Edith waited till morning to tell Woodrow of the vote. As she remembered it, he took the news calmly, sure that he would be vindicated by history. But she was writing years after the fact. Grayson, writing in the moment, found the president “very blue and depressed,” wishing to go back to bed and stay there.
Wilson’s fighting spirit revived a few days later, when Tumulty sent a memo urging him to announce that he would not run for a third term. Wilson ignored it and fumed that he would not hand the party back to William Jennings Bryan. Nor could he imagine declining a nomination he had not been offered. But if the voting at the Democratic National Convention reached an impasse and the party turned to him, he would then feel free to accept, he told Grayson. Wilson did not ask if he could withstand the strains of a presidential campaign, and Grayson remained silent for fear of depressing him.
Wilson was now able to walk slowly, with a cane, for short distances but still needed a wheelchair to reach other parts of the White House. He had also resumed taking automobile rides, although he had to be lifted into the car and propped in a corner in order to remain upright. Jimmie Starling and his Secret Service colleagues did the lifting and, Starling wrote, “conspired in every way to give him solace.” Among other things, they recruited friends to stand at the White House gate and cheer when Wilson returned from a spin. Assuming the gatherings were spontaneous, Wilson was moved to tears.
Summoned to the president’s room at 2:00 a.m. on April 13, Grayson found his patient agitated and wide awake. For two hours he rambled on about the hypocrisy of the Senate, his break with Colonel House, and the question of resigning. Aware of his inefficiency, Wilson said that he did not want his pride to stand in the way of his duty. When he asked for Grayson’s thoughts, the doctor suggested calling a cabinet meeting, believing that it would do Wilson good to confer with his advisors and see that he was still useful to the country.
A day later the cabinet assembled in Wilson’s study for its first meeting with him in more than seven months. As an aide announced each arrival, at least one cabinet member silently wondered why, and no explanation was offered. Few outside the sickroom knew that the stroke had severely damaged Wilson’s vision. David F. Houston, now secretary of the treasury, was devastated by the president’s old and haggard face, his useless left arm, and the drooping jaw and faint voice. More cabinet meetings followed, but Wilson often showed more interest in the past than in the pending business of the executive branch. He sometimes spoke bitterly of the senators who had killed the treaty, oblivious to his own role in its demise. When Albert S. Burleson, the postmaster general, urged him to resubmit it with reservations he considered acceptable, Wilson said that he had forced the Allies to agree to his terms and could not ask them to do more. The willingness of Britain and France to live with the American reservations seemed immaterial to him.
The Senate’s rejection of the treaty meant that the United States was still technically at war with Germany, and absent a formal peace, the two countries could not renew diplomatic ties or resume normal commercial relations. Nor could the United States file claims for lives and property lost to U-boat attacks during the neutrality period. Taking matters into its own hands, Congress declared the war against Germany at an end in a joint resolution approved May 27. Wilson vetoed it immediately, enraged by the idea of making peace without the Allies and by the fact that Congress was willing to make a peace that did not require Germany to right the wrongs it had committed. Congressional leaders could not find the votes to override the veto, and Republicans went on complaining that the most serious obstacle to world peace was Woodrow Wilson.
• • •
Both parties would soon hold their national conventions and choose their presidential nominees, and neither party had a clear frontrunner. The Republican short list included Senator Hiram Johnson of California; General Leonard Wood, a stand-in for his late friend Theodore Roosevelt; and the popular governor of Illinois, Frank Lowden, one of the last American politicians born in a log cabin. Among the dark horses were Calvin Coolidge, the law-and-order governor of Massachusetts, and Senator Warren Gamaliel Harding of Ohio, a former small-town newspaper publisher with little to show for his five years in Washington. As a fond Senate colleague put it after Harding’s death, “The simple fact is that my dear old friend just did not like to work.” Harding liked golf and poker, smoking and drinking, parties and female companionship. Wilson, stunned by the interest in Harding, asked, “How can he lead when he does not know where he is going?”
