Wilson

by A. Scott Berg

  Wilson returned to an empty White House on July 19, 1915; and though the walls had been stripped for the summer and the furniture was dressed “in white pajamas,” he did not feel lonely. “You were not actually here,” he wrote Edith, “but your thought and love were here to greet me.” For the rest of the summer, he scrawled long letters, sometimes a dozen pages or more, to Edith—interspersing accounts of the day’s events with passionate expressions of his preoccupation: “You are everything to me,” he wrote the following afternoon.

  For the next several months, the President intensified what surely became the most romantic correspondence ever to emanate from the White House—250 letters between them, most of them expressing the desperate fervency of a world leader in crisis. In the middle of the night, precisely one year after Ellen died, he suddenly awakened. He did not know why exactly, but he recounted that in his dream Edith had disappeared and he found himself exclaiming, “Edith, my Darling, where are you?” Even though they gave themselves that month away from each other—in part to quell any gossip—Woodrow was revived.

  Edith Bolling Galt was engaged in the first full-blown love affair of her life—and a Cinderella story at that. As she explained in a letter to Woodrow, “I—an unknown person—one who had lived a sheltered inconspicuous existence, now having all the threads in the tangled fabric of the world’s history laid in her hands for a few minutes, while the strong hand, that quicks the shuttle, stops long enough in its work, to press my fingers in token of the great love and trust with which you crown and bless my life.” Edith felt new purpose in her life and began training for it with gusto. She boned up on foreign affairs and United States history; she took golf lessons; she adopted Woodrow’s quirky use of “okeh”—a Choctaw word meaning “it is so”—which he insisted was the proper form of “O.K.” And she offered ferocious support for his decisions and fearless assessments of those who surrounded him, even his innermost circle: Dr. Grayson was above reproach, and the President was already in the process of promoting him; Tumulty she considered “common”; and Colonel House, she dared say, was “not a very strong character.” She knew what a “comfort and staff” he was to Wilson, but she considered him “a weak vessel.” Woodrow explained that House possessed a strong character and was noble, loyal, devoted, prudent, farseeing, and wise; but, he admitted, “His mind is not of the first class. He is a counsellor, not a statesman.” Woodrow suggested that Edith would come to love House—“if only because he loves me and would give, I believe, his life for me.” In preparing to become Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, Edith even found herself trying to match his eloquence. “Do you feel my arms ’round your neck and my lips on yours while I whisper—goodnight?” she wrote him mid-August.

  When Edith returned to Washington at the start of September, she saw how world events had turned his eyes into “pools of tragic suffering.” During their traditional drive, Wilson spoke of the increasing struggle to avoid entrance into the war, to say nothing of all the complications closer to home. “And so, little girl,” he said, “I have no right to ask you to help me by sharing this load that is almost breaking my back, for I know your nature and you might do it out of sheer pity.” And in that moment—despite the presence of the chauffeur, the Secret Service, and Helen Bones—Edith threw her arms around Woodrow’s neck and said, “Well, if you won’t ask me, I will volunteer.” She agreed to marry him as soon as he was ready. She presumed he would suggest the American public would need a year to get used to the idea of the President taking a second wife.

  Wilson divulged his intentions to his daughters, and each responded with enthusiasm. Margaret spoke for her sisters when she wrote Edith late that summer, “I’m so glad that he has your love to help him and support him in these terrible times! . . . I love you dear Edith, and I love to be with you.” Edith revealed her secret to her mother and siblings, allowing Woodrow to reach out to them. He made them feel welcome at the White House, and he wrote Edith’s mother that he hoped “that you will love me and accept me as your own son.” The couple prepared to go public.

  But then they encountered the first naysayers—right in the West Wing of the White House. Grayson, the matchmaker, knew how therapeutic it had been for the President to be in love again, but the rest of Wilson’s advisers worried about the politics of the situation. Rumors of a love affair would not play as well with the electorate as the suffering of a grieving widower—especially in the quarter of the states (mostly in the Progressive West) that permitted women to vote. With Ellen dead only a year and the Presidential election only twelve months away, the Cabinet decided somebody had to advise the President to wait. They selected the President’s son-in-law.

