Wilson’s classmates had raised an additional $6,000 to furnish the large Tower Room over the central arch of Seventy-nine Hall, making it the president’s office and the administrative hub of the university. Dramatically situated, with corbelled oriel windows on opposite walls, it offered disparate views of Princeton life. On one side stretched Prospect Avenue, with its growing number of eating clubs—citadels of privilege—and on the other sprawled a vast greensward waiting to be filled with some academic building that might truly transform the college into a university.
In just four years as president of the college, Wilson had reorganized the departments and curricula and restructured the pedagogy with the preceptorial system—which he immodestly considered “the greatest strategic move . . . that has been made in the whole history of American universities.” Now he intended to galvanize Princeton with a massive overhaul of campus life. At this time, his notions of education and social life at Princeton began to collide, forming a nucleus of a political outlook. “My own ideals for the University,” he would soon articulate, “are those of genuine democracy and serious scholarship. The two, indeed, seem to me to go together. Any organization which introduced elements of social exclusiveness constitutes the worst possible soil for serious intellectual endeavour.” Wilson envisioned a new freedom—of education.
The caste system he chose to fight existed on many college campuses—especially the older schools, where fraternities and secret societies reinforced class distinctions. But few if any rivaled Princeton as a bastion of snobbery—a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant preserve that thrived on exclusivity. Before he could level its social playing field, Wilson felt he had to raze Princeton’s upper-class club system, at a time when its private baronial houses continued to rise. There would be more than a dozen clubs, and they were filling to capacity through a selective interview process called “Bicker”; the process still blocked approximately a third of the juniors and seniors from enjoying “the Street.” Privileged sophomores, even some freshman, were quietly recruited early. A few of the less advantaged students were admitted each year, allowing them to rub shoulders with their social betters, affording the opportunity to maintain their relationships later in life, often to commercial advantage. The rest were considered outcasts; some of these “muckers” felt stigmatized enough to leave school.
Wilson felt the “slow, almost imperceptible and yet increasingly certain decline of the old democratic spirit of the place and the growth and multiplication of social divisions” was eroding the true Princeton values. These influences, he maintained, not only introduced “a spirit of social competition which interferes with the natural intercourse and comradeship of the undergraduates, but are also distinctly and very seriously hostile to the spirit of study, incompatible with the principles of a true republic of letters and of learning.” Wilson prepared to wage a holy war for the soul of the university—a “fight for the restoration of Princeton”—a duel between money and merit, which would determine whether or not the university would be damned or saved.
At the December meeting of the Board of Trustees, Wilson presented a report that consolidated much of his thinking of the last several years. He envisioned an intellectual utopia, a community of the mind. “The remedy I suggest is to oblige the undergraduates to live together,” he wrote, “not in clubs but in colleges”—a cluster of quadrangles, each with its own eating hall, resident masters, and preceptors, all of whom would dine together. He even recommended that the larger clubs convert into colleges, each one a self-governing unit within the university system, with dormitories attached to the existing structures. In essence, Princeton would become the sort of university where the Witherspoon Gang could have integrated with the most privileged sons in America.
Even that much integration seemed unlikely at Princeton at the turn of the century; and the intermingling of any other outsiders remained beyond the pale. The American Negro, for example, was excluded from Princeton, as he was from most American colleges. Separate campuses for the education of the black man had appeared—notably Howard University in Washington, D.C., after the Civil War and Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute, where Booker T. Washington had become it’s first president. Elite Northern colleges opened their doors to a few Negroes, mostly at the graduate level; and in 1896 Harvard had awarded its first Ph.D. to an African American—W. E. B. Du Bois. But higher education for the African American operated under a traditional policy of de facto segregation well into the middle of the twentieth century.
With its heavy Southern enrollment, Princeton discouraged Negroes from even thinking about attending. Even though John Witherspoon had tutored a handful of freed slaves in the eighteenth century and several black students from the Princeton Theological Seminary had taken courses on campus in the nineteenth, when the question arose at Princeton in 1904, Wilson replied that “while there is nothing in the law of the University to prevent a negro’s entering, the whole temper and tradition of the place are such that no negro has ever applied for admission, and it seems extremely unlikely that the question will ever assume a practical form.” Just a few years later, Wilson received a brief letter from a student at Virginia Theological Seminary and College, a Baptist institution in Lynchburg, Virginia. “I want so much to come to your School at Princeton,” this student wrote. “I am a poor Southern colored man from South Carolina, but I believe I can make my way if I am permitted to come.” Wilson replied with regrets—“that it is altogether inadvisable for a colored man to enter Princeton.” He recommended starting college in a Southern institution, after which he might attend the Princeton Theological Seminary. If he truly wished to attend a Northern school, Wilson recommended Harvard, Dartmouth, or Brown.
