Wilson

by A. Scott Berg

  Congratulations poured in from Tigers of all stripes—classmates, former students, colleagues, and alumni of every vintage. Nobody doubted that Wilson was the best man for the job, as during his twelve years back on campus he had rendered himself indispensable. Even Theodore Roosevelt—who had recently become President of the United States upon the assassination of McKinley—expressed his pleasure, calling Wilson “a perfect trump.” He wrote trustee Grover Cleveland that he had “long regarded Mr. Wilson as one of the men who had constructive scholarship and administrative ability.” He planned to attend Wilson’s inauguration.

  Ellen’s pride in her husband was palpable, as was her dismay. Although Princeton was a small private institution, she realized that her husband had suddenly become a public figure, and that “this was the end of the simple, ideal life,” the privacy she cherished. She knew in her heart what he had expressed was in his—as he had admitted to Frederick Jackson Turner just months prior—that, “after all, I was born a politician, and must be at the task for which, by means of my historical writing, I have all these years been in training.” Wilson would never write another book; but he immediately began to prepare for the next chapter of his life.

  • • •

  “I feel like a new prime minister getting ready to address his constituents,” Wilson wrote Ellen, who was vacationing alone with friends in Massachusetts in July 1902, while he remained in Princeton with his father and the children. In devoting himself that summer to “straightening out my ideas” on educational reform, he found some peace of mind. Weeks later, he explained that his recent election had “settled the future for me and given me a sense of position and of definite, tangible tasks which takes the flutter and restlessness from my spirits.” By the time his wife returned, he had drafted his inaugural address, and his dreams of public office had gone dormant. At Ellen’s insistence, he spent the final days of his recess in New Hampshire with the Hibbens.

  Fifty Library Place sold swiftly, and in September the Wilsons moved into Prospect, the president’s house on the southern perimeter of the campus. It was an asymmetrical two-story Italianate villa with a porte cochere, twenty rooms with high ceilings, and a four-story tower. To the rear was a large uninspired garden, though there was a commanding view of New Jersey countryside. The feeble Joseph Wilson had a large back bedroom; the girls liked to use the topmost room of the “medieval” tower for playing Knights and Ladies; and there was even a room over the kitchen for Woodrow’s billiard table, a gift from Ellen. So eager were the trustees to ensure the Wilsons’ happiness, they provided a $500 redecorating allowance, which Ellen put to prudent use. The president’s study, with books from floor to ceiling, faced the campus; its windows looked onto big elms. As Nell was going to bed that first night, she heard her mother crying and her father consoling her. “I should never have brought you here, darling,” he said. “We were so happy in our own home.” Designing the gardens would become Ellen’s most fulfilling project at Prospect, an enduring legacy. Reforming the rest of the university would be Woodrow’s task.

  Princeton had recently set the bar for academic pageantry, and on October 25, 1902, a perfect autumn morning, the college raised it. Once again, the campus was a spectacle of color, as an unprecedented number of academicians appeared in their hoods and robes—Harvard crimson and Oxford scarlet and Yale blue amid a sea of orange and black. Because of a recent carriage accident, President Roosevelt was unable to attend; and so it fell upon former President Cleveland to lead the procession to Alexander Hall, with Governor Murphy of New Jersey at his side. Woodrow Wilson walked right behind them, followed by representatives from more than a hundred institutions, including the greatest names in higher education, from Maine to California. Four women marched, the presidents of Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Wellesley, and Barnard. Booker T. Washington, the head of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, a Negro college, walked behind them, his very presence scandalizing many.

  Junius S. Morgan marshaled the next division of dignitaries, among them his uncle J. P. Morgan; the former Speaker of the House Thomas B. Reed; several judges and political figures, including former Secretary of War and Presidential son Robert Todd Lincoln; and such literary figures as Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and publisher Colonel George Harvey. Then came the university trustees, faculty, and alumni, led by the oldest living graduate, a member of the Class of 1832. After the invocation and several introductory speeches, Governor Murphy presented Wilson. Alexander Hall rose to its feet in an ovation that did not abate for almost ten minutes.

