“I was left with an active business either to maintain or to liquidate, upon which all my income was dependent,” Edith later recounted. She had no business experience, and the estate still owed money to the Galt relatives Norman had bought out. Edith felt further indebted to the employees who had served the firm for decades and to her own three brothers who worked there, supporting their mother and unmarried sister. Edith, at age thirty-five, decided to run the company. She drew the smallest possible salary for herself until her debts were paid. Afterward, she could indulge in an annual grand tour of Europe but always returned to an empty house. By forty, she was settling into a comfortable but lonely widowhood.
Edith had both the time and inclination to enjoy her new friendship with Helen Bones. She delighted in hearing stories about Helen’s cousin Woodrow, because they contrasted so sharply with his public image. Edith had previously considered the President “a human machine, devoid of emotion.” Now she felt only sympathy for the “lonely man . . . uncomplainingly bearing the burden of a great sorrow and keeping his eye single to the responsibilities of a great task.”
One afternoon in March 1915, instead of riding in Edith’s electric car, Helen insisted on changing their routine by having a White House limousine take them to the park. After a long walk along muddy paths, Edith suggested returning to her house, where she would have Helen’s boots cleaned. “We are not going to your house,” Helen said. “I have ordered tea at the White House this afternoon, and you are to go back with me.” Edith insisted she could not for fear of being seen with such muddy shoes; but Helen explained that there was nobody home. Cousin Woodrow was playing golf with Dr. Grayson, and they could take the White House elevator directly to the private quarters. “Cousin Woodrow asked me the other day why I never brought my friends back there,” she explained. “He really wishes I would have some one in that lonely old house.”
But exiting the elevator, Edith was surprised to see the President and his physician, just returned from golf, their shoes as muddy as those of the women. Helen explained that they were about to have tea, and she invited the gentlemen to join them. After the men had changed and everybody’s shoes had been cleaned, they gathered for an hour in the oval sitting room on the second floor, where Edith displayed her vivacity and tart sense of humor. Wilson was struck by his guest, with her wide smile and buxom figure. Dr. Grayson had clearly arranged the “chance encounter.” Wilson and Helen invited Edith to remain for dinner, but she chose not to overstay her welcome.
The two women continued their walks together, and Edith redeemed her rain check on Tuesday, March 23. The White House sent a car for her, and they picked up Dr. Grayson along the way. Grayson left dinner early to make a house call at the McAdoos’, leaving the President alone to entertain Helen and Edith. He charmed them with stories and, upon Helen’s request, the reading of several poems. Edith reported to her sister-in-law that night that as a reader, “he is unequalled.”
Two weeks later, Helen invited Edith for a drive. The big White House open touring car picked her up, and returned to get Helen, only to find the President ready to join them as well. He sat up front with the chauffeur, while the Secret Service agent took a seat in the back with Helen and Edith. Wilson and Helen begged Edith to dine with them, explaining that they would otherwise be alone. After dinner, the three of them sat by the fire, where the President felt so much at ease that he shared stories of his youth and of his father. Edith did the same, animatedly talking in her Virginian accent about the heartache of Reconstruction. The whole evening passed quickly for Edith; and she was touched by Wilson’s “warm personality” and “boylike simplicity.”
The following Wednesday, Wilson invited Edith to join his party at Griffith Stadium, where he tossed out the first ball at the opening game of the baseball season. They got to watch the Washington Senators shut out the New York Yankees, 7 to 0. Edith’s walks with Helen continued, and soon Nell and Margaret joined them. With the arrival of warm weather, Woodrow and Edith and Helen took rides in the afternoon and the evenings in the comfortable open-air car. Mrs. Galt became a regular dinner guest at the White House, and the staff began to talk amongst themselves. “She’s a looker,” the doorkeeper told Colonel Edmund W. Starling, the newest member of the White House Secret Service detail and Wilson’s personal bodyguard. “He’s a goner,” confirmed Arthur Brooks, the President’s valet. One evening Edith outshone herself, wearing a smartly tailored black charmeuse dress designed especially for her by Worth, the leading Paris designer, and a pair of gold slippers—all meant to match the corsage of golden roses that had arrived earlier that day with the President’s card. The evening ended early only because the President was leaving the next morning for his grandson’s baptism in Williamstown.
Wilson returned a few days later, on May 3, and invited Mrs. Galt to dine the next night. Margaret and Helen and Dr. Grayson were there, as were Wilson’s sister Annie Howe and her daughter. It was a prematurely warm evening; and after dinner, Wilson suggested having coffee on the South Portico, with its privileged vista of the city. Dr. Grayson left right after the meal, and suddenly—as if on cue—all the other guests decided to walk around the South Lawn, leaving Edith alone with the President. In that moment, he pulled his chair closer to hers. “I asked Margaret and Helen to give me an opportunity to tell you something tonight that I have already told them,” he said. And then, he declared his love for her.
Without thinking, Edith blurted, “Oh, you can’t love me, for you don’t really know me, and it is less than a year since your wife died.”
