Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  Wilson showed some of his new attitudes late in 1908 and early in 1909. In one speech, he called the “present conflict in this country … a contest between those few men in whose hands the wealth of the land is concentrated, and the rest of us.” In another, he attacked “the men who are using their wealth for predatory purpose.” He retreated to safer ground in a magazine article attacking the Republican Party’s high tariff record, which all Democrats deplored, but he defended tariff protection in principle as a boost to economic development and condemned the way the Republicans had perverted protective tariffs, making them into nothing more than a “system of patronage.” He told a group of New Jersey Democrats, “Most of the old formulas of our politics are worn threadbare and have lost their significance,” and he urged them, “whenever national action is necessary, [to] be shy, not of governmental power, but of … its use to the wrong ends.”16

  One area where Wilson’s thinking did not change was race relations. During his trip abroad in the summer of 1908, the daughter of his artist friend Fred Yates recorded in her diary that Wilson deplored Roosevelt’s recent appointment of an African American to a prominent government post in South Carolina as “too much for them [whites] to stand. And intermarriage would degrade the white nations, for in Africa the blacks were the only race who did not rise. … Social intercourse would bring about intermarriage.” Publicly, Wilson took more moderate stands. Speaking at an African American church in Princeton, he maintained that “the so-called ‘negro problem’ is a problem, not of color, but capacity; not a racial, but an economic problem,” and he praised the work done by Booker T. Washington’s school at Tuskegee “and many smaller institutions conducted along similar lines.” A few months later, Wilson discouraged an African American from applying to Princeton. “Regret to say that it is altogether inadvisable for a colored man to enter Princeton,” he wrote in a memorandum. “Appreciate his desire to do so, but strongly recommend his securing education at a Southern [Negro] institution.”17 These views kept Wilson in harmony with Democrats of all stripes and a growing number of Republicans.

  He obviously was not keeping the promise that he had made after his health crisis of 1906 to cut down on outside speaking and take things easy. Within a year, he had resumed his heavy schedule of speechmaking around the country, on top of working the alumni circuit to promote the Quad Plan. The stepped-up activity did not seem to affect his health. The one complaint that bothered Wilson much at this time involved his digestion. Off and on in the twenty-five years since his days at Johns Hopkins, he had suffered from stomach pains and various problems with eating, but he did not change his diet. The Wilson family continued to eat the fried, grease-laden southern-style cooking he and Ellen had grown up with. His doctors treated him with remedies that were in vogue in those days, which included having him periodically pump out his stomach. Such practices, since abandoned by the medical profession for their lack of therapeutic value, evidently did him neither good nor harm. Later, when he became president, his physician discontinued them.18

  One thing that may have helped Wilson was a new administrative regime at Princeton. In 1909, he appointed a business manager and named Edward Elliott dean of students. He turned over much of the internal running of the university to Fine, already dean of the faculty, naming him dean of science as well. This division of labor, in which the president would concentrate more on general policy and external relations while a strong second in command would oversee internal management, foreshadowed the practice that most American colleges and universities of any size would adopt later in the twentieth century. The new arrangement allowed Wilson to devote much of his time to advocacy of the Quad Plan before the alumni. Throughout 1909, he not only hammered away at his previous arguments, but he also expanded his vision of the stakes involved and continued to give a new progressive twist to his stands. In one speech, he denounced colleges and universities that “encouraged social stratification and made a bid for the exclusive patronage of the rich,” and he asked, “Could Abraham Lincoln have been of more or less service to this country had he attended one of our universities?”19

  It might seem ironic—even hypocritical—that at the same time Wilson was saying those things publicly he was privately asking for money from two of the richest men in the country. In February 1909, he wrote an anguished letter to Carnegie’s financial agent asking for funds with which to establish the Quad Plan: “If I cannot do this thing I have spoken of, I must turn to something else than mere college administration, forced, not by my colleagues, but by my mind and convictions and the impossibility of continuing at an undertaking I do not believe in.” And he asked John D. Rockefeller’s daughter about the possibility of approaching her father. Nothing came of these overtures, and the experience hurt Wilson. That summer, in a letter to Mary Peck, he lashed out at “the restless, rich, empty-headed people the very sight of whom makes me cynical. … They and their kind are the worst enemies of Princeton, and create for me the tasks which are likely to wear my life out. But enough of them,—let them pass and be d——forgotten.”20

