Wilson

by A. Scott Berg

  The school proposed an ambitious agenda of educational expansion—certainly a graduate school and probably a law school. Patton, however, revealed himself incapable of fostering such innovations, which only encouraged others to fill the vacuum in leadership. Professor West, for example, had shown that he could attract talent and produce results. President Cleveland was so entranced by his Princeton experience, he would move to town the following spring. With the assistance of his new friend West, he purchased a colonial mansion, which he even named “Westland.” After the campus had quieted, however, only one voice from the Sesquicentennial resonated. The New York Times devoted most of an entire column on page 2 to the remarks of Woodrow Wilson.

  In charting its fresh course, the new university would adopt his phrase “Princeton in the Nation’s Service” as its motto. Over the next few years, however, Wilson would reveal the speech’s personal subtext, as it had actually been an exercise in self-exhortation. Only two months shy of forty, the college professor reexamined his own goals. He returned to his former schedule—teaching and writing and lecturing with even more intensity than before. Stockton Axson, whom he had encouraged to become an English professor, observed that Woodrow had become more purposeful, “with less time to sit down for prolonged talks in the old, easy, gossiping way. He was just as companionable as ever, but he was like a man who had things to attend to and could not spend the hours in rambling talk which I had so much enjoyed.” He used the time to infuse public lectures on theories of government with personal statements of his current beliefs.

  The Presidential election of 1896 was a watershed in American politics, coming after the United States had experienced five controversial elections since 1872. In that period, two men lost the popular vote but won the Presidency; and in the other three elections, third-party candidates kept the victors from achieving majorities. The main issue in 1896 was the depressed economy, and the voters had a clear choice. The most stirring Populist voice of his generation, the “silver-tongued” William Jennings Bryan, argued against retaining the gold standard and became the Democratic nominee for President. “Gold Democrats”—such as Grover Cleveland—formed the National Democratic Party. The Republicans ran Governor William McKinley of Ohio; arguing that “free silver” would create inflation, not jobs, he gained the support of big business, ethnic labor, and urban voters. For the first time in twenty-four years, the American people spoke decisively, handing McKinley an imposing popular and electoral victory. Wilson voted as a Gold Democrat.

  The consolidation of businesses into monopolies, the raising of protective tariffs, and the blocking of immigration marked McKinley’s first term. So did America’s emergence onto the world stage. Invoking the Monroe Doctrine, the new administration argued for Cuba’s liberation from Spain and sent the USS Maine into Havana harbor in early 1898 to show that America meant business. Upon its sinking—which the yellow journalists of the day attributed to a Spanish attack—the United States found itself in a four-month military conflict against Spain, a battle that would put her colonies up for grabs. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt helped organize a volunteer troop of “Rough Riders” to fight in the Cuban theater. Saber rattling accompanied America’s flag-waving, and the United States won what Ambassador John Hay called a “splendid little war,” the spoils of which included a small empire—Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.

  Delivering a commencement address at the University School of Bridgeport in the middle of the Spanish-American War that spring, Wilson said, “The general mass of men like to be led by men strong in deed, and the literary man influences only a few.” Although there was only so much a college professor could do, Wilson began writing political memoranda to himself, items he would incorporate into public lectures. By the middle of that summer, he noted, “We did not enter upon a war of conquest. We had neither dreamed of nor desired victories at the ends of the earth. . . . It was for us a war begun without calculations, upon an impulse of humane indignation and pity.” For the first time, Wilson considered the moral imperative involved when a strong country saw a weak neighbor attacked. He wished his nation had not gone to war; but having done so, America assumed responsibilities. Instead of allowing those colonies to be seized by others, he believed, America would act in their best interests by preparing them to care for themselves. “No doubt the war pleases the jingoes,” he wrote; “but any war would please them, and this war was undertaken, not just because war is pleasing, but because this particular war was just, and indeed, inevitable; and we have not made ourselves a nation of jingoes by undertaking it.”

