When the Cheering Stopped: The Last Years of Woodrow Wilson

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Praise for When the Cheering Stopped

A tragedy, brilliantly told. —Life

Brilliant. With this book we see Wilson as much more than one of the great American Presidents. He becomes real as a human being. —Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey

One of the most remarkable—and frightening—stories on American politics and personalities I have ever read. —Theodore H. White

Reads like a thriller … A hair-raising chronicle. —Houston Post

One of the strangest periods in the history of the U. S. Presidency … Dramatic and deeply moving. —New York Herald Tribune

There’s a new star on the literary horizon, a man whose writing is going to bring about a revision of certain historical attitudes. His book has penetrated the curtain of silence that obscured Woodrow Wilson’s last years and has produced a human being. —Chicago Tribune

Remarkable … A pageant restoring a time long ago as if it were yesterday. —Book-of-the-Month Club News

All the elements of a Greek tragedy. —The Christian Science Monitor

A book that cannot fail to touch readers’ emotions, for it is an eloquent and persuasive witness to the truth that the White House is one of the truly great stages of our time, and the tragedy of Woodrow Wilson one of the greatest dramas that has been played on it. —Show

One of the season’s most stunning adventures in searching biography. A bold, sensitive picture of one of history’s most enigmatic figures. —Chicago American

Sandburg did it for Lincoln, and now, in an exceptionally gripping and moving account, Gene Smith does it for Wilson … Magnificently portrayed. —San Francisco Call-Bulletin

A remarkably effective account of the descent of a once magnificent man … Unabashedly a piece of popular history. —Oakland News

The most interesting history since Winston Churchill. —Dwight MacDonald

When the Cheering Stopped

The Last Years of Woodrow Wilson

Gene Smith

To S. R. S. and J. S. S.

CONTENTS

PART ONE: THE PRESIDENT

PART TWO: THE SECOND MRS. WILSON

PART THREE: S STREET

Bibliography

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

PART ONE

The President

If we do not know courage

1

She who in her youth had been Miss Elly Lou Axson of Rome, Georgia, but who more latterly was First Lady of America, lay dying. In March she had slipped and fallen heavily, and during the spring she ceased to come downstairs for meals. In late July her doctor took up residence in the room next to hers, and as August began it was obvious that she could not live very much longer. And in fact the case was hopeless from the start, for she was suffering from Bright’s disease and complications, the complications being tuberculosis of both kidneys.

Her husband, the President, either did not understand or could not to himself admit that she must die. All through July and into the first days of August he wrote friends that there was no real cause for alarm. But when her meals were served to her in the sickroom, it frightened him that she would not eat, and he would take a plate of food and sink to his knees beside her bed. You will soon get well, darling, if you’ll try hard to eat something, he would say. Now please take this bite, dear. Often he got up at three in the morning to be with her when she could not sleep, and that he was there seemed to give her a degree of peace, for she was restless in those brief intervals when he left her. Is your father looking well? Is your father looking well? she kept asking her daughters when her husband was out of the room.

To one of the daughters, Eleanor—Little Nell or Nellie to the family—her sickness seemed like the coming-true of a terrible premonition. The day before her father’s 1913 inauguration Nellie helped her mother dress for a tea-time call on the outgoing President and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. William Howard Taft. Arranging her mother’s hair and adjusting her prettiest hat, the girl, excited and young, chattered away. But her mother was utterly silent. At the end, Nellie kissed her and told her how lovely she looked. And the mother put both hands over her face and burst into tears. Nellie found spirits of ammonia for her and after a while her mother said she was all right. But Nellie had seen an awful, sudden despair in her mother’s face, something she had never seen there before, and it terrified her. When her parents had gone off to the Tafts’, she began to walk around the room, saying over and over, It will kill them; it will kill them both. She was crying, and soon she was screaming, and after a time she was crawling under the bed and pounding the floor with her hands and crying over and over again, It will kill them! It will kill them both!

But when the next day the sun came out just as her father, taking his oath of office, lifted his wife’s small Bible to his lips, Nellie forgot her fears and took the light as an omen that all would go well. During the inauguration speech, it touched the girl to see her mother leave her seat to stand just beneath her father, looking up at him like a small child, a look of rapture on her face.

