When the Cheering Stopped (25 page)

In the morning when he awoke the scope of the debacle was clear and also the meaning of that debacle. When the Senate turned down the League it had been in the President's eyes the work of politicians, of the Lodges and Falls—of the Warren G. Hardings. Now it was the people, the people, the people themselves. They had turned on him and he was alone. He made no public comments, issued no statements, but, hurt and bewildered, sank into a terrible isolation from his country and its mood and even perhaps its ultimate meaning. Once he had thought there was an almost magical relationship between himself and the American people he believed the most generous, the best, the most idealistic of all the world, and that in that relationship it had been given to him to speak the deepest thoughts of that people. He had known that people. They were his; he theirs. Now they had thrown him out. He was alone. Or almost alone. The Secret Service man Edmund Starling came to him with a message from a friend of Starling's whom the President had met a few times: “Mr. Barker wants you to know that he is still with you and he will follow you anywhere you want to go.” The President turned away to try to hide his quick tears, and blinked them back and looked at Starling and said, “Tell Barker I thank him, but there is nowhere now to go.”

For what was Barker's support when the electoral vote was 404 to 127? Those close to him tried to help—but it was useless. Nothing could help. They tried. Nellie wrote: “Darling, darling Father—I just want to send a line to tell you that I
know
this is not a repudiation of the League.… Nothing can destroy what you have done—nothing in the whole wide world. I love you so much and I want so much to see you—can I go down soon, darling? With all my love to you both, Your adoring daughter.” Jessie wrote: “On election night when I couldn't sleep I picked up a life of Joan of Arc and read it through. It comforted me just a little because though they burned her, and her life seemed stultified and frittered
away by intrigues and politicians, it went on inevitably for she had made it alive. With a heart overflowing with love, Your adoring daughter.” Secretary Colby: “You have spoken the truth. You have battled for it. You have suffered for it. Your crown will be one of glory, and the heathen who have imagined vain things will some day creep penitently to touch the hem of your garments.” Alfred S. Niles of Baltimore: “My dear Wilson: It is impossible for me, as your classmate of '79, to refrain from telling you that some of us (including myself) are now, in the time of the apparent defeat of the principles for which you have stood, more proud than ever of you and your record.”

A few days later when he went driving with George Creel along as passenger, he shrank back from a handful of sightseers standing by the White House gate, ducking like a man avoiding a blow. “Why, what is the matter, Mr. President?” asked Creel. “Didn't you see them?” whispered the President. “Of course, sir. But what about it? I saw only respect and devotion.” “No. Just curiosity.”

One day Ray Stannard Baker was invited for lunch, and the First Lady suggested he come early so as to see the morning's film. Baker came and waited in a parlor where the servants lifted and put aside a heavy red rug so that the President might walk with greater ease upon the bare floor. He came shuffling along slowly, heavily, his left arm hanging straight down. Very few people had seen him walk at that time, and it was a terrible shock to Baker to see the leaden steps in place of the alert and active movements of former days. Baker felt a surge of intense compassion, but it gave way to admiration when he saw the President's determination to persevere shine from the gleaming eyes. The handshake was a mustered-up show of strength. Baker thought to himself, The will is unconquerable; the life untamable. They went slowly down the hall into the East Room empty of all save for a few chairs grouped in the middle. The room was unlighted and their steps echoed. They took seats, Baker, the President, the First Lady, a niece of hers, Grayson. The projector clicked and sputtered and the film began. They were having a pre-release showing of a film on the
President's visit to Europe. By magic, Baker remembered later, “we were in another world; a resplendent world, full of wonderful and glorious events. There we were, sailing grandly into the harbor at Brest, the ships beflagged, the soldiers marshalled upon the quay, and planes skimming through the air. There was the President himself, smiling upon the bridge, very erect, very tall, lifting his hat to shouting crowds.

“By magic we were transported to Paris. There he was again, this time with the President of France, driving down the most famous avenue in the world, bowing right and left. In the distance we saw the Arc de Triomphe, symbol too of this latest triumph, and caught a glimpse of the great Napoleon guarding its dimmed glory.”

