Wilson

by A. Scott Berg

  Wilson’s energetic fortification of the university came at a price—the destruction of his personal health. His right hand flared up again in the summer of 1904, and his chronic gastritis required a treatment that involved siphoning excess acid. At the end of the year, he underwent hernia surgery. The operation went well, but as a result, Wilson suffered from phlebitis in his left leg. That required a long hospital stay and a five-week convalescence in Palm Beach. With Eddie Axson’s death, Stockton requiring hospitalization for his recurring mental illness, and daughters Jessie having recently come through a bout of diphtheria and Margaret the measles, Wilson developed a facial tic, which would recur for the rest of his life whenever he was nervous and overtired. Wilson’s baccalaureate address in June 1905, not surprisingly, touched upon the subject of well-being—physical, mental, and spiritual. He said that it was God’s “saving health, which must be known among all nations before peace will come and life be widened in all its outlooks.” The university, he felt, was only growing stronger, as evidenced by its drop in enrollment, a loss only of students who were not serious about their education. In 1905, Wilson and the college proved sound enough to institute his preceptorial system.

  “I think that no university in the country has ever, before or since, added to its faculty at one blow so large and so able a new recruitment,” wrote Robert K. Root forty years after he had been tapped by President Wilson to become one of the first preceptors at Princeton. Root was a young English instructor at Yale writing a book about Chaucer when he received an unsolicited letter in March 1905 from Wilson himself. Root was “reasonably contented” where he was and had misgivings about “this new-fangled method of teaching.” But he could not ignore the handsome offer of $2,000. His interview lasted all of forty minutes, during which time Wilson asked no questions but spoke only of his plans for Princeton. “Before five minutes had passed,” Root would recall, “I knew that I was in the presence of a very great man. . . . Had Woodrow Wilson asked me to . . . work under him while he inaugurated a new university in Kamchatka or Senegambia I would have said ‘yes’ without further question.” Others, such as Edward S. Corwin, a Ph.D. candidate at Pennsylvania, applied for his job; and, like Root, he left his interview believing “that was one of the most memorable moments of my life. Mr. Wilson seemed to me easily the most impressive human being I had ever met.” Another of the original squad of preceptors, Luther P. Eisenhart, most remembered Wilson’s addressing the first gathering of the fifty chosen young men, and how the “troup was electrified and went forth ready to give their best to an educational adventure.” Preceptorials became one of the hallmarks of the Princeton education and a template for American higher education.

  Wilson’s experiment in education worked from the start. The “severe standards of efficiency and scholarship” governing faculty and students inspired everybody on campus; and every academician in America knew Wilson was the catalyst. “What had been called a high-class country club,” said Professor Edwin Grant Conklin, who left Pennsylvania’s Zoology Department to teach at Princeton, “began to be a real university.”

  Princeton rapidly gained national attention. In the autumn of 1905, the Athletic Association asked Wilson if Princeton might host the annual Army-Navy game on its field. He approved. When President Theodore Roosevelt announced that he would be attending the game, Wilson invited him to lunch. He met TR at the Princeton station, and they rode in a carriage up University Place to Nassau Street, the route heavily cordoned with police. A party that included Roosevelt’s wife and sister and daughter, military brass, and Secretary of State Elihu Root followed them to Prospect. Afterward, they all went to the field, where the teams played to a 6–6 tie. As had become tradition, the Commander in Chief viewed each half of the game from a different side; and for many, the most memorable sight of the day was that of Roosevelt and Wilson crossing the field together between the halves, TR exuberantly waving his hat to the cheering crowd while the academician followed with modest dignity.

  As his and Princeton’s fame steadily grew, Wilson received numerous invitations to lecture at schools, churches, businessmen’s luncheons, and women’s clubs all over the country. Because he considered Princeton’s goals tied to those of every college, and the role of higher education bound to the progress of the nation, he tried to accept most of them—three or four a month. He invariably spoke about education and politics, linking his thoughts about universities to those about patriotism, commerce, Americanism, and the “citizenship of the world.” His speeches veered into contemporary issues, and he was soon commenting upon Socialism, the Philippines, and William Jennings Bryan.

