by G. J. Meyer
Such data become even more impressive when compared with the rest of the industrial and industrializing world. The contrast with Britain is especially striking. In 1870 Britain produced more than three times as much pig iron as the United States. By 1914 the situation had reversed, with British output barely a third of America’s and half of Germany’s. It was the same with steel. In 1875 Britain was producing 40 percent of the world’s steel. By 1913 its output was not only less than a fourth of America’s but also less than half of Germany’s.
Between 1870 and 1913, when the U.S. economy grew at 7 percent per year and Germany’s maintained a 6 percent pace, Britain’s limped along at a sorry 1 percent. In 1880 Britain’s factories accounted for 22.9 percent of worldwide manufacturing, and Germany’s for only 8.5 percent; by 1913 German’s share had risen to 14.8 percent while Britain’s was down to 13.6 percent. Some commentators have maintained that resentment and fear of Germany’s industrial success was a significant reason for Britain’s entry into the Great War. By this line of argument, the war was an opportunity to wreck an upstart rival and reassert a global supremacy that the British saw as theirs by right. It is certainly true that, in the years leading up to 1914, British newspapers went to extraordinary lengths to depict Germany as a sinister force and inflame public opinion against her.
Thomas Woodrow Wilson grew up with the United States in the years following the Civil War. Born in Virginia in 1856, early enough for him to have indelible memories of that conflict, he spent most of his boyhood in the Deep South state of Georgia, where his father enjoyed a position of local eminence and earned a comfortable living as pastor of a substantial Presbyterian church. In 1870 the family moved to Columbia, South Carolina, where Joseph Ruggles Wilson became professor at a seminary and a senior officer of the Southern Presbyterian Church.
The elder Wilson was a strong, upright, self-confident man and the dominant figure in his son’s formative years. Though by no means a domestic tyrant—he could be both playful and affectionate—he set high standards for young Tommy and sometimes shocked visiting relatives by ridiculing the boy when his expectations were not met. Tommy was nevertheless an obedient, submissive, even worshipful son. Biographers of a psychoanalytic bent, Sigmund Freud among them, have hypothesized that his father’s demands irreparably damaged the younger Wilson’s self-confidence, that the boy must, at some unconscious level, have seethed with an anger that he was unable to express or even admit to himself. They have suggested that the Reverend Dr. Wilson implanted in his son the extreme neediness, the insatiable craving for approval, that Colonel House and others would later turn to their advantage, and that it was repressed anger at his own inability to assert himself against his father that compelled Wilson to be dominant in all his adult relationships, cut off close friends when they displayed independence of thought or action, denounce anyone who declined to do as he demanded, and respond to the acquisition of power by seeking still more power.
Some who have studied Wilson’s character say that his father implanted in him an obsession with righteousness, and that this made it impossible for him to accept that he was subject to such commonplace emotions as anger or resentment. He could admit to becoming emotional only for lofty reasons, in the service of high ideals, and could feel justified in acting on such feelings only by deciding that those who opposed him were not merely wrong but morally wrong. To relieve the resulting inner tension, he had to turn differences of opinion into crusades that he alone could lead because he more than anyone else was the champion of justice and truth. He could permit himself to fight only by persuading himself that some great principle was at stake. A dispute over his plans for new buildings at Princeton would thus become, in his eyes, a battle for democracy. Later, in insisting that American citizens were entitled to safety even when traveling on ships of belligerent nations carrying the equipage of war, he would declare himself to be upholding the sacred rights of all humanity.
The one astonishing fact about his childhood, his failure to learn to read until he was nine years old, once was explained as an oblique rebellion against his father’s demands. More recently it has been diagnosed as developmental dyslexia. As this form of dyslexia can be caused by emotional problems, especially in youngsters of at least normal intelligence, such a diagnosis does not altogether invalidate the earlier, more Freudian hypothesis.
Presbyterianism, too, was a shaping influence on the future president. In his case, in boyhood at least, it was an undiluted hard-core Scottish Presbyterianism; both sides of the family were Scots and Scots-Irish, and not only all four of young Tommy’s grandparents but his mother as well had been born in the old country. His mother’s people, the Woodrows, had been Presbyterian clergy of distinction for generations. The Calvinism in which their faith was rooted had at its core the concept of predestination, the belief that even before we are born, the Creator, being omniscient, knows whether we will be saved or damned, and we can do nothing to change our fate. This theology has often been credited with inspiring believers to live disciplined, upright lives, presumably because it reassures them to do so. Doing good and doing well could not win salvation—that question was settled before the world began—but could be evidence that one was among the elect. This does not seem irrelevant to the president’s character and career.
Thomas Woodrow Wilson
He hungered from boyhood to do “immortal work” and serve humanity “in a large way.”
Be all that as it may, Tommy Wilson was better positioned than most young Americans to partake in the surging prosperity of his native land. Though he grew up in a defeated and devastated South, he was a member by birth of a genteel and not-unprosperous postwar southern elite. At a time when only a tiny minority of youngsters went on even to secondary education, it was taken for granted that he would attend university and enter a learned profession. In a nation where most people lived in or on the verge of poverty and child labor was commonplace, he remained financially dependent on his father into his late twenties, free to explore a succession of possible careers.
