When the Cheering Stopped

by Smith, Gene;

  Still The Document’s fire lighted and warmed him and when he talked about it something rose in him and he put his curse upon his enemies and said that soon, soon, when he was cured, he would smite them and smite them well: “I’m going to get some scalps!”

  Visitors who would not disturb this picture were allowed to come, encouraged to come. Sometimes they found him in fine fettle, as he put it, alert and anxious to hear their news, but sometimes they found him blankly looking out into the garden and deep in depression. Ex-Secretary Daniels came one hot day and found him in bed and feeling very low. Edith sat with the two men, and Daniels tried to find something cheery of which to speak. He said, “Mrs. Wilson, did I ever tell you of the near-panic created in the Democratic Party in 1915 when the leaders believed the President was trying to persuade you to become Mrs. Wilson?” Mrs. Wilson had not, and so Daniels in his Southern way told the story. It had seemed a marriage would cost the election of 1916, and after much harried consultation a group of prominent Democrats came to Daniels. Daniels was, they announced, the perfect man to step up to the President of the United States and give him the word that he should not marry. Daniels felt like Caesar declining a crown, he said now, seven years later in the third-floor rear bedroom of 2340 S Street, but he had declined nevertheless. And he had offered the prominent Democrats a little advice in the bargain. The advice came embodied in a story Daniels gave the men. It seemed that once there was a Western Congressman with the largest nose in all Washington. Everywhere the Congressman went people stared at him. One evening in a restaurant the Congressman saw a man looking at the giant nose with a particularly incredulous air. The Congressman went to the man. “Why are you staring at me?” he demanded. The man said, “I beg your pardon, sir.” The Congressman said, “Beg my pardon nothing. Why are you staring at me so rudely?” The man protested he meant no harm, but the Congressman cried, “You are looking at my nose and wondering why it is so big!” The man had to admit this was the case. But he had meant no offense. “Of course not,” said the Congressman, “but if you really desire to know what made my nose so big, I will tell you. I kept it out of other people’s business and gave it a chance to grow!”

  The ex-President laughed hugely. That day he had needed laughter, but on other days he could produce it himself. William Gorham Rice came one day and the two men talked about automobiles, the host remarking that some of his afternoon trips covered up to forty miles. “Like flying!” exclaimed Rice, and his host was reminded of a joke. It seemed, he told Rice, that Sandy the Scotsman owned an airplane. A fellow countryman, Donald, asked if Sandy would take Donald and his wife Maggie up in the plane. Sandy said he would do so for five pounds. Donald demurred at this price. The two Scots argued. Finally Sandy said, “I will do this: it will cost ye nothing if ye will not speak a word while we’re flying. But if either of ye speak a word it is to be five pounds.” Donald and Maggie said the terms were agreeable. They got into the plane and sat behind Sandy while he dipped the craft up and over and flew upside down in an attempt to get them to speak. But nothing was heard from them. Finally, defeated, Sandy flew down and landed the plane. As the wheels touched the ground, Donald tapped Sandy on the shoulder from behind and asked, “May I speak noo?” Sandy said, “Ye may.” Donald said, “Maggie fell oot.”

  A few minutes later Mrs. Wilson came into the room and Rice thought to himself that it was wonderful the way her husband’s face lighted up when he saw her. “I have been telling Mr. Rice the story of Sandy and Donald and Maggie,” he said. It was beautiful, Rice thought, the way they were with each other.

  Other people came. One spring day three young men came. They were the chairman of the Woodrow Wilson Club of Washington’s National School of Law* and two of the members. The club had seventy members and had what they called an annual banquet at a dollar a head, and they met after classes in a room of the school and believed that Woodrow Wilson had been meant to be the savior of America and of the world and wrote him saying they wanted to send a delegation to be with him for a little while. The chairman was Henry P. Thomas and to his note Bolling sent a reply that Mr. Thomas and two others might come for half an hour. When the Bolling invitation came the Woodrow Wilson Club held a two-hour meeting to discuss what the delegation should say. Each of the seventy members had an opinion, but none of the opinions had much in common with one another save for the unanimously held one that the delegation must not use a Yellow Cab Company taxi to go to S Street. For the Yellow Cabs charged too much and tried to take advantage of students. So nothing was decided, but Henry Thomas and the others put on their Sunday suits and on the afternoon of April 14, 1922, they went to find a cab. Many cabs passed, but all were Yellow Cabs. Time grew short and the delegation was in a predicament. They searched for some sort of conveyance, anything but an accursed Yellow, but in the end they had to capitulate. The Yellow Cab took them to S Street and at 3 P.M. Bolling took them up to the library.

