Senator Swanson of Virginia rushes across the aisle to Senator Lodge’s desk. “For God’s sake, can’t something be done to save the treaty?”
“Senator, the door is closed,” replies Lodge. “You have done it yourselves.”
By the end of December the President is well enough to dress himself and to hobble about a little with a cane. “He had changed from a giant to a pygmy in every wise,” wrote the White House usher. “It was so sad that those of us about him, who almost without exception admired him, would turn our heads away when he came along, or when we went near him.”
For another fourteen months Woodrow Wilson lives on at the White House, immured in a sickroom. Every message, every newspaper passes through Edith Wilson’s hands.
“He must never know how ill he was; and I must carry on.”
When he is well enough to go out for drives in the White House motor car he sits covered by a cape in front with the driver, because it’s too painful for him to try to sit up in the back seat. He takes pathetic pleasure in the motion pictures that are shown him almost every afternoon, propped in his wheel chair in one of the large upstairs rooms.
By early February Wilson is well enough to settle with Lansing. Secretary Lansing has been calling informal meetings of the members of the Cabinet to keep the government rolling during the President’s illness. This is the last straw. He dictates a stiff letter asking for the Secretary’s immediate resignation.
Bainbridge Colby, erstwhile Progressive who became a devoted Wilsonian, and who has the reputation of writing a very good speech, is appointed in Lansing’s stead.
Illusions flourish in the sickroom world.
Wilson is convinced that the American people, the people who cheered him in Omaha and Seattle and Coeur d’Alene and Pueblo, Colorado, are for him and for his covenant almost to a man. Only the reactionary senators stand in their way.
He propounds a strange scheme: he will challenge the senators who are against the treaty to resign and seek re-election. He will promise that if they are re-elected he will induce the Vice President to resign and, after appointing a Republican Secretary of State he will resign himself; the Secretary of State will thus become President. Hasn’t he always believed in party government in the English style?
When the Senate reconsiders the Versailles Treaty, and the possibility arises that ratification may still be secured, with reservations tempered by compromise, Wilson again insists that Hitchcock’s obedient Democrats cast their votes against any treaty with reservations of any kind. So strong is the clamor for compromise that, even so, the treaty almost passes with the necessary twothirds vote. Only strict orders from the White House keep the Democrats in line for rejection. “We can always depend on Mr. Wilson,” says Brandegee to Lodge.
The theory is abroad that Wilson has insisted on rejection of the amended treaty because he wants a campaign issue for 1920. Can it be that he dreams of a third term?
When the Democrats convene in San Francisco in June the candidates are William Gibbs McAdoo and A. Mitchell Palmer. Wilson won’t let Tumulty give his endorsement either to his soninlaw or to his Attorney General. Newspaper articles are inspired about the President’s very good health. Photographs are broadcast taken from his good side. Colby is dispatched to San Francisco as bearer of a message from the White House: in case of a deadlock; why not Wilson?
The scheme goes awry. On the fortyfourth ballot a harmless Ohio politician named James M. Cox receives the nomination. His runningmate is the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Cox is to run against another Ohio politician, considered equally harmless, Warren Gamaliel Harding, whose candidacy is the product of a similar deadlock in the Republican convention. Senator Harding’s qualifications are that he’s a strong reservationist on the treaty and that he comes from Canton which was William McKinley’s home town. Perhaps there is something that reminds people of McKinley about the way Harding wears his frock coat.
Wilson calls the Democratic candidates to the White House for his blessing. From his wheel chair he receives their assurance that they will treat the campaign as a solemn referendum on the Covenant of the League of Nations.
When the American people go to the polls in November to decide this solemn referendum Harding wins by seven million votes.
On Inauguration Day Woodrow Wilson drives to the Capitol from the White House with President-elect Harding. While Harding walks with swinging stride up the broad steps of the Capitol, Wilson is smuggled in a wheel chair through a side door and up by a private elevator to the President’s room in the Senate wing. There the traditional congressional committee waits upon the retiring President to ask if he has any further communications to make to the retiring Congress. The man whose duty it is to ask that question as committee chairman is Henry Cabot Lodge.
“I have no communication to make,” says ex-President Wilson; “I appreciate your courtesy, good morning, sir.”
No crowds packed the empty sidewalks of the avenues when Woodrow Wilson was driven from the Capitol to the house on S Street which Edith Wilson had readied to receive him. The sickroom life went on. A querulous invalid, sometimes he surprised his family by a burst of high spirits. He liked to spring a limerick on them. For a while his health seemed to improve. He would speak of his plan to write a book on the philosophy of government, but he got no further than a dedication to his wife.
When he sat up he liked to wear an old gray sweater he had worn as a young professor. When occasionally an old friend, or a delegation, was admitted to see him, they found him seated by the fire in his library, always in the same worn brown leather armchair that had come with him from Princeton. Visitors deferred to him as titular head of the Democratic Party.
Each Armistice Day a small nostalgic crowd would gather on the quiet street and a few extra policemen would be assigned to the beat and Edith Wilson would arrange for him to say a few words urging all good men to come to the aid of the League, and the lost peace. He enjoyed the afternoon rides in their motor car. Though the day was excessively hot, he was well enough, when President Harding, whose administration was beset with storms and scandals, died of poisoning attributed to an Alaskan crab, to attend the funeral.
There was no real recovery. In the fall of 1923 the sight began to fail in Wilson’s good eye. Glasses brought no relief. His digestion failed. Dr. Grayson remembered him whispering, “The machinery is worn out … I am ready.”
He died on February 3, 1924, about churchtime on a Sunday morning. When he was interred in the crypt of the unfinished Episcopal cathedral up on St. Alban’s Hill, President and Mrs. Calvin Coolidge were present at the ceremony.
NOTES ON SOURCES
There is more material on World War I than any man can possibly cope with. The reader who tries to thread his way through the currents and crosscurrents of the period is faced by astronomical quantities of printed matter. Everyone remotely connected with even the most distant aspects of the conflict managed to get some volume printed celebrating his exploits. Persons in authority, with the help of journalists, ghostwriters, and rewrite men, produced a flood of memoirs, almost always selfserving, and often inaccurate. The official records are monumental. The patient reader has to wade through shelf after shelf of flatulent verbiage in pursuit of that tiny flicker of truth which makes a page worthwhile.