For more than a century, conjecture has surrounded the relationship between Woodrow Wilson and Mary Allen Hulbert Peck, raising eyebrows—if not serious questions—about their association. This is due in large part to the fact that much of their relationship is enshrouded in mystery—there are omissions in their correspondence, and the alleged commission of acts has been reported secondhand. The surmise of what occurred has become most tantalizing because of the participants themselves—an unconventional woman of dubious respectability and a man of flagrant morality.
Wilson’s letters to Mrs. Peck undeniably increased in frequency and frankness between 1908 and 1910; and during that period, Mrs. Peck separated from her husband in Massachusetts and moved into an apartment at 39 East Twenty-seventh Street in New York City with her mother and son. As Wilson had reason to visit the city with some frequency—on matters of both education and politics—he tried as often as possible to include a visit with Mrs. Peck. Sometimes, they were alone. In later years, Wilson himself would admit that there had once been a passage in his life of “folly and gross impertinence” during which he had neglected “standards of honourable behavior.” He would later confess to “the contemptible error and madness of a few months,” which left him “stained and unworthy,” but say that it was a “folly long ago loathed and repented of.” Ellen Wilson would once speak of “the ‘Peck’ affair” as “the only unhappiness” her husband caused her during their married life.
Yet, the letters between Wilson and Mrs. Peck, for all their friendliness, don’t reveal, or even suggest, physical intimacy. They do not even imply emotional intimacy. Instead, they merely recount Wilson’s actions and thoughts, including the fact that he felt needy. He expressed tenderness toward the unhappy widow and recent divorcée but nothing like the sexual ardor and romantic passion his letters had lavished upon Ellen over many years. His letters to Mary Peck were melodious, but never rhapsodic—at least those letters whose existence is known. If fervent love letters passed between them, especially in those lacunae where no missives now exist, nothing in the letters that would precede or follow such an exchange suggests an affair in the modern meaning. Wilson introduced his wife and family to Mrs. Peck. One might construe that as a clever ruse; but not a single witness ever surfaced who recounted any untoward behavior between them, and there exist few letters from Wilson to Mrs. Peck that do not include happy mentions of or regards from Ellen and the rest of his family—hardly the sentiments a furtive husband might extend to a mistress.
In modern times of looser sexual standards, Wilson’s description of his folly too easily appears to be that of a sexual affair. But at the turn of the twentieth century, a man of Wilson’s rigid morality held himself to stricter standards. Ellen Wilson had gained weight in recent years, becoming somewhat plump and matronly; but whatever attraction he may have felt for Mrs. Peck, he never expressed even the slightest disapproval of his wife. It seems all but impossible to imagine that he could have subjected Ellen or their children to a woman who was his inamorata.
The Catholic Church refers to the “occasion of sin,” external circumstances that might incite moral evil; a future President late in the twentieth century would refer to harboring lust in his heart. In view of Woodrow Wilson’s nature, and with no conflicting evidence anywhere else in his life, just being alone with another woman—perhaps touching her hand, even seeking her solace when Ellen was unable to provide the comforting shoulder she had long provided—was probably what Woodrow Wilson considered “folly and gross impertinence.” Often omitted in accounts of “the Peck affair” are the rest of Ellen’s comments about her husband’s indiscretion. She said it was the only such unhappiness in their married life but added that there was nothing “wrong or improper” about it, “for there was not, but just that a brilliant mind and an attractive woman had some-how fascinated—temporarily—Mr. Wilson’s mind.” Woodrow’s love for his wife—and the expression thereof—never wavered. His friendship with Mrs. Peck would continue for several more years, gradually dissipating. Although Woodrow’s guilt and Ellen’s hurt were real, the “affair” with Mrs. Peck was almost surely not physical.
In September 1909, President Wilson opened the 163rd session of Princeton University, but for the first time felt none of the romance of a new school year. Disenchanted, he wrote Mrs. Peck:
Sophomores are tiresome young fools, and Freshmen are a great anxiety. . . . Committees meet and discuss the same old cases and questions. . . . There are lectures to deliver, and you are plagued by the same old ignorance: I mean your own, not the students’. Parents flock, with the same old delusion about their sons. Trustees tease you with suggestions and oppositions, alumni criticise, and praise as ignorantly and injudiciously as they criticise.
