TWELVE

Presidential Politics, 1916 and 1920

EVER SINCE THE WAR ENDED, AMERICANS HAD BEEN ARGUING ABOUT peace. As Wilson’s term neared its end, his strength and health were in decline. For nearly two years he had fervently and tirelessly promoted the Fourteen Points and his vision of a cooperative international body whose mission was to promote peace—the League of Nations. Charles Evans Hughes spoke out against the United States joining the League. He believed the United States should reserve the right to decide such a serious matter as whether to go to war on a case-by-case basis, taking each situation as it arose, rather than arrange its alliances in advance. On September 25, 1919, Wilson collapsed after a speech urging the ratification of the covenant of the League of Nations. On October 2, he suffered a serious stroke that left him paralyzed on his left side and blind in his left eye.

In 1920 the U.S. Senate rejected the covenant and the United States refused to join the 44 member states in the League of Nations. Political isolationism gained popularity among Americans, and politicians discussed placing limits on immigration. While Wilson was incapacitated, he was sequestered from even his vice president and cabinet members. Edith Galt Wilson, Wilson’s second wife, spoke for the president during the remainder of his term, thus earning her the title “American’s first woman president.” Although the seriousness of Wilson’s condition was withheld from the public, one thing was evident—he would not run again.

Looking toward the presidential election in November, the Republican Party felt that it was their year, and the leaders cast about for a candidate. Hughes, now fifty-eight years old, was once again being considered for the Republican nomination. Since he was first elected Governor of New York in 1906 his name had been bandied in conversations of consequence by men who mattered, often in smoke-clouded back rooms and private clubs. Until now he had adhered to Benjamin Franklin’s credo that one should never seek out a public office and never refuse one when asked.

Yet in 1920 Charles and Antoinette were nearly ruined by grief. The idea of a second presidential nomination weighed heavily on them; they spent many an evening in quiet discernment, trying to come to terms with how to respond to the call if it came. Could they possibly summon the strength to endure the campaign, never mind the actual presidency were they to win? And what of Elizabeth, and the miserably practical matter of the timing of her death? Were Charles to run, he would rely on Antoinette to accompany him on the campaign trail as she had in 1916. But how could she leave Elizabeth when she was so desperately ill? Could they bear to commit her to the Physiatric Institute full time? Could they afford it financially?

Hughes had not aspired to be president. He viewed public office as “a burden of incessant toil at times almost intolerable, which under honorable conditions and at the command of the people [it] may be a duty, and even a pleasure to assume, but it is far from being an object of ambition.” He was a very private, deeply thoughtful man of frugal tastes. He walked to his office, usually came home to eat a spartan lunch with his wife, dressed conservatively, and trimmed his own beard. One colleague on the Court recalled that later, when he was chiefjustice dining in the justices’ dining room, he ate the same meal every day: two boiled eggs, a demitasse of coffee, and a bowl of soup. Although friendly to all, Hughes had few close friends. His closest relationships were with his wife and children.

“What would we do if she were to pass away in six months?” Antoinette asked.

“We would have to cancel campaign appearances and come home,” Charles replied softly.

“And what if she didn’t die right away but lay in a coma for weeks? Would we then withdraw from the race?”

It was a ghastly business to consider such practicalities, but to ignore the reality of Elizabeth’s condition and proceed without considering its impact would be a disservice to the party and to the American people. In any case, who would vote for a man who could leave his fatally ill daughter to run around the country kissing other people’s babies? Ironically, a decision not to run would disappoint no one more than Elizabeth.

In 1920 Elizabeth was enthralled with illustrious people, and the idea of living in the White House sent her into excited fantasy. She imagined a daily parade of prominent visitors from royalty to movie stars and countless parties and receptions. Besides, Helen had impressed upon her how important it was to be where things really got done, especially now and especially for women. The 19th Amendment would be ratified in August 1920. Elizabeth could not abide the thought that her condition might cost her father the chance to be president—and the nation the presidency of Charles Evans Hughes!

One of her earliest memories was being held in her father’s arms on the balcony of their suite at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel on election night in 1916. Hughes had seized the lead early and he was favored to win the election. He had even won New Jersey, which had been predicted for Wilson. It all came down to California. Waiting for the final results, father and daughter breathed in the night air and looked northwest from their aerie above Fifth Avenue (where the hotel was then located), to the very center of the narrow island of Manhattan, to Times Square. There, huge celebratory bonfires surged and spat sparks at the stars that seemed to wheel above their heads. Like everyone else, they kept a close watch on the 357-feet tall Times Building at the corner of Forty-third Street and Broadway where, according to tradition, the searchlight would signal the election results. The signal light was visible for thirty miles, and voters from Paterson, New Jersey, to Tarrytown, New York, to Staten Island could read the message from the Times Tower.

