by Smith, Gene;
Upon the door Scott hung a wreath of early spring flowers—yellow jonquils, mignonettes and forsythia. John Randolph Bolling filled out the death certificate, which Cary Grayson signed as attending physician. Under “Trade, profession, or particular kind of work,” Bolling wrote: “Retired.”
Foreign cablegrams began to arrive in addition to the domestic telegrams. PARIS WHO IN THE DAYS FOLLOWING VICTORY WELCOMED PRESIDENT WILSON TO HER HEART AND ACCLAIMED HIM NOW ENTERS INTO YOUR MOURNING MUNICIPAL COUNCIL CITY OF PARIS … Edward P.…THE QUEEN AND I EXTEND TO YOU OUR DEEP SYMPATHY IN ASSURING YOU OF THE LASTING MEMORY WE SHALL ALWAYS KEEP OF THE GREAT ONE WHO HAS GONE ALBERT R.… The President of Liberia … Chamber of Representatives of Belgium … The Secretary General of the League of Nations … WE SHALL NEVER FORGET THE HOURS THAT YOU AND YOUR HUSBAND SPENT AS OUR GUESTS ON YOUR WAY TO THE PEACE CONFERENCE GEORGE R. … Clemenceau … Lloyd George … A PRINCE AMONG THE SONS OF MEN HAS DEPARTED JAN CHRISTIAAN SMUTS.
President Coolidge’s secretary came up the hill. He spoke to Bolling and said the President offered the aid of all government departments in funeral arrangements, but he was told the widow would wait until Nellie McAdoo arrived before making plans. That evening electric-light signs in most cities were dimmed, and radio fans twirling their dials and manipulating their headsets found no programs of any kind were going out on the air.
The next day, Monday:
BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA:
A PROCLAMATION:
To the People of the United States:
The death of Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States from March 4, 1913, to March 4, 1921 … deprives the country of a most distinguished citizen and is an event which causes universal and genuine sorrow.… In testimony of the respect in which his memory is held by the Government and people of the United States, I do hereby direct that the flags of the White House and of the several Departmental buildings be displayed at half staff for a period of thirty days, and that suitable military and naval honors under orders of the Secretary of War and of the Secretary of the Navy may be rendered on the day of the funeral.
Done at the City of Washington … In the year of Our Lord one thousand nine hundred and twenty-four, and of the Independence of the United States of America one hundred and forty-eight.
CALVIN COOLIDGE
In the Senate it was voted that all business, including all committee meetings and investigations—which included the one concerning Teapot Dome—be suspended for three days. A delegation of Senators was appointed to attend the funeral. The Senate adjourned.
One of the Senators named as a member of the funeral delegation did not get home to his residence at 1765 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., until several hours after the adjournment. He found waiting for him a note delivered by a Postal Telegraph boy. On the envelope was attached a Postal Telegraph sticker requesting an immediate reply. The note was handwritten. It said:
My dear Sir:
I note in the papers that you have been designated by the Senate of the U.S. as one of those to attend Mr. Wilson’s funeral.
As the funeral is private and not official and realizing that your presence would be embarrassing to you and unwelcome to me I write to request that you do not attend.
Yours truly,
Edith Bolling Wilson
The Senator wrote back in his own hand:
My dear Madam:
I have just received your note, in which you say that the funeral services of Mr. Wilson are to be private and not official and that my presence would be unwelcome to you. When the Senate Committee was appointed I had no idea that the Committee was expected to attend the private services at the home and I had supposed that the services at the church were to be public.