The Democrats’ early favorites were Wilson’s son-in-law, William G. McAdoo, the former treasury secretary; A. Mitchell Palmer, the current attorney general; and William Jennings Bryan, the old war horse. And the Democrats too had an Ohio newspaper publisher, Governor James M. Cox. Wilson found fault with all of them. He felt betrayed by Bryan, who had come out for treaty reservations. Palmer did not want the election to be a great and solemn referendum on the League. Cox struck him as small beer. “Dear Mac” got things done, but Wilson worried that he was insufficiently reflective for the presidency.
As the spring wore on, Wilson convinced himself that the election had to be a referendum on the League and that he was the one to lead the fight. In early June he jotted down the questions he would ask the voters: Did they wish him to serve for another term? Did they approve of his conduct of the war? Did they want the Treaty of Versailles ratified and the United States in the League? He also made a list of potential cabinet members.
Tumulty knew nothing of the lists but feared the worst because of Wilson’s silence on the matter of his candidacy. In desperation he confided in a friendly reporter, Louis Seibold of the New York World, and together they drew up questions for a newspaper interview—the first since the stroke. The interview would be a coup for Seibold, and he agreed to help Tumulty by asking Wilson about the American tradition of leaving the presidency after two terms and about his plans for life after the White House. The interview request, along with questions, went upstairs to Edith Wilson on June 12. Wilson agreed to see Seibold a few days later but rejected many of the questions, and the first lady informed Tumulty that the article had to be a hymn of praise. Tumulty read the order and told her to go to hell—in a note for his files.
Seibold’s visit was staged even more carefully than the encounter with the smelling expedition. It was al fresco, on the South Portico, where the air was rich with the scent of roses and the grounds were at their lushest. The president, seated at a small table, was wearing a gray suit and a Panama hat broad enough to shade most of his face. His wife, crisp in white linen, stood with a hand on the back of his chair. He started to rise, she blocked the move, and he settled for a handshake. Seibold seemed pleased that Wilson’s grip was firm and that he declared himself capable of more than his keepers would allow.
The play produced for Seibold had three acts: an hour of watching Wilson take care of correspondence, an hour and fifteen minutes of watching a Western with the Wilsons, an intermission of an unspecified length, and lunch. Seibold’s three and a half hours at the White House yielded a hymn of thanksgiving as well as the requisite praise. Wilson’s face showed the strain of his ordeal, but his eyes were bright and alert. He limped, but the limp was slight. He needed a cane, yes, but it was reed-thin. He moved slowly but without evident discomfort and without dragging his left leg. (In fact, Wilson used the strength of his right side to swing his left leg forward, a move that Seibold mistakenly took as proof that the leg was not paralyzed.) No, he could not get into an automobile on his own, but he needed only slight assistance, an assertion that must have surprised the aides who strained to hoist the president in and out of the car. There was no mention of the drag in Wilson’s speech.
Seibold returned the next day for an hour’s talk on politics. The Republicans had just nominated the affable nonentity Warren Harding. As Senator Brandegee explained, “There ain’t any first-raters this year. . . . We’ve got a lot of second-raters, and Warren Harding is the best of the second-raters.”
When Seibold asked Wilson for his thoughts on the convention, Wilson dryly remarked that the nominee matched his party’s reactionary platform. Besides rolling back twenty years of progressive reform, the Republicans seemed intent on making the election a referendum on Woodrow Wilson. The platform denounced him as “unconstitutional and dictatorial,” declared that he had been as unprepared for peace as he was for war, and accused him of pursuing a foreign policy that was “humiliating to America and irritating to other nations.”
“I suppose I should feel flattered over being made the issue,” Wilson said. As he saw it, the insults were meant to cloud the great and solemn issue and confuse the American people. Did Wilson have an opinion on the type of man the Democrats should nominate? Seibold asked. Wilson reminded him that there was to be no discussion of the Democratic field. As the interview was coming to a close, Seibold tried again, and Wilson again demurred.
Seibold’s long report, widely reprinted after its June 18 publication in the World, left most Americans with the impression that their president’s mind was as sharp as ever and that his body (apart from the limp) was in good shape. There was nothing in the article about Wilson’s plans for life after the White House. Tumulty had gambled and lost.
