When the Cheering Stopped

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Praise for
When the Cheering Stopped

“A tragedy, brilliantly told.” —
Life

“Brilliant. With this book we see Wilson as much more than one of the great American Presidents. He becomes real as a human being.” —Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey

“One of the most remarkable—and frightening—stories on American politics and personalities I have ever read.” —Theodore H. White

“Reads like a thriller … A hair-raising chronicle.” —
Houston Post

“One of the strangest periods in the history of the U. S. Presidency … Dramatic and deeply moving.” —
New York Herald Tribune

“There's a new star on the literary horizon, a man whose writing is going to bring about a revision of certain historical attitudes. His book has penetrated the curtain of silence that obscured Woodrow Wilson's last years and has produced a human being.” —
Chicago Tribune

“Remarkable … A pageant restoring a time long ago as if it were yesterday.” —Book-of-the-Month Club News

“All the elements of a Greek tragedy.” —
The Christian Science Monitor

“A book that cannot fail to touch readers' emotions, for it is an eloquent and persuasive witness to the truth that the White House is one of the truly great stages of our time, and the tragedy of Woodrow Wilson one of the greatest dramas that has been played on it.” —
Show

“One of the season's most stunning adventures in searching biography. A bold, sensitive picture of one of history's most enigmatic figures.” —
Chicago American

“Sandburg did it for Lincoln, and now, in an exceptionally gripping and moving account, Gene Smith does it for Wilson … Magnificently portrayed.” —
San Francisco Call-Bulletin

“A remarkably effective account of the descent of a once magnificent man … Unabashedly a piece of popular history.” —
Oakland News

“The most interesting history since Winston Churchill.” —Dwight MacDonald

When the Cheering Stopped

The Last Years of Woodrow Wilson

Gene Smith

To S. R. S. and J. S. S.

CONTENTS

PART ONE
: THE PRESIDENT

PART TWO
: THE SECOND MRS. WILSON

PART THREE
: S STREET

Bibliography

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

PART ONE

The President

If we do not know courage

1

She who in her youth had been Miss Elly Lou Axson of Rome, Georgia, but who more latterly was First Lady of America, lay dying. In March she had slipped and fallen heavily, and during the spring she ceased to come downstairs for meals. In late July her doctor took up residence in the room next to hers, and as August began it was obvious that she could not live very much longer. And in fact the case was hopeless from the start, for she was suffering from Bright's disease and complications, the complications being tuberculosis of both kidneys.

Her husband, the President, either did not understand or could not to himself admit that she must die. All through July and into the first days of August he wrote friends that there was no real cause for alarm. But when her meals were served to her in the sickroom, it frightened him that she would not eat, and he would take a plate of food and sink to his knees beside her bed. “You will soon get well, darling, if you'll try hard to eat something,” he would say. “Now please take this bite, dear.” Often he got up at three in the morning to be with her when she could not sleep, and that he was there seemed to give her a degree of peace, for she was restless in those brief intervals when he left her. “Is your father looking well? Is your father looking well?” she kept asking her daughters when her husband was out of the room.

To one of the daughters, Eleanor—Little Nell or Nellie to the family—her sickness seemed like the coming-true of a terrible premonition. The day before her father's 1913 inauguration Nellie helped her mother dress for a tea-time call on the outgoing President and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. William Howard Taft. Arranging her mother's hair and adjusting her prettiest hat, the girl, excited and young,
chattered away. But her mother was utterly silent. At the end, Nellie kissed her and told her how lovely she looked. And the mother put both hands over her face and burst into tears. Nellie found spirits of ammonia for her and after a while her mother said she was all right. But Nellie had seen an awful, sudden despair in her mother's face, something she had never seen there before, and it terrified her. When her parents had gone off to the Tafts', she began to walk around the room, saying over and over, “It will kill them; it will kill them both.” She was crying, and soon she was screaming, and after a time she was crawling under the bed and pounding the floor with her hands and crying over and over again, “It will kill them! It will kill them both!”

