23

DISABILITY

The stroke and illness Woodrow Wilson suffered in October 1919 brought on the worst crisis of presidential disability in American history. Nothing like it had ever happened before. Five presidents had died in office and had been succeeded by their vice presidents. In all but one of those instances, the fallen president had died within hours, as Lincoln did, or within a few days. The sole exception was in 1881, when James A. Garfield had lingered for two months after a would-be assassin shot him. Though weakened, Garfield had remained alert and in command of his faculties, and little pressing public business had required his attention. Things were totally different now: it was plain from the first that Wilson’s disability was going to create problems and raise questions that the nation had not yet faced.¹

At the outset, the question of whether the president should resign or be removed from office came to several people’s minds. Not surprisingly, the one person who does not seem to have contemplated that prospect was Wilson himself. Just a few times during the rest of his presidency would he mention resigning, and those would be months after he suffered the stroke and had begun to recover. For the first three weeks, the White House head usher recalled, “[h]e just lay helpless. … He was lifted out of bed and placed in a comfortable chair for a short while each day. He gradually seemed to kind of get used to his helpless condition. At times Mrs. Wilson would read to him.”² The thoughts that passed through Wilson’s mind as he lay in bed in that upper room in the White House almost certainly did not include resignation. He had always dealt with illnesses and obstacles by denying their existence or minimizing their severity. Moreover, he was in the middle of the biggest political fight of his life, and he had resisted abandoning the speaking tour because he did not want his enemies to call him a “quitter.” In that frame of mind, stepping down would never have occurred to him.

Edith supposedly did think about his resignation. As she later told the story, Dr. Dercum spoke reassuringly about her husband’s condition, citing the scientist Louis Pasteur, “who had been stricken exactly in this way, but had recovered and did his most brilliant work afterwards.” Recovery would depend on relieving the president of stress, the neurologist told her: “But always keep in mind that every time you take him a new anxiety or problem to excite him, you are turning a knife in an open wound.” Edith asked whether he should resign, and the doctor responded with an emphatic no: “He has staked his life and made his promise to the world to do all in his power to get the Treaty ratified and make the League of Nations complete. If he resigns, the greatest incentive to recovery is gone; and as his mind is clear as crystal he can still do more with even a maimed body than any one else.” Edith said Dercum also advised her to act as a clearinghouse and to judge whether matters really needed to come to the president’s attention.³

That recollection suffered from the embroidery of memory. It is highly unlikely that Dercum or any responsible physician would have talked to Mrs. Wilson that way. None of the doctors’ records of their consultations contains any comment on how resignation might affect the president’s recovery. They did share the diagnosis of a stroke with Edith and with Wilson’s daughter Margaret, but Grayson noted that everyone agreed they should issue “only a general statement regarding the President’s case. … Mrs. Wilson, the President’s wife[,] was absolutely opposed to any other course.” She seems to have latched onto the uncertainty about the extent of her husband’s impairment and the likelihood of some recovery to rule out resignation and forbid any mention of a stroke.⁴

Edith Wilson would later come in for harsh criticism for those decisions. Some interpreters would fault her for putting wifely concern about her husband’s health ahead of the good of the country and the world. She probably did think that staying on as president would help him recover, but that was not the main reason why she rejected resignation. She must have believed that she was speaking for him, doing what he wanted to do, and she read his mind right. Edith would receive even harsher criticism for another decision. She had already started to act as the gatekeeper for the president when, two days before the stroke, she had barred Wiseman from seeing Wilson. After the stroke, supposedly on Dercum’s advice, she continued the practice. Her “stewardship,” as she called it, included reading all the papers that came to the office and deciding which ones to pass on to her husband.⁵

Except for her, Wilson’s daughters Margaret and Jessie (Nell was on the West Coast and came later), doctors and nurses, and a few White House servants, no one got to see the president for nearly a month after the stroke. Thereafter, Edith continued to act as gatekeeper, restricting access to her husband until well into 1920. Tumulty would not get to see the president until mid-November; afterward, he would gain access only for occasional meetings and would usually go through Edith. In screening Wilson from outside contact the way they did, Edith and Grayson were following the medical thinking of the time about treating stroke patients. Moreover, the life-threatening prostate infection and urinary blockage reinforced the decision to isolate him. Later, physicians would reverse themselves because they would discover that such isolation worsens the psychological impact of a stroke. Patients need the stimulation of outside contacts to recover their capacity for dealing with reality and to keep them from entertaining illusions about how things were before the stroke. Ironically, and with the best intentions, the president’s wife and doctor were doing one of the worst things possible for him.

In later years, Edith Wilson would defend herself against charges that she had usurped the powers of the presidency. “I, myself, never made a single decision regarding the disposition of public affairs,” she declared. The First Lady did protest too much. In one case, she probably did make an important policy decision. In late October, three weeks after the stroke, Congress passed the Volstead Act, the law to enforce prohibition under the recently ratified Eighteenth Amendment. Most likely with Edith’s consent and without Wilson’s knowledge, Tumulty wrote a veto message, which Secretary of Agriculture Houston revised. This action was consistent with Wilson’s views on prohibition, but given that the measure had passed by big majorities in both houses of Congress, an override seemed foreordained. Nor was Edith’s gatekeeper role as small or benign as she maintained. The person who controls access to the president is, to a degree, president. Many people believed that was just what she was. There were charges that the country had a woman president, that the nation was afflicted with “government by petticoat.” What no one seemed to ask was, if there was going to be a surrogate president, who was better qualified than this woman, who was her husband’s closest confidant, who knew his mind better than anyone else?⁶

Whether there should have been a surrogate president at all was a different matter. Many people did not think there should be, and some of them made moves toward removing Wilson from office. The first person to raise the issue was Lansing. On October 3, the day after the stroke, he met for two hours with Tumulty and Grayson in the Cabinet Room of the White House. Before Grayson joined them, Lansing asked Tumulty what was the matter with the president. Lansing would later write, “He did not answer me in words, but he significantly put his hand to his left shoulder and drew it down along the left side. Of course the indication was that the President had had a shock [a stroke] and was paralyzed.” When Grayson came, he would say little about what ailed Wilson. They discussed the possibility of the vice president filling in temporarily, which infuriated Tumulty. They did agree that the cabinet should discuss the situation, and Lansing talked afterward with Secretary of War Baker, who concurred. Over the weekend, Lansing discussed the situation with Secretary of the Interior Lane as well.⁷

The following Monday, October 6, the cabinet met and had a brief discussion. Lansing raised the question of calling on the vice president to fill in and referred “to the Constitutional provision ‘in case of the inability of the President.’” Further, he asked, “What constitutes ‘inability’ & who is to decide it[?]” He was referring to Article II, Section 1: “In case of the removal of the President from office, or of his death, resignation, or inability to discharge the powers and duties of the said office, the same shall devolve on the Vice President”—which was all the Constitution had to say about a situation like this one. Grayson then joined the meeting, and, he recorded, “Secretary Lansing asked me the direct questions as to what was the matter with the President, what was the exact nature of the President’s trouble, how long he would be sick and was his mind clear or not. My reply was that the President’s mind was not only clear but very active, and that he clearly showed that he was very much annoyed when he found out that [the] Cabinet had been called and that he wanted to know by whose authority the meeting had been called and for what purpose. Secretary Lansing was somewhat astounded when I spoke thus.” Secretary of War Baker thereupon broke in to assert that the cabinet had “only met as a mark of affection” and said, “Please convey our sympathy to the President and give him our assurance that everything is going all right.”⁸