There was no Inaugural Ball—the President and First Lady did not want one—but there was a party in the White House, with the many relatives of the family, nearly all from the South, roaming through the rooms and singing around a piano. Cousin Florence Hoyt, a cripple, arrived at the railroad station and, unable to find a cab, hailed an old Negro selling frankfurters from a wagon pulled by a skinny scarecrow of a horse. She asked him to take her to the White House, main entrance, please, and he doubtfully agreed, suggesting, however, that they go in the back way. Cousin Florence would have none of that, though; nestling among the hot dogs, she told the man to make for the front door. Liveried attendants there lifted her out and, relatives shouting with laughter at her carriage, she was taken in to offer her congratulations. In the kitchen even an old servant of the President’s late father was celebrating with the Negroes of the White House staff; to him the President—Cousin Woodrow and Uncle Woodrow to the majority of the guests—was still the Mister Tommy of boyhood days.

As Cousin Florence was being welcomed, someone came to say that Aunt Annie Howe, the President’s sister, had fallen on a marble staircase and cut her forehead. A servant was sent for a doctor and returned with Lieutenant Cary Travers Grayson of the U. S. Navy, the White House physician under President Taft and Taft’s predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt. Grayson at once sewed up the slight wound and quickly put Aunt Annie right, and the President said to him that it had all been so promptly and efficiently done that Lieutenant Grayson must have been prepared for Aunt Annie’s fall even before it happened. The party went on: there was a stand-up buffet lunch, a parade, and in the evening wonderful fireworks.

In the days that followed, the Wilson daughters, Margaret, Jessica and Nellie, the first two blue-eyed blondes, the last a brunette with blue-gray eyes very like her father’s—a noticeable man, with large gray eyes, his wife called him, quoting Wordsworth—enjoyed themselves enormously. They were all single and in their twenties and Washington was marvelously stocked with young officers and aides to take them dancing and to the horse shows and parties. They frolicked around their new home, jumping out of dark corners to scare the servants, and they went on the White House tours incognito, loudly criticizing the President’s daughters to the out-of-town tourists. Their father, looking better than he had ever looked before (or would ever look again), did not find his duties onerous. He spent no more than four or five hours a day on his work, and saying he still kept to a schoolboy schedule, he did not work on Saturdays or Sundays. Nights when the girls were home the family gathered by a piano, and the President and Margaret, an aspiring singer, performed duets together. Or the President did the imitations which had for years convulsed his daughters: The Drunken Man, during which performance he staggered about with a cow-like look in his eyes and an incoherent mumble coming from his slack lips; The Heavy Englishman, with an insufferably superior accent and an invisible monocle; The Villain, done with a scowl and a dragging foot; the Fourth of July Orator, gesturing not with his hands but with his feet, and Theodore Roosevelt, waving his fist and shouting, We stand at Armageddon and battle for the Lord! There were limerick recitations also, including the much-loved one with which, as head of Princeton University, he had surprised a dinner party:

"There was a young monk of Siberia,

Whose existence grew drearier and drearier,

Till he burst from his cell with a hell of a yell,

And eloped with the Mother Superior."

Sometimes in the Oval Room on the second floor, which the First Lady filled with their old furniture from Princeton, he romped with Nellie and Margaret around the table in so fast and furious a fashion that his wife cried out, Woodrow, what is the matter with you? Jessie would generally only watch, not participate, when the fun grew too boisterous, for she was, according to her father, classified along with her mother as one of the Proper Members of the family, as opposed to himself and Nellie, who were the Vulgar Members. Margaret, he said, was in between: she was Proper part of the time and Vulgar all the rest.

