With The State behind him, Wilson received a tempting offer from Harvard’s Albert Bushnell Hart, who was the leader in the budding field of American historiography. He was editing a three-volume series to be called the Epochs of American History, and he hoped Wilson—the Yankee professor from the Confederacy—would write the third volume. It would chronicle the nation from 1829 almost to the present and would be titled Division and Reunion. Hart reminded Wilson of the dearth of textbooks in this field and that departments of history were sprouting everywhere. Upon publication of the proposed sixty-five thousand words in the fall of the following year, Wilson would receive $500.
As his wife had suggested, Wilson believed he was uniquely prepared for the job, “the very man who can impartially review the scenes of our American story” during those sixty crucial years. But as attractive as he found the proposition, Wilson declined, citing the strain of overwork: “With my nervous disposition,” he feared, “if I were to suspend over myself the whip of a contract . . . my health would, I am afraid . . . desert me at the critical moment.” Once told he could have all the time he would need, Wilson signed on to the project. He enlisted the aid of Frederick Turner, hoping to continue the dialogue they had begun in Baltimore about “the growth of the national idea, and of nationality, in our history, and our agreement that the role of the west in this development was a very great, a leading, role.”
For all the pleasures of Middletown, Wilson remained as restless as he had been since leaving Princeton on his graduation day in 1879. Realizing his disquiet, several of his friends—chiefly Robert Bridges—had been lobbying members of the Princeton faculty and administration on his behalf. Upon the death of a political economy professor, McCosh’s successor, Francis Landey Patton, thought the time had arrived to create a School of Political Science, one that Wilson might head. The two men met to discuss the position, though it was not Patton’s to offer. Several old Princeton trustees objected to Wilson—for being Southern and for failing to give enough credit to Christianity and Divine Providence in The State. Furthermore, Wilson himself was not sure he could even accept an offer. Wesleyan had been too generous for him to leave the school “in the lurch”; he still had his teaching obligations to Johns Hopkins; and he did not especially want to teach political economy. Patton waited for the dissent to die down; and on the thirteenth of February, 1890, the Princeton trustees elected Woodrow Wilson to the chair of Jurisprudence and Political Economy—at a salary of $3,000, with the promise that within two years, political economy would be separated from the department and Wilson would have to teach only within the field of public law.
After ten years adrift—two graduate schools, a brief law career, teaching on three college campuses, two books, a marriage and three daughters—Woodrow Wilson was right back where he had started, and no closer to his long-hidden desire. But the scholar-gipsy had decided, at last, to settle. His political fever—the Senatorial dream—had broken, though anybody who has ever been so afflicted could have told him that the virus never dies.
Such was the case with William Cabell Bruce, Wilson’s debating and literary rival back in Charlottesville, the one whose transfer had allowed Wilson to become president of the Jefferson Society. In Maryland, Bruce followed Wilson’s road map to the letter—graduating from the state law school, establishing a practice, serving in the state legislature, and writing on the side. In the end, he won a Pulitzer Prize and Maryland sent him to the United States Senate.
As for Woodrow Wilson—the Princeton offer was lower than he had hoped, especially when Wesleyan said it would raise his salary to $3,500. Williams College even entered the bidding. Then Patton agreed to let Wilson continue lecturing at Johns Hopkins. In March 1890, on his way back to Middletown from his six-week course in Baltimore, Wilson stopped in New Jersey—to look for a house.
5
REFORMATION
And bee not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renuing of your minde . . .
—ROMANS, XII:2
For the second time in his life, Woodrow Wilson would find himself at Princeton.
The College of New Jersey, as it was still officially known, had grown in the eleven years since Tommy Wilson’s graduation, though more in size than in stature. Enrollment had climbed from 475 to 650 students, and the faculty had practically doubled to forty. President James McCosh had long hoped Princeton could be recognized as a full-fledged university—as Harvard, Yale, Pennsylvania, and Johns Hopkins had been—with all the status that suggested. “True,” he granted upon retiring in 1888, “we have not medicine or law, but professional schools are not necessary to a university which is a place of learning and not of the practical arts.” In truth, Princeton’s own Board of Trustees held it back, its reactionary members wishing to preserve the college’s parochial nature.
