Wilson

by A. Scott Berg

  On April 15, 1886, several weeks before her due date, Wilson escorted his wife as far as Washington, D.C., where she changed trains at the station, which was then on the National Mall. For the first time, he explored the city. He visited his former law partner, Edward Renick, then working at the Treasury Department. In the afternoon, he visited the United States Capitol. With the Senate in Executive Session, he observed the House of Representatives in action. He looked in on the Supreme Court before returning to the station to catch his train back to Philadelphia. Ellen reached Georgia that night and—unexpectedly—gave birth at 11:30 the next morning. Her aunt commented that she did not even groan during her labor, but instead cried only once and insisted the tears came not from the pain “but for Woodrow.” The girl would be named Margaret Axson, for Ellen’s late mother.

  Wilson busied himself every moment he was separated from his wife and child. He finished his teaching for the school year; he studied for his forthcoming examinations at Johns Hopkins; and he visited his publishers in Boston, where he met Abbott Lawrence Lowell, who had criticized Wilson’s Congressional Government in The Atlantic Monthly. Lowell would long remember the appearance in his office of “a tall, lantern-jawed young man, just my age. He greeted me with the words: ‘I’m Woodrow Wilson. I’ve come to heal a quarrel, not to make one.’” With that, a friendship began, one that would mature as Lowell abandoned the law for education, eventually becoming Harvard’s president. On May 29, Wilson could write Ellen from Baltimore, “Hurrah—a thousand times hurrah—I’m through—the degree is actually secured.”

  Mid-June, Dr. Woodrow Wilson met his daughter and wife in Georgia. For several joyous weeks, they remained there surrounded by Axsons, including Ellen’s brother Stockton, nineteen and suffering from nervous maladies that temporarily kept him from attending college. Strolling leisurely with Wilson along the railway track to a nearby summer resort, the bright young man received his first lessons in Burke and Bagehot. He also saw for the first time the extent to which indigestion and severe headaches afflicted his brother-in-law and how closely related were Wilson’s physical and mental indisposition. Stockton was startled to learn of his secret dream, as “Brother Woodrow” revealed that he “would dearly love a seat in the United States Senate but believed that his academic profession had permanently sidetracked him from active politics.”

  The Wilsons left Gainesville for Clarksville, where baby Margaret met her paternal grandparents. Both were in a state of decline—Woodrow’s father professionally, his mother physically. By the time Woodrow and Ellen returned to their cramped quarters in Pennsylvania, Wilson was determined to leave the Betweenery, if not Bryn Mawr itself. In a bold but desperate moment, he even sought a position in Washington, when he saw there was an opening as an Assistant Secretary of State. While his application attracted little attention, such universities as Cornell, Indiana, and Michigan inquired about his availability, as did the Peabody Normal Institute in Nashville, which was then looking for a chancellor and willing almost to double his Bryn Mawr salary.

  For many years Wilson would contemplate a magnum opus, a “history of government in all the civilized States in the world,” which he was calling The Philosophy of Politics. As an étude in preparation for that work, he labored over what he called a “dull fact book,” The State, which he had contracted with D. C. Heath & Company to write and which would be a comprehensive description of the governments of all nations. The most relevant research material on the subject was, in fact, written in German, which Wilson never mastered. With a dictionary close by, he could translate those texts, but the process was so slow that Ellen took it upon herself to learn the language, so that she could rock the cradle with one hand and write translations with the other. In order to improve his foreign language skills and to get a better sense of “the modern world”—away from Bryn Mawr—Wilson thought of taking his wife and child abroad for a year. But just as he was assessing the financial feasibility, Ellen became pregnant again, with the baby due that summer. When his second year of teaching ended, the Wilsons returned to Gainesville, where, on August 28, 1887, their second child was born—another daughter, whom they named after Woodrow’s mother.

  Back in Bryn Mawr, the family moved into the ramshackle eleven-room Baptist parsonage on Gulph Road, which the local minister did not use. The elder Jessie Wilson had questioned the sense of her son’s renting such a large place; but it spawned a new aspect of Woodrow’s character—the role of the patriarch. Although he and Ellen would always live modestly, pinching pennies at that, they would never again live by themselves. Woodrow, long dependent on his father’s financial support, stepped up at last to the responsibilities of caring for the next generation of Wilsons and Axsons.

  The role assumed added significance on April 15, 1888, when Janet “Jessie” Woodrow Wilson died in Clarksville. She had fallen two years prior and never recovered. Transportation and communication being what they were, by the time Woodrow reached Clarksville, his father and brother had left for Columbia, where she was buried in the churchyard. “My mother was a mother to me in the fullest, sweetest sense of the word,” he wrote Heath Dabney, “and her loss has left me with a sad, oppressive sense of having somehow suddenly lost my youth. I feel old and responsibility-ridden.”

