Poisoned Whisperings

Poisoned Whisperings

Unknown

WWP16373

1921 October 9

Cary T. Grayson Papers, Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library, Staunton, Virginia

English

IT HAS taken time for the American people to see, realize and understand one of the genuinely fine but unsung things of recent days. It is a curious fact that we Americans simply could not realize at the time the pathos and the power of the silent drama, that almost-tragedy, that was being played through in the White House in the final days of President Wilson’s Administration. Strange, also, that the American sense of chivalry and of fair play was so dull and deadened.

In the Ladies’ Home Journal of October Charles A. Selden tells as much of real story of those days as the world is likely ever to know. For a good many reasons it is fitting that the story should be told in a great magazine for American women, for in its essence it is the record of an American woman’s sense of duty to the man she loved; of her heroism, yes, and of her patriotism.

That was a time of poisoned whisperings. Back and forth across the country, in American homes, on American streets, under church porticos, in Pullman smoking rooms, everywhere, anywhere, the whispers were running. There was a “petticoat Government in Washington”; the Nation was leaderless; the country was drifting to ruin because of “that woman in the White House.” The country was full of mixed hates and prejudices, blended with the curious, quick, senseless anger at any and everything; that was a part of war-weariness. The land seethed with feelings that were part reptilian partisanship and part reaction from war strain. All these somehow converged, beating against the door of a sickroom.

Back of that door lay a crusader for Idealism, wounded near unto death. Maybe he was mistaken crusader, but he was an honest one. By his side, barring the door aganist the world, turning aside the poisoned spearheads of hatred, saving the hurt man from the venomous thrusts of a Nation he had all but died to save, stood a woman.

Strange that America could not see all this then! Passing strange that it is only beginning to see it now! For at last the forked tongues are stilled and the poisonous whisperings are dying away. It is hard to believe now that in all that long time when the Chief Executive of America was fighting the weary battle to live an American Congress failed to offer even the most perfunctory resolution of sympathy. It is true just the same; and even the shortest memory will recall the congressional harassings and houndings of the sick man. The Congressional Record tells the tale of how certain leading lights flayed the President with scorpion whips.

Mr. Selden’s story disposes, once and probably for always, of the tales that Mrs. Woodrow Wilson was handling the wheel of the Ship of State, appointing Federal officials and in divers and devious ways trying to “run the Government.” She is pictured as a Virginia gentlewoman, a home-maker and the presiding genius of the White House hearthfires. She who had been on “of those pretty Bolling girls” in a little Virginia village was the “wife, super-nurse and super-secretary” of the “Sick Man of the White House” when he needed these services more than he needed anything else in the world.

It is good for us to know the story of a woman’s devotion and her solitary heroism now that we have become sane enough, politically, to understand and appreciate it.

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