Woodrow Wilson left the White House in March 1921 with a profound feeling of disappointment. The fight and failure for the Treaty of Versailles ratification had wrecked his health. He would never recover from his stroke—in fact, it would shorten his life. Wilson was unable to defend himself, his record, or what he had accomplished at Paris. By 1923, only three major countries had not joined the League of Nations: Germany, the Soviet Union, and the United States. The failure to ratify the Treaty of Versailles meant that the U.S. would never join the league.
As their days in the White House ran down, Edith and Woodrow Wilson made post-presidential plans. They needed to find a new home. Whereas every president had left Washington after completing his term, Wilson would be different. This was in part because of the access to the Library of Congress—Wilson hoped to write a book about government, though he never got past the dedication to Edith—but above all, because he needed access to health care. Dr. Cary Grayson would continue serving as Wilson’s physician, despite being on active duty in the navy.
Edith set out looking at houses in Washington. After exploring at a number of properties, she visited a townhouse at 2340 S Street, NW in the Kalorama neighborhood, where America’s wealthiest families had built mansions, and where embassies were beginning to be established. She wrote later, “I found an unpretentious, comfortable, dignified house, fitted to the needs of a gentleman’s home.” It was a relatively new Georgian Revival townhouse, built in 1915. The house was deceptively small from the outside but built into a hillside, and came with every modern appliance from the era, including electricity and a gas-and-coal fired stove.1
Trusting in his wife’s judgment, Woodrow quietly purchased the house sight unseen for $150,000, then surprised her by presenting the deed. Wilson had no pension or regular source of income, so he used the cash award from the Nobel Peace Prize for the house’s down payment. His financial benefactors, including Bernard Baruch, contributed the remainder, providing enough funds to add a garage and to upgrade the service elevator so Wilson could ride in it, as he could not navigate stairs.
One of the reasons the house attracted Edith was because it had a wall sufficiently large to display the Gobelin tapestry that the French had given her during the war. As it was a personal gift, rather than a gift to the White House, Edith kept it. She would hang the tapestry in the drawing room; even there it is too large, and it is rolled up slightly at the bottom.
The day that the Wilsons left the White House on March 4, 1921, they rode with incoming President Harding to the Capitol. (Two months earlier, Secretary of War Newton Baker asked Wilson if he would ride with Harding to the swearing-in ceremony. “I hope you will not go if it is a cold and sleety day,” he stated. Wilson responded, “Oh that will not matter. I will wear a gas mask anyhow.”2) Harding bounded up the steps, leaving the ailing Wilson behind to search for an elevator. He took his place in the Capitol’s President’s Room as representatives and senators came by the pay their respects. Shortly before noon, Wilson’s senatorial foe Henry Cabot Lodge entered the room and announced, “Mr. President, we have come as a committee of the Senate to notify you that the Senate and House are about to adjourn and await your pleasure.” Joe Tumulty thought the president might lash out at the man, but instead he gave the wisp of a smile and formally responded, “Senator Lodge, I have no further communication to make. I thank you. Good morning.”3
Wilson quickly tired and was escorted to his car before the swearing in began. He joked to reporters, “Well, the Senate threw me down before, and I don’t want to fall down myself again.” Wilson walked slowly with a cane and a limp. The Wilsons drove down Pennsylvania Avenue, past the White House, to their new home. As they turned the corner onto S Street, they were met by a throng of five hundred well-wishers who greeted the Wilsons from both sides of the street. After lunch, Wilson appeared on the balcony to wave to the crowd a dozen times, but he declined to give a speech. A delegation entered the house to deliver flowers, and former cabinet secretaries dropped by to wish him well. It was an exhausting day for the now-former president.4
Along with the transport vans carrying the Wilsons’ furniture was a truck bearing a special cargo: their wine collection. Prohibition had made the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcohol illegal, but not its possession. Wilson had no desire to leave behind his collection for President Harding, who was known to throw a good party. The former president could have simply removed the wine and no one would have asked questions; however, being a man of principle, Wilson applied for the appropriate legal permits from the Prohibition Bureau to move the collection. “In the shipment was a whole barrel of fine Scotch whiskey, besides a variety of rare wines and liquors,” the New York Times reported. Numerous outgoing cabinet members and congressmen likewise shipped their collections home with Bureau permission.5
Wilson’s wine bottles were taken down the service staircase to the basement, where they were placed on wooden shelves for storage. Edith would continue adding to the collection during Prohibition, many of them fine French vintages, quite possibly from the connections that the Wilsons had with the French embassy. Embassies were considered foreign territory, and therefore they could import alcohol for their own use. The wine cellar still remains, a rare Prohibition-era gem.6
