Wilson

by A. Scott Berg

  No sooner had the Bermudian docked and Wilson checked into the Hotel Hamilton than he went in search of Mrs. Peck. He found her in Paget, the fashionable area across the harbor from Hamilton. With Mrs. Peck’s mother and son and a number of other young people in residence to chaperone, Mrs. Peck invited Wilson to make “Shoreby” his home, to come whenever he liked for tea or simply to lie in the hammock on her verandah above the sea. Her luncheons and dinners provided Wilson with the finest company Bermuda had to offer, including several encounters with Mark Twain. Wilson found himself at Shoreby so often, Mary Peck suggested he place on her mantelpiece one of the pictures of Ellen with which he traveled. Wilson talked constantly of his wife, enough that it suggested his own concerns about Mary Peck’s attractiveness. After a few weeks, the two took long walks together, leaving behind the problems at home. “Bermuda is certainly the best place in the world in which to forget Princeton,” Woodrow wrote Ellen, “at least Princeton as an organization and a problem.” But more than campus politics appeared to be weighing upon him. He asked if Mrs. Peck might give him a whole day to discuss a matter of importance.

  The next morning, he arrived at Shoreby’s dock, and they walked the South Shore until they came to a bay tree surrounded by roses, oleanders, and cedars. Gazing at the world below—horseback riders, children playing in the sand—Wilson spoke at last. “My friends tell me that if I will enter the contest and can be nominated and elected Governor of New Jersey,” he said matter-of-factly, “I stand a very good chance of being the next President of the United States. Shall I, or shall I not, accept the opportunity they offer?”

  At first, Mrs. Peck felt like a coin being tossed, until she realized Wilson needed a sounding board. “Why not?” she asked. “Statesmanship has been your natural bent, your real ambition all your life and, God knows, our country needs men like you in her national life!”

  Wilson raised the fact that he was not a rich man and that his current position at least provided his family a dignified home and some of the luxury they deserved. “If I know anything of your wife and daughters,” Mrs. Peck said, “they would rather scrub to earn their bread than have you do less than your best work in life—your full duty.” Then Wilson asked if it was fair to desert those who had fought with him in the recent battle at Princeton. Mrs. Peck suggested that perhaps his work there was done. “If your ideas and ideals are right, they will endure.” Resigning himself even to the possibility, Wilson added, “The life of the next Democratic President will be hell—and it would probably kill me.” And Mrs. Peck suggested he would “rather die in harness, fighting for all the great things for which you stand than live up to less than the best that is within you.” After mentioning a few lesser arguments, Wilson said, “Very well, so be it!”

  He returned to Princeton on February 27, 1908, his neuritis no better and his future no more certain; but he had the comfort of knowing that he had two years in which to decide. During that time he could pursue two tracks at once, for the choices of education or politics no longer required him to split his personality. Wilson would drive harder than ever to promote his changes for Princeton. The eating clubs had become social trusts—powerful monopolies dictating much of campus life—and like the cartels dominating American business, they needed busting. So, while Wilson’s jurisdiction was something less than local, his vision was universal; while the specifics of his speeches differed, his general themes fused into one: his philosophy of equal opportunity over privileged exclusivity remained the same. His Princeton talks and his political talks became virtually one and the same.

  Shortly before Wilson’s vacation, supporter David B. Jones had written of his distaste for the influence the alumni of wealth were exerting over the university. In urging Wilson to stick to his convictions, even at the expense of paring down the faculty, he wrote, “If Mr. Pyne thinks it best to withdraw his support, I shall be very sorry, but I shall be infinitely more sorry to see the University dominated by the club men of New York, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.” Just as a rising Progressive movement was finding that its primary foe included the same rich men in the East, Wilson found the farther he went from Princeton, the more kindly disposed his audiences were toward his Quad Plan. “The particular threat that seems to me the most alarming to our life at the present moment,” he told the alumni of the Princeton Club of Chicago, “is that we are beginning to think in classes, that we are beginning to think in the terms of the capitalistic interest or in terms of the labor interest or in terms of some other . . . interest, like the mining interest or the agricultural interest.” He insisted that the order of life which had made America meant that “there must be absolutely a free field and no favor for anybody.”

