After
President Woodrow Wilson suffered a paralyzing stroke in the fall of
1919, his wife, First Lady Edith Wilson, began to handle the day-to-day
responsibilities of the Executive Office. Mrs. Wilson had had little
formal education and had only been married to President Wilson for four
years; yet, in the tenuous peace following the end of World War I, Mrs.
Wilson assumed the authority of the office of the president, reading all
correspondence intended for her bedridden husband and assuming his role
for seventeen long months. Though her Oval Office presence was
acknowledged in Washington, D.C. circles at the time--one senator called
her "the Presidentress who had fulfilled the dream of suffragettes by
changing her title from First Lady to Acting First Man"--her legacy as
"First Woman President" is now largely forgotten.
William Hazelgrove's Madam President
is a vivid, engaging portrait of the woman who became the acting
President of the United States in 1919, months before women officially
won the right to vote. A Selection of the History Book Club, Military
Book Club and Conservative Book Club.
Prologue
She
was from the South and had two years of formal schooling and wrote like
a child. She married a quiet man from Washington
and her baby died after three months. Her husband then died and left her
with a failing jewelry company that was severely in debt. She turned
the company around while taking almost no salary. She bought an electric
car and was issued the first driver’s license
given to a woman in the District of Columbia. She married a President
who had been recently widowed. In four years, the President would have a
severe stroke, and leave her to run the Unites States Government and
negotiate the end of World War I.
She was our First Woman President.
1 – The Cover Up
President
Woodrow Wilson lay with his mouth drooping, unconscious, having
suffered a thrombosis on October 2nd 1919 that left
him paralyzed on his left side and barely able to speak. The doctors
believed the President’s best chance to survive was in the only known
remedy for a stroke at the time; a rest cure consisting of total
isolation from the world.
His second wife of four years, Edith Bolling Wilson, asked how a country could function with no Chief Executive. Dr. Dercum,
the attending physician leaned over and gave Edith her charge.
“Madam, it is a grave situation, but I think you can solve it. Have
everything come to you; weigh the importance of each matter: and see if
it is possible by consultation with the respective heads of the
Departments to solve them without the guidance of your
husband.”
From
here on Edith Wilson would run the White House and by proxy the country
by controlling access to the President, signing
documents, pushing bills through, issuing vetoes, isolating advisors,
crafting State of the Union addresses, disposing or censoring
correspondence, filling positions, analyzing every problem and deciding
what to give to the President and what to solve by her
own devices; all the while keeping the fact the country was no longer
being run by President Woodrow Wilson a guarded secret.
A
few guessed at the real situation. A frustrated Senator Falls from New
Mexico pounded the Senatorial table when he demanded
a response from the White House. “We have a petticoat government! Wilson
is not acting! Mrs. Wilson is President!” Clearly some would see a
power grab Edith Wilson ensured by keeping Vice President Marshall from
seeing the President and preventing the Constitutional
transfer of power. But Edith believed the doctors admonishment that any
stress would kill her husband. From here on she would shield Woodrow
Wilson from the world with one simple guiding principle in running the
country; keep her husband alive.
Edith
participated in the Wilson Administration in an extraordinary way. They
were more like a couple today where both people
are more of a team than was found in 1919. President Wilson made sure
they were together constantly and valued his wife’s input and made Edith
part of many of his decisions prior to his stroke. In this way he gave
her hands on training for her “stewardship.”
“I tried to arrange my appointments to correspond with those of the
President, so we might be free at the same times,” she would later
write. Woodrow Wilson gave Edith presidential access to all his work and
many times she was with him all day. As she later
wrote, “Breakfast was at eight o’clock sharp. Then we both went to the
study to look in “the drawer” and if nothing had blown up overnight,
there was time to put signatures on papers or other official papers.
These I always placed before my husband and botted
and removed them as fast as possible.”
Edith’s
participation in the Wilson White House allowed a woman, who just four
years before was a widower living alone in Washington,
the ability to deal with the demands of the United States while nursing
her husband. The essential death of the President was felt from the
failure of The League of Nations to get approved to the virtual
standstill of foreign policy and domestic concerns. At
a point, the White House simply began to cease to function
Edith
Wilson had to step in and power followed. Literally we have a woman
with only two years formal education making it up
as she went along; approving appointments, making foreign policy and
domestic policy decisions, orchestrating the cover up, and restricting
access to her husband who at times was totally “gone.” When looking
through the Papers of Woodrow Wilson, one is struck
by how much correspondence from 1919 to 1921 was directed toward Edith.
