IT WAS PONZI WHO MADE headlines late in the summer of 1920, but there was a much more important story in Washington, D.C. at the time, a story of which few people were aware, a crisis that affected not only the manner in which government was conducted but perhaps the decisions that it made—there is no way to know. It was a kind of crisis that had never existed before and will never exist again.
Thomas Woodrow Wilson, who as a boy had been called Tommie by his family and friends, was the son, grandson, and nephew of Presbyterian ministers. As a result, Tommie could not help but inherit a certain stiff-necked, churchified rectitude, an image that he carried into adulthood, when he was known by his middle name.
But the Wilsons were not nearly as strict in their religion as their fellow followers of Calvin. Tommie’s father, for example, known to all as Dr. Wilson, smoked, had an occasional drink, played billiards, and enjoyed vacationing at fancy resorts, even when his leisure activities prohibited him from a strict observance of the Sabbath. He also enjoyed tutoring his son; “they talked like master and scholar of classical times,” writes Wilson’s biographer Arthur Walworth, “the father giving the boy in digestible doses what he had learned of the world, of literature, the sciences and theology—imparting it all with humor and fancy.”
However it was imparted, though, theology was probably the most important part not just of Tommie’s lineage, but of his life. Dr. Wilson might not have been a strict Presbyterian, but of the fact that he was a true believer there is no doubt. He displayed it to his son most often when the two of them were alone together on Sunday afternoons.
There were readings … in the big leather-bound Bible. The doctor penciled notes in the margins that interpreted the text in the language of the day. His religion had no cant and was suffused with a love of mankind that often overflowed sectarian bounds.
Young Tommie was exposed to the best that Augusta (Georgia) offered in religious education. In the Sunday school, of which Uncle James Bones was superintendent, the boy memorized the Shorter Catechism. To his roving mind this was as painful as formal schooling, and he did not remember the work permanently.
Yet Tommie … [o]ften rode in his father’s buggy when the preacher made parish calls. His favorite playground was the shady churchyard. … Even as he lay in bed on summer evenings the strains of the organ soothed him. Music affected his emotions; he would sometimes weep at the communion service when moving hymns were sung.
This was Tommie Wilson’s foundation for maturity, and if it seems more appropriate for a minister than for a politician, that is exactly what it should do, for it indicates the kind of elected official Wilson would eventually become. He was sure of the dictates of proper morality and determined to follow them, regardless of storms of disapproval, both public and legislative. It was this certitude that probably killed him.
At the start, though, it seemed that Wilson would reside in the academe. It was there that the Holy Grail of tenure awaited him; and of the first forty-six years of his life, he would spend almost half as a Princeton faculty member, devout as ever in his faith but teaching primarily jurisprudence and political economy.
In 1902, to the surprise of many, even Wilson himself, he was appointed the university’s president. His goals, he decided, once regaining his composure, were twofold, and both extremely ambitious. “First,” says historian John Milton Cooper, Jr., “he wanted to make Princeton the nation’s top university. Second, he sought to quash the pseudo-rebellious student hedonism that already held sway in the clubs and was making headway in colleges across the country. His symbolic antagonist was a boy who did not enter Princeton until three years after Wilson left—F. Scott Fitzgerald.”
While pursuing these goals, Wilson lost a good number of battles with various faculty and alumni committees—not on merit, but because he was unskilled at the fine points of campus politics. Taking on men who believed that Princeton was too noble an institution to require alteration, as well as insufficiently endowed to meet requests for expansion of both the curriculum and the campus, Wilson found himself being continually struck down in his attempts at reform. As a result, he started to think seriously not just about campus politics, which he eventually began to master, but about politics in the larger world of national government and whether that might be a more suitable place for him than an academic cloister. In 1904, establishing his credentials as a conservative Democrat, he spoke publicly and often against the liberal presidential candidate, Democrat William Jennings Bryan, as well as the eventual winner, Republican Theodore Roosevelt.
In 1906, when U.S. senators were still elected by state legislatures, Wilson received a few votes as a minority Democratic nominee. In another two years, there was talk of him as a vice-presidential candidate and even, in some quarters, as a presidential contender, although Wilson does not seem to have encouraged support for either position. He was still observing, still learning, his heart still committed to Princeton. But wavering. In fact, two years later, in 1910, believing he had learned all that Princeton had to teach him about politics, Wilson decided he was ready for a big leap forward and entered the contest for the New Jersey governorship.
