Wilson

by A. Scott Berg

  Wilson’s tirade delighted his opposition. “His speech has been universally condemned by every one whom I have seen, whether on his side or against him,” Pyne gleefully wrote a fellow trustee, “and I think it can only lead to one result.” This condemnation was certainly the case in Pyne’s social circle, one member of which published the text and distributed it among Princeton alumni and beyond. Coupled with the press coverage, it caused Wilson’s speech to reverberate far beyond Pittsburgh—but not in ways the opposition had anticipated.

  “That Pittsburgh Speech” not only gave voice to a lot of dispirited Princetonians but also spoke to average Americans, many of whom considered a college education a privilege of the wealthy. Alumnus and zinc magnate David B. Jones of Chicago suggested that Wilson had suddenly become the conscience of the country, and that to “resign a position second only to the Presidency of the Country as a pulpit, because [Wilson] would not submit to the control of education by money and for money,” would attract national interest and might even result in a political nomination. But Wilson still wanted to fight this class war on his home turf. In private conversations and conferences, he continued to argue ideals over practicalities, and he believed he was positioned to defeat West by commencement.

  Then, on May 18, 1910, a rich recluse named Isaac Chauncey Wyman died in Massachusetts at the age of eighty-three. His father had fought under George Washington in the Battle of Princeton; and Isaac had graduated from the college there in 1848. He practiced law, went into banking and real estate, and amassed a small fortune. On Sunday the twenty-second, Wilson picked up his Sunday newspaper at breakfast. The front page of The New York Times announced: “GIFT OF $10,000,000 LEFT TO PRINCETON. Isaac C. Wyman of Salem, Mass., Bequeaths Bulk of Estate to Graduate School.” As Woodrow read the article aloud to Ellen, he broke into laughter, a sound she had not heard from her husband in months. By the time he got to the last sentence of the lead paragraph, he was guffawing. “Almost absolute power in the disposing of the property,” it read, “. . . is given to the trustees named in the will, John M. Raymond of Salem and Dean Andrew F. West of the Princeton Graduate School.”

  Woodrow turned to Ellen and said, “We have beaten the living, but we cannot fight the dead. The game is up.”

  Later that day, Wilson received a telegram from West and his coexecutor with a more realistic appraisal of the legacy: “Impossible at present to state value of gift for graduate college but it will probably be at least two millions and may be more.” The exact number—especially with that many zeroes—no longer even mattered.

  “I can hardly believe it. . . . It is all so splendid,” a giddy West wrote Momo Pyne from Boston on the drizzling gray day of Wyman’s funeral. West had, of course, been privately cultivating the old bachelor for some time. He carried a spray of ivy from Nassau Hall and placed it atop Wyman’s casket, and he planted an ivy root from Nassau Hall on his grave.

  A perusal of the will convinced Wilson that discretion in administering the Wyman funds had been given to the Board of Trustees, but there was no way to keep West from directing its disbursement. Wilson realized “it would seem small and petulant” if he were to resign in the circumstances, and questioning the legacy in any way would make him seem even pettier. Besides, Wilson could only presume that West would always have another benefactor to pull out of his hat. At the end of May, Wilson invited West to Prospect, where he told his adversary, “You know I have set my face like flint against the site on the Golf Links. But the magnitude of the bequest alters the perspective. You have a great work ahead of you and I shall give you my full support.”

  Wilson met with several trustees, who assured him that he would “no longer have to suffer the embarrassment of opposition from the Pyne party in the Board.” But days later, Wilson attended a meeting of the Committee on Grounds and Buildings, at which several members of the Pyne faction and even Pyne himself continued to nurse their old grudges, displaying what one observer called “a thoroughly nasty” spirit. William Procter visited Princeton in early June, and the university hoped he might reopen his checkbook. A complacent West hosted a luncheon in Procter’s honor, to which the Wilsons were not invited. Days later, Procter re-offered his $500,000, almost half of which was earmarked for the construction of the grand dining hall West had long fantasized about. This, on top of the Swann bequest and the Wyman fortune, left Princeton rolling in money, though Wilson no longer controlled the purse strings. (In the end, the Wyman bequest amounted to about $800,000.)

