1920 (29 page)

One night in Pueblo, Colorado, an occasion when the crowd was even more restless than usual, seemingly more dubious about what it was hearing, a night when Wilson told his fellow Americans they would lead others “into pastures of quietness and peace such as the world never dreamed of before,” the pains he had been feeling throughout his body
for more than a week seemed to explode into his head. Finishing his talk to but scattered applause, he turned and tried to step back to his seat. He could not. He lost his balance, stumbling from the podium into the arms of his traveling companions, who had sprung up from their own seats. Those in the audience who saw the president fall assumed he had just tripped over something. Instead, they had just seen the last speech of Woodrow Wilson's life.

LIKE WAYNE WHEELER, WHOM HE
somewhat resembled, Wilson wore wire-rim glasses over a will of steel. But the rest of the western tour had to be canceled; and on October 2, 1919, once again in the White House after a virtually sleepless journey back east, the president's will joined his body in breaking down. He awoke that morning with no feeling in his left hand. His doctor, Cary Grayson, was summoned immediately; but by the time he arrived, Wilson was on the floor of his bedroom, his body curled into a semicircle, barely breathing. He wanted a glass of water, but his struggle to form the words was ineffective; he had to motion with his hand.

Previously having contracted arteriosclerosis and possibly influenza, the latter probably a souvenir of Paris, Wilson had now suffered a stroke. Or so it was initially reported. More precisely, what had struck him was thrombosis, a clot in a blood vessel. Not only was the left side of his body paralyzed; he had been blinded in the left eye and suffered brain damage to an extent never made public and still not known. “It was,” says historian John Morton Blum, “a wonder and a tragedy that he lived.” The president was down now to that final ounce.

There was no provision for anything like this in the Constitution, a president almost totally incapacitated yet with more than a year left in his term. And so it was that Mrs. Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, the widowed president's second wife, made history of which only a few people knew at the time, becoming the first woman, however unofficially, to assume the duties of the presidency of the United States.

She was not totally unprepared. Her husband had discussed politics and diplomacy with her often. Eventually, he began to think of her as his top adviser in a number of matters: she was, after all, an intelligent woman, a woman who listened carefully when the president talked, who asked intelligent questions and remembered the answers, whom Wilson
could trust without reservation. In fact, after only a year as First Lady, the
Louisville Courier-Journal
commented on how intimately involved she seemed to be in her husband's decision-making, in affairs both domestic and international. Although she already had two middle names, “Omnipotence,” the paper suggested, might well be a third.

Senator Albert Fall of New Mexico was not impressed. Despite the secrecy so quickly and rigidly imposed by the White House, he knew what was happening there. “We have petticoat government!” thundered the fiery Republican, who would later make ignominious history of his own. “Mrs. Wilson is President!”

Women might have gained the vote in August 1920 but, unknown to virtually all of them, they had gained the Executive Mansion the previous October.

For most of the nearly year and a half that remained of her husband's term, which included all of 1920, Wilson was an invalid at best, little more than a rumor at worst. Most of the time, he stayed in his bedroom with the door locked and the shades drawn, secreted in a perpetual night that was virtually all he could bear. No light, no noise, no ability to understand the labyrinth of governmental actions and decisions swirling around him.

“So began my stewardship,” Mrs. Wilson is quoted by Phyllis Lee Levin, the author of a book on the White House:

I studied every paper, sent from the different Secretaries or Senators and tried to digest and present in tabloid form the things that, despite my vigilance, had to go to the president. I, myself, never made a single decision, regarding the disposition of public affairs. The only decision that was mine was what was important and what was not, and the
very
important decision of when to present matters to my husband.

