Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  At that meeting, Wilson probably also broached the idea of ending the partnership. Three months later, he reminded Colby of “the suggestion I made to you in the summer … to leave you free individually to take business such as has frequently come to us but with which I, because of my years of public service and conduct of national affairs,—cannot associate myself as counsel.” Colby demurred, but after his return from Europe he bowed to financial reality and suggested closing the Washington office. Wilson responded by renewing his offer to leave the practice. This time, Colby agreed. At the middle of December, he announced the end of the partnership. Although he mentioned “the long interruption of [Wilson’s] active work in the bar,” Colby insisted that Wilson had “shown the same effectiveness that he has displayed in every field to which he has turned his energies.” Their parting was completely amicable.9

  This second foray of Wilson’s into the law proved only a little more remunerative and no more satisfying to him than his youthful sojourn in Atlanta had been forty years before. This time, despite Colby’s polite disclaimer at the time of the dissolution of their partnership, the ex-president’s health obviously had hobbled his work. His lack of physical energy and his difficulty concentrating might not have raised an insuperable obstacle if his stiff ethical scruples and regard for his former office had not barred the door to most prospective clients. Yet as in his long-ago encounter with legal practice, the real fault lay in his attitude and desires. Soon after he suggested dissolving the partnership, he told McAdoo, “The members of the [American Bar] Association constitute the most reactionary and pig-headed group in the nation.”10 Also, Wilson did not take much interest in the practice; the partners’ correspondence usually dealt with Democratic party politics rather than legal business. In every other field to which he had dedicated himself—as scholar, writer, teacher, college president, governor, president of the United States—Wilson had succeeded brilliantly. The law was the only endeavor where he fell short. He failed at it in his old age for the same reason he had in his young manhood—his heart was not in it.

  The physical and mental handicaps that kept him from actively practicing law hampered him in other pursuits as well. In November 1921, the public got a painful reminder of how feeble Wilson was. The third anniversary of the Armistice witnessed the dedication of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, containing unidentified remains of a serviceman killed in the war. Because he could not walk from the White House to the cemetery in Arlington, Wilson asked permission to go in a horse-drawn carriage, which the War Department denied. Instead, he and Edith rode in the procession that took the remains from the Capitol to the White House, and then they returned to S Street. Loud cheers along Pennsylvania Avenue heartened Wilson, as did more cheers and tributes from people gathered in front of his house. After hobbling inside and waving from the upstairs window, he came to the front door and told the throng, “I wish I had the voice to reply and thank you for the wonderful tribute you have paid me. I can only say God bless you.” When someone shouted, “Long live the best man in the world!” Wilson’s eyes filled with tears, and he reached out to hold hands with Edith, who was weeping too.11

  Now, scholarship and writing no longer seemed open to him either. The paralysis in his left hand made it hard to hold a book, and his limited vision made reading on his own slow and laborious. During the second half of 1921, Stockton Axson stayed with the Wilsons, and he often took Edith’s place, reading to his brother-in-law from more serious works, including the novels of Jane Austen and the essays of his old inspiration, Edmund Burke, who interested him anew. In 1922, he commended to Colby “the word expediency as Burke would have used it, to mean the wisdom of circumstances.” Soon afterward, Baker noted, “We got on the subject of Edmund Burke of whom he is a great admirer: & he was positively brilliant in his comments on Burke’s service.”12

  Not long after he talked with Baker, Wilson dictated to Edith some notes for a book to be titled “The Destiny of the Republic.” Under the heading “The Vision and Purpose of the Founders,” he observed that unlike every other nation, the United States had been founded “for the benefit of mankind as well as for the benefit of its people.” Yet, others in the world had not welcomed this experiment. Under other headings he outlined reactions and effects abroad, and, echoing Burke, he observed, “France caught in a luminous fog of political theory, was groping her way from revolution to revolution in bewildered search of firm ground upon which to build a permanent government.” Two weeks after dictating those notes, Wilson told J. Franklin Jameson, his onetime teacher at Johns Hopkins, that he was thinking about making a study of the impact of the American republic on European politics, “and I would be greatly indebted to you if you would direct me to the books which are likely to be of most service to me in carrying out that purpose.”13

