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News despatch to New York Tribune, April 18
DR. WILSON AN ALARMIST
Princeton's President Attacks Protestant
Church Methods
COLLEGE MAN'S DEFECTS
Universities Need Democratic Regeneration—
Fears for the Country's Future
[By Telegraph to the Tribune]
Pittsburg, April 17.—Woodrow Wilson, president of
Princeton University, was the guest of honor at the Princeton
alumni banquet here last night and he improved the oppor¬
tunity to make an address which amazed his two hundred col¬
lege hearers. He attacked the methods of Protestant churches
of the present day, denounced privately maintained colleges,
and said, in short, that the college-bred man of to-day would
not do. He then launched into political conditions, and closed
his fiery address with the following:
" If she loses her self possession America will stagger like
France through fields of blood before she again finds peace and
prosperity under the leadership of men who know her needs."
In part the head of Princeton University said:
" How does the nation judge Princeton ? The institution is
intended for the service of the country, and it is by the require¬
ments of the country that it will be measured. I trust I may be
thought among the last to blame the churches, yet I feel it my
duty to say that they—at least, the Protestant churches—are
serving the classes and not the masses of the people. They
have more regard for the pew rents than for the men's souls.
They are depressing the level of Christian endeavor.
" It is the same with the universities. We look for the sup¬
port of the wealthy and neglect our opportunities to serve the
people. It is for this reason the State university is held in
popular approval, while the privately supported institution to
which we belong is coming to suffer a corresponding loss of
esteem.
"While attending a recent Lincoln celebration I asked
myself if Lincoln would have been as serviceable to the people
of this country had he been a college man, and I was obliged to
say to myself that he would not. The process to which the col¬
lege man is subjected does not render him serviceable to the
country as a whole. It is for this reason that I have dedicated
every power in me to a democratic regeneration.
"The American college must become saturated in the
same sympathies as the common people. The colleges of this
country must be reconstructed from the top to the bottom. The
American people will tolerate nothing that savors of exclusive-
ness. Their political parties are going to pieces. They are
busy with their moral regeneration, and they want leaders who
can help them to accomplish it. Only those leaders who seem
able to promise something of a moral, advance are able to secure
a following. The people are tired of pretence, and I ask you,
as Princeton men, to heed what is going on."
From the Princeton Alumni Weekly, April 20
PRINCETON DAY IN
PITTSBURG
* * * The subjoined report of the president's speech, the
proofs of which he has kindly corrected for publication here,
will be read with deepest interest. * * *
Toastmaster Seymour introduced President Wilson, the final
speaker, as "the true type of American statesman—he has
loved truth for truth's sake, for truth's sake alone."
The president was received with great enthusiasm.
PRESIDENT WILSON'S ADDRESS
* * * " What does the country expect of Princeton ? It ex¬
pects of Princeton what it expects of every other college, the
accommodation of its life to the life of the country.
" The colleges of this country are in exactly the same danger
that the churches are in. I believe that the churches of this
country, at any rate the Protestant churches, have dissociated
themselves from the people of this country. They are serving
the classes and they are not serving the masses. They serve
certain strata, certain uplifted strata, but they are not serving
the men whose need is dire. The churches have more regard to
their pew rents than to the souls of men, and in proportion as
they look to the respectability of their congregations to lift them
in esteem they are depressing the whole level of Christian
endeavor (applause).
" The colleges of this country are in the same danger. They
are looking to the support of the classes, looking to the support
of wealth; they are not looking to the service of the people at
large. At any rate, the privately endowed colleges are not.
The State universities are being lifted and the privately en¬
dowed universities are being depressed in the public esteem.
The future is for the State universities and not for the privately
endowed institutions. The State universities are constantly
sensitive to the movements of general opinion, to the opinion of
the unknown man who can vote, and the private institutions are
not sensitive to that opinion.
" Where does the strength of the nation come from ? From
the conspicuous classes? Not at all. It comes from the great
mass of the unknown, of the unrecognized men, whose powers
are being developed by struggle, who will form their opinions as
they progress in that struggle, and who will emerge with
opinions which will rule.
" Most of the masters of endeavor in this country have not
come through the channels of universities, but from the great
rough-and-ready workers of the world." College men, he said,
serve the non-college men, who draw from the colleges their
skilled and expert tools—not tools in any unworthy sense, but
the instruments through which they work. The men who rule
the country have not come to their mastery through the proc¬
esses of the colleges, he declared.
Dr. Wilson went on to say that he believed that Lincoln
would have been less suitable for his work if he had been put
through the processes of our colleges. He declared that you
can't spend four years at one of our modern universities without
getting the spirit in your thought which is most dangerous to
America—namely, that you must treat with certain influences
which now dominate in the commercial undertakings of the
country. " If I wanted a leader for the people I would choose
him from persons saturated with the impressions of common
men.
" Whafwe cry out against is that a handful of conspicuous
men have thrust cruel hands among the heartstrings of the
masses of men upon whose blood and energy they are subsisting.
"The universities would make men forget their common
origins, forget their universal sympathies, and join a class—and
no class ever can serve America.
