Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  In the decades to come, Wilson’s academic presidency would undergo repeated scrutiny, principally in terms of two questions: First, what clues did his performance in this office give to how he would fare in politics, especially in the White House? Second, what did he accomplish at Princeton, and what did his performance say about the future of that university and higher education? The first of these questions would receive far more attention, much of it sharply critical of Wilson. A common line would be that his behavior, particularly in the Graduate College controversy, showed him to be a self-righteous zealot who ignored or resented criticism and refused to compromise. Some have also argued that in this fight, as later, a stroke warped his behavior. Some of those interpretations would lump together dissimilar situations and personality traits and strain to find commonalities where few or none existed. Still, this search for similarities and patterns has been inescapable, and it has sometimes yielded insights into how Wilson functioned as a leader in both the academic and the political realms.33

  The main pattern that shone through was what he said himself to Axson: “Unless I can improve something I cannot get thoroughly interested.” Throughout his presidency of Princeton, Wilson repeatedly chose the path of boldness. He showed this proclivity most clearly with the preceptorial system and the Quad Plan. The main flaws that he displayed in these affairs were the defects of his boldness and innovation—namely, impatience and insufficient preparation. Those flaws did not hamper him with the preceptorial system, where he was adding resources and advantages, but they proved fatal with the Quad Plan, where he was taking away resources and where he underestimated the depth of the opposition. Worse, he did not at first seem to grasp the difference between the two situations, in part because his reaction to the blow to his health may have intensified his impatience. In his political career, his boldness and itch to develop would serve him splendidly until close to the end. Then, as at Princeton, he would pay a price for not preparing the ground and not explaining his position soon enough.

  The Graduate College fight was different. It was not something he initiated; faculty supporters, especially Fine, helped push him into it, and he had to strike out defensively from start to finish. There, too, his main flaw lay in lack of preparation—in this case, in opposing the off-campus site. He did not prepare the way sufficiently in two areas. One was fund-raising: as with the Quad Plan, Wilson should have lined up financial backing before taking his stand. That would become the cardinal rule for college and university presidents later in the twentieth century. Although this was a new aspect of academic leadership in Wilson’s time, he did recognize how important money was, and he can be faulted for not overcoming his distaste for what he called “begging.” That was the one advantage, besides blind luck, that West had over him—the dean positively enjoyed asking for money.

  The other way in which Wilson failed to smooth the path sufficiently lay in not explaining why the location of the Graduate College was critical to his vision of a new, intellectually serious Princeton. The lack of such an explanation was the reason some observers could dismiss the issue as just a squabble about a “boarding house for graduate students.” When he finally did state his position fully, as he did to the alumni in the spring of 1910, he made a compelling case. Wilson seems to have learned from this defeat. In the future, he would make timely exposition of his thinking—education of the public—central to his political career. The one great exception would come with the League of Nations, when, as in the Graduate College fight, he only belatedly took his case to the people. As it was, he almost won the fight over the Graduate College. Only an unexpected event stopped him just short of victory.

  Wilson certainly thought his Princeton presidency prepared him for politics. Besides the public visibility and administrative experience that the office gave him, he believed that it taught him valuable, hard-won political lessons. In later years, he would often compare academic politics with the “real” thing. “After dealing with college politicians,” Wilson commented during his first year as governor of New Jersey, “I find that the men with whom I am dealing … now seem like amateurs.” When he campaigned for president in 1912, he observed that “politicians in the field of politics … play their hand rather openly,” whereas “the college politician does it carefully. He plays it very shrewdly, and he has such a gift of speech that he could make black sound as if it were white any time that he chooses.” Even after he became president, his mind strayed back to Princeton. His later confidant, Edward M. House, recorded on one occasion that Wilson told him “he had nightmares, and that he thought he was seeing some of his Princeton enemies.” On another occasion, House wrote, “Whenever we have no governmental business to discuss, somehow or other, we drift into his life at Princeton and his troubles there, showing, as I have said before, how deeply the iron entered his soul.”34

  This experience also left so deep a mark on Wilson because of what he believed it meant for Princeton. When, as governor, he walked across the campus in the fall of 1911, he became aware, as he told Mary Peck, “at every turn of how the University … has turned away from me. … I went about from familiar place to place with a lump in my throat, and would have felt better if I could have cried.” The year after he lost the fight over the Graduate College brought more wormwood and gall as Pyne engineered Hibben’s succession as president and West basked in glory at the opening of his grand new Graduate College. Early in 1913, House recorded in his diary, “[Wilson] said that Princeton was really for sale.”35

  He grieved over his beloved school’s having forsaken the path of greatness in order to worship false gods. To some extent, his dark thoughts were justified. West never regained the full measure of his earlier autonomy, and the Wyman bequest ultimately turned out to be less than $800,000. Still, the dean reigned in splendor in his new buildings and resumed his old game of playing favorites and making life difficult for serious graduate students. The “country club” side of Princeton soon received powerful reinforcement, first in the person of a golden-haired, aristocratic athletic idol, Hobart (Hobey) Amory Hare Baker, of the class of 1914, and then in the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald, class of 1917. They and others helped to brand Princeton with an image of glamorous pleasure seeking and social snobbery that would endure for decades and never fully wear off.

