Wilson

by A. Scott Berg

  The manse of the Presbyterian Church in Staunton, Virginia—birthplace of Thomas Woodrow Wilson, who later dropped his first name. Born in 1856, he was the third child of the Reverend Joseph Ruggles Wilson and Janet Woodrow Wilson, who was descended from a long line of Scottish ministers.

  “Tommy” Wilson, as he was known into his twenties, at age sixteen. Photographed in Columbia, South Carolina, one of four Southern cities in which he was raised.

  The College of New Jersey, in Princeton, where Wilson enrolled in 1875.

  The Reverend James McCosh came from Scotland to become the eleventh president of Princeton (1868–1888).

  While Wilson (standing, holding his hat) thrived intellectually at Princeton, he also reveled in extracurricular activities and joined an eating club—the Alligators.

  Thomas W. Wilson, Class of 1879, upon his graduation—with an essay about Congress already accepted for publication and with dreams of becoming a Senator.

  While studying law at the University of Virginia, Woodrow Wilson fell in love with Harriet “Hattie” Woodrow, his first cousin. After she refused his marriage proposal, he requested at least a photograph of her, posed according to his specifications.

  In 1882, Wilson practiced law in Atlanta, though he cared little for the city or the profession.

  Before abandoning his career for graduate school in 1883, he did some legal work in Rome, Georgia, where he met Ellen Louise Axson, the daughter of the local Presbyterian minister. Before entering Johns Hopkins University in the fall, he proposed marriage, and she accepted.

  While studying for his doctorate in history and political science, Wilson did little else but write hundreds of passionate love letters to his fiancée and sing in the Johns Hopkins Glee Club (top row, second from left).

  Even before he had received his degree, Wilson secured a teaching position at a new school for women, Bryn Mawr College—its faculty and students pictured below. (The newlywed Wilson is in the top row, at the far right.)

  Yearning to teach “a class of men,” Wilson (bottom row, third from left) joined the faculty of Wesleyan University in 1889 but remained frustrated for having diverged from a career path into politics.

  In 1890, Professor Wilson accepted a teaching position at his alma mater and became the most popular and respected professor on the Princeton campus.

  “I am madly in love with you,” Woodrow wrote his wife of ten years in 1895. “Are you prepared for the storm of love making with which you will be assailed?” he asked at the close of one long absence.

  The three Wilson daughters in 1893: Jessie, Eleanor (called Nell), and Margaret.

  Professor Wilson (photographed in 1893) published dozens of articles, essays, and reviews, several books of political science, a five-volume History of the American People, and a biography of George Washington—all within twenty years.

  He also became a renowned speaker; and in 1896, the 150-year-old College of New Jersey became Princeton University and named Wilson its Sesquicentennial orator.

  In 1902, Woodrow Wilson was elected Princeton’s thirteenth president.

  Nassau Hall in the late nineteenth century.

  In 1906, Princeton conferred an honorary degree upon one of its benefactors, Andrew Carnegie (front, to Wilson’s left), then the richest man in the world.

  Prospect, the twenty-room residence of the president of Princeton. Ellen transformed the backyard with her formal garden. She would later plant a rose garden at the White House.

  Ellen regretted their private lives becoming more public and underwent several crippling personal tragedies.

  Ellen and Woodrow on the terrace at Prospect with their daughters—the philosophical Margaret, the soulful Jessie, and the playful Nell.

  Suffering from the strains of his new office, Wilson vacationed alone in Bermuda, where he met the twice-married Mary Allen Hulbert Peck. Rumors of an affair between them persisted for the rest of their lives.

  In 1906, Wilson traveled with his wife and family to England’s Lake District, where he befriended artist Frederic Yates, who drew these portraits of Ellen and Woodrow.

  The Faculty Room of Nassau Hall, where meetings of Princeton’s Board of Trustees grew increasingly contentious. After Wilson had introduced sweeping innovations that strengthened the character of the university, the trustees blocked his two most controversial plans.

  Andrew Fleming West, dean of the Graduate School, was Wilson’s leading adversary.

  John Grier Hibben was the closest friend Wilson ever had—until he opposed Wilson’s views about democratizing the college with residential quadrangles. Wilson neither exchanged another personal word with him nor allowed himself another friendship so intimate.

  “Sugar Jim”—New Jersey Democratic Party boss James Smith, Jr., who offered Wilson the opportunity to run for Governor, expecting the academician to serve as his puppet. Instead, Wilson promptly dismantled the party machine.

  Governor Wilson in his office in the New Jersey State House in Trenton, 1911.

  Wilson proved to be an effective campaigner for his political agenda, executing the most progressive slate of laws in the nation.

