That was an ambitious plan, especially coming from a twenty-nine-year-old scholar who was then only on the verge of receiving his Ph.D. To his Princeton friend Hiram Woods, Wilson confessed “an intellectual self-confidence, possibly out of all due proportion to my intellectual strength, which has made me feel that in matters in which I had qualified myself to speak I could never be any man’s follower.” He needed such self-confidence because research and writing did not come easily to him. “Composition is no child’s play with me,” he told Ellen. “I can’t write just what comes into my head: I have to stop and perfect both expression and thought.”11 After they married, Ellen helped him by reading not only his manuscripts but also foreign texts. With her gift for languages, she quickly learned German, and she read, selected, and translated material for him.
Looking at current affairs, he expounded on the need for party realignment in order to come to grips with such pressing issues as the tariff and monetary standards, and he claimed that “the difference between democracy and socialism is not an essential difference, but only a practice difference.” In using government to address social and economic problems, socialists rushed in where democrats trod warily, but with the growth of huge corporations, he asked, “[M]ust not government lay aside all timid scruple and boldly make itself an agency for social reform as well as for political control?” He went further in his lectures at Johns Hopkins in 1888: “Government does not stop with the protection of life, liberty, and property, as some have suggested; it goes on to serve every convenience of society. … The state is not a body corporate,—it is a body politic; and rules of good business are not always rules of good politics. … Business-like the administration of government should be—but it is not business. It is organic life.”12
This sympathetic attitude toward socialism presaged an important breakthrough in Wilson’s political thought. Also at Hopkins in 1888, he divided the nature of government into two functions, constituent and ministrant. Constituent functions are “necessary to the civic organization of society,—which are not optional with government, even in the eyes of the strictest laissez-faire.” Ministrant functions are activities undertaken “by way of advancing the general interests of society,—functions which are optional, being necessary only according to standards of convenience or expediency.”13 This definition of the functions of government allowed Wilson to move beyond asking how power worked so that he could begin to ask why political systems take the forms that they do. His identification and delineation of constituent and ministrant functions would provide the basic structure for the textbook published in 1889 as The State, and his latitudinarian, relativistic views about the permissible activities of government would receive further elaboration in that book. Likewise, his analogy likening political life to organic life would provide the basis for his interpretation of the growth and functions of states through the lens of evolutionary thought.
Another significant change in Wilson’s life occurred on April 15, 1888, when his mother died. He left at once for Clarksville, Tennessee, where his parents had been living, and spent a week with his father, brother, and sisters. From there he wrote grief-filled letters to Ellen, in which he recalled his mother and his childhood with her, including his depiction of himself as “a laughed-at ‘mamma’s boy.’” Work helped Wilson get through this anguished time, as did the move a few months later to Wesleyan, where he again quickly demonstrated his prowess as a lecturer. “I can see him now with his hands forward, the tips of his fingers just touching the table, his face animated,” one student later remembered, and another recalled, “He had a contagious interest—his eyes flashed.”14 At Wesleyan, Wilson could concentrate more on his specialty, and he used chapters of The State in his lectures. Outside the classroom, he organized the Wesleyan House of Commons, a debating society modeled on the ones he had participated in at Princeton and Virginia, and he found an outlet for his love of sports by helping to coach Wesleyan’s fledgling football and baseball teams.
As southerners, he and Ellen had felt some trepidation in venturing so far north, but the college and the town suited them. With the larger income they were able to rent a bigger house—and Ellen could gather more of the Axson family together again under one roof. Already living with them was her brother Eddie, and in 1889 her brother Stockton joined them, enrolling at Wesleyan to study English literature. The Wilsons also found the religious situation in Middletown to their liking. Since Presbyterian churches were scarce in New England, they joined the First Congregational Church of Middletown, whose pastor was a superb preacher and became a close friend. When Ellen became pregnant for the third time, early in 1889, she did not retreat to Georgia, in part because she was receiving excellent care from a female physician in Middletown. This proved to be the most difficult of Ellen’s pregnancies, but the doctor’s care helped her through the last weeks. On October 16, 1889, she gave birth to another daughter, whom they christened Eleanor Randolph, after Ellen’s aunt and uncle. Wilson and Ellen may have been hoping for a son, but because this pregnancy had taken such a toll on Ellen, they did not try to have any more children.
Happy as Wilson affected to be with his male students at Wesleyan, he did not find them an improvement over his female undergraduates at Bryn Mawr. “My source of stimulation is my connection with the Johns Hopkins,” he told Scudder.15 While giving his lectures there in 1889, he met Frederick Jackson Turner, a graduate student from Wisconsin, who was taking Wilson’s class and staying at the same boardinghouse. Turner and another graduate student, Charles Homer Haskins, soon became fast friends of Wilson’s. Both men went on to become outstanding historians, and Wilson would keep in touch with them, especially Turner.
Wilson never regarded Wesleyan as anything more than a way station on the road to Princeton, and in 1889 Francis Landey Patton, McCosh’s successor as president, tentatively offered him a position teaching political economy and public law. Wilson demurred because it would oblige him to spread himself thin. Some Princeton faculty members then objected that Wilson was, as Bridges reported, “a little heterodox (shades of Calvin and Witherspoon protect us) … [and] too learned and deep to interest his students.”16 Patton, who was an orthodox, old-fashioned Presbyterian cleric and dilatory by temperament, shelved the matter.
