When the Cheering Stopped (11 page)

Billings, Montana: “I am just as sure what the verdict will be as if already rendered, and what has convinced me most is what plain people have said to me, particularly what women have said to me. When I see a woman dressed with marks of labor upon her and she says, God bless you, Mr. President, and God bless the League of Nations, then I know the League of Nations is safe. I know the League of Nations is close to those people. A woman came to me the other day and took my hand and said, God bless you, Mr. President, and turned away in tears. I asked a neighbor, What is the matter? and he said, She was intending to say something to you but she lost a son in France. That woman did not take my hand with the feeling that her son should not have been sent to France. I sent her son to France. She took my hand and blessed it but she could not say anything more because a whole world of spirit came up in her throat. Down deep in the heart of love for her boy she felt that we had done something so that no other woman's boy would be called upon to lay his life down for a thing like that.”

As the train pulled away from the station some little boys came running after it. One had an American flag and he reached up to the rear platform of the
Mayflower
and handed it to the First Lady. “Give it to him,” he said. A boy running by his side had no flag, but he reached down into his pocket and then stretched out his
hand with something in it. The child was running as fast as he could, holding out his hand, and Starling hooked a leg through the platform railing and leaned out to reach him. “Give him this,” the boy panted. Starling opened his hand. A dime lay in his palm.

They kept going, up into the Northwest. Meanwhile, back in Washington, Senator Lodge dispatched men to speak out against the League, “that evil thing with the holy name.” Senators Johnson, McCormick and Borah went to Chicago. Johnson cried to a crowd of ten thousand sitting with coats off and ties loosened in the steaming Coliseum, “I have heard of men placing themselves in the hands of their creditors, but never have I heard of a man placing himself in the hands of his debtors. The United States is the greatest solvent power on earth and they ask us to enter into partnership with bankrupts!” Borah hooked his thumbs under his arms and stalked across the stage. “Is there an American who wants a foreign nation to say when and where the Monroe Doctrine should apply?” he asked. “No, no,” the crowd yelled. “England has suggested—all England has to do now is to suggest—that we send 100,000 men to Constantinople,” the Senator said. “Don't let 'em go,” the crowd cried back. Who betrayed the American soldier and the American ideals? the Senator asked. “Wilson! Impeach him! Impeach him!” roared the crowd. Johnson the next day went on to Indianapolis to say the Europeans were filled with “duplicity unequaled in the history of the world. But when the President seeks to keep up the duplicity by binding our sons to guarantee it, I say it shall not be!” “No!” roared the crowd. In the Senate at Washington, Senator Sherman stood to say, “He is no longer Wilson the American President of the United States. Now he is Wilson the internationalist, aspirant for first President of the World's League of Nations.” Senator Reed, a Democrat, went into New England and waved a sheet of paper over his head, crying that it was the Covenant of the League. “I have it here and I seem to see the bloody footprints of John Bull tracking all over the dastardly document.”

The train went on: Helena, Coeur d'Alene … Outside Coeur d'Alene, Borah's town, a woman held up a baby
for the President to see. The First Lady leaned over the platform railing and took the child. “It's a boy,” the infant's father proudly said, “and his name is Wilson.” They went on to a circus tent, cowboys in Western regalia riding before, and he told the people, “My fellow countrymen, we are facing a decision now in which we cannot afford to make a mistake.”

The crowds were getting more enthusiastic now with every stop, but at night in the hot dry air the President could hardly breathe. It became necessary for him to try to sleep sitting up in an easy chair of his compartment in the jolting and swaying train; that way, it was not as difficult for him to catch his breath. Fighting the splitting headaches, he would sit with his forehead resting on the back of another chair and dictate by the hour to his stenographer, Charles Swem.

Tumulty kept coming in from each stop with a stream of telegrams sent on from the White House and dealing with the Russian situation, the actions of U.S. troops on occupation duty, petitions about the high cost of living, the question of what American decoration should be awarded the King of the Belgians, who would soon be coming to the country on a state visit, and the labor disturbances breaking out all over the country—including the police strike in Boston, which saw mobs free of interference breaking windows, shooting craps on Boston Common, molesting women in the street. The telegrams had to be dealt with even as he planned ahead for his next speech.

