Wilson probably did not recognize his affinity for Burke earlier and seize upon this insight to move forward with his “Philosophy of Politics” because he was focusing on other things. In addition to teaching and lecturing, he wrote a volume in the Epochs of American History series, edited by Professor Albert Bushnell Hart of Harvard. Titled Division and Reunion, 1829–1889, it was a work of synthesis, not original research, and in it Wilson followed the lead of Turner in stressing the influence of the frontier. He depicted the Old South in a kindly light, viewing slavery as generally benign, taking issue only with the breaking up of slave families and the institution’s economic inefficiencies, but he had no patience with secession. The book received generally good reviews, although some historians criticized its sketchiness in parts and its slighting of the moral dimension of slavery. In the 1890s, he was also writing for a number of better-paying magazines, such as Albert Shaw’s Review of Reviews; The Forum, which was edited by Walter Page; Scribner’s, where Bridges had become editor; and The Atlantic, edited then by Horace Scudder, who had earlier accepted Congressional Government at Houghton Mifflin, and after 1899 by Bliss Perry.
The most interesting of these articles were “A Calendar of Great Americans” and “Mere Literature.” In “Calendar,” he praised Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln but dismissed Jefferson as “a great man, but not a great American” because his political thought was un-American in being “abstract, sentimental, rationalistic, rather than practical.” In “Mere Literature,” he took revenge on the dismissal of a book by a philologist at Johns Hopkins as “mere literature” and, possibly unconsciously, on his father’s scoffing at his wanting “a merely literary career.” The phrase “mere literature” epitomized “the irreverent invention of a scientific age,” which had tried to turn universities into “agencies of Philistinism.”41
Literary success and disengagement from current affairs did not entirely quell Wilson’s yearning to play an active part in politics. He mentioned to Ellen “the road I used to burn to travel,” declaring that he was “yet fairly restless and impatient with ambition, as of old.” Seeing contemporaries make their way in politics drew varying reactions. When President Cleveland appointed the Atlanta lawyer and newspaper owner Hoke Smith secretary of the interior in 1893, Wilson told Shaw, “I … despise him as heartily as all the other men I knew at the Atlanta bar did.” In a magazine article, he depicted Smith as a typical product of the bar: “Their training is narrow, their apprehension specialized; their conceptions of justice are technical, their standards of policy too self-regardful.”42 That sounds like a restatement of Wilson’s own reasoning when he abandoned the law. Others in politics were not so easy to brush aside. Wilson’s first editor, Henry Cabot Lodge, had become a Republican congressman and then a senator from Massachusetts, while Lodge’s close friend and Wilson’s new acquaintance, Theodore Roosevelt, was enjoying a meteoric rise after having served spectacularly in the Spanish-American War.
Wilson crossed paths with Roosevelt a number of times. After Roosevelt’s election as governor of New York, Roosevelt sought Wilson’s advice about politics, and Wilson sought Roosevelt’s about academic appointments. Wilson found in Roosevelt, he told Ellen, “a very sane, academic side … not known by everybody so much as to exist.” Publicly, he praised Roosevelt as “too big a man to have it make any difference to him whether he was in office or out.” When he was vice president, Roosevelt invited professors from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to talk about interesting young men from their colleges who might go into politics. Wilson was the professor from Princeton, and during the summer of 1901 he spent part of a weekend at Roosevelt’s home at Oyster Bay on Long Island. Roosevelt and Lodge evidently figured in conversations in the Wilson household, for Ellen wrote to her husband after driving past Lodge’s estate in Massachusetts, “He seems to be, like Roosevelt, one of fortune’s all round favourites.”43
Some of those yearnings for the political arena may have sprung from Wilson’s physical problem in 1896. Stockton Axson believed that his brother-in-law changed after that episode: “He had always been a purposeful man, but now he was a man of fixed and resolute purpose.” He explained to Wilson’s first biographer that “a subtle change came over Mr. Wilson after the return from the trip to Europe in 1896,” and he no longer sat and talked for hours with Axson and Joseph Wilson. “Old Dr. Wilson often complained that Woodrow was getting away from his old interests.” His brother-in-law struck Axson as “torn between the desire to live a studious and scholarly life, doing creative work and a life of action.” Wilson once said to him, “I get so tired of a talking profession.”44
Wilson began to take a greater interest in current affairs as the decade drew to a close. In 1897, he decried “leaderless government … in which no man stands at the helm to steer.” In 1898, he cast aside his detachment in response to the Spanish-American War. Bliss Perry later recalled, “In those days Wilson was much more of a ‘militarist’ than I. I thought he romanticized the army and the navy too much.” Axson similarly recalled, “During and immediately after the war he was belligerent—regretted he was not free to enlist in the armed forces and fight—read each day’s news with the eagerness of a boy.” Breaking with fellow Democrats, he publicly argued that America should take Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippines as colonies in order to prevent Germany or Russia from taking them. Moreover, he declared, “As long as we have only domestic subjects we have no real leaders.”45
When the Democrats charged the Republicans with “imperialism” during the 1900 presidential campaign, Wilson supported McKinley’s foreign policy and welcomed the political changes that he saw emerging in its wake. In a preface to a new edition of Congressional Government, he argued that the president was gaining new powers and that “new prizes in public service may attract a new order of talent,” especially in carrying “the novel burdens we have shouldered.” In an essay in The Atlantic, he maintained that possession of the Philippines “put us in the very presence of the forces that will make the politics of the twentieth century radically unlike the politics of the nineteenth” and that Americans must help “undeveloped peoples, still in the childhood of their natural growth[,] … inducting them into the rudiments of justice and freedom.” If those arguments sounded like Rudyard Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden,” it was probably no accident. Ellen and Wilson had recently added Kipling to their short list of favorite poets, and Wilson would carry Kipling’s poem “If” in his wallet for years.46
His embrace of imperialism dovetailed with his rekindled interest in active politics. Early in 1898, Wilson observed Congress in session for the first time. “I have sat and watched the Houses a good deal in the afternoons,” he told Ellen, “and the old longing for public life comes upon me in a flood as I watch. Perhaps I should be safer somewhere else, where I should be kept from a too keen and constant discontent with my calling.” He also met the powerful Republican Speaker of the House, Thomas B. Reed, whom he found “not only agreeable but even attractive.” Reed flattered Wilson by telling him “he had read ‘Congressional Government’ and had been astonished to find how admirably one outside affairs had been able to group the features of our ‘government by helter-skelter.’ ”47 Except for the occasional meetings with Roosevelt, nothing came of these renewed longings for active politics.