  Having crossed this Rubicon, America had become part of world affairs; and Wilson chose to enter the public discourse. He told his students in 1899 that it was nigh impossible to enter politics without independent means of support or without succumbing to the wishes of a political machine. As though reading the tea leaves of his own future, he admonished any man without wealth who still chose to enter politics to “be careful of his conduct when in office and be ready to sacrifice himself for principle.” He warned an audience in Brooklyn in 1900 that America was no longer “a fine provincial nation” and that it behooved the country to “impart liberty” to the new American dependencies—and not just “impossible ideals, but the practical hard headed experience of the race.”

  In an address at the Taylor Opera House commemorating the 125th anniversary of the Battle of Trenton, Wilson turned what formerly would have been a historical lecture into a statement of public policy. He asked his audience to realize that the newly acquired American colonies needed self-government: “But when will our work there be done, and how shall we know when they are ready?” He noted that not since the first quarter century of the nation had foreign affairs played such a strong part in America’s life.

  In 1902 he also dissected America’s current domestic policy. At “this new turning-point of our life,” Wilson told an audience at Vassar College, he had come to see the great “elasticity of American institutions”—the source of which was the Constitution. He felt the great document called for contemporary interpretations and application. In placing few restrictions on the role of the President, for example, the authors had left room for the executive branch to become the most powerful. When it came to gun control, to cite another specific, he was utterly convinced that “the accumulation of arms, and the bearing of concealed weapons, may be forbidden constitutionally,” because he believed the Second Amendment was less about private use of guns than the maintenance of a well-regulated militia, as stated in the amendment’s often overlooked opening clause.

  Increasingly, Wilson was also drawn into university politics, which were as Machiavellian as those of some European principalities. President Patton had suggested great strides during the Sesquicentennial, but the energized campus quickly settled into its old lassitude. Patton dragged his heels in reorganizing the Department of History and did nothing to establish a law school, which Wilson had expected to head. In the spring of 1897, Wilson was embroiled in a more disturbing episode with the administration when he was encouraged to recruit Frederick Jackson Turner for the History Department, only to find Patton, Andrew Fleming West, and several trustees loath to perfect the offer. Wilson finally learned the problem: Turner was a Unitarian; and Patton suggested that conservative Presbyterian trustees would be reluctant to keep supporting the school with such an infidel inside their gates. “They would accept an agnostic,” Wilson observed, “but not a Unitarian. Unitarianism is their bête-noire.” Wilson felt hung out to dry, having misled an important friend and distinguished scholar. “I am probably at this writing the most chagrined and mortified fellow on this continent!” he wrote Turner, his distress over Patton curdling into distrust. Wilson contemplated leaving, but he could not deny that since his first day on that campus, he had felt possessed by Princeton, a place in which he had by then lived longer than any other.

  By the winter of 1898, Wi
lson’s elective course in politics had become the most popular offering on campus, outdrawing classes in the Bible and American literature. And his academic reputation extended beyond New Jersey. In the last few years alone, he had been offered not just professorships (to teach law at Yale or politics at Johns Hopkins) but also presidencies of a half dozen colleges (the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which offered $6,000, twice his current salary; Nebraska; Alabama; Minnesota; and Washington and Lee). Most tempting was the University of Virginia, which wanted to overhaul its administrative structure and make Wilson its first chief executive. Despite what he considered “sinister influences” at Princeton, he refused them all, believing he was destined to make his mark at his alma mater. In the meantime, he accepted honorary degrees from Tulane and Hopkins and Yale (alongside Theodore Roosevelt, Chief Justice Melville Fuller, and Mark Twain). And he made his restlessness known, stirring things up.

