Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  This bad, even tragic, outcome of the League fight turned on Wilson’s stroke. Even more than in the earlier round, his emotional imbalance and skewed judgment blocked a more constructive outcome. At times in the first three months of 1920, he did seem to verge on mental instability, if not insanity. Edith Wilson, Dr. Grayson, and Tumulty did the best they could by their lights, but they were frightened, limited people who should not have been trying to keep Wilson’s presidency afloat. He should not have remained in office. If he had not, the League fight would have turned out differently, and the nation and the world would have been better off.

  Wilson did not take the end of the League fight well. According to one story, Edith did not break the news of the Senate vote to him until the next morning, and a depressed Wilson said to Grayson, “I feel like going to bed for a week and staying there.” By another account, Wilson got the news immediately after the vote and spent a sleepless night, calling Grayson to his bedside several times and telling him, “Doctor, the devil is a very busy man.” Grayson later recalled that the president asked him to read to him from the Bible, 2 Corinthians 4:8—“We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair”—and then said, “If I were not a Christian, I think I should go mad, but my faith in God holds me to the belief that He is in some way working out His own plan through human perversity and mistakes.” That sounds more like something he would say later. The other reactions rang true to Wilson’s thoughts and feelings as he faced his last, worst year in the White House.63

  24

  DOWNFALL

  March 1920 was a cruel month for Woodrow Wilson. After his defeat in the League fight, his delusions and mood swings grew worse. Six days after the Senate voted, he told Grayson that the League should be the main issue in the presidential election and the Democratic convention might decide that “I am the logical one to lead—perhaps the only one to champion this cause.” Other times, he sounded philosophical, telling Grayson it was “too soon for the country to accept the League—not ready for it. May have to break the heart and the pocketbook of the world before the League will be accepted and appreciated.” Yet at the end of March, the doctor found him depressed over the defeat of the treaty and complaining, “I feel that I would like to go back to bed and stay there until I either get well or die.”1

  Physically, Wilson continued to show signs of recovery, although only modestly. He paid some attention to politics, and he intended to veto the Republicans’ resolution authored by Senator Knox that would end the state of war with Germany without a peace treaty. He told Grayson he intended to make his veto message so “extremely distasteful to the Senate” that they might “try to impeach me for it.”2 He also scoffed at Herbert Hoover’s decision to run for president as a Republican, saying he lacked the courage to stand by the Democrats. Yet when Tumulty urged him to make a public statement about such domestic issues as inflation, taxes, and prohibition and drafted a statement for him, he did not respond. Similarly, he did not answer pleas by Secretary of War Baker and Tumulty to issue a general amnesty for all persons convicted under the wartime laws against dissent.

  April brought additional mixed signs of physical recovery and emotional fragility. At two o’clock in the morning on April 13, he summoned Grayson to his bedroom, where they talked for two hours. Wilson dwelled on the “double-dealing of some of the Senators,” particularly Hoke Smith, James Reed, and Lodge, and on how much he wanted to fight them. Yet he also mentioned resigning: “If I am only half-efficient I should turn over the office to the Vice-President … the country cannot afford to wait for me.” This time, Grayson did not encourage that thought but told him that meeting with the cabinet would reassure him about his ability to handle his office, and Wilson responded, “I will try not to be discouraged even as it is and I shall make the best of the circumstances.”3

  He took the doctor’s advice, and in his study the next day, April 14, he held his first cabinet meeting in seven and a half months. Wilson sat at his desk and did not stand up when the cabinet members came in, as he had done in the past, and his only contribution to the discussion was to deplore public criticism of Burleson and to tell Palmer “not to let the country see red.” This was the first time any of the cabinet members had seen Wilson since his stroke, and their reactions to him varied. “He looked fuller in the face, lips seemed thicker & face longer,” Daniels noted, “but he was bright and cheerful.” Palmer thought he “looked like a very old man and acted like one,” while Houston later recalled that his voice was weak and his jaw drooped: “It was enough to make one weep to look at him.”4

  Wilson would hold cabinet meetings almost weekly until early in June, and his appearance and performance at them would wax and wane. Domestic matters came up again at the later meetings, but foreign affairs dominated most of them, particularly the situation with the Senate and the peace treaty. Wilson’s most energetic performance came at the second cabinet meeting, when Burleson tried unsuccessfully to persuade him to resubmit the treaty with reservations that he would accept. In later meetings, he continued to fulminate about the perfidy of the British and French and his determination to veto the Knox resolution, but despite efforts by Burleson and others, he provided no guidance on most matters, especially domestic concerns. Cabinet members continued to act largely on their own, as they had done since the president’s stroke. This practice had the virtue of keeping the government going after a fashion, but it also allowed Palmer to conduct his anti-radical rampage without the president’s knowledge. In early June, the new British ambassador, Sir Auckland Geddes, painted a painfully accurate picture of the situation in Washington: “The deadlock is so complete that one would almost be justified in saying that the United States had no Government.” Geddes blamed the deadlock equally on the Democrats—“the President has been the whole show”—and the Republicans—“[t]he President is regarded as antichrist or something worse.”5