The President bent forward, looking at 1918 in the great empty East Room in 1920. He was absolutely silent. The film showed the trip to England, the warships in the Channel, London. “Were there ever such marching regiments of men, such bowing dignitaries, so many lords and their ladies! And there was the President, riding behind magnificent horses with outriders flying pennants, and people shouting in the streets, coming down from Buckingham Palace with the King of England.” It was over. “It was only a film. All that glory had faded away with a click and a sputter.” They sat for a moment in the dark room and Baker looked over at a stooped, seated figure: the President, immobile. Someone came out of the darkness and put a foot against the President's foot so that he might not slip as he rose from the chair, and he got up and turned slowly and shuffled out of the room without looking aside and without speaking. In later years Baker found his memory of that moment to be an intolerable thing.

He would have four more months as President, and he tried to pull himself together to get them done with. Writing a Thanksgiving Day proclamation with the result of the election fresh in his mind was too much for him and he asked Colby to do it—“though I have no resentment in my heart.” He worked to walk and began to take meals regularly downstairs and to receive frequent visitors. But they saw a timidity in him, an apologetic cast to the
slipping smile, the request to be excused from rising, the very manner of speaking: “You will pardon me if I put on my hat. I like to keep my hat on.” Sewing by his side or with her hand on his, a quick “my darling” for him upon her lips, the First Lady seemed to offer a contrasting cheeriness mixed with an attitude that made visitors feel she was now the captain of their destiny, hers and her husband's. Stockton Axson, Ellen's brother, thought to himself it was well that this First Lady, and not the preceding one, was there to meet the crisis—this one was a far better warrior.

Almost every morning now the First Lady went house-hunting in the District or in Virginia. They had decided to live in the Washington area after long discussions of possible other sites, and had made up a chart listing the ratings of five cities according to Climate, Friends, Opportunities, Amusements, Libraries and Freedom. (New York got the highest rating in Climate and Amusements, tying with Boston and Baltimore in Opportunities; Richmond and Baltimore tied in Friends; and although Washington got the lowest score for Freedom, the Library of Congress and the fact that it was the First Lady's real home carried the day.) Their finances, merged when they married, totaled something like $250,000, and they felt he would be able to make money by writing books and articles. In fact he began the book on government which for decades he had said he was going to write. He did so by typing with his one good hand the first page:

A Dedication.

To

E. B. W.

I dedicate this book because it is a book in which I have tried to interpret life,' the life of a nation, and she has shown me the full meaning of life. Her heart is not only true but wise; her thoughts are not only free but touched with vision; she teaches and guides by being what she is; her unconscious interpretation of faith and duty makes all the way clear; her power to comprehend makes work and thought alike easier and more near to what it seeks.

It was the first and the last page.

The cold weather came and in December he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the American Minister to Norway representing him at the ceremonies. In December, President-elect Harding came to Washington and the First Lady sent a note to Mrs. Harding asking her to call. Mrs. Harding wrote back on the stationery of Mrs. Evalyn Walsh McLean—she of Hope Diamond fame—accepting the invitation and asking if Mrs. McLean might not accompany her. The First Lady answered that as the Washington
Post,
owned by Mrs. McLean's husband, had opposed the President, Mrs. McLean would not be welcome. On her husband's United States Senate stationery Mrs. Harding wrote that she would come alone. She wore a dark dress and a hat with blue feathers and a black mesh veil fastened tightly over her face. (The First Lady noted, however, that her successor-to-be wore rouge upon her cheeks.) The First Lady also found her too nervously talkative, too pushy, too effusive. But it was not likely she would approve of any woman whose husband had so decisively destroyed the hope of a happy end to her own husband's work.

They took tea together alone and after half an hour the First Lady managed to “stem the torrent of words” (so she put it) in order to introduce Mrs. Jaffray, the housekeeper, who would show Mrs. Harding the White House, every room save for one in which the President was resting. Mrs. Harding put on a pair of eyeglasses over the mesh veil, did not shake hands with Mrs. Jaffray, and went off with her for the tour. The First Lady said good-by and went out on an errand, returning some hours later. She found Mrs. Harding still there, down in the kitchen talking with the cook. It was not until after eight o'clock that she finally left.