  McAdoo—evidently in concert with Colonel House—devised a strangely devilish ploy. Over lunch on September 18, he told the President that he had received an anonymous letter asserting that rumors of his engagement had spread and that the desperate Mrs. Hulbert had been shopping his letters. Whatever her motive, McAdoo suggested, the letters were sure to create a scandal, possibly one that would portray their latest exchange as a $7,500 payoff. Wilson was aghast that Mary Hulbert could ever do such a thing. He knew the innocence of the correspondence, but he could also imagine how desperate Mary had become and how the political opposition in Washington would respond.

  Shaken to the core, he dispatched a note to Edith, informing her that there was “something, personal to myself, that I feel I must tell you about at once.” He took the liberty of asking if he might defy propriety and call upon her at home. “Of course, you can come to me,” a distressed Edith replied, though she asked him to bring Dr. Grayson along, to provide the necessary cover.

  Woodrow bared his soul. He told Edith—as he would later record in a letter to her—all about his relationship with “Mrs. Peck” and what he called “a passage of folly and gross impertinence in my life.” For that, he was “deeply ashamed and repentant,” and also tormented and confused. He could not understand what would possess anybody to publish such letters, knowing the humiliation they would bring. Wilson was contrite—not because Mrs. Peck was unworthy of the sentiments expressed in the letters but because Wilson felt he did not have “the moral right to offer the ardent affection which they express.” In fact, the whole cache of mail seems to corroborate that the “affair” with Mrs. Peck did not trespass into the physical. Wilson said his “utter allegiance to my incomparable wife [had not been] in any way by the least jot abated.”

  None of that lessened either the shame Wilson suffered or the grief “that I should have so erred and forgotten the standards of honorable behavior by which I should have been bound.” Now that indiscretion implicated Edith Galt. “Stand by me,” he pled. “Don’t desert me.”

  Edith hesitated, and Woodrow left her to sort out her feelings. Each endured a restless night. He lamented the pain he had brought to her. “When it was the deepest, most passionate desire of my heart to bring you happiness,” he wrote her the next morning, “. . . I have brought you, instead, mortification and thrown a new shadow about you.” After spending the night in her big chair by the window, she wrote Woodrow to apologize for having faltered.

  “This is my pledge, Dearest One,” she wrote. “I will stand by you—not for duty, not for pity, not for honor—but for love—trusting, protecting, comprehending Love. And no matter whether the wine be bitter or sweet we will share it together and find happiness in the comradeship.” Woodrow was overjoyed.

  House told the President he did not believe the issue of “the Peck letters” would ever amount to anything. The Colonel never mentioned that he knew that the entire incident had been trumped up. Instead, he graciously accepted the responsibility for planning the impending wedding, which the two men agreed could take place before the end of the year. House conceded that the salutary benefits of Wilson’s remarrying far outweighed any political fallout.

  A private telephone wire was installed between the White House and Edith’s,
avoiding any switchboards; letters passed between them several times a day, as did a pouchful of memoranda, with the President’s comments and notations, so that Edith could brief herself on his activities. He continued to send flowers every day—orchids if they were dining out or attending the theater, a corsage that she would wear high on her left shoulder. He also changed the routine of his regular automobile ride by making time to stroll with Edith through Rock Creek Park; it was Agent Starling’s task to follow them. He wanted to look away, to afford the lovers some privacy, but his job did not permit it. “He was an ardent lover,” Starling recalled. “He talked, gesticulated, laughed, boldly held her hand. It was hard to believe he was fifty-eight years old.”

