When the Cheering Stopped (22 page)

But the McKellars were very few, and day by day Tumulty and others saw that the League was in terrible danger unless the President yielded on the reservations. Ray Stannard Baker came again to plead compromise and this time was allowed to talk with the President in person. Buried in blankets, a fur muff at his feet, the President listened while Baker spoke. But the argument had no effect. He would accept no reservations. “If I accept them, these Senators will merely offer new ones, even more humiliating,” he said. He paused. Baker was silent—there was nothing more he could add. “These evil men intend to destroy the League,” the President said. Baker left.

William McAdoo came and made a plea, but the
President cut him off by saying, “I am willing to compromise on anything but the Ten Commandments.” Senator Carter Glass, a loyal supporter, wrote that ex-President Taft had written up some reservations differing from the Lodge ones—would the President take them?—and the First Lady wrote back questioning Taft's “good faith” and saying the President felt “absolute inaction” was better than “mistaken initiative.” Postmaster General Burleson came to talk about using “good tactics” in the fight for ratification, but the President said, “I will not play for position. This is not a time for tactics. It is a time to stand square. I can stand defeat; I cannot stand retreat from conscientious duty.” He refused to consider it even possible that the Senate would actually kill the American entry into the League which was the hope of mankind—“The thing is too preposterous to talk about”—but sometimes it must have come to him that perhaps the unthinkable could happen, for once when Tumulty came to him on the South Portico and said, “Governor, you are looking very well today,” he turned his head away and burst into tears and said, “I am very well for a man who awaits disaster.” The First Lady worried about him terribly; she wrote Jessie, “As the normal strength returns I will be less and less necessary—but now I never leave except for an hour in the afternoon and at mealtimes. For he gets nervous if alone and allowed to think—so I stay every minute of the day.… There have been so many things in the conduct of affairs to worry him that I try not to let him have time to think of them.”

On March 19, 1920, the entrance of the United States into the League of Nations under the special conditions outlined by the Lodge reservations was voted down in the Senate. The count was 49 in favor and 35 against.

Of the 35 Senators who voted “nay,” one dozen were Republicans. The other 23 were Democrats loyal to the command of their President. Had but seven of those men defied that command, the required two-thirds vote would have been met and the United States would have been in the League.

There would never be another vote taken on the
issue. The League was “as dead as Hector,” said Senator James Reed of Missouri. “As dead as Marley's ghost,” said Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts.

It was Tumulty who came to tell him that it was all over. Tumulty must have known—would have to have known—that it was going to end in this way, and he came prepared. He had with him a book. He would read to the President from it, but first he smiled—loyal Tumulty, he managed a smile!—and then he said, “Governor, only the Senate has defeated you. The People will vindicate your course. You may rely upon that.” Then he said, “Governor, I want to read a chapter from the third volume of your ‘History of the American People' if it will not tire you.” So they sat together and Tumulty read out the words the President had written many years ago as a college professor no one had heard of: “‘Slowly the storm blew off … But in the meantime things had been said which could not be forgotten. Washington had been assailed with unbridled license as an enemy and a traitor to the country.

“‘The country knew its real mind about him when the end of his term came and it was about to lose him.'” Tumulty ceased reading. The President said in the voice that once had been so clear and pure but now was husky and whispering as it came out of his tortured, twisted mouth in the white face above the thin and ravished neck which once, a long time ago, the dead Ellen had massaged and called her daughters to look at so that they might see there were no hollows there—he said to Tumulty that he thanked him for putting him into such company.