At midnight, the signal flashed from the tower: “Hughes Elected!” The chant of the throng of two hundred thousand people gathered in Times Square rang like a temple bell—”Hughes! Hughes! Hughes!” It was pure magic. Then came the confirmation over the radio: Hughes had won. A breathless bellboy appeared on the balcony with an early edition of The New York Times bearing the front-page headline “The President-Elect—Charles Evans Hughes.” The boy’s face was bright with the thought that he could forever after tell people that he had delivered a paper to the nation’s president.

Bonfires burned in cities all across the nation on election night 1916. One such fire burned in Chickasha, Oklahoma, on the corner of Chick- asha Avenue and Third Street in front of the First National Bank Building. Watching it was a twelve-year-old named William T. Gossett, who could not have imagined that a boy from Oklahoma would one day work for the eminent Charles Evans Hughes. Even more unimaginable was the idea that he would fall in love with his daughter.

While the bonfires still burned, and although the final results from California had not yet been tallied, Charles Evans Hughes went to bed.

The next morning the count was official. The popul ar vote was 8,538,221 votes for Hughes to 9,129,606 votes for Wilson. Hughes had lost by 3 percent of the popular vote. Women had voted for Hughes two to one, but their votes were counted only at the state level. The electoral vote was one of the closest in American history. With 266 votes needed to win, Wilson took thirty states and 277 electoral votes, while Hughes won eighteen states and 254 electoral votes. If Hughes had carried California and its 13 electoral votes, he would have won the election. Describing the episode nine years later, The New York Times Magazine remarked, “He went to bed the next president of the United States, and woke up a mere man.”

Of all of the positions Hughes held, he found the work of the court the most satisfying. He had even said so in his letter accepting the 1916 nomination: “I have not desired the nomination. I have wished to remain on the bench. But in this critical period in our national history I recognize that it is your right to summon and that it is my paramount duty to respond. . . . Therefore, I accept the nomination.” The letter, dated June 1916, was addressed to the chairman of the Republican National Convention, Warren G. Harding.

Hughes’s six years as an associate justice of the Supreme Court had been a very happy time for the Hughes family. So confident were Antoinette and Charles in projecting a long and stable life in Washington that they used what was left of their savings to buy a quiet lot on the southwest corner of Sixteenth and V Streets, and build a gracious brick Georgian at 2100 Sixteenth Street NW in the Sheridan-Kalorama neighborhood. It was their ideal home in every detail. In November 1911 they moved in, fully expecting to live there for the rest of their days. Antoinette, Catherine, and Elizabeth tooled around town in an electric car. Charlie had just been graduated from Harvard Law School and was beginning his practice in New York City. Helen was at Vassar. Catherine and Elizabeth were attending National Cathedral School, a girls’ school on the grounds of the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., an institution also attended by Roosevelts, Rockefellers, and Firestones. Grandmother Hughes occupied the top floor of the house, which she shared with Elizabeth—the youngest and oldest members of the household.

It was during this time that Elizabeth first began to appreciate the privileges and responsibilities of being born the daughter of Charles Evans Hughes. He set an inhumanly high standard for himself and others and was not shy in expressing his disapproval. There was an unspoken feeling, shared by all the Hughes children and by Antoinette, that one must never disappoint him.

Shortly before the Republican National Convention of 1920, which met in Chicago, Illinois, from June 8 to June 12, 1920, Senators Henry Cabot Lodge, James W. Wadsworth, and William M. Calder met in Washington to discuss who should be nominated as the Republican presidential candidate. The senators each had their favorite candidates, on whom they did not agree, but they could all settle on Hughes as an acceptable alternative for the nomination. And so the senators approached Meier Steinbrink to present the idea to Hughes to see what his response might be to being nominated.

Steinbrink, a leader in the Republican Party, had a good relationship with Hughes, forged through assisting him in two major undertakings: the Draft Appeals Board and an aviation inquiry. Hughes and Stein- brink met for lunch at the Lawyers Club. Steinbrink was alarmed at the change in his friend’s appearance. He seemed to have aged ten years. He anticipated that Hughes might not even hear him out, and so he asked him to refrain from comment until he had finished his proposal. Hughes agreed. Then Steinbrink told Hughes that the senators wanted to be able to vote for him for president and why.

