Tender letters flew back and forth during the month Edith and Woodrow were apart, and elaborate precautions were taken to keep the seriousness of their relationship out of the newspapers. Her letters were sent in envelopes addressed to Margaret. His were often mailed from a post office in a town at some distance from Cornish. She was his “own Darling,” he was her “best Beloved” and her “precious One.” She sent love and chatted about her recreations in Geneva, New York. He savored every morsel: “How jolly, my Sweetheart, that you are taking golf lessons (and how I envy the teacher—you will be adorable as a pupil!). . . . If you’ll give yourself as free a swing in hitting the ball as you give yourself in walking, you’ll beat me all to pieces.”
The day after Edith’s departure, Woodrow started a letter to her at seven in the morning, added to it at lunchtime and again at bedtime, and did not reach the end of what he had to say until the next morning. “You have changed the world for me, my darling Edith, changed this mad world into a place of peace and confident hope for me,” he wrote. “Every moment I can spend writing to you I must spend,” he wrote a few days later. “I long for you so passionately, that I am as restless as any caged tiger if I cannot at least be pouring out my heart to you when I am free to come to my desk at all.” Demure and unsure of herself, Edith held off for weeks before addressing him as “Dear Tiger.”
Woodrow missed their working hours on the porch so much that he transplanted himself to another part of the house to take care of the day’s business. He kept her up to date on his work—their work, as he thought of it—by sending thick packets of dispatches, correspondence, and newspaper clippings. She responded with comments and questions, and when it occurred to her that she was a confidante of the president of the United States, she could scarcely believe it. “I felt so queer this afternoon,” she wrote him. There she was, in a quiet room in a tiny town beside a lake, an ordinary person “who has lived a sheltered inconspicuous existence, now having all the threads in the tangled fabric of the world’s history laid in her hands for a few minutes.”
The threads had never been more tangled. The tallies made on August 4, 1915, the first anniversary of the war, defied comprehension: 2.4 million dead, 5 million wounded, 1.8 million captured or missing in action. In a single year the belligerents had spent more on the war—$18.6 billion—than the Great Powers had put up for all the wars of the previous century. The kaiser took the occasion to issue a statement defending his actions: “Before God and history my conscience is clear. I did not will the war.” In an exchange of telegrams, the president of France and the king of England vowed to fight until their enemies could no longer disturb the peace of the world. The Russians, who had lost 100,000 square miles of territory, affirmed their commitment to an Allied victory. Pope Benedict XV appealed for peace. He had issued a similar call when the fighting began and hoped that this echo would “induce kindly and more serene intentions.” Enraged, the cardinals of France ordered their bishops to fix a day of prayer for victory.
To the English author H. G. Wells, it seemed that civilization would not survive unless humankind created a world government. Until all states were bound together as one, nations would be perpetually at war, he wrote. “Violence has no reserves but further violence. . . . Wars always end more savagely than they begin.” Woodrow Wilson had had similar thoughts. In the first weeks of the war, he had told his brother-in-law Stockton Axson that world peace would require four things: an end to national expansion by conquest, governmental control of arms manufacturing, a recognition that all nations were equal, and a worldwide association of nations in which all were committed to the protection of each. After the attack on the Lusitania, Wilson’s thoughts about peace were often crowded out by his fears of war.
For respite he turned to Edith. On an August evening soon after his return to the White House, he wrote her of working at his desk while listening to a band concert on the South Lawn.
At the end, when they played the Star Spangled Banner, I stood up all alone here by my table, at attention, and had unutterable thoughts about my custody of the traditions and the present honor of that banner. I could hardly hold the tears back! And then the loneliness! The loneliness of the responsibility because the loneliness of the power, which no one can share. But in the midst of it I knew that there was one who did share—everything—a lovely lady who has given herself to me, who is my own, who is part of me, who makes anxieties light and responsibilities stimulating, not daunting, by her love and comprehension and exquisite sympathy.
Wilson’s second Lusitania note to Berlin had brought an unsatisfactory reply, and in a third, dispatched July 31, he took an even stronger stand. Insisting once again that international law gave neutrals the right to travel the seas unmolested, he pledged to defend the principle “without compromise and at any cost.” The kaiser covered his copy of the note with exclamations: “Immeasurably impertinent!” “Commands!” “It ends with a direct threat!”
