It was as if they had known each other all their lives. They wrote almost daily. “You are the only person in the world,” he told her, “except the dear ones at home—with whom I do not have to act a part; to whom I do not have to deal out confidences cautiously …”
As usual he was working himself too hard: “One must dig in books,” he wrote from Baltimore, “he can’t find history anywhere else: he can’t understand present experience unless he knows the experience bound up between the senseless covers of ponderous books or recorded on the faded faces of old manuscripts … so that he must focus all his senses in his spectacles, and strive to forget he was not meant to sit all day in a hard chair at a square table … It’s quite as necessary for a Christian to work as for him to be glad.”
He was critical, in his letters, of the dryasdust quality of American scholarship even in the brilliant assemblage Professor Adams had collected in his Historical Seminary: “Style is not much studied here; ideas are supposed to be everything—their vehicle comparatively nothing. But you and I know that there can be no greater mistake … and style shall be, as under my father’s guidance, it has been, one of my chief studies. A writer must be artful as well as strong.”
From earliest boyhood his father had been drilling him in the niceties of English prose. Years later in an address to a teachers’ association he told of his father’s saying to him: “When you frame a sentence don’t do it as if you were loading a shotgun but as if you were loading a rifle. Don’t fire in such a way and with such a load that you will hit a lot of things in the neighborhood besides; but shoot with a single bullet and hit that one thing alone.”
From the prolix academic style of the period Woodrow Wilson did manage to develop a way of writing suited to the purpose for which it was intended; but his real gift was for public speaking. He seized every opportunity to address an audience. Primarily he was training himself for a career as a college lecturer, afterwards, who knew? “Oratory,” he wrote Ellen Axson, “is not declamation, not swelling tones and an excited delivery, but the art of persuasion, the art of putting things so as to appeal irresistibly to an audience.”
He described to her his joy in speaking “as an intellectual exercise. That is the secret,” he added, “undoubtedly of what little success I’ve had as a speaker. I enjoy it because it sets my mind—all my faculties aglow: and I suppose that this very excitement gives my manner an appearance of confidence and self-command which arrests the attention. However that may be I feel a sort of transformation—and it’s hard to go to sleep afterwards.”
Woodrow Wilson and Ellen Axson, as wellmatched a pair as ever said “I will,” were married in a Presbyterian manse in Savannah, Georgia, in June of 1885.
The following September Wilson settled down to academic life at Bryn Mawr as Associate Professor of History with a salary of fifteen hundred dollars a year. The young couple’s board and lodging would cost them twenty dollars a week. It was slim pickings.
Particularly after the first baby appeared it was essential for him to find means of increasing his income. The great work he was planning on the philosophy of politics had to be put aside for a textbook on government. He was beginning to manage to get articles into The Atlantic Monthly. It seemed as if he would have indefinitely to postpone his political ambitions. In the fall of 1886 he wrote his friend Charlie Talcott, who had gone home to upstate New York to practice law and was already city counsel in Utica, explaining why he wasn’t getting ahead with their project to reform the government of the United States: “After my winter had been hurried away by the unaccustomed, therefore arduous duties of the classroom, my summer vacation was swallowed up by work on a textbook … But Mrs. Wilson could tell you how, meanwhile, my thoughts have constantly reverted to our old compact.
“I believe, Charlie,” he wrote, “that if a band of young fellows (say ten or twelve) could get together (and by getting together I mean getting their opinions together, whether by circular correspondence or other means) upon a common platform, and, having gotten together good solid planks upon the questions of the immediate future, should raise a united voice in such periodicals, great or small, as they could gain access to, gradually working their way out, by means of a real understanding of the questions they handled, to a position of prominence and real authority in the public prints and so in the public mind, a long step would have been taken towards the formation of such new political sentiment, and party, as the country stands in such pressing need of,—and I am ambitious that we should have a hand in forming such a group.”
