Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  Tommy Wilson could not have been a young white southerner without encountering race. He grew up surrounded by African Americans. His family had not owned slaves because the common practice was for Presbyterian churches to lease slaves, usually from parishioners, for their ministers’ use. Tommy and those slaves and, later, servants had known each other well. In moving to Columbia, the Wilson family moved to a city and a state where a majority of the population was African American, and while they lived there, African Americans served in Congress, held statewide offices, and made up a majority in the state legislature, as they would for nearly all the years of Reconstruction. Yet African Americans remained invisible to Wilson. References to people of color almost never appear in any of the documents or recollections of Tommy’s early years. Later, he told a friend of how some blacks had seemed awestruck when he practiced oratory in the pulpit of his father’s church in Wilmington. “I’m Southern,” he commented, “but I have very little ease with coloured people or they with me. Why is it? For I care enormously about them.” Wilson’s later dealings with matters of race suggest otherwise.28

  Tommy Wilson’s youth in the South ended after his first foray into college education. In the fall of 1873, at the age of sixteen, he entered Davidson College in North Carolina. Small and struggling, like other southern colleges, Davidson was a spartan place, with each student having to draw his own water, cut his own wood, and light the fire in his room. The student body numbered only between 100 and 150. Tommy got good grades, except in mathematics, and did a lot of reading on his own. He made friends, took a leading part in the literary and debating society, and played on the baseball team. He spent just one year at Davidson. Why he left is not clear, but contrary to some later reports, ill health does not seem to have been the reason for his withdrawal. He spent the next year at his family’s new home in Wilmington, where he read, helped around the house, practiced oratory, and improved his shorthand skills. He wrote to his shorthand school, “I am studying for entering Princeton College, where I expect to be next session.” The “diffident youth” evidently planned to expand his horizons beyond the bounds of his native South.29

  The official name of the institution that eighteen-year-old Tommy Wilson wanted to enter was the College of New Jersey, but from early on it had gone by the name of the town in west-central New Jersey where it was located, Princeton, which by the 1870s boasted a population of about 3,500 people. It was one of nine American colleges founded before the American Revolution, and its main building, Nassau Hall, dating from 1756, was the second-oldest college building in the United States. During the Revolution, Nassau Hall came under fire before and after the battle of Princeton, and it later served briefly as the meeting place of the Continental Congress.30

  Princeton’s history was as illustrious as it was long. The college’s early presidents included the theologian Jonathan Edwards and the Scottish-born and -educated divine John Witherspoon, who was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Its early alumni included three other signers of the Declaration; nine delegates to the Constitutional Convention; the nation’s notorious third vice president, Aaron Burr; and most notable of all, the co-author of The Federalist Papers, co-framer of the Bill of Rights, and fourth president, James Madison. Equally important to the members of a Presbyterian minister’s family, Princeton was the first college in America founded by their denomination. Its founders had named Nassau Hall for William, prince of Orange and count of Nassau, the king who secured Protestant succession to the English throne, and the students had adopted orange and black as their college colors.

  When Tommy Wilson entered Princeton, in 1875, the college was staging a comeback. Until recently, a succession of lackluster presidents had not upheld the standard set by the early leaders, and more recent alumni had not been as stellar as those from the early years. Princeton had also suffered from the Civil War. Before the war, the college had drawn students from the South, but sectional tensions and the war had constricted and then cut off this source of students. Circumstances had begun to improve only in 1868, with the appointment of an able new president, James McCosh, who had immediately begun to upgrade intellectual standards and recruit students. The class Tommy Wilson entered was the largest in the college’s history, and the place was a good fit for him. With an unbroken succession of minister presidents, Princeton had not strayed far from its denominational roots and embodied the learned, sophisticated, liberal brand of Presbyterianism in which he had grown up. Happily for him, the college allowed plenty of time for reading and solitude. For all of McCosh’s learning and intellectual rigor, he had not made Princeton academically demanding for its students.31

  Tommy Wilson quickly made friends and fitted in socially, but his classes did not challenge him. Princeton’s curriculum during the first two years consisted entirely, as in most colleges, of prescribed subjects, mainly the classics, and the classroom experience featured incessant daily drill. Yet the academic situation seemed to suit Tommy Wilson. “He was not a hard student and had no ambition to stand high,” recalled his classmate Robert McCarter. Instead, he “read a great deal—good books.” Another classmate, Robert (Bob) Bridges, who became his closest friend at Princeton, remembered that “what he called ‘the play of the mind’ was as exhilarating to him as the play of the body to an athlete. It was as natural for him as an undergraduate to talk about [Edmund] Burke … as it was for the rest of us to allude to [James Fenimore] Cooper or [the popular boys’ novelist] Mayne Reid.”32

