Wilson
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In the spring, Wilson’s participation with the baseball team provided one of the most significant experiences of his Princeton career. In a long editorial, he discussed the need to bring a more systematic approach to selecting the University Nine—all of which he said depended on not only a good captain on the field but the selection of the best possible president of the association. “The majority of men in College are sufficiently familiar with the rules of the game to fill the office,” he wrote. “The president must, above all things else, be a man of unbiased judgment, energy, determination, intelligence, moral courage, conscience.” To those who knew Tommy Wilson—which by then included most of his classmates—only one man on campus fit that description.
That very day, Tommy attended a meeting of the Base Ball Association, which had intended to elect his classmate Cornelius C. Cuyler its president. At the start of the meeting, according to a plan Wilson had devised, one of his closest friends moved that they postpone the vote by four weeks, to allow further consideration of Wilson’s qualifications. After a debate of the matter, the group voted to delay. “Walked home from the meeting quite elated with our victory,” Tommy wrote in his diary that night, “for a victory it was.” When the election was held in late October, not only was Wilson made president of the organization but a politician was born.
He soon realized that he was spreading himself too thin. Even Tommy’s doting mother urged him to resign the presidency of the baseball club. “It is very pleasant to think that your fellow-students have such confidence in you,” she wrote. “But it would be wrong to put aside your more important interests.” She added, “You will make a great mistake if you allow anything of the kind to come in the way of your doing your utmost in the direction of your future interest.”
Humility—drummed into him by both his parents—tempered his ambition. The harder he pushed himself, the more harshly he judged himself. In one self-analysis, he challenged his own literary ability, insisting in the third person that his compositions “go limping about in a cloud of wordy expressions and under a heavy weight of lost nouns and adjectives. Ideas are to his writings what oases are to the deserts, except that his ideas are very seldom distinguishable from the waste which surrounded them.”
Shortly after Tommy turned twenty-one, his father wrote:
You have talents—you have character—you have a manly bearing. You have self-reliance. You have almost every advantage coupled I trust with genuine love for God. Do not allow yourself, then, to feed on dreams—daydreams though they be. . . . It is genius that usually gets to the highest tops—but, what is the secret heart of genius? the ability to work with painstaking self-denial.
Cautioning his son in the ways of ambition, Dr. Wilson added, “In short, dearest boy, do not allow yourself to dwell upon yourself—concentrate your thoughts upon thoughts and things and events. . . . I am not charging egotism upon you. Far from it. I am only warning you against an evil, common to youth.”
Since Princeton’s inception, every Princetonian has believed he attended the college during its golden age. In retrospect, Wilson’s undergraduate years—when McCosh was at the peak of his powers—were a genuine millennium; and the Scotsman pronounced the Class of 1879 “the largest and finest . . . ever to attend me college.” A statistical summary of its 124 graduates supported the claim: in addition to future Governor and President Woodrow Wilson, the class would ultimately yield a Justice of the Supreme Court, two Congressmen, a Chancellor of New Jersey, an Attorney General of New Jersey, two Maryland judges, one Princeton dean, thirty lawyers, twenty doctors, and twenty ministers. The men of 1879 would prove to be unparalleled in their generosity, led by a number of wealthy young men, among them Cyrus McCormick, whose father started the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, Cleveland Dodge, son of a mining industrialist, and such future banking titans as Edward W. Sheldon and Cornelius C. Cuyler.
In February 1877, Witherspoon Hall—a five-story building of blue-gray marble, built upon a dark-stone ground floor—opened its doors. Each floor had its own style of windows; and each face of the building featured its own style of tower, including one conical turret. Its eighty rooms could accommodate 140 students, and its water closet on every floor made Witherspoon the first college dormitory in America with indoor plumbing. Tommy Wilson’s suite on the second floor—7 West, with its study, small bedroom, and fireplace—would remain his home for the next two and a half years.
Steadily, Wilson found the most rewarding elements of college came not through the formal academics (“No undergraduate can be made a scholar in four years”) but in friendship, that immeasurable influence twenty-year-olds have upon one another before their personalities have hardened. A generation later, he would conclude that “the very best effects of university life are wrought between six and nine o’clock in the evenings, when the professor has gone home, and minds meet minds, and a generating process takes place.” For the most part, Tommy Wilson found that communion with seven fellow residents of his dormitory. For the rest of their lives they remained friends, calling themselves “the Witherspoon Gang.”
They shared modest backgrounds. Without being part of Princeton’s social elite, the Gang provided most of the horsepower for the college’s nonathletic extracurricular activities. As with Wilson, oratory and current affairs engaged the other members of the Gang the most, and they joined Whig and Wilson’s Liberal Debating Club or worked on his staff at the Princetonian or contributed to the Nassau Literary Magazine. Most of them prepared for the law, while two hoped to go to medical school. None of Wilson’s closest friends was among the twenty-four Seventy-niners who would become ministers. He would remain closest to the Gang member who followed the least traditional postgraduate path: Robert Bridges, an ace debater who pursued a literary life—becoming a newspaper reporter and, eventually, the longtime editor of Scribner’s Magazine. To their dying days, they remained “Bobby” and “Tommy” to each other.