From America’s entry into the League of Nations to winding down the war
to the recognition of diplomats, Edith was on the front lines.
Instead
of My dear Mr. President in the Wilson Papers we now see My dear Mrs.
Wilson. And these letters cover all matters of
state. The correspondence of the Edith Wilson Years would fill four
volumes. As she wrote to Colonel House the Presidents unofficial
advisor, “My hands are so full that I neglect many things. But I feel
equal to everything that comes now that I see steady progress
going on.”
Americans
wouldn’t see their President for five months. Appointments remained
filled and correspondence piled up. Years later
essential Presidential communications never opened in the White House
were found in the National Archives. Like someone who can’t get to their
bills, Edith had simply thrown them in a pile.
The
cover up would last until our present day with historians and Edith
Wilson herself taking part; her memoir written in1939
continued the cover up by calling her Presidency a “stewardship” and
downplaying any significance to her role. Historians would seal the deal
with many conceding Edith Wilson was almost the President but that
Woodrow Wilson was still in charge. Some would say
she might have been the President for six weeks, but that was all.
It
is still shocking to the majority of Americans to learn that President
Wilson had a massive stroke in office. But to tell
people that his wife, Edith Wilson, was the acting President for almost
two years is unbelievable. The motivations among historians and the
people at the time is simple. If you say Edith Wilson was President from
1919 to 1921,then you diminish the impact Woodrow
Wilson had on the country and his legacy.
Power
is given to those who can act upon it, and President Wilson, who
remained in bed only to be wheeled out for movies and
some fresh air, could not act upon anything. The question then is; who
was Edith Bolling Wilson? Was she a woman singularly gifted enough to
run the country and nurse her husband back to health; or was she a woman
doing the best she could in a world of men
who saw women as little more than second citizens? Now almost a hundred
years later, we ponder the very relevant impact of our First Woman
President again.
But we have to go back to a train car outside of Pueblo Colorado in the Indian summer of 1919. It is here in the heat and dust
on September 25th, that Edith Wilson’s Presidency began.
2 – A Bad Day
1919
“Edith, can you come to me? I am very sick.”
A
woman stood in the darkness with the desert wind blowing in the open
windows. The train car shifted from side to side as she
grabbed the handle to the Presidents bedroom. Somewhere outside of
Pueblo, Colorado, in the stifling heat of September 14, 1919, Edith
Bolling Wilson opened the door from her train compartment and found the
28th President of the United States with his forehead
against a chair at 11:30 in the evening. Pressing against the cranial
thump of blood gave some relief to President Wilson, but things were
quickly deteriorating.
The
steel Presidential car, The Mayflower, was stifling hot as Wilson
moaned and inhaled the scent of smoke from forest fires
they passed through earlier. The President had few remedies for the
excruciating headaches of hypertension. Add to that years of campaigning
for The League of Nations had left him physically exhausted. The League
was already the barefoot child of the treaty
and Henry Cabot Lodge and other Republicans were whipping the country
into isolationist fury with their mission to destroy Wilson’s dream.
Lodge saw the League as a breach of America’s sovereignty and a
violation of the Monroe Doctrine, but he had another motivation
for blocking ratification of The Treaty of Versailles; he loathed
Woodrow Wilson.
Lodge
viewed the preacher from the South as an arrogant dreamer who had no
real concept of realpolitik. The Brahmin from Boston
who wore spats and sported a Vandyke beard, thought Wilson inept in war
and peace and it didn’t help that he had defeated his lifelong friend
Teddy Roosevelt in the 1912 presidential race. It was no secret Lodge
loathed President Wilson to the point Henry Adams
found the Senators hatred of the president…”demented.”
President
Wilson feared the defeat of The League would ensure another war. The
sacrifice of millions of lives was in the balance
as the “War to End All Wars,” could only be justified by The League.
Without America in the new organization of world government it would be
only a paper tiger. So the President had gone on the road to take his
case to the American people.
But
there was no Air Force One, there was only the Presidential train car,
The Mayflower, basically a steel tube hauled by a
steam locomotive that belched coal smoke. Edith described the the
Presidential accomondations this way in her memoir: “Entering the car
from the rear one came first to a sitting room, fitted with armchairs, a
long couch and a folding table on which we dined.