They made their way up to the State of Washington, moving slowly through wooded mountain country and under a drizzle and low-lying mist that turned the atmosphere suddenly cold. It was the chilliest spell for that season that the area had experienced in years, and for the first time the heat in the train was turned on. At Rathdrum, Idaho, the train stopped for a few moments to change engines and a band appeared to play for him. He went out on the platform very much bundled up against the penetrating damp cold and spoke for a few minutes to the people, some of them Indians, standing by their muddy trucks. “A League of Nations will not make war impossible but it will help to prevent war. You
do not want war. You want world peace.…” A mounted policeman put his horse through a bucking exhibition.

In Spokane two hours later the weather was boilingly hot; the reporters came from the train in panamas. The crowds were, despite the heat, the most enthusiastic of the entire trip. Marching troops of the 21st Infantry led the motorcade through twenty-three blocks filled with people, some sitting atop big delivery vans parked in the side-street intersections. Flags hung across the hot streets and a canopy of white and red dahlias woven into a wire screen stretched above the main thoroughfare. Bouquets sailed out of the crowd toward him, and the Secret Service men on the running boards leaped high to catch them. At each side of his nose there were heavy dark lines leading down to his mouth, and when he stood up in the car to wave his hat the people noticed that the First Lady, in navy-blue jersey cloth and a small toque of dark gray velour, reached up her hand to steady him.

They went to a park to be seen by hundreds of massed school children, and then to his speech: “Isn't 10 per cent insurance against war a pretty good thing?” “You bet it is,” a man called out. “Well, the League of Nations will give you 98 per cent insurance against war.” Two hours after arriving at Spokane they pulled out. A policeman asked him how he liked the city and he said, “Fine! Fine! I have always wanted to visit Spokane, I have heard so much about it. This is the first opportunity I have had.” His headache made him actually see double. The policeman held up a child to shake his hand.

They made for Tacoma and paused for a moment at Pasco, Washington, so that he might say a few words. After his talk he remarked to the little throng that theirs was a dusty area. Someone joked, “Yes, we have to have a lot of grit to live here.” As the train pulled out a man came dashing down the track. The President looked at him curiously. “Don't mind me,” gasped the man. “I only promised to get the last look at you from Pasco and now I've done it.”

Tacoma's crowds were enormous and uproarious:
TACOMA GREETS AMERICAN LEADER.
“… If it fails every woman should weep for the child at her breast who when
he grows to manhood will have to go forth to fight …” He talked about the little boy who had given him the dime: “I would like to believe that dime has some relation to the widow's mite—others gave something; he gave all that he had.”

At Seattle they found Secretary of the Navy Daniels and his wife, back from a trip to Hawaii, ready to take them at once to a formal review of the Pacific Fleet in Puget Sound. The street crowds unleashed deafening cheers; at Union Street the employees of a store had constructed a confetti gun, and when they fired it he and the First Lady, who held him with one white-gloved hand, disappeared from view in the paper pouring down on them. Japanese school children waved flags and shrieked while auto horns blared.

He was standing up in the car waving a high silk hat—it was the first time on the trip he had worn one—when with terrifying suddenness all the noise and cheering ended. Standing by the curb in long lines were men in blue denim working clothes. Their arms were folded and they stared straight ahead, not at the President, but at nothing at all. They did not hiss or boo but motionless, noiseless, simply stood there. In their hats they wore signs saying
RELEASE POLITICAL PRISONERS.
They were members of the International Workers of the World—the Wobblies—gathered from all over the state to demonstrate their anger at the imprisonment of radical leaders on sedition charges and to embarrass Seattle's Mayor Ole Hanson, their sworn enemy. They lined the building fronts to the curbs, and only a few children pushed and yelled for the President, making the silence and immobility of the men even more awesome. From the streets over which the motorcade had come there were heard the bands playing and the crowds noisily breaking up, but where the IWW's were there was not a sound but the put-putting of police motorcycles. The President was standing and smiling when he first reached the IWW's, but in a flash the smile vanished and a flabbergasted look came over his face. He stood in the terrible silence for two blocks, the hand holding his hat hanging by his side, and then he sank down onto the car seat beside the First
Lady. He put his tall hat on his head, a little to one side, and it seemed that he sat in a crumpled-up way. His face was white.

