24

DOWNFALL

March 1920 was a cruel month for Woodrow Wilson. After his defeat in the League fight, his delusions and mood swings grew worse. Six days after the Senate voted, he told Grayson that the League should be the main issue in the presidential election and the Democratic convention might decide that “I am the logical one to lead—perhaps the only one to champion this cause.” Other times, he sounded philosophical, telling Grayson it was “too soon for the country to accept the League—not ready for it. May have to break the heart and the pocketbook of the world before the League will be accepted and appreciated.” Yet at the end of March, the doctor found him depressed over the defeat of the treaty and complaining, “I feel that I would like to go back to bed and stay there until I either get well or die.”¹

Physically, Wilson continued to show signs of recovery, although only modestly. He paid some attention to politics, and he intended to veto the Republicans’ resolution authored by Senator Knox that would end the state of war with Germany without a peace treaty. He told Grayson he intended to make his veto message so “extremely distasteful to the Senate” that they might “try to impeach me for it.”² He also scoffed at Herbert Hoover’s decision to run for president as a Republican, saying he lacked the courage to stand by the Democrats. Yet when Tumulty urged him to make a public statement about such domestic issues as inflation, taxes, and prohibition and drafted a statement for him, he did not respond. Similarly, he did not answer pleas by Secretary of War Baker and Tumulty to issue a general amnesty for all persons convicted under the wartime laws against dissent.

April brought additional mixed signs of physical recovery and emotional fragility. At two o’clock in the morning on April 13, he summoned Grayson to his bedroom, where they talked for two hours. Wilson dwelled on the “double-dealing of some of the Senators,” particularly Hoke Smith, James Reed, and Lodge, and on how much he wanted to fight them. Yet he also mentioned resigning: “If I am only half-efficient I should turn over the office to the Vice-President … the country cannot afford to wait for me.” This time, Grayson did not encourage that thought but told him that meeting with the cabinet would reassure him about his ability to handle his office, and Wilson responded, “I will try not to be discouraged even as it is and I shall make the best of the circumstances.”³

He took the doctor’s advice, and in his study the next day, April 14, he held his first cabinet meeting in seven and a half months. Wilson sat at his desk and did not stand up when the cabinet members came in, as he had done in the past, and his only contribution to the discussion was to deplore public criticism of Burleson and to tell Palmer “not to let the country see red.” This was the first time any of the cabinet members had seen Wilson since his stroke, and their reactions to him varied. “He looked fuller in the face, lips seemed thicker & face longer,” Daniels noted, “but he was bright and cheerful.” Palmer thought he “looked like a very old man and acted like one,” while Houston later recalled that his voice was weak and his jaw drooped: “It was enough to make one weep to look at him.”⁴

Wilson would hold cabinet meetings almost weekly until early in June, and his appearance and performance at them would wax and wane. Domestic matters came up again at the later meetings, but foreign affairs dominated most of them, particularly the situation with the Senate and the peace treaty. Wilson’s most energetic performance came at the second cabinet meeting, when Burleson tried unsuccessfully to persuade him to resubmit the treaty with reservations that he would accept. In later meetings, he continued to fulminate about the perfidy of the British and French and his determination to veto the Knox resolution, but despite efforts by Burleson and others, he provided no guidance on most matters, especially domestic concerns. Cabinet members continued to act largely on their own, as they had done since the president’s stroke. This practice had the virtue of keeping the government going after a fashion, but it also allowed Palmer to conduct his anti-radical rampage without the president’s knowledge. In early June, the new British ambassador, Sir Auckland Geddes, painted a painfully accurate picture of the situation in Washington: “The deadlock is so complete that one would almost be justified in saying that the United States had no Government.” Geddes blamed the deadlock equally on the Democrats—“the President has been the whole show”—and the Republicans—“[t]he President is regarded as antichrist or something worse.”⁵

Wilson’s foes did not have a strong or energetic antichrist to fight against. Grayson thought the president was making slow but steady progress, as evidenced by the nineteen pounds he had gained since February. In May, the doctor described Wilson’s daily routine to Cleveland Dodge: at nine in the morning, he walked from the bedroom to the study and worked at his desk until ten-thirty or eleven, when he was wheeled into the garden; at noon, he often watched a movie for an hour; after lunch in the bedroom, he napped for an hour and then attended to some matters and sometimes took a ride in the car with Edith. Grayson also reported to Dercum that the president’s walking had improved to the point where for the first time he could come to the dining room to eat lunch.⁶ This cheered him, but the doctor was grasping at straws. By any reasonable standard, Wilson was not functioning as president.

