When the Cheering Stopped (12 page)

That day there was bad news from Washington. Testifying before Senator Lodge and his Foreign Relations Committee, William C. Bullitt, who had been attached to the American delegation at Paris during the Peace Conference,
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said that Secretary of State Robert Lansing had told him outright that the League of Nations was a terrible idea. Reading from notes he said he had made of the conversation, Bullitt quoted Lansing as saying, “I believe that if the Senate could only understand what this treaty means, it would unquestionably be defeated, but I wonder if they will understand what it lets them in for … I believe that the League of Nations at present is entirely useless.”

The newspapers headlined the story and added that Secretary Lansing, on vacation in upstate New York, returned from a day of bass fishing and said he had no comment on Bullitt's statement. The implication of the Secretary's silence clearly was that he was not going to deny that he made the remarks to Bullitt. The revelations of his Secretary of State's attitude threw the President into a rage. “Read that,” he rasped at Tumulty, “and tell me what you think of a man who was my associate on the other side and who confidentially expressed himself to an outsider in such a fashion! Think of it! This from a man whom I raised from the level of a subordinate to the great office of Secretary of State of the United States! My God! I did not think it was possible for Lansing to act in this way!” Senators Borah and Johnson traveling behind him damning the League and Senator New in the Senate saying his dreams were “scarcely less visionary than the hallucinations of Don Quixote” were one thing, but for his Secretary of State to say the same thing was quite another. He could not get it out of his mind, and
there was something desperate in his face as they went south into California behind three engines pulling the train up over the Siskiyou Mountains.

They spent two days in the San Francisco area and he made five major addresses. There was a men's luncheon, a women's luncheon, a trip by ferry across the bay and a talk at the Greek Theatre of the University of California at Berkeley. Margaret Axson Elliott, Ellen's younger sister, came with her husband, an assistant to the President in Princeton days, and stayed with them at the Hotel St. Francis in San Francisco. Sitting with the Mayor of Oakland and the President and First Lady as they drove in one of the unending motorcades, Margaret—“Madge” to the family—saw a child fall off the curb and get dragged back by its father. The Mayor of Oakland saw it too. “Those are the little chaps for whom you are fighting, Mr. President.” “God help them, yes!” the President said. Often on the trip he repeated that—“I am the attorney for these children.” At the end of their stay Madge drove with them to the train. “Take care of yourself. This trip is pretty strenuous,” she said. He nodded. “It is! I shall be ready for a rest when it is over.”

The Far West's September weather was hot, steamy, draining—he seemed to be weakening hour by hour, but there was no let up in the reception committees and politicians and the pushing and screaming crowds that were everywhere, along with the bands that awakened him in the morning and blared long into the night. Always there were more hands to shake, more people wanting just a moment of the President's time, his ear for just a second or two. “They mean so well—but they are killing me,” he groaned. They went down to San Diego and to the stadium, where with the assistance of then-novel loudspeakers he spoke to a crowd of more than forty thousand madly enthusiastic and vociferous persons shielding themselves with umbrellas from the sun.

As they headed north to Los Angeles, Grayson had the train halted so that the President might get off and sleep in an inn. The doctor also argued that there must be no more rear-platform speeches and handshaking, but in the Los Angeles station a begrimed Mexican rail-yard worker reached up to shake. Although the Secret Service
men leaped forward to bar others from doing the same, the crowd set up three cheers and would not take no for an answer. So he had to shake what the reporters estimated to be a thousand hands in a matter of minutes.

There was a dinner for him, the First Lady wearing black and silver brocade and a velvet hat trimmed with sapphire tulle fastened with a diamond and sapphire, and at the Shrine Auditorium there were seven thousand to hear him while three times that number stood outside. Cheers drowned out the voice of the Mayor as he tried to make the introduction, and when the President stood up the people increased the enormous volume of sound. As soon as the cheers began to diminish, a man waving a large American flag urged the people to redouble their efforts, and so he stood for a long time before he began his speech.
LOS ANGELES SHRIEKS APPROVAL OF THE PRESIDENT
, said a local paper, and the New York
Times
correspondent on the train wrote the traveler was “now getting the cumulative effect of his missionary work.” Correspondent David Lawrence, who earlier in the trip had been struck by the lack of enthusiasm, now wrote the President would leave the West Coast “triumphant.”

