Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  Wilson also maintained that having cabinet members sit and debate in Congress would forge a link between the executive and legislative branches and thus promote efficiency and lessen corruption. Although he conceded that a cabinet system might bring its own defects and dangers, knitting together executive and legislative powers still struck him as a positive good because it would overcome the “complete separation of the executive and the legislative.” He scoffed at those who would sound “the alarm-bell of centralization,” inasmuch as congressional committees already exercised “despotic authority.” The present defects in American government were not, he claimed, “self-adjusting”: without action by “the people from whom springs all authority, … our dangers may overwhelm us, our political maladies may prove incurable.”44

  “Cabinet Government” would have done credit to an older writer, much less a twenty-two-year-old college senior. The essay is not perfect. The analysis does have a hasty, all-embracing quality, and the tone often suggests an alarmist speech rather than a dispassionate dissection. Such ideas as seating cabinet members in Congress and comparing American and British practices were not original with Wilson, and his writing sometimes lapses into floweriness and convolution. Yet despite those shortcomings, he had come by his thoughts on his own and poured his own thoughts and writings since adolescence into the essay. “Cabinet Government” was also his declaration of intellectual independence. He was embracing both democracy and Hamiltonian federalism, and he was rejecting the limited, noninterventionist government views that were purveyed in high-toned journals and college classrooms, including Princeton’s. “Cabinet Government” was a plea to make politics and government matter more, so that those arenas could become challenging, worthy fields of endeavor for him and others like him.45

  Publishing his essay in a well-regarded journal complicated Wilson’s plans for what he would do after graduation. Four years later, he wrote to his fiancée, Ellen Axson, “The profession I chose was politics; the profession I entered was the law. I entered the one because I thought it would lead to the other.” In fact, his choice was not so straightforward. His political ambition evidently remained unchanged. As Robert Bridges later recalled, Wilson regularly joked, “When I meet you in the Senate, I’ll argue that out with you.” Law was the part of his choice that had grown problematic. For years both Wilson and his father had assumed that he would become a lawyer after college. Yet he yearned to follow the path that allowed young men from wealthy, socially prominent families to gain office at an early age. His new editor, Lodge, was already active in Massachusetts politics and would go to Congress within a decade and would become a senator at the age of forty-two. Lodge’s closest friend, Theodore Roosevelt, an upper-class New Yorker, would enter the New York State legislature only a year out of Harvard and become president at the same age at which Lodge entered the Senate. Without such wealth and connections, Wilson could foresee for himself only a long grind at the law to earn a living, which he thought would unfit him for meaningful, broad-gauged public service.46

  That was only part of the problem. Publishing essays in student publications and now the International Review whetted his desire to write. As he also later told Ellen Axson, “[M]y predilections, ever since I had any that were definite, have always turned very strongly towards a literary life, notwithstanding my decided taste for oratory. … I want to contribute to our literature what no American has ever contributed, studies in the philosophy of our institutions, not the abstract and occult, but the practical and suggestive, philosophy which is at the core of our governmental methods; their use, their meanings, ‘the spirit that makes them workable.’ ”47 The quotation came from Bagehot, and Wilson wanted to be an American Bagehot. Over the next six years, he would devote himself to explaining how American politics and government really worked and how to make them work better. During his four years at Princeton, he had experienced an intellectual awakening that was changing his life and taking him away from being Tommy Wilson.

  2

  WOODROW

  In the fall of 1879, twenty-two-year-old Thomas Woodrow Wilson followed the path of many young college graduates when he bowed to family pressure in preparing himself for a career. Dr. Wilson had long assumed that his older son would become a lawyer, and he had aimed much admonition and advice toward that end. Unlike his Princeton friends and classmates, Wilson did not follow the usual path of the time, which was to read law under an established attorney’s tutelage. Instead, he enrolled in the law school of the University of Virginia. This seemed an academically more respectable way to enter the legal profession, but law school and Wilson were a mismatch from the start—and the fault lay with the student, not the institution.

