Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  Wilson’s new job left him with little time for writing, except on educational issues. He did express some political opinions, but only privately or in passing in speeches on educational subjects. “I am of the class of men who are described as imperialists,” he declared early in 1903, although he also confessed to “an intense sympathy with the men on the other side.” Another time, he asserted that “the great incubus upon this country is its provincialism,” and he condemned the provincialism of urbanites for lacking “an imaginative sympathy” for the lot of farmers. Yet he stuck to his anti-Bryan guns. “The trouble is that Bryan has caught the spirit and instincts of the finer aspects of American life,” Wilson told Roland Morris, a former student who was a Bryan supporter, “but, Morris, the man has no brains. It is a great pity that a man with his power of leadership should have no mental rudder.” Wilson’s private views on race did not show much breadth of sympathy—or foresight—either. At the beginning of his third year as president, he answered an inquiry about the possibility of an African American applying to Princeton this way: “I would say that, while there is nothing in the law of the University to prevent a negro’s entering, the whole temper and tradition of the place are such that no negro has ever applied for admission, and … [it] seems extremely unlikely that the question will ever assume a practical form.”20

  Wilson’s family life was happy and harmonious during the first years of his Princeton presidency, with one tragic exception. Ellen did not enjoy having to exchange her beloved house on Library Place for Prospect House, the president’s house on campus, especially after some students tore down a new fence around the grounds. But she and their daughters and her sister, Madge, adjusted to their new lives. Margaret, Jessie, and Nell followed Madge to the girls’ school in the town of Princeton, founded by Harry Fine’s sister, and Margaret and Jessie subsequently went away to college. The lively, attractive Madge became the object of much attention from the preceptors, and in 1910 she married one of them, a special favorite of Wilson’s whom he made a dean, Edward (Ed) Graham Elliott. Ellen’s brother Stockton had meanwhile established himself as a popular teacher at Princeton, although he periodically took leaves for “nervous exhaustion,” most likely depression. The tragic exception to this pattern of domestic happiness came at the end of April 1905, when Ellen’s brother Eddie and his wife and young son were killed in a ferryboat accident in South Carolina. Their deaths devastated Ellen, who fell into a depression that lasted several months and left a shadow of sadness over her for the rest of her life. As self-therapy, she read deeply in philosophy to assuage her doubts about religion, and she resumed drawing and painting.21

  Ellen Wilson needed to summon up emotional reserves as the year 1905 drew to a close. On December 2, Princeton hosted the Army-Navy game, attended by the president of the United States. The Wilsons entertained the official party at a pregame lunch, and Madge later recalled Roosevelt shouting “Miss Axson!” at her and thumping the table with his fists as he delivered loud pleasantries. When she excused herself to meet her date for the game, the young man asked what the commotion was about. “That was just the President of the United States engaged in mild banter,” Madge snapped, “and if that’s the way Presidents behave, I hope to the Lord I never meet another!” At the game, Navy came from behind at the end to hold Army to a tie, but for some spectators the high point came when, as one preceptor recalled, “Roosevelt and Wilson cross[ed] the field together between the halves, Roosevelt exuberant, smiling, delighted, waving his hat, acknowledging the plaudits of the multitudes and tugging along the University president who followed ‘with conscious step of purity and pride,’ if not reluctant, at least not equally ebullient.”22

  As events transpired, Wilson was then almost halfway through his tenure as president of Princeton and at the pinnacle of accomplishment and joy in that office. “We have seen academic life at its best,” Fine later remarked to Edward Elliott. “Never again can we hope to attain the conditions that marked the first half of Woodrow’s regime.” Six months later, on the morning of May 28, 1906, Wilson awoke to find that he was blind in his left eye. Accompanied by his friend Jack Hibben, he traveled to Philadelphia, where George de Schweinitz, an ophthalmologist, found that he had suffered a hemorrhage in the eye. He diagnosed its cause as arteriosclerosis—hardening of the arteries—and advised Wilson to give up all active work. A second physician, Alfred Stengel, an internist, agreed with the diagnosis but reassured Wilson that the disease was in an early stage and that a three-month rest would make him fit to work again. He did gradually regain partial vision in that eye.23

