The Illusion of Victory (69 page)

If Wilson had been on the job as president instead of playing world savior, he might have fought the passage of this bad legislation and immediately started rallying enough congressional votes to sustain a veto. He did neither. It was one more piece of evidence that the president had lost sight of his responsibility as leader of the American people.
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Woodrow Wilson had barely launched his rhetorical offensive to save his version of the League of Nations when the worst strike of the year reminded people that their elected leader was not minding the nation’s store. With war-spurred inflation at 102 percent and other unions getting raises, the nation’s policemen began to wonder if they too deserved a piece of the action. Police unions took shape in Washington, D.C., New York and Boston and began talking to the American Federation of Labor. A great many people grew alarmed. The police commissioner of Washington warned that anyone who joined a union was out of a job. The AFL asked for Wilson’s intercession. He responded with a telegram urging everyone to stay calm until he returned from his tour.

In Boston, where a Republican mayor and police commissioner held sway, calm did not prevail. Although Commissioner Edwin Upton Curtis, a crusty WASP and former mayor, issued a stern warning, the mostly Irish-American policemen accepted an AFL charter and elected union officials to negotiate with the city. Besides abysmal pay, they had grievances aplenty. The day shift worked seventy-three hours, and the night shift eighty-three hours, per week. The station houses were filthy, cockroach-infested wrecks.

Commissioner Curtis suspended the 19 union leaders on September 8. The next afternoon, 1,117 of Boston’s 1,544 cops walked off the job. Curtis had confidently assured the mayor and the governor that he was “ready for anything.” Either he thought only a handful of police would walk, or he expected the good citizens of Boston to behave so decorously, it would prove all over again that Beantown was indeed the “city on a hill” that his Puritan forebears had envisioned.

Curtis was wrong on both counts. When the lower orders realized that there was scarcely a cop on duty, they began looting every store in sight. People were held up in broad daylight and stripped of their valuables. Things only got worse as darkness fell. By the following morning, the thugs were more organized. They began carting away stolen goods in trucks. Professional criminals arrived by the trainload from New York and other cities to get a share of the swag.

Curtis tried Postmaster General Burleson’s ploy and asked Harvard students to become volunteer policemen. The mobs beat them silly. Boston’s frantic mayor called out a regiment of the state guard, and Governor Calvin Coolidge sent another regiment. The 6,700 soldiers, many of them veterans of the Western Front, meant business. They used machine-gun and rifle fire to disperse the looters. Seven people died, but by the following afternoon, order was restored to Boston.

The leader of the police union offered to send his men back to work if the governor and/or mayor agreed to negotiate their grievances. Samuel Gompers of the AFL, no longer a warm admirer of Woodrow Wilson, backed the union men. Governor Coolidge, a man of a few words, said there was nothing to negotiate. Not one of the strikers would ever work as a policeman for Boston again. Even if Curtis’s peremptory style had triggered the strike, as Gompers argued, that did not justify “the wrong of leaving the city unguarded. There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime.”

That last sentence shot through the forty-eight states like a lightning bolt. The laconic Coolidge instantly became the kind of hero America wanted in 1919. In the distant west, Woodrow Wilson’s comment on the strike came in a pale second. He called it “a crime against civilization.” For the thousands of Boston Irish-Americans whose fathers, sons, and brothers had lost their jobs, the president’s words only added wormwood to the gall they were drinking. They heard Wilson’s sneering attacks on hyphenates behind the word “civilization.” they remembered the vicious things the “icicles of Yankeeland” had said about the famine-starved, demoralized Irish when they cascaded into Boston in the middle of the previous century. They were animals, barbarians; they would never become Americans. Their descendants were not inclined to endure similar insults from a president who had refused to lift a hand to help Ireland win its freedom.
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On September 23, another dose of bad news reached the Wilson cavalcade, this time from Washington, D.C. The Republican mild reservationist senators whom the president had tried to woo in the White House had negotiated a deal with Senator Lodge. Thanks to Wilson’s insults, the Republicans now had the votes to bar ratification of the treaty without reservations.
Numerous Democrats who also favored mild reservations seemed on the brink of joining them.

