For her part, Mary Peck behaved with restraint and dignity. Despite her divorce in 1911 and dire financial need, she never betrayed what had passed between her and Wilson. She never published anything about him until after his death, when she wrote some magazine articles and a gossipy memoir, which were more about her than him.
When Wilson returned from Bermuda at the end of February 1908, guilt and anguish about the relationship with Mrs. Peck lay in the future. At that moment, he returned, as he usually did from his holidays abroad, full of fighting spirit—in this case for the Quad Plan. Two weeks after his return, he defended it to an alumni group in Chicago and avowed, “I am a good fighter gentlemen,—on the whole I would rather fight than not, but I have made it a rule never to fight in my own family. I so thoroughly believe that the Princeton feeling is a family feeling.”54 Which way things would go—toward a fight or toward “a family feeling”—would soon become clear.
5
ACADEMIC CIVIL WAR
When Wilson renewed his effort to push the Quad Plan in 1908, he found not “a family feeling” but an academic civil war that for two years would pit student against student, professor against professor, alumnus against alumnus, trustee against trustee, and dean against president. “The quality of the fight on the personal side was increditably [sic] bitter,” recalled Stockton Axson. “It was taken up by the women, wives of Trustees[,] of the faculty[,] of the alumni[,] with all the intensity which women have subsequently shown in actual politics.” That misogynistic gibe by a lifelong bachelor may be taken with a grain of salt, but in fact the distaff side of this academic family did lend a special edge to the fight. Jack Hibben’s wife, Jennie, evidently harbored bitter feelings toward Wilson and badgered her mild-mannered husband, making sure that he continued to oppose him. Ellen Wilson reciprocated with malice toward their former best friend. Early in 1912, when the trustees finally picked Hibben as her husband’s successor, Ellen wrote him sarcastically to salute “your very unusual loyalty and availability.”1
The summer of 1908 provided a brief respite in the fight. Wilson’s time in England and Scotland refreshed him, despite the strained feelings between him and Ellen over Mrs. Peck. Fred Yates, their artist friend in the Lake District, reported to Ellen, “He was like a boy last night in his light heartedness. You wouldn’t think he ever had a care—it has done him good to come over—and he returns with a new grip of things.” As before, Wilson spent much of his time bicycling. He wore short pants, a peaked cap, and a rain cape, and he carried The Oxford Book of English Verse. He did unburden himself about Hibben to Yates, who told Ellen, “I think there is no pain like the disloyalty of a man that one has trusted through a life time.”2
Yet the time away was just a respite; upon his return from abroad Wilson faced Princeton’s civil war—and on more than one front. In 1908, the question of the location of the proposed Graduate College burgeoned into a major controversy. This fight, unlike the one over the Quad Plan, struck some observers as overly personal. Bad blood between Andrew West and Wilson had become a painful fact of life at Princeton. Given their contrasts in temperament, outlook, and aims, a clash between them may have been likely, if not foreordained. They had been friends during Wilson’s first years on the Princeton faculty, and they had some things in common. West, too, was a Presbyterian minister’s son with one parent born in England, and he was likewise a cultural Anglophile and an admirer of Oxford and Cambridge. Also a loyal, devoted Princetonian, class of 1874, he had similarly chafed under the dilatory Patton regime and worked to raise academic standards. Yet even a casual acquaintance with the two men would reveal how different they were. Wilson’s trim physique and solitary industriousness contrasted sharply with West’s portly build and relentless sociability. It would be wrong, however, to overstress purely personal elements in their clash. A deep gulf in experience, values, and vision separated Wilson from West. The dean of the Graduate School had never attended such a school himself. His doctorate was an honorary degree from Princeton, awarded because he had been a personal favorite of McCosh’s. His only academic experience outside Princeton had been at high schools in Cincinnati and New Jersey, and he remained a schoolmaster at heart, delighting in drilling students on fine points of Latin grammar, playing favorites among the students, rewarding and going easy on the sons of trustees and other prominent men. As one preceptor remembered, “He liked social distinctions and social amenities.”3
When and why West first turned against Wilson is not entirely clear. He had legitimate complaints about the neglect of his plans for the Graduate College, but his enmity seems to have run deeper than would have been expected if those complaints had been the sole cause. He and Wilson held diametrically opposed visions for graduate education and the Graduate College, although the men did not clash during the first four years of Wilson’s presidency. In 1903, Wilson had written an approving preface to a university publication in which he praised the dean’s published plan for an elaborate, costly Graduate College, maintaining that this was not to be “a pleasing fancy of an English college” and insisting that “this little community of scholars set at the heart of Princeton” would furnish “the real means by which a group of graduate students are most apt to stimulate and set the pace for the whole University.”4 That same year, at Princeton’s expense, the dean spent several months in England visiting the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge.
