When the Cheering Stopped (36 page)

Upon the door Scott hung a wreath of early spring flowers—yellow jonquils, mignonettes and forsythia. John Randolph Bolling filled out the death certificate, which Cary Grayson signed as attending physician. Under “Trade, profession, or particular kind of work,” Bolling wrote: “Retired.”

Foreign cablegrams began to arrive in addition to the domestic telegrams.
PARIS WHO IN THE DAYS FOLLOWING VICTORY WELCOMED PRESIDENT WILSON TO HER HEART AND ACCLAIMED HIM NOW ENTERS INTO YOUR MOURNING MUNICIPAL COUNCIL CITY OF PARIS
… Edward P.…
THE QUEEN AND I EXTEND TO YOU OUR DEEP SYMPATHY IN ASSURING YOU OF THE LASTING MEMORY WE SHALL ALWAYS KEEP OF THE GREAT ONE WHO HAS GONE ALBERT R
.… The President of Liberia … Chamber of Representatives of Belgium … The Secretary General of the League of Nations …
WE SHALL NEVER FORGET THE HOURS THAT YOU AND YOUR HUSBAND SPENT AS OUR GUESTS ON YOUR WAY TO THE PEACE CONFERENCE GEORGE R.
… Clemenceau … Lloyd George …
A PRINCE AMONG THE SONS OF MEN HAS DEPARTED JAN CHRISTIAAN SMUTS
.

President Coolidge's secretary came up the hill. He spoke to Bolling and said the President offered the aid of all government departments in funeral arrangements, but he was told the widow would wait until Nellie McAdoo arrived before making plans. That evening electric-light signs in most cities were dimmed, and radio fans twirling their dials and manipulating their headsets found no programs of any kind were going out on the air.

The next day, Monday:

BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA:

A PROCLAMATION:

To the People of the United States:

The death of Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States from March 4, 1913, to March 4, 1921 …
deprives the country of a most distinguished citizen and is an event which causes universal and genuine sorrow.… In testimony of the respect in which his memory is held by the Government and people of the United States, I do hereby direct that the flags of the White House and of the several Departmental buildings be displayed at half staff for a period of thirty days, and that suitable military and naval honors under orders of the Secretary of War and of the Secretary of the Navy may be rendered on the day of the funeral.

Done at the City of Washington … In the year of Our Lord one thousand nine hundred and twenty-four, and of the Independence of the United States of America one hundred and forty-eight.

CALVIN COOLIDGE

In the Senate it was voted that all business, including all committee meetings and investigations—which included the one concerning Teapot Dome—be suspended for three days. A delegation of Senators was appointed to attend the funeral. The Senate adjourned.

One of the Senators named as a member of the funeral delegation did not get home to his residence at 1765 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., until several hours after the adjournment. He found waiting for him a note delivered by a Postal Telegraph boy. On the envelope was attached a Postal Telegraph sticker requesting an immediate reply. The note was handwritten. It said:

My dear Sir:

I note in the papers that you have been designated by the Senate of the U.S. as one of those to attend Mr. Wilson's funeral.

As the funeral is private and not official and realizing that your presence would be embarrassing to you and unwelcome to me I write to request that you do
not
attend.

Yours truly,

Edith Bolling Wilson

The Senator wrote back in his own hand:

My dear Madam:

I have just received your note, in which you say that the funeral services of Mr. Wilson are to be private and not official and that my presence would be unwelcome to you. When the Senate Committee was appointed I had no idea that the Committee was expected to attend the private services at the home and I had supposed that the services at the church were to be public.