Some matters that did engage his attention seemed strange and often petty. He told Grayson that the new secretary of state, Colby, was “the flower of the cabinet” and said House had made “a fizzle” at Paris. He still nursed his grudge against Jack Hibben, complaining to a Princeton classmate about the shortcomings of the university’s administration. After one of his rides, he became obsessed with trees that were being cut down in Rock Creek Park and called the superintendent “a liar” for saying that only dead trees were being thinned out. Ten years later, the stenographer Charles Swem reminisced to Tumulty about how the president would sit wrapped in blankets in the wheeled chair “and brood, and when a thing struck him he would send for me and dictate it.” It might be the trees in the park or a plan to spend the summer in England or a scheme for the presidential campaign.⁷ Yet Burleson complained that he got no response from Wilson to a draft platform for the Democratic convention. Edith Wilson did not falter during these dark days in the White House. She continued to shield her husband from whatever she thought might hurt him, and she showed him fierce loyalty and uncritical devotion. Her love and loyalty unquestionably made his affliction easier to bear, but they did not help him face up to the troubles and dangers that confronted him, his party, and the nation.

As spring came to Washington, Wilson became more active, and he began to receive the new ambassadors who came to present their credentials to him. The new Swiss minister noted that his open mouth “gives him an air of senility, which, however disappears once he speaks and his eyes light up.” The minister also noted that his left arm did not move and he did not stand up or leave his chair; he worried that Wilson might suffer another stroke and noted that the White House “has become for him an ivory tower.” Geddes, the new British ambassador, was a physician by training, and he likewise noted that Wilson’s immobility indicated paralysis. He found the president mentally alert and given to telling stories—an old habit—but he concluded, “I should say he is a typical case of hemiplegia. He is not really able to see people and ought to be freed from all the cares of office.” More than anything else and despite Burleson’s complaint about the draft platform, Wilson tried to deal with the way the Democrats stood on the League. Late in May, he drafted in his shorthand a model plank on the treaty, which called for “the unqualified ratification of the Treaty of Versailles” and full and immediate American participation in the League. What Wilson meant to do with this shorthand draft is not clear. He did not have it transcribed, and he does not appear to have shared this model plank with anyone.⁸

At the same time, Wilson did make public his thoughts on one aspect of peacemaking by calling the bluff of his adversaries on Capitol Hill. On May 14, the Senate had passed, unanimously by voice vote, a resolution authored by Warren Harding expressing sympathy for the Armenians, whose massacre at the hands of the Turks had become a prominent international cause. Wilson responded by urging Congress to accept an American mandate over Armenia: “I believe that it would do nothing less than arrest the hopeful processes of civilization if we were to refuse the request to become helpful friends and advisers.” The Republicans in the Senate gave Wilson’s request the back of their collective hand. On June 1, the Senate adopted a resolution, drafted by Philander Knox, rejecting the mandate by a vote of 52 to 23. Every Republican voting opposed the mandate, including Lodge, who had earlier championed the cause of the Armenians.⁹

Wilson also had a chance to air his views when he rejected the Republicans’ move to end the state of war. Starting in April, the two houses of Congress, voting almost strictly along party lines, passed resolutions declaring the war at an end. On May 27, the president vetoed the final version of what was called the Knox resolution. In a stinging message, he affirmed, “I can not bring myself to become party to an action which would place an ineffaceable stain upon the honor and gallantry of the United States. … Such a peace with Germany—a peace in which none of the essential interests which we had when we entered the war is safeguarded—is, or ought to be, inconceivable, is inconsistent with the dignity of the United States, with the rights and liberties of her citizens, and with the very fundamental conditions of civilization.” The veto held. On May 28, a motion in the House to override fell twenty-nine votes short of the necessary two thirds—once more almost strictly along party lines. This outcome pleased Lodge and other Republican leaders because they could continue to charge the president with being the main obstacle to peace.¹⁰

Clashing with his adversaries over Armenia and the Knox resolution seemed to invigorate Wilson. Four days after the veto, while sitting in his wheeled chair on the rear portico of the White House, he had a long talk with Homer Cummings, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee. When they went over the draft of the keynote speech that Cummings was to deliver at the convention, Wilson made only one criticism. Cummings recalled, “I spoke of his being many times at the point of death. He said that wasn’t true. I shall never forget the way he looked at me with his big eyes when he said that and I looked at Mrs. Wilson and I knew then that the President did not fully realize how sick he had been or how near death he had been.” On matters related to the convention, Wilson objected to Senator Thomas Walsh of Montana because he had voted for the peace treaty with the Lodge reservations, and he gave Cummings a draft plank on prohibition, which condemned the Volstead Act. He also worked out a way of communicating with the chairman, using the same code he had arranged earlier with House. When Cummings mentioned potential nominees, Wilson expressed no preference and said he wanted “a free and open convention.” He also declared, “It is dangerous to stand still. The government must move, and be responsive to the wishes of the people.”¹¹