The news drove Wilson to a near frenzy. At a brief stop in Ogden, Utah, he lashed out at “pro-Germans” and claimed everyone opposed to the treaty was “in cahoots” with Germany. His next major speech, in Salt Lake City, was a rambling, incoherent mess. At one point, he read the Lodge reservation to Article 10, and many people clapped and cheered. The president excoriated the confused applauders, accusing them of wanting to “cut out the heart of the covenant.”
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At Pueblo, Colorado, after denouncing hyphenates, Wilson sought refuge in idealistic rhetoric. He called the doughboys crusaders. He said their sacrifices had made “all the world believe in America as it believes in no other nation organized in the modern world.” He invoked not only the “serried ranks in khaki” who had come home but “the dear ghosts that still deploy upon the fields of France.” In their name he called upon the American people to “extend their hand” to the “truth of justice and of liberty and of peace” in the covenant of the League of Nations. Many in the audience were moved to tears by this vision.
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But idealism could not silence the ugly passions, the antagonisms, and the hatred that the war had aroused in America. They were loose in Woodrow Wilson’s body and mind as well as in the souls of the people. Terrible headaches began to torment the president day and night. As the train climbed to the high altitudes of Denver and Pueblo, he had difficulty breathing. Fits of choking assailed him—grim evidence of arteriosclerosis and congestive heart failure—as well as fateful signs of a faltering crusade.

As the train rolled toward the next speaking date in Wichita, Kansas, Wilson told his wife he felt horribly ill. After sitting with him for a few hours, Edith Wilson summoned Admiral Grayson to the compartment at 2 A.M. Waves of nausea were engulfing the president. He struggled for breath, his face twitched convulsively. The ache in his head had become intolerable.

Grayson awoke Joe Tumulty and told him the rest of the trip would have to be canceled. The president was suffering from nervous exhaustion. “I don’t seem to realize it, but I have gone to pieces,” a weeping Wilson told the dismayed Tumulty. Outside Wichita, the president’s secretary summoned the reporters to tell them Wilson was suffering from a “nervous reaction in his digestive system” and the train was heading back to Washington.

Woodrow Wilson’s appeal to the people was over. Not a few of his enemies sneered that he was faking an illness because the trip had been a failure. The president was not the only one who resorted to the low road.
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Back in the White House on September 28, Admiral Grayson ordered complete isolation and total rest for his patient. For a few days, the president seemed to be recovering. His appetite returned. He went for several rides in one of the White House Pierce Arrows. He played pool. He slept fairly well. But he could not escape the political brawl that continued to agitate the nation and the Senate. There, party lines were hardening. The Democrats were declaring themselves committed to a treaty with no reservations. The Republicans were insisting on reservations or no treaty. A stalemate loomed. Only presidential intervention could resolve it.

Another kind of intervention resolved Wilson’s dilemma. About 9 A.M. on October 2, White House Chief Usher Irwin “Ike” Hoover received an anguished call from Edith Galt Wilson.“Please get Dr. Grayson. The president is very sick,” she whispered over a private wire from the second floor. Hoover telephoned Grayson and ordered a car to bring him to the White House. Hurrying upstairs to see if the First Lady needed help, Hoover found the door to the president’s bedroom shut. When Grayson arrived, he tried the door and found it was locked. Already, Edith Wilson had decided only a select few would find out what was wrong with her husband.

A knock gained Grayson access to the room. Ten minutes later, the admiral emerged to stare at Hoover with an unnerving mixture of horror and dismay. Throwing up his arms, Grayson gasped,“My God! The president is paralyzed!”
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In his memoir, Hoover noted that this was the first and last time he heard the word “paralyzed.” Grayson swiftly summoned four other doctors, one a well-known Philadelphia neurologist, and a nurse who had cared for Ellen Wilson, the president’s first wife, when she died of Bright’s disease in 1914. In the late afternoon, Hoover was asked to come into the bedroom to rearrange some of the furniture. He was the only member of the White House staff whose discretion Edith Wilson trusted.