  The incident shook Ellen, who was still grieving over Eddie’s death, even more than it did her husband. “It is hardening of the arteries,” she told Florence Hoyt, “due to the prolonged high pressure on brain and nerves. He has lived too tensely. … Of course, it is an awful thing—a dying by inches, and incurable.” At the time, physicians had no way to treat arteriosclerosis except to prescribe rest. Wilson arranged to take a leave of absence, naming Hibben acting president, and he spent most of the summer of 1906 in England, particularly in the Lake District, first with Ellen and later by himself, hiking regularly, sometimes fourteen miles a day. On one of his hikes, he met a local artist named Fred Yates, who soon became a close friend and later painted portraits of Wilson and Ellen. By early September, he could report to Ellen that two eminent physicians in Edinburgh, an ophthalmologist and an internist, believed he could return to work with “proper moderation.”24 Wilson would make gestures at moderation, such as promising to limit outside speaking engagements and taking a winter vacation, in Bermuda, at the beginning of 1907. Otherwise, he reacted to this physical setback by becoming even more focused, purposeful, and driven.

  Two major items remained on Wilson’s agenda for transforming Princeton into one of the nation’s leading universities. One was to reorganize the undergraduates into residential units, where they would be overseen and taught by members of the faculty, after the fashion of the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. The other was to build a graduate college and locate it in the center of the campus. Wilson tackled both problems as soon as he got back to New Jersey in the fall of 1906. Of the two, he would have preferred to deal first with the undergraduate college. The centerpiece in this design was a scheme that had gelled in Wilson’s mind during that summer of 1906—what came to be called the Quadrangle Plan, or the Quad Plan, for short. Instead, events intervened to bring the Graduate College to the fore temporarily. In October 1906, Andrew West, the dean of the Graduate School, received an offer to serve as president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. West later said that he told Wilson he was “discouraged at the delays in furthering the cause of the Graduate College and at his attitude toward me. President Wilson became indignant and said he had given me full support and that my attitude was not justified.” After a meeting of the trustees’ Graduate School Committee, they and the president urged the dean to stay, and West agreed. Everyone papered over the incidents with professions of harmony, but this was the first open clash between West and Wilson. It marked the beginning of a struggle for direction and control of graduate education at Princeton.25

  With the matter of West’s offer settled, Wilson could turn his attention to the Quad Plan. Late in 1906, he unveiled a preliminary sketch of his vision at a meeting of the trustees. The eating clubs, with their “social competition,” struck him as “peculiarly hostile” to intellectual life, and he proposed to remedy the situation by having students “live together, not in clubs but in colleges.”26 He also suggested that some clubs might become colleges. This presentation of the Quad Plan marked his first major misstep as president of Princeton. As with the preceptorial system, he had not consulted anyone in advance, but this time his vision did not carry the day. The trustees appointed a committee that would take five months to study the question before making a recommendation. In the meantime, Grover Cleveland worried that the plan might interfere with development of the Graduate Sc
hool, and another trustee asked why they could not simply require the eating clubs to take in all upperclassmen. Wilson tried to reassure Cleveland but dismissed the other trustee’s question because it struck him as missing the point, which was not the clubs’ social discrimination.

  He also had mixed success in selling the Quad Plan to faculty intimates. After a meeting at Prospect House, Fine enthusiastically told him, “Yes, Tommy, I think that it will do the trick.” Hibben, however, said nothing one way or the other. Undeterred, Wilson announced to the trustees’ Graduate School Committee at the end of May 1907 that the Quad Plan involved “a thing more hopeful and of deeper consequence than anything we have hitherto turned our counsels to.” Princeton’s recent advances would be “in vain if the processes of disintegration and of distorted social ambition … are not checked and remedied by some radical change.” The eating clubs were also pernicious, in his view, because they had “no intellectual purposes or ideals of any kind at their foundation.” He made this argument to the Graduate School Committee because West was now proposing that the Graduate College be built at an off-campus site, separated from the undergraduate classrooms and dormitories. Wilson argued that such a move would be contrary to the larger purposes behind the Quad Plan: “nothing will so steady and invigorate the process of transformation as the close neighborhood, the unmistakable example, and the daily influence of the Graduate College.”27