That night he could not sleep. Grayson stayed in the White House, going into the President's room every hour or so. The President was very quiet, hardly talking, but about three in the morning he said, “Doctor, the devil is a busy man.” After that for a very long time he was silent. But awake. Then he said, “Doctor, please get the Bible there and read from Second Corinthians, Chapter 4, Verses 8 and 9.” Grayson went for it and opened it and read out into the room where they were alone, the light visible to anyone who cared to walk along Executive
Avenue just as dawn was about to come up and know that the President of the United States lay sleepless: “‘We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed …'”

The President lay in the bed that Abraham Lincoln slept in, in the House to which once Cousin Florence came in the little hot-dog wagon, in the capital city of the nation which often he said had saved the world and would lead it forward, and in time fell asleep. But a few days later when George Creel, head of the wartime Committee on Public Information, came to see him, he had in Creel's eyes the pallor of very death itself. It came from his heart unguarded against the blow, Creel thought. “I sat with him, miserably fumbling for words of comfort, but it was as though I had not been in the room. All the while his bloodless lips moved continuously, as if framing arguments and forming new appeals. Only as I was leaving did he look at me seeingly, his eyes filled with an anguish such as I trust never to see again. ‘If only I were not helpless,' he whispered.”

Alice Roosevelt Longworth, daughter of T.R., wife of a Republican leader of the House of Representatives, contemptuously dismissed the invalid in the White House with a thought about what his enemies said of him. “Some of the comments,” she remarked, “were noticeably lacking in the Greek quality of Aidos—the quality that deters one from defiling the body of a dead enemy.”

He could not stand the staring eyes—so the auto rides were discontinued.

*
Before the invitation was tendered, Lord Grey was warned that Jimmy Roosevelt had measles, but said this did not worry him as “he did not think he was subject to childish diseases.”

*
Over teacups, the First Lady asked Secretary of Agriculture Houston to take the Treasury Department; Houston was replaced in Agriculture by Edward Meredith. In a personal interview she also asked Judge John Barton Payne to leave the Shipping Board for the Department of the Interior. Neither Houston, Meredith nor Payne saw the President.

*
The “mental expert” was presumably Dr. Francis Dercum.

*
“Doc” Moses.

10

Spring came to Washington and to the country, the first spring of the nineteen-twenties, of the bootlegger and speakeasy and hip flask, of the Golden Age of Sports,
the Bull Market, the Florida land boom, Al Capone, Bobby Jones, Fatty Arbuckle, Scott Fitzgerald, the flappers, jazz, the Stutz Bearcat, the short dress, the high back, the accepted “Goddamn” in polite conversation. In another spring he had gone through light misty rain to ask for a war to end war and make the world safe for democracy; in another spring he had been the great man of Paris' great men. Now in this spring he sat in the closed and stilled White House grounds and watched the two-year-old son of Cary Grayson and the former Altrude Gordon go for a ride in a cart drawn by a gentle pony. At eleven each morning a glass of milk and a cracker or cookie were brought to him, and with it a cookie for the tiny Gordon Grayson. He would hold back Gordon's snack and then they all smiled when there was a childish whisper from the babyish mouth: “Didn't anybody bring a tookie out here for me?” They went in then for the movie, Gordon riding along on the footrest of the wheel chair or running ahead to get in his kiddie car and race around the East Room.

That the United States and the League were dead one to the other haunted the President, but he tried to fight the terrible depression which settled upon him with the weapons of his religion and faith. For forty years he had never had the slightest doubt of the existence of a divine God; Ellen had wondered and doubted, the girls had their skeptical moments, but he never let go for an instant. “If I were not a Christian, I think I should go mad,” he said to Grayson when the League died in the Senate. Still it could not be that he was able completely to throw off his shock and horror over what had happened. “Good morning, it is a beautiful spring day and warm,” Grayson greeted him one day; he replied, “I don't know whether it is warm or cold. I feel so weak and useless. I feel that I would like to go back to bed and stay there until I either get well or die.” To George Creel it seemed as though he were consumed by a vast inner loneliness, the loneliness of one who had marched at the very head of the procession that was the world's desire for peace and security, but who now was the shattered evangel of a shattered cause. From the Senate came back the actual physical copy of the treaty he had submitted to them and
they had refused to pass—Ray Stannard Baker thought the dispatch of the document was the work of Senator Lodge, “for it was like him”—and the President in his agony said that it would have been better, far better, for the country and for himself had he died in the train going from the Western prairie to Washington, or in the bathroom of the White House.

