Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  By the time that magazine article appeared, Wilson’s life had taken several significant turns. In May 1882, he began his law practice, in Atlanta. This city was the boomtown of the post-Civil War South, the capital of Georgia, and the unofficial but generally recognized capital of the “New South,” where Henry Grady, the editor of its leading newspaper, the Constitution, beat the drum for the South’s commercial and industrial renaissance. Wilson heartily endorsed the economic side of the New South vision, and he had earlier identified himself as a member of “that younger generation of Southern men who are just now coming to years of influence … [who are] full of the progressive spirit.”14 The impetus to move to Atlanta had come in January 1882, when Edward I. Renick, a classmate at Virginia, invited Wilson to share a law office and take a room in the boardinghouse where he lived. The arrangement worked well. They made a division of labor in which Renick did the office work and Wilson handled the court appearances. In October 1882, Wilson passed the Georgia bar examination with the highest score among the test takers, and he was admitted to practice in the federal district court the following February.

  Unfortunately, the fledgling attorneys lacked work. Wilson argued only two or three cases in court during his time in Atlanta, and he and Renick had little other business. The two young men whiled away idle hours in the office reading Virgil’s Aeneid aloud to each other, and Wilson read Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and biographies of Alexander Hamilton and John C. Calhoun, in which he wrote marginal notes. “I allow myself my afternoons for writing,” he told Bridges.15 As an outlet for public speaking, he and Renick organized a branch of the New York Free Trade Club, at which they discussed questions of political economy and promoted opinions opposing tariff protection. Wilson went to observe sessions of the Georgia legislature a few times, but he made no effort to get involved in local politics or take part in election campaigns.

  A fortuitous event allowed him to address a significant audience on a weighty subject. In September 1882, the Tariff Commission, an investigatory body created by Congress, held hearings in Atlanta. Covering the commission as a reporter for the New York World was a friend of Renick’s, Walter Hines Page. This lanky, cigar-smoking North Carolina native, who was a year older than Wilson, arranged for him to testify before the commission. In his thirty-minute talk, the young lawyer called the tariff “one of the leading questions of political discussion” and advocated “a tariff for revenue merely.” He doubted that he made much of an impression on the commissioners, but he was grateful for the exposure, particularly Page’s report in the World that “[n]o argument of dignity was made to-day except by Mr. Woodrow Wilson.”16 That was a bit of puffery, but Page prided himself on being a talent spotter, and he marked Wilson as someone to watch and keep in touch with. Their paths would cross again, and they would play important roles in each other’s lives.

  Wilson could have enjoyed himself in Atlanta, but he did not. He evidently complained from the outset about his situation, because his father resumed writing letters of advice and admonition. Joseph Wilson counseled his son to overcome “your law-distaste” and exhorted him to “fight the future with a brave front not only but also with a smiling [one].” Wilson almost never argued with his father, but he lamented to Bridges “the dreadful drudgery which attends the initiation into our profession.” His discontent grew to include his fellow lawyers and his newly adopted hometown. He might identify with the New South as an intellectual proposition, but confronting the reality of it and trying to make his way in its heartland filled him with disgust. “Here the chief end of man is certainly to make money,” Wilson told a Princeton classmate, “and money cannot be made except by the most vulgar methods.” Worse, he confessed to a friend from Virginia, he found that “the practice of law, when conducted for purposes of gain, is antagonistic to the best interests of the intellectual life,” which was “the natural bent of my mind. … I can never be happy unless I am enabled to lead an intellectual life; and who can lead an intellectual life in ignorant Georgia?”17

  In the spring of 1883, Wilson decided to abandon his law practice and pursue graduate study in order to become a college professor. Leaving a legal career for teaching had been on his mind even before he went to Atlanta. He had mentioned it to Harriet Woodrow at the time of his ill-fated proposal to her, and just after he moved to Atlanta, he told Bridges that he wanted to go into college teaching. Bridges tried to talk him out of the idea, warning him, as he recalled later, “that the material results of the course you propose to follow appear even more slowly than in the law.” Still, the decision was a wrench. He believed he was turning his back on his heartfelt dream of holding office. He claimed to Bridges that he was not forsaking politics completely: “I want to make myself an outside force in politics. No man can safely enter political life nowadays who has not an independent fortune, or at least independent means of support: this I have not: therefore the most I can hope to become is a speaker and writer of the highest authority on political subjects. This I may become in a chair of political science, with leisure and incentive to study, and with summer vacations for travel and observation.” The following fall, he told Ellen Axson, “The law is more than ever before a jealous mistress. Whoever thinks, as I thought, that he can practice law successfully and study history and politics at the same time is wofully mistaken.”18

