When the Cheering Stopped (21 page)

The letter as sent tempered down the questionable statements, but it was a shock to those who heard it read out. For it repeated that the President would not accept any reservations: “Personally I do not accept the action of the United States Senate as the decision of the nation … We cannot rewrite this treaty. We must take it without changes which alter its meaning, or leave it.” And the letter said something that frightened the Democrats and hardened the will to resist of the Republicans. For it seemed the President was saying he would want a third term: “If there is any doubt as to what the people of
the country think on this vital matter the clear and simple way is to submit it for determination at the next election to the voters of the nation, to give the next election the form of a great and solemn referendum.”

It seemed the President had given the final blow to compromise. But still the White House was beseeched with appeals that the reservations be accepted, that anything be accepted that would put the country into the League and make the war worth having been fought. Ray Stannard Baker, the President's press liaison man at Paris, went to the White House to plead with the First Lady, but found her ungiving on the issue and resentful of the criticism of the President. “They think him stubborn,” she said accusingly; Baker replied, “So much hangs on this issue.” “He believes the people are with him,” she answered, and Baker left, thinking, This sick man, with such enormous power, closed in from the world and yet acting so influentially upon events! He wrote a letter to the First Lady: “People in the future will forget the minor disagreements if the thing itself comes into being.”

Baker had been traveling through all of the country and was sure he was right in saying the President must not stand so solidly upon the letter of what he had brought back from Paris. But the President had other ideas on how to fight. He had the First Lady send Albert Burleson, the typical politician made Postmaster General, a list of some thirty-five Senators with the request that Burleson indicate whether it might be said that these were the men most against ratification. Burleson wrote back indicating which men should perhaps be omitted from the classification and which others should perhaps be added, and the President and First Lady took up the list and wrote a statement to go with it: “I challenge the following named gentlemen, members of the Senate of the United States, to resign their seats in that body and take immediate steps to seek re-election to it on the basis of their several records with regards to the ratification of the treaty. For myself, I promise and engage if all of them or a majority of them are re-elected, I will resign the Presidency.” With difficulty the President was persuaded not to make public the statement.

In Europe there was growing apprehension that the
United States would not come into the League. One of the most prominent Europeans was fearful that this might come to pass and wrote a letter to the London
Times
saying the reservations attached to American entry would not mean much one way or the other, that they were relatively innocuous and really not terribly objectionable. The writer of the letter was Lord Grey and he ended it by saying the important thing was for the United States to come in on whatever terms were necessary. Only let the Americans come in! When word of the letter reached America the First Lady went to the President's room and came out with a cold statement she had written in her childish scrawl upon blue-lined notebook paper: “Had Lord Grey ventured upon any such utterance when he was still at Washington as Ambassador, his Government would have been promptly asked to withdraw him.”

February began. It had been four months since the President fell in the bathroom, and in that time the Cabinet continued to meet on a regular basis. As ranking minister, Secretary of State Lansing each week issued a call for the meeting, and after each one the newspapers duly reported what subjects had been discussed. Two Secretaries had resigned and been replaced by men asked to take the vacant posts by the First Lady,
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and so each department had its head who offered his opinion at the meetings. Now and then Grayson or Tumulty sat in, the latter often pointing to the conferences as indicative that the business of the country was going on smoothly. More than a score of the Cabinet meetings had been held when on February 7 Lansing received a signed letter from the President:

“My dear Mr. Secretary: Is it true, as I have been told, that during my illness, you have frequently called the heads of the executive departments of the government into conference?”

One can imagine Lansing's astonishment at being asked such a question. He replied, “It is true.… Shortly
after you were taken ill in October, certain members of the Cabinet, of which I was one, felt that in view of the fact that we were denied communication with you, it was wise for us to confer informally together.” The President wrote back, “I am very much disappointed by your letter … I find nothing in your letter which justifies your assumption of Presidential authority in such a matter … I must say that it would relieve me of embarrassment, Mr. Secretary, if you would give your present office up.” Lansing at once sent in his resignation, saying, however, that he could not permit to “pass unchallenged the imputation” that he sought to “usurp” Presidential authority and that he still felt the conferences were in the best interests of the Administration and the country. The President answered that the resignation was accepted.

