25

TWILIGHT

Woodrow Wilson lived the rest of his life in twilight. He lived a month short of three years in the house on S Street, which Edith made into a refuge for and shrine to him. A replica of the big Lincoln bed took up much of his second-floor bedroom, at the back of the house. At his insistence, the bedroom harbored one object that Edith disliked and replaced after he died: over the mantel, where his eye alighted when he lay in bed, hung a painting he had bought of a young woman who reminded him of Ellen. On bright days, sunlight flooded through the bedroom’s south-facing windows, which looked out on a terraced backyard and garden and offered a verdant, flower-filled view in the spring and summer. On the first floor, between the library and the dining room, there was a solarium reminiscent of the White House portico where Wilson had spent many hours; in the dining room, French doors opened onto a large terrace. The weakness of Wilson’s left leg prevented him from walking on the grass in the yard.¹

The ex-president’s family worked to make the move to his new home as easy as possible for him. When the Wilsons arrived from the Capitol on inauguration day, familiar faces surrounded him at lunch. After the meal, as Edith recalled, Grayson said, “Mr. President—“to which her husband replied with a smile, “Just Woodrow Wilson.” He disliked being called Mr. President now, and he would henceforth discourage people from addressing him in that way. Catching himself, the doctor responded, “Mr. Wilson, I think you should excuse yourself and get some rest.” President Harding generously permitted Grayson, who was still an active-duty naval officer, to continue to serve as the ex-president’s physician. A succession of private nurses would care for him during the next three years. In place of Arthur Brooks, the thoughtful and efficient valet at the White House, Edith secured the services of a highly recommended couple, Isaac and Mary Scott, who soon became essential to Wilson’s comfort.²

After a few days, Edith established a household routine. She brought in her bachelor younger brother, John Randolph Bolling, to be Wilson’s secretary. In frail health since childhood and hunchbacked, Randolph knew shorthand and typing and had helped out during the last months in the White House. He handled the voluminous correspondence at a desk in the hall outside Wilson’s bedroom and responded to most letters on Wilson’s behalf. Tending to the mail was Wilson’s first activity in the morning, followed by walking in the hall and being shaved by Isaac Scott. Unless guests came, he would stay in his bathrobe and slippers, having lunch in the bedroom and taking a nap in the early afternoon. Then, he would dress for the daily ride in the Pierce-Arrow and afterward receive a few visitors by the fireside in the library. He usually ate dinner on a small table in the bedroom while Edith read to him; later, she would have dinner with Randolph and come back to read to her husband again until nine or ten. Family visitors included his daughters Margaret, Jessie, and Nell and Stockton Axson, together with Edith’s relatives. The Wilsons and their visitors often watched movies in the library. Starting in April, they also went out each Saturday night to Keith’s Theater on Fifteenth Street, where the audience and sometimes even the actors applauded Wilson.³

Despite this care, he did not make the transition well. He grew tired more easily, and he suffered a recurrence of the prostate problems. When Ray Stannard Baker visited two and a half weeks after they moved into the house, Wilson struck him as “lon[e]lier, more cut-off, than ever before. His mind still works with power, but with nothing to work upon!” When Baker told him that audiences at movie theaters were cheering him in the newsreels more than Harding, Wilson grumbled that once when he was in a theater, people had cheered Roosevelt louder. He managed a flash of humor. About hostile accounts of the peace conference in a recently published book and magazine article by Lansing he quipped, “I think I can stand it if Lansing can!”⁴

The coming of spring in 1921 brought little cheer or solace to Wilson. In May, Tommy—as Wilson was still known to some—had to beg off a nearby reunion of the Witherspoon Gang from Princeton, telling one of them that newspapers exaggerated his improvement: “I have not yet the physical strength to venture so far afield.” When Baker visited again in May, Edith told him her husband had resisted suggestions that he do some work and was reading mostly mystery stories, and in the car he always wanted to ride along the same route. In June, Stockton Axson secretly reported to Hibben, who hoped to reconcile with Wilson, that he saw no improvement in the arm and leg and that Wilson could not seem to get interested in writing.⁵

Practicing law with Bainbridge Colby did not occupy his mind the way he had thought it might. After going abroad briefly in the spring of 1921, Colby began to set up the practice, renting and furnishing offices in New York and Washington. According to Edith’s recollection, Grayson advised his patient not to take up work for a while, and remodeling problems delayed the opening of the Washington office until August. Wilson went there on the opening day, but that would be his only visit. A ceremonial appearance before a judge to be admitted to the District of Columbia bar would be his only other venture outside the house for the law practice. Colby sought to remedy his partner’s absence by installing three telephone lines from the office to the house, but there was little traffic on those lines at first. An ex-president and former secretary of state should have dazzled as rainmakers, but high-paying clients did not immediately flock to their practice.⁶

When business finally picked up, another obstacle loomed. Wilson nearly always found something ethically objectionable about prospective clients. Approached in February 1922 about a boundary dispute between Costa Rica and Panama, he told Colby, “I am sure you will agree with me that we should accept no business which might involve us in dealings with the Government of Costa Rica.” Four months later, in a matter involving Ecuador and American banks, he said, “Frankly, my dear Colby, I am not willing to have my name associated with this transaction.” He did agree to represent the bid of the breakaway Western Ukrainian National Republic for recognition by the League of Nations. Colby went to Europe in the fall of 1922 to look into the matter, but he found that they could do little on behalf of the Ukrainians.⁷