  Wilson’s foes did not have a strong or energetic antichrist to fight against. Grayson thought the president was making slow but steady progress, as evidenced by the nineteen pounds he had gained since February. In May, the doctor described Wilson’s daily routine to Cleveland Dodge: at nine in the morning, he walked from the bedroom to the study and worked at his desk until ten-thirty or eleven, when he was wheeled into the garden; at noon, he often watched a movie for an hour; after lunch in the bedroom, he napped for an hour and then attended to some matters and sometimes took a ride in the car with Edith. Grayson also reported to Dercum that the president’s walking had improved to the point where for the first time he could come to the dining room to eat lunch.6 This cheered him, but the doctor was grasping at straws. By any reasonable standard, Wilson was not functioning as president.

  Some matters that did engage his attention seemed strange and often petty. He told Grayson that the new secretary of state, Colby, was “the flower of the cabinet” and said House had made “a fizzle” at Paris. He still nursed his grudge against Jack Hibben, complaining to a Princeton classmate about the shortcomings of the university’s administration. After one of his rides, he became obsessed with trees that were being cut down in Rock Creek Park and called the superintendent “a liar” for saying that only dead trees were being thinned out. Ten years later, the stenographer Charles Swem reminisced to Tumulty about how the president would sit wrapped in blankets in the wheeled chair “and brood, and when a thing struck him he would send for me and dictate it.” It might be the trees in the park or a plan to spend the summer in England or a scheme for the presidential campaign.7 Yet Burleson complained that he got no response from Wilson to a draft platform for the Democratic convention. Edith Wilson did not falter during these dark days in the White House. She continued to shield her husband from whatever she thought might hurt him, and she showed him fierce loyalty and uncritical devotion. Her love and loyalty unquestionably made his affliction easier to bear, but they did not help him face up to the troubles and dangers that confronted him,
his party, and the nation.

  As spring came to Washington, Wilson became more active, and he began to receive the new ambassadors who came to present their credentials to him. The new Swiss minister noted that his open mouth “gives him an air of senility, which, however disappears once he speaks and his eyes light up.” The minister also noted that his left arm did not move and he did not stand up or leave his chair; he worried that Wilson might suffer another stroke and noted that the White House “has become for him an ivory tower.” Geddes, the new British ambassador, was a physician by training, and he likewise noted that Wilson’s immobility indicated paralysis. He found the president mentally alert and given to telling stories—an old habit—but he concluded, “I should say he is a typical case of hemiplegia. He is not really able to see people and ought to be freed from all the cares of office.” More than anything else and despite Burleson’s complaint about the draft platform, Wilson tried to deal with the way the Democrats stood on the League. Late in May, he drafted in his shorthand a model plank on the treaty, which called for “the unqualified ratification of the Treaty of Versailles” and full and immediate American participation in the League. What Wilson meant to do with this shorthand draft is not clear. He did not have it transcribed, and he does not appear to have shared this model plank with anyone.8

  At the same time, Wilson did make public his thoughts on one aspect of peacemaking by calling the bluff of his adversaries on Capitol Hill. On May 14, the Senate had passed, unanimously by voice vote, a resolution authored by Warren Harding expressing sympathy for the Armenians, whose massacre at the hands of the Turks had become a prominent international cause. Wilson responded by urging Congress to accept an American mandate over Armenia: “I believe that it would do nothing less than arrest the hopeful processes of civilization if we were to refuse the request to become helpful friends and advisers.” The Republicans in the Senate gave Wilson’s request the back of their collective hand. On June 1, the Senate adopted a resolution, drafted by Philander Knox, rejecting the mandate by a vote of 52 to 23. Every Republican voting opposed the mandate, including Lodge, who had earlier championed the cause of the Armenians.9

  Wilson also had a chance to air his views when he rejected the Republicans’ move to end the state of war. Starting in April, the two houses of Congress, voting almost strictly along party lines, passed resolutions declaring the war at an end. On May 27, the president vetoed the final version of what was called the Knox resolution. In a stinging message, he affirmed, “I can not bring myself to become party to an action which would place an ineffaceable stain upon the honor and gallantry of the United States. … Such a peace with Germany—a peace in which none of the essential interests which we had when we entered the war is safeguarded—is, or ought to be, inconceivable, is inconsistent with the dignity of the United States, with the rights and liberties of her citizens, and with the very fundamental conditions of civilization.” The veto held. On May 28, a motion in the House to override fell twenty-nine votes short of the necessary two thirds—once more almost strictly along party lines. This outcome pleased Lodge and other Republican leaders because they could continue to charge the president with being the main obstacle to peace.10

