Old President, New President
Woodrow and Edith Wilson were the OG Joe and Jill Biden.
In the fall of 1919, President Woodrow Wilson was on the offensive. Due to a spat in 1912 between Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft that split the Republican party, Wilson enjoyed an easy road to the White House. In 1916, as Europe was at war with itself, he squeaked by with just 277 electoral votes and 49.2% of the popular vote.
Now nearing the end of his second term and hoping for a third, he was stumping for his pet project: entering the League of Nations. Believing he had the vigor to win a third term, he embarked on an aggressive speaking tour that covered 8,000 miles in 22 days — because if Congress wouldn't concede, perhaps he could convince the American people.
On October 2, 1919, his wife, Edith, found him collapsed on the toilet, having suffered a massive stroke that effectively ended his campaign.
We've been here before
If you get one lesson from this Substack, it should be this: We've seen almost everything there is to see. And if you're anything like me and watched the Presidential debate the other week, you saw the video of Jill Biden helping President Joe Biden off the stage and immediately thought of Edith Bolling Galt Wilson — President Wilson's second wife.
The presidential debate was a hot mess from beginning to end, with both parties mouthing off, going off-topic, and relying on hyperbole and less-than-truths (or outright lies) to get vague points across. However, there was one notable difference from when Trump and Biden went head-to-head in 2020: Biden was clearly struggling with some sort of neurological issue worsened only by a measly cold.
Rumors about Biden's condition had been swirling around the White House for the last four years — only to be quickly silenced by accusations of ablism, ageism and general divisiveness — but on June 27, 2024, there it was in plain view on national television.
Just prior to Wilson's 1919 speaking tour, he had been recovering from a bout of the Spanish flu. But it wasn't just that, he had also had a stroke in 1896. Then, in 1906. Then another in 1913. Then, a warning shot diagnosis of hypertension in 1915. Finally, his stroke in 1919 left him permanently disabled until he died in 1924.
Whether it was a cover-up or just the gentility of the time, the papers reported that Wilson had a series of "restless nights" and "exhaustion." Just a few days earlier, his wife noted twitching in his face, nausea, and his complaints of a splitting headache, causing him to cancel the rest of the tour because of what his private secretary called a "a nervous reaction in his digestive organs."
The president was in far from a fit state to run the country. But with the League of Nations, the Treaty of Versailles, and her husband's insistence that neither arrangement could be amended, Edith Wilson, along with the president's personal physician, Dr. Cary T. Grayson, and his secretary, Joe Tumulty, conspired to keep the president's condition a secret.
According to Edith's biographer, Rebecca Boggs Roberts:
"The president remained seriously ill. Virtually no one was allowed to see him. Edith met all inquiries with the same polite but firm brush-off: The president was mentally as sharp as ever; he was merely suffering from nervous exhaustion. He was not accepting meetings, but she would be happy to relay any important messages and return any necessary replies. This seemed to satisfy the bulk of would-be visitors. Most of them were content to conduct their business in writing, usually addressed directly to her."
Madam President
If you had suggested in 2024 that someone was running the government behind the scenes, I would have outright dismissed it as a conspiracy theory—except that this has happened before. I have heard many people accuse the Biden administration of being run by someone behind the curtain.
Edith Wilson is often referred to as America's first female president. It was love at first sight for Woodrow — even before his big stroke (and even before their marriage), he entrusted her with state secrets and insisted she sit in on his official meetings. During Woodrow's administration, the Republican cohort of Congress was suspicious of her, with one of its more eccentric members, Sen. Albert Fall, shouting on the Senate floor, "We have [a] petticoat government. Wilson is not acting. Mrs. Wilson is president."
Jill Biden enjoys a similarly close relationship with Joe and is his biggest advocate — as she should be. But you could argue that she has crossed the frontier line of being a supportive spouse and life partner to helping the president shuffle off the stage, congratulating him for answering every question, and brushing off inquiries about his fitness to be president.
What's next? Probably another Trump presidency ðŸ«
Wilson's administration was bookended by remarkably Trumpy events. His first campaign threw him into the White House because Theodore Roosevelt re-entered the race, splitting the Republican vote between William Howard Taft and himself, even going as far as believing that Taft's nomination was fraudulent.
Wilson's stroke made it impossible for him to attain a third term. The stroke notwithstanding, he wasn't exactly the most popular president and Warren G. Harding's campaign was gaining steam.
You can't deny the similarities between Harding and Donald J. Trump. While Trump campaigned on the slogan "Make America Great Again," Harding campaigned on a similarly nostalgic one, calling for a "return to normalcy." And while much of the American public is still clutching its pearls at Trump's "morals of an alleycat" in regards to his affair with porn star Stormy Daniels, Harding had a legacy of multiple affairs. The Republican National Convention even went so far as to pay a former mistress $25,000 and then some to keep her out of the U.S. until after the 1920 election.
Harding's presidency was filled with scandals and bribes, ultimately leaving a cool, collected Calvin Coolidge to clean up his mess when he died of a heart attack in 1923.
Let's be honest—neither Trump nor Biden are the picture of health or mental acuity. Personally, I am also not convinced that Trump's (or any recent president's) administration was run fully by him, either. With the current president in bad shape and no one else stepping up to the plate, we might be looking at another four years of him. (Maybe three if he follows the rest of Harding's legacy.)
But don't worry — that's later. Maybe we'll be dead by then.