You may rest assured that nothing could be more distasteful to me than to do anything which by any possibility could be embarrassing to you. I have the honor to be
Very truly
yours,
H. C. Lodge
Nellie and McAdoo arrived in Washington, the Rolls-Royce meeting them at the station. The young woman was in constant tears. Just before her father’s death, the malodorous E. L. Doheny of Teapot Dome fame had revealed that he, Doheny, had paid McAdoo $250,000 in legal fees over a period of some years. The revelation was working to shatter McAdoo’s hopes of ever becoming President, and along with newspaper articles about the death in S Street appeared stories headlined FEAR MCADOO CANDIDACY DOOMED. Panic-stricken Washington supporters of McAdoo flocked to S Street as soon as he arrived, and in the library one floor beneath the room in which his father-in-law died McAdoo held frightened conferences. Completely undone, he dictated telegrams to all points saying “skunks” and “calumniators” were trying to smear him. This talk of the forthcoming nominating conventions just half a year off, and the elections later in the year, seemed completely sacrilegious to the mistress of the house, and she savagely lashed out at McAdoo and Nellie, saying in a rage that the young woman “cared more about getting her husband elected President than she does about her dead father.” The statement was untrue and very unkind, but Edith was far from a responsible person in the grief which flung her into headlong spells of unrestrained weeping. The control she had shown ever since the morning the Mayflower halted on the prairie outside Wichita fell from her and the accumulated strain of the long years came pouring out. No one had ever seen her like this. Distraught, she said things that erected a wall between herself and Nellie that would never be torn down. She was also bitter at Margaret’s attitude. Margaret, interested in religion all her life, was at the time involved in a study of Christian Science, which led her to wear a smile as she went around the house telling callers that death was really an illusion and that there was hence no reason to grieve for her father.
The funeral plans were completed on Tuesday. They had thought of burial in Staunton, the birthplace, but none of his flesh and blood were there and in fact he had lived there only one year of his life. There was a family plot in Columbia, South Carolina, where his mother and father were; but a few years earlier, when his sister, Aunt Annie Howe, was buried there, Edith remembered that he had said that the sister’s body now occupied the last free space. And once on a ride into Virginia he had said that he did not think he would want to lie in Arlington. So they decided interment would be in the crypt of the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul, commonly called Washington Cathedral. Not completed, but an immense and beautiful church, it stood atop Mount Saint Alban, the highest elevation in Washington. Stones from Canterbury were in it, and the Bishop’s formal seat was from the ruins of Glastonbury. It was decided there would be a brief service at the house and then the body would be taken to the Cathedral and its Bethlehem Chapel, where there would be room for three hundred invited guests. This would not be a state funeral, and the body would not lie in state. The funeral would be on Wednesday, February 6.
That day was cloudy, wet, cold. The sunshine of Sunday morning was gone, and it was overcoat weather and a time to wear galoshes. At sunrise that morning, by order of the Secretaries of War and Navy, guns began to fire, every half hour on the half hour, at every United States Army post, at every Navy yard or station. They would continue pounding all day at the half-hour intervals, and at sunset forty-eight-gun salutes would be discharged. All regimental colors and standards were draped, officers wore mourning bands, and crape was on sword hilts. The foreign embassies and consulates all had their flags at half staff, all save for the German Embassy, where the Ambassador announced that as his government had instructed him to take no official part in this burial of an unofficial person, he would not put the German flag down. Washington seethed at this slight by the recent enemy, and a former U.S. sailor studying at Georgetown University climbed up the Embassy porte-cochere and hung an American flag there. Everyone who saw the flag applauded the gesture, but the police were called by the Embassy and they removed the flag. A policeman took up station in front of the building to guard against any disturbances. But th
e German attitude drew a violent reaction, and in Wall Street many bankers said that because of the matter they doubted a proposed loan to the Weimar Republic would be made. A woman member of the German Reichstag, visiting America, made a public appeal that the loan go through, that German children not be forced to suffer because of the faux pas.
At eight in the morning, troops were paraded at all service posts, and the Presidential Proclamation of mourning was read out. In Washington, the President suggested to his Cabinet members that it be made clear to all government employees that although they could not officially be released from their duties for the funeral of an unofficial person, no work would be expected after lunch. The New York Stock Exchange announced trading would end at twelve-thirty. At that hour, too, Washington’s school children were released from classes after standing in silence for five minutes.