Between expressing no preference for a nominee and talking about the need for responsive, dynamic government, it might be thought that Wilson wanted to run again. He did indeed. He was beginning to indulge in his greatest delusion of all following the stroke. Early in June, he wrote two notes in shorthand and his own hand. One, titled “The Great Referendum and Accounting of Your Government,” enumerated three questions, the last labeled “chiefly” in capital letters: “Do you wish to make use of my services as President for another four years? Do you approve of the way in which the Administration conducted the War? Do you wish the Treaty of Versailles ratified? Do you, in particular, approve of the League of Nations as organized and empowered under the Treaty of Versailles, and do you wish the United States to play a responsible part in it?” The other note, titled “3rd Administration,” listed cabinet officers, with Colby staying on as secretary of state and Burleson as postmaster general, McAdoo possibly returning as secretary of the Treasury, and Bernard Baruch becoming secretary of commerce.¹²

Some of the people closest to Wilson struggled to keep this flight of fancy from getting off the ground. At the middle of June, Grayson told Senator Glass that the president was seriously contemplating a third term but he was not up to a campaign, which would “probably kill him.” Grayson begged him to do everything possible to prevent this, and Tumulty expressed the same concerns. Grayson also went to see another Democratic activist, his friend Robert Woolley, and unburdened himself, telling Woolley how feeble and moody the president was. The doctor was particularly worried because Wilson had scheduled an interview with Louis Seibold of the New York World.¹³

The interview with Seibold, one of The World’s star reporters, sprang from a scheme by Tumulty that went awry. Since March, Tumulty had been trying to get the president to announce that he was not going to run for a third term, and he believed that this interview might smoke him out. Wilson completely foiled those intentions. Seibold’s stories, which appeared on June 18, opened, “Nine months of courageous battling to repair the consequences of illness resulting from the profligacy with which all earnest men draw upon their balance in the bank of nature has neither daunted the spirit nor impaired in the slightest degree the splendid intellect of Woodrow Wilson.” The reporter spent three hours with the president on June 15 and “saw him transact the important functions of his office with his old-time decisiveness, method and keenness of intellectual appraisement.” He recounted how Wilson told jokes, dictated letters, and worked through a basket of documents “with characteristic Wilsonian vigor.” The following day, Seibold saw the president again as he was about to take one of his afternoon rides. “From the distance of a dozen feet he suggested a man ready to sally forth for a stroll on the beach,” Seibold wrote. Though Wilson walked with a cane, “there was no hesitancy in his step, or apparent lack of confidence. His movements, while slow, were not those of a man whose lower limbs have become paralyzed.”¹⁴

In the interview, Wilson claimed, “I am coming around in good shape and could do a lot more more things now if Mrs. Wilson and Dr. Grayson would kindly look the other way once in a while.” He said he was concentrating better than ever on public business, and he declined to discuss candidates for the nomination. He did say he wanted the party to adopt a progressive platform on domestic issues and make a forthright defense of the League of Nations, calling again for a referendum on the League: “No one will welcome a referendum on that issue more than I.” With this interview, Wilson staged a show comparable to the one he had put on earlier for the “smelling committee.” Most observers read these stories as a bid for a third term, and Democrats around the country started expressing support for the president to run again.¹⁵

The day after the first story appeared, Wilson talked with Glass, who was about to leave for the convention. About the leading candidates, he thought McAdoo—who had just published a letter announcing that he was dropping out of the race—had still left the door open to being nominated, Palmer would be a weak candidate, and the nomination of Governor James Cox of Ohio “would be a fake.” He said nothing about his own prospects, but when Glass regretted that the president’s health would not permit him to lead “a great fight for the League of Nations, … [n]either the President nor Mrs. Wilson responded to this.” Glass added that he “would rather follow the President’s corpse through a campaign than the live bodies of some of the men mentioned for the nomination. This seemed to please the President.” It did not please Tumulty and Grayson. They rode with Glass to Union Station and pumped him to say whether Wilson was thinking of a third term. Grayson got on board with Glass and talked until the train started moving. The doctor’s final words to the senator were “If anything comes up save the life and fame of this great man from the juggling of false friends.” Glass evidently heeded Grayson’s warning, because in a newspaper interview at a stopover in Chicago, he noted that Democrats on the train were convinced that the president was not thinking of a third term and would be surprised if the convention nominated him.¹⁶

It took more than such gentle splashes of cold water to awaken Wilson from his dream. The same day that he talked with Glass, he summoned Colby to the White House and deputized the secretary of state to put his name before the convention. Newspaper reports were already circulating that the president was seeking renomination. Cummings sent a steady stream of telegrams back to the White House, using the code Wilson had worked out with him. Most of the pre-convention maneuvering centered on the League plank in the platform. Glass and Colby held out for a strong endorsement, but Senator Walsh succeeded in leaving the door open to reservations. That concession angered Wilson, but Cummings assured him that the League plank was a victory for him, and Wilson sent a telegram congratulating the delegates.

