That night the townspeople and students of Princeton said goodbye to Wilson, gathering on Nassau Street and marching with flares to Cleveland Lane, where the band played “Hail to the Chief,” “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” and “Auld Lang Syne.” The president of the First National Bank presented Wilson with a silver loving cup on behalf of “the Citizens of Princeton.” An emotional Wilson addressed the crowd, unable to resist one anecdote of “mortification”: he had recently entered a shop to buy an item from a man whose face he had known for years. When Wilson asked if the salesman might send the item to the house, the shopkeeper said, “What is your name, sir?” Now he told his well-wishers that the “real trials of life” were the connections one broke. “I have never been inside of the White House, and I shall feel very strange when I get inside of it,” he said. “I shall think of this little house behind me and remember how much more familiar it is to me than that is, and how much more intimate a sense of possession there must be in the one case than in the other.” Upon the conclusion of his remarks, the Princetonians in the crowd broke into “Old Nassau.”
On Monday the third, Secret Service men, a large crowd, and a line of motorcars waited outside 25 Cleveland Lane. At 10:30, Woodrow and Ellen exited the house, choosing to walk to the train station instead of riding in one of the automobiles. They made a slight detour, strolling down Library Place, past the house they had built years earlier. Friends and neighbors paid their respects along the way, though most of the townspeople waited for them at the train—a special car followed by a half dozen coaches filled with six hundred rollicksome undergraduates. The family stood on the back platform as the train pulled out of the campus depot at eleven, the First Couple smiling and waving and looking wistful as the spires and towers disappeared from view.
Passing flag-waving crowds all along the route, the train pulled into Washington’s Union Station at 3:45. The students hastily detrained, in order to form a double line through which the Wilsons made their way from the Presidential car to the street, where a limousine took them through side streets to the Shoreham Hotel at 15th and H Streets. They completely bypassed the chaotic gathering of woman suffragists who were staging a “pageant” down Pennsylvania Avenue and commanding most of the attention that afternoon—5,000 women demanding their rights as they paraded in front of a crowd of 500,000. One of the guests of honor, the deaf and blind and militant Helen Keller, got waylaid in the congestion and never got to address the crowd; but she had her say in the next day’s newspapers, assuring the public and the incoming President that the demonstration symbolized “the coming of the new, not the passing of the old” and that it would “not be long before a president shall ride down these broad avenues elected by the people of America, women and men.”
The Wilsons encountered friendlier commotion at the Shoreham. Because the hotel served as headquarters for Princeton alumni, hundreds donned orange and black as they secured badges that would admit them to a number of special events. During one encounter that day, a plump and dapper gentleman approached Wilson to introduce himself: it was Franklin Lane, the new Secretary of the Interior. By late afternoon, the stress of moving caught up to Ellen. The color left her face, and she repaired to her room to rest behind locked doors. After a while, Nell entered, to help her dress for a six-o’clock tea at the White House. Sitting before a mirror, arranging her hair, Ellen put both hands over her face and burst into tears. But she managed to pull herself together before she had to join her husband.
Full of charm, the Tafts explained the White House to the new tenants, and conversation came easily. In the background that afternoon stood a short, handsome, dark-haired lieutenant in the naval medical corps, thirty-five-year-old Cary Travers Grayson. Virginia-born and -educated, Grayson—an Episcopalian—radiated modest confidence. He was quiet and deferential by nature but a lively raconteur when called upon, and Washington hostesses considered him the ideal “extra man.” Before the Wilsons departed, Taft jovially drew his successor under his arm and said, “Mr. Wilson, here is an excellent fellow that I hope you will get to know. I regret to say that he is a Democrat and a Virginian, but that’s a matter that can’t be helped!”
The Wilsons returned to their hotel, where Ellen, exhausted but undaunted, announced, “It’s just a bigger Prospect—Sea Girt with no servant problem.” A Wilson cousin hosted a dinner at the Shoreham for a few dozen intimates, including Fred Yates, the Wilsons’ artist friend visiting from England’s Lake District. After dinner the President-elect excused himself to appear at a “smoker”—a dinner of eight hundred Princeton alumni—on the tenth floor of the nearby New Willard Hotel, where he spoke briefly but emotionally about the “comradeship” he felt within the Princeton family, largely because of the university’s great role in the nation’s service.
Under gray skies, Woodrow Wilson left the hotel the next morning at ten o’clock in a two-horse open victoria. Some one thousand Princeton students—all wearing orange sashes—along with five hundred more from the University of Virginia, served as an honor guard, lining the carriage’s route to the White House. Ellen and the girls remained at the hotel, giving themselves ample time to dress. The retinue of undergraduates was permitted to follow the carriage and then gather on the White House lawn, where, once again, they burst into song. A military band announced Wilson’s arrival, but he waited on the front porch until the students had finished their medley, concluding, of course, with “Old Nassau”—at the end of which, a hatless Wilson bowed his head. Then he walked between the military aides in full dress uniforms to the Blue Room, where President Taft joined him, followed by the arrival of the new Cabinet and Vice President–elect Thomas R. Marshall. Taft took Wilson by the arm, leading him through the Red Room to the South Portico, where photographers had lined up cameras for official photographs. The incumbent was then tipping the scales at 340 pounds, twice Wilson’s weight; and though he was born the year before the incoming President, his girth and big mustache—and, perhaps, his four years in office—made him look considerably older than his successor.