“The president lay stretched out on the large Lincoln bed,” Hoover wrote in his memoir.“He looked as if he were dead. There was not a sign of life. His face had a long cut about the temple from which the signs of blood were still evident. His nose also bore a long cut lengthwise. This too looked red and raw.”

In her memoir, Edith Wilson would deny these vivid details. But they have the ring of truth. Hoover had nothing to gain from telling what he saw. Edith Wilson had an urgent need to conceal or revise almost everything she said and did from October 2, 1919, until she left the White House eighteen months later.
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Edith had found her husband on the floor of his bathroom with those ugly cuts on his forehead and nose. Wilson had suffered a stroke and struck his head on the bathtub fixtures as he fell. By the end of the day,“an air of secrecy had come over things,” Ike Hoover recalled. This was not an accidental development. The doctors conferred, but no one on the White House staff, including Hoover, was told anything. Edith Wilson was determined to keep her husband’s collapse a secret.

White House servants knew enough—and whispered enough—to arouse the curiosity of reporters in the press room. The newsmen asked Grayson what was wrong with Woodrow Wilson. For a reply they got a bulletin:“The President had a fairly good night but he is not at all good this morning.” toward the end of the day Grayson amended this vague message:“The President is a very sick man. His condition is less favorable today and he has remained in bed throughout the day.”
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So began the greatest deception in the history of American politics. Strong-willed Edith Wilson bullied Cary Grayson and Joe Tumulty into joining her in a conspiracy to conceal how sick the president was. Woodrow Wilson had suffered a cerebral thrombosis, which collapsed the lower left side of his face and paralyzed the left side of his body. For a month he hovered between life and death, totally incapable of exercising the powers and responsibilities of his office.

Cabinet members sought information from Tumulty or Grayson. To those they trusted, such as Josephus Daniels, they told the truth. The president’s appointees reacted with bewilderment and horror. Vice President Marshall came to the White House to inquire about Wilson’s condition and was told nothing. Only Secretary of State Lansing seems to have realized drastic action was required. The Constitution stated that if the president was incapacitated, the vice president should immediately succeed him. Lansing went to the White House and asked Tumulty for the truth.
Without using the explosive word “paralyzed,” tumulty conveyed Wilson’s condition.

The secretary read Tumulty the relevant clause from the Constitution, making it clear he thought it applied to Wilson. Emotion took charge of Tumulty’s usually strong intellect. Lansing was already regarded as a traitor, thanks to William Bullitt’s testimony before Congress. Tumulty curtly informed the secretary that “the Constitution was not a dead letter in the White House.” It was a curious thing to say—because Tumulty, Mrs. Wilson and Admiral Grayson were already in the business of making the national charter exactly that.

Grayson now joined the discussion. In some ways he was more partisan than Tumulty. He had introduced Edith Galt to the president; she had not a little to do with persuading Wilson to promote him over a hundred or so senior officers to the rank of rear admiral. Like Edith (and Wilson), the doctor was a Virginian. Tumulty asked Lansing who would certify that the president was disabled. Lansing said either Tumulty or Grayson could do it. According to his memoir, Tumulty exploded and roared,“While Woodrow Wilson is lying in the White House on the broad of his back I will not be a party to ousting him. He has been too kind, too loyal, too wonderful to me to receive such treatment at my hands.” the secretary added that he was sure that Grayson would join him in resisting any attempt to bring an outside authority into the White House to pass such a judgment on the president. Grayson emphatically backed Tumulty’s defiance.
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Lansing would later deny Tumulty’s version of their conversation ever took place. There are grounds for believing the secretary of state. Wilson had been neither kind nor wonderful to Tumulty for a long time. But there is no doubt that Admiral Grayson willingly joined the conspiracy. When Lansing convened a cabinet meeting on October 6 to discuss the situation and summoned Grayson, the doctor blatantly lied about the president’s condition. He said Wilson was suffering from a nervous breakdown, indigestion and physical exhaustion. Not a word was said about paralysis or a stroke.