Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  Life did not stand still while Wilson was writing his book and basking in the glory of its reception. The Axson family’s ordeal had worsened in the spring of 1884, and Ellen’s situation looked grim. Confinement in the Georgia state mental hospital had not helped her father, and his deterioration raised the question of what would become of his four children. Only Ellen was in a position to contribute to their support, which she decided to do by seeking a teaching job. The prospect filled Wilson with chagrin. He wished “most earnestly to keep my darling from its wearing, harassing trials,” and he bemoaned that “I have never yet been of any use to anyone: I have yet to become a bread-winner.” He wanted to marry Ellen immediately, but his father advised against it and admonished, “Imitate her, my son, in the sacrifice she is making for independence.”46

  Wilson tried to do that. Through his sister Marion, who was married to Anderson Ross Kennedy, a Presbyterian minister in Little Rock, Arkansas, he learned of a possible opening at the University of Arkansas. Wilson told Ellen he did not like the university’s being “co-educational, admitting women to its classes, and even to its faculty,” and going for this post would also mean taking a “foot-hold of places lower down” in the academic world, but “a good offer is not to be despised whencesoever it comes.” Ellen knew what he craved, and she discouraged him from going to Arkansas. In any event, the prospect of a professorship there fell through in early summer. Then a turn of events brought both tragedy and salvation to Ellen and her siblings. On May 28, 1884, Samuel Axson died suddenly in the state mental hospital, probably a suicide. The news shook Ellen so badly that she told Wilson, “I sometimes wish I could go to sleep and never, never wake again.” Her fiancé rushed to Georgia as soon as he could get away from Hopkins and spent two weeks with her and her seventeen-year-old brother Stockton, whom he met for the first time. Years later, Stockton Axson recalled that his sister’s fiancé “was so very cordial that I lost my heart to him at once.”47 This was the beginning of what would become the closest and longest-lasting friendship of Wilson’s life.

  The tragedy had a true silver lining. Samuel Axson left his children an estate of $12,000, a substantial sum at that time. When Ellen learned about the inheritance, her brother recalled, she blurted out, “Now that we are rich, you can go to college and I can go to the Art League.” For Stockton, college meant Davidson, while Ellen intended to go to New York to study at the Art Students League so that she might develop her talent as a painter under the best possible tutelage, a decision that Wilson reacted to with mixed feelings. Since he was going to spend another year at Hopkins, he was in no position to object, but he confessed that he was disappointed by “the indefinite postponement of our marriage. … I cannot live or work at my best until I have, not your love only, but your self, your companionship, as well.”48 He came as close as propriety permitted to confessing his sexual desires.

  The couple spent two weeks together in September and early October when Ellen stayed with the Wilsons in Wilmington and he traveled with her to New York, with a sightseeing stopover in Washington. In New York, Wilson escorted Ellen to her boardinghouse. She reveled in her work at the Art Students League, and she enjoyed New York’s cultural attractions, especially the museums and theater. Those months formed a happy interlude in her life as she developed a new sense of herself and her artistic gifts.

  Yet she felt no pangs about giving up this independent life for marriage. After Wilson spent a week with her in New York over Christmas in 1884, he nerved himself to ask whether she really wanted to abandon it to marry him: “I hate selfishness, it hurts me more than I can tell you to think that I am asking you to give up what has formed so much of your life and constituted so much of your delight.” Ellen put his fears to rest: “Sweetheart, I would never give you a divided allegiance; I owe you my little all of love, of life and service, and it is all my joy to give it. Believe me, dear, it is an absolutely pure joy—there is in it no alloy, I have never felt the slightest pang of regret for what I must ‘give up.’ Don’t think there is any sacrifice involved, my darling, I assure you again there is none whatever.“49

  Wilson was right when he told Ellen that he could not work at his best apart from her. Except for the success of Congressional Government, his second year at Hopkins pleased him even less than the first, and he was a bit at loose ends. Even before the book was accepted for publication, he decided not to try for a doctorate. He told Ellen he would “profit much more substantively from a line of reading of my own choosing,” although he did concede “that a degree would render me a little more marketable.” With another graduate student, he did join a collaborative project initiated by Richard Ely to produce a textbook to be titled “History of Political Economy in the United States,” a collection of accounts of American writers on political economy. Wilson plunged into the work, and by May 1885 he had completed his section of the volume—seventy legal-size pages on seven political economists. The book never would be published, most likely because Ely never wrote his part of it.50