The “arduous duties of the classroom” occupied Woodrow Wilson’s life for the next twenty years. His academic career was notably successful The years at Bryn Mawr were the dullest. No one could have been less enthusiastic over the education of earnest young women. It was lecturing rather than teaching that interested him. He complained that if he got off a joke in class his girls copied it solemnly down in their notes.
Externally he was himself a solemn young man. “I am quite used to being taken for a minister,” he admitted to a friend. When his classmate Robert Bridges, who was making himself an editorial career in New York, arranged for him to give a talk at an alumni gathering there, he produced such an austere harangue on the duty of the colleges to prepare men for government service that people kept slipping out and only returned to their seats to roar with laughter when Chauncey Depew, who followed him, poked fun at the lanternjawed young professor with the eyeglasses.
He was happier at Wesleyan. Middletown was one of the loveliest places in Connecticut. He found New Englanders congenial. Students crowded into his classes. He established a debating club on the English model which he named The House of Commons. The club managers stayed in office only so long as they could secure votes of confidence from the floor.
Already he was the popular professor. He led a movement to break up the fraternity cliques and get men accepted, in athletics at least, on their merits alone. Though not athletic himself he was an enthusiast for college sports. An alumnus told one of his biographers of seeing Professor Wilson dash out from the bleachers in slicker and rubberboots at an edgy moment in a hardfought football game played in the rain against a heavier team from Lehigh to lead the Wesleyan cheering with his umbrella.
Among the colleges his reputation was building. Johns Hopkins invited him to give a course of lectures. He was elected president of the Alumni Association, honored by Phi Beta Kappa, given an honorary degree, which was to be the first of many, by Wake Forest in North Carolina. James Bryce, whom he’d met at a Baltimore lecture, commended his Congressional Government in a new edition of The American Commonwealth. By 1889 his friends of the class of ’79 didn’t find it too hard to put through this outstanding alumnus’ appointment to a professorship at Princeton.
At Princeton he passed pleasant years. The pay was far from ample but Ellen Wilson was an excellent manager. She set a hospitable table. She made most of her own dresses and the dresses for their three little girls and cut out paper dolls for them to save buying toys. She worked the flower garden, did embroidery, drilled the girls in the Shorter Catechism and even found time for a little painting. Hers were the crayon enlargements of portraits of Burke, Webster, Gladstone, Bagehot and of Professor Wilson’s own father that hung in the study. She acted as occasional secretary and helped him read proof. The professor was not a handy man around the house but with grim determination he tended the coal furnace in winter. He once was seen mowing the lawn.
His students loved his lectures. Year after year he was voted the most popular professor. He was much in demand as a public speaker. His articles were published in the leading magazines. He reviewed books for The Atlantic Monthly.
At home he was the center of a group of admiring females. The Wilsons’ house was always full of relatives who joined the family as a matter of course in the oldtime southern way. There were Ellen Wilson’s brothers and sisters and nieces, Woodrow and Wilson cousins, distantly related students they were helping through college
.
Meals were on the dot, breakfast at eight, lunch at one. The professor led the conversation from the head of the table. Only his wife dared contradict him. “Oh Woodrow, you don’t mean that,” she would sometimes say. “Madam I was endeavoring to think that I meant that,” he would answer with a sarcastic smile, “until I was corrected.”
Though he made warm friends and fervent supporters among the faculty he remained a shy standoffish man. He was reluctant to meet strangers.
It was only at home that he relaxed from the cold intellectual stance. At home he made puns, recited limericks, told dialect stories. Evenings he read aloud from Dickens or Macaulay or Matthew Arnold. He enjoyed charades and sometimes said he wished he’d been an actor. To amuse the little girls he’d pull the loose skin of his long face into odd shapes, or act out little skits. The town drunk or the affected Englishman were favorites with the children. He is even described as having been seen dancing a jig with his silk hat cocked over his eyes. He rode to his classes on a bicycle.