During his academic years, Wilson wrestled with the question of race, without ever divining a solution. He knew all too well the animosity many Southern white men held toward blacks. While his own thinking on this subject may have evolved slightly, the sentiment on his campus had not changed in the least. Unlike Harvard, Yale, Columbia, or the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton was situated in a small rural town, not an urban center. The only person of color whom a student or professor might encounter was somebody who served or cleaned and probably lived in slums students would never even see, only blocks from the college. Some alumni still spoke disdainfully of Wilson’s having invited Booker T. Washington to participate in his inauguration as president. Only a decade earlier, the Princeton football team had exited a dining hall when Harvard’s team, with its sole black player, entered. Racial integration at Princeton just then surely would have meant confrontation for which neither the college nor its president was ready.
“Time,” Wilson believed, “is the only legislator in such a matter.” As he wrote on the subject as early as 1897:
The race problem of the South will no doubt work itself out in the slowness of time, as blacks and whites pass from generation to generation, gaining with each remove from the memories of the war a surer self-possession, an easier view of the division of labor and of social function to be arranged between them.
Wilson believed acceptance of others could only come through gradual exposure; but he also knew that the first to cross any barriers of prejudice would incite trouble. No racial advances would be made during Wilson’s tenure. Indeed, a Negro would not receive an undergraduate degree from Princeton for another four decades.
Woodrow Wilson treated every person of color, regardless of that person’s position, with decency and dignity; but he never failed to consider the color of that person’s skin. Beyond any inferred inferiority, he could not deny ethnic differences and social ramifications. He spoke of his household’s colored servants as different from the white; and he pronounced President Roosevelt’s appointment of a black man as Collector of the Port of Charleston, South Carolina—a position with authority over white merchants—“an unwise piece of bravado,” because it was simply “too much” for the whites “to stand.” H
e believed individual Negroes had proved to be “splendid”; but, as a group, he considered them lazy—the only race in Africa that “did not rise”—while the Egyptians, who had endured the same heat, scaled the heights of civilization. He believed interracial marriage would “degrade the white nations.”
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Wilson’s racial views were fairly centrist in America. Proud bigots served in the United States Congress at that time, uninhibitedly talking in vulgarisms about Theodore Roosevelt’s having invited Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House. In a letter to Wilson, Boston-born, Amherst- and Hopkins-educated Professor J. Franklin Jameson thought nothing of referring to “the nigger question.” Wilson himself told jokes in Negro dialect—this one to the Pennsylvania Bar Association: “De Lawd told Moses to come fo’th, and he came fif and lost de race”—with no offense intended. In step with his countrymen or not, Wilson’s thoughts, words, and actions were, nonetheless, indubitably racist.
Another excluded minority fared better at Princeton, though not by much. “Hebrews,” as they were identified, represented a minuscule percentage of the student body, a little lower than Catholics. Most Jews were miserable there—enduring self-loathing if they “passed” as Gentile or social ostracism if they did not. A few felt it was a small price to pay for the quality of the education and the beautiful surroundings. “I was rudely awakened at the end of the first year by discovering all of my class mates landed in clubs,” one Leon Levy, Class of 1905, wrote Wilson, “while I wandered hopeless on the outskirts, an Ishmaelite and outcast.” Only a few students deigned to consort with him (classmate Norman Thomas, the future political activist and Presidential candidate, among them); and after two years of “cold contempt and icy prejudice,” he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania. In 1903, Wilson had hired the first Jew to teach at Princeton, Harvard graduate Horace Meyer Kallen, an instructor in English. His two-year contract was not renewed, leaving him to embark upon a stellar career in philosophy and social reform elsewhere. David McCabe, a Catholic in the Politics Department, was hired shortly thereafter and remained for decades. And at Wilson’s urging, in 1906 the university declared its nonsectarian status, avowing that no denominational test would be imposed in its choice of trustees, teachers, or students. Wilson knew that, through incremental change, Princeton could ultimately diversify: indeed, by 1910, Episcopalians outnumbered Presbyterians.
Tangential to his Quad Plan, Wilson believed the second crucial piece to foment social change at Princeton was building a graduate school. He considered the location as important as his timing. This particular quadrangle must be erected “not apart, but as nearly as may be at the very heart, the geographical heart, of the university; and its comradeship shall be for young men and old, for the novice as well as for the graduate.” In that way, the graduate students could be part of “harmonizing, invigorating, and elevating the life and thought of the undergraduate students.” For the last several years, there had been little action on the subject, but the talk seldom veered far from The Proposed Graduate College of Princeton University, by Andrew Fleming West—who had been named its founding dean. His study served as both a manifesto and a sales brochure. Wilson and West shared a vision of a graduate school “of residence, a great quadrangle in which our graduate students will be housed like a household, with their own commons and with their own rooms of conference, under a master, whose residence should stand at a corner of the quadrangle in the midst of them.” The great lawn outside 1879 Hall seemed the ideal location.