Of all the members of the Witherspoon Gang, however, Tommy found the greatest kinship with a young man from upstate New York whose career at Princeton most closely mirrored his. Charles Talcott was a fellow debater and a member of the Princetonian board who had an eye on a legal and political career. The two of them formally entered into what Wilson called a “solemn covenant” that “we would school all our powers and passions for the work of establishing the principles we held in common; that we would acquire knowledge that we might have power; and that we would drill ourselves in all the arts of persuasion, but especially in oratory . . . that we might have facility in leading others into our ways of thinking and enlisting them in our purposes.” Years later, Wilson realized the pact was not just “boyish enthusiasm, though we were blinded by a very boyish assurance with regard to the future and our ability to mould the world as our hands might please.” Bobby Bridges would later record that “there was a certain integrity in his ideal from boy to man that gave his friends a peculiar confidence in his ultimate destiny as a leader of men. It was a jest of his in college which ended ‘when I meet you in the Senate, I’ll argue that out with you.’”
Expanding his social base, Tommy joined an informal “eating club.” Although Wilson was poorer than most of the members, he wanted for nothing while at Princeton. One time, though, he did run out of money and could not afford even the postage to write home. Remembering that he had once dropped a penny, he turned his room upside down until he found it, so that he could mail an SOS by penny postcard. Letters from home invariably included a post office money order to tide him over; and Tommy was able to join a dozen men who took their meals in a house on Nassau Street. There were dozens of such establishments around campus—such as the Knights of the Round Table, the Hollow Inn, and the club he joined with Charlie Talcott and Robert McCarter, the Alligators.
“There was not a touch of the pedant or dig about him,” wrote Robert Bridges, fifty years after graduation. Tommy exercised with the crew, too
k the train into New York City to attend the theater (one day he saw Edwin Booth perform twice, alternating between Othello and Iago), and lingered in the Alligator club with Earl Dodge, captain of the football team, scribbling plays on the tablecloth. Said McCarter, “He had clear-cut notions of how the game should be played and insisted on them.” By the end of his senior year, nobody had slid more smoothly into more organizations than Tommy Wilson.
Princeton’s student body of five hundred men remained homogeneous. Fifty years later, Bridges recalled a crisis in Dr. McCosh’s philosophy class when a Negro student from the Theological Seminary entered the classroom. No black man had yet enrolled at the college. Upon his taking a seat in the back row, several Southerners stood and exited. While few schools other than the all-black colleges enrolled more than a handful of African American students, some doors were at least open, albeit but a crack. To the Princeton Class of 1879, however, diversity meant only the presence of Episcopalians, and the odd Methodist.
For all his activity in the classroom and out, Wilson ultimately distinguished himself most as a scholar, through countless hours of independent thought and work. He was bursting with ideas, as every book he read seemed to inspire one he hoped to write. Junior year, he read the newly published Short History of the English People, by John Richard Green, which he reviewed in the pages of the Princetonian as having the “candor of Carlyle, the concise expression of Gibbon, and the brilliancy of Macaulay.” It got Wilson thinking that he might one day chronicle his own country in a similar fashion.
Wilson often contemplated the matter of leadership in America, in part because one of the most exciting elections in American history occurred during his sophomore year. At age twenty, he was too young to vote, but the election of 1876, between Democratic Governor Samuel J. Tilden of New York and Republican Governor Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio, was the first to engage him. The night before the election, Tommy heard that pools in New York offered its Governor two-to-one odds. Late that night, word reached New Jersey that Tilden had won his home state by seventy-five thousand votes, which seemed to be an electoral prize large enough to give him the Presidency. The next night, Tommy joined the Democrats on campus around a huge bonfire by the Revolutionary War cannon buried muzzle-down on the green. But while the fire blazed, word spread that Hayes had been elected. Tilden had won the popular vote by four percentage points—250,000 votes—but Hayes appeared to have carried the electoral college, with four votes to spare. The final results hung in the balance for days, and then months, as returns were challenged. Cries of fraud and threats of violence erupted, especially in the South, where Reconstruction had left some states with two sets of elected officials; and now Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina fought over certification of their Presidential electors. Congress created an Electoral Commission composed of five members from the Senate, five from the House, and five from the Supreme Court—all of whom, including the Justices, voted along party lines. Two days before the Constitution called for the inauguration of the new President, the scales tipped in favor of the Republicans. A constitutional crisis had been averted, but evidently at a price: shortly after taking his oath, President Hayes ordered the withdrawal of federal troops from the South. As future historian Woodrow Wilson would write, “The supremacy of the white people was henceforth assured in the administration of the southern States.” Reconstruction ended; but the American political system stagnated in a period in which the executive branch was subordinate to the legislative, and the legislative lacked adequate leadership.
