Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  It took more than such gentle splashes of cold water to awaken Wilson from his dream. The same day that he talked with Glass, he summoned Colby to the White House and deputized the secretary of state to put his name before the convention. Newspaper reports were already circulating that the president was seeking renomination. Cummings sent a steady stream of telegrams back to the White House, using the code Wilson had worked out with him. Most of the pre-convention maneuvering centered on the League plank in the platform. Glass and Colby held out for a strong endorsement, but Senator Walsh succeeded in leaving the door open to reservations. That concession angered Wilson, but Cummings assured him that the League plank was a victory for him, and Wilson sent a telegram congratulating the delegates.

  The Democratic convention that opened in San Francisco on June 28, 1920, featured several firsts. It was the first major party convention to be held on the West Coast—a circumstance that disgruntled many of the delegates, who endured several days of dusty, hot, bumpy train rides to get there. It was the first convention to use microphones and electrical amplifiers—a circumstance that infuriated Bryan, who brushed the microphone aside as if it were an instrument of the devil when he spoke. It was the first convention to be broadcast in part on the radio—a medium that was in its infancy and did not yet reach many listeners. As it played out, the convention had a Janus face: its seemingly interminable ballots harked back to the stalemate of 1912 that had finally broken in Wilson’s favor, and they looked forward to a much worse deadlock four years later that would come close to tearing the party apart.17

  Wilson seemed to own the convention. During the opening ceremonies, winches lifted the huge flag behind the speaker’s platform to reveal a gigantic portrait of the president. The delegates went wild, and when a spotlight played on the portrait, they exploded again. Delegates marched up and down the aisles waving their state placards in a show of support. New York’s Tammany-dominated delegation conspicuously refrained from joining in, whereupon Franklin Roosevelt wrestled the state placard from a Tammany delegate and paraded in the aisles. The thirty-eight-year-old assistant secretary of the navy attracted a lot of publicity with that gesture, which would soon redound to his political benefit. The pro-Wilson mood persisted as the days wore on, and Burleson told another Democratic insider that without the general impression of Wilson’s physical incapacity, nothing could have kept him from being nominated, “notwithstanding the third-term bogey.”18

  The impression of Wilson’s unfitness to run prevailed at the convention because at a crucial moment Burleson and others made sure that it did. When the balloting began, Palmer faded, and McAdoo and Cox became the leading contenders. Prohibition emerged as an issue between them; McAdoo had come out as a “dry,” favoring strict enforcement, whereas Cox was a long-standing “wet,” opposing prohibition and favoring relaxation of enforcement. McAdoo’s status as Wilson’s son-in-law and his presumed closeness to the president had earned him the nickname of Crown Prince, but people greatly exaggerated his ties to his father-in-law. Indeed, the president cast a jaundiced eye on the leading contenders. He thought a vastly better person had a chance to win the nomination—himself. On July 2, Colby telegraphed that since the convention appeared deadlocked, he would put the president’s name in nomination. Wilson gave Colby the go-ahead by telephone.19

  This scheme sowed consternation on opposite sides of the country. Tumulty learned about it from Ray Stannard Baker, who was in San Francisco. Taking his political life in his hands, Tumulty wrote to tell Edith that the president’s true friends all opposed his seeking a third term, adding, “As his devoted friend, I am still of the same view, for I firmly believe it would mar his place in history.” Curiously, Edith did not resent this stand by Tumulty, whom she had never grown to like. On Sunday, July 4, Colby unveiled the scheme before a conclave in San Francisco that included Cummings, Burleson, Daniels, Glass, Senator Joseph T. Robinson of Arkansas, Representative Cordell Hull of Tennessee, Ray Stannard Baker, and Vance McCormick. Except for Colby, everyone at the meeting believed that any move to nominate Wilson would be a mistake and would hurt the party. Colby seemed taken aback and said the others made him feel like a criminal. But that was the end of Wilson’s dream of another nomination, and he blamed the cabinet members at that meeting, particularly Burleson, for killing it. According to the recollection of a well-informed journalist from New Jersey, he wanted to fire Burleson, and Tumulty had to work hard to prevent that. The White House head usher recalled that the cabinet members got a cold reception when they returned. With Grayson’s help, Daniels got back in Wilson’s good graces, but “poor old Burleson … became sort of an outcast around the White House.”20