The second day in Los Angeles was a Sunday and in the morning he drove to a shabby street where there lived a woman who as a young girl had been very close to Miss Elly Lou of Rome, Georgia. When the parents of the girl—“Janie” in the long ago—died, Ellen's people took her in and raised her as their own. The two girls shared Ellen's room, went to the same school, grew up to be young ladies. Then Janie married a man who took her west and to a financially very difficult life. She and Ellen never met again but corresponded regularly through the years. Now Ellen was dead, but her husband went to Janie in her small bungalow in a down-at-the-heels neighborhood. In San Francisco, Madge Axson Elliott heard of it and something caught at her throat. “His heart is turning to his young Ellen,” she breathed.

In the afternoon there came to the hotel someone else from out of the past: Mrs. Peck, invited for lunch by the First Lady. She came by streetcar to the Hotel Alexandria and went in through the great crowds to Grayson, who brought her to the President and First Lady. She had not
seen the former in four years; the latter she had never met. Mrs. Peck thought the First Lady handsome and Junoesque with a charming smile; the First Lady thought her sweet-looking but faded.

Mrs. Peck told of her troubles with the President's enemies who sought to buy the letters he had written her, of how her room had been searched and of the large sums offered. “God, to think that you should have suffered because of me!” said the distressed President. She told of her financial difficulties, of how she sold encyclopedias door to door and worked as a movie extra sipping tea in the background of a garden-party scene, of her suffering because of the gossip about them. In an apparent attempt to smooth over a difficult situation by making a joke, the First Lady said, “Where there's so much smoke there must be some fire.”

It was an unwise remark to make to a woman who, she once had told a friend, still kept the lace for the dress she had intended to wear at her White House wedding. She flared out some sharp things to the First Lady, but the tiff was passed over when the President talked about his fight for the League. Several times people came in to ask if the President would not greet the crowds outside the hotel, or this delegation or that, and once Grayson came in to ask if the First Lady would not say hello to a women's group, and finally the President went out to meet with some League supporters. It seemed to Mrs. Peck that he was like a man being drawn into a maelstrom.

Finally it came time for her to go. The President put his hand on the First Lady's and asked, “Isn't there something we can do?” Mrs. Peck did not fail to note the First Lady's silence and said, “Not for me; not for me. I am quite all right.” The First Lady went to tell a valet to bring Mrs. Peck's wrap and the President walked with his visitor to the hall. She quoted from a poem: “‘With all my will, but much against my heart, we two now part.'” The elevator came and she was gone. They would never meet again.

Going across the Sierras, finally heading in the direction of Washington, they ran into forest fires that scorched the sides of the train cars and filled the long mountain tunnels with choking gas fumes. He could not sleep at
all and the headaches, formerly located at the back of his head, now seemed to be moving into the very center of his brain. The sharp changes of altitude were the worst thing possible for his asthma, and when they moved out of the mountains into the dust of the Western desert the twitching of his face was more pronounced and continuous for hours on end. In Washington a resolution was introduced in Congress directing the State Department to furnish a “list of all presents of any kind whatsoever that were tendered” the President from “any King, Prince or Foreign State.” Rumors were spread that “women and liquor” were aboard the train.

At Reno, Nevada, the crowd called for the First Lady and he brought her out on the train platform. “Here is the best part of this traveling show,” he said. A man below called, “Mr. Wilson, I would like to make a statement: I am very much pleased with your better half.” Everyone laughed. They drove to a theater: “Answering those who fear the League will get the United States into trouble, I want to get into any kind of trouble that will help to liberate mankind!” The talk was piped over telephone lines to megaphones set up in three other theaters in the town.

They went on toward Salt Lake City, stopping at Ogden for a one-hour drive through crowded city streets after rolling through the small desert towns where the entire populations turned out to call his name, the children singing, Indian squaws standing with papooses on their backs, people clinging to dust-covered telegraph poles along the right of way. At Salt Lake City the speech was to be in the Mormon Tabernacle at eight in the evening. At six Tumulty came to the hotel where they were resting and said the Tabernacle was so packed that the police had locked the doors. Looking from the hotel windows, they saw thousands of people milling about in the streets, and when they went down, a police escort had hard work getting them through the crowds.