In one instance, Wilson’s ethical qualms saved the partners from a painful embarrassment. In August 1922, representatives of the oil company owned by Harry Sinclair asked the firm to represent them in an upcoming Senate investigation into the leasing of the Teapot Dome oil reserves in Wyoming. They were offering a retainer that would, Colby noted, “swamp the inadequate financial returns that are involved in the Ukrainian business.” He did not give a figure, but Edith recalled that it was $100,000—a huge amount at the time. Wilson smelled a rat. “Colby must be a child not to see through such a scheme,” he told Edith. Because exploding political scandals soon made Teapot Dome a byword for corruption under the Harding administration, her memory may have exaggerated Wilson’s reaction—but not by much. He composed a letter to Colby stating that he did not know what the oil companies were up to, but reading the newspapers gave him “the impression that some ugly business is going on in respect to Teapot Dome.” Instead of sending the letter, however, he telegraphed to say that they should talk in person, and when Colby came to Washington and heard Wilson’s objections, he agreed to withdraw.⁸

At that meeting, Wilson probably also broached the idea of ending the partnership. Three months later, he reminded Colby of “the suggestion I made to you in the summer … to leave you free individually to take business such as has frequently come to us but with which I, because of my years of public service and conduct of national affairs,—cannot associate myself as counsel.” Colby demurred, but after his return from Europe he bowed to financial reality and suggested closing the Washington office. Wilson responded by renewing his offer to leave the practice. This time, Colby agreed. At the middle of December, he announced the end of the partnership. Although he mentioned “the long interruption of [Wilson’s] active work in the bar,” Colby insisted that Wilson had “shown the same effectiveness that he has displayed in every field to which he has turned his energies.” Their parting was completely amicable.⁹

This second foray of Wilson’s into the law proved only a little more remunerative and no more satisfying to him than his youthful sojourn in Atlanta had been forty years before. This time, despite Colby’s polite disclaimer at the time of the dissolution of their partnership, the ex-president’s health obviously had hobbled his work. His lack of physical energy and his difficulty concentrating might not have raised an insuperable obstacle if his stiff ethical scruples and regard for his former office had not barred the door to most prospective clients. Yet as in his long-ago encounter with legal practice, the real fault lay in his attitude and desires. Soon after he suggested dissolving the partnership, he told McAdoo, “The members of the [American Bar] Association constitute the most reactionary and pig-headed group in the nation.”¹⁰ Also, Wilson did not take much interest in the practice; the partners’ correspondence usually dealt with Democratic party politics rather than legal business. In every other field to which he had dedicated himself—as scholar, writer, teacher, college president, governor, president of the United States—Wilson had succeeded brilliantly. The law was the only endeavor where he fell short. He failed at it in his old age for the same reason he had in his young manhood—his heart was not in it.

The physical and mental handicaps that kept him from actively practicing law hampered him in other pursuits as well. In November 1921, the public got a painful reminder of how feeble Wilson was. The third anniversary of the Armistice witnessed the dedication of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, containing unidentified remains of a serviceman killed in the war. Because he could not walk from the White House to the cemetery in Arlington, Wilson asked permission to go in a horse-drawn carriage, which the War Department denied. Instead, he and Edith rode in the procession that took the remains from the Capitol to the White House, and then they returned to S Street. Loud cheers along Pennsylvania Avenue heartened Wilson, as did more cheers and tributes from people gathered in front of his house. After hobbling inside and waving from the upstairs window, he came to the front door and told the throng, “I wish I had the voice to reply and thank you for the wonderful tribute you have paid me. I can only say God bless you.” When someone shouted, “Long live the best man in the world!” Wilson’s eyes filled with tears, and he reached out to hold hands with Edith, who was weeping too.¹¹

Now, scholarship and writing no longer seemed open to him either. The paralysis in his left hand made it hard to hold a book, and his limited vision made reading on his own slow and laborious. During the second half of 1921, Stockton Axson stayed with the Wilsons, and he often took Edith’s place, reading to his brother-in-law from more serious works, including the novels of Jane Austen and the essays of his old inspiration, Edmund Burke, who interested him anew. In 1922, he commended to Colby “the word expediency as Burke would have used it, to mean the wisdom of circumstances.” Soon afterward, Baker noted, “We got on the subject of Edmund Burke of whom he is a great admirer: & he was positively brilliant in his comments on Burke’s service.”¹²

Not long after he talked with Baker, Wilson dictated to Edith some notes for a book to be titled “The Destiny of the Republic.” Under the heading “The Vision and Purpose of the Founders,” he observed that unlike every other nation, the United States had been founded “for the benefit of mankind as well as for the benefit of its people.” Yet, others in the world had not welcomed this experiment. Under other headings he outlined reactions and effects abroad, and, echoing Burke, he observed, “France caught in a luminous fog of political theory, was groping her way from revolution to revolution in bewildered search of firm ground upon which to build a permanent government.” Two weeks after dictating those notes, Wilson told J. Franklin Jameson, his onetime teacher at Johns Hopkins, that he was thinking about making a study of the impact of the American republic on European politics, “and I would be greatly indebted to you if you would direct me to the books which are likely to be of most service to me in carrying out that purpose.”¹³

Despite Jameson’s prompt offer to help, the project fell by the wayside. The only fruit to come from these musings was an abbreviated essay that Wilson finally produced in April 1923, “The Road Away From Revolution.” Typed by Wilson himself, the essay opens by asking what had caused the present unsettled state of the world and by noting that the Russian Revolution was part of a widespread reaction against “capitalism” and the way it treated people. “The world has been made safe for democracy,” Wilson asserted. “But democracy has not yet made the world safe against irrational revolution. That supreme task, which is nothing less than the salvation of civilization, now faces democracy, insistent, imperative.” The clearly marked road away from revolution lay through the reassertion of the highest standards and ideals: “The sum of the whole matter is, that our civilization cannot survive materially unless it be redeemed spiritually. It can be saved only by becoming permeated with the spirit of Christ and being made free and happy in the practices which spring out of that spirit.”¹⁴