  Wilson began by referencing his earlier speech, which had been largely retrospective. Calling this one “Princeton for the Nation’s Service,” he said, “We must now assess our present purposes and powers and sketch the creed by which we shall be willing to live in the days to come.” The crux of this address was that in planning for Princeton, “we are planning for the country,” that the “service of institutions of learning is not private but public,” that the nation “needs efficient and enlightened men,” that the “universities of the country must take part in supplying them.” Toward that end, Wilson insisted, colleges should not exist as vocational schools, merely to provide “bread-winning [tools],” no matter how honorable and indispensable such education might be.

  Wilson spoke of a new approach to liberal studies, one in which the “mind of the modern student must be carried through a wide range of studies in which science shall have a place not less distinguished than that accorded literatures, philosophy or politics.” He spoke of the importance of the graduate school, not just as “a body of teachers and students but also a college of residence, where men shall live together in the close and wholesome comradeships of learning,” one he intended to build at the very geographic heart of the university. He spoke of escaping “the pedantry and narrowness of the old fixed curriculum” and embracing new ideals, investing in “men who care more for principles than for money, for the right adjustments of life than for the gross accumulations of profit.” He wanted Princeton to take charge “not of men’s fortunes, but of their spirits.” Summoning Witherspoon and Madison, Wilson concluded by suggesting, “We must lead the world.” The response was thunderous.

  Those who could not fit into Alexander Hall waited at the steps of Nassau Hall, where Wilson summarized his formal remarks. Then he proceeded to the eastern edge of the campus to break ground on a dormitory to be erected in his class’s name. A “state luncheon” followed at Prospect.

  Upstairs, Joseph Wilson suffered an attack of angina pectoris that night. He was not to leave his bedroom again. Despite all the demands of Woodrow’s new office, he sat by his father’s side almost every evening, reading aloud or singing Dr. Wilson’s favorite hymns. Not three months later—on January 21, 1903—Joseph Wilson died at eighty. Jack Hibben conducted a brief service at Prospect the next day, after which Dr. Wilson’s remains were transported to South Carolina. All of Columbia’s religious lights appeared for his funeral services in the First Presbyterian Church, where he was buried by his wife in the churchyard. Woodrow was disconsolate for weeks; and, noted daughter Nell, “for weeks it took all of Ellen’s love and wisdom” to comfort him.

  At his first board meeting as president, Wilson presented a detailed memorandum of his ambitious program for Princeton’s future. It was nothing short of “a thorough-going readjustment.” He called for a clear definition of each department—with a sequence to its courses—in which each student might concentrate after two years of prescribed courses. Then students should elect some courses that would allow them to specialize further within their majors and some courses from different disciplines, which would round out their educations. This plan of a major with electives and distribution requirements would become the model for most liberal arts curricula across the country for the next century.

  The new program, Wilson felt, demanded new methodology. Synthesizing all his classroom experience, as both
a student and a professor—and determined to shatter the pedagogical model of lectures and recitation—he boldly recommended a variation on the English tutorial system. He thought each course should offer two lectures a week and a “conference” in which students could meet with a “guide, philosopher, and friend”—to use Alexander Pope’s phrase—to discuss books, those that had been assigned and those they had discovered independently. The goal was for students to develop and express thoughts of their own and for teachers to challenge and shape them. In time, the best students would gather in small discussion groups. This would require a change in the faculty: in addition to the current hundred members, Wilson recommended hiring fifty “preceptors,” men who would “be employed as tutors, as superintendents and coaches . . . with the task of seeing to it that the reading is done, and is done thoroughly.” Moreover, he envisioned these preceptors as being young men who would hold their posts for no more than five years. Where Oxford dons staled during a lifetime of tutoring, Wilson wanted preceptors only so long as they “retained the freshness and enthusiasm of the first years of teaching.”

  Wilson considered Princeton particularly deficient in three departments—History, Economics, and Biology—and said: “We lack students now only in proportion as we lack reputation.” And the university needed to grow. With Princeton’s current endowment below $4 million, Wilson told the board that his proposed changes would cost $6 million.