His health was uneven. There was a consistent history of breakdowns from overwork. When in the spring of 1896 he finished his George Washington he was so crippled by “writers’ cramp” that he had to start learning to write with his left hand. The doctors advised a change. Since there wasn’t money enough to take the whole family Ellen Wilson urged him to leave for a solitary English holiday. He sailed on one of the economical Anchor Line boats to Glasgow.
Princeton’s foremost political theorist, who remained a Democrat though he deplored the populist heresies that the Boy Orator of the Platte was arousing in the cornbelt, spent the summer of Bryan’s freesilver campaign bicycling through Scotland and England.
The sight of the Gothic colleges at Oxford sent him into ecstasy. He read Wordsworth at Tintern Abbey. After an afternoon with the Rembrandts and the Reynoldses and the Turners at the National Gallery he wrote his dear Ellen that he felt quite guilty looking at them without her.
He picked up travelling acquaintances. On the Ethiopia going over he became so cosy with a South Carolina lawyer and his wife that they chummed up for the whole trip. He unbosomed himself of his ambitions to them. They parted with the halfhumorous understanding that when he was President he’d make Mr. Woods a federal judge. Years later he fulfilled this pledge to the letter.
Around the turn of the century higher education in America was in the throes of one of its periodical soulsearchings. Hadley at Yale and Eliot at Harvard were much in the news. The Princeton trustees, reinforced by ex-President Grover Cleveland and several other prominent alumni who had chosen the pleasant village for their residence, were getting tired of having their college known as a rural resort for wealthy young loafers. In the fall of 1896 Professor Wilson, fresh from his visit to Oxford, at the ceremonies incidental to the formal changing of the name of The College of New Jersey to Princeton University, called for a sound rigorous classical education to train up young men in conservative principles for the service of the state. The speech made an impression. When Dr. Patton resigned as president in 1902 Professor Wilson found himself elected by unanimous vote of the trustees to serve in his stead.
That was the end of a plan he had been forming to take sabbatical leave and to give his girls the advantages of travel in Europe while he devoted himself to his project for a philosophy of politics which would be the Novum Organum of nineteenthcentury liberalism.
His inauguration was a great occasion. Ex-President Grover Cleveland and Governor Murphy of New Jersey led the academic procession. Friends remarked on Woodrow Wilson’s slim erect keenfaced appearance under the mortarboard. Henry van Dyke the poet preacher, Booker T. Washington, Hadley of Yale, Lowell of Harvard, Butler of Columbia added their varicolored hoods to the train. The participants were astonished by the size of J. Pierpont Morgan’s nose. There was Mark Twain whitemaned in his invariable linen suit, and William Dean Howells. Plughatted Colonel Harvey and Walter Hines Page followed in the rear as the faithful publishers of the professor’s books.
The new president’s inaugural speech was received with acclaim. Only Grover Cleveland is said to have muttered under his mustache: “Sounds good. I wonder what it means.”
Dr. Joseph Wilson, bowed down by the years, had taken to his bed for his last illness, but a visitor downstairs told of hearing his singing, “Crown him with many crowns,” at the top of his voice. He said it was the best day of his life. He lined up his three little granddaughters at the foot of his bed and told them never to forget what he was going to tell them: their father was the greatest man he had ever known.
Woodrow Wilson was fortysix years old when he moved from the cosy stucco house in the fashionable halftimbered style which he and his wife had built for themselves on Library Place into the grandeurs of Prospect, the official residence.
As president of Princeton he was a talkedabout and writtenabout man. He began a drive for funds. He hired fifty new tutors to superintend the students’ studies according to the preceptorial system he had admired at Oxford and Cambridge. He made plans to abolish the snobbish eating clubs which took the place of the forbidden fraternities and to divide the university into colleges in the English manner, where students and tutors would eat their meals together. He tightened up the curriculum. Sons of wealthy alumni found themselves flunking out.
“He’s spoiling the best country club in America,” groaned the old grads, but for a while they went along, even in the face of a drop in enrollment. Led by Grover Cleveland and M. Taylor Pine, wealthy Princetonians began to make really sizeable contributions. Ralph Adams Cram was designing the new quadrangles in the Tudor Gothic style dear to the hearts of the anglophiles.