  He paid scant regard to what went on in class. He confessed in his shorthand diary that he cut class to read Thomas Babington Macaulay’s History of England: “It has all the fascination for me of a novel.” Yet he experienced an intellectual awakening. Soon after he arrived at Princeton, he wrote home excitedly, “Father, I have made a discovery; I have found that I have a mind.” His diary entries crackled with excitement at his discoveries and reflections, and his growing sense of his intellectual powers filled him with doubt as well as confidence. “I have come to the conclusion,” he wrote, “… that my mind is a very ordinary one indeed. I am nothing as far as intellect goes. But I can plod and work.” Despite his unconcern for classes, he got good grades. In a class that averaged 180 students during his four years at Princeton, he always ranked in the highest quarter, though never among the “honor men,” who were limited to the top twenty-one students.33

  His academic performance also came in spite of his preoccupation with sports, which were beginning to emerge on the college scene. Princeton played its first schedule of football games against other colleges during Tommy’s sophomore year. Although he was big enough to make the team in those days, having grown to his full height of five feet eleven inches, with a medium build, he did not try to play, but he did become an avid fan of the game. Baseball remained his favorite sport, and at the end of his freshman year he noted, “This is the first day this week that I have not played baseball.” He also joined an eating club, called the Alligators. In a photograph of the Alligators taken during Wilson’s senior year, he is the most recognizable figure because he is the only one to make the jaunty gesture of doffing his hat.34

  Of the three celebrated temptations of college men—tobacco, alcohol, and sex—Tommy Wilson made no mention in his diaries. One of his daughters told his first biographer that she remembered “hearing her father say that he had never smoked because the old Doctor [Joseph Wilson] had done enough of it for the two.” His ambitions and training as a speaker may also have led him to consider smoking a hazard to his voice, as did some aspiring orators of his generation. Later, Wilson did become a moderate drinker—like his father, of Scotch whisky—but alcohol did not flow as freely at Princeton in the 1870s as it subsequently would. Nor did sex—at least in the form of the romantic associations permissible among proper young men and women of that time—loom large. He later tried to explain away a post-college romance to his fiancée this way: “I was just fresh from Princeton where for four years I had been leadi
ng what was, to all intents and purposes, a monastic life.”35

  Tommy Wilson found outlets for “the play of the mind” in speaking and writing. Of Princeton’s two venerable debating societies, he joined Whig, where the debate topics featured his favorite subject—politics. In his freshman year he began to reflect on what he saw as the shortcomings of the system of government in the United States as compared with Britain’s parliamentary institutions, noting, “How much happier [?] she [the United States] would be now if she had England’s form of government instead of the miserable delusion of a republic. A republic too founded upon the notion of abstract liberty!”36 That preference for British institutions and practices most likely stemmed from pride in his mother’s English birth and his family’s Scottish heritage, combined with his southerner’s resentment toward the triumphant North. Rejection of universal suffrage for men was becoming a widely held article of faith among “better” people throughout the country, and it was one of his father’s strongest convictions.

  Wilson would soon change some of those views, especially the bias against republics and universal suffrage. But that early statement contained two significant elements of his later political thought. One was the penchant for comparing the British and American systems of government, and the other was his scorn for “the notion of abstract liberty,” which showed how early and how thoroughly he had absorbed Edmund Burke’s fundamental approach to politics—the rejection of notions of applying general principles and sweeping theories to public life and the belief that institutions and parties must emerge organically from human experience.

  His political views were already changing by the end of his freshman year. Twelve years later, he told a fellow scholar, “Ever since I have had independent judgments of my own I have been a Federalist (!)” By “a Federalist,” he meant the rejection of prevailing southern state-rights and limited-government views and the espousal of a strong, centralized national government, along the lines expounded by Alexander Hamilton, who would become his favorite among the founders of the Republic. Wilson also claimed that the “mixture of elements in me—full identification with the South, non-Southern blood, and Federalist principles”—instilled “a detachment of my affectionate, reminiscent sympathies from my historical judgments.”37

  In his sophomore year, Wilson began writing for publication at Princeton. In 1876, the faculty approved student petitions to start a campus newspaper, which took the name The Princetonian. This student paper became young Wilson’s major activity in addition to his participation in Whig. His first contribution was a long letter signed “W,” which deplored “the fact that very little attention is paid to oratory in Princeton College.” He came into his own during his last two years. He had already moved into the most desirable housing on campus, the newly opened Witherspoon Hall, where he joined a coterie of student leaders known as the Witherspoon Gang. Overlapping with his eating club, the Alligators, the Witherspoon Gang included such close friends as Bob Bridges, who would later distinguish himself as a poet and editor of Scribner’s Magazine; Charles (Charlie) Talcott, a future lawyer who shared Wilson’s interest in politics and would later serve in Congress; and Hiram “the Cow” Woods, who would become a physician and professor of medicine in Baltimore.38 Another future lawyer who roomed in Witherspoon, wrote for the Princetonian, and belonged to the Alligators, Mahlon (May) Pitney was not such a close friend of Wilson’s. Pitney would also serve in Congress and would become a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, appointed by Wilson’s Republican predecessor.

  During those final years at Princeton, Tommy still read on his own, although he devoted more time during his junior year to writing for The Princetonian. His harping on Princeton’s deficiencies in oratorical training took on a sharper edge, while he ridiculed charges that football was dangerous and brutal. In his senior year, he ascended to the top position, managing editor. Another editor in 1879 was his successor in the next class, a tall, gifted mathematician named Henry (Harry) Burchard Fine, who would later become a dean and Wilson’s right-hand man during his presidency of Princeton.