Taking care of the former president became a full-time job for a number of people. The Wilsons could no longer rely on White House staff to support them. They were now private citizens and hired two African-American servants to run the house: Isaac and Mary Scott, “the best of the old-time coloured Virginia stock,” as Edith described them. The Scotts were efficient and hard-working, facing long days of attending to every detail of an ailing man and his household. Isaac was Wilson’s personal manservant, and he was constantly at his side during waking hours. Mary took care of the cooking, the housekeeping, the laundry, and worked as Edith’s servant.7
Another important staff member was Edith’s brother Randolph Bolling, who functioned as the president’s secretary. Randolph took the downstairs office and handled the correspondence. To look after the president at night, the Wilsons hired a nurse, who slept in the small room between Woodrow and Edith’s bedrooms. Wilson had a replica of the White House’s “Lincoln bed” built for his room. It was an unusually large bed to accommodate Abraham Lincoln’s large height. Wilson came to appreciate its size during his lengthy illness. In his bedroom was also the brass casing from the first artillery shell that American soldiers fired in the Great War.
Wilson was bitter, depressed, and in bad health. As an invalid, he was emotionally needy and constantly demanded Edith’s attention. She arranged her schedule entirely around his and did her best to cheer her husband. The Wilsons filled the house with a large number of state gifts, in particular from Wilson’s months at the Paris Peace Conference. At the time, presidents could keep their gifts (today they become property of the American people). The house in essence became a museum to the Wilson presidency.
Wilson took his leather swivel chair from the Oval Office to his new home and placed it behind the desk in his library, where he spent many of his waking hours. He also brought eight thousand books into the house. Edith recalled a visitor asking her husband if he had read every book. “Not every line,” he replied, “but I believe I know what is in them all.” She frequently read to her husband as his eyesight steadily worsened.8
After Wilson woke and ate breakfast, his manservant Isaac Scott helped him shave and dress for the day. Scott accompanied Wilson down the elevator and helped him into the library, where the former president spent much of his day. With his left leg out of commission, Wilson could not wander in the large garden behind the house, but he could bask in the sunlight of the solarium adjacent to his library. Edith called her husband “a wounded eagle chained to a rock.”9 Wilson walked with a cane, which he called his “third leg.” After a daily automobile drive, Scott helped Wilson change into a robe and slippers. He almost never used the formal dining room, which, he felt, would require him to dress in finer attire. He ate most of his meals in the library.10
Wilson enjoyed the movies, which were still silent until the end of the 1920s. In 1922, Douglas Fairbanks gave him a movie projector, and a pull-down screen was installed in the library. On occasional Saturdays, the Wilsons continued their tradition of seeing live vaudeville shows at Keith’s Theatre. Dr. Grayson recalled one night the cast presented him with a huge bouquet of flowers. “We simply want to tell you that we love you dearly,” a woman told him. Crowds always gathered when the former president left his home. People retained a deep affection for him.11
Wilson briefly went into private legal practice with former secretary of state Bainbridge Colby, but he had to recuse himself from so many cases that they dissolved the partnership. He considered running for the presidency again in 1924, a delusional idea given his precarious health. Although Wilson dreamed of publishing another book, he only wrote a short article of little consequence in the Atlantic Monthly called, “The Road Away from Revolution,” for which he was paid $300. His essay addressed the question of the Russian Revolution and how a passionate minority managed to seize the levers of power. “The world has been made safe for democracy,” he claimed, “But democracy has not yet made the world safe against irrational revolution.” His answer was that the world needed more Christian charity to address societal ills and to create a just international community.12
After leaving the White House, Wilson only made two public appearances: the unveiling of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in 1921, and the funeral of his successor in 1923. Despite the use of dog tags that helped identify wounded and dead soldiers in the Great War, there were many unidentified remains. One of these was chosen for a new memorial in Arlington National Cemetery, dedicated on the third anniversary of Armistice Day. The cruiser USS Olympia brought the remains of the unknown soldier back from France. Among the pallbearers were three Congressional Medal of Honor recipients: Charles Whittlesey, who had led the Lost Battalion in the Argonne Forest, Samuel Woodfill, and Alvin York. Traumatized by the deaths of his men, Whittlesey committed suicide a week later.