  The Wilson family spent the summer of 1909 at an artists’ colony in Lyme, Connecticut, where Ellen had gone earlier to pursue her painting. The vacation evidently did Wilson good, because he returned to Princeton that fall bent on pressing forward. He told alumni in Baltimore that because the university could attract distinguished faculty and graduate students, “a little Princeton has given place to a big Princeton.” As ever, the essential means to continue to build that “big Princeton” were the Quad Plan and a properly located Graduate College. Wilson persisted in seeking money for the Quad Plan, and using Cleveland Dodge as an intermediary, he again approached Rockefeller. Earlier, he had partially wrested control of graduate education from West, but he still regarded the location of the Graduate College as critical to his goals. West had upset the earlier decision in favor of an on-campus site by bringing in a pledge for $500,000 for construction of the Graduate College. The pledge came from William Cooper Procter, class of 1883, a member of the family that owned Procter and Gamble, the nation’s leading manufacturer of soaps and cleansers, and it had two stipulations: that Princeton must match the sum within a year and that the new facility not be built at the on-campus site. When Procter visited Princeton in June 1909, he insisted on either Merwick or the golf course site that Cleveland had reportedly favored. At the same time, Ralph Adams Cram, the architect who was designing Princeton’s new Gothic Revival buildings, had switched his allegiance to the golf course site, because the prospect of a larger, grander building appealed to his aesthetic ambitions; that summer, Wilson had gone to Boston to try to get him to change his mind. Cram played no further role in the controversy, but his defection was a blow to Wilson.21

  Over the summer, Wilson had also attempted to get rid of West, by recommending him for the presidency of Clark University, but that scheme did not pan out. Efforts at conciliation and compromise failed, and Pyne went over to West’s side. In October the trustees voted 14 to 10 to accept the Procter gift and build the Graduate College on the golf course site. Wilson felt so upset after the trustees’ meeting that he telephoned Mary Peck long-distance in New York and then poured out his hurt and discouragement in a letter: “Suffice it to say that, after a week-long struggle, the Trustees adopted a plan of that arch-intriguer West’s.” Once again, “money talked louder than I did.” He wanted to resign, he said, but he owed it to his supporters to fight on. “I admit, to you, that I am very low in my mind, filled with scorn and disappointment, and fighting to hold my tongue from words that might make all breaches irreparable.”22

  For the next two months, Wilson struggled to be patient. He tried to patch things up with Pyne, and he proposed a compromise: building two facilities for graduate students, one on campus, using the earlier bequest and other money, and another, smaller establishment on the golf course, using Procter’s gift. Pyne said nothing to Wilson to discourage him, but he evidently told Procter to stand his ground
. When Wilson met with Procter on December 22, he spent more than an hour laying out the details and observing that less than 10 percent of the faculty favored an off-campus site for the Graduate College, but Procter responded that the trustees had already accepted his offer. Right after that meeting, Wilson told Pyne, “The acceptance of this gift has taken the guidance of the University out of my hands entirely,—and I seem to have come to the end.” Instead, he decided to force a showdown over Procter’s gift. On Christmas day, he told Pyne, “This is a very solemn matter, my dear Momo, but the issue is clear. Neither my conscience nor my self-respect will permit me to avoid it. … I must ask [the trustees] to give the University, at whatever cost, its freedom of choice in matters which so nearly touch its life and development.”23