  After less than a year of public service, Wilson allowed others to promote his candidacy for President. He had no supporters more loyal than newspaperman William Bayard Hale and former state legislator Joseph Patrick Tumulty, who became Wilson’s private secretary and political adviser.

  After a weeklong convention in Baltimore, the Democrats nominated Wilson as their candidate. On August 7, 1912, at the Governor’s summer cottage in Sea Girt, New Jersey, Wilson accepted the nomination.

  The election of 1912 pitted Wilson against an incumbent President, William Howard Taft, and a former President, Theodore Roosevelt (seen here), who ran as the candidate for the Bull Moose Party, and Socialist Eugene V. Debs.

  On November 5, 1912, Governor Wilson walked to his Princeton polling place and cast his vote. He was elected the twenty-eighth President of the United States in a landslide.

  March 3, 1913—the President-elect and Mrs. Wilson walked to the Princeton depot and then departed to Washington, D. C.

  “There has been a change of government,” Wilson proclaimed in his inaugural address on March 4, 1913.

  “I’m glad to be going,” President William Howard Taft told Wilson upon leaving the White House, “—this is the loneliest place in the world.”

  The First Lady used her social position to lobby for improved housing in Washington’s slums.

  Ellen Wilson pouring tea, with her daughters Jessie, Eleanor, and Margaret—as painted by American Impressionist Robert Vonnoh, one of Ellen’s teachers when she studied at the Lyme Art Colony in Connecticut.

  An accomplished artist, Ellen created a makeshift studio on the third floor of the White House, and exhibited her work in New York and Philadelphia. This oil on canvas—Winter Landscape—was painted probably in late 1911–early 1912.

  A team of Rebels: the Wilson Cabinet—mostly Southerners who never shed their Confederate biases. Clockwise from the left: Wilson, W. G. McAdoo, J. C. McReynolds, J. Daniels, D. F. Houston, W. B. Wilson, W. C. Redfield, F. K. Lane, A. S. Burleson, L. M. Garrison, W. J. Bryan.

  The President and his Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan—the longtime standard-bearer of the Democratic Party, who had lent his support to Wilson’s nomination. Disagreeing with his handling of the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, Bryan resigned.

  Robert Lansing—the son-in-law of one Secretary of State and uncle of another, John Foster Dulles—succeeded Bryan at the State Department.

  “My second personality,” Wilson called Colonel Edward Mandell House. Unpaid and answerable to nobody but the President, he became Wilson’s most trusted roving diplomat and adviser—for a while.

  Wilson met Cary Travers Grayson, M.D., a lieu
tenant in the naval medical corps, at the start of his administration. Over the next eight years, he became Wilson’s personal physician and most loyal friend.

  Louis D. Brandeis was the leading architect of Wilson’s “New Freedom,” a program of progressive legislation that included establishing the Federal Reserve System and anti-trust regulation. After a bitter confirmation hearing, he became the first Jew to sit on the Supreme Court.

  Wilson was at his most regressive in his civil rights policies, permitting segregation in federal workplaces. He always kept his door open to African American petitioners until activist-journalist William Monroe Trotter arrived with his grievances. “Your tone, sir, offends me,” Wilson said, banning him from the White House for the duration of his term in office.

  At Dr. Grayson’s urging, Wilson sought recreation whenever possible. In the summers, he joined his vacationing family in Cornish, New Hampshire, where he could read a newspaper at his leisure.

  Wilson played more golf than any President in White House history—an estimated twelve hundred rounds while in office.

  In June 1914, he “P-raded” with his Class of 1879 at their 35th Princeton Reunion.

  Tragedy struck in the summer of 1914 when war broke out across Europe and Ellen Wilson unexpectedly died of Bright’s disease. Severely depressed, the President relied more than ever on the company of his inner circle—Tumulty, Dr. Grayson, and, as seen here, Colonel House.

  In March 1915, Dr. Grayson introduced Wilson to a young Washington widow, Edith Bolling Galt, whom he quietly courted.

  That October, they appeared together at a World Series game in Philadelphia; and that December, they married.

  Wilson’s other great joy that year was the birth of his first grandchild, seen here in the arms of his father. Francis Bowes Sayre, Jr., the last child to be born in the White House, would become the dean of the National Cathedral.

  Wilson received official notification of his re-nomination for President on September 2, 1916, at Shadow Lawn in Long Branch, New Jersey. Standing below him (far left), in a light suit, is Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  Despite a nasty campaign, Wilson was always happy on the hustings. Running against Charles Evans Hughes, a former New York Governor and former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, Wilson won on the slogan “He kept us out of war.”