Lansing’s motives in raising the question of presidential disability are open to question. The recent brouhaha over Bullitt’s testimony and his tepid response had left him sore and resentful toward the president. Stories were circulating in Washington that Lansing was anxious to have the vice president take over, and even before the stroke he had told a Republican lawyer that cabinet members had conferred and agreed to go about their business “without attempting to consult with the President.” That seems doubtful, because no one else left any record of such conferring, but Colonel House learned from State Department sources that in calling the cabinet meeting on October 6, “Lansing had in mind more than the interchange of ideas on departmental matters.”⁹

What did Lansing have in mind? Was he plotting a coup to make himself president? If the vice president replaced Wilson, the secretary of state would be next in line of succession and could step up if the vice president resigned. As Lansing knew, Wilson had hatched such a plan three years earlier to make Hughes president if he had won the election. A scheme of that sort might have suited Lansing’s nature, but it did not ring true with much else in the man’s character. The secretary of state was timid and unimaginative, and he was not in good health. Nor did he enjoy close relations with the vice president. At worst, he may have been trying to get rid of a superior who pursued policies he disliked and who, he believed, had neglected and humiliated him.¹⁰

If this tense, badly handled business had an unsung, unlikely hero it was the forgotten man of the Wilson administration, Vice President Thomas R. Marshall. This folksy, low-keyed Hoosier enjoyed a reputation as a small-bore party hack and was best known for his quip, “What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar.” In fact, Marshall resembled others who survived and got ahead in the cutthroat, faction-ridden politics of the Midwest of that time—most notably Ohio’s Warren Harding—by encouraging people to underestimate them. He was still vice president only because in 1916 Wilson had rejected efforts to dump him in favor of Newton Baker. Marshall had stayed on as before, an invisible figure in Washington, never consulted by Wilson or the cabinet or anyone else in the administration and not even playing much part in relations with Democrats on Capitol Hill.

Marshall still seemed invisible during these days after Wilson’s return from the speaking tour. He made no contact with the White House, and he refused to talk to reporters. Behind that pose of detachment, he was much more involved than all but a few people knew. A political reporter, J. Fred Essary of The Baltimore Sun, later recounted that someone at the White House—most likely Tumulty acting on Edith’s orders—informed him about the president’s condition right after the stroke and asked him to pay a secret visit to the vice president. As Essary told the story, when he went to Marshall’s office in the Capitol, the vice president sat dumbfounded and silently stared down at his hands clasped on his desk. “It was the first great shock of my life,” Marshall said later.¹¹Other shocks were to follow because rumors about the president’s illness were circulating on Capitol Hill. On October 12, newspapers published a letter in which Senator George Moses of New Hampshire, a Republican irreconcilable, told a constituent that Wilson’s illness was a cerebral lesion. Grayson immediately brushed the assertion aside, joking to reporters that Moses must have his own sources of information.

Grayson’s denial of the gravity of Wilson’s illness and his and the other physicians’ vague but upbeat reports did not satisfy a number of men on Capitol Hill. Senators twice attempted to persuade Marshall to take over from Wilson. One overture reportedly came from two prominent but unnamed Democrats; the second came from four Republicans, probably including Moses and James Watson of Indiana. Marshall spurned both moves and kept the matter almost entirely to himself. His secretary tried to get him to think about replacing Wilson, but the vice president answered that the only way he might agree to become president was if Congress passed a resolution declaring the office vacant and Mrs. Wilson and Dr. Grayson agreed to it in writing. The vice president steadfastly refused to take any initiative. Later, when he wrote his memoirs, Marshall would inject an implied criticism of Wilson and his role in the League fight: “I have sometimes thought that great men are the bane of civilization; that they are the real cause of all the bitterness and contention that amounted to anything in the world.”¹²

As it turned out, Wilson played no role in the League fight during October and the first part of November. He was in such bad physical shape, particularly at the time of the prostate infection, that he could not pay attention to public business. There is never a good time to suffer a stroke, and Wilson’s stroke and illness came at a particularly bad time in the League fight. As he lay in his bed in the White House, at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue senators were voting on the amendments to the treaty that had come out of the Foreign Relations Committee. Republican senators were also negotiating among themselves over reservations. Aside from a few dissidents who backed reservations, Democrats did not take part in those negotiations. They felt both loyal and indebted to Wilson, and they were afraid to act in his absence. On October 24, most of the Democratic senators met in a caucus and voted to take no action on reservations unless and until they heard from the president. Their absence from the negotiations put the mild reservationist Republicans in a bind. One of them, Charles McNary of Oregon, told a reporter, “The proponents of the treaty among the Democrats missed a great opportunity. The mild reservationists were forced to deal with the radicals of their own side.” What McNary meant was that in the absence of competing suggestions and counterpressure from Democrats, he and his fellow mild reservationists had to acquiesce in stronger reservations than they liked in order to defeat the proposed amendments.¹³

As a result, Lodge won a sweeping victory. Also on October 24, he sent out from the Foreign Relations Committee a set of reservations—which numbered fourteen. These reservations withheld assent to the Shantung clauses of the treaty, allowed the United States to maintain relations with Covenant-breaking nations and exceed arms limitations set by the League, prohibited American mandates for former German colonies, and stingingly asserted exclusive rights to exempt questions deemed to be vital national interests or matters of national honor. The Article X reservation was just as restrictive as, and only slightly less offensively worded than, the one Wilson had denounced in Salt Lake City: this one disclaimed obligations “under provisions” of the article unless authorized by Congress “by act or joint resolution.” In addition, a preamble to these fourteen reservations required three of the four leading Allies—Britain, France, Italy, and Japan—to assent to them.¹⁴

In this situation, two questions stood uppermost. First, for Wilson and League advocates, did these reservations concede too much? Were they really a compromise, or did they mask a surrender? Second, could there have been a compromise closer to the convictions of the president and like-minded people if he or Democratic senators had taken part in the negotiations? Wilson would soon answer the first question, and his supporters in the Senate would have to decide whether they agreed with his answer. No one could answer the second question because it involved a might-have-been. Still, it is worth pondering. Democratic senators might have succeeded in modifying the language and softening the thrust of some of the reservations, thereby saving face for themselves and the president.¹⁵

As always, however, Article X formed the crux on which everything depended. Here, it would have required a truly gifted dialectician to reconcile Wilson’s insistence on an obligation and Lodge’s demand to gut any such obligation. No Democrat in the Senate filled that bill; the only Republican senator who possessed such gifts was Philander Knox of Pennsylvania, and he had joined the irreconcilables. Outside the Senate, Elihu Root could have played such a role, but he had absented himself since offering his earlier suggestions for reservations. In the end, any meeting of minds on Article X would have required Wilson’s active involvement. If he had returned from the speaking tour a healthy man and if he been able to use another resounding tour, of the Northeast, to strengthen his hand for bargaining, then he might have been able to bring off a grand, mutually acceptable compromise. He had done something comparable in 1916 with military preparedness, although then his political circumstances had been more favorable and he had been dealing with his own party. Now the hour was late, and he had missed more promising opportunities to reach out and shape the terms for a bargain that could bring him some semblance of victory in the Senate. Wilson was no longer capable of that kind of thinking and action, as he would soon demonstrate in a devastating way.