With the Graduate College fight eroding his spirit, he rallied the energy to confront William Cooper Procter himself. On October 20, 1909, the two met in New York City, the seventh time the benefactor had traveled east in an attempt to get the university to accept his half-million-dollar donation. Wilson’s latest argument for an on-campus site, instead of the remote Merwick or the Golf Links, fell on deaf ears. At the trustees’ meeting the next morning, Moses Taylor Pyne urged his colleagues, at long last, to accept the “very generous offer” and—by a vote of 14 to 10—they did.
“Suffice it to say that . . . the Trustees adopted a plan of that arch-intriguer West’s which I and all my colleagues on the Faculty earnestly opposed,—a plan of deep and lasting consequence to the University and its whole development,” Wilson wrote Mrs. Peck three days later. “The money overshadowed all my counsel. They do not trust West any more than I do. They think him a nuisance and would be glad to get rid of him. But they did want the money. . . . Twice, therefore, on two questions as important as can arise in my administration, they have refused to allow my leadership because money talked louder than I did. It is really intolerable.” Disgusted and disheartened, Wilson stewed for days, trying to think of a solution.
Where there’s a will, there’s a way—in this case, Mrs. Swann’s. While counsel for all parties examined the codicils for ambiguities, Wilson met again with Procter to present an expedient if not Solomonic solution—the building of two graduate quadrangles: one on campus, using the Swann money, which would satisfy Wilson’s needs and meet the strictest interpretation of the will; another on the Golf Links, using Procter’s money, which would meet his stipulations and the need for their growing graduate student body. Procter said he believed neither in dividing the graduate students nor in their associating with undergraduates. He left unsaid that such a plan would diffuse the power of Dean West, who could not rule from both citadels, especially when one would be situated right between Wilson’s house and his office.
After meeting once more with Procter, on December 22, Wilson sat in the Jersey City station and composed a note to Momo Pyne, reporting the benefactor’s indifference to a compromise. “The acceptance of this gift has taken the guidance of the University out of my hands entirely,” he wrote, “—and I seem to have come to the end.” Two days later, Pyne replied that he trusted that Wilson had given the matter further consideration and would withdraw his hastily penciled note.
On Christmas Day, Wilson replied, granting that his note had been written “under deep excitement,” but that the “judgment it expressed was not hastily formed.” Simply, he explained, “I cannot accede to the acceptance of gifts upon terms which take the educational policy of the University out of the hands of the Trustees and Faculty and permit it to be determined by those who give money.” For the sake of his conscience and his self-respect, Wilson put his position on the line, as he asked Pyne and the board to reconsider the Procter gift.
One by one, Wilson’s allies unified, outnumbering West’s and agreeing to disregard Procter’s offer. The next morning, Pyne got delayed in a snowstorm and arrived just minutes before a trustees’ meeting at which he presented a letter he had received the nigh
t before from Procter. Its contents were stupefying: in order to remain in the game, Procter now consented to Wilson’s proposal of separating the two bequests and building two separate graduate quadrangles.
Wilson was gobsmacked, less at the news than the chicanery behind it. With no time for careful consideration, he did not know how he could refuse his own proposition. Wilson could only re-argue that the issue was one “not of geography but of ideals,” and he urged the trustees to see that if “the Graduate School is based on proper ideals, our Faculty can make a success of it anywhere in Mercer County.” He called upon the trustees to decline the gift. The meeting ended without a decision.