Bermuda-born Francis Landey Patton was a conservative cleric, the twelfth consecutive Presbyterian minister to lead the college since its founding. His inaugural address tried to appeal to all factions of the Princeton community while offending none. He praised the liberal arts and academic freedom but expressed the need for more conventional religious values. He discussed “the relation of the university to the problem of the world’s improvement”—suggesting that Princeton might serve beyond its gates—but he also described it as “an intellectual retreat,” an ivory tower.
For all his intelligence, Patton was lazy and laissez-faire, making him, in the words of one of his faculty members, “a wonderfully poor administrator.” Without a progressive academic agenda—and a leader to advance it—a college campus slips into narcosis, or worse. Even though a distinguished professoriate offered quality education to aspiring scholars, Princeton in the Gilded Age became a playground for sons of the wealthy. Princeton’s student body came almost exclusively from private preparatory schools, whose graduates arrived on campus in cliques. The lack of amusements in the isolated country town spawned extravagant extracurricular activities, and intramural spirit grew fervent. A snobby system of eating clubs—mansions on Prospect Avenue, just off campus—gained importance among not only undergraduates but also alumni who sought weekend retreats. The architect of a Morgan heir’s Princeton manor house, for example, would design the Ivy Club; wealthy alumni hired McKim, Mead, and White to erect the University Cottage Club next door, complete with tennis court. A prodigious undergraduate named Booth Tarkington started the Triangle Club, which would write and perform original musical plays that would tour the country for the amusement of spirited graduates. Above all, athletics came to dominate campus culture, with sports news filling half the pages of the Princetonian. Football boasted a thirteen-game schedule, each contest routinely drawing a crowd in the tens of thousands. And President Patton preferred the old policies to the new, tampering little with the curriculum. He reputedly claimed that he ran the finest country club in America.
• • •
In September 1890, the Wilsons moved into a roomy wood-framed rental at 48 Steadman Street (soon renamed Library Place), a half mile from Nassau Hall. It was always a full house. Woodrow’s father was spending more of his time in the North, often keeping company with a widow in New York City, and gradually extending his visits to Princeton; Ellen’s two brothers and their sister all made the place their home, as did the family of Wilson’s widowed sister, Annie, and his cousin Helen Bones, a student at local Evelyn College, a women’s school that lasted ten years without fulfilling its dream of affiliating with Princeton.
Wilson ripped into his new job with undergraduate zeal. He stocked the college catalogue with an astonishing array of eight courses in jurisprudence and political economy, two each semester over the next two years. They were all designed for upperclassmen, and a few were open to graduate students. The courses ranged from public law—“its historical derivation, its practical sanctions, its typical outward forms, its evidence as to the nature of the state and as to the character and scope
of political sovereignty”—to studies of political economy and administration. Some courses allowed him to reuse his lectures from his prior teaching, while others required fresh research and composition. All were meant to contribute to his long-imagined Philosophy of Politics and to his goal of establishing a school of law at Princeton. By his second year, Wilson was able to shed his classes in economics, teaching only courses that he liked—Mondays and Tuesdays, four hours a week, at eleven and five.
From the start, his students put him to the test. “Back in those days a custom was in vogue among the underclassmen to find out just how ‘easy’ each ‘new prof.’ was,” recalled one alumnus from the 1890s. One morning, just as Wilson was about to speak, a local drunk rose from one of the seats and created a scene. Wilson asked the man what he was doing there, and the sot replied, “The students invited me in.” Grabbing the man by his collar, Wilson said, “I’ll invite you out again,” as he showed him downstairs, returning to lecture as though the incident had never occurred. From then on, the students were his.