On October 30, Edith finally allowed a visitor into her husband’s sickroom. Albert, king of the Belgians, and his queen, Elizabeth, accompanied by their son Prince Leopold, called at the White House, and the president insisted on seeing the king. Grayson took him upstairs, where Wilson shook his visitor’s hand and beckoned him to sit to the right of the bed; they had a ten-minute talk. Two weeks later, on November 14, the president received another royal visitor when the Prince of Wales came to call. Propped up in bed, Wilson pointed out that it was the same bed in which the prince’s namesake and grandfather, the future King Edward VII, had slept in 1860 and in which Lincoln had later slept. “I was much relieved to find him looking better than I had expected from the published reports,” Prince Edward later wrote to Edith. Wilson was looking better because two days earlier he had allowed himself to be shaved, and the previous day he had marked the first anniversary of the Armistice by leaving the bedroom for the first time. Grayson had ordered a wheelchair, but the ones then available proved clumsy and hard to maneuver, so the doctor had procured one of the wicker chairs on wheels used to transport tourists on the Atlantic City boardwalk. On the day of the Prince of Wales’s visit, Wilson spent some time sitting in the open air on the South Portico.¹⁶

Those royal visits were brief and strictly ceremonial, but between them Wilson received his first caller to talk business. Senator Hitchcock of Nebraska was Lodge’s opposite number as the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee and party leader, in an acting capacity, substituting for the ailing senator Thomas Martin of Virginia. In late October, Hitchcock had come to the White House, conferred with Grayson, and requested a meeting with the president. Edith finally relented, and on November 7 the senator spent half an hour with Wilson. “I beheld an emaciated old man with a thin white beard which he had permitted to grow,” Hitchcock later recalled. Wilson asked him how many senators would vote for the treaty without reservations: “I told him not over forty-five out of ninety-six. He fairly groaned: ‘It is possible, it is possible.’” Talking with reporters immediately afterward, Hitchcock said Wilson would accept compromises to save the treaty but believed “that the Lodge reservations would kill the treaty.”¹⁷

Attending to public business appeared to do Wilson good. His excursions in the wheeled chair now included some time out on the White House lawn, and after examining him on November 15, Dr. Dercum told Edith and Margaret that the president was making a good recovery. Probably at her husband’s request, Edith asked Hitchcock to send reports on the situation in the Senate, which she read to Wilson. On November 13, Hitchcock characterized the Article X reservation as less “obnoxious” than earlier but still bad. He said the Democrats planned to block consent to the treaty with the Lodge reservations and then introduce five reservations of their own, which he enclosed. “The first four are substantially in accordance with the suggestions made to me by the President,” Hitchcock said, “and the last one is, I think, in accordance with his views on the true meaning of the league covenant.”¹⁸ Two days later, Hitchcock restated the plan to block consent with the Lodge reservations and requested another meeting with the president to get his approval.

It is clear that Wilson did think this was the proper course, because Edith wrote on the envelope containing Hitchcock’s second report, “Program [Hitchcock] out lines has [Wilson’s] approval. He could not accept Lodge Reservations in any case.” He agreed to see Hitchcock, who came again on November 17. The senator found a changed man, stronger and more assertive. “I would give anything if the Democrats, in fact, all the Senate, could see the attitude that man took this morning,” he told Grayson afterward. “Think of how effective it would be if they could see the picture you and I saw.” When the senator asked about Lodge’s set of reservations, which Grayson had previously read to him, the president replied, “I consider it a nullification of the Treaty and utterly impossible.” He deliberately used the pejorative term nullification, because he compared these reservations to South Carolina’s efforts to nullify the federal laws before the Civil War—which was like waving a red flag in the face of Republicans. When Hitchcock asked about the Article X reservation, Wilson shot back, “That cuts the very heart out of the Treaty.”¹⁹

Wilson meant to play a blame game. “If the Republicans are bent on defeating the treaty,” he said,

I want the vote of each, Republican and Democrat, recorded, because they will have to answer to the people. I am a sick man, lying in this bed, but I am going to debate this issue with these gentlemen in their respective states whenever they come up for re-election if I have breath enough in my body to carry on the fight. I shall do this even if I have to give my life to it. And I will get their political scalps when the truth is known to the people. They have got to account to their constituents for their actions in this matter. I have no doubts as to what the verdict of the people will be. Mind you, Senator, I have no hostility towards these gentlemen but an utter contempt.

When Hitchcock mentioned compromise, Wilson dismissed the idea and then asked the senator to describe the situation in detail. Hitchcock’s rendition stretched the meeting to over an hour, and he apologized for tiring the president. Grayson recorded that Wilson smiled and said, “No, Senator, you have strengthened me against the opponents.”²⁰

The president’s performance awed Hitchcock, but it should have appalled him. The transformation of the wispy-bearded wraith of ten days before was striking, but the psychological effects of the stroke were even more striking. Wilson’s emotions were unbalanced, and his judgment was warped. Whereas he had formerly been able to offset his driving determination, combativeness, and overweening self-confidence with detachment, reflection, and self-criticism, those compensations were now largely gone. Worse, his denial of illness and limitations was starting to border on delusion, particularly when he talked about fighting senators for reelection. Yet when he called himself “a sick man, lying in this bed,” he was displaying a trait that he had never shown before—self-pity. Worst of all, he had said he wanted to “pick up the threads that were left when I was put to bed,” but that—adjusting to changing political realities—was something he was no longer capable of doing.²¹

Starting with his meeting with Hitchcock, Wilson threw an insurmountable obstacle into the path of the Senate. In a guarded account to reporters waiting outside the White House, the senator invoked the threat of refusing to ratify: “President Wilson will pocket the treaty if the Lodge program of reservations is carried out.” Contradictorily and misleadingly, however, he added that Wilson had not totally rejected the Lodge reservations. Hitchcock and Edith Wilson were going to let the president appear to speak for himself. Later in the day, the senator sent to the White House a draft of a letter—which Edith read to her husband and edited at his dictation—to go out ostensibly from the president dated the next day, November 18. The letter stated that the Lodge reservations did not “provide for ratification but for nullification. I sincerely hope that the friends and supporters of the treaty will vote against the Lodge resolution of ratification.”²²

