When the Cheering Stopped (24 page)

San Francisco was alive with lighted portraits of the President and marching bands of men shouting out his name. The convention opened with blaring bands and a file of U.S. marines carrying in the colors. A giant American flag hung in the front of the jammed auditorium, and when the delegates grew silent as they waited for the proceedings to begin, the flag was slowly rolled up to disclose a tremendous picture of the President. He was the leader who had won two elections for the Democrats, and the delegates went wild with applause, marching up and down the aisles and shouting above the noise of the pounding drums and swelling music. State standards went dancing up and down above the heads of the celebrants as men carried the flagstaffs into the aisles, every state standard but one—that of the State of New York, which was motionless among the seated and silent members of the New York delegation.

Then a young and athletic New Yorker went yelling into the delegation and grabbed at the flagstaff. There was a scuffle all around him and curses and perhaps even a few blows before he wrenched it away and, yelling in triumph, rushed it out into the aisle. But the great demonstration only strengthened the will of the President's friends to save him from what might happen. Homer Cummings spoke with Senator Joseph T. Robinson of Arkansas, Glass, Daniels, Burleson, Secretary of War Baker, and found them all agreed that it was “impossible and unthinkable,” it would be a “tragic mistake” to name the President as candidate.

But one man at San Francisco was working for that
nomination. He was Secretary of State Colby, who had seen the President before heading west and had absorbed his ideas and those of the First Lady. And now Colby was biding his time, waiting for the right moment to present the name of the President for renomination. “The outstanding characteristic of the convention is the unanimity and fervor of feeling for you,” Colby wired the White House in code. “Convention seizes every opportunity for demonstration which is most impressive.… I propose, unless otherwise definitely instructed, to take advantage of first moment to move suspension of rules and place your name in nomination.” Tumulty saw the wire and frantically begged the First Lady to wire Colby that this thing not be done. She refused. A stream of other wires asking the President's endorsement of McAdoo (a candidate despite his earlier disavowals), Homer Cummings, James Cox, Palmer—all were left unanswered also. Frightened of what the convention might be about to do, terrified of a renomination for his chief, Tumulty asked the First Lady to hold Colby back until the convention deadlocked. Away from her and the President, Tumulty prayed there would be no deadlock at all and that someone else would be named.

The balloting began and McAdoo showed the greatest strength. Burleson telegraphed a request that the President endorse his son-in-law, and the wire threw the President into a rage. He wired Cummings an order to bar Burleson from all inner councils at San Francisco and said he would fire Burleson for this. Meanwhile word of what Colby was going to do leaked out in San Francisco and precipitated an immediate tense meeting of the President's friends in a hotel room. They ordered Colby to come to them, and when he arrived they bitterly fell upon him in such a fashion that Secretary Daniels was moved to think that never in any small gathering had he seen more indignation and resentment. “You had no right to send such a message,” Daniels raged at Colby; the other men blasted him for his “cruel” and “fantastic” plan and told him that were the President well enough to run, Colby's aid would not have been needed to get him nominated—it would have been seen to by the men in
the room. They forced Colby to send a stalling telegram to the President saying the time was not yet ripe for presentation of his name.

At the White House the President hung upon the reports coming in from the west. Ballot after ballot failed to secure enough votes for any of the potential candidates. All wires begging endorsements were ignored, but finally on the forty-fourth ballot, after McAdoo and Palmer were hopelessly deadlocked, the convention nominated Governor Cox, the compromise candidate. When the news reached Washington, the President, who could literally go for years without using a stronger term than “damn” or “hell,” burst into a stream of profanities and obscenities. For Vice President the convention nominated the young man who had grabbed the New York State banner—Franklin D. Roosevelt.

It became a question of importance as to whether Cox would call upon the President. That McAdoo and Palmer had gone down to defeat was construed by many as a repudiation of the President, and many of Cox's people did not want their candidate, who was not closely identified with the Administration, to tie himself to the Administration's leader. But Cox saw it otherwise, saying that he would reproach himself forever should the President die without having had a courtesy call from the Democrat who hoped to succeed him. So on a warm day in that summer of 1920 Cox went with Franklin Roosevelt to see the President.