Inside, fifteen thousand people sat in an unventilated building on a very hot night; the heat and fetid air made the First Lady feel sick and blind. They went up on the rostrum, where the hot thick air was even more stifling, and she thought she was going to faint. Her maid saw her getting white and passed up a bottle of smelling salts
which she gratefully inhaled and then poured onto a handkerchief for the President. He was in agony from the terrible pain in his head and choking from the asthma and the poor air, and when they got back to the hotel his clothing was soaked through with perspiration. The First Lady and Grayson got him into dry things, but within five minutes they too were sopping wet. All night on the train he could not keep dry.

The next day at Cheyenne two troops of cavalry from Fort Russell gave him a saber salute as he stood at attention for
The Star-Spangled Banner
before the parade to the Princess Theater and an hour's speech. Four hours later, at eleven at night, they pulled into Denver. They had wired ahead asking there be as small a reception committee as possible, giving the explanation that this was a security request from the Secret Service, but when they got there they found the entire city ablaze with special lights strung up by the Denver Gas and Electric Light Company. The streets were jammed. Thousands of yelling people escorted them to their hotel, where they talked with his cousin Harriet Woodrow Wells, whom as a boy he had loved but who had rejected his proposal of marriage.

When he tried to sleep, he could not. The First Lady was desperate, terrified of the way he looked and what lay ahead. “Let's stop,” she begged. “Let's go somewhere and rest. Only for a few days.” “No,” he said. “I have caught the imagination of the people. They are eager to hear what the League stands for. I should fail in my duty if I disappointed them.” She was so downcast that he tried to make light of the situation: “Cheer up! This will soon be over. And when we get back to Washington I promise you I'll take a holiday.”

In the morning they went to the state capitol grounds to greet school children and then to the City Auditorium for his speech. The acoustics were very bad and he had to shout. By eleven in the morning they were on their way to Pueblo, Colorado. They lunched on the train and his appetite was bad, as usual. As the train approached Pueblo he asked what the arrangements were and was told the schedule called for a drive to the fairgrounds to greet a crowd before going to speak in the Memorial
Auditorium. The idea of a long standing-up auto tour to the fairgrounds seemed too much for him. “Who authorized such an idiotic idea?” he snapped. He was told it was listed in the plans he himself had approved. “Send for Tumulty and tell him to bring the original program,” he ordered. Tumulty brought it and showed the President where he had signed an approving “W.W.” The President sighed. “Any damned fool who was stupid enough to approve such a program has no business in the White House.”

He said he would not go to the fairgrounds. But when they arrived in Pueblo the reception committee pleaded that he make the trip, saying ten thousand people were waiting for him. Reluctantly he agreed and drove around in front of the crowd, waving his hat. When they went to the auditorium for his speech he seemed to stumble at the single step of the hall's entrance. The Secret Service man Edmund Starling caught him and almost lifted him up over the step. Always before the President had refused any suggestion of physical assistance when his party was battling its way through the enormous crowds of the trip, but this time he did not object. He went out onto the platform. It was a little after three in the afternoon, September 25, 1919. Passing the newspapermen, he said, “This will have to be a short speech. Aren't you fellows getting pretty sick of this?”

He went up to the cheering and yells and began to speak. His voice was not strong, but he did well enough until suddenly he stumbled over a sentence. “Germany must never be allowed—” He stopped and was silent. “A lesson must be taught to Germany—” He stopped again and stood still. “The world will not allow Germany—” Reporter Joseph Jefferson O'Neill looked up from his notes. This had never happened before in any of the speeches. O'Neill looked at the First Lady and saw terror on her face. Edmund Starling thought to himself the President was about to collapse and tensed to step forward and catch him. But the President gathered himself together, although his voice was very weak, and went on. He spoke of Memorial Day at Suresnes, of the soldiers alive and dead at the cemetery, and of how he wished that some of the Senators opposing the League might have
been there on that day. As he spoke of the dead boys in the graves at Suresnes, Joe Tumulty, standing in the wings of the auditorium, saw down in the audience men and women alike reaching for handkerchiefs to wipe their eyes. “There seems to me to stand between us and the rejection of this treaty the serried ranks of those boys in khaki, not only those boys who came home, but those dear ghosts who still deploy upon the fields of France.”