On February 3, 1910, The New York Times ran an editorial called “Princeton.” Rather like Wilson’s speeches over the last decade, it cast the American campus—Princeton in particular—as a metaphor for the nation. In framing the mission of American colleges—that of “throwing together youths of promise of every kind from every part of the country”—it further suggested that Princeton’s current battle was part of a greater political and partisan war. “The Nation is aroused against special privilege,” said the Times. “Sheltered by a great political party, it has obtained control of our commerce and industries. Now its exclusive and benumbing touch is upon those institutions which should stand pre-eminently for life, earnest endeavor, and broad enlightenment.” The newspaper understood that the current struggle was not about a new building for the Graduate College or even the procurement of Procter’s funds. It was about whether Princeton—and its peer institutions—were to “direct their energies away from the production of men trained to hard and accurate thought, masters in their professions, men intellectually well rounded, of wide sympathies and unfettered judgment, and to bend and degrade them into fostering mutually exclusive social cliques, stolid groups of wealth and fashion, devoted to non-essentials and the smatterings of culture.” The editorial suggested this was essentially the age-old class war between entitlement and merit.
Now that they were under a microscope, trustees on both sides conferred in back rooms, so that their board meeting might proceed with a minimum of controversy. One faculty member reduced the argument to a single question: “Which can Princeton least afford to lose, Professor West & $500,000, or Woodrow Wilson & our honorable rank among American universities?” With trustee sentiment shifting against William Procter and West, the former summarily withdrew his $500,000 offer—a significant victory for Wilson. As his friend Cleveland Dodge wrote him, “Hereafter Princeton University is not to be run by the clamor of an irresponsible body of Alumni.”
But Dodge misjudged the situation. All hell broke loose. Many graduates howled that Wilson should not have let so much money slip between his fingers; and many embraced Dean West’s view of exclusive higher education. As Wilson’s daughter Nell recalled, “Angry protests, vitriolic abuse, demands that the president resign and that Mr. Procter be informed that his terms would be accepted, if he would renew his offer, arrived daily at the president’s office.” Nell wrote that this was her father’s “first experience with unpopularity, and it hurt.”
At Ellen’s anxious insistence, Woodrow boarded the S.S. Oceana for Bermuda on February 12, 1910. He would not see Mrs. Peck, for she was spending that winter in her New York apartment. At the Hamilton Hotel, he wrote an article called “The Country and the Colleges,” which linked the “essentially democratic” spirits of learning and American life. (“Learning knows no differences of social caste or privilege. The mind is a radical democrat.”) He visited with friends in the evenings, catching up with Mark Twain just two months before his death. Wilson maintained lengthy correspondences with both Mrs. Peck and his wife during his holiday, but his letters to the former were mostly about tea parties. To Ellen, who visited Mary Peck in the city with Nell while Woodrow was away, he expressed his profound love. On February 21, 1910, he wrote, “How sweet it is to think of you, to count on you, to know what you are. We have no compromises to look back on, the record of our consciences is clear in this whole trying business. We can be happy, therefore, no matter what may come of it all.” And then he pondered their future. “It would be rather jolly, after all,” he wrote, “to start out on life anew together, to make a new career, would it not?”
• • •
On a Saturday afternoon in January 1910, Colonel George Harvey had a long lunch at Delmonico’s with James Smith, Jr., New Jersey’s most powerful Democratic boss—a man Tammany Hall leader Richard Croker called “the greatest one-man-politician in the country.” After the state’s run of five consecutive Republican Governors, Harvey argued the necessity for a new kind of candidate—specifically, Woodrow Wilson. Smith balked. This former United States Senator who had created his own financial and political fortune through decades of deals under the table expressed serious doubts. He had countless chits to redeem and constituents to consider; and he could not help wondering whether a lifelong academician—whom he called “that Presbyterian priest”—had either the experience or the popular touch necessary to talk to the common folk in his wards. Harvey suggested those very weaknesses were Wilson’s strengths: at a time when greedy business interests and corrupt political machines were under attack, nobody could more articulately advocate against special privilege than this politically untarnished moralist.