"The great.voice of America does not come from seats of
learning. It comes in a murmur from the hills and woods and
the farms and factories and the mills, rolling on and gaining
volume until it comes to us from the homes of common men.
Do these murmurs echo in the corridors of universities ? I have
not heard them."
Editorial in Brooklyn Times, April 18
WOODROW WILSON ON
COLLEGES
Woodrow Wilson, the president of Princeton University, has
been repeatedly mentioned as a likely candidate for the Demo¬
cratic nomination for president of the United States, but it has
not been easy heretofore to imagine that this was done with his
consent. The address which he delivered at the Princeton
alumni banquet at Pittsburg on Saturday, however, tends to
justify the impression that the ambition has been aroused within
him to abandon temporarily his scholarly vocation and make a
serious essay to reach the chair once occupied by his friend,
Grover Cleveland. Were it not for the distinguished place he
worthily occupies and the spotless reputation he has won it
might be suspected that there was somewhat of the leaven of the
demagogue in his appeal. He said:
"I trust I may be thought among the last to blame the
churches, yet I feel it my duty to say that they—at least the
Protestant churches—are serving the classes and not the masses
of the people. They have more regard for the pew rents than
for the men's souls. They are depressing the level of Christian
endeavor.
" It is the same with the universities. We look for the sup¬
port of the wealthy and neglect our opportunities to serve the
people. It is for this reason the State university is held in
popular approval, while the privately supported institution to
which we belong is coming to suffer a corresponding loss of
esteem.
"While attending a recent Lincoln celebration I asked
myself if Lincoln would have been as serviceable to the people of
this country had he been a college man, and I was obliged to
say to myself that he would not. The process to which the
college man is subjected does not render him serviceable to the
country as a whole. It is for this reason that I have dedicated
every power in me to a democratic regeneration."
Further, President Wilson assured his hearers that the
American people will tolerate nothing that savors of exclusive-
ness. "Their political parties are going to pieces," he said.
" They are busy with their moral regeneration and they want
. leaders who can help them to accomplish it. Only those lead¬
ers who seem able to promise something of a moral advance are
able to secure a following."
No one will deny that there is very much of truth in Dr.
Wilson's statement, but it is not easy to repress the suspicion
that there is between the lines a suggestion that Woodrow
Wilson is the man the people are crying for.
News item in Tammany Times, April 16
BOOM LAUNCHED FOR
WILSON FOR UNITED STATES
SENATOR
A boom was launched in Newark at a Jefferson's birthday
banquet on Wednesday night for Woodrow Wilson, president of
Princeton University, for United States senator to succeed John
Kean. There seemed to be no doubt among the diners that the
State will be Democratic and that a Democrat would be selected
to represent the State in the upper house of the national legisla¬
ture.
Despatch sent out by Associated Press, April 16
ACT ON WILSON BOOM
Atlantic City, N. J., April 16.—At a meeting of Demo¬
cratic leaders of New Jersey here to-day the gubernatorial boom
of Dr. Woodrow Wilson, president of Princeton University, was
the principal topic of discussion. Many prominent Democrats
are in favor of nominating the famous educator and author for
governor, believing that he could sweep the State and carry
many others.
Editorial in the Independent, April 21
PRESIDENT WILSON AND
PRINCETON
President Wilson's address at a Princeton alumni dinner at
Pittsburg a few days ago spoke in general terms when he meant
particularly to hit the university of which he is president. What
he said was not all true, but it is partly true. This language is
somewhat needlessly alarming:
" If she loses her self possession America will stagger like
France through fields of blood before she again finds peace and
prosperity under the leadership of men who know her needs."
In getting ready to accuse the colleges he thus assailed the
churches:
"I trust I may be thought among the last to blame the
churches, yet I feel it my duty to say that they, at least the
Protestant churches, are serving the classes and not the masses
of the people. They have more regard for pew rents than for
men's souls. They are depressing the level of Christian
endeavor."
This is true of certain city churches, but not of churches as a
whole. Many of them have no pew rents. This charge is
hardly in any degree true of the country churches, and there are
few churches where the poor clerk or milliner or the mechanic is
not welcomed. But it was the universities President Wilson
was after:
" It is the same with universities. We look for the support
of the wealthy and neglect our opportunities to serve the people.
It is for this reason the State university is held in popular
approval, while the privately supported institution to which we
belong is coming to suffer a corresponding loss of esteem."
This may be in good part true as applied to Princeton Uni¬
versity, for it has been very much an aristocratic institution,
which President Wilson would not have it be. But there are
not a few "privately supported institutions" of which this is not
true, and which are as eager to serve the public as are those
whose presidents have to buttonhole governors and senators and
legislative committees at State capitols to get the money they
need.