  Despite Jameson’s prompt offer to help, the project fell by the wayside. The only fruit to come from these musings was an abbreviated essay that Wilson finally produced in April 1923, “The Road Away From Revolution.” Typed by Wilson himself, the essay opens by asking what had caused the present unsettled state of the world and by noting that the Russian Revolution was part of a widespread reaction against “capitalism” and the way it treated people. “The world has been made safe for democracy,” Wilson asserted. “But democracy has not yet made the world safe against irrational revolution. That supreme task, which is nothing less than the salvation of civilization, now faces democracy, insistent, imperative.” The clearly marked road away from revolution lay through the reassertion of the highest standards and ideals: “The sum of the whole matter is, that our civilization cannot survive materially unless it be redeemed spiritually. It can be saved only by becoming permeated with the spirit of Christ and being made free and happy in the practices which spring out of that spirit.”14

  Barely 1,000 words long, vague and evangelical in tone and message, this essay sounded like some of Wilson’s immature writing during and just after college. When he sent the essay to George Creel, the journalist wrote back—not to him but to Edith—that it was not up to Wilson’s usual standard. Creel was telling this to her rather than her husband because he worried that it would crush his spirit and bring back “all of the old depression with possible effect upon his physical state.” When Edith gently tried to convey that assessment during a ride in the car with Wilson and Axson, he said to Axson, “They kept after me to do this thing, and I did it.” Edith responded, “Now don’t get on your high horse about this. I am just telling you that they say that what the article needs is expansion, reasoning out the case more.” Wilson shot back, “I have done all I can, and all I am going to do.”15

  Back at the house, after Wilson retired to his bedroom, Axson found Edith sobbing in the hallway. “All I want to do is help in any way I can,” she said. “I just want to help and I don’t know what to do.” Axson offered to read the essay and then told her it needed to be shorter, not longer: “This is not an argument, it is a challenge.” Edith asked Axson to talk to her husband, who readily agreed to his suggested cuts.16 Wilson sent the revised essay to The Atlantic, which published it in the August issue and later as a short book.

  “The Road Away From Revolution,” which would be Wilson’s next-to-last published work, contained the germ of later analyses of totalitarianism. The seizure of power in Italy by Benito Mussolini’s Fascists had recently troubled him, and his stress on ideals and spiritual values to combat such creeds anticipated later anti-Communist and anti-Fascist views. But a few intellectual nuggets and rhetorical sparks did not make up for the essay’s shortcomings. For someone who had once written so easily and confidently to produce such a slight piece of writing after so much effort and anguish marked a sad finish to a formerly great literary career.

  Other pursuits did beckon Wilson. He attracted constant public attention as an ex-president and champion of the League of Nations. Early in 1921, a group of friends and admirers set about to organize and endow the Woodrow Wilson Foundation,
which would promote his ideas and annually honor a person who made contributions to world peace. Prominent among the organizers and donors were the League advocate Hamilton Holt and Wilson’s wealthy Princeton classmates Cleveland Dodge and Cyrus McCormick. The main energy behind the effort, however, came from Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt corresponded with Wilson in 1921 and came to visit during the summer, not long before he contracted polio. Roosevelt’s subsequent paralysis would be the basis for a bond between him and Wilson, who would send regular messages of encouragement. With his soon-to-be-famous determination, Roosevelt plunged ahead with work on the foundation. Even though Wilson refused to lend his name to any appeal for money, the organizers had raised most of the $1 million endowment by the end of 1922. Formal incorporation took place on December 27 at Roosevelt’s home in New York. The next day, on the ex-president’s sixty-sixth birthday, a delegation visited to inform him that the Woodrow Wilson Foundation had been established.17