Barely 1,000 words long, vague and evangelical in tone and message, this essay sounded like some of Wilson’s immature writing during and just after college. When he sent the essay to George Creel, the journalist wrote back—not to him but to Edith—that it was not up to Wilson’s usual standard. Creel was telling this to her rather than her husband because he worried that it would crush his spirit and bring back “all of the old depression with possible effect upon his physical state.” When Edith gently tried to convey that assessment during a ride in the car with Wilson and Axson, he said to Axson, “They kept after me to do this thing, and I did it.” Edith responded, “Now don’t get on your high horse about this. I am just telling you that they say that what the article needs is expansion, reasoning out the case more.” Wilson shot back, “I have done all I can, and all I am going to do.”¹⁵

Back at the house, after Wilson retired to his bedroom, Axson found Edith sobbing in the hallway. “All I want to do is help in any way I can,” she said. “I just want to help and I don’t know what to do.” Axson offered to read the essay and then told her it needed to be shorter, not longer: “This is not an argument, it is a challenge.” Edith asked Axson to talk to her husband, who readily agreed to his suggested cuts.¹⁶ Wilson sent the revised essay to The Atlantic, which published it in the August issue and later as a short book.

“The Road Away From Revolution,” which would be Wilson’s next-to-last published work, contained the germ of later analyses of totalitarianism. The seizure of power in Italy by Benito Mussolini’s Fascists had recently troubled him, and his stress on ideals and spiritual values to combat such creeds anticipated later anti-Communist and anti-Fascist views. But a few intellectual nuggets and rhetorical sparks did not make up for the essay’s shortcomings. For someone who had once written so easily and confidently to produce such a slight piece of writing after so much effort and anguish marked a sad finish to a formerly great literary career.

Other pursuits did beckon Wilson. He attracted constant public attention as an ex-president and champion of the League of Nations. Early in 1921, a group of friends and admirers set about to organize and endow the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, which would promote his ideas and annually honor a person who made contributions to world peace. Prominent among the organizers and donors were the League advocate Hamilton Holt and Wilson’s wealthy Princeton classmates Cleveland Dodge and Cyrus McCormick. The main energy behind the effort, however, came from Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt corresponded with Wilson in 1921 and came to visit during the summer, not long before he contracted polio. Roosevelt’s subsequent paralysis would be the basis for a bond between him and Wilson, who would send regular messages of encouragement. With his soon-to-be-famous determination, Roosevelt plunged ahead with work on the foundation. Even though Wilson refused to lend his name to any appeal for money, the organizers had raised most of the $1 million endowment by the end of 1922. Formal incorporation took place on December 27 at Roosevelt’s home in New York. The next day, on the ex-president’s sixty-sixth birthday, a delegation visited to inform him that the Woodrow Wilson Foundation had been established.¹⁷

Wilson received another birthday tribute when a resolution arrived from the Capitol expressing “the pleasure and joy of the Senate of the United States because of his rapid recovery to good health.” Newspaper reports noted that the senators had passed the resolution unanimously by voice vote, with Democrats shouting aye and most Republicans appearing occupied with other business. “Think of them passing it and not meaning it,” Wilson chuckled to Grayson. “I would much rather have had three Senators get together and have it passed with sincerity.” The senators had heard correctly about his health. Six weeks earlier, he had displayed his newfound vigor on the fourth anniversary of the Armistice. In contrast to his tearfulness and his inability to say more than a few words the year before, he spoke forcefully and at some length to some 5,000 people gathered in front of his house. He excoriated the Senate for blocking the path to permanent peace and avowed, “Puny persons who are standing in the way will find that their weakness is no match for the strength of a moving Providence.” Reporters observed that he looked good and seemed to have put on weight. Although Isaac Scott helped him out through the front door, Wilson stood without support and tucked the crook of his cane into his coat pocket. His voice did not ring out as strongly as in days past, but most in the crowd could hear him.¹⁸

Concern about world affairs and the League helped pull Wilson out of his prolonged slump in 1921. In October, when the Harding administration submitted a treaty with Germany that copied the Treaty of Versailles without the League Covenant, he privately scorned Democratic senators who voted “to accept national disgrace in the form of a separate treaty with Germany which repudiated every obligation to our allies.” Soon afterward, he sent Justice Brandeis a statement on foreign policy for a possible Democratic platform. Reclaiming the motto he had first coined and the Republicans had taken up in 1920, Wilson declared, “‘AMERICA FIRST’ is a slogan which does not belong to any one political party.” For Republicans, it meant America “must render no service to any other nation or people,” whereas for Democrats it meant “that in every organization for the benefit of mankind America must lead the world by imparting to other peoples her own ideals of Justice and of Peace.”¹⁹ That statement marked the beginning of consultation and collaboration with Brandeis and other prominent Democrats, such as Frank Cobb of the New York World and the diplomat Norman Davis about what they came to call “The Document.”

Not everyone chose to pursue American membership in the League through party channels. Hamilton Holt and John Hessin Clarke, Wilson’s appointee to the Supreme Court, who resigned in 1922 partly because of ill health, began to plan an organization to promote League membership outside politics. They attracted a number of prominent Republicans, including former leaders of the League to Enforce Peace, but when Clarke approached Wilson, the ex-president said that he preferred to concentrate his influence upon Democrats to get a strong League plank in the next party platform and nominate someone who would rectify “the gross and criminal blunder of failing to ratify the Treaty of Versailles.” Yet he told Holt that he and Clarke were doing good work, “and it will always be a pleasure to cooperate with you.”²⁰ Taking that message as assent, Holt and Clarke formed the League of Nations Non-Partisan Association, which eventually grew into a large, well-funded organization but, like the LEP, would never succeed in reaching its goal.