This bombshell blasted away all hopes for compromise. Since the beginning of November, various people inside and outside the Senate had been scurrying to find some middle ground between Lodge’s reservations and milder ones. LEP lobbyists had busied themselves meeting with senators; ex-president Taft and Harvard’s president Lowell had persuaded the organization’s executive board to announce that, if necessary, it could accept the Lodge reservations as the price of entering the League. Even Lodge made a stab at compromise. Stephen Bonsal, formerly a member of House’s staff in Paris and a friend of the Lodge family, later revealed that he met twice with the senator at the middle of November and secured his agreement to changes in Article X. According to Bonsal, a draft of those changes went to House, who supposedly forwarded them to the White House but never got a reply. If the colonel had forwarded those changes—which is doubtful—Wilson probably would have spurned them. “The Colonel’s stock has fallen to zero,” Ray Stannard Baker noted after talking with Grayson early in November. “He is no longer a factor.”²³

On the morning of November 19, Democratic senators met in caucus, where Hitchcock read the letter putatively from the president. Either he or the White House also released the letter to the press, and newspapers carrying its text were circulating in the chamber soon after the Senate convened at noon. Lodge read the letter aloud to his colleagues and said, “I think comment is superfluous, and I shall make none.” Privileged spectators packed the galleries and others milled around in the corridors as the Senate spent ten hours in final debate and then voted on the Treaty of Versailles. On consent with the Lodge reservations, the treaty fell short, with thirty-nine senators in favor—thirty-five Republicans and four Democrats—and fifty-five against—forty Democrats and fifteen irreconcilables. Then, after futile attempts to buy time in order to introduce compromise reservations, Lodge allowed a vote on the treaty without reservations. This too fell short, with thirty-eight in favor—thirty-seven Democrats and one Republican, Porter McCumber of North Dakota—and fifty-three against—thirty-three Republicans, five Democrats, and fifteen irreconcilables. Afterward, just before adjournment, a Democratic senator asked whether the president should be informed. Pennsylvania’s corpulent, cynical conservative Republican Boies Penrose responded, “Oh, he’ll know about it well enough.”²⁴

The president did know. When Edith told him the news, he lay silent and then said, “All the more reason I must get well and try to bring this country to a sense of its great opportunity and greater responsibility.” He tried to draft a statement but managed to dictate to Edith only a few disjointed remarks. Lodge made no public statement either. The next day, however, the senator indulged his malice when he privately told George Harvey, Wilson’s erstwhile patron now turned bitter enemy, “Brandegee and I thought of you last night after the thing was over and wished we could have an opportunity to exchange with you a few loving words.”²⁵

If Lodge and Wilson had gotten their way, the League fight would have been over. The senator snapped at a friend who urged compromise, “It is for [Wilson] to move—not for us.” The president did not answer letters from Democrats who urged compromise, although Edith evidently did read or describe two letters to that effect from House. In response, he did try again to draft a statement to the press but left it unfinished and directed Edith to strike out all but a few oblique references to the treaty in the State of the Union message that Tumulty was drafting for the opening of the next session of Congress on December 2. Not being able to speak in person and having someone else write an address for him hurt Wilson deeply. The message admitted that he could not deal directly with some problems and was relying on cabinet members. It presented a list of suggestions for legislation along progressive lines, including a unified federal budget, continuation of income and excess-profits taxes, an unaltered tariff, aid to veterans and farmers, and better procedures for labor relations. It sidestepped the pressing issue of whether to keep the railroads under government control and blamed current domestic problems on the failure to ratify the peace treaty.²⁶

Nine years at Wilson’s side had taught Tumulty how to capture his boss’s thought and language reasonably well. The message sounded like the last speech the president had been able to give to Congress, the one on the high cost of living four months earlier, which had also been long on rhetoric and short on solutions to burning problems. This message’s references to domestic problems glaringly understated the troubles that plagued the country at the end of 1919. Inflation, or HCL, still ran rampant, unemployment was soaring as veterans returned to the workforce, and strikes were disrupting major industries, including coal and steel. A radical-led general strike earlier in the year in Seattle, explosions of bombs in May at the homes of public officials, including one on the doorstep of the home of Attorney General Palmer himself, and the police strike in Boston in September—these events had made many people shudder at the specter of revolution. Palmer was beginning his crackdown on “Reds” by having 249 noncitizens suspected of radical connections deported to Russia aboard a former troopship that was dubbed the Soviet Ark.²⁷

If there have been times in the nation’s history that have cried out for strong presidential leadership, this was one of them. Instead, from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue came silence, occasionally punctuated by a vague but always upbeat report about the president’s condition. Rumors rushed in to fill the information vacuum. Besides complaining about “government by petticoat,” some people were saying that Wilson had gone insane and bars on some first-floor windows proved that the White House was harboring a lunatic. The bars had, in fact, been installed during Roosevelt’s presidency, to keep his young sons from breaking windows with their baseballs. Rumblings about Wilson’s condition broke out on Capitol Hill after an infuriated Hitchcock told reporters that Wilson had refused to see him on November 29. Tumulty tried to make light of the incident, explaining to reporters that the president was improving but Mrs. Wilson did not think he should have any long conferences just now.²⁸

When Congress reconvened on December 2, newspapers reported that Wilson’s refusal to see Hitchcock had stirred disquiet and led many in Congress to believe that the president’s condition was worse than his physicians were letting on. Senators soon found a way to assuage their curiosity. Tensions with Mexico had flared up again in October when Carranza’s Constitutionalists seized and detained an American citizen, William O. Jenkins, thereby sparking new cries for military intervention. The loudest and most relentless advocate of intervention was Senator Fall of New Mexico, who owned land in Mexico and was close to conservatives there. On December 1, Lansing told Fall privately that he had not discussed Mexico with Wilson since August, and three days later he publicly repeated that admission in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The committee then voted, along party lines, to send two of their members, Fall and Hitchcock, to discuss the Mexican situation with the president. Some senators privately admitted that their real motive was to check up on Wilson. Wags immediately dubbed the two senators the “smelling committee.”²⁹

Grayson thought something like this might happen, and he had laid plans. Doctor and patient now put on a show designed to hide the nature and extent of Wilson’s disability. When Fall and Hitchcock telephoned on December 5, Grayson told them the president would see them at two-thirty that afternoon. When they arrived, he told them to stay as long as they needed, and he escorted the two senators upstairs to the president’s bedroom, where they found him propped up in his bed. It was a gloomy day, with the December sun low in the sky, and Wilson had instructed that all the lights in the room be turned on so that his visitors could get a good look at him. He lay with his paralyzed left side cloaked in the bedcovers; papers lay on a table to the right of the bed, where he could reach them with his good hand. Edith sat to one side with a writing pad. Wilson shook hands with both senators, and Fall said, “I hope you will consider me sincere. I have been praying for you[,] Sir.” Edith later recalled that her husband shot back, “Which way, Senator?” That was Wilson’s wit at its best. Unfortunately, he almost certainly did not say it, since neither Edith’s notes nor Grayson’s memorandum, written the same day, recorded the remark.³⁰

