Nishtha

Margaret was daughter of the 28th President of the United States of America, Woodrow Wilson, (1913-1921) whose vision and commitment to world unity eventually lead to the formation of the 'League of Nations'. She was an intelligent, capable, fiery woman of her times, a suffragette, and a famous concert singer. In an age before television, when the public might not instantly recognize a presidential child on the street, the Wilson girls took malicious delight in flitting about Washington, testing public opinion for themselves. Margaret, the firstborn, once instigated a sightseeing tour of Washington, with the sisters disguised as “hicks” from out of town. They patiently waited in line, bought tickets and then proceeded to ratchet up the farce by asking inane questions of the tour guide. With a whiny, high pitched voice, Margaret relentlessly implored the guide to let them go inside the White House itself. They wanted to see the family quarters, she said, where the Wilson girls actually slept. The exasperated guide patiently explained that it could not be done and then patronized them with his authority on the subject of the White House and his “authentic” stories of the first family. Neither he, nor the other sightseers, caught on to their true identities. Later, upstairs in the White House alone, the Wilson girls convulsed with laughter.

While Eleanor and Jessie were busy planning their weddings, Margaret continued her voice lessons. She had beaus of her own, but somehow never found the right one. One of them, Boyd Archer Fisher, was a graduate of Harvard, a writer, social worker and efficiency expert from New York. Margaret’s mother was impressed, describing him as “quick to take not only an idea but a point of view or an impression.” But Margaret was not in love.

Boyd pursued the first daughter, trying to win her by writing a one-act play, using it to describe his jealousy over a singing career with which he couldn’t compete. Aware of stories that suggested Margaret was the least attractive of the sisters, Boyd’s protagonist in the play told her character, “When I think about you, you begin to radiate until I think you are the most beautiful girl in the world.”

In one of his letters to her, Boyd described how he was attempting to make something of himself so she didn’t have to be ashamed of him, just in case “you do decide to take me.” He was her date at a party in Greenwich Village on February 14, 1914, after which Margaret was portrayed in a New York Times article as being the “chief factor in the evening’s success.” The article said that Boyd Fisher claimed Margaret for the first dance and “a share of the others,” but he was not able to monopolize her evening. “Miss Wilson distributed her time among the two hundred men and women, boys and girls at the party so evenly that when it was over she had exchanged a few words with every one of them.” Boyd and Margaret remained only friends for the rest of their lives.

When the First Lady died, Margaret Wilson, the only remaining daughter at the White House, stepped in as hostess, growing to hate the pressures as well as the role. In a note to her sister Jessie, she apologized for not writing sooner, saying she had to entertain houseguests and callers “every minute.”

Margaret’s musical career had long been the great love of her life. She had studied music at Goucher College, with continual vocal training in New York. In 1915, with her father happily in love with Edith Bolling Galt, Margaret finally felt free to start her concert tours. The newspapers were filled with surprised praise, saying that her lyric soprano and personal charm would “command recognition quite independent of her distinguished parent.” A piece in the Baltimore Sun, captured in one of her sister’s scrapbooks, proclaims that “there are many voices that appear bigger, but hers is so clear, so pure, that it carries…just as a Stradivarius does.” Her “Ave Maria,” the newspaper said, was “an act of worship.” After a sold-out concert for twelve thousand in Denver, a free concert was held the following day for the thirteen thousand who had been turned away the night before. Always, all proceeds after concert expenses were given to charities. During the First World War the Red Cross was the benefactor. She toured around America singing to raise funds for the Red Cross, and went to sing at the frontiers of war-torn France as a way of giving her support and making a contribution to the cause.

From October 1915 to March 1918 Margaret and her accompanist traveled to every training camp in the country, giving concerts for the soldiers. Porter Oakes, a young journalist for the National War Committee of the YMCA, captured one such concert, held at twilight. He described a “sea of bronzed faces,” ten thousand soldiers, waiting for Margaret to sing. The men had just received word that they were being shipped to the front. Her songs, favorite old melodies, made “a chain of musical memories to be carried away.” Oakes described soldiers weeping, seeing through the music the love of a mother or sweetheart or father. The tears “loosened up and washed away that tight-around-the-heart feeling that came with the knowledge that there would be no furloughs home before the big movement began.”

Margaret’s tireless treks across the world for American service men were a constant worry to her father. She would travel twenty miles down artillery-blasted roads to sing for two or three wounded soldiers, often after much bigger performances. By the end of the war, her outdoor concerts had strained her voice beyond repair, and the sights and experiences of battlefield horror prompted a nervous breakdown. Recuperating some months after the war at Grove Oak Inn in North Carolina, General John J. Pershing and his staff asked her to sing. When she told them how she had lost her singing voice, General Pershing rose and lifted his glass. “To Miss Wilson,” he said, “just as much a victim of war service as were the soldiers who filled this country’s hospitals.”

Less than a year and a half after Margaret’s mother died, her father married Edith Bolling Galt on December 18, 1915. There was, of course, scandal in Washington because he married so soon. But Margaret and her sisters knew that Woodrow Wilson had been devastated by the loss of his wife, and was desperately lonely. They tried their best to be understanding and to welcome the new wife into the family.

