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 COPYRIGHT DEPOSrr. 
 
WOODROW WILSON 
 
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 WOODROW WILSON 
 
WOODROW WILSON 
 
 THE STORY OF HIS LIFE 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM BAYARD HALE 
 
 Author of 
 "A Week in the White House with Theodore Roosevelt' 
 
 Garden City New York 
 
 DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 
 
 19U 
 
\\IC 
 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUniNG THAT OP TRANSLATION 
 INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN 
 
 COPYRIGHT, IQII, I912, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE AND COMPANY 
 
 THE COtlNTRY LITE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y. 
 
 gCl.A3l27n^ 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Chapter 
 
 I. — Background and Boyhood ....... 3 
 
 II. — Boyhood m Georgia 23 
 
 III.— Off to College 43 
 
 IV. — A Student at Princeton 54 
 
 V. — Still Studying Law and Politics .... 77 
 
 VI.— "Professor" Wilson 96 
 
 VII. — ^Princeton's New President 112 
 
 VIII. — Democracy or Aristocracy .f^ 122 
 
 IX.— The Graduate College Contest 139 
 
 X. — Out of Princeton into Politics 160 
 
 XI. — One Year of a Progressive Governor . . 185 
 
 XII. — The Presidency Looms Up 214 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 WooDROW Wilson Frontispiece ^' 
 
 FACING PAGE 
 
 Judge James Wilson 20 
 
 The Rev. Dr. Thomas Woodrow 20 
 
 William Duane Wilson 20 
 
 The Rev. Dr. Joseph Ruggles Wilson . . 20 ^- 
 
 The Manse, Staunton, Va., where Woodrow 
 
 Wilson was born 104 
 
 The house designed by Woodrow Wilson at 
 
 Princeton 104 
 
 Governor Wilson and His Family . . . .192 
 
WOODROW WILSON 
 
WOODROW WILSON 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 BACKGROUND AND BOYHOOD 
 
 IT WAS four years more than a century ago 
 that a restless youth of twenty, to whose 
 ears had come amazing stories of the oppor- 
 tunities to be found in a new land, forsook the 
 home of his Scots-Irish fathers in County Down, 
 on the Irish shores of the windy North Channel, 
 and sailed forth toward the baths of the Western 
 stars. Perhaps he had heard of the fame of a 
 Scotsman of his own name and without doubt 
 his own kin who, having migrated to America 
 only a generation before, had become one of the 
 founders of the new nation, one of the signers of 
 its Declaration of Independence, a member of 
 its Constitutional Convention, and a Justice 
 of its first Supreme Court. At all events, it 
 
4 ^^ooDROw wilson 
 
 was on a ship bound for the city of Justice James 
 Wilson that young James Wilson sailed. 
 
 The later emigrant may have been destined 
 to no such eminence as was the earlier, yet young 
 James, too, found his opportunity in the new 
 country — found it in a little shop full of the 
 smell of printer's ink and mysterious with the 
 apparatus of the preservative art — the shop 
 at 15 Franklin Court, formerly the home of 
 Benjamin Franklin, whence issued, to the en- 
 lightenment of the good people of Philadelphia, 
 William Duane's daily paper, the Aurora, 
 
 To their enlightenment, it is to be hoped; 
 certainly very much to their entertainment and 
 their agitation — and not only theirs, but the 
 whole country's as well. William Duane was 
 the earliest muck-raker in American journalism; 
 indeed, he was muck-raking on the other side 
 of the world before he had a chance to employ 
 Bunyan's celebrated tool here. Though born 
 on the shores of Lake Champlain, Duane was 
 educated in Ireland, whence he went out to 
 India and started a newspaper much occupied 
 with arraigning the British Government — 
 
