When the Cheering Stopped (10 page)

“My fellow citizens,” he began, “it is with great pleasure that I greet you. I have long chafed at confinement in Washington and I have wanted to report to you and other citizens of the United States. It has become increasingly necessary that I should report to you.” He spoke with no notes, saying, “This is what the League of Nations is for: it is to prove to the nations of the world that the nations will combine against any nation that would emulate Germany's example. When you are told that the League of Nations is for any purpose but to prevent war, tell them that it is not so.” He smacked his hands together when he spoke of the war and said, “The League of Nations is the only thing that can prevent the recurrence of this tragedy and redeem our promises. And when
this treaty is accepted, as it will be accepted, men in khaki will not have to cross the seas again!”

Outside the hall his car was halted for a few minutes while escorting Army troops fell into line. People jammed up against the vehicle. He stood up and waved his hat and the crowd clapped hands, but the reporters thought the applause relatively restrained. And the crowds were not as large as expected. Perhaps it was because the Columbus trolleymen were on strike and the streetcars from the outlying areas were not running, but perhaps also it was because all over America that September railroad men, plumbers, rubber workers, machinists, cigar makers, chorus girls, potters, shoe workers, electrical workers, all these and others were on strike and there were people in Columbus (and elsewhere) who felt that a President ought to be doing something about the worst labor situation in the country's history instead of gallivanting about, talking of the troubles of far-off places and (in the eyes of some) laying the groundwork for his Presidency of the World or of the United States for a third term.

Just two hours after they arrived they left Columbus, ten minutes of their time having been spent beside the waiting train greeting the local dignitaries presented by the Mayor and a former Governor. An Army veteran told the reporters he had been in Paris when the President entered the city: “I never will forget that day. All Americans were princes and Woody was King.” But the man also thought the President looked a lot older now.

They headed for Indianapolis, halting for a few minutes at Urbana, Ohio. “You will beat them,” a man called out. “Their case is so weak they are not hard to beat,” the President answered. They went on. Earlier the day had been overcast, but now the sun came out, baking both the lush fields around them and the jolting cars of the rolling train. At Richmond, Indiana, he spoke from the rear platform for six minutes: “Shall we or shall we not sustain the first great act of international justice? The thing wears a very big aspect when you look at it that way, and all little matters seem to fall away and one seems ashamed to bring in special interests, particularly party interests.” The Secret Service men were in a semicircle, holding the people back, and he was up on the platform
crying, “What difference does party make when mankind is involved?”

Outside Indianapolis a local reception committee came aboard to ride in on the
Mayflower,
and he talked with them in the lounge compartment. They pulled into the station at six in the evening and went at once in a motorcade to the Indianapolis Coliseum. The Indiana State Fair was in session and people came streaming in from the midway, deserting the prize cattle and the exhibits to jam the arena. The crowd was unruly and seemed, in the eyes of the reporters, to view the President and First Lady—she in a gown with a gray georgette bodice and a dark blue velvet skirt—as simply an added attraction to the fair. The Governor of the state began an introductory speech, but the crowd did not quiet down even when the Mayor of Indianapolis got up to ask that they do so. Finally the President arose. “I am making this journey as an American and as a champion of the rights which America believes in—” But still the crowd was noisy and those in the back, unable to hear him, made for the doors, which added to the clamor. A state official got up and told those who wanted to leave that they should do so at once; afterward police would bar the doors. Several thousand people in the rear walked out and his speech went on: “If it is not to be this arrangement, what arrangement do you suggest to secure the peace of the world? It is a case of put up or shut up.”

