Once more, Wilson could have been happier than he was. The fault again lay more with him than with the institution, but not entirely. Six weeks after he arrived at Hopkins, he told Ellen that he wanted “to get a special training in historical research and an insight into the most modern literary and political thoughts and methods” so that he might achieve his “ambition to become an invigorating and enlightening power in the world of political thought and [that] a master in some of the less serious branches of literary art may be the more easy of accomplishment.” But he had discovered that no one at Hopkins seemed to care about how to express thoughts: “Style is not much studied here; ideas are supposed to be everything—their vehicle comparatively nothing.” He was balking at the ruling intellectual dispensation of Johns Hopkins—the German model of rigorous, painstaking “scientific” research in all fields, based on the belief that the steady, progressive accumulation of knowledge would yield precise, measurable standards and explanations. He told Ellen that his professors “wanted to set everybody under their authority to working on what they called ‘institutional history,’ … and other rumaging [sic] work of a like dry kind, which seemed very tiresome in comparison with the grand excursions amongst imperial policies which I had planned for myself.” He also disliked carrying a heavy load of courses on top of work for the seminary, admitting to Ellen, “I have a distinct dread (partly instinctive and partly instilled by my home training) of too much reading.”31
Wilson likewise had scant respect for his professors. The three faculty members in his field were Herbert Baxter Adams, who had earned a doctorate at Heidelberg before becoming Hopkins’s first professor of history and political science; Richard T. Ely, who also held a doctorate from Heidelberg and worked in economics; and John Franklin Jameson, who had just received Hopkins’s first Ph.D. in history. Wilson quickly took their measure, telling Ellen in November, “I have been much disappointed to find that the department of history and politics is more weakly manned as regards its corps of instructors than any other department of the University.” Wilson found Adams “insincere and superficial,” Ely “full of information but apparently much too full to have any movement which is not an impulse,” and Jameson “merely a satellite” of Adams.32 Further contact did not improve those impressions. Wilson’s judgment was not wide of the mark. Adams and Ely subsequently built reputations as academic organizers, whereas only Jameson would do much original work as a scholar.
Physical separation from his fiancée also hurt him keenly. He settled again for an epistolary romance, but because he and Ellen had already committed themselves to each other, he could write freely, frankly, and revealingly to her, and he did so to a greater degree than he would to anyone else in his life. During the three decades of their engagement and marriage, the couple would write more than 1,400 letters to each other—the most remarkable set of letters between a president and his spouse, except for the correspondence between John and Abigail Adams. They usually wrote letters to each other every day or two; this period before they were married, between September 1883 and June 1885, yielded well over a third of their letters (306 by Wilson and 280 by Ellen).
As an engaged couple, they wrote about many things—family, friends, respective doings, art, music, physical surroundings, hopes, dreams, plans, thoughts. But from first to last, these letters were expressions of love. “Why, my darling, I can’t tell you how completely I am yours, in my every thought,” Wilson declared in his first letter from Baltimore. “I did not know myself how much I loved you until I found out that you love me.” Ellen—who soon insisted that he call her that instead of Ellie Lou, which she disliked—responded, “I love you. Ah, my darling, I have no words—will never find them—to tell how much; nor how very, very happy it makes me to hear you say—and repeat it—that you love me.” Each one’s tone of passionate love for the other never faltered. In her last letter before their wedding, Ellen quoted from one of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese and avowed, “When I feel that you give me such a love as that, my heart is flooded with a deep peace—a perfect joy in loving and … being loved, such as no other thought can give.”33
Since Wilson seemed more comfortable with the written word, his letters were usually longer than hers, although the literary quality of her letters does not suffer in comparison. At least twice a week during his first two months at Hopkins, he sent her letters that covered many pages with his neat handwriting. The longest and most revealing of these is dated October 30, 1883. Avowing that “there can be no greater delight in my life, my love, than making you the keeper [of] all my secrets, the sharer of all my hopes, because I am sure of your love,” he filled nineteen pages about his “object” in studying at Hopkins, his original political ambition, his disappointment with the law, his settling for “becoming an outside force in politics,” his literary aspirations (“an unquenchable desire to excel in two distinct and almost opposite kinds of writing: political and imaginative”), his description of the meetings of the seminary, his assessment of his own abilities, and his mixed desires and doubts about “reaching the heights to which I aspire.” He said that writing “this profuse epistle … had done me lots of good. I’ve worked off any amount of stored-up steam.”34