BACKGROUND AND BOYHOOD 5 
 
 which the Government very sensibly seized and 
 whose editor they ordered out of the country. 
 Returning to Great Britain, he became par- 
 liamentary reporter to London papers, including 
 the Times. So he was pretty well equipped to 
 make trouble when, in 1795, he came back to 
 the country of his birth and engaged himself 
 with Franklin Bache (grandson of the most 
 famous of all Philadelphia printers, and son of 
 Richard Bache, the Postmaster-General) on the 
 Aurora. Bache dying of the yellow fever, 
 Duane took over the widow — and the Aurora. 
 It was already a leading Democratic journal, 
 Philadelphia being then the national capital. 
 Duane made it the chief organ of the party. 
 His were the shrieking methods of the yellowest 
 day journalism has ever seen, and within a year 
 he had been haled before Congress for a viola- 
 tion of the Sedition Law. However, he did a 
 great deal toward electing Jefferson to the 
 Presidency and putting the Democrats in power, 
 and even after he had turned into a bitter as- 
 sailant of President Madison and had come to 
 be regarded as an opposition editor, we find 
 
6 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 Jefferson writing him (1811), calling him "Col- 
 onel" William Duane: 
 
 The zeal, the disinterestedness, and the abilities with 
 which you have supported the great principles of our 
 revolution, the persecutions you have suffered, and the 
 firmness and independence with which you have suffered 
 them, constitute too strong a claim on the good wishes 
 of every friend of elective government, to be effaced by a 
 solitary case of difference in opinion. 
 
 William Duane never got any political reward, 
 but his son was made Secretary of the Treasury 
 by President Jackson. He served only a few 
 months, refusing to obey Jackson's order to 
 remove the Government deposits from the United 
 States Bank without authority of Congress. 
 
 Duane was in financial difficulties most of 
 the time, but he stuck it out until 1822, when 
 the country had settled down into an "era of 
 good feeling" so paradisiacal that there was 
 nothing for a fighting journalist of Irish educa- 
 tion to do in the United States. So he closed 
 out the Aurora and went on a tour of South 
 America, then in the throes of revolution. 
 
BACKGROUND AND BOYHOOD 7 
 
 Such was the employer from whom young 
 Jimmie Wilson got his first notions of American 
 life. Wilson appears to have taken aptly to the 
 printing trade, and to his employer, as his em- 
 ployer did to him. The young man prospered. 
 He moved from a room in the rear of Fourth 
 Street, which he had taken on landing, to 45 
 Gaskill Street. And he married — married 
 Anne Adams, an Irish girl, four years his junior, 
 who had come oVer on the ship that brought 
 him. To her latest days she used to love to 
 talk of their North of Ireland home, from which 
 she said they could see the white linen flying 
 on the line in Scotland; so she must have been a 
 County Down or a County Antrim lass. There 
 was more than the glint of wind-blown linen that 
 came across to them from Scotland, for James 
 Wilson's wife was a blue-stocking of a Pres- 
 byterian to the day of her death, and brought 
 up her ten children in the nurture and admoni- 
 tion of the Lord in the strictest sect of Pres- 
 byterianism. They began life together, No- 
 vember 1, 1808, by going to the Rev. Dr. George 
 C, Potts, pastor of the Fourth Presbyterian 
 
s ^YOODRO\^' wilsox 
 
 Church, to be married. AYhen their first child 
 was born, they called him "William Duane." 
 That year they moved up town to the corner of 
 Tenth and Spruce streets; it must have been 
 either the northeast or the northwest corner. 
 
 Wilson now became nominally publisher of 
 the Aurora. Duane, when the War of 1812 
 broke out, was made Adjutant-General of the 
 Eastern District of Pennsylvania, and it seems 
 that he left the management of the paper to 
 Wilson. 
 
 With the Peace of Ghent, a new movement 
 westward set in. The Federal Government was 
 pushing the National Road over the AUeghanies 
 on the first stage of its journey to the plains. 
 The steamboat, which had appeared on the 
 Hudson in 1808, was now screeching on the 
 Ohio. Wilson determined to try his fortunes 
 in the hinterland. He went to Pittsburg, just 
 growing into a city. Then his fancy was taken 
 by the little town of Lisbon, just across the line 
 in the new state of Ohio; but soon he found a 
 better location in Steubenville, a little below, 
 on the river, county seat of Jefferson, nobly 
 
BACKGROUND AND BOYHOOD 9 
 
 named. Here he started a paper of his own — 
 the Western Herald it was called — and it was 
 destined to a long and measurably influential 
 career. 
 
