When the Cheering Stopped (29 page)

Mostly, however, the rides were not city ones, but rather country trips. He took with him an old cape bought years ago in Scotland and even on warm days wore it around his shoulders beneath the long thin face. A cap was always on his head. He lived but did not live in the America of 1921; he was like some apparition from the past, from Yesterday, coming along the road in his big old open car with two small
W
's painted where once the Seal of the President had been. Motionless and silent, he roused himself only at the sight of a soldier or an
American flag. For the soldier there would be a slow salute with the good hand. For the flag he would lift his hat and take it off and hold it over his heart. Always. Atop the government buildings and in the parks a fluttering banner would catch his eye, and his arm would come up and for a moment as his car glided by he would be bareheaded, the face seemingly even more stark now that it could be seen that only a thin fringe of longish hair came back from his forehead to run down to his collar in back.

But it was possible to live in the Washington of that day and never know that he lived there also, so rarely was he seen. He belonged to no organizations of note; his wife was patroness of no dinners or women's affairs and was not seen in the shops. For the first month in S Street they had retained the services of a guard, but then they let him go. There was no need for the guard, for Washington and the world did not, save for the letters, bother with the ex-President any more than with the widow of General Philip Sheridan, a neighbor. The world did not seem to care that he was there, an ex-President and aged figure with an expression of infinite sadness upon that ravaged face, a look of questioning also, a wondering request of God and Fate to know what had happened, where did it all go, was this what life was—ruin and a terrible loneliness?

On November 10, 1921, there came a letter written in pencil upon the stationery of Louis Miller, Cut-Rate Dealer in Hardware, Paints, Oils, Kitchen Supplies and Sporting Goods, Floyd Avenue, Richmond, Va.

“To my Hero,” it began. “Dear Mr. Wilson, Tomorrow we celebrate Armistice Day and my Daddy says its to honor the Brave Boys who made peace possible. I think the biggest honor is you. I take my hat way off to you. I pray God will let you live and be happy and healthy. From David H. Miller seven years old.”

He wrote back, “My dear Little Friend, Your delightful letter gave me a good deal of pleasure. I send you, besides my warm thanks, my most cordial good wishes, and am glad to call myself your friend.”

On that Armistice Day the body of the Unknown Soldier would be going to its grave in Arlington and on
that day the former Commander in Chief would be in the funeral parade. In the days preceding the burial, when the plans were made, the former Commander in Chief's presence had not been expected, so no arrangements for his participation were made. A letter to President Harding, however, brought forth an invitation. The other mourners would be marching on foot behind the coffin, but it would be impossible for this mourner, and so, early on Armistice Day morning, in black, wearing a tall black hat, he came out to where a rented horse carriage waited before his house. His man Scott lifted his left leg to the carriage's step, and the coachman held the horses, a bay and a black, and with difficulty he was gotten up onto the seat. His wife sat by him, she also in black. A poppy was in his lapel and one at her breast. He held a cane in his good hand. The Secretary of War had asked that by eight twenty-five he be at the east entrance of the Capitol, where an Army officer would take him into his place for the funeral procession down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House. There he would drop out of the procession in compliance with the Secretary's request—only military contingents would march all the way to Arlington.

With Scott beside him on the victoria's box, the coachman drove by way of Massachusetts Avenue and First Street, N.E., in order to avoid the congestion of the many troops that would march. But when they got to the Capitol there was no sign of the officer who would direct them to their place. The crowds and confusion affected the horses and they grew restless, but finally a police sergeant took over and led the carriage to a place in the line. And so the funeral of the Unknown began, and down Pennsylvania Avenue, behind six jet-black horses with black trappings, came the cortege. The hoofs of the artillery horses drawing the great caissons were muffled, and upon muffled drums a slow, rhythmic beat dully sounded. The flags were draped in mourning and lowered, and dirges played. Faded flowers brought from overseas sat atop the draped flag on the casket. A wall of humanity, silent save for an occasional sob, watched as the Unknown went slowly by.