He did make some lucrative forays into the literary marketplace. In 1895 and 1896, he wrote a brief serialized biography of George Washington for Harper’s, with illustrations by the artist Howard Pyle, which was later published as a book. Wilson received $300 for each of the six installments, thereby earning more than half as much as his annual Princeton salary at the time. George Washington was a bad book, written in an affected style with the saccharine, moralizing tone of contemporary children’s books such as Black Beauty and Little Lord Fauntleroy. In 1900, Harper’s offered Wilson $1,000 apiece—an “immense sum,” he told Bridges—for twelve installments of a history of the United States, wh
ich would subsequently be published in five lavishly produced volumes as A History of the American People. Though better written than George Washington, these volumes amounted to—in the words of a Princeton faculty member—“a gilt-edged pot boiler.”48 Regardless, they earned him nearly $30,000, over and above the $12,000 for the magazine installments.
Having sated his need for money, he turned again to his “Philosophy of Politics” (“P.o.P.”). Early in 1902, he told Turner that he had “to do the work I really seem to have been cut out for. I was forty-five three weeks ago, and between forty-five and fifty-five, I take it, is when a man ought to do the work into which he expects to put most of himself.”49 What might Wilson have produced if he had stuck with “P.o.P.”? Might he have wrought what Burke himself had never done, a comprehensive examination of politics as an art or science that did not stem from theory and ideology but grew out of life and experience? No one before Wilson had ever written such a book, and no one has written one since. His essays and comments anticipated the mid-twentieth-century reaction among liberal intellectuals against metaphysical politics and world-altering systems of thought. If Wilson had run with his insights the way he had in Congressional Government, he might have written a still greater book, a unique masterpiece of reflection on the meaning and conduct of political life.
He did not stick with “P.o.P” because circumstances and other ambitions intervened to set his life and career on a different course. Affairs at Princeton were heating up as the twentieth century approached. Patton’s indolent habits and conservative views dashed the high hopes raised in 1896 by the sesquicentennial celebration and the renaming of the institution. Jack Hibben and Andrew West began to foment opposition to the Patton regime. “We have had several informal gatherings of the Faculty malcontents on West[‘]s porch,” Hibben reported to Wilson in 1899. “The excitement of the early days of the summer has subsided, and a sullen resentment seems to have taken its place in reference to the powers that be.” Wilson shared their discontent, telling Ellen, “I know that Dr. P. cannot be depended upon for anything at all.” When Patton hired a replacement for Bliss Perry, Wilson exploded to Ellen, “How complete it all is: … not a name added to our list, or prestige; money saved and second-rate men promoted!”50
The situation slowly began to change. In 1900, the trustees authorized the establishment of a graduate school with West as dean, although this new arm of the university existed only on paper. Also in 1900, faculty dissidents overcame Patton’s objections and formed a committee to investigate undergraduate education, with a view to raising standards; they found allies among the trustees, including Moses Pyne, Cyrus McCormick, and Cornelius Cuyler, wealthy businessmen accustomed to efficiency and action. Patton’s days as president of Princeton were clearly numbered, particularly after faculty dissidents began meeting privately with some of the trustees in the spring of 1902. Wilson attended several of these sessions, and he helped draw up a plan to create a joint faculty-trustee executive committee that would effectively supplant Patton.
