Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  The intervening year, 1923, marked the best time in his life since the stroke. Nearly everyone who saw him commented on how much better he looked. In June, a senior reporter for The New York Times, Richard Oulahan, wrote a long story about him. Oulahan noted that he still limped but did not drag his left foot, and he used a cane but could stand without it and could get in and out of a car without help. “He has good color, his eyes are clear, his voice is strong, his cheeks are filled out, and he has lost that emaciated appearance of face and body which shocked those who saw him on his first outing after his long siege of confinement to the White House.” The reporter noted that from all reports, mentally he was “the Woodrow Wilson of the stirring days of September, 1919.” He compensated for lack of paid work with attention to public affairs. Oulahan dismissed rumors that Wilson was personally interested in the race for the Democratic nomination in 1924, and he noted that Wilson had not committed himself to any of the contenders, not even his son-in-law McAdoo.26 This newspaper story read a lot like the one by Louis Seibold in The World three years earlier, which had set the stage for the abortive stab at a third-term bid.

  As in 1920, McAdoo’s drive for the nomination pained Wilson. Mac had moved his family to California in 1922 to establish a new political base, and he appeared to be the front-runner. Wilson’s silence notwithstanding, McAdoo might have secured a lock on the nomination except for damaging publicity growing out of legal work he had done for the Teapot Dome oilmen—the kind of guilt by association that Wilson had had the wit to avoid. This setback made McAdoo covet an endorsement from his father-in-law all the more. He sent warm, newsy letters regularly, and in November he and Nell and their two daughters came to Washington for a ten-day visit. Wilson did not want to talk about the campaign with McAdoo, and he asked Edith not to leave him alone with his son-in-law. On the last day of the visit, McAdoo asked Edith if he could talk about the campaign with Wilson. She declined the request and once more the Crown Prince went away empty-handed—with dire consequences for his candidacy and the prospect of a deadlocked convention.27

  During the summer of 1923, Americans got a macabre reminder of Wilson’s improved health. On August 2, the news flashed across the wires that President Harding had died in San Francisco while on an official tour of the West. Wilson had found his successor amiable and felt grateful to him for permitting Grayson to continue as the ex-president’s doctor, but he held Harding’s intellect in contempt. In May 1922, he had told Ida Tarbell that Harding “has nothing to think with,” and he remembered that at his meeting with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee “nobody [but Harding] asked such unintelligent questions.”28 Also, like other critics, Wilson had winced at his successor’s use of language. Such aspersions paled, however, in the face of what Wilson saw as his official duty. On August 8, he rode in the funeral procession that carried Harding’s casket from the White House to the Capitol. The irony was not lost on reporters and spectators: the living ghost from the inauguration of two years earlier was riding down Pennsylvania Avenue behind the body of the seemingly hale younger man who had bounded up the Capitol steps.

  During the summer and fall of 1923, Wilson gave other signs of increasing strength and vigor, and three weeks after Harding’s funeral, Edith left for a short vacation in Newport, Rhode Island, and Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts. Although visitors usually noted how well she was bearing up, the strain of caring for her invalid husband had taken a toll on her. This was the first time in their seven and a half years of marriage that the couple had been apart even for one night, except during Wilson’s visit to the Atlantic fleet in 1917. Edith’s decision to get away sprang from confidence that her husband was well enough to stand a brief separation, and he raised no objections. She wrote loving letters to him every day, and with one hand he typed two letters to her, which were speckled with errors, and then, at the end of the second one, he wrote by hand, “I do not feel equal to the typewriter to-day but must send a line to say I love you.“29 Edith went away again in October for a weekend in New York.