These were the years of Theodore Roosevelt’s New Nationalism. The president of Princeton, who was described as fighting the entrenched snobbery of privileged wealth in the colleges, was greatly in demand as a speaker. His campaign for equality of opportunity for education for the service of the commonweal was closer to the theories of the Republican progressives than to what was considered in the East as the rabblerousing appeal of William Jennings Bryan. But even to him the word democracy was taking on an egalitarian tone. Professor Wilson who had previously been a Hamilton man began to interest himself in the ideas of Thomas Jefferson.
In the winter of 1905 his health broke down again. A hernia operation followed by phlebitis forced him to take five weeks off in Florida to recuperate.
His reforms at Princeton had at first clear sailing, but now opposition was raising its head. He ran up against another Presbyterian, equally enthusiastic for a great future for Princeton, but with somewhat different ideas as to how to bring it about.
Andrew West was dean of the Graduate School. At first he and Wilson agreed as to how this school, which they were both promoting, should fit into the new scheme. Indeed Dean West was induced to refuse the presidency of Massachusetts Tech in order to assist with the good work.
Differences of opinion as to details turned into a personal contest of wills. The rancors of the presbytery began to work in both men. Once Woodrow Wilson had formed an opinion it became to his mind the cause of righteousness. If you disagreed you were either a knave or a fool. He decided Dean West was both.
Political omens “barely the size of a man’s hand” had begun to appear in the Democratic sky. Talk was beginning of Woodrow Wilson as a standardbearer to whom conservative Democrats might rally. “Don’t you pity me,” he wrote Robert Bridges, then editor of Scribner’s Magazine, “With all my old political longings … set throbbing again.”
After a speech on Americanism in Charleston, South Carolina, the influential News & Courier spoke of him as the most promising southern candidate for the presidency. Introducing him to a dinner held in his honor at the Lotos Club in New York, George Harvey, the hardbitten Vermont publicist and political wirepuller who had been entrusted by the Morgans with the reorganization of Harpers’ publishing firm and who personally edited Harper’s Weekly, formally nominated him to be the Democratic
candidate in the next election:
“As one of a considerable number of Democrats who have become tired of voting Republican tickets, it is with a sense of rapture that I contemplate even the remotest possibility of casting a ballot for the President of Princeton University to become President of the United States.”
Wilson quoted Tennyson in reply and declared he had learned more about statesmanship from the poets than from the politicians. He affected to make light of Harvey’s suggestion, but his political longings were indeed set throbbing. He began to see his battle for righteousness at Princeton as the preliminary skirmish in a greater campaign to reform the nation.
His mail increased. He travelled all over the country to speak. He drove himself hard. There was research to do for his History of the American People. He was handling an enormous amount of paperwork with only the help of his wife and an occasional student. He did all his own typing. It would have been a strenuous enough life if his plans for Princeton had gone unopposed. He could never reconcile himself to opposition.
One morning in the spring of 1907 he woke up to find that he couldn’t see out of his left eye. It was only then that he admitted to his wife that he had been suffering severe pain which he described as neuritis in his left shoulder and leg. His friend Professor Hibben hurried him to Philadelphia to consult a specialist. The specialist reported that he had a severe case of hardening of the arteries and must immediately give up all activity and spend the rest of his life as an invalid.
Outwardly Woodrow Wilson bowed to the verdict. He cancelled his speaking engagements and secured leave of absence from the university. Meanwhile he shopped around for other physicians who might see his predicament in a less drastic light. A doctor was found who considered that the symptoms were not so alarming after all and promised him complete recovery after a three months rest.
Here was an opportunity to take Ellen and the girls on an outing to England. Sitting in a chair Woodrow Wilson packed the family trunks, as he always did. Ellen Wilson brought along her paints. They rented a cottage (from a Mrs. Wordsworth who had married some descendant of Wilson’s favorite poet) in the English lake country for the summer, and were completely happy there.
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