As Wilson’s health improved, he devoted his gradually increasing energies mainly to defending his actions as president and involving himself in Democratic politics. Veterans of his administration were quick to tell their tales, particularly about the peace conference. Lansing had jumped in first with an article in The Saturday Evening Post and a book titled The Peace Negotiations: A Personal Narrative, both published in March 1921. Wilson himself had already moved to get out his side of the story by enlisting Baker to write an account of the time in Paris. Baker worked with Wilson’s files, first in the White House and then during the spring of 1921 at S Street. He found the material so massive that he persuaded the Wilsons to have the files moved to his home, in Amherst, Massachusetts. There, Baker labored to produce three volumes of narrative and documents. Excerpts were serialized in newspapers and magazines, and the complete work was published late in 1922 as Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement.²¹ Before those volumes appeared, Tumulty published magazine articles about Wilson and his memoir, Woodrow Wilson As I Know Him. His accounts were sentimentalized and often inaccurate.

Wilson evidently did not read Tumulty’s book, but he soon found reasons for being vexed with his former secretary. At the beginning of April 1922, Tumulty asked Wilson to give him a statement that he could read at the Democrats’ Jefferson Day dinner in New York. Wilson, who was working behind the scenes on “The Document,” declined, saying he did not think this an appropriate occasion “for breaking my silence.” According to Edith, Tumulty telephoned her the next day to ask her to get “the Governor” to make the statement, which she refused to do. She recalled that Tumulty then asked to see Wilson about “an important personal matter.” She put down the telephone to ask her husband, who agreed to see Tumulty before he went for his ride in the afternoon. She was out when Tumulty came to the house, but she recalled that her brother cautioned Tumulty not to mention the statement. When Edith got back, Wilson told her Tumulty had not mentioned it.²²

After the dinner, at which Tumulty did issue a statement on Wilson’s behalf, he described the incident differently. “As I stood up to go,” he explained, “you took hold of my arm and in substance said what was contained in the message.” He admitted that Wilson had not told him to make the remarks at the dinner, “but I think I was justified by every fair implication from what you said to me.” The statement read, “Say to the Democrats of New York that I am ready to support any man who stands for the salvation of America, and the salvation of America is justice to all classes”—which the press took as an endorsement of Cox, who was at the dinner. When Wilson read the newspaper accounts, he wrote to The New York Times, “I did not send any message whatever to that dinner nor authorize anyone to convey a message.” As for Cox, Wilson gibed privately that the party would “commit suicide” if it nominated him again. He did not answer Tumulty’s letters of explanation and profuse apology. “Tumulty will sulk for a few days, then come like a spanked child to say he is sorry and wants to be forgiven,” Edith recalled him saying. He took no lasting hard feelings away from this incident, and he later recommended Tumulty as a possible Senate candidate in New Jersey in 1924. The hard feelings were on Tumulty’s side. He did not come to the house until the ex-president lay dying, and then Edith would not allow anyone but family members into the sickroom.²³

Wilson cared about maintaining his silence in early 1922 because he wanted to control his reentry into Democratic politics. Besides repeatedly working over and consulting on “The Document,” he endorsed and opposed candidates for the Senate in Democratic primaries in 1922. In Missouri, he backed a challenge to James Reed by Breckinridge Long, his former student who had served in the State Department. He felt keenly disappointed when Reed narrowly won the primary, and he seriously considered endorsing Reed’s Republican opponent. In Mississippi, he denounced Vardaman, who was attempting a comeback, as “thoroughly false and untrustworthy,” and he applauded Vardaman’s defeat. In Maryland, he endorsed former representative David J. Lewis, and he lamented Lewis’s loss to William Cabell Bruce, his nemesis from the University of Virginia. Despite those disappointments, Wilson took heart from the election results in November 1922. In New York, Al Smith won back the governorship, and in Congress the Democrats picked up seventy-six seats in the House and five in the Senate—enough to give them effective control of both houses in combination with newly energized Republican insurgents. “I believe with you that Tuesday’s elections make it easier to turn the thoughts of the country in the right direction,” Wilson told former justice Clarke, “and to make ready for the great duty of 1924.”²⁴

Wilson had something in mind for 1924 more personal than a renewed push for League membership. His earlier remark to Clarke about the need to nominate someone to rectify “the gross and criminal blunder of failing to ratify the Treaty of Versailles” sounded suspiciously like a description of himself. Writing around the same time to an Alabama newspaper editor and influential state Democrat, Wilson asserted, “[M]y principles and purposes are known and sympathetically interpreted in every part of the world,—particularly among the plainer and simpler kind of people. The selfish conspiracy against the realization of my ideals is confined to a few highbrows who have their own ends to seek. I think I am justified in saying that I am perhaps the only public man in the world who does not need to be interpreted to anybody.”²⁵ Incredible as it might seem, Wilson wanted to run again for president in 1924.

The intervening year, 1923, marked the best time in his life since the stroke. Nearly everyone who saw him commented on how much better he looked. In June, a senior reporter for The New York Times, Richard Oulahan, wrote a long story about him. Oulahan noted that he still limped but did not drag his left foot, and he used a cane but could stand without it and could get in and out of a car without help. “He has good color, his eyes are clear, his voice is strong, his cheeks are filled out, and he has lost that emaciated appearance of face and body which shocked those who saw him on his first outing after his long siege of confinement to the White House.” The reporter noted that from all reports, mentally he was “the Woodrow Wilson of the stirring days of September, 1919.” He compensated for lack of paid work with attention to public affairs. Oulahan dismissed rumors that Wilson was personally interested in the race for the Democratic nomination in 1924, and he noted that Wilson had not committed himself to any of the contenders, not even his son-in-law McAdoo.²⁶ This newspaper story read a lot like the one by Louis Seibold in The World three years earlier, which had set the stage for the abortive stab at a third-term bid.