  Wilson received another birthday tribute when a resolution arrived from the Capitol expressing “the pleasure and joy of the Senate of the United States because of his rapid recovery to good health.” Newspaper reports noted that the senators had passed the resolution unanimously by voice vote, with Democrats shouting aye and most Republicans appearing occupied with other business. “Think of them passing it and not meaning it,” Wilson chuckled to Grayson. “I would much rather have had three Senators get together and have it passed with sincerity.” The senators had heard correctly about his health. Six weeks earlier, he had displayed his newfound vigor on the fourth anniversary of the Armistice. In contrast to his tearfulness and his inability to say more than a few words the year before, he spoke forcefully and at some length to some 5,000 people gathered in front of his house. He excoriated the Senate for blocking the path to permanent peace and avowed, “Puny persons who are standing in the way will find that their weakness is no match for the strength of a moving Providence.” Reporters observed that he looked good and seemed to have put on weight. Although Isaac Scott helped him out through the front door, Wilson stood without support and tucked the crook of his cane into his coat pocket. His voice did not ring out as strongly as in days past, but most in the crowd could hear him.18

  Concern about world affairs and the League helped pull Wilson out of his prolonged slump in 1921. In October, when the Harding administration submitted a treaty with Germany that copied the Treaty of Versailles without the League Covenant, he privately scorned Democratic senators who voted “to accept national disgrace in the form of a separate treaty with Germany which repudiated every obligation to our allies.” Soon afterward, he sent Justice Brandeis a statement on foreign policy for a possible Democratic platform. Reclaiming the motto he had first coined and the Republicans had taken up in 1920, Wilson declared, “‘AMERICA FIRST’ is a slogan which does not belong to any one political party.” For Republicans, it meant America “must render no service to any other nation or people,” whereas for Democrats it meant “that in every organization for the benefit of mankind America must lead the world by imparting to other peoples her own ideals of Justice and of Peace.”19 That statement marked the beginning of consultation and collaboration with Brandeis and other prominent Democrats, such as Frank Cobb of the New York World and the diplomat Norman Davis about what they came to call “The Document.”

  Not everyone chose to pursue American membership in the League through party channels. Hamilton Holt and John Hessin Clarke, Wilson’s appointee to the Supreme Court, who resigned in 1922 partly because of ill health, began to plan an organization to promote League membership outside politics. They attracted a number of prominent Republicans, including former leaders of the League to Enforce Peace, but when Clarke approached Wilson, the ex-president said that he preferred to concentrate his influence upon Democrats to get a strong League plank in the next party platform and nominate someone who would rectify “the gross and criminal blunder of failing to ratify the Treaty of Versailles.” Yet he told Holt that he and Clarke were doing good work, “and it will always be a pleasure to cooperate with you.”20 Taking that message as assent, Holt and Clarke formed the League of Nations Non-Partisan Association, which eventually grew into a large, well-funded organization but, like the LEP, would never succeed in reaching its goal.

  As Wilson’s health improved, he devoted his gradually increasing energies mainly to defending his actions as president and involving himself in Democratic politics. Veterans of his administration were quick to tell their tales, particularly about the peace conference. Lansing had jumped in first with an article in The Saturday Evening Post and a book titled The Peace Negotiations: A Personal Narrative, both published in March 1921. Wilson himself had already moved to get out his side of the story by enlisting Baker to write an account of the time in Paris. Baker worked with Wilson’s files, first in the White House and then during the spring of 1921 at S Street. He found the material so massive that he persuaded the Wilsons to have the files moved to his home, in Amherst, Massachusetts. There, Baker labored to produce three volumes of narrative and documents. Excerpts were serialized in newspapers and magazines, and the complete work was published late in 1922 as Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement.21 Before those volumes appeared, Tumulty published magazine articles about Wilson and his memoir, Woodrow Wilson As I Know Him. His accounts were sentimentalized and often inaccurate.

