Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  Wilson’s most ambitious project for changing Princeton was to start a law school. It would be, he explained, “an institutional law school, so to speak, in which law shall be taught in its historical and philosophical aspects, critically rather than technically, … as it is taught in the better European universities.” During his first three years on Princeton’s faculty, he spoke repeatedly to alumni groups about his plan and expounded the need for broader education for all the professions. “I believe that no medical or law or theological school ought to be a separate institution,” he avowed. “It ought to be organically and in a situation part of a university.” He called the narrowly trained specialist “the natural enemy of society.”26 Yet nothing came of this scheme. A nationwide depression in 1893 made funds hard to raise, and Patton did not bestir himself. After 1893, Wilson abandoned the idea and concentrated more on his own writing and undergraduate teaching. Yet the vision of instituting a liberal education for the professions and of integrating theoretical with practical education would remain central to his definition of a great university.

  Setbacks did not unduly cloud Wilson’s happiness at Princeton. For six years in a row, a student body poll chose him most popular professor, and most of the faculty held him in equally high regard. He served on such important committees as those dealing with student discipline, athletics, and the library, and the faculty chose him more often than anyone else to represent them in communicating with the trustees. Even Patton and older, more conservative faculty members could not gainsay his eminence—because he was getting job offers from other institutions. In 1892, the University of Illinois offered him its presidency at a salary of $6,000. Ellen shrewdly advised her husband to exploit the offer, and she urged him to consult with other university presidents, especially Daniel Coit Gilman at Hopkins, as a bit of self-advertising. The possibility also arose of his being offered the presidency of the University of Wisconsin. “It would be such fun for you to have this one too,” Ellen exulted. “I should like to keep the Princeton trustees in the hottest kind of water on your account until they were shaken out of their selfish lethargy in the matter of salaries.”27

  Wilson’s most tempting outside offer came in 1898, when the University of Virginia asked him to become its president. “Mr. Jefferson’s University” had operated for almost three quarters of a century without a president, but by the 1890s the Board of Visitors had conceded that they needed one. Wilson was the first choice of the board and the faculty, strongly seconded by the governor. He responded to the offer by telling a Virginia friend that “almost every affection drew me towards the State and the institution I love” and to accept what “will probably turn out to be the highest honour of my life-time.” But he did not hesitate to use the offer to improve his situation at Princeton, and he got sympathetic trustees to agitate to keep him. Patton professed himself eager to retain Wilson but insisted, “I cannot see that it is my duty to take the initiative.”28 Instead, Wilson’s friends among the trustees, particularly Cyrus McCormick, arranged for him to receive an additional $2,500 a year for the next five years. Wilson thereupon turned down the Virginia offer, explaining that moral bonds held him at Princeton, together with the need to continue his writing.

  Wilson was also happier with his home life and his circle of friends during his years as a professor at Princeton than at any other time in his life. His immediate family—Ellen and their three daughters, Margaret, Jessie, and Eleanor (Nell)—formed the core in a ring of concentric circles of love and friendship. Wilson and Ellen loved each other deeply and passionately. In a letter to her, he bemoaned “the riotous elements in my own blood,” but he found ample outlets for his physical desires within their marriage, once reminding her, “The other thing I had thought of may occur to you independently: will you not bring the little bundle of rubbers in the bottom drawer of the washstand?”29 She shared more than a bed with her husband. She was also his adviser and confidant. She interested herself in his work, and he gladly discussed with her his thinking about nearly everything. She often showed a keener insight than he did into such people at Princeton as Patton and various trustees. Above all, she understood him better than anyone else ever would.

  Ellen managed the household and made sure that Wilson had plenty of time for his work. He spent long hours in his study turning out a stream of books, magazine articles, and speeches. Yet he did not impress people as driven or excessively absorbed in his work. He still played tennis, and he took up the new craze of bicycling. His brother-in-law Stockton Axson also recalled that Wilson “loved to ‘loaf and invite his soul.’” His faculty friend Bliss Perry attributed Wilson’s combination of productivity and apparent leisure to his highly disciplined habits, particularly his now almost exclusive use of the typewriter, and his “gift of intense concentration.”30

  He did not let the pressures of work make him an absentee or distant figure at home. The second Wilson daughter, Jessie, told his first biographer that her father loved to tell stories and was a “remarkable mimic,” doing various dialects, including Irish and African American—betraying touches of ethnic and racial prejudice, though innocently intended. Often he would “seize one of the little girls and dance around the room, or up and down the hall with her, in a wild spirit of gaiety.” He divided the family into its “proper members”—Ellen and Jessie—and its “vulgar members”—Nell and himself—with Margaret in between. His nephew George Howe similarly remembered his uncle’s “playful nature, playful both of mind and body,” and how he would dance with the girls after dinner, with “Aunt Ellie” calling out when they got too rambunctious, “Woodrow, what is the matter with you?”31

