When the Cheering Stopped (33 page)

There was an old man of Khartoum

Who kept two black sheep in his room.

To remind him, he said,

Of two friends who were dead.

But he never would specify whom.

He delighted in the old man of Khartoum and recited it to Lloyd George when the Welshman visited S Street—he replied to Lloyd George's request for an opinion on Calvin Coolidge by quoting Oscar Wilde, who, meeting an individual, adjusted his monocle, sniffed, and asked, “Are you anyone in particular?”—and recited another limerick also. This one had to do with a lawsuit instituted by the aristocratic Cabots of Boston against an immigrant family, the Kabotskis, who sought to take the Cabot name. “The limerick had to made over,” he said gleefully, and recited it:

“Here's to Massachusetts,

The land of the bean and the cod.

Where the Lodges can't speak to the Cabots

Because the Cabots speak Yiddish, by God!”

In that fall Bernard Baruch's daughter, Belle, an active worker for United States entry into the League, came to see him with a friend, Evangeline Johnson, and begged that he go on the radio the night before the fifth anniversary of the Armistice and give an address that would promote interest in the League. He had always disliked the radio, then in its infancy, and fought Edith's attempts to get him interested in the programs, but for such a cause on such a day he would override his antipathy. So again they went to work, the husband and wife, and worked for weeks on a talk that would take less than ten minutes. On the Western tour in 1919 he went to the train without one word of his half a hundred speeches written out; but that was in 1919, a long while ago.

On the afternoon of November 10, a truck bearing the transmission facilities parked in the driveway. Only a microphone attached to a wire would be in the house itself. No photographers. All day he was in bed with a sickening
headache, but he was up on his feet—he had always said he could speak only while standing up—and in the library at eight-thirty when an announcer said, “Mr. Woodrow Wilson will now say a few words.”

He began to speak into the device carrying his voice to anyone who on a Saturday night cared to hear what Woodrow Wilson thought about Armistice Day. He had tried to memorize the address but found it impossible, and so he tried to read it from a typed page. But he had great trouble seeing the words and his voice failed him. The first few faltering sentences were almost unintelligible to the listeners all across America gathered in the homes of persons who had radios, headsets and amplifiers. In a Madison Square studio a New York
World
reporter saw a woman turn her head away from the radio speaker. “Oh, he is so ill, so broken,” she cried. But he steadied himself and, standing in the library, he managed to get the words out even though between sentences he gasped as a man does when hit by cold water. Now and then he seemed to halt completely until Edith prompted him with the next words. Over most sets it could not be heard that she was doing this, for she stood well away from the microphone, but at New York's Station WOR, a very clear signal came in and her voice was plainly heard.

He said now, five years after the guns of the war stopped all along the fronts: “Memories of that happy time are forever marred and embittered for us by the shameful fact that when the victory was won … we withdrew into a sullen and selfish isolation which is manifestly ignoble because manifestly dishonorable.

“The only way in which we can worthily give proof of our appreciation of the high significance of Armistice Day is by resolving to put self-interest away and once more formulate and act upon the highest ideals and purposes of international policy. Thus, and only thus, can we return to the true traditions of America.”

He was finished. He stood in S Street's library and said, “That is all, isn't it?” The words came over the speakers of all the radio sets, and in the Madison Square studio a man softly repeated them. “That is all, isn't it?”

But he had spoken to the greatest audience in the
history of radio up to that time. Upward of three million persons heard his voice. Dozens of them wrote to the originating station in Washington. “Dear Sirs, The speech of ex-President Wilson came in fine and I sure did enjoy his speech. I tuned in after he had started his speech and when he finished and they announced who had been speaking, I nearly fell out of my seat. Radio sure is a wonder. I enjoy your other programs. Lawrence Campbell, Jr., Mannington, W. Va.” … “I have just listened to Woodrow Wilson talk over the radio and wish to tell you we heard every word clear & plain and you would think Mr. Wilson was right in the room. Sure was good. If you get this letter kindly let us know if Mr. Wilson knew how plain his voice was heard in Green Bay. I am sure he would be glad …”