  Wilson evidently did not read Tumulty’s book, but he soon found reasons for being vexed with his former secretary. At the beginning of April 1922, Tumulty asked Wilson to give him a statement that he could read at the Democrats’ Jefferson Day dinner in New York. Wilson, who was working behind the scenes on “The Document,” declined, saying he did not think this an appropriate occasion “for breaking my silence.” According to Edith, Tumulty telephoned her the next day to ask her to get “the Governor” to make the statement, which she refused to do. She recalled that Tumulty then asked to see Wilson about “an important personal matter.” She put down the telephone to ask her husband, who agreed to see Tumulty before he went for his ride in the afternoon. She was out when Tumulty came to the house, but she recalled that her brother cautioned Tumulty not to mention the statement. When Edith got back, Wilson told her Tumulty had not mentioned it.22

  After the dinner, at which Tumulty did issue a statement on Wilson’s behalf, he described the incident differently. “As I stood up to go,” he explained, “you took hold of my arm and in substance said what was contained in the message.” He admitted that Wilson had not told him to make the remarks at the dinner, “but I think I was justified by every fair implication from what you said to me.” The statement read, “Say to the Democrats of New York that I am ready to support any man who stands for the salvation of America, and the salvation of America is justice to all classes”—which the press took as an endorsement of Cox, who was at the dinner. When Wilson read the newspaper accounts, he wrote to The New York Times, “I did not send any message whatever to that dinner nor authorize anyone to convey a message.” As for Cox, Wilson gibed privately that the party would “commit suicide” if it nominated him again. He did not answer Tumulty’s letters of explanation and profuse apology. “Tumulty will sulk for a few days, then come like a spanked child to say he is sorry and wants to be forgiven,” Edith recalled him saying. He took no lasting hard feelings away from this incident, and he later recommended Tumulty as a possible Senate candidate in New Jersey in 1924. The hard feelings were on Tumulty’s side. He did not come to the house until the ex-president lay dying, and then Edith would not allow anyone but family members into the sickroom.23

  Wilson cared about maintaining his silence in early 1922 because he wanted to control his reentry into Democratic politics. Besides repeatedly working over and consulting on “The Document,” he endorsed and opposed candidates for the Senate in Democratic primaries in 1922. In Missouri, he backed a challenge to James Reed by Breckinridge Long, his former student who had served in the State Department. He felt keenly d
isappointed when Reed narrowly won the primary, and he seriously considered endorsing Reed’s Republican opponent. In Mississippi, he denounced Vardaman, who was attempting a comeback, as “thoroughly false and untrustworthy,” and he applauded Vardaman’s defeat. In Maryland, he endorsed former representative David J. Lewis, and he lamented Lewis’s loss to William Cabell Bruce, his nemesis from the University of Virginia. Despite those disappointments, Wilson took heart from the election results in November 1922. In New York, Al Smith won back the governorship, and in Congress the Democrats picked up seventy-six seats in the House and five in the Senate—enough to give them effective control of both houses in combination with newly energized Republican insurgents. “I believe with you that Tuesday’s elections make it easier to turn the thoughts of the country in the right direction,” Wilson told former justice Clarke, “and to make ready for the great duty of 1924.”24

  Wilson had something in mind for 1924 more personal than a renewed push for League membership. His earlier remark to Clarke about the need to nominate someone to rectify “the gross and criminal blunder of failing to ratify the Treaty of Versailles” sounded suspiciously like a description of himself. Writing around the same time to an Alabama newspaper editor and influential state Democrat, Wilson asserted, “[M]y principles and purposes are known and sympathetically interpreted in every part of the world,—particularly among the plainer and simpler kind of people. The selfish conspiracy against the realization of my ideals is confined to a few highbrows who have their own ends to seek. I think I am justified in saying that I am perhaps the only public man in the world who does not need to be interpreted to anybody.”25 Incredible as it might seem, Wilson wanted to run again for president in 1924.