  The White House announced their engagement on Wednesday, October 6, 1915. In an accompanying statement, the President declared his intention to vote for woman suffrage in New Jersey the following month. He added that he would be voting as neither the leader of the nation nor of his party, only as a citizen of New Jersey. Although there was a strong movement for an equal rights amendment to the Constitution—which his daughter Margaret strongly advocated—Wilson believed this was a matter for each state to settle. The press credited Edith with turning Wilson into a suffragist; but, as Cary Grayson wrote Altrude Gordon, “The joke is that she’s against it: but she’s too good a diplomat to say anything on the subject these days.”

  Woodrow and Edith went to New York that Friday, to spend time with Colonel House and his wife. The President bunked at their apartment, while Edith and her mother stayed at the St. Regis Hotel. Before they went to dinner and the theater, Wilson received a jeweler, who arrived at the apartment with thirteen diamond rings, one of which Edith selected. Saturday the couple went to Philadelphia, where Wilson became the first President to attend a World Series game—as the Boston Red Sox beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 2 to 1. Thanksgiving weekend, the President showed off his bride-to-be at the annual Army and Navy football game at the Polo Grounds in New York. They sat in a box on the Army side of the gridiron until halftime, when the Admirals of the Navy came to escort their Commander in Chief across the field to the enthusiastic cheers of the entire stadium. “Every one,” Edith observed, “seemed to be our friend.” Even though the couple chose to send announcement cards in lieu of wedding invitations, gifts from all over the world began to arrive. Many came from manufacturers, hoping for a White House endorsement, while foreign delegations sent glassware, silverware, jewelry, and furniture. The only gift the President officially accepted was a nugget of California gold, which the state hoped they might hammer into a wedding ring.

  Ironically, once the President and Mrs. Galt had made their relationship public, they could spend more time together in private. As they were engaged to be married, there was no need for furtiveness. On Sundays, after attending church, the couple would seclude themselves all day. Almost every night, a Secret Service agent accompanied Wilson to Twentieth Street and sat vigil outside Edith’s house, usually until midnight. Often Wilson wanted to walk home along the late-night deserted streets; and Agent Starling could not but notice that the President would unconsciously jig a few steps whenever he had to wait for an occasional milk truck to pass. He also realized that when Wilson got lost in his own thoughts, he often whistled—softly, through his teeth—invariably the same tune, one he undoubtedly had heard in one of his visits to the theater: “Oh, you beautiful doll! You great big beautiful doll! Let me put my arms around you, I could never live without you.”

  The White House came alive again. The President smiled for most of his photographs. There were frequent small celebrations among intimate friends and family. On November 30, seventy-five members of the Class of 1879 went to the White House for a mini-reunion; the members of the old Witherspoon Gang spent the night in the guest rooms upstairs. “Dinner went off delightfully,” Woodrow wired Edith, who had gone to shop in New York. “. . . You were unanimously elected an honorary member of the class amidst loud cheers.”

  Wilson delivered his State of the Union address on December 7, 1915. While it covered a variety of subjects, they encompassed one overall theme: “national efficiency and security.” With war spreading across the globe, Wilson stood confidently behind his firewall, remaining “studiously neutral.” While the British push through the Dardanelles had resulted in a bloodbath costing 100,000 lives, Wilson maintained that America’s task was domestic—making “a common cause of national independence and of political liberty in America.” He said the United States would “aid and befriend Mexico, but we will not coerce her. . . . We seek no political suzerainty or selfish control.” He endorsed Pan-Americanism, the notion that the states of the Americas “are not hostile rivals but cooperating friends” and that there was “none of the spirit of empire in it.” He expressed his belief in the Second Amendment—“the right of the people to keep and bear arms”—not for the sake of shooting each other but so that its citizens could be “ready and sufficient to take care of themselves and of the governments which they have set up to serve them” with a well-regulated militia.