 Behold, then, at the close of the first quarter 
 of the nineteenth century, the immigrant James 
 Wilson a settled citizen of the state of Ohio, 
 influential, prosperous, and at the head of a 
 thriving family. 
 
 James Wilson, first and last, must be held 
 responsible for a goodly portion of the printed 
 wisdom and folly of the early nineteenth century. 
 He printed in Philadelphia; he founded a news- 
 paper in Steubenville, and in its office he trained 
 every one of his seven sons to be an expert com- 
 positor; in 1832 he founded a paper at Pittsburg 
 — the Pennsylvania Advocate. The first number 
 of the Pennsylvania Advocate was printed in 
 Ohio, at the Steubenville press. Very soon, 
 however, a fine Washington hand-press was 
 installed in a Pittsburg office, to the wonder of 
 the city, for it was the first press set up west of 
 the mountains that was capable of printing a 
 double-page form of a newspaper at one impres- 
 
10 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 sion — that is, one side of a whole sheet at once. 
 Mr. Wilson started the Advocate with the aid 
 of four of his sons and tw^o apprentice boys, but 
 when it was fairly on its feet he left it in the 
 immediate charge of his eldest son. 
 
 During the remaining twenty-five years of 
 his life James Wilson, an editor to the end, 
 divided his time between Steubenville and 
 Pittsburg. 
 
 James W^ilson was a man of extraordinarily 
 positive opinions; furthermore, he was very out- 
 spoken in them. His paper was a very vigor- 
 ous publication indeed, discussing the questions 
 of the day — and they had pretty big questions 
 in the first half of the nineteenth century — 
 with fearless conviction and bluntness. The 
 editor w^as a Justice of the Peace, and was 
 ordinarily addressed as ''Judge" W^ilson. He 
 was, for a term, a member of the Ohio State 
 Legislature. During his absence at Columbus 
 his wafe, with the aid of the sons, edited the 
 paper and boarded the hands. 
 
 One of W^ilson's political aversions was the 
 person of Samuel Medary, a frequent candidate 
 
BACKGROUND AND BOYHOOD ll 
 
 for public office. The Western Herald habitually 
 referred to him as " Sammedary " — though 
 exactly why, no one remembers. A sample of 
 the Judge's caustic remarks about this candi- 
 date was: 
 
 "Sammedary's friends claim for him the 
 merit of having been born in Ohio. So was my 
 dog Towser." 
 
 Samuel Medary afterward became Governor 
 of Ohio, and (ironically enough) it came about 
 that Judge Wilson's son Henry married the 
 Governor's daughter. The old Judge attended 
 the wedding, and there were greetings amicable, 
 but possibly not of unrestrained cordiality, 
 between the ancient antagonists. Judge Wilson 
 died in Pittsburg during a cholera epidemic, 
 in 1837. 
 
 Judge James Wilson had ten children: seven 
 boys and three girls. The daughters married 
 well, and the sons all attained considerable 
 distinction. Henry, Edwin, and Margretta 
 were triplets. Henry (he who married Gover- 
 nor Medary's daughter) became, during the 
 Civil War, Commissary-General on the staff of 
 
12 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 General Burnside, stationed at St. Louis. Edwin 
 studied law with Edwin M. Stanton, at Steuben- 
 ville, practised law at Franklin, Pa., and became 
 Adjutant-General of Pennsylvania under Gov- 
 ernor William F. Packer. 
 
 Edwin and Henry bore a remarkable resem- 
 blance to each other; throughout their lives the 
 two men were so much alike that few outside 
 the family could distinguish one from the other. 
 Once, Governor Packer happened to meet Henry 
 at the Girard House in Philadelphia, and thinking 
 all the time he was w^ith his Adjutant-General, 
 Edwin, spent several days with him. On the 
 other hand, once, when Edwin was at the old St. 
 Nicholas Hotel in New York, General Burnside 
 came along and proceeded to administer a 
 reprimand to the officer whom he took to be 
 his Commissary-General for having left head- 
 quarters without leave. Edwin let Burnside 
 exhaust himself, and then asked: 
 
 ''General, when did you see me last!" 
 
 Burnside replied: "Why, I left you at St. 
 Louis, last week." 
 
 Edwin retorted: ''You are mistaken." 
 
