President Marshall

WI Woodrow Wilson had a fatal stroke anytime after March 3 1913 (except during the 1916 election campaign)

I have heard the guy treated as a joke. I am, however well aware that numbers of VPs who accidently get the top job doing better than expected.

Any ideas?

Early on would he have taken a different view of WW1?

If it were late in the term might Woodrow's 'martyrdome' have allowed him to get the US into the League, and even Marshall elected in 1920?
 
Wilson, who is as close to a supervillian as has ever lived on 1600 Pennslyvania avenue, would be dead. This is a massive gain for the ATL, who would be spared the segregation of the armed forces, the revival of the KKK, and the Palmer Raids.

Marshall, I think, would be a folksy type and I think would probably rise to the challenge of being POTUS without being brutally partisan and outright evil against Blacks and people who didn't like him. That said, only the Taft-TR split made Wilson's 1912 election possible, and the Republicans may very well gain the office in 1916.

As for Marshall's legacy? He'd have to deal with the opening of WWI, continued struggles from organized labor for rights, and how he wants to handle Wilson's campaign promises to beat the trusts and tariffs. I don't think Marshall would entirely give up on such aims, so that would still be the direction the US continues in, as Marshall tries to adopt more of the Progressive elements of the last decade.

All in All, probably an average presidency/
 
Easiest way is for the conspiracy to be exposed. Edith Wilson was defacto POTUS after 1919 (Nancy Reagan looking insignificant in comparison), and when SecState Lansing tried holding Cabinet meetings and running the govt, Wilson fired him and most of the Cabinet who participated. He even had delusions about a third term in 1920. If so, they declare him incapacitated (impeachment takes too long), Marshall becomes POTUS. Or the OTL stroke can kill him, and Marshall automatically becomes POTUS.
 
Origin of the Presidential Pension

This what if reminds me of a (hopefully) humorous what if I posted on soc.history.what-if many years ago.

Origin of the Presidential Pension

There's a common legend told about a former President ending up
destitute and penniless in a subway station, but it's just not so. I
would like to set the record straight on this matter.

The legend is probably based on the story of Thomas R. Marshall, who was
Vice President under Woodrow Wilson from 1913-1921. Marshall was an
affable, but not very talented, political hack from Indiana who often
joked that he'd run for Congress in the 1890s in order to afford moving
out of his mother's house.

Following his very short lived attempt to secure the Presidential
nomination in 1920, Marshall returned briefly to his small hometown of
New Athens, Indiana, and tried to resume his law practice. But by then
the entire state had been taken over by pro-Harding Republicans, and
they effectively black-balled Marshall's law business. The destitute and
desperate Marshall then moved to New York City in 1923 with an
invitation from none other than Frank Roosevelt, the former Navy
Undersecretary during the Wilson Administration and one of Marshall's
closest friends from the Washington years. Roosevelt said he was going
to arrange for a number of interviews for Marshall in the autumn with
New York law firms, any of whom would be glad to have the prestige of a
former VP in their offices.

Unfortunately, before Marshall could meet with Roosevelt, Franklin went
on a vacation in Maine where he was exposed to the deadly polio virus.
Suddenly stricken and eventually paralyzed from the waist down,
Roosevelt and his wife and family moved that summer down to Warm
Springs, Georgia, to facilitate his eventual partial recovery from the
crippling disease. In the panic of the moment they understandably forgot
about poor Tom Marshall, who was living in the luxurious Waldorff
Astoria in Manhattan in eager anticipation of landing a lucrative job
with a top law firm.

According to one report he actually was notified of Roosevelt's
condition and departure for the Southern spa, but was too drunk on
illegal sherry and champagne (the famed "swizzling Portuguese" drink of
the Roaring 20s) to pay any heed to the telegram he'd been handed.
Whether that story is true or not, the case truly was that Marshall had
developed a sad fondness for the bottle in the years following his
departure from the corridors of power in Washington, DC.

It was not until February of 1924 that Marshall became truly aware of
his loss of a patron in NYC and realized he would have to leave his
plush accommodations in the Waldorf and begin living within his means.
By then, however, his drinking was legendary around the state, and his
own attempts to secure employment with increasingly less prestigious law
firms resulted in no offers Thomas could consider worthy of his position
as a former Vice President. It is here that Marshall's story took its
saddest turn.

A widower since the Crimson Fever epidemic of 1917, the very one that
had delayed US entry into the Great War, the 64 year old Marshall in
January of 1925 met a young lady, one Tabetha Sorenson of Brooklyn,
whose exact age is lost to historical records. She is variously listed
in the newspaper clippings of the day as being 27, 29, and 34 years of
age. Her employment and romantic background were even more mysterious,
if not scandalous. It is certain that Miss Sorenson had been kept as a
paramour by a series of bankers in the early 20s, though the rumors that
she'd started in her life of ill repute as the consort of Henry Ford
during his war time visits to England in 1917-1918 were probably just
rumors.

Nonetheless, in 1925 she too had fallen on hard times and was attempting
to sue one of her former gentlemen benefactors in order to keep her 15
year old son, Jeffery Sorenson, in Albany's prestigious Hamilton-Rockley
boarding school. By a happenstance meeting at a New Year's Eve party,
Miss Sorenson met and engaged the legal services of Marshall, assuming
that as a high profile politician, he would be able to secure her a
favorable settlement.

