Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  The Quad Plan would almost certainly have prevailed if the faculty had gotten a chance to vote on it, and opponents were already talking about compromise. But the trustees rendered their consideration and talk of compromise moot when they met in October and passed three resolutions withdrawing their earlier approval. They softened the blow by adopting a further resolution that allowed Wilson to continue to try to sell his ideas to the Princeton community. For all practical purposes, this was the end of the Quad Plan. It was a stunning defeat, and Wilson should have seen it coming. His earlier successes had masked the fragile nature of his support among the trustees. Three years earlier, one supporter on the board had advised him to nominate other like-minded men and not to “elect two or three more very rich men simply because they are richmen.”38Wilson had secured Dodge and other supporters as trustees, and they would form his hard core of support on the board. Otherwise, most of its members were “very rich men” chosen mainly for their wealth and alumni loyalty, and some of them had begun to have second thoughts soon after they approved the Quad Plan in June.

  Why Wilson failed to heed the straws in the wind probably spoke more to his physical and emotional state than to anything else. His agitation and rigidity may have stemmed from his reaction to his illness the previous summer. His impatience to see the Quad Plan enacted and his combativeness toward critics and opponents bordered on obsession. Fine believed, he later told Wilson’s first biographer, that “undoubtedly Wilson was too impatient and that if he had been willing to put the new plan in force gradually, he could perhaps have carried it, but he wanted it all at once.” Wilson evidently recognized that he was rushing things. Before the trustees met, he drafted a statement affirming, “So great and complex a reform cannot be hastened either in its discussion or in its execution,” but he extended this olive branch too late. Alumni opposition to the Quad Plan seemed to be growing. The editor of the Princeton Alumni Weekly, which was not an official university publication, opposed the plan and offered a forum for public attacks, which, together with private communications, moved the trustees to vote as they did. Their minutes did not record how each of them voted on the resolutions rescinding approval of the plan, but they did note that Moses Pyne moved the main resolutions. The most influential member of the board had evidently turned against Wilson.39

  He tried to make the best of the situation. Right after the meeting, he drafted, in his shorthand, a stinging letter of resignation, telling the trustees that they had made “it plain to me that you will not feel able to support me any further in the only matters in which I feel that I can lead and be of service to you.” He did not finish the draft and told a supporter, “I refrained from resigning because I saw at last that I did not have the right to place the University in danger of going to pieces.” Instead, he put an optimistic gloss on the trustees’ action in an interview with the New York Evening Sun: “I do not consider that the trustees are opposed to the quad system on principle, but merely reversed their former decision … as they thought that the university and alumni were not sufficiently informed or prepared for the new plan.” That statement infuriated Pyne, who had words with Wilson. “They wish me to be silent,” Wilson told a trustee who was a supporter, “and I have got nothing out of the transaction except complete defeat and mortification.” If Pyne thought he could muzzle Wilson, he misjudged his man. “The difference between a strong man and a weak one,” Wilson told a student group soon afterward, “is that the former does not give up after a defeat.”40

  The encounter with Pyne in October 1907 marked the opening skirmish in Wilson’s continuing advocacy of the Quad Plan, which soon merged with the fight over the Graduate College. He would have the same main antagonist in both fights—not West, but Pyne. The dapper, handsome, high-voiced Momo Pyne epitomized the breed of “very rich men” Wilson had been warned about earlier. Heir to a large fortune made mostly in railroads, Pyne was just a year older than Wilson and had been two classes ahead of him at Princeton. He had retired early from active work to live at his elegant estate, called Drumthwacket, not far from the campus. He devoted his energies mainly to Princeton, where he had been a trustee since 1884. Previously a strong supporter of Wilson’s, Pyne did not turn against him all at once in the fight over the Quad Plan. Two months after the trustees’ decision, he worried that Wilson was working too hard and told him, “As one of your warmest friends, please allow me to protest against this.”41 Still, Pyne never again admired or trusted Wilson as he had done previously.

  Wilson did not jump at once into the renewed fight over the Quad Plan because other matters occupied him at the end of 1907. This had been one of his best years for attracting academic stars to the Princeton faculty, and politics continued to provide an interesting diversion. He also delivered eight lectures at Columbia University, which gave him a chance to revisit the territory of Congressional Government. He spoke from shorthand outlines, and a stenographer produced a transcript of the lectures, which he revised for publication in 1908 as a book titled Constitutional Government in the United States. “A constitutional government is one whose powers have been adapted to the interests of its people and to the maintenance of individual liberty,” he declared, and he advocated “conservative change, … a process, not of revolution, but of modification … nor by way of desperate search for remedies for existing evils.”42

  Despite those statements, Constitutional Government was not a conservative manifesto. Wilson included few direct comments on contemporary concerns and produced, instead, a work that stood somewhere between a revision of Congressional Government (which he had never undertaken) and a foreshadowing of what he might have done in “Philosophy of Politics.” Wilson again revealed that he had no use for absolutist state-rights, limited-government views. Among the founders of the Republic, he praised only two Federalists—John Marshall and Alexander Hamilton—and, without naming Jefferson, he eschewed what he regarded as Jefferson’s political legacy by scorning “the Whig theory of political dynamics, which was a sort of unconscious copy of the Newtonian theory of the universe. … The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. … It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life.”43