The Democratic convention that opened in San Francisco on June 28, 1920, featured several firsts. It was the first major party convention to be held on the West Coast—a circumstance that disgruntled many of the delegates, who endured several days of dusty, hot, bumpy train rides to get there. It was the first convention to use microphones and electrical amplifiers—a circumstance that infuriated Bryan, who brushed the microphone aside as if it were an instrument of the devil when he spoke. It was the first convention to be broadcast in part on the radio—a medium that was in its infancy and did not yet reach many listeners. As it played out, the convention had a Janus face: its seemingly interminable ballots harked back to the stalemate of 1912 that had finally broken in Wilson’s favor, and they looked forward to a much worse deadlock four years later that would come close to tearing the party apart.¹⁷

Wilson seemed to own the convention. During the opening ceremonies, winches lifted the huge flag behind the speaker’s platform to reveal a gigantic portrait of the president. The delegates went wild, and when a spotlight played on the portrait, they exploded again. Delegates marched up and down the aisles waving their state placards in a show of support. New York’s Tammany-dominated delegation conspicuously refrained from joining in, whereupon Franklin Roosevelt wrestled the state placard from a Tammany delegate and paraded in the aisles. The thirty-eight-year-old assistant secretary of the navy attracted a lot of publicity with that gesture, which would soon redound to his political benefit. The pro-Wilson mood persisted as the days wore on, and Burleson told another Democratic insider that without the general impression of Wilson’s physical incapacity, nothing could have kept him from being nominated, “notwithstanding the third-term bogey.”¹⁸

The impression of Wilson’s unfitness to run prevailed at the convention because at a crucial moment Burleson and others made sure that it did. When the balloting began, Palmer faded, and McAdoo and Cox became the leading contenders. Prohibition emerged as an issue between them; McAdoo had come out as a “dry,” favoring strict enforcement, whereas Cox was a long-standing “wet,” opposing prohibition and favoring relaxation of enforcement. McAdoo’s status as Wilson’s son-in-law and his presumed closeness to the president had earned him the nickname of Crown Prince, but people greatly exaggerated his ties to his father-in-law. Indeed, the president cast a jaundiced eye on the leading contenders. He thought a vastly better person had a chance to win the nomination—himself. On July 2, Colby telegraphed that since the convention appeared deadlocked, he would put the president’s name in nomination. Wilson gave Colby the go-ahead by telephone.¹⁹

This scheme sowed consternation on opposite sides of the country. Tumulty learned about it from Ray Stannard Baker, who was in San Francisco. Taking his political life in his hands, Tumulty wrote to tell Edith that the president’s true friends all opposed his seeking a third term, adding, “As his devoted friend, I am still of the same view, for I firmly believe it would mar his place in history.” Curiously, Edith did not resent this stand by Tumulty, whom she had never grown to like. On Sunday, July 4, Colby unveiled the scheme before a conclave in San Francisco that included Cummings, Burleson, Daniels, Glass, Senator Joseph T. Robinson of Arkansas, Representative Cordell Hull of Tennessee, Ray Stannard Baker, and Vance McCormick. Except for Colby, everyone at the meeting believed that any move to nominate Wilson would be a mistake and would hurt the party. Colby seemed taken aback and said the others made him feel like a criminal. But that was the end of Wilson’s dream of another nomination, and he blamed the cabinet members at that meeting, particularly Burleson, for killing it. According to the recollection of a well-informed journalist from New Jersey, he wanted to fire Burleson, and Tumulty had to work hard to prevent that. The White House head usher recalled that the cabinet members got a cold reception when they returned. With Grayson’s help, Daniels got back in Wilson’s good graces, but “poor old Burleson … became sort of an outcast around the White House.”²⁰

When Cox won the nomination, on the forty-fourth ballot on July 6, Wilson took the news hard. He sent Cox a perfunctory telegram of congratulations, and when Franklin Roosevelt won the vice-presidential nomination, he sent him an equally perfunctory telegram. He felt depressed and complained to Grayson that everyone had lost interest in him, but his spirits lifted a little when the party’s nominees came to call on him on Sunday, July 18. Cox and Roosevelt went to the South Portico of the White House, where Wilson was waiting in his wheeled chair with a shawl over his left arm and shoulder. When Cox shook the president’s hand, Wilson said in a weak voice, “Thank you for coming. I am very glad you came.” Roosevelt later remembered that he noticed tears in Cox’s eyes. Edith recalled that her husband brought up stories about Warren Harding’s having an African American ancestor and said they should not use those stories; “we must base our campaign on principles, not backstairs gossip.” The meeting lasted fifty minutes. Wilson’s talk about the League moved Cox, who told him, “Mr. President, we are going to be a million per cent with you and your Administration and that means the League of Nations.” Wilson replied in a whisper, “I am very grateful. I am very grateful.”²¹

