Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  Wilson was furious. For five days after Bullitt’s testimony, Lansing did not contact him, and then he telegraphed a brief account of the conversation in Paris, calling Bullitt’s conduct “most despicable and outrageous.” Tumulty later recalled that Wilson summoned him to the private car and showed him Lansing’s telegram: “Read this and tell me what you think of a man who was my associate on the other side and who expressed himself to an outsider in such a fashion: Were I in Washington I would at once demand his resignation. Think of it! This from a man whom I raised from the level of a subordinate to the great office of Secretary of State of the United States. My God! I did not think it was possible for Lansing to act in this way.”42 Given his own attitude and their past relations, Lansing’s behavior should not have surprised Wilson. On his return to Washington, Lansing circulated to cabinet colleagues a letter of resignation in which he expressed bitter disappointment at the president’s failure to fulfill the Fourteen Points and live up to the idealism of the war. Only the president’s stroke would prevent Lansing from staging a dramatic, damaging exit.

  As the presidential train made its way across the Great Plains, the sparse, scattered population meant fewer stops and speeches during the second week of the tour and more time for Wilson to rest. Grayson continued to worry about the accumulating effects of heat, fatigue, and the noise and motion of the train, and he commented in his diary that his patient was having headaches that lasted several days and kept coming back. Wilson was also having trouble breathing, which may have been because of the thinner air and dry heat of the Plains and Rockies. Whether or not these ailments were warning signs of an impending stroke, they showed that the rigors of the tour were harming Wilson’s health.43

  With his usual mix of determination and denial, he soldiered on, but his speeches seemed to suffer from his deteriorating health. In North Dakota and Montana, he delivered disjointed, rambling remarks, and once he abruptly switched to domestic affairs, expressing “my shame as an American citizen at the race riots that have occurred in some places.” This was Wilson’s only public statement on the racial violence of the summer of 1919. He made no separate, extended statement condemning the violence, as he had done against lynching a year before. His absorption in the League fight probably explained this silence and neglect, but it was a lamentable failure of presidential leadership, especially for someone as eloquent as Wilson. He added insult to injury by linking this brief, passing mention of the race riots with the strike by the police force in Boston, which he called “a crime against civilization.”44

  When the train reached the Pacific Northwest, with its lower altitude and higher humidity, Wilson’s health seemed to improve, and his speeches grew more hard-hitting. He called Article X “the heart of the pledge we have made to other nations in the world” and said he could accept interpretative reservations but not ones “which give the United States a position of special privilege or special exemption.” He began to make his most poignant emotional appeal when he noted that at every station there were “little children—bright-eyed little boys, excited little girls”—who might have to fight another world war. He began to praise the LEP and Taft, and he quoted Lodge’s 1915 espousal of the league idea. In doing that, he was following advice from Tumulty to reach out to the other party. He also asked his audience to give no thought to the 1920 election and asked them to “forget, if you please, that I had anything to do with … [the League].”45 Was Wilson suggesting that he would not run again and hinting at what might happen if he disavowed a third term? Most political wisdom counseled against disavowing a third term—at least then. The threat of running in 1920 was the biggest stick he could wield. With Roosevelt gone, no one commanded anything like Wilson’s stature, and he was making this tour to remind friend and foe of his public appeal. Reports were reaching him that Democrats in the Senate might defect to support reservations, and taking himself out of the presidential race would rob him of the best way to keep them in line. Yet an announcement that he would not run would have reshaped the League fight. It would instantly have made people forget the Bullitt-Lansing fiasco, and it could have had a healthy, air-clearing impact on the larger debate. It would have allowed the president to put himself forward as the totally disinterested seeker of peace.