Running on a platform that denounced the state’s political bosses and promising that he would not be their tool once in office, which was just what the electorate wanted to hear, the scholar conquered the State House, perhaps surprising himself again by entering the world of government in such a prominent position.
And although campaign promises are seldom able to be kept, especially one of this magnitude, Wilson in fact turned out not to be a tool of the bosses, refusing to divide the spoils according to the old-time politicos’ whims, at times even refusing to grant them appointments to plead for their whims in person. The growth and prosperity of the state, he believed, depended on the best-qualified men, not the best-connected. In fact, once Wilson proved victorious in a hard-fought battle against the Senate and Assembly to institute a system of state primaries, the political bosses of New Jersey had little left to boss. Wilson was right. Princeton had taught him well. He knew how to play the game now, and would play it for high stakes, but with a beacon of morality to guide him.
AFTER SERVING AS GOVERNOR FOR another two-year term, Wilson accepted the pleas of national Democratic leaders and ran for president. His reputation for independence, his introduction of workers’ compensation to New Jersey, and his restructuring of the state’s decayed, inefficient public utilities commission attracted so much attention that, despite continuing to appear like a cleric and act, occasionally, in the prissy manner of a schoolmaster, he was elected to the nation’s highest office in 1912.
Actually, the White House was a gift to Wilson from Theodore Roosevelt. Republicans got 1.3 million more votes than Democrats that year, but the problem was that there were two Republicans in the race, and the bull-headed Bull-Moose rebel, former president Roosevelt, despite knowing that his candidacy would split the GOP vote with his enemy and successor, William Howard Taft, ignored the advice of virtually everyone who offered it and ran anyhow, seeing to it that the opposing party, the minority party, achieved the nation’s highest elective office.
Nonetheless, Wilson set out superbly. In his first term, he was one of the most productive chief executives the United States had ever had. His accomplishments included the Federal Reserve Act, antitrust legislation that actually worked, low-interest loans for farmers, unreserved support for woman’s suffrage, and the dubious but necessary introduction of a federal income tax.
His second term, however, started out poorly and then began to worsen, finally ending divisively and disastrously, although the reasons were not entirely of the president’s making. Wilson ran in 1916 under the banner “He kept us out of war”—and he did, longer than he should have in the opinion of many. Eventually, though, he had to enter the European conflict, and he seems never to have forgiven himself for going back on his word. He believed, however, that he had no choice, and believed further that he would atone for his broken campaign promise by taking steps to make the Great War the last one in which the United States ever participated, perhaps the last war ever to be fought anywhere, by anyone. Woodrow Wilson the idealist now became Woodrow Wilson the fantasist. Unfortunately for him, he also became a preacher to a an assembly of atheists.
In a speech to a joint session of Congress on January 8, 1918, the president introduced his Fourteen Points, known derisively by those incapable of tolerating Wilson’s self-righteousness as the Ten Commandments. They were a detailed plan for a postwar world in which armed conflict would no longer have a place. Among other things, the points stressed open diplomacy rather than secret treaties, free trade, freedom of the seas, worldwide disarmament, and the rebuilding or restoration of France, Belgium, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Poland, the Ottoman Empire, and the Balkan states. It was a program of totally unrealistic breadth. It sounded wonderful.
It was because of such humanitarian goals that, when Wilson went to Paris to take part in negotiations for the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, he was hailed by the French as no American since Benjamin Franklin had been hailed. In the words of historian Gene Smith,
It seemed the whole of France stood in the streets. From the Madeleine to the Bois de Boulogne not a square foot of space was clear. Stools and tables were put out by the concierges of houses along the parade route, with places on them selling for ten, twenty or fifty francs, depending on the affluence of the customer. Carpenter horses and boards were arranged into improvised grandstands, and men and boys clung to the very tops of the chestnut trees. The housetops were covered with people … [who] had gathered hours before [Wilson’s] train was due in Paris and stood waiting and looking down toward the station, a tiny bandbox on the edge of the Bois reserved for official arrivals of visiting royalty.