  The University of Virginia still bore the impress of its founder, Thomas Jefferson. Even fifty years after young Wilson entered the law school, according to Jefferson’s leading biographer, “they still talked of Mr. Jefferson as though he were in the next room.” Much about the place did strike a responsive chord with this youthful would-be statesman. The university had an intellectual seriousness he had not found at Princeton. “Study is made a serious business and the loafer is the exception,” Wilson wrote to Robert Bridges. He found the teaching at Virginia much better than any he had encountered before: “The course in Law is certainly as fine a one as could be desired,” he told Bridges. Professor John Barbee Minor, whom he called “a perfect teacher,” would be the only instructor whom Wilson would praise in any of the four colleges and universities that he eventually attended; he would later rank Minor among the greatest teachers he ever had, surpassed only by his father. “And the place is cosmopolitan,” he added, “—at least as far as the South is concerned … and one feels that the intellectual forces of the South are forming here.”1

  At Virginia, Wilson made some good friends, sang in the glee club, joined a fraternity, and continued to occupy himself with writing and debate. In an essay he had written the preceding summer, “Self-Government in France,” he contrasted the convulsions of French politics with the gradual achievement of self-government in Britain and America. Openly borrowing from Alexis de Tocqueville’s L’ancien régime, he concluded that France’s “liberties are insecure. They rest upon habits of revolution.” Wilson was stressing the relativity of institutions, and in leaning on Tocqueville, he chose the most insightful interpreter yet of the French Revolution. In another essay, “Congressional Government,” he called the American Constitution “a cornerstone, not a complete building. It is a root, not a perfect vine.” He defended political parties against currently fashionable denigrations, dubbing party government “the best that human wisdom has yet been able to devise,” and he again called for bridging the separation of powers by having the president choose the cabinet from among members of Congress. In that essay, he coined the phrase that would become the title of his first and most influential book, and he showed his lack of reverence for the Constitution and took for granted that a Hamiltonian centralist position was the only one worth considering.2

  During his first year in law school, Wilson published some other essays in The Virginia University Magazine. In one, he maintained that it was “next to impossible” for new ideas to flourish “in agricultural communities or rural neighborhoods. … Trade, indeed, is the great nurse of liberal ideas.” Saying that at Jefferson’s university was tantamount to pulling the beard of the Sage of Monticello in his own house. He uttered an even more daring declaration of apostasy when he wrote, “I yield to no one in precedence in love of the South. But because I love the South, I rejoice in the failure of the Confederacy.” Successful secession would have perpetuated slavery, which was “enervating our Southern society and exhausting our Southern energies. … Even the damnable cruelty and folly of reconstruction was to be preferred to helpless independence.”3

  The debating club at Virginia, the Jefferson Society, was where Wilson had his first real encounter with rivalry and jealousy. In 1879, the society’s other star speaker was William
Cabell Bruce, a handsome nineteen-year-old scion of a distinguished Virginia family. The two young contenders disliked each other from the start. Many years later, Bruce dismissed Wilson as a socially stunted Presbyterian minister’s son and noted, “In all my life, I think, I have never known any one so covetous of fame as he was, or so confident that he would attain it.” For his part, Wilson later confessed to his fiancée, “I admire my friend (?) Bruce’s striking face and brilliant talents, but the words would stick in my throat if I were to try to tell him so, because I thoroughly dislike the man.”4 It was when he encountered Bruce that Wilson told a cousin that if he had had his father’s looks, it would not have mattered what he said.

  The pair collided head-on in April 1880, when they competed in the Jefferson Society’s annual oratorical contest. The question assigned for debate was “Is the Roman Catholic element in the United States a menace to American institutions?” Bruce drew the affirmative, Wilson the negative, stands that allowed these polar opposites to draw on their respective strengths. At his energetic, gesticulating, fiery best, Bruce painted a lurid picture of the menace posed by Catholics, especially the Irish. Wilson, an eyewitness later recalled, “did not use oratory. He adopted the English style. No gestures. No step forward.” He maintained that “the vitality of Anglo-Saxon institutions … had stood the test of centuries” and America’s vital, superior culture would easily assimilate Catholics.”5 After two days of deliberation, the judges, three professors at the law school, awarded the first prize to Bruce and a consolation prize to Wilson.