From an editorial in the Evening Post, April 18
DEMOCRACY AND THE
COLLEGES
* * * And yet we cannot let this utterance of President
Wilson go without a word of demurrer. To expect moderation
and perfect balance on the part of a man of great oratorical
gifts, exhorting his hearers in behalf of a militant reform, would
be to expect too much; but it is not any question of mere exag¬
geration that we here have in mind. It is a fundamental ques¬
tion of point of view. With Mr. Wilson's attitude as regards
luxury, snobbery, and the rest of it, we are in the heartiest
sympathy, but a college is not confined to the choice of being
a paradise of the jeunesse doree on the one hand and a propa¬
ganda of social service on the other. Surely, it is preoccupation
with the one object he has immediately in view that must be
held accountable for President Wilson's apparently determined
ignoring of the claims of culture as such. This is not the first
time he has stated his position in this way. In a careful and
comprehensive discussion in Scribner's Magazine some months
ago of the question: " What is a college for ? " one looks in vain
for any recognition of the value of culture that is not directly
applied to social achievement. If we take him at his word,
in measuring the benefits that flow from the existence of our
colleges, we must throw out of the reckoning altogether the
making of the college men themselves into human beings having
higher, or broader, or more complex, or more remote intellectual
interests than would have otherwise been theirs. Time was—
and that when boys went to college in homespun and lived on
three dollars a week—when this upbuilding of the man himself
was regarded as the primary aim of the college, but President
Wilson would seem to wish us to believe that we must have
done with all that—by its service to the masses of the people and
by that alone must the college stand or fall in the modern
judgment.
This defect in Mr. Wilson's position is the more to be de¬
plored because we are convinced that it necessarily operates to
diminish immeasurably his chance of influencing opinion and
sentiment in the very quarters in which, for his purpose, they
most need to be influenced. To denounce the failure of col¬
leges to live up to a fine and generous ideal of culture is one
thing; to ignore the existence of such an ideal is quite another.
Most of us are not prepared to abandon as idle frippery every¬
thing in the social institutions and personal activities of the
day except what tends to the solution of the problems of poverty
or the improvement of the condition of the less well-to-do
masses of the population. Service directed toward these ends
is noble, and receives its meed of recognition from rich and poor,
learned and simple, and in such service college men have by no
means been deficient as compared with other classes of the com¬
munity. But there are other things in the world that are worth
while and that go to the making of a world that has in it beauty
and interest and variety and stimulus. Among these is liberal
culture, and the liberal culture that men get out of four college
years properly employed leavens their whole lives and makes
the world a better and brighter place not only for themselves
but for others. Indeed, if we are to place ourselves at Mr.
Wilson's position, we cannot stop there; there are other funda¬
mental institutions of the existing organization of society that
would fare vastly worse under the test that he applies than
would the colleges. Judged from the standpoint of a maximum
of immediate benefit to the masses—judged without reference
to the myriad interlacing influences that flow from them—all
the institutions upon which our complex social structure is
built would have to go by the board. In spite of Lord Salis¬
bury's dictum of many years ago, we are not all Socialists yet,
and those of us who are not must refuse assent to that dogma
of service which Mr. Wilson would seem to make the alpha and
the omega of his college doctrine.
News item in New York Times, April 22
WILSON ISOLATED, HE SAYS
Princeton's Head Further Astonished Alumni
Here as to Pittsburg Speech
President Woodrow Wilson, of Princeton, thinks he occupies
in the controversy over the Procter gift a place of "splendid
isolation," so Princeton alumni of this city learned yesterday
when the Alumni Weekly arrived from Princeton, containing
a full report of President Wilson's speech in Pittsburg, proof¬
read by himself.
Many of the alumni here, it is said, refused to believe the
newspaper reports of President Wilson's address accurate until
they read the Alumni Weekly, giving an even fuller account,
with the statement from the editor that President Wilson had
approved the report in proof. Most of the things he said about
the Procter gift and the division of opinion between himself and
the trustees over his desire to submit the matter to the faculty
for an opinion did not appear in the newspapers at all, however,
and created more surprise than what had been published.
" Referring to his toast,' The University,' " said the Alumni
Weekly report, "President Wilson said he did not know who
but himself he represented; a few days ago he had thought he
would be in the way of knowing the opinion of the university
faculty concerning the present situation at Princeton with re¬
gard to the graduate school; he had asked the trustees if they
would ask the faculty what its opinion was, but the trustees
found themselves unwilling to do so.
"He, therefore, did not officially know the opinion of the
faculty, and ' I must say,' he continued, £ that I can't tell you
what the board of trustees thinks. I do not believe any living
human being can.' He said that he occupied a place now of
1 splendid isolation,' and that if formal isolation were all that
was necessary to make a man conspicuous he was one of the
most conspicuous men in America."
Some of the comment here yesterday had it that President
Wilson's reference to his inability to ascertain the opinion of the
trustees was a slap at them. It became known also that when
the vote came as to whether the president should have his way
in submitting the Graduate School situation to the faculty for
its opinion -the trustees voted 14 against to n for it.
The significance attached to the vote by some is that it re¬
vealed the strength of those trustees who have not approved the
president's stand in the Procter matter. It is said, on the other
hand, that it was merely the expression of an opinion as to
whether the Graduate School matter was academic or adminis¬
trative, the majority of the trustees holding the latter view.