You may rest assured that nothing could be more distasteful to me than to do anything which by any possibility could be embarrassing to you. I have the honor to be

Very truly

yours,

H. C. Lodge

Nellie and McAdoo arrived in Washington, the Rolls-Royce meeting them at the station. The young woman was in constant tears. Just before her father's death, the malodorous E. L. Doheny of Teapot Dome fame had revealed that he, Doheny, had paid McAdoo $250,000 in legal fees over a period of some years. The revelation was working to shatter McAdoo's hopes of ever becoming President, and along with newspaper articles about the death in S Street appeared stories headlined
FEAR MCADOO CANDIDACY DOOMED.
Panic-stricken Washington supporters of McAdoo flocked to S Street as soon as he arrived, and in the library one floor beneath the room in which his father-in-law died McAdoo held frightened conferences. Completely undone, he dictated telegrams to all points saying “skunks” and “calumniators” were trying to smear him. This talk of the forthcoming nominating conventions just half a year off, and the elections later in the year, seemed completely sacrilegious to the mistress of the house, and she savagely lashed out at McAdoo and Nellie, saying in a rage that the young woman “cared more about getting her husband elected President than she does about her dead father.” The statement was untrue and very unkind, but Edith was far from a responsible person in the grief which flung her into headlong spells of unrestrained weeping. The control she had shown ever since the morning the
Mayflower
halted on the prairie outside Wichita fell from her and the accumulated strain of
the long years came pouring out. No one had ever seen her like this. Distraught, she said things that erected a wall between herself and Nellie that would never be torn down. She was also bitter at Margaret's attitude. Margaret, interested in religion all her life, was at the time involved in a study of Christian Science, which led her to wear a smile as she went around the house telling callers that death was really an illusion and that there was hence no reason to grieve for her father.

The funeral plans were completed on Tuesday. They had thought of burial in Staunton, the birthplace, but none of his flesh and blood were there and in fact he had lived there only one year of his life. There was a family plot in Columbia, South Carolina, where his mother and father were; but a few years earlier, when his sister, Aunt Annie Howe, was buried there, Edith remembered that he had said that the sister's body now occupied the last free space. And once on a ride into Virginia he had said that he did not think he would want to lie in Arlington. So they decided interment would be in the crypt of the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul, commonly called Washington Cathedral. Not completed, but an immense and beautiful church, it stood atop Mount Saint Alban, the highest elevation in Washington. Stones from Canterbury were in it, and the Bishop's formal seat was from the ruins of Glastonbury. It was decided there would be a brief service at the house and then the body would be taken to the Cathedral and its Bethlehem Chapel, where there would be room for three hundred invited guests. This would not be a state funeral, and the body would not lie in state. The funeral would be on Wednesday, February 6.

That day was cloudy, wet, cold. The sunshine of Sunday morning was gone, and it was overcoat weather and a time to wear galoshes. At sunrise that morning, by order of the Secretaries of War and Navy, guns began to fire, every half hour on the half hour, at every United States Army post, at every Navy yard or station. They would continue pounding all day at the half-hour intervals, and at sunset forty-eight-gun salutes would be discharged. All regimental colors and standards were draped, officers wore mourning bands, and crape was on sword
hilts. The foreign embassies and consulates all had their flags at half staff, all save for the German Embassy, where the Ambassador announced that as his government had instructed him to take no official part in this burial of an unofficial person, he would not put the German flag down. Washington seethed at this slight by the recent enemy, and a former U.S. sailor studying at Georgetown University climbed up the Embassy porte-cochere and hung an American flag there. Everyone who saw the flag applauded the gesture, but the police were called by the Embassy and they removed the flag. A policeman took up station in front of the building to guard against any disturbances. But the German attitude drew a violent reaction, and in Wall Street many bankers said that because of the matter they doubted a proposed loan to the Weimar Republic would be made. A woman member of the German Reichstag, visiting America, made a public appeal that the loan go through, that German children not be forced to suffer because of the faux pas.

At eight in the morning, troops were paraded at all service posts, and the Presidential Proclamation of mourning was read out. In Washington, the President suggested to his Cabinet members that it be made clear to all government employees that although they could not officially be released from their duties for the funeral of an unofficial person, no work would be expected after lunch. The New York Stock Exchange announced trading would end at twelve-thirty. At that hour, too, Washington's school children were released from classes after standing in silence for five minutes.

By noon the Cathedral grounds were jammed with upward of fifty thousand persons. Most of the people had umbrellas, for alternately snow and rain came down from the leaden dark skies. Many sat upon newspapers laid on the soaked grass. Some brought sandwiches and ate lunch in the rain.