• • •
By refusing to sideline himself, Wilson had signaled that he was available, and the Democrats found themselves in a fix. They could not openly disown the president, but they could not indulge him, either—because of his health and because they did not feel the Democrats could win if they flouted the two-term tradition. Reading Seibold en route to the party’s convention in San Francisco, the bosses of Tammany Hall told a reporter that they would lead the fight against Wilson’s nomination. The boss of Illinois vowed to join them.
The first casualty of Wilson’s unwillingness to step aside was William Gibbs McAdoo, who could hardly run against his own father-in-law. It is easy to imagine that Wilson’s caginess set off a streak of Dear Mac’s wall-blistering profanity, but in a statement issued on the heels of Seibold’s story, McAdoo said only that he did not wish his name placed before the convention. He had left the Treasury in order to rehabilitate his personal finances, he explained, and had not yet completed the task. McAdoo called his decision irrevocable, but Wilson noticed that he had not explicitly promised to decline the nomination. Insiders understood that McAdoo still yearned for the nomination but could no longer pursue it openly.
Discussing the Democratic platform with Wilson a day later, Senator Carter Glass of Virginia expressed regret that Wilson was not in shape to lead the fight for the League. If Glass was fishing for a renunciation, he did not get it. Wilson remained silent. Tumulty and Grayson collared the senator on his way out of the White House and escorted him to Union Station, where Grayson begged him—for the third time in ten days—to prevent a Wilson stampede at the convention. “If anything comes up, save the life and fame of this great man,” Grayson said. Grayson was even more direct with a party official named Robert W. Woolley: “No matter what others may tell you, no matter what you may read about the president being on the road to recovery, I tell you that he is permanently ill physically, is gradually weakening mentally, and can’t recover. He couldn’t possibly survive the campaign.” Woolley assured him that the president would be honored but not nominated.
Aware that Glass was not the only influential Democrat who opposed his candidacy, Wilson enlisted his new secretary of state, the man he thought of as “the flower of his cabinet,” Bainbridge Colby. New to Washington and not a member of the Democratic establishment, Colby was probably the only one Wilson could have trusted to represent him at the convention. Wilson had him accredited as a delegate from the District of Columbia and invited him to the White House for a talk on June 20. Wilson believed that a deadlock was inevitable. A dozen men were going to San Francisco in hopes of receiving the nomination, but only one-quarter of the delegates had pledged themselves to anyone, and a candidate needed two-thirds of the votes to carry the convention. Wilson asked Colby to stay in touch with him and wait for the deadlock. They would conceal their dealings from Tumulty by wiring each other in code.
When the convention opened, on Monday, June 28, the unveiling of an enormous photograph of Wilson touched off the kind of long, heartfelt demonstration feared by the party’s leaders. Delegates whooped and marched for twenty minutes and would have gone on and on had not someone thrown a switch that turned off the auditorium’s brightest lights. Colby told a reporter that the fervor for Wilson was so intense that a motion to suspend the rules and nominate the president by acclamation would have carried at any moment.
On Friday, as the balloting got under way, the chairman of the Democratic Party somehow learned of Wilson’s machinations, and on Saturday the convention’s leaders confronted Colby. The tongue-lashings, which included the accusation that he did not have the president’s best interests at heart, left him feeling like a criminal.
Colby’s contrition was short-lived. McAdoo and Palmer had been leading the field, but after twenty-two rounds of balloting, both men stalled. It seemed to Colby that Wilson was still the sentimental favorite, and he told Wilson that without definite orders to the contrary, he would seize the first moment to move for a suspension of the rules and nomination by acclamation.
On Sunday, Ray Stannard Baker telephoned Tumulty from San Francisco to alert him to Colby’s plan and to report that Wilson was aware of it. Tumulty dashed off a memo to the first lady, a warning that the plan would fail. The Democrats opposed to a third term for Wilson were numerous enough to defeat a motion to suspend the rules, and when they did, Tumulty said, Wilson would suffer a public humiliation at the hands of his own party. Tumulty also pointed out that if Colby’s plan were exposed, the malevolent would say that the president’s friends “had connived to bring about a deadlock and that the purpose from the first was to nominate the president.”
