Dan Snow's History Hit - A President Incapacitated: Woodrow Wilson's Stroke

Episode Date: October 6, 2020

101 years ago this week, President Woodrow Wilson suffered a serious stroke which left him prone to "disorders of emotion, impaired impulse control, and defective judgment." As President Trump confronts his own health crisis, I talked to John Milton Cooper, Jr., Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison about President Wilson.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. The eyes of the world are on Donald Trump's medical team. We want updates, we're furious when we don't get x-rays, scans, detailed breakdowns of minute-to-minute treatment. This is something of a new phenomenon in US political history. There have been many presidents in the past with serious health concerns that have been hidden from the population. In this episode of the podcast, I talked to John Milton Cooper, Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin. He is the world's greatest living authority on Woodrow Wilson. He gave me a chance to talk about Wilson's stroke, which was hidden from the American people, left him in many ways

incapacitated, and also talked about Wilson's handling of the last great global pandemic, the influenza of 1918 to 1919, as well as other things like Wilson's racial justice, progressive agenda, and attitude towards governing. It's a long overdue look at one of the most consequential presidents in US history. If you want to watch history documentaries, US history, for example, you can go to History Hit TV. I've started a new history channel. It's like Netflix for history. It's got all the back episodes of this podcast, many other podcasts, lots of audio, but also hundreds of hours of history documentaries on there as well. And if you use the code POD1, P-O-D-1, you get a month for free in your second month for just one pound, one dollar, one euro, wherever you are in the world, just one of them.

In the meantime, everyone, here's John Milton Cooper talking about Woodrow Wilson. John, thank you very much for coming on this podcast. Glad to be here. Where do we even start with, I mean, one of the most consequential presidents and indeed statespeople of US and world history. But can we start at the end, if that's okay? It feels a bit strange because of the controversy at the moment surrounding the current president's health and updates given and who's in charge. Tell me, Wilson, apart from having a huge impact on the rest of US and international politics,

his stroke became quite an important part of his legacy, didn't it, in terms of governance? Well, it's the worst case of presidential disability the US has ever had. I hesitate to use the word crisis because it was a long running thing. And we think of a crisis as something short and intense. It had moments like that, but it was something that ran out for too long. Wilson really should not have continued as president. He didn't have what it took. The problem was, there was kind of a perfect storm or a triple whammy, as we'd say. First, there was the stroke. That was bad. It's important to understand what kind of stroke it was. It was the stroke that's caused by clots, not the apoplectic or hemorrhagic stroke, which those kind of strokes, the other kind, which are less common, are the ones that are life-threatening and very sudden onset.

himself suffered it in the night, didn't know it, got up in the morning, got out of bed and started trying to walk across the room to the bathroom and sank down. He didn't fall down. There were lots of legends that he'd fallen down in the bathroom and cut his head. No, he just sank down. Mrs. Wilson and his physician discovered this pretty soon. They immediately called in a leading neurologist from Philadelphia who hastened down. This is a man who actually had examined Wilson some years earlier when he was still in academic life for a hemorrhage he'd suffered in his eye, so he knew his condition. And he was diagnosed that way, and it was serious. It led to paralysis on the left side. He never really recovered full use of his arm. That's fairly common in those kind of strokes. Well, that was bad, but what little evidence we have is that

he was laid up, but very conscious, very with it, you know, wanted to know what was going on. But then just a few days after that, he suffered a very serious urinary blockage, which led to a really bad infection. And that really laid him out and was life-threatening. And they called in several different specialists from Johns Hopkins and such places, and they were debating back and forth whether or not to do surgery. They decided against it. They used hot compresses, got him through it. But that's what

really just blasted him, absolutely blasted him. And for about a month, he was semi-conscious, in and out. It was bad that way. But finally, the medical wisdom of that time, and Mrs. Wilson has this in her memoir, was spare the stroke person anything that might upset him or her. In other words, keep them calm, keep them isolated. Now, I've talked to neurologist friends of mine and they say,

that's exactly the wrong thing to do. In other words, the medical wisdom has done a 180 degree turn on that. Now, for them, the most important thing is to get the stroke person back into social interaction as soon as possible. So what you've got is this triple quammy. You've got the stroke, you've got this life-threatening illness, which he did get over, but it's lingering after effects, and you have the isolation. And I think the worst consequences of this stroke for

Wilson, in terms of his ability or inability to function as president, were on his emotional balance and on his judgment. His intellect was unimpaired. His speech was unimpaired, you know, those kinds of things. So he was still with it that way. But the man simply, as they say, wasn't himself and couldn't really exercise good judgment. He then became, this happened, of course, there's no good time for this to happen, but this happened at an especially bad time, because this was when the Senate was just getting ready to vote on the Treaty of Versailles, which the Republican majority led by Henry Cabot Lodge had attached reservations to. And these reservations, all except one or two of them, were aimed at limiting Americans' obligations under membership of the League of Nations.