BACKGROUND AND BOYHOOD 13 
 
 "Aren't you General Wilson?" asked Burn- 
 side. 
 
 "I am so called," replied Edwin, "but I am 
 very thankful that I am not your Commissary- 
 General." 
 
 Before Burnside could be persuaded of his 
 mistake, a visit had to be made to the hotel 
 register; the writing of the two men was totally 
 unlike, and Burnside was familiar with the hand 
 of Gen. Henry Wilson. General Henry and 
 General Edwin distinguished themselves to 
 their acquaintances by the manner in which 
 they w^ore their watch guards: Henry wore a 
 chain about his neck, while Edwin wore a fob. 
 
 One of the earliest photographs made in 
 Columbus was a portrait of Gen. Henry Wilson. 
 Henry sent it to General Edwin, at Harrisburg, 
 and he, by way of practical joke, sent it home 
 to his wife, as a likeness of himself. Mrs. 
 Wilson hung it on the parlor wall and proudly 
 called the attention of callers to the excellent 
 photograph of her husband. 
 
 Judge Wilson's youngest son w^as Joseph 
 
U W'OODROW WILSON 
 
 Ruggles — through whom runs the special cur- 
 rent of this story. 
 
 Joseph was born at Steubenville on February 
 28, 1822; he got his first schooKng in his father's 
 shop. Like all the other sons, he learned the 
 printer's trade — not one of them but could, to 
 the day of his death, "stick t^^e" with any 
 journeyman. 
 
 It is recorded of Edwin Wilson that, later in 
 life, he made a wager with the proprietor of the 
 Venango Spectator that he could set the longest 
 "string of i}ipe in an hour." At it they went, 
 and the General was an easy winner — and he 
 was not the fastest "sticker" in the family, 
 either. Joseph was allowed, as a boy, to get 
 out a little paper of his own from the Western 
 Herald ofiice. 
 
 Joseph, from the start, was marked for the 
 scholar of the family. There was a good 
 academv at Steubenville, and he attended it. 
 At eighteen he went to Jefferson College, a 
 Presbyterian institution at Canonsburg, Pa. 
 (now merged in Washington and Jefferson 
 College), where he was graduated in 1844 as 
 
BACKGROUND AND BOYHOOD 15 
 
 valedictorian. He engaged in teaching for a 
 year, taking charge of an academy at Mercer, 
 Pa. But the call was clear to a higher life work. 
 Before he had left home for college he had made 
 a public profession of his faith in the First 
 Presbyterian Church of his native town. Now 
 he took his way to the Western Theological 
 Seminary, at Allegheny, Pa., remained a year, 
 and then went to spend another year at Prince- 
 ton Seminary. He w^ent home, and w^as licensed 
 to preach, although not yet ordained; he taught 
 for two years in the Steubenville Male Academy. 
 To the fact that there was another Steuben- 
 ville academy is due the necessity of telling this 
 story. There w^as another, not for males, and 
 to it there came, among other girls of the Ohio 
 Valley, a damsel from Chillicothe, the pretty 
 town which was Ohio's first capital, lying be- 
 tween the pleasing hills behind which the sun 
 still rises on the state seal. Janet Woodrov/ 
 was her name, though most people called her 
 "Jessie," and she was the daughter of a great 
 and famous Presbyterian minister of the day, 
 but neither did that nor her English birth forbid 
 
16 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 her having a gleeful laugh and an eye for fun. 
 One afternoon, the lessons at Doctor Beattie's 
 school being over, Janet Woodrow took a walk; 
 passing by the Wilson house, she spied, through 
 the pickets of the garden fence, the young theo- 
 log, raking, in a pair of kid gloves. On the 
 7th day of June, 1849, Joseph R. Wilson and 
 Janet Woodrow were legally joined in marriage 
 by Thomas W^oodrow, minister of the Gospel 
 — so attests an entry preserved in the marriage 
 records of the Probate Court of Ross County, 
 Vol. F., page 91. 
 