As in 1920, McAdoo’s drive for the nomination pained Wilson. Mac had moved his family to California in 1922 to establish a new political base, and he appeared to be the front-runner. Wilson’s silence notwithstanding, McAdoo might have secured a lock on the nomination except for damaging publicity growing out of legal work he had done for the Teapot Dome oilmen—the kind of guilt by association that Wilson had had the wit to avoid. This setback made McAdoo covet an endorsement from his father-in-law all the more. He sent warm, newsy letters regularly, and in November he and Nell and their two daughters came to Washington for a ten-day visit. Wilson did not want to talk about the campaign with McAdoo, and he asked Edith not to leave him alone with his son-in-law. On the last day of the visit, McAdoo asked Edith if he could talk about the campaign with Wilson. She declined the request and once more the Crown Prince went away empty-handed—with dire consequences for his candidacy and the prospect of a deadlocked convention.²⁷

During the summer of 1923, Americans got a macabre reminder of Wilson’s improved health. On August 2, the news flashed across the wires that President Harding had died in San Francisco while on an official tour of the West. Wilson had found his successor amiable and felt grateful to him for permitting Grayson to continue as the ex-president’s doctor, but he held Harding’s intellect in contempt. In May 1922, he had told Ida Tarbell that Harding “has nothing to think with,” and he remembered that at his meeting with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee “nobody [but Harding] asked such unintelligent questions.”²⁸ Also, like other critics, Wilson had winced at his successor’s use of language. Such aspersions paled, however, in the face of what Wilson saw as his official duty. On August 8, he rode in the funeral procession that carried Harding’s casket from the White House to the Capitol. The irony was not lost on reporters and spectators: the living ghost from the inauguration of two years earlier was riding down Pennsylvania Avenue behind the body of the seemingly hale younger man who had bounded up the Capitol steps.

During the summer and fall of 1923, Wilson gave other signs of increasing strength and vigor, and three weeks after Harding’s funeral, Edith left for a short vacation in Newport, Rhode Island, and Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts. Although visitors usually noted how well she was bearing up, the strain of caring for her invalid husband had taken a toll on her. This was the first time in their seven and a half years of marriage that the couple had been apart even for one night, except during Wilson’s visit to the Atlantic fleet in 1917. Edith’s decision to get away sprang from confidence that her husband was well enough to stand a brief separation, and he raised no objections. She wrote loving letters to him every day, and with one hand he typed two letters to her, which were speckled with errors, and then, at the end of the second one, he wrote by hand, “I do not feel equal to the typewriter to-day but must send a line to say I love you.“²⁹ Edith went away again in October for a weekend in New York.

His spirits were good during the summer and fall of 1923, and he was rediscovering some of his old-time cheerful fatalism. In September, Bernard Baruch told the British diplomat Lord Riddell that Wilson had recently said to him, “Perhaps it was providential that I was stricken down when I was. Had I kept my health I should have carried the League. Events have shown that the world was not ready for it.” That was not the only time he expressed that belief. His daughter Margaret later recalled him saying that when America joined the League, it would be because the people were convinced it was right “and then will be the only right time for them to do it.” With a smile, he added, “Perhaps God knew better than I did after all.”³⁰

In September, Jessie came with her husband, Frank Sayre, and their three children. They were bidding good-bye before leaving for Asia, where Sayre would spend a year as a legal adviser to the king of Siam. The other members of the Big Three at the peace conference also came to call, Clemenceau the previous December and Lloyd George in October. Those were pleasant personal visits, and Lloyd George particularly enjoyed hearing Wilson recite limericks.

Wilson’s mind went back to his academic days. In October he asked his former student Raymond Fosdick, who was now working for the Rockefeller Foundation, to see him about “an educational matter.” When Fosdick arrived the following week, Wilson told him that he had made his greatest contributions not in politics but as a teacher and college administrator and wanted to do more there. He believed that American colleges and universities could yet rise to the levels of scholarship of Oxford and Cambridge, and he asked for help from the Rockefeller Foundation so that he could become “president of some university which would take the initiative in the new reformation.” Fosdick suggested that on account of his health Wilson might not be up to such a task, but he insisted he was “ready for any kind of work.” Fosdick noted that Wilson had tears in his eyes when he talked about his ideas, and he spoke bitterly about their alma mater: “Princeton was bought once with Ivory Soap money, and I suppose she is for sale again.”³¹

Fosdick later confessed to Baker that he was “considerably embarrassed by his request,” but he promised to take it up with his colleagues in New York. A month later, he wrote diplomatically that the foundation found Wilson’s ideas attractive but it was “necessarily reluctant to initiate enterprises of an experimental character in education.” Unappeased, Wilson fired back, “Please do not let the idea get rooted in the minds of the Rockefeller trustees that what I have in mind is experimental. … I can honestly say that my plans are so thoroughly thought out in detail that there is nothing experimental about them.” Fosdick promised to talk further with Wilson, but thirty years later he would write, “It was, of course, the nostalgic dream of an old and crippled warrior as he thinks over the battles of his younger days—a knight with his armor laid aside, sitting by the fire in the autumn of his life and remembering the blows he had struck for causes that had inspired his youth.”³²