Colby folded later in the day, the balloting dragged on, and on the forty-fourth round, at 1:40 a.m. on July 6, the Democrats bestowed their nomination on James M. Cox, governor of Ohio. A farm boy who had taken up journalism and built a modest fortune as a newspaper publisher, Cox was fifty years old and in splendid physical shape from the hours he devoted to hunting, fishing, and golf. His personal history included a divorce, but he was so upright and steady that the people of Ohio refused to be scandalized. They had twice elected him to the House of Representatives and given him three terms as governor. A middle-of-the-road progressive, he favored a League of Nations covenant with reservations, and he enforced the Prohibition laws because he was governor, not because he was a temperance man. (In the battle between the “drys” and “wets,” he was classified as “moist.”) The Democrats hoped that Cox would attract moderates of both parties, carry the crucial state of Ohio, persuade Congress to exempt beer and wine from Prohibition, and honor the triumphs of Woodrow Wilson without promising to perpetuate his regime.
After telephoning Cox in Ohio and getting some sleep, the leaders of the convention named his running mate—Franklin D. Roosevelt, assistant secretary of the navy. With FDR, the Democratic ticket got the aura of the Roosevelt name, a shot at the forty-five electoral votes of his home state of New York, and a big infusion of charisma. FDR was one of the most attractive candidates in the history of American politics: young (thirty-eight), tall (six-foot-two), handsome, and personable. He had not done especially well in his single term as a state senator, but he had learned to give a memorable speech and to guard his independence. Despite eight years in the Wilson administration, he carried no Wilson baggage.
Within hours of FDR’s nomination, a reporter tracked down his mother and asked for a comment. “He’s a fine boy,” she said, “and I shall certainly vote for him.” The boy did not have to be told that his place was in the backseat. He was in San Francisco as a delegate and could have been present for his nomination but had had the sense to disappear beforehand in order not to upstage the absent Cox.
Wilson wired his congratulations to both nominees and on July 18 received them at the White House. Watching from a distance as an aide rolled the president’s wheelchair onto the portico, Roosevelt was shocked. This Wilson—almost inert, his left arm concealed by a shawl—was a husk of the man Roosevelt had known before the stroke. Cox’s eyes filled as he stepped forward to shake the president’s hand and praise his fight for the League. “Mr. Cox,” Wilson replied, “that fight can still be won.” Cox declared that the Democrats’ campaign would be “a million percent with you, and your administration, and that means the League of Nations.” Wilson, clearly in low spirits, could muster only a few words of thanks: “I am very grateful. I am very grateful.”
The convention had been unsettling for Wilson. Twice while it was in progress he summoned Grayson in the middle of the night to report that he could hardly breathe. In the weeks after the convention, Wilson complained that everyone, including his wife and doctor, had lost interest in him because they considered him a hopeless case. He was so depressed that he scarcely noticed when the Nineteenth Amendment, giving all American women the right to vote, was ratified by Tennessee, last of the thirty-six states needed to make it the law of the land. Although slow to abandon the state-by-state approach to suffrage, he had decided in 1918 to put the power and prestige of his office behind the amendment. He understood that the victory was historic, but apart from congratulating the Tennessee legislature, he did nothing to mark the occasion.
Harding spent most of the next few months on the front porch of his home in Marion, Ohio, attacking Wilson’s record and vowing to lead the country in the direction of something he called “normalcy.” He was not aiming for a return to the old order, he said, but for “a regular steady order of things. I mean normal procedure, the natural way, without excess.” The statement implied that Woodrow Wilson’s presidency had been abnormal, unnatural, and excessive. Early in the campaign Harding sometimes claimed to favor America’s entry into the League of Nations but he was soon touting nationalism over internationalism. The United States had no need to go adventuring abroad, he said. There was enough work to do at home, and doing it well would set an example for the rest of the world. Future generations would wonder how a banality like “normalcy” inspired anyone to go to the polls, but inspiration was not wanted in 1920. As a veteran political correspondent put it, “The country was tired of the high thinking and rather plain spiritual living of Woodrow Wilson. It desired the man in the White House to cause it no more moral overstrain than does the man you meet in the Pullman smoking compartment.”
