Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  Behind the walls at S Street, apprehension was mounting. On February 1, Edith told Randolph Bolling she thought her husband was dying, and she asked him to contact Wilson’s children. Bolling telephoned Margaret, who took the train from New York and arrived in the afternoon. He telegraphed Nell; she and McAdoo started out immediately but would not reach Washington until the day of the funeral. Jessie and her family were in Bangkok, and she got the news of her father’s illness by a cablegram that Bolling sent through the Siamese embassy. That same day, the physicians began giving their patient oxygen and morphine, and they issued regular updates on his condition to reporters who gathered outside the house. Wilson was only intermittently conscious. He spoke his last sentences that Friday. When Grayson read him a note from President Calvin Coolidge, he said, “He is a fine man.” When the doctor talked to him about his condition, he said, “I am ready. When the machinery is broken—“He stopped and then repeated, “I am ready.” Stirring once more later, he told Grayson, “You have been good to me. You have done everything you could.” The next day, Saturday, February 2, he briefly regained consciousness in the afternoon and called out faintly, “Edith.” That was his last word.43

  Woodrow Wilson died at eleven-fifteen in the morning of Sunday, February 3, 1924. Besides Grayson and two nurses, only Edith and Margaret were in the bedroom when he breathed his last. Other family members and friends were in the house, and hundreds of people were outside in the street, some kneeling in prayer. Grayson came out the front door and announced, with tears streaming down his cheeks and his voice trembling, “The end came at 11:15.” In a brief statement, he explained, “His heart action became feebler and feebler and the heart muscle was so fatigued that it refused to act any longer.” Grayson attributed the remote cause of death to the stroke and the immediate cause to “exhaustion following a digestive upset which began in the early part of this week and reached an acute state until the early morning hours of February first.” On the official death certificate, Grayson listed “General Arterio-sclerosis with hemiplegia”—hardening of the arteries and paralysis—as the cause of death, with “Asthenia”—weakness and loss of strength—as a contributory cause. In lay terms, the stroke and its underlying pathology had finally worn him out and killed him.44

  The funeral and burial that came three days later were Edith’s choices. She declined President Coolidge’s offer to use his influence with Congress to have Wilson’s body lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda, as Harding’s had done six months earlier, or to have her husband buried at Arlington—Wilson had reportedly believed that the land for the cemetery had been taken unfairly from the family of Robert E. Lee. Nor, with his unhealed resentments toward Princeton, had he wanted to be buried in the cemetery on Witherspoon Street, which contained the graves of other presidents of the college. Edith did not want him to be buried alongside Ellen in Rome, Georgia, or with his parents in Columbia, South Carolina. Instead, she accepted an offer from James Edward Freeman, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, to inter her husband’s remains in the basement chapel of the newly begun cathedral. Freeman had visions of his cathedral becoming America’s Westminster Abbey, and he had previously persuaded the family of Admiral George Dewey to bury the victor of Manila Bay in the same chapel. That ambition of Freeman’s appalled the now only living ex-president, Taft, who, according to his granddaughter, implored his wife, “[D]on’t let those body snatchers at the Cathedral get me.”45

  The funeral service took place in the house on S Street, where family, officials, and old friends crowded in. Edith allowed Tumulty to attend, but she had word sent to House that there would not be room for him. Also, after learning that the Senate had named Lodge to attend, she wrote, “As the funeral is private, and not an official one, and realizing that your presence there would be embarrassing to you and unwelcome to me I write to request that you do not attend.” President and Mrs. Coolidge came, but Taft, who was now chief justice, was ill and could not be present. Most of the members of Wilson’s cabinet were in attendance. Two lines of uniformed servicemen decorated for bravery in the war flanked a pathway to the door, but there was no military presence inside. The ministers of the Presbyterian churches where Wilson had most recently worshipped, Sylvester Beach from Princeton and James Taylor of the Central Presbyterian Church in Washington, conducted most of the fifteen-minute service. Beach read from Psalm 23 and offered a brief tribute to Wilson for “his unswerving devotion to duty; for his courage to do the right as God gave him to see the right.” Bishop Freeman closed the service by reading biblical verses from a devotional book that Wilson had kept at his bedside.46