Princeton’s president could read the handwriting on the wall. As soon as he learned of the plan for the executive committee, Patton talked about resigning, and he cleverly inveigled the trustees into giving him a pension of $10,000 a year for six years. When the trustees met on June 9, Patton submitted his resignation and recommended Wilson as his successor. The trustees then unanimously elected Wilson president of Princeton. “I never saw so many men of many minds so promptly, without debate, without hesitation at the mere mention of a name,” one of the trustees told Wilson, “… & when the vote was announced we agreed that it was an act of Providence.”51 This unanimity and seeming spontaneity masked a bit of maneuvering. Others had reportedly entertained hopes of succeeding Patton, including West. Patton reportedly swung around to Wilson because he and Wilson had maintained pleasant personal relations and he hated West for plotting against him. It also seems likely that Wilson’s friends and patrons among the trustees had prepared to put his name forward and push his election.
Wilson affected surprise. The day after the election, he told the alumni gathered for class reunions, “This thing has come to me as a thunderbolt out of a clear sky.” Yet Perry’s wife wrote to Ellen, “[I]t makes me homesick and blue to think that the event we had so often talked about and wished for has come to pass and we are outsiders, not there to enjoy it.” Ellen expressed some regrets to her cousin Florence Hoyt about how Wilson’s “literary work must suffer greatly,—just how much remains to [be] seen, and we must leave our dear home and sweet, almost ideal life when he was [a] simple ‘man of letters.’” If Wilson felt that way too, he hid his misgivings well. Speaking briefly at commencement ceremonies the following day, he gave a foretaste of what could be expected from him. “There are things which we hope to add to this university,” he declared, “and there are things which we hope will never be subtracted from it. We hope that men will open their hearts to us and will enable us to crown this university with a great graduate college.”52 Woodrow Wilson was forecasting the greatest challenges, accomplishments, and conflicts of this new turn in his life.
4
BOLD LEADER
Princeton University inaugurated Woodrow Wilson on October 25, 1902. He considered his ranking as the university’s thirteenth president a good omen because, unlike many people, he believed that thirteen was his lucky number—it was the sum of the number of letters in his first and last names. The inaugural ceremony was a gala event, which preceded a midday dinner for the attendees, a football game, and an evening dinner given by Wilson’s class of ‘79. An injury prevented President Theodore Roosevelt from attending, but earlier, on hearing of the trustees’ action, he had told a mutual friend, “Woodrow Wilson is a perfect trump. I am overjoyed at his election.” Ex-president Cleveland, now a resident of Princeton and a trustee of the university, did attend, as did Abraham Lincoln’s only surviving child, Robert Todd Lincoln. Other luminaries included the financier J. P. Morgan, former Speaker of the House of Representatives Thomas B. Reed, and the novelist William Dean Howells, together with such magazine editors as Wilson’s friends Bridges of Scribner’s, Perry of The Atlantic, and Page, who had recently started his own monthly, The World’s Work, as well as George Harvey of Harper’s Weekly, who had worked earlier with Wilson on his History of the American People.1
The pomp and circumstance of the academic procession recalled the spectacle six years before at Princeton’s sesquicentennial celebration. But unlike that event, this was not an all-male or all-white affair. At Wilson’s initiative, three female representatives of women’s colleges joined the procession, as did an African American—the renowned principal of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, Booker T. Washington. The Tuskegee principal’s views on race relations seemed to match Wilson’s own thinking about gradual improvement in race relations. In 1897, he had written, “Even the race problem of the South will no doubt work itself out in the slowness of time. … Time is the only legislator in such matters.” Not everyone in Wilson’s family thought that way. As their daughter Jessie remembered, “Mrs. Wilson felt much more strongly about the color line than did Mr. Wilson.” She also recalled that one of Ellen’s aunts felt “scandalized” by Washington’s presence at the inauguration “and said if she had known he was to be there she wouldn’t have gone.” Wilson said that he thought Washington’s “speech was the very best at the dinner afterwards bar none.”2
Wilson titled the speech that he delivered at the inaugural ceremony, on the steps of Nassau Hall, “Princeton for the Nation’s Service.” By changing just one word in the title of his sesquicentennial speech, he invited comparison with that earlier oratorical feat. Wilson asserted that as the nation’s “affairs grow more and more complex[,] … [i]t needs efficient and enlightened men. The universities of the country must take part in supplying them.” He laid greatest stress on the general education of undergraduates through “disciplinary” studies, such as classics, mathematics, and science, which would
form a core curriculum. Without naming Harvard or its president, Charles William Eliot, who was not present, he was rejecting the free-elective system that Eliot had instituted there. Wilson also insisted that the leading professors, “those who guide special study and research[, should not be] altogether excused from undergraduate instruction.” Moreover, Princeton should build a residential graduate college “at the very heart, the geographical heart, of the university,” thus mingling graduate and undergraduate education in such ways as to produce leaders for America in a “new age, … in which, it seems, we must lead the world.”3
“Princeton for the Nation’s Service” was not as good a speech as its similarly titled predecessor. Wilson was more abstract and self-consciously oratorical, seldom mentioning Princeton by name, and offered the Graduate College as his only concrete proposal. All the same, he received thunderous applause, and the press reported the speech widely and approvingly. Particularly impressed was George Harvey of Harper’s Weekly. A conservative Democrat and political associate of Cleveland’s, he regarded himself as a political talent spotter, and he later said he had marked Wilson as a presidential possibility after hearing the speech.4
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