  Clashing with his adversaries over Armenia and the Knox resolution seemed to invigorate Wilson. Four days after the veto, while sitting in his wheeled chair on the rear portico of the White House, he had a long talk with Homer Cummings, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee. When they went over the draft of the keynote speech that Cummings was to deliver at the convention, Wilson made only one criticism. Cummings recalled, “I spoke of his being many times at the point of death. He said that wasn’t true. I shall never forget the way he looked at me with his big eyes when he said that and I looked at Mrs. Wilson and I knew then that the President did not fully realize how sick he had been or how near death he had been.” On matters related to the convention, Wilson objected to Senator Thomas Walsh of Montana because he had voted for the peace treaty with the Lodge reservations, and he gave Cummings a draft plank on prohibition, which condemned the Volstead Act. He also worked out a way of communicating with the chairman, using the same code he had arranged earlier with House. When Cummings mentioned potential nominees, Wilson expressed no preference and said he wanted “a free and open convention.” He also declared, “It is dangerous to stand still. The government must move, and be responsive to the wishes of the people.”11

  Between expressing no preference for a nominee and talking about the need for responsive, dynamic government, it might be thought that Wilson wanted to run again. He did indeed. He was beginning to indulge in his greatest delusion of all following the stroke. Early in June, he wrote two notes in shorthand and his own hand. One, titled “The Great Referendum and Accounting of Your Government,” enumerated three questions, the last labeled “chiefly” in capital letters: “Do you wish to make use of my services as President for another four years? Do you approve of the way in which the Administration conducted the War? Do you wish the Treaty of Versailles ratified? Do you, in particular, approve of the League of Nations as organized and empowered under the Treaty of Versailles, and do you wish the United States to play a responsible part in it?” The other note, titled “3rd Administration,” listed cabinet officers, with Colby staying on as secretary of state and Burleson as postmaster general, McAdoo possibly returning as secretary of the Treasury, and Bernard Baruch becoming secretary of commerce.12

  Some of the people closest to Wilson struggled to keep this flight of fancy from getting off the ground. At the middle of June, Grayson told Senator Glass that the president was seriously contemplating a third term but he was not up to a campaign, which would “probably kill him.” Grayson begged him to do everything possible to prevent this, and Tumulty expressed the same concerns. Grayson also went to see another Democratic activist, his friend Robert Woolley, and unburdened himself, telling Woolley how feeble and moody the president was. The doctor was particularly worried because Wilson had scheduled an interview with Louis Seibold of the New York World.13

  The interview with Seibold, one of The World’s star reporters, sprang from a scheme by Tumulty that went awry. Since March, Tumulty had been trying to get the president to announce that he was not going to run for a third term, and he believed that this interview might smoke him out. Wilson completely foiled those intentions. Seibold’s stories, which appeared on June 18, opened, “Nine months of courageous battling to repair the consequences of illness resulting from the profligacy with which all earnest men draw upon their balance in the bank of nature has neither daunted the spirit nor impaired in the slightest degree the splendid intellect of Woodrow Wilson.” The reporter spent three hours with the president on June 15 and “saw him transact the important functions of his office with his old-time decisiveness, method and keenness of intellectual appraisement.” He recounted how Wilson told jokes, dictated letters, and worked through a basket of documents “with characteristic Wilsonian vigor.” The following day, Seibold saw the president again as he was about to take one of his afternoon rides. “From the distance of a dozen feet he suggested a man ready to sally forth for a stroll on the beach,” Seibold wrote. Though Wilson walked with a cane, “there was no hesitancy in his step, or apparent lack of confidence. His movements, while slow, were not those of a man whose lower limbs have become paralyzed.”14

  In the interview, Wilson claimed, “I am coming around in good shape and could do a lot more more things now if Mrs. Wilson and Dr. Grayson would kindly look the other way once in a while.” He said he was concentrating better than ever on public business, and he declined to discuss candidates for the nomination. He did say he wanted the party to adopt a progressive platform on domestic issues and make a forthright defense of the League of Nations, calling again for a referendum on the League: “No one will welcome a referendum on that issue more than I.” With this interview, Wilson staged a show comparable to the one he had put on earlier for the “smelling comm
ittee.” Most observers read these stories as a bid for a third term, and Democrats around the country started expressing support for the president to run again.15

  The day after the first story appeared, Wilson talked with Glass, who was about to leave for the convention. About the leading candidates, he thought McAdoo—who had just published a letter announcing that he was dropping out of the race—had still left the door open to being nominated, Palmer would be a weak candidate, and the nomination of Governor James Cox of Ohio “would be a fake.” He said nothing about his own prospects, but when Glass regretted that the president’s health would not permit him to lead “a great fight for the League of Nations, … [n]either the President nor Mrs. Wilson responded to this.” Glass added that he “would rather follow the President’s corpse through a campaign than the live bodies of some of the men mentioned for the nomination. This seemed to please the President.” It did not please Tumulty and Grayson. They rode with Glass to Union Station and pumped him to say whether Wilson was thinking of a third term. Grayson got on board with Glass and talked until the train started moving. The doctor’s final words to the senator were “If anything comes up save the life and fame of this great man from the juggling of false friends.” Glass evidently heeded Grayson’s warning, because in a newspaper interview at a stopover in Chicago, he noted that Democrats on the train were convinced that the president was not thinking of a third term and would be surprised if the convention nominated him.16