by Smith, Gene;
Viereck, George Sylvester. The Strangest Friendship in History: Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House. New York: Liveright, 1932.
Walworth, Arthur. Woodrow Wilson: American Prophet. New York, London and Toronto: Longmans, Green and Company, 1958.
—. Woodrow Wilson: World Prophet. New York, London and Toronto: Longmans, Green and Company, 1958.
Watson, James E. As I Knew Them. Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1936.
Wells, Wells (pseud.). Wilson the Unknown. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1931.
White, William Allen. Woodrow Wilson: The Man, His Times and His Task. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1924.
—. Masks in a Pageant. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1939.
Williams, Wythe. The Tiger of France: Conversations with Clemenceau. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1949.
Wilson, Edith Bolling. My Memoir. Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1938.
Winkler, John K. Woodrow Wilson: The Man Who Lives On. New York: The Vanguard Press, 1933.
MAGAZINES AND NEWSPAPERS
Quotations from magazines are indicated either in the text or Notes. For contemporary newspaper accounts of the events covered I have relied largely upon the Washington Post, New York World, and New York Times. I have also made use of Associated Press, United Press, and International News Service dispatches. It would have been a cumbersome business to cite these sources continually, and as I have generally interwoven accounts from the various papers and wire services, a difficult business also. For these reasons I have rarely mentioned which paper or wire service acted as source for any given incident. In almost every case, however, the report of the given incident appeared either on the day it took place or, more regularly, on the following day.
MANUSCRIPT COLLECTIONS
A great part of the contents of this book was garnered from the manuscript collections of the Library of Congress in Washington. Primarily, of course, I have made use of the Woodrow Wilson Collection. This consists of literally millions of items ranging from yellowed newspaper accounts of the clothing tastes of Mrs. Edith Galt to letters sent the ex-President in S Street by indignant relatives desiring money with which to effect a move to a neighborhood where the children could mix with a better class of playmates. In the collection, to name items that come readily to mind, are: the large manila envelope Senator Fall bore to the bedside of the President on December 5, 1919, with the scribbled writing of the First Lady upon it; hundreds of calling cards left at S Street when the former President was dying; many pictures of children named for the President and sent to the White House by proud parents; the reply of the Queen of England to the First Lady’s “bread and butter” note sent after the visit to Buckingham Palace in 1918; an indignant account by John Randolph Bolling of how an architect overcharged for advice about constructing a home (which was never built) for occupancy after the President’s term of office ended; flowers worn by Mrs. Galt to dinner with the President and later pressed and put away so that today, nearly half a hundred years later, the color is still true; bills for two and three dollars periodically submitted by a man who refinished the tips of billiard cues used by Mrs. Wilson and guests at S Street; a report by Cary Grayson describing blood tests given the late President (this to record for history that the extremely widespread story that Woodrow Wilson suffered from a venereal disease was untrue); a sadly disjointed letter dictated by the President to the First Lady early in his illness and thanking the Mayor and City Council of Carlisle, England, for honors granted; a series of violently worded letters dictated to John Randolph Bolling and signed by the ex-President but not sent at the behest of Mrs. Wilson (the letters might well have been found embarrassing if they ever appeared in print: “Dirty little liar” applied to the President of France was a typical example); a long exchange of notes with a man who wanted to put up a statue of Woodrow Wilson in the courtyard of an apartment house in the Bronx, New York (photos of proposed bust after bust were rejected by S Street, but finally after Woodrow Wilson’s death the man did put up a bust which, with nose defaced, can still be seen in the Wilson Apartments across from DeVoe Park in the Bronx); and, finally, notes sent from the Library of Congress requesting the return of mystery novels long overdue.
