Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  46. EBGW to HCL, Feb. 4, 1924, PWW, vol. 68; New York Times, Feb. 7, 1924.

  47. New York Times, Feb. 7, 1924.

  48. Raymond Fosdick to RSB, June 23, 1926, RSBP, box 103.

  Sources and Acknowledgments

  In a display of excessive modesty, Sir Isaac Newton said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” I make the same claim with no modesty whatever. If I have seen further into Woodrow Wilson and his times, it is entirely by standing on the shoulders of giants. Some of those giants come from the time I have written about, so the debts I wish to acknowledge include men and women from Wilson’s time as well as my own.

  The first and greatest debt owed by any Wilson biographer is to the man himself. He remains perhaps the most self-revealing of all American presidents. He was not secretive or elusive, and he shared his thoughts and motives with others, particularly with the women in his life. Fortunately for the biographer, he began his life when people communicated mainly by letters, and despite the inroads of the telephone and more rapid transportation later in his life, he and his contemporaries continued to rely on written communication for important and intimate matters.

  The letters Wilson exchanged with his first wife, Ellen, before and after their marriage stand alongside the correspondence of John and Abigail Adams as the frankest, deepest, and most touching exchanges between a president and his spouse. The letters he wrote to his second wife, Edith, before their marriage offer comparable views into his mind and spirit, but they do not cover as long a period, and her responses are not as insight-filled as Ellen’s. Likewise, his letters to Mary Hulbert (also Peck) reveal his thoughts and emotions at a particularly significant juncture in his life. Unfortunately, her letters to him do not survive, most likely because he destroyed them for fear of potential scandal. Those were among the few papers Wilson ever discarded—much to the gratitude of biographers and historians. He also wrote what seem to be astonishingly revealing letters from a president to a variety of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. Earlier, at different times in his life, he bared his plans, dreams, and feelings to close friends, most notably Robert Bridges during his first decade out of college. These letters alone would suffice to make Wilson a biographer’s dream subject.

  His contemporaries also contributed greatly to making him accessible to future generations. Fortunately, the great tradition of diary keeping had not yet died out—as it largely would later in the twentieth century—and several of Wilson’s closest associates served as a small team of Boswells for him. First, foremost, and most controversially comes Colonel House. His deviousness and his agendas, both open and hidden, require the reader to approach his diary and correspondence with caution. Although House could lie and often shade the truth to suit his listener, he kept a diary that was usually accurate on the facts as far as it went. The main problems in using this diary come from its shades of meaning—which magnify House’s importance and sagacity—and its aspersions on others—although those afford important, though unintended, insight into House himself. Another problem is having only House’s side of the story for most of the time until the peace conference; then other important figures also kept diaries, against which his accounts can be checked. Only once, in a letter to Edith before they were married, did Wilson speak for himself about House and their relationship. Still, despite those pitfalls and drawbacks, House’s diary remains an indispensable source from the time of Wilson’s election as president in 1912 to the end of the peace conference in 1919.

  Wilson’s physician, Cary Grayson, likewise kept a diary during the conference and on the speaking tour in September 1919, and he wrote frequent memoranda relating particularly to his patient’s health. Grayson’s diary entries in Paris recount what Wilson told him and Edith, usually at the end of each day. The president evidently did the same thing with the press secretary to the American delegation, Ray Stannard Baker, who was long practiced at keeping a diary. Grayson and Baker include information about others at Paris, and Baker often makes shrewd comments on the principal negotiators, members of the delegation, and the progress of the conference. Grayson’s diary entries during the speaking tour are open to question about whether he altered them later to cover himself in diagnosing the president’s deteriorating physical condition. Unlike the earlier diary, there are no manuscripts of this one, only a typescript. The memoranda that he wrote after Wilson’s stroke are more reliable.

