Tuesday, August 4, 1914, gave Washington something it rarely got: a perfect summer day. Light breeze, temperature of seventy-nine degrees. Few savored it. Most of officialdom had taken wing, as it did every summer, and although Congress was still in session, its members were not spending much time outdoors. They went to the Capitol early and stayed late in hopes of finishing the work that stood between them and a bit of vacation before their campaigns for reelection.
The president was also immured, absorbed in matters that rendered the loveliness of the day grotesque. In a single week, Europe had self-destructed, and millions of soldiers were now on the march. Wilson had followed the collapse hour by hour, and while there was little he could do, he had not been idle. On August 3, he issued a proclamation of U.S. neutrality, forbidding Americans from joining or recruiting for the belligerents’ armies, arming ships for any nation at war, or planning a military expedition in support of a combatant.
The president also asked reporters to abstain from passing along reports or rumors that might incite an American version of the lawlessness sweeping the capitals of Europe. In Paris, an overzealous patriot had assassinated the Socialist leader Jean Jaurès for his pacifist leanings. In Berlin, embassy windows were smashed, and English tourists were evicted from their hotels. There and in Paris and London, foreigners were being spat upon and roughed up. Crowds roamed the streets at all hours, waving flags, singing national airs, and looking for foreign-owned establishments to vandalize. The Continent’s finance ministers staved off a panic by closing stock exchanges, raising interest rates, and curtailing withdrawals, but Europeans fearing the worst were emptying the stores.
Thousands of American tourists in Europe were cut off from their money, and as the captains of dozens of transatlantic liners ducked into port to await instructions from their home offices, departure dates and reservations disappeared. Americans poured into their embassies, which worked nonstop to relieve the destitute and to issue passports. When Holland declared its neutrality, Ambassador Gerard bought hundreds of steerage tickets on Dutch liners and sold them to Americans. Ambassador Page wrote Wilson that “Crazy men and weeping women were imploring and cursing and demanding. . . . Men shook English banknotes in my face and demanded U.S. money and swore our Government and its agents ought all to be shot.”
On August 4, Wilson wrote the heads of the warring states to say that he would welcome an opportunity to act for peace. In tendering the good offices of the United States, he was taking a cue from The Hague Convention for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes, which recommended that in case of an armed conflict, a disinterested third party should offer to mediate.
Wilson customarily wrote on a typewriter, but on this day he was composing in pencil, at his wife’s bedside, and straining to concentrate. Ellen’s failure to recover from her fall in March had led Grayson to diagnose a nervous breakdown caused by the demands of her life as first lady. She had rallied in May for her fifty-fourth birthday and Nell and Mac’s wedding, but by June good days were rare. Then the diagnosis was revised to Bright’s disease, an incurable disorder of the kidneys. Grayson summoned the specialists and reassured Wilson, hoping to protect him from anguish for as long as possible. Toward the end of July, Grayson moved into the White House to care for Ellen around the clock.
The most important visitor on August 4 was Edward P. Davis of Philadelphia, the Wilsons’ family physician for many years and one of Wilson’s inner circle during their student days at Princeton. “We sat all day waiting,” Nell wrote. The day would remain in her memory as “a terrible nightmare—Europe in flames, and all hope fading from our own hearts.” Grayson came and went from the sickroom, his face inscrutable, and late in the afternoon, after Davis arrived, it was decided that he should tell the girls that their mother’s death was imminent. Their father wept, which he had never done in their presence.
Wilson had known for weeks that Ellen’s illness was fatal, but knowing was not the same as believing: “we are still hoping and the doctors are doing noble work,” he wrote House on August 6. On the same day, the Senate passed the legislation Ellen had sought to clean up Washington’s alleyways, and when Woodrow gave her the news, she seemed to understand. Ellen died at five o’clock, with Woodrow and Margaret and Jessie and Nell at her side. He wept again, uncontrollably. Turning away, he walked to a window and burst out, “Oh, my God, what am I to do?” When he could speak again, he was resolute: “I must not give way.”
Ellen’s funeral took place in the East Room on August 10 at two in the afternoon. The ceremonies were simple, the guest list abbreviated. The Wilson family entered moments before the service began and did not linger when it ended. By four-thirty they were on a private train bound for Rome, Georgia, Ellen’s hometown. She would be buried next to her parents. The president’s official retinue numbered exactly two: Tumulty and Grayson.
The coffin traveled with the president, at one end of his private car, where he continued the vigil he had kept since her death. The Secret Service had orders to admit no one but family except at his invitation. Rome had draped itself in black, and row upon row of townspeople lined the streets between the railroad station and the Presbyterian church where Ellen’s father had served as pastor. Wilson maintained his composure throughout the service but broke down at the grave.