  Yearning to write and lead “an intellectual life” was what pulled him away from the law. In the same letter to Ellen Axson, he confessed his “unquenchable desire to excel” in both political and “imaginative” writing, by which he meant “something (!) that will freshen the energies of tired people and make the sad laugh and take heart again.” College teaching was not the only or necessarily the best alternative to the law for fulfilling that desire. He had earlier told Bridges, “I sometimes find myself regretting that I too had not gone into journalism.” Bridges had started writing for the high-toned, influential magazine The Nation, and that kind of work would have given Wilson greater opportunity to study, observe, write about, and influence politics than a college professorship. But Wilson shied away from journalism. He saw himself as a slow learner and methodical thinker who was not naturally given to ready observation and description. Conversely, college teaching attracted him because it would allow him to live in a milieu that he found conducive to “an intellectual life.”19

  Wilson may also have chosen college teaching because of his family’s opinion. When he informed his father of his wishes early in 1883, Dr. Wilson urged him to stick with the law, but added, “I will not object to any decision you may come to, and will do my utmost to secure you a position.” His parents sought advice from the family’s arbiter in matters academic, James Woodrow, who urged that his nephew attend the graduate school at the Johns Hopkins University. The better colleges were increasingly looking for faculty from “the Johns Hopkins,” James Woodrow explained, and a fellowship there would give their son excellent visibility in the changing job market.20 When Wilson applied for a fellowship in April 1883, he was told that all of the slots for the next year had been filled; his father then agreed to pay his son’s expenses.

  Before Wilson left Atlanta, he made two further changes in his life. One was mundane, but it would have a big impact on the way he did his work. In June 1883, he bought his first typewriter, a Caligraph, which cost the substantial sum of $87, and thereby jumped aboard the technological bandwagon of the time. Typewriters had been on the market for less than a decade and did not yet feature either standard keyboards or common mechanisms for producing capital letters. Nonetheless, the typewriter gave Wilson another means with which to overcome his slowness in reading and writing, and he quickly learned to use it, typing with two fingers on each hand. In later years, he produced most of his correspondence, even intimate letters, on a succession of typewriters. He would also compose on the typewriter his manuscripts for publication and speeches that required a prepared text, often working from shorthand notes.21

  The oth
er big change in Wilson’s life was that he had fallen in love again. On April 8, 1883, he met Ellen Louise Axson. “The first time I saw your face to note was in church,” he recalled a few months later. It was a fitting place for them to meet, since she was the daughter of the Reverend Samuel Edward Axson, a friend and colleague of his father’s and a member of a family that stood even higher than the Woodrows in Presbyterian circles. Wilson had gone to Rome, Georgia, to do legal work for his mother in a dispute over the estate of one of her brothers. On Sunday he attended the church where Ellen’s father was minister. He probably did not pay much attention to the service because, he told Ellen later, “I remember thinking ‘what a bright, pretty face; what splendid, mischievous, laughing eyes! I’ll lay a wager that this demure little lady has lots of fun in her!’” After the service, he further recounted, “I took another good look at you, and concluded that it would be a very clever plan to inquire your name and seek an introduction.”22

  If this was not love at first sight, it came close. Ellen Axson, who would celebrate her twenty-third birthday the following month, was an attractive young woman. She stood five feet three inches tall, weighed about 115 pounds, and had a slightly rounded face, dark blond hair, and haunting, expressive brown eyes. When Wilson called on the Axsons after the service, his first conversation with Ellen did not proceed beyond pleasantries because her father talked about church matters. The young man fared better on his next visit to Rome, at the end of May. He got Ellen to go for a carriage ride and a walk up a hill. “Passion,” he later confessed, “… had pretty nearly gotten the better of [me] by the time we had climbed to the top of that hill.” After this visit, he confided to his mother that he was in love with Ellen Axson and intended to ask her to marry him. On a walk during his next visit, he recalled, “I was quite conscious that I was very much in love with my companion, and I was desperately intent upon finding out what my chances were of winning her.” He told her about his plans to be a teacher, including “the narrowness of my means,” all “with a diplomatic purpose, in order to ascertain whether she was inclined to regard such an alliance as a very dreary and uninviting prospect for any maiden free to choose.” Soon afterward, as they sat together in a hammock at a picnic, “I declared that you were the only woman I had ever met to whom I felt that I could open all my thoughts[.] I meant much more than I dared to say.”23

  Within the conventions that governed courtship between respectable middle-class people of the time, especially ministers’ children, the young man made his intentions unmistakable. This time, Wilson was giving his heart to someone who was prepared to receive it. For her part, Ellen remembered feeling during their walk “a quiet little glow and thrill of admiration, tingling out of my very finger-tips,” as she got her “first glimpse of your [Wilson’s] aims in life,” especially his “generous enthusiasm” about attempting to do great things and striving to be “one who could live the best and fullest life.” Yet Ellen had a reputation among her female friends as a “man-hater.” She had rejected at least three marriage proposals, in part because no man had yet come up to her standards. Her husband must be, she had once told a friend, “good, nice, handsome, splendid, delightful, intelligent and interesting.” Woodrow Wilson filled the bill except in the matter of being handsome, but with his mustache and sideburns he cut an attractive figure.24