  Wilson was also looking for a job, which turned out to be easier than he anticipated. His fondest wish was to go back to Princeton as a member of the faculty, but nothing opened up there. In the meantime, another institution snapped him up, a newly founded and well-publicized college for women scheduled to begin classes in the fall of 1885: Bryn Mawr. Although the prospect of teaching there excited Wilson, Ellen raised the inevitable question:” But do you think there is much reputation to be made in a girls school,—or [if] it please you, a ‘woman’s college’?” He responded: “I have none of the same objections … that I have to a coeducational institution: and the question of the higher education of women is certain to be settled in the affirmative, in this country at least, whether my sympathy be enlisted or not.” He would, “of course, prefer to teach young men,” but Bryn Mawr offered better opportunities “than elsewhere for original work: and, after all, it’s my writing, not my teaching, that must win me my reputation.”51 Wilson accepted an offer at the rank of associate in history with a salary of $1,500. Herbert Adams also held out the prospect of a part-time lectureship at Johns Hopkins, which would pay an additional $500.

  Yet Wilson was having second thoughts about academic life. Before the Bryn Mawr prospect arose, he told Ellen, “I want to be near the world. I want to know the world; to retain all my sympathy with it—even with its crudenesses. I am afraid of being made a mere student.” Later, he told her he worried about “avoiding the danger peculiar to a professor’s position, the danger of being accounted a doctrinaire. I must make all my writings so conspicuously practical that the sneer will be palpably absurd.” Now that the Democrats had regained the presidency with Grover Cleveland’s victory in the 1884 election, he made inquiries about a position in the State Department. Journalism offered another possibility. In March 1885, the editor of a New York newspaper approached him about working as a Washington correspondent. He admitted to Ellen that he was intrigued by the “chance such work would give me for my favourite studies, in Washington, the place of places for the purpose.”52

  That journalistic feeler turned out to be a last temptation before Wilson entered academic life. He rejected that path, he explained to Ellen, because writing “strictly scientific study of institutions” was the only “field of journalism that I care to enter ever. … I should like an occupation which would leave me foot-loose, living on my wits, as it were.” But his internal voice of prudence said no: “This excellent, conservative mentor says reprovingly, ‘Wilson keep your head! Don’t let your love of active affairs tempt you to hover on their outskirts. You know well enough that you can’t enter them ever. If you understood the practical side of government and extracted a bit of its philosophy as a college pupil, there’s no reason why you should not hope to do more and better of the same as a professor if only you keep out of scholastic ruts and retain your sympathetic consciousness of the conditions of the practical world.’”53

  One last, happy task remained before
Wilson could embark on his career as a professor. At the end of May 1885, he and Ellen separately made their way southward. On the evening of June 24, 1885, they were married in Savannah, Georgia. Out of respect for her father’s recent death, the ceremony took place in the manse rather than in the sanctuary of her grandfather’s church, with no flowers or music and only immediate family and a few friends in attendance. As befitted this union of two distinguished Presbyterian families, Ellen’s grandfather Isaac Stockton Axson and Joseph Ruggles Wilson jointly performed the ceremony.54 When the couple journeyed northward in September 1885 to Bryn Mawr, the new Mrs. Woodrow Wilson was two months pregnant, and her twenty-eight-year-old husband was eager to get on with the business of living.

  3

  PROFESSOR

  When he began his teaching career at Bryn Mawr College in September 1885, Woodrow Wilson did not hold the title of professor—that would come two years later—but he would be a professor for the next twenty-five years. The Bryn Mawr campus occupied a former farm and as yet had only a few buildings. After spending a month at a boardinghouse, the Wilsons moved into a frame house newly built for faculty and their families. Bryn Mawr’s first students, thirty-six members of the class of 1889 and five graduate “fellows,” arrived on September 23, 1885. The faculty numbered only seven, five men and two women, all of whom held a Ph.D. except Wilson.1