President Harding marched side by side with General
Pershing, who wore no decorations but the Victory Medal which every American soldier could wear. The Cabinet walked behind the coffin, and the Senators, and the Representatives, and the Supreme Court Justices, and the soldiers in long regimental formations, and the sailors, the lumbering guns of the artillery, the banners, the generals, the admirals. And the foreigners who would present to him in that coffin their Victoria Crosses and their Croix de Guerres—Marshal Foch, Admiral Lord Beatty, the others. All passed by the people standing on the curb in a great silence, and so did a marching group of Congressional Medal of Honor winners, and then, gripping a cane and leaning on it so that he might sit up the straighter, came Woodrow Wilson.

And the silence of the funeral was broken, for the people were whispering to each other, “It's Wilson; look, President Wilson.” A flutter of applause came out to him, and a few low calls of greeting. And more cheers. He had seventeen blocks to go in the procession, and by the time those blocks were traveled the people all around were cheering him. His carriage stopped before the White House, where he would be leaving the procession, and President Harding and his wife took up a position in a box opposite the west gate, and the President looked over toward the halted carriage and bowed to its occupant. Inside the grounds a couple of Negro servants saw who was there, and they came running out to look up at him and say their names and ask if he didn't remember them from before. All around the carriage people were pushing to get closer, and more White House servants came crying their greetings. It was a funeral, and the funeral of the Unknown Soldier at that, but the cheering got louder until it was an ovation. With no smile, seemingly with the greatest reluctance, Woodrow Wilson took off his high black silk hat and held it out to the cheers. His stern face was unrelaxed, and nothing showed, but from that moment on nothing would be for him as it had been before, before he heard those cheers and saw those people crying, “Oh, Mr. Wilson, Mr. Wilson.”

The coachman turned the bay and the black and they went to S Street. When they got there they found the pavement covered with people. For a small group of
women had gathered at Connecticut and Florida avenues with the aim of marching to his home to stand before him and let him know that they cared. As they marched other people came up to ask, What is it? Where are you going? And when they found out they too joined the double column. In the end the people numbered thousands.

They stood in front of his house, and as the guns were firing in salute to the Unknown in Arlington across the river they shouted, “Three cheers for the greatest soldier of them all!” and gave those cheers. And “Three cheers for Woodrow Wilson!” and gave those cheers. Bursts of hand-clapping spontaneously broke out after he went inside, and spontaneously also people shouted for him. After a time there was a great roar, for the door opened and, leaning upon his cane, he came out and stood underneath the flag waving from his house because this day was Armistice Day and the soldier who served under him was being laid to rest. Three disabled young men, fellow soldiers in the past to that Unknown, sat in a car before his house, and when he saw them he went down the steps, Scott on one side, his cane holding him up on the other, and shook their hands. Hamilton Holt, long identified as a League supporter, came forward to speak for the people.

“Mr. Wilson,” Holt said, his voice carrying to the outermost reaches of the crowd and to the trees brown with November's leaves, “we congratulate you, a wounded soldier of the World War. You have our respect and our affection. Your work will not die.” The people burst into applause, but then those in front turned and beat at that applause with their hands, crying “Hush! Hush! He's going to speak!” Silence fell. He took off his hat and moved forward one step.

It had been two years and two months since Pueblo.
I believe that men will see the truth, eye to eye and face to face. There is one thing that the American people always rise to and extend their hand to, and that is the truth of justice and of liberty and of peace. We have accepted that truth and we are going to be led by it, and it is going to lead us, and through us the world, out into pastures of quietness and peace such as the
world never dreamed of before.
He said, “I wish …” His voice was broken and quavering. His hand was shaking; the high silk hat he held was trembling. “I wish I had the voice to reply …” Tears ran down his cheeks to the black coat. “… to reply and to thank you for the wonderful tribute …” The faces before him were strained as the people leaned toward him as if to lend him strength to go on. “… for the wonderful tribute you have paid me. I do thank you from the bottom of my heart. God bless you.” He tried to turn away, but the people pushed forward and threw flowers before him. He groped for his wife's hand and found it, and it was wet, for she was crying, crying, Edith Bolling Wilson crying as though she were a little girl back in Virginia long before the nights when he lay in the Lincoln bed and she at her desk worked on the papers and looked across at the lights of the State, War and Navy Building. He waved his hat and at the last kissed his hand to them and then he was gone, the thin shoulders shivering as his wife and his servant took him inside. The people sang “My Country, 'Tis of Thee.”