On August 19 a German submarine sank the English liner Arabic off the coast of Ireland. The dead numbered forty-four, including two Americans. The Arabic was well known for transporting munitions and passengers on its voyages to Liverpool, but on this trip it was bound for New York, carrying only passengers and mail. Most of the 432 persons aboard survived because of calm seas and the forehandedness of the captain, who had left Liverpool with all lifesaving equipment at the ready.
In a plaintive letter asking House for advice, Wilson said he could see only one thing clearly: war would be a calamity. Most Americans strongly opposed the war, and the United States would cease to be the disinterested third party who could broker a just peace. “In view of what has been said, and in view of what has been done, it is clearly up to this government to act,” House replied. “The question is, when and how?”
When Arabic survivors reported that the ship had been sunk without warning, American newspapers demanded Bernstorff’s recall. The ambassador managed to hang on by persuading Lansing to wait until all the facts were in. Bernstorff also confided a state secret to Lansing: despite its icy replies to Wilson’s notes, Germany had ordered its submarine commanders not to attack passenger ships without warning unless they tried to escape or resist. Passengers were to be allowed to board lifeboats before a ship was torpedoed. On September 1, with Bernstorff at his side, Lansing disclosed the policy to the press. With that, the crisis seemed to be over, although Wilson thought the newspapers went too far in hailing the moment as a diplomatic triumph. The submarine commander had yet to be heard from, there was no guarantee that the German order would remain in effect, and in the weeks between the loss of the Arabic and the happy moment that Bernstorff and Lansing shared with reporters, two other wildfires had broken out.
• • •
The first was set by Konstantin Dumba, the Austrian ambassador. In hopes of winning the propaganda war in the United States, the belligerents often funded the European travels of American reporters and photographers, and Dumba had agreed to underwrite the journey of a photojournalist named James F. J. Archibald. In August, just before Archibald’s departure, Dumba asked him to deliver a letter to the Foreign Office in Vienna. Unfortunately for Dumba, the British interdicted Archibald’s liner and found the letter, which was a request for funds to support labor agitation at American munitions factories. Lansing informed Vienna that its ambassador was no longer welcome in the United States.
Dumba’s covert operation turned out to be only one strand in a large web of Austro-German sabotage and espionage in the United States. In the spring of 1915, Bernstorff’s naval attaché, Captain Franz von Rintelen, recruited Wilson’s old nemesis, General Victoriano Huerta, to help him start another Mexican-American war. Huerta, who had been living in Spain since his abdication, arrived in the United States in April, and it was widely rumored that he would soon go to Mexico to lead a rebellion against his successor, Venustiano Carranza. Huerta denied it, but Rintelen had already given him $800,000, Germany had pledged millions to the rebels, and there was a promise to deliver weapons to the Mexican coast by U-boat.
When newspapermen asked Huerta about the rumored insurrection, he first claimed that he was in the United States as a tourist. Then he rented a mansion in Queens, and Señora Huerta soon arrived with the extended family. The general became a New York landlord with a $300,000 investment in an apartment house in Harlem and a New York businessman with a civil engineering firm in a rented office on lower Broadway. On June 24, after telling friends that he had decided to take a pleasure trip to San Francisco, he boarded a westbound train.
Three days later, in a dusty border town, Huerta and one of his former generals were apprehended by Justice Department officials and a U.S. cavalry contingent. The Mexicans were charged with violating American neutrality laws banning the recruitment and arming of foreign military expeditions on U.S. soil. When Huerta appealed to the German embassy in Washington for protection for his family, Bernstorff cannily shared the message with the State Department. In disbelief, Lansing forwarded Huerta’s message to Wilson, who forwarded it to Edith Galt. “Did you ever hear anything more amazing?” he asked her. “I’ve no doubt Bernstorff would have been dee-lighted, but didn’t dare!” Huerta died in a Texas jail a few months later.
Rintelen lasted only a few months before falling into a British trap, but in addition to conspiring with Huerta, he organized a ring of saboteurs who planted time bombs on munitions ships and founded a union of longshoremen who went on strike to delay arms shipments to the Allies. The German embassy’s military attachés were equally productive. They organized smuggling operations in American coastal towns to supply German cruisers lying offshore. They made plans to blow up tunnels and railways. And before they were deported, at the end of 1915, they plotted an invasion of Canada, to be launched from the American side of the Great Lakes. The attack was supposed to frighten the Canadian government out of sending more troops to the aid of British forces in France. As the one who approved and funded German sabotage in the United States, Bernstorff was responsible for much more havoc than Dumba, but he excelled at covering his tracks. With no hard evidence against Bernstorff, Lansing was reduced to watchful waiting.