“Yes,” he said, “I know you feel that; but, little girl, in this place time is not measured by weeks, or months, or years, but by deep human experiences; and since her death I have lived a lifetime of loneliness and heartache. I was afraid, knowing you, I would shock you; but I would be less than a gentleman if I continued to make opportunities to see you without telling you what I have told my daughters and Helen: that I want you to be my wife.”
Before she could speak again, the President addressed the unique obstacles of his proposal, those even greater than his having known her for only two months. With a spotlight always directed upon the White House, he explained, all who enter were observed; and no matter how hard he worked to protect her, gossip would inevitably begin.
After Woodrow and Edith had talked for more than an hour, she told him if he required an answer that night, it was no. Never having given herself wholly to any man—certainly not to one of Wilson’s passions—she had to consider whether she wanted to sacrifice her independence at this stage of her life. She had to ask herself not just how she felt about Woodrow Wilson but also about becoming a wife again—and a public figure at that. At ten o’clock, he and Helen escorted Edith home in silence.
Edith could not sleep that night. She sat in the big chair by her window and stared into the darkness, thinking how he had made her “whole being . . . vibrant!” In the morning hours, she calmed herself by committing her thoughts to paper. Edith considered it “an unspeakable pleasure and privilege” to share the President’s “tense, terrible days of responsibility” but felt inadequate, unable to offer any gift so great. “I am a woman,” she wrote Woodrow, trying to get used to the very “thought that you have need of me.”
Hours later, Helen arrived for their walk through Rock Creek Park. She said nothing of the night before until they sat on some stones in the middle of the woods. “Cousin Woodrow looks really ill this morning,” she said. Then she burst into tears and added, “Just as I thought some happiness was coming into his life! And now you are breaking his heart.” Edith tried to explain how unprepared she had been for the suddenness of Woodrow’s announcement—that up until then she had not allowed herself to think of him as anything but the President and a delightful new friend. At the same time, she knew she was right in asking for time to sift through her feelings.
She was in a quandary—“more and more
torn by the will to love and help him, and yet unconvinced that I could.” Edith handed her late-night letter to Helen, who became the lovers’ go-between. She nicknamed her cousin “Tiger”—not, as some have suspected, for his animal desires nor even because of his Princeton connection but because Helen found him “so pathetic caged there in the White House . . . that he reminded her of a splendid Bengal tiger she had once seen—never still, moving, restless, resentful of his bars that shut out the larger life God had made him for.”
So began the most ardent chase of Wilson’s life. His hundreds of letters to the former Ellen Axson had expressed every romantic sentiment he could conjure, but they were callow sentiments alongside the torrent of words that would now engulf Edith—billets-doux employing every manner of entreaty. There was urgency in the Tiger’s pursuit, fueled by the gratitude that he had been granted one final stab at love. The same held true for Edith, except she realized that this was her first.
The last twenty-four hours had left Wilson spent, but Edith’s letter replenished him. And that night, he shamelessly stripped his emotions bare. “Here stands your friend, a longing man, in the midst of a world’s affairs,” he wrote, “—a world that knows nothing of the heart he has shown you . . . but which he cannot face with his full strength or with the full zest of keen endeavor unless you come into this heart and take possession.”
Meetings and briefings, of course, came between his morning letters and evening dinners with Edith. He learned of a new conflict between China and Japan and once again offered the protection of the Monroe Doctrine to a new President of Haiti. He was even more troubled by Colonel House’s informing him that Allied diplomats were suggesting that the President was pro-German, just as England—with more than two million men in its military ranks—expected to get through the Dardanelles and help Russia, which was already running out of munitions. But until Edith accepted his proposal, Wilson felt as if his world stood still. And then came news that put everything out of mind, not just for America but for most of the world.
• • •
On May 7, 1915, the President had just finished lunch and was preparing to play golf when he learned that a submarine had sunk the Lusitania. That first bulletin reported no loss of life, but the President canceled his game nonetheless, opting for a drive instead. News dribbled in through the night, giving him time to write Edith, “My happiness absolutely depends upon your giving me your entire love.” He feared that she was overthinking the situation, second-guessing what was best for him—“when the only thing that is best for me is your love.”
The President was beside himself that night. Possessed, he stepped right past his Secret Service guards and out the front door of the White House onto Pennsylvania Avenue, into a light shower, as though he were headed to Edith’s house. Then, instead of veering left toward Dupont Circle, he felt duty pulling him home. By ten o’clock, more details of the day’s events were available. It seemed that, without any warning, the German submarine U-20 had fired two torpedoes into the belly of the Lusitania—seven days out of New York and in the Irish Sea. The great liner sank in eighteen minutes, taking 1,198 souls with it—413 crewmembers and 785 passengers, 128 of whom were American citizens.