After five years of teaching, he had become a compelling lecturer. He spoke from a rostrum, dictating his major points at the top of the class so that the students could write down the basic precepts. Then he teased out an hour’s lecture, weaving anecdotes with opinions, and tying everything together with vivid descriptions of relevant historical events. Periodically, he interjected a stanza of an appropriate poem into the lecture. One former student who would become a colleague said, “I consider Wilson the greatest class-room lecturer I ever have heard. . . . Wilson held his students spell-bound, and at the close of a lecture they would often cheer him, not for the purpose of bootlicking, but because they just could not help it.” Where most professors were addressing a score of students at most, Wilson found himself with as many as two hundred students in one class, many of whom dropped in merely to hear him speak. By his second year, the university had to move his lectures to the chapel to accommodate the crowds. As Booth Tarkington observed, “We did not see any rigidity in him. I saw in him only an agreeable, supremely intelligent human being—wise—kind—but a fellow human being. He looked happy. His eyes were bright. . . . He seemed to be a person getting what he wanted out of life.”
And as he had as an undergraduate, Wilson worked his way to the epicenter of student activities. Barely a month on campus and Wilson was appointed to the Committee on the Senior Class, which defended and acquitted several students on disciplinary matters. He coached undergraduate orators and judged the Lynde Debate. He refereed the Caledonian Games, an interclass competition in track-and-field events; he coached the football team and served on the faculty committee on outdoor sports, urging the formation of new teams wherever possible. A member of the Graduate Advisory Committee of the University Athletic Association, he even sat on a committee to arrange for the restoration of billiard tables. Cap and Gown, one of the new eating clubs, elected him an honorary member. He invited students to drop by his house for informal gatherings; and the undergraduates annually voted Wilson the most popular professor at Princeton. His reach did not end there.
The junior faculty boasted dazzling young scholars in every field, including several contemporaries who were also Princeton alumni—among them Henry B. Fine, Class of 1880, whom colleague Oswald Veblen called the man who put “American mathematics” on the map, and Henry Fairfield Osborn, Class of 1877, a geologist and paleontologist who would soon leave to head the American Museum of Natural History. They concurred with literature scholar Bliss Perry, who discovered upon his arrival that it was “admitted without question then in Princeton that Wilson was the most brilliant man among the younger faculty. He led us inevitably by his wit, his incisive questioning mind, his courage, and his preeminence in faculty debates.” Joining every faculty committee offered, Wilson began to influence his senior colleagues and the administration, fixing whatever he thought was broken.
The academic slackness on campus troubled him most, especially the problem of cheating. Students copying off one another’s papers had become common practice; and in the waning fashion of the day, men wore removable celluloid cuffs, on which they could sneak a synthesis of a semester’s notes into the examination room. Even more than Woodrow, Ellen Wilson was appalled by such behavior, especially because “there were so many southern lads who were supposed to have higher notions of honor.” She took it upon herself to raise the subject with a number of the young men who visited the house, and Woodrow advocated the code he had known at Virginia for dealing with the problem. Because he believed heavier surveillance would only encourage greater stealth, Wilson supported an honor system, under which nobody would proctor exams other than the students themselves, each of whom would pledge his honor as a gentleman on each test paper itself that he had neither given nor received aid. Furthermore, the faculty would not sit in judgment of violators; a student committee would. The plan was ultimately presented at a meeting of the faculty, which divided largely along generational lines. Bliss Perry remembered one old-school representative mocking the notion of gentlemanly honor, which Wilson rebutted with enough passion and eloquence to sway the vote and the direction of the college, as “it was a distinct triumph for the young faculty members who had begun to win an occasional majority vote in the faculty meetings for the first time.”
The pleasures of life in Princeton escalated, especially with the arrival that year of a fellow alumnus five years Wilson’s junior. John Grier Hibben was the son of a Presbyterian minister—of Scottish and Scotch-Irish descent—who had been the president and valedictorian of the Class of 1882. A dapper Illinoisan with a thick chevron mustache and a pince-nez, studious and pious, he had pursued graduate work for a year in Berlin before returning to the Princeton Theological Seminary. Although he was ordained, a throat condition thwarted a career in the pulpit; and so, in 1891, while pursuing graduate study in philosophy, he became an instructor. Two years later, he received his Ph.D., and two years after that an assistant professorship. Wilson instantly found himself enjoying the most intense friendship he had ever known.
