When the Cheering Stopped (39 page)

Second, the collection contains all correspondence sent to the President during his terms of office, and all copies of letters by him.

Last, there are letters sent and received during the years in S Street. Mixed with the letters are a few such miscellaneous items as the President's badly typed—we must remember he had the use of only one hand—constitution for the Pure English Club, the purpose of which was to encourage residents of 2340 S Street to remind each other to use correct grammar at all times. (One speculates as to just what was in the ex-President's mind when he established the “Club.”) The reader will know how heavily I have made use of the correspondence files.

At the Library of Congress will also be found the papers of most of the persons connected with Woodrow Wilson. Most
important of all is the Ray Stannard Baker Collection, which holds the fruits of Baker's enormous researches into the President's life. Designated by Mr. Wilson as his official biographer, Baker continued his work for many years after the subject of his research had died. Baker's interviews with hundreds of persons who knew the President are of inestimable value, and the reader will see in the Notes how extensively I, like all who study Woodrow Wilson, have made use of Baker's papers. Other collections utilized include those of Tumulty, Creel, Daniels, Colby, Lansing, Hamlin, Long, Ike Hoover, McAdoo, Glass, Burleson, Newton D. Baker, Palmer, Edith Benham Helm, Hitchcock, and William Allen White. There is also an Edith Bolling Wilson collection of value, but by direction of Mrs. Wilson's will much of the material is locked in the Library vaults, where it will stay until fifteen years have passed from the time of her death. It is believed that much of this now-proscribed material consists of letters sent Mrs. Galt, as she then was, during the period of the President's courtship of her.

This book had its origin in the mind of Lawrence Hughes of William Morrow and Company on the morning of December 29, 1961. On that day the New York
Times,
as did nearly every paper in the country, carried in its columns the obituary of Edith Bolling Wilson.

On the day she died, December 28, she was two months past her eighty-ninth birthday. Edith had grown to be a very old lady indeed. Thirty-five years and more had passed since the day William McAdoo led her from the Bethlehem Chapel and the casket sinking slowly down into the vault.

In the first months after that day, in the spring of 1924, people who lived near the Cathedral grew accustomed to seeing each afternoon a woman in black, on foot, going up the hill upon which the Cathedral stands. Behind the woman slowly moved a beautiful new Rolls-Royce, a gift given her husband as a birthday present a few weeks before his death. After a time alone in the chapel, Edith would come out and enter the car, and her chauffeur would drive her home to S Street. At the house everything was just as it was on February 3, 1924. Everything, in fact, is still just as it was on that day. The sofas are the same, and the pictures, and the rugs, and even the bathroom plumbing.

It was years before Edith wore anything but black. It was not until 1928 that she set foot in the White House she had left in March of 1921. (Her return was to hear a Paderewski recital. She had always loved music.) By 1930 she allowed herself to attend social events regularly and put away her widow's garb. She traveled to Europe and the Orient and went to horse-race meets and Southern pageants. On December 8, 1941, she was at the Capitol at the invitation of Eleanor Roosevelt and sat next to her as Eleanor Roosevelt's husband asked for what Edith's had asked upon a misty April evening twenty-four years earlier.

By the 1950's her servants had grown accustomed to people in stores and delivery agencies saying, “Mrs. Woodrow Wilson! Is
she
still alive?” During those long years of widowhood, Edith first grew stouter, and then, as old ladies do, she became thin and fragile. At the end she was the very picture of the former Southern belle grown old and daintily old-fashioned. And yet she was still very recognizable as the Edith of long before. Although she was a thin little old lady, her passions were yet unquieted. Eighty-five years old, she could still refer to Henry Cabot Lodge as that “stinking snake.” Fifteen years after the death of Franklin Roosevelt, a year before her own death, she could still raise her voice in anger when she talked of how Roosevelt had gotten hold of the desk Edith's husband used on the
George Washington
and had it transported to Hyde Park. Edith thought the desk should be at S Street; Roosevelt thought it should be at Hyde Park. “He said to me, ‘You're not going to get it,'” Edith told people. “I told him he was nothing but a common thief, and I should have sued him for that desk.” She did not appear to be joking.