  Yet Wilson had not labored in vain. Fine judged his legacy correctly when he told Wilson’s first biographer in 1925, “[W]hen all is said and in spite of controversies and other difficulties, Wilson made Princeton. … He gave it the intellectual stimulus.”36 As it turned out, Hibben’s regime did not bring total defeat for Wilson’s aims, and under succeeding presidents Princeton would continue a steady ascent in academic prestige, so that by the middle of the twentieth century it would rank among the handful of most highly regarded universities in the nation.

  Wilson did deserve the greatest credit for putting the university on that path. There was nothing foreordained about it. As he pointed out, Princeton did not enjoy the advantage of size that other major universities enjoyed, nor did it have the urban location and the ready-made ties to other institutions conferred by professional schools that most other major universities also enjoyed. Of all the colleges founded before the American Revolution, Princeton was unique in beginning the metamorphosis into a modern university as early as it did and without such extrinsic advantages. Other prestigious small colleges, including the newly founded women’s colleges, were likewise adapting themselves to this new academic world of research and professionalization, but only Princeton rushed to make the leap to a full-fledged university and vied for the top spot among these newfangled institutions. That was Wilson’s doing. It would take several decades for his vision to be fully realized, but Princeton University would never have become what it is today without his initial inspiration.

  It is tempting to close the judgment on Wilson’s presidency of Princeton by lauding him for his vision and early labors while faulting him for trying to do too much too
soon. In that view, his academic career does seem to prefigure his political career; the same judgment encapsulates the near-universal estimate of what he achieved early in domestic affairs and then tried and failed to do with the League of Nations. But the question is not so easily laid to rest. Wilson at Princeton, it must be remembered, was operating at a moment of flux and possibility in the development of American higher education. Universities were a fresh import to the country. Some of the best of them were brand-new creations, such as Johns Hopkins, Cornell, Chicago, and Stanford. Even the state universities that emerged as scholarly and scientific powerhouses, such as Wisconsin, Michigan, and California (at Berkeley), were just a few decades removed from their origins as small, meagerly funded colleges. The situation was ripe for dynamic, visionary leadership, as had already been shown by Daniel Coit Gilman at Hopkins, Charles W. Eliot at Harvard, Andrew D. White at Cornell, and William Rainey Harper at Chicago—the kind of men Thorstein Veblen dubbed “captains of erudition.” Princeton might have been a relative latecomer to this academic revolution, but not by much, and there was still room at the top for an institution led by someone with vision and boldness.

  Wilson possessed both qualities in abundance. As a visionary, he grasped the essential problem of transforming the old-style small college into a modern university—combining intimate instruction of undergraduates with pioneering scholarly and scientific research by professors and graduate students. Wilson aimed all three of his main programs—the preceptorial system, the Quad Plan, and the location of the Graduate College—at perfecting that combination. Other universities soon followed his lead in one way or another. In the 1920s and 1930s, first Harvard, with its houses, and then Yale, with its colleges, adopted versions of the Quad Plan. In the 1930s and 1940s, Chicago, under Robert M. Hutchins, conducted a campaign to make its undergraduates more intellectually serious by downgrading varsity sports and other extracurricular diversions. Every other major university would mingle graduate students with undergraduates rather than separate them, after West’s model. At Princeton, Wilson had within his grasp the chance to do all of those things first, and he came close to achieving his aims. If he had won his academic civil war, American higher education would have had an undisputed champion. Yet if he had won, he would have had to stay at Princeton and continue to remake the university in his own image. Andrew West’s windfall liberated Woodrow Wilson from academic life and opened a larger career for him in politics.

  6

  GOVERNOR

  As an academic political scientist, Woodrow Wilson seldom studied state politics, and he rarely wrote about the office of governor. Likewise, except for speaking about it a couple of times in the mid-1890s, he did not involve himself in local or state politics. In 1910, Wilson had been living in New Jersey for twenty years, but he had seen little of his adopted state. Speaking engagements as president of Princeton sometimes took him to Jersey City, Morristown, or Newark, but he visited few other places in the state, and he had never set foot inside the capitol in nearby Trenton. It might seem odd, then, even ironic, that he first entered active politics by running for and winning the governorship of New Jersey. In fact, it turned out to be an ideal way for him to begin his political career. Circumstances seemed to conspire to propel this fifty-three-year-old neophyte on a meteoric rise in both state and national politics. He became a political star practically overnight and a hot prospect for his party’s presidential nomination almost as soon as the ballots were counted in New Jersey in November 1910.

