Most of his subordinates liked the latitude he gave them, but they and other politicians often found him a strange sort. Wilson enjoyed being with people and got along well with individuals and small groups. He was no “effete” intellectual. In 1914, he told an audience of journalists that he disliked notions “that I am a cold and removed person who has a thinking machine inside. … You may not believe it, but I sometimes feel like a fire from a far from extinct volcano, and if the lava does not boil over it is because you are not high enough to see into the basin and see the cauldron boil.”5 Wilson certainly passed most of the tests expected of a “regular guy.” In his youth, he played baseball, and he remained an avid fan throughout his life. As a professor, he helped coach football, and as a college president, he helped save the game from being banned. He never smoked, but he liked to take an occasional drink of Scotch whisky. He was a sexually ardent lover to the two women whom he married and, possibly, to another during his first marriage. Yet Wilson was not naturally gregarious the way politicians usually are. He probably spent more time alone than any other president. When he made big decisions, he would listen to advice and discuss matters with the cabinet, but he would also seclude himself and think the matter through strictly on his own.
In the White House, Wilson retained the working habits of a professor. He liked to study questions, read memoranda and papers, and write notes to himself and drafts of ideas that might or might not find their way into his speeches. Some of the people close to him griped about Wilson’s solitary habits and claimed that they weakened him politically. Plausible as such complaints might sound, they were nearly always wrong. With only a few exceptions, Wilson profited from his penchant for sequestering himself and thinking things through. The proof of this pudding was in his spectacular legislative accomplishments and his reelection despite the relative weakness of his party.
Besides luck and a natural talent for leadership, Wilson owed much of his success as president to something else that he brought with him from academic life. His study of politics always revolved around a central question and its corollary: how does power really work, and how, in a democratic system, can power be made to work more efficiently, with more accountability to the people? He compared the American separation of powers with parliamentary governments, which he found more efficient and more accountable, and he advocated adopting parliamentary practices in the United States. As part of that advocacy, he became the champion of a normally unloved institution—the political party—and he called for government through parties that acted “responsibly”—that is, efficiently and accountably—as the remedy for many of the nation’s troubles. When he entered politics, he enjoyed the opportunity to put his ideas and approaches to work; in particular, he acted like a prime minister and functioned as a party leader. Other circumstances helped him rack up his legislative achievements and win reelection, but he owed much of his success to his practice of party government.
Wilson was not a president for all seasons. Peculiar political circumstances—particularly divisions in both parties between progressives and conservatives—allowed this outsider to leap into the front ranks in a way that would not have happened in ordinary times. The superheated reform sentiment of the times aided him enormously in compiling his legislative record and winning a second term. The earth-shaking events of the world war and revolutionary upheavals opened incredible opportunities for international leadership. Nor was Wilson a perfect president. Two things will always mar his place in history: race and civil liberties. He turned a stone face and deaf ear to the struggles and tribulations of African Americans. Though a southerner by birth and upbringing, he was not an obsessed white supremacist like most whites from his native region in that era. Yet in keeping with his practice of delegating authority, he allowed some of his cabinet secretaries to try to introduce segregation into the federal workplace, and he permitted them to reduce the number of African Americans employed by the government. When vicious racial violence broke out during and after the war, he said nothing, except once, when he belatedly but eloquently denounced lynching. Wilson essentially resembled the great majority of white northerners of his time in ignoring racial problems and wishing they would go away.
During the war, Wilson presided over an administration that committed egregious violations of civil liberties. He pushed for passage of the Espionage Act, which punished dissident opinions, and he refused to rein in his postmaster general, who indiscriminately denied use of the mails to dissenting publications, particularly left-wing ones. He likewise acquiesced in his attorney general’s crackdown on radical labor unions. Wilson did not order those actions himself, but he was aware of them. The worst violations of civil liberties came after the war, with the “Red scare.” By then, Wilson had suffered his stroke, and he knew nothing about the central role that another of his attorneys general was playing in those events. Still, it remains a mystery why such a farseeing, thoughtful person as Wilson would let any of that occur. Likewise, it remains puzzling why someone so sensitive to economic, religious, and ethnic injustices could be so indifferent, often willfully so, to the toxic state of race relations in his country.