  The teaching load was heavy. Wilson had to offer all the courses in history and political science, five each semester, but he threw himself into his work with gusto. Even in areas where he was not well prepared, he declined to slip into well-worn grooves and developed his own approaches, stressing individuals, governments, and comparisons. Wilson proved from the outset to be a lucid, engaging lecturer. Decades later, a former student remembered him as “the most interesting and inspiring college lecturer I have ever heard” and others commented on his smiles and jokes, which were often lost on earnest students, but one former student believed “that he did not enjoy teaching young women” and seemed to see them “not as of a lower sort of intelligence so much as of a different sort from himself.” It is not clear whether such views affected his teaching. He did complain to Bridges, “I very much fear that teaching young women (who never challenge my authority in any position I may take) is slowly relaxing my mental muscle.” But he also told a friend from Virginia that he felt “thankful for so comfortable a berth—where the classes are docile, intelligent, and willing,—where the administration is honest, straightforward, and liberal.” In his journal, he noted about student passivity, “Perhaps it is some of it due to undergraduateism, not all to femininity.”2

  Any restiveness Wilson felt at Bryn Mawr stemmed from his not feeling fully reconciled to academic life. After a year of teaching, he told his Princeton friend Charlie Talcott that he felt “the disadvantages of the closet. I want to keep close to the practical and the practicable in politics … in order that I may study affairs, rather than doctrine.” His lack of total commitment to academic life had an impact on his dealings with graduate students. Two of the graduate fellows who studied with him, Jane Marie Bancroft and Lucy Maynard Salmon, had unhappy experiences, in part because he believed he had to dominate them and they did not want to be dominated by him or anybody else. Both women were older than Wilson; Bancroft was already a professor of French and dean of women at Northwestern University and held a Ph.D. in history from Syracuse University. Salmon, an experienced teacher, later told Wilson’s first biographer that she had resolved “to express no opinions, to be entirely passive, and colorless, and to be a good listener.” That was hard for Salmon, who judged him “singularly ill-adapted to teaching women,” but she admitted that the real fault lay in his not having “an inquiring, adventurous mind, … never going out into the bypaths and seeking new facts or treasures.”3 Salmon was committed to scholarly research and inquiry, and Wilson was not.

  Wilson liked the undergraduates at Bryn Mawr, although he told Stockton Axson that he had had to shave off his mustache so that they could see his mouth and know whether he was serious or joking. As a married man with a pregnant wife, he did not socialize outside the classroom as much as the bachelor professors did, but he did take up tennis, playing with students and other faculty members. The small rooms and lack of privacy in the faculty house bothered the young couple, who found the situation unsatisfactory for the birth of their child. In April 1886, Ellen journeyed to the home of her aunt in Gainesville, Georgia, arriving only a day before the birth of her daughter, who was christened Margaret, for Ellen’s mother, and Woodrow, for Wilson’s mother’s family. Ellen stayed in Georgia through the rest of the academic year and into the summer, when Wilson joined her and saw his daughter for the first time. By the beginning of 1887, Ellen was pregnant again, and in the summer the Wilsons returned to Gainesville, where their second daughter was born in August. They christened her Jessie, for Wilson’s mother, and again Woodrow. When they returned to Bryn Mawr in the fall of 1887, they moved into a rented Baptist parsonage near the campus. The Wilson household now included Ellen’s eleven-year-old brother Eddie and her cousin Mary Hoyt, who would attend Bryn Mawr.4

  Despite the heavy teaching load, Wilson signed a contract with the textbook publisher D. C. Heath to write a college survey of politics and government. He also changed his mind and decided to try for the doctorate. Professor Adams again proved accommodating by not requiring Wilson to return for further classes at Hopkins; in May 1886, Wilson, after sparse and sporadic preparation, passed the examinations easily. “Hurrah—a thousands times hurrah,” he exulted to Ellen, “—I’m through, I’m through—the degree is secured! Oh, the relief of it!” With the Ph.D. in hand, he got a three-year contract to serve as associate professor at a salary of $2,000 and a promise from the Bryn Mawr administration to lighten his teaching load by appointing an assistant to take over some of his courses. Wilson had wanted a doctoral degree mainly because he still had his sights set on Princeton. In the spring of 1886, he spoke at a Princeton alumni banquet in New York, where he bored his listeners by talking about the college as a “gymnasium” for exercising “men’s minds.” The incident made some people at Princeton think that Wilson was too heavy and dull to teach there, but he continued to conspire with Bridges to gauge his chances at Old Nassau.5 In 1887, Adams finally came through with a part-time appointment at Johns Hopkins to lecture on comparative politics and public administration.

