AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION:
I propose to tell the true story of the Wilson Administration, curiously entwined with the story of the friendship between Woodrow Wilson and Edward Mandell House — the strangest friendship in history. In preparing my recital I have had the unconscious collaboration of Woodrow Wilson. His constant intimate letters to Colonel House have been opened to me and I have found in them an index to the real Wilson. Colonel House himself has answered numberless questions.
Other distinguished contemporaries have helped to guide my sometimes faltering footsteps. Emperor William II carefully read and revised my account of the historical interview between himself and Colonel House which almost stopped the World War.
Dr. Constantin Dumba, the ambassador of Francis Joseph in Washington; Count Johann von Bernstorff, the envoy of William II; Bainbridge Colby, Mr. Wilson's Secretary of State; General T. W. Gregory, Mr. Wilson's Attorney-General; David F. Houston, Mr. Wilson's Secretary of Agriculture and McAdoo's successor as Secretary of the Treasury; Newton D. Baker, the pacifist Secretary of War of a pacifist President; Frank L. Polk, legal adviser of the State Department; Joseph P. Tumulty, the most loyal of secretaries; the late Sidney E. Mezes, Director of the Inquiry, the body established to prepare the American data for the Peace Conference; Justice Charles Evans Hughes, Wilson's opponent in 1916; Louis Seibold, the brilliant Washington correspondent; Professor Charles Seymour, the editor of The Intimate Papers of Colonel House — and innumerable others — have been kind enough to aid my researches.
No one except myself is responsible for my conclusions. Many of those to whom I am indebted for information, including Colonel House himself, will disagree emphatically with some of my interpretations. I am the cook. If I have spoiled the broth, the fault is mine, not theirs.
I draw freely upon my own experiences. My slant is somewhat more intimate than that of the historian, because I have met and known personally many of the personages who stalk through my articles: President Wilson and his daughters, Clemenceau, McAdoo, Bryan, Page, Burleson, Gregory, Colby, Morgenthau, Ludendorff, Foch, Briand, Sir William Wiseman, once head of the British Secret Service in the United States, President Roosevelt, Colonel House, William II, etc., etc.
When I began my study I looked upon Woodrow Wilson as the villain of the ensuing drama. As I proceeded to delve into the débris of reminiscences and unwritten history, he gradually assumed aspects of a hero and a saint. There was a time when there was no one in the world whom I distrusted more than Edward Mandell House. Today he seems to me a genuine philosopher and a gifted statesman. Even if his good intentions, like Wilson's, have helped to pave mankind's way to hell, they gave us a glimpse of the Promised Land where peace abides and a new sanction governs the fate of nations.
We shall travel on uncharted seas of history. The story that unfolds itself before the reader will astonish those who have never looked behind the stage where history is made. A Swedish Chancellor once said: "My son, you do not know with how little wisdom the world is governed." The Swedish statesman was right. There are neither heroes nor villains in our drama, but poor, struggling mortals, each trying vainly to play his part without fumbling his lines.
Those who follow me will discover that for six and one-half years the United States was governed by a duumvirate — a committee of two. They will note the confusion prevailing in the diplomatic service of the United States because the duumvirs, scorning official avenues of diplomacy, chose to communicate with foreign governments through channels of their own. We shall witness the spectacle of a President disowning his own ambassadors, and of ambassadors disowning their government. We shall catch intimate glimpses of monarchs and of premiers. We shall hear what Colonel House said to the Kaiser and to King George, and what they said to him. We shall learn why Wilson called the British boobs, and why the United States was on the verge of war with Great Britain during the Wilson Administration.
We shall reveal the origin of "the strangest and most fruitful personal alliance in history," and tell, for the first time, the true story of why it was broken. There will be no doubt as to who was the real author of the Fourteen Points and who tried to save them in Paris. We shall discover that Woodrow Wilson made a secret agreement pledging the United States to war before he was reëlected, why he reversed himself on the Panama tolls, and why he plunged us into the war. We shall learn that twice in his career President Wilson was on the point of resigning the Presidency, and why Wilson refused to support his son-in-law McAdoo's Presidential ambitions, and other carefully guarded secrets.
In this connection we shall make the astounding discovery that for six and one-half months, if not longer, Edith Bolling Wilson was virtually President of the United States.