Some of Wilson’s discontent found a constructive outlet when he went to see Professor Adams and, as he told Ellen, “made a clean breast” of his distaste for “institutional” research. To his surprise, Adams “received my confidence with sympathy … and bade me go on with my ‘constitutional’ studies.” Wilson began research for the project he really wanted to undertake—a book about Congress. “My desire and ambition are,” he told Ellen, “to treat the American constitution as Mr. Bagehot (do you remember Mr. Bagehot, about whom I talked to you one night on the veranda at Asheville?—) has treated the English constitution,” although he admitted, “I am not vain enough to expect to produce anything so brilliant or so valuable as Bagehot’s book.” In January 1884, Wilson had to interrupt writing this new work in order to make an emergency visit to Ellen in Savannah. Her father’s mental state had apparently turned violent, forcing the Axsons to commit him to a state asylum. After the visit, Wilson returned to Baltimore doubly determined to write his book and marry Ellen as soon as he could.35
The nine months from January through September 1884 would give him the most concentrated, least interrupted, most satisfying experience of writing he ever had. Evidently not yet completely comfortable composing directly on the typewriter, he first wrote and revised a draft in longhand and then typed a copy on his Caligraph. In early April, he submitted some chapters to the Boston publishing house Houghton Mifflin, which gave an encouraging though noncommittal response. In May, he read parts of those chapters to the seminary and submitted them as part of his fellowship application, which was successful this time. He wrote the last three chapters over the summer at his parents’ home in Wilmington.36
In early October 1884, Wilson sent the revised manuscript to Houghton Mifflin. On November 26, after what seemed to him an interminable wait, the publishers accepted the book. “They have actually offered me as good terms as if I were already a well-known writer!” he exulted to Ellen. “The success is of such proportions as almost to take my breath away—it has distanced my biggest hopes.” By mid-December, he was reading proofs, and on January 23, 1885, he received the first bound copies of the book, one of which he immediately sent to Ellen. “It is a very nicely gotten up, and attractive looking book, is it not?” she wrote back. “It’s truly delightful to behold it—almost as delightful as to read it. It seems to me, darling, that it sounds better than ever ‘in print.’ The style is really wonderful; not the most fascinating novel could ‘hold’ one more closely.” Lovers are prone to exaggerate, but Ellen did not overestimate her fiancé’s book by much. Congressional Government would be the best book that Wilson ever wrote. Some people thought that this first book by an unknown twenty-eight-year-old was the feat of a prodigy, but it was not. Wilson had b
een working on this subject for more than five years, and he had found his voice and viewpoint in ways that he had not been able to do before. Rereading Bagehot’s English Constitution during the summer of 1883 had helped, as had his successful wooing of Ellen Axson—requited love had concentrated his mind wonderfully.37
Congressional Government has a different tone from that of his earlier efforts. “I have abandoned the evangelical for the exegetical—so to speak!” he told Bridges. From its opening sentences, Congressional Government purports to present a dispassionate look at the American system. “The most striking contrast in modern politics is not between presidential and monarchical governments,” Wilson asserted, “but between Congressional and Parliamentary governments. Congressional government is Committee government; Parliamentary government is government by a responsible Cabinet Ministry.” Elucidating the contrast between these two systems is the “chief aim” of the book, which Wilson pursues through the next 330 pages. He briskly argues that the American system of checks and balances has grown outmoded, that the government is a living organism in which the Constitution is “only the sap-centre,” that the major development was centralization of power in Congress at the expense of both the states and the other branches of the federal government, and that this centralization stemmed from the ways in which “the whole face of that world has changed.”38
In his treatment of the House of Representatives, Wilson again painted his portrait of a body dominated by standing committees that meet in secret and stifle meaningful debate on the floor, but he leavened that familiar mix of criticisms with a more extensive comparison than anyone had yet made between the ways of Congress and the British and French parliamentary practices. He broke fresh ground when he contrasted the methods by which Congress and Parliament handle the tasks of raising revenue and funding executive departments and when he described the Senate. Rejecting what he regarded as an excess of both condemnation and praise of that body, he judged senators to be no better than congressmen because they all rise out of the same pool of talent: “No stream can be purer than its sources.” He regretted that the Senate was not spawning “a new order of statesmanship to suit the altered conditions of government,” and he argued that it also suffered from domination by committees, absence of debate, lack of party leadership, and divorce from executive responsibility.39
Another fresh contribution was his consideration of the executive branch. The president, in Wilson’s view, falls victim to the same fundamental flaw as the houses of Congress. “The business of the President, occasionally great, is usually not much above routine. Most of the time it is mere administration, mere obedience of directions from the masters of policy, the Standing Committees.” This subordinate role is “the practical result of the piecing of authority, the cutting of it up into small bits,” which fragments responsibility. “Power and strict accountability for its use are the essential constituents of good government,” Wilson declared. “The best rulers are always those to whom great power is intrusted in such a manner as to make them feel that they will surely be abundantly honored and recompensed for a just and patriotic use of it, and to make them know that nothing can shield them from full retribution for every abuse of it.”40 It sounded as if he was arguing for a stronger presidency, but he did not say so directly.