  Ellen may have had other reasons for her reluctance to marry. She had a deep, searching mind and a complex personality. From childhood, she had shown great intelligence, excelling in school and leading her class at the Rome Female Seminary. Unlike Wilson, she had a flair for mathematics, as well as foreign languages, and she showed exceptional talent at drawing and painting. She also had a taste for philosophy and the deeper aspects of religious thought. Her dearest wish was to continue her education, but her father could not afford to send her to college, a circumstance that outraged her best friend, who told her, “Ellie, I feel bound to believe that you won’t always live in Rome.”25

  Ellen was clearly expressing her own yearnings when she said she recognized that Wilson wanted to “live the best and fullest life.” For her, such a life had seemed to grow even further out of reach when her mother, Margaret Jane Hoyt Axson, died in November 1881, soon after giving birth to her fourth child, a daughter. Ellen had lost the parent who understood her best and sympathized with her aspirations, and Samuel Axson’s wife’s death shattered his fragile mental composure. Showing signs of the severe depression that would later also afflict Ellen and two of her siblings, he was unable to work or cope with people for long periods of time. The burden of keeping the family together fell on Ellen, who now had to look after her father and her younger brothers, Stockton and Edward, who were fourteen and five. Her infant sister, Margaret (Madge), was put for the time being in the care of their mother’s sister. In the midst of this ordeal of managing the household, watching over her increasingly unstable father, and looking after her brothers, Woodrow Wilson must have struck Ellen like a ray of hope. Even his poor financial prospects as a consequence of his going to graduate school may have seemed like an advantage, since the situation could allow her time to sort out her life.26

  The romance between these two young Presbyterians had a happy though madcap ending. Wilson began to write serious, intimate letters to “Miss Ellie Lou.” In July, he told her that “I had longed to meet some woman of my own age who had acquired a genuine love for intellectual pursuits without becoming bookish, without losing her feminine charm. … See, therefore, what a delightful lesson you have taught me!” He faced the problem of how and where to make his move. After pulling up stakes in Atlanta, he went to Wilmington and then accompanied his mother, brother, sister Annie, and her children to the mountains of North Carolina, planning to leave from there for Johns Hopkins at the middle of September. Ellen also went to North Carolina in early September, and Wilson desperately angled to get together with her so that he might have the chance to declare his love.27

  The fateful encounter almost did not take place. Ellen’s father’s illness took a turn for the worse, and she decided to return to Rome. Her letters to Wilson about her change of plans went astray, and they met only by a coincidence. In order to return home, Ellen had to wait for several hours between trains in a hotel in Asheville on September 14. Wilson, who was to leave for Johns Hopkins two days later, chanced to be in Asheville that day. As he walked down the street where the hotel stood, he looked through a window and recognized Ellen by the way she wore her hair. Rushing into the hotel, he persuaded her to postpone her trip until he had to leave. The couple walked and talked and went for a drive in the mountains. Wilson took Ellen to meet his mother, and when the time came for him to leave, he told her that he loved her and asked her to marry him. Flustered, Ellen said yes. “I had no smallest idea how much I loved you,” she wrote him a few days later, “until I found how wretched I was made at the thought of your leaving … and felt my heart give a great suffocating throb.” For Wilson, there could have been no better send-off for his venture into “an intellectual life” and no sweeter token of the transformation signaled by his newly adopted name. Ellen’s letters to him would now begin “My darling Woodrow.”28

  Journeying northward to Baltimore in September 1883 to begin graduate study at Johns Hopkins was another big change for Wilson. Baltimore, with around 360,000 residents, was much larger than any city in the South and had a population that was mixed in religion and ethnicity as well as race. Not yet a decade old in 1883, Hopkins, as it was commonly called, was modeled on a German university and occupied a few drab edifices in downtown Baltimore. The student body consisted largely of men pursuing the Ph.D. degree in academic subjects. Wilson made friends with his fellow graduate students in the seminary in history and political science and at the boardinghouse where he lived, went to the theater, and under Ellen’s influence, took an interest in the visual arts for the first time. The university drew a stream of visiting intellectual luminaries, of whom the most interesting to Wilson was
James Bryce, a professor at Oxford and a member of Parliament in Britain. He told Ellen that he marveled at the “strength and dash and mastery about the man which are captivating.”29 This was the first of what would turn out to be several encounters with Bryce over the next four decades.

  The seminary in history and political science offered Wilson an outlet for public speaking. Students and faculty gathered for weekly Friday-evening meetings around a large table covered with a red tablecloth in what Wilson described to Ellen as “a large cheerful room,” during which students read papers “upon special subjects political and social.” From the beginning, he shone in those sessions. The seminary also staged debates on current issues, including one in which Wilson argued against a Republican-sponsored bill in Congress for the provision of federal aid to public schools, particularly in the South. The minutes of the seminary noted that he called it “both unconstitutional … and politically inexpedient.” That was a good characterization of his position: the critical words were politically inexpedient, and he almost certainly stressed what he considered the unwise nature of the proposal more than the constitutional limitations. His mostly northern fellow students teased Wilson about his southern background and views by greeting him as Colonel.30