 We have another immigration to observe: 
 The W^oodrows (or W^odrows, as they spelled it 
 in Scotland) are an ancient family originally 
 out of England, who trace their Scottish history 
 back 600 years. Among them flourished min- 
 isters, scholars, and men of substance, with 
 a Presbyterian martyr or two. The Rev. Dr. 
 Thomas Woodrow, born at Paisley in 1793, a 
 graduate of Glasgow University, recrossed the 
 Tweed to become minister of the Independent 
 Congregation at Carlisle, England. After hav- 
 
BACKGROUND AND BOYHOOD 17 
 
 ing served there sixteen years and begotten 
 eight children he felt the call to become a mis- 
 sionary in the New World. 
 
 Accordingly he embarked, the 21st of October, 
 1835, on a ship bound for New York. All his 
 family was with him: his wife, Marion (born 
 Williamson), and their children: Robert, John, 
 Thomas, William, Janet, George, and Marion, 
 ranging from fifteen years of age down to three. 
 One day little Janet was on deck; she happened 
 to be clutching a rope when a big wave hit the 
 ship, buried her bow in the water, and sent the 
 little maid far out over the sea; however, she 
 held on fast and escaped with a good wetting. 
 
 All landed safely after a passage of ten weeks, 
 having spent Christmas and New Year's Day 
 at sea. Shortly after the landing, however, we 
 find this passage in the Doctor's diary: 
 
 New York, U. S., February 23, 1836. 
 Little did I expect that the first death I should have to 
 record on my arrival in this country should be that of my 
 dear wife. How mysterious and distressing often are the 
 ways of God. I landed in this country on the 12th day 
 of January, 1836, with my dear wife and family, and on 
 
18 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 the 16th Inst, the faithful and affectionate companion of 
 my travels was taken from me by a sudden and unex- 
 pected stroke. I had the melancholy satisfaction yester- 
 day of committing her dear, sweet body to the cold and 
 silent tomb. Her body was interred in the Oliver Street 
 Church (Baptist) Burial Ground in a dry, sandy grave, 
 where it lies until the morning of the Resurrection, when 
 at the sound of the last trumpet it shall be raised up a 
 glorious and incorruptible body, and when I hope I shall 
 meet my dear love and join with her and all the redeemed 
 in praising God and the Lamb. 
 
 However, the good man went on to his desti- 
 nation — Canada — where, with headquarters 
 at Broekville, on the St. Lawrence, he fulfilled 
 for a while the duties of a missionary through a 
 wide circuit of country. In a year came an 
 invitation to the pastorate of the First Presby- 
 terian Church of Chillicothe, and the Woodrows 
 came into the States. The Doctor's ministry 
 at Chillicothe stretched from 1837 to April, 
 1849. While there he married a second time, 
 in 1843, the bride being Harriet L. Renick, 
 widow of Asahel Renick. From Chillicothe 
 he went to Columbus, where he was pastor of 
 the Hogg First Presbyterian Church. He died 
 
BACKGROUND AND BOYHOOD 19 
 
 at Columbus April 27, 1877, and was buried in 
 Greenlawn Cemetery. 
 
 The history of the Presbytery of Chillieothe 
 says of the Rev. Dr. Woodrow that he 
 
 Was a fine scholar, a good preacher, and especially 
 powerful in prayer. He was conservative in his views and 
 thoroughly presbyterian in his belief. His sermons 
 were always instructive and pointed. He loved to dwell 
 on the great cardinal doctrines of the Gospel and to pro- 
 claim them in their simplicity and fulness. 
 
 Doctor Woodrow was a stocky man, of short 
 stature — very vigorous in the pulpit. A man 
 now in middle life remembers hearing him preach 
 a sermon in the chapel of the Presbyterian 
 Church of Augusta, Ga., on a very warm day 
 — the church was, in fact, that presided over 
 by the Rev. Joseph R. Wilson, as we shall see. 
 Doctor Woodrow had lost or misplaced his 
 spectacles, and so the Rev. Mr. Wilson 
 canvassed the congregation for a pair that would 
 suit the preacher. He brought to the pulpit 
 a variety of spectacles. There was only one 
 pair through which the dominie could see his 
 