  Some trustees still wanted to accept Procter’s offer, but the members of the faculty’s Graduate School Committee, with the exception of Hibben, sent Wilson a strongly worded letter backing the president’s position. Pyne remained outwardly noncommittal, but his pose was a ruse. Behind the scenes he was plotting with Procter to drop a bombshell. When the two men met in New York in January 1910, Pyne drafted a letter for Procter in which the manufacturer no longer required that his $500,000 be matched and pledged the whole amount for construction at the golf course site. Pyne read the letter aloud at the next meeting of the trustees’ Graduate School Committee, which, Pyne told Procter, “took the ground entirely from under their feet.” Wilson responded, Pyne recounted, “that the Faculty did not care where the College was placed;—anywhere in Mercer County would suit them, provided it was carried out under proper ideals.” Pyne chortled that Wilson “was confused and self-contradictory, and I never saw a man more embarrassed or in a more unpleasant position where it was impossible for him to extricate himself from the numerous contradictory statements he has made.”24

  Wilson’s behavior did not show him at his best, and he often did not respond quickly to changing circumstances. But he and his supporters appeared to take the incident in stride, and from this point on naked conflict was the order of the day. Later in January, Pyne outlined a scheme to force Wilson’s resignation by having Procter publicly withdraw his offer while privately keeping it open and having West step down as dean. In that way, Wilson’s opponents would be, Pyne believed, “ready to start in with the new administration when it comes, and it cannot be long in coming when these facts are known to the public.” Procter was willing to go along with this scheme because, he told Pyne, “restoration of proper feeling in the Board, Faculty, and Alumni cannot begin while Woodrow remains.”25 Meanwhile, possibly at Pyne’s instigation, the Princeton Alumni Weekly turned its issues of January 26 and February 2 into an anti-Wilson forum.

  Two could play the game of going public. In a letter responding to an inquiry from a New York Times editorial writer, Wilson explained his stand on the Graduate College issue in terms of “the same artificial and unsound social standards that already dominate the life of the undergraduates,” affirming that “[m]y own ideals for the University are those of genuine democracy and serious scholarship.” Based partly on that letter, an editorial appeared in The New York Times in early February that took Wilson’s side and portrayed him as fighting against “mutually exclusive social cliques, stolid groups of wealth and fashion, devoted to non-essentials and the smatterings of culture.”26

  Things seemed to go Wilson’s way after this spate of publicity. Procter withdrew his offer, and Wilson exulted to Dodge, “At last we are free to govern the University as our judgments and consciences dictate! I have an unspeakable sense of relief.”27 When the trustees met, the Graduate School Committee presented a report that favored an on-campus site for the Graduate College but expressed the hope that Procter might change his mind. With the board’s acceptance of this report, Wilson felt sure enough of his ground to discuss plans to get rid of West, broaching the subject with some of his trustee supporters and with the faculty’s Committee on the Graduate School, minus Hibben, who had just resigned from that committee. Whether motivated by prudence or cold feet, the professors shied away from trying to force West out, and Wilson did not press the issue.

  Academic communities have always been poor places in which to keep secrets, and word of faculty members’ second thoughts about moving against West soon reached Wilson’s opponents. Pyne chortled at reports that some faculty members “may come over to our side. In that case Wilson’s side would have its back broken.” Trustees on Wilson’s side, by contrast, busied themselves with further efforts to find a compromise on the site issue. Wilson went along with those efforts, meeting with Procter before speaking to an alumni group in St. Louis. “Mr. Procter behaved very well but committed himself to absolutely nothing,” he reported to a supporter. Wilson also expounded his position in speeches to alumni. In New York, he called the present situation “critical in respect of Princeton’s standing among American universities.” It had taken the lead “in a new age of reconstruction” that had brought it “to the budding point, to the blooming point,” and now it must “take that step which would complete our title to be called a university and develop a great graduate school.” In the academic world, Princeton’s only choice was “which part of the procession we will form—the van or the rear. When you have once taken up the torch of leadership you cannot lay it down without extinguishing it.”28