Even without that comeback, the president performed beautifully. Hitchcock told reporters afterward that Fall had done most of the talking and Wilson listened attentively for forty minutes. He also reached out and took some papers from the senators and took papers off the bedside table. At one point, Grayson left the room, and when he came back he announced, “Secretary Lansing has asked me to tell you immediately that Jenkins has been released.” Grayson afterward admitted “that he felt like an actor making a sensational entrance.” In the ensuing discussion, Wilson counseled against haste in dealing with Mexico. According to Hitchcock, he repeated a joke made by one of Finley Peter Dunne’s characters: “Mexico is so contagious to us that I’m thinkin’ we’ll have to take it.” As for the peace treaty, Hitchcock reported, “The President said that he regarded responsibility … as having been shifted from his shoulders to others, and that he was disposed to let it rest there awhile.”³¹

The show achieved the desired effect. Hitchcock told reporters, “The President looks much better than when I last saw him. He was sitting up in bed, wearing a dark brown sweater. His color was good. … He was mentally most alert, and physically seemed to me to have improved greatly.” Fall agreed, telling the reporters that Wilson was perfectly capable of handling the Mexican situation and “seemed to me to be in excellent trim, both mentally and physically, for a man who has been in bed for ten weeks. Of course, I am not an expert, but that’s how it appeared to me.”³² Wilson’s performance before the “smelling committee” ended talk of removing him from office.

He was recovering a bit. On December 14, he stood up and took his first steps since the stroke, and the physical therapist assigned to him reported to Dr. Dercum that he would soon be able to sit in a chair for one meal a day and use the toilet instead of a bedpan. Wilson’s defiance was also growing stronger. When Hitchcock finally got to see him alone and urged compromise, Wilson shot back, “Let Lodge compromise. Let Lodge hold out the olive branch.” The same day that he took his first steps, he dictated a press release “from the highest authority in the executive department,” declaring that the president had “no compromise or concession of any kind” in mind and intended to let blame for the failure of the peace treaty remain with the Republican senators.³³

Wilson’s attitude was starting to cross the line between defiance and delusion. Also at the middle of December, he had Tumulty draft a statement—which he revised by dictating changes to Edith—in which he again asserted with respect to the peace treaty, “There is but one way to settle such questions, and that is by direct reference to the voters.” Because the Constitution does not provide for a referendum, he challenged fifty-six senators, listed by name, to resign and run for reelection. “For myself I promise if all of them or a majority of them are re-elected, I will resign the presidency.” The vice president would also resign, and he would “invite one of the acknowledged leaders of the Republican party” to become secretary of state and thereby become president.³⁴

If this fantastic scheme had come to light, fresh calls might have arisen for Wilson’s removal from office. He was mixing a crazy brew of his youthful notions about adopting parliamentary practices with his more recent ideas about appealing to the people over the heads of legislators and his plan to resign if Hughes had won in 1916. Moreover, his list of senators was bizarre; it included three Democrats who had supported him on the treaty and the two mildest reservationist Republicans, McCumber and Knute Nelson of Minnesota, and it omitted one of the irreconcilables, George Norris of Nebraska. Fortunately for him, Wilson lacked the will and energy to pursue the scheme, but he had the referendum idea in his head, and he would soon air it again in a slightly less drastic way.³⁵

Wilson’s statement to the press rejecting compromise backfired because it flew in the face of efforts to bring the treaty back before the Senate and work out a way to achieve consent with reservations. Democratic and Republican party leaders wanted to put the controversy behind them before the next election, while the LEP’s lobbyists and the American Federation of Labor were exerting influence in the direction of compromise. Senators themselves made the most important moves toward breaking the stalemate by starting to conduct the kind of bipartisan talks that should have preceded the earlier votes on the treaty. Now the mild reservationists took more initiative, and Democrats started talking about concessions.³⁶

Meanwhile, in the White House the Wilsons passed a subdued Christmas without a tree, and Tumulty tried to cheer the president on his sixty-third birthday by saying, “Be of good cheer Governor, the clouds are going to pass away.” Tumulty was trying to lift his own spirits as well. He was being barraged with complaints that cabinet and diplomatic appointments were not being filled. Likewise, the British were miffed because Wilson had refused to meet with their temporary ambassador, the former foreign secretary, who was now Viscount Grey. The alleged reason was that Grey’s private secretary, Major Charles Kennedy Craufurd-Stuart, had spread stories about Dr. Grayson, the First Lady’s premarital involvement with the president, and Bernard Baruch’s relations with an attractive woman suspected of spying for the Germans.³⁷

As the new year began, Wilson made a new attempt to scuttle plans for compromise on the treaty by reviving the referendum idea. Two days before the Democrats’ Jackson Day dinner on January 8, he ordered Tumulty to draft a letter charging that the Senate’s failure to act threatened to undo the victory over Germany and that the only way to avoid a calamity was “by a direct referendum; … it is our duty as a party to give the next election the form of a great and solemn referendum to the voters of the country in this great matter.” Tumulty showed again that he could mimic Wilson’s style, coining the ringing slogan “great and solemn referendum,” which sounded typical of the president. Tumulty evidently felt uneasy about the tone and content of the letter, however, because he asked several people to go over it with him. Those he consulted thought the letter was unwise but also thought it fruitless to try to talk Wilson out of it. One of them, Secretary of Agriculture Houston, revised the letter to eliminate errors of fact and give it a slightly more conciliatory tone. Wilson accepted Houston’s revisions, but he dictated to Edith another sentence declaring, “We have no moral right to refuse now to take part in the execution & administration of these settlements.”³⁸

When the letter was read at the dinner, it did less damage than some feared and Wilson hoped. Bryan, who was the featured speaker, sought to soften its impact by arguing that too much had been made of Article X and urging compromise. Much as many Democrats liked that message, some questioned the motives of the messenger. Some Democrats in the Senate grumbled about a revolt against Wilson, although one of them scoffed at such “cloakroom courage.” On January 15, a group of them got together with Lodge and a few Republicans and began a series of meetings that came to be called the bipartisan conference. The going was tough in those meetings, but by January 23 the conferees appeared to be on the verge of an agreement to a reservation on Article X. At that point, the Republican irreconcilables hauled Lodge into a stormy meeting at which they threatened to depose him as majority leader unless he broke off the negotiations. Lodge readily complied, thereby casting doubt on his true desire for a compromise, and he told the bipartisan conference that he would accept no modification of his previous reservations.³⁹

Back at the White House, another move toward compromise was afoot, although not one instigated by Wilson. It was Tumulty who opened a behind-the-scenes campaign to get the president to take part in compromise negotiations. On January 14, he drafted a letter for Wilson to send to Hitchcock, and he circulated it to secretaries Baker, Houston, and Lansing and to Edith. The next day, he told her that in view of talk of compromise in the Senate, this was the “psychological moment” for action and the president should put forward his own interpretation of the treaty. The cabinet secretaries approved the draft letter; so did Edith, who seems to have encouraged Tumulty to send it to her husband, as he did the next day.⁴⁰