Lansing then released the exchange of letters to the newspapers and at once a storm of criticism of the President poured forth. The President had not forgotten Lansing's doubts about the League and Lansing's questioning of whether Vice President Marshall should not take over the White House, but nothing of this was said in the letters. Instead the President had asked if it was true, “as I have been told,” that something known to all the world was taking place a few hundred feet from his sickroom. The New York
Evening Post
said the question was incredible: “We have been repeatedly assured by those surrounding the President during his illness that Mr. Wilson at all times has been in perfect mental condition and in touch with what was going on in the land. If this is so, is it at all conceivable that Mr. Wilson never stopped to inquire how the business of the country was being carried on during his illness? Was he ignorant of Cabinet meetings at which coal strikes and Mexican complications were discussed? The indignation at a sudden discovery implied in Mr. Wilson's letter is incomprehensible.”

Other papers said that if the country had been lied to about how the President was keeping in touch with things, as evidently it had, how could the country trust those who now said the President was in full possession of his mental faculties? “It is unthinkable that a sane man would offer any objection to the department heads getting together,” said the Worcester
Evening Gazette.
The
President was, said the New York
Tribune,
like the Sleeping Princess, “alive, yet of suspended animation” and desiring “all around him likewise frozen into lifelessness.” Why did he not demand that Congress cease operating also, so as to have a complete shutdown? WILSON'S LAST MAD ACT, headlined the Los Angeles
Times.

The men up on Capitol Hill had their opinions to add. Senator George Norris of Nebraska told reporters the letters showed two things: “First, the President was incapacitated and it was necessary for someone to look after the Government; second, that the mental expert that has been employed at the White House has been discharged too soon.”
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Representative George Holden Tinkham of Massachusetts was even blunter: “Whom the Gods would destroy they first make mad.” The Baltimore
Sun
voiced what many Senators and Representatives were thinking: “They ask in stage whispers at the Capitol whether this is not the work of the enigmatical villain of the play, the dark and mysterious Mr. Tumulty, or, more sinister still, must we look for the woman in the case?”

Actually Tumulty desperately fought against the firing of Lansing, but the President told him “disloyalty” must be “spiked.” The First Lady's reaction was different. “I hate Lansing,” she said, her bitterness shocking to Secretary Daniels, who found equally frightening her violent anger at Franklin Roosevelt because of his Christmas spent with Lord Grey. Daniels was baffled; all of the President's friends were baffled. The wife of Charles Sumner Hamlin of the Federal Reserve Board asked Secretary Houston's wife how it could have come about that the President would do such a thing, and Mrs. Houston said, “There is only one explanation—he is not in his right mind.” The journalist Raymond Clapper, before noting in his diary that he and his wife had both had wisdom teeth removed, wrote of what he had heard the day the letters were printed in the papers: “Many believe he is on the verge of insanity. No one can understand it.” Even the friendly New York
World
the next day reinforced this impression of its description of how, when Tumulty appeared bearing newspapers with “glaring headlines” about
the firing, the President “with the glee of a boy reached out his cane, grasped a railing, and swung his wheel chair in circles, at the same time admonishing Mr. Tumulty to ‘see how strong I am!'”

As Tumulty remembered it later, the President said that the whole thing would blow over and nothing would be recalled save the “disloyalty” of Lansing. But the
World
was right in thinking the President was growing stronger, for within a short time, on a warm day in March, Grayson judged the patient capable of withstanding the strain of an auto ride. A platform was put up at the south entrance of the White House so that the wheel chair could be rolled to a position level with the waiting car, and three or four Secret Service men lifted the President to his feet and held him in their arms and put him into the car's rear right-hand corner—the right side in order that the paralyzed left side of his face would not show to the people in the street—and braced him up so that he might not topple to the floor when the car started, and adjusted his cape (he could not wear a coat; it was too difficult to get the inert left arm into a sleeve) and set his hat square on his head. And so he was driven through Washington, his face devoid of all color, grayish white, thin, waxlike, a bright-eyed old man trying to smile, the lips revealing the teeth only on the right side, the eyes protuberant, a thin face on a thin neck ducked down so as to hide the paralyzed side.