By noon the Cathedral grounds were jammed with upward of fifty thousand persons. Most of the people had umbrellas, for alternately snow and rain came down from the leaden dark skies. Many sat upon newspapers laid on the soaked grass. Some brought sandwiches and ate lunch in the rain.
A little after noon it was announced that Senator Lodge, suffering from a sore throat, would not be able to attend the funeral. “No alarm is felt over Senator Lodge’s illness by members of his family,” said a spokesman from the Senator’s office.*
During that morning, also, McAdoo telephoned Joe Tumulty* and learned no invitation to the funeral had been received at the Tumulty home. McAdoo said, “I’m going to see that you’re invited,” and shortly afterward Altrude Gordon Grayson telephoned Tumulty and said that “of course” Tumulty and his wife would be expected.
Upstairs in S Street, in the bedroom, the body lay upon a couch by the window. Dr. Edward P. Davis of Philadelphia, a college classmate and the man who ten years earlier had the task of telling the President of the United States that the former Miss Elly Lou Axson of Rome, Georgia, was dying, stared down into the face he first had seen when both were boys at Princeton so many years ago. It was extraordinary, Dr. Davis thought to himself, the way his friend looked. For he looked young now. Young. The hair seemed prematurely gray for such a young face. “The lines of care, of anxiety and weakness had disappeared. The outlines of the face were smooth and beautiful. It was as if a distant sunrise had touched the features.”
Below, flowers were ranged all around the library and drawing room, and on the tables there were eight thousand messages of condolence. (Three years earlier, leaving the White House, he had received just 124 telegrams.) The services at the house would be at three; a little before that hour the police admitted through the ropes blocking the street those cars whose occupants bore invitations. Crowds stood in the slow-falling snow for blocks in all directions, and already along Massachusetts Avenue up toward the Cathedral tens of thousands of people were waiting behind lines of infantrymen and marines standing at evenly spaced intervals. At the Grayson house, the doctor came out with Altrude, and a reporter asked, “How do you feel?” Earlier, Grayson had made a formal statement to the press: “In sick days and well, I have never known such singleminded devotion to duty as he saw it against all odds, such patience and forbearance with adversity, and finally such resignation to the inevitable. I once read an inscription in a Southern country church yard. It said: ‘He was unseduced by flattery, unawed by opinion, undismayed by disaster. He faced life with antique courage, and death with Christian hope.’ These words, better than any words of mine, describe Woodrow Wilson.” Now to the reporter asking how he felt, Grayson said, “Oh, I am all right. But I don’t mean that exactly. I’m still under the strain of it all. That is keeping me going. But I can’t really feel all right when I have lost my closest friend for the past twelve years. The fact that I can’t call the nurse up there in the morning or run in there to see him has left an awful emptiness. I miss it now.” As he spoke, the batteries at Fort Myer across the Potomac fired. Guns pumped also from Governors Island, and at Gordon, Dix, Carson, Shafter, Upton—all the posts. At sea, the dull thunder of the destroyers and dread-noughts rolled across the February waves.
At fifteen minutes to three the President and First Lady stepped into their limousine for the short drive to S Street. When they arrived, it was nearly time for the services to begin. The body was in the drawing room in a closed black casket, and the guests were standing in the library and along the stairway. When the President entered the house, the drawing-room doors were opened and the guests filed in and sat down. The shades were drawn on the windows facing the street. It was just three o’clock. In Washington the streetcar motormen and conductors got out of their vehicles and stepped into the streets and took off their hats. Independence Hall’s tower bell in Philadelphia began to toll. People in New York’s department stores came to silent attention. Church bells sounded in Chicago. Detroit’s traffic came to a halt. In the nation’s large railroad stations Taps came over the loudspeaker systems. All telegraph service everywhere in the country halted. Outside in S Street the people were unmoving and the motorcycle policemen switched off their noisy engines. In Madison Square Garden both the people inside for a memorial service and the overflow standing in the street outside were motionless. Theaters in every city the country over interrupted performances. In the auditorium of Montana Deaconess School in Helena, a fourteen-year-old boy sounded Taps on his cornet as all the children, the youngest six years old, sang the words. In the front of the room where they would pass by it before their assembly was dismissed, a flag-draped picture of Woodrow Wilson looked out at them.