  To the full board of trustees, he declared, “We have witnessed in the last few years the creation of a new Princeton,” and now consummation of its drive to the top among American universities demanded the creation of residential colleges. “The clubs simply happen to stand in the way. … We are not seeking to form better clubs, but academic communities.”28 His eloquence appeared to carry the day, although he had also done his homework, meeting several times with the Graduate School Committee and enlisting Fine’s aid in persuading committee members. Just one trustee voted against the plan, but in fact the trustees approved the Quad Plan only in principle. Wilson was not yet home free.

  At the time, however, he felt so good that he allowed himself to crow a bit. Two weeks after the trustees’ meeting, he received an honorary degree and spoke at Harvard. Wilson teased his hosts about the differences in their backgrounds—Massachusetts versus Virginia, Puritan versus Scotch-Irish—and drew upon those differences to observe that their respective universities were academic competitors: “Now we at Princeton are in the arena and you at Harvard are in the arena.” Harvard championed the free-elective system, while Princeton was “seeking to combine men in a common discipline.”29 He welcomed the contest and left no doubt who he believed would win. Wilson was once more bearding a lion in his den. The Harvard president who conferred the honorary degree was Charles W. Eliot, the father of the free-elective system, and this upstart from Princeton was attacking the man’s brainchild and challenging his university’s primacy in American higher education.

  Wilson’s cocky tone may have reflected some success that he was enjoying in another area. The publicity he had garnered as president of Princeton had given him a chance to flirt again with his first love—politics. The magazine editor George Harvey had indeed marked him as a good prospect to shoulder the banner of the conservative Cleveland wing of the Democratic Party. A year earlier, in February 1906, the Lotos Club—a prestigious New York City literary club whose members were prominent artists, journalists, and publishers—had given a dinner at which Wilson was a guest and speaker, and on that occasion Harvey had called on the Democrats to choose a leader “who combines the activities of the present with the sober influences of the past … Woodrow Wilson of Virginia and New Jersey.” Wilson professed to be embarrassed by Harvey’s remarks and the editor’s endorsement in Harper’s Weekly. Yet he did not laugh off this “nomination.” Shortly afterward, he told a Democratic newspaper editor that he hoped their party would nominate “someone who held views and a position like my own” and reject “rash and revolutionary proposals.”30

  Probably through Harvey’s influence, Wilson spoke in April 1906 at the annual Jefferson Day dinner held by the New York Democratic Club, a conservative group allied with the city’s Democratic political machine, Tammany Hall. He soft-pedaled his long-standing rejection of Jefferson’s limited-government state-rights views, lambasted socialism, and scorned wrongheaded government interference with business and labor. Frequent bursts of applause at the dinner, together with reactions that Harvey gathered, showed that the editor’s new political prospect had made a hit. During the year following that speech, Wilson kept a foot in politics. Late in 1906, he spoke out against the income tax because he said it discriminated against the rich and because “I know of only one legitimate object of taxation, and that is to pay the expenses of the Government.” In March 1907, he took a slap at Roosevelt and the president’s platform, by declaring, “[W]hat we need is not a square deal, but no deal at all—an old-fashioned equality and harmony of conditions.”31

  Early in 1907, Wilson allowed Democrats in the New Jersey legislature to place his name in nomination for the office of U.S. senator. This was strictly a gesture, since the Democrats were in the minority. His backing came from party bosses and offended reformers. Wilson told a conservative Princeton alumnus, Adrian Joline, that he agreed with a pro-business, anti-Bryan speech Joline had recently given, adding, “Would that we could do something, at once dignified and effective, to knock Mr. Bryan once and for all into a cocked hat!”32 That sentence would come back to haunt him, as would his sponsorship by the New Jersey bosses. This initial foray into politics would give him an embarrassing conservative past to live down.