  Most members of the Jefferson Society regarded Wilson as the better speaker, but one of them recalled long afterward that Bruce excelled in “brilliant oratorical flights” and in “[p]owerful summary of affirmative facts in unanswerable logic.” Bruce and Wilson reacted differently to what happened. One of Wilson’s friends recalled that Bruce “seemed nettled and sour because the judges had not immediately awarded him the medal.” After the judges’ decision, another friend remembered that Wilson admitted to being fairly beaten but added, “Bruce beat me in this, but I will beat him in life, for I’m a worker, he is not.” The wounds from this encounter left a smoldering resentment. In the last year of his life, Wilson would warn a Democratic Party official about Bruce: “He is by nature envious and intensely jealous, and cannot take part in disinterested service of any kind.”6

  Dealing with Bruce and knowing that he would meet others like him did not endear the young man to the law. After three months at Virginia, he confessed to a Princeton classmate, “I am most terribly bored by the noble study of Law sometimes.” It was like eating “that other immortal article of food, Hash, when served with such endless frequency.” Wilson wanted to be studying and writing about politics. In February 1880, he told Bridges that his “brightest dream” was “the great work of disseminating political truth and purifying the politics of our own country. … [W]hen I get out of this treadmill of the law I intend to devote every scrap of leisure time to the study of that great and delightful subject.” Joseph Wilson did not share his son’s dream. He warned him against “a mere literary career such as you seem to dream about now and then. At any rate, far, far, better conquer the law, even through all its wretched twistings and technical paths of thorn.”7

  This time witnessed the closest approach to an open clash that ever occurred between father and son. The words “a mere literary career” sparked another smoldering resentment in Wilson. It would flare up thirteen years later, when he published an essay titled “Mere Literature,” in which he figuratively flung his father’s words and views back in his face. He remained a dutiful son who respected and loved his father, but their relationship was changing as the son began to have his own ideas about his future. He also changed his name. During his first year at Virginia, he gave up calling himself Tommy in favor of Woodrow. Such experimentation with names was common among young men of that era. He would still be Tommy to his old Princeton cohorts, but family and new friends would now call him Woodrow. The shorter, alliterative pairing, Woodrow Wilson, had a nice literary ring to it.

  His attitude toward assignments and classes did not change. He dutifully read and made shorthand notes in his texts, but he found a new reason for cutting classes: he was falling in love. His affections settled on his first cousin, Harriet (Hattie) Woodrow, who was a student at the Augusta Female Seminary in nearby Staunton. A vivacious young woman of nineteen with brown hair and blue eyes, Hattie was the daughter of Thomas Woodrow, Jr., one of Jessie Wilson’s brothers who had stayed in Ohio. Years later, Hattie remembered that she had taken walks with Woodrow and participated in a group singing around the piano: “I think of him as a rather mature, dignified, serious minded young man—yet with a keen sense of humor.” Wilson got into academic trouble in the spring of 1880 when he cut several classes to attend Hattie’s graduation ceremony.8

