Crusaders

Crusaders

Grayson, Cary T. (Cary Travers), 1878-1938

WWP16536

1924 February 7

Cary T. Grayson’s reflections on Woodrow Wilson and the great events of his presidency.

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

English

(Spring - 1924)

CRUSADERS.

Twenty-four hours after the body of Woodrow Wilson had been committed to the sepulchre I was sitting scarcely relaxed, rather one might say numb, after the long vigil, and there passed through my mind a series of reflections which I offer you because they were the first verbal expressions of a grief, the first attempt to see into the significance of that great life. After eleven years of close association with him as friend and physician I found myself for the first time sitting as one whose occupation had been taken away from him. During the four and a half years before he died he was an invalid, and though there were periods when he rallied, when I hoped he might virtually recover his health, I had been practically always on the watch, - Doctors know what that means, - to sleep lightly expecting a momentary call to the bedside of a very sick patient, though I think it is not often that a doctor is called upon to maintain so long a watch as I. At his side and with the strong support of his own indomitable will and the incomparable courage of his devoted wife, we have fought death for four and a half years.

It was a week ago today that the turn came suddenly for the worse, and the three of us knew that the end was approaching. None of us knew more clearly than he. wWhen I told him the situation, he said, “the machinery is worn out”, and calmly added, “I am ready”.

There followed four and a half days and nights of fighting, waiting, watching. I slept little, but lay on a couch dozing a few minutes at a time. It was my friend as well as my patient who was slipping away on the out-going tide.

On Sunday morning (February 3, 1924) at 11:15 the end came quietly, as a tired man falls asleep. Only his wife, his daughter Margaret, I and two nurses were in the room. Over his bed was a piece of tapestry, the stars and stripes and underneath an eagle in flight. It seemed symbolical of the dauntless spirit which was leaving the tired body. Across the room was a picture of a Red Cross nurse, with hands extended, symbol of the mercy to all mankind ewhich inspired him. On a stand at the right of his bed was his old Bible, the book this man of letters loved best of all. On the walls, tables and desks were family photographs and some paintings, including an oil portrait of Mrs. Edith EWilson and a red chalk portrait of Mrs. Ellen Wilson. The landscapes were painted by Mrs. Ellen Wilson, his first wife. To us who have known the family it is the most natural thing in the world that the first wife’s portrait, photograph and paintings should be in that room. He loved her and Mrs. Edith Wilson is too great a soul to resent his loyalty to his first wife, the mother of his children. Her landscape paintings are all over the house, and directly above the casket in the room where the casket lay for the funeral exercises was a large Madonna and child, a copy of a Bougereau made by Mrs. Ellen Wilson forty years ago.

There followed three days filled with infinite details for all of us, and yesterday afternoon we laid the mortal part of him at rest in the crypt of the National Cathedral which crowns the highest point in Washington.

Today I am scarcely thinking; I do not know that I am even feeling. I only know that I am bereft of the most momentous charge that any physician of my generation has had committed to him, the greatest man of his age, and my hands are empty, my spirit restless. During the morning I have been busy with secondary duties, but this afternoon I sit in silence, while memories and impressions fleet through my mind.

I know he is not dead. He was the master spirit of his age and I know that such spirits do not die. To the tired body has come rest, but the spirit lives and will live to inspire the spirits of generations yet to come.

There is no more of calculating the influence of such a soul on those closely associated with him and on the millions, the billions who knew him only through his works, including the astonishing fight which he made for the League of Nations. They know that he glorified in the Great War because he believed it was the last general war, the means to be used in the providence of God and by the wisdom of men to end all wars of conquest, all wars bred by secret diplomacies and the ambitions of unscrupulous rulers and ambitious war lords, all wars between nations, all wars except perhaps internal revolutions.

For that cause he laid down his life. And today all the world recognizes him as the warrior gone to rest. If there is any one who thinks derogatorily of him today, he thinks so in silence. He would not dare to utter his thoughts aloud.

Some men, many, still believe that some of Mr. Wilson’s methods were impolitic, but they probably admire him all the more for that.

There was a time when even his friends wished he would compromise. He could not if he would, he would not if he could. It was a saying of his that the word “compromise” had been omitted from his vocabulary. Historians will render different verdicts on that trait. Some will say one thing, some another. Some will contend that it would have been better to compromise, that half a loaf would have been better than no bread.

But all this seems quibbling now that the mighty eagle has taken his last flight. The very point which most now recall is that he would not compromise. Men and newspapers which fought him unsparingly unite today in tribute to a man who had the courage not to compromise. They are not today debating his policies; irrespective of political differences they are uniting in homage to a soul so great that it could not compromise.