In practical terms, the Fourteen Points ended up serving as the first draft for the constitution of the League of Nations, forerunner of the United Nations. The delegates to Versailles, many of whom had initially supported both the war and the complex web of treaties that led to its outbreak, needed something to atone for their sin, a penance for the fatalities and ruination caused by their earlier bellicosity. Their war-battered constituents demanded it. More important, they needed something hopeful to take home with them, something promising, optimistic. Given Wilson’s overwhelming reception in Paris, support for the League, the delegates reasoned, would be just what their nations wanted to hear. They would return home not just with a treaty, as expected, but with a treaty that would eliminate the need for treaties in the future. The League’s Covenant began as follows:
THE HIGH CONTRACTING PARTIES,
In order to promote international co-operation and to achieve international peace and security
by the acceptance of obligations not to resort to war,
by the prescription of open, just and honourable relations between nations,
by the firm establishment of the understandings of international law as the actual rule of conduct among Governments, and
by the maintenance of justice and a scrupulous respect for all treaty obligations in the dealings of organised peoples with one another,
Agree to this Covenant of the League of Nations.
Forty-two countries assented to the League. The United States was not one of them. Wilson was stunned. That his own nation, a nation whose citizens had elected him president twice, the second time without a bifurcated Republican vote, would reject so nobly intended a peace proposal, one that was certain to go down in history and make every man who signed it a hero to posterity, was the greatest embarrassment of Woodrow Wilson’s life.
WILSON HAD BEEN AS SHATTERED by the brutality overseas as the soldiers who had returned from it, soldiers who would form the core of the “lost generation.” Never again, Wilson vowed, never again such pointless carnage. But was the League of Nations the solution? The majority of Americans seemed to agree not with their president about the League, but with Congress, led by Senate Republican Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. He, too, shared the president’s revulsion to the Great War. All Americans shared it. But Lodge, among many other members of the House and Senate, thought a return to the battleground would be more likely, not less, if the United States were part of an association of European countries, thus allowing its actions to be governed by diplomatic ties that were made abroad and allowing the League to call America to arms again if its members couldn’t play together nicely. Lodge believed in his own country’s law, not “acceptance of obligations,” as the Covenant put it, imposed by others. And he did not believe in a “respect for all treaty obligations,” only those into which the United States had entered of its own will, without having been reduced to a single voice among a chorus of nations, its vote a mere one forty-second of the final decision.
After all, the United States had already achieved world hegemony in many ways—and it continued to increase its production of railroads, automobiles, and airplanes; continued to manufacture steel and literally thousands of products made of steel; dominated trade with other nations; controlled sea lanes with its management of the Panama Canal; provided weaponry for a small but dynamic military; and created wealth as it had never been created before. Why should America be a team player when it already owned the entire sporting franchise?
To Wilson, these arguments made no sense; they were not rebuttals so much as evidence of “narrow, selfish, provincial purposes,” a destructively competitive nature, and that is what he told Lodge and his followers. After which he issued a warning: “I have fighting blood in me and it is sometimes a delight to let it have scope, but if it is challenged on this occasion it will be an indulgence.” And fight he did, pushing himself well beyond the limits that his frail body could tolerate in pursuit of the unattainable.
At first, the League was voted down. In fact, two versions of it were voted down in rapid succession. With Lodge leading the way, the Senate rejected President Wilson’s plea for League membership, 53–38; and then it turned its attention to another bill, full of amendments added by Lodge and his followers to frustrate what he believed were the president’s attempts to yield American sovereignty. This diluted version of the League of Nations, which should have had a better chance of passing, since it satisfied many of the opposition’s objections, also lost, this time by the almost identical margin of 55–39. The Senate, apparently, wanted nothing to do with a foreign alliance of any kind.
Wilson surely expected defeat, but that is not the same thing as accepting it. He considered himself a man of principle as well as one of faith, and as long as there was an ounce of energy left in him he would do what he believed was right. There would be one more congressional vote on the League, and perhaps, Wilson deluded himself into believing, if he simply worked hard enough, and explained the League’s purposes clearly and eloquently enough, even more clearly and passionately than he had done numerous times before, the American people would pressure their representatives to do the right thing, to ensure peace for all time. How, he asked himself time and again, could the United States not cast a vote for a purpose so noble?
Refusing to heed the pleas of doctors, staff members, and friends, the president set out on a journey all the way across the country to the western states, where opposition to the League seemed to be at its greatest. He would confront the beast in its own lair.