The lift from the candidates’ visit did not last long. The next night, Wilson had difficulty breathing, and when Cummings came to see him a week later, he noticed that the president’s eyes filled with tears when Cummings assured him of his continued loyalty. The same day, Swem noted, “The President’s mind is not like of old.” Instead of being able to dictate more than one letter at a time, “he lapsed into a sort of coma.” Edith had to remind him what to do next. Wilson fretted about the size of his envelopes and the proper way to fold letters, and he flew into a rage about automobiles passing the presidential limousine when he was out for a ride. The head of the Secret Service found him irascible and had trouble getting around his unreasonable orders. Even a visit from Jessie and Frank Sayre and their children failed to cheer him up.²²

He gave his surest sign of depression when the presidential campaign failed to rouse his old combativeness. From the beginning, the Republicans made him their main issue. They denounced “Wilson’s league,” blamed all the country’s troubles on him, and promised a return to “normalcy”—a word their nominee, Warren Harding, had made their chief slogan. Tumulty repeatedly begged the president to speak out, but Wilson rebuffed him. The most he would do was grant a confidential interview at the end of September to a reporter, William Hawkins of the United Press, who found him “only the shattered remnant of the man” he had been before, with “a timidity, almost an apologetic effect in his [manner].” Still, Wilson had some praise for Cox, declared “Harding is nothing,” and showed a spark of humor when he said, “I suppose at that distance, I look like a damn fool.”²³

Early in October, he roused himself to write a lengthy public statement on the campaign. Breathing his old fire and overruling advice from Tumulty and George Creel, he avowed, “This election is to be a genuine national referendum. … The chief question that is put to you is, of course: Do you want your country’s honor vindicated and the Treaty of Versailles ratified?” Wilson maintained that people had been “grossly misled” about the treaty by the “gross ignorance and impudent audacity” of opponents of the treaty and the League. They would “substitute America for Prussia in the policy of isolation and defiant segregation.” He dismissed the charge that Article X would impair Congress’s authority to declare war as “absolutely false,” and he said that the framers of the Covenant would be “amazed and indignant at the things that are now being ignorantly said about this great and sincere document.” The whole world, he concluded, awaited the voters’ verdict on the shape of the future.²⁴

Immediately after the release of that statement, Wilson became even more of a campaign issue. A Republican senator running for reelection, Selden Spencer of Missouri, claimed that Tumulty had acted as president and issued orders in his own name. Tumulty denied the charge, and Wilson publicly telegraphed a denial to Spencer. The senator also claimed that at Paris, Wilson had promised military aid to Romania and Serbia. Wilson answered, “I am perfectly content to leave it to the voters of Missouri to determine which of us is telling the truth.” The flurry of charges and countercharges following this exchange received extensive coverage in newspapers all over the country, temporarily crowding the presidential campaign off the front pages. Wilson did not enjoy the attention, and he continued to resist Tumulty’s pleas to involve himself more actively. Visiting the president again early in October, Cummings told him that the campaign should have focused more on the League. “Yes, that is the pity of it,” Wilson answered. “You and men like you are Crusaders. The other people are politicians.”²⁵

Viewing the election as a crusade for the League of Nations finally prompted him to get into the campaign, though in a limited way. On October 18, he addressed a public letter to Harding, rejecting the Republican candidate’s claim that the French had asked him, Wilson, to “lead the way to a world fraternity.” Wilson asserted, “I need not point out to you the grave and extraordinary inferences to be drawn from such a statement.” That was a warm-up to his biggest foray into the campaign. Nine days later, on October 27, he spoke to fifteen pro-League Republicans who had bolted their party and were supporting the Democratic ticket. This was Wilson’s first speech in more than a year, and he had written it himself. He apologized for sitting while he spoke and for reading from a text, “what my dear father called ‘dried tongue.’” He affirmed that the League offered the only way to redeem the sacrifices made by the husbands, sons, and brothers who had fallen in the war and that Article X would prevent another world war. “This is the true, the real Americanism.” This was the “supreme choice” that transcended parties: “The nation was never called upon to make a more solemn choice than it must now make.”²⁶

Two days later, he made one last foray into the campaign. Cox invited him to attend a large rally in New York, but he declined, using infirmity as an excuse. In fact, although Cox and Roosevelt had issued statements endorsing the League, they had also talked favorably about reservations, and that distressed Wilson. He recognized, though, that the candidates still offered a sterling alternative to Harding, and on October 29, four days before the election, he wrote a public letter praising Cox for having “spoken truly and fearlessly about the great issue at stake.” Wilson predicted victory and signed the letter, “Your gratified and loyal supporter.”²⁷ Still, the endorsement lacked warmth and came far too late.