  “I am most cordially disposed to do anything in my power to keep Prof. Wilson in Princeton,” President Patton wrote Cyrus McCormick, a trustee and Wilson’s classmate, “but I confess I do not know what could be done that has not already been done.” Patton said he had championed Wilson ever since his arrival as a professor: even against a strong minority in the Board of Trustees, he had nominated him for the chairmanship of his department; he had allowed him to continue lecturing at Johns Hopkins; and he had nominated him as the Sesquicentennial orator. Afraid Patton’s inaction would result in Wilson’s departure, several alumni who believed that Wilson himself was the key to Princeton’s future took a proactive approach.

  In late March 1898, Wilson’s classmate Cornelius C. Cuyler, the banker Wilson had beaten for the presidency of the Base Ball Association in 1878, declared, “There is no honor too high for you in the future as far as Princeton is concerned.” Aware of “the selfsacrificing [sic] work you have rendered Princeton for 10 years past and the small recompense which up to a certain period you have received,” he and classmates Cleveland Dodge and McCormick, along with five others, pledged a $2,500 annual supplement to his Princeton salary for the next five years, under the proviso that Wilson would cease delivering lecture courses on other campuses and would commit himself fully to Princeton during that time. Wilson accepted the offer.

  Although his concerns over Patton’s Princeton ran deeper than finances, this new arrangement afforded him the liberty to write what he pleased and even the luxury of time to travel and think. At Ellen’s insistence, he took another vacation, cycling through Cumbria with her brother Stockton. Woodrow retraced much of the itinerary of his first trip abroad, especially in revisiting Wordsworth shrines. Although he enjoyed a brief detour to Ireland—roaming the quads of Trinity College in Dublin in search of Burke’s spirit—and shed tears in St. Giles’s Church in Edinburgh, where he heard the very hymns his mother had sung to him—there remained “no spot in the world in which I am so completely at rest and peace,” he said, “as in the lake country.”

  Refreshed, and no longer having to moonlight to pay for his house, Wilson found the additional funds spurred him to publish even more—all of which bespoke a growing interest in the politics of the nation. In 1896, Houghton Mifflin had anthologized eight of his essays under the title of the lead piece, “Mere Literature.” In a chapter on Bagehot, Wilson seemed to be taking himself to task, writing: “The genuine practical politician . . . reserves his acidest contempt for the literary man who assumes to utter judgments touching public affairs and political institutions. . . . The ordinary literary man, even though he be an eminent historian, is ill enough fitted to be a mentor in affairs of government.” Another essay, “A Calendar of Great Americans,” examined the national character through several noteworthy lives. Jackson and Lincoln were quintessential Americans in Wilson’s eyes. Washington, on the other hand, “hardly seems an American, as most of his biographers depict him,” Wilson wrote; and so he spent the next few years trying to right that wrong. His full-length biography George Washington, published in 1897 after having been serialized in Harper’s Magazine, was Wilson’s poorest literary effort. Under-researched and overwritten, it adopted a foppish tone that did nothing to Americanize or even humanize the first President. Even so, with seventy-five dramatic illustrations (most by Howard Pyle, a leading artist of the day), the decorative book added to his fame.

  In 1902 Harper and Brothers published Wilson’s History of the American People. While not the penetrating story of the nation that he had hoped, the imposing five-volume set made him one of the best-known historians in the country. In truth, he never considered himself as much—“I am only a writer of history . . . a fellow who merely tried to tell the story, and is not infallible on dates”; but the books became a commercial success, reprinted in numerous special editions over the years, complete with illustrations every few pages by the likes of Frederic Remington and Howard Chandler Christy. While Wilson received $12,000 for the twelve-part magazine serialization alone, money had not been his sole motivation. “I wrote the history of the United States in order to learn it,” he later told an audience at the University of North Carolina. “That may be an expensive process for other persons who bought the book, but I lived in the United States and my interest in learning their history was, not to remember what happened, but to find which way we were going.” With Wilson’s growing presence, one anonymous “Old-Fashioned Democrat” wrote a letter to the editor of the Indianapolis News suggesting that what his party needed just then was a candidate like Woodrow Wilson—“a man of affairs, a scholar, a patriot, and a man whose very presence inspires enthusiastic devotion.”