In the afternoons when the weather was good he and one or more of his womenfolk went riding in one of the White House Pierce-Arrows, big open cars with right-hand drive and the President’s Seal on the door. He mapped out a series of routes, and the chauffeur was not allowed to deviate from them: The Number One Ride, The Southern Maryland Ride, The Potomac. Going on these rides, the First Lady saw things that shocked her. She was born in a small town and grew up there and after her marriage lived in a series of small college towns, and the crowded big-city back streets and alleys of Washington were a revelation to her. She walked through the slums and talked a great deal to the Negro servants about their homes, and it became her passion to do something for the people who lived in the houses that appalled her. She urged the President to get a bill passed that would clean up the slums, and he sent one on to Congress. That she was involved in such a project amused diplomatic and political Washington, and people smiled at the mention of her name. Her clothing also caused derisive comment, for she was far from fashionable. When she let it be known that she did not intend to spend more than one thousand dollars a year for clothes, she was marked down as an eccentric. Actually, for the former Miss Elly Lou Axson and former Mrs. Professor Wilson and former Mrs. President of Princeton, one thousand dollars for clothing was a fantastic sum. In the middle years of her marriage she was accustomed to spending less than fifty a year on her attire, and it was said in Princeton that every fall, year after year, Mrs. Wilson looked sweeter and sweeter in her brown fall dress. She had never in her life owned furs until after her husband was elected President of the United States; then she let him give her sables. She was tiny and gentle and had golden hair and spoke in the softest of Southern tones and painted landscapes in a studio she created in the White House attic. When, anonymously, several of her paintings were sold through a gallery, she donated the money to educational funds for Southern mountaineer people and for crippled children.

She loved flowers and plants and remodeled the gardens on the south lawn of the White House. She planted boxwood, rosebushes and rose trees, tall cypresses and clipped hedges, and placed among them a statue of a small Pan, which the servants said must be symbolic of the boy she had wanted to continue her husband’s name. For that husband she had the very greatest of solicitude and worried constantly over his health, which had never been strong. A doctor once told her that as long as a man’s neck was full and firm there was little need to worry about him, and often the First Lady massaged that of the President, calling to her daughters to come and see that there were no hollows there. Thinking of her husband’s health, she sent for Lieutenant Grayson, who had patched up Aunt Annie with such efficiency, and asked him if he would not look after the President. Grayson took on the job. He found that the President had suffered for years from neuritis and respiratory troubles and that a retinal hemorrhage in his left eye had damaged his sight badly. Grayson’s patient had been operated on for phlebitis—I was flea-bitten, he explained—and was also subject to headaches, but his greatest trouble came from digestive upsets that caused nausea, heartburn and gastritis, all of which he treated himself with his own stomach pump and a series of powders. It was a matter of turmoil in Central America, he said, of disturbances in the equatorial regions. Grayson took away the pump and the powders and put the President on a rigid diet based on raw eggs and orange juice. The President did not mind the juice, but he balked at the raw eggs. I feel as if I were swallowing a newborn baby, he groaned. Grayson forced him to stick to it, however, and also instituted regular golf sessions in Virginia and Maryland, getting up himself in the very early morning hours to make sure the President played the entire course. Himself a very mediocre golfer, Grayson was a fit partner for a player who, hampered by his poor sight, rarely broke 100, although his approach and putting shots were not bad. And the outings led to a new Presidential imitation: Grayson Approaching a Golf Ball. Soon the digestive problems were all but completely cleared up and Grayson, working with the President’s valet, arranged for the President to be regularly served only well-chosen foods that would also appeal to him: oatmeal, chicken, steak, Virginia country ham, a bit of port after dinner.

But as the President’s health improved, that of the First Lady declined. Jessica and Nellie had both gotten married, but as the family’s second summer in the White House began, both came back to be with their mother. Then came August, the August of 1914, and she was dying. Holding her hand, the President worked by her bedside, and his secretary, Joseph Patrick Tumulty of Jersey City, New Jersey, gave it out that there by her bed he wrote his note offering to mediate the disputes of the Europeans falling into the disaster called the Great War. By his instructions the First Lady was not told of the war—Don’t say anything to your mother about it—but when she asked about her bill to help the slum dwellers they were able to tell her it had passed Congress and would soon be implemented.*