Fortunately for Wilson, Bridges kept working on his behalf, and some influential younger alumni interested themselves in bringing him to Princeton. Two of them were Wilson’s wealthy classmates Cleveland Dodge and Cyrus McCormick. Although they had not known Wilson well at Princeton, they felt a strong sense of class solidarity, and as products of the McCosh era they wanted to promote the college’s academic prestige. McCormick was already a trustee, as was Moses (Momo) Taylor Pyne, another extremely wealthy man, who had been two classes ahead of them and was on his way to becoming the most powerful member of the board. At some point, these men offered to make up any additional salary for Wilson, and Patton and the trustees relented. On February 13, 1890, Pyne telegraphed Wilson to offer him a professorship at a salary of $3,000, with the promise that his classes would soon be limited to public law, his preferred field.
The victory had some sour notes. Wilson was already making $3,000, and Patton would not guarantee that he could continue to lecture at Hopkins. The president also took the new recruit down a peg by telling him that some at Princeton had objected to the way “you minimise the supernatural, & make such unqualified application of the doctrine of naturalistic evolution.” Patton reminded him that the trustees “mean to keep this College on the old ground of loyalty to the Christian religion … & they would not regard with favour such a conception of academic freedom or teaching as would leave in doubt the very direct bearing of historical Christianity as a revealed religion upon the great problems of civilization.” Wilson shrugged off the reproof. He told a friend that Princeton had “the size and progressiveness without the unbearable and dwarfing academic Pharaisaism [sic] of Harvard or the narrow college pride of Yale,” and he called Patton “a
thoroughly wide-awake and delightful man.”17
Ironically, it was Wilson’s growing reputation as a scholar that almost prevented him from going to Princeton. Patton’s criticism accurately reflected what Wilson had been saying in his lectures at Hopkins and what he had written in The State. “It is now plain that [democracy’s] inspiration is of man, and not of God,” he also declared. “The constitution of govt. is not a matter of inspiration.” Wilson further demonstrated his renown and his ambition when he reviewed James Bryce’s newly published and much-heralded book, The American Commonwealth, in the leading journal in his field, Political Science Quarterly. Although he called Bryce’s book “a great work, worthy of the heartiest praise,” particularly for its clarity, its author having “breathed the air of practical politics,” he judged it inferior to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America in style and philosophy. Bryce conveyed the facts, he said, “not the principles derived from them.” Though praising the book’s “invaluable” contributions, he regretted that Bryce, “who has given us a great deal, might have given us everything.”18
He also had a personal problem with The American Commonwealth. Bryce frequently cited and quoted from Congressional Government, but his treatment of Congress virtually plagiarized Wilson’s book. “How remorselessly ‘Congressional Government’ (a small volume by myself) is swallowed up in Part I of Bryce!” he noted privately to the editor of Political Science Quarterly. “Was I not ‘nice’ not to say anything about it?” Instead, criticizing Bryce as he did allowed him to stake his own claim “to yield an answer to the all-important question: What is democracy that it should be possible, nay natural, to some nations, impossible as yet to others?” Answering that question would lead to “the most significant thing to be discovered concerning democracy,” and that was what Wilson meant to do.19
The State marked his first step toward his grand work of interpretation and synthesis. He began with the proposition that government rests “ultimately on force” and that the potential use of force “gives it its right to rule.” In essence, government depends “upon the organic character and development of the community.” There is, therefore, “no universal law, but for each nation a law of its own which bears evident marks of having been developed along with the national character.” Sovereignty really embodies only the “will of an organized, independent community,” and laws follow “standards of policy only, not absolute standards of right and wrong.” Government is much more than “a necessary evil. It is no more of an evil than society itself. It is the organic body of society: without it society would be hardly more than an abstraction.” That being the case, “we ought all to regard ourselves and act as socialists, believers in the wholesomeness and beneficence of the body politic.” He toned down that apparent radicalism by adding that there is “one rule … which cannot be departed from under any circumstances, and that is the rule of historical continuity. In politics nothing radically novel may safely be attempted. … Nothing may be done by leaps.” Because it was a textbook, The State was not widely reviewed, but in the judgment of several scholars it was Wilson’s finest published work on politics.20
By the time he went to Wesleyan, Wilson was in demand as a lecturer at colleges and universities and as a speaker to civic groups, and in June 1890 he gave a commencement address at the University of Tennessee, the title of which was “Leaders of Men.” Reflecting on the differences between thought and action, he observed, “The seer, whose function is imaginative interpretation is the man of science; the leader is the mechanic.” Statesmen he likened to riverboat captains: “Politics must follow the actual winding of the channel; if it steer by the stars it will run aground.” The leader must do the work of “gathering as best he can, the thoughts that are completed, that are perceived, that have hold upon the common mind … and combining all these into words of progress, into acts of recognition and completion. Who shall say that is not an excellent function? Who shall doubt or dispraise the titles of leadership?”21 The passion of unrequited yearning for Wilson’s first love—politics—shone through in the speech, and a listener might have wondered whether the speaker would rather be piloting the riverboat than studying the stars.