Next came my bedroom and then the Presidents, with a door connecting.
Each room had a single bed and dressing table. Beyond this was a room my
husband used as an office. There was placed his typewriter without
which he never traveled.”
A
whistle stop tour was a grueling event for a young healthy man and the
sixty two year old Wilson was neither of these. They
passed through the scorching temperatures of the West without the
comfort of air conditioning. In the desert, Wilsons steel train car
became an oven and the President hadn’t been for some time. They had
been traveling for twelve days and the last two had been
brutal. As Edith wrote in her Memoir later: “The weather was warm and
enervating. These two days would have taxed the vitality of one who was
rested and refreshed. My husband took them on top of twelve days and
nights of travel.”
Hypertension
and a hardening of the arteries had steadily crept up on the sixty two
year old Wilson .Pressing his head against
a chair was the latest self-medication technique. Many times the
headaches would drive the President to darkened bedrooms where Edith
would pull the curtains. There were no beta blockers with medical
science still fifty years out from the Civil Wars approach
of loping off gangrenous limbs and using leaches to deal with
suppuration. The brain was still as foreign as Mars.
Edith
immediately called Dr. Grayson. She had been married to the President
for four years and had many apprehensions before
she accepted Woodrow Wilsons proposal of marriage. Born in a small town
in Virginia and widowed at 23, she had been an independent woman before
she met the grieving President who started wooing her with Victorian
love letters.
Greyson
examined his patient and noticed The Presidents face was twitching and
that he was gasping from an asthmatic attack.
As Grayson later recorded in his diary, “The strain of the trip had
taken its toll from him and he was very seriously ill. For a few minutes
it looked as if he could hardly get his breath.” The headache screwed
into his forehead and was getting worse. The President
of the United States was suffering early symptoms of a stroke, though
the worst was to come.
The
doctor moved him to the “office” car which was roomier. Wilson tossed
in the train car most of the night. “The Doctor and
I kept the vigil, while the train dashed on and on through darkness,”
Edith would later write in her memoir. “About five in the morning a
blessed release came, and, sitting upright on the stiff seat, my husband
went to sleep. I motioned to the Doctor to go
to bed and I sat opposite scarcely breathing.”
The
next morning Wilson emerged clean shaven but Grayson argued against
continuing on. They had only completed 3500 miles of
a 10,000 mile trip. The President pointed out his problem, “Don’t you
see that if you cancel this trip, Senator Lodge and his friends will say
that I am a quitter and the trip was a failure, and the Treaty will be
lost.”
Grayson
told the President he should, “stop now before very serious
developments should occur.” He then bluntly said the tour
would kill him. Edith urged her husband to cancel the rest of his
speeches. When his personal Secretary Joe Tumulty came in the President
admitted, “I don’t seem to realize it, but I seem to have gone to
pieces. The doctor is right. I am not in a condition
to go on.” He then turned and looked out the window with tears coming to
his eyes. Wilson would later call it, “the greatest disappointment of
his life.”
The
train started back East. Edith sat up a watching her husband with the
steam locomotive chugging toward Washington. The psychological
shift that allowed Edith to run the United States was cast. She had
married Woodrow Wilson four years before knowing her life would change
forever. Now her life would change again. Edith reflected twenty years
later that she, “would have to wear a mask, not
only to the public, but to the one I loved best in the world; for he
must never know how ill he was and I must carry on.”
Edith
was devoted to the President. She rose early to help make his meals and
monitored who saw him. She took long drives with
Woodrow and felt this was a remedy for his exhaustion, sometimes
depression, and the chronic hypertension. Edith had tried to protect her
husband from stress for years. An election in 1916, a World War, then a
year in Europe fighting for the League of Nations,
had taken everything Wilson had.
The
President believed The League would give meaning to the millions of
young men who died in the hollowed out hell of trench
warfare in France. At the very least he could look American mothers in
the eye and say their sons helped to end war. Wilson saw American boys
who came over “ as crusaders, not merely to win the war, but to win a
cause,” That cause was The League of Nations,
but without approval by the United States, the League would mean
nothing.
The
train ran back on a specially cleared track with the blinds lowered.
People gathered at stations to watch the speeding Presidential
Express ball though only stopping to take on water. The press was told
“nervous exhaustion” was the reason for the cancellation of the speaking
tour. Wilson sent a telegram from Wichita, Kansas to his daughter,
Jessie Woodrow, trying to stem the alarm. “Returning
to Washington. Nothing to be alarmed about. Love from all of us.”