were aimed at limiting Americans' obligations under membership of the League of Nations. And the question was, if Wilson had been in good health, he certainly would have negotiated with the senators. Whether this would have led to an agreement, we don't know. But what happened was, instead, he took no part in the negotiations. So Lodge and the Republicans presented him and the Democrats with a take it or leave it. This is it. Here it is. And he instructed the Democrats to say no, to stand firm against it. So what you got was a deadlock. You got a spiteful deadlock. You had about a third of the Senate voting for it with the Lodge reservations, a third of the Senate rejecting that. And then you had a group in the middle called the Reconcilables who wanted nothing to do with it under any circumstances. So that happened. Then it was really on the initiative of some senators that they tried again. The first votes happened in November 1919. They tried again in early in March. They had a last vote on it, again with the Lodge reservations. And Wilson again said, absolutely not. And he was able to keep enough

Democrats in line. So that's how it turned out. And he became the biggest barrier to some kind of compromise, some kind of limited liability, American membership in the League of Nations. But most of the European powers were, they just wanted the United States in just about under any terms. I mean, they wanted America involved. They wanted that kind of commitment. OK, if we hedged around on it, that's all right. That was the half low for them.

It was better than none. So we've got transatlantic engagement that feels very familiar today. We've got presidential infirmity. We're going to come on to racial justice. We're going to come on to other aspects of his career. Was there any discussion around succession, around handing over powers to a vice president or other figure at that time? Briefly, Mrs. Wilson says in her memoirs that she asked the doctor, the consulting, the neurologist, well, maybe we should ask Mr. Marshall to come in. Marshall was the vice president and take over. According to her, and I think this is very questionable that this happened, the doctor said, oh, no, no, no, no. The best thing for his recovery will be for him to stay on the job. No responsible physician would say that. So that's where it was. There was some talk in the Senate about some approach to Marshall. Marshall himself said, absolutely not. In some ways, I think he's a kind of,

not a very exciting, charismatic man, but in a way, I think he was a quiet hero at this, because he just did not want to get mixed up in it. Now, the U.S. had no mechanism for dealing with this then. We now have the 25th Amendment, which was adopted in the late 1960s, and really in the wake of Kennedy's assassination. I like to say to people, go read that amendment again. That is a very strange and I think very cumbersome piece of legislation. It is much less protection against presidential disability than most Americans think it is. And it is particularly weak if it comes to a president who is mentally or emotionally impaired and doesn't want to go. Because what it does,

if you read it, it calls for the vice president of the cabinet to get together and stage a coup and get him or her out. And that I don't think is good policy. I think the biggest protection that the U.S. has now, which actually has something to do, a little bit of relevance to what's happening right this minute, I think the biggest protection we have against something like Wilson, or for that matter, Franklin Roosevelt in 1944. FDR went off the radar screen for about two months. This was in the spring of 1944, where essentially he was down in seclusion at Bernard Baruch's estate in South Carolina, and just resting. He would have a little bit of public business, not doing too much down there.

He was able to manage a statement for D-Day. And then later, he bounced back and was able to do some campaigning for the 1944 election and so forth. But the kind of presidential seclusion and cover-up that was mounted for Wilson and for FDR, I don't think it happened. And it's not because of that amendment. It's because of the media. I think there's just presidents have to be seen and heard regularly. And of course, we noticed that's what's happening now. This president wants to be seen and heard or thinks he does. I wonder, is it also something to do with the changing nature of executive power that the so-called thermonuclear monarchy we've created? I mean, if you look at Wilson, FDR, and to a certain extent, Kennedy, they were hiding

monumental health concerns from the population that now would be considered completely unacceptable. Yes. Although with this current president, we don't know much about his health. Aside from this COVID-19 infection right now, the man is borderline obese. And that's a medical term. By body mass, if it's 30, that's the threshold for obesity. And he's at, I think, 30.5. I mean, the man, and as Maureen Dowd said the other day in her column, she's amazed that he isn't sick all the time. He's old. He's overweight.

He doesn't exercise. He eats a terrible diet. True, he doesn't drink or smoke. But on the other hand, the other things that he puts into himself, apparently he's addicted to Coca-Colas, lots of caffeine. It's just things that we don't know and we're not being shown. But you're right. We've had presidents who've had some serious medical conditions. Can I ask another thing about Woodrow Wilson's health? In fact, about the great influenza outbreak of 1917, 18, 19.

Do you think that, A, Wilson had it when he was ill in Paris? Did that affect perhaps the course of the negotiations there in Paris in 1919? And also, having experienced this government's response to this pandemic, has that encouraged you to think differently about the government's response to the pandemic in 1918, 19, which at a federal level was pretty limited, am I right? Well, yes, you're right, because in those days, for better or for worse, this kind of thing was not considered a federal responsibility. In other words, this was for state and local health departments to handle. The context of it, we always have to remember, is the war.