  “He ran a good paper,” Tommy’s classmate Robert McCarter recalled long afterward. “I can remember him now running around with a memo pad, taking shorthand notes; he worked hard.” Wilson left his stamp on The Princetonian. In contrast to his predecessor as managing editor, he included almost no references to religion and instead covered and commented on student activities and athletics. His editorials reflected his major interests, particularly speaking. In one, he pleaded for more opportunities for debate, because “debate is the chief field of oratory outside of the pulpit. … Oratory is persuasion, not the declaiming of essays.”39 Those editorials may also have been part of a self-serving and none-too-subtle campaign on Wilson’s part for a prominent speaking role at his graduation: he was describing the kind of orator that he was striving to be.

  One essay from this time, which was not published, gives the first evidence of this young man’s newfound detachment and independent judgment. Titled “Some Thoughts on the Present State of Public Affairs,” this work deplores “the entire and almost fatal separation of power and responsibility.” What sets this essay apart from Tommy’s earlier musings is an about-face on universal suffrage, which he now called “the blessing that it is capable of becoming.” Acknowledging the view that universal suffrage had lowered the tone of American politics, he argued, “This is one side of universal suffrage: look at the other. While it is indisputably true that people can comprehend great truths, is it not as true that people can comprehend these truths and that they must be educated into an acceptance of them?”40 Young Wilson was becoming a convinced democrat, and he was beginning to grasp what would become the central tenet of his concept of leadership—education of the public.

  By contrast, Joseph Wilson told his son, “Either a limitation of suffrage or anarchy in twenty-five years or sooner. I do not refer to the Negroes any more than to the ignorant Northern voters.” Conflict between the young man’s growing independence of thought and filial loyalty caused him to pass up a chance at the highest oratorical honor at Princeton. He refused to take part in the Lynde debate because he would have had to argue publicly in favor of universal suffrage; he lamely claimed to his father that the subject did not interest him. Wilson was not elected to be a class officer, either. That may have been because other classmates resented the Alligators and the Witherspoon Gang as a privileged clique that dominated college affairs. If so, that was ironic, because the Princeton class of 1879 included young men from New York and Chicago such as Cleveland Dodge and Cyrus McCormick, whose families were far richer and more socially prominent than the families of Wilson and his friends. The college was small enough for all the students to know each other, but Wilson was not particularly friendly with his upper-crust classmates. Nor was he chosen to be valedictorian. The faculty selected William F. Magie, who later recalled, “Wilson ought to have had it.” The faculty evidently resented Wilson’s outspoken criticisms of them and the curriculum in The Princetonian, together with his thinly veiled campaign for the valedictorian’s spot.41

  Editing the college paper and speaking at Whig cut down on Wilson’s outside reading, but not completely. In fact, he began a more purposeful program of self-education, which led him to discover a major intellectual influence. Five years later, he noted, “My reading in constitutional law and history had begun to widen about a year before I left Princeton,” when he had come upon the writings of the recently deceased English political commentator Walter Bagehot. Of those writings, he wrote that his “appetite for the investigation was whetted by my admiration … and finally demanded a comparative examination of our own constitution as it exists outside of the books and stripped of ‘the refinements of the literary theory.’” Those writings appealed to Wilson because his previous steeping in Burke’s anti-theoretical approach to politics had made him receptive to Bagehot’s approach to politics and government. Like the child in Hans Christian Andersen’s
fairy tale about the emperor’s new clothes, this Englishman had been an unrelenting empiricist who insisted upon seeing things as they were, not as they were supposed to be. He had set aside formal institutions and insisted on probing how politics really worked, wanting to know where power resided, who exercised it, and to what ends. Likewise, Bagehot’s direct, pungent writing style caught Wilson’s fancy.42

  This new intellectual influence also helped bring about some immediate results for Wilson’s study of politics. At the middle of his senior year, he composed an essay titled “Cabinet Government in the United States,” and in April 1879 a Boston magazine, the International Review—whose editor was a young instructor in history at Harvard named Henry Cabot Lodge—accepted it for publication. Appearing in the magazine’s August 1879 issue, “Cabinet Government” was more polished, mature, and thoughtful than anything Wilson had written before. He opened by noting a “marked and alarming decline in statesmanship,” but he argued that its “real cause” lay not in universal suffrage but “in the absorption of all power by a legislature which is practically irresponsible for its acts.” This irresponsibility sprang, in turn, from Congress’s suppression of “thorough, exhaustive, and open discussions” in favor of “dangerous and unwholesome” domination by committees that operated in secret. To remedy this evil, he proposed to give seats in Congress to cabinet members, thereby introducing “responsible Cabinet government in the United States” and opening the way for freer, more open discussion in Congress. Wilson’s solution would deprive “factious government, … [p]arty trickery, legislative chicanery … of the very air that they breathe—the air of secrecy, of concealment,” and would restore the fundamental principle “that debate is the essential function of a popular representative body” and absolutely indispensable to its role in educating the public.43