  The Lotos Club of New York—founded in 1870 “to promote social intercourse” among artists and gentlemen amateurs—gathered in a tribute to Woodrow Wilson on February 3, 1906. After several college presidents paid homage, the president of the club introduced the guest of honor, saying, “There are men whom we admire not because they have accumulated great fortunes, but because they have thought great thoughts.”

  Wilson did not deliver a long speech, nor one that was especially profound. But it combined eloquence with humor, as he moved from generalizations about the national character and the need for knowledge to modern specifics, quoting Tocqueville and Tennyson along the way. While acknowledging that the Republican Party was then a strong majority, he suggested “that it is worth while sometimes to be very impertinent to the majority, and that university men are, if they are worthy of the name, the men especially qualified by their training to entertain independent opinions.” Even Supreme Court decisions, he asserted, are not always the final word. They may be wrong and must be challenged. This was why one must always have “the spirit of learning.”

  Colonel George B. M. Harvey—a journalist who became a businessman in light-rail construction, made a fortune, and then returned to publishing as the owner and editor of The North American Review, Harper and Brothers, and Harper’s Weekly—had a longtime interest in Democratic politics. Because he was considered something of a kingmaker in the reelection of Grover Cleveland, everybody at the Lotos Club paid particular attention when Harvey closed the evening by extolling the virtues of the new Princeton and, particularly, its leader. “It is that type of man that we shall soon, if indeed we do not already, need in public life,” Harvey said. Lest he had not made himself clear, he ended by saying, “As one of a considerable number of Democrats who have become tired of voting Republican tickets, it is with a sense almost of rapture that I contemplate even the remotest possibility of casting a ballot for the president of Princeton University to become President of the United States.”

  Wilson spent the night at the University Club in New York and sent a heartfelt note of thanks to Harvey before going to sleep. “It was most delightful to have such thoughts uttered about me,” he wrote, “whether they were deserved or not.” Reports of the evening’s speeches hit the New York papers the next morning.

  Stockton Axson was at Prospect when Wilson returned home, standing at the foot of the staircase just as Ellen was descending. “I see Colonel Harvey has nominated you for the presidency,” Stockton said. Woodrow made light of the moment.

  “Was he joking?” Ellen asked.

  Said Wilson, “He did not seem to be.”

  6

  ADVENT

  . . . but God is faithfull, who wil not suffer you to bee tempted aboue that you are able: but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may bee able to beare it.

  —1 CORINTHIANS, X:13

  For weeks Wilson modestly insisted he was not seriously considering Colonel Harvey’s suggestion. Even so, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle dispatched a writer to chase the story, and Wilson’s denials of any interest in a Presidential nomination were more convoluted than convincing. His statement that “nothing could be further from my thoughts than the possibility or the desirability of holding high political office” was as false as his modesty.
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  Before Colonel Harvey focused on him, Wilson had agreed to deliver a speech at the annual Jefferson Day Dinner of the National Democratic Club of New York; and when he addressed the members on April 16, 1906, Wilson made America’s third President sound a little like himself. He described Jefferson not as a charismatic public figure but a studious man of letters. Instead of a Renaissance man with European ideas, Wilson described Jefferson as “a typical American,” a Virginian who had “lived among . . . the plainest people of his time and drank directly at the sources of Democratic feelings.” Wilson added that Jefferson “believed in the right of the individual to opportunity.” He was “a poet and a dreamer,” able to think at once “in visions and in concrete politics,” making him “the great prototype of all true Democracy,” to whom “we do not return . . . to borrow policies” but “to renew ideals.” Applause repeatedly interrupted the speech, as many in the audience concluded that the party of Jefferson had no greater spokesman.