  He did not stop there. In order to take its place as a proper university, said Wilson, Princeton must also erect its Graduate School, a School of Jurisprudence, a School of Electrical Engineering, and a Museum of Natural History. Those additions would cost another $6.5 million, and he had not even begun to reckon such other vital needs as new dormitories and dining halls, so that all students would become full-time residents on campus. The numbers boggled the mind; but as a minister’s son, Wilson knew no shame in passing the hat. People preferred investing in a large dream rather than small practicalities—to raise dollars to build a new church rather than dimes to patch the old leaky roof.

  Wilson appealed to the alumni for the necessary $12.5 million. In late November 1902, he opened his campaign in Chicago, where he addressed one hundred Princeton graduates and spent a few days as the guest of Cyrus McCormick, head of the International Harvester Company. In early December, James Waddel Alexander, the president of the Equitable Life Assurance Society, introduced Wilson to six hundred members of the Princeton Alumni of New York at the Waldorf-Astoria. Alexander Van Rensselaer, founder of the Philadelphia Orchestra Association, presented him to more than one thousand people in Philadelphia. Wherever he went for the rest of his first year in office—Pittsburgh, Albany, Washington, D. C., St. Louis, St. Paul, Cincinnati, and Newark—he encountered cheers as he exuberantly raised awareness and spirits and then funds.

  Campus attitudes shifted overnight, adopting a new rigor. “I am not going to propose that we compel the undergraduates to work all the time,” Wilson told the New York alumni; “but I am going to propose that we make the undergraduates want to work all the time.” He explained that lectures and required reading were meant to be but points of embarkation for students’ own intellectual voyages to discover things for themselves. His goal was to “transform thoughtless boys performing tasks into thinking men.” To students who could not meet these new standards, he said, “We shall have the pain of parting company with you.”

  By midterms of his second semester as president, forty-six students were dropped—including “some good athletes,” noted the Princeton Alumni Weekly. “Draconian,” protested many undergraduates. When one student was about to be expelled for cheating, his mother made an appointment with Wilson to plea for clemency. “I am to have an operation,” she said, “and I think I shall die if my boy is expelled.” Wilson replied quickly, saying, “Madam, we cannot keep in college a boy reported by the student council as cheating; if we did, we should have no standard of honour. You force me to say a hard thing, but, if I had to choose between your life or my life or anybody’s life and the good of this college, I should choose the good of the college.”

  Wilson held his faculty to the same high standards, expecting each professor to be a scholar and teacher of the highest order. He, after all, maintained his teaching load on top of all his duties—and at the first meeting of his constitutional government class, 376 students welcomed him with cheers. By the end of his first year in office, he had purged the academic ranks of anybody who lacked seriousness about teaching. One professor of French who regularly dismissed his classes early and another whose lectures were disorganized ramblings were both let go. The fate of Arthur Frothingham, a professor of art and archaeology whose courses were considered “snaps,” was heard in the senior class’s “Faculty Song”:

  Here’s to Frothy our latest find,

  He’s gentle and easy to drive and kind

  He had to make his courses hard

  Or he couldn’t play in Woodrow’s yard.

  Wilson concluded his first year as president of Princeton by fine-tuning the next year’s curriculum, adding courses in music, architectural drawing, eighteenth-century prose, and mineralogy. He not only presided over Princeton’s commencement but also delivered addresses at several preparatory schools and Brown University, where he received an honorary degree.

