Wilson

by A. Scott Berg

  Ellen’s fortunes changed dramatically as well. With some money from her father, and her younger siblings in their grandparents’ care, she pursued a long-deferred dream—enrolling at the Art Students League in New York City. After a two-week visit with the Wilsons, she and Woodrow cast discretion to the wind and traveled north together, as he insisted upon seeing her settled in Manhattan. They left Wilmington on October 1 and spent that night in separate rooms in a Washington hotel. The next day, they visited the Corcoran Gallery of Art before finding their berths on a sleeping car to New York. Upon arrival, Wilson escorted his bride-to-be to her home for the next year, a boardinghouse at 60 Clinton Place. He hated to leave her there—“in those dreary quarters amidst those horrid people”—but Ellen was too exhilarated by her upcoming year to notice the conditions. She took advantage of both the city’s and her school’s cultural offerings—visiting museums, theaters, and artists’ studios, and taking classes in portraiture, life drawing, perspective, and classical sculpture. She proved herself a highly accomplished fine artist. She and Woodrow corresponded practically every day—long, lyrical letters. “There surely never lived a man with whom love was a more critical matter than it is with me!” he wrote.

  Within a week of his return to Baltimore, Wilson mailed his completed manuscript to Houghton Mifflin; and six weeks later they offered him a contract, proposing the standard royalty of 10 percent on the retail price of all copies sold. That same day, Dr. Adams invited Wilson to his office to meet Martha Carey Thomas and James E. Rhoads, who were establishing an all-female college in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. A year younger than Wilson, Miss Thomas was the founding dean of the institution, a daughter of a Johns Hopkins trustee and a formidable scholar in her own right—an alumna of Cornell University, Hopkins, and the University of Zurich, where she studied for her Ph.D. because no American university offered advanced degrees to women. Rhoads had trained as a medical doctor at the University of Pennsylvania but dedicated most of his life to education and philanthropy and was serving as the first president of Bryn Mawr College. Hoping to open in the fall, they were assembling a faculty; and Dr. Rhoads said he was pleased to learn from the interview that Wilson “believed that the hand of Providence was in all history; that the progress of Christianity was as great a factor as the development of philosophy and the sciences; and that wars were to be justified only by necessity.”

  Girls in the United States had traditionally received education in the home, but by the late eighteenth century, a number of female academies and seminaries had appeared in all corners of the country, evolving into colleges, institutions where women might study the liberal arts and find educational opportunities equal to those afforded men. By the mid-1800s, a number of coeducational colleges had opened—mostly in the Midwest and West: such institutions as Oberlin, the University of Iowa, Carleton, and Stanford. By 1885, there were almost a hundred women’s colleges in America, including Mount Holyoke, Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, and Radcliffe. The suggestion that a job at Bryn Mawr would be waiting for Wilson upon the completion of his second year at Hopkins was encouraging, but teaching at an all-female college—one yet to open—required further consideration. Wags were already referring to the new school as “the Johanna Hopkins.”

  Ellen appreciated the Bryn Mawr offer but could not resist asking, “Do you think there is much reputation, to be made in a girls school . . . ? Can you be content to serve in that sort of an institution?” Woodrow said, “The question of the higher education of women is certain to be settled in the affirmative, in this country at least, whether my sympathy be enlisted or not.” He wrote Heath Dabney that the great advantages to his accepting the position were in “its situation in the midst of the most cultivated portion of the country and the freedom of method, the comparatively limited number of topics to teach, and the comparatively small number of hours per week in teaching them, that will be given each instructor.” He assured Ellen that he would much rather teach men, but he thought “good literary work will be much more noticed . . . in the North than in the South.” When the school raised its offer from $1,200 per year to $1,500, Wilson accepted a two-year contract. He realized that there simply was no better job available to a graduate student without any teaching experience.