President Harding oversaw the tomb’s dedication with General John Pershing, but first he was caught in a traffic jam as the procession attempted to cross the Potomac River when a car ran out of gas on the bridge and blocked the roadway. Former President Wilson was invited but was snubbed in the lineup, and it was a difficult, long day for him. Appreciative former soldiers gathered around Wilson’s carriage. When the Wilsons finally made it home, they found their street crowded with people who wanted to see the former chief.13
The second public event that Wilson attended was President Harding’s funeral at the White House on August 8, 1923. Harding was deeply flawed, though Wilson never publicly criticized the man’s many faults or scandals. Instead, Wilson “retired into dignified silence,” as Dr. Grayson called it. The day of the funeral was very hot, and Marines in their dress uniforms fainted from the heat. Though the former president maintained his dignity and did not seem bothered by the heat, he lost his cool when a colonel approached to ask a question, as Grayson recalled.
“‘Could you tell me whether Senator Lodge has arrived or not?’”
“Mr. Wilson replied: ‘I can not.’ And then asked me what asylum that Colonel had escaped from.”14
Cabinet members and others close to Wilson began publishing their memoirs. Ray Baker, Wilson’s press secretary at Paris, wrote a 1919 apologia called What Wilson Did at Paris. Public relations man George Creel published The War, the World and Wilson in 1920, an energetic defense of Wilson’s leadership that also sought to rebut John Maynard Keynes’s Economic Consequences of the Peace. (As it turns out, Keynes was largely correct that the Treaty of Versailles was a disaster.) In 1921, Robert Lansing published The Peace Negotiations: A Personal Narrative, a book that made clear his divergent views from Wilson’s. Baker followed his short 1919 apologia with the three-volume Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement in 1923, using Wilson’s papers from the Paris Peace Conference. Joe Tumulty published his memoirs of his eleven years working as Wilson’s private secretary in 1921, a book called Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him. Frank Cobb of The World died of cancer in December 1923, and a special collection of his most notable editorials was prepared for publication in a book. Cobb had long been a Wilson supporter, and Wilson was asked to write a short foreword. Wilson put together four sentences for the book, which came out in 1924 as Cobb of “The World.”15
The former president tired quickly. Guests were limited to brief visits, though there was a constant stream of visitors. Edward House dropped by the Wilson home in October 1921, but the Wilsons were out riding, and they did not summon him back. Georges Clemenceau visited the Wilsons in December 1922. The normally grumpy former French premier was charming and pleasant. David Lloyd George likewise visited in October 1923. This came around the time that Wilson’s health took a sharp decline. His eyesight worsened in his one good eye until he was nearly blind. He grew more fidgety and hypochondriacal. He grew nervous and slept less. He demanded ever more attention as his suffering increased. But he made one last public communication, this time on the budding technology known as radio.16
Radio broadcasting was taking off in the 1920s as the public embraced the new medium. For the fifth anniversary of the Armistice, Bernard Baruch’s daughter Belle had an idea. She was a leader in the Nonpartisan League, which lobbied for America’s entry into the League of Nations. She and a friend proposed that Wilson address the nation over the radio on the eve of Armistice Day. The president struggled for weeks preparing the speech. On the day of the address, a microphone was installed in the library, and the broadcast equipment was parked in the driveway. Wilson was nervous and suffered a daylong headache, but at 8:31 P.M. he stepped up to the microphone and delivered his four-minute speech. Indeed, Wilson always preferred to stand when he spoke, and this was no different. He denounced the country’s retreat into isolation following the war: “We turned our backs upon our associates and refused to bear any responsible part in the administration of peace, or the firm and permanent establishment of the results of the war—won at so terrible a cost of life and treasure—and withdrew into a sullen and selfish isolation.”17
Wilson’s speech was broadcast nationally. Imagine if this radio network had been available just four years earlier when Wilson made his national barnstorming tour for the Treaty of Versailles, and how that may have spared his health. To those who had seen Wilson speak in person, hearing him on the radio must have been shocking. His voice once filled crowded halls and stadiums; now his voice was husky, and he stumbled over the words. Some heard a woman’s voice quietly prompting him, possibly Edith’s.18
The next day, November 11, thousands of people gathered outside the Wilson house, and though Wilson was exhausted, he gave a short speech giving credit to the soldiers and to Pershing for defeating the Germans. After a band played a hymn, Wilson added a triumphant postlude: “I am not one of those that have the least anxiety about the triumph of the principles I have stood for. I have seen fools resist Providence before, and I have seen their destruction, as will come upon these again, utter destruction and contempt. That we shall prevail is as sure as that God reigns.” The crowd applauded the president’s prophesy that the country would one day rejoin the international community.19 They would have to wait two decades until the U.S. helped establish the United Nations in 1945 to replace the League of Nations.