Wilson spoke out only a few times during the campaign. He reminded voters on October 3 that the election ought to be a referendum on the League. On October 27 he gave his first speech since the stroke, to an audience of fifteen prominent Republicans and independents who favored League membership. They moved in close to his wheelchair and strained to catch his words, which called on the American people to complete the great moral task they had undertaken on entering the war. If the United States did not join the League, he said, the war would have been fought in vain. “The whole future moral force of right in the world depends upon the United States . . . and it would be pitiful indeed if, after so many great free peoples had entered the great League, we should hold aloof. I suggest that the candidacy of every candidate for whatever office be tested by this question: Shall we or shall we not redeem the great moral obligations of the United States?” At several points he seemed to choke back tears.
Those who noticed that Wilson did not mention Cox in either pronouncement correctly surmised that the president was irritated by Cox’s openness to treaty reservations, even on Article X. Tumulty, fearing that a rift between Wilson and Cox would hurt the Democrats at the polls, persuaded the president to write an open letter praising Cox’s governorship and his campaign. This time around, the president made no mention of the League. Despite Tumulty’s attempt to paper over the differences, it was clear that Cox was a disappointment to Wilson and Wilson was a millstone for Cox.
“Tomorrow the dirty job,” H. L. Mencken wrote on the eve of the election. “I shall be on my knees all night, praying for strength to vote for Gamaliel.” Mencken admired nothing about Harding, whom he saw as a “blank cartridge,” but he preferred Harding to Cox, whom he saw as a man endlessly willing to change his mind to please the crowd. It seemed to Mencken that presidential politics had taken a sharp turn for the worse. In a country with more than 100 million citizens, a candidate for president could meet no more than a sliver of the electorate, leaving the rest to form their impressions from the newspapers. Force of character, force of ideas—both had been subsumed by the blandness required of each candidate as he tried to persuade the masses that only he would serve all the people all the time. “The presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men,” Mencken wrote. “As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” But all of this took the reader “far from Gamaliel, and the eve of his annunciation,” Mencken wrote. “Unless all signs fail, he will be elected tomorrow by a colossal plurality. The solemn and holy referendum will thrust upon us, certainly for four years and maybe for eight, a ruler with the high ideals of a lodge joiner and the general intellectual lift and punch of a mackerel.”
Mencken was right. On November 2, Harding’s fifty-fifth birthday, the men and women of the United States gave him the greatest landslide in a hundred years: 60 percent of the popular vote, 76 percent of the electoral vote. Of the 26 million votes cast, 16 million went to Harding, 9 million to Cox. Nearly a million votes were bestowed upon the Socialist Eugene Debs, who made his run from a federal penitentiary, where he was serving his sentence for protesting the draft. In every state, the Republicans received a larger share of the vote in 1920 than in 1916. They also widened their majorities in Congress, picking up sixty-four seats in the House and ten in the Senate. The Democrats did not even carry the whole of their supposedly solid South.
“The American people wanted a change, and they have voted for a change,” said the New York World. “They did not know what kind of change they wanted, and they do not know today what kind of change they have voted for.” The Nation observed that the country was “absolutely through with Woodrow Wilson,” and in his diary Colonel House explained why: “Another Samson has pulled a temple down upon himself.”
Lodge privately boasted that he and his fellow Republicans had “torn up Wilsonism by the roots” and advised Harding to ditch the League and make a fresh start in foreign policy. Needing no persuasion, Harding would see to it that the United States turned its back on the League and on Wilson’s vision of a world order committed to democracy, free trade, and collective security.
• • •
To the relief of his caretakers, Wilson received the election news serenely, although he could not make himself congratulate the victor. Friends who wrote to assure Wilson that Americans still cherished his ideas need not have bothered; he was sure that he was right about the League, sure that his ideals would be realized. Ellen Wilson’s brother Stockton, who was visiting the White House, marveled at the president’s appearance, his high spirits, and his equanimity.
