When the Cheering Stopped (8 page)

He could not go on in this way. On April 3 a fit of coughing seized him. All day his voice had been husky
and by evening he could hardly talk. Grayson took his temperature: it was 103. The doctor was terrified, thinking to himself that the President had been poisoned. Such was the rumor that flew over Paris: he had been poisoned by germs slipped into the ice in his drinking water. He took to his bed. The coughing was frighteningly violent and so severe that he could not get his breath for long moments at a time. Grayson sat with him all night and the First Lady acted as nurse, but he could not keep food down and suffered violent diarrhea. To Dr. Grayson the situation seemed very serious; it was influenza, he decided. The fever kept up and the President could not sleep, he who had always been able to sleep—to “pull down the curtains of my mind”—no matter what aggravations were his. When he dozed off for a few minutes he came awake to racking coughs that Grayson could not stop. His entire digestive system was completely out of control and his face grew alarmingly thin, its gauntness emphasizing the luminous eyes.

He insisted on getting back to work and sent word to the Premiers of France, England and Italy that unless they were afraid of catching his disease he wanted them to come to his room for more conferences and more arguments. They came and he sat up in bed to go over with them yet once again the questions of who got what. Grayson and the First Lady were outside the door, telling each other he should never have gone back to work so soon, and Grayson cabled Joe Tumulty in Washington that the President was working too hard in spite of the illness: “This is a matter that worries me.” Tumulty cabled the President a plea that he not strain his constitution and the President sent back a grim joke in reply: “Constitution? Why man, I'm already living on my by-laws.”

There came a night of burning fever and Grayson, backed by the First Lady, absolutely forbade any more work. The patient had no strength with which to fight. For three days he slept—a fitful slumber.

When he awoke, he sent for his reports and his papers, he held his conferences. And he ruled that it was over, the fight was lost. The Italians were too wild in their demands, the French greedy, the British unreasonable. He
told Grayson to order the captain of the
George Washington
to prepare for an immediate return to the United States. “I will retire in good order; we will go home.” At once the Europeans came flying to promise moderation and compromise. Clemenceau might privately say the President was like a cook who keeps her trunk ready in the hall, and the French papers might say he was like a spoiled child threatening to run home to Mama, but the demands were scaled down and conciliatory gestures made.

He stayed. But in the American delegation they could no longer understand their chief. He became obsessed by the idea that the French servants—the waiters, the porters, the cleaning women—everyone—were all spies who spoke perfect English and reported to their government every word he said. It was useless to point out that three quarters of them knew no more than a few words of English, for he insisted it was not so. He locked all his documents in a safe he kept near him.

At the same time he began to worry about the furnishings of the Paris house in which he was staying. He wanted everything itemized; he said things were being stolen. “Coming from the President,” Ike Hoover wrote, “these were very funny things, and we could but surmise that something queer was happening in his mind.” He began to check very carefully on the use of the delegation's automobiles, ordering they be used only for strictly official trips even though, before, he had urged the cooped-up staff to go for relaxing drives and trips. Suddenly, also, he decided the furniture in a room was wrongly arranged and spent half an hour with Grayson moving the couches and tables back and forth. And quite as suddenly he turned on Colonel House. House suggested the President spare himself some of his labors by making better use of aides instead of trying to carry the load alone; it meant House was trying to plant spies by his side and subvert him.

His tone and his attitude toward the Europeans and his own Americans alike bespoke a disturbing secretiveness and dourness. He spoke to the former in what they considered an infuriating fashion: they thought him the schoolmaster criticizing errant boys all over again, and they suspected his motives. “I never knew anyone to
talk more like Jesus Christ and act more like Lloyd George,” said Clemenceau. The Americans he largely ignored. He dismissed the views of Secretary of State Robert Lansing and lectured his experts on their own fields of expertise. He was extremely impatient in his dealings with people, kicking his legs in irritation and walking fretfully about the room. The criticisms of the French press angered him and he threatened to force the transfer of the entire business to another country. There was a petulance in the way he labored over his typewriter on his reports, as if to indicate no secretary could do it right. His work in a way was brilliant, for he was able to compress scores and hundreds of difficult problems in his mind and come up with answers to them—perhaps no one else in the world could have done it—but that he was doing it more and more by himself exposed him to the great dangers of forgetful mistakes.