  During his third year at Bryn Mawr, despite the promotion, the pay raise, and the promise of an assistant, Wilson began complaining about his students and expressing renewed doubts about academic life. Because women were barred from voting and holding office almost everywhere in the United States, he declared, “[l]ecturing to young women of the present generation on the history and principles of politics is about as appropriate and profitable as would be lecturing to stone-masons on the evolution of fashion and dress.”6 He still sympathized with women’s aspirations for greater independence and education. He and Ellen had brought her cousin Mary Hoyt to study at Bryn Mawr, and Mary would stay on to finish her degree after the Wilsons departed. The Wilsons’ three daughters would attend women’s colleges, and when Jessie grew dissatisfied at Women’s College of Maryland, she considered transferring to Bryn Mawr, with her father’s support.

  All the while, Wilson’s reputation was growing in academic circles. James Bryce invited him to contribute a chapter to his forthcoming book, The American Commonwealth; he declined because he did not think he knew enough about the suggested subject, woman suffrage. In June 1888, Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, offered him a full professorship at a higher salary, $2,500, with a lighter teaching load and an arrangement to continue his lecturing at Hopkins.7

  Accepting the offer from Wesleyan required Wilson to get out of his contract at Bryn Mawr. He told the president, James E. Rhoads, “[M]y duty to my little family makes it even more imperative that I should seek rapid advancement in my profession in point of salary, amount and character of wo
rk, &c.” He also claimed that Bryn Mawr’s failure to hire an assistant for him meant that his contract was no longer binding. Rhoads and the Bryn Mawr trustees tried to hold him to the contract; he responded by consulting a lawyer, and the trustees relented. Wilson felt triumphant as he prepared to move. “I have for a long time been hungry for a class of men,” he told Bridges.8

  Wilson also looked forward to having more time for his writing. Yet in spite of Bryn Mawr’s teaching load and his marriage and new fatherhood, he had completed most of the government textbook and produced essays on various subjects. In one essay, “The Study of Administration,” he pioneered the new field of political science that later came to be called public administration—the study of how laws are administered after they are made. “It is getting harder to run a constitution than to frame one,” he asserted. Unlike Prussia and Napoleonic France, where administration had developed naturally under absolutist regimes, Britain and the United States faced the problem of balancing accountability to public opinion with the creation of a strong, efficient civil service. That would require borrowing from alien political cultures, but, he argued, “[i]f I see a murderous fellow sharpening a knife cleverly, I can borrow his way of sharpening a knife without borrowing his probable intent to commit murder.”9

  Next, Wilson turned to other and, to his mind, bigger questions. In December 1885, he wrote in a note to himself, “I have conceived the (perhaps whimsical) purpose of combining Montesquieu, Burke, and Bagehot” and, thereby, achieving a “SYNTHESIS” of thought about the nature of democracy. He tried out some of his ideas in an essay in which he called democracy a doctrine that had never “arrogated to itself absolute truth … but was eventually convicted of being only relatively true, and nutritious only under certain conditions and for certain persons.” Democracy worked both in “little Switzerland and big America,” though not in France or Spain or Latin America, because it was “a form of state life for a nation in the adult age of its political development.” In May 1886, he sent Horace Scudder at Houghton Mifflin a twelve-page letter in which he outlined “a very ambitious” program, noting and commenting on topics he wished to cover: “Political Morality … the democratic state is … a moral person with a very peculiar, delicate constitution;” “Political Progress. What … is political progress … and how can its conditions be supplied?;” “Political Expediency. A big subject, and as important as big, hitherto largely neglected, save from the boss’s point of view;” “Political Prejudice … its good offices as well as its bad;” and, finally, “Practical Politics.” He intended to develop this “vast subject” over several years and eventually distill his best thoughts into a single volume.10