The president seemed to rally in the month after the Armistice Day speech. It proved fleeting. For the former president’s sixty-seventh birthday on December 28, 1923, Wilson’s friends presented him with a Rolls-Royce, painted black with orange trim, the colors of Princeton University. These were the same friends who had helped cover the cost of the house and made it accessible for Wilson.20
In his declining months, Wilson seems to have found grace in his political defeat, knowing that he would die with his life’s great work uncompleted. “I think it was best after all that the United States did not join the League of Nations,” he told his daughter Margaret. When she asked why he felt this way, Wilson responded, “Because our entrance into the League at the time I returned from Europe might have been only a personal victory. Now, when the American people join the League it will be because they are convinced it is the right thing to do, and then will be the only right time for them to do it.”21
In late January 1924, Dr. Grayson was worn out and planned a hunting vacation with Bernard Baruch. The last conversation that Edith recorded of her husband dealt with Grayson’s weary departure and Wilson’s depression. “I always feel badly now, little girl, and somehow I hate to have Grayson leave,” Wilson told her. When Edith said she would run downstairs to stop the doctor from departing, Wilson stopped her. “It won’t be very much longer, and I had hoped he would not desert me; but that I should not say, even to you.”22
Over the next several days, Wilson’s health rapidly declined from arteriosclerosis. Edith telegraphed Grayson, who quickly returned to Washington, and soon other doctors arrived as well. For several days the president lingered in a stupor, his body failing. Visitors dropped by to pay their respects, including former secretary Joe Tumulty. Wilson spoke his last words on Friday, February 2. “I am a broken piece of machinery. When the machinery is broken . . .” Wilson said trailing off, then added, “I am ready.” Edith stepped out of the bedroom for a moment, and Wilson whispered his last word: “Edith.”
The former president drifted in and out of consciousness on Saturday and Sunday as Edith, Dr. Grayson, his daughter Margaret, and brother Joseph maintained a vigil at his bedside while his heartbeat faded. At 11:15 A.M. on Sunday, February 3, Wilson briefly opened his eyes but said nothing and fell back to sleep. Edith held his right hand, while Margaret held his left. Ten minutes later his heart stopped. Wilson died peacefully in his sleep.
A crowd had gathered in front of the Wilson house for the past several days once word got out that Wilson was on his deathbed. Minutes after Wilson’s death, Dr. Grayson stepped outside to make a brief tearful statement to the press. Men removed their hats and many wept. Some knelt in prayer on the sidewalk.23
President Calvin Coolidge soon made a visit to the house to pay his respects. He declared an official thirty-day mourning period and for flags to be lowered to half-staff. Congress recessed for two days until after the funeral. “Saddened by the death of Woodrow Wilson, I wore a black tie,” penned Carter Bealer, a federal employee, in his diary. “At the office I found that nearly everybody else wore black—the women black dresses and the men black ties. That they should all separately decide to wear black seemed to me a sign of sincere regard for the memory of Woodrow Wilson.”24
All of the foreign embassies in Washington lowered their flags in honor of the funeral except one: the German embassy. Germany was still angry at Wilson’s perceived betrayal at the Paris Peace Conference. The ambassador argued that Wilson was a private citizen. The next morning, however, a small crowd staged a protest at the German embassy. One man climbed the portico above the main entrance and hung an American flag, which the police soon took down. The Germans got the message and agreed to lower their flag to half-staff.25
Wilson’s funeral was a private ceremony held in the home’s drawing room on February 5. Edith made it clear that neither Edward House nor Senator Lodge were welcome. Most of Wilson’s cabinet attended the short service, as did President Coolidge. Afterward the former president was interred at the National Cathedral, which was still under construction.