They left at ten and went on to St. Louis, a pilot engine running two minutes in front of them. They arrived at four in the morning and at eight a dozen youths of the Junior Chamber of Commerce came to volunteer to carry baggage or do anything needed. Behind them came a reception committee to greet him with yells when at nine he came down from the train in a straw hat. He went to the Hotel Statler in a motorcade, waving. But the cheers were not boisterous and there were no children: school was open in St. Louis that day. In the hotel lobby there was a band that burst into
The Star-Spangled Banner
as he entered, and he came to attention for it and then went up in the elevator to a room where he met with members of the reception committee brought in by twos and threes to pump his arm up and down and hear
him say that St. Louis was a wonderful city and he was charmed to be there. He went downstairs to a businessmen's luncheon in the hotel ballroom where he spoke of his Senate opponents, saying they were “contemptible quitters” did they “fail to see the game through.” Cigar smoke drifted up to him from the thousand men and made more intense the headache he had had all day. He cried, “America was not founded to make money; it was founded to lead the world on the way to liberty.” At the end there was a dash to get on line so that every man could tell his children he shook hands with the President, and then he went upstairs to work on the speech he would give that night.

It was twilight when he went to the hall to sit on a platform in a hard steel chair from which he rose to cry out to the thousands of listeners that “if we keep out of this arrangement war will come soon. If we go into it war will never come.” From the hall they drove to the station, arriving there at nine-fifteen. Crowds gathered by the
Mayflower,
and when Grayson and the Governor of the state appeared on the platform they were greeted by shouts of “We want Wilson!” He came out to bow and when at eleven the train pulled out the people got another glimpse of him through the window of the car, sitting at his desk in the evening warmth and working on his next speech, typing, typing. The next morning he was up early when the train stopped to kill some time in Independence so as not to get to Kansas City before the scheduled arrival time of eight o'clock. Housewives came running from their homes when word spread that the President was there, most of them wearing big cottage aprons and Mother Hubbards. One apologized, saying they would have dressed up had they known beforehand he would stop in their town, but he said he was glad to see them “just as you are.” They asked if the First Lady would not come out, and she did so and the women burst into applause. In Kansas City at eight the heat was already quite intense and he had to shout at the reception committee in order that his words be heard above the hubbub of the crowd gathered outside the
Mayflower
. There were flowers for the First Lady—“Oh thank you, they're beautiful”—and clicking movie cameras. The headache was worse.

Kansas City, the voice hoarse: “I have come to fight a cause, and that cause is greater than the U. S. Senate!” At noon they were back on the train with its white “special” flags flying from both sides of the locomotive. He turned to the milling crowd behind the police lines and cupped his hands to shout, “I've had a great time here!” Between smiles, the reporters noticed, his face wore the most serious of looks; the headache was continuous for most of the hours of the day.

They hurried north as the second section of the regular train. At St. Joseph they stopped for three minutes and a crowd shouted, “Speech! Speech!” but Grayson asked him to spare his voice, so he only leaned down over the platform rail, almost bending double, and shook some of the dozens of hands thrust up at him. Fathers held their children on their shoulders to see, and a group of Red Cross women got him and the First Lady to sign their roster. Newspaper people from Des Moines came aboard to ride the train into their city, and at eight that night they pulled in to where the reception committee waited—representatives of the Commerce, Trades and Labor Assembly of the city, the Grand Army of the Republic post, the Ladies of the Grand Army of the Republic, the Spanish-American War Veterans, the Rotary, the City Federation of Women's Clubs, the War Camp Community Service, the Salvation Army, the Red Cross, the Soldiers Fathers League, the League to Enforce Peace, officials of the City of Des Moines and the State of Iowa, the Greater Des Moines Chamber of Commerce, people from the Des Moines
News,
the
Register and Tribune,
the
Capital.
He shook hands all around and went to stand before ten thousand people in the Coliseum and cry out—there were no mechanical devices to project his voice—that “the world is waiting, waiting to see not whether we will take part, but whether we will serve and lead, for it has expected us to lead.”

That night they slept at the Hotel Fort Des Moines, their first night off the train, and he told his people he felt like taking three baths to wash off the train grime. The next day, Sunday, the reporters went driving and to play golf and tennis while he complied with the rule of his church that there be no work on the Sabbath. But of
course there were the forthcoming speeches to be worked on, and when he and the First Lady went to the Central Presbyterian Church there were crowds hoping to shake his hand and, inside, people stretching in their seats to see the visitors. Meanwhile a Missouri priest said the League was a Wall Street plot. The clergyman was echoed by the Socialist Victor Berger of Milwaukee declaring it was a “capitalist scheme” to bring “more wars and more armaments.”