  Wilson’s baccalaureate address that June sounded valedictory. It was tinged with melancholy, as he visited his own feelings upon the departing seniors. “This is a turning point in your lives,” he said, “a day of endings and of beginnings. . . . There is a dull ache at your heart.” For the previous classes who crowd the town, he said, “it is a season of reunion, but for you it is a time of parting.” Wilson could not help surveying the last two decades, in which Princeton had become “part of the very warp and woof of my life”; but, he said, “it has never in all those years been for a single moment the same Princeton for me that it was in the magical years that ran their cheerful course from the exciting autumn of 1875 to the gracious June of 1879.” With each of the many thunderous ovations, tears flowed down his face.

  He could not get out of town fast enough. Within a fortnight, Wilson had packed up his office for the summer and prepared to take his family to Florence Griswold’s in Old Lyme, on Saturday, June 25. That very moment, “Big Boss” Smith notified Colonel Harvey that he could stall his minions no longer, that if Woodrow Wilson wanted to run for Governor that fall, Smith must have immediate assurance that he would accept the nomination. Harvey had just returned from Europe to the Jersey Shore, and he urgently called Wilson to invite him for dinner on Sunday night at his home in Deal. He wanted him to meet Smith and the powerful editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, Colonel Henry Watterson. With such imposing company gathering, Harvey insinuated that this was a command performance, with national implications. The moment of truth had arrived: either Wilson would appear at the dinner to commit himself to the launch of his new career or Smith would settle upon another candidate. If ever Woodrow Wilson intended to follow his political dreams, this was the moment. He was fifty-three years old, had never run for public office, and would never be handed another plum this ripe.

  The Wilsons left for Connecticut as planned, arriving late Saturday. Nell attested that her father “was still reluctant to take the final plunge, reluctant to give up his work at Princeton”; but he said he had every intention of returning to New Jersey for the dinner in Deal. Upon reaching Old Lyme, however, he checked the train schedule, only to learn that the meeting was not meant to be.

  “NO SUNDAY TRAIN FROM LYME BEFORE LATE EVENING,” he wired Colonel Harvey that night. “EXTREMELY SORRY.”

  7

  PAUL

  And as he iourneyed he came neere Damascus, and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heauen.

  —THE ACTES, IX:3

  New Jersey, Benjamin Franklin supposedly said, was like “a barrel tapped at both ends.” The fourth smallest of what had become forty-six states lay between the East Coast’s two most populous cities, New York and Philadelphia. With an infusion of immigrants at the turn of the century, and people settling outside the major metropolitan areas, New Jersey became the most densely populated state in the nation—2.5 million residents living in but a few small cities and some 250 incorporated municipalities, each with its own local administration.

  Because government is a conduit of vast amounts of money, it becomes a breeding ground for graft; and no state was more infested than New Jersey, which offered financial incentives to corporations wishing to escape the anti-trust laws in the major metropolises. Standard Oil of New Jersey, to name but one beneficiary, became the largest organization in the world to produce, transport, refine, and market oil. Because New Jersey allowed corpo
rations to own stock in other corporations, Standard Oil readily extended its reach into steel and railroads. The state became known as the “Mother of Trusts,” so corrupt that even Woodrow Wilson conceded that his home of the last twenty years was “one of the backward States of the Union.”

  Recently, several progressive Republicans in New Jersey had attempted a reform movement called the “New Idea,” but they made little headway. Every division of government in the state—from the smallest town to the capital city of Trenton—enjoyed a cozy relationship with some corporation. The Chief Justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court was in the pocket of the Democratic Party’s “Big Boss” himself, the former Senator James Smith, Jr.