This only further enamored Wilson with Britain’s parliamentary system, especially after he read a decade-old book called The English Constitution, by Walter Bagehot, an English political analyst and journalist. Bagehot (pronounced badge-it) defied political labels (considering himself a conservative Liberal) and failed in several stands for election to Parliament; but his dissection of power in the Cabinet-led House of Commons stood unsurpassed. In The Economist, which he edited for years, he wrote of both internal and international socioeconomic issues affecting England. He observed the American Civil War with great interest, sympathizing with the South but admiring Lincoln. Tommy clung to Bagehot’s every word. Not two weeks after the author’s untimely death at fifty-one, Wilson submitted to the Liberal Debating Club a plan for the reformation of America’s federal government, more along the lines of the British Cabinet system, in which executive and legislative powers would be entrusted to ministers serving at the pleasure of the majority party.
His senior year, he took classes in history, ethics, and political science, scoring solidly in the 90s, though chemistry and astronomy brought his ranking down to thirty-eighth in a class of 167. In January and February of 1879, he took on yet another task—that of composing a political essay based on themes he had presented to the Liberal Debating Club. The assignment proved so engaging that Wilson relinquished the Base Ball Association presidency.
Although Wilson’s essay borrowed heavily from Bagehot’s work, he wrote a prodigious piece—sophisticated beyond his years. In over 8,500 words, the Princeton senior argued that “Congress is a deliberative body in which there is little real deliberation; a legislature which legislates with no real discussion of its business. Our Government is practically carried on by irresponsible committees.” He suggested that members of the President’s Cabinet ought to sit in Congress and engage in debate and that the executive and the legislative branches should run the government together, advancing the same agenda. The entire concept was based on faith in the “display of administrative talents, by evidence of high ability upon the floor of Congress in the stormy play of debate.”
Upon its completion, Tommy sought his father’s reaction, only to find Joseph Wilson’s praise mixed and measured. “I will say that your manner of presentation is worthy of my sincerest commendation,” he wrote his son at the end of February 1879. “I do not think you could improve the composition.” And yet—he thought it might “be made to glow a little more. It is to a certain extent, cold.” That said, he encouraged Tommy to submit it to any number of periodicals, adding, “You will find that practise is, in this as in all else, another name for perfection. You have only to persevere.” In her mollifying way, Janet Wilson reflexively sent her son a letter assuring him of her unqualified admiration.
Heeding his father’s advice not to tinker with it any longer, Wilson submitted the piece to the prestigious International Review. A junior editor there accepted it—one Henry Cabot Lodge, a Boston blue blood six years Wilson’s senior who was about to start a long and powerful legislative career with his election to the Massachusetts lower house. The article, entitled “Cabinet Government in the United States,” would run in the August issue. It would not be Lodge’s last assessment of Wilson’s political philosophy, but it would be the most generous.
Spring in Princeton long marked a succession of lazy afternoons until graduation. Wilson’s final months defied tradition. He wrote nine editorials in his last six weeks as managing editor of the Princetonian, as well as his senior thesis, “Our Kinship with England.” Busy as he was, he also discovered a poet whose words he would take to heart for the rest of his life—William Wordsworth.
Unexpectedly, he did forgo one senior activity. The Lynde Debate was one of the featured events at Princeton graduation, for which the participants had to compete in a qualifying match—Whig’s top three arguing against the trio from its rival, the Cliosophic Society. Wilson was an obvious contender, and the preliminary topic was of great interest to him: “Resolved that it would be advantageous to the United States to abolish universal suffrage.” Upon drawing lots to determine which side he would be arguing, however, Wilson promptly withdrew. On principle alone, he could not bring himself to argue the negative. Dr. Wilson supported his son’s decision, saying it would lead to “either a limitation of suffrage or anarchy in twenty-five years or sooner. I do not refer to the Negroes any more than to the ignorant Northern vot
ers.” Whether it was because of a white Southern aversion to the Negro having the vote or, like his father’s, his attraction to the English belief that only stakeholders—landowners—should be enfranchised, Wilson’s feelings remained firm. As he had noted in his diary back in 1876, “Universal suffrage is at the foundation of every evil in this country.” Wilson’s views on that subject would change over the years; but then, he took comfort in the words of his friend Talcott: “Arguing against settled convictions, in my opinion, injures a man more than it benefits him.”
Commencement exercises stretched over four days. They began on Sunday, June 15, 1879, with President McCosh’s delivering the baccalaureate address in the Presbyterian Church on Nassau Street. Class Day followed—an informal celebration of the men of 1879—and Wilson was named the class’s “model statesman.” Beyond that, he was not singled out. While he had once considered himself a candidate for valedictorian, he contented himself by graduating in the top third of the class with a 90.3 percent average. At nine o’clock in the morning of Wednesday the eighteenth, Wilson joined the procession in front of Nassau Hall as it returned to the church for the formal presentation of diplomas. He was listed in the graduation program as one of four winners of a prize from the Nassau Lit for his essay on William Pitt, the Earl of Chatham; and, along with forty-one others, he graduated with honors. He was also one of twenty-six seniors invited to deliver an oration in the First Presbyterian Church based on his senior thesis. A few hours later, depression set in, as he found leaving Princeton “harder than I had feared.”