  On January 23, 1885, six weeks after receiving his first batch of proofs, Wilson received two finished copies of his book, Congressional Government, a small but impressive blue volume of 333 pages. He immediately mailed one to Ellen, saying, “Everything in the book . . . was written as if to you, with thoughts of what you would think of it.” The dedication, however, was to the author’s father—“THE PATIENT GUIDE OF HIS YOUTH, THE GRACIOUS COMPANION OF HIS MANHOOD, HIS BEST INSTRUCTOR AND MOST LENIENT CRITIC.”

  “Never,” responded Dr. Wilson, “have I felt such a blow of love. Shall I confess it?—I wept and sobbed in the stir of the glad pain.” He read the book more than once, admiring it and gloating over it. From then on, he told his wife, he expected to be referred to as Woodrow Wilson’s father. Critical reaction was national and generally favorable, as the book was pronounced “masterly” and “important” and likened to Bagehot’s English Constitution. His Hopkins classmate Albert Shaw reviewed the book for the Minneapolis Daily Tribune and called it “the best critical writing on the American constitution which has appeared since the ‘Federalist’ papers.” The book sold its initial one thousand copies almost immediately, and smaller successive runs were ordered annually over the next fifteen years. New job offers presented themselves, including one from the University of Michigan. His family wondered if he could not get out of the Bryn Mawr contract; but in the end Dr. Wilson advised against it, further suggesting that a year or two at the new college would not be time lost. Woodrow corresponded with Dr. Rhoads about places where he and his new bride might live.

  Before starting at Johns Hopkins, Wilson had considered a Ph.D. his meal ticket in academia; now that he had become an overnight sensation in academic circles and had a teaching contract, he questioned the need to cram for countless hours in order to receive a certificate. He also had grave doubts about his ability to master German, as the requirements demanded. He knew that the degree would increase his value in the marketplace, but he knew his mental and physical health would be heavily taxed by “a forced march through fourteen thousand pages of dry reading.” Friends challenged his thinking, but Wilson insisted, “I know what I am about.”

  By the first of June, the betrothed couple left their respective schools for the South, each spending a few weeks among family. “What a sweet preparation we have had for our wedding day!” Woodrow wrote from Columbia on the twenty-first. “How precious the experience of these months of our engagement has been! It has brought us to a point where to marry is the only logical, natural, consistent thing we could do—hasn’t it, darling? To wait longer now would be only to torture ourselves.” In the common parlance of the day, Woodrow would consistently refer to Ellen as his “little wife,” but he intended it more as a term of endearment than diminution, as, ironically, he would most often become the infantilized partner in the relationship, the needy boy seeking a mother’s comforting hand. Two days later, the Wilson family arrived in Savannah.

  Tacitly, the bride and groom each placed an offering upon the wedding altar. Ellen had decided to abandon serious pursuit of her art. Knowing Woodrow would consider that too great a sacrifice, she assured him that her rather one-track disposition demanded it. “As compared with the privilege of loving and serving you and the blessedness of being loved by you, the praise and admiration of all the world and generations yet unborn would be lighter than vanity. If now I held such greatness in my hand I should toss it away without a second thought that the hand might be free to clasp in yours.”

  Woodrow’s offering could be found tucked away in a few sentences amid the hundreds of epistles to each other, a private confession only to her. “I do feel a very real regret that I have been shut out from my h
eart’s first—primary—ambition and purpose, which was, to take an active, if possible a leading, part in public life, and strike out for myself, if I had the ability, a statesman’s career. That is my heart’s—or, rather, my mind’s—deepest secret, little lady.” His priorities had shifted, and he said he would now content himself interpreting great thoughts to the world. “I should be complete if I could inspire a great movement of opinion,” he wrote, “if I could read the experiences of the past into the practical life of the men of to-day and so communicate the thought to the minds of the great mass of the people as to impel them to great political achievement.”

  Only in that letter to Ellen in 1885, could Woodrow admit that he possessed one thing that he did not have when he first dreamed about a career as a statesman and orator—“that one priceless, inestimable thing,” he said, “is your love, my Eileen!”