They saw each other daily, often more than once. “John Grier Hibben learnt his every thought and ambition,” wrote another friend of Wilson’s. “I have talked with Jack Hibben,” Wilson would say, “and I am refreshed.” The two men were so happy together, Ellen could but delight in their closeness. Along with Bliss Perry and their respective wives, the two men met regularly for tea, often during the week and almost always on Sundays, during which time Perry found Wilson was “always at his best”—though he displayed a tendency to appear “more interested in what he was saying than in what you were saying; but perhaps this is only like a skillful golfer playing against you who is more intent upon his own shots than upon yours.” Ellen said that Hibben became the friend Woodrow “took to his bosom.”
Although Wilson also enjoyed playing tennis, riding his bicycle for both its physical and practical benefits, and playing billiards at the Nassau Club, where he was one of the local sharks, nothing fulfilled him more than his family life. He doted upon his daughters, playing silly games with them when they were very young, and reading poems to them as they aged. “Father had a certain spontaneous gaiety, a delicious sense of fun and mischief,” Nell later recalled, “and though mother was quiet and took no active part in this, insisting that she was not ‘gamesome,’ she was the perfect audience for him.” A “deep happy peace,” said Nell, “permeated the household,” with its ever-changing stream of relatives. “So much laughter and teasing and warm friendliness.” The children’s favorite moments came each evening, after prayers, when the lights had been dimmed and their father would sit in the nursery by the fire and sing lullabies and gentle hymns.
Ellen remained the center of his life. She oversaw the house’s redecoration, she tended the garden, and she sewed the children’s clothes. She even managed to find a few hours alone, during which she continued to dabble at an easel. She homeschooled the girls in hi
story and literature; and even when they could barely read, they questioned who was greater—Shakespeare or Homer, Milton or Dante? Every Sunday afternoon, Ellen instructed the girls in the Bible, teaching them the Shorter Catechism until they could recite it by heart, for which she rewarded each with her own Bible.
Woodrow considered Ellen an ideal wife, a woman who nurtured without overindulging. In everything he read and wrote, Wilson told a Virginia classmate, “Mrs. Wilson is in all senses my literary partner.” In time, he came to consider her even more than that—“simply my critic and mentor” and muse. “I am madly in love with you,” he wrote her in February 1895. “I live upon your love,—would die if I could not win and hold your admiration: the homage of your mind as well as your heart.” She could argue the large points of philosophy and politics with him one moment and spot a misplaced comma in one of his manuscripts the next.
And after ten years of marriage, their ardor had only intensified. They still corresponded daily whenever they were apart, letters replete with such sentiments as those he expressed in February 1894, when he was delivering his lecture series at Johns Hopkins. “When you get me back you’ll smother me, will you, my sweet little lover?” he wrote from his boardinghouse in Baltimore. “And what will I be doing all the while—simply submitting to be smothered? . . . Are you prepared for the storm of love making with which you will be assailed?”
The years of Wilson’s professorship at Princeton constituted the most prodigious literary period of his life, as he became a virtual cottage industry. In addition to his classes there and at Hopkins, he agreed to write and deliver a ten-lecture series on constitutional law at the New York Law School, an institution on lower Broadway, which overnight became the second-largest law school in the country. (The school attracted a number of accomplished teachers and attorneys, including Charles Evans Hughes.) On top of that, Wilson published more than two dozen lengthy historical, political, or literary pieces, often in The Atlantic Monthly, with dozens of book reviews scattered in other periodicals. Publishers printed several more of his long essays in book form. He also wrote a biography, a five-volume history, and, at last, his historical account of the United States between 1829 and 1889, Division and Reunion.
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