When the Cheering Stopped (4 page)

While McAdoo and House worried about these issues, they had even more frightening facts to deal with. The President during his Princeton days took—alone, without Ellen—a trip to Bermuda and there met a stylish, cheerful, good-looking woman vacationer with whom he spent much time; she visited him at Princeton and the White House and received from him more than two hundred letters; as President he sent her $7,500 of his own money; all this was in general known to the President's political enemies, and—most terrifying of all—it was said this woman was going to play the role of jilted paramour and reveal the whole story if the President married Mrs. Galt.

The woman, born Mary Allen, had married a Mr. Peck. After his death she married a Mr. Hulbert, and when the marriage ended in divorce she resumed her former married name. Mrs. Peck was now living in California, and rumors were floating east that the letters were up for sale to anyone who wanted to buy them and make their contents known the moment the President remarried.

McAdoo and House saw political ruin ahead. They, and others, decided the President should not marry. Or if he must do so, then he must at least wait a year, until after the 1916 election.

The question was, how was the President to be told this? Various candidates were sought out to perform the task, but no one accepted the job. So McAdoo and House worked up a scheme that McAdoo carried out. Lunching with his father-in-law, McAdoo said that an anonymous letter from California had been received. The letter (which existed only in the minds of McAdoo and House) said Mrs. Peck was talking about the $7,500 and showing the President's letters to all interested comers. The President, as expected, was horrified. He said the letters were of a totally innocent nature, the $7,500 was a loan he gave Mrs. Peck against some mortgages she held, and as far as the relationship being illicit in any way, his late wife had known everything he ever did with Mrs. Peck, and Ellen herself had enjoyed reading the letters replying
to his. He was astonished that his friend Mrs. Peck would act in this way, but her doing so meant there was only one thing he could do about his relationship with Mrs. Galt.

He went to his desk to write a note telling Mrs. Galt that he would not expose her to slander and publicity that would hurt her in a way he could not prevent but also could not ask her to accept. For a long time he sat seeking the right words. Grayson came into the room and saw the President was pale, his lips tightly pressed together. The hand holding the pen shook. He did not write anything for a long time and then he put down the pen. “I cannot bring myself to write this,” he said. “You go, Grayson, and tell her everything and say my only alternative is to release her from any promise.”

Grayson went to Mrs. Galt. She sat silently when he finished speaking. “What shall I tell him?” Grayson asked. “Tell him I will write,” she said.

She sat for many hours, and night came on, and dawn. She wrote:

Dearest …

I will stand by you—not for duty, not for pity, not for honour—but for love—trusting, protecting, comprehending love …

I am so tired I could put my head down on the desk and go to sleep—but nothing could bring me real rest until I had pledged to you my love and my allegiance.

Your own

Edith

All of that day passed with no reply from the White House. The next day and the next brought no answer. She was shattered. It appeared the romance, at his wish, was over. But on the third day Grayson appeared. He did not even shake hands with her before he began to speak. “I beg that you will come with me to the White House. The President is very ill. It is a desperate situation. Neither Miss Margaret nor Miss Bones is here, so I will have to act as chaperon.” She said, “Did the President ask you to come?” “No, I told him I was coming, and he said it would be unfair to you and weak in him
to ask it. If you could see him you would not hesitate. He looks as I imagine the martyrs looked when they were broken on the wheel.”

She asked Grayson to wait and stepped out of the room. Her letter! What had happened to it? What was he doing to her? But she had written, “I will stand by you.” She rejoined Grayson and went with him to the President's room. He was lying in bed. His face was pale. He held out a hand and it was cold. She took it and clasped it in her own. When she released it the waiting and the doubts and fears were gone forever from them both. Later it would be whispered that she bought off Mrs. Peck with giant sums and that Louis Brandeis was appointed to the Supreme Court because he was the intermediary who carried the money; later it would be said Colonel House took Mrs. Peck to Europe to get her out of the way and that she was on a regular salary from McAdoo's Treasury Department in order to insure her silence; later it would be rumored Mrs. Peck was about to institute a breach-of-promise suit against the President; later all these things and more would be said and wits would call him Peck's Bad Boy, but these stories did not touch them because they loved each other and always would. And she would learn, months later, when he confessed it to her, that he had not had the courage to open her letter. He carried it in his pocket until their honeymoon, when he drew it out, the envelope worn and frayed, and read what she had written: “I will stand by you for love.”