  Woodrow Wilson shook their hands, three young men—boys, really—and asked where their homes were. Henry Thomas said he was from Virginia, from Leesburg, and their host said, “I was born in Staunton.” Thomas thought, As if I didn’t know it! and remarked that his late father had been a private in the Confederate Army. Woodrow Wilson said, “Can’t you tell me some of his stories?” Thomas talked about how once his father went on a raid to steal Yankee horses and how years later old Confederate soldiers used to visit the father and each one said, I killed two Yankees at Gettysburg, or I killed three. Yankees at Chancellorsville, but the father never said anything about killing anyone until one of the other old soldiers said, Well, you know you killed at least one Yankee. And the father said, No, I just knocked him in the head. And the explanation was that on this horse-stealing expedition the Confederates were not out to capture men, not even a general, because they would have had to feed a general, but only horses, which were easier to provision. So they went to a Yankee encampment and held weapons on the Yankee troops and Thomas’ father was told to go to the stable and get the horses. When he went in, he saw, standing up, half asleep, a Yankee soldier on guard. The father took a plank of wood and raised it high and conked the Yankee and took the horses and ran. And this was the one Yankee he might have killed, but he never found out.

  Their half hour slipped by. Thomas wanted to offer something about how the seventy boys at school in the club were for the League and for Woodrow Wilson, but he could not get it straight in his mind how to say it—nothing had been decided at the damned meeting but that no Yellow Cabs should be used—and finally the time was up and they stood to go. Thomas had one last minute to get it out that the man before them meant something to them that was very big. Something very big. But it was too late. Bolling showed them out. They went into S Street and nothing, really, had been accomplished but that now the man by the library fire knew that some boys in school cared for him enough to organize a club for him. Forty years later it was still all clear in Thomas’ mind. “I was born in Staunton.… Can’t you tell me some of his stories?”

  Also in that spring there came a large delegation of ladies attending a Pan-American conference in Washington. They gathered before the house and when he came out for his ride they begged him to give them a few words. He said his voice was not up to it, but he would recite a limerick for them. Leaning on his cane, his “third leg,” as he always called it, he gathered himself to say:

  “For beauty I’m not a star

  There are others more handsome by far.

  But my face, I don’t mind it

  For I am behind it.

  It’s the ones out in front that I jar!”

  The next day there was a letter:

  Your courage is nobler by far

  Than mere beauty e’en though like a star.

  And your face? Why, we find it

  Just right! You’re behind it.

  So we people in front cry “Hurrah!”

  There also came to see him the officers of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, crea
ted to establish annual awards for “meritorious service on behalf of democracy, public welfare, liberal thought and peace through justice.” The aim of the Foundation was to raise one million dollars to finance the awards. (Held in Jessie’s arms, little Woodrow Wilson Sayre, two and a half years old, opened the drive to raise $85,000 in Massachusetts by ringing the bell in Boston’s Old State House. He resisted violently when Jessie made him stop pulling the line that made the bell ring so delightfully.)

  Originally the Foundation was to be called the Woodrow Wilson Memorial, but during the planning stages Franklin D. Roosevelt, chairman of the National Committee, received a letter from the man being honored which pointed out that the word “memorial” suggested death—“and I hope in the near future to give frequent evidences I am not dead.” The word “endowment” was suggested in the letter, but Roosevelt wrote back that this might “suggest to some people that we are endowing you!” Finally “foundation” was chosen. With the correspondence there came a softening of S Street’s attitude toward Roosevelt, and when in August of 1921 Roosevelt fell ill with that disease which would leave him little better equipped to walk than was Woodrow Wilson, the letters took on a much warmer tone: “I am indeed delighted to hear you are getting well so fast and so confidently, and I shall try to be generous enough not to envy you.” Word was sent to Roosevelt that it was now a race between the two invalids to see which one would play golf first, and when, partially recovered, Roosevelt came to Washington, Bolling asked him to call at S Street: “If Mrs. Roosevelt is with you Mrs. Wilson would be so happy if she would come along too—and let them have a little talk while you are with Mr. Wilson.”

  On December 28, 1922, his birthday, the officers of the Foundation came to S Street to say the raising of the one million dollars seemed assured. Hamilton Holt, the executive director, spoke for the group and told of a check for $100 given to the head of the North Carolina division of the Foundation, the wife of ex-Secretary Daniels. Attached to the check, Holt said, was a note: “From the family of Frank M. Thompson, who died in the World War for world peace, in gratitude to Woodrow Wilson for the faith he has kept for the dead.” As he sat in the library the quick tears came to the invalid’s eyes. He was unable to speak, and when the people left he was upset over his silence. He said to his wife, “I wish I could have controlled my voice so I could really have expressed what I felt, but I could not control myself lest I break down and cry like a schoolboy.” Days later he was still anxious about it; he said to her, “I am still worrying over my silence. Please make up for my omission if you can and let them know why I can’t express myself.”

  But the Foundation people had understood and so would have those many people who on that birthday sent him cards of greeting. Grayson came to pay a call and the ex-President showed the remembrances and said, “I am having quite a card party today!” But he had a bitter laugh when he discussed a Senate resolution adopted unanimously that day saying the Senate had heard “with great pleasure” of the “rapid recovery to good health of former President Hon. Woodrow Wilson” and wished to “express to Hon. Woodrow Wilson the pleasure and joy of the Senate of the United States” at the news. “Think of them passing it and not meaning it,” he said to Grayson.