The collection, for my purposes in covering this circumscribed portion of Mr. Wilson’s life, can be broken down into three segments. First, there are nearly a score of enormous scrapbooks, each weighing more than fifty pounds and containing material impossible to classify under any single description. The books became the career of Mrs. Wilson’s brother Bolling after the ex-President died. (Before his death, Bolling had worked on them when not handling the correspondence for his brother-in-law.) Bolling continued his labors on the books until well into the days of World War II. The material dates from about the time Mrs. Galt met the President but is largely concerned with the S Street period. Anything that appealed to the ex-President during his residence in S Street is there, as is material which seemed of value to Bolling or his sister. A copy of Mrs. Wilson’s letter to Senator Lodge telling him his presence at the funeral was not desired is there; next to it is Lodge’s reply. A picture published in a magazine of the ’20’s and showing a man who looked like the President wearing a pith helmet in a desert setting is in the books, along with a typed note by Bolling saying this is not Mr. Wilson. Numerous newspaper clippings are there; so is a long description of the ex-President’s last illness, written by Bolling at his sister’s direction. Also, invitations sent Mrs. Wilson for White House dinners in the ’30’s and ’40’s, Mrs. Wilson’s ticket to the 1933 Kentucky Derby, and pictures taken by amateur photographers of Mr. Wilson on one or another of his auto rides. Neatly pasted in are the scores of many games of Canfield played by the Wilsons. At one point he was 50,000 points ahead of her.
Second, the collection contains all correspondence sent to the President during his terms of office, and all copies of letters by him.
Last, there are letters sent and received during the years in S Street. Mixed with the letters are a few such miscellaneous items as the President’s badly typed—we must remember he had the use of only one hand—constitution for the Pure English Club, the purpose of which was to encourage residents of 2340 S Street to remind each other to use correct grammar at all times. (One speculates as to just what was in the ex-President’s mind when he established the “Club.”) The reader will know how heavily I have made use of the correspondence files.
At the Library of Congress will also be found the papers of most of the persons connected with Woodrow Wilson. Most important of all is the Ray Stannard Baker Collection, which holds the fruits of Baker’s enormous researches into the President’s life. Designated by Mr. Wilson as his official biographer, Baker continued his work for many years after the subject of his research had died. Baker’s interviews with hundreds of persons who knew the President are of inestimable value, and the reader will see in the Notes how extensively I, like all who study Woodrow Wilson, have made use of Baker’s papers. Other collections utilized include those of Tumulty, Creel, Daniels, Colby, Lansing, Hamlin, Long, Ike Hoover, McAdoo, Glass, Burleson, Newton D. Baker, Palmer, Edith Benham Helm, Hitchcock, and William Allen White. There is also an Edith Bolling Wilson collection of value, but by direction of Mrs. Wilson’s will much of the material is locked in the Library vaults, where it will stay until fifteen years have passed from the time of her death. It is believed that much of this now-proscribed material consists of letters sent Mrs. Galt, as she then was, during the period of the President’s courtship of her.
This book had its origin in the mind of Lawrence Hughes of William Morrow and Company on the morning of December 29, 1961. On that day the New York Times, as did nearly every paper in the country, carried in its columns the obituary of Edith Bolling Wilson.
On the day she died, December 28, she was two months past her eighty-ninth birthday. Edith had grown to be a very old lady indeed. Thirty-five ye
ars and more had passed since the day William McAdoo led her from the Bethlehem Chapel and the casket sinking slowly down into the vault.
In the first months after that day, in the spring of 1924, people who lived near the Cathedral grew accustomed to seeing each afternoon a woman in black, on foot, going up the hill upon which the Cathedral stands. Behind the woman slowly moved a beautiful new Rolls-Royce, a gift given her husband as a birthday present a few weeks before his death. After a time alone in the chapel, Edith would come out and enter the car, and her chauffeur would drive her home to S Street. At the house everything was just as it was on February 3, 1924. Everything, in fact, is still just as it was on that day. The sofas are the same, and the pictures, and the rugs, and even the bathroom plumbing.
It was years before Edith wore anything but black. It was not until 1928 that she set foot in the White House she had left in March of 1921. (Her return was to hear a Paderewski recital. She had always loved music.) By 1930 she allowed herself to attend social events regularly and put away her widow’s garb. She traveled to Europe and the Orient and went to horse-race meets and Southern pageants. On December 8, 1941, she was at the Capitol at the invitation of Eleanor Roosevelt and sat next to her as Eleanor Roosevelt’s husband asked for what Edith’s had asked upon a misty April evening twenty-four years earlier.