Roosevelt was in a dark coat and gleaming white pants and shoes. Boyish and bright, he ushered Cox into Tumulty's office, where they waited fifteen minutes while the President was wheeled out onto the South Portico. They walked over to him where he sat with a shawl draped across his shoulders, covering the left arm but not concealing the wasted look. “He is a very sick man,” Cox murmured to Roosevelt as they walked up. They greeted him warmly and he looked up and in what seemed to Roosevelt a very weak, low voice said, “Thank you for coming. I am very glad you came.” The President's utter weariness was startling to Roosevelt, and tears came into Cox's eyes as he looked down. “Mr. President,” Cox
said, “I have always admired the fight you made for the League.” “Mr. Cox,” the President said, “that fight can still be won.”

They talked a few minutes more, the President saying he was sure Cox would enjoy living at the White House, and then Cox said, “Mr. President, we are going to be a million per cent with you and your Administration, and that means the League of Nations.” The President looked up. “I am very grateful,” he said. His voice was scarcely audible. “I am very grateful,” he repeated. They left him and went to a room in the Executive Wing and Cox sat down at a desk—Franklin Roosevelt would use that desk again, one day—and wrote out a statement committing the candidates to making the League the paramount issue of the campaign.

They got up to go, Cox saying to Tumulty that seeing the President as now he was had touched him more deeply than any other experience of his life. They drove away. They left behind a man working at trying to walk and succeeding to the extent that soon, on the arm of an attendant, he would be able to make his slow and painful way to the library, where each night in a dinner jacket he dined alone with the First Lady. The room had rose hangings and upholstery and small colored vases with a single different-color rose in each, and the two sat there alone, he using only his right hand, an almost noiseless figure eating his food so slowly and quietly in the hot summer evening.

*
With what success is another question. Joseph C. Grew found his work as Minister to Denmark difficult because of the State Department's lack of interest in what he was doing and the paucity of orders about what he should do. All questions and appeals to Washington were left unanswered. “The only constructive criticism I received was: ‘Don't send in too much stuff.'”

11

There were old canal streams in the countryside only fifteen miles out of Washington, and honeysuckle and scattered pines. Along the Conduit Road running toward Great Falls there were reservoirs and hills thick with trees. Rural Virginia was beautiful in the summer, and along the roads country children waited for his slow-moving
car; when it came into sight they ran up flags and yelled. One curly-headed little boy, hardly more than a toddler, always had the same greeting: a tiny hand held up in salute and a piping “Hi, Wilson!” For long hours that summer he was driven in the solitary hills and along the Potomac, and always in almost complete silence. He rarely spoke; he was almost totally mute. He did not display interest in the campaign being fought to determine whether Cox or Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio was to be his successor, and when Tumulty suggested he make some effort to aid Cox, he replied that he would do it in his own time and in his own way. He ended by letting months go by before he did anything at all.

But who he was and what he was dominated the forthcoming election. “The issue which the American people are going to vote upon,” said ex-President Taft, “no matter what Mr. Cox wishes, Mr. Wilson wishes, Mr. Lodge wishes, or Mr. Harding wishes, is whether they approve the Administration of Mr. Wilson.” Harding expressed it perfectly, had it just right, when he said that what the United States wanted was no more parades, no heroics—“return to ‘normalcy.'”
*

It was obvious to all the world that the Republicans were going to win this election, that the country was going to throw out the Democrats with their taxes and war and crusading for the world's good, but the President could not see that this was so. Secretary Daniels remarked that “of course” Cox had no chance, and the President incredulously asked, “Do you mean it is possible that the American people would elect Harding?” “It is not only possible,” Daniels said, “but they are going to do it.” The President flared out, “Daniels, you haven't enough faith in the people!” Postmaster General Burleson ventured to predict that Cox would take the worst beating in years, and the President cried, “Burleson, shut up! You are a pessimist!” Stockton Axson, Ellen's brother, tried to raise the subject of possible defeat several times, but the President would not listen. “You don't understand the American people,” he said, a sick old man intoning through white lips that it was out of the question that
the nation would turn down the candidate who stood for the League of Nations, for the Right, for Truth.