Wilson’s extensive library went to the Library of Congress, as did his presidential papers. But the remaining artifacts from his presidency and his life remain in the Woodrow Wilson House. Edith understood that this was a former president’s home, and so maintained it in museum-like condition. She remained in the house for another four decades until her death in 1961, then willed the house and all of its contents to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. It is today a presidential museum in Washington, D.C.
Wilson the man died, but his ideas lived on. Wilson’s vision was one of grand idealism in the name of humanity and world peace, but his execution was one of overreach. He failed in his life’s greatest ambition, creating the League of Nations, and his country refused to accept its global role. Ray Baker wrote in 1923 that the United States “has so far rejected its opportunity of world leadership, has considered its interests, its fears, and its rights, rather than its duties and responsibilities.”26
Johann von Bernstorff, the former German ambassador to the United States, admired Wilson’s commitment to peace but also passed the world’s judgment on him. He concluded: “The man who wanted to be Arbiter Mundi was shattered by the magnitude of his task. Like Moses on Mount Pisgah, Wilson saw the Promised Land, but he did not reach it. The world applauded his purpose overmuch, and then passed too harsh a judgment on his want of power to carry it out.”27 In August 1939, literally days before the outbreak of World War II, the League of Nations erected the Celestial Sphere Woodrow Wilson Memorial at its Geneva headquarters, dedicated to the man who made the League possible.
The lessons from Wilson’s tenure were not forgotten. A Constitutional amendment, the Twenty-fifth, specifically addressed the question of a living president no longer being able to perform the duties of the office, such as had happened after Wilson’s stroke. The vice president shall serve as acting president until the president is fit to serve again. The amendment was adopted in 1967.
Faced with the crushing Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president in 1933 and continued Wilson’s progressive agenda with the New Deal. He too would go to war, fighting the catastrophic Second World War that Wilson had warned against. Wilson’s reputation staged a remarkable recovery: he had provided the model for others to follow in international diplomacy. It was FDR’s successor, Harry Truman—the artilleryman who had captained a battery of French 75s—who built the institutions that would win the Cold War against the Soviet Union, largely by embracing Wilsonian diplomacy and promoting democracy abroad. The U.S. led the founding of the United Nations in 1945, the successor to the League of Nations, and this time there was little dissent as to the necessity of joining. It works to this day to mitigate conflict, though no one has yet found a way to prevent war entirely.
One lesson was not learned: in the Great War, some five thousand Germans were interned in camps. These were largely sailors and a few resident aliens who were deemed a security risk. Overall the number of detainees was fairly small, given the size of the German-American population. In World War II, however, the United States categorically detained an entire class of people—120,000 Japanese-Americans, of whom two-thirds were citizens. These people were held in concentration camps for four years, specifically targeted for their race. Although the U.S. was at war with both Germany and Italy in addition to Japan, millions of German and Italian-Americans remained free.
One crucial outcome from World War II was that the United States embraced its role as a global power, in part because the country recognized an existential threat posed by the Soviet Union and global communism. George Washington in his farewell address had warned the country against “permanent alliance,” and Woodrow Wilson’s framework in the League of Nations hoped to end military coalitions, but the U.S. initiated a number of alliances shortly after the war’s end. Chief among them was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, which defended Europe from the communist threat. The U.S. became committed to its global leadership.
Thomas Marshall, the former vice president, raised the question of Wilson’s legacy and America’s role in the world. It is a question as relevant today as it was in the 1920s: “Some time again a great moral question will confront the people of the United States, and then again we shall have real politics. We shall have men whose convictions are strong enough to submerge their interests.”28