In the end, much about Wilson remains troubling. He shared his shortcomings with Abraham Lincoln, who likewise approved massive violations of freedom of speech and the press, and Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner who fathered children by a slave mistress, and Franklin Roosevelt, who approved an even worse violation of civil liberties, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. A consideration of Wilson poses the same ultimate question as does that of those other towering figures in the presidential pantheon: do his sins of omission and commission outweigh the good he did, or do his great words and deeds overshadow his transgressions? Likewise, as with Jefferson, who similarly left office under the cloud of a foreign policy failure, the fiasco of the embargo, does a final failure offset earlier eloquence and accomplishment? Behind Woodrow Wilson’s distinctive and often caricatured features—his long nose, big jaw, and pince-nez eyeglasses—lay one of the deepest and most daring souls ever to inhabit the White House. His was also a flawed soul rendered worse by the failing of his body, which consigned his presidency to an inglorious ending. His tomb in the National Cathedral speaks to the Christian faith that helped to form this man’s mind and spirit and would forgive him his trespasses.
1
TOMMY
In December 1912, Woodrow Wilson’s name, picture, and story were all over the newspapers and magazines. Everybody, it seemed, wanted to meet the man who had been elected president of the United States the month before. Office seekers and advice givers figuratively, sometimes literally, banged on his door. Each mail delivery brought invitations to attend ceremonies in his honor around the country. The president-elect evaded the callers for a while by sailing away with his family for an island vacation. He declined invitations to events—except one. He could not resist making a sentimental journey to Staunton, Virginia, the town of his birth, for a celebration of his fifty-sixth birthday.
The trip lived up to all expectations for warmth and festivity. The whole town turned out for a parade, and the guest of honor spoke at two events. For him, the highlight of the occasion came when he spent the night of his birthday sleeping in the same bed, in the same room, in the same house where he had been born. Also during the visit, he went to see the only member of his family who still lived in the town, an elderly aunt on his mother’s side of the family who was slightly deaf. She remembered him from his childhood, but she had not followed his life and career since then, and she did not even call him by the name he had been using since his early twenties. “Well, Tommy, what are you doing now?” she asked. “I’ve been elected President, Aunt Janie,” he shouted into her ear trumpet. “Well, well,” she answered. “President of what?”1
When Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born, on December 28, 1856, in Staunton, his birth was big news in this town of just under 4,000 people.2 He was the third child and first son of the R
everend Joseph Ruggles Wilson, minister of Staunton’s leading church, the First Presbyterian Church. He was born in the house that the church provided for the minister, which Presbyterians call a manse, and this manse stood among the newest and finest houses in the town. Staunton is in the Shenandoah Valley, then a diversified agricultural area with a focus on wheat growing and comparatively few plantations and slaves. It drew its population largely from the Scotch-Irish who had migrated southward from Pennsylvania and Maryland. They had made the valley strongly Presbyterian.