For the memory of Woodrow Wilson, nothing was too much trouble. Through the long years she was always available for anyone dedicating a Woodrow Wilson Bridge or a Woodrow Wilson School, always ready to sit on the platform with the speakers. “This is for Woodrow,” she told her hired companions and her friends, and regardless of the heat or cold or the length of the trip, she went to the dedication ceremonies. (On the day she died, which was coincidentally the 105th anniversary of her husband's birth, she was to have been present at the dedication of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge over the Potomac in Washington.) But there were never any interviews. “It is a recognized rule that I have nothing to say,” she told countless reporters. Or, “I am never interviewed—I have no comment to make.”

She played cards incessantly. With the after-dinner coffee her servants brought the bridge table. Probably not a day passed for decades that she did not play. And as time went by she played more and more. There were those who thought she did so because she was tired and bored and just killing time until she could also go to lie in the Washington Cathedral.

In the end, she did go to lie there. She died and the New York
Times
said she had been characterized as the “first woman President of the United States.” (Edith would have blazed up at that. Woodrow Wilson was President, she would have said. And for her, that would have ended the argument.) In the Cathedral they carved her name into the stone of the wall forming a niche where her husband's body had been for some years since it was removed from the Bethlehem Chapel below. His sepulchre is very simple. There are personal flags of the President of the United States in the niche, and a flag carried by the first American troops to parade in London before going to France and action in 1917–18. The casket is encased in limestone with only his name upon it and a single ornament: a Crusader's Cross.

William Gibbs McAdoo pursued the Presidency relentlessly, but his highest elective office was Senator from California. Defeated for re-election to that post in 1938, he became head of the ironically named American President Lines. In the mid-1930's he and Nellie were divorced, and he later married a girl decades younger than he. In 1941, aged seventy-seven, he died.

Joseph Tumulty practiced law for many years. His ending was very sad. He fell into a mental decline and became a recluse. Eventually he was hospitalized and his friends said it was Edith Wilson's cruel treatment of him that had taken its toll of his mind. In the early 1950's a friend visited him in the hospital, taking a recently published book on the life of Woodrow Wilson with him. “Look, Joe,” the friend said, “here's a picture of you and Wilson.” Tumulty looked and his foot shot out and he kicked the book across the room. The doctor came and suggested that the friend leave. Shortly afterward Tumulty died. That was in 1954. Tumulty was seventy-four. Edith did not attend the funeral, nor did she send flowers or a card.

Jessie was forty-five years old in 1932 when she died
following an operation. One of her sons, Francis B. Sayre, Jr., is Dean of the Cathedral where Jessie's father lies.

Margaret went from one job to another—stocks and bonds, public relations. She never married. One day in the New York Public Library she became engrossed in a book about an Indian mystic. She decided to go to India and study under him. She went to Pondicherry, French India, and became a member of the man's religious colony. She wore sandals and a flowing white robe and was fifty-seven when, in 1944, she fell ill and died.

Colonel House lived on in New York. He remained quiet, mannerly, subtle. Eminent persons dropped in to see him, but he never again exercised any real role in the world's doings. When he and his wife celebrated their fiftieth anniversary, the newspapers noted that among those not present was Edith Wilson. Aged seventy-nine, House died in 1938.

Cary Grayson left the Navy in 1928 and spent much of his time in running a racing stable he owned in company with Bernard Baruch. (Their most notable horse was Happy Argo, a successful campaigner of the '30's.) Grayson served as chairman of the Inaugural Committee for one of the Roosevelt inaugurations and as head of the Red Cross. He died in 1938 at the age of fifty-eight. His widow, the former Altrude Gordon, kept her friendship with Edith intact through the years.

Nellie Wilson McAdoo did not remarry after her divorce. As she grew older, her appearance grew very remindful of her father's. Her eyes, particularly, seemed startlingly like his. When people remark on the similarity, she gives a roguish smile that is very youthful and says, “Well, thank you! My father, after all, had beautiful eyes!” She is devoted to the memory of both her parents. She lives in California.

NOTES

(The numbers in the left-hand columns refer to pages in this book.)

CHAPTER ONE

3
–Medical details of Mrs. Wilson's illness: Grayson, pp. 32–34.

3
–“Take this bite, dear”: Jaffray, pp. 48–49.

3
–“Father looking well?”: E. W. McAdoo, p. 300.