  A hearse followed by cars carrying the funeral party proceeded up Massachusetts Avenue to the site of the cathedral on Mount St. Alban. More officials attended this service, including Secretary of State Hughes, Wilson’s opponent in 1916, and others from the Coolidge cabinet, as well as Harding’s widow. After the choir and clergy processed in, Freeman performed the Episcopal ritual of the order of the burial of the dead, with Beach and Taylor assisting in the responsive readings. At the end, the congregation recited the Lord’s Prayer, with Episcopal “trespasses” rather than Presbyterian “debts,” and the Apostles’ Creed. After the benediction, the choir recessed to the hymn “The Strife Is O’er, the Battle Done.” The only military touches came when a bugler outside played taps as the honor guard lowered the casket into the crypt. At the same moment, another bugler sounded the same notes at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in the amphitheater at Arlington.47

  Those services marked the end of Wilson’s earthly days in ways that were at once ironic and fitting. The most Presbyterian of presidents now lay at rest in an Episcopal cathedral, interred with the rites of the church his forebears had rebelled against. Yet for all his pride in his heritage, Wilson had never made much of sectarian differences. He had once joined a Congregational church, and he had taught at colleges founded by Quakers and Methodists. At Princeton, he had labored to loosen lingering Presbyterian orthodoxy, and Fosdick remembered that when Wilson had led chapel services, he had always closed with the same reading from the Book of Common Prayer, which began, “Almighty and most merciful Father; we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed the devices and desires of our own hearts,” and included the plea, “Spare those, O God, who confess their faults.”48 At Princeton, in Trenton, and in Washington, he had appointed Jews and Catholics to important posts, and he had counted Catholics and Jews among his closest political associates. When he came to marry a second time, he wed an Episcopalian, and he never asked her to leave her church for his. His middle daughter also married an Episcopalian, and her older son would one day serve as dean of the cathedral where his grandfather lay buried.

  Wilson’s interment in what would later rise to become a great stone edifice in the nation’s capital suited him. Almost alone among truly notable presidents, he had no strong association with a single home or place: no Mount Vernon; no Monticello; no Sagamore Hill, as with his rival Roosevelt; no Hyde Park, as with his successor Roosevelt. Son and grandson of immigrants; born in Virginia; raised in Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina; educated in North Carolina, New Jersey, Virginia, and Maryland; working as a private citizen in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and New Jersey; elected to office from New Jersey; holding office in New Jersey and Washington, D.C.—Wilson came closer to epitomizing the mobile, rootless American of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than any other president. Likewise, he spent more time working within nongovernmental institutions than others who ascended to the White House, and he had risen to the top rank in two private professions. Wilson never thought of himself as a cosmopolitan, but he had about him a breadth and catholicity that made a great building in a city that is home to everyone and no one in America a fitting place for his remains.

  The chapel in the basement of that building would not be Wilson’s final resting place. Three decades after his burial, when the cathedral’s soaring nave was finally finish
ed, his remains would come up to the tomb there in time for the centennial of his birth. There, on his birthday, a military honor guard would yearly lay a wreath, and the light streaming through the stained glass windows would cast bright patches of color on his stone sarcophagus. This last move resonated with the ups and downs and controversies that would continue to swirl around his memory.

  Wilson, along with Lincoln and Jefferson, would come to be one of the best remembered and most argued over of all presidents. Like Jefferson, but unlike Lincoln or even such once-controversial figures as the two Roosevelts, he would not ascend into a glow of warm and near universal, though often contradictory, adulation. Just as Jefferson’s thought, actions, and aftermath formed an ideological battleground in the nineteenth century and beyond, so Wilson’s words, deeds, ideas, and legacies would furnish fodder for debate and conflict throughout the twentieth century and beyond. The man whose bones lie in the cathedral would leave behind a mind and spirit that live on in everything he touched.

  Notes

  Abbreviations used in notes

  ASL Arthur S. Link

  CTG Cary T. Grayson

  CTGD Cary T. Grayson diary

  EA; EAW Ellen Axson; Ellen Axson Wilson

  EBG; EBGW Edith Bolling Galt; Edith Bolling Galt Wilson

  EMH Edward M. House

  EMHD Edward M. House diary

  HCL Henry Cabot Lodge

  HCLP Henry Cabot Lodge Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society

  HWB Henry W. Bragdon

  HWBC Henry W. Bragdon Papers, Woodrow Wilson Collection, Seeley G. Mudd Library, Princeton University

  JD Josephus Daniels

  JDD Josephus Daniels diary

  JPT Joseph Patrick Tumulty

  LC Library of Congress

  MAH; MAHP Mary Allen Hulbert; Mary Allen Hulbert Peck

  Memoir Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, My Memoir (Indianapolis, 1939)

  NDB Newton D. Baker

  PWW Woodrow Wilson, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur S. Link et al., 69 vols. (Princeton, N.J., 1966–1993)