GEORGE SYLVESTER VIERECK
PART ONE — THE GREAT COLLAPSE
For six and one-half months, from September 26, 1919, to April 13, 1920, a woman was virtually President of the United States.
For six and one-half months Edith Bolling Wilson fulfilled the dream of Susan B. Anthony.
For six and one-half months she was, so to speak, not only acting President, but secretary to the President, and Secretary of State.
From mid-April to the end of Wilson's term on March 4, 1921, Edith Bolling Wilson shared with Woodrow Wilson the responsibilities and duties of the Chief Magistracy of the Republic.
To understand this, perhaps the most extraordinary, chapter in American history, we must briefly sketch Woodrow Wilson's crusade on behalf of the Covenant and the League of Nations, which ended with his physical and nervous collapse. This collapse seems all the more astounding since Woodrow Wilson was never more fit physically than when he was in the White House. I have this assurance from Colonel House. It is corroborated by Admiral Grayson. "I am in better health than I have been in forty years," Wilson himself said to his doctor, prior to America's entrance into the war. Dr. Grayson's régime enabled the President to bear his war burdens with undiminished vitality. He had laid aside coal-tar tablets and found golf a substitute for the stomach pump. Even strenuous speaking campaigns did not tax his strength unduly.
Clinton Gilbert, who met Wilson in Paris at the apex of his career, describes him as marvelously fresh and young, his color warm and youthful, his eye alive to pleasure. "His League Covenant had just been agreed to. The world had accepted him.... He was elated and confident."
Dr. Grayson insists that Paris upset Wilson's constitution. It limited his exercise and French hospitality made it impossible to carry out the rigid diet to which Wilson had accustomed himself. The circumstances cited by Dr. Grayson were no doubt important. But Wilson's mysterious physical breakdown was probably due largely to psychic causes.
All his life Wilson shrank from contact with other men. Everyone who knew Wilson closely testifies that such contacts, except under conditions chosen by himself, were a torture to him. But Wilson had found an escape from his difficulty by his alliance with House, who permitted the outside world to filter through his mind to Wilson, but protected his sensitive partner from the harsh winds that blew. For seven years House had functioned as his defense. The collapse of his alliance with House compelled him to bear unendurable frictions and combats. Wilson's conferences with Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Orlando undermined his strength and destroyed the psychic and nervous balance he had so laboriously acquired.
In addition to these assaults from without, he was assailed by inimical forces battling for mastery within himself. That battle was waged at the expense of his nervous surplus.
Wilson's organic inferiority combined in a vicious circle with psychic complications. Eyestrain, in all likelihood, aggravated both conditions. We can understand Wilson's mentality better if we realize that he was constrained to make one eye do the work of two. Years before the Peace Conference a retinal hemorrhage had deprived him of the sight of his right eye. The strain on his optical nerve, and that messenger of death hardening of the arteries, explain the violent headaches which began to plague him again in Paris. People noticed that one side of his face twitched ominously.
An encounter with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had compelled Wilson to face the unpleasant reality that he would have to wage battle for the Covenant unless he accepted certain senatorial reservations. But he was in no mood for compromise. He compelled his followers to vote against all reservations. The Covenant was defeated not by its enemies but by its friends!
Unimpressed by the tokens of Wilson's illness, pro-League senators impressed upon the President that he could not secure the acceptance of the Peace Treaty and the Covenant unless he personally undertook a great moral crusade. Remembering his recent European apotheosis, Wilson determined to take his case to the people. Tumulty and Grayson both urged him to delay the contemplated swing around the circle. But his stern moral Scotch-Presbyterian self overruled every other consideration.
Wilson met Grayson's objections with a grim smile. "I know why you are here. You want to persuade me not to go. I know all your arguments and I admit their truthfulness. But the boys who went overseas did not refuse to go because it was dangerous. Many of them sacrificed their lives in an attempt to bring about a permanent peace. The thought of their sacrifice makes me more determined to put forth my utmost endeavor to have the League ratified, for I believe it will prevent another such world-wide catastrophe. No; despite your advice, I must go."
With the same grand gesture Wilson waved away Tumulty's advice to take a needed rest.
"Disastrous consequences may follow if you insist upon this trip," Tumulty objected.