As promised, Hughes listened to Steinbrink to the end. Then, struggling to maintain his composure, he beseeched Steinbrink to understand that he and Mrs. Hughes were dispirited and bereft after the nearly yearlong vigil that had preceded Helen’s death. In a most uncharacteristic decision, he asked to be relieved of the duty to run for president of the United States and asked that his name not be mentioned as a possible choice. He doubted that he had the strength and stamina to meet the national and international challenges that the next president would inherit, the same ones that had most certainly caused Wilson’s physical collapse. He never mentioned Elizabeth’s condition.

Like most people, Hughes believed that whoever was nominated at the Republican Convention would be elected. He predicted to Stein- brink that the man who assumed the office at this most unhappy time of international unrest would likely not live to finish his term. Hughes did not want to be that man. His ominous prediction would prove to be accurate, but ironically the bulk of the international peacemaking responsibilities would soon fall to him anyway.

In the late summer and autumn, the 1920 presidential election swung into high gear. Leading the Republican ticket was the same man who had officially proffered the 1916 nomination to Hughes—-Warren G. Harding. He was a junior senator and newspaper publisher from Ohio. His running mate was to be the stoic governor of Massachusetts, Calvin Coolidge. Harding was a great admirer of William McKinley, and it was during McKinley’s presidency that Harding began his political career as senator. He had a winning personality and a strong, handsome, face. With these assets he had transformed a struggling local newspaper, The Daily Star of Marion, Ohio, into one of the most successful in the nation.

The Democratic presidential candidate was James M. Cox, governor of Ohio and his vice presidential candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt. On October 30, 1920, the day Banting had his epiphany in London, Ontario, The New York Times published an article entitled, “Roosevelt Makes 12 Speeches in Day; ‘Things Look Awfully Good,’ He Says at Ossining, ‘and We’re Going to Win.’ “ It was his eighty-first day on the road; he had been in thirty-one states.

In October 1920, having forfeited the opportunity to run for president himself, Charles Evans Hughes announced his support for his party’s choice. Although Harding was in the journalism business, he could bloviate with the best of them and played fast and loose with language besides. Harding is responsible for the introduction of at least one new word to the English lexicon, a word minted on the campaign stump. The word was “normalcy,” and it drew Americans to it like the peal of a dinner bell.

“America’s present need is not heroics, but healing,” Harding declared. “Not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.”

William Gibbs McAdoo, a Democrat, called Harding’s speeches “an army of pompous phrases moving across the landscape in search of an idea.”

For the first time the American women’s vote for president would be counted. On August 18, 1920, one day before Elizabeth’s thirteenth birthday, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified by Congress. All through the day, Elizabeth fought the impulse to weep as she thought of Helen, who had so dearly longed to see this momentous event and missed it by four months to the day. Now that it had arrived, it came with such bitter irony for the Hughes family. Not only had Helen not lived to cast a vote, but it was certain that Elizabeth would not live to do so either.

By election time in November 1920 the colds and tonsillitis that had so weakened Elizabeth’s system throughout the spring had temporarily abated. To stabilize her metabolism Dr. Allen had decreased her diet to five hundred calories per day. In October she weighed sixty-five pounds; the following March her weight fell to fifty-four pounds.

The Harding-Cox presidential election returns were the first to be broadcast by a commercially licensed radio station—Westinghouse-owned KDKA. When the news was official that Warren Harding had been elected twenty-ninth president of the United States, Elizabeth sobbed in Blanche’s lap.

In fact, the diminutive Harding’s first act in office was to reach up and appoint a giant as his first cabinet member. Charles Evans Hughes accepted the position of secretary of state. For the first time in five years, Americans felt safe knowing that international affairs would be guided by such a capable mind.

When her parents told Elizabeth the news, she was so elated that she announced that she would bathe in the White House fountain. Catherine’s response was just the opposite: She had fallen in love with Chauncey Waddell, an attorney just beginning his career in New York City. She persuaded her parents to allow her to live in the Bronx with her brother and sister-in-law, Charlie and Marjory, where she could more easily continue her courtship. And so Charles, Antoinette, and Elizabeth were moving back to Washington after all.

Hughes was to take office in March 1921. Antoinette prepared to leave the home in which both Elizabeth and Helen took sick. What were they to do with Elizabeth while they looked for a house in Washington? The Physiatric Institute seemed like the best option, at least as a temporary measure until they were settled. The only ones who would be pleased at this prospect were Dr. Allen; a diabetic named Eddie, whom Elizabeth would help to secure a pet canary; and a little boy named Teddy Ryder, who weighed only twenty-seven pounds and who, in July of 1921, would celebrate his fifth and almost certainly final birthday inside the institute.