Wilson did not entirely forsake evangelism for exegesis. At the end, he argued that the demands of physical and economic progress require still greater and more efficient centralization of power. Therein lay the problem: “As at present constituted, the federal government lacks strength because its powers are divided, lacks promptness because its processes are roundabout, lacks efficiency because its responsibility is indistinct and its action without competent direction.” The cure lay in taking a leaf from British practice and requiring those who talked in the legislature to execute their policies. Wilson did not think such a result would be easy to achieve in America, and he closed with a call for “fearless criticism,” scrutiny “without sentiment,” and assessment “by the standards of common sense.”41
The book’s reception exceeded Wilson’s wildest dreams. Some critical, even hostile, reviews dismissed it as long on rhetoric and short on solutions, but there were few of those. The most gratifying review came in The Nation, from Gamaliel Bradford, an influential political writer whom Wilson admired and read regularly. Bradford called Congressional Government “one of the most important books, dealing with political subjects, which have ever issued from the American press.” He found the book, which was “evidently modeled on Mr. Bagehot’s ‘English Constitution,’” so good that “it will, though the praise is so high as to be almost extravagant, bear comparison to that inestimable work.” In the longer view, Congressional Government came in for additional criticism and regard. A year after its publication, The Atlantic Monthly published an article by A. Lawrence Lowell, a Boston lawyer and part-time instructor at Harvard, who took exception to Wilson’s borrowing from British models and castigated him for not appreciating the need to restrain the power of the majority. Those two points—misplaced Anglophilia and unchecked majoritarianism—formed the main lines of attack on Congressional Government for several years after its publication.42
Wilson responded to those criticisms with good-humored silence, although he did stick to his guns in prefaces to later editions of the book. In the case of his critic in The Atlantic, he took direct action. As Lowell recalled, “A few weeks later there appeared at my office a tall, lantern-jawed young man just my age. He greeted me with the words: ‘I’m Woodrow Wilson. I’ve come to heal a quarrel, not make one.’” He availed himself of The Atlantic’s offer to respond to Lowell’s criticism: he insisted that the written Constitution, though useful in fostering “conservatism” to check public opinion, did not make the situation in the United States fundamentally different from that in Britain, and he continued to call for responsible party government. “The grave social and economic problems,” Wilson argued, “now putting themselves forward as the result of the tremendous growth of our population, and the consequent sharp competition for the means of livelihood indicated that our system is already aging, and that any clumsiness, looseness, or irresponsibility in governmental action must prove a source of grave and increasing peril.”43
The early critics were not particularly perceptive about the book’s shortcomings. The allegation of Anglophilia did not stick because Wilson simply measured Congress and Parliament by standards of efficiency and accountability. The charge of majoritarianism carried greater weight. At the time, however—given persistent inertia, divided party control, and gridlock on Capitol Hill—that did not seem like much of a danger. A stronger criticism was that in his analysis he had mistaken the political deadlock between the major parties and fumbling over old and new issues for endemic structural flaws. Those conditions would soon change, first with the Republicans’ imposition of party discipline in the House under Speaker Thomas B. “Czar” Reed in 1889 and then with the major party realignment over economic issues in 1896. Actually, Wilson observed that the present state of affairs had come to pass as a result of changing conditions and that the political system was an evolving, ever-adapting organism. When he stressed party discipline and leadership as cures for current ills, he was anticipating what would soon come to pass.
It was and remains a remarkable book. In the century and a quarter after its publication, Congressional Government would never go out of print. Part of the book’s longevity has obviously sprung from its author’s becoming president of the United States, but there is more to it than that. In Congressional Government, Wilson put his finger on enduring problems engendered by the separation of powers and the fragmentation of responsibility in the American system. Masterful Speakers of the House such as Reed, Joseph G. Cannon, and Sam Rayburn might periodically tame that rambunctious chamber, but entrenched committee chairs would limit even their ability to impose discipline. The Senate would fare even worse; it would be plagued by seniority and virtually lim
itless debate and brought in line only rarely through leadership of genius, as with Lyndon Johnson.
Wilson’s achievement was all the more remarkable because of the way he wrote the book. He never made the short trip from Baltimore to Washington to observe Congress in person and would not set foot in the Capitol until 1898. This lack of curiosity seems strange because he had gone to observe the legislature in Georgia and had attended campaign events there and in North Carolina as recently as the summer before the publication of Congressional Government. Lowell later believed he had an explanation when he claimed that Wilson “lacked a scientific mind” and saw everything “through the haze of his own preconceptions.” That judgment contained a kernel of truth. Wilson admitted to Ellen shortly after the book’s publication, “I have no patience for the tedious toil of what is known as ‘research’; I have a passion for interpreting great thoughts to the world.”44
Yet it is doubtful whether firsthand observation and more primary research would have improved Congressional Government. Ironically, for all his worship of British empiricism and disdain for “literary theory,” Wilson followed the path that he professed to scorn. Though not exactly a theorist, he did belong to the class of thinkers who take an idea and develop it. He recognized and regretted that he worked that way. “The fault of my mind is that it is creative, without being patient and docile in learning how to create,” he told Ellen. He likened himself to a pianist who did not like to learn music or a soldier who wanted to lead without learning how to follow. This approach to scholarship also helps to explain why Wilson never wrote as good a book again. With Congressional Government, he had gone about as far as he could go with the inspiration from Bagehot. In order to do other work of this caliber, he would need a new inspiration.45
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