  In the evening of Wednesday, June 24, 1885, Woodrow Wilson married Ellen Louise Axson at her grandfather’s residence. The large manse, behind the Independent Presbyterian Church, featured a stately parlor with a high ceiling and arched windows and a fireplace, before which Woodrow and Ellen stood, as the Reverends I. S. K. Axson and Joseph Wilson performed the ceremony before their many relatives. The bride wore a simple white dress, which she had sewn; the groom, a dark suit. All the women cried at the sheer beauty of the ceremony and the couple’s obvious joy.

  The newlyweds hied to Arden, North Carolina, the hamlet outside Asheville, where they enjoyed a seven-week idyll in a small vine-covered cottage surrounded by a pine forest. “We are out of doors most of the time, walking together and reading, unless I coerce him into singing, for he has a beautiful voice,” Ellen wrote her cousin Mary Hoyt. Then they left for New York to see Wilson’s parents, who were visiting from Tennessee. By the time Professor and Mrs. Wilson boarded the train for their new lives in Pennsylvania, Ellen was two months pregnant.

  • • •

  In the seventeenth century, William Penn sold much of the land west of Philadelphia to Welsh Quakers; but it was another two hundred years before the extension of the Main Line of the Pennsylvania Railroad encouraged wealthy city dwellers to build estates in the twenty small communities that dotted the countryside west of the Schuylkill River. Bryn Mawr—Welsh for “big hill”—sat in the middle of the Main Line towns, ten miles from the city. The first buildings of its new college were an easy walk from the train depot—Merion Hall, a dormitory, and Taylor Hall, an administration-classroom building, complete with a library, an assembly room, and a campanile. The Victorian Gothic buildings, as yet without landscaping, were massive and stark, looking as though they intended to remain on the campus forever.

  The same could not be said of the Wilsons. They arrived in September 1885 with no intention of staying. They moved into one of three frame houses on the periphery of the campus: M. Carey Thomas’s was called the “Deanery”; a second wooden house, with its view of the sylvan setting, was called the “Greenery”; and the newlyweds moved into the house in the middle, which was filled with other faculty members and called the “Betweenery.” After a season of negotiating, Wilson was able to secure its two best rooms plus board for nineteen dollars a month. The second room was an extravagance, which Woodrow hoped Ellen would consider her study as much as his—for there he “would most need sympathy.”

  On a stormy September 23, Bryn Mawr College held its inauguration ceremonies in Taylor Hall. The three dozen young women who formed the Class of 1889 and five graduate “fellows” sat in the front rows of the assembly hall; on the platform before them sat President Rhoads and Dean Thomas along with the school’s trustees and the faculty, fourteen strong—only a handful, like Wilson, without doctorates. Special guests that day included the presidents of such nearby colleges as Swarthmore and Haverford as well as Dr. Gilman from Johns Hopkins. In fact, this new Quaker institution was still the only place in the United States where a woman could earn a doctorate. Dr. Rhoads told the crowd, “All discussion of the question whether women ought to share equally with men facilities for mental culture in its highest forms is obsolete”—an observation then more wishful than accurate. But nobody questioned the words of the featured speaker that day, poet and diplomat James Russell Lowell, who said, “The object of education is to make men and women of culture.”

  Economics, politics, and history—departments that would dominate most liberal arts campuses a century later—were seldom found in course catalogues in the 1800s, especially at schools for women. Those disciplines were all combined into one department at Bryn Mawr, under Wilson’s direction. He had eight advisees, almost a quarter of the entering class. His only lecture course was in ancient history; but before teaching the early civilizations, Wilson offered the young women four general lectures on the discipline of history. He urged his students not to “learn history” but to “learn from history”—by arousing “genuine living interest in the subjects of study.” Toward that end, he asked his students to “look into ancient times as if they were our own times, and into our own times as if they were not our own. Suppose that you had yourself wished to thrust Pericles from power, or that Socrates were the grandfather of your college-mate.” He urged them to use their imaginations in studying ancient civilizations, as he did in teaching them. From the start, he brought novelty to the traditional curriculum: instead of teaching a semester on the Greeks and then one on the Romans, he bounced between civilizations each week, emphasizing outstanding individuals in Greek society and deathless principles of law in the Roman.