  More immediate problems vexed Wilson in 1907 as a backlash arose against the Quad Plan. Students and alumni who were attached to the clubs predictably saw the plan as a threat to their cherished institutions, and the trustees’ timing—they met during the week of commencement and reunions and announced their support for the plan on a night when many students and alumni were enjoying parties at the clubs—seemed calculated to raise suspicion and ire. Opponents seethed in private over the summer and would burst into the open in the fall. In July, West told Wilson that the Quad Plan and the way he had introduced it were “both wrong—not inexpedient merely—but morally wrong. … If the spirit of Princeton is to be killed, I have little interest in the details of its funeral.” In September, Henry van Dyke—a Presbyterian minister, popular poet and magazine writer, and professor of English—wrote in the Princeton Alumni Weekly that the Quad Plan was “distinctly an un-American plan. It threatens not only to break up the classes, but also to put the Princeton spirit out of date.”33 In October, Tommy Wilson’s old paper, now called The Daily Princetonian, also came out against the plan.

  Opposition from conservatives such as West and van Dyke was to be expected. What Wilson had not expected was the stand Jack Hibben took. In tense conversations early in July, Hibben told Wilson that he did not agree with him on the Quad Plan. These encounters upset both men, although they strove to handle their disagreement with respect and friendship. Wilson assured “my dear Jack” that they would still “at every step know each other’s love.” Otherwise, opposition to the Quad Plan roused a combative streak that had lain mostly dormant in Wilson since his youth. “The fight is on,” he told Cleveland Dodge.34 Letters of support that poured in from alumni, particularly younger men who had suffered rejection by the clubs, stiffened his resolve, as did expressions of support from other faculty members. But this combativeness worried some of his supporters among the faculty and board of trustees, who thought Wilson seemed tense and obsessive.

  The showdown came when the faculty met to consider the Quad Plan in September. Some of Wilson’s supporters had gotten together beforehand, and one introduced a resolution calling for the appointment of a committee to implement the plan. Van Dyke offered a substitute resolution to refer the matter to a joint faculty-trustee committee for further study, and Hibben seconded the motion. The faculty then agreed to adjo
urn and take up the resolutions the following week. Hibben’s action struck the faculty like a thunderbolt and hit Wilson like a body blow. Ellen recalled that when she heard the news, she burst into tears and blurted out, “Oh, he might have let someone else second the motion!” Why Hibben did it is not known. Signs of strain had occasionally cropped up earlier in their friendship, and differences in temperament—Wilson’s driving intensity and Hibben’s bent toward conciliation—had made some around Princeton regard them as an odd couple. Also, theirs had never been a friendship of equals, and both Hibben and his strong-minded wife may have grown to resent what they regarded as Wilson’s domineering ways.35

  Nothing up to that time had ever hurt Wilson so deeply as what he regarded as Hibben’s betrayal, and subsequent events would keep the wound raw. Three years later, he told a confidant about the anguish he felt on seeing Hibben at a ceremony at Nassau Hall: “Why will that wound not heal over in my stubborn heart?” With the exception of Stockton Axson, who was a family member, Wilson never had such a close male friend in his life, no one whom he could freely and unreservedly tell he loved. His daughter Margaret would later tell a family friend, “The two major tragedies in Father’s life were his failure to carry over the League of Nations and the break with Mr. Hibben.”36 Never again would Wilson open his heart this way to anyone, except sometimes to Axson and to the women who were closest to him.

  Wounded feelings did not prevent him from rising to the occasion in the faculty debate over the Quad Plan, however. He spoke with such eloquence that even West applauded him. Unfortunately, no one recorded what he said; there is only one preceptor’s recollection that he had affirmed, “Truth is no invalid.” Wilson’s eloquence helped him prevail with the divided faculty, although he almost certainly had the votes to win anyway. Those who favored van Dyke’s motion to shelve consideration of the Quad Plan were alumni with attachments to the “old Princeton;” the only possible surprise was Wilson’s classmate William Magie. Otherwise, the opposition included such familiar faces as West, van Dyke, Patton, and now Hibben. The president’s supporters were an equally predictable assortment that included Axson, Fine, and all but one of the preceptors.37