After the war, with his post war treaty in shambles, Wilson undertook a disastrous trip to urge ratification of the Treaty of Versailles and to try to gain support from the American public for the League of Nations. He traveled eight thousand miles in twenty-two days. He made thirty-two major speeches and eight minor ones. He collapsed on the trip, his health irretrievably broken, and was rushed back to the White House. He soon suffered a major stroke. His new wife, Edith Wilson, protected him. She was accused of being the Lady President, the Regent, the Iron Queen, “the Petticoat government”--and less complimentary terms. By this time Margaret was living and working in New York, but she would come home on weekends to be with her father.

Finally, on Sunday, February 3, 1924, at 11:55 a.m., nearly three years after he left the White House, Woodrow Wilson died. His doctor stood on one side of his bed, taking his pulse, with Margaret and Edith Wilson on the other, as he breathed his last. At the time, Jessie and Frank Sayre were living in Siam and could not come. Eleanor and William McAdoo rushed home. Margaret moved about in a daze, and would not respond to conversation.

The Wilson’s, who had always been so close, had lost the lynchpin of the family. Their father left his modest estate to Edith Wilson, with the exception of $2,500 to be paid annually to Margaret as long as she remained unmarried. She was to remain unmarried for the rest of her life. Rent consumed half of her stipend, leaving her little to live on.

Margaret returned to New York. Her life there remains somewhat of a mystery. It is said that she worked with the Biow Agency, an advertising firm, as a consultant and to develop new clients for the firm. Later, she attempted some speculation in oil stocks that went sour. It is not known whether she actually sold the stock or just introduced people to brokers. However, a letter from Helen Bones, the cousin who had lived with the Wilson’s in the White House, indicated that she had received repayment from Margaret. Helen Bones said she had entered the venture knowing it was a risk, and that it was not Margaret’s fault. However, she kept the money, knowing also that it meant much to Margaret’s sense of pride and honor to pay back everyone of her friends.

Despite privation, Margaret finally had the space and “time for concentrated thought,” as her father had once described it, reading philosophy and striving for a higher principled life. In March 1926 Margaret appeared in court where two teenagers were being arraigned for burglarizing her apartment. She refused to press charges. The magistrate said, “If they are not prosecuted, now, they will not learn their lesson.” Margaret smiled at the judge and said mildly, “The best lesson for them is the lesson of kindness.” The following day the Time wrote an editorial, stating that Miss Wilson was perhaps more kind than wise.

Margaret became interested in the religious classics of India and had begun reading about Indian mystics in the early 1930’s. One day in the library she happened upon a book by Sri Aurobindo and sat down in the main reading room. She became lost in it, and an attendant had to tell her that the library was closing. Every day she returned to read until she finished the book.

Margaret went to live at Pondicherry, India, where Aurobindo had his ashram, or spiritual community. There she spent her days in prayer and meditation, working at her assigned tasks in the flower garden, and helping to type and edit Sri Aurobindo’s religious writings.

Her father’s stipend went further there, and Margaret was able to contribute one hundred dollars a month to the ashram and still have a little money for fresh fruit, and for her favorite facial lotions sent by Eleanor from home. There were two servants to prepare her simple meals, although she reserved for herself what she perceived as the privilege of washing Aurobindo’s dishes. “I am not homesick,” she told a visiting reporter. “In fact, I never felt more at home anywhere any time in my life.”

Her obituary as printed in the New York Times, called her a “recluse,” as though she were some sad hermit, but such was not the case. Letters between Margaret and her sister, Eleanor, show a fully alive, happy soul, at peace with herself. “Do you remember those beautiful words in the Bible?” she wrote her sister. “And I shall keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed (or fixed) on me? That is what we must do,” she said, “learn to stay our minds on Him.” In the same letter Margaret told Eleanor of her new name, given by Aurobindo. It was “Nishtha,” she said, and it meant a “one-pointed fixed and steady concentration, devotion and faith in the single aim.” Her intense times of prayer and meditation moved Margaret deeply. “Sometimes I feel as if the Divine were whispering to my soul, and I, in order to catch the faintest word, am listening as I have never listened before,” she wrote to a friend in the States. “Sometimes it is as if the Beloved and I were telling each other secrets that none could share except in a wordless communion with ‘Us.’”

At length Margaret’s body, which had suffered ill health for much of her life, began to give way. In an ironic twist of fate, she suffered periodic occurrences of kidney problems that had eventually killed her mother, but she would beg the Indian doctor not to send her back to New York. For several days she hovered between life and death. On April 24, 1944 Margaret Woodrow Wilson, or Nishtha, died of uremia. She was buried in the Protestant section of the cemetery at the ashram in Pondicherry.

Risha Blackand, an Indian student at the ashram who had been assigned the task of escorting Margaret back to her apartment every evening after meditation, wrote of her death. “So lived Nishtha in her spacious apartment fanned by the fresh breeze from the sea and caressed by the palmy breath of her garden blossoms. So she thought and felt and dreamed: so she loved God and her fellow men,” he said. “...Suddenly, like a flower, she drooped and languished and faded away. But the unfading bloom and aroma of her soul still hovered over the atmosphere in which she aspired and prayed and adored her beloved Lord.”