Woodrow Wilson
Page 40
Fortunately for him and the country, at the time that Wilson faced these growing challenges his personal life was undergoing a transformation—dramatically and for the better. Family and friends had tried to distract him from his grief. In January, Jessie came to the White House to give birth to his and Ellen’s first grandchild, Francis Bowes Sayre, Jr. Nell and McAdoo came for dinner at least once a week, and Helen Woodrow Bones, Wilson’s cousin and Ellen’s former secretary, continued to live in the White House. Grayson played golf with him nearly every day, weather permitting, and persuaded him to go for rides in one of the limousines and for an occasional cruise on the presidential yacht, the Mayflower. Time and distractions did begin to dull the pain of his wounded spirit, and he was privately talking about running for reelection, if only to keep Bryan from making another bid for the White House. The secretary of state would be a bad president, Wilson told a friend—in one of his few criticisms of Bryan recorded anywhere besides House’s diary—because he was too trusting and was “a spoilsman to the core and a determined enemy of civil service reform.”37
That determination to run again, together with his renewed zest for progressivism and political combat, were signs that he might be returning to his old self. Also in January, House noted that when Nell got her father to stand in front of a portrait of himself, “he made all sorts of contortions, sticking his tongue in his cheek, twisting his mouth into different positions, rolling his eyes, dropping his jaw, and doing everything a clown would do at a circus.” Yet there were signs to the contrary as well. One was that this devotee of English novelists and poets had lost his taste for reading. “Even books have grown meaningless to me,” he told a friend. “I read detective stories to forget, as a man would get drunk!” Wilson was not likely to drown his sorrows in alcohol, and he did not turn to another readily available and more respectable source of solace—religion—although in January 1915 he made a rare confession about his religious beliefs: “My life would not be worth living if it were not for the driving power of religion, for faith, pure and simple. I have seen all my life the arguments against it without ever having been moved by them.” He felt sorry, he said, for “people who believe only so far as they understand—that seems to me presumptuous and sets their understanding as the standard of the universe.”38
With that kind of faith, it is not surprising that Wilson did not turn to religion in his grief. Privately, after his outcries at the time of Ellen’s death, he mentioned God only in conventional and unreligious comments, as when he said to Bryan, “God knows I have searched my mind and conscience.” Publicly, he gave just one speech that touched on religion. That was in October 1914, on his first trip outside Washington after Ellen’s death, when he addressed the Pittsburgh chapter of the Young Men’s Christian Association. He applauded faith like theirs, which expressed itself in good works and social reform, but he also said that he did not like to think of Christianity “as a means of saving individual souls.”39 He was being true to his Presbyterian upbringing, which stressed the workings of God in the world in large ways, not as solace to individuals for life’s agonies. He was also being true to a personal faith that was deep and steady but something he took for granted and seldom thought about in good times or bad. That aspect of his religious attitude would change as he continued to confront the world war, when he would be dealing with the fate of millions of people, not personal tribulations.
Wilson found his greatest solace, predictably, in female companionship. This companionship came mainly in the form of letters, especially when he poured out his heart to Mary Hulbert, as he often did. His letters carried emotional intimacy but never a hint of romance or desire for physical intimacy; whatever passion had once burned between them had long since cooled, on Wilson’s side at least. Such friendships of emotional warmth on a plane of equality between a man and a woman were unusual in those days and might have caused comment if they had become publicly known. Long-standing social taboos against courtship and remarriage by widowed men and women were weakening, but individuals were expected to observe a “decent interval of time.” For someone who had lost his spouse so recently to fall in love again was unthinkable. Yet that is what Wilson did.
The relationship began as the offshoot of another couple’s romance. Grayson had been patiently courting Alice Gertrude Gordon, a fellow Virginian who had moved to New York and went by the nickname Altrude. She had a close friend who lived in Washington, a widow named Edith Bolling Galt, who was also a Virginian and a friend of Grayson’s. In the fall of 1914, the doctor confided in Mrs. Galt about his feelings for Altrude and talked about life in the White House after Ellen Wilson’s death. As Mrs. Galt later recalled, Grayson was worried about Helen Bones, who seemed lonely in Washington. He soon introduced the two women to each other, and they struck up a friendship, taking rides in Mrs. Galt’s car and walking on bridle paths in Rock Creek Park and taking tea afterward at Mrs. Galt’s house. Helen recounted how her aunt, Wilson’s mother, had raised her after her own mother died; she also described how Wilson and Ellen had taken her and other young relatives into their home and sent them to college.