It was Mrs. Wilson who controlled access to her husband, and she permitted few into his quarters. To some, especially those who supported the League of Nations, Mrs. Wilson's restrictive control was destructive, both to the League and the republic. As Levin says:

It has been written that Edith Wilson, “in her quiet, ignorant, misguided way did much damage at Paris, and even more at Washington,” where Wilson, disabled and isolated, rendered the Senate's ratification of the league impossible through his absolute refusal to compromise on what the British economist John Maynard Keynes regarded as the “disastrous blots on the Covenant.” In that hour, when [former Wilson adviser Edward M.] House's talents for conciliation were supremely required, his efforts were frustrated by the first lady. One wonders today at her disregard of that counsel; [French Prime Minister Georges] Clemenceau was only one of many European leaders who lauded the “super-civilized” [House] “who sees everything, who understands everything,” and whose “keen, enlightened intelligence” was of “such assistance.”

When Mrs. Wilson allowed someone to speak to her husband, she made certain that the person came and went swiftly, and on the way out reported to her. How did the president seem? The answer was usually not encouraging, although it was always difficult for such a judgment to be made to the First Lady. But there were times when Wilson could not speak a coherent sentence, nor avoid repetition of a few phrases that seemed to stick in what remained of his memory. Seldom could he hold eye contact with his visitor. His wife had to be told.

On his better days, when he
was
able to speak coherently for a time, he “was petulant, irascible, unreceptive to advice. Furthermore, Mrs. Wilson, fearful that pessimistic communications might cause a setback in the President's health, maintained her close surveillance over his correspondence and routine. To many of those who had pressing affairs of state to review with the chief executive, she seemed also to be jealous of the power she had inadvertently acquired.”

Consulting with the president in 1920 was a habit, protocol; it was not an effective means of governing.

More often than receiving guests, the president received a note. A staff member of a senator or congressman, or perhaps a junior aide at a diplomatic mission, would tap lightly on the door of Wilson's quarters
and his wife would emerge. She would take the note, close the door behind her, and read the note to her husband, trying to help him comprehend. If he could comment sensibly, he did; otherwise she advised him on what he would probably believe to be the best course of action, then waited for a sound or motion that indicated approval. In many cases, when he was simply not up to the complexities of a rider to an already complex bill, she made the decision herself, always as she thought he would have done. Then she wrapped his hand around a pen and helped him write a response, the handwriting a scrawl that could not be recognized as belonging to either of them. She returned the note to the messenger at the door and, if necessary, translated it for him. At another time, the marks on the paper might have been regarded as scratches on pieces of White House stationery. Now they were official U.S. policy.

Still, there were no calls for Vice President Thomas Marshall, “a completely discounted factor,” to assume Wilson's duties. Nor did Marshall evince any desire to do so. “What this country needs,” he is known for having said once, “is a really good five-cent cigar,” and that is easily the most famous policy statement he ever made.

A few times near the end of the president's term, after he had shown slight signs of recovery, and after making certain there were no photographers lurking about, Mrs. Wilson led him by the hand to cabinet meetings. It was a mistake. Wilson could not contribute. Instead, he sat quietly, seldom moving, and when he did his head tended to bob as if it had been attached too loosely to his neck. His occasional comments were uttered in a voice not recognizable as Wilson's previous voice; they were sounds, more than sense. Something was probably getting through to him, but not enough so that he could form actual sentences about it, utter those sentences coherently—this man who had been among the most brilliant and literate ever to reign as chief executive.

It was, of course, not just Washington insiders who knew of the president's condition. The word could not help but spread in government circles. Jules Jusserand, the French ambassador to the United States, told his superiors at home that it no longer mattered what the great Wilson thought; the real ruler of the United States was “Mme. President.”

Most Americans did not know the depth of the president's incapacitation. Not wanting to alarm the populace, almost all newspapers referred
to his condition in a kind of code—and of necessity; not being able to see Wilson, they were not aware themselves of the state to which he had been reduced. Far fewer papers had Washington bureaus in 1920 than do today; those outlets had to rely on other sources for their news, meaning that they were getting their information second-hand; thus they were even more leery of reporting that the president had broken down and his wife had taken over many of his duties, made most of his decisions.

