Woodrow Wilson As I Know Him, Joseph P. Tumulty, Doubleday Page, 1921

The Piece

Woodrow Wilson As I Know Him, by Joseph P. Tumulty, published by Doubleday, Page and Company, Garden City, New York and Toronto, 1921. Dark navy ribbed cloth over boards. The front is stamped in gilt inside a blind-ruled panel, title over author, with a second blind rule running down the board beside it. The spine carries the title and the author in gilt with the Doubleday, Page imprint at the tail. The rear board is plain.

The title page is printed in red and black, the title in red over the author's name, with the publisher's device at center and the date at the foot. Facing it is the frontispiece, a photograph by Edmonston of Washington captioned Mr. Tumulty with the President at the Signing of a Treaty: Wilson seated at a desk with a document and pen, Tumulty standing behind his shoulder.

Better than five hundred pages, running past chapter forty three. That chapter is titled Reservations and opens on a cabled message Tumulty received from the President on 25 June 1919. The text runs through the New Jersey governorship, the two campaigns, the neutrality years, the war, Paris, and the fight over the League.

The appendix is the part a historian goes to. It prints the cable traffic between Tumulty at the White House and Wilson in Paris across May and June 1919, each one headed Cablegram and signed off Tumulty or Woodrow Wilson. The President asking what Tumulty believes is vital. Tumulty reporting that every Republican on the new Foreign Relations Committee is against the treaty. Wilson answering at length about the German ships and the Urgent Deficiency Bill. It is the working correspondence of a presidency in trouble, set in type eighteen months after it was sent.

On the front free endpaper, in pencil, a bookseller's arithmetic: Pub 5.00 ruled off above 1.50 ruled off below. Someone noted what the book had cost new and what they would take for it. Beneath that, in black ink, an ownership signature ending Thompson.

History & Provenance

Joseph Patrick Tumulty was born in Jersey City on 5 May 1879 and died at Olney, Maryland on 9 April 1954. He sat in the New Jersey General Assembly from 1907 to 1910, advised Wilson's run for governor that year, and when Wilson won he was made private secretary. He held the job through Trenton and then through eight years in the White House, until 1921. The title understates it. He was press secretary, public relations manager, political organizer and gatekeeper, and for long stretches he was the man deciding what reached the President.

It was never an easy relationship. Tumulty objected to Wilson's marriage to Edith Bolling Galt in December 1915 and the two were never close again. Wilson dismissed him after the 1916 reelection and took him back only after David Lawrence intervened. Then in October 1919, with the Senate treaty fight at its height, Wilson suffered a stroke. Much of the work of the White House fell to Tumulty and to Edith Wilson, who had no use for him. Henry Cabot Lodge had put fourteen reservations to the treaty that September. The Senate refused to ratify it with them or without them on 19 November 1919, and refused again in March 1920.

Which is the context for this book. Tumulty published it in 1921, the year the administration ended, while Wilson was alive and broken in a house on S Street. Wilson was furious and shut him out for good. The two men never reconciled, and Tumulty spent the next thirty three years practicing law in Washington.

So this is not a reverent campaign biography written after the fact. It is the account of a man who was in the room, published while it could still cost him, and it cost him. Whatever its bias, and it has one, the documents at the back are the documents.

The title page is dated 1921, the year of first publication. The copyright page is not offered here as evidence of a first printing, so the book is sold on what the title page says and nothing more.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Navy and gilt is the default look for a serious book and this one earns it. The spine still reads across a room, the gilt is intact where it matters, and it shelves with anything. A run of law, history or presidential material absorbs it immediately.

What makes it worth more than its color is that it is a primary source rather than a book about one. A man who stood behind the desk in the frontispiece wrote it, published it while the President he served was still alive, and printed the cables at the back. Wilson read it and never spoke to him again. That is a story with an edge on it, and it is the kind of thing a dealer can actually tell a customer.

It belongs in a study, on a shelf of American political history, in a lawyer's or a historian's office, or anywhere the Versailles fight and the League still get argued about. The condition is honest and so is the price; buy it to read and to keep, not to case.