Although the two fell madly in love, poor Miss Sorenson grossly
overestimated the legal talents of Marshall, who proceeded to botch
every pre-trial motion and deposition he performed in Sorenson's case,
even when he managed to show up sober (or show up at all!) for the
proceedings. Somehow the flighty Miss Sorenson found Marshall's
ineptitude charming, and by March of 1926, with all her legal recourses
exhausted, the couple found the only way they could continue to stay
together was to get married. The groom was 65.

Neither was aware of just how meager Marshall's resources had become. By
this time he'd been expecting a large settlement from the New York
banker he was suing to create a retirement fund for himself, and had
been living only off of the proceeds of the sale of his family farm in
New Athens, IN. Now forced to fend for himself for the first time in his
life, Marshall took to endorsing new cigarette brands just to make his
rent and still rather exorbitant food bills. He had also tried to win a
small salary as car salesman, but an irate and vindictive Henry Ford
personally ordered the Staten Island dealership to fire Marshall in
December 1927, thereby adding fuel to the rumor that the new Mrs
Marshall had once been in Ford's employ (and perhaps that her services
had been below standard).

Regardless, with their first child on the way in early 1928 and his
prospects for future employment completely exhausted, Thomas finally
scraped together an investment group comprised of a number of former
Democratic officials and a couple of reputed mobsters from the Gambino
crime family and plunged over $450,000 in the stock market in hopes of
making a killing in the bloated New York Stock Exchange. For the first
16 months the investment club seemed to be an incredible success. Things
were going so well, that after November 1928, when his friend Frank
Roosevelt, now rather pretentiously calling himself "FDR", was elected
Governor of New York, Thomas snubbed the man at his own inaugural party,
calling him "Franklin Delano Rolling-chair" to his face and winning the
lingering animosity of the future president.

But times were good and the aging ex-pol was wanting to enjoy "his
crusty Autumn years" as he called them, and enjoy the company of his
young toddler daughter, Rejuvena Magdalen Marshall. Marshall about this
time also began engaging in the risky Wall Street practice of investing
against future earnings in order to "balloon his profits" as the ironic
pre-Depression figure of speech went. "Balloon" was right. Less than 10
months after insulting the new Governor of New York, Marshall and his
highly leveraged investment club was wiped out by the 1929 crash of the
Stock Exchange--and he found himself over $3 million dollars in debt!

Distraught, the septuagenarian turned to the bottle with an unheralded
vengeance, driving his wife to suicide and eventually having to give up
his 2 year old daughter Rejuvena up for adoption after the New York City
Department of Child Welfare determined him to be an unfit parent. His
last coherent years were spent drifting from one Democratic Party
function to another, railing about how he and "Woody" had "whupped the
Kaiser in '18 and saved Western Civilization," and generally making a
nuisence of himself. In fact Marshall had been the most outspoken
pacifist in the Wilson Administration, criticizing US involvement in the
European War even after the Declaration of War passed Congress on July
the 4th, 1917.

By 1931 he was in a constant tremble from shot nerves, old age, and an
excessive use of alcohol. Like many out of work men of the Depression,
he survived by selling apples on the street corners, begging handouts
from area Catholic soup kitchens, and probably by a bit of petty
larceny, too. He was generally unrecognized by even his old colleagues
when the Democrats gathered in New York in August of 1932 to nominate
his now bitter enemy FDR for the Presidency.

When his former associate from Congress, Cactus Jack Garner, finally
figured out who Marshall was in a surprise encounter the night before
Garner himself was nominated for Vice President, Garner tried to hand
Thomas a $50 bill and give him directions to the nearest cheap
restaurant. But FDR's assistant, Harry Hopkins, who'd been accompanying
Garner during the whole convention, also recognized the drunk as FDR's
sworn enemy and persuaded Garner that this really was just an infamous
local crazy man who happened to look like Marshall and had since become
convinced that he was either Marshall or Napolean. Garner and Hopkins
got back into their '31 Ford Fairlane and drove on to the Madison Square
Garden convention center, never to see Marshall again.

The next few years carry a number of stories, mostly recounted by fellow
drunkards on the fringes of society, of Marshall's attempts to survive
life as a homeless man. But for a 72 year old man in the advance stages
of degenerative alcoholism and probably on the margins of sanity itself,
actual survival on the mean streets of New York City was not a pleasant
prospect. When he was finally found dead in a Bronx bus station (not a
subway station, please note) in June of 1934, the only possessions he
had were a few loose coins, a half-eaten bagel, some newspaper clippings
of his partying hey-days at the Waldorf-Astoria, and a "Win With Wilson
(And Marshall, too!)" campaign button from his 1912 political and personal
zenith.

His demise caused a brief scandal in Congress at the time, but no
legislative action was taken for another 7 years, when it was discovered
that former President Calvin Coolidge was also living in extreme poverty
in a wooden cabin in the north of the Vermont Maple Country. By the only
unanimous vote in Congress during the entire Roosevelt Presidency--some
say as a rebuke to the notoriously frugal and vindictive FDR--the US
Congress in February 1941 voted for the creation of a life long pension
for all former US Presidents and Vice Presidents, what is now called the
Coolidge-Marshall Law. It is said that laughter was heard in that same
Bronx bus station in April of 1945 when FDR died in office, never to
collect the pension named after the man he so utterly despised.


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Of course the above should be read with a grain of salt.
 
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