  Another diary keeper during his presidency was Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, whose entries often give the only account of cabinet meetings. Daniels’s entries tend to be brief, sometimes almost like shorthand, but they are always valuable. He and other members of the cabinet conducted voluminous, frequently revealing correspondence, most of which is preserved in the collections of their papers at the Library of Congress. Many of those cabinet secretaries also wrote memoirs of their service under Wilson; these are most valuable when they can be checked against contemporary letters and diary entries.

  Joe Tumulty, the ever-faithful Horatio of Wilson’s political career, likewise contributed greatly to illuminating the thoughts and actions of his boss. Even though they were in daily personal contact, the two men exchanged frequent notes and memoranda, which illuminate the workings of the president in his White House office. Suffering as he did from the machinations of House and the dislike of Edith Wilson, Tumulty was sometimes not privy to important matters, but his perseverance at the “governor’s” side affords a view of the personality dynamics surrounding Wilson. Tumulty, too, wrote a memoir—one of the first to appear after Wilson left the White House—but, either through faulty memory or a highly sentimentalized view of events, he left accounts that often have to be regarded with skepticism.

  One other contemporary who also provided great insight into Wilson was his brother-in-law Stockton Axson. He later titled his memoir Brother Woodrow, and he was closer to Wilson than his own brother or than any other person except his two wives. As a young man, Axson frequently lived with his sister and brother-in-law, and as a fellow faculty member at Princeton he came to their house practically every day. Later, he was a frequent visitor to the White House and the house on S Street. Besides his memoir, which was not published until 1993, Axson left extensive written accounts of parts of Wilson’s life, annotations on the manuscript of the first biography of him, and extended interviews, which are in Ray Stannard Baker’s papers at the Library of Congress. Two other family memoirs are also valuable. The youngest Wilson daughter, Eleanor (Nell), who married William Gibbs McAdoo, wrote a memoir of her parents and later edited their letters, and Ellen’s sister, Margaret (Madge) Axson Elliott, likewise wrote an account of the family, with whom she lived from the age of ten until her marriage. The Elliott memoir contains some inaccuracies, but it offers an intimate look at life in the home of the professor and university president.

  The biographer’s good fortune with Wilson does not end with him and his contemporaries. Other biographers and scholars who have come afterward have continued to shed light on him and his career. Two of them have stood out from all the others. The first of them, Ray Stannard Baker, straddled the roles of contemporary observer and biographer. Wilson’s own deathbed anointment of him and Edith’s cajolery brought him to his task while memories were still fresh. As a journalist, Baker reflexively sought out reminiscences of his subject through correspondence and interviews. This was fortunate because academic historians still remained in the thrall of strictly contemporary documents and would not come to appreciate the value of oral history for another generation. Baker did not neglect documents, and he collected a number of letters that might otherwise have gone astray, but his greatest contribution was to gather recollections of Wilson dating back to his childhood. The transcripts of his interviews and the commentary Stockton Axson produced as Baker wrote the biography, together with the other material he collected, make his papers in the Library of Congress second only to Wilson’s own papers in value to the biograph
er and to historians of this era.

  The other outstanding contributor to the illumination of this man and his times was Arthur S. Link. Born three years before Wilson died, Link did not know him, but he began work on him soon after Baker completed his multivolume authorized biography. Link approached Wilson differently, as a historian of the era rather than as a biographer. Over the course of twenty years, Link produced a five-volume history of Wilson’s political career up to intervention in World War I. The four volumes dealing with Wilson’s time in the White House constitute the fullest, most insightful history of a presidential administration ever written. Their only rivals are Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s two volumes on the first Franklin Roosevelt administration and Henry Adams’s eight volumes on the Jefferson and Madison administrations. My notes to the chapters dealing with the years from 1910 to 1917 begin to indicate my reliance on Link’s work. Having used many of the same sources that he did, I continually marvel at how he “got it right.” Link’s work can be corrected only where evidence to which he did not have access has come to light, and the instances of that are infrequent.