But when the next day the sun came out just as her father, taking his oath of office, lifted his wife's small Bible to his lips, Nellie forgot her fears and took the light as an omen that all would go well. During the inauguration speech, it touched the girl to see her mother leave her seat to stand just beneath her father, looking up at him like a small child, a look of rapture on her face.

There was no Inaugural Ball—the President and First Lady did not want one—but there was a party in the White House, with the many relatives of the family, nearly all from the South, roaming through the rooms and singing around a piano. Cousin Florence Hoyt, a cripple, arrived at the railroad station and, unable to find a cab, hailed an old Negro selling frankfurters from a wagon pulled by a skinny scarecrow of a horse. She asked him to take her to the White House, main entrance, please, and he doubtfully agreed, suggesting, however, that they go in the back way. Cousin Florence would have none of that, though; nestling among the hot dogs, she told the man to make for the front door. Liveried attendants there lifted her out and, relatives shouting with laughter at her carriage, she was taken in to offer her congratulations. In the kitchen even an old servant of the President's late father was celebrating with the Negroes of the White House staff; to him the President—Cousin Woodrow and Uncle Woodrow to the majority of the guests—was still the Mister Tommy of boyhood days.

As Cousin Florence was being welcomed, someone
came to say that Aunt Annie Howe, the President's sister, had fallen on a marble staircase and cut her forehead. A servant was sent for a doctor and returned with Lieutenant Cary Travers Grayson of the U. S. Navy, the White House physician under President Taft and Taft's predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt. Grayson at once sewed up the slight wound and quickly put Aunt Annie right, and the President said to him that it had all been so promptly and efficiently done that Lieutenant Grayson must have been prepared for Aunt Annie's fall even before it happened. The party went on: there was a stand-up buffet lunch, a parade, and in the evening wonderful fireworks.

In the days that followed, the Wilson daughters, Margaret, Jessica and Nellie, the first two blue-eyed blondes, the last a brunette with blue-gray eyes very like her father's—“a noticeable man, with large gray eyes,” his wife called him, quoting Wordsworth—enjoyed themselves enormously. They were all single and in their twenties and Washington was marvelously stocked with young officers and aides to take them dancing and to the horse shows and parties. They frolicked around their new home, jumping out of dark corners to scare the servants, and they went on the White House tours incognito, loudly criticizing the President's daughters to the out-of-town tourists. Their father, looking better than he had ever looked before (or would ever look again), did not find his duties onerous. He spent no more than four or five hours a day on his work, and saying he still kept to a schoolboy schedule, he did not work on Saturdays or Sundays. Nights when the girls were home the family gathered by a piano, and the President and Margaret, an aspiring singer, performed duets together. Or the President did the imitations which had for years convulsed his daughters: The Drunken Man, during which performance he staggered about with a cow-like look in his eyes and an incoherent mumble coming from his slack lips; The Heavy Englishman, with an insufferably superior accent and an invisible monocle; The Villain, done with a scowl and a dragging foot; the Fourth of July Orator, gesturing not with his hands but with his feet, and Theodore Roosevelt, waving his fist and shouting, “We stand at Armageddon and battle for the Lord!” There were
limerick recitations also, including the much-loved one with which, as head of Princeton University, he had surprised a dinner party:

“There was a young monk of Siberia,

Whose existence grew drearier and drearier,

Till he burst from his cell with a hell of a yell,

And eloped with the Mother Superior.”

Sometimes in the Oval Room on the second floor, which the First Lady filled with their old furniture from Princeton, he romped with Nellie and Margaret around the table in so fast and furious a fashion that his wife cried out, “Woodrow, what is the matter with you?” Jessie would generally only watch, not participate, when the fun grew too boisterous, for she was, according to her father, classified along with her mother as one of the Proper Members of the family, as opposed to himself and Nellie, who were the Vulgar Members. Margaret, he said, was in between: she was Proper part of the time and Vulgar all the rest.