In the early hours of one April morning, sleepless, he spoke to Grayson of resigning: “My personal pride must not be allowed to stand in the way of my duty to the country. If I am only half efficient I should turn the office over to the Vice President. If it is going to take much time for me to recover my health and strength, the country cannot afford to wait for me. What do you think?” The doctor reviewed how his patient was keeping in touch with things and writing more notes every day, and suggested a Cabinet meeting, which would perhaps reassure him of his ability to handle the job he held. The President acquiesced in the idea of the meeting, but he could not cease brooding over the death of the League. “I have had nothing but discouragement from those who should support me and should cooperate with me and stand for the principles for which I stand,” he said, his mouth inert on the left side and the words coming through the thin lips as from a faraway and muffled place. “I have stood for principles and not personalities,” he said, an old man bent in a wheel chair, the white hair thin and wispy above the tortured face. “Many have failed me in this crucial time.” The husky soft voice murmured on in the night: betrayal, betrayal. But the great fighting spirit and the will for victory were still there in the crumpled and broken body even if physically it could be seen only in the undulled eyes. “If I were well and strong I would gladly and eagerly fight for the cause stronger than ever,” he said. There was something in him of the Southerners who loved their Lost Cause and who surrounded him in his boy's days in Georgia and South Carolina. The cause, the cause.

The Cabinet meeting was called for April 14, the first meeting since the final one held by the fired Lansing, the first one the President had attended since August, eight months earlier. The meeting was in his study near his
bedroom, not in the Cabinet Room of the Executive Wing. Before the Cabinet members came he was put into a chair and propped up at the end of a desk. When each man came in Ike Hoover formally announced his name and title in a very loud, clear voice, making a horrified Secretary Daniels think to himself that the President must be blind. (But the announcing was only an extra precaution and was not done again in later meetings.) Secretary Houston looked at his chief and thought to himself that it was enough to make you weep to see him, he was so old, so worn and haggard. In repose his face looked somewhat as it had, but when Houston shook his hand and he said hello the Secretary saw how the jaw dropped on one side. The voice uttering greetings was weak and strained.

When all the men were seated, the President convened the meeting with a weak joke: “I thought it would be well that we put our heads together, but not like the Chicago aldermen who wanted to form a solid surface.” The Cabinet men sent a chuckle over the desk to him, but then a silence fell. For several moments they sat thus in embarrassed quiet, it seeming that he had nothing additional to say, no more to contribute. At length someone brought up the subject of the nationalized railroads. The President seemed to have difficulty in keeping his mind on the discussion. A debate began between Secretary of Labor William Wilson and Attorney General Palmer about the deportations of suspected anarchists, Palmer saying more deportations would have ended the mining strike and Secretary Wilson saying it would only have aggravated matters. The President roused himself and said to Palmer, “Do not let the country see Red.”

There was some talk of complaints about the Post Office Department and he said of the Postmaster General, “This seems to be an open season for criticizing Burleson.” On matters that took place before his illness he seemed clear enough, but on everything else he wished to postpone discussion. Several times in the course of the meeting Grayson appeared in the doorway to look closely at the patient, and after an hour's dragging talk the doctor came in with the First Lady, who with anxiety written all over her features suggested that the men should
go. “Holding this Cabinet meeting is an experiment, you know,” the President said, “and I ought not to stay long.” So they filed out.

The later irregularly held meetings were painful for the Cabinet men, for he would repeat himself to them, telling the same stories, the same jokes. From his seat he waved vaguely and said the last resting place of the League was nearby and every morning he put fresh flowers on the grave. The men continued to run their departments as they saw best, conferring with the First Lady now and again and the President occasionally, and attempting to fit into their work the instructions which reached them in his short notes. But the notes were generally of a bitter nature and it seemed he was lashing out at all the world. The French and British, avaricious nations, were out to take advantage of the other Europeans, and the State Department should “keep on their track”; the French Marshal Ferdinand Foch had a “touch of insubordination” about him and could not be trusted; the Princeton Endowment Fund would receive nothing from Princeton's most illustrious graduate because that graduate did not “believe at all in the present administration of the University”; the American Ambassador to Mexico was, like his predecessors, derelict in his duty: “I wonder if there is something in an assignment to Mexico which makes a man a quitter.”