The President’s answer — as Edith quoted it — was, that as Commander in Chief he had been responsible for sending American soldiers into battle. “If I don’t do all in my power to put that treaty into effect, I will be a slacker and never able to look those boys in the eye. I must go.”
Tumulty added his plea. He had been argued around to the conclusion that the President’s health was even more important than the Democratic Party. “I know that I’m at the end of my tether,” Tumulty remembered Wilson’s telling him. “… Even though, in my condition it might mean giving up my life, I will gladly make the sacrifice to save the treaty.”
The Washington streets were hot and muggy and airless on the evening of September 3 when the President and Mrs. Wilson drove to Union Station. The President arrived jaunty in a straw hat.
Tumulty had thrown everything he had into the preparations for the trip. A private clubcar named Mayflower was specially arranged for the presidential party. There were staterooms for the President and Mrs. Wilson and for Dr. Grayson and for Mrs. Wilson’s Swedish maid. Brooks the valet was to sleep on the couch in the drawingroom. An office had been installed. On the foldup table was one of the President’s favorite Hammond portable typewriters.
Tumulty and the White House staff and the secretservice men rode in pullmans ahead. There were accommodations for more than a hundred newspapermen and reporters.
The first stop was Columbus. The meeting there was thinly attended. After the President had finished speaking a Chinese student called out from the gallery, “What about Shantung, Mr. President?”
At Indianapolis there was a parade to the state fair. Dust and heat and yelling crowds. An enormous turnout; but when the President spoke people seemed more interested in the fat cattle and the exhibits of prize-winning pickles than in the League of Nations.
At St. Louis, the bailiwick of knownothing Senator Reed, who was raging up and down the country denouncing the treaty, the crowds were unexpectedly cordial. Wilson was introduced as “The Father of World Democracy.” Shouts of approval and storms of handclapping capped every sentence.
Kansas City was even better.
The presidential train avoided Chicago where anglophobe “Big Bill” Thompson was mayor and where Senator Medill McCormick’s excoriation of the treaty had been frantically applauded and Wilson’s name booed, amid shouts of “Impeach him, impeach him.”
Wherever Wilson talked people seemed to leave the halls convinced. He threatened them with doom. “I can predict with absolute certainty,” he said in Omaha, “that within another generation there will be another world war if the nations of the world do not concert the method by which to prevent it.” He was thrilled by the response he got. “I am catching the imagination of the people,” he told his wife. “I don’t care if I die the minute after the League is ratified.”
At Mandan he spoke from the rear platform to a throng collected in the station. Billings and Helena turned out excited crowds. He met with an ovation at Coeur d’Alene in Senator Borah’s home state. Spokane, the hated Poindexter’s home town, seemed to have gone mad for Wilson.
Tumulty was in his element. He had democratic committees aboard the train at every stop to wring the President’s hand. The President smiled and smiled. Good humor reigned in the presidential party. Grayson and Tumulty carried on a sort of minstrel show that kept everybody in stitches. Edith Wilson put up a brave front though she knew that her husband was suffering blinding headaches, that he hardly ate or slept.
Wilson was agreeable to everybody. He told stories and shook hands and tirelessly stood up in open touring cars, waving at the crowds through the dusty broiling western towns. At night he’d ask the newspapermen in for sandwiches. He’d never been more affable. When people suggested that he was pushing himself too hard he had a wisecrack for them. “My constitution may be exhausted, but I still have my bylaws.”
The reception in Seattle was overwhelming. The President made three speeches in a day and reviewed the Pacific fleet in Puget Sound from the deck of the famous old Oregon, back from overawing the Russians off Vladivostok. On the way to the armory singing schoolchildren waved red white and blue flags. When he appeared on the platform he was greeted like a presidential candidate with confetti and balloons and a prolonged demonstration.
The only sour note was the young Wobblies standing with folded arms along the curb on the downtown streets with PARDON DEBS on their hatbands and banners reading RELEASE THE POLITICAL PRISONERS. Wilson had repeatedly refused even to consider a pardon for any of them.
The baneful seething that had worried Wilson in past years was rising hourly to the surface in the news that came to the presidential train. The President wracked his brains for solutions. While one secretary was kept busy typing out fresh speeches another had to pound away on the day to day work of the presidency.
From coast to coast came complaints about wartime profiteering and the high cost of living. War industries were shutting down. There was unemployment everywhere. Wages were cut. There were bloody race riots where Negro laborers had moved north. Steelworkers were on strike. Coal miners were walking out. Employers were fighting strikes with injunctions and hired gunmen. The New York theatres closed because the actors refused to perform until they got fair contracts. In Boston a strike of the police force turned the streets over to hoodlums and thugs.
To quiet the unrest of labor the President was calling an industrial conference to meet in Washington.
Overseas hotspots kept exploding on the map like popcorn in a skillet. French and British plans to establish some respectable capitalist regime in Russia went continually awry. The leaders they backed, though they massacred the Reds that fell into their hands as tirelessly as the Reds massacred the Whites, seemed to face invariable defeat. In China echoes of the Fourteen Points had set the young students’ ears to tingling. The blind revolt against foreign exploitation of Boxer days was taking new forms. Students were learning the language of European politics from Wilson and Lenin and from the democratic idealism of American missionaries. Voices calling for Chinese selfdetermination and Chinese selfgovernment were reaching the American press. On the Adriatic a baldheaded poet named Gabriele d’Annunzio was defying the dictates of Versailles by lashing up an Italian mob to seize Fiume. The President could hardly control his indignation.
As a final aggravation wires from Washington detailed the testimony of a rich and earnest young man named William C. Bullitt before the Senate Committee for Foreign Affairs. Bullitt had resigned from a Peace Conference job in protest against the treaty and against the Allied policy of backing every outbreak in Russia of partisans of the old regime against the soviet power. Now he revealed some private conversations with Secretary Lansing. Lansing not only disapproved of the Shantung agreement, but of the covenant. The Secretary of State had said the American people would unquestionably defeat the treaty if they ever understood what it let them in for.
“My God,” Wilson cried out to Tumulty, “I did not think it was possible for Lansing to act in this way.”
The train was rushing on to the next speaking engagement. There was no time to deal with Lansing now. Lansing would get what was coming to him later.
Back in Paris the story tickled Clemenceau. His bon mot was going the rounds. “I got my bullet during the conference; Lansing got his after.”