  On April 2, 1917, less than a month after his second inauguration, President Wilson stood before Congress and delivered a war message, insisting, “The world must be made safe for democracy.”

  The Great War had been ravaging Europe since 1914, but the United States did not declare war until April 1917. The isolationist country, with an Army of a few hundred thousand, mobilized—shipping two million men to the front. At home, citizens poured all their resources into the war effort—including the Wilsons, who kept a flock of sheep at the White House, to trim the lawn and to grow wool for the Red Cross.

  Wilson had long supported women’s suffrage, but only through state-by-state adoption; with American women contributing to the war effort, he became the most persuasive advocate for the Nineteenth Amendment.

  The Wartime Cabinet

  The war fought and won, President Wilson sailed to France on the George Washington in December 1918 to settle the peace. He would spend the next six months in Europe.

  Paris welcomes its hero; on the right with French President Raymond Poincaré.

  Wilson received further acclaim in England. After his arrival in Dover, he was the guest of King George V.

  In the courtyard of Buckingham Palace, the President met American soldiers released from German prison camps.

  The American Peace Commissioners: Colonel House, Secretary Lansing, the President, Ambassador Henry White, General Tasker H. Bliss.

  France’s Premier Georges Clemenceau—“the Tiger”—who sought revenge against the Germans at every turn.

  Great Britain’s Prime Minister David Lloyd George, whom one American adviser said was “slippery as an eel.”

  Italy’s Prime Minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, whom Clemenceau dubbed “the Weeper,” because he burst into tears whenever his demands were not met.

  January 18, 1919—the opening of the Paris Peace Conference in the Salle de la Paix in the Quai d’Orsay.

  Representatives of nearly every population in the world flocked to Paris in the first six months of 1919. Among them were Emir Faisal (center), who would become the King of Greater Syria and the King of Iraq, and an Englishman named T. E. Lawrence (third from right), known as “Lawrence of Arabia.”

  Wilson inspected the ruins of the library of Belgium’s University of Louvain.

  Official war painter Sir William Orpen captured the world-weariness of President Wilson in Paris, where he fought for an equitable peace based on his Fourteen Points.

  Orpen’s rendition of the Council of Ten, which reshaped the world, at the Quai d’Orsay.

  The Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles during the signing of the Treaty, the centerpiece of which was Wilson’s League of Nations.

  Clemenceau, Wilson, and Lloyd George (far right) exit the Palace of Versailles on June 28, 1919, after the signing. Their faces reveal exhaustion more than joy.

  The United States Senate had to approve the Treaty, and Republicans had planned its obstruction even before the terms had been agreed upon. Wilson’s nemesis was the senior Senator from Massachusetts, Henry Cabot Lodge.

  When Wilson found Senate resistance too great, he took his cause to the people. Despite excruciating headaches, he embarked upon a cross-country tour in September 1919. In St. Paul, Minnesota, at the Tacoma Stadium (upper right), and at the Greek Theatre at Berkeley (bottom) —Wilson rallied audiences in favor of the Treaty and the League of Nations.

  After a speech in Pueblo, Colorado, Wilson broke down and returned to Washington, looking like a ghost of the man he had been three weeks prior. Days later, he suffered a stroke, which was kept from the public for the rest of his Presidency.

  Wilson did not lose his powers to think or speak, but his left side was immobilized. For the next eighteen months, a conspiracy of Edith Wilson, Dr. Grayson, and Tumulty essentially ran the country. Some consider this “woman behind the man” (in a touched-up photograph) America’s first female President.

  For more than six months, the President held no Cabinet meetings. By the time he was able to conduct minimal government business, he faced several new Secretaries (clockwise, after Wilson on the far left): D. F. Houston; A. Mitchell Palmer (who had authorized notorious raids during the President’s illness, in hopes of ridding the country of seditious terrorists); Josephus Daniels, E. T. Meredith; W. B. Wilson; J. W. Alexander; J. B. Payne; A. S. Burleson; N. D. Baker; and Bainbridge Colby, who replaced a disgruntled Robert Lansing as Secretary of State.

  March 4, 1921. After the Senate did not pass the Treaty of Versailles, Wilson faced further humiliation: his successor, Warren G. Harding, reversed as many of Wilson’s policies as possible.

  The Wilsons remained in Washington, retiring to an elegant house at 2340 S Street NW.

  For years, Colonel House had enjoyed the honored position as Wilson’s most trusted confidant. But during the Peace Conference in Paris, the President felt his adviser had overstepped. Upon his return to America, Wilson never spoke to him again. Only Dr. Grayson remained in Wilson’s good graces to the end.