“The country was horrified, and at that moment the popular feeling was such that if the President, after demanding immediate reparation and apology to be promptly given, had boldly declared that . . . it was our duty to go to war, he would have had behind him the enthusiastic support of the whole American people,” recalled Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Although the sinking of the ship was not a targeted attack on the United States, the Lusitania became a battle cry for a growing number of jingoes. Nobody sounded the charge more loudly than Theodore Roosevelt. Even before all the facts were known, he bellowed to the media that the incident was “an act of piracy.” He said, “We earn as a nation measureless scorn and contempt if we follow the lead of those who exact peace above righteousness.” Roosevelt told his son Archibald, “Every soft creature, every coward and weakling, every man who can’t look more than six inches ahead, every man whose god is money, or pleasure, or ease, and every man who has not got in him both the sterner virtues and the power of seeking after an ideal, is enthusiastically in favor of Wilson.”
There was, of course, an opposing view, which Secretary Bryan voiced in the Cabinet Room. He felt Americans had to take responsibility for their actions. One week before the Lusitania’s crossing, the Imperial German Embassy in Washington had posted admonitory advertisements in fifty American newspapers in a box beneath the Cunard Line’s schedule. It reminded travelers that a state of war existed between Germany and her allies and Great Britain and her allies and that travelers sailing in the war zone on British or Allied ships did so at their own risk.
When Bryan heard the news, he immediately wondered if the ship carried “munitions of war.” If she did, he said, “it puts a different phase on the whole matter!” Assistant Secretary Lansing reported that an examination of the clearance papers revealed that there had been ammunition on board. International law permitted ships to carry small quantities of ammunition; but upon learning the actual numbers, Bryan said the 4,200 cases of rifle cartridges and 1,250 cases of shrapnel, along with cases of fuses, shell castings, and high explosives meant the United States should rebuke not only Germany for destroying the Lusitania but also England for interference in international shipping, particularly for “using our citizens to protect her ammunition.” From London, Colonel House cabled that an “immediate demand should be made upon Germany for assurance that this shall not occur again.” More than that, the United States must consider the inevitability of going to war. America, he added, “must determine whether she stands for civilized or uncivilized warfare. Think we can no longer remain neutral spectators. Our action in this crisis will determine the part we will play when peace is made, and how far we may influence the settlement for the lasting good of humanity.” Ordinary citizens were even more outspoken. One wired the White House, “In the name of God and humanity, declare war on Germany.” To that, Wilson took offense, telling his secretary, Charles Swem, “War isn’t declared in the name of God; it is a human affair entirely.” The Washington Post editorialized that it had faith in the “courage, patience and wisdom of President Wilson,” and it waited to see how he intended to “uphold the honor and interests of the United States.”
In truth, Wilson was not thinking straight—laboring, as he was, over two, even three love letters a day, some requiring more than one draft as he felt Edith was coming around at last. “You ask why you have been chosen to help me! Ah, dear love,” he wrote on May 9, “there is a mystery about it . . . but there is no mistake and there is no doubt!”
On May 10, 1915, Woodrow and Edith saw each other in the afternoon and professed their mutual love. “The most delightful thing in the world,” he told her, was “that I am permitted to love you.” With that, the Chief of State entrained to Philadelphia, where he addressed fifteen thousand people at Convention Hall—including four thousand recently naturalized citizens. Speaking from his shorthand outline, he spun some romantic ideals before settling down to the issue of American neutrality in the face of that week’s disaster. “The example of America must be a special example,” he said, “. . . not merely of peace because it will not fight, but of peace because peace is the healing and elevating influence of the world, and strife is not.” Full of humanity that evening, he blurted, “There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight. There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.”
“Too proud to fight,” became the next day’s headline and an easy target for the political opposition. “This was probably the most unfortunate phrase that he ever coined,” said Henry Cabot Lodge, the Republican leader, who always resented Wilson’s rhetorical gifts and who intended to make political hay out of the comment. With 128 Americans at the bottom of the Iris
h Sea, it struck many as tone-deaf. “It was not the moment for fine words or false idealism,” said Lodge; and this turning the other cheek gave Wilson’s opponents—especially those disavowing neutrality—the chance to strike again. “The phrase ‘too proud to fight,’ uttered at such a moment, shocked me, as it did many others,” Lodge said, “and I never again recovered confidence in Mr. Wilson’s ability to deal with the most perilous situation which had ever confronted the United States in its relations with the other nations of the earth.”
The four-word phrase was, in fact, a re-articulation of his attitude about American neutrality as a badge of “splendid courage of reserve moral force.” But even Wilson himself admitted he was not sure what he had said in Philadelphia, since Edith remained foremost in his mind. “If I said what was worth saying to that great audience last night,” he wrote her the next day, “it must have been because love had complete possession of me.”
At a press conference the next morning, the President backpedaled, insisting he had not been dictating any policy in Philadelphia, merely speaking for himself. The significance of the Lusitania was not lost on him. He told Tumulty that he could not bring himself to ponder the details of the tragedy because, if he did, he was afraid that “when I am called upon to act . . . I could not be just to any one.” He vowed not to “indulge my own passionate feelings.”
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