The turning point for West probably came in 1905, when he took a stab at a trial run at implementing his vision of the future Graduate College. He took over Merwick, a large house with spacious grounds located half a mile from the campus, which Moses Pyne had secretly bought, to serve as a residence for graduate students. The dean often presided over meals and social functions in the evening, and the students afterward carried lighted candles to escort him to his house across the street. At dinner, the students wore formal dress under their academic gowns, recited grace in Latin, and ate sumptuous meals. Most of the residents knocked off from their studies around four in the afternoon and played sports or bridge. Merwick offered a more refined version of the amenities that the more fortunate juniors and seniors found in the clubs. Small wonder that West excoriated the Quad Plan as inimical to the clubs and the “spirit of Princeton.”5
These opposing visions of the Graduate College explain why the battle between Wilson and West came to focus on the location of the college. Once he had tasted the delights of Merwick, the dean demanded an off-campus site, whereas Wilson never budged in his insistence that the facility should be located in the heart of the university. For some observers, this fight over location seemed petty and puzzling. Stockton Axson later recalled one of the trustees saying that “he could not see for the life of him why there was all this fighting … [over] where a boarding house should be located.”6 This notion that the fight over location was a tempest in a teapot—a viewpoint that would later work against Wilson—was mistaken. The quarrel over where to build the Graduate College involved starkly opposed visions of both the environment and the aims of graduate education at Princeton and, thereby, the prevailing tone of the entire university.
Also, a struggle for power was lurking just offstage. When the trustees established the Graduate School, they gave the dean a large measure of autonomy as a means of circumventing President Patton. West was given the power to approve courses, admit students, award fellowships, and select the faculty Oversight Committee, and he reported directly to the trustees, not the president. Many at Princeton chafed at the arrangement. One graduate student recalled the dean as “authoritarian and devious, simply not to be trusted. He played favorites in awarding fellowships, and even tampered with amounts of scholarship and fellowship funds already granted.”7 The academic stars whom Wilson and Fine had attracted to Princeton disliked the situation, too. Even the location issue had a bearing on the power struggle. Wilson’s preferred location for the Graduate College was a tract on the campus between Prospect House, where the president lived, and 1879 Hall, wher
e he had his office. Being thereby constantly under Wilson’s eye, West would not help being under his thumb. Thus the two men clashed openly over the location in May 1907, but a committee of trustees sidestepped the issue, deciding that it was not expedient to choose a site at that time—a postponement that left West more embittered than ever.
Nearly a year passed before the question of the location of the Graduate College reared its head again. In April 1908, the trustees’ committee voted in favor of the site between Prospect and 1879, but West soon introduced a new wrinkle. He claimed that shortly before Grover Cleveland’s death in June he and the ex-president had inspected several possible sites and when they came to one adjoining a golf course, which was even farther from the campus than Merwick, Cleveland struck his cane on the ground and exclaimed, “Here is the best site, if you can get it!”8 This reported blessing gave the dean a new weapon in the fight over the location of the Graduate College.
Wilson seemed oblivious to this turn in the Graduate College controversy, and he turned his attention again to the Quad Plan. When he resumed speaking about it in the fall of 1908, he sounded a new note of political and social reform. In October, at Haverford College’s seventy-fifth-anniversary celebration, he asked his fellow college presidents whether it was “their ambition to be presidents of country clubs.” He avowed, “Country clubs are very admirable things; but their presidencies do not afford careers.” A month later, speaking at a high school in Jersey City, New Jersey, he regretted that only 18 percent of Princeton’s students came from schools like that one: “The section from the public schools represents the great rank and file of our nation, and I want to see our colleges benefited and vitalized by the increment of blood and gristle from the very backbone of our civilization.”9
Casting aspersions on country clubs and lauding “the great rank and file of our nation” provided the first public signs of a major shift in Wilson’s approach to political issues outside the university. He was forsaking his flirtation with the conservative Democrats and joining their foes, the insurgents and reformers who were now calling themselves “progressives.” In speeches in the spring of 1908, he again condemned the rush to regulate business, and he dismissed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act for being “as clumsy as it has been ineffectual.” Those were the next to the last truly conservative utterances to come out of Wilson’s mouth. His final foray on that side occurred when Princeton faculty members gathered informally to debate a resolution approving “the Roosevelt Policies.” Wilson attacked the policies, but when a young preceptor vigorously rebutted his argument, he seemed to enjoy it—most likely because he secretly admired the expression of views that he was coming to hold himself.10
When, how, and why Woodrow Wilson became a progressive would become hotly debated questions after he entered politics. Foes on both sides would denounce him for opportunism: erstwhile conservative patrons would scorn him for ingratitude and for pandering to passing popular fancies; skeptical progressives would suspect him of belated and halfhearted adherence to their side. Opportunism unquestionably played a part in swaying Wilson toward progressivism. The popularity of Roosevelt’s anti-trust and regulatory policies, growing reformist insurgency in both parties, and repeated defeats of conservative Democrats—all pointed to the direction in which the political winds were blowing. In November 1907, Wilson obliquely confessed to being an opportunist: “A politician, a man engaged in party contests, must be an opportunist. Let us give up saying that word as if it contained a slur. If you want to win in party action, I take it for granted that you want to lure the majority to your side. I never heard of any man in his senses who was fishing for a minority.”11 His tilt toward progressivism did contain an element of disingenuousness in that he did not tell his conservative Democratic sponsors that he no longer agreed with them. Instead, he soft-pedaled his newly evolving views and continued to welcome their efforts to boost his entry into politics.