At midnight they left Des Moines for Omaha. Originally it had been intended to arrive there at five in the morning and for the party to remain sleeping in the rail yards until the reception committee came at nine, but Grayson felt the President would rest better in some quieter place and so the train halted by a siding near Underwood, Iowa, fifteen miles northeast of Council Bluffs. They slept there by a quiet cornfield. At Omaha there were sirens, noisemakers, auto horns blaring to welcome him, and a battery of photographers. “Stand by your guns,” the President said to them, and they in return said, “Please have Mrs. Wilson turn this way and smile.” “I have no control over that little lady,” he answered. He looked better, the reporters traveling with him thought; the quiet Sunday and the night by the cornfield seemed to have done much good.

Omaha: “I predict there would be another world war within a generation if no pains were taken to prevent it. If this guarantee is not lived up to, I want to say that in another generation or two we must have another and far more disastrous war. If I felt that I stood in the way of this settlement of the world's affairs, I would be glad to die that it might be consummated.” After his talk people came rushing up past the guards and jumping over the press table to grab his hand. At the train a crowd was yelling “We want Wilson,” and he told the Secret Service men to form them up into a line so that he could shake hands with several hundreds of them. By noon they were on their way north to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, stopping along the way, as always, for him to make brief talks from the rear platform.

They spent two hours in Sioux Falls: out of the train; the motorcade with the cheers and his responding wave;
the speech: “America may have the distinction of leading the way!… I sometimes think, when I wake up in the night, of the wakeful nights that anxious fathers, mothers, and friends spent during the weary years of the awful war, and I hear the cry of the mothers of the children, millions on the other side and thousands on this side: ‘In God's name give us security and peace and right'”—and then they were again in the lurching autos and back to the train and going on. He tried to sleep as they went through the night to St. Paul, but it was difficult for him. In the morning at the St. Paul station fifteen hundred girls of the War Camp Community Service waited, and as soon as he appeared on the
Mayflower
's platform they burst out into a nonsensical get-up-in-the-morning war song: “Good morning, Mr. Zip-Zip-Zip, with your hair cut just as short as mine, rise up and shine, good morning, Mr. Zip-Zip-Zip, you're surely looking fine.” He stood with a fixed smile on his face and then went to the cars standing behind troops of the 4th Minnesota National Guard who led him to the state capitol.

After that it was Bismarck, North Dakota, crying “The whole world is waiting on us,” and an auto tour of the city. During the day they stopped for a few minutes to walk from the train a short distance to where there was a wonderful view of some waterfalls. It was the first, literally the first, quiet exercise of any kind since Washington.

When they returned to the siding the Secret Service men made their usual check of the train and flushed out two hobos who were planning to hitch a ride under one of the cars. When the men found out whose train this was, one asked a Secret Service man, “Do you think he would shake hands with fellows like us?” The President stepped forward and did so, and even offered a lift. But the hobos said no, they would not trouble him, he had troubles enough, and they would wait for the next train coming through. The First Lady shook hands with them and then the train pulled away. Looking back, the President waved to the two and they bowed and waved their shabby hats in return. Edmund Starling glanced at the President and, seeing a wistful smile, thought to himself, He envies them.

And indeed there was much about the two tramps that
the President could envy. For it was likely they slept well at night and were free from a constantly more severe headache and free also from the sneezing and coughing that resulted from the train fumes and the cigar smoke blown up at him in the crowded halls where he spoke, and from the serious asthma attacks the high altitudes were bringing on in spite of the sprays and medications Grayson gave him. The President's poor appetite in the murderous September heat also worried the doctor, and he prescribed predigested foods and lots of fluids to help his patient, but the reporters could not help but notice that although the President in public smiled and waved he seemed to sag as soon as he was out of sight of the crowds. They also noticed the serious, intent look that rarely left the face of the usually cheery First Lady and the tense, worried appearance of Grayson.