February 24, 2008
Iredell’s connection to the White House
By O.C. Stonestreet
With all the hoopla and folderol about the up-coming presidential election descending upon us, this might be a good time to tell a story about a past president with a local connection.
If you drive through Davidson, heading south down N.C. Highway 115, as you pass the college, you’ll see one of those N.C. Historic Highway Markers on the left, which states that Woodrow Wilson studied at Davidson College from 1873 to 1874.
Thomas Woodrow Wilson was our 28th president, serving from March 1913 to March 1921. Wilson, the son of a Presbyterian minister, studied at Davidson for a year and then transferred to Princeton and in 1902 became president of that institution of higher learning.
No big secret about that. What may not be as well-known is that Wilson made a surprise, spur-of-the-moment visit to Davidson College while he was president.
Wilson had been invited to Charlotte to take part in the annual Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence Day celebration.
“The what?” you ask.
Years ago, the two biggest holidays in this area were Christmas and May 10, which is Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence Day.
Stay with me.
If you take a moment to look at the North Carolina State Flag, there are two dates on it. One of the dates is May 10, 1775, and the same date is on the Great Seal of the State of North Carolina.
Supposedly, a group of local patriots met in northern Mecklenburg County at a location known as Alexandriana and on that date adopted a set of resolves that basically called for independence from Great Britain. You’ll notice this date is more than a year before the “official” U.S. Declaration of Independence on the Fourth of July 1776.
There is debate among North Carolina historians as to the veracity of the “Meck. Dec.,” as the original document was supposedly lost in a fire. A more complete telling of the Mecklenburg Declaration story may be the subject of a future column, as several Iredell (then Rowan County) men were involved.
Back to Wilson.
The president was invited to speak on May 10, 1916, in Charlotte. As the story goes, someone asked if Wilson hadn’t attended Davidson College, some short distance north of the Queen City, and Wilson replied that yes, indeed he had.
One of the Secret Service men, so the story goes, then said something to the effect that nothing was going on for several hours and that if the president and Mrs. Wilson would like to take a nice drive up the road to visit his old college, it could easily be done.
The story is related in Walter S. Lingle’s “Memories of Davidson College” (1947):
“(Wilson) was weary and requested that he be allowed to roam around the campus without having to make a talk or to meet the people. He was a student at Davidson during the session 1873-74 and wanted to renew the memories of his student days. Among other things he wanted to visit the room he occupied as a student, number 13 on the first floor of the north wing of the Old Chambers Building.
“When he knocked on the door the freshman occupant said: ‘Come in.’ The President, not hearing him, knocked a little louder and longer. The freshman, a bit exasperated, shouted: ‘Come on in. Who are you anyway?’ The President replied: ‘Woodrow Wilson.’ The freshman answered: ‘You’ve got nothing on me. I’m Christopher Columbus. Come right on in.’ When the door opened and the freshman saw that it was really President Wilson he gave just one look of anguish and plunged out the open window.”
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By the way, whether or not Sen. Hillary Clinton gets the Democratic nomination and goes on to become president, she will not be the first woman to wield the powers of chief executive.
Following the end of the First World War, President Wilson campaigned vigorously for the establishment and U.S. membership in The League of Nations, a forerunner of today’s United Nations. This had been one of his famous “Fourteen Points.”
The league was organized, but the U.S. Senate blocked America’s entry into the organization in the surge of isolationism that swept the country after the war.
President Wilson made many train trips across the country, speaking to the people in an attempt to rally popular support for American membership in this international tribunal where nations could, hopefully, settle their grievances without resorting to war.
Wilson’s health was never good. He had a several strokes, collapsing from one in September 1919, during a speech in Colorado, and suffered an even worse one the following month which left him blind in his left eye and paralyzed on his left side.
Mrs. Wilson, the former Edith Galt, kept the president secluded in the White House.
Anyone coming to check on the president’s condition, including the vice president, was completely blocked from seeing him.
Mrs.Wilson would say that he was slowly regaining his health and that she would tell the president that Mr. So-and-So or Congressman So-and-So had called.
If there was official business to be done, Mrs. Wilson would take the material, make a decision about it herself and then forward it through the proper channels, just as if her husband had seen it.
In effect, so the story goes, Mrs. Wilson acted in the capacity of the president for some months, with no one, except those in a very close circle, the wiser.
And she seems to have done a pretty good job of it, though the extent of her influence is debatable.
This arrangement was not general knowledge for many years.
Mrs. Wilson has been called “The Secret President.” It is suspected that it was she who commuted the death sentence of Robert Stroud, aka “The Birdman of Alcatraz,” to life imprisonment.
Wilson died Feb. 3, 1924.
Mrs. Wilson survived him by 37 years, passing away in December 1961.
She lived to ride in a limousine in President John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Parade.