As things turned out, earlier, more enthusiastic endorsements by Wilson and speeches, if he had been able to make them, would have done little good. The only surprise in the election results was the Republicans’ truly titanic victory. Harding captured more than 60 percent of the popular vote, more than 16 million, to 9 million for Cox. His electoral margin was 404 to 127—almost as big as Wilson’s in 1912. This tidal wave swept away almost everything the Democrats held outside the South. Beyond the borders of the Confederacy, not a single one of the party’s candidates for senator or governor won, not even New York’s rising star, Al Smith. Except for Kentucky, all the border states went Republican, as did such usually safe states as Oklahoma and Arizona. Even in the South, despite whispering campaigns about Harding’s alleged “black blood,” Tennessee fell to the Republicans. New York City and Boston went Republican for the first time since the Civil War. The party’s majority in the House of Representatives rose to 303 seats to the Democrats’ 131, while in the Senate they gained ten seats to hold 70 to the Democrats’ 26.²⁸

Wilson had wanted this election to be a referendum, and many people were delighted to read its outcome as such. Senators Borah and Johnson gleefully proclaimed that the American people had spoken resoundingly against League membership, and later historians would echo their judgment and call this election a “referendum for isolation.” Actually, the League and foreign policy in general played far less of a role in the results than did discontent with post-war troubles. Another influence was “reform fatigue.” In their national campaign, Republicans hewed to an unabashedly conservative line. They slammed Wilson’s domestic policies, and they almost never uttered the name of Theodore Roosevelt. That was a deliberate omission. The governor of Kansas told William Allen White, “I have a feeling that we have had all the superman business the party is likely to want.”²⁹ For the Republicans, Harding’s “normalcy” meant implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, a return to the days of McKinley.

In the only apparent contradiction, Eugene Debs, running from his cell in the federal prison in Atlanta, racked up more than 900,000 votes—a few thousand more than he had gotten eight years earlier. Actually, the Socialist’s showing was perfectly consonant with Harding’s triumph: either way, people were voting against Wilson. If the election of 1920 was a referendum, it was a referendum on him. As one historian has put it, Harding offered the perfect foil to Wilson: “modest mediocrity rather than arrogant genius; … warm humanity rather than austere intellectual-ism; genial realism rather than strenuous idealism.” There was no question which half of that antinomy the electorate chose.³⁰

The object of this repudiation had oscillating reactions to the event, as was typical with most of his reactions since the stroke. Wilson spent part of election day, November 2, as he did every day now, trying to climb a set of little steps Grayson had ordered built for him. The next day, he told Swem that the “Republicans had committed suicide”—by which he evidently meant that their conservative domestic policies would doom their future political prospects. He also believed that the result had hurt the country in the eyes of the world. Yet Stockton Axson told Jessie, “He has never been finer than he is today, serene, steady, his patriotism sublime.” Axson thought Wilson looked better than he had in months, “and this evening he was almost merry, laughed more than I have seen him laugh for a year.” Talking about the election and the fate of the country, Axson found “not a suggestion of bitterness, rather loving-kindness.” Yet a few days later, Cummings noted that the president seemed “mournful,” and his “whole household seems tired.” Wilson asked Colby to write a Thanksgiving proclamation for him because “although I have no resentment in my heart I find myself very much put to it to frame a proper proclamation.”³¹

The Republicans’ romp in 1920 left Wilson the lamest of lame ducks. He would pass his final four months in the White House as an often-embittered caretaker. A special target of his bitterness was Debs. Earlier, in August, the subject of pardons for persons convicted under the wartime laws had come up again. Changing his mind, Palmer now favored them, as did Newton Baker and Josephus Daniels, but Wilson said no. Appeals to pardon Debs continued to come, particularly from labor leaders, including Samuel Gompers, and at the end of January 1921, Palmer sent the president a formal legal argument—replete with references to Supreme Court opinions, particularly ones written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.—in favor of executive clemency. “Debs is now approaching 65 years of age,” Palmer concluded. “If not adequately, he surely has been severely punished.” Wilson wrote on the document, “Denied. W.W.” He would carry his refusal to forgive to his grave. A year later, after Harding did pardon Debs, Ida Tarbell recorded Wilson saying, “Debs should never have been released. Debs was one of the worst men in the country. He should have stayed in the penitentiary.”³²

The president’s engagement with affairs of state picked up after the election. Edith let down her guard over access to her husband, and Tumulty resumed his former role of chief adviser. The government still functioned with surprising smoothness, thanks to the delegation of authority to cabinet members. As he had done before the stroke, Wilson interested himself in foreign affairs, although he deferred to Colby far more than he had ever done with Lansing. He insisted upon nonrecognition and noninterference toward the Bolsheviks in Russia, he resisted Allied incursions in Asia Minor, and he favored nonintervention in the Caribbean and Mexico. Wilson adamantly rejected all suggestions to resubmit the peace treaty to the Senate, and he feared that when the Republicans came in, they would, as he told an old friend from Princeton, “take us into the League in such a niggardly fashion, with ‘if’s’ and ‘but’s’ which so clearly proceed from prejudice and a desire to play a lone hand and think first and only of the United States.”³³