20 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 manuscript. These were too big for him and, 
 as he preached, they kept sHpping down his 
 nose, which was also the course of the perspira- 
 tion that gathered on the preacher's forehead. 
 A httle boy in a front row sat fascinated by the 
 sight of the spectacles slowly travelling down 
 the parson's nose and amazed at the dexterity 
 with which he managed to catch them at the 
 last minute, push them up and go on with the 
 unbroken discourse.* 
 
 Two weeks after his marriage with Jessie 
 Woodrow, Joseph Ruggles Wilson was ordained 
 by the Presbytery of Ohio. It w^as several years, 
 
 *0f Dr. Thomas Woodrow's children, one son, James, had a rather remarkable career: 
 He graduated at Jefferson College, where he was a classmate of Basil Gildersleeve, who 
 has taught Latin and Greek to most of the living generation of Americans. Then he 
 became a minister of the Presbyterian Church. His real interest, however, seemed to 
 have been in science, and he went to Heidelberg University, where he achieved such dis- 
 tinction that he was invited to remain as a professor in succession to the celebrated 
 Bunsen. Coming home, however, he became instead a professor at the Southern Pres- 
 byterian Theological Seminary at Columbia, S. C, his chair being denominated, in 
 accordance with a leading thought of that day, that of "the Relation Between Science 
 and Religion." His views on the subject of evolution becoming more pronounced, they 
 aroused dissatisfaction, and he was obliged to resign. Then he was chosen president of 
 South Carolina College. Later he became a bank president, and as such ended his days. 
 
 Of the other children, Robert developed phenomenal scholarship, but died in the early 
 twenties. Thomas was a man of considerable ability and of unusual nobility of char- 
 acter. He lived a quiet, self-sacrificing life. Cut out for a scholar, the necessities of the 
 family forced him into business, and he lived as a gentleman storekeeper. William was 
 a sort of rolling stone, but when, in the course of his wanderings, he reached Nebraska, 
 he got hold of land that proved to be of value and acquired considerable fortune. The 
 daughter Marion married James Bones, of Augusta, Ga. A new acquaintance, once loth 
 to accept the homely patronymic of Marion Wilson's husband, undertook to address him 
 as Mr. Bone. He was instantly rebuked with the words: "No, just dry Bones." 
 
THE REV. DR. THOMAS \yOODRO\V 
 
 THE REV. DR. JOSEPH RUGGLES 
 WILLIAM DUANE ^VILSON WILSON 
 
 GRANDFATHERS, UNCLE AND FATHER OF WOODROW WILSON 
 
BACKGROUND AND BOYHOOD 21 
 
 however, before he undertook a pastorate of 
 any consequence, serving for a year as "pro- 
 fessor extraordinary" of rhetoric in Jefferson 
 College, and for four years as professor of 
 chemistry and natural sciences in Hampden- 
 Sydney College, Virginia, in the meantime sup- 
 plying small neighboring churches. The Rev. 
 Mr. Wilson had become the father of two 
 daughters, Marion and Annie Josephine, before 
 he was called as pastor to Staunton, Va., in 1855. 
 Staunton, where he remained for tw^o years, was 
 a tow^n of 5,000 population, beautifully situated 
 in the famous Valley of Virginia. 
 
 Here it was that on December 28, 1856, 
 Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born. 
 
 The infant Wilson (to spend a moment re- 
 viewing his parental history) was born to an au- 
 spicious heritage. His blood w^as Scotch-Irish, 
 a strain perhaps the most vigorous physically, 
 the most alert mentally, the most robust morally 
 of all those that have mingled in the shaping of 
 the American character. His forebears were 
 
22 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 men and women who had conspicuously dis- 
 played the qualities of a sturdy race: they were 
 people imaginative, hopeful, venturesome; stub- 
 born, shrewd, industrious, inclined to learning, 
 strongly tinctured with piety, yet practical and 
 thrifty. On one side they were an ancient 
 family who had preserved the memory of a part 
 in large affairs, who for generations had carried 
 the banner of religion and learning — the para- 
 mount concerns of Scottish men. On the other 
 side they had had their share in the public 
 affairs of a more modern nation. The new-born 
 was descended from clergymen and editors; 
 men of strong opinions; men likewise accustomed 
 to give free leave to their opinions. They were 
 protestants in religion, and in politics, radicals: 
 pioneers — a stout-hearted breed. 
 