On October 7, 1915, they announced their engagement via Joe Tumulty, who handed out typed sheets to the reporters assigned to the White House. To Ellen's brother the President said that Ellen told him before she died that she wanted this, and the brother said, “That is just the way she loved you.” An old friend of the family, whose sister the President addressed as “Cousin,” said to him that she had prayed he would be comforted and took this as an answer to those prayers. “What do you think, Cousin Mary?” he asked her sister. “To tell you the truth, I was a little shocked at first,” said the woman. “So was I,” said the President. He wrote another friend, “The last fourteen months have seemed for me, in a world upset, like fourteen years. It is not the same world in which my dear
Ellen lived; and one of the last things she said to me was that she hoped that what has happened now would happen. It seemed to me incredible then, and would, I think, have continued to seem so if I had not been brought into contact with Mrs. Galt.” He even wrote Mrs. Peck, saying he knew she would rejoice for him in this “blessing.”

The afternoon the news was released he went to call on Mrs. Galt's mother for the first time, and he asked her, along with a sister and brother of the prospective bride, to come to dinner at the White House. The next day the mother and daughter went with him to Philadelphia for the opening game of the World Series. The crowds cheered her; her dimpled smile was enchanting. On October 10, for the first time he dined with her alone at her home.

They set the wedding date for December 18. In the remaining two months of their official engagement they talked constantly on a direct telephone line from the White House to her home, went golfing together (she consistently won), and took long walks and drives. The Secret Service men, who, embarrassing though it was, had to follow everywhere, agreed among themselves that she was a stunner with a wonderful figure complete with the prettiest ankles. They also said it was hard to believe the President was almost fifty-nine years old, for he acted like a boy, dancing off the curbs when he walked from the White House to her home and leaping over obstacles on the golf course. He whistled, tapping time with his feet. He was animated and gay; he played the fool for her, bending over with arms dangling to shuffle along like an ape when she put a golf club across his shoulders, and then leaning forward so that it slid over his head, to be caught with a flourish. He was proud to show her off and had his Princeton class of '79 come to dinner in the White House so they might meet her and, as it turned out, elect her an honorary member. They went to the Army-Navy game at New York's Polo Grounds and she marched with him across the field at half-time. There was a roar of applause and she thought to herself that everyone was her friend and his.

The wedding was to be at her house and they did not send invitations, feeling this would make it clear to all
public officials and others that no gifts were to be given them. But when the State of California sent a gold nugget with the request that the wedding ring be fashioned from it, they accepted the present and had a plain band made. A minister from his Presbyterian church and an Episcopalian from hers would perform the ceremony and only a very few old friends and servants would join the families as witnesses. The head usher of the White House, Ike Hoover, took over the decorating of her home and arranged the catering of the buffet supper with an outside concern. Hoover had all the furniture removed from the lower floor of her home and in the drawing room, where the ceremony would be, he put in a wedding bower made of a background of farleyense and maidenhair fern extending from the floor to the ceiling, with overhead a canopy of green arranged in the form of a shell, Scotch heather forming the inner side. There was a mirror framed with orchids and the corners of the canopy were also caught up with orchids—
Dendrobium phalanopsis, Vanda coerules
and
Laelia anceps alba
. Above the mirror were South American
Cattleya trianae,
and sheaves of long-stemmed American Beauty roses were on both sides of the canopy. In the dining room there were roses and ferns; a small band of U.S. Marine musicians would furnish the music.