That characterization of Wilson was not entirely on the mark. More than nostalgia, Wilson was showing the same delusions of potency he had demonstrated when he hatched his third-term scheme in 1920. Nor, despite what he said to Fosdick, had he forsaken politics. Twice in November 1923, he spoke out forcefully on current affairs. On the day before the fifth anniversary of the Armistice, he gave his first and only talk over the radio. Standing before a microphone in the library of his house, he spoke in a voice that quavered a bit at first and betrayed more of a southern accent than in the past. He excoriated America’s failure to live up to the responsibilities to maintain peace, but he believed that the nation would “retrieve that fatal error and assume once more the role of courage, self-respect and helpfulness which every true American must wish to regard as our natural part in the affairs of the world.” Stations across the country carried the talk, and some towns set up loudspeakers in auditoriums, allowing thousands of people to hear the ex-president’s voice for the first time. It might have served as a kickoff for a campaign.³³

The following day brought another public appearance that looked even more like a campaign event. This year, the Armistice Day crowd on S Street numbered an estimated 20,000 people. A band played, and Senator Glass spoke for a delegation of Democratic dignitaries, assuring the ex-president of the American people’s loyalty to and affection for him. Visibly moved, Wilson faltered and stopped as he began to speak. The band struck up the hymn “How Firm a Foundation,” but he raised his hand and started speaking again. After paying tribute to the doughboys and General Pershing and condemning the Armistice again as “an armed standstill,” Wilson concluded, “I am not one of those who have the least anxiety about the triumph of the principles I have stood for. I have seen fools resist Providence before and I have seen the destruction, as will come upon these again—utter destruction and contempt. That we shall prevail is as sure as that God reigns.” The crowd did not disperse after he stopped speaking, and the band played on until the car pulled out of the driveway to take Wilson for his afternoon ride, accompanied by Edith and her mother.³⁴ This would be his last speech and public appearance.

Another moving experience awaited him six weeks later, on his sixty-seventh birthday. On December 28, as he and Margaret were about to go out for his daily ride, Cleveland Dodge and other wealthy friends surprised Wilson with a Rolls-Royce. The car, which reportedly cost $15,000, had a removable top for open rides; it also sported orange and black stripes on the trim and the monogram W.W. on the rear doors. Wilson was delighted, and a photograph of him sitting in the Rolls-Royce would be the last one taken of him. That same day in New York, Franklin Roosevelt spoke at a luncheon of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and announced its annual $25,000 prize for service to the world. Someone who had seen Wilson the week before told reporters at the luncheon that his mind was active, but he was no longer up to the strains of the presidency.³⁵

Wilson thought otherwise. Earlier in December, he had told Baker, “You may be sure that I will keep my eye out for every opportunity to guide the Democrats, and I hope and believe that the opportunity will not now be long deferred.” On January 16, 1924, the Democratic National Committee made a pilgrimage to S Street, where Wilson shook hands and said something personal to each of the 200 visitors. The party chairman, Representative Cordell Hull of Tennessee, announced that the next convention would meet in New York and presented Wilson with a resolution from the committee pledging a campaign “inspired by the incomparable achievements of his great Administration and confident of the compelling power of the high ideals which he brought to the service of his country.” Four days later, Wilson took a step toward guiding that upcoming campaign by sending Newton Baker a “confidential document”—the latest version of “The Document”—for Baker to use in the platform committee. Wilson did not trust the Document to the mails but had Randolph Bolling hand it over more than nine days later, on Baker’s next visit to Washington.³⁶

The same day that Wilson wrote to Newton Baker, Raymond Fosdick stopped by for an impromptu visit. Fosdick had come earlier in January to put a polite quietus to the university scheme. On this second visit, the conversation rambled over many topics, including the League, and Wilson commented on current affairs, telling Fosdick, “Mussolini is a coward. Somebody should call his bluff. Dictators are all cowards,” and “Some day another Bismarck will arise and the Germans will wipe the French off the face of the earth—and I hope they do.” He thought the 1920 campaign had been “fought with lies. Sick as I was, I wish I had consented to run. I think I could have won.” He liked Newton Baker as a future president but thought he “ought not to run in 1924. He ought to be saved for 1928.”³⁷

The person Wilson wanted to run in 1924 was himself. Around the time of the letter to Newton Baker and Fosdick’s last visit, he made notes in shorthand and on his typewriter for a speech accepting the Democratic nomination and a third inaugural address. For the acceptance speech, he praised the Democrats as “an effective instrument of public service … (See Burke on party)” while lambasting the “complete and disastrous failure of the Republicans,” as well as their “deep and heinous treason,” which had betrayed “a deep and holy cause whose success has been bought by the blood of thousands of your fellow countrymen.” In “3rd Inaugural,” he admonished Americans “[t]o fight and defeat all—aggression—all Reaction and thus bring light and hope back into the world of affairs. … Present objects and motives: to establish an order in which labour shall have assumed greater dignity and capital acquired greater vigour and advantage by the practice of justice.” “Justice,” in capital letters, headed “Closing passage of third Inaugural,” which read, “[Justice] is the only, certain insurance against revolution. … Without justice society must break up into hostile groups—even into hostile individuals and go utterly to pieces.”³⁸

Those fragmentary notes show that Wilson had not retreated from his progressivism at home and internationalism abroad. Together with his other comments at the time, they prefigured essential elements of the next Democratic presidency a decade later, under Franklin Roosevelt, particularly in its vigorous government intervention in economic affairs and resistance to aggression and dictatorship overseas. Even if Wilson had been healthier, he almost certainly would have had no real chance to move his party and country in those directions. The Democrats were retreating from the League and international commitments almost as fast as the Republicans. Worse, they were on the verge of tearing themselves apart over such red-hot social issues as immigration restriction, prohibition, and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. Those conflicts—which pitted big-city Catholics from the Northeast and Midwest against small-town and rural Protestant whites from the South and West—had intruded on Democratic conventions as early as 1912, and they burst out in force in 1920. The looming deadlock in 1924 between the two sides’ respective champions, Al Smith and William McAdoo, would come close to wrecking the party. That Wilson’s presence could have made much difference seems doubtful. Yet with radio at his disposal, even as a semi-invalid he might have made a better compromise candidate than the one the party finally picked—the obscure and lackluster John W. Davis.