The next day, Armistice Day, twenty thousand persons came to S Street. The trolley lines put on extra cars to carry them. They were not the elite of Washington or the government, noted William Allen White, and among them were fewer than a dozen persons whose names a regular newspaper reader would recognize. They were clerks, housewives, some Negroes, young veterans. Joe Tumulty, still barred from Number 2340, hired a little scratch band to lead the people, and a man who used to dress up as Uncle Sam and march in Washington parades was at the head of the musicians. Behind came the people, the largest crowd ever to go to S Street. The New York
Times
the next day frankly called them “pilgrims,” and to the writer Mark Sullivan there was indeed something of the religious in the solemn fashion in which they conducted themselves and in the mood that was theirs. They were something like a church congregation, Sullivan thought, holding the meeting out of doors. In the windless air maple leaves dropped upon them as they covered the streets for five blocks in every direction. Many of them carried white chrysanthemums; others had League of Nations banners and American flags.

They began to gather after Sunday lunch, around two o'clock. At three-thirty Senator Carter Glass of Virginia came out of the house, and with him was the servant Scott, and behind them, leaning heavily on his cane but outfitted in morning coat and gray trousers, was Woodrow
Wilson. The band played
Over There.
Some ex-soldiers wearing their old uniforms were directly in front of the house, and when during the music and the cheering their old Commander in Chief looked at them he found a smile to give back in exchange for those on their young faces. When the waiting thousands were silent, Glass began to read a prepared address. “We are here,” Glass called out, “to renew our faith and to signify the unabated loyalty of millions of Americans to that immutable cause which you, more than any man on earth, so impressively personify.” The people burst into a roar. Glass was standing on the lower step of the entrance to the house and the man he was speaking to stood just above him on the upper step, head bent, eyes on Glass's hands. The lips were slightly parted and now and again the bared head nodded up and then down. Glass said, “What might have been accomplished had America given heed to your wise counsel and taken the imposing place which still awaits her coming!” Glass spoke then of how it yet would come, that America would yet join the League, and that when it did all America and all the world would “stand uncovered before him to whom, through the goodness of God, will belong the most enduring honor.” Cheer after cheer rose from the people. Glass stepped back.

Woodrow Wilson's eyes were on the ground as the applause slowly quieted. Edith stood behind him in a moleskin cape with sable collar. He moved forward one step and put on his hat so that he might lift his cane and with his good hand hook it into the top pocket of his overcoat. Then he took off his hat again and for perhaps thirty seconds he stood silent, swaying slightly. He raised his bowed head and peered at the ex-soldiers in front and at the people in the street. He moved the right hand holding the high silk hat in a vague gesture and then he began to speak.

“Senator Glass, ladies and gentlemen: I am indeed deeply touched and honored by this extraordinary exhibition of your friendship and confidence; and yet I can say without affectation that I wish you would transfer your homage from me to the men who made the Armistice possible. It was possible because our boys had beaten the enemy to a standstill. You know—if you will allow me to be
didactic for a moment—‘Armistice' merely means ‘standstill of arms.' Our late enemies, the Germans, call an Armistice
‘Waffenstillstand,'
an armed standstill; and it was the boys who made them stand still.” There was laughter and applause. “If they had not, they would not have listened to proposals of armistice. I am proud to remember that I had the honor of being the commander in chief—” Someone yelled, “The best on earth!” “—the commander in chief of the most ideal army that was ever thrown together—” And his voice broke and his eyes filled for a moment and he said, “Pardon my emotion,” and went on: “Of the most ideal army that was ever thrown together, though the real fighting commander in chief was my honored friend Pershing, to whom I gladly hand the laurels of victory. Thank you with all my heart for your kindness.”

He turned away and put on his hat. He said, “That's all I can do.” Huston Thompson of the Federal Trade Commission, a former student at Princeton, stepped forward to help him back to the house, and as the crowd cheered, the band broke into the hymn
How Firm a Foundation.
But as Thompson took his arm he moved his lips. Above the cheers and the music Thompson could not understand the whispered words; Thompson put his ear to the speaker's lips and faintly heard, “Stop the band. I have something more to say.” Thompson waved his arms at the band to quiet them and they stopped playing and again S Street became completely silent.