Probably compromise will remain for generations the rule of the game of politics; men will discuss their differences and adjust their views to each other’s. They will lose a little here and gain a little there. Practical politics is usually a game of “muddling through”. Into the pot are poured many ingredients and out of it comes a mixture, not quite like the thing that any individual poured in.

Woodrow Wilson knew the game of politics and played it, always on a high plane, in the Governorship of New Jersey and during his first term as President of the United States. He got things done by following the rules of the game.

But there came a time when he was more prophet than politician, more warrior than civil executive. He became inspired with a vision of the future, of a warless world. He saw himself as the attorney of the children of today that he might deliver them from the anguish through which their parents had passed.

The League of Nations idea was to him not a political idea, but a conception of eternal righteousness, a fulfillment of the law of Christ.

In that conception how could he be wrong in not compromising? If wars shall cease there will be no compromise. Either men will fight or they will not fight. What middle ground can there be? He was God’s warrior in the caues of peace. So all see him today.

Yesterday there appeared an inspired cartoon in a newspaper - the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, with a trumpeter blowing taps, and under it the legend, “the known soldier”.

So men see him today, a soldier known and honored because he would not compromise.He will do more for the cause of peace by dying without compromise, by giving his life for the thing in which he believed, than he could ever have done by mingling in the dust of and confusion of political parleys.

This one thing all men know today of Woodrow Wilson, that, like St. Paul, “He fought a good fight, he kept the faith”.

Though he was combative and his life from the time he became President of Princeton, not prior to that, was a struggle, a continual fight, he was always fighting for some great principle - ajn educational principle or a great democratic principle. In the State of New Jersey, with the idea in his mind that the government had slipped away from the people and got into the hands of the few, he made it his fight to put the government back into the hands of the people.

During his first administration as President of the United States he was waging a somewhat similar fight. It was the age of progressivism in politics, and progressivism meant to his mind really a recovery of the fundamental ideas on which this government was founded - a people’s government.

The issues in his first administration were too numerous to be summarized even here, but the fundamental idea running through it all, like the threads that make a pattern in a tapestry, was the idea of the restoration of a democracy which had been endangered for several decades through the exploitation of government by the interested wealthy and powerful few.

That tThe key to his varied policies during his first administration is the key of democracy, to unlock again the doors that had been so long closed the cobwebs had grown over it, and to fling wide open those doors and give the people once more access to their own.

He did this without demagogery, without cant, without any of the highflown rhetoric which the so-called champions of the people are so fond of. He did it as quietly as a man in his conspicuous position could do it. He never dramatized himself in this matter. He was facing the facts of things.

By instinct he was so retiring that though a champion of the people he was thought by many to be cold. He was thinking of the task and not trying to portray himself as a picturesque figure in this struggle. He had not the habits of the genial politician, who clapped men on their shoulder and called them by their first name. He remained himself, and that self was a reserved self. He was fighting for faith rather than for self-exploitation. He never shrank from a fight. He once expressed a derogatory opinion of a member of his faculty in Princeton University who declined to take any strong stand in the discussion there, saying, “I am no fighter”. When Mr. Wilson reporting and repeating what this man had said observed: “I suppose the reason that I cannot have any sympathy with that sort of man is because I myself am a fighter.”

With the entrance of America into the Great War, he became more than ever a fighter, but the principle for which he was fighting was something bigger than any of the principles for which he fought previously. He had emerged from the University Campus into the field of state politics, and from state politics he passed to national politics, and now almost suddenly found himself in the vast field of international politics - of a world’s crisis, - and he became the acknowledged leader in that vast struggle because he was fighting for world peace. This was the paradox - that this fighting man was struggling with lall the blood, bone, tissue, will and soul that was in him for the permanent establishment of peace.

From the time that the United States became a participant in the World WarMr. Wilson became a crusader, and so as I think of him now that he has gone, I think of him not merely as the fighting man. America has had a great many glorious fighting men from the nbeginning of her early history down to the present hour. But there was something different about this fighting man. In him there re-awoke the spirit of those who centuries ago went forth on crusades for the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre.Woodrow Wilson felt that he was a participant and a leader in a combat for something supremely holy, not for the Sepulchre where rested for only a little while our Lord’s body, but it was body before it was translated, but for the establishment on earth once and for all of the principle and the will of the Lord Christ.

We who were in close personal touch with him during the momentous months that lay between the Declaration of War on April 56, 1917, (?) until thee the close of the Conference at Paris on June 28, 1919, sensed in him a new patience. He could still rebuke folly, marvel at stupidity, deal smashing blows to those who opposed the plan that seemed to him so holy. But underneath it all there was this growing patience.He delivered and received hard blows in Paris. I saw him many a time quivering under insults growing out of misunderstanding of his aim when great men associated with him in the Conference even accused him of pro-Germanism because he insisted that a permanent peace could not be built upon by vengeance. But the personal pain quickly passed, for he had a cause that was greater than himself.