In 1908, George Harvey mounted a drive to get Wilson the Democratic presidential nomination and got some backing from Tammany Hall. Wilson affected not to take the matter seriously, but that summer, while he was in Scotland, he stayed within reach of the telegraph at the time of the convention. Remote as he regarded his own prospects that year, the idea of running for president excited him. After the election—in which Bryan was the Democratic nominee and went down to his third defeat—Wilson told Mary Peck that the Democrats needed someone who could match Bryan’s devotion “to principles, to ideas, to definite programmes and not to personal preferment, … a man with a cause, not a candidacy. It’s a desperate situation,—for what man of that kind will be willing to risk the appearance of personal ambition?” He eschewed any such ambition for himself: “Certainly I do not want the presidency! The more closely I see it the less I covet it.”12 That is just the sort of ritual disclaimer typically made by a man with the presidential bee in his bonnet.
Wilson’s opportunism and disingenuousness showed only that he was an ambitious man with a healthy regard for his prospects, and those qualities did not tell the whole story of how and why he became a progressive. Other influences were also propelling him in that direction. Several interpreters have concluded that the battles at Princeton over the Quad Plan and the Graduate College helped change his politics—that the clubs’ social exclusiveness and the influence of private wealth over the location of the Graduate College made Wilson more progressive in state and national politics. Certainly the tales he heard from former students and their parents about the pain and suffering inflicted by Bicker—the clubs’ selection process—moved him, and he resented the way some of the rich men among the alumni and trustees threw their weight around. The trouble with that view of Wilson’s turn toward progressivism is that it puts the cart before the horse; his changing political views were what influenced the stands he took at Princeton. Before 1908, he had based his arguments for the Quad Plan and the location of the Graduate College almost solely on intellectual grounds, and only after he started espousing progressive political views did he condemn the clubs’ snobbery and the influence of rich men over the university.13
Wilson’s intellect played a critical part in his political shift. Even at the height of his attempted espousal of Democratic conservatism, he could not hide his approval of strong, centralized government, as he showed in Constitutional Government. Given the public outcry against the arrogance of big business, misery among the rural and urban poor, and the corruption of political machines, progressivism made a good fit for a believer in governmental activism. Likewise, his party affiliation was more than a flag of convenience: it showed his loyalty to his southern origins and his feeling for the hinterlands and the hardworking folk who lived there. Two and a half decades of living in the Northeast and often hobnobbing with people of wealth and social prominence had not brought him to identify with them and their part of the country. In Constitutional Government, he lauded “the South and the West with their simpler life, their more scattered people, their fields of grain, their mines of metal, their little towns. … No country ought ever to be judged from its seething centres.”14 He was sounding like a Bryanite Democrat.
When Wilson turned toward progressivism, he was not yet a practicing politician. Instead of taking stands on current issues, he was able to proceed the way he preferred, which was to stake out his general position before he got down to specifics. He did this in speeches over the course of 1909. Although he still called himself a conservative, he repeated his long-held view that growth and adaptation were truly conservative, adding, “All the renewal of a nation comes out of the general mass of its people. Nations have no choice, in respect of power and capacity, but to be democratic.” In expounding his approach to leadership, he again drew upon his favorite nautical analogy: “Because although you steer by the North Star, when you have lost the bearings of your compass, you nevertheless must steer in a pathway on the sea,—you are not bound for the North Star. The man who insists on theory insists that there is a way to the N
orth Star.” He also reiterated his belief in “expediency,” maintaining that it, not theory, dictated what laws and reforms were needed.15 Wilson was clearly drawing on his earlier political thinking to establish the core principles and strategic approach that would guide his emerging progressivism.
His anti-theoretical conception of politics and his metaphor of organic growth sprang from insights he had previously drawn from Burke, as did his renewed espousal of “expediency,” which lent philosophical sanction to opportunism. The novel element was the radically democratic twist he now gave to these views. His affinity for strong, activist government and his permissive views about the “ministrant” functions of government always contained the potential for moving in a reformist direction, and this new vision of social renewal from below made such a move nearly impossible to resist. Political opponents would later point to Wilson’s gradual, occasionally hesitant embrace of some reform measures as proof of a halfhearted, insincere conversion to progressivism. They misread the way his mind worked. Despite his rejection of theory and his disdain for “literary politicians,” Wilson was a true intellectual. Ideas mattered to him, and he had always grasped for broad insights and perspectives before getting down to cases. His most significant step on the road to progressivism was the intellectual leap he made at the outset, when he embraced a thoroughly democratic vision. Once he decided where he stood on the big questions of political direction and leadership strategy, such matters as which reform measures to champion and when to champion them involved only reading changing political circumstances—matters of “expediency.”
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