Recently, however, West’s notions had strayed from his original concept. A local widow named Josephine Thomson Swann had recently died and left $250,000 to Princeton for the construction of a graduate college “upon the grounds of said University.” Growing impatient with Wilson’s spending so much of the board’s time and money on other educational reforms, West took it upon himself to raise money to rent and refurbish Merwick, an eleven-acre estate at 83 Bayard Lane, across the street from his own house. It became home to a dozen men, who were only a small corps of Princeton’s graduate students. Life at Merwick so delighted West, he took to promoting it as the model for the graduate college—a few dozen select scholars living as country squires, with the dean their Lord of the Manor. Wilson saw Merwick as just another eating club, if not West’s own private satrapy.
That fall, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology offered its presidency to Dean West. The choice was completely unexpected. Andrew Fleming West was not versed in the sciences; in fact, he was a man with few academic credentials, a questionable scholar even in his own field. Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, he was a son of a troublesome Presbyterian minister and professor of theology. Andrew’s education at Princeton was interrupted because of poor health, but he graduated in 1874 and taught Latin in a Cincinnati high school for six years before serving as principal of an academy in Morristown, New Jersey, from which President McCosh plucked him to teach Latin at the college. West wrote a Latin primer and edited a collection of Terence but produced no important works of scholarship.
He distinguished himself, however, with his personality. Affable and authoritative, the portly dean developed a taste for gracious living (“Here’s to Andy, Andy West / 63 inches around the vest,” noted one verse of the “Faculty Song”), and he mixed easily with the wealthy and powerful. McCosh had bestowed upon him his only advanced degree, an honorary doctorate. Grover Cleveland and Momo Pyne ranked among his closest friends and strongest allies, the latter having bought Merwick, which he leased to the college rent-free.
With both Wilson and West about to cross swords over the future of the graduate school, nothing would have been easier than to allow the dean to leave for Massachusetts. But Wilson recognized that West was as valuable as he was voluble, that Princeton’s graduate school had no greater ambassador among prospective donors. When West suggested that Wilson’s confidence in him would be reason enough to stay, Wilson himself drafted a gracious resolution on behalf of all the trustees. It said: “The Board would consider his loss quite irreparable. By his scholarship, by his ideals, by his fertility in constructive ideas, he has made himself one of the chief ornaments and one of the indispensable counsellors of the place.” West declined MIT’s offer.
Before the trustees could debate the revolutionary new agenda, Ellen Wilson insisted her husband stick to his recent vow to take an annual winter vacation. On January 12, 1907, he sailed alone for the Bermuda Islands, which had become a popular destination for wealthy Americans, titled Britons, and such writers as Rudyard Kipling, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and Mark Twain. Almost seven hundred miles east of North Carolina’s Outer Banks, the resort offered pink sand beaches and clear blue waters, its tropical warmth thawing some of its English reserve. Upon landing, Wilson checked into the Hotel Hamilton. While the occasional Princeton alumnus on the streets of the town interrupted his solitude, every moment, he wrote Ellen, was bringing “peace and renewal.”
Wilson spent most of his time studying and loafing. In the mornings, he composed outlines for the short lecture series on government he had agreed to give at Columbia; in the afternoons, he strolled the waterfront, explored the island on bicycle, or viewed the surrounding sea and reefs in glass-bottom boats. On two Sundays, he delivered sermons in local churches.
On February 5, the Mayor of Hamilton and his wife hosted a small dinner party in Wilson’s honor. At the last minute, they invited an American neighbor, who wintered regularly on the island. She had been born Mary Allen in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and grew up in Duluth, Minnesota, where she married a mining engineer named Thomas Hulbert. He died six years later, leaving her with an infant son. The next year, the twenty-eight-year-old married a textile executive from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, a widower named Thomas Dowse Peck. Theirs was a loveless marriage, and the couple steadily grew apart. In Bermuda, Mrs. Peck became a woman of some notoriety—respectably married and traveling with her grown son but li
ving for the most part as an unusually independent woman for her time. She even smoked cigarettes.
A woman of immense charm and no small amount of intrigue, Mrs. Peck was a gifted hostess—a generous conversationalist and an inspired cook, as well as an accomplished pianist. Her salon welcomed every interesting visitor to the island. She had already read about the progressive educator being honored on this particular night. “The face was even more rugged than his pictures showed and seemed plain at first glance,” Mrs. Peck would later write of meeting Wilson. “Then came the friendly smile and the voice with its rare clear quality.” She and Wilson immediately fell into a conversation filled with the smart banter in which Wilson loved to engage, especially with women. He also spoke devotedly of his wife, and that uxoriousness was a little like catnip.
Mrs. Peck invited Wilson to a dinner party the night before he left Bermuda; but the gentlemen found him so interesting that she and her guest of honor could exchange little more than pleasantries and a few words about Bagehot. Although she missed Wilson’s call the next day before he sailed, he left a note saying, “It is not often that I can have the privilege of meeting anyone whom I can so entirely admire and enjoy.” Upon his return to the business of Princeton—where the mercury had fallen below zero—he sent her two books, a small volume of his own essays and another of Bagehot’s, writing that one “has no right to whet another’s appetite for Walter Bagehot without supplying the means of gratifying it.” He was sure she would enjoy it “with as much zest as anyone I know.” After he was home only a couple of days, the business of his university once again consumed all his time.
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