  Link also made a second, still greater contribution to an understanding of Wilson. Starting in the 1950s, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation dedicated its assets and Princeton University provided institutional support for a comprehensive multivolume edition of The Papers of Woodrow Wilson. Link was the editor of this edition from start to finish, which came with the publication of the final volume in 1993. He enjoyed able assistance throughout most of the project from his associate editors, John Wells Davidson, David W. Hirst, and John Little, as well as his wife, Margaret Douglas Link. There was also an editorial advisory committee, which included Richard W. Leopold, William H. Harbaugh, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., among others, for the duration. About twenty years into the project I also joined that advisory committee, and I was proud to serve to its completion. In the process, I became a close friend of Arthur and Margaret Link, and I regret that I began this biography when they were no longer alive to help me with their counsel and criticism.

  Important as the assistance of others was, what Link always called The Papers was his work: it perfectly fulfills Emerson’s dictum, “An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.” The sixty-nine volumes of The Papers of Woodrow Wilson constitute one of the great editorial achievements in all history. Of the great documentary editions that began to flourish in the second half of the twentieth century, this is the only one that has been completed and the only one that has had only one editor. Second only to Wilson himself and equal to Baker, Link deserves the greatest credit for making this man so accessible to anyone who wants to know a little or a lot about him.

  These volumes bring together and reproduce nearly all the significant contemporary documents by and about Wilson and the events in which he played a major role. Much of the material comes from the Wilson manuscripts in the Library of Congress, but, particularly for his earlier life—when people wrote longhand letters and did not make copies—this edition gathers material from widely scattered sources. Those volumes also contain extensive editorial notes that add up to a biography of Wilson in those years. For the presidency, the selection sometimes leaves out material and requires consulting the manuscripts—which are available on microfilm—but those instances are rare. All relevant diary entries are included, and when foreign affairs are involved there is material from archives in other countries. Again, my notes indicate my heavy reliance on PWW, as they are abbreviated there. They are the indispensable source for anyone who studies Wilson or this era. For the biographer, it is amazing how seldom he or she needs to venture beyond PWW, except to Baker’s collection and a few other sources.

  I have likewise relied on the work of other historians and biographers. The notes give some indication of those whose work I found most helpful. One whose work is frequently cited deserves additional thanks. Henry Bragdon served as a bridge between Baker and Link. In the 1930s, he also interviewed people who had known Wilson during his years as a student, professor, and college president. He was able to talk with some people whom Baker missed or could not get much out of, and even when he repeated interviews, these elicited fresh information and provided a second take on the person’s memories. Bragdon then produced an excellent biography of Wilson’s “academic years,” prior to his entry into politics in 1910. It is also a fine contribution to the history of higher education in America, although it has been supplemented and in some instances supplanted by a still better work in that field, James Axtell’s history of Princeton in the century that started with Wilson’s presidency there. Axtell tells the story of what Wilson attempted in the way of transforming Princeton into one of America’s and the world’s great universities and how, by fits and starts and over a long time, his vision came to be a reality. It is the finest history of an American university yet written.

  Other works on Wilson that I found helpful and are cited in the notes, though not often enough, are John Mulder’s account of Wilson’s life to 1910, Edwin Weinstein’s medical and psychological biography of Wilson, Neils Thorsen’s study of his pre-presidential political thought, and Robert Kraig’s study of Wilson’s rhetoric. All are excellent works. Mulder emphasizes the religious environment of Wilson’s youth. Weinstein brings matters of Wilson’s health into perspective, as do notes in PWW for the time surrounding his stroke in 1919. Thorsen probes into what a truly gifted student of politics Wilson was. Kraig places Wilson in the Western rhetorical tradition dating back to classical times and illuminates the influences and contributions that he made to that tradition—now horribly eroded by modern techniques of political manipulation and appeals through mass media. Thomas Knock’s book on Wilson’s foreign policy and Margaret MacMillan’s account of the peace conference also guided me through these aspects of Wilson’s life and work. At the risk of immodesty, I should mention two of my previous books, a comparative biography of Wilson and his great rival Theodore Roosevelt and a study of the League Fight. The first puts Wilson in an indispensable context that sheds light on both him and his greatest rival; the second examines not only him but also his friends and foes in the last great debate over American foreign policy—the culmination of what Kraig aptly terms “the lost world of oratorical statesmanship.” There are many other fine works on Wilson and the momentous events of his time, and a good way to approach them is through the comprehensive bibliography published in 1997 by John Mulder and his associates.