  The administration at Princeton equally valued Wilson’s gifts, as he continued to schedule numerous addresses on education, many at regional alumni conferences across the country. Speaking at the annual convention of the Western Association of Princeton Clubs in Cleveland, he illustrated the new “spirit of study” by telling them of an undergraduate who had recently said in a tone of great condemnation that “Princeton was not the place it used to be—that men were actually talking about their studies at the clubs.” The preceptorial system, Wilson said, was infusing the student body with “the independent pursuit of certain studies by men old enough to study for themselves.” He cautioned against the prevalence of conservatism among college men, those who adhered to the “ideals and tenets” of their fathers. These speaking tours steadily raised Wilson’s personal profile, though they left him exhausted.

  Back in Princeton for the upcoming graduation exercises, Wilson awakened on May 28 feeling fine until he passed his hands before his face and realized he could see nothing out of his left eye. Ellen accompanied him to Philadelphia, where his ophthalmologist, Dr. George de Schweinitz, diagnosed a blood clot and rupture in his eye. Piecing this with Wilson’s symptoms from prior years, he saw a graver medical picture. The sudden blindness combined with the periodic weakness and numbness in his extremities directed the doctor’s attention to Wilson’s carotid artery—that vessel that begins just below the neck and flows to the brain, supplying blood to its motor and sensory areas as well as the eyes. Wilson had suffered a stroke—probably his second—and the doctor recommended complete rest.

  Years later, Nell Wilson recalled her parents’ return from Philadelphia. “Father was calm, even gay,” she recalled, “but after one look at mother’s face we knew that something dreadful had happened.” Woodrow’s false cheer heightened the children’s fears, for it suggested his condition was bad enough to warrant disguise. Nell cried through the night, and only much later did her father admit that he too had become “deeply depressed.”

  Ellen asked Jack Hibben to meet with Woodrow’s doctors in Philadelphia to glean further information. Their prognosis was serious enough to reshape Ellen’s role for the rest of her life. “[We] are all making every effort to keep him free from anxiety and worry and above all to keep things quiet for him,” Ellen wrote about Woodrow to her cousin Mary Hoyt mid-June. “He is of course very nervous—annoyed by the things he usually enjoys,—as for instance the lively chatter of the young people. He is making rather uncomplimentary remarks about the confusion caused by ‘seven women in a house.’” He even began asking when his sister and nieces would be leaving. A few weeks later, a Philadelphia internist, Dr. Alfred Stengel, rendered a less grave second opinion—saying that three months’ rest should restore him. Indeed, the blood in Wilson’s eye was already almost completely absorbed. “Of course 50-year-old arteries do not go back to an earlier condition,” Stengel warned the Wilsons; but he expected that Princeton’s president could reasonably return to work in the fall. “You have doubtless done too much in the last few years,” he said, adding that this warning “simply indicates that excess of work is dangerous.”

  Over the preceding few years, several Princeton trustees had tried to tell Wilson as much. On one of his visits to Prospect, Moses Taylor Pyne saw Stockton Axson and walked with him on the grounds for the better part of an hour, revealing both his “solicitude and anxiety, saying that the death or disablement of Mr. Wilson would be an extreme catastrophe for the university.” In addition, Pyne said Wilson did not exercise sufficiently. Axson agreed, knowing that Wilson’s presidential duties had kept him from bicycling, to say nothing of the occasional round of golf, which he had taken up after a previous medical incident; but Axson said that Wilson did at least find time for daily walks. “Walks!” Pyne harrumphed. “He doesn’t walk, he only saunters.”

  Wilson got the message. He canceled all speaking engagements, including any participation in graduation exercises. He worked only at planning an immediate family visit to the English Lake District. At the next meeting of the Board of Trustees, Momo Pyne seconded Grover Cleveland’s resolution that “we request, and especially enjoin it upon [President Wilson], that he prolong his vacation to such an extent, as to time and manner of enjoyment as may promise the complete restoration of his health and vigor.”