Woodrow Wilson
A
news report in the Denver Post on Sept 26th ran: President is Ill and
Cancels his Tour. In what would become precedent, Dr.
Grayson reported physical exhaustion as the reason the Western speaking
tour was cancelled. The article speculated the ordeal of the parades for
the President “seemed to be most trying on his nerves,” and that “the
trip had also been very tiring to Mrs. Wilson.”
The press respected privacy in 1919 in a compact between the White House
and the reporters who covered the President. The investigative reporter
had yet to rear its head.
Edith knitted while the President tossed in the agony of hypertension in
the extreme. On September 27th, Grayson issued another bulletin from
the train for the press: “The presidents condition is about the same. He
has had a fairly restful night.” The New York
Times headline on Saturday Sept 27th announced “The President Suffers
Nervous Breakdown” and connected it to an attack of influenza in Paris
and caused by overwork.
Grayson
requested the train run at half speed to keep from jarring the
President. The train slowed to twenty five miles an hour
while the President writhed from the intense cerebral pressure. When
they reached Washington, the President managed to walk from the
Presidential car and then was ordered to bed by Admiral Grayson. The
next day he and Edith took a two hour drive in the Pierce
Arrow Presidential limousine. The day was cool and autumnal and Wilson
seemed to improve. But the headaches never abated and upon his return,
Grayson ordered him back to bed.
The doctor then invoked several mandates that would guide Edith Wilson
over the next two years. In his diary he wrote, “I took steps to put
into effect the rest cure which I had planned and which I realized was
the only thing that would restore him to health.”
The only cure was total isolation from the pressures of his job. “…he
shouldn’t be bothered with any matters of official character…it was to
be a complete rest, not partial rest…and nothing was to be allowed to
interfere with the Presidents restoration to health
if possible.”
Any
pressure on the President could now be fatal. If Edith’s husband was to
survive she must insert herself between him and
the United States. No cabinet meetings. No meetings of any kind. A wedge
of devotion and the sustaining restorative powers of the body might
save his life. But of course this was all proving to be too late for The
President.
Edith
Wilson started to fill in for her ailing husband. The Secretary of War,
Newton Diehl Baker sent her the first official
telegram. “Dear Mrs. Wilson, If anything comes to the White House in the
next few days which you think I could do and save the President having
to give it attention…feel free to send it to me.” Edith then stepped in
by entertaining ten journalists from the
Western Tour. Her first duty of state was when Sir William Wiseman of
the British Government said he had an urgent message for the President.
Edith met him at eleven o’clock and said she would get back to him.
Edith
mentioned the diplomats message, but the President waved it off. Sir
William Wiseman received no response . Edith would
write in her memoir, “This was the only instance that I recalled having
acted as intermediary between my husband and another on an official
matter.” The real Edith starts to bleed through her prose when she
comments, about Wiseman; “I had never liked this plausible
little man.” Edith was liable to make snap judgements that dictated who
got an answer and who didn’t. Sir William Wiseman would never get one.
On
the third day, Wilson improved and even played some pool. He was eating
more and taking his daily drives. But nothing could
alleviate the lurking thrombosis caused by pressured arteries Medical
science had years earlier told another future President he would have to
live the life of a recluse because of an abnormality in his heart.
Teddy Roosevelt would become the most vigorous
President America ever had. He did not take the doctor’s advice.
The
New York Times reported on September 30th, “President Wilson seems to
be getting better…at 10:30 tonight Real Admiral Grayson
issued the following bulletin. The President spent a fairly comfortable
day and is improving.” The Times then reported on Oct 1, “President is
again Jaded after Another Restless Night.,,.”
On
the night of October 2nd, Edith looked into the Presidents bedroom and
found her husband sleeping soundly. She stopped back
a half hour later and found him sitting up in his bed. “I have no
feeling in that hand,” he murmured, gesturing to his left. Edith sat on
the bed and started rubbing the President’s hand, then helped him to the
bathroom.
“I’m going to call Dr. Grayson,” she told him and left her husband in the bathroom.
Edith hurried down to the White House Switchboard and told the operator to contact Dr. Grayson immediately. The thump was a
body falling to the floor toward the Presidents living quarters.
Edith ran back upstairs and found the President of the United States bleeding and unconscious on the hard white tiles of the
bathroom floor.