  When Cox won the nomination, on the forty-fourth ballot on July 6, Wilson took the news hard. He sent Cox a perfunctory telegram of congratulations, and when Franklin Roosevelt won the vice-presidential nomination, he sent him an equally perfunctory telegram. He felt depressed and complained to Grayson that everyone had lost interest in him, but his spirits lifted a little when the party’s nominees came to call on him on Sunday, July 18. Cox and Roosevelt went to the South Portico of the White House, where Wilson was waiting in his wheeled chair with a shawl over his left arm and shoulder. When Cox shook the president’s hand, Wilson said in a weak voice, “Thank you for coming. I am very glad you came.” Roosevelt later remembered that he noticed tears in Cox’s eyes. Edith recalled that her husband brought up stories about Warren Harding’s having an African American ancestor and said they should not use those stories; “we must base our campaign on principles, not backstairs gossip.” The meeting lasted fifty minutes. Wilson’s talk about the League moved Cox, who told him, “Mr. President, we are going to be a million per cent with you and your Administration and that means the League of Nations.” Wilson replied in a whisper, “I am very grateful. I am very grateful.”21

  The lift from the candidates’ visit did not last long. The next night, Wilson had difficulty breathing, and when Cummings came to see him a week later, he noticed that the president’s eyes filled with tears when Cummings assured him of his continued loyalty. The same day, Swem noted, “The President’s mind is not like of old.” Instead of being able to dictate more than one letter at a time, “he lapsed into a sort of coma.” Edith had to remind him what to do next. Wilson fretted about the size of his envelopes and the proper way to fold letters, and he flew into a rage about automobiles passing the presidential limousine when he was out for a ride. The head of the Secret Service found him irascible and had trouble getting around his unreasonable orders. Even a visit from Jessie and Frank Sayre and their children failed to cheer him up.22

  He gave his surest sign of depression when the presidential campaign failed to rouse his old combativeness. From the beginning, the Republicans made him their main issue. They denounced “Wilson’s league,” blamed all the country’s troubles on him, and promised a return to “normalcy”—a word their nominee, Warren Harding, had made their chief slogan. Tumulty repeatedly begged the president to speak out, but Wilson rebuffed him. The most he would do was grant a confidential interview at the end of September to a reporter, William Hawkins of the United Press, who found him “only the shattered remnant of the man” he had been before, with “a timidity, almost an apologetic effect in his [manner].” Still, Wilson had some praise for Cox, declared “Harding is nothing,” and showed a spark of humor when he said, “I suppose at that distance, I look like a damn fool.”23

  Early in October, he roused himself to write a lengthy public statement on the campaign. Breathing his old fire and overruling advice from Tumulty and George Creel, he avowed, “This election is to be a genuine national referendum. … The chief question that is put to you is, of course: Do you want your country’s honor vindicated and the Treaty of Versailles ratified?” Wilson maintained that people had been “grossly misled” about the treaty by the “gross ignorance and impudent audacity” of opponents of the treaty and the League. They would “substitute Americ
a for Prussia in the policy of isolation and defiant segregation.” He dismissed the charge that Article X would impair Congress’s authority to declare war as “absolutely false,” and he said that the framers of the Covenant would be “amazed and indignant at the things that are now being ignorantly said about this great and sincere document.” The whole world, he concluded, awaited the voters’ verdict on the shape of the future.24