The buoyancy did not last. When asked again to pardon Debs, Wilson could hardly contain his wrath. “I should never be able to look into the faces of the mothers of this country who sent their boys to the other side,” he told Tumulty. Wilson knew that he would be denounced by champions of free speech but did not care.
Ray Stannard Baker, who paid Wilson a visit at the end of November, found him deeply depressed. “It was dreadful,” Baker told his diary. “I cannot get over it yet. A broken, ruined old man, shuffling along, his left arm inert, the fingers drawn up like a claw, the left side of his face sagging frightfully. His voice is not human: it gurgles in his throat, sounds like that of an automaton. And yet his mind seems as alert as ever.” Baker and Grayson joined the Wilsons to watch newsreels of their first intoxicating days in Europe. “There we were,” Baker wrote, “sailing grandly into the harbor at Brest, the ships beflagged, the soldiers marshalled upon the quai and flying machines skimming through the air. There was the president himself, smiling upon the bridge, very erect, very tall, lifting his hat to shouting crowds. By magic we are transported to Paris. There he was again, this time with the president of France, driving down the most famous avenue in the world, bowing right and left.” Wilson watched in silence. When the show ended, an aide came forward in the darkness and planted a foot next to one of Wilson’s feet to prevent a slip when he rose. He got up and limped from the room without a word to his companions.
A week later Wilson spent a few minutes in the Blue Room with a delegation from the House and Senate, come to give official notice that Congress was again in session. Wilson leaned on his cane the whole time, explaining that he could not yet do without his “third leg.” In fact, he could stand on his own for a bit, but he had decided not to shake hands with any of the visitors in order to avoid shaking the hand of one of them in particular, Senator Lodge.
• • •
A few shafts of sunlight penetrated the gloom. The League of Nations met for the first time, in Geneva, and on opening day unanimously approved a tribute to Wilson. He sent his thanks and his hope for the League’s success. Wilson also managed to compose his eighth and last State of the Union message to Congress, probably the most complex intellectual task he had set himself since the stroke. Like his previous annual messages, it made legislative recommendations, but this time he had only a handful. He used the occasion for a farewell couched as a confession of faith. Uppermost in his mind, he said, was a sentence of Abraham Lincoln’s: “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us dare to do our duty as we understand it.”
To Wilson, faith in the power of right was the essence of the American experiment, as crucial to the country’s founding as to its success. And with that faith, he said, came the hope of a new order “in which reason and right would take precedence over covetousness and force.” He was certain that this faith had won the war and certain that only this faith would lift the postwar world out of its chaos and despair. He took it as axiomatic that the American faith had given birth to an American mission—the mission to champion democracy by living up to its ideals at home and by standing for right in international affairs. To do otherwise, he said, would be to cast aside the great gift of the men who had struggled against long odds and formidable adversaries to bring American democracy into being.
Without mentioning the treaty, the League, or even peace, Wilson had offered a blueprint for American foreign policy in the next chapter of the world’s history. He presented it as an inevitable, indispensable extension of the American past and the surest way to make the world safe for democracy. And in asking the United States to stand with the right and the just in international affairs, he sent up one last flare for his ideals, which had inspired a world devastated by war to strive for lasting peace. Wilson’s confession of faith was a fitting farewell for a president whose belief in the force of American ideals was abiding as his faith in God.
December also brought a Nobel Peace Prize, shared with Léon Bourgeois, for their work in creating the League of Nations. The prize carried an award of $29,000, a welcome addition to Wilson’s life savings of $250,000. Presidential pensions did not yet exist, and Wilson, facing retirement with uncertain prospects for generating income, fretted about his finances.
After weighing the merits of several cities, the Wilsons had decided to stay on in Washington, partly because Edith had lived there for decades and partly because of the Library of Congress, which Woodrow considered essential to a book he had long wanted to write, on government. Wilson was about to become the first ex-president to remain in Washington.