  As Wilson’s personal reputation ascended, Princeton’s continued to slump into mediocrity. Half a decade had passed since Patton had declared his aspirations for the new university, and he had realized few of them. Despite strong faculty support, not until December 1900 had a skeletal “Plan of Organization” for a graduate school, drafted by Andrew West, been presented; and in April 1902, it was still being refined. A committee that had been established in 1896 to consider changes in university policy, administration, curriculum, and faculty had yielded little. The only hope for the future lay in the recent recomposition of the Board of Trustees, which was skewing younger and more progressive, and which could now boast the illustrious addition of Grover Cleveland.

  By 1901, the faculty prepared to revolt over slackening academic standards. Wilson’s classmate William Magie, a physics professor, called for a committee to ameliorate matters. When President Patton questioned its purpose, Magie replied it was to ascertain “what was the cause of the utterly rotten condition of education in Princeton—and what was the remedy.” Stockton Axson, then teaching at Princeton, recalled Patton’s attempted explanation: “Gentlemen, whether we like it or not, we shall have to recognize that Princeton is a rich man’s college and that rich men frequently do not come to college to study.”

  The Board of Trustees could endure no more. It averted an outright rebellion by forming an executive committee, which included three faculty members, to assume control of the university, while a group of young trustees, headed by Wilson’s classmate Cyrus McCormick, suggested that it was time for Patton to step down. In a backroom deal, they agreed to buy him out—to the tune of six years’ salary in cash. They even sweetened the pot with a new position, president of the Theological Seminary. On June 1, 1902, while Wilson lunched at the Princeton Inn, C. C. Cuyler approached him and said, “It looks now, Tommy, as if you were going to have a great deal of responsibility.” Wilson did not know exactly what Cuyler meant.

  Eight days later, at the June board meeting, Patton stood and announced his resignation and recommended his successor. In an instant, Woodrow Wilson was voted upon. Reported one of those present, S. Bayard Dod, “I never saw so many men of many minds unite so promptly, without debate, without hesitation at the mere mention of a name. When the ballot was taken I thought that there might be one or two blanks.” But every man had p
romptly cast his ballot for Wilson; “when the vote was announced we agreed that it was the act of Providence.” Woodrow Wilson had been elected Princeton’s thirteenth president, the first who was not an ordained minister.

  Patton and the three trustees from the Class of 1879—Cuyler, Dodge, and McCormick—left the meeting for 50 Library Place to inform the president-elect. Despite the prior hints, his selection came as a joyous surprise. Before the delegation could escort him back to campus, Woodrow and Ellen entered his father’s room with the news, which got the ailing octogenarian out of bed and excitedly pacing the room. When Woodrow and their guests left, old Joseph Wilson shouted out to his granddaughters, “Never forget what I tell you. Your father is the greatest man I have ever known.” Margaret, the eldest at sixteen, assured their grandfather that they knew that already. “You’re too young to know,” he insisted. “I know what I’m talking about. This is only the beginning of a great career.”

  Wilson made a point of stopping off to share his news with Jack Hibben before going to Nassau Hall. There students and alumni had already gathered to cheer as he mounted the steps to accept the board’s offer. At an alumni luncheon the next day, Patton introduced his successor, and Wilson replied, “How can a man who loves this place as I love it realize of a sudden that he now has the liberty to devote every power that is in him to its service?” Ovations greeted him whenever he walked into a room. On June 11, The New York Times editorialized, “This new president is a man of distinction. His political writings have made him already well known to the country as a man capable of clear, straightforward thinking upon the problems of government, while his career as an educator testifies to his fitness for the new responsibility. . . . Under his direction a new life, a higher fame, and a greater usefulness to the youth of the nation and to the Nation itself await the university.”