  His spirits were good during the summer and fall of 1923, and he was rediscovering some of his old-time cheerful fatalism. In September, Bernard Baruch told the British diplomat Lord Riddell that Wilson had recently said to him, “Perhaps it was providential that I was stricken down when I was. Had I kept my health I should have carried the League. Events have shown that the world was not ready for it.” That was not the only time he expressed that belief. His daughter Margaret later recalled him saying that when America joined the League, it would be because the people were convinced it was right “and then will be the only right time for them to do it.” With a smile, he added, “Perhaps God knew better than I did after all.”30

  In September, Jessie came with her husband, Frank Sayre, and their three children. They were bidding good-bye before leaving for Asia, where Sayre would spend a year as a legal adviser to the king of Siam. The other members of the Big Three at the peace conference also came to call, Clemenceau the previous December and Lloyd George in October. Those were pleasant personal visits, and Lloyd George particularly enjoyed hearing Wilson recite limericks.

  Wilson’s mind went back to his academic days. In October he asked his former student Raymond Fosdick, who was now working for the Rockefeller Foundation, to see him about “an educational matter.” When Fosdick arrived the following week, Wilson told him that he had made his greatest contributions not in politics but as a teacher and college administrator and wanted to do more there. He believed that American colleges and universities could yet rise to the levels of scholarship of Oxford and Cambridge, and he asked for help from the Rockefeller Foundation so that he could become “president of some university which would take the initiative in the new reformation.” Fosdick suggested that on account of his health Wilson might not be up to such a task, but he insisted he was “ready for any kind of work.” Fosdick noted that Wilson had tears in his eyes when he talked about his ideas, and he spoke bitterly about their alma mater: “Princeton was bought once with Ivory Soap money, and I suppose she is for sale again.”31

  Fosdick later confessed to Baker that he was “considerably embarrassed by his request,” but he promised to take it up with his colleagues in New York. A month later, he wrote diplomatically that the foundation found Wilson’s ideas attractive but it was “necessarily reluctant to initiate enterprises of an experimental character in education.” Unappeased, Wilson fired back, “Please do not let the idea get rooted in the minds of the Rockefeller trustees that what I have in mind is experimental. … I can honestly say that my plans are so thoroughly thought out in detail that there is nothing experimental about them.” Fosdick promised to talk further with Wilson, but thirty years later he would write, “It was, of course, the nostalgic dream of an old and crippled warrior as he thinks over the battles of his younger days—a knight with his armor laid aside, sitting by the fire in the autumn of his life and remembering the blows he had struck for causes that had inspired his youth.”32

  That characterization of Wilson was not entirely on the mark. More than nostalgia, Wilson was showing the same delusions of potency he had demonstrated when he hatched his third-term scheme in 1920. Nor, despite what he said to Fosdick, had he forsaken politics. Twice in November 1923, he spoke out forcefully on current affairs. On the day before the fifth anniversary of the Armistice, he gave his first and only talk over the radio. Standing before a microphone in the library of his house, he spoke in a voice that quavered a bit at first and betrayed more of a southern accent than in the past. He excoriated America’s failure to live up to the responsibilities to maintain peace, but he believed that the nation would “retrieve that fatal error and assume once more the role of courage, self-respect and helpfulness which every true American must wish to regard as our natural part in the affairs of the world.” Stations across the country carried the talk, and some towns set up loudspeakers in auditoriums, allowing thousands of people to hear the ex-president’s voice for the first time
. It might have served as a kickoff for a campaign.33

  The following day brought another public appearance that looked even more like a campaign event. This year, the Armistice Day crowd on S Street numbered an estimated 20,000 people. A band played, and Senator Glass spoke for a delegation of Democratic dignitaries, assuring the ex-president of the American people’s loyalty to and affection for him. Visibly moved, Wilson faltered and stopped as he began to speak. The band struck up the hymn “How Firm a Foundation,” but he raised his hand and started speaking again. After paying tribute to the doughboys and General Pershing and condemning the Armistice again as “an armed standstill,” Wilson concluded, “I am not one of those who have the least anxiety about the triumph of the principles I have stood for. I have seen fools resist Providence before and I have seen the destruction, as will come upon these again—utter destruction and contempt. That we shall prevail is as sure as that God reigns.” The crowd did not disperse after he stopped speaking, and the band played on until the car pulled out of the driveway to take Wilson for his afternoon ride, accompanied by Edith and her mother.34 This would be his last speech and public appearance.