  A natural teacher, Wilson forbade his students from taking notes during the first half of the class hour, so that they would not just listen but also consider the general ideas he presented—the broad strokes of that day’s story and the players within. Then he would dictate to the class, in perfect outline form, the facts and details that fleshed out the concepts. “He always entered the classroom smiling and animated and always in a good humour,” remembered one of his students. “His lectures were fascinating and held me spellbound; each was an almost perfect little essay in itself, well rounded and with a distinct literary style.” With his long, silky mustache, he was the most dashing man on campus.

  The three women who became Wilson’s graduate fellows over the next few years got a closer look at him, and they sensed—for all his Southern gentility—a malcontent. The first student was an abolitionist minister’s daughter from Massachusetts, Wilson’s age, and already a dean and professor at Northwestern University; she found him patronizing and told a future Wilson biographer that it was a new experience for her “to meet a Southerner who had no special sympathy for Negroes as human beings.” Wilson’s second “fellow,” Lucy Salmon, was even older, a high school teacher with a master’s degree; she sat through her tutorials, often listening to him read lectures as though he were auditioning material. He found his third graduate student “exhausting,” simply devoid of challenging stimulation that he felt men offered more readily.

  “I’m tired of carrying female Fellows on my shoulders!” he told Ellen. “When I think of you, my little wife, I love this ‘College for Women,’ because you are a woman; but when I think only of myself, I hate the place very cordially.” In short order, the ladies of Bryn Mawr felt as much. The astute Miss Salmon believed these feelings reflected less about where Woodrow Wilson was in his career than where he was not. She was struck by his “extreme personal ambition.” More than once she heard him say that “if our system had been like that of England he would have gone into public life.”

  Wilson decided to publish, to keep from perishing—financially and emotionally. Living on his skimpy salary, with a child on the way, he composed several articles on “administration” and “the art of governing.” None would be published as written, but most would reappear in future lectures, books, or speeches. In early spring 1886, he began outlining a textbook in civil government, a work that began as a grammar school text and would mature over the next
few years into his most comprehensive volume on government, The State.

  He never neglected his duties at Bryn Mawr. From the Deanery, Carey Thomas often saw Wilson’s light burning through the night, as he designed a two-year course of study for history and political science majors and fellows—all of which he was meant to teach—including courses in American and French history, the Italian Renaissance, and the German Reformation. Notes for his American history lectures would become the core of another future book, Division and Reunion. For his second-year graduate courses, he composed fifty lectures on “The History, Functions and Organs of Government.” Everything would get recycled.

  Throughout this frustrating period, Ellen remained an emotional pillar, despite an uncomfortable pregnancy in the close confines of the Betweenery. She was never above cleaning and mending; but because no proper Southern lady had been allowed to prepare a meal, she had never learned how. She now took it upon herself to go into Philadelphia twice a week to take cooking lessons from Mrs. Sarah Tyson Rorer, one of America’s first home economists and dieticians. Seeing that even “domestic science” had become a competitive field, she believed her husband’s lack of a doctorate might hinder him in the future.

  At her urging, Woodrow wrote Professor Adams at Johns Hopkins on April 2, 1886, about completing the requirements for his degree, asking for some special consideration now that he was no longer a student. Adams replied that there would be no chance of a degree without examination and just as little chance that Wilson would fail. Adams would conduct the three-hour written test in History (covering the fields Wilson was then teaching), and Ely would read the Political Economy exam, with assurances that the candidate had already qualified. Then the Hopkins professors would subject Wilson to his oral examination, with Adams already assuring him, “You will pass that ordeal very easily.” Hopkins agreed to let Wilson’s Congressional Government stand as his dissertation, and his lack of proficiency in German would be ignored. After much discussion, Woodrow and Ellen came to the decision that he would spend the balance of the spring alone in Bryn Mawr, free to prepare for his examinations, while she would await the birth of their child in Gainesville, Georgia, attended by her mother’s sister, who lived in a big house with servants and who had become, in fact, the guardian of Ellen’s baby sister.