Edith Galt first met Wilson on a sunny afternoon in March 1915. As she later recounted the story, Helen had insisted on their using one of the presidential limousines and returning to the White House for tea after their walk. The paths in the park were muddy that day, and Edith protested against the plan to return to the White House: “Oh, I couldn’t do that; my shoes are a sight, and I should be taken for a tramp.” Helen brushed aside her objections. Cousin Woodrow, she said, would be out playing golf with Grayson, and he had been urging her to have people come to visit. When they got off the elevator on the second floor, Edith found herself face-to-face with the president, who had just come back from the golf course with Grayson. His and the doctor’s shoes were as muddy as hers and Helen’s. “We all laughed at our plight, but I would have been less than feminine than I must confess to be, had I not been secretly glad that I had worn a smart black tailored suit which [the fashion house of] Worth had made for me in Paris, and a tricot hat which I thought completed a very good-looking ensemble.” Edith also recalled noticing that the president’s golf clothes “were not smart.” The women had their shoes cleaned, the men changed their clothes, and the foursome gathered for tea in front of a fire in the oval sitting room on the second floor.40
For Woodrow Wilson, history was repeating itself. Thirty-two years earlier, he had fallen in love with Ellen Axson practically from the moment he first laid eyes on her. Now he would react the same way with Edith Galt. The forty-two-year-old widow was a tall woman, with a shapely though not slender figure, gray eyes, dark hair, and a glowing complexion. Her Virginia roots stretched back to 1607 and the original settlement at Jamestown, including among her ancestors Pocahontas and John Rolfe. Over the intervening generations, her family had belonged to the planter class of the Tidewater, and they had connections with one of Virginia’s grandest names, the Randolphs. Like many such families, the Bollings lost most of their money in the Civil War. Edith’s father, a graduate of the University of Virginia Law School, relocated, becoming a judge in Wytheville, a town at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains near the North Carolina border, where Edith was born in October 1872. A lively young woman with a talent for music but little liking for books, she had received a somewhat spotty education, although she did attend two boarding schools. In her teens and early twenties, she began traveling to Washington to visit her oldest sister, who had married a member of the Galt family, which owned the city’s most distinguished jewelry store. In the course of those visits, Edith met her brother-in-law’s cousin, Norman Galt, who also worked in the family business, and they were married in 1896.41
The Galts’ marriage lasted just eleven years. Outwardly, it appeared happy enough. As the wife of a prominent businessman, Edith enjoyed an assured though not elevated place in Washington society. She had been raised a devout Episcopalian, and she attended church regularly. Inwardly,
some strains may have existed between the couple, possibly involving a tendency toward depression on Edith’s part. They had had one child, a son who was born in 1903 but lived only three days. The jewelry store also posed problems. Norman Galt had taken sole ownership, but soon afterward, in January 1908, he died unexpectedly and without having paid the debts he had incurred to buy out his relatives. “I had no experience in business affairs,” Edith later wrote, “and hardly knew an asset from a liability.” Nevertheless, with the help of an experienced manager, she kept the store going. After a few prosperous years, she was able to delegate active management to others, and she began to enjoy herself.42
If not a merry widow, Edith certainly was a liberated one. She played golf, obtained the first driver’s license issued to a woman in the District of Columbia, attended the theater and concerts, had one or two romances, and traveled widely, to Europe and around the United States, often accompanied by Altrude Gordon. As her comment about her own and the president’s attire indicated, she had a flair for fashion. In sum, Mrs. Galt was a stylish, worldly, independent woman; in those respects, she resembled Mary Hulbert. Between that resemblance and her good looks, Edith Galt might well have been expected to catch the eye of the lonely widower who lived in the White House.
Catch his eye she did. Grayson recalled that one day they had been riding in a limousine when Wilson saw Mrs. Galt, whom he had not yet met, walking on the street and asked, “Who is that beautiful lady?” The story sounds apocryphal, but when Wilson did meet her, he was immediately smitten. She accepted an invitation to join Wilson, Grayson, Helen Bones, and a visitor from out of town for dinner on March 23. “I am just home from the White House where I spent the evening and dined informally with the President,” she told her sister-in-law. “He is perfectly charming and one of the easiest and most delightful hosts I have ever known.” After dinner, she and Helen went upstairs with Wilson to the oval sitting room, where they again sat in front of the fire, and he told “interesting stories” and, at Helen’s request, read three English poems, “and as a reader he is unequalled.” Two weeks later, she accepted another invitation, this time for a drive with Helen and the president. He sat in the front seat with the chauffeur and did not say much. After a quiet dinner, however, he talked about his childhood and his father. “The evening ended all too soon,” Edith recalled, adding, incorrectly, “for it was the first time I had felt the warm personality of Woodrow Wilson. A boylike simplicity dwelt in the background of an official life.”43
Wilson saw Mrs. Galt several more times during the month of April. She came to dinner and took rides again and went to the opening-day game of the baseball season, where she sat behind him in the presidential party. At the end of the month, Wilson began writing to her almost daily. He would use his shorthand to draft a letter, which he would then write, not type—a sure sign of how deeply he felt. For him, it was a short step from epistolary intimacy to a face-to-face declaration of love. He took the step on May 4, right after returning from a trip to Williamstown, Massachusetts, for the christening of his grandson. As Edith later recalled, the two of them were sitting alone on the South Portico porch after dinner with Helen, Wilson’s daughter Margaret, and his sister Annie Howe. Drawing his chair closer to hers, he told her he loved her. She remembered that she felt almost shocked and blurted out, “Oh, you can’t love me, for you don’t really know me; and it is less than a year since your wife died.”44
As Edith recounted the story, he replied, “Yes, I know that you feel that; but, little girl, in this place time is not measured by weeks, or months, or years, but by deep human experiences; and since her death I have lived a lifetime of loneliness and heartache. I was afraid, knowing you, I would shock you; but I would be less than a gentleman if I continued to make opportunities to see you without telling you what I have already told my daughters and Helen: that I want you to be my wife.” He explained that because he was a public personage and the White House a public place, her visits were bound to stir up gossip. “It is for this reason I have talked to the girls about it, so that they can safeguard you and make it possible for me to see you. They have all been wonderful about it, and they love you for your own sake, but would anyway for mine.” Edith recalled that they talked for more than an hour. She told Wilson that if he had to have an immediate answer, it would be no, but she agreed to keep seeing him. He then accompanied her home in a limousine.45
This account leaves a mistaken impression of Edith’s feelings and behavior. She evidently did decline Wilson’s proposal of marriage: an initial refusal was the proper response from a gently bred woman of that time, even when she planned to say yes. Likewise, it was untoward for such a recently widowed man to ask a woman to marry him. In fact, Edith was not so discouraging as she later claimed. That night, after midnight, she wrote a letter to him, opening with a poem that began with the lines
Your dear love fills me with a bliss untold,
Perfect, divine
I did not know the human heart could hold
Such a joy as mine.