As I look back upon those months and years, it seems to me that I saw his spirit undergoing a great purification, passing through that experience which the old religious rteachers used to call “sanctification”. I would not have said this to him, for he would probably have disputed it. He was a man living in a man’s world, dealing with men in human terms. Sometimes he would speak with sudden heat, often he would laugh and joke, and make puns and recite limericks and draw word caricatures of the busy-bodies who flitted thorugh the streets of Paris with such an enlarged sense of their importance in the great controversy. All that is earthly and Woodrow Wilson was not posing as a saint. But I repeat - and it is the point that I am making - that one great purpose was swallowing up everything else, and as that purpose gripped him day by day, there came into him something more manifestly spiritual than most men experience in this world. Perhaps it was a dim reception of this transfiguaration that caused so many plain people to say of him in his later years that Woodrow Wilson seemed to have something divine in him, that he was different from all other politicians, that in fact he was no polkitician at all but a seer and a prophet and a deliverer, yes, a deliverer, for though, like Moses, he did not live to lead his people into the promised land, he died in the full faith that they would enter that land some time and in some way. In one of his last public utterances he said: (RADIO).

In 1920 there was the strangest reaciton against this man in our own country and among our own people. They said he was an idealist - as if that was a condemnation; indeed, the very word “idealism” came into disrepute in those dark, bitter months from reaction and materialism and repudiation of the things that had seemed to us of all so great in 1917. But now he has gone and the idealism seems as fine as when he first began to give utterance to it in those marvelous war addresses.

Back in the days of the bitterness of the debate over the League of Nations his opponents accused him of having mistaken his own dreams for the will and purpose of America. They said he had no right whatsoever to commit this country to the things to which he did commit it in Paris. They said he did not understand the practical motives of Americans. They said that he talked nonsense when he ascribed our to our expeditionary forces in Europe the great crusading spirit which animated himself. Ambassador Harvey, on his arrival in England, took prompt occasion to assure Englisment that Americans had not been fighting for any ideals but had been fighting “to save their own skins”. Was Mr. Wilson mistaken in the spirit which animated the great masses of the American troops overseas and on this side of the water? Of course, they could not express their idealism in language inspired like his - none could. Our doughboys were inarticulate about ideals, but they put ideals into their fighting and their dying. When the aedvancing Marines at Chateau Thierry were informed by panic stricken troops in retreat that the Germans were coming on to crush them, the Marines had no lofty, rhetorical replies to make. “What the hell are we here for”, was all that they said, as they made the great charge that turned the fortunes of the war. “What the hell are we here for”? Woodrow Wilson had answefred the question months before - “To make the world safe for democracy”.

Their immediate purpose was to beat the Germans, and in process of doing it they used all manner of language that is not permissible in polite society. But back of it all, there must have been some dim perception of the meaning of it all, as Woodrow Wilson had defined it.

Be this as it may, the fact is that Woodrow Wilson, through all the months of the war, through all the months in Paris, including the great afternoon at Suresnes, when he made one of his great speeches to the living soldiers over the graves of the dead soldiers, - all through the years of his invalidism kept that faith in the great American army as an army of crusaders. He loved the soldiers passionately. He loved them tenderly. He loved them so much that he could seldom speak of them and their sacrifices without emotion. On his rides through and around Washington he never failed to salute a disabled soldier.--Visit to American Hospital in France --Visit to French Hospital on a Sunday afternoon --
the blind soldier.While Mr. Wilson admired and loved the soldiers of our Allies, he naturally had a special place in his heart for the American soldier. He would not have consented to the boastful assertion that we won the war, but he did feel and he said with a thrill of pride -- “Our boys turned the war at Chateau Thierry”. In public he said;,

(In in effect that no such army had ever been mobilized in the history of the world.).

Because Mr. Wilson was so just in his thinking and so intent upon drawing the nations of the world into a covenant for the preservation of peace, and because he was so opposed to a peace pact founded upon mere vengeance, many of his fellow-countrymen failed to realize how intense was his Americanism. He and Colonel Roosevelt were temperamentally entirely different from each other, but Colonel Roosevelt was nox no more “American” than Mr. Wilson.