One night in Pueblo, Colorado, an occasion when the crowd was even more restless than usual, seemingly more dubious about what it was hearing, a night when Wilson told his fellow Americans they would lead others “into pastures of quietness and peace such as the world never dreamed of before,” the pains he had been feeling throughout his body for more than a week seemed to explode into his head. Finishing his talk to but scattered applause, he turned and tried to step back to his seat. He could not. He lost his balance, stumbling from the podium into the arms of his traveling companions, who had sprung up from their own seats. Those in the audience who saw the president fall assumed he had just tripped over something. Instead, they had just seen the last speech of Woodrow Wilson’s life.
LIKE WAYNE WHEELER, WHOM HE somewhat resembled, Wilson wore wire-rim glasses over a will of steel. But the rest of the western tour had to be canceled; and on October 2, 1919, once again in the White House after a virtually sleepless journey back east, the president’s will joined his body in breaking down. He awoke that morning with no feeling in his left hand. His doctor, Cary Grayson, was summoned immediately; but by the time he arrived, Wilson was on the floor of his bedroom, his body curled into a semicircle, barely breathing. He wanted a glass of water, but his struggle to form the words was ineffective; he had to motion with his hand.
Previously having contracted arteriosclerosis and possibly influenza, the latter probably a souvenir of Paris, Wilson had now suffered a stroke. Or so it was initially reported. More precisely, what had struck him was thrombosis, a clot in a blood vessel. Not only was the left side of his body paralyzed; he had been blinded in the left eye and suffered brain damage to an extent never made public and still not known. “It was,” says historian John Morton Blum, “a wonder and a tragedy that he lived.” The president was down now to that final ounce.
There was no provision for anything like this in the Constitution, a president almost totally incapacitated yet with more than a year left in his term. And so it was that Mrs. Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, the widowed president’s second wife, made history of which only a few people knew at the time, becoming the first woman, however unofficially, to assume the duties of the presidency of the United States.
She was not totally unprepared. Her husband had discussed politics and diplomacy with her often. Eventually, he began to think of her as his top adviser in a number of matters: she was, after all, an intelligent woman, a woman who listened carefully when the president talked, who asked intelligent questions and remembered the answers, whom Wilson could trust without reservation. In fact, after only a year as First Lady, the Louisville Courier-Journal commented on how intimately involved she seemed to be in her husband’s decision-making, in affairs both domestic and international. Although she already had two middle names, “Omnipotence,” the paper suggested, might well be a third.
Senator Albert Fall of New Mexico was not impressed. Despite the secrecy so quickly and rigidly imposed by the White House, he knew what was happening there. “We have petticoat government!” thundered the fiery Republican, who would later make ignominious history of his own. “Mrs. Wilson is President!”
Women might have gained the vote in August 1920 but, unknown to virtually all of them, they had gained the Executive Mansion the previous October.
For most of the nearly year and a half that remained of her husband’s term, which included all of 1920, Wilson was an invalid at best, little more than a rumor at worst. Most of the time, he stayed in his bedroom with the door locked and the shades drawn, secreted in a perpetual night that was virtually all he could bear. No light, no noise, no ability to understand the labyrinth of governmental actions and decisions swirling around him.
“So began my stewardship,” Mrs. Wilson is quoted by Phyllis Lee Levin, the author of a book on the White House:
I studied every paper, sent from the different Secretaries or Senators and tried to digest and present in tabloid form the things that, despite my vigilance, had to go to the president. I, myself, never made a single decision, regarding the disposition of public affairs. The only decision that was mine was what was important and what was not, and the very important decision of when to present matters to my husband.
It was Mrs. Wilson who controlled access to her husband, and she permitted few into his quarters. To some, especially those who supported the League of Nations, Mrs. Wilson’s restrictive control was destructive, both to the League and the republic. As Levin says:
It has been written that Edith Wilson, “in her quiet, ignorant, misguided way did much damage at Paris, and even more at Washington,” where Wilson, disabled and isolated, rendered the Senate’s ratification of the league impossible through his absolute refusal to compromise on what the British economist John Maynard Keynes regarded as the “disastrous blots on the Covenant.” In that hour, when [former Wilson adviser Edward M.] House’s talents for conciliation were supremely required, his efforts were frustrated by the first lady. One wonders today at her disregard of that counsel; [French Prime Minister Georges] Clemenceau was only one of many European leaders who lauded the “super-civilized” [House] “who sees everything, who understands everything,” and whose “keen, enlightened intelligence” was of “such assistance.”