Through it all, though—the irritability and ill-health which made him if not cool to his wife (for he could never be cool to her), then unresponsive to her cheeriness; through the high-handedness to his colleagues—he clung to one great central idea: the establishment of a League of Nations which would be a forum for the dispensation of justice for all men and wipe out the threat of war forever. If the peace treaty possessed flaws—and who could say it would not?—then the League would exist to remedy those flaws. As a boy in a barn near his minister-father's church he had composed a set of rules by which his boys' club would be governed, and as a man he had for decades studied the problems of how men can live with one another within the framework of laws. Now as a President and most powerful man in the world he worked for a League of laws and intelligence to deal with whole nations standing before a bar of international justice.

In this he never wavered. He talked about it on Memorial Day of 1919, on May 30, when he went to the American Army graveyard at Suresnes to speak over the dead boys in their freshly dug graves. He attempted in that speech to say what it was they died for and to give meaning to those deaths, and the journalist Ray Stannard Baker, listening, thought to himself it was the greatest speech he had ever heard in his life, it was so perfectly
turned, so sure, so musical and so appealing in that hour in that place. Another speech of another war President came into Baker's mind—the speech made at Gettysburg.

In the acacia groves on a hillside from which one could gaze off to the valley of the Seine and to Paris, he stood bareheaded under a hot, bright sun near the old fortress of Mont Valérien, dust from the new cemetery rising from under the feet of the listening thousands, many of whom were wounded soldiers, and said:

“So it is our duty to take and maintain the safeguards which will see to it that the mothers of America and the mothers of France and England and Italy and Belgium and all the other suffering nations should never be called upon for this sacrifice again. This can be done. It must be done, and it will be done. The great thing that these men left us … is the great instrument of the League of Nations …

“If we do not know courage, we cannot accomplish our purpose and this age is an age that looks forward, not backward; which rejects the standard of national selfishness that once governed the counsels of nations and demands that they shall give way to a new order of things in which the only questions will be, ‘Is it right?' ‘Is it just?' ‘Is it in the interest of mankind?'

“Ladies and gentlemen: we all believe, I hope, the spirits of these men are not buried with their bones. Their spirits live. I hope—I believe—that their spirits are present with us at this hour. I hope that I feel the compulsion of their presence. I hope that I realize the significance of their presence. Think, soldiers, of those comrades of yours who are gone. If they were here, what would they say?

“They would remember America … they would remember the terrible field of battle. They would remember what … they had come for and how worthwhile it was to give their lives for it.

“‘We command you in the names of those who, like ourselves, have died to bring the counsels of men together, and we remind you what America said she was born for. She was born, she said, to show mankind the way to liberty. She was born to make this great gift a common gift. She was born to show men the way of experience by which they might realize this gift and maintain it.'

“Make yourselves soldiers once for all in this common cause, where we need wear no uniform except the uniform of the heart, clothing ourselves with the principles of right, and saying to men everywhere: ‘You are our brothers and we invite you into the comradeship of liberty and peace.' Let us go away hearing this unspoken mandate of our dead comrades.

“If I may speak a personal word, I beg you to realize the compulsion that I myself feel I am under. By the Constitution of our great country, I was the Commander in Chief of these men. I advised the Congress to declare that a state of war existed. I sent these lads over here to die. Shall I—can I—ever speak a word of counsel which is inconsistent with the assurance I gave them when they came over? It is inconceivable. There is something better, if possible, that a man can give than his life, and that is his living spirit to a service that is not easy, to resist counsels that are hard to resist, to stand against purposes that are difficult to stand against, and to say, ‘Here I stand, consecrated in the spirit of the men who were once my comrades, and who are now gone, and who left me under eternal bonds of fidelity.'”