The boy’s father, thirty-four-year-old Joseph Wilson, was himself the son of Scotch-Irish immigrants, and he had been born and raised in Ohio. In his youth, he had worked as a printer on the newspaper edited by his father, who had also served as a representative in the Ohio legislature and as a state judge. He had sent Joseph, his youngest son, to Jefferson (now Washington and Jefferson) College in Pennsylvania, where he graduated as valedictorian of his class in 1844. Joseph Wilson had taught school for a year before going to seminary, first in Ohio and then in New Jersey, at Princeton. He had taken his first pulpit in Pennsylvania while teaching rhetoric part-time at Jefferson College. Teaching had drawn him to Virginia in 1851, when he became professor of chemistry and natural sciences at Hampden-Sydney College. Preaching, however, was his heart’s desire, and he served as a temporary, or supply, minister while at Hampden-Sydney. In December 1854, two years before his son’s birth, Joseph Wilson had received the call to Staunton, and the following June he had moved there with his family to fill the pulpit of its large, prosperous Presbyterian church.3
The new minister did not fit the prevalent stereotype of the stern pastor. He was outgoing and witty, much given to puns. He smoked cigars and a pipe heavily, played billiards incessantly, dressed well, and took an occasional drink of Scotch whisky. He was tall and handsome, with warm brown eyes, and he endeared himself particularly to his female parishioners. According to one relative, Joseph Wilson’s first son believed “that if he just had his father’s face and figure, it wouldn’t make any difference what he said.” Yet Joseph Wilson did care about what he said and how he said it. Having taught rhetoric, he was well versed in secular as well as religious speaking, and he followed the contemporary oratorical stars of American politics, especially Daniel Webster. Perhaps not surprisingly, Joseph Wilson remained fascinated with worldly success and would try to push his first son toward that goal.4
In those days, a truly successful Presbyterian minister needed intellect and an intellectual pedigree. With their intricate Calvinist theology, the Presbyterians laid great stress on learning and analysis, but Joseph Wilson had little taste or patience for the intricacies of that theology. Likewise, as the son of a self-made man and Scotch-Irish immigrant, he enjoyed no particular standing in Presbyterian circles. But he did have one advantage: he had married well.
Joseph Wilson’s wife was Janet Woodrow, the English-born daughter of a Scottish-born and -educated Presbyterian minister. Janet, or Jessie, as her family called her, was eight years younger than her husband, whom she had married in 1849 at the age of nineteen. Her father, Thomas Woodrow, had graduated from the University of Glasgow and its seminary and counted among his ancestors eminent seventeenth-century Scottish divines. When Jessie was five, her family immigrated to the United States from England, enduring a rough ocean crossing, which her mother did not long survive. They eventually settled in Ohio as well, where Jessie and her four older siblings were raised by their mother’s sister; their father had remarried when Jessie was thirteen and had gradually distanced himself from his first family. Those experiences had left Jessie Woodrow a shy, timid, sometimes self-pitying young woman. She also lacked her future husband’s good looks. The few surviving photographs of her suggest that it was from her that her son got his long jaw and angular features. He also inherited her blue-gray eyes, which reportedly changed color according to his mood, as had hers.5
In Presbyterian circles, everyone regarded the Woodrows as enjoying a higher status than the Wilsons. This sense of superiority was not just a matter of background. Jessie’s older brother, James, or Jimmy, Woodrow was a rising star in their little Presbyterian firmament. A friend of Joseph Wilson’s at Jefferson College, Jimmy Woodrow had studied first at Harvard, with the leading American scientist Louis Agassiz, and then in Germany, at Heidelberg. In 1861, at the age of thirty-three, he would become a professor at the South’s leading Presbyterian seminary, the Columbia Theological Seminary, then located in South Carolina. The Woodrow connection was something that Joseph Wilson cherished.
The young couple had two daughters before their son was born: Marion Williamson Wilson, born in Pennsylvania in 1851, and Anne, or Annie, Josephine Wilson, born at Hampden-Sydney in 1853. As happy as the Wilsons were with the births of their daughters, they made a great deal more of the birth of their first son. In the first surviving description of him, when he was four months old, Jessie Wilson told her father that he was “a fine healthy fellow … and just as fat as he can be. Every one tells us, he is a beautiful boy. What is best of all, he is just as good as he can be—as little trouble as it is possible for a baby to be. You may be sure Joseph is very proud of his fine little son. … Our boy is named ‘Thomas Woodrow.’ ”6
• • •
The Woodrow connection played an indispensable part in Joseph Wilson’s rise in his denominational world. In August 1857, he preached at James Woodrow’s wedding, at the First Presbyterian Church in Augusta, Georgia. His sermon evidently went over well, because the church issued a call to him the following December. Joseph Wilson was moving up in his world. With more than 12,000 residents, Augusta counted for much in its region’s economy, particularly the lucrative cotton trade. The church there had more members and bigger buildings than Staunton’s First Presbyterian, and its manse was larger and grander and provided more slaves to serve the minister and his wife and children.7 Joseph Wilson also parlayed his professional advancement still further with a shrewd political move. In May 1858, he invited the president of Oglethorpe University, where James Woodrow was then teaching, to take part in his installation service. A few months later, possibly with some prompting from James Woodrow, the president repaid the compliment by conferring an honorary doctorate of divinity on Joseph Wilson. No title sounded sweeter or more august to Presbyterian ears than Reverend Doctor, and for the rest of his life he would go by the title Dr. Wilson.