  The small inheritance from Samuel Axson’s estate helped, and so did earnings that trickled in from Woodrow’s various writings and lectures. Chief among them was a $500 stipend he earned from an extramural position, lecturing at Johns Hopkins. In the fall of 1886, the president of Cornell had invited Wilson to speak before his Historical and Political Science Association. Recognizing that such appearances served as tryouts for future jobs, he gladly accepted. With a Civil Service system expanding as rapidly as the nation itself, administrative science was becoming a viable branch of political science, a discipline in which Wilson had become expert. He built his paper, “The Study of Administration,” around a concept of co-operative government, with local, state, and federal governments remaining independent but working interdependently. Months later, Johns Hopkins invited Wilson to prepare a series of twenty-five lectures over the course of a semester on comparative administrative law. In the spring of 1888, he began to deliver the series, as he would over the next decade.

  Meanwhile, Wilson looked for loopholes in his renewed Bryn Mawr contract—which raised his salary to $2,000 per annum for the next three years and stipulated that “he shall have an assistant.” Above that clause, Dr. Rhoads had inserted the words “as soon as practicable.” After another year had passed and no assistant appeared, Wilson declared that the contract had been breached, for—as he told Bridges—“that was the condition upon which I signed.” The Trustees of the College resorted to some unfriendly persuasion, suggesting the law was on their side; but Rhoads informed Dean Thomas that Wilson’s attorney felt otherwise. In July 1888, the board acquiesced, and Rhoads gave Wilson the benefit of the doubt as to the reasons for his sudden departure. He expressed his warm personal regards and the “expectation that a most useful career lies before you.” Martha Carey Thomas, however, long bore a grudge.

  In truth, an attractive contract elsewhere awaited Wilson’s signature. He wished it had come from Princeton, but he had recently bungled an opportunity to obtain a position there. Leading alumnus Moses Taylor Pyne had invited Wilson to address the New York Alumni Association’s annual dinner at Delmonico’s. It was a rah-rah occasion for 250, full of cigar smoke and spirits, college songs, and President McCosh’s brief remarks about the school’s recent progress. After that, Wilson was to speak for a few minutes about government and education. Desperate to showcase his erudition, Wilson chose as his topic “the scholar in politics.” His address was thoughtful and lyrical and completely out of place—twenty minutes that felt like an hour. Many in the audience either ignored him or laughed at him. By the time he finished, he had cleared much of the hall with the worst speech of his life. It kept Princeton from callin
g for years. Wesleyan University in Connecticut, on the other hand, had recently pursued him, with an offer of $2,500, plus a six-week leave of absence so that he could continue to deliver his lectures at Johns Hopkins. The timing could not have been better. “I have for a long time been hungry,” he wrote Bridges in August 1888, “for a class of men.”

  • • •

  In September 1888, Woodrow and Ellen Wilson moved their family to Middletown, a red-brick New England village on the western bank of the Connecticut River. In 1831 the town had helped several Methodist preachers establish a college there, in the name of their movement’s founder, John Wesley. A progressive institution, Wesleyan University reflected many of Methodism’s social-minded tenets but always remained nonsectarian, a school for the liberal arts, not theological training. The college encouraged independent study and research and was in the middle of a forty-year “experiment” with coeducation.

  The Wilsons unexpectedly found the Wesleyan community a model of Northern hospitality. Their house at 106 High Street—a stone’s throw from the campus—had a backyard for the children and a view of the river. After living in five cities in the nine years since he had left Princeton, the young professor had at last found a place where he could light.

  Wilson quickly made friends, starting with the Reverend Dr. A. W. Hazen of the Congregational Church. He also found several lively young minds on the faculty, especially Caleb T. Winchester, a Wesleyan alumnus and an English literature scholar. Wilson admired him enough to encourage Ellen’s brother Stockton to move to Middletown so that he might study under Winchester. Wilson became addicted to lawn tennis and the two professors played whenever time and weather permitted.

  Teaching only upperclassmen, Wilson entitled his primary course Histories of England and France. It amounted to sixty lectures that traced Western Europe since the fall of Rome. He taught a second course in political economy. For both, he was able to draw upon his Bryn Mawr lectures. He used the notes he had taken for The State in his other courses in the history of institutions and the United States Constitution. With his passion for oratory renewed and a wealth of material at hand, Wilson became a first-rate teacher, inspired by his motivated students as much as by his colleagues. “He had a contagious interest—his eyes flashed,” one former Wesleyan student recalled. “I can see him now with his hands forward, the tips of his fingers just touching the table, his face earnest and animated, many times illuminating an otherwise dry and tedious subject by his beautiful language and his apt way of putting things.”

  His mode of pedagogy evolved from a monologue to a Socratic dialogue as the school year progressed. In the beginning of each course, he lectured for the most part, painting the background and affixing a frame. Stockton Axson took two of his brother-in-law’s classes and observed firsthand that “he had the great art of quizzing students, of drawing them out by degrees, and of leading them to show what it was they did not understand in the text. He would clarify their own rudimentary notions.”