By the 1950’s her servants had grown accustomed to people in stores and delivery agencies saying, “Mrs. Woodrow Wilson! Is she still alive?” During those long years of widowhood, Edith first grew stouter, and then, as old ladies do, she became thin and fragile. At the end she was the very picture of the former Southern belle grown old and daintily old-fashioned. And yet she was still very recognizable as the Edith of long before. Although she was a thin little old lady, her passions were yet unquieted. Eighty-five years old, she could still refer to Henry Cabot Lodge as that “stinking snake.” Fifteen years after the death of Franklin Roosevelt, a year before her own death, she could still raise her voice in anger when she talked of how Roosevelt had gotten hold of the desk Edith’s husband used on the George Washington and had it transported to Hyde Park. Edith thought the desk should be at S Street; Roosevelt thought it should be at Hyde Park. “He said to me, ‘You’re not going to get it,’” Edith told people. “I told him he was nothing but a common thief, and I should have sued him for that desk.” She did not appear to be joking.
For the memory of Woodrow Wilson, nothing was too much trouble. Through the long years she was always available for anyone dedicating a Woodrow Wilson Bridge or a Woodrow Wilson School, always ready to sit on the platform with the speakers. “This is for Woodrow,” she told her hired companions and her friends, and regardless of the heat or cold or the length of the trip, she went to the dedication ceremonies. (On the day she died, which was coincidentally the 105th anniversary of her husband’s birth, she was to have been present at the dedication of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge over the Potomac in Washington.) But there were never any interviews. “It is a recognized rule that I have nothing to say,” she told countless reporters. Or, “I am never interviewed—I have no comment to make.”
She played cards incessantly. With the after-dinner coffee her servants brought the bridge table. Probably not a day passed for decades that she did not play. And as time went by she played more and more. There were those who thought she did so because she was tired and bored and just killing time until she could also go to lie in the Washington Cathedral.
In the end, she did go to lie there. She died and the New York Times said she had been characterized as the “first woman President of the United States.” (Edith would have blazed up at that. Woodrow Wilson was President, she would have said. And for her, that would have ended the argument.) In the Cathedral they carved her name into the stone of the wall forming a niche where her husband’s body had been for some years since it was removed from the Bethlehem Chapel below. His sepulchre is very simple. There are personal flags of the President of the United States in the niche, and a flag carried by the first American troops to parade in London before going to France and action in 1917–18. The casket is encased in limestone with only his name upon it and a single ornament: a Crusader’s Cross.
William Gibbs McAdoo pursued the Presidency relentlessly, but his highest elective office was Senator from California. Defeated for re-election to that post in 1938, he became head of the ironically named American President Lines. In the mid-1930’s he and Nellie were divorced, and he later married a girl decades younger than he. In 1941, aged seventy-seven, he died.
Joseph Tumulty practiced law for many years. His ending was very sad. He fell into a mental decline and became a recluse. Eventually he was hospitalized and his friends said it was Edith Wilson’s cruel treatment of him that had taken its toll of his mind. In the early 1950’s a friend visited him in the hospital, taking a recently published book on the life of Woodrow Wilson with him. “Look, Joe,” the friend said, “here’s a picture of you and Wilson.” Tumulty looked and his foot shot out and he kicked the book across the room. The doctor came and suggested that the friend leave. Shortly afterward Tumulty died. That was in 1954. Tumulty was seventy-four. Edith did not attend the funeral, nor did she send flowers or a card.
Jessie was forty-five years old in 1932 when she died following an operation. One of her sons, Francis B. Sayre, Jr., is Dean of the Cathedral where Jessie’s father lies.
Margaret went from one job to another—stocks and bonds, public relations. She never married. One day in the New York Public Library she became engrossed in a book about an Indian mystic. She decided to go to India and study under him. She went to Pondicherry, French India, and became a member of the man’s religious colony. She wore sandals and a flowing white robe and was fifty-seven when, in 1944, she fell ill and died.
Colonel House lived on in New York. He remained quiet, mannerly, subtle. Eminent persons dropped in to see him, but he never again exercised any real role in the world’s doings. When he and his wife celebrated their fiftieth anniversary, the newspapers noted that among those not present was Edith Wilson. Aged seventy-nine, House died in 1938.