Not many were so fortunate. The phenomenal economic growth and galloping westward expansion that brought fabulous wealth to a minuscule minority and robust prosperity to middle-class families like the Wilsons also drew floods of immigrants to the United States. Many of the new arrivals found the land and the opportunities that they had left their homelands for. Millions, however, found themselves struggling to wring a living out of soil that never should have been plowed or toiling long hours under miserable conditions for wages barely sufficient to sustain life.
They were not welcome, these newcomers, except as grist for the factories and hardscrabble farmers on the marginal western lands made accessible by the new railroads. They were alien and suspect. Many were Irish—destitute, illiterate, despised. Even more were German, and if somehow they seemed less offensive than the Irish, nonetheless they were guilty of not speaking English and capable of behaving shamefully—of drinking beer in public on the Sabbath, even. There were eastern Europeans with preposterous names, swarthy creatures from Italy, all of them incomprehensible and not only in the languages they spoke. There were Jews, too, piling up in their filthy tenements, performing their weird rites. Not enough of these people seemed properly grateful for having been allowed in, or willing to do as they were told.
Most horrifying of all was the avalanche of Catholic newcomers. It seemed to have no end. Protestant America had from the start viewed Catholics as a threat to the republic and its values: in the presidential election of 1852, a party created for the sole purpose of stopping Catholic immigration received a quarter of all the votes cast. But as their numbers grew, so did the Catholics’ political heft and the difficulty of keeping them in their place. As for black Americans, most whites preferred to ignore their existence, especially in connection with politics. Freed from slavery, briefly invited into full citizenship by Reconstruction, they, too, came to seem a threat to true Americanism. But then the Democrats, driven b
y hatred of Abraham Lincoln and all his works, took control of the former Confederacy and imposed the rule of Jim Crow.
Looming above all this turmoil and tension were the gigantic new corporations that industrialization had brought forth, seemingly out of nothing. Standard Oil, U.S. Steel—they and their counterparts in other industries had not existed when Woodrow Wilson was born. Now they seemed to dominate everything, their vast wealth translating into vast political power, the nation unsure of what to do about them—or of whether anything should be done.
It was the Gilded Age (Mark Twain’s name for it), the age of the robber barons: Rockefellers and Vanderbilts, Morgans and Mellons. They were a curious breed. When Andrew Carnegie sold his steel company to the Morgan-led syndicate that was creating U.S. Steel, he used his $800 million in proceeds to become one of the most extravagantly bountiful philanthropists in history. And yet in building his empire—he had come from Scotland as a boy, virtually penniless—he had been ruthless not only as a competitor but as an employer, treating workers as raw material to be consumed and discarded, crushing all resistance. Did he undergo a change of heart upon cashing in? Not at all. His savagery in business and the generosity that caused him to build public libraries across America were two sides of a single coin: social Darwinism, one of the leading intellectual fashions of his time. Applied to industry, it meant that only the most efficient should survive, and not to achieve maximum efficiency was to fail in one’s duty. But once he had triumphed, especially if his religious roots were strong, a Carnegie or a Rockefeller might well feel impelled to share.
None of which was of much comfort to farmers who could barely pay the interest on their debts, or to industrial workers in their fetid slums. But neither political party displayed much unhappiness with the status quo. The Republicans, as the 1890s began, were more inclined than the Democrats to support government activism—so long as its purpose was to promote economic growth. They used the government to impose the high tariffs that protected domestic producers from foreign competition. By contrast, the Democrats, heavily influenced by their party’s potent southern element, favored states’ rights and a small, inert government. For a quarter of a century after the Civil War, government regulation of the economy was scarcely an issue. Few in either party were able to imagine such a thing.
There is nothing surprising about the young Wilson’s satisfaction with the state of the nation. He was a Democrat because he was a southerner, and growing up in Georgia, he had little exposure to industrial development, urban slums, the more suspect kinds of immigrants, or non-Protestants. He had much exposure to blacks, of course, but in an environment that, even more than the north, viewed them as inferior and dangerous. All his life he would express nostalgia for the social order that the Civil War had destroyed, and his acceptance of Jim Crow was merely typical of his time and place. He was conservative both by instinct and in conformity with the standards of his class. He saw no contradiction between his Christian faith and the law of the jungle in the economic sphere, and he was no more scornful than other young gentlemen of the idea that government might intrude upon the workings of the market. As an undergraduate, he withdrew from an important debating competition rather than violate his conscience by speaking as assigned in favor of universal male suffrage—allowing even white men who did not own property to vote. His admirers prefer to point to a different college oration, one in which he declared Catholics not to be a threat to American democracy. His position was actually not that Catholicism and American values were compatible but that the institutions established by the Constitution were sturdy enough to withstand papist immigration.