  Several friends accompanied the five Wilsons to New York before they set sail on the Caledonia at the end of June. On board, one of the friends was meant to hand Wilson a check, a stipend the trustees had voted to bestow upon their president to lessen any financial anxiety. Wilson refused the gift. He later told Ellen, “I cannot afford to let the trustees do this. The relationship between them and myself is now delightful, but none of us can foresee the future. A time may come when I shall have to oppose them on some point of college policy, and I must therefore keep myself a free man. My obligations are to the best interests of the college as I see them, and it would be a mistake to permit any personal favors to stand between me and the discharge of those duties.”

  On July 10, 1906, the Wilsons arrived in Rydal, and moved into the two-story Loughrigg Cottage, which they sublet from the widow of Henry Curwen Wordsworth, a grandson of Wilson’s muse. Outside the bay windows, beyond the gardens, flowed the river Rothay, and the gentle summer rains never kept the family from exploring the emerald meads. “I can only guess that I am improving from the unmistakable increase of energy that comes to me from week to week,” Woodrow wrote his sister Annie. He and Ellen visited all the Wordsworth haunts, at which she frequently opened her paint box; with his daughters, he walked the neighboring “fells,” clearing his head when he was not losing himself in conversations with local shepherds. He hiked as much as fourteen miles some days. The family spent late afternoons by the fire, indulging in high tea with yellow Devonshire cream and playing whist and euchre.

  During one of his solitary walks, crossing the Rothay on Pelter Bridge, Wilson encountered an artist named Fred Yates, who had studied in Paris and exhibited at the Royal Academy in London. “We live near here,” said the portraitist. “We’re poor, but, thank God, not respectable.” Wilson liked him instantly. Yates and his California-born wife had a daughter; and the two families spent many of their evenings together, singing and reading aloud. Yates drew pastel portraits of all the Wilsons and gave painting lessons to Ellen. As Princeton had wanted a picture of its president, Wilson secured the commission for Yates, who rendered his portraits with a muted palette and gentle brushstrokes. The family long agreed that nobody ever captured Woodrow’s essence better than Fred Yates.

  “No doubt God could have made a lovelier country than this Lake District,” Wilson wrote Robert Bridges, “but I cannot believe he ever did.” Each day revived him a little more; but Ellen had confided to her first cousin Florence Hoyt how difficult it had been watching a man with hardening of the arteries who “lived too tensely.” She called it “a dying by inches.” In September, Wilson went to Edinburgh to consult with two physician
s. The oculist found Wilson’s eye “in excellent condition,” healed enough for him to resume reading, though he noted a scotoma, a blind spot to which Wilson was already adapting. The Scottish internist was especially encouraging, telling Wilson he could return to work “with perfect safety,” that it would be better than leading “an aimless and perhaps anxious year” in Great Britain.

  And so, even though the Princeton trustees had given him no timetable, the Wilsons returned home the first week of October 1906. “The summer has brought to maturity the plans for the University which have for years been in the back of my head but which never before got room enough to take their full growth,” Wilson wrote Cleveland Dodge. “I feel richer for the summer, not only in health but also in thought and in ability to be of service. A year such as I have planned . . . ought to set all sorts of processes in order, and that without undue strain on me.”

  The press covered Wilson’s return to America, but not for educational reasons. In his final days in Rydal, he had received a telegram from the New York Evening Post seeking a comment on the report that his name was being floated as a candidate for the United States Senate from New Jersey. The state legislature would make its choice right after the November election. At the same time, Wilson’s most ardent supporter, Colonel Harvey, had mentioned his name to his friend James Smith, Jr., a former Senator and the boss of the Democratic Party from Essex County, where he owned the Newark Advertiser. It seemed unlikely that the Democrats would gain the power to elect one of their members to the Senate that year, but Harvey was floating Wilson’s name once again as a trial balloon. Faithful to their party boss, all the Democratic candidates of Essex County office pledged that if they were elected, their choice for United States Senator would be Dr. Wilson of Princeton University. He and only he would bring “the purity of purpose and the high intellectual powers which will add honor and prestige not only to New Jersey but to the entire nation.” Wilson had told the press two weeks earlier that the mention of his name had come as a great surprise. Furthermore, he declared, “My duty is to Princeton, and I should be reluctant to give up my work there.”