December 18 was clear, crisp and bracing. At eight in the evening the President came to Mrs. Galt's sitting room, alone save for a Secret Service man, and a while later Hoover tapped on the door and said, “Mr. President, it is eight-thirty.” Bride and bridegroom smiled and both called out, “Thank you,” and they went downstairs together. Margaret, Jessie and Nellie were there, of course, and both sons-in-law, and Aunt Annie and her daughter, and Ellen's brother and Altrude and Grayson. Some of Mrs. Galt's relatives by her first marriage were there, and all of her brothers and sisters with their wives and husbands. She wore a black velvet gown with a velvet hat trimmed with goura; her only jewelry was a brooch of diamonds the groom gave her. The President wore a cutaway coat and grey striped trousers.

When the minister asked, “Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?” Mrs. Galt's mother took the
hands of both of them and put them one in the other. And so they were married. The buffet supper was served and then they left for their honeymoon at The Homestead in Hot Springs, Virginia. They went out of her house past aged Negro servants of both families standing in the hall calling, “God bless you, Miss Edith and Mr. President.” Her mother's old cook, who as a slave had belonged to her grandfather, cried out, “Take Jesus with you for your doctor and your friend!”

Twentieth Street was roped off and they slipped into a car and with only Secret Service men along drove to the Alexandria station instead of Washington's Union Station in order to avoid possible crowds. Snow from the previous day's fall was still on the ground and they thought it lovely in the clear moonlight. At Alexandria a private car was waiting filled with flowers, and some sandwiches and fruit stood on a table. Around midnight the train pulled out.

The next morning at seven one of the Secret Service men, Edmund Starling, stepped into the car as the train came into Hot Springs. As Starling went into the narrow train corridor a figure came out of the car's sitting room. It was the President, in top hat, tail coat, and grey morning trousers. He was facing away from the Secret Service man. As Starling watched in silence, the President's hands went into the pockets of his trousers and his feet came flashing up in the air to click heels. He began to whistle a popular song. The heels came leaping up to click again and the whistling changed into outright singing:

“Oh, you beautiful doll, you great big beautiful doll; oh, oh, oh, oh, OH, YOU BEAUTIFUL DOLL!”

3

At thirty years of age he was teaching history and political science to the girls at Bryn Mawr College. He did not enjoy his work, for the students could not be expected ever to vote or play a part in the governing of the nation,
and their girlish ways did not stimulate him to do his best lecturing. They admired him and faithfully wrote down his jokes in their notebooks, but their response to constitutional law was limited.

He threw himself into the writing of a college textbook,
The State
, and supplemented his $1,500 a year salary by delivering lectures at Johns Hopkins. But when Wesleyan College asked him to join its faculty, he was happy to leave Bryn Mawr; he was “hungry for a class of
men
,” he wrote a friend. In his new post he taught political economy, the histories of France, England and the United States. In 1890, getting on to thirty-five, he returned to his alma mater, Princeton.

He stayed there twenty years. As a professor, he was one of the most popular in the university's history, and the highest-paid of his day. He was a wonderful classroom orator, precise, artful, knowledgeable. He related his lectures to the doings of the times as he illustrated the developments of political institutions, and his jokes and dramatizations were marvelously apt. Often the students applauded and stamped their feet at the end of the class. He worked with the boys on extra-curricular activities, coaching the debating societies and helping out with the football team. At home during his free hours he wrote extensively—essays, political treatises. Also short stories. (Everything else sold well, but his attempts at fiction brought only rejection slips.) He wrote books about the political history of the country, a life of George Washington, a five-volume history of the American people. He rode a bicycle from his home to his classes. At home were the three little daughters growing up, and in the classrooms were hundreds of young men who would leave Princeton thinking him the finest teacher they had ever seen. When in 1902 the head of Princeton resigned, the university trustees unanimously picked as replacement the head of the Department of Jurisprudence and Political Economy.