  Another moving experience awaited him six weeks later, on his sixty-seventh birthday. On December 28, as he and Margaret were about to go out for his daily ride, Cleveland Dodge and other wealthy friends surprised Wilson with a Rolls-Royce. The car, which reportedly cost $15,000, had a removable top for open rides; it also sported orange and black stripes on the trim and the monogram W.W. on the rear doors. Wilson was delighted, and a photograph of him sitting in the Rolls-Royce would be the last one taken of him. That same day in New York, Franklin Roosevelt spoke at a luncheon of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and announced its annual $25,000 prize for service to the world. Someone who had seen Wilson the week before told reporters at the luncheon that his mind was active, but he was no longer up to the strains of the presidency.35

  Wilson thought otherwise. Earlier in December, he had told Baker, “You may be sure that I will keep my eye out for every opportunity to guide the Democrats, and I hope and believe that the opportunity will not now be long deferred.” On January 16, 1924, the Democratic National Committee made a pilgrimage to S Street, where Wilson shook hands and said something personal to each of the 200 visitors. The party chairman, Representative Cordell Hull of Tennessee, announced that the next convention would meet in New York and presented Wilson with a resolution from the committee pledging a campaign “inspired by the incomparable achievements of his great Administration and confident of the compelling power of the high ideals which he brought to the service of his country.” Four days later, Wilson took a step toward guiding that upcoming campaign by sending Newton Baker a “confidential document”—the latest version of “The Document”—for Baker to use in the platform committee. Wilson did not trust the Document to the mails but had Randolph Bolling hand it over more than nine days later, on Baker’s next visit to Washington.36

  The same day that Wilson wrote to Newton Baker, Raymond Fosdick stopped by for an impromptu visit. Fosdick had come earlier in January to put a polite quietus to the university scheme. On this second visit, the conversation rambled over many topics, including the League, and Wilson commented on current affairs, telling Fosdick, “Mussolini is a coward. Somebody should call his bluff. Dictators are all cowards,” and “Some day another Bismarck will arise and the Germans will wipe the French off the face of the earth—and I hope they do.” He thought the 1920 campaign had been “fought with lies. Sick as I was, I wish I had consented to run. I think I could have won.” He liked Newton Baker as a future president but thought he “ought not to run in 1924. He ought to be saved for 1928.”37

  The person Wilson wanted to run in 1924 was himself. Around the time of the letter to Newton Baker and Fosdick’s last visit, he made notes in shorthand and on his typewriter for a speech accepting the Democratic nomination and a third inaugural address. For the acceptance speech, he praised the Democrats as “an effective instrument of public service … (See Burke on party)” while lambasting the “complete and disastrous failure of the Republicans,” as well as their “deep and heinous treason,” which had betrayed “a deep and holy cause whose success has been bought by the blood of thousands of your fellow countrymen.” In “3rd Inaugural,” he admonished Americans “[t]o fight and defeat all—aggression—all Reaction and thus bring light and hope back into the world of affairs. … Present objects and motives: to establish an order in which labour shall have assumed greater dignity and capital acquired greater vigour and advantage by the practice of justice.” “Justice,” in capital letters, headed “Closing passage of third Inaugural,” which read, “[Justice] is the only, certain insurance against revolution. … Without justice society must break up into hostile groups—even into hostile individuals and go utterly to pieces.”38