How much hope Wilson invested in these notions is hard to tell. He had a long-practiced capacity for denial of obstacles and limitations, and this would have been his second stab at a third-term bid. Yet reminders of mortality haunted him. A month earlier, Frank Cobb, his journalist friend and collaborator on “The Document,” had died, and Cobb’s widow, in answering Wilson’s letter of condolence, had written, “Speaking of you a few days before he died he ended up triumphantly—‘He never lowered his Standard.’” Those words could have served as Wilson’s epitaph. In a brief foreword to a collection of Cobb’s writings, which included an account of how the president had bared his agony of soul on the eve of entering the war, Wilson wote early in January, “I recognized in him a peculiar genius for giving direct and effective expression to the enlightened opinions which he held.” That was Wilson’s last published piece of writing, and it could have served as another epitaph for him. On his last visit, Fosdick found him in poor shape, and when Fosdick asked him how he was, Wilson quoted a presidential predecessor: “John Quincy Adams is all right, but the house he lives in is dilapidated, and it looks as if he would soon have to move out.”³⁹

Another indication that Wilson may have recognized that time was running out came in his dealings with Ray Stannard Baker. Several people had obliquely approached him about writing his biography, including Creel and the University of Chicago historian William E. Dodd, who was both a fervent admirer and a fellow southern academic expatriate. Early in January 1924, Baker tried the direct approach, reminding Wilson that he had once spoken to him “about going forward with a further and more complete study of your whole career. I have a great ambition to do this and do it thoroughly.” At first, Wilson put him off, saying his papers were “scattered and inaccessible” and he had doubts about “making too much of a single man.” On January 25, however, he wrote to Baker that he would give him exclusive access to his papers: “I would rather have your interpretation of them than that of anybody else I know.”⁴⁰

The would-be biographer would later get cold feet about undertaking the task. As an editor friend predicted to Baker—correctly, as it turned out—“It will swallow up your whole life.” Early in 1925, Baker shared his second thoughts in long talks with Edith Wilson, explaining the need for “my own complete freedom as a writer. If I should undertake such a task, I must put down exactly what I found, and take my own time in doing it.” For her part, Edith was, as Baker recalled, “as level-headed and far-sighted as I could wish.” Still, he wrote, he might not have agreed to take on the task “if Mrs. Wilson had not shown me a letter written to me by Mr. Wilson only a few days before his death. It was dated January 25, 1924, and was the last letter he ever wrote to anyone. He was too ill to sign it.” Baker could not resist what he took to be a deathbed entreaty.⁴¹

The day after Wilson dictated that letter, everyone thought him well enough to allow Grayson to leave on a hunting trip to South Carolina. He seemed about as well as usual until January 29, when the night nurse told Randolph Bolling that she thought Wilson was very sick, and after midnight Edith instructed her brother to send a telegram to Grayson. When the doctor received the telegram the next day, he telephoned Edith and said he would come back as soon as possible but thought Wilson was just suffering from his recurrent digestive troubles. When Grayson arrived on January 31, he examined Wilson and did not find his condition alarming. Still, Edith was concerned enough to call in Dr. Sterling Ruffin, who had also attended her husband after the stroke, and he and Grayson issued a joint statement to the press that Wilson had a digestive complaint that confined him to bed.⁴²

Behind the walls at S Street, apprehension was mounting. On February 1, Edith told Randolph Bolling she thought her husband was dying, and she asked him to contact Wilson’s children. Bolling telephoned Margaret, who took the train from New York and arrived in the afternoon. He telegraphed Nell; she and McAdoo started out immediately but would not reach Washington until the day of the funeral. Jessie and her family were in Bangkok, and she got the news of her father’s illness by a cablegram that Bolling sent through the Siamese embassy. That same day, the physicians began giving their patient oxygen and morphine, and they issued regular updates on his condition to reporters who gathered outside the house. Wilson was only intermittently conscious. He spoke his last sentences that Friday. When Grayson read him a note from President Calvin Coolidge, he said, “He is a fine man.” When the doctor talked to him about his condition, he said, “I am ready. When the machinery is broken—“He stopped and then repeated, “I am ready.” Stirring once more later, he told Grayson, “You have been good to me. You have done everything you could.” The next day, Saturday, February 2, he briefly regained consciousness in the afternoon and called out faintly, “Edith.” That was his last word.⁴³

Woodrow Wilson died at eleven-fifteen in the morning of Sunday, February 3, 1924. Besides Grayson and two nurses, only Edith and Margaret were in the bedroom when he breathed his last. Other family members and friends were in the house, and hundreds of people were outside in the street, some kneeling in prayer. Grayson came out the front door and announced, with tears streaming down his cheeks and his voice trembling, “The end came at 11:15.” In a brief statement, he explained, “His heart action became feebler and feebler and the heart muscle was so fatigued that it refused to act any longer.” Grayson attributed the remote cause of death to the stroke and the immediate cause to “exhaustion following a digestive upset which began in the early part of this week and reached an acute state until the early morning hours of February first.” On the official death certificate, Grayson listed “General Arterio-sclerosis with hemiplegia”—hardening of the arteries and paralysis—as the cause of death, with “Asthenia”—weakness and loss of strength—as a contributory cause. In lay terms, the stroke and its underlying pathology had finally worn him out and killed him.⁴⁴