"I know," Wilson replied wearily, "that I am at the end of my tether. But my friends on the Hill say that the trip is necessary to save the Treaty, and I am willing to make whatever personal sacrifice is required; for if the Treaty should be defeated, God only knows what would happen to the world as a result of it. Even though, in my condition, it might mean the giving up of my life, I will gladly make the sacrifice to save the Treaty."
On September 3, 1919, the battered, broken, one-eyed Covenanter set forth upon his crusade. He made a notable speech in Columbus, Ohio. Others followed in quick succession. His reception by the crowds was not over-friendly. Tossing logic aside, he drew upon the mighty arsenal of his rhetoric. His phrasing and his delivery were exquisite. He pitted the batteries of his eloquence against the stone wall of destiny. Day after day his emotional ecstasy grew. Then came a shock, an attack that could neither be ignored nor laughed off.
On September 12 he received a news dispatch that unnerved him. William C. Bullitt testified before the Committee on Foreign Relations that Secretary Lansing had criticized the League of Nations severely. To Wilson and his friends this seemed like a stab in the back. Lansing's lame explanation in a dispatch failed to improve Wilson's temper.
"Were I in Washington," he said to Tumulty, "I would at once demand his resignation. That kind of disloyalty must not be permitted to go unchallenged for a single minute."
Tumulty is convinced that only Wilson's illness a few days later prevented his immediate dismissal of Lansing. Identifying himself with his cause, Wilson, like a true crusader, persuaded himself that anyone who disagreed with him was an enemy of the Lord. The arch-fiend in his universe was no longer the Kaiser but Lodge, who led the fight against the Peace Treaty. Lansing, by admitting in a confidential conversation that the Peace Treaty was not perfect, aligned himself with the powers of evil.
Living in a dream world of his own, Wilson planned, upon the completion of the Western trip, to make a sally into Senator Lodge's own territory in Massachusetts. But every day shattered more completely the confidence of the American people in Wilson's handiwork at Versailles.
At last a ray of the truth must have pierced a chink of the fantastic armor in which Wilson accoutered himself, like the poor emperor in the story who suddenly realizes that he is naked. Colonel House was the only man who could have softened the blow to Wilson's pride without concealing from him the realities of the situation. But Colonel House was in Paris!
In Pueblo, on September 25, no longer master of his emotions, Woodrow Wilson bursts into tears when he addresses the crowd. His headaches rob him of sleep. When he sleeps, saliva drops from the corners of his mouth. Fever assails his body. Catastrophe is at hand.
At four o'clock in the morning, on September 26, Grayson knocks at Tumulty's compartment. "The President is seriously ill. I greatly fear that the trip may end fatally if he attempts to go on."
When Tumulty arrives at the President's drawing-room he finds him fully dressed and seated in his chair. Speech no longer flows freely. His tongue stumbles. His lips refuse to articulate. His face is ghostly pale; one side of it seems to have fallen, like a ruined house. Tears stream down the President's cheeks.
"My dear boy," he mumbles painfully, "this has never happened to me before. I felt it coming on yesterday. I do not know what to do."
Tumulty agrees with Grayson. The trip must be canceled. The sick man pleads with his doctor and his secretary. "Don't you see that if you cancel this trip Senator Lodge and his friends will say that I am a quitter, and that the Western trip was a failure, and the Treaty will be lost?"
Reaching over to him, Tumulty takes both of his hands. "What difference, my dear Governor, does it make what they say? Nobody in the world believes you are a quitter, but it is your life that we must HOW consider."
Wilson is unable to persuade Tumulty. His left arm and leg no longer function. His whole left side is paralyzed. But the indomitable Scotch-Presbyterian soul continues to argue: "I want to show them that I can still fight and that I am not afraid. Just postpone the trip for twenty-four hours and I will be all right."
The train slides into a siding near Wichita, Kansas. Mrs. Wilson, now thoroughly alarmed, takes command of the situation. The Wichita engagement is canceled. With the assistance of Grayson, she takes hold of the reins, never to relinquish them while Wilson lives. Riding around the town, the train, turns homeward. Blinds drawn, it heads for Washington.