  Two days later, Wilson addressed the Commercial Club of Chicago. He spoke not as a college president but as a concerned citizen; but as he had two nights before, he challenged an existing system in which wealth had created unfair advantages in an increasingly predatory corporate world. He addressed the primary issue of the day, which was governmental regulation of immoral business practices. He articulated a position he would carry for the rest of his life—that there were no dishonest corporations or greedy trusts, only dishonest and greedy individuals within those organizations, who must be held accountable. Morality is “never corporate,” he said. “Morality is never aggregate. The only way you get honest business is from honest men.” The question before the nation was how best to achieve that honesty and fairness. On April 13, 1908, Princeton’s president spoke before the National Democratic Club in New York, sharing the stage with two United States Senators and the Governor of Minnesota. “We hear a great deal of candidacies and programmes,” he said, “but very little of principles. Parties seem almost to have gone to pieces and to have become indistinguishable.” He proposed stronger laws, especially in indicting abusers of the corporate system. “Law, and the government as umpire,” he said, “not discretionary power, and the government as master, should be the programme of every man who loves liberty and the established character of the Republic.”

  By commencement 1908 the Quad Plan was being revisited and Wilson’s name increasingly mentioned as a potential candidate. The political undertones to all of Wilson’s utterances became more and more apparent to everybody within earshot, even the undergraduates. Among the verses the seniors of “Aughtie-Eight” sang in their “Faculty Song” that year was:

  Here’s to Woodrow, King Divine,

  He rules this place along with Fine.

  We fear that soon he’ll leave this town

  To try for Teddy Roosevelt’s crown.

  With the Democratic Party about to open its Presidential nominating convention in Denver, word spread that Colonel George Harvey, among others, intended to lobby on Wilson’s behalf. The Democratic bench could hardly have been shallower, and Wilson represented the kind of candidate the press corps has always been quick to embrace—a fresh face with an unorthodox background.

  As Grover Cleveland’s two nonconsecutive terms had been the party’s only victories in more than fifty years, the party struggled for an identity as much as a victory. A dozen states in the southeast quadrant of the country guaranteed a solid base of a third of the nation’s 483 electoral votes, as they had since 1880; but the Democrats had not been able to field a candidate since Cleveland who could broaden their reach much beyond that. They came closest in 1896 when they embraced Populist values and that party’s candidate, William Jennings Bryan, who was able to lasso eleven Western states. But that rural region did not come close to matching the more urban elector-rich Northeast. In 1900, the party hoped familiarity with Bryan might extend his brand; but his second run fared worse than the first. And so, in 1904, the party tried to reach into the Northeast by running Alton B. Parker, a Bourbon Democrat, as conservative members of the party were known. Wilson had supported him, but Parker proved no match for TR.

  By the time Wilson was ready to leave for anot
her vacation in the British Isles, it appeared that the delegates would revert to their Western strategy by reenlisting Bryan. But there remained the remote possibility of nominating Wilson for Vice President, as a way of seasoning him for the next election. So real did that undesired possibility seem to Wilson, he left a statement with Stockton Axson, to be published if necessary, refusing to allow his name to be presented at the convention. With Wilson’s neuritis so bad that he could hardly hold a pen, Ellen feared her constant anxiety about his condition would only further inflame it, and so she insisted on his spending the summer alone. She would calm her own nerves studying landscape painting in Old Lyme, Connecticut, which had become a thriving artists’ colony.