The funeral and burial that came three days later were Edith’s choices. She declined President Coolidge’s offer to use his influence with Congress to have Wilson’s body lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda, as Harding’s had done six months earlier, or to have her husband buried at Arlington—Wilson had reportedly believed that the land for the cemetery had been taken unfairly from the family of Robert E. Lee. Nor, with his unhealed resentments toward Princeton, had he wanted to be buried in the cemetery on Witherspoon Street, which contained the graves of other presidents of the college. Edith did not want him to be buried alongside Ellen in Rome, Georgia, or with his parents in Columbia, South Carolina. Instead, she accepted an offer from James Edward Freeman, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, to inter her husband’s remains in the basement chapel of the newly begun cathedral. Freeman had visions of his cathedral becoming America’s Westminster Abbey, and he had previously persuaded the family of Admiral George Dewey to bury the victor of Manila Bay in the same chapel. That ambition of Freeman’s appalled the now only living ex-president, Taft, who, according to his granddaughter, implored his wife, “[D]on’t let those body snatchers at the Cathedral get me.”⁴⁵

The funeral service took place in the house on S Street, where family, officials, and old friends crowded in. Edith allowed Tumulty to attend, but she had word sent to House that there would not be room for him. Also, after learning that the Senate had named Lodge to attend, she wrote, “As the funeral is private, and not an official one, and realizing that your presence there would be embarrassing to you and unwelcome to me I write to request that you do not attend.” President and Mrs. Coolidge came, but Taft, who was now chief justice, was ill and could not be present. Most of the members of Wilson’s cabinet were in attendance. Two lines of uniformed servicemen decorated for bravery in the war flanked a pathway to the door, but there was no military presence inside. The ministers of the Presbyterian churches where Wilson had most recently worshipped, Sylvester Beach from Princeton and James Taylor of the Central Presbyterian Church in Washington, conducted most of the fifteen-minute service. Beach read from Psalm 23 and offered a brief tribute to Wilson for “his unswerving devotion to duty; for his courage to do the right as God gave him to see the right.” Bishop Freeman closed the service by reading biblical verses from a devotional book that Wilson had kept at his bedside.⁴⁶

A hearse followed by cars carrying the funeral party proceeded up Massachusetts Avenue to the site of the cathedral on Mount St. Alban. More officials attended this service, including Secretary of State Hughes, Wilson’s opponent in 1916, and others from the Coolidge cabinet, as well as Harding’s widow. After the choir and clergy processed in, Freeman performed the Episcopal ritual of the order of the burial of the dead, with Beach and Taylor assisting in the responsive readings. At the end, the congregation recited the Lord’s Prayer, with Episcopal “trespasses” rather than Presbyterian “debts,” and the Apostles’ Creed. After the benediction, the choir recessed to the hymn “The Strife Is O’er, the Battle Done.” The only military touches came when a bugler outside played taps as the honor guard lowered the casket into the crypt. At the same moment, another bugler sounded the same notes at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in the amphitheater at Arlington.⁴⁷

Those services marked the end of Wilson’s earthly days in ways that were at once ironic and fitting. The most Presbyterian of presidents now lay at rest in an Episcopal cathedral, interred with the rites of the church his forebears had rebelled against. Yet for all his pride in his heritage, Wilson had never made much of sectarian differences. He had once joined a Congregational church, and he had taught at colleges founded by Quakers and Methodists. At Princeton, he had labored to loosen lingering Presbyterian orthodoxy, and Fosdick remembered that when Wilson had led chapel services, he had always closed with the same reading from the Book of Common Prayer, which began, “Almighty and most merciful Father; we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed the devices and desires of our own hearts,” and included the plea, “Spare those, O God, who confess their faults.”⁴⁸ At Princeton, in Trenton, and in Washington, he had appointed Jews and Catholics to important posts, and he had counted Catholics and Jews among his closest political associates. When he came to marry a second time, he wed an Episcopalian, and he never asked her to leave her church for his. His middle daughter also married an Episcopalian, and her older son would one day serve as dean of the cathedral where his grandfather lay buried.

Wilson’s interment in what would later rise to become a great stone edifice in the nation’s capital suited him. Almost alone among truly notable presidents, he had no strong association with a single home or place: no Mount Vernon; no Monticello; no Sagamore Hill, as with his rival Roosevelt; no Hyde Park, as with his successor Roosevelt. Son and grandson of immigrants; born in Virginia; raised in Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina; educated in North Carolina, New Jersey, Virginia, and Maryland; working as a private citizen in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and New Jersey; elected to office from New Jersey; holding office in New Jersey and Washington, D.C.—Wilson came closer to epitomizing the mobile, rootless American of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than any other president. Likewise, he spent more time working within nongovernmental institutions than others who ascended to the White House, and he had risen to the top rank in two private professions. Wilson never thought of himself as a cosmopolitan, but he had about him a breadth and catholicity that made a great building in a city that is home to everyone and no one in America a fitting place for his remains.

The chapel in the basement of that building would not be Wilson’s final resting place. Three decades after his burial, when the cathedral’s soaring nave was finally finished, his remains would come up to the tomb there in time for the centennial of his birth. There, on his birthday, a military honor guard would yearly lay a wreath, and the light streaming through the stained glass windows would cast bright patches of color on his stone sarcophagus. This last move resonated with the ups and downs and controversies that would continue to swirl around his memory.

Wilson, along with Lincoln and Jefferson, would come to be one of the best remembered and most argued over of all presidents. Like Jefferson, but unlike Lincoln or even such once-controversial figures as the two Roosevelts, he would not ascend into a glow of warm and near universal, though often contradictory, adulation. Just as Jefferson’s thought, actions, and aftermath formed an ideological battleground in the nineteenth century and beyond, so Wilson’s words, deeds, ideas, and legacies would furnish fodder for debate and conflict throughout the twentieth century and beyond. The man whose bones lie in the cathedral would leave behind a mind and spirit that live on in everything he touched.