In the end the President knew that she was dying, for she told him so herself, saying also that it was her wish that he marry again. On the morning of August 6, even with the impact of her words upon him, he was able to write a friend that he was hoping still. But in the late morning or early afternoon of that day a Princeton classmate of his 1879 class, now a Philadelphia doctor, plainly said to him that she could not live more than a few hours. All through that hot afternoon not forty-eight hours after the first German troops crossed the frontier and met Belgian defenders, the President and the girls sat with Ellen in her room filled with flowered chintz and gay cushions and light-colored lampshades. Two nurses and Grayson were there also. In another room the husbands of the two married girls waited with Joe Tumulty, who, not very much older than the daughters, had loved Ellen Wilson like a mother ever since the days in the New Jersey Governor’s mansion. They were all together in the other room and Grayson was alone for a few moments with her when she roused herself from a semi-stupor and took the doctor’s hand to draw him to her. Please take good care of Woodrow, Doctor, she whispered, uttering the last words of her life. A few minutes later Grayson told the family it would be well if they came back into her room. Twilight outside was about to begin; the day was still very warm. They walked to her bed and the girls knelt beside it. The President took her hand and was still holding it when, a little later, just before evening, she died. He was very controlled and looked over the bed at Grayson and said, Is it all over? Grayson nodded and the President quickly straightened up to fold her hands over her breast. She was fifty years old and they had been married twenty-nine years. He used to say, recalling the time they first met, when he was a little boy and she a baby, that he had loved her since she was in her cradle.

He walked to the window and looked south over the gardens she had planted and toward the Washington Monument and the Potomac and Virginia. Grayson was busying himself with the dead woman when he first heard the sobs. Oh my God, what am I going to do? What am I going to do? the President said over and over.

Outside, on the bell knob beside the main doorway, a heavy band of black crape soon appeared.

He did not want her to lie in a casket, so they placed her on a sofa in her room and he bent over to put a white silk shawl around her shoulders. For the rest of her time in the White House she was there, never alone at night, the President and one or more of the girls always sitting by her, talking quietly or reading or simply sitting still.

God has stricken me almost beyond what I can bear, he wrote a friend, and the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, said to the Secretary that he feared the President was about to have a breakdown. But in fact he did not again completely give vent to his feelings after his first sobs had stopped. At times it seemed as if he were about to, but he would pull himself together, saying, I must not give way.

Monday the tenth, in the morning, was the time for her funeral service, she at last in a casket resting on the shining floor of the East Room with its marble fireplaces and concert piano in gold leaf. Afterward the President and the girls withdrew to a room nearby and sat alone looking out toward the south. At two in the afternoon the funeral train left Washington for Georgia and the hillside cemetery in Rome where lay her mother and father, who in life had been, like the President’s father, a Presbyterian minister.

Riding down in the nearly empty special train, the President rarely left his wife but sat by the casket, only occasionally napping on a lounge in the car’s compartment. By Tuesday morning they were deep in the South, and although only the tolling of the engine bell signaled their approach, at the railroad platforms of the small towns and even at the way stations silent people stood with their hats off. Going through the hills and valleys of north Georgia, they saw old men standing at attention on the porches of the remote rural cabins. At noon in Rome the stores closed and the trolleys stopped running and the factories shut down; when in the early afternoon the train pulled into the station, bells began to toll all over the city. They got out of the train into the hot Georgia sun and a group of her relatives took the casket and put it in the hearse while the President looked at it with a strong fixed stare. They drove directly to the church where her father had been pastor and held a very simple service. There were two hymns and then the mourners formed up to go to the Myrtle Hill Cemetery. Schoolgirls in white, all holding myrtle branches, lined the way. Although the President had wanted as quiet a funeral as possible, almost the entire population of his wife’s home town turned out and stood by as her casket was lowered into the ground. When the casket rested in place, it was suggested to the President that now he leave the cemetery, but he said that he wanted to wait until the work was completely done. The crowds moved back to leave him quite alone with the girls near a large oak, and a breeze came up and moved some of the flowers. The workmen began to pile earth on Ellen’s casket where she lay with two rings on her hand, the first her wedding ring, the other a diamond one. His head bared, he stood by the men with their shovels, and a distance off the people of the town, the relatives and the Washington people shortly saw that once again the President was weeping because Ellen was gone.

* It was later declared unconstitutional. Many of the slums are still as they were when Ellen Wilson last saw them.