But was she the real ruler of the United States in 1920? The question cannot easily be answered. It is reasonable to assume that she made the decisions she believed her husband would have made, and therefore it was, in effect, as if Woodrow Wilson were still President of the United States. It is likely that he would have approved the second Palmer raids, and that she did so on his behalf; likely that he as much as she supported California's efforts to limit Japanese real estate holdings; likely that he as much as she approved the tariff treaty between the United States and China. And, Phyllis Lee Levin's opinion notwithstanding, it is unlikely that a healthy Wilson would have allowed Colonel House to persuade him to compromise on the League of Nations. The president had been too hell-bent on self-ruin. He would live or die according to the vote on the League, and perhaps always sensed what the outcome would be.

Besides, in a peacetime democracy, the president's power is limited, diluted by its having to be approved by majorities of the—at that time—400 members in the House and 96 in the Senate. There was never a complaint from the legislative branch, however, that Mrs. Wilson even tried to take a position contrary to one the president would have been expected to take. Both House and Senate seemed to think all was proceeding, if not in all cases well, at least in the vast majority of cases as the president would have wanted.

Only one potentially troublesome aspect of “petticoat government” remains: it cannot be known, must always remain speculation, precisely what issues Mrs. Wilson brought before her husband. Did she deem all the notes she allowed to have read to him of equal importance? Or did she not even present them all; did she simply make a few scribbles of her own at the bottom of some of the missives, then tell the errand boy that
the matter was one the president did not wish to consider more thoroughly at present? Mrs. Wilson might have consulted with her spouse, as well as she could, about topics of more interest to herself than to him, and thus, in setting the agenda for his decisions, could perhaps have left a different mark on the country than her husband would have, despite their shared viewpoints. As she herself admitted, according to Levin, “The only decision that was mine was what was important and what was not.” But this was, without question, as big a decision as any.

Exactly what happened behind the closed door at the White House will forever remain a mystery to historians. It seems a safe assumption, though, that Mrs. Wilson's influence was of minor import, and that that was precisely what she intended it to be.

THE SECOND TIME THE SENATE
voted on the League of Nations, there was no Lodge version, only Wilson's. It was rejected by a vote of 49–35. The
New York Times
declared “senators of both parties united in declaring that in their opinion the treaty was now dead to stay dead.” In the words of historian Jackson Lears, Wilson's “grandiose dreams of global redemption went unfulfilled.”

It was the First Lady's opinion too, but she did not quite know what to do with it. Should she tell her husband right away that the greatest hope of his life would never be realized? Or should she delay the information? If so, for how long, and to what end? Perhaps one of his rare visitors would let word of the death knell slip—and then what? It was his wife from whom Wilson should hear of what she believed to be the Senate's perfidy, and just as she had performed her previous duties as president, so would she carry out this one.

“Edith withheld the news from the president until the following morning,” Kristie Miller learned, and he was able to react—and his reaction was to be expected. In her book
Ellen and Edith: Woodrow Wilson's First Ladies
[the former having passed away in 1914], “Wilson was ‘blue and depressed.' He told his doctor, ‘I feel like going to bed and staying there.'” He was tucked under the covers and closed his eyes on the future.

Edith Wilson, Miller continues,

has been criticized for shielding her husband from important advisers who might have persuaded him to compromise [on the League of Nations, thereby ensuring its passage—an impossibility]. She and Grayson—he consulted with other doctors but was very much the primary care physician—did indeed limit Wilson's visitors. But they were following conventional medical wisdom of the time. Although the modern view is that stimulation is beneficial for stroke victims, it was not the view in Wilson's day. On March 16, 1920, Dr. [Francis X.] Dercum [who had treated Wilson years earlier for hypertension] wrote Dr. Grayson that he was doubtful whether the president should be seeing “a larger number of persons.” He warned Grayson, “If his contact with other persons is increased, it should … be only with close personal friends.” If this was his opinion nearly six months after Wilson's stroke, on the eve of the second treaty vote, Dercum would certainly have discouraged Edith from allowing her husband to be seen by more than a handful of people during the months the treaty was debated.