  The Wilson daughters were each very different from the other in appearance and personality. The oldest, Margaret, was the smallest and the most musically gifted. She had a melodious voice and was a good student; she left the Women’s College of Maryland after two years to go to New York, where she studied voice and tried, with mixed success, to become an opera singer. Margaret inherited her father’s looks, and when she was in her twenties, she started wearing the same kind of eyeglasses, making her look like a female version of him. Jessie was the beauty of the family, with honey-blond hair and large blue eyes; she was an even better student than Margaret, attending the same college, where she earned a Phi Beta Kappa key. She was also the most deeply religious of the three daughters and felt a strong attraction to social reform. She and Margaret became ardent advocates of woman suffrage and often argued the issue with their father at the dinner table. Nell, the youngest, was dark-haired and dark-eyed, with a resemblance to her father that was softer than Margaret’s. She was the least studious of the three; her higher education consisted of two years of finishing school in North Carolina. As the liveliest and least inhibited of the daughters, she became her father’s favorite. She eagerly joined in his high jinks and made him laugh. According to Stockton Axson, Nell and her father played tag in the halls of the White House.32

  The immediate family circle extended beyond the couple and their daughters. Ever since her mother’s death, Ellen had wanted to bring the Axsons back together, and in Princeton she finally got her wish. After Stockton joined the Princeton faculty in 1897, he came to the Wilson house almost daily. Her brother Eddie continued to live with them during his four years as a student at Princeton, where he was a member of the class of 1897. And in 1893, Ellen had brought her twelve-year-old sister, Madge, to live with them, the rebellious tomboy adding to a household already lively with sprites. George Howe, Eddie’s classmate at Princeton, lived with the family from 1893 to 1897, and Wilson’s cousin Helen Woodrow Bones lived with them while she attended a women’s college in Princeton. George Howe’s mother, Wilson’s sister Annie, was a frequent visitor, as was Wilson’s father. Following the custom in southern families, relatives nearly always came for extended stays. Sadly, Wilson’s other sister, Marion, had died in 1890, and he saw little of her children.

  Several circles of friends radiated around the
family. Everyone on the Princeton faculty knew everyone else and socialized to some extent. With some of his colleagues Wilson had pleasant but mainly businesslike relations, as with the physicist William F. Magie, his onetime classmate. He was closer to Harry Fine, who lived across the street and still called him Tommy. With Bliss Perry, Wilson enjoyed both a personal and a literary friendship until Perry left Princeton in 1899 to become editor of The Atlantic Monthly. Highest of all in Wilson’s affections stood a new friend, the philosophy professor John (Jack) Grier Hibben, who was four years younger than Wilson and had joined the faculty a year after him. Madge Axson later counted Hibben among the small circle of men who—along with Wilson’s father, Stockton Axson, and Bridges—“belonged in the inner citadel of his heart.” Hibben’s wife, Jennie, also became close to the Wilson family. In addition, there were frequent visitors from out of town, such as Bob Bridges and Walter Page.33

  Church played less of a role in Wilson and Ellen’s lives than it had earlier. It was seven years before they transferred their letter of membership from the church in Middletown to one in Princeton, where they rejected the older, long-established First Presbyterian Church in favor of its nearby dissident offshoot, the Second Presbyterian Church. After he became president of Princeton, Wilson transferred the family membership to the First, which in the meantime, with Hibben’s influence, had reconciled its differences with the Second. The family recited grace before meals and said nightly prayers, and they read from the Bible together, although more often they read aloud from literary works, with Thackeray’s Vanity Fair being a favorite.

  During their first years in Princeton, the family lived in a rented frame house about a mile west of the campus. In 1895, Wilson took out a loan that permitted him to buy the lot next door and start construction on a house. Ellen designed the building, a large, elegant structure in the fashionable half-timber style. It cost $12,000 to build, with another $3,000 for the land—large sums of money at that time. In order to bridge the gap between the loan and the costs, Wilson took on additional outside speaking engagements. “I wanted to pos[t]pone building,” Ellen explained to a friend, “but he had gotten his heart set on it and has agreed to lecture this fall for the University Extension Society to make up the deficit.”34 Having encountered and overcome some of the typical snags and frustrations of home building, the Wilson family moved into their new house in February 1896.

  Wilson paid a physical price for the extra work he was doing. Looking back at her husband’s lecturing efforts, Ellen told Frederick Jackson Turner, “Mr. Wilson makes $1500 every year; and last year when we were building, and he really tired himself, he made $4000 extra;—and almost killed himself doing it!”35 In May 1896, he suffered his first serious health problem. Up to that point in his life, his only complaint had been recurring digestion problems, for which he sometimes used a stomach pump—a commonly prescribed remedy at the time—to remove acids and inject small amounts of coal. Now, without warning, he found that severe pain and numbness left him barely able to use his right hand. His doctors could not discover a cause and vaguely mentioned “neuritis” and “writer’s cramp” and prescribed rest. With Hibben’s help, Ellen arranged for her husband to take a two-month holiday in England and managed his affairs in his absence. While he was abroad, he wrote letters home in his neat handwriting, using his left hand until he gradually recovered the use of his right. He enjoyed the holiday, visiting Bagehot’s grave and thrilling to the sights of London and, especially, Oxford. He mixed in a little work by renewing his acquaintance with James Bryce, trying to get him to come to lecture at Princeton. The rest cure evidently worked, because Wilson resumed his typical pace of activity in the fall.