The draft set out twelve numbered points, which covered most of the Lodge reservations. On all but three of the points, it took no issue with the intent behind a reservation and often said, “I see no objection.” It did disagree with two reservations, those that covered withdrawal from the League and appointments to the Reparations Commission. On “the much-discussed Article X,” it stated that it was necessary that the president’s “moral influence … for the preservation of peace shall not be diminished,” while keeping “inviolate” Congress’s power to accept or reject League recommendations. The letter also expressed a sincere hope that these interpretations would assist “in bringing about an early ratification of the Peace Treaty.” Tumulty was trying to get around the question of whether an obligation remained under Article X. Coincidentally, he was following the same line that the bipartisan conference would come close to adopting. The effect of listing numbered points corresponding to reservations and giving agreeable responses left an impression of reasonableness and accommodation. Tumulty had high hopes and told Edith that the bipartisan conference would “give the President, in my opinion, his great opportunity.”⁴¹

Unfortunately, Tumulty did not reckon on Wilson’s physical and emotional state. He made only a few marks beside the more accommodating points, and he deleted an implied acceptance of reservations as part of the instrument of ratification. Grayson told Ray Stannard Baker, who was then visiting the White House, that Wilson was “perfectly calm about everything that comes up except the treaty. That stirs him: makes him restless.” Baker told Edith “as diplomatically as I could” that people were blaming her husband for the stalemate over the treaty. “I know,” she replied, “but the President still has in mind the reception he got in the west, and he believes the people are with him.” Edith was unwittingly describing the effects of her husband’s isolation in the White House bedroom and a psychological consequence of the stroke—an inability to adjust to reality—which together made it impossible for him to seize the opportunity that Tumulty was trying to offer.⁴²

At this point, Wilson’s physical health made matters still worse. On January 20 or 21, he came down with what Grayson called “a sharp attack of the ‘flu,’” which gave him a high fever, accompanied by headaches and vomiting. He got over this episode fairly quickly, but it depressed him. “It would probably have been better if I had died last fall,” he said to Grayson. As earlier, a bit of recovery heightened his combativeness. On January 26, he wrote to Hitchcock that the reservation to Article X proposed in the bipartisan conference must not “create the impression that we are trying to escape obligations.” The closest he could come to appearing accommodating was to have Edith attach a note to the letter leaving it up to Hitchcock’s judgment whether to publish his letter. Hitchcock would not release the letter for two weeks, and in the meantime Wilson would revive the referendum scheme. He had Edith send Albert Burleson a list of the names and states of fifty-four senators, Democrats and Republicans, and asked him to consult with the Democratic leaders in the Senate about whether those men had opposed the treaty. Burleson, after consulting on Capitol Hill, replied by simply reciting which senators had taken which stands on the treaty during the previous session of Congress. That deadpan reply may have dampened Wilson’s ardor, but it is more likely that another brief bout of influenza at the beginning of February distracted him and sapped his limited energies.⁴³

Coming so soon after the previous illness, this one worsened the mood swings that were afflicting Wilson after the stroke. Renewed depression evidently made him think, uncharacteristically, of resigning, and Grayson seems to have tried to engineer that resignation. During coming months, Grayson would sometimes whisper to close friends about this effort. At one point, he would dictate a note to himself: “Look up notes re President Wilson’s intention to go before the Senate in a wheeled chair for the purpose of resigning.” In his whispered confidences, Grayson would blame Edith for scotching the resignation scheme, but it seems more likely that Wilson’s quick recovery from this bout of flu again spurred his determination and combativeness.⁴⁴

Wilson’s recovery from this second illness at the beginning of February 1920 triggered his most destructive behavior in the League fight and in his whole presidency. It started with a well-intentioned gesture by an outsider. Foreign leaders also felt dismayed at the stalemate over the treaty, although the governments in London and Paris and their ambassadors in Washington studiously avoided comment for fear of offending Wilson. Lord Grey, who had returned to London, believed he could help to break the deadlock. On January 31, The Times published a letter from him—reprinted the next day in American newspapers—stating that the Allies should welcome American participation in the League of Nations on almost any terms. The letter infuriated Wilson. On February 5, he dictated a press release excoriating this attempt at outside influence, saying that if Grey were still ambassador, his recall would be demanded. That rebuke understated Wilson’s anger. Grayson told Ray Stannard Baker that the White House was “all in a state of utter confusion heightened by the President’s illness & his stubborn temperament. He does not want to hear what is going on apparently.”⁴⁵

Wilson did hear, possibly from Tumulty, that Lansing liked Grey’s letter, and he chose this occasion to stage a showdown with the secretary of state. On February 7, Wilson sent Lansing a stinging letter—which he dictated—asking whether it was true that Lansing had convened cabinet meetings in his absence. “If it is, I feel it my duty to call your attention to considerations which I do not care to dwell upon until I learn from yourself that this is the fact.” For a change, Lansing did not shrink from confrontation. The letter’s “brutal and offensive” language sounded to him like the product of “a species of mania, which seems to approach irrationality. … It sounded like a spoiled child crying out in rage at an imaginary wrong.” He felt relieved because it gave him “the very opportunity I have been looking for to leave the Cabinet.” He replied on February 9 with a coolly worded letter noting that he had always kept the president informed of cabinet meetings and had only tried to serve him. If Wilson was questioning his loyalty or lacked confidence in him, “I am of course ready, Mr. President, to relieve you of any embarrassment by placing my resignation in your hands.”⁴⁶

Lansing did not immediately release the exchange of letters to the press, and he allowed Undersecretary of State Frank Polk to go to the White House the next day and talk to Grayson. Polk warned that this incident would make the president look bad, and Grayson agreed and talked to Edith and Tumulty. They also agreed, and they tried to talk Wilson out of firing Lansing. Edith recalled that she told her husband his “letter as written made him look small,” and Tumulty remembered telling the president that “it was the wrong time to do the right thing.” Wilson answered both of them the same way. “Well, if I am as big a man as you think me I can well afford to do a generous thing,” he laughingly told Edith, adding that he had to put a stop to disloyalty. Likewise, he told, Tumulty, “[I]t is never the wrong time to spike disloyalty. When Lansing sought to oust me, I was upon my back. I am on my feet now and I will not have disloyalty about me.”⁴⁷

Delusions of potency prompted Wilson to take further action. Urged by Hitchcock and Carter Glass—who had resigned as secretary of the Treasury to fill the Senate seat for Virginia left vacant by Thomas Martin’s death—the president now released his statement on reservations. Some thought this a good move, but Glass told him that every Democratic senator he talked to wanted the president to accept a reservation to Article X like the one proposed earlier by Taft and feared that the voters would punish them if they did not appear conciliatory. Again, Wilson would have none of it. On February 9, Edith wrote to Glass that the president’s “judgment is decidedly against the course Sen. G. proposes. Article 10 is the backbone of the Covenant & Mr. Taft[‘]s proposed reservation is not drawn in good faith.” Wilson still believed that the Republicans should take the initiative to compromise, and he “attached little importance to party strategy at this juncture.”⁴⁸

The next day, Wilson decided to take diplomatic matters into his own hands for the first time since the stroke. He had a public note sent rebuking the British and French for what he viewed as appeasement of Italy’s Adriatic ambitions. He put language back into the note that Lansing and Polk had tried to soften, stating that this dispute “raises the fundamental question as to whether the American Government can on any terms cooperate with the European associates in the great work of maintaining peace by removing the causes of war … [through] a concert of powers the very existence of which must depend upon a new spirit and new order.” The note also stated that many Americans were “fearful lest they become entangled in international policies and committed to international obligations foreign alike to their ideals and their traditions,” and to give way to Italy “would be to provide the most solid ground for such fears.”⁴⁹ This all-or-nothing, isolationist-sounding language would soon damage further efforts at compromise in the Senate.