Once in S Street he had said that he missed the bonging of the White House’s many clocks. He had liked that. So Edith had had made for him a magnificent grandfather’s clock that would loudly ring every fifteen minutes. It stood at the second-floor stair landing. Now in S Street the last reverberations of the clock ringing the hour sounded throughout the house. The Reverend James Taylor of Central Presbyterian Church said, “‘The Lord is my shepherd …’” Before the minister, dimly lit by the soft wall lights, a small spray of flowers sat atop the black steel of the casket. Orchids, black orchids, from Edith. On the wall hung a copy of Bouguereau’s Madonna, done by Ellen. Behind the seated people, from the stairs, came the sound of Edith sobbing.
The Reverend Sylvester Beach of Princeton University prayed, then, that there would be divine aid to help the world to a realization of the vision of a world at peace that had been seen by this dead man before them. He asked that there would be consolation for the family.
Outside, snow mixed with the rain falling upon the thousands around the house, on the policemen, on the eight servicemen—soldiers, sailors and marines—who could carry the casket to the black hearse, on the men and women standing on the muddy slopes across from the house.
Bishop James Freeman of the Washington Cathedral, holding in his hand the khaki-bound Bible of the dead man, said, “Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and present you faultless before the presence of His glory and with exceeding joy; to the only wise God, our Savior, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and evermore. Amen.” The clock chimed the quarter hour: three-fifteen.
The three clergymen went down the aisle between the people seated at right and left and down the stairs through the opened doors and out into the snow and rain. They took off their hats and stood in a line. Utter silence attended them. The eight servicemen, all young, the soldiers in khaki, the sailors in blue jackets, the marines in field green, went up the stairs and took the casket and came down, passing on both upward and downward journeys the sobbing widow. As the boys came through the door with their burden, almost every man in the street except the saluting servicemen joined with the clergymen in standing bareheaded. The spray of orchids moved up and down with the movement of the black steel coffin. There was no sound but the clicking of press and movie cameras.
The hearse driver started his motor and when the casket was inside moved down the hill a short distance. Another car pulled up
directly in front of Number 2340. The widow came out on the arm of John Randolph Bolling. She wore a plain black cloth coat with lynx cuffs and collar. Her mourning veil was square and bordered by a three-inch band of crape. It completely covered her features. Behind her came McAdoo with Nellie on one arm and Margaret on the other, both sisters also wearing heavy black veils. Then came the guests: the President and First Lady, the honorary pallbearers ex-Secretary Daniels, ex-Secretary Baker, ex-Secretary Houston, ex-Secretaries Redfield, Meredith, Gregory, Payne, Senator Glass, Bernard Baruch, Jesse Jones, General Tasker Bliss, Cleveland Dodge, Dr. Davis and Dr. Hiram Woods—these last three representing the Class of ’79—some other old friends. The Cabinet came out, and the Senators, and the household servants, and even two men from Keith’s Theatre, doormen who had been kind and understanding. The names of the passengers for the waiting limousines were read out. After the servants and the doormen were assigned their places in the cars, the names of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Tumulty were spoken.
The procession got under way, a slow rolling line of cumbersome high-roofed black automobiles heading down S Street’s hill. By the first car, the hearse, marched servicemen. Other servicemen, the soldiers and marines standing in a two-mile line to the Cathedral, one by one came to a salute as the hearse reached them. For as far as could be seen hands came up and stayed at foreheads for a moment and then dropped. No sidearms of any kind were worn, and there were no muffled kettle-drums, no gun caissons, no horse with empty saddle and stirrups reversed, no band to play a dirge. At the junction of S Street and Massachusetts Avenue some young American Legionnaires stood with standards and flags, the only color in the gray afternoon.