Before, Woodrow Wilson had spoken in a monotone, and what he said was mild, graceful enough, of no real significance. It was a sick old man's few remarks in front of his house; it meant nothing. But now he was going to speak again for one moment, one paragraph, and he was going to find it in him to speak so that his voice, suddenly strong, would carry to the outermost reaches of the crowd ranging down S Street's hill; to the little boys perched up in the maple trees; to the people on the sloping mud banks across the street. For this moment, this one last instant, that voice was the voice of the Professor Wilson who long ago called to the students at the football games that they should cheer louder for the team; the voice was that of the President in the West crying aloud that there would be
a terrible war if the nation did not enter the League. These were the last words he was ever going to say in public. The long crusade was over. This was summation—valedictory. And no tears.

He said:

“Just one word more; I cannot refrain from saying it. 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. Thank you.”

On Christmas Eve they went to Keith's. Helen Bones, who introduced them—(eight years … Edith Galt in muddy shoes and the President in tatty golfing suit and Grayson saying he thought the ladies could at least invite the men for tea)—Helen was down from New York for the holiday and so was Margaret. Two strong doormen waited at the alley entrance to the theater and half carried him in to Seat U-21. The headliners that night were the madcaps Olsen and Johnson, the latter playing a maniac version of Santa Claus, and the final set was of a living room with a fireplace. Above the fireplace was a portrait of Woodrow Wilson. The cast came out on the stage for the finale, and the actress Nan Halpern stepped forward and said to the audience in the dark, “Merry Christmas to you and you and you.” She turned her back and went to the picture and looked up at it and said, “And to you, an abundance of Yuletide blessings and a bountiful year.” The people in the theater were entirely silent then, both those on the stage and those sitting before them, for she was raising herself to the picture and she was holding it in her arms and pressing her lips to it in a long sweet embrace. Down the aisle came showgirls. They carried roses. They went to Row U and handed them over. Onstage the cast began to sing
Auld Lang Syne
and at the first slow familiar notes the audience got up—every last one of them, Olsen noted—and stood and turned toward Seat U-21 and sang along with the orchestra. This was no ordinary singing, Olsen thought. He had never heard such singing. At the end there was a long
silence that seemed to Olsen to last and last until one of the girls on the stage stepped forward to the footlights. The brightness illuminated her tears glittering down through the mascara and stage make-up. She said, “Merry Christmas, Mr. President.”

Four days later, December 28, they celebrated his birthday. Richard Linthicum, a Democratic Party publicist, sent a limerick:

On S Street resides a great sage

Whose name brightens history's page.

Is he old? Fiddlesticks!

One year past sixty-six—

A very young age for a sage.

Outside when he went for his afternoon drive at three o'clock there waited a magnificent birthday gift from a group of his old friends and associates. It was a Rolls-Royce, specially constructed to make his entrances and exits easier. It was black with a thin orange stripe—Princeton's colors. On the doors was “W.W.”

New Year's came and Helen and Margaret left. Now he was alone with Edith, to whom he had always been My Dear One, My Beloved, My Darling, My Own; to whom he would always be these. Her smiles to cheer him did not stop, but now in this last winter, these last weeks and days, he could hardly see her or the letters he dictated. His pen dragged badly when he tried to sign his name; one letter to the Misses Ford of Bournemouth was filed away with a notation by Bolling: “Not sent on account of bad signature.” For days, in fact, he lay too weary and spent to try even to lift his pen. But on January 16 he asked Cordell Hull, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, to bring the members of the committee, in session in Washington, to call. They came in a fleet of taxicabs driving up S Street through a heavy cold rain. They hurried in through the outer doors thrown open for the first time—for this was his first reception—and formed a line to go up the staircase. There were 125 of them. Edith stood at the top of the steps in front of the library, where he sat before a blazing fire. In a green
afternoon frock, she shook hands with each visitor, but constantly, every few seconds, she turned her head to look at her husband. The guests went single file into the library to where Hull stood by to say their names quietly. There was no cheering, no music; there were no speeches. There were hardly any words. For each person there was a slow lifting of the right hand no more than six inches in the air, but above the rustling of the moving people and the swish of their damp clothing nothing he might have said in his weak voice could have been heard. His lips moved and there was an almost imperceptible nod of the head; that was all. He grew ever more fatigued as the line kept coming, and his head sagged forward, so that he could no longer look up into the anxious faces of the people gently reaching their hands out to his. After an hour it was over. He had shaken the hand of every man and woman.