• • •
The second wildfire proved impossible to contain. In the summer of 1915 Britain and France shifted cotton from conditional to absolute contraband after Le Matin of Paris claimed that two-thirds of German and Austrian gunpowder contained American cotton. The Liverpool Gazette printed statistics showing that Holland and Scandinavia were importing sixteen times more cotton than they had before the war, a strong indication that most of the shipments were going on to Germany. By ignoring the problem, the Gazette said, British authorities were contributing to the slaughter of their own armies.
Weeks before the change took effect, Ambassador Page reported that Britain had begun making arrangements to buy massive quantities of American cotton, a plan intended to prevent a crash in the cotton market. When Bernstorff’s spies learned that Britain would buy more than two million bales at ten cents a pound, he offered to take three million at the market price.
The State Department was open to Bernstorff’s proposal, but when Wilson read it, he went into an exclamatory lather worthy of the kaiser. “What crude blunderers they are!” he wrote Lansing. “The idea of offering us a palpable bribe—or rather offering it to the Southern planters. How little they understand us!” But Bernstorff had simply asked that Germany and England be treated alike in the cotton market. Wilson’s fury showed how far he had drifted from the ideal of impartiality he set at the beginning of the war.
Secretary McAdoo lost no time in making the case for putting even more support into the Allied cause. Wartime prosperity had just begun to take hold in the United States and would be even greater if American banks could furnish more credit to the governments making purchases in the United States, McAdoo told Wilson. England needed hundreds of millions of dollars to carry on its fight, and France and Russia were as needy as England. American banking houses had been granting modest lines of credit to foreign governments but had shied away from large bond offerings because of the former secretary of state’s declaration that such loans were at odds with the spirit of neutrality. As a result, McAdoo said, “we cannot help ourselves or help our best customers.”
To William Jennings Bryan, money was the worst of all forms of contraband because it enabled the warring parties to continue fighting even after they had bankrupted themselves. But McAdoo (seconded by Lansing) argued that the loan ban made no sense. On the one hand, the United States approved of selling American-made munitions and other goods to the Allies, but on the other, it refused to help the buyers finance their purchases. McAdoo assured Wilson that Wall Street could handle the transactions and that the securities would find a ready market.
Wilson acquiesced, but when Lansing asked him for a public statement supporting the $500 million bond issue McAdoo had in mind, Wilson refused. He wanted it understood that the government would take no action for or against such a transaction, he told Lansing, and he wanted that view conveyed orally, not in writing. There was to be no hint from the administration of any deviation from the strict neutrality that Wilson had proclaimed at the start of the war. When Senator George E. Chamberlain asked the president for details about the loans, Wilson directed McAdoo to reply, and McAdoo made it sound as if the lending was part of a settled policy: “The government has no power to prevent national banks from extending credits or making loans permitted by the national banking laws, and of course it has no power to interfere with loans made by private individuals or corporations not under its jurisdiction.”
By the time England and France came to terms with the House of Morgan, the $500 million securities offering was being called a loan, and many went so far as to call it a war loan. Bryan protested that it amounted to placing a bet on the outcome of the war. Senator Robert M. La Follette read it as proof that the United States had “ceased to be neutral in fact as well as in name.” Others who opposed such lending predicted that it would prolong the carnage and sweep the United States into the fighting. The critics got no comfort from the administration. A senator who sent a pointed query to the Federal Reserve was curtly informed that its board of governors would consider his views but had no jurisdiction over private loans to foreign governments.
Despite Wall Street’s enthusiasm, American investors hesitated to put their money into a foreign war. They could earn similar returns on bonds issued by American corporations, and the foreign loans were backed by nothing but a promise to repay. Americans bought only $320 million of the $500 million offered, leaving the House of Morgan to pick up the rest. McAdoo showed no concern. An American economic collapse had been averted, and in September 1915, that seemed to justify the loan. But it was clear that the borrowers would be back for more and that each loan increased the American stake in an Allied victory.
Colonel House would soon complain in his diary of the president’s tendency to “dodge trouble” rather than face it squarely, and it seemed to House that the tendency was growing more pronounced. He was right. Wilson’s decision to stand by in silence as American banks lent $500 million to the Allies effectively brought U.S. neutrality to an end.