  The Senate, or at least many Senators, may indeed have been hypocritical, but there were those in the United States in that year who were something else. Those others were the people who, in Ida Tarbell’s words, more and more sought the man they could not forget. Few could get to see him at his home, but they stood in the rain and in the snow and wind each Saturday night to see him when he went to the vaudeville at Keith’s Theatre. “Wilson Night,” it was called—Saturday night after a week in which the ticket sellers had constantly to say, “This is as near to him as I can place you.” Always he sat in the same seat, U-21. At eight in the evening a police lieutenant with a squad closed off G Street between 14th and 15th to all vehicular traffic and took up station in a little alley by the side of the theater. The street filled up with people—always they were there, no matter what the weather; and week by week they grew in their numbers—and a little after eight the big Pierce-Arrow came slowly down the way and halted in the alley.

  The servant Scott, in black suit instead of the white jacket he wore at home, helped the ex-President out of the car and to the alley door held open by a member of the theater staff. He was always in evening clothes. As he came out, behind him there would be a thrill of excitement in the waiting crowd and a series of audible whispers: “There he is!” Inside, Edith helped him out of his coat and took off his hat and put them in a little vestibule, and he moved to Seat U-21, she preceding him with a guest or two, John Randolph Bolling, perhaps, or Margaret down for a weekend. The theater’s house detective stood in the aisle to keep people away. He had always loved the theater and in another day used to put a record on the victrola that stood in the Oval Room at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and dance to it in imitation of the stage hoofers. Now there could be no dancing for him, but still he could laugh at the stunts and the jokes. When he missed a line, Edith whispered it to him, and when he dropped his handkerchief she picked it up.

  At the end of the performance people dashed out of the main entrance and circled back to the alley to see him into his car. Often a group of performers waited there to hand him a spray of flowers and say a few words. Cary Grayson remembered a young actress still in costume and stage make-up offering flowers and speaking for the other girls with her, saying, “We simply want to tell you that we love you dearly.” Sometimes there might be a card accompanying the bouquet: “The Little Folks of Singer’s Midgets Act wish you good luck and the best of health and thank you for the opportunity of playing before you.”

  It was those people in the street at Keith’s, and the ones who came to his house, but mostly it was the people who cheered him when America buried the Unknown Soldier. And it was what was within himself—faith, belief, surety that, like his minister-father and minister-grandfather, he too had been about God’s work. For the people and the faith changed him. He had prayed every night of his life, and he had said the people would in the end do right, and now God and the people came to his aid. The terrible bitterness began to drop away, and the hopelessness and the loneliness, and instead there came a feeling that it had not all been for nothing that he had lived. He said, “If it turn out well or if it turn out ill, it will turn out right,” and then he said, “I would rather fail in a cause that some day will triumph than to win in a cause that I know some day will fail.” He said, “I am confident that what I have fought for and stood for is for the benefit of this nation and of mankind. If this is so I believe that it ultimately will prevail, and if it is not, I don’t want it to prevail.” And the visitors went away, the politically shrewd ones knowing that America would never enter the League of Nations, but all of them thankful that now at the last he was coming to terms with life and with his fate. In the years to come he was to be compared to Samson shorn of his locks, to Apollo blind, to Prometheus bound, to St. Paul, even to Jesus of Nazareth hanging on a cross. But in his own eyes now he was but a tiny figure in God’s plan for the Right, an implement, a tool. Nothing more. One day Margaret came to sit with him in a peaceful silence and he slowly began to talk in what she thought was contemplation of the past. It was the great soul that spoke, Margaret thought, not the tired body. He said, “I think it was best after all that the United States did not join the League of Nations.” She was startled. “Why, Father darling?” He said, “Because our entrance into the League at the time I returned from Europe might have been only a personal victory. Now, when the American people join the League it will be because they are convinced it is the only right time for them to do it.” He was smiling a little. He said, “Perhaps God knew better than I did after all.”

  After that there was pain for him from the crippled body and from the tortured nerves, but above that pain was exaltation. He had not failed. God would make it right. George Creel came to see him and saw re
ligious serenity in the eyes where there had been despair and fear. There was peace in the lines around the mouth which once, when the two drove past the staring crowds outside the White House, had said to George Creel that only menace and curiosity lived in those crowds. “It will come, yes, it will come,” he said to George Creel now in S Street. Creel wrote, “I saw glory shining from his face. ‘It will come.’”

  * Now a part of George Washington University.

  14

  Nineteen twenty-three. His eyes, always weak, became so impaired that he could read only through a magnifying glass held in the good hand. Soon even that was too difficult, and all he could do was look at the pictures in the National Geographic and the motion picture magazines, Film Fun, Screenland, Photoplay. She read aloud to him—Stevenson, Dickens, O. Henry, Scott, the Home Book of Verse, and the mysteries: Malcolm Sage, Detective; Find the Woman; Twenty-Six Clues.

  He thought about the past. Nellie came in and read to him and when it seemed he had drifted into sleep she put away her book. He opened his eyes. By the bed was a little dwarf pine tree someone had sent him. A light shone upon it. He had dozed off looking at it and now, awake, he smiled. “I was back on the island at Muskoka,” he said to Nellie softly. “Do you remember our picnics there, and your mother reading poetry under the pines? I wish I could hear her voice.”