  He enjoyed his longest, most restful respite from the grind of the tour when the train traveled two nights and a day through scenic woods and mountains in Oregon and California on the way to San Francisco. The tour was now in its third week, and he would spend the next six days in California. Two days and nights in San Francisco marked the longest stop on the trip, and one of the three times when he and Edith slept in a hotel. The speeches he gave in California were the best of the tour, and a few ranked among the finest Wilson ever gave. In San Francisco, he explained the obligation under Article X and charged his opponents with wanting “to make it [the League] a matter of opinion merely.” In Oakland, he pointed again to the “little children who [seem] to be my real clients,” because unless the League works, “there will be another and final war just about the time these children come to maturity.”46 Wilson got a lift from giving those speeches and from the enthusiastic reception in Hiram Johnson’s adopted hometown. Grayson believed that this tonic effect offset the headaches. A restful day with only short stops and no speeches on the way to San Diego further refreshed him.

  Perhaps as a result, Wilson went on to give the finest speech of the tour. On September 19 in San Diego, he addressed a crowd of 30,000 in an outdoor stadium. The speaker’s platform had a glass box with a “voice phone” inside and electric wires connected to megaphones aimed at the audience. This early use of a microphone and electric amplifiers offered a taste of things to come: the Democrats’ gathering the next year in San Francisco would be the first national political convention to use such technology. Now, Wilson did not enjoy the experience because he could not move around, yet the constraint did not seem to affect his performance. He declared that “the great heart of humanity beats in this document,” and he answered criticisms, again rejecting reservations that sought “an unjust position of privilege.” He ended with another reference to the children: “I know, if by any chance, we should not win this great fight for the League of Nations, it would mean their death warrant.” They would have to fight “that final war” in which the “very existence of civilization would be in the balance,” and to reject the League would betray the sacrifices of mothers of sons who had laid down “their lives for an idea, for an ideal, for the only thing that is worth living for—the spiritual redemption that rests in the hearts of humanity.”47

  That night and the next, he and Edith slept in a hotel in Los Angeles and spent Sunday there before starting on the return leg of the trip. The day of rest included a reminder of a painful part of Wilson’s past: Mary Allen Hulbert, formerly Mrs. Peck, came to have lunch at the hotel with him, Edith, and Grayson. This was the first time the two women met. “She came,” Edith later wrote, “—a faded, sweet-looking woman who was absorbed in an only son.” According to Edith, Mary Hulbert told tales of her difficulties and took up time Wilson needed to spend with other visitors, but he insisted on hearing about her troubles. When the talk turned to the stories about the two of them, Wilson cried out, “God, to think that you should have suffered because of me.” In parting, as Edith went to get her coat, Wilson asked, “Mary, is there nothing we can do?” She asked only if he could help her son. Edith walked her to the elevator, which, Mrs. Hulbert would write, “quickly dropped me out of the life of my friend Woodrow Wilson.”48

  The rest of the third week of the speaking tour brought an ascent in altitude and a decline in performance. The distances between cities in the Rockies gave Wilson more time to rest, but the thinner, drier air caused him breathing problems again. Grayson noted in his diary that the president had constant headaches and coughing spells. Five years later, the doctor would claim that in Los Angeles he had seen a more alarming sign: “Little drops of saliva appeared at the c
orners of Mr. Wilson’s mouth. The saliva continued. His pallor increased.” That recollection smacked of a face-saving claim on Grayson’s part that he had diagnosed his patient’s true condition earlier than he did. News from Washington did not help either. When the train made a stop in Ogden, Utah, on September 23, Wilson received a telegram informing him that Lodge had reached an agreement with McCumber and other senators on the Foreign Relations Committee about a reservation on Article X. At first, the president appeared to react calmly, instructing Tumulty to telegraph back to the White House for more information. The calm was deceptive. In brief remarks after a motorcade in Ogden, Wilson lashed out, saying that “all the elements that tended toward disloyalty are against the League, and for a very good reason. If this League is not adopted, we will serve Germany’s purpose.”49