• • •
Only a few days after Lansing and Bernstorff smilingly informed reporters that German submarine commanders had been ordered not to attack unarmed passenger ships without warning, an explosion tore a hole in the starboard side of the Hesperian, an English liner bound for Montreal. But nearly all of the 1,100 persons aboard had been rescued, and when it was learned there were no Americans among the dead, Germany saw no reason to negotiate the case with the United States.
The submarine problem became a kind of chronic illness, flaring up and subsiding only to flare up again as Bernstorff made promises and Germany broke them. The United States kept up a pretense of neutrality by contesting the legality of British interference with neutral shipping but generally ignored Britain’s most flagrant violation of international law, the blockade. Blockades were supposed to be limited to the enemy’s coastal waters, but Britain had cut off the whole North Sea. By the time the United States protested the blockade in the autumn of 1915, it knew of the spreading food shortages among civilians in Germany, but the White House and the State Department ignored the moral questions raised by a policy aimed at starving an enemy into submission. Following a pattern set at the beginning of the war, the United States continued to upbraid the British only for their disruptions of trade.
Lansing assumed that the war would drag on and the United States would eventually have to join with the Allies to bring it to an end. Wilson still hoped to stay on the sidelines. In a speech on October 11, he said, “We are not trying to keep out of trouble; we are trying to preserve the foundations upon which peace can be rebuilt.” But he knew that the United States could not predict much less control the course of the war. As he told House, “My chief puzzle is to determine where patience ceases to be a virtue.”
• • •
Lansing’s negotiations with Bernstorff enabled Wilson to avoid a rupture with Germany, and McAdoo’s success in selling the idea that American prosperity depended on huge loans to the Allies deflected most criticism from the White House to Wall Street. But there was one trouble Wilson could not dodge. By September 1, when Edith Galt returned to Washington, the fact of her romance with the president was an open secret, and the gossips were whispering about the couple’s billing and cooing. They were also censorious about the president’s hastiness in the wake of his wife’s death. House regarded the romance as “extremely delicate” from the standpoint of the 1916 presidential election, but he wished the gossips could know the private Woodrow Wilson as well as he did. “I have never seen a man more dependent upon a woman’s companionship,” he wrote in his diary. “He was perfectly happy and contented with his wife. They had an ideal married life, as all her relatives will readily testify and have, indeed, to me. But his loneliness since her death has oppressed him, and if he does not marry and marry quickly, I believe he will go into a decline.”
The situation grew even more delicate when the gossips resurrected the tales about Wilson and Mrs. Peck of Bermuda, now Mary Allen Hulbert of Los Angeles. Her finances deteriorated after her divorce from Mr. Peck, and chief among her liabilities was her only son, Allen Hulbert. Twenty-seven years old, he struggled with alcoholism and had not yet established himself in a career. In the spring of 1915 he moved to Los Angeles with ambitions of raising fruit, and Mary’s letters to Woodrow about the venture suggest that she saw it as a last chance for herself as well as for Allen. In closing out her financial affairs in the East so that she could move west to assist him, she tried to raise cash by selling some small mortgages that she held as investments, but she had not found a buyer. When she mentioned the difficulty to her friend in the White House, he gallantly offered to purchase them, and she accepted. He sent her the money—$7,500—along with his best wishes.
The transaction was an exchange of assets, not a gift, but McAdoo was so afraid of what the gossips might read into it that he concocted a lie about it. Over lunch on September 18, he told Wilson that he had received an anonymous tip claiming that Mary Hulbert was sharing Wilson’s letters to her and “doing him much harm.” If the president’s engagement were not announced soon, McAdoo said, the gossip would destroy Wilson’s chances for reelection. Wilson could not imagine Mary stooping so low, but he panicked at the possibility that Edith would be swept up in the mess. His first impulse was to write Edith and tell her the whole story. Too distraught to frame his thoughts, he asked Grayson to see Edith that evening and “tell her everything and say my only alternative is to release her from any promise.”
Dr. Grayson delivered the message but relayed a slightly different version of the story McAdoo had told Wilson. In Grayson’s telling, reporters had warned House and McAdoo that if the rumors of an engagement proved to be true, Mary planned to take revenge by sharing her Wilson letters with the press. Edith, who apparently had not heard about Woodrow Wilson and Mrs. Peck, was deeply upset. She stayed up all night, despairing until she realized that she cared less about Woodrow’s political fortunes than about their love for one another. At sunup she wrote a letter promising to stand by him “not for duty, not for pity, not for honor—but for love—trusting, protecting, comprehending love.”