2

The President sat by himself hour after hour on the observation platform of the train heading for Washington and the now unbearably lonely White House. I feel so utterly alone, he said, and begged some of Ellen’s relatives to stay with him for a while. They did so, and for long hours he talked to them, saying it was his ambition and his career that killed her. Her brother said to him that it was not so, but that even if it were Ellen would not have wanted it otherwise.

Ellen was dead, Jessie and Nellie were married, and Margaret was often away. There was no woman to take charge of the White House. He asked his cousin, Helen Woodrow Bones, who had been brought up by his mother and father, if she would step into the breach. She took up permanent residence with him, hoping also that her two pets, Sandy the Airedale and Hamish the sheep dog, would amuse him. But of course nothing was the same, and often he sat alone reading Ellen’s favorite poems or went walking the corridors of the Corcoran art gallery to look again at paintings she had loved.

Ellen was dead. I do not care a fig for anything that affects me, he wrote a friend, and to another indicated that it would come as a blessing if someone would assassinate him. If I hadn’t gone into politics she would probably be alive now, he told her sister, and took a great interest in hearing from the British Ambassador details of how British Foreign Minister Sir Edward Grey, when he lost his own wife, worked to submerge his grief in his love of the outdoors, of flowers and fishing. Even as Great Britain went to the war, Sir Edward took time to write the President a sympathetic note. The lonely man in the White House read it out loud to the people around him.

Cary Grayson saw his patient declining before his eyes and worked harder than ever to keep up the golfing and auto rides. The doctor also stayed many nights in the White House to be on hand if the President wanted someone to chat with. And often the gentle Helen Bones would sit by her cousin in silence, simply wanting him to know that she was there to help. In her eyes he was something like a Bengal tiger she had once seen in a cage; she thought him trapped by his own cage of high position that prevented him from seeking out friendships wherever he could find them. As summer turned to fall and spring of 1915 came, Helen Bones herself sickened in the depressing atmosphere of the White House, and Grayson began to worry about her. She was a shy person and quiet, and had hardly any friends at all in Washington. Grayson decided that what she needed was a woman friend to talk with, someone who could take her out of the White House now and then.

Grayson looked around for the proper person and decided to introduce Helen to the older friend of the girl he would shortly marry. Grayson’s future wife was Alice Gertrude Gordon, who was called Altrude by her friends, and Altrude’s friend was a forty-two-year-old widow who owned a Washington jewelry shop left her by her late husband. The shop was a profitable one and ran itself with little aid from its owner, who was able to travel widely, take a great interest in clothes, particularly Paris frocks, and drive around in an electric automobile which, she said, was the first ever owned and operated by a Washington woman. She lived alone save for two maids in a house on 20th Street, N.W., at New Hampshire Avenue. She was tall and imposing and had a beautiful smile and appealing dimples. Her family was one of the oldest in Virginia and her father had been a plantation owner, Confederate officer, lawyer and judge, but she had been brought up in the impoverished post-Civil War South and had but two years of formal education. She was a non-political person, not active in Society or charitable circles, and in almost twenty years of Washington residence had never been inside the White House. Her name was Edith Bolling Galt.

Miss Bones and Mrs. Galt soon became friends, going for outings in Mrs. Galt’s electric (which she drove like an absolute madwoman) and for long afternoon walks along the paths in Rock Creek Park. The Galt home was only a few blocks from the park, and after their walks they would make for its library, where a fire would be lit and tea served. One day in March, after a long hike over muddy paths, Helen Bones invited her friend to come for tea in the White House instead of in the 20th Street library. Oh, I couldn’t do that; my shoes are a sight, and I should be taken for a tramp, Mrs. Galt said.

Yes, you can, said Miss Bones. There is not a soul there. Cousin Woodrow is playing golf with Dr. Grayson and we will go right upstairs in the elevator and you shall see no one. They went to the White House and to the second floor. As they stepped out of the elevator, they saw coming around the corner, attired in golfing clothes and muddy boots, the President of the United States and his physician. Mrs. Galt had time to note that the golf suits were tatty and not smart at all, and time to think to herself that if her own shoes were not clean at least she was wearing a Worth gown and a nice tricot hat. Then she was being introduced and Helen Bones was explaining that they had been for a walk and were going to have tea. I think you might ask us, Grayson said, and it was agreed that the men would change while the women had their shoes cleaned up. They would then all meet in the Oval Room.