More immediately, fallout from Lansing’s resignation did greater damage to Wilson. On February 11 and 12, the president and the secretary of state engaged in a duel by letter. Wilson said he was “very much disappointed” with Lansing’s explanations and accused him of disloyalty. Lansing replied with a letter of resignation in which he denied the charges of disloyalty and recited a series of cases in which he had been ignored or met with “frequent disapproval of my suggestions.” Assistant Secretary Breckinridge Long, a former student of Wilson’s at Princeton, believed this exchange of letters would hurt the president and went to the White House and talked with Grayson, who evidently got Wilson to send a brief note simply accepting Lansing’s resignation. The secretary had already had the previous letters mimeographed, and the State Department gave them to reporters at seven-thirty in the evening. “Friday, the 13th!” Lansing exulted. “This is my lucky day for I am free from the intolerable situation in which I have been so long.”⁵⁰

Despite Wilson’s fondness for the number thirteen, this was one of his unluckiest days. As predicted, the Lansing affair cast him in a terrible light. Dismissing the secretary of state ostensibly because he had convened the cabinet angered and puzzled even Democratic newspapers, while Republican journals excoriated the action. The editors did not support Lansing so much as they condemned Wilson. “It seems the petulant & irritable act of a sick man,” Baker noted. That view had received reinforcement on February 10, when the urologist from Johns Hopkins who had treated Wilson earlier told a reporter that the president had suffered a “cerebral thrombosis.” This was the first admission by any of his physicians that Wilson had had a stroke, and it set off a flurry of comment by other physicians, including a statement by a former president of the American Medical Association that the president had a “permanently damaged brain.” Grayson did not directly deny the urologist’s statement, but he and Dercum insisted that Wilson was improving.⁵¹

The furor over the secretary’s resignation and the urologist’s disclosure ignited doubts about the president’s ability to govern that had been simmering among the public for the past four months. During the third week in February, The Literary Digest collected newspaper opinion, and nearly every comment it cited expressed qualms about Wilson’s fitness to remain president. Up to this time, to the extent that public opinion can be gauged, it appears that people blamed the Republican senators just as much as Wilson for the deadlock over the treaty and were showing increasing impatience and boredom with the business. Now sentiment was beginning to focus on Wilson’s ability to hold office, especially in view of such domestic problems as strikes, inflation, unemployment, and Palmer’s campaign against Reds. McAdoo warned a Texas Democrat that “a drifting course is the worst possible thing for the party. We have had too much of it. This is due, primarily, I believe to the President’s unfortunate illness.”⁵²

Wilson sowed further doubt about his competence when he appointed a successor to Lansing. It would be his fifth cabinet appointment in three months. He had already picked Representative Joshua W. Alexander, a Missouri Democrat, to replace William Redfield, who had retired, at Commerce. He had moved Houston from Agriculture to replace Glass at the Treasury, and he had named Edwin T. Meredith, an Iowa Democrat and publisher of a farm journal, to replace Houston. He had chosen John Barton Payne, a Chicago lawyer and member of the Shipping Board, to replace Lane (who had resigned to pursue a private career) at Interior. All were reasonable, though not stellar, appointments. The State Department was another matter. On February 25, he asked Grayson, “Do you know of any reason why I should not appoint Bainbridge Colby Secretary of State?” Grayson guardedly observed, “It would really be an unusual appointment.” Wilson replied, “We do not want to follow precedents and stagnate. We have to do unusual things in order to progress.”⁵³

This was a bizarre appointment. The fifty-year-old Colby was a New York lawyer, a former Progressive who had supported Wilson in 1916, and a member of the Shipping Board. Colby had no experience in foreign affairs, and Wilson did not know him well. The president was passing over the undersecretary of state, Polk, another New York lawyer and an anti-Tammany Democrat who had served as a Wilson loyalist in the department for the past four years. Polk blamed Tumulty for being passed over, but it is doubtful he was responsible. Colby probably owed his appointment to the twisted version of Wilson’s thinking about doing bold things. Editorial reaction to Colby’s appointment ran the gamut from puzzlement to outrage. Privately, some observers thought it gave further proof of Wilson’s incompetence. Lodge would not comment publicly to reporters, but off the record he called the appointment the worst he’d ever seen and “a political plum handed to a man who is willing to serve as a rubber stamp.”⁵⁴

Other signs of the president’s weakness came from Capitol Hill. When the Senate took up the treaty again, Borah delighted in reading extensive quotations from Keynes’s Economic Consequences of the Peace, which had been published in the United States at the beginning of February and earlier serialized in The New Republic. In it, Keynes called the president “a blind and deaf Don Quixote” and portrayed him as not just a naïve and ignorant idealist “bamboozled” by wily Europeans but also a hypocrite who possessed “all the intellectual apparatus of self-deception.” This view of Wilson would soon strike a chord among such self-styled American disillusionists as H. L. Mencken. Democratic senators were also growing restive. On February 27, Tumulty told Wilson that in the Senate “there is no doubt our forces are rapidly disintegrating” and warned that the treaty with the Lodge reservations might be approved by a two-thirds vote that would include a majority of the Democratic senators. He urged the president to accept that outcome but also issue a statement “showing wherein those reservations weaken the whole Treaty and make it a useless instrument.”⁵⁵

Others also made abortive attempts to get through to the president and urge him to compromise. On February 29, a conclave of leading Democrats gathered at the Chevy Chase Club: they included Tumulty, six cabinet members, and senators Glass and Hitchcock, as well as Homer Cummings, the party’s national chairman; Edward Hurley, chairman of the Shipping Board; and Vance McCormick, chairman of the War Trade Board. Evidently, everyone at the meeting agreed that Wilson should yield in some way. Hurley recalled that the group agreed that the president should accept the Lodge reservations, but Glass interjected, “I would like to know, in the present condition of the President’s mind and his state of health, who among us will be willing to go to him and tell him that he should accept the reservations.” After Glass spoke, Hurley recalled, “There was a hush. … There was no volunteer.”⁵⁶

If any of those Democrats had approached Wilson, he would have been on a fool’s errand. The day before they met, the president started to draft a statement, in the form of a letter to Hitchcock, about the “so-called Lodge reservations.” He said he was willing to accept some of them, but “if the treaty should be returned to me with such a reservation on Article X, I would be obliged to consider it a rejection of the treaty and of the Covenant of the League of Nations. Any reservation seeking to deprive the League of Nations of the virility of Article X cuts at the heart of the Covenant itself.” He maintained that Article X was essential to assuring peace and preventing another world war. “Every imperialistic influence in the chancelleries of Europe opposed the embodiment of Article X in the League of Nations, and its defeat now would mark the complete consummation of their efforts to nullify the treaty.”⁵⁷