  In July, Wilson embarked on a vacation that would last until late September. His children, all in their teens, were sent to relatives in North Carolina so that he could take his wife abroad. To a schoolmaster and his wife, the tour seemed very grand indeed—costing $1,666.88, according to his record of expenses. The trip was affordable, what with his $8,000 annual salary, plus $2,000 for entertainment and the upkeep of Prospect. He and Ellen spent almost two months touring England and Scotland, starting in his beloved Lake District. Woodrow guided Ellen through Wordsworth’s haunts, the theaters and galleries of London, Oxford, and Stratford, before they crossed the Channel. It was their first time on the Continent, and they sight-saw for a week in Paris—day-tripping to Versailles, where they visited the Grand Trianon and the Palais. The rest of September, they visited Switzerland and Italy’s lakes before sailing home from Cherbourg. The following spring, he sent Ellen back to Europe without him, to fulfill her lifelong dream of seeing Italy’s artistic masterpieces.

  Only months after her return, Ellen’s youngest brother, Edward, who had married after Princeton and moved to Georgia, was involved in a freak accident. He and his pregnant wife and child were about to board a flat ferryboat, when their carriage horses spooked and plunged into the Etowah River. They all drowned. Ellen mourned as though she had lost her own children; but mindful of her family’s mental history, she worked her way out of her despair with domestic activity.

  Woodrow—who could not think of the boy without welling up—immersed himself in the unremitting task of securing capital. Having visited the major alumni hubs, he turned to an inner core of graduates who would underwrite much of his visionary campaign. He could always rely on the same names—McCormick, Cuyler, Dodge, and Thomas D. Jones, a Chicago businessman—which would be chiseled in stone on new edifices that were doubling the size of the campus. At Wilson’s direction, most new construction was in the Tudor Gothic style of Oxford and Cambridge. “We have added a thousand years to the history of Princeton by merely putting those lines in our buildings which point every man’s imagination to the historic traditions of learning in the English-speaking race,” he told a group of supporters. Over the next few years, the most generous donors would form a Committee of Fifty, which would stimulate not only a steady infusion of funds but also activity among alumni, which Wilson encouraged by having each graduating class become a team of supporters. At its twenty-fifth reunion, in 1904, the Class of 1879 could boast donations of $425,000 to the university since graduation; and within the central vaulted archway of the new red-brick dormitory bearing its name was a private entrance leading to a magnificent ro
om, which Wilson claimed as his aerie. It became the university’s development office, as the understaffed president typed out individual appeals for money himself. “I hate above all things to write a begging letter to a generous man like you,” he wrote one potential donor, “. . . but in the present circumstances . . . I seem to have no choice in the matter.”

  No benefactor was more essential to Princeton’s revival than Moses Taylor Pyne, Class of 1877. An heir to banking and railroad fortunes, “Momo” Pyne became a university trustee in 1884 at the age of twenty-eight and remained the seminal figure in the life of the college and the town for the rest of his years. He became a one-man alumni council—urging graduates to maintain lifelong ties to their alma mater, establishing alumni clubs across the country, and helping to start the weekly alumni magazine. He chaired the trustees’ grounds and buildings committee; and a half dozen buildings on campus were named for him or his family. As head of the committee on finance, he not only supervised the raising of funds but was known to dip into his own pocket whenever a shortfall occurred. His contributions to the school could never be completely accounted for because, it was said, he simply wrote a personal check at each commencement so that the school would not end the year in the red. Although Wilson never kowtowed to his most munificent trustee, he recognized that he would periodically have to stoop.

  At his most upright, Wilson approached the richest man in the world. Scottish-born industrialist Andrew Carnegie had just endowed an eponymous institution with $10 million to “encourage investigation, research, and discovery . . . and afford instruction of an advanced character.” Wilson spent hours drafting a long appeal, shamelessly bagpiping Princeton’s heritage wherever he could. “She has been largely made by Scotsmen,” he wrote of Witherspoon and McCosh’s college, not failing to speak of himself, being of “pure Scots blood”; and, he added, the school “is thoroughly Scottish in all her history and traditions in matters educational.” Seven months later, Wilson’s efforts paid dividends, as Carnegie contributed more than $100,000—not for any educational costs but for the conversion of some adjacent swampland into a four-mile lake for the university’s crew. Wilson gladly accepted the money but persistently pressed his benefactor for more. When Carnegie said he had already given Princeton a lake, Wilson could but ambiguously reply, “We needed bread and you gave us cake.”