Woodrow, made physically ill by the conversation with McAdoo, was instantly cured. “Thank God there is such a woman and such love in the world,” he replied. That night he slept like a child, and in the morning he wrote her, “A new chapter has opened in our wonderful love story.” But the next chapter was dictated by politics, not love. Wilson capitulated to McAdoo and House, and the White House announced the engagement on October 6.
Years later, after Wilson left office, a journalist asked Mary Hulbert why Woodrow Wilson had not married her after his wife died. “Because Tumulty and McAdoo wouldn’t let him,” she said. There is every reason to think that Tumulty and McAdoo would have seen such a match as political suicide, but if Wilson ever explored the possibility of a courtship in a letter to Mary, it did not survive. After his death she offered a strikingly different explanation for the marriage that did not materialize: he and she were fundamentally incompatible, she wrote in Liberty magazine. He was the sort of man who needed a “doormat wife,” and his habit of correcting grammatical lapses and other small faults “was warranted to drive certain temperaments to the verge of consideration of brutal murder.”
• • •
The White House insiders who feared that the country would turn against the president for falling in love too soon were wrong. Three days after the engagement was announced, the president and his fiancée made their first public appearance together as a couple, at a World Series game in Philadelphia. To Agent Starling of the Secret Service, it seemed that “people showed increased affection for the president, and when they saw that Mrs. Galt was pretty, they loved her.”
With no further need to conceal the relationship, Woodrow often spent his evenings at Edith’s home, on Twentieth Street. “Almost every night we took him to see her, then waited outside the house until he reappeared,” Starling wrote in his memoir. “That was never before midnight, and on Sundays the vigil was frequently from 1 p.m.—after church—to 1 a.m. We didn’t mind. We were all romantic, and we were glad the boss had made good.” The president often chose to walk the mile back to the White House, and Starling walked with him. When they paused at a corner to allow the traffic to pass, Wilson sometimes broke into a whistle and a tap-dance. The tune, always the same, was the vaudeville hit “Oh, You Beautiful Doll.”
Woodrow and Edith were married at her home on the evening of December 18. The house was small, giving the bride and groom an excellent excuse for keeping the guest list to fifty. The honeymoon destination was kept under wraps, and the Secret Service created the illusion that the newlyweds would be leaving town by train, from Union Station. The Superb, a luxurious Pullman car, was coupled to a train. Golf bags and luggage were seen going aboard. Come evening, the lights were switched on at the presidential entrance, and two lines of policemen formed a protective corridor between the driveway and the door. But just as the president and the new first lady were stepping into an automobile on Twentieth Street, the train crew received orders to leave without them.
The automobile carrying the newlyweds was a black White House limousine with the shades drawn and sheets of carbon paper taped over the presidential seals on the doors. It sped to Alexandria, Virginia, hid behind the station, and when the Superb pulled in, President and Mrs. Wilson were hustled aboard. At seven the next morning, when the train came to a halt on a siding at Covington, Virginia, Starling entered the president’s car and, he claimed, he heard the president singing a familiar tune: “Oh, you beautiful doll . . .”
The Superb and three cars transporting the Secret Service detail, the president’s stenographer, and a party of White House servants were hitched to two ancient locomotives and hauled through a mountain gorge to the Homestead Hotel in Hot Springs. The Wilsons were given a large suite on the third floor, and their entire wing was closed to everyone who was not part of their entourage. To the Baltimore Sun’s correspondent, the hotel looked like “a mammoth hospital plant and the President’s quarter might easily be taken for the isolation ward.”
Isolation was exactly what Woodrow and Edith wanted. Reporters were ordered to keep their distance, and the Secret Service informed photographers that film would be confiscated and cameras broken if they were seen taking pictures of the president or the first lady. The press was reduced to reporting on Mrs. Wilson’s wardrobe as the couple came and went from the hotel and relaying scraps of information deemed innocuous enough for public consumption: The Wilsons took a six-mile hike. The president removed his sweater and used it to shelter the first lady when they were caught in the rain on the golf course. The Homestead surprised the Wilsons with a Christmas tree. The first lady ordered an elaborately decorated cake for the president’s birthday—his fifty-ninth—on December 28.
With his intimates, the president was more forthcoming. “We are having a heavenly time here,” he wrote old friends. “Edith reveals new charms and still deeper loveliness to me every day and I shall go back to Washington feeling complete and strong for whatever may betide.”
