but not answered.) Old students of decades in the past would want job references. (They would not get them.) People offered country homes for sale. (There was not to be any purchase.) A man wanted an introduction to the President of Czechoslovakia. (He must go elsewhere for it.) A home economics expert compiling a list of favorite recipes of great men asked about Mr. Wilson’s favorite food. (“Mr. Wilson directs me to say that as he doesn’t know of any recipe which he regards as his favorite, he is unable to comply with the suggestion contained in your letter of yesterday. Yours very truly, John Randolph Bolling, Secretary.”) Would Mr. Wilson receive this high school civics class, Boy Scout troop, women’s group, visiting South American delegation, these friends of that Senator? (“Mr. Wilson regrets that the state of his health and the circumstances surrounding his convalescence at present make it unwise for him to see large groups of people.”) Then the business suggestions—requests that he write book reviews, prefaces, forewords, a history of the peace negotiations in Paris (for a fee of $150,000), a newspaper column, a series of monthly articles for the Ladies’ Home Journal ($5,000 per article), a life of Jesus Christ. Would he be interested in a series of speaking engagements? Always the answer was that Mr. Wilson was not engaging in any such work at the present time.*