Taft and Wilson entered a large landau drawn by four horses. Great cheers greeted them all along Pennsylvania Avenue. In the meantime, White House chauffeurs drove the Wilson family in automobiles down side streets to the Capitol, where they took seats in the Senate Gallery to witness Marshall’s being sworn into office. Senator Miles Poindexter took the floor to deliver a speech that droned on, standing as the only impediment between those inside the chamber and the largest audience that had ever assembled for an inauguration. Three times, as the minute hand of the chamber clock crept toward twelve, an attendant pushed it back. An indignant Nell Wilson wondered how a Senator could be so cavalier. Someone close by provided an explanation, which further described the political climate in Washington: “He’s a Republican,” said the voice, “—he’s doing it on purpose.” At last, Marshall took his oath, and everybody moved to seats on the portico of the Capitol. Back at the White House, the flag was lowered and a new one raised.
It was still overcast but a mild fifty-five degrees as the Presidential carriage pulled before the crowd, the incumbent appearing happier than the incoming President. With little pomp, Wilson took his place on the grandstand, which sat slightly above the heads of the 100,000 countrymen who stood there in anticipation. Wilson had asked to be sworn in with his hand on Ellen’s small Bible, which Chief Justice Edward Douglass White opened and offered to a Deputy Clerk of the Court to hold. Upon completing the oath of office, Wilson followed the example of George Washington and stooped to kiss the pages of Scripture before him—the 119th Psalm: “So shall I keep thy Law continually: for ever and ever.” In that moment, the sun broke through the clouds. The crowd started to push through the barriers to get closer to the platform, so they might better hear their new President. As the police began to force them back, Wilson said, “Let the people come forward.”
He proceeded to deliver a stirring inaugural address. Equa
l parts lesson, sermon, and mission statement, his carefully chosen 1,800 words—composed over the last month—began with a simple proclamation of fact: “There has been a change of government.” He described the Democratic takeover of both houses of Congress and the White House in the last two years; and then he asked what that meant. He spent ten paragraphs answering the question.
At first he inspired the audience, describing the bounty of America—“Our life contains every great thing, and contains it in rich abundance.” But he hastened to add that the riches had come at great human cost. He said the government had too often been used for private and selfish purposes, and those who used it had forgotten the people. The change in government, Wilson assured, meant new “vision.” He said, “Our duty is to cleanse, to reconsider, to restore, to correct the vile without impairing the good, to purify and humanize every process of our common life without weakening or sentimentalizing it.”
For the next few minutes he enumerated the specific Progressive ideas he intended to enact. Not least among them was “safeguarding the health of the nation,” as the “first duty of law is to keep sound the society it serves.” As he spoke of his ambitious program, many felt they were listening to the most glorious rhetoric from that podium in fifty-two years, when Lincoln summoned “the better angels of our nature” in his first inaugural address. Wilson proclaimed the “high enterprise of the new day: to lift everything that concerns our life as a nation to the light that shines from the hearthfire of every man’s conscience and vision of the right. It is inconceivable that we should do this as partisans. . . . The feelings with which we face this new age . . . sweep across our heartstrings like some air out of God’s own presence, where justice and mercy are reconciled and the judge and the brother are one.”
“This is not a day of triumph,” he concluded, “it is a day of dedication.” With that in mind, he summoned “all honest men, all patriotic, all forward-looking men, to my side,” assuring them that “God helping me, I will not fail them, if they will but counsel and sustain me!” He made no mention of foreign affairs. This speech was about restoring justice to a great but broken nation, a “government too often debauched and made an instrument of evil.”
Speaking in his manner of heightened conversation rather than theatrical bombast, Wilson earned wave upon wave of applause at the end. Ellen Wilson quietly left her seat and unobtrusively descended the steps, to stand on a bench directly below her husband. She gazed up at him with a look of rapture.
The President and former President returned to the White House, while the Wilson women were chauffeured separately. Upon their arrival, Ellen and her daughters were taken to their second-floor quarters. Woodrow and Ellen’s suite consisted of two bedrooms, a dressing room, and two baths. Bright and airy, with fires burning in the open grates, it overlooked the Ellipse and the Washington Monument. When the girls checked on their mother, they found her at the window, looking down upon Mrs. Taft’s formal garden with its graveled paths and geometrical flower beds. “Isn’t it lovely, children?” she asked tentatively, already thinking of improvements. “It will be our rose garden with a high hedge around it.”
They joined the Cabinet members and their wives and other distinguished guests—two hundred of them—who had gathered in the dining room for a stand-up buffet luncheon. Colonel and Mrs. House were there, though he had chosen not to attend the actual inauguration. “Functions of this sort do not appeal to me and I never go,” he wrote in his diary. The former and new Presidents arrived and awkwardly stood together in the vestibule. Wilson invited Taft to remain for the lunch honoring the new administration, never expecting him to accept. But Taft stayed, only to find himself in the unfortunate position of standing alone as the new President received congratulatory handshakes. At last, Wilson returned to Taft, who said in parting, “Mr. President, I hope you’ll be happy here.” Wilson questioned the sentiment: “Happy?”