  Wilson’s eloquence was wasted on his opponents. Pyne and his supporters blocked all attempts to refer the site question to the faculty. Wilson responded by escalating the public conflict. “Immediately after the Board meeting I started for Pittsburgh, where I let myself go, as you may have noticed by the papers,” he told Mary Peck. He was referring to the speech to alumni in which he charged that churches and colleges were dissociating themselves from the people: “They serve the classes, not the masses. … Where does the strength of the nation come from? Not from the men of wealth. … It comes from the great mass of the unknown, of the unrecognized.” He asked again whether Lincoln could have done as well if he had gone to college, and he pledged, “I shall not be satisfied—and I hope you will not be—[until] the American people shall know that the men in the colleges are saturated with the same thought that pulses through the body politic.” Never before had he injected his political opinions so blatantly into a speech about Princeton. This talk attracted the kind of attention from the press that was usually accorded to utterances by major politicians, and the “muckraking” journalist David Graham Phillips and the Social Gospel clergyman Washington Gladden were among those who wrote to commend him.29

  The next month brought the conflict to an unexpected end. Early in May, Pyne and another trustee went to see West and informed him of a compromise plan that would allow the Graduate College to be built on the golf course but would remove West as dean. West reluctantly acceded to the plan, but then fortune suddenly smiled on him. He received word that Isaac Wyman of Salem, Massachusetts, a wealthy member of the Princeton class of 1848, was ill and might be dying. Wilson had tried unsuccessfully to meet Wyman in 1902 on his first fund-raising trip, and West had later succeeded in seeing him. The cantankerous old bachelor had challenged the dean’s persuasive skills until he learned of West’s plans for the Graduate College, although he would not make an immediate donation. On May 18, West got word that Wyman had died. Four days later, Wyman’s lawyers telegraphed West and Wilson with the news that the bulk of the estate would go to Princeton for a graduate college, with West named as executor. No one knew exactly how much money was involved. Rumors placed the sum as high as $10 million, but most sources placed it around $2 million. Even at the lower estimate, it was a huge bequest. Assuming Procter’s offer could be revived, it would permit the Graduate College to be built on a grand scale and with a substantial endowment that would attract both professors and graduate students.30

  Wilson knew at once that he had lost the fight, and he took his defeat gracefully. Ellen’s sister, Madge, remembered waking in the night when she heard his voice in the adjoin
ing bedroom: “I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but I was startled by a note of tenseness.” Through the open door, she could see Wilson talking on the telephone and Ellen leaning back in a chair, “obviously close to tears.” When Wilson saw Madge, he explained what had happened and said grimly, “I could lick a half-million, but I’m licked by ten millions.” Nell Wilson recalled coming down to breakfast the next morning to find her father laughing in the dining room. When she asked him what was so funny, he told her about the Wyman bequest and said, “We’ve beaten the living, but we can’t beat the dead—the game is up.” He telephoned West and asked him to come to Prospect House. When the dean arrived, he recalled the president’s saying, “You know I have set my face like flint against the site on the Golf Links. But the magnitude of the bequest alters the perspective. You have a great work ahead of you and I shall give you my full support.” During the last week in May, Wilson told his supporters he was conceding. He did not plan to resign, but he admitted to a friend, “I must say that my judgment is a good deal perplexed in the matter.”31

  During the next few weeks, Wilson continued to feel perplexed. He worried about having, he told Mary Peck, “to drudge on here, trying to wring something out of an all but intolerable situation, … it all seems, sometimes, as if one should wake up and find it a bad dream.” In June, commencement found him in a dark mood. What later became a famous photograph shows him in his academic gown striding forward with his long jaw set in a grim expression. Far from depicting the typical Wilson, that picture caught him at a moment of defeat and inner turmoil. Soon after commencement, he said to Stockton Axson, “I can stay here indefinitely, but the question in my mind is what is the use. I am not interested in simply administering a club. Unless I can develop something I cannot get thoroughly interested. I believe I can be elected Governor of New Jersey and the question I am debating in my own mind is whether or not I shall take that step.”32 This was not the first time politics had seemed to beckon him to greener pastures, and adversaries at Princeton were in no mood to make life easy for him. It seemed likely that he would leave sooner rather than later. Effectively, his presidency of Princeton had come to an end.