The First Lady, on crutches because of an infected foot, sat in a car. Near her was her secretary, Edith Benham, and in the crowd were Miss Benham's two young servicemen assistants, whom she sent to the ceremonies because she wanted them to have something, some ideals, a memory, to take home and make a part of their lives. Listening, she wondered if the boys would care for the speech. She found later that they were so moved they did not know if they ought to stand still or applaud at the end; that sitting next to one of them was a “little roughneck motorcycle driver” and that the driver cried.

At the end the President took a wreath sent by the Boy Scouts of America and moved to place it by the graves. A Frenchwoman came up to him; she said, “Mr. President, may I be permitted to add these flowers to those which you have just deposited here as a tribute to the American dead who in sacrificing their lives saved the lives of thousands of Frenchmen? My two boys were killed in battle.”

A month later, work done, the Versailles Treaty and
the Covenant of the League of Nations completed, the President and First Lady sailed for America.

On July 10, 1919, the President came before the Senate of the United States to present to it for its approval the treaty and the Covenant. Two of the Senators refused to stand up when he entered.

In the eyes of most of the men before him as he began to speak he was the schoolmaster incarnate raised to unthinkable heights from which he flung down not requests but dictates. In the most recent election, that of November of 1918, days before the Armistice, he had asked the country to give him a Congress dominated by members of his own party. The request seemed unfair, partisan, to many voters; a Republican House and Senate were elected. But the President ignored the verdict and the implied suggestion that Republicans should have something to do with the peace and treaty-making and took no Republican of stature with him to Paris. Once there, he consulted only with himself. And in fact he had always been a self-contained thinker and planner, always treating politicians, even those of his own party (let alone the opposition) with suspicion. It was futile to spend much time with them, he said. No Senators were ever asked to a sociable lunch at the White House; their opinions were rarely requested under any circumstances. If given gratuitously, they were ignored.

Now he stood before them as the world figure of his time. He had burst all narrower confines. Looking down at him from the press gallery, the journalist Henry L. Stoddard, shocked somewhat by the pallor of his face and his worn look, thought to himself that below stood a being utterly suffused with arrogance and the certainty that as he had dictated the laws and remade the map the job must needs have been done right and that therefore upon it these Senators must stamp, and quickly, their approval. There was a sureness about the speaker, Stoddard thought, that was the confidence of one who saw world Utopia as the result of
his
labors. Looking up at him from their seats, the Senators—human beings, after all—saw with senatorial eyes their dignity being shredded by a President who seemed to be saying to them, and
bluntly so, that as he had redone the world, so now it was their duty to approve his work and then be gone. He was in their eyes the man who, when the war was over, had the government take over the oceanic cables so that the American people at home would learn just what he, and he alone, wanted them to learn about the Paris negotiations. And those negotiations in the end, many Senators thought, repealed the Declaration of Independence and took away the liberty of action of the United States and surrendered its rights and made it, as Theodore Roosevelt's daughter Alice put it, “merely a pawn in Mr. Wilson's campaign for the Presidency of the Federation of the World.”

And now this would-be emperor aping the Hohenzollerns and Hapsburgs stood before the Senate demanding a rubber-stamped “Yes!” upon his treaty and his League. All wartime unity and restraint gone, Senators opened fire. “Britain's tool—a dodger and a cheater”
*
sought with his League to open “Pandora's box of evil” to “empty upon the American people the aggregated calamities of the world and send the Angel of Death into every American home, embargo our commerce, close our exchanges, destroy our credits, leave our merchandise rotting on our piers, shut the Isthmian canal, order Congress to declare war, levy taxes, appropriate money, raise and support armies and navies, dispatch our men to any part of the globe to fight because an alien Council so willed.”
†
This was the man who spoke so much of sacrifice but made a great ship his pleasure yacht for European jaunts, lived in the palaces of princes and accepted “presents from foreign diplomats worth hundreds of thousands of dollars”
**
—“more than a million.”
***
He was “trying to impose his arbitrary will on the nation … seeking to hand over American destiny to the secret councils of Europe” or to the black races, or the Pope, or “greedy, conscienceless England.”
‡
“I feel as if I had been wandering with Alice in Wonderland and had tea with the Mad Hatter.”
§