They sat down to tea and when they finished the President took Mrs. Galt to see a desk made from the timbers of the British ship Resolute which, icebound and abandoned in the Arctic, was found by an American ship and returned to England, where Queen Victoria had the desk made for President Rutherford B. Hayes. Then Edith Galt went home. In the short time she was with the President, her cheerful manner made him laugh twice, making Helen Bones wonder if she was hearing right. He had laughed. I can’t say that I foresaw in the first minute what was going to happen, Helen Bones said later. It may have taken ten minutes.

A few days later Mrs. Galt came to dinner at the White House, and a few days after that went riding with the two cousins, she and Helen sitting in the back of the car while the President sat by the driver. He seemed very tired and hardly said a word while his cousin and her friend chattered away. Around five-thirty they drove back to the White House and he asked the guest if she would not join them for dinner. There was something plaintive in the way he told her he and Cousin Helen were entirely alone. After they ate he seemed far more lively and the three of them sat around a fire talking about books and their pasts in the South. He read aloud, as he always loved to do, and spoke feelingly of his father, who had drilled him in English and composition when he was a boy. He talked a good deal of that boyhood, of the time he saw Jefferson Davis, the prisoner of Union soldiers, being led past his home in Georgia. She spoke also of her family; she was a direct descendant of Pocahontas, who after saving Captain John Smith from execution married John Rolfe and was Mrs. Galt’s grandmother seven times removed. They talked about the scrimping the parents of both had to do after the Civil War, and of Negro ex-slaves their families knew. She saw, she thought, boyishness and simplicity in him, and something crying out for human companionship.

In the days that followed, the President and Mrs. Galt went for frequent rides with his cousin as chaperone (along with the ever-present Secret Service men), and she came often to dine in the White House. He sent her a book, and read aloud to her in the Oval Room. She met Margaret and Nellie, and he asked Dr. Grayson to come for dinner with Altrude. On April 30 in that spring of 1915 the four dined together, with Grayson performing the duty of picking up the ladies at their homes. The President earlier sent each a corsage of roses, golden ones for Mrs. Galt and pink for Altrude. Grayson came by at seven forty-five to pick up the older woman, she in a Worth black charmeuse gown with golden slippers, and the two drove together to get Altrude. Altrude, only twenty-one, was found in an unready state: she had decided the pink roses did not go with the dress she planned to wear and was changing into another one. Grayson, on edge and anxious that his friend make a good impression on the President, went into a panic at the idea that they would be late. Make her come on, he begged Mrs. Galt, and urged that the finishing touches be done in the auto—he would turn his head. They went to the car and Altrude and Mrs. Galt spent the time of the trip in deciding whether the pink roses should be worn at the side of the shoulder or the waistline. (Finally they chose the shoulder.) The dinner went off splendidly and on May 4 Mrs. Galt (in white satin and green slippers) was back to dine with the President, Aunt Annie and her daughter, Helen, Margaret and Grayson. It was a warm night and the party adjourned to the South Portico for their coffee. Soon everyone else drifted away, Grayson leaving and the other women taking a stroll on the south lawn. Mrs. Galt was alone with the President. He moved his chair closer to hers and said, I have asked Margaret and Helen to give me an opportunity to tell you something tonight that I have already told them. And he said he loved her.

She was astonished. They had known each other two months; they were still Mr. President and Mrs. Galt to each other. Oh, you can’t love me, she said. You don’t really know me. And it is less than a year since your wife died.

I know you feel that, he said. But, little girl, in this place time is not measured by weeks, or months, or years, but by deep human experience; and since her death I have lived a lifetime of loneliness and heartache. I was afraid, knowing you, I would shock you; but I would be less than a gentleman if I continued to make opportunities to see you without telling you what I have told my daughters and Helen: that I want you to be my wife. He went on, saying any relationship between them would provoke gossip but that they would have to bear it and that it would