  This episode may have been a sign of a deeper problem. With the benefit of knowledge of the massive stroke he suffered more than twenty years later, some interpreters have speculated that the pain and weakness in Wilson’s hand stemmed from a small stroke, caused by an occlusion in his right carotid artery. The transient nature of the semiparalysis was consistent with such a small stroke, and his family history, particularly his father’s condition as he aged, likewise hinted at cardiovascular problems. But any diagnosis can only be speculative. Wilson would have no comparable problems for another ten years. Whatever its cause, this episode came as an unwelcome reminder of vulnerability and mortality.36

  Wilson’s physical problem came at a singularly inopportune time. Though not yet forty, he was the brightest star on the Princeton faculty, and his reputation was growing in academic circles and among the broader public. In the fall of 1896, he got an opportunity to shine before a most distinguished audience. It was the 150th anniversary of the charter of the College of New Jersey, and the trustees agreed to stage an elaborate sesquicentennial celebration in October and to use the occasion finally to change the institution’s name to Princeton University. One faculty member, classics professor Andrew Fleming West, made most of the arrangements for what became an impressive affair that featured academic processions and stately ceremonies. West pulled off a coup when he secured the attendance of the president of the United States, Grover Cleveland. (Princeton and West made such a favorable impression on Cleveland that he decided to retire to the town when he left the White House the following year.) The highest place of honor at the celebration fell to Wilson, who was the undisputed choice to deliver the major address.

  He titled the address “Princeton in the Nation’s Service,” but contrary to what that title seemed to imply and what later generations presumed the speech to say, it was not a call for students to enter public service or for the newly renamed university to outfit them for careers in the political arena. Its first half evoked the history of Princeton, and the second half pleaded for enlightened conservatism. The first half dwelled almost exclusively on John Witherspoon, “your thorough Presbyterian,” but noted that Princeton’s founders had not wanted “a sectarian school.” In the second half, Wilson affirmed, “There is nothing so conservative of life as growth: when that stops, decay sets in and the end comes on apace.” His conservatism was academic and intellectual rather than political, decrying the shift toward universities’ spawning “your learned radical, bred in the schools,” and exalting “the scientific spirit of the age,” which has “bred in us a spirit of experiment and contempt for the past.” Instead of trying to extend science beyond its proper sphere, Princeton “must turn back once more to the region of practicable ideals.” Wilson closed by saluting a “place where ideals are kept in the heart in an air they can breathe; but no fool’s paradise,” and he asked, “Who shall show us the way to this place?”37

  “Princeton in the Nation’s Service” was an oratorical triumph. “And such an ovation as Woodrow received!” Ellen exulted to her cousin Mary Hoyt. “I never imagined anything like it. And think of so delighting such an audience, the most distinguished, everyone says, that has ever been assembled in America.” Wifely adoration aside, Ellen’s description captured the mood of the occasion. A faculty friend of Wilson’s later recalled that someone who entertained notions about succeeding Patton as president of Princeton said this speech had made him abandon those hopes.38 Whether Wilson had similar aspirations is not known, but the offer from Virginia a few months later would almost certainly plant the idea deeper in the minds of others, most notably such patrons of his among the trustees as McCormick and Pyne.

  • • •

  During most of the 1890s, Wilson took little interest in politics. In 1893, he declined to write a magazine article about a hot current issue because “I am estopped by ignorance.” There were exceptions to his detachment. In 1895, he spoke at a rally in Princeton for the Democratic candidate for governor of New Jersey, and in 1896 he addressed a meeting in Baltimore to protest shenanigans by the city’s political machine. At that meeting, Wilson shared the platform with the dashing young Republican politician and New York City police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt. This was the first time that the two men met. They hit it off well, and Roosevel
t had dinner with Wilson when he visited Princeton a year later. Wilson was in England during the first part of the 1896 presidential campaign—the epic clash between William McKinley, the Republican who backed the monetary gold standard, and William Jennings Bryan, the anti-Cleveland insurgent Democrat who stood for free silver and measures aimed at curbing the power of big business. Wilson confessed to Ellen, “It looks as if I would have to vote for McKinley!”39 Fortunately for him, a splinter gold Democratic ticket offered a way to avoid such apostasy.

  Wilson was beginning to take a new direction in his political thought. Ever since he first laid plans to write his grand synthesis, which he now called “Philosophy of Politics,” he had been circling around Edmund Burke’s conception of the nature of politics. Rereading Burke’s writings in 1893 brought the intellectual breakthrough that enabled Wilson to recognize his deep affinity for that conception of politics. “If I should claim any man as my master,” he told a friend, “that man would be Burke.” In an essay, he lauded Burke’s work for containing “no page of abstract thinking” and his perception “that questions of government are moral questions, and that questions of morals cannot always be squared with rules of logic, but run through as many ranges of variety as the circumstances of life itself.” Wilson further argued, “The politics of the English-speaking peoples has never been speculative; it has always been profoundly practical and utilitarian. Speculative politics treats man and situations as they are supposed to be; practical politics treats them (upon no general plan, but in detail) as they are found to be at the moment of actual contact.”40