This increased activity reflected continued recovery, but Wilson was nowhere near fully functioning as president. When Ray Stannard Baker saw him at the end of November, the sight shook him: “A broken, ruined old man, shuffling along, his left arm inert, the fingers drawn up like a claw, the left side of his face sagging frightfully. His voice is not human: it gurgles in his throat, sounds like that of an automaton. And yet his mind seems as alert as ever.” Baker watched newsreels of the European tour with the Wilsons, and he noted that the president sat silent except for making a few remarks “in a dead, hollow, weary voice.” Baker was visiting the White House to write a magazine article, but after reading the draft, Edith and Grayson blocked publication. Edith told Baker she feared readers might receive “a great shock, but to us who have been constantly in touch and seen great improvement it would seem to strike the wrong note.”³⁴

Such improvement led Wilson to want to give the State of the Union speech in person again when Congress reconvened in December. Grayson had to talk him out of it. He reminded the president that the ovation at the Capitol might overcome him and that his voice might give out. Grayson told Baker that Wilson “easily loses control of himself” and that “when he talks he is likely to break down and weep.” Although he did not go to Capitol Hill, Wilson did meet with congressional leaders at the White House on the day the session of Congress opened. The staff ushered into the Blue Room senators Lodge and Underwood, who was now the Democratic leader, and representatives Joseph W. Fordney of Michigan, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, and Champ Clark, the former Speaker. Wilson walked in, holding his cane in his right hand; he did not shake hands with the men. He whispered to Underwood, “I used the excuse of this ‘third leg,’ as I did not want to shake hands with Lodge.” After the meeting, he told Grayson, “Can you imagine what kind of a hide Lodge has got, coming up here in these circumstances and wanting to appear familiar and talk with me. His hide has a different anatomical arrangement than any I have heard of.”³⁵

Wilson dictated and edited his last State of the Union message, which sparkled with his eloquence and opened with “an immortal sentence of Abraham Lincoln’s, ‘Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us dare to do our duty as we understand it.’” He depicted democracy being put to the test in the world, and he wanted the United States to uphold democracy at home and champion weak nations abroad. Specifically, he called for a unified government budget, simplified taxes, loans to Armenia, and independence for the Philippines. “I have not so much laid before you a series of recommendations, gentlemen,” he concluded, “as sought to utter a confession of faith, of the faith in which I was bred and which it is my solemn purpose to stand by until my last fighting day. I believe this to be the faith of America, the faith of the future.”³⁶

Lame-duck sessions of Congress usually enact little legislation, and this Republican-controlled body was in no mood to please a partisan adversary in the dying days of his administration. In those circumstances, Wilson would have had little to do even if he had been in good health. He did veto some bills passed by the Republican-controlled Congress, including a measure to raise tariff rates back to pre-1913 levels. In a veto message written by Secretary of the Treasury Houston, the president warned that higher tariffs would hurt American farmers and that the United States had now become the world’s leading creditor nation, which meant that European nations must sell goods here in order to be able to pay their debts.³⁷ This Congress still contained enough Democrats to sustain the veto, but the tariff bill offered a foretaste of a government in which the Republicans controlled both the executive and the legislative branches. This veto message accurately predicted the damage that higher tariffs would do to the American and international economy in the coming decade.

Some of the time, Wilson occupied himself with thoughts about his future. Back in July, after the Democratic convention, he had talked about entering a new career, and he also occasionally thought about academic life and writing. Edith later recalled that shortly before they left the White House, she found him at his typewriter. He looked up at her and smiled as he said, “I have written the dedication to the book on Government for which I have been preparing all my life and which now I will have leisure to do.” The dedication began, “To E. B. W. I dedicate this book because it is a book in which I have tried to interpret life, the life of a nation, and she has shown me the full meaning to life.” Edith added in her memoir, “The tragedy is that this was the only page of that book ever written.”³⁸

Money worried her and her husband because Congress did not then provide an ex-president with a pension. In fact, they were in good shape financially. Wilson had saved money from his $75,000-a-year presidential salary, and a newspaper report later stated that he had $250,000 in the bank—a handsome sum in those days.³⁹ A welcome addition to their assets came in December, when the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded Wilson the Nobel Prize for Peace for his role in founding the League of Nations. He was the second American president so honored—the first was Theodore Roosevelt, for his role in mediating the Russo-Japanese War. In addition to the honor, the Nobel Prize brought him a cash award of $40,000.

