13 January 2007

The Accidental Wilsonian

I am a sucker for museums. I like 'em big, like the British Museum, or the Air and Space Museum. I like 'em found by the roadside, and exult in the tacky attractions that dot the old pre--interstate routes west across America.

Best of all, I like the small and intimate museums that give you the vicarious feelings of knowing some great historical figure. George Washington's estate at Mount Vernon is one of those, or the birth-home of Robert E. Lee down on the Northern Neck of Virginia.

The best one I have seen is the Duke of Wellington's house at Number One London. It appears that the Iron Duke has just gone out for a carriage ride, and even his stiff starched collars remain snowy white in their boxes.

I stumbled on Number One London in the rain one day, and it is purely by accident that I have wandered into some great ones- like the Washington home of brewer Christian Heurich, a hardy German whose life spanned almost a hundred years. He died in 1948, and the heritage of his heyday and wealth survived past his death. It is all still in the magnificent Romanesque home, the first fireproof residence in the city built of poured concrete and reinforced steel.

There is no guarantee that it won't be developed, though, so see it while you can. The constituency for German brewers is diminishing.

There is no danger to the second best small museum in the world, and it is just several blocks from the Huerich mansion, at 2340 Se St SW. It is the last home of President Woodrow Wilson.

If the Iron Duke's house stresses the magnificence of the military achievement of the victor of Waterloo, Wilson's house in Kalorma (Greek for “beautiful view”) celebrates the life of an academician, visionary, and accidental President.

Had it not been for the revolt of Teddy Roosevelt and his Bull Moose Party against the conservative Republicans, he would never have had a chance at being elected. Had he not become a widower while in office, and married a considerably younger woman, he would not have had an active partisan to preserve his memory for another half century.

Edith Bolling Galt was a towering presence. Some call her the first female president, since she was the gate-guard to her husband's sick-room in the days of his incapacitation, and it was her word about what he said, and her judgment on what to release publicly about his medical condition.

She maintained the house in Kalorama as a sort of shrine to him, and it is close enough in time to see things as they actually were, not reconstructed or re-interpreted. They are exactly as they were left by the man himself, like the tools Thomas Alva Edison used to recreate his invention of the electric light at the Ford Museum at Greenfield Village.

There are as many interpretations of Edith as the are of her husband. Phyllis Levin, once a reporter for the New York Times, wrote that she was "a woman of narrow views and formidable determination."

I think both are indisputable. When she died in December of 1961, she left the house to the National Trust for Historic Preservation to be made into a museum honoring her husband.

I was much impressed by it, when I stumbled in on a walking tour headed elsewhere. It was the beginning of my journey to accidental Wilsonism. I thought much about Mr. Wilson before I came to Washington, it would have been as patrician with grand dreams who could not quite pull them off.

He became a personal icon in my life due to the bridge that Edith fought hard to have named in his honor. There was a bas-relief profile of Mr. Wilson on the great span that carried interstate I-95 across the Potomac from Alexandria to the Maryland shore.

By the time I first saw it, slogging daily from the suburbs of Virginia to Naval Intelligence Headquarters in Maryland, the bridge was falling apart. Great chucks of the roadway were falling down, and it was not known that sudden new holes could grab a tire and rip it right off a vehicle.

The structure even started in disaster: Edith was supposed to be the guest of honor at the dedication ceremony on Dec. 28, 1961, but she died that morning at age 89. The day had been chosen because it was the 105th anniversary of the former president's birth in Staunton, Virginia, and that is why I was headed to the Wilson Presidential Library in that pleasant county seat.

The day of his birth, and Edith's death, was bitter cold and the wind gusted up off the brown river. No one wanted to be on the bridge, and that is the general sentiment that everyone had right to the moment they blew up the old span last year.

That was not true last Thursday. It was a fine day, crisp and sunny in the Shenandoah. I was driving a borrowed car, and feeling a bit giddy with being so far off my normal beaten track. I was prepared to drive around aimlessly until I found it, but drove past the Library on the first pass up North Coalter Street.

It was fate, or maybe Staunton is a fairly small town.

I was impressed with it. The houses are large and Victorian. There is a lot of brick and stone, and the spires from the seven Presbyterian churches rise with reverence over a human-scaled city that seems frozen in another century.