When Mrs. Wilson allowed someone to speak to her husband, she made certain that the person came and went swiftly, and on the way out reported to her. How did the president seem? The answer was usually not encouraging, although it was always difficult for such a judgment to be made to the First Lady. But there were times when Wilson could not speak a coherent sentence, nor avoid repetition of a few phrases that seemed to stick in what remained of his memory. Seldom could he hold eye contact with his visitor. His wife had to be told.
On his better days, when he was able to speak coherently for a time, he “was petulant, irascible, unreceptive to advice. Furthermore, Mrs. Wilson, fearful that pessimistic communications might cause a setback in the President’s health, maintained her close surveillance over his correspondence and routine. To many of those who had pressing affairs of state to review with the chief executive, she seemed also to be jealous of the power she had inadvertently acquired.”
Consulting with the president in 1920 was a habit, protocol; it was not an effective means of governing.
More often than receiving guests, the president received a note. A staff member of a senator or congressman, or perhaps a junior aide at a diplomatic mission, would tap lightly on the door of Wilson’s quarters and his wife would emerge. She would take the note, close the door behind her, and read the note to her husband, trying to help him comprehend. If he could comment sensibly, he did; otherwise she advised him on what he would probably believe to be the best course of action, then waited for a sound or motion that indicated approval. In many cases, when he was simply not up to the complexities of a rider to an already complex bill, she made the decision herself, always as she thought he would have done. Then she wrapped his hand around a pen and helped him write a response, the handwriting a scrawl that could not be recognized as belonging to either of them. She returned the note to the messenger at the door and, if necessary, translated it for him. At another time, the marks on the paper might have been regarded as scratches on pieces of White House stationery. Now they were official U.S. policy.
Still, there were no calls for Vice President Thomas Marshall, “a completely discounted factor,” to assume Wilson’s duties. Nor did Marshall evince any desire to do so. “What this country needs,” he is known for having said once, “is a really good five-cent cigar,” and that is easily the most famous policy statement he ever made.
A few times near the end of the president’s term, after he had shown slight signs of recovery, and after making certain there were no photographers lurking about, Mrs. Wilson led him by the hand to cabinet meetings. It was a mistake. Wilson could not contribute. Instead, he sat quietly, seldom moving, and when he did his head tended to bob as if it had been attached too loosely to his neck. His occasional comments were uttered in a voice not recognizable as Wilson’s previous voice; they were sounds, more than sense. Something was probably getting through to him, but not enough so that he could form actual sentences about it, utter those sentences coherently—this man who had been among the most brilliant and literate ever to reign as chief executive.
It was, of course, not just Washington insiders who knew of the president’s condition. The word could not help but spread in government circles. Jules Jusserand, the French ambassador to the United States, told his superiors at home that it no longer mattered what the great Wilson thought; the real ruler of the United States was “Mme. President.”
Most Americans did not know the depth of the president’s incapacitation. Not wanting to alarm the populace, almost all newspapers referred to his condition in a kind of code—and of necessity; not being able to see Wilson, they were not aware themselves of the state to which he had been reduced. Far fewer papers had Washington bureaus in 1920 than do today; those outlets had to rely on other sources for their news, meaning that they were getting their information second-hand; thus they were even more leery of reporting that the president had broken down and his wife had taken over many of his duties, made most of his decisions.
But was she the real ruler of the United States in 1920? The question cannot easily be answered. It is reasonable to assume that she made the decisions she believed her husband would have made, and therefore it was, in effect, as if Woodrow Wilson were still President of the United States. It is likely that he would have approved the second Palmer raids, and that she did so on his behalf; likely that he as much as she supported California’s efforts to limit Japanese real estate holdings; likely that he as much as she approved the tariff treaty between the United States and China. And, Phyllis Lee Levin’s opinion notwithstanding, it is unlikely that a healthy Wilson would have allowed Colonel House to persuade him to compromise on the League of Nations. The president had been too hell-bent on self-ruin. He would live or die according to the vote on the League, and perhaps always sensed what the outcome would be.
Besides, in a peacetime democracy, the president’s power is limited, diluted by its having to be approved by majorities of the—at that time—400 members in the House and 96 in the Senate. There was never a complaint from the legislative branch, however, that Mrs. Wilson even tried to take a position contrary to one the president would have been expected to take. Both House and Senate seemed to think all was proceeding, if not in all cases well, at least in the vast majority of cases as the president would have wanted.