Traveling back to Washington he stood alone for hours on the train’s rear platform. Grayson, who went out at one point to keep him company, was sent away. “I want to think,” Wilson said. Once home, though, he clung to Grayson. They golfed together, dined together, and read together in Wilson’s study. “I never understood before what a broken heart meant, and did for a man,” Wilson wrote his friend Mary. “It just means that he lives by the compulsion of necessity and duty only, and has no other motive force. . . . Every night finds me exhausted—dead in heart and body.” He blamed Ellen’s early death on his demanding political career, and he sought escape from guilt and grief in his work.
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Twenty-one of Bryan’s cooling-off treaties were pending in the Senate when the world war began, and as soon as Wilson returned from Georgia he urged William J. Stone, chairman of the Senate’s Committee on Foreign Relations, to secure ratification quickly and without any watering down. The incessant hopscotching of Bryan’s mind exasperated all who dealt with him, but he had moved the treaties forward with the single-mindedness of Woodrow Wilson. Great Britain, France, Russia, and Austria had accepted the treaties in principle, and Bryan regularly nudged their ambassadors to press their governments for final approval. He also made repeated approaches to the chief resisters, Germany and Japan. Germany had spurned him on the basis of a military calculation: after years of preparation and an investment of billions of marks, it had the most powerful army in Europe. A cooling-off treaty would require Germany to put war on hold if it found itself at an impasse with the United States. The German army had prepared itself to strike quickly and was not about to forfeit its advantage. Tokyo rejected Bryan’s approaches because the United States disapproved of Japanese ambitions in China and because Japan still resented California’s Alien Land Law. Nevertheless, Bryan had stuck to his last, and on August 13 the Senate ratified eighteen of the treaties. The rest were returned to the State Department for fine-tuning.
Bryan had spent the afternoon conferring with senators at the Capitol, and as he walked to his automobile after the vote, the Christian Science Monitor’s correspondent caught up with him. The reporter was puzzled. Germany had ridiculed Britain for entering the war in defense of “a scrap of paper” (a reference to an old treaty protecting the neutrality of Belgium). The reporter wondered why the United States was busily signing peace treaties at a moment that seemed to prove their pointlessness. The cooling-off treaties were “absolutely new,” Bryan said. He was sure that if the belligerents had had time to think, they would not have gone to war.
Unless one of them decided that the treaty was a scrap of paper.
• • •
Though Americans would grow rich on the war, its first economic effects were devastating. The value of exports shipped from New York sank by 30 percent in three weeks. Imports also plummeted, and the decline in revenues from customs duties threatened to leave the Treasury well short of its projections for the fiscal year. Wharves and warehouses were soon piled high with exports of every description.
Overnight, European cargo ships had disappeared from the Atlantic. Many French and English vessels were pressed into war service, and scores of German ships docked in American ports to avoid destruction or capture by the British, who still ruled the Atlantic. American ships were in short supply, because the growth in trade had far outstripped the growth of the U.S. merchant marine: only 10 percent of American exports traveled in American bottoms. Shipping rates soared as marine insurers canceled policies and U.S. shipping companies either suspended operations or demanded compensation for the added risk.
McAdoo proposed a heretical solution: government intervention. The country was in crisis, business had gone into hiding, and no one but government could save the day, he told Wilson. He thought that the administration should establish a federal agency to provide the necessary insurance and a corporation to buy and build ships. Wilson liked the ideas but foresaw a huge fight with Republicans, who would accuse him of putting the country on the road to socialism. But after considering the proposition for a day or two, he decided to pursue it. Although Congress quickly approved the insurance agency, the debate on the shipping corporation dragged on for months and thrust the administration into quarrels with Big Business, Big Finance, and the governments of France and Great Britain.
Days after the war began, the House of Morgan telephoned the State Department to ask if a $100 million loan to the French government would be at odds with the new state of neutrality. The laws of war allowed neutrals to do business with all belligerents, but Bryan strongly believed that the United States should not allow its banks to lend to the warring countries. “Money is the worst of all contrabands because it commands everything else,” he wrote Wilson. Bryan argued that barring such loans would shorten the war and set a fine example for the rest of the world. Wilson agreed, and on August 15 the United States banned loans to all belligerents.
Given their antipathy to war, Wilson and Bryan might have banned the sale of munitions as well, but they did not, and when called upon to explain, they turned to the new counselor of the State Department, Robert Lansing. An experienced international lawyer, Lansing pointed out that banks typically turned large loans into bonds for sale on Wall Street. Because the bonds would probably be purchased by investors who sympathized with the government borrowing the money, thousands of Americans would become fierce partisans of one side or the other, Lansing argued. But a sale of munitions was different, he said. The manufacturer would sell to one belligerent as readily as he would to another. No chauvinism would be aroused. The moral conundrum of being an amoral accomplice to all parties in the slaughter was never addressed.
• • •
Grayson and House pleaded with Wilson to take a vacation, and House proposed a cruise along the Massachusetts coast in the presidential yacht. “You owe it to the country to do this, and I trust you may find it possible to do so this week,” the colonel wrote the president soon after Ellen’s death. “Our automobile can follow the Mayflower from place to place, so that you may have diversion both by land and sea.” Wilson declined, saying that he had to keep a close watch on Europe. And, he added, “my great safety lies in having my attention absolutely fixed elsewhere than upon myself. I believe this is good ‘doctor’ sense as well as good reasoning about the public welfare.”