  Immediately after the release of that statement, Wilson became even more of a campaign issue. A Republican senator running for reelection, Selden Spencer of Missouri, claimed that Tumulty had acted as president and issued orders in his own name. Tumulty denied the charge, and Wilson publicly telegraphed a denial to Spencer. The senator also claimed that at Paris, Wilson had promised military aid to Romania and Serbia. Wilson answered, “I am perfectly content to leave it to the voters of Missouri to determine which of us is telling the truth.” The flurry of charges and countercharges following this exchange received extensive coverage in newspapers all over the country, temporarily crowding the presidential campaign off the front pages. Wilson did not enjoy the attention, and he continued to resist Tumulty’s pleas to involve himself more actively. Visiting the president again early in October, Cummings told him that the campaign should have focused more on the League. “Yes, that is the pity of it,” Wilson answered. “You and men like you are Crusaders. The other people are politicians.”25

  Viewing the election as a crusade for the League of Nations finally prompted him to get into the campaign, though in a limited way. On October 18, he addressed a public letter to Harding, rejecting the Republican candidate’s claim that the French had asked him, Wilson, to “lead the way to a world fraternity.” Wilson asserted, “I need not point out to you the grave and extraordinary inferences to be drawn from such a statement.” That was a warm-up to his biggest foray into the campaign. Nine days later, on October 27, he spoke to fifteen pro-League Republicans who had bolted their party and were supporting the Democratic ticket. This was Wilson’s first speech in more than a year, and he had written it himself. He apologized for sitting while he spoke and for reading from a text, “what my dear father called ‘dried tongue.’” He affirmed that the League offered the only way to redeem the sacrifices made by the husbands, sons, and brothers who had fallen in the war and that Article X would prevent another world war. “This is the true, the real Americanism.” This was the “supreme choice” that transcended parties: “The nation was never called upon to make a more solemn choice than it must now make.”26

  Two days later, he made one last foray into the campaign. Cox invited him to attend a large rally in New York, but he declined, using infirmity as an excuse. In fact, although Cox and Roosevelt had issued statements endorsing the League, they had also talked favorably about reservations, and that distressed Wilson. He recognized, though, that the candidates still offered a sterling alternative to Harding, and on October 29, four days before the election, he wrote a public letter praising Cox for having “spoken truly and fearlessly about the great issue at stake.” Wilson predicted victory and signed the letter, “Your gratified and loyal supporter.”27 Still, the endorsement lacked warmth and came far too late.

  As things turned out, earlier, more enthusiastic endorsements by Wilson and speeches, if he had been able to make them, would have done little good. The only surprise in the election results was the Republicans’ truly titanic victory. Harding captured more than 60 percent of the popular vote, more than 16 million, to 9 million for Cox. His electoral margin was 404 to 127—almost as big as Wilson’s in 1912. This tidal wave swept away almost everything the Democrats held outside the South. Beyond the borders of the Confederacy, not a single one of the party’s candidates for senator or governor won, not even New York’s rising star, Al Smith. Except for Kentucky, all the border states went Republican, as did such usually safe states as Oklahoma and Arizona. Even in the South, despite whispering campaigns about Harding’s alleged “black blood,” Tennessee fell to the Republicans. New York City and Boston went Republican for the first time since the Civil War. The party’s majority in the House of Representatives rose to 303 seats to the Democrats’ 131, while in the Senate they gained ten seats to hold 70 to the Democrats’ 26.28

  Wilson had wanted this election to be a referendum, and many people were delighted to read its outcome as such. Senators Borah and Johnson gleefully proclaimed that the American people had spoken resoundingly against League membership, and later historians would echo their judgment and call this election a “referendum for isolation.” Actually, the League and foreign policy in general played far less of a role in the results than did discontent with post-war troubles. Another influence was “reform fatigue.” In their national campaign, Republicans hewed to an unabashedly conservative line. They slammed Wilson’s domestic policies, and they almost never uttered the name of Theodore Roosevelt. That was a deliberate omission. The governor of Kansas told William Allen White, “I have a feeling that we have had all the superman business the party is likely to want.”29 For the Republicans, Harding’s “normalcy” meant implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, a return to the days of McKinley.