This stepped-up defiance once more sprang from Wilson’s growing sense of his own strength. This was the first long letter that he appears to have dictated to a stenographer and the first long letter he wrote without relying on a draft by Tumulty. He also made changes and additions in his own handwriting—another first since the stroke. A different sign of recovery came a few days later, when he left the White House for the first time in five months. On March 3, he rode with Edith for more than an hour in the presidential limousine, which traveled along the Potomac and up Pennsylvania Avenue to Capitol Hill. Many people recognized the car and waved at the president. Rides in the limousine would again be Wilson’s favorite way to relax for the rest of his days in office. At this time, he was also reworking his statement about the Lodge reservations. Tumulty showed the president’s draft to some cabinet members, and they made suggestions. Wilson accepted some of those suggestions, made shorthand notes, and dictated a final version to a stenographer and Edith. This was his longest piece of speaking or writing since the speech at Pueblo, and even people who disagreed with him conceded that it was an impressive rhetorical performance.

The statement—released as a letter to Hitchcock at the end of the day on March 8—thundered with righteous defiance and focused almost entirely on Article X: “For myself, I could not look the soldiers of our gallant armies in the face again if I did not do everything in my power to remove every obstacle that lies in the way of this particular Article of the Covenant. … Any reservation which seeks to deprive the League of Nations of the force of Article X strikes at the very heart of the Covenant itself.” Without its guarantees, the League would be merely “a futile scrap of paper,” like the guarantee of Belgium that Germany had violated in 1914. Instead of quibbling about obligations, America should fearlessly embrace “the role of leadership which we now enjoy, contributing our efforts towards establishing a just and permanent peace.” The letter ended with a sting: “I have been struck by the fact that practically every so-called reservation was in effect a nullification of the terms of the treaty itself. I hear of reservationists and mild reservationists, but I cannot understand the difference between a nullifier and a mild nullifier.”⁵⁸

This bombshell did its destructive work. All but a few staunchly Democratic newspapers recoiled from Wilson. The Washington Post labeled him “an affirmative irreconcilable,” and the New York World carried an editorial titled “Ratify!” which called his position “weak and untenable.” His opponents on Capitol Hill were delighted. Senator Brandegee told reporters, “The President strangled his own child.” On the Senate floor, Lodge mockingly thanked the president for having “justified the position that we on this side, all alike, have taken, that there must be no obligation imposed on the United States to carry out the provisions of article 10.” Mild reservationists bristled at the “mild nullifier” label, and Democrats openly defied Wilson, with Robert Owen of Oklahoma declaring, “I will not follow any leader who is leading to [the treaty’s] defeat or delay.” During the next ten days, the senators voted to attach the same fourteen reservations as they had voted for earlier, plus one more, offered by a Democrat, Peter Gerry of Rhode Island, affirming self-determination for Ireland and expressing sympathy for an independent Ireland. With that, the Senate was ready to vote again on consent to the Treaty of Versailles.⁵⁹

The vote came on March 19, exactly four months after the earlier votes on the treaty. This time, debate lasted just six hours, and the senators considered only the treaty with the Lodge reservations plus the Gerry reservation. Several Democrats usually loyal to Wilson announced that they would vote for the treaty with those reservations. At six in the evening, when the roll call began, it looked as if enough Democrats might break with the president to supply the two thirds necessary for consent. Three of the first four answered aye, and next came Charles Culberson of Texas, who had not announced his intentions. There was talk that if he voted in favor, most other Democrats would join him. Culberson reportedly hesitated and looked perplexed before he answered nay. Everything then went as predicted. The vote was 49 in favor and 35 against, seven votes short of two thirds of the members present. A majority of Democrats voted for consent, which was a rebuke to Wilson. All but three of those who stayed with him were from the southern or border states; many of those “loyal” Democrats appeared to be afraid of reprisals by the president. A final bit of business was to return the treaty to the president. The following day, the secretary of the Senate carried back to the White House the same bound volume of the Treaty of Versailles that Wilson had presented to the Senate eight months earlier.⁶⁰

This was the end of the League fight. Wilson had lost. The United States would never ratify that treaty and would never join the League of Nations. Many newspapers and commentators expressed regret at the outcome, and most of them laid the blame on Wilson—properly so. Brandegee’s cruel remark about Wilson’s strangling his own child was not far off the mark. Wilson had blocked every effort at compromise, and only his active intransigence prevented more Democrats from voting for the treaty with the Lodge reservations. Even though he threatened to refuse to ratify the treaty, the Senate’s consenting to the treaty with those reservations would have put pressure on the Republicans to take a stand for League membership on those terms in the 1920 election and, when they won, to complete the process of ratification. As things now stood, the Republicans were free to wipe the foreign policy slate clean and go their own way, which was what Lodge wanted and what they soon would do.⁶¹

One question has haunted Wilson’s defeat in the League fight: what, in the larger scheme of things, did it mean? Did it, as he said, “break the heart of the world”? The outbreak of another world war almost exactly twenty years after the ceremony in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles would lead many people to elevate Wilson to the stature of a prophet whose words had gone unheeded. Others, however, would claim that Wilson had made a mountain out of a molehill in his fixation on Article X. With or without stringent reservations like Lodge’s, the United States was going to consult its own interests and convenience every time an international conflict threatened—just as the European powers would do in the League. Yet membership in the League, even though restricted by Lodge’s or some other reservations, would at least have given the United States a larger, more active role and a generation of experience as a leading power in the international arena.⁶²

This bad, even tragic, outcome of the League fight turned on Wilson’s stroke. Even more than in the earlier round, his emotional imbalance and skewed judgment blocked a more constructive outcome. At times in the first three months of 1920, he did seem to verge on mental instability, if not insanity. Edith Wilson, Dr. Grayson, and Tumulty did the best they could by their lights, but they were frightened, limited people who should not have been trying to keep Wilson’s presidency afloat. He should not have remained in office. If he had not, the League fight would have turned out differently, and the nation and the world would have been better off.

Wilson did not take the end of the League fight well. According to one story, Edith did not break the news of the Senate vote to him until the next morning, and a depressed Wilson said to Grayson, “I feel like going to bed for a week and staying there.” By another account, Wilson got the news immediately after the vote and spent a sleepless night, calling Grayson to his bedside several times and telling him, “Doctor, the devil is a very busy man.” Grayson later recalled that the president asked him to read to him from the Bible, 2 Corinthians 4:8—“We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair”—and then said, “If I were not a Christian, I think I should go mad, but my faith in God holds me to the belief that He is in some way working out His own plan through human perversity and mistakes.” That sounds more like something he would say later. The other reactions rang true to Wilson’s thoughts and feelings as he faced his last, worst year in the White House.⁶³