  While aboard the S.S. California, Wilson forced himself to “turn off his mind” by running for an hour every day on the upper deck, reading only out of his Oxford Book of English Verse, and sleeping fourteen hours a day. After docking in Glasgow, Wilson rode his bicycle to Edinburgh. There he remained for several days more, not only to nurse a sore knee but because he wanted to be in a big city during the Democratic Convention, as he was “waiting on the possibility of the impossible happening.” Wilson’s name was never even raised during the convention. In hopes of carrying a Midwestern state, the convention handed Bryan an Indianan, John Kern, with whom he would suffer his biggest defeat yet, running against TR’s handpicked nominee, Secretary of War William Howard Taft.

  Wilson got back on his bike, paying homage this year to Thomas Carlyle, the Scot whose thoughts about the “Great Man Theory” (“The history of the world is but the biography of great men”) inspired him. He rode through Cumbria—wearing cycling shorts, and a blue shirt and blue tie under a waterproof cape, his pockets packed with a comb and toothbrush, a volume of poetry, and a change of underwear—in search of Carlyle’s birthplace. Returning to his familiar Wordsworth country, he renewed his friendship with the Yateses.

  That summer Grover Cleveland died. Wilson so admired the former President, he did not begrudge his lack of support in the recent board battles at Princeton. For that he blamed Andrew Fleming West, for manipulating Cleveland into serving as his “dupe and tool.” Cleveland’s absence would give Wilson some slight advantage in the upcoming board battles; but, recognizing the greater necessity of staying always one step ahead of West, Wilson had already planned an offensive maneuver.

  Mid-August, he took a train to the remote Scottish Highlands, where Andrew Carnegie and his wife resided part of each year in Skibo Castle. The castle dated back to the twelfth century and sat upon 120 square miles. The Carnegies had owned the property for a decade and invested £2 million—expanding the living quarters to sixty thousand square feet and adding a lake and a golf course. Wilson’s fellow guests included lords and artists and businessmen, all of whom spent their days hunting, fishing, playing tennis and croquet, and swimming in a heated pool. In the evenings, they played whist or billiards or just read and conversed. In his time alone with Carnegie, Wilson managed to plead his case for $3.5 million to underwrite his Quad Plan. He returned to Princeton with his right hand less palsied, but empty.

  • • •

  “It floats!” These two words threatened to sink Woodrow Wilson. Soap had been part of civilization for at least four thousand years, going as far back as the Babylonians, who had discovered a formula for water, alkali, and oils that could dissolve dirt and grease. In the 1830s, a man named Alexander Norris suggested that his two sons-in-law—one of whom made candles, the other soap—merge their companies. William Procter and James Gamble did just that, making a small fortune together as purveyors to the Union army during the Civil War. A decade later, Gamble’s son created a phenomenon, combining a strong laundry detergent and a gentle cleaner and whipping in enough air to keep the white cake of soap from sinking. Its two-word advertising campaign helped turn Ivory soap into an American household staple for another century and Procter & Gamble into one of America’s leading manufacturers.

  At the start of the 1908 school year, William Cooper Procter—one of the cofounders’ grandsons—traveled from Ohio to Princeton to see a football game, ostensibly his first visit to the campus since dropping out as a senior in 1883. Recently made president of Procter & Gamble, he was one of the richest men in the Midwest. A few months later, Procter offered Princeton $500,000 for a graduate college, but with strings attached: Princeton would have to match his pledge; and he did not want the Graduate College to be built on the site Wilson had long envisioned, adjacent to Prospect, but on “some other site . . . which shall be satisfactory to me.” No one gave Wilson prior knowledge of the gift.

  All the negotiations, as became immediately obvious, had been conducted by Dean West, who had been one of Procter’s high school teachers in Cincinnati. Stockton Axson immediately recognized the entire transaction as a political plot. Upon leaving Princeton, Procter had become too busy “turning soap fat into millions and attempting to act the dominant part in his community” to give any thought to his alma mater, said Axson.

  But, meanwhile, Princeton become fashionable . . . and association with it meant the sort of pleasing sensation which a snob covets. Procter had money; was arrogant by nature; liked the things which were beginning to be so prominent at Princeton—display and social advantage. So with his money he sought to settle the dispute in a thoroughly characteristic way—by purchase.