At Christmas they held a little family dinner party and got together small gifts for the children along the country roads. They at first considered building a home, and the President spent much time looking through architectural magazines, but as time grew short they gave up the idea and sought an already-constructed one. They looked very seriously at a house near Alexandria and at one in Massachusetts Avenue Park, and at one situated upon twenty-six wooded acres through which a quiet stream ran, but
the plans for purchase did not work out. One morning she went to see two possible places in S Street—one of them would shortly be purchased by Herbert Hoover—but neither met their needs. She was about to leave S Street, which in Washington in 1920 was the point at which country began to take over from city, when the agent with her asked if she would not look at a third house on the block, Number 2340. She did so and decided the house was perfect. She returned to the White House and told the President that she thought this was the place. That afternoon she went to a concert by the touring New York Philharmonic and when she returned he was in the Oval Room with the deed to the house in his hand.
*
The President had not seen the house at all, but the next day they went to it together. At the door the President's valet, at his instruction, dug out a small piece of sod and with a key to the door gave the earth to the First Lady; it was an old Scottish custom.

The house, four years old, with thick walls and fine high ceilings, was of Georgian design. The front door opened upon a formal hallway with a floor of black and white marble. A small room was on each side. From there one mounted three marble steps to the main hall, behind which were the kitchen, the servants' dining room, and a billiard room. On the second floor were the front drawing room, whose windows opened upon S Street and the wooded terraces across the way; the library in the rear facing the semiformal garden surrounded by a brick wall; and the dining room and a solarium with glass doors, both looking out upon the garden. On the third floor were five bedrooms and five bathrooms. The fourth floor contained the servants' rooms and the laundry. They arranged for the installation of an electric elevator, the construction of a brick garage with a tiled sun terrace upon its top, and for enough built-in bookshelves to hold his library of eight thousand volumes.

New Year's came and January went. On February 1,
with no public announcement, he went to the theater, his first visit in a year and a half. He entered through a rear-alley door and before the curtain was raised he was taken across the stage, Starling and Ike Hoover aiding him as he took his slow, hesitant steps, the First Lady going on ahead to screen him from the eyes of the people in the cast. They went up into a box, the men awkwardly half carrying him and then lowering him into his seat. The play was John Drinkwater's
Abraham Lincoln
and it must have seemed strange to one who had been Mr. President for nearly eight years to see the actor Frank McGlynn addressed by that title.
“To be President of this people,”
McGlynn said on the stage,
“that's a searching thing. Bitterness, and scorn, and wrestling often with men I shall despise, and perhaps nothing truly done at the end.”
McGlynn wore a Lincoln beard; he had a shawl and tall stovepipe hat. There came a scene when the actor knelt at a table and in an agony of horror about war and being President buried his face in his hands. The watcher in the box above had done that also.

“I've a heart that's near to breaking every day.”
Harding would be President. There would be no American entry into the League.

When the curtain fell for the end of the first act and the lights in the theater came up, the audience for the first time knew the President was there. He was so changed that many of the people were not sure it was he, but enough of them decided that it was indeed the President and they broke into applause. He remained seated, his hands nervously fingering his steel-banded cane and seeking his watch. Soon the whole theater joined in the hand-clapping as people pointed to him and craned their necks upward, and a look of surprise came over his features. The First Lady looked as if she were astonished at the cheering. With great difficulty he struggled to his feet and bowed. At the end of the performance they cheered him again. The reporter Louis Seibold, harking back to the offer of a foot race between the two of them, wired when news of the theater visit was printed:
JUDGING FROM YOUR PRESENT FORM YOU
'
LL HAVE TO INCREASE THE HANDICAP YOU OFFERED SOME TIME AGO IF I
'
M TO RACE YOU. CONGRATULATIONS TO YOUR GENTLE TRAINER
.