For Wilson, the move to Princeton in the fall of 1890 was a homecoming. In the eleven years since his graduation, the student body had nearly doubled, and younger men had joined the faculty, including the top student in Wilson’s own class, William F. Magie, now a professor of physics, and the leading man in the next class, Wilson’s friend from The Princetonian, Henry Fine, who had become a professor of mathematics. Yet Princeton’s upward trajectory in the academic world had stalled, and in 1887 the trustees had blocked McCosh’s move to change the institution’s name from the College of New Jersey to Princeton University because they regarded the use of the word university as a move in a more secular direction. When McCosh retired the following year, the trustees picked the conservative and less dynamic Patton to succeed him.
The stalled academic progress at Princeton did not seem to bother Wilson. He quickly established himself as the most popular lecturer on campus. His course in public law, which was open to juniors and seniors, drew more than half the members of those classes during his first year at Princeton and still more during his second year. The new professor joked about his reputation for seriousness, telling an alumni group, “So clean-shaven is my solemnity, that at the Irish end of the town, I’ve been taken for a Catholic priest.” One student later recalled, “Speaking from a mere skeleton of notes, he hammered in his teaching with an up-and-down, full-armed gesture. Thus he was a perpendicular lecturer, his talking nose and his oscillating Adam’s apple moving up and down with speech, along with his pump-handle gestures. … He was essentially the lecturer rather than the teacher.” He would spend the first fifteen minutes of each session dictating concepts and information that he required the students to take down. As a result, another student recalled, “Very little reading was necessary for Wilson’s course. The students trusted their lecture notes to get them by.”22
Making his courses easy undoubtedly contributed to his popularity, but light reading and spoon-fed lectures were the norm at Princeton, buttressing its reputation as a “picnic” among leading colleges. Wilson gained a big undergraduate following also because of his manifest empathy with the students. Two of them who went on to become writers explained his attractiveness as a matter of his caring about them. The journalist Ernest Poole remembered that he came to their rooms to talk and recommend such books as How the Other Half Lives, Jacob Riis’s account of life in the slums of New York’s Lower East Side, which “gave me an exciting sense of new life stirring in our land.” The novelist and playwright Booth Tarkington recalled the same thing: “I think we felt that Wilson understood us, and understood us more favorably than any other man on the faculty.” His friendliness toward students extended beyond studies. He again played a part in extracurricular activities, particularly speaking and debate, and gave talks in chapel, as all faculty members were required to do, although he touched only lightly on religious subjects. He also immersed himself in college sports. He admired rowing and deplored Princeton’s lack of the proper conditions for crew. Baseball remained his favorite sport, but he increasingly threw himself into the promotion of football, though now as a business manager and fan, not as a coach. He publicly defended football against charges that it was brutal and distracted students from academic pursuits. “Foot-ball is a manly game,” he told an alumni group. “Athletics are a safety valve for animal spirits.”23
Still, some shadows darkened Wilson’s joy at Princeton. As much as he savored lecturing, he recognized the limitations of current university teaching. In 1894, he published an article titled “University Training and Citizenship,” in which he argued that universities must induce their students to read “widely and intelligently. … For it is reading, not set lectures, that will prepare a soil for culture.” To reach that goal, colleges should bring in a “considerable number of young tutors�
� to guide the students “in groups of manageable numbers, suggesting the reading of each group.” This was the germ of the major reform in teaching that Wilson would introduce later as president of Princeton. Indeed, from the moment he came back, he had ideas for improving his alma mater. One such idea was to inject new blood into the faculty. Most of his fellow professors were also alumni, but unlike Wilson, few of them had studied or taught anywhere else. He shared the discontent of some younger faculty members with the prevailing parochialism, but he saw the problem as a matter of sectional as well as academic and religious narrowness—not just too many Princetonians and Presbyterians but also “too many men from the Northeast.”24
Wilson particularly wanted to add men with broader perspectives in the fields closest to his own. During his first year at Princeton, he tried to recruit his Hopkins friend Albert Shaw—a midwesterner by background who was on the faculty at Cornell and editing a new magazine, The American Review of Reviews—to teach economics. Patton initially backed Wilson’s effort, but conservative trustees shot down Shaw’s candidacy because of his economic views. The opponents were, Wilson told Shaw, “businessmen, the moneyed men of the corporation. … Hard-headed, narrow men,—that’s the breed.” In 1896, he tried to recruit another friend from Hopkins, Frederick Jackson Turner, whose pathbreaking essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” had made him a rising star in his field. Once more, Patton ostensibly encouraged Wilson, but the trustees rejected Turner’s candidacy, claiming that there was not enough money to create a separate professorship in American history. Wilson felt ill-used because Patton failed to inform him of the trustees’ decision for three weeks. “I have been treated like an employee rather than a colleague,” he exploded to Patton.25 The president tried to mollify him with his usual sweet talk, but Wilson never again felt as warmly toward Patton or gave him the benefit of the doubt as he had done before.
Woodrow Wilson Page 9