The family’s move to Georgia made their son truly a child of the South. Located across the Savannah River from South Carolina, Augusta was the unofficial capital of the region known as the black belt, at first because of the color of its soil. The richness of the soil had made this part of South Carolina and Georgia, together with the lands stretching westward to the Mississippi River, a singularly attractive place for producing the most profitable commodity in the world at that time, cotton, which had fueled a half-century-long economic boom. But this form of economic development exacted a high price from the labor force, which planters paid by using large numbers of slaves to work the plantations, thereby giving an ironic racial twist to the name of the region. At the time of the Wilson family’s move to Augusta, slaves made up just under a third of the city’s residents, but in the surrounding county they constituted half the population.8
The Wilson family soon felt a huge consequence of their move to Augusta. According to his own account, their son’s first lasting memory from childhood went back to November 1860, just before his fourth birthday, “hearing some one pass and say that Mr. Lincoln was elected and there was to be war. Catching the intense tones of his excited voice, I remember running in to ask my father what it meant.” Lincoln’s victory at the polls set off a chain of cataclysmic events. Six weeks later, South Carolina moved to secede from the Union, and the rest of the black belt, or Deep South, states quickly followed suit, including Georgia, on January 19, 1861. Though not a politician, Joseph Wilson was in the thick of the events that led to secession and the ensuing four years of civil war.9<
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The southern wings of all the major Protestant denominations except the Episcopalians likewise seceded from their national organizations. Despite his Ohio birth and upbringing, Joseph Wilson fervently embraced the cause of the South. When the southern presbyteries withdrew from the Presbyterian Church of the United States of America during the summer of 1861, he offered his church as the meeting place for the newly formed General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America, which convened there the following December. That body elected him to its third-ranking office, permanent clerk, and in 1865 he moved up to the second-ranking spot, stated clerk, managing the organization’s finances and serving as its parliamentarian and record keeper. At the war’s end, the southern Presbyterians dropped the reference to the Confederacy from their denominational name but did not rejoin their northern brethren. Joseph Wilson would remain stated clerk of this denomination for thirty-three years. He also saw active service in the Confederate cause. He joined a group of influential citizens of Augusta in a home defense unit and made at least one trip to the Confederate capital, Richmond, Virginia, to inspect hospitals and confer with high-ranking officials, and he also served briefly as an army chaplain.10
The war and the denominational split caused a family rift as well. The break was worse with the Wilsons than with the Woodrows. Joseph Wilson’s father had earlier taken anti-slavery stands, and two of his brothers became Union generals. Joseph Wilson did not resume relations with his extended family after the war, and his son would not get to know his Wilson relatives until he was a grown man. On the Woodrow side, things were different. James Woodrow’s move to the Columbia Seminary in 1861 had placed him in the citadel of secession. During the war he put his scientific training to use as chief chemist of the Confederacy, which meant that he oversaw munitions manufacturing for the Confederate armies. His and Jessie’s father, Thomas Woodrow, remained in Ohio and sided with the northern Presbyterians, but after the war Joseph Wilson invited his father-in-law to preach in Augusta, and his son grew up knowing his Woodrow relatives from the North.11
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