  Wilson called for preparedness—an increase of the regular Army and Navy and the building up of the merchant marine in order to stay competitive. New revenues would be needed. “I, for one, do not believe that the people of this country approve of postponing the payment of their bills,” he said. “Borrowing money is short-sighted finance.” He recommended a tax on gasoline and on automobiles and internal combustion engines. He urged legislation that would combat new threats of disloyalty and anarchy. He praised the nation for its spirit, which believed in “self-government, industry, justice, liberty and peace,” all of which made Americans “heralds and prophets of a new age.” Wilson was already contemplating the establishment of a department devoted to homeland security, to deal with “an unavoidable lack of coordination between the different Departments of the Government charged with investigation of . . . the activity of agents of the belligerent Governments in this country.” The President wanted to ready the nation for civil defense, not war.

  “Wilson is at heart an abject coward,” Theodore Roosevelt had recently written his son Kermit; “or else he has a heart so cold and selfish that he is entirely willing to sacrifice the honor and the interest of the country to his own political advancement.” Ever since the Gulflight was sunk, TR felt the nation should have declared war. He held Wilson “morally responsible” for the loss of American lives on the Lusitania; and he vociferously disapproved of Wilson’s policy of half-preparedness, of valuing words over action. “There are no bad regiments but there are plenty of bad colonels,” the “Hero of San Juan Hill” reminded his son. “The United States would stand like a unit if we had in the Presidency a man of the stamp of Andrew Jackson.” In truth, Wilson was a practical centrist: there were ardent pacifists in the country, such as Bryan; and there were even a few dreamers with ideas airier than Wilson’s—such as Henry Ford.

  On December 4, 1915, the austere automobile manufacturer floated a concept so utopian, it momentarily captured the attention of the world. He sponsored a series of peace conferences in the capitals of neutral European nations, at which he hoped to gather enough representatives to discuss a settlement of the war. Ford believed he could will an armistice into existence. Toward that end, he chartered a Scandinavian ocean liner, the Oscar II, and filled it with 166 passengers, including pacifists and activists, journalists, and students. Sailing to Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Holland, Ford planned to strafe Europe with messages of peace compelling enough to lure the belligerents to the conference table. William Jennings Bryan, Thomas Edison, and three thousand other peace advocates appeared in Hoboken to bid them bon voyage. But the journey attracted little attention from those at war. When this Peace Expedition proved to be futile, Ford himself jumped ship, quietly leaving the tour to sail home on another vessel. The great venture was quickly ridiculed despite its noble ambitions; but it had its defenders. H. G. Wells would write in 1933 that “des
pite its failure, this effort to stop the war will be remembered when the generals and their battles and senseless slaughter are forgotten.” Even Ford conceded, “I didn’t get much peace, but I heard in Norway that Russia might well become a huge market for tractors soon.”

  The President and Colonel House spent most of December 15 together at the White House. Wilson was dissatisfied with American relations with all the participants in the war and wanted House to return to Europe to express America’s desire to join the international conversation. After dinner, the two men called upon Edith for a half hour. She expressed regret that House would not be at their wedding; but the Colonel sensitively suggested that his presence would only engender a lot of hurt feelings within the Administration. Indeed, this third Wilson wedding in two years was to be the most exclusive event of his Presidency.

  The bride and groom decided not to marry in the White House, eschewing all protocol for something personal. The ceremony and reception would be held in Edith’s town house with only their families present. They agreed that both their faiths should be represented—by the pastor of the city’s Central Presbyterian Church and an Episcopalian Bishop. Edith invited the latter to be her guest at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington; and because of the strictly familial nature of the occasion, she explained that his wife was not invited. He understood, only to shock Edith on December 16 when he sent her a note from the Shoreham explaining that it would cause his wife “much chagrin to acknowledge to her titled friends that she had not been asked to the marriage of the President where her husband had officiated.” As his wife was with him at the hotel, he presumed she would be welcome at the ceremony. Edith read the Bishop’s letter twice and handwrote her reply, thanking him for his explanation of the embarrassing situation . . . and then relieving him from his duty of performing the ceremony.