  Much of this book reads like Congressional Government revisited, but with a different choice of subjects and a difficult emphasis. About the presidency, he affirmed, “There is no national party choice except that of President. No one else represents the people as a whole, exercising a national choice. … He can dominate his party by being spokesman for the real sentiment and purpose of the country, by giving direction to opinion.” Wilson also noted that in foreign affairs the president’s power is “very absolute.” Congress pleased him no more than it had twenty years earlier. In the House, the Speaker had become “an autocrat,” replacing the previously all-powerful committees, but the effect remained the same—stifling debate. Meanwhile, the Senate had become “the chamber of debate and individual privilege.” To remedy these defects, Wilson now looked to the president: with his ability “to appeal to the nation,” he could become the real legislative leader.44

  Wilson also discussed courts and the states in Constitutional Government. He praised the power of courts “to restrain the government,” but he worried about the influence of money, asking, “Are our courts as available for the poor man as for the rich?” He also declared, “The Constitution was not meant to hold the government back to the time of horses and wagons.” He praised the states for saving the nation from excessive centralization, but he also once more dismissed the “old theory of State sovereignty” as having been settled by the “stern arbitrament” of the Civil War. In closing, Wilson argued that “only by the external authority of party” could the separation and dispersal of powers be bridged in order to gain “some coherence to the action of political forces.” He ridiculed “the distinction that we make between ‘politicians’ a
nd ‘statesmen,’” and he praised those who “attempt the hazardous and little honored business of party management.” Fortunately, he asserted, Americans now seemed to regard “parties once more as instruments for progressive action, as means for handling the affairs of a new age.”45

  Constitutional Government did not make the same splash as Congressional Government. Reviews were mixed, and it would never be as widely read, nor would it remain continuously in print, as Congressional Government has. To some extent, the difference in the two books’ reception and reputation was deserved. Constitutional Government lacked the focus and freshness of Congressional Government. It suffered from mixed inspirations and mixed tones—sometimes sharp like Bagehot, sometimes reflective like Burke, sometimes diffuse like Bryce. Yet those defects did not detract from the book’s strengths. Constitutional Government covered a larger canvas, and it spoke much better to possible cures for current ills. It also raised questions about how far its author had really gone down the road to conservatism.

  Little else that Wilson said in 1907 would have made anyone doubt his allegiance to the right wing of the Democratic Party. At one point, he took a slam at both Roosevelt and Bryan by warning against radicalism and haste: “We are undertaking to regulate before we have made thorough analysis of the conditions to be rectified.” He also objected to the new forms of direct democracy that were coming out of the West—the initiative and referendum—and he still opposed woman suffrage. His daughter Jessie later recalled that when she came home from college a convinced suffragist, she took issue with her father and said to him, “You have the vote, but there is only one of you and there are four of us, and we are unrepresented.” Wilson’s public and private utterances in 1907 marked his longest stretch toward conservatism. During the summer, he wrote a statement of his political convictions, “A Credo,” in which he argued against “the danger of attempting what government is not fitted to do” and called for strict separation of powers in the federal government, especially insulation of the courts from pressures by the president or Congress. Yet he said nothing about state-rights, and he condemned over-active government as unwise and inexpedient, not as morally or constitutionally impermissible. He also again called the president “the only active officer of the government who is chosen by the whole people. He alone, therefore, speaks for them as a direct representative of the nation.”46

  One other influence held Wilson back from resuming the fight over the Quad Plan at the end of 1907. In late November, he suffered another attack of pain and numbness in his right hand, similar to the one he had suffered eleven years before.47 This latest episode of what his doctors again called “neuritis” prompted Wilson to bow to urgings to take another winter vacation. He again traveled by himself, to spend half of January and most of February 1908 in Bermuda, where he rode his bicycle and spent time thinking and writing, including revising the transcripts of his lectures for Constitutional Government. He also enjoyed the company of some of the people he encountered there, among them the writer Mark Twain.

  But of all Bermuda’s seasonal denizens, the one who interested Wilson most was a tall, slender woman in her mid-forties from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, named Mary Allen Hulbert Peck. Long estranged from her husband, Mrs. Peck had spent winters in Bermuda since the early 1890s and had become a social fixture there. Wilson must have liked her almost at first sight, because on his first visit to Bermuda, a year earlier, he had told her, “It is not often that I can have the privilege of meeting anyone whom I can so entirely admire and enjoy.” After he returned to Princeton, he sent her a volume of Bagehot’s writings and a collection of his own essays, and he wrote to her of “an instinctive sympathy between us.” Such expressions were common for Wilson; he was in the habit of corresponding on familiar terms with women. Ellen encouraged those relationships and did not accompany him on his winter trips to Bermuda in 1907 and 1908 or his summer visit to England and Scotland in 1908 because she recognized her own tendencies toward depression, especially after Eddie’s death. “Since he has married a wife who is not gay,” Florence Hoyt remembered her saying, “I must provide him with friends who are.”48