Larger and still more welcome additions to the Wilsons’ finances would soon come from their wealthy friends. A group led by Cleveland Dodge and Bernard Baruch would raise money for them to purchase one of the White House limousines and a house in Washington. Over the next three years, these financial angels would establish a trust that would pay an annuity of $10,000 a year; Wilson would receive the first quarterly payment less than a month before his death. In the meantime, Wilson made a surprising move, apparently dictated by concerns about money. In February, he asked Secretary of State Colby what he planned to do after leaving office. Colby replied that he was going to practice law again; although the prospect did not excite him, he had to make a living. “Well, I, too, must make a living,” Wilson said. “As I was once a lawyer, why not open an office together here in Washington?” Although Edith soon told Colby that this was just a momentary impulse and not something to take seriously, the arrangements went forward, and Wilson casually remarked one day, “Oh, that reminds me, Tumulty—you can tell [reporters] I have decided to open a law office in partnership with Colby.”⁴⁰

Wilson made this move after he and Edith had decided where they would live after they left the White House. She later recalled that in Paris they had begun to consider various places. She drew up a list that included Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, Boston, and New York, and they scored those cities for “Climate,” “Friends,” “Opportunities,” “Freedom,” and “Amusements.” Washington came out lowest, but they chose it anyway because he wanted to use the Library of Congress in writing his book, and, she said, “it was home to me.” Wilson wanted to build a house on a site overlooking the Potomac beyond Georgetown, and he had clipped articles and illustrations from architectural magazines. When the project proved impracticable, they considered several houses in the district and nearby Virginia, including Woodlawn, a plantation that had belonged to George Washington’s stepchildren. Edith did most of the house hunting, assisted by her brother Wilmer Bolling, who was in the real estate business. Eventually, she settled on a large, recently built house at 2340 S Street N.W., half a block off Massachusetts Avenue. Their benefactors put up $100,000 toward the purchase price of $150,000, and Wilson signed the deed on December 14. This would be home to both of the Wilsons for the rest of their lives.⁴¹

During the new year, Edith busied herself with renovations to the house, adding an elevator and bookshelves for her husband’s library. In February, for the first time since his stroke, Wilson went to the theater, where the audience cheered him before and after the performance and between acts. His moods still seesawed. He was reliving past glories by watching newsreels of the European tour over and over. One last unpleasant duty remained before Harding’s inauguration on March 4. At six-thirty in the preceding evening, the president-elect and his wife paid the customary call on the outgoing president and First Lady. The visit, which lasted only twenty minutes, was cool and correct. Earlier, Edith had invited Florence Harding to the White House to discuss domestic arrangements. Given Wilson’s health, questions arose about whether he would attend the inauguration. At a cabinet meeting in January, Daniels recorded Newton Baker saying, “I hope you will not go if it is a cold & sleety day.” Wilson answered, “O that will not matter. I will wear a gas mask anyhow.”⁴²

Inauguration day, March 4, 1921, was clear and cold. Wilson rode from the White House to the Capitol beside Harding in an open car, with two old-line Republicans, Senator Knox and Representative Joseph G. Cannon of Illinois, the former speaker, sitting in front of them. People who lined up along Pennsylvania Avenue got their first glimpse of the president since his return from the speaking tour. One reporter described “the pathetic picture” of him limping out of the White House to the car; beside the ruddy-faced, smiling Harding, the reporter wrote, Wilson looked like a living ghost.⁴³ Harding was solicitous, helping him in and out of the car, but at the Capitol the younger man reinforced the contrast by bounding up the steps while Wilson had to use a wheeled chair to enter the building. Once inside, Wilson walked with his cane to the elevator that took him to the ornate President’s Room off the Senate chamber.

One last painful encounter awaited Wilson in that room. Senator Lodge entered and informed the president that the houses of Congress had concluded their business and asked if he had any further communication to make to them. “Tell them I have no further communication to make,” Wilson replied. “I thank you for the courtesy. Good morning, Sir.” A reporter who was in the room noted, “There was something in the voice of the President and the way he uttered those words. … The President’s response was not uttered curtly or discourteously, but there was no mistaking the rigidity of the response.” Wilson then told Harding and the incoming vice president, Calvin Coolidge, that he could not attend the inaugural ceremony because the stairs were too steep for him. He joked to Knox, “Well, the Senate threw me down before, and I don’t want to fall down myself now.” Shortly before noon, the Wilsons, accompanied by Tumulty, Grayson, and a valet, left the Capitol and drove to S Street. A crowd cheered his arrival, and a group of League supporters marched up the street at three o’clock. Wilson came out several times and waved, but he declined calls to speak.⁴⁴

On that quiet, subdued note, the eight years of Wilson’s presidency ended. No one tried to look for silver linings in the clouds that had overhung his last year in the White House. He did receive many messages wishing him well, and public tributes usually hailed him as a prophet who had pointed the way toward a better world. No one tried, either, to disguise the struggle and conflict that had marked his time in office from the beginning or to pretend that he had not failed in his final quest. The most affecting valedictory came from the journalist who, besides Baker, knew Wilson best—Frank Cobb, the person to whom the president had bared his soul as he agonized over his decision to enter the war. Cobb closed his editorial in the New York World by affirming,

Woodrow Wilson on this morning of the fourth of March can say, in the words of Paul the Apostle to Timothy:

“For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand.

“I have fought a good fight. I have finished my course, I have kept faith.”

Those words pleased Wilson as he departed from the public arena and faced the prospect of the rest of his life.⁴⁵