  When he spoke that evening at the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, a crowd estimated at between 13,000 and 15,000 packed the unventilated hall. “The fetid air we encountered was unlike anything I have ever experienced,” Edith recalled. She nearly fainted, and she found that her husband’s suit jacket was soaked with perspiration. Wilson gave his worst performance on the tour. He equated—erroneously—reservations with amendments and claimed they would require the assent of all signatories to the treaty, including Germany. Then he read the text of the reservation that the committee members had just agreed to, and when the audience applauded, he lashed out, “Wait until you understand the meaning of it, and if you have a knife in your hand with which you intend to cut out the heart of the Covenant, applaud.” Recovering his poise, he maintained that nothing in the Covenant impaired Congress’s sole power to declare war. Furthermore, common sense would prevent sending American forces to faraway fights: “If you want to put out a fire in Utah, you don’t send to Oklahoma for the fire engine.” He argued that reservations like that one undermined the moral obligation under Article X, and, thereby, “by holding off from the League, they serve the purposes of Germany.”50

  The speech was so bad that even the normally uncritical Tumulty told him, “Frankly, your ‘punch’ did not land last night.” He advised Wilson to stick to a few main points, particularly the assertion that failure to enter the League wholeheartedly would betray the sacrifices of the men who had fallen in the war. Tumulty also took the unusual step of drafting a speech that included a comparison between Article X and the last statement on the league idea by Roosevelt. Wilson did not adopt Tumulty’s suggestion, but the next day in Cheyenne, Wyoming, he declared that Article X “cuts at the taproot of war,” and he urged senators who supported reservations—“men whom I greatly respect”—to realize that they would “make no general promise” and leave other nations to guess what they felt obligated to do in each instance. On September 25 in Denver, he painted a picture of the next war: the last war’s weapons “were toys as compared with what would be used in the next war.” That war “would be the destruction of mankind. And I am for any kind of insurance against it and the barbarous reversal of civilization.” Wilson bobbed on reservations. He still maintained, “Qualified adoption is not adoption,” but he added that it was legitimate “to say in what sense we understand certain articles.” He also pointed out that contrary to what people thought, the Senate did not ratify a treaty but gave only advice and consent: final ratification lay with the president.51

  In the afternoon of September 25, Wilson spoke at the Colorado state fairgrounds in Pueblo. Grayson noted that the president had a splitting headache all day, but he gave a strong, moving speech. This time, he followed Tumulty’s suggestion and quoted Roosevelt on the need for organized peace, which he equated with Article X, which the United States could not adopt “on a special privilege basis.” He again painted a picture of a militarized America in the event that America did not enter the League, and he closed with an avowal that Americans had seen “the truth of justice and of liberty and of peace. We have accepted that truth, and we are going to be led by it, and it is going to lead us, and, through us, the world out into the pastures of quietness and peace such as the world has never dreamed of before.”52

  Those were Wilson’s last words on the speaking tour, and they ended the last extended speech he would ever give. They would be the closing lines of one of the greatest speaking careers in American history—a final burst of eloquence from a dying star. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who would later make himself the most shining example of the scholar in politics since Wilson, would deem the speech at Pueblo “as moving as anything in the language of the American presidency,” and he would call it a “speech from the cross.”53 Laudatory as that comparison is, it would not have entirely pleased Wilson. He never thought of himself as a messiah, and he did not entertain any intimations of finality as he spoke in Pueblo. The tour was only three quarters completed, and the schedule included five more stops with major speeches before the return to Washington. Wilson planned to make another speaking tour in October that would take him to the Northeast and include a stop in Boston, where he would pull Lodge’s pointed beard in his own hometown. None of that was to be.

  On the train, Grayson noted that Wilson was tired and in pain. He suggested a walk, and about twenty miles outside Pueblo the train stopped. With Edith and Grayson, Wilson walked briskly for about an hour. Along the way, an old farmer driving his car recognized the president and stopped to shake his hand and give him a cabbage and some apples. Later, Wilson spotted a sick-looking soldier in a private’s uniform sitting on the porch of a house, and he climbed over a fence to shake hands with him. At dinner, he said he thought the walk had done him good, and his appetite was better than it had been for several days. Wilson insisted on staying up until ten o’clock, when the train made a last stop in Colorado, at Rocky Ford. The doctor tried to keep the president from going out on the platform, but as the train pulled out, Wilson did get in some hand shaking and then waved to the people lined up beside the tracks.54 It was the last flesh-pressing public appearance Wilson would make.