  The second year of law school proved even less palatable because Hattie had gone home to Ohio, and he had to content himself with writing to her. Classwork bored him as much as before, and after he came down with a persistent cold in December 1880, he bowed to his mother’s entreaties to come home. He insisted to Bridges that his plans remained unchanged: “My end is a commanding influence in the councils (and counsels) of my country—and means to be employed are writing and speaking.” He lived for the next year and a half with his parents in Wilmington, where he spent much of his time practicing oratory in the pulpit of his father’s church and writing essays. He read law and prepared himself for bar examinations, but he studied on his own rather than under the tutelage of an established lawyer. He taught Latin to his brother, helped with household chores, and played with his young nieces. He began wearing eyeglasses—the pince-nez that would become a hallmark of his appearance—and he grew a large, flowing mustache, which together with his newly thick sideburns softened the impression made by his long jaw and angular features. In February 1881, the New York Evening Post published an essay by him titled “Stray Thoughts from the South,” in which he condemned Reconstruction for having “held the South back from her natural destiny of regeneration” but applauded the South’s “happy extension” of commerce and manufacturing, “such as the unnatural system of slave labor alone kept her from establishing long ago.”9 In getting the piece published, it helped that Bridges was now working for the Evening Post.

  He also continued to court Hattie Woodrow. Physical separation and social convention required his courtship to be epistolary and oblique. He wrote long, rambling letters in which he dropped broad hints about deeper feelings. After he returned to Wilmington, he told her, “I simply love you well enough to love to write to you even when I have to write stupidly.” Later, he used expressions such as “You know that I love you dearly” and “You know how much [love] I send—just as much as you desire.”10 How Hattie responded to such hints of love is not known. If she hinted that she did not return his affections, he failed to take the hint and pushed his suit to a disastrous conclusion.

  A moment of truth—and melodrama—came on the night of September 25, 1881. On a visit to the Woodrow home in Chillicothe, Ohio, Wilson got Hattie to leave the dance floor at a party so that he could declare his love and propose marriage. She turned him down, saying they were too closely related. Distraught, he left the party and insisted on moving to a local hotel for the night and departing from Chillicothe the next day. From the hotel, he scribbled an anguished note on a torn piece of paper. “Now, Hattie,” he implored, “for my sake, and for your own, reconsider the dismissal you gave me tonight. I cannot sleep tonight—so give me the consolation of thinking, while waiting for the morning that there is still one faint hope left to save me from the terror of despair.” Hattie stood her ground. Her refusal to marry him because they were first cousins was an excuse to spare his feelings. She did not love him, and the next day, as Wilson waited at the train station and poured his heart out to Hattie’s younger brother, he met Edward Welles, the man she did love and would soon marry. The inc
ident plainly hurt Wilson. Hattie’s letters to him were among the few pieces of correspondence in his life that this compulsive saver of papers would not keep. Two years later, he told Ellen Axson that Hattie had been “heartless,” and he maintained, “I had been mistaken in thinking that she was capable of loving.”11

  Like other young men who make fools of themselves in love, Wilson was rationalizing. He soon got over his hurt feelings. A few months later, he told Bridges, “Of course I am not such a weakling as to allow myself to be unmanned even by a disappointment such as this,” although he admitted that it had delayed his plans to begin practicing law. Yet he gave no sign of being in a hurry to hang out his shingle as a lawyer, and he told Bridges he was “intellectually busy in the same desultory manner as of old. I’ve read all sorts of books besides law books.”12

  Wilson also wrote his first book-length work at this time, which he called “Government by Debate.” As the title suggests, he was revisiting the ground he had covered in “Cabinet Government” and the unpublished “Congressional Government.” In fact, much of this work repeats his previous arguments and his Bagehot-derived observation that the Constitution “has had a great growth. It is now neither in theory or in fact what its framers are thought to have intended it to be.” He did lay a new stress on “reason” as opposed to “passion,” which would become a central element in his political thought. This stress on reason did not lead him down paths of conservatism, because he called for “regulation of its [America’s] vast and innumerable industries” and “the restraint of monopolies.” As a piece of writing, “Government by Debate” bounced between scholarly analysis and political exhortation and was long on rhetoric and short on specifics. Wilson was clearly having trouble making the shift from writing essays to writing a book. “Government by Debate” fell flat with publishers, three of which turned it down. A portion of the manuscript finally appeared as an article titled “Committee or Cabinet Government?” in the January 1884 issue of The Overland Monthly.13