For six blocks the statue-like men lined the street. When the car had gotten past the silent, terrible blocks there were more cheering people, but the President did not again rise in the car; he simply waved his hand and weakly smiled. They went to the harbor and boarded an overcrowded launch that lurched violently and collided with another craft before taking them to the
Oregon
. They sailed several miles through the bay alive with warships firing salvos of twenty-one guns each and flinging across the water the strains of the National Anthem.

At seven in the evening, after speaking at a Seattle Hippodrome dinner, he went to the Seattle Arena for a second talk and found wildly enthusiastic mobs ringing it on all sides. While he was speaking inside, the people outside noisily shouted his name and cheered, making it hard for the listeners to hear him. “If there had been a League of Nations in 1914, whether Germany belonged to it or not, Germany would never have dared to attempt the aggression she did attempt,” he cried out over the clamor from outside. Secretary Daniels felt his chief had put his last ounce of strength forward, and Jonathan Daniels, his son, thought the President had made a great speech. But a Navy admiral said to the boy's father, “Something seemed to be wrong with President Wilson. He appeared to have lost his customary force and enthusiasm.”

That night the President sat in darkness with the First Lady in a little roof garden of the Hotel New Washington and looked down to where the fleet stood at anchor with all lights blazing. It was a beautiful sight, and all of a sudden in her eyes he looked good again, delighted as a boy with the ships and the beauty and quiet of the night. But later for hours from their suite in the hotel they heard below the roistering sounds of sailors off the ships playing guitars bought on shore leave in Honolulu and twanged in the street as a tribute to the Commander in Chief. With the noise and his extreme difficulty in breathing, he was up most of the night, and the next morning, Sunday, when Secretary Daniels and his wife came to
pay a call, they were told the President had a terrible headache and must beg to be excused.

Later, however, he pulled himself together to break his rule about working on the Sabbath and received the leaders of the terrible silent men of the six blocks. A delegation of five men came, two wearing the caps they had been issued during their Army service. Jack Kipps, a Socialist and the head of the International Workers of the World in the Seattle area, led them into a room where the President stood by a long table, one hand holding the edge. “Good morning,” the President said, stepping forward. Kipps thought to himself that the President was smaller than his pictures made him appear and that his head seemed heavy on his neck. “And he looked old—just
old
.” They shook hands and Kipps found the President's was dry and shaky. His voice also trembled. He waited for the men to speak. He did not look at them. The delegation and the President stood in silence for a moment and then one of the men got out something about a petition they had for him asking that all imprisoned radical leaders be released. The President said he would read it and they handed it to him. His face seemed terribly long and gray to them. Again there was a long silence. Kipps said they had a thousand signatures on their petition but that if they had had more time they could have gotten ten thousand. The President's hand was shaking so much that he gripped the lapel of his coat with it. For a few moments he closed his eyes—the headache that had prevented his seeing Secretary Daniels was all but unendurable—and the men started to leave. Again he shook their hands and got out a thank-you. They went to the door and he took a few steps after them and stopped in the middle of the room and bowed. He looks like a ghost, Kipps thought. The men went down and got into a streetcar. “Christ Almighty,” one of them breathed. “What a mess he was!” Kipps said.

That night the travelers went to the train and headed for Portland and a drive around a race track where ten thousand people roared for him and to the Hotel Portland for a luncheon after which the cigars of the men in the banquet room sent clouds of thick smoke drifting up to him. His voice was very hoarse. “I have lived to
see a day in which, after saturating most of my life in the history and traditions of America, I seem suddenly to see a culmination of American hope in history; all the orators seeing their dreams realized, if their spirits are looking on; all the men who spoke the noblest sentiments for America heartened with the sight of a great nation responding to and acting upon those dreams, saying, ‘At last the world knows America as the savior of the world.'”