  Later that night, as Edith recalled, her husband knocked on the door of her compartment and told her he could not sleep because his headache was “unbearable.” She called Grayson, who found Wilson “in a highly nervous condition, the muscles of his face were twitching, and he was completely nauseated.” The doctor did what he could to relieve the pain and suggested that the rest of the trip be canceled; Wilson protested that his enemies would call him a quitter. Edith and Grayson propped him up on pillows in the study in an effort to get him to sleep, and he finally did around five. “That night was the longest and most heart-breaking of my life,” Edith later wrote.55

  While Wilson slept, Grayson went to see Tumulty and told him that the rest of the trip must be canceled. Tumulty in turn sent word to the engineer to stop the train in the yards outside Wichita, Kansas. Whether Grayson immediately suspected something more serious than exhaustion is not clear, but at some point he did. Six weeks later, he told Ray Stannard Baker that on the way eastward he had seen “a curious drag or looseness at the left side of his mouth—a sign of danger that could no longer be obscured.”56 That may have been a symptom of what neurologists now term a transient ischemic attack—a temporary blockage in the smaller capillaries of the brain that often prefigures a stroke. Grayson was not trained in neurology, and at no time in his diary did he use the word stroke. Still, he must have suspected something was wrong in the president’s circulatory system, because he asked two specialists from Philadelphia to examine the president. But Grayson did not summon those doctors until after the party had returned to Washington.

  When Wilson woke the next morning in Wichita, he tried to resist the plans to cancel the trip, but Grayson insisted. When Tumulty came to talk to him about arrangements, he admitted, “I don’t seem to realize it, but I seem to have gone to pieces. The Doctor is right. I am not in condition to go on. I have never been in a condition like this, and I just feel as if I am going to pieces.” Then he looked out the window and wept. Tumulty issued a statement to the press that the
rest of the trip was being canceled because the president’s exertions had brought on “a nervous reaction in his digestive organs.” The railroad cleared the tracks so that the train could proceed directly to Washington. Wilson stayed in his compartment; twice Grayson had railroad officials slow the train in an attempt to ease his patient’s suffering. When the train arrived at Union Station, a photographer snapped a picture that shows the president’s face haggard and his mouth fixed in a grimace.57

  The speaking tour had unquestionably taken a toll on Wilson, and serious questions arose immediately about whether it had been worth the price he paid. Critics and opponents predictably scoffed at his effort to influence public opinion and the Senate while supporters praised it. The most balanced assessment came from Secretary of War Baker, who told a friend at the end of the tour that Wilson had gotten an enthusiastic reception but, “[a]s one of the Senators said to me the other day, ‘Nearly every Senator has from four to six years to serve, and they are perfectly willing to let future events cover up any present disapproval of their course of action.’” Most interpreters since then have echoed that assessment, although some have gone further and maintained that Wilson went on a fool’s errand that produced no results and left him a broken man. By contrast, one of the veteran reporters on the tour, Charles Grasty of The New York Times, told a friend soon afterward “that the President would have produced an enormous effect if he had continued.” Grasty probably meant not just the rest of this tour but also the next one Wilson planned, in the Northeast.58

  Wilson made mistakes on the tour, particularly in failing to target senators for praise or criticism, and his speeches often suffered from his deteriorating health. Yet with all due allowance for such shortcomings, he put on a remarkable performance. Taken together, his speeches put forward the most compelling case for his side in the League fight. He effectively answered the major criticisms of the League and the treaty, especially those aimed at Article X and Shantung, and he delivered deeply moving appeals to spare that generation’s children from the horrors of another world war. He did tread occasionally on the verge of demagoguery, as when he pointed to the specter of Bolshevism, cast aspersions on the motives of his opponents, and played on anti-German sentiment. In fact, he might have stirred up public opinion more and put greater heat on senators by resorting to more of those appeals. But that was not like Wilson: he rarely chose to stoop to conquer.