  “Sugar Jim,” arguably the most powerful man in the state, came from humble Irish Catholic origins in Newark and had worked his way up in business and politics. When he reached the United States Senate, he manipulated a tariff bill that favored the sugar industry, all the while buying shares in the commodity. His interests expanded to shipbuilding, insurance, newspaper publishing, and banking. At sixty, this blimp of a man conveyed an air of the sunny plutocrat more than the shady autocrat that he was. Woodrow Wilson’s missing Colonel Harvey’s dinner that Sunday would not only insult Smith but would also indicate his lack of interest in a political future, starting with the governorship.

  Fortunately, a young associate of Colonel Harvey named William O. Inglis had a plan. He spent that Saturday night—June 25, 1910—on a train to New London, Connecticut, where he hired a “motor cab” to drive him the fifteen miles to Old Lyme. He arrived at Florence Griswold’s just as the Wilson family was heading to church. Inglis was prepared to argue Wilson into returning with him to New Jersey but found that unnecessary. While he did not intend to pursue elected office, neither would Wilson resist it. With no time to spare, they caught an express from New London, which got them to Deal moments before the dinner, which stretched until midnight.

  The governorship of New Jersey was on everybody’s lips, but they also had larger plans in mind, as evidenced by the presence of Colonel Harvey’s third guest—another honorary colonel and a powerful conservative Democrat, Henry “Marse” Watterson, owner and editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal. “Whatever one may think of Colonel Watterson,” Wilson would later confide to a friend, “there can be no doubt of his immense political influence in his section of the country, and indeed throughout the whole South.” He came specifically to look Wilson over; and before the night had ended, he said that if New Jersey made him Governor, he would “agree to take off his coat and work” for Wilson’s Presidential nomination in 1912. The opportunity, Wilson understated, “seems most unusual.”

  Wilson assured Smith of enough interest that night to buy a little more time, in which he could discuss the matter with two constituencies in particular. The first remained anxiously in Old Lyme. Upon Woodrow’s return, the Wilson women all gathered in Ellen’s room, where he sat on a small steamer trunk and related that the party leaders had agreed that if he accepted the nomination, he would be left “absolutely free—no pledges of any sort were to be demanded and Smith had further agreed that in no circumstances would he run for the Senate.” Then, with a wistful air, Wilson noted, “Colonel Watterson says it will inevitably lead to the Presidency.”

  Wilson next sought the counsel of his most devout supporters in his reformation efforts at Princeton. He did not want to disappoint them by withdrawing from the school in this crucial hour. “Perhaps it is the fear that this will look to you like a mere case of personal ambition,” he wrote David Jones. “To my mind it is a question of which is the larger duty and opportunity.” Jones replied that Wilson had brought Princeton to “a position of great distinction”; and even though the political situation in the state and country was “hampered and burdened . . . with incompetency and corruption,” he thought “it offers a more important field of service than even the reform of our educational institutions.” Recognizing that Wilson was at a crossroads in his life, Cleveland Dodge said, “We should not use any pressure to deter you from a path which your best judgment & conscience indicate to you is a path of duty.”

  “WALL ST. TO PUT UP W. WILSON FOR PRESIDENT,” announced William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal, even before Wilson had agreed to anything. The lifelong scholar suddenly realized how quickly the world moved outside the walls of academia. He told a reporter in Connecticut that he was not “seeking” any office at that time. On July 12, 1910, the party powers and the would-be candidate reconvened to consider each other before committing themselves.

  Although Boss Smith would not attend, he assembled several of his lieutenants—including a cousin-in-law, James R. Nugent, the Newark boss and state chairman of the party—at the Lawyers’ Club on lower Broadway. Smith called upon his backup choice for the nomination, Judge Robert S. Hudspeth, to examine the president of Princeton. An attorney from Jersey City, a former Speaker of the state’s General Assembly, and a member of the Democratic National Committee, Hudspeth began by asking if Wilson was prepared to enter the race. He replied, “I will not accept the nomination unless it comes unanimously. I am not seeking this office.”