  Wilson did not write to Mrs. Peck again before he returned to Bermuda in 1908, but he rushed to see her as soon as his ship docked. During the next six weeks, he spent a great deal of time with her, sometimes in the company of others but often with her alone. He was plainly smitten with the vivacious, attractive Mary Peck. At one point, he wrote in shorthand on a document, “My precious one, my beloved Mary.” He may have fallen for her now because of the emotional void left by the break with Jack Hibben. A year later, he would say to her, “What a fool I am to go back to that so often! Can my heart never be cured of its hurt?” She would also be the one to whom he would later confide how his “stubborn heart” would not heal from that wound.49

  The recent defeat of the Quad Plan may also have made him feel emotionally vulnerable. Over the next two years, his feelings for Mary Peck would wax and wane, growing particularly intense during the times when he was suffering strain and setbacks in the fight over that plan and the negotiations for the Graduate College. He did not begin writing regularly to Mrs. Peck until the fall of 1908, after he and Ellen visited her in Pittsfield on their way to Williams College, where a friend and supporter from the Princeton faculty, Harry Garfield, was being inaugurated as president. After that visit, he started writing her letters in which he bared his heart and mind in a way he had not done with anyone except Ellen twenty years earlier. Mary Peck was not on Bermuda when Wilson returned for winter vacation early in 1909, and he saw her afterward mainly on visits to New York, where she moved around that time. For Wilson, the relationship seems to have peaked in intensity at the beginning of 1910. He did not see Mary Peck much after that, although he continued writing her revealing letters for another five years.

  One question has always hung over the encounter between Wilson and Mrs. Peck—how far did it go? Was this more than an intense, confiding friendship between a man and a woman (from 1909 on, Wilson began his letters “Dearest Friend”)? Did this relationship qualify as an affair? The only people who knew—Woodrow Wilson and Mary Peck—never said. No one, therefore, can say for certain what happened between them, but that would not stop speculation. Some interpreters have concluded that this was not a full-fledged affair. Some, wishing to view Wilson’s behavior charitably, have maintained that he was a moral man who did not want to hurt his wife, whom he still loved deeply. Wilson himself supported this view when he wrote to Ellen in 1908 about Grover Cleveland’s admitted sexual dalliances, calling them Cleveland’s “early moral weaknesses” and hinting that they “had returned” in his later years. Others, viewing Wilson harshly, have maintained that such a supposedly unattractive prig was incapable of having a sexual fling. When stories about Mrs. Peck began to circulate during the 1912 presidential campaign, Theodore Roosevelt, who was by then a bitter rival, brushed the talk aside with the sneer, “You can’t convince the American people that a man is a Romeo who looks so much like the apothecary’s clerk.”50

  Some interpreters have concluded that it was a real, sexual affair. Wilson may have been over fifty, but the sexual desires he had shown earlier for Ellen had not cooled. A few years later, when he courted the woman who became his second wife, he would demonstrate again just how much physical passion he could feel. Moreover, from the start, Ellen suspected something untoward between her husband and Mrs. Peck. She evidently said some harsh and hurt-filled things to him just before he went abroad by himself during the summer of 1908. “‘Emotional love,’ ah, dearest,” Wilson wrote to Ellen from England, “that was a cutting and cruel judgment and utterly false; but as natural as false; but I never blamed you for it or wondered at it. … My darling! I have never been worthy of you,—but I love you with all my poor, mixed, inexplicable nature,—with everything fine and tender in me.”51 He wrote her several more letters in the same vein that summer; revealingly, perhaps, this was the only time that he did n
ot save Ellen’s letters.

  On Ellen’s side, shortly before Wilson’s death a friend of Cary Grayson’s, the White House physician, noted in his diary, “Mrs. Wilson—the first—also talked about … [Mrs. Peck] to Cary and among other things said that the ‘Peck’ affair was the only unhappiness he had caused her during their married life—not that there was anything wrong or improper—about it, for there was not, but just that a brilliant mind and an attractive woman had some-how fascinated—temporarily—Mr. Wilson’s mind and she (Mrs. Wilson) did not want to share his confidence of his inner mind with anyone.”52

  Wilson’s guilt-filled protests did not stop him from carrying on an intimate correspondence with Mary Peck and seeing more of her. Something happened between them in 1908 that made Wilson feel guiltier still. Seven years later, after Ellen’s death, when Wilson became engaged to Edith Bolling Galt, stories about Mrs. Peck surfaced again, and there were threats that some of his letters to her would be published. In an agony of remorse, Wilson drafted a shorthand statement in which he declared, “These letters disclose a passage of folly and gross impertinence in my life. I am deeply ashamed and repentant. Neither in act nor even in thought was the purity or honor of the lady concerned touched or sullied, and my offense she had generously forgiven.” He made a clean breast of the business with Edith Galt, writing to her, “I dreaded the revelation which seemed to be threatened because I knew that it would give a tragically false impression of what I really have been and am,—because it might make the contemptible error and madness of a few months seem a stain upon a whole life.”53