“Yes, I know,” Taft replied. “I’m glad to be going—this is the loneliest place in the world.”
Nellie Wilson overheard the comment and thought the strength of their family would keep that from happening. And then a minor mishap occurred, which, strangely, would ensure that Wilson would never be alone. The President’s sister Annie Howe slipped on one of the marble staircases and gashed her scalp and forehead. Several Army and Navy aides were on hand, Dr. Grayson among them. Equipped for medical emergencies, he stitched her wound. This began what would become the most constant and intimate relationship the President had with a man for the rest of his life—a unique affiliation characterized by trust beyond that of any official, as Dr. Grayson would literally have his hand on the President’s pulse and, thus, on the well-being of the world. “My official connection with Mr. Wilson was almost accidental,” Grayson himself would later explain, “though, as I look back over the long stretch of years, I should like to call it providential.”
A little after three, the Presidential party went outside to the reviewing stand in front of the house to watch the longest parade in inaugural history, forty thousand participants over the course of four hours. Young cadets from the service academies marched, including West Point “yearling” Dwight D. Eisenhower. Woodrow Wilson stood throughout the procession, repeatedly doffing his tall silk hat, while Ellen smiled and waved her lace handkerchief. After the parade, fourteen of the innermost circle dressed for dinner in the State Dining Room. Profusions of roses filled the table, under the soft glow of the great silver candelabra. Everybody stared admiringly at the man sitting quietly at the head of the table. Afterward, a display of fireworks lit up the sky before the various family members set about finding their bedrooms, shrieks of excitement signaling each new discovery. For the first time since Franklin Pierce’s inauguration in 1853, there would be no official ball. While other Presidents held to the festive tradition even in times of war and national hardship, Wilson chose to omit the occasion, considering it not just an unnecessary expense but also a source of “graft.” Local vendors did not care for this curtailment of their quadrennial windfall, but they got a clear sense of the austerity of their new neighbors. Ellen Wilson appeared too weak to have danced that night anyway.
Wilson dropped into his office, to get a feel of the place and to meet briefly with Colonel House; but he soon rose from his desk to head to the Shoreham Hotel, where he arrived at the tail end of a dinner being held by the Class of 1879. After his strenuous day, the Princetonians had fully expected an announcement that he was too tired to appear; but Wilson beamed as he sat between reelected Congressman Charles Talcott—with whom he had once made a “solemn covenant” to devote themselves to the political arts—and Taft-appointed Justice of the Supreme Court Mahlon Pitney. The “Witherspoon Gang” was there in force.
The President stayed past midnight. Not long after he had returned to the White House and found his bedroom, he began pushing several of the mother-of-pearl buttons set in the wall, hoping to summon an attendant. A doorkeeper hastened to the second-floor residence, only to find Woodrow Wilson standing in his underwear. One of his trunks, which happened to hold his pajamas, never got delivered. It was immediately located at the train station, but it did not arrive at the White House until one o’clock, by which time the President of the United States was sound asleep.
9
BAPTISM
And Iesus, when hee was baptized, went vp straightway out of the water: and loe, the heauens were opened vnto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a doue, and lighting vpon him.
—MATTHEW III:16
Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution of the United States ordained the creation of a “District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may . . . become the Seat of the Government of the United States.” It was christened Columbia, the elegiac term for America, and its “federal city” was named for the first President. Congress held its first session in the District of Columbia in 1800, even before the completion of the Capitol
. A National Mall extending from this great hub to the Potomac River would gradually fill in with monuments and buildings worthy of the Acropolis. “Slowly,” Henry Adams commented upon the end of the nineteenth century, “a certain society had built itself up about the Government; houses had been opened and there was much dining; much calling; much leaving of cards.” Unlike most world capitals, Washington was neither its nation’s chief commercial nor cultural center. Government was its only industry, powered by the fact that every elected official held a temporary job with limited time to achieve his goals. In 1913, Washington, D.C., was a gracious Southern city of 350,000 people.
African Americans accounted for nearly a third of that population, the largest Negro congregation in the country. Most were invisible, unseen or overlooked in their subservient positions. Practically all the black women served as domestics, while the men worked as servants, waiters, and manual laborers. For the most part, Negroes knew their place. The city appeared to have no slums, because the overcrowded ghettos were on its periphery or made up of shacks tucked in the downtown alleys, where thousands subsisted in poverty. With the establishment of the Civil Service, a few Negroes began rising to the middle class, entering through the front doors of the Postal Service and the Treasury Department, where they could hold jobs similar to those of white people. A small upper middle class of blacks had risen in the capital; but, so far as Nell Wilson could tell, the “undisputed leaders of Washington colored society” were the dozens of footmen, doormen, maids, and butlers who staffed the Executive Mansion at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. They wore elegant uniforms; and, unlike the masters of the house, they held their jobs for life.
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