Cary Grayson left the Navy in 1928 and spent much of his time in running a racing stable he owned in company with Bernard Baruch. (Their most notable horse was Happy Argo, a successful campaigner of the ’30’s.) Grayson served as chairman of the Inaugural Committee for one of the Roosevelt inaugurations and as head of the Red Cross. He died in 1938 at the age of fifty-eight. His widow, the former Altrude Gordon, kept her friendship with Edith intact through the years.
Nellie Wilson McAdoo did not remarry after her divorce. As she grew older, her appearance grew very remindful of her father’s. Her eyes, particularly, seemed startlingly like his. When people remark on the similarity, she gives a roguish smile that is very youthful and says, “Well, thank you! My father, after all, had beautiful eyes!” She is devoted to the memory of both her parents. She lives in California.
NOTES
(The numbers in the left-hand columns refer to pages in this book.)
CHAPTER ONE
3–Medical details of Mrs. Wilson’s illness: Grayson, pp. 32–34.
3–“Take this bite, dear”: Jaffray, pp. 48–49.
3–“Father looking well?”: E. W. McAdoo, p. 300.
4–“Kill them both!”: ibid., p. 202.
4–Rapture on her face: ibid., p. 205.
4–Cousin Florence incident. ibid., pp. 209–10.
5–Promptly and efficiently: Grayson, p. 1.
5–Jumping out of dark corners: Parks, p. 133.
5, 6–Presidential imitations: E. W. McAdoo, pp. 26–27 and Elliott, p. 246.
6–The limerick is quoted by Virginius Dabney in Alsop, p. 18.
6–Proper and Vulgar Members: Jessica Wilson Sayre, quoted by R. S. Baker, Baker Papers.
6–Auto rides: I. H. Hoover, p. 61.
6–Mrs. Wilson and the slums: Jonathan Daniels, pp. 85–86.
6, 7–Her clothing: E. W. McAdoo, p. 55.
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br /> 7–Her appearance and demeanor: Jonathan Daniels, p. 124.
7–Her paintings: Parks, p. 134.
7–The boy she had wanted: ibid., p. 132.
7–Neck full and firm: E. W. McAdoo, p. 191.
8–Oatmeal, steak, ham, port: Starling, p. 39.
7, 8–Medical details on the President: Grayson, pp. 2–3, 80–81, and Grayson quoted by R. S. Baker, Baker Papers.
9–That he was hoping still: the letter was to Edward M. House.
9–The Philadelphia doctor was Edward Parker Davis.
9–Mrs. Wilson’s death: Grayson, pp. 34–35, and Grayson quoted by R. S. Baker, Baker Papers.
10–White silk shawl: Jaffray, p. 50.
10–“Beyond what I can bear”: the letter was to Mary Peck.
10–Roosevelt fear of breakdown: Jonathan Daniels, p. 137.
10–“I must not give way”: Grayson, quoted by R. S. Baker, Baker Papers.
10, 11–Mrs. Wilson’s funeral: Stockton Axson, quoted by R. S. Baker, Baker Papers.
CHAPTER TWO
11–“Utterly alone”: quoted by Stockton Axson and Helen Bones by R. S. Baker, Baker Papers.
11–Not have wanted it otherwise: Stockton Axson, quoted by Mary Hoyt, R. S. Baker, Baker Papers.
11–Sandy and Hamish: Parks, p. 135.
12–“Fig for anything that affects me”: letter to Mary Peck.
12–If someone would assassinate him: Arthur D. H. Smith, p. 118.
12–Tiger she had once seen: quoted by Wilson, p. 67.
12, 13–Background of Edith Bolling Galt: Wilson, pp. 56–57.
13–Drove like an absolute madwoman: Mrs. J. Borden Harriman to author.
13, 14–Meeting of Mrs. Galt and the President: Wilson, p. 56.
14–“Going to happen … ten minutes”: quoted by Elliott, p. 273.
14f.–Details of the romance: Wilson, pp. 59ff.
17–Ease and informality of the way the President acted: Francis B. Sayre to author.