4
–“Kill them both!”:
ibid.
, p. 202.

4
–Rapture on her face:
ibid.
, p. 205.

4
–Cousin Florence incident.
ibid
., pp. 209–10.

5
–Promptly and efficiently: Grayson, p. 1.

5
–Jumping out of dark corners: Parks, p. 133.

5
,
6
–Presidential imitations: E. W. McAdoo, pp. 26–27 and Elliott, p. 246.

6
–The limerick is quoted by Virginius Dabney in Alsop, p. 18.

6
–Proper and Vulgar Members: Jessica Wilson Sayre, quoted by R. S. Baker, Baker Papers.

6
–Auto rides: I. H. Hoover, p. 61.

6
–Mrs. Wilson and the slums: Jonathan Daniels, pp. 85–86.

6
,
7
–Her clothing: E. W. McAdoo, p. 55.

7
–Her appearance and demeanor: Jonathan Daniels, p. 124.

7
–Her paintings: Parks, p. 134.

7
–The boy she had wanted:
ibid.
, p. 132.

7
–Neck full and firm: E. W. McAdoo, p. 191.

8
–Oatmeal, steak, ham, port: Starling, p. 39.

7
,
8
–Medical details on the President: Grayson, pp. 2–3, 80–81, and Grayson quoted by R. S. Baker, Baker Papers.

9
–That he was hoping still: the letter was to Edward M. House.

9
–The Philadelphia doctor was Edward Parker Davis.

9
–Mrs. Wilson's death: Grayson, pp. 34–35, and Grayson quoted by R. S. Baker, Baker Papers.

10
–White silk shawl: Jaffray, p. 50.

10
–“Beyond what I can bear”: the letter was to Mary Peck.

10
–Roosevelt fear of breakdown: Jonathan Daniels, p. 137.

10
–“I must not give way”: Grayson, quoted by R. S. Baker, Baker Papers.

10
,
11
–Mrs. Wilson's funeral: Stockton Axson, quoted by R. S. Baker, Baker Papers.

CHAPTER TWO

11
–“Utterly alone”: quoted by Stockton Axson and Helen Bones by R. S. Baker, Baker Papers.

11
–Not have wanted it otherwise: Stockton Axson, quoted by Mary Hoyt, R. S. Baker, Baker Papers.

11
–Sandy and Hamish: Parks, p. 135.

12
–“Fig for anything that affects me”: letter to Mary Peck.

12
–If someone would assassinate him: Arthur D. H. Smith, p. 118.

12
–Tiger she had once seen: quoted by Wilson, p. 67.

12
,
13
–Background of Edith Bolling Galt: Wilson, pp. 56–57.

13
–Drove like an absolute madwoman: Mrs. J. Borden Harriman to author.

13
,
14
–Meeting of Mrs. Galt and the President: Wilson, p. 56.

14
–“Going to happen … ten minutes”: quoted by Elliott, p. 273.

14f
.–Details of the romance: Wilson, pp. 59ff.

17
–Ease and informality of the way the President acted: Francis B. Sayre to author.

19
,
21
–McAdoo and House worries: Wilson, pp. 75–76.

21
,
23
–Final details of the romance: Wilson, pp. 76–78.

22
–“The way she loved you”: Stockton Axson, quoted by R. S. Baker, Baker Papers.

22
–Answer to those prayers and “little shocked at first”: Miss Lucy Smith and Miss Mary Smith, quoted by R. S. Baker, Baker Papers.

23
–“Contact with Mrs. Galt”: letter to Mrs. Edith Reid.

22
,
23
–Details of the engagement period: Wilson, pp. 79–85, and Starling, pp. 49–62.

23
–Wedding details: Wilson, pp. 85–86, and I. H. Hoover Papers.

26
–“You beautiful doll”: Starling, p. 62.

CHAPTER THREE

It does not seem appropriate to the author that he give citations for the facts outlined in the necessarily sketchy discussion of the President's doings up until the end of the World War. The incidents given and the outlooks expressed will all be familiar
to anyone knowledgeable about the President's life. For others interested in deeper delving than afforded in this book, the author will take the liberty of recommending standard works on the subject, viz.: the books by. Walworth, Cranston, McKinley and Steinberg. All are noted in the Bibliography of this book.