  RB Robert Bridges

  RL Robert Lansing

  RSB Ray Stannard Baker

  RSBD Ray Stannard Baker diary

  RSBP Ray Stannard Baker Papers, Library of Congress

  SA Stockton Axson

  TR Theodore Roosevelt

  WHT William Howard Taft

  WHTP William Howard Taft Papers, Library of Congress

  WJB William Jennings Bryan

  WW Woodrow Wilson

  WWP Woodrow Wilson Papers, Library of Congress

  PROLOGUE “THIS MAN’S MIND AND SPIRIT”

  1. Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, vol. 3, 1916–1918 (London, 1927). On the nine decades of argument and analysis of American intervention, see John Milton Cooper, Jr., “The United States,” in The Origins of World War I, ed. Richard F. Hamilton and Holger H. Herwig (New York, 2003).

  2. Charles E. Swem diary, entry for 1915, PWW, vol. 33; WW speech at Pittsburgh, Oct. 24, 1915, PWW, vol. 31.

  3. WW remarks, Apr. 8, 1918, PWW, vol. 47.

  4. WW speech, June 13, 1914, PWW, vol. 29. In 2008, a faculty committee at Princeton rated the twenty-five most influential alumni and the twelve alumni who have had the greatest impact on Princeton. On the first list, Wilson ranked third, behind James Madison and the mathematician Alan Turing, and on the second list he ranked first. He and Fitzgerald were the only two to appear on both lists. See Princeton Alumni Weekly, Jan. 23, 2008.

  5. WW speech, Mar. 20, 1914, PWW, vol. 29.

  1 TOMMY

  1. The story is told in Eleanor Wilson McAdoo, The Woodrow Wilsons (New York, 1937).

  2. The birth is recorded in the Wilson family Bible, PWW, vol. 1. There is some dispute about whether Wilson was born on December 28 or 29. See PWW, vol. 1, n. 7.

  3. On Joseph Ruggles Wilson, see PWW, vol. 1, n. 1, and John M. Mulder, Woodrow Wilson: The Years of Preparation (Princeton, N.J., 1978).

  4. Harriet Woodrow Welles to RSB, Sept. 28, 1925, RSBP, box 124.

  5. On the Woodrows, see Mulder, Years of Preparation, and RSB, Woodrow Wilson: Life and Letters, vol. 1, Youth, 1856–1890 (Garden City, N.Y., 1927).

  6. Janet Woodrow Wilson to Thomas Woodrow, Apr. 27, 1857, PWW, vol. 1.

  7. On the Augusta church and Joseph Wilson’s move there, see Mulder, Years of Preparation. It is not possible to determine from the slave schedules of the census for Richmond County, Georgia, the number, age, or sex of the slaves who worked for the Wilsons.

  8. The proportion of slaves in the population is based on U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population of the United States: Eighth Census (Washington, D.C., 1861). Richmond County, in which Augusta is located, also had 490 “Free Colored” residents, 386 of whom lived in Augusta.

  9. WW speech, Feb. 12, 1909, PWW, vol. 19.

  10. On Joseph Wilson’s wartime service, see PWW, vol. 1, and Florence Fleming Corley, Confederate City: Augusta, Georgia, 1860–1865 (Columbia, S.C., 1960), 63–64, 67–68.

  11. On the relations with the respective families, see Harriet Woodrow Welles to RSB, Sept. 28, 1925, RSBP, box 124, and J. Wilson Woodrow to RSB, Feb. 10, 1926, RSBP, box 124.

  12. WW shorthand note, July 19, 1880, PWW, vol. 1; EMHD, entry for Feb. 14, 1913, PWW, vol. 27.

  13. Jessie W. Wilson to WW, Aug. 23, 1880, PWW, vol. 1; WW to EAW, Apr. 19, 1888, PWW, vol. 5; Pleasant A. Stovall to RSB, June 8, 1925, RSBP, box 122. The recollection of cockfighting is in EMHD, entry for May 11, 1914, PWW, vol. 30.

  14. WW to EAW, Apr. 19, 1888, PWW, vol. 5.

  15. CTG, interviews by RSB, Feb. 18–19, 1926, RSBP, box 109; McAdoo, The Wilsons; WW to EAW, Mar. 9, 1889, PWW, vol. 6. On Josie Wilson, see RSB, Memorandum of a Conversation with J. R. Wilson, Feb. 19, 1926, RSBP, box 124.

  16. On the left-handed writing, see Edwin A. Weinstein, Woodrow Wilson: A Medical and Psychological Biography (Princeton, N.J., 1981).