Months of searching finally turned up the perfect house, four stories of dignified red brick and limestone, at 2340 S Street. The owner spontaneously volunteered to sell when he learned of the Wilsons’ interest, but Edith feared that he had acted on a whim and would change his mind. On the sly Woodrow recruited her brother to approach the owner again, and Woodrow surprised her with the deed just before Christmas. With a nudge from Grayson, ten of Wilson’s friends put up $100,000 of the $150,000 purchase price. Almost new, the house had every modern convenience, and workmen were soon adding the vital missing parts—an elevator and more bookcases. Five of his Princeton chums also pooled $3,500 to buy him the White House limousine he liked best—the fanciest model of one of the fanciest automobiles on the market, a Pierce-Arrow Series 51.
Shortly before leaving the White House, Woodrow gave Edith another gift, the dedication page for his next book. It was for her, he wrote, because it was “a book in which I have tried to interpret life, the life of a nation, and she has shown me the full meaning of life.” There would be no book, but she kept the page and reproduced it in her memoir. Wilson also imagined that he would be able to practice law and asked Bainbridge Colby if they could open a firm together. Recognizing the folly of the idea, Edith urged Colby to ignore it, but Colby went ahead and on Wilson’s last day in office, Tumulty told the press about the founding of Wilson & Colby.
• • •
The final hour of Wilson’s presidency began in the Blue Room, where he and the first lady received Warren and Florence Harding at eleven o’clock before going up to the Capitol for the inauguration. Tradition called for the president and president-elect to scale the front steps of the Capitol together, but Grayson had walked all the stairs and corridors the inaugural party would be expected to take on inauguration day and declared them beyond Wilson’s powers. Harding left the car to make the ascent alone, and the car deposited Wilson at the Senate’s freight elevator. On the main floor he was seen leaning heavily on his cane and limping the fifty feet to the President’s Room to sign the last bills of the Sixty-sixth Congress. Harding was there to greet him, as were the members of the cabinet and a host of congressional Democrats.
Among the reporters on hand was Wilson’s old Princeton student David Lawrence, who was moved to pity by the sight of the president sinking awkwardly into the chair at the desk.“For a moment the president had appeared as the decrepit figure so often pictured since his physical collapse . . . and then again as he sat at his desk and signed bills with a firm hand and a steady pen, his eyes burned with the fire of the soldier who never surrenders,” Lawrence wrote. “Warren Harding stood over him, bending low and almost paternally beside the man whose arduous labors in the presidential office had caused his physical, if not political, overthrow.” Lawrence was close enough to hear Harding tell Wilson that he would understand if Wilson did not feel up to going outdoors for the inaugural ceremony. “I guess I had better not try it,” Wilson said.
The first bill presented for Wilson’s signature authorized additional funds for hospitals caring for disabled veterans. Between signatures, Wilson shook hands with members of Congress who had come to pay their respects, and at one point he greeted General Pershing, at the Capitol to serve as marshal of the inaugural parade. Pershing, who had watched Wilson hobble to the desk, reported to his sister that he had never witnessed a spectacle more “pitiable and tragic.”
Wilson was about to leave when he found himself face-to-face with a group led by Senator Lodge. Wilson flushed, and for an instant Tumulty feared that the president would give full rein to his animosity. But Wilson looked Lodge in the eye as the senator delivered his official message: “This committee begs to inform you that the two Houses have completed their work and are prepared to receive any further communications from you.” Wilson was as brusque as Lodge. “I have no further communication,” he said. “I would be glad if you would inform both Houses and thank them for their courtesy. Good morning, sir.”
The moment was the last skirmish in one of the greatest feuds in American political history, and with his cold “Good morning, sir,” Wilson fired the last shot.
By 11:55 a.m., the President’s Room had emptied and the east porch of the Capitol was filling up with dignitaries. “Then it was,” Lawrence wrote, “that Woodrow Wilson, with halting step and downcast head, his left shoulder stooped but his eyes turned upward endeavoring to smile, trying to the end to exhibit a fighting spirit and an attitude of no surrender, passed out of official life.”