Axson told Grayson he was worried about the effect of defeat upon the President and that something should be done to ready him for the shock that seemed to be coming. But no one could change the President's opinion that his country would opt for the League. In another summer, that of 1919, presenting the League to the Senate of the United States, he said it had come about “by no plan of our conceiving but by the hand of God who has led us into this way.” He had said, “We cannot turn back. We can only go forward, with lifted eyes and freshened spirit, to follow the vision. It was of this that we dreamed at our birth. America shall in truth show the way.” It was still true in his mind and in his soul where down beneath the pain and helplessness there lived utter faith, belief, devotion. “I am sure,” he said to Tumulty, “that the hearts of the people are right on this great issue and that we can confidently look forward to triumph.”

All through those hot months of 1920's summer, he continued to say that victory was certain. That vindicating triumph became the raft to which he clung—Cox would be his monument—but he ignored all appeals to do something to help the candidate until October came. On the twenty-seventh day of that month, with Election Day a week off, he received a handful of pro-League Republicans in the Green Room. He sat hunched over in his wheel chair under a portrait of Abraham Lincoln and did not rise when they came in. “I must apologize for receiving you like this,” he said. “It is unavoidable and I guess you all understand.”

They remained standing grouped about him as he began to read a statement. Although they numbered little more than a dozen persons, the tone of his remarks was that of an address made to a great multitude. “My fellow countrymen: it is to be feared that the supreme issue presented for your consideration in the present campaign is growing more obscure rather than clearer …” His voice began strong with each paragraph of this his first speech, his first public appearance, since Pueblo, but it gradually grew weaker, particularly if the paragraph was long, until at the end he would be whispering. Mrs. Schuyler N.
Warren of New York saw tears in the eyes of many of the listening men and herself felt crushed and broken to see the President as he was, converted in her eyes from the comparatively young person she had seen some time before into an old, old man. She thought to herself that he in his chair was tragic and glorious—it was tragic that he suffered so; glorious that America had produced such a man.

“… The nation was never called upon to make a more solemn determination than it must now make. The whole future moral force of Right in the world depends upon the United States.” His whispering voice, like that of a man praying to himself, lent the air of a religious ceremony to the scene. It did not seem he would be able to finish and the Reverend Arthur J. Brown thought to himself that this was in the nature of a farewell address, that before them was a dying man speaking his last wishes.

“… I suggest that the candidacy of every candidate for whatever office be tested by this question: Shall we or shall we not redeem the great moral obligations of the United States?” He had finished. Haggard, breathing with difficulty, eyes closed, trembling, he was wheeled away. Once upon a time when he spoke he leaned forward with eyes narrowed and muscles taut, his fingers closed into a tight fist, and reminded those who saw him of a man about to begin a race.

On November 2 there was a Cabinet meeting. One of the men said he was apprehensive about Cox's chances, but the President interrupted. “You need not worry,” he said. “The American people will not turn Cox down and elect Harding. A great moral issue is involved. The people can and will see it.” Harding that day scored the most one-sided electoral triumph since the election of James Monroe just one hundred years before. He carried every state in the Union save those of the former Confederacy. “We have torn up Wilsonism by the roots,” exulted Senator Henry Cabot Lodge.

During that day, Election Day, as the people went to the polls, the President labored to climb a series of two or three steps Grayson had constructed for him, but he simply could not lift his left leg. In the early evening
Tumulty tried to find a few bright reports in the election picture, but there were none to be found. The President had planned to stay up two hours past his nine o'clock bedtime in order to hear the results, but by nine it was clear that Cox was to lose, and so he went to sleep.