Skeptics among the newspaper men believed that the President was shamming illness. The majority were not surprised. They had seen unmistakable signs of the approaching collapse. When the train arrived in Washington on a Sunday morning, Wilson, controlling the agony that racked his limbs, walked briskly through Union Station.
A few days later, October 4, at four o'clock in the morning, Mrs. Wilson, hearing the President calling from the bathroom, found him prostrate on the floor, his left leg crumpled under him. Grayson was summoned in haste. When the President regained consciousness he asked his wife and his doctor to keep his condition a secret. Such, at least, is the statement vouchsafed by Josephus Daniels. No one talked to the invalid immediately after his stroke except Grayson and Mrs. Wilson.
Grayson summoned a Philadelphia specialist, Dr. Francis X. Dercum, Rear Admiral E. R. Stitt of the Naval Medical Corps, and Mrs. Wilson's family physician, Dr. Sterling Ruffin of Washington. The doctors agreed that Wilson had suffered from a cerebral thrombosis, a blood clot in the right side of his brain, which paralyzed the left side of his body. Dr. Dercum was grave. "Mr. Wilson," he said, "may live five minutes, five months, or five years."
The last part of his prediction came nearest the truth. Shut off completely from the world of reality, Wilson survived from October 4, 1919; to February 3, 1924. But was he the same Woodrow Wilson after the stroke?
No hint of the President's true condition was permitted to percolate through from the White House. Mrs. Wilson and Dr. Grayson threw around the sick bed the screen of professional secrecy and wifely devotion. No member of the Cabinet, not even the Secretary of State, was permitted to approach the sick man's bedside. Even Tumulty was compelled to wait in the anteroom. The Vice President of the United States was left in the dark, like the rest of the country.
Conscious of his duty to keep the machinery of the government moving, Mr. Lansing, in a private talk with Tumulty, suggested the advisability of calling upon the Vice President to act for the President. He opened Jefferson's Manual and read to Tumulty a clause of the Constitution.
Tumulty, already wroth with Lansing, was enraged. "Mr. Lansing," he sharply retorted, "the Constitution is not a dead letter with the White House. I have read the Constitution and do not find myself in need of any tutoring at your hands in the provisions you have just read. And who," he asked, shaking with indignation, "should certify to the disability of the President?"
"That," Lansing diplomatically intimated, "would be a job for either Dr. Grayson or for you."
"You may rest assured," Tumulty thundered, summoning all the fighting instincts of his race, "that while Woodrow Wilson is lying in the White House on the broad of his back I will not be a party to oust him. He has been too kind, too loyal and too wonderful to me to receive such treatment at my hands."
Here Dr. Grayson entered the Cabinet room. Who guided Dr. Grayson's steps in that epic moment?
"I am sure," Tumulty said, every tone an impeachment of Lansing, "that Dr. Grayson will never certify to his disability. Will you, Grayson?"
Dr. Grayson emphatically concurred with Tumulty. Tumulty then, in no uncertain terms, notified Lansing: "If anyone outside the White House circle attempts to certify to the President's disability, Grayson and I will stand together and repudiate his statement."
"No further attempt," Tumulty says in his recital of the incident, "was made by Mr. Lansing to institute ouster proceedings against his chief."
Loyalty won at the expense of the Constitution!
"If," Tumulty added, as Lansing turned to the door, "the President were in a position to know of this episode, he would take decisive measures."
October, November, December, and January passed. For more than one quarter of a year, until February 13, 1920, Lansing remained Secretary of State. Wilson took no steps to end Lansing's régime in the State Department. The President was unable for over one-fourth of a year to discharge the functions of his office, even with the aid of Mrs. Wilson and Dr. Grayson.
In short, from March 4, 1913, to Wilson's debacle in Paris, June, 1919, the United States was governed by a duumvirate consisting of Wilson and House.
Wilson ruled alone, after his return, until September 26, when his Western trip ended.
From September 26 to October 4, the ship of state floundered without a helmsman.
Between September 26 and October 4, when Wilson was paralyzed by a blood clot on the brain, Mrs. Wilson assumed the reins, and she remained in command from that day until April 13, 1920, when Wilson resumed meetings with his Cabinet. But she remained his coregent until the end, March 4, 1921.
If Mrs. Wilson did not virtually rule the United States throughout that period, who did?
Publication Date: February 20, 1932