Though some of his attitudes and opinions can be shocking today, in fairness they have to be measured against the standards of his time and place. During the most frustrating period of his young manhood—in 1882, when he was unhappily and unsuccessfully attempting to establish himself as a lawyer in Atlanta—he came for a brief period to seem almost consumed with indignation at the respectful attention given to a Catholic bishop by the Wilmington, North Carolina, Morning Star. On January 25 the North Carolina Presbyterian carried a letter, written by Wilson under the nom de plume “Anti-Sham,” complaining that “in giving unqualified endorsement to the views of Romish prelates, [the editor of the Wilmington paper] is helping on the aggressive advances of an organization whose cardinal tenets are openly antagonistic to the principles of free government.”
That this was not just a momentary outburst of bile became evident on February 5, when a second letter from Anti-Sham appeared. It repeated much of the earlier rant, adding that parochial schools demonstrated how “education seems to be the chosen gate of Romish invasion in this country.” More of the same appeared in a third letter on March 22, after which Anti-Sham fell silent. It should be remembered that such opinions were commonplace in the polite society of nineteenth-century America, perhaps especially among Scots Presbyterians, perhaps most strongly among southern Scots Presbyterians.
What was striking about young Wilson was not his inherited prejudices but his desire, which gripped him with almost painful intensity, to do good and do well, and to do both on the grandest scale imaginable. When he was sixteen, a cousin asked about the picture displayed above his desk. He explained that it was of William Gladstone, three-time prime minister of England. “That is the greatest statesman who ever lived,” he said, “and when I grow up to be a man I mean to be a great statesman, too.” In his twenties he told his fiancée that he longed to do “immortal work” and not merely serve humanity but serve it “in a large way.” When the fiancée became his wife, he told her that “I have the uncomfortable feeling that I am carrying a volcano about with me.” Whatever was fueling that volcano—Oedipal rage, fear of damnation, frustration as the fulfillment of his dreams began to seem impossible—in his early years he kept it concealed behind an amiably tranquil facade.
He fed his dream of becoming a Gladstone by honing his gifts, which proved to be exceptional once he began to read, as a speaker and writer. He did so first under the watchful tutelage of his father, then as a college and graduate student, and ultimately on his own. During his months as a clientless young Atlanta attorney, he used his empty hours to practice composition. He was driven by his hunger to be a “statesman” and his conviction that, as he wrote a friend, “statesmanship consists not in the cultivation and practice of the arts of intrigue, nor in the pursuit of all the crooked intricacies of the paths of party management, but in the life-long endeavor to lead first the attention and then the will of the people to the acceptance of the truth in its applications to the problems of government.” To do this, of course, a person has to know the truth. This posed no problem for Wilson. He was never much inclined to doubt that he had better access to the truth than most men.
He was also untroubled by questions of what exactly leadership was for. Of how he would use power, if ever it came to him. He preferred to deal in grand abstractions and entered adulthood satisfied that he had the “absorbing love for justice and truth” and the “consuming, passionate devotion to principle” that he saw as making one man worthy to lead the many. But there appears to have been no particular cause or movement of which he wished to take charge or even to join. This vagueness would prove an asset when he embarked at last upon a career in politics. It allowed him to reshape himself into whatever voters appeared to be looking for at the time.
He decided, at an early age, that the career in statecraft that he craved was not open to him. He complained that to succeed in American politics one needed independent financial means—a proposition contradicted by any number of the most significant political figures of his time—and said that he would have had more opportunities under a parliamentary system like Britain’s, which he revered. Upon graduating from Princeton, he enrolled in the University of Virginia’s law school. He did so not because the study of law interested him—quite the opposite was true—but because he saw it as a portal to politics. What he then saw of local an
d state politics while attempting to practice law in Atlanta disgusted him and led him to change course.
He decided to settle for academia. He resigned himself to a life of writing and speaking about politics, perhaps advising statesmen rather than being one himself, but he was never entirely comfortable with the decision. He did well all the same, earning a doctorate from the Johns Hopkins University, attracting much attention with the book Congressional Government, and moving upward through the educational hierarchy from Bryn Mawr to Wesleyan University and finally to a professorship at his alma mater, Princeton. Along the way he entered upon a thoroughly happy marriage. Ellen Axson, herself the child of a Presbyterian clergyman, regarded Wilson as a great man and abandoned a promising career as a painter in order to become his bride. In four years they became the parents of three daughters. Wilson was a success, a popular lecturer both on and off campus, earning enough as a speaker and writer to provide his family with a more than comfortable lifestyle. He was also deeply, deeply dissatisfied.
He had been at Princeton only a couple of years when, early in the 1890s, the United States was hit by the worst of the financial crises that the Gilded Age called panics. The speculative excesses of the time regularly produced booms and bubbles that were inevitably followed by busts, but this one was uniquely severe, a precursor of the Great Depression. Whole regions suffered as commodity prices plummeted, and great cities found themselves insolvent. By 1894 unemployment was three or four times what it had been a few years earlier. It reached 43 percent in Michigan, 35 in New York. Workers who kept their jobs found their wages savagely cut. Strikes broke out, and much violence. The government had no instruments with which to help the afflicted—not many in authority thought the government should do any such thing—and had only troops as an answer to unrest.