  Those fragmentary notes show that Wilson had not retreated from his progressivism at home and internationalism abroad. Together with his other comments at the time, they prefigured essential elements of the next Democratic presidency a decade later, under Franklin Roosevelt, particularly in its vigorous government intervention in economic affairs and resistance to aggression and dictatorship overseas. Even if Wilson had been healthier, he almost certainly would have had no real chance to move his party and country in those directions. The Democrats were retreating from the League and international commitments almost as fast as the Republicans. Worse, they were on the verge of tearing themselves apart over such red-hot social issues as immigration restriction, prohibition, and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. Those conflicts—which pitted big-city Catholics from the Northeast and Midwest against small-town and rural Protestant whites from the South and West—had intruded on Democratic conventions as early as 1912, and they burst out in force in 1920. The looming deadlock in 1924 between the two sides’ respective champions, Al Smith and William McAdoo, would come close to wrecking the party. That Wilson’s presence could have made much difference seems doubtful. Yet with radio at his disposal, even as a semi-invalid he might have made a better compromise candidate than the one the party finally picked—the obscure and lackluster John W. Davis.

  How much hope Wilson invested in these notions is hard to tell. He had a long-practiced capacity for denial of obstacles and limitations, and this would have been his second stab at a third-term bid. Yet reminders of mortality haunted him. A month earlier, Frank Cobb, his journalist friend and collaborator on “The Document,” had died, and Cobb’s widow, in answering Wilson’s letter of condolence, had written, “Speaking of you a few days before he died he ended up triumphantly—‘He never lowered his Standard.’” Those words could have served as Wilson’s epitaph. In a brief foreword to a collection of Cobb’s writings, which included an account of how the president had bared his agony of soul on the eve of entering the war, Wilson wote early in January, “I recognized in him a peculiar genius for giving direct and effective expression to the enlightened opinions which he held.” That was Wilson’s last published piece of writing, and it could have served as another epitaph for him. On his last visit, Fosdick found him in poor shape, and when Fosdick asked him how he was, Wilson quoted a presidential predecessor: “John Quincy Adams is all right, but the house he lives in is dilapidated, and it looks as if he would soon have to move out.”39

  Another indication that Wilson may have recognized that time was running out came in his dealings with Ray Stannard Baker. Several people had obliquely approached him about writing his biography, including Creel and the University of Chicago historian William E. Dodd, who was both a fervent admirer and a fellow southern academic expatriate. Early in January 1924, Baker tried the direct approach, reminding Wilson that he had once spoken to him “about going forward with a further and more complete study of your whole career. I have a great ambition to do this and do it thoroughly.” At first, Wilson put him off, saying his papers were “scattered and inaccessible” and he had doubts about “making too much of a single man.�
� On January 25, however, he wrote to Baker that he would give him exclusive access to his papers: “I would rather have your interpretation of them than that of anybody else I know.”40

  The would-be biographer would later get cold feet about undertaking the task. As an editor friend predicted to Baker—correctly, as it turned out—“It will swallow up your whole life.” Early in 1925, Baker shared his second thoughts in long talks with Edith Wilson, explaining the need for “my own complete freedom as a writer. If I should undertake such a task, I must put down exactly what I found, and take my own time in doing it.” For her part, Edith was, as Baker recalled, “as level-headed and far-sighted as I could wish.” Still, he wrote, he might not have agreed to take on the task “if Mrs. Wilson had not shown me a letter written to me by Mr. Wilson only a few days before his death. It was dated January 25, 1924, and was the last letter he ever wrote to anyone. He was too ill to sign it.” Baker could not resist what he took to be a deathbed entreaty.41

  The day after Wilson dictated that letter, everyone thought him well enough to allow Grayson to leave on a hunting trip to South Carolina. He seemed about as well as usual until January 29, when the night nurse told Randolph Bolling that she thought Wilson was very sick, and after midnight Edith instructed her brother to send a telegram to Grayson. When the doctor received the telegram the next day, he telephoned Edith and said he would come back as soon as possible but thought Wilson was just suffering from his recurrent digestive troubles. When Grayson arrived on January 31, he examined Wilson and did not find his condition alarming. Still, Edith was concerned enough to call in Dr. Sterling Ruffin, who had also attended her husband after the stroke, and he and Grayson issued a joint statement to the press that Wilson had a digestive complaint that confined him to bed.42