In her own words, Edith told him, “Ever since you went away my whole being is awake and vibrant! … I am a woman—and the thought that you have need of me—is sweet!” Those were not the words of a woman who intended to keep a man waiting for long.46
Requited love brought out the best in Wilson. Thirty years earlier, Ellen’s love had helped him write Congressional Government and launch his academic career. Now this new love would invigorate him to meet fresh challenges as president. In the morning of May 7, he wrote to Edith, “Ah, my precious friend and comrade, what happiness it was to be with you last night! While your hand rested in mine I felt as if I could stand up and shout for the strength and joy that was in me. … I knew where I could get the solace that would ease the strain and felt fit for any adventure of the spirit.”47
14
THE SHOCK OF RECOGNITION
Friday, May 7, 1915, was in its time what Sunday, December 7, 1941, and Tuesday, September 11, 2001, would be in their times. Interviewing Americans ten years later, the journalist Mark Sullivan found that this day had burned itself into people’s memories. Everyone he talked to remembered the sinking of the Lusitania; they remembered what they had thought and felt when they heard the news; they remembered where they had been; they remembered what they had done for the rest of the day. This sudden destruction of the world’s fastest and grandest ocean liner inevitably recalled the sinking of the Titanic almost exactly three years before. But this great ship went down not because she had grazed an iceberg but because a German submarine had fired a torpedo into her hull. The liner sank in eighteen minutes, killing 1,198 people, of whom 128 were Americans. The event instantly transformed the stance of the United States toward the war. It brought the shock of recognition: gone were notions of viewing from afar a tragedy that was happening to somebody else; gone were ideas about enduring and managing a gradual accumulation of small incidents caused by blockades and sporadic submarine attacks.1
This traumatic recognition of how close and threatening the war now was spawned contradictory opinions. Nearly every person who spoke out expressed outrage. Roosevelt and Lodge stopped barely short of calling for war, but not many went so far. New York newspapers conducted the closest thing to a public opinion poll that was possible at the time, asking every editor in the country to telegraph his opinion of what the United States should do. Out of the thousand who responded, only six called for war. The lack of belligerence was not surprising. Newspaper and magazine coverage of the carnage on the Western Front and the recent use of poison gas left no room for illusions about the horrors of this war. Wilson summed up the public reaction best when he said to Bryan, “I wish with all my heart I saw a way to carry out the double wish of our people, to maintain a firm front in respect of what we demand of Germany and yet do nothing that might by any possibility involve us in the war.”2
The news of the sinking of the Lusitania shook the president. The first report reached the
White House early in the afternoon, just as he was about to leave for his daily round of golf. He canceled the game and stayed to hear more news, leaving only to take a ride in the limousine. A cable with more information arrived in the evening, just after dinner. Soon afterward, reporters noticed the president walking by himself out the main entrance to the White House. He crossed Pennsylvania Avenue and Lafayette Square and walked several blocks up Sixteenth Street and back down Fifteenth Street, ignoring the rain that was falling. “I was pacing the streets to get my mind in hand,” he told Edith Galt the next morning. Typically for him at a stressful time, but unlike most other politicians, he did not see or talk with anyone.3
Over the weekend the president made a show of leading life as usual. On Saturday, he played golf and took a long ride. Whether Edith Galt accompanied him on the ride is not clear, but she came to dinner. The couple spent time alone afterward, and he handed her a love letter he had written that morning. On Sunday, Wilson went to church, but he departed from his usual practice of not working on the Sabbath to spend much of the day in his study. He started to draft a diplomatic note to Germany, and he made shorthand notes and wrote out two long letters to Edith. His only public reference to the incident came in a statement he had Tumulty give to the press on Saturday night, saying that he viewed the situation with utmost seriousness and was considering how to respond.4