  He led his students to understand that the American Constitution, for example, was “not merely a document written down on paper but is a living and organic thing, which, like all living organisms, grows and adapts itself to the circumstances of its environment.” He helped a class composed mostly of Northerners understand that only a generation prior, the statesmen of the South had been strict constructionists, looking so microscopically at the Constitution that they failed to realize that the world around it had expanded and changed. “The northern boys began to see that the southern statesmen were absolutely honest in their contention that the Constitution gave them the right to secede, and the very few southern boys . . . began to see that the northern statesmen had a larger vision of a greater United States than had been perceived when the colonies formed themselves into a Union.” Wilson would speak frankly as a Southerner about the “War of the Rebellion” and how he believed “in the matter of secession the South was absolutely right from the point of view of a lawyer, though quite wrong from the point of view of a statesman.” Watching her husband adapt so readily to Connecticut, Ellen Wilson came to understand his identity. “You are an American citizen—of Southern birth,” she told him. “I do believe you love the South, darling. . . . I believe you are her greatest son in this generation and also the one who will have greatest claim on her gratitude. . . . You are free from ‘provincialisms’ of any sort.”

  The instant contentment Wilson found at Wesleyan quelled his political desires. He would never “stand before the Senate,” he would say, suppressing his governmental ambitions; and he began dedicating himself to a new purpose, finding that he “could inspire young men to go into politics and become the kind of leader he would have liked to be.” Toward that end, he breathed life into a gasping debating society. And, as in his undergraduate days, Professor Wilson trotted all his college spirit onto the playing field. He got elected to the Advisory Board of the Wesleyan football team and once again coached and provided plays. The home team played a crucial game against Lehigh on Thanksgiving Day 1889, in rain and mud. Once Lehigh scored two touchdowns, Wesleyan seemed too dispirited to compete further . . . until, as one witness remembered, a man rose from the Wesleyan bleachers and stepped in front of the small crowd, wearing heavy rubber boots and a raincoat. He excoriated the Wesleyan fans for abandoning the team and exhorted them to join him in the school yell, beating out the charge with his umbrella and maintaining his cheers until the team had turned the score around. Evidently, this history professor, who now wore a pince-nez, could rally crowds and motivate troops.

  As Wilson’s presence grew on campus, so too did his extramural reputation. He continued to deliver his lectures at Johns Hopkins—where one of his admiring students was a brilliant young historian named Frederick Jackson Turner, who would soon become the nation’s leading interpreter of the frontier in antebellum America. Wilson was regularly invited to speak at other colleges, at historical conventions, and in Middletown on commemorative occasions. And he finished writing The State: Historical and Practical Politics in June 1889, with copies in hand by fall—seven hundred pages detailing all forms of government, from the earliest formation of families to Socialism and the modern industrial organization. This volume, he always believed, had sprung from a genuine need—as “no text-book of like scope and purpose has hitherto been attempted.”

  Wilson dedicated the book to “His Wife, whose affectionate sympathy and appreciative interest have so greatly lightened the labor of preparing” it. While it revealed a prodigious amount of research and some occasional paragraphs of lyrical interpretation, the author himself knew its limitations. “A fact book is always a plebeian among books, and it is a fact book,” he wrote Heath Dabney, then teaching history at Virginia; “but a great deal has gone out of me into it, none the less, and I hope you will receive it kindly on that account.” Frederick Turner, just starting his distinguished career at the University of Wisconsin, wrote his former professor that he was “much pleased” with the book and intended to adopt it in his courses. Harvard did as well, with other colleges following suit. The Nation noted, “The work has been very well done. . . . The style is clear, and there is a certain vivacity in the narrative portions of the text that relieves the dryness of the theme.” The book would be reprinted many times during Wilson’s life.

  With a higher salary than he had at Bryn Mawr and several sources of miscellaneous income, Wilson’s domestic life flourished on High Street. They continued to stretch their dollars; but, as one of his children would later recall, “Ellen and Woodrow always remembered their two years at Wesleyan as among the happiest in their lives.” And then, on October 22, 1889, she gave birth to their third daughter within four years of marriage. The Reverend Joseph Wilson wrote his son outright that he had hoped for a boy, “but the divine Father who has events in His own hand, moulds all things for the best.” Woodrow insisted the baby be named after her mother; Ellen suggested a variation. And so
, she was named Eleanor, and called Nellie or Nell.

  None of Ellen’s pregnancies had been easy, and the postpartum months were no better. Depression always hovered, along with memories of her mother’s death after her sister’s birth. A doctor in New York uncovered possible kidney damage incurred during this last pregnancy. And then, two months after Nellie’s birth, Ellen spilled a kettle of boiling lard onto her feet, which forced her to remain in bed for the better part of the next five months. The many relatives assisted with domestic chores, but Woodrow himself waited on his wife, supervised the household, and even bathed his babies. He had never enjoyed such a long stretch of good health.

  “The boyish feeling that I have so long had and cherished is giving place consciously, to another feeling,” Woodrow wrote Ellen that year, “—the feeling that I am no longer young . . . and that I need no longer hesitate . . . to assert myself and my opinions in the presence of and against the selves and opinions of old men, ‘my elders.’ It may be all imagination, but these are the facts of consciousness at the present moment in one Woodrow Wilson—always a slow fellow in mental development—long a child, longer a diffident youth, now at last, perhaps, becoming a self-confident (mayhap a self-assertive) man.”