A little after noon it was announced that Senator Lodge, suffering from a sore throat, would not be able to attend the funeral. “No alarm is felt over Senator Lodge's illness by members of his family,” said a spokesman from the Senator's office.
*

During that morning, also, McAdoo telephoned Joe Tumulty
*
and learned no invitation to the funeral had been received at the Tumulty home. McAdoo said, “I'm going to see that you're invited,” and shortly afterward Altrude Gordon Grayson telephoned Tumulty and said that “of course” Tumulty and his wife would be expected.

Upstairs in S Street, in the bedroom, the body lay upon a couch by the window. Dr. Edward P. Davis of Philadelphia, a college classmate and the man who ten years earlier had the task of telling the President of the United States that the former Miss Elly Lou Axson of Rome, Georgia, was dying, stared down into the face he first had seen when both were boys at Princeton so many years ago. It was extraordinary, Dr. Davis thought to himself, the way his friend looked. For he looked young now. Young. The hair seemed prematurely gray for such a young face. “The lines of care, of anxiety and weakness had disappeared. The outlines of the face were smooth and beautiful. It was as if a distant sunrise had touched the features.”

Below, flowers were ranged all around the library and drawing room, and on the tables there were eight thousand messages of condolence. (Three years earlier, leaving the White House, he had received just 124 telegrams.) The services at the house would be at three; a little before that hour the police admitted through the ropes blocking the street those cars whose occupants bore invitations. Crowds stood in the slow-falling snow for blocks in all directions, and already along Massachusetts Avenue up toward the Cathedral tens of thousands of people were waiting behind lines of infantrymen and marines standing at evenly spaced intervals. At the Grayson house, the doctor came out with Altrude, and a reporter asked, “How do you feel?” Earlier, Grayson had made a formal statement to the press: “In sick days and well, I have never known such singleminded devotion to duty as he saw it against all odds, such patience and forbearance with adversity, and finally such resignation to the inevitable. I once read an inscription in a Southern country church yard. It said: ‘He was unseduced by flattery,
unawed by opinion, undismayed by disaster. He faced life with antique courage, and death with Christian hope.' These words, better than any words of mine, describe Woodrow Wilson.” Now to the reporter asking how he felt, Grayson said, “Oh, I am all right. But I don't mean that exactly. I'm still under the strain of it all. That is keeping me going. But I can't really feel all right when I have lost my closest friend for the past twelve years. The fact that I can't call the nurse up there in the morning or run in there to see him has left an awful emptiness. I miss it now.” As he spoke, the batteries at Fort Myer across the Potomac fired. Guns pumped also from Governors Island, and at Gordon, Dix, Carson, Shafter, Upton—all the posts. At sea, the dull thunder of the destroyers and dread-noughts rolled across the February waves.

At fifteen minutes to three the President and First Lady stepped into their limousine for the short drive to S Street. When they arrived, it was nearly time for the services to begin. The body was in the drawing room in a closed black casket, and the guests were standing in the library and along the stairway. When the President entered the house, the drawing-room doors were opened and the guests filed in and sat down. The shades were drawn on the windows facing the street. It was just three o'clock. In Washington the streetcar motormen and conductors got out of their vehicles and stepped into the streets and took off their hats. Independence Hall's tower bell in Philadelphia began to toll. People in New York's department stores came to silent attention. Church bells sounded in Chicago. Detroit's traffic came to a halt. In the nation's large railroad stations Taps came over the loudspeaker systems. All telegraph service everywhere in the country halted. Outside in S Street the people were unmoving and the motorcycle policemen switched off their noisy engines. In Madison Square Garden both the people inside for a memorial service and the overflow standing in the street outside were motionless. Theaters in every city the country over interrupted performances. In the auditorium of Montana Deaconess School in Helena, a fourteen-year-old boy sounded Taps on his cornet as all the children, the youngest six years old, sang the words.
In the front of the room where they would pass by it before their assembly was dismissed, a flag-draped picture of Woodrow Wilson looked out at them.