For hours after that the people stayed in the street although police came and asked them to please move on and clear the area. The aged Senator John Sharp Williams of Mississippi sat on the ground on the terrace across the street and tried to hear what the people were saying as they slowly went away, always casting long glances back. But the Senator's hearing was bad and so he relied upon his wife to tell him what they were saying. She gave him the comments she picked up and he thought to himself that it was remarkable, remarkable, that so many people would gather with nothing to be accomplished of any actual use but that tribute be shown to a broken old man in a tall silk hat.

The writer Ida Tarbell saw something else: that the crippled body was as the crippled hopes of the people who went to war with the wish and belief that by so doing they would make the world better, and good, and clean, and right; she saw them as asking if he too had lost his hopes and ideals, his faith and vision, the ability to believe. “They seek him,” she wrote. “He means something to them; they don't quite know what. He is a
living link with their noblest phase.” They wanted to see him, she wrote, to get, if only in a fleeting glimpse, something that would bid them to live again as they did in the great but quickly dead moment of their Great Crusade, the war. She called her article “The Man They Cannot Forget.”

*
Writing the letters of refusal was Bolling's job, but occasionally the ex-President dictated one in his own words and name. To a publisher asking if he would write an autobiography he replied: “There ain't going to be none.” Asked for a statement on the virtues of grinning—this by the promoters of National Smile Week—he dictated: “I have no message to send on such a silly subject.”

13

Joe Tumulty was warm, alive, enthusiastic, a wonderful story-teller. His negro stories were very good, his German accent was first-rate, and his Irish brogue was perfection itself. Edith Bolling Wilson thought him a cheap political hack from Jersey City. She had never liked him, she told people. In April of 1922, Tumulty asked the ex-President if it would not be a good idea to send a greeting message to the Jefferson Day banquet of the National Democratic Club in New York. “It would hearten and inspire everybody,” Tumulty wrote his former chief. The ex-President wrote back to Tumulty at Tumulty's Washington law office, “I do not feel that the occasion is a specially appropriate one for breaking my silence.”

Tumulty telephoned S Street and spoke to the lady of the house. “Mrs. Wilson,” he said, “can't you get the Governor to send a letter to this dinner in New York?” She said, “Why, Mr. Tumulty, he answered your letter yesterday. Haven't you gotten it?” Tumulty said that he had indeed gotten the letter but still hoped the Governor would change his mind. He asked if he might not call that afternoon. She said he could if he wanted to, and from three to three-thirty Tumulty sat with his former chief in the library.

On April 8, 1922, the dinner was held. A woman speaker read off messages of greetings from persons not able to attend. Among the messages was one typed on yellow paper that looked, to the audience, like a telegraph form: “Say to the Democrats of New York that I am ready to support any man who stands for the salvation of
America, and the salvation of America is justice to all classes. Woodrow Wilson.” The audience cheered. Immediately afterward, the chief speaker of the evening made an address. The chief speaker was James Cox, the defeated Presidential candidate of 1920 and a potential candidate for 1924. The next day the New York
Times
said, “Cox Boom Launched on Wilson Keynote of Justice for All.”

The
Times
headline brought consternation to S Street. At once a letter went out asking the newspaper upon what authority it represented the alleged message as anything but “an absolute fabrication.” Another letter went to Tumulty asking his aid in determining how such a message was given to the banquet. The explanation was that Tumulty had typed the message on the yellow paper but had not meant it to be interpreted as the ex-President's endorsement of Cox. The reporters present had misunderstood the import of the words, Tumulty announced to the public. The whole thing came from a “casual conversation with me at Mr. Wilson's home on Friday last when he remarked he would support any candidate who stood for justice for all,” he told the
Times.
“He simply gave a casual message to me in a casual manner. It had nothing to do with any individual.” The
Times
published Tumulty's explanation and with it reported that members of the National Democratic Club felt the whole thing was a “slight misunderstanding” that would easily be cleared up.