After leaving the White House and becoming again a private citizen, he unostentatiously saluted the flag wherever he saw it on his motor trips in and around Washington, remarking: “I am trying to introduce the custom of always saluting the flag wherever it is”.Many who fought him on the League of Nations issue endeavored to creat the impression that he was more of an internationalist than an American, but none who knew him well could ever have made that error. He frequently used the in expression “America First” in his pre-war addresses, and to the end of his life the idea of America First was enshrined in his heart. All that is normal in accordance with the habits of thought and feeling of a natural-minded man, just as a normal man loves his own family first and most. But Mr. Wilson felt that the most glorious way of putting America first was to have America lead the nations into the paths of permanent peace. This idea of a compact of nations with America showing the way to peace was a matter of supreme pride with him. He believed, as most right-thinking Americans believed in the opening months of the war, that our country had entered into the conflict without selfishness, without purpose of gaining anything for herself, and it was his pride after the war that America as a nation had sought no advantage from the war. It was this attitude of mind that made it almost inconceivable to him that his fellow-countrymen would not agree with the great purpose of the covenant of the League of Nations. He began to sacrifice his health to this idea even when he was in Paris. He drove himself night and day so hard that I had to warn him repeatedly, but he would always answer: “Just give me a little while longer, and I hope we can finish this business, and when we get back home we will return to our routine of living and maintaining health”. All the world knows the sequel. The plan of the League of Nations was made a political issue, and Mr. Wilson finally decided that, tired and worn though he was, it was necessary for him to take the issue to the people. I strongly objected to this. I knew that it would be dangerous for him to continue indefinitely over-taxing his strength, and I protested. I persuaded him not to take the trip on account of the intense heat prevailing in the West- otit was August - because he had to travel in a steel car. But about two weeks later Mr. Tumulty told me late one night that the President had decided to take the Western trip. I went to the White House early the next morning and found the President in his private study. He was seated at his desk writing. I stood at the door silent for a few moments. He looked up and greeted me and said: “Doctor, I know what you have come for”. I immediately said: “Tumulty tells me that you are planning a Western trip, and I have come to say please do not go.” He said: “I believe I have complied with every request you have made of me as a physician, and I do not want to do anything foolhardy now, but I feel that I must go to the people and present to them the cause of the League of Nations. You must remember that I was responsible for sending our soldiers to France and in the crucial moment in the trenches they did not turn back. And this is a crucial moment with the League of Nations. If it fails I dread to think what will happen to the world. The last war will be child’s play compared to the next when I think of the chemistry and of the scientific devices for the destruction of human life. I am thinking of what another war will mean to the little children of today. I feel that I am their attorney, and I must do all in my power to prevent another war. If my life is the only thing in the balance I must go, but I hafve got to do this thing. I sent those soldiers across the seas. They did not turn back at the crucial moment in the trenches and the crucial moment has now arrived for completing the work which they did, and if my life has got to pay the price I cannot pause now to think of myself. I must go.”

With his pen in hand he rose and walked to the window looking out toward the Washington Monument, stood silent for a few seconds, and, as he turned around and looked at me, I saw moisture in his eyes. I paused a moment, and, then turning, left the room. There was lead where my heart ought to be, but I knew that the debate was closed, that there was nothing I could do except to go with him and take such care of him as I could.

I am not now speaking as a physician. I could give many harrowing details of the suffering which he endured on that journey and of the anxiety of Mrs. Wilson and myself, but that is a story which I shall probably tell elsewhere some day. I am thinking now only of the soldier on his last march with one purpose in his mind and reflected in his eyes -- to make clear to the people of America in whose sound judgment he believed that he was pleading the cause of posterity. Again and again as we rode through crowded streets of Western cities he would look intently at the lines of school children on the pavements and say: “I am the attorney for these children.”

When I recollect how little physical strength he had left and how he was carried on merely by his iron will, I recall Kipling’s lines:

He fell fighting and after he had fallen he kept on fighting.

Back in the White House bed-ridden and so weak he could scarcely move, his will never wavered. When it became possible for him to see public men - a few at a time - they always came away impressed by the courage, the will, the unyielding purpose of this man whose body was flat but whose soul was still a flame. I think he knew where he was going when he left the White House for that Western journey. I think he knew that his health would break, but that did not daunt him.He had returned from Europeo in July, 1919, and had immediately begun his fight for the ratification of the treaty by the Senate. It was on September second that he started on the mission against which I had so earnestly protested for the sake of his health. (The full justification of my fears were realized on the morning of September 24th at Wichita, Kansas, when I saw that he was on the very verge of a complete breakdown. Even then it was with great difficulty that I could persuade him to turn back to Washington and omit the remainder of the itinerary. He insisted that he must go on saying: “I should feel like a deserter. My opponents will accuse me of having cold feet should I stop now”. I replied: “I owe it to the country, to you, and to your