This is the climax of World War I. And the Allies were absolutely desperate to get as many doughboys, American troops, to France and to the front lines as they could. And in turn, so were the American generals, so was the War Department, all of it. So the pressure, the priorities were always getting men to the front, you know, fighting a war, which really kind of took everything else off the table. I mean, one of the things was, you know, we talk about cruise ships now as being incubators for this virus. Those troop ships were even worse because you talk about men being crowded in together for a long period of time under probably not the best sanitary conditions. And they were just breeders

for it. But the War Department, no, we want to get them there now. That was the mindset. It was just kind of, we got to fight this war, we've got to do it. So that took precedence over everything else. And as for Wilson's flu, he came down with something in right at the beginning of April 1919 when he was in Paris. It laid him up for five, six days. Several scholars have studied this very carefully and consulted, shown all the records to medical experts. And the consensus is this was not the Spanish influenza. This was not the big one. This was another kind of flu. It's just the symptoms are not congruent with the Spanish influenza. So he had something else. There's lots of arguments about whether, how this affected Wilson's performance at Paris. There's some who think that when he got over it,

he felt so good that he said, okay, fine, I don't want to argue about this financial stuff anymore. So that he gave in a little too quickly on reparations. Perhaps there's evidence both ways on that. But by and large, I don't buy that this affected his performance at Paris all that much. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed.

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a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. But just come back quickly to domestically within the u.s as the pandemic was sweeping across the nation wilson and the federal government didn't have much to say about it i mean was it left to city authorities state authorities yes it was now this was seen as a local sometimes state responsibility and some of them acted it was as you can imagine it was a patchwork and some did and some didn't the most notorious incident was in Philadelphia. I think this was in February 1919.

It was sometime early in 1919, where they insisted upon having a victory parade. And the health authorities said, please, please, don't do this, don't do this. And as a result of that, the worst single incidence of flu mortality was on a couple of days in Philadelphia. It was like six to 700 people a day were dying. So that was bad. One other thing about the Spanish influenza, where it's different from COVID-19, it affected people in the prime of life most. They were the most likely to die, 15 to about 45. And the reason was that that particular flu overstimulated the immune system, so that people with healthier, stronger immune systems were more at risk, because the immune system, you had your own immune system working against you, your system was killing.

We've got Wilson's progressive domestic policy, if you like, the idea that you establish income tax, spend money, attempt to address social inequality and problems. It's often the forerunner, it's one of the great three spasms of progress. You know, you've got the Wilson, you've got FDR, you've got Great Society, JFK slash Johnson. So controversial at the moment, though, is the fact that he completely failed to act on race and racial justice, particularly at the moment. Is that a fair criticism? Yeah, it's a fair criticism. But whenever anybody approaches this, unless it's absolutely this was just terrible, he was an awful man, he should have done such and such and such and such.

If you're going to look at all at him and at the political circumstances, then you get into the kind of the, some call it the cop out of sojourn old man. But that is one African American historian, Rayford Logan, called this the nadir of race relations. And that's a fair characterization. But for most non-Southern whites, race was a pesky distraction. This is still when 90% of African-Americans lived in the South. The Great Migration only begins to kick in right around the beginning of World War I. African-Americans aren't living in large parts of the country. And so it's very convenient for Northern whites to see this as a Southern problem.

Let them take care of it. You know, that guy Booker T. Washington's doing nice things, you know, that self-help and, you know, forget about it there. That's Woodrow Wilson. Too much, frankly, is made out of his Southern birth and upbringing. He was an accidental Virginian. Yes, he did out of his Southern birth and upbringing. He was an accidental Virginian. Yes, he did grow up in Georgia and South Carolina. Part of it was that he led a sheltered childhood because he was a child of the Mance, very much of the Presbyterian church,

so that that sheltered him somewhat from his surroundings. But when he had the chance, he moved north. From the time he went to college, he only lived back in the South for four or five years. And he chose to live in the North. And he cast his lot there. I see him as a Northern white man of his time. The other thing is, he was a Democrat. The efforts at segregation in the federal government had already started under previous Republican administrations. Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft. The Republicans also, from the end of Reconstruction, from the late 1870s on, were absolutely lusting to have a beachhead in the South.