  In the only apparent contradiction, Eugene Debs, running from his cell in the federal prison in Atlanta, racked up more than 900,000 votes—a few thousand more than he had gotten eight years earlier. Actually, the Socialist’s showing was perfectly consonant with Harding’s triumph: either way, people were voting against Wilson. If the election of 1920 was a referendum, it was a referendum on him. As one historian has put it, Harding offered the perfect foil to Wilson: “modest mediocrity rather than arrogant genius; … warm humanity rather than austere intellectual-ism; genial realism rather than strenuous idealism.” There was no question which half of that antinomy the electorate chose.30

  The object of this repudiation had oscillating reactions to the event, as was typical with most of his reactions since the stroke. Wilson spent part of election day, November 2, as he did every day now, trying to climb a set of little steps Grayson had ordered built for him. The next day, he told Swem that the “Republicans had committed suicide”—by which he evidently meant that their conservative domestic policies would doom their future political prospects. He also believed that the result had hurt the country in the eyes of the world. Yet Stockton Axson told Jessie, “He has never been finer than he is today, serene, steady, his patriotism sublime.” Axson thought Wilson looked better than he had in months, “and this evening he was almost merry, laughed more than I have seen him laugh for a year.” Talking about the election and the fate of the country, Axson found “not a suggestion of bitterness, rather loving-kindness.” Yet a few days later, Cummings noted that the president seemed “mournful,” and his “whole household seems tired.” Wilson asked Colby to write a Thanksgiving proclamation for him because “although I have no resentment in my heart I find myself very much put to it to frame a proper proclamation.”31

  The Republicans’ romp in 1920 left Wilson the lamest of lame ducks. He would pass his final four months in the White House as an often-embittered caretaker. A special target of his bitterness was Debs. Earlier, in August, the subject of pardons for persons convicted under the wartime laws had come up again. Changing his mind, Palmer now favored them, as did Newton Baker and Josephus Daniels, but Wilson said no. Appeals to pardon Debs continued to come, particularly from labor leaders, including Samuel Gompers, and at the end of January 1921, Palmer sent the president a formal legal argument—replete with references to Supreme Court opinions, particularly ones written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.—in favor of executive clemency. “Debs is now approaching 65 years of age,” Palmer concluded. “If not adequately, he surely has been severely punished.” Wilson wrote on the document, “Denied. W.W.” He would carry his refusal to forgive to his grave. A year later, after Harding did pardon Debs, Ida Tarbell recorded Wilson saying, “Debs should never have been released. Debs was one of the worst men in the country. He should have stayed i
n the penitentiary.”32

  The president’s engagement with affairs of state picked up after the election. Edith let down her guard over access to her husband, and Tumulty resumed his former role of chief adviser. The government still functioned with surprising smoothness, thanks to the delegation of authority to cabinet members. As he had done before the stroke, Wilson interested himself in foreign affairs, although he deferred to Colby far more than he had ever done with Lansing. He insisted upon nonrecognition and noninterference toward the Bolsheviks in Russia, he resisted Allied incursions in Asia Minor, and he favored nonintervention in the Caribbean and Mexico. Wilson adamantly rejected all suggestions to resubmit the peace treaty to the Senate, and he feared that when the Republicans came in, they would, as he told an old friend from Princeton, “take us into the League in such a niggardly fashion, with ‘if’s’ and ‘but’s’ which so clearly proceed from prejudice and a desire to play a lone hand and think first and only of the United States.”33

  This increased activity reflected continued recovery, but Wilson was nowhere near fully functioning as president. When Ray Stannard Baker saw him at the end of November, the sight shook him: “A broken, ruined old man, shuffling along, his left arm inert, the fingers drawn up like a claw, the left side of his face sagging frightfully. His voice is not human: it gurgles in his throat, sounds like that of an automaton. And yet his mind seems as alert as ever.” Baker watched newsreels of the European tour with the Wilsons, and he noted that the president sat silent except for making a few remarks “in a dead, hollow, weary voice.” Baker was visiting the White House to write a magazine article, but after reading the draft, Edith and Grayson blocked publication. Edith told Baker she feared readers might receive “a great shock, but to us who have been constantly in touch and seen great improvement it would seem to strike the wrong note.”34