  17. WW shorthand diary, entry for June 10, 1876, PWW, vol. 1; SA comments on manuscript of RSB biography of WW, vol. 1, [ca. 1926], RSBP, box 100. On Wilson’s teaching himself shorthand, see Editorial Note, “Wilson’s Study and Use of Shorthand, 1872–1892,” PWW, vol. 1. For the interpretation that Wilson suffered from dyslexia, see Weinstein, Medical and Psychological Biography.

  18. Jessie W. Wilson to WW, Feb. 6, 1877, PWW, vol. 1; David Bryant, quoted in William Allen White, Woodrow Wilson: The Man, His Times, and His Task (Boston, 1924).

  19. WW speech, May 29, 1914, PWW, vol. 30; CTG, interviews by RSB, Feb. 18–19, 1926, RSBP, box 109.

  20. WW to James Edwin Webster, July 23, 1878, PWW, vol. 1. On the work with his father in denominational meetings, see Mulder, Years of Preparation.

  21. WW speech, Dec. 27, 1907, PWW, vol. 17; Joseph R. Wilson to WW, Mar. 27, 1877; Nov. 5, 1877, PWW, vol. 1; unnamed niece quoted in Margaret Axson Elliott, My Aunt Louisa and Woodrow Wilson (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1944). See also CTG, interviews by RSB, Feb. 18–19, 1926, RSBP, box 109.

  22. The best account of this incident is in Mulder, Years of Preparation.

  23. WW notebook, Apr. 5, 1874, PWW, vol. 1.

  24. Douglas McKay to WW, June 25, 1875, PWW, vol. 6. Jessie Bones Brower to RSB, May 9, 1926, RSBP, box 102. The historian who has studied Wilson’s early life most closely has argued that Joseph Wilson did want his son to follow him into the ministry and that Tommy showed some interest, attending lectures at the seminary. See Mulder, Years of Preparation.

  25. WW to RB, Aug. 22, 1881, PWW, vol. 2; WW confidential journal, entry for Dec. 28, 1889, PWW, vol. 6.

  26. On Wilson’s lack of a southern accent by the time he went to college, see responses to questionnaires sent to his Princeton classmates by Henry W. Bragdon in the late 1930s and early 1940s, HWBC. On Wilson’s use of a broad a, see WW, The Priceless Gift: The Love Letters of Woodrow Wilson and Ellen Axson Wilson, ed. Eleanor Wilson McAdoo (New York, 1962). On his effort to wean Ellen from her southern accent, see WW to EA, Feb. 17, 1885, PWW, vol. 4.
/>
  27. Robert H. McCarter, interview by HWB, July 14, 1940, HWBC; WW speech, Jan. 19, 1909, PWW, vol. 18.

  28. WW quoted in Edith Gittings Reid, Woodrow Wilson: The Caricature, the Myth and the Man (New York, 1934). The only biographer who interviewed any of the family’s African American servants was William Allen White, who wrote a brief and fundamentally hostile book about Wilson (The Man, His Times, and His Task). It is odd that Ray Stannard Baker, who was assiduous in seeking material about Wilson’s early life, did not seem to have sought out any of the family’s black servants. It is doubly odd because Baker was one of the few white journalists of the time who was interested in race relations. In 1907, he wrote a series of magazine articles that was published as Following the Color Line: An Account of Negro Citizenship in the American Democracy (Garden City, N.Y., 1908).

  29. WW to Andrew J. Graham, [ca. Apr. 24], 1875, PWW, vol. 1. Mulder views Wilson’s year at Davidson as a time of spiritual and vocational turmoil for him and speculates about his ill health. See Mulder, Years of Preparation. I do not agree with that interpretation.

  30. On the founding and early history of Princeton, see Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker, Princeton, 1746–1896 (Princeton, N.J., 1946).

  31. On McCosh and his presidency of Princeton, see J. David Hoeveler, Jr., James McCosh and the Scottish Intellectual Tradition: From Glasgow to Princeton (Princeton, N.J., 1981).

  32. Robert H. McCarter, interview by HWB, July 15, 1940, HWBC; RB, Woodrow Wilson (Princeton, N.J., 1931).

  33. WW shorthand diary, entries for June 12, 1876; Oct. 27, 1876, PWW, vol. 1; WW, quoted in SA, Brother Woodrow: A Memoir of Woodrow Wilson (Princeton, N.J., 1993). For a similar version of the “mind” discovery, see CTG, interviews by RSB, Feb. 18–19, 1926, RSBP, box 109.