  In order to make that determination, the committee needed to know whether Wilson was a team player, one who would play ball with them. Smith had told Judge Hudspeth that Wilson would be unelectable without the support of the liquor interests in New Jersey, for example; and so Hudspeth asked for his position on the matter of Prohibition. Wilson said, “I believe the question is outside of politics. I believe in home rule, and that the issue should be settled by local option in each community.” Hudspeth reminded Wilson that the state party had been opposing local option—the power of small constituencies to vote on such controversial matters—for years. “It is our bête noire,” he said, a threat to Boss Smith’s autonomy. “Well,” Wilson said, “that is my attitude and my conviction. I cannot change it.”

  With Wilson now appearing more recalcitrant than reluctant, Hudspeth posed the most important question, long unspoken. “Doctor Wilson,” he said, “there have been some political reformers who, after they have been elected to office as candidates of one party or the other, have shut the doors in the face of the Organization leaders, refusing even to listen to them. Is it your idea that a Governor must refuse to acknowledge his party organization?”

  “Not at all,” Wilson said. “I have always been a believer in party organizations. If I were elected Governor I should be very glad to consult with the leaders of the Democratic Organization. I should refuse to listen to no man, but I should be especially glad to hear and duly consider the suggestions of the leaders of my party.” The answers were not all that the party leaders had hoped, but they were good enough.

  Back in Old Lyme, Wilson wrote Cyrus McCormick, “It cost me a great pang, but I felt obliged to say to the New Jersey men that I would accept the nomination for governor, if it came to me unsought, unanimously, and without pledges to anybody about anything. I have all my life been preaching the duty of educated men to undertake just such service as this, and I did not see how I could avoid it.” As he had promised the party bosses, Wilson released a statement to the press insisting that he was not a candidate for the gubernatorial nomination but that should it be the wish of the delegates at the state convention, he would accept, deeming it “my duty, as well as an honor and a privilege.”

  Not even machine support made the Democratic nomination a lead-pipe cinch. Henry Otto Wittpenn, the progressive Mayor of Jersey City, had already announced his gubernatorial candidacy and did not intend to withdraw; progressive State Senator George Silzer of New Brunswick had a large group of followers as well; and the president of the Central Labor Union, along with party leaders in Wilson’s own county, announced his endorsement of former Trenton Mayor Frank S. Katzenbach, Jr. The fact that he was an untested college professor with the sudden endorsement of “Sugar Jim” was sure to suggest that a naïve Wilson was simply
carrying water for Boss Smith. The would-be candidate knew to lie low until the convention, as making political speeches would only suggest that he was campaigning for the nomination.

  Wilson diligently did his homework that summer, toiling over a Democratic state platform. His earliest drafts revealed plans for a thorough administrative reorganization, which would be both economical and efficient; he sought to regulate corporations, particularly in matters of taxes and corrupt practices; he wanted Civil Service reform at the state and local levels; he hoped to give regulatory power to public service commissions and to enact an eight-hour workday. Harvey and Smith urged Wilson to continue his work in private. “The situation is well in hand,” Harvey assured him; “there are no breaches in the walls.”

  Wilson left Old Lyme for Princeton on Wednesday, September 14, 1910, the day before the Democratic delegates in New Jersey were to gather in Trenton to nominate their candidate. The next morning, thousands swarmed around the Taylor Opera House, a few blocks from the state capitol. Only officials and invited guests gained admittance to the hall, which they packed to the rafters. The convention conducted party business in the morning and began its nominating process at 2:30 that afternoon. All the city bosses appeared, none more visible than Jim Smith in the front row, wearing his tall silk hat; and Colonel Harvey sat in a box with easy access to backstage, should the need arise for him to manage any unforeseen disruption in their plot. Wilson’s name was in the air—people were clamoring for information about him. He remained twelve miles away, on Princeton’s Golf Links.