There was to him something cruel and terrifying in the faces of the people who looked at him as the car went by; they did not cheer, but stared as if to see if it was all true what they had heard: that the car held a madman. When they came back to the White House policemen were waiting, and when the car pulled up to a remote rear gate all traffic was halted and they drove quickly into the grounds. As they went in, a small group of people by the gate threw into the thin March sunshine a faint cheer. They were backstairs White House workers whose faces the President would not know, and friends and relatives of Secret Service men, and they had been recruited just for this reason: so that on his ride there might be for him one bit of applause. When the car stopped and the men went to lift him out and carry him to the wheel chair
there were tears in his eyes and he was saying, “You see, they still love me.” The First Lady left him for a moment and went to stand by herself so that he would not see that she wept.

But he was strange on the succeeding drives. He got it into his mind that any car that passed his own was going dangerously fast, although at his orders the chauffeur rarely went faster than fifteen or twenty miles an hour. Whenever a car went by he would order that the Secret Service vehicle overtake it and bring back the driver for questioning. Miserably trying to give him the impression that his instructions were perfectly logical, the Secret Service car would chase after the offending auto, always to return with the excuse that the speeder was going too fast to be overhauled. He brooded over this and wrote to Attorney General Palmer asking if the Presidency carried with it the powers of a justice of the peace; if it did, he told his people, he was going to make sure the speeders were caught and himself try their cases there by the roadside. (The Secret Service men desperately killed the plan by saying to him that the idea was beneath his dignity.)

Even the First Lady fell afoul of him when she arranged for him to go on a ride in a Secret Service Cadillac when his own favorite Pierce-Arrow was sent to a garage for repair work. He said he would not have it that he not be consulted on the matter and declared he would not ride in the Secret Service car. Instead he would use a horse-drawn carriage until his own car was ready for use. He was the President and those were his orders, so he went forth in an open victoria. The offending Cadillac idled along behind him, out of sight but ready at hand if it should be needed.

Meanwhile there were no Cabinet meetings and no Secretary of State. Tumulty sent up the names of some veteran State Department men as nominees, but his suggestions were ignored and he was ordered to telephone Bainbridge Colby, a New York lawyer working on the Shipping Board, and tell him to come to the White House. “What's up now, Joe?” asked Colby; Tumulty said he could not say, but Colby must come to Washington at once. At the White House he was taken to the President, who sat wrapped in blankets on the South Portico.
Initially shocked by the President's waxen and deathlike appearance, Colby was completely astonished when he, a man utterly inexperienced in foreign affairs, was offered the job of Secretary of State. It seemed incredible to him—and would seem even more so to official Washington when the announcement of his appointment was made. “Say you will accept,” said the President, and Colby thus became Lansing's successor.

The choice was so widely criticized after the first wave of astonishment passed over Washington, and the President so completely damned, that one Senator, Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee, felt impelled to rise in the Senate and make answer. He summed up what had been said about the President on the Senate floor: he was a despot, tyrant, madman. Then he spoke of another President who on the same floor had been called uncontrollable, irresponsible, “monster usurper … felon … weak and imbecile.” After reading from Senate speeches of 1861–65, he said, “I stop here long enough to wonder whether the distinguished Senator from New Hampshire
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who was assailing the President for alleged physical and mental disabilities the other day did not copy in substance some of the language here used about Abraham Lincoln. It sounds very much like him.” Joe Tumulty brought word of the speech to the President and tears rolled down the invalid's cheeks.