The gift shop is where you purchase admission, which is in the form of ticket to the 1912 Democratic National Convention in Baltimore, the forum that catapulted the one-term New Jersey Governor to the White House.

It was accidental that Teddy split the Republicans over his personal animosity for his hand-picked Republican successor, but Woodrow Wilson was the right man at the time. He made his mark in Jersey cleaning up the corruption of the political machine there. He was the man for the times.

The Museum is housed in a renovated chateau-style mansion adjacent to the Birthplace. You are directed through the garden to the museum to browse until it is time for the guided tour of the birth house. There is a nice lady to check your admission ticket, and direct you to galleries which take you through the president's public life, from the twenty years as the president of Princeton study to his historic peace efforts to end the Great War on terms that would prevent such madness from ever occurring again.

I was somewhere between Princeton and the 1912 Convention when Linda came to scoop me up. I owe my understanding of the place to her, since her lively appreciation of the house and its contents was completely secondary to her understanding of the context of the place.

She is not from Staunton, but started out in Atlanta on the way to marrying into the State Department with an eclectic career path in the consular service that wended through Bogotá and Bangkok.

I told her that I “Worked for the State Department” a few times, and winked. She properly ignored me, since the only other member of the tour was a phlegmatic stocky fellow in a Kennebunkport sweatshirt from South Carolina. I had the suspicion that he was collecting places, and he had no questions.

By contrast Linda and I chatted madly, goading each other on. The President's father was a minister here, living well for the times, and we saw the bed where Thomas Woodrow Wilson's mother gave him life. It is a curious thing that the past is so near us; Jimmy Carter was the first President who was actually born in a hospital, after all.

There were slaves in this house, too. They probably did not belong to the Minister, who could not afford such a human luxury, but probably hired from local landowners by the Presbyter. That too seemed not so far away on that sunny morning, standing near the wood-burning range in the kitchen.

The work of every day life was crushing then, and the institutions brutal.

Little Tommy and his family moved on when he was only two years old, and those two formative years are the hat on which Staunton hangs its Presidential lineage. The family moved to Georgia in 1858, just three years before the great conflict erupted that would end with that great state scourged with flame and the sword.

The memory of that is never far from Georgians, and Linda is no exception. When we were done talking about chamber-pots and low-set furniture to avoid the constant smoke of the oil lamps and fireplaces, we walked back to the Museum.

When Tommy went off to University he dropped that name, and never used it again. “Woodrow” he remained until the day he died. Linda assumed the desk and I returned to the galleries to muse alone. I looked over the incursion into Mexico, and the lofty resolution to keep us out of the Great War on the continent.

Perhaps it was the recollection of what happened to Georgia when he was a boy that shaped his resistance. I had not considered that before.

I moved forward into the time of the Versailles Treaty, and the foundation of the League of Nations.

I read the Fourteen Points again, the plan that Wilson carried forward to bring lasting peace. They seem reasonable. Perhaps I misjudged this man.

Perhaps he really had shaped the modern Presidency, and perhaps the efforts that brought him the Nobel Peace Prize could have resulted in a strong League that could have forestalled the unimaginable catastrophe of the second stanza of the global conflict.

I talked to Linda about that on the way down to look at the 1919 Pierce-Arrow limousine in the annex with the big glass window.

“He never recovered from the stroke, you know. New medical research indicates that stroke survivors are inclined toward inflexibility in their mental process. That would certainly account for his inability to compromise with the Senate, and the failure to ratify the treaty and the League.”

“So the legacy was doomed by the stroke. What would have happened if Edith had not preserved the Presidency when he was ill. What would the consequences have been if he had been replaced?” I asked.

Linda said she didn't know, but Wilson was the inspiration for a generation of new political thinkers, including Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt who both worked in his White House, and called on him after he left office at the house on S Street.

Linda said that they had just got a box of private papers from the physician who treated Wilson all through those years, and it might help to explain things, even if it could not change them.

“If the League had worked out, and the terms of the treaty had not doomed the Weimar Republic, we would not have had the Great Depression, and Hoover might have been the great President of the last Century…” I thought the last as I walked down the hall toward the limousine, becoming an accidental Wilsonian.

It is a nice restoration job on the car. It is complete now. The Director of the Museum came up with the original German Silver side lamps just recently. He found them on eBay, God only knows where they have been.

Copytight 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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