Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him

by Joseph P. Tumulty

THE WESTERN TRIP

Tentative plans for a Western trip began to be formed in the White House because of the urgent insistence from Democratic friends on the Hill that nothing could win the fight for the League of Nations except a direct appeal to the country by the President in person.

Admiral Grayson, the President's physician and consistent friend, who knew his condition and the various physical crises through which he had passed here and on the other side, from some of which he had not yet recovered, stood firm in his resolve that the President should not go West, even intimating to me that the President's life might pay the forfeit if his advice were disregarded. Indeed, it needed not the trained eye of a physician to see that the man whom the senators were now advising to make a "swing around the circle" was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. More than once since his return from the Peace Conference I had urged him to take a needed rest; to get away from the turmoil of Washington and recuperate; but he spurned this advice and resolved to go through to the end.

No argument of ours could draw him away from his duties, which now involved not only the fight for the ratification of the Treaty, but the threatened railway strike, with its attendant evils to the country, and added administrative burdens growing out of the partisanship fight which was being waged in Congress for the ostensible purpose of reducing the high cost of living.

One day, after Democratic senators had been urging the Western trip, I took leave to say to the President that, in his condition, disastrous consequences might result if he should follow their advice. But he dismissed my solicitude, saying in a weary way: "I know 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. In the presence of the great tragedy which now faces the world, no decent man can count his own personal fortunes in the reckoning. Even though, in my condition, it might mean the giving up of my life, I will gladly make the sacrifice to save the Treaty."

He spoke like a soldier who was ready to make the supreme sacrifice to save the cause that lay closest to his heart.

As I looked at the President while he was talking, in my imagination I made a comparison between the man, Woodrow Wilson, who now stood before me and the man I had met many years before in New Jersey. In those days he was a vigorous, agile, slender man, active and alert, his hair but slightly streaked with gray. Now, as he stood before me discussing the necessity for the Western trip, he was an old man, grown grayer and grayer, but grimmer and grimmer in his determination, like an old warrior, to fight to the end.

There was another whose heroism was no less than his, Mrs. Wilson. She has since referred to the Western trip as "one long nightmare," though in the smiling face which she turned upon the crowds from Columbus to San Diego and back to Pueblo none could have detected a trace of the anxiety that was haunting her. She met the shouting throngs with the same reposeful dignity and radiant, friendly smile with which she had captivated the people of England, France, Italy, and Belgium.

At home and abroad she has always had a peculiar power to attract the populace, though she herself has never craved the spotlight. Like her husband, she finds home more congenial, and, like him, she prefers not to be written about.

In her husband's career she has played a notable rôle, the more noble because self-effacing. She has consistently disavowed intention to participate actively in public affairs, and yet in many a crisis she, out of her strong intelligence and sagacity, has been able to offer timely, wise suggestion. No public man ever had a more devoted helpmeet, and no wife a husband more dependent upon her sympathetic understanding of his problems. The devotion between these two has not been strengthened, for that would be impossible, but deepened by the President's long illness. Mrs. Wilson's strong physical constitution, combined with strength of character and purpose, has sustained her under a strain which must have wrecked most women. When the strong man broke, she nursed him as tenderly as a mother nurses a child.