  Wilson was confounded by an embattlement of riches. The money from the Swann estate, which specifically stipulated that the Graduate College be built on the Princeton campus, had become available; and Wilson, architect Ralph Adams Cram, and the majority of trustees on the Graduate College committee all agreed on its central location. But now Dean West clearly intended to fight with the backing of the Soap King, whose offer was twice the size and stipulated that the one place his money could not be spent was on the very site Wilson had selected. As neither gift was enough to build the graduate school, the funds would have to be pooled. The struggle immediately became about something more than geography and less than educational ideals. In essence, it was about control of the Graduate College; and the personalities of both Wilson and West were overtaking their principles. Procter, obviously prompted by West, said he preferred Merwick as the site but would approve a two-hundred-acre tract of land with golf links that had been donated to the college in 1905.

  The Golf Links were the better part of a mile from Nassau Hall, with townspeople living in between. Wilson argued that the Swann bequest could not be applied to either of Procter’s preferred sites. For months, trustees and attorneys fought over the legalities of the situation; students and faculty and alumni discussed the practicalities. West argued that the graduate students should not have to consort with the rowdy undergraduates, whose periodic spring riots, for example, had recently impelled Wilson to erect a gate around Prospect. He believed Merwick remained the most congenial spot; and he had long fantasized about all the trappings of a graduate school’s great refectory, with oak paneling and Gothic windows and two or three long tables and professors at the high table. Wilson clung to his belief that an intellectual community would thrive best when scholars of all degrees lived among one another and where the Graduate College would be within sight of the president’s house.

  By June 1909, Wilson’s impatience became apparent in every speech he delivered, as he became less politic and more political with each breath. At St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, that June, he told an audience that included many rich men’s sons, “A danger surrounding our modern education is the danger of wealth. . . . The lad who is to inherit money is foredoomed to obscurity.” His dreams for Princeton slipping from his grasp, he added: “So far as the colleges go, the sideshows have swallowed up the circus, and we don’t know what is going on in the main tent and I don’t know that I want to continue as ringmaster under those conditions. . . . Schools like this one and universities like Princeton must pass out of existence unless they adapt themselves
to modern life.” In early July he told the Harvard chapter of Phi Beta Kappa that he wished for all of them “that we reorganize our colleges on the lines . . . that a college is not only a body of studies but a mode of association. . . . It must become a community of scholars and pupils,—a free community but a very real one, in which democracy may work its reasonable triumphs of accommodation, its vital processes of union.”

  Wilson and his family retreated for the summer to Connecticut, where Ellen rejoined her community of artists. On the main street of Old Lyme, a charming town on the eastern bank of the Connecticut River, sat the home of Florence Griswold, who turned what had been her birthplace into a boardinghouse for artists only—complete with bedrooms, studio space, and exhibition rooms. Painter Childe Hassam started coming in 1903, and promptly attracted scores of colleagues and acolytes, turning the little town into the epicenter of American Impressionism. Frank DuMond, who would later mentor Georgia O’Keeffe and Norman Rockwell, taught Ellen; and he was so impressed with her work, he arranged for her to paint in a private studio. Ellen proved to be no dilettante—her landscapes revealed expert brushwork, an alluring palette, and even a tendency toward abstraction—and she would soon be exhibiting her work.

  Although guests of the artists were not allowed to stay in the house, Miss Florence excepted Wilson. He delighted in Ellen’s joy at being at the boardinghouse and adored the town, with no sounds of the rude world beyond the occasional motorcar or train in the distance. He spent his mornings in Old Lyme writing several long pieces on education and his afternoons playing golf on a “sheep pasture course.” In the evenings, he read or conversed with his fellow boarders and indulged in an epistolary relationship, one of greater intensity than prior exchanges with a number of women friends. His correspondent was Mrs. Peck.