He was more candid with Mary Hulbert: “In God’s gracious arrangement of things I have little time or chance to think about myself. The day’s work and responsibilities exhaust all the vitality I have and there is none left to spend on pity for myself. I am lamed and wounded more sorely than any words I have could describe. I never dreamed such loneliness and desolation of heart possible. I suffer all the time a sort of dumb agony of longing.” He was grateful for the magnitude of his labors, he said, because they forced him to stay in harness. “Nothing less great, I imagine, could. The world itself seems gone mad, and there is a sort of grim pleasure and stern compulsion to keep sane and self-possessed amidst the general wreck and distemper.”
Wilson expected the United States to face the general wreck with the same stoicism he imposed on himself. On August 18, a week after Ellen’s burial, he issued a statement exhorting Americans to serve the national interest by acting and speaking in “the spirit of impartiality and fairness and friendliness to all concerned.” Some 35 million Americans—one in three—were immigrants or, like Wilson himself, children of immigrants. With ties to one or another of the countries at war, they were bound to differ in their sympathies, Wilson acknowledged, and he asked them to rein in their passions. “We must be impartial in thought as well as in action,” he said.
The belligerents answered Wilson’s call for a neutrality of spirit by starting a propaganda war in the United States, hoping to persuade Americans to do the very thing their president had asked them not to do: take sides. Within days of his appeal, Britain, France, Germany, and Japan had set up “information bureaus” in Washington and other American cities.
• • •
The president granted himself a few days’ leave at the end of August and went up to the house he and Ellen had rented in Cornish. Jessie and her husband, Frank Sayre, a lawyer who devoted his career to public service and higher education, were already there. Wilson took Margaret and Grayson with him and extended an invitation to House, who was also in mourning—for the Great Adventure, which had been blasted to pieces by the Great War. He was distraught, too, about Ellen’s death, and deeply unhappy that his hypersensitivity to heat had kept him from going to Washington to comfort his friend.
House did not mention (as others did) that Wilson looked older, but he was clearly moved by Wilson’s grief. As Wilson spoke of his loss, he cried and told House that he felt like a machine that had given out. As far as he could tell, he was still doing good work, yet he looked to the rest of his term in office—two and a half years—with dread. “He did not see how he could go through with it,” House told his diary.
Wilson put House in the suite he had shared with Ellen, a pair of bedrooms joined by a bath. The president rose early to take care of his ablutions before the colonel got up, which House saw as a perfect illustration of Wilson’s thoroughgoing courtesy. At night they played billiards, read, and talked about the war. Wilson was sickened by the week’s news from Belgium, where the Germans were systematically destroying villages and executing scores of civilians, punishing whole towns for casualties inflicted by a handful of snipers. The worst of these depredations, the sacking of the medieval city of Louvain, had begun on the night of August 25 in a moment of confusion over who had fired on whom. Five days later, German soldiers were still moving through the streets, smashing windows and tossing incendiary devices into every house. More than a thousand homes were destroyed, along with the cathedral and most of the University of Louvain.
Wilson predicted that such barbarism would erase centuries of civilization. House, too, was in despair, unable to imagine any good ending for the war. If the Allies won, he thought that Russia, not England and France, would dominate the Continent. And if the Central Powers won, German militarism would force the rest of the world to become an armed camp.I
Between the first and last days of August 1914, nine European nations had mobilized eighteen million men, fought eighteen battles, and inflicted hundreds of thousands of casualties. The French dead and wounded in a handful of short engagements collectively known as the Battle of the Frontiers numbered 140,000.
By the time Wilson returned to Washington, on September 1, he was under attack from every quarter. There were demands for an official protest of the German rampage through Belgium, and while Wilson deplored the wantonness of the destruction, he maintained that neutrality required the United States to refrain from commenting on the acts of any belligerent. Germany accused American newspapers of favoring Britain. Britain feared that American exports to the neutral nation of Holland would be floated up the Rhine to Germany. And France cried foul when it learned that the U.S. government might purchase the German ships lying idle in American ports. Ambassador Jusserand wondered how the United States could justify paying huge sums to German shipping interests when it refused to let the French government borrow money in the United States. “What is our duty, what are our obligations, what are our rights under the circumstances?” asked The Baltimore Sun. “. . . We have got to consider other nations, and we have got to consider ourselves. And Uncle Sam will have to put on his best thinking cap to reach the right conclusion.”
I. Ultimately the six Allies (Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Japan, and Portugal) would have twenty-two Associates (Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, China, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Ecuador, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, the Hejaz [an Arabian kingdom], Honduras, Liberia, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Poland, Romania, Serb-Croat-Slovene State, Siam, the United States, and Uruguay).