But they wanted a white beachhead. The Republicans could have made the South a politically competitive region if they had intervened or made efforts to have people down there who really wanted to vote and vote for them, vote. I'm talking about blacks, African Americans. Instead, what you have is this steady abandonment of African Americans by the Republican Party. So that's already in the works. Well, then at the same time, you have this rising of, yeah, it's fair to call it white nationalism. It certainly was a white nationalism. You have racist demagoguery, Tom Watson, James Cade Vardaman, Ben Tillman. You have lynching. You have disenfranchisement laws. All of this stuff is going on. And so what you have is an overheated white electorate. And this is the base

of the Democratic Party, then, the solid South. Woodrow Wilson, despite his Southern roots, almost didn't get the Democratic nomination because of weak support in the South. It's an odd thing, but the two ends of the political spectrum in the South, the white spectrum, the agrarian radicals on the one side and the old style machine bourbon Democrats on the other, both ganged up against him. And the reason was they both thought he wasn't enough of a Southerner. He'd left, he was an expatriate. And for different reasons, they suspected him to become Yankee-fied that way. And what they wanted was a real Southerner. Now they had different reasons for opposing him. But so he felt weak in the South. And then when he comes in, and he's got several cabinet officers who are Southerners. And they all say to him, Mr. President, our folks down South are really disturbed about this, especially because you got black men bossing white women in the federal government. Well, that was a canard. But that was what it was. And they said, we think it'd be a dandy idea to try to introduce segregation in the federal workplace. Well, his attitude was, and this speaks ill for him, well, if you think that's really what you want to do, go ahead and give it a try. They did, for various reasons, including just plain unworkability, and also well-mounted protest by this new organization called the NAACP.

They abandoned that. But Wilson gave it a try. And so there's not formal segregation. There is informal segregation. There's also a tendency to downgrade the jobs that African Americans had in the federal government. And what happened was the Republicans swept back in the 1920s. And those policies just stayed in place. And then the only cracks you begin to get in segregation in the federal government begin under Franklin Roosevelt with the New Deal. And it's slow there to me. FDR is no great champion of African-Americans either. You've written so eloquently about his legacy, whether it's in women voting, in antitrust, in progressive taxation. I mean, there are so many areas that we should really be engaging with Wilson on today. You've got everyone listening to this podcast. What are the areas that you would like us to understand more about Woodrow Wilson? I'd like people to understand that he was a very circumspect and careful idealist. Everybody talks about his idealism. And of course,

given that he is the child of the Mance, that he does project an image that seems rather preacherly, of course, then you're going to see him as a kind of preacher in politics and profit. that he does project an image that seems rather preacherly, of course, then you're going to see him as a kind of preacher and politics and prophet. He didn't see himself that way. In fact, the one who called the presidency the bully pulpit was his great adversary, Theodore Roosevelt, who, by the way, was a religious skeptic. No, it's the preacher's son,

did not see politics as a kind of preaching. So he, but he did have, he was a very principled man, but he believed in approaching it carefully, sometimes gradually, sometimes not so gradually. The test was, for him, was expediency. Do we ever use expediency now in a non-fajardic way? Do we ever use it in a positive way? Well, he did. In fact, he picked it up from Edmund Burke. Well, he did. In fact, he picked it up from Edmund Burke. His great political mentor, the one that he looked to, was Edmund Burke. And what he rejected especially was what thing. When it comes to foreign policy, the most widely misquoted thing he ever said was about making the world safe for democracy. And that's in his war speech, his declaration of war speech, which is really quite a beautiful speech. He doesn't say we must make the world safe for democracy. He says the world must be made safe for democracy. Now, this guy was, I think, maybe the possible exception of Jefferson or Madison, the most punctilious stylist that ever sat in the White House. He would not have used a passive voice if he hadn't meant to. And there is, pun intended, a world of difference between how you say it. between how you say it. He said it that way because he didn't think we, especially we Americans alone, and probably even we together with the allies, could make the world safer

democracy, at least if not soon. What we can do is we can become engaged, we can become committed, we can pursue these goals, and this will grow. This will grow, but we've got to stick with it. And that's the legacy. I'd like people to give him credit, obviously, for his idealism. He had great ideals. He was one of the most eloquent presidents we've ever had. But somebody who had his feet on the ground, he liked to use nautical metaphors. He wasn't all that much of a sailor, but he still liked it.

He said, your ideals are like the stars that you're navigating by. They point the way to you. But you're not trying to like the stars that you're navigating by. They point the way to you. But you're not trying to reach the stars. What you're doing is you're trying to reach your goals on this earth. And to get there, you've got to sail. You've got to have wind and tide and barriers and all of that. I think it's a very mature vision of politics and vision of leadership. Well, thank you very much indeed for joining us.

Thank you. My pleasure. Hi everyone, it's me Dan Snow. Just a quick request. It's so annoying and I hate it when other podcasts do this, but now I'm doing it and I hate myself. Please, please go onto iTunes, wherever you get your podcasts and give us a five-star rating and review it. It really helps basically boost up the chart, which is good and then more people listen which is nice so if you could do that i'd be very grateful i understand if you don't subscribe to my tv channel i understand if you're not by my calendar but this is free come on do me a favor thanks