  Finally comes the happiest task of all, thanking the individuals and institutions that have aided and speeded me along the path to this book. Early on Frank Smith and my children, John M. Cooper III and Elizabeth Cooper Doyle, together with my wife, Judith Cooper, encouraged and prodded me to write a biography of Wilson. I resisted, but not for long, because they were asking me to do something I really wanted to do. Along the way, several people have helped me find material, including Robert Cullinane, Kathleen Dalton, Lewis Gould, Arthur S. Link III, Samuel Schaffer, William Walker, and Katherine Wilkins. At Princeton’s Mudd Library, Dan Linke and Chris Kitto aided me in gathering illustrations, and at the National Gallery of Ireland, Adrian Le Harivel afforded me the opportunity of a close-up examination of the Sargent portrait of Wilson and helped arrange its reproduction. Others have read and commented on portions of the manuscript, including Anthony Gaughan, Bruce Freed, Christine Schillig, Marc Winerman, Victoria Brown, Edward Coffman, and Michael Dickens. Three people have read everything in one version of this work and sometimes more. My wife, Judy, has patiently gone over several incarnations line by line, constantly raising questions about what I meant, how I said things, and how I interpreted a number of Wilson’s and others’ motives and actions. Jim Axtell performed the same service, reading and writing comments on everything and raising constant questions. Since he was writing his history of Princeton at the same time, we became something like co-conspirators as we read each other’s chapters and traded opinion and lore. Justus Doenecke took great pains to spot numerous errors
. To all these friends and loved ones, I can offer only small thanks for making a lonely job far more enjoyable and stimulating.

  Two institutions provided greatly appreciated aid toward the end of this work. The University of Wisconsin–Madison granted me a sabbatical for the academic year 2007–8, which allowed me to write full-time. I would like to thank the university for this opportunity. The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars made me a Policy Scholar for five months in 2008. Besides time, a pleasant place for writing, and proximity to sources, the Wilson Center furnished me with the services of an intern, Colin Biddle, who found material for me, read portions of the manuscript, and checked references for the first part. In addition, the Wilson Center provided a most enjoyable and stimulating place to be, living up to its mission of bringing together scholars and persons in public life. I would like to thank its director, Lee Hamilton, and its associate director, Samuel Wells, for making this possible.

  From manuscript to book, this biography has enjoyed the indispensable services of giants in the world of publishing. My agent, Alexander Hoyt, navigated the waters of this industry for me, landing me with a superb publisher and aiding and encouraging me all along the way. At Alfred A. Knopf, I have profited from the gifts of two outstanding editors, who have proven that the truly noble work of the golden age of American publishing is not dead. I began first with Ashbel Green, who is a legend in his own time for his work with a long line of distinguished historians. If I had written faster, Ash could have seen this through to the end, but he graciously read the rest of the work in retirement and gave me the benefit of his eagle eye for infelicities of wording and curbed my tendency toward slanginess. His retirement meant that I also benefited from the services of another equally gifted editor, Andrew Miller, who reinforced Ash’s oversight and went on to suggest ways to streamline and improve the work. As I have told him, Andrew really knows how to make a book move, and the flow of this one owes a great deal to him. In addition, Andrew was a fount of ideas for how to improve the interpretations and depictions of persons and events. Sara Sherbill and Andrew Michael Carlson patiently and cheerfully shepherded me through the indispensable tasks of transforming a piece of writing into a book. Finally, Abigail Winograd copy-edited the book with truly extraordinary skill and insight—I have never had a more attentive and helpful reader. My deepest thanks to each of them.