Only one potentially troublesome aspect of “petticoat government” remains: it cannot be known, must always remain speculation, precisely what issues Mrs. Wilson brought before her husband. Did she deem all the notes she allowed to have read to him of equal importance? Or did she not even present them all; did she simply make a few scribbles of her own at the bottom of some of the missives, then tell the errand boy that the matter was one the president did not wish to consider more thoroughly at present? Mrs. Wilson might have consulted with her spouse, as well as she could, about topics of more interest to herself than to him, and thus, in setting the agenda for his decisions, could perhaps have left a different mark on the country than her husband would have, despite their shared viewpoints. As she herself admitted, according to Levin, “The only decision that was mine was what was important and what was not.” But this was, without question, as big a decision as any.
Exactly what happened behind the closed door at the White House will forever remain a mystery to historians. It seems a safe assumption, though, that Mrs. Wilson’s influence was of minor import, and that that was precisely what she intended it to be.
THE SECOND TIME THE SENATE voted on the League of Nations, there was no Lodge version, only Wilson’s. It was rejected by a vote of 49–35. The New York Times declared “senators of both parties united in declaring that in their opinion the treaty was now dead to stay dead.” In the words of historian Jackson Lears, Wilson’s “grandiose dreams of global redemption went unfulfilled.”
It was the First Lady’s opinion too, but she did not quite know what to do with it. Should she tell her husband right away that the greatest hope of his life would never be realized? Or should she delay the information? If so, for how long, and to what end? Perhaps one of his rare visitors would let word of the death knell slip—and then what? It was his wife from whom Wilson should hear of what she believed to be the Senate’s perfidy, and just as she had performed her previous duties as president, so would she carry out this one.
“Edith withheld the news from the president until the following morning,” Kristie Miller learned, and he was able to react—and his reaction was to be expected. In her book Ellen and Edith: Woodrow Wilson’s First Ladies [the former having passed away in 1914], “Wilson was ‘blue and depressed.’ He told his doctor, ‘I feel like going to bed and staying there.’” He was tucked under the covers and closed his eyes on the future.
Edith Wilson, Miller continues,
has been criticized for shielding her husband from important advisers who might have persuaded him to compromise [on the League of Nations, thereby ensuring its passage—an impossibility]. She and Grayson—he consulted with other doctors but was very much the primary care physician—did indeed limit Wilson’s visitors. But they were following conventional medical wisdom of the time. Although the modern view is that stimulation is beneficial for stroke victims, it was not the view in Wilson’s day. On March 16, 1920, Dr. [Francis X.] Dercum [who had treated Wilson years earlier for hypertension] wrote Dr. Grayson that he was doubtful whether the president should be seeing “a larger number of persons.” He warned Grayson, “If his contact with other persons is increased, it should … be only with close personal friends.” If this was his opinion nearly six months after Wilson’s stroke, on the eve of the second treaty vote, Dercum would certainly have discouraged Edith from allowing her husband to be seen by more than a handful of people during the months the treaty was debated.
For creating the League of Nations, which was affirmed by most of the rest of the world and would last from 1920 to 1946, eventually enlisting 63 countries, Woodrow Wilson was voted the Nobel Peace Prize for 1919. He was certainly told the good news, but that does not mean he was aware of it, that it ever sank in. If it did, he surely found it poor consolation. He also, of course, found it impossible to accept the award in person. The United States Minister in Norway, Albert G. Schmedeman, received the prize in Oslo on Wilson’s behalf, bringing it back to Washington on his next home leave. Mrs. Wilson put it in her husband’s bedroom.
On February 3, 1924, Woodrow Wilson succumbed to a stroke at his home in the nation’s capital. Dr. Grayson announced the news to reporters. “Mr. Wilson died at eleven-fifteen this morning. His heart action became feebler and feebler and the heart muscle was so fatigued that it refused to act any longer. The end came peacefully.” The occasion was one of the most sorrowful in the capital’s long history, perhaps surpassed only by the deaths of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
A few days after he died, Wilson became the only president to be buried in Washington, D.C.
Ironically, despite his lengthy illness, Wilson would outlive the man who succeeded him in the White House, a man who seemed so much healthier, yet so much less dedicated to world peace, or perhaps any other issue of the time.