  Irony abounded, especially in the way Wilson won the Democratic nomination for governor. This freshly minted progressive and future reformer at the state and national level owed his start in politics to conservatives, machines, and bosses. As before, George Harvey got the ball rolling. The magazine editor owned a seaside home in New Jersey, which gave him good connections in conservative Democratic circles at the state as well as the national level. For several years, he had worked to interest the foremost leader of the New Jersey Democrats in Wilson. This was James Smith, a wealthy onetime U.S. senator. Widely known as Sugar Jim for his services as senator to the sugar-refining industry, Smith fit the popular image of the political boss. He was a big, smooth-faced Irish American with expensive tastes and a hearty manner. Politics was a family business: his son-in-law, James Nugent, was the boss of Newark’s Democratic machine and his second in command in the state party. No two figures roused greater enmity among New Jersey’s fledgling progressive Democrats.1

  Yet it was Smith and, to a lesser extent, Nugent who made Wilson the Democrats’ choice for governor. The Princeton president and the party bosses engaged in a lengthy and elaborate mating dance. Nineteen ten was starting to look like a good political year for Democrats at both the state and the national levels. In Washington, the Republicans were teetering on the brink of civil war as progressives, led by Robert M. La Follette, now a senator from Wisconsin, openly rebelled against the Taft administration over the recently passed Payne-Aldrich tariff and other issues. In Trenton, the Republicans were similarly suffering from internal strain as local progressives challenged their party’s conservative leadership. In these circumstances, Smith and Nugent liked the idea of having an attractive, respectable new face at the top of their ticket. Harvey, whose hornrimmed glasses and slicked-down hair made him look like an owl, again put Wilson’s name in play with Smith. In January 1910, he assured Wilson that “the nomination for governor shall be tendered to you on a silver platter, without your turning a hand to obtain it.”2 Rumors about Wilson’s nomination began to circulate in the spring, and he talked about the idea with Ellen and some of his supporters on the Princeton board of trustees.

  Curiously, however, the road to Wilson’s gubernatorial nomination really began in Chicago. Smith was there in June 1910, at a luncheon with the city’s Democratic boss, Roger Sullivan, when some lawyers and businessmen with Princeton connections talked up Wilson. That talk led to a meeting at the middle of July between Wilson and party leaders, where he impressed them, although Smith did not like his favoring local option on liquor sales. He also struck some of the party men as unfamiliar with state issues, but he reportedly assured them that he would not try to interfere with the Democratic organization. Three days after that meeting, Wilson issued a public statement in which he asserted that if “a decided majority of the thoughtful Democrats of the State” wanted him to run for governor, “I should deem it my duty, as well as an honor and a privilege, to do so.”3 In other words, his hat was in the ring.

  He was not yet home free, however. Nugent wanted a different candidate, but he promised to defer to the “Big Fellow.” In August, Wilson drafted a set of suggestions for the New Jersey Democrats’ platform, expressing progressive ideas. He also made some public pronouncements to cover divergent political bases, such as insisting that he was “the warm friend of organized labor” but also praising corporations “as indispensable to modern business enterprise.” Coming out in the open as an aspiring politician gave Wilson mixed feelings. “I feel very queer adventuring upon the sea of politics,” he told a Princeton friend, “and my voyage may be brief.”4 He also chafed under an injunction from the bosses that he not talk to reporters, although he acknowledged that it allowed him to duck the liquor question.

  Wilson did not have to put up with enforced silence for long. The state Democratic convention opened in Trenton on September 14. Smith arrived, accompanied by Harvey, and ensconced himself in room 100 of the Trenton House, the hotel where party bosses customarily resided. From there he and Nugent worked through the night to round up the votes needed to nominate Wilson. The party’s progressives were furious at having a political unknown shoved down their throats by the bosses, but Wilson was duly nominated. A few minutes after five o’clock in the afternoon on September 15, 1910, he strode into the auditorium where the delegates were meeting. Many of the progressives sat in sullen silence while machine supporters and Princeton students shouted and cheered. Few of those present knew wha
t to expect from their new nominee for governor, and few had ever seen him or heard him speak. “God, look at that jaw!” one man reportedly exclaimed.5

  Wilson began his acceptance speech by claiming, “I did not seek this nomination.” Therefore, he vowed, if he was elected governor, there would be “absolutely no pledge of any kind to prevent me from serving the people of the State with singleness of purpose.” On the major issues, Wilson declared, “I take the three great questions before us to be reorganization and economy in [government] administration, the equalization of taxation and the control of corporations.” Other important issues included employers’ liability for workplace injuries, corrupt practices in elections, and conservation of natural resources. Wilson sounded a conservative note when he asserted, “We shall not act either justly or wisely if we attack established interests as public enemies.” But he also called for the establishment of a public service commission to regulate rates for utilities and transportation, to be modeled on the one La Follette’s progressives had instituted in Wisconsin. In closing, Wilson proclaimed, “We are witnessing a renaissance of public spirit, a re-awakening of sober public opinion, a revival of the power of the people.” At that point, he offered to stop, noting that the delegates must be tired after putting in so many hours of work. Cries arose from the floor: “Go on!” He then repeated his promise to serve only the people and his demand for a public service commission, and he declared that the state needed to control corporations. Appealing to the “ideal” of America as a haven for equal rights, he urged the delegates, “Let us devote the Democratic party to the recovery of these rights.”6