Smith’s backroom boys liked the idea. They believed Wilson’s inexperience would require his relying on them to run the government while he provided an air of Progressivism and propriety. He would be the ideal puppet. The following Saturday, Smith and Harvey reconvened, and the party boss told him, “I have thought it all over carefully, and I am ready to go the whole hog.” He was prepared to secure the nomination for Wilson once Harvey could assure him that Wilson would accept. Recognizing that his own sudden interest in forcing Wilson upon the party could taint the candidate, Smith said he would declare that if the New Jersey legislature went Democratic in the election, he would not offer himself to them as a choice for the United States Senate. Wilson would appear to be his own man, the nominal head of the Democratic Party in New Jersey.
On March 17, 1910, Harvey and his wife visited Prospect. After dinner the gentlemen retired to Wilson’s library, where Harvey spoke bluntly. “If I can handle the matter so that the nomination for governor shall be tendered to you on a silver platter, without you turning a hand to obtain it, and without any requirement or suggestion of any pledge whatsoever,” he asked, “what do you think would be your attitude?” Wilson paced the room, deliberating. He finally said that if the nomination came to him in that manner, “I should regard it as my duty to give the matter very serious consideration.”
Over several months, Wilson appeared to be convincing himself as well as the New Jersey bosses, as he delivered numerous speeches with no educational pretext. A public beyond the Princeton community began paying attention to this new national voice. “This is what I was meant for, anyhow, this rough and tumble of the political arena,” he confided to Mrs. Peck, happy to loosen himself from the restraints of his academic position.
One of his first auditions came in early 1910, before the New York State Bankers’ Association at the Waldorf-Astoria. Nearly every financier of importance in the city attended; J. P. Morgan himself sat to Wilson’s left. With the Panic of 1907 still fresh in everybody’s mind, Treasury Secretary Franklin MacVeagh delivered remarks about currency reform. But Wilson grabbed everybody’s attention when he fired round after round into the crowd of six hundred, accusing New York of being too provincial and its bankers “too much centred in the affairs of their own institutions” when they should be serving enterprise everywhere in the nation. “The basis of banking, like the basis of the rest of life,” he preached, “is moral in its character, not financial.” He said there was too much reliance in America on legal defense of illegal action. Men of commerce no longer even asked if their decisions put them on a road to profit but, instead, on a road to jail. He felt the bank
ers of New York did not trust the country, which is why the country did not trust them. “I beg you gentlemen not to think of my criticism as impertinent,” he said, but to consider it “as your own voice calling you to the service of the great country we love.” The audience sat in stunned silence, as Wilson’s glum dinner partner aggressively puffed his cigar. Then they filled the hall with enthusiastic applause. Morgan actually rose from his chair and publicly and warmly shook Wilson’s hand.
Four nights later the Princeton president addressed the Short Ballot Organization, a progressive group committed to simplifying state and local governments. “Nothing is more interesting to me and nothing more discouraging at present than the privacy of public business,” he told the crowd at the Hotel Astor. The simplification of government, he said, would yield greater accountability. At the end of the month, he addressed a Democratic Dollar Dinner in Elizabeth, New Jersey, planned in part by the editor of the city’s Evening Times. One local leader had just returned from Washington, where he found unusual support for Wilson and even convinced Oklahoma’s Senator Thomas Pryor Gore to come north to launch a Wilson candidacy. The college president withheld his permission, thinking it all premature; but that did not stop him from delivering more spellbinding speeches.
He continued to hold down his day job, though its satisfactions decreased every week. Anti-Wilson trustees rallied enough support among the alumni to get the Board of Trustees to ask Procter to restore his gift; and when Wilson himself went before alumni groups, especially in the East, he encountered growing hostility. At each alumni gathering, he whipped himself into a frenzy, framing his argument as nothing less than the American Dream. By mid-April, when he faced two hundred alumni in Pittsburgh, he appeared unhinged. He ranted about college having come to serve “the classes, not the masses,” and said that it was providing for “certain visible uplifted strata” while ignoring “the men whose need is dire.” He rambled about Lincoln, wondering if he “would have been as serviceable to the people of this country had he been a college man.” He said American colleges had to be “reconstructed from top to bottom, and I know that America is going to demand it.” And then, almost as an afterthought, and sounding irrational, he asked, “Will America tolerate the seclusion of graduate students?”
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