 Such was the ancestral preparation for life 
 of the little son of the Presbyterian pastor who 
 came into the world Christmas week, 1856, in 
 the dawn of an ample day of national evolution 
 and conflict. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 BOYHOOD IN GEORGIA 
 
 IN THE spring of 1858, Thomas Woodrow 
 Wilson being then two years old, the family 
 moved to Augusta, Ga., where the father was 
 to be pastor of the Presbyterian Church for the 
 next four years. 
 
 With his entrance upon the Augusta pastorate, 
 the Rev. Mr. Wilson became one of the most 
 noted ministers in the South. Thoroughly 
 equipped in the theology of his denomination, 
 a pulpit orator of great power and a personality 
 of extraordinary force, he early reached and long 
 maintained a position of much influence. When 
 the war came on, he embraced, with all the 
 strength of his character, the Southern side. 
 At the division of the Presbyterian Church into 
 Northern and Southern branches, he invited 
 the first General Assembly of the latter to meet 
 
 23 
 
24 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 in his church, and became its permanent clerk. 
 Twenty-five years later Doctor Wilson gave a 
 description of the scene when, in that assembly, 
 the chairman on the committee appointed to 
 prepare an address justifying the separation, 
 rose to speak: 
 
 The thrill of that hour is upon me now. The house was 
 thronged, galleries and floor. The meagre person of the 
 intellectual athlete (Dr. Thornwell) occupied a small space 
 in the front of the pulpit, and so near as to gain from the 
 framework a partial support, for even now he felt the 
 approach of fatal disease. Every eye was upon him, and 
 every sound was hushed as by a spell whilst for forty 
 historic minutes this Calvin of the modern Church poured 
 forth such a stream of elevated utterance as he of Geneva 
 never surpassed, his arguments being as unanswerable as 
 they were logically compact. 
 
 In 1865, Doctor Wilson was styled "Stated 
 Clerk" of the Southern Presbyterian General 
 Assembly, and he continued to be such until 
 1899, when he resigned, being then seventy- 
 seven years old and having kept the Southern 
 Presbyterian records for nearly forty years. He 
 was moderator of the assembly in 1879. He 
 
BOYHOOD IN GEORGIA 25 
 
 died at Princeton, N. J., in his eighty-first 
 year.* 
 
 Mr. Wilson had been a professor of rhetoric, 
 and he always remained one, taking very seri- 
 ously, and practising with a sense of its sanc- 
 tity, the art of words. He read his sermons, 
 every one of which was marked by high literary 
 finish, although in no sense unduly rhetorical. 
 A man of unusual scholarship and a student to 
 the end of his days, he is remembered to have 
 indulged in but a single form of pedantry; his 
 regard for language had inclined him affec- 
 tionately toward the original significance of 
 words, and he was sometimes observed to use 
 them in an antiquated sense. Thus he occasion- 
 ally indulged in such a phrase as, '"I wonder with 
 a great admiration." Charles Lamb used to do 
 the same thing, as you will learn if you will read y^i^ 
 the first sentence of "Imperfect Sympathies." Y\^ 
 
 * Of the Rev. Dr. Wilson's children other than Woodrow, the elder daughter, Marion, 
 married the Rev. Ross Kennedy, a Presbyterian minister, who died in Augusta, Ark., 
 some years ago. The younger daughter, Annie Josephine, became the wife of a physician 
 and surgeon of Colvunbia, S. C, Dr. George Howe. Mrs. Howe is now living, a widow, 
 in Raleigh, N. C. A second son, and fourth child, Joseph R., was born ten years after 
 Woodrow. After leaving college, Joseph R. Wilson went to Nashville, Tenn., where he 
 has made himself a name as a political writer of influence in state affairs. He is now city 
 editor of the Nashville Banmr. 
 
^6 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 WTien indulging in his harmless foible the 
 preacher might have been caught glancing 
 around the congregation to catch, if it might be, 
 the pleasure of an appreciative gleam in some 
 hearer's eye. He was a man of humor as well 
 as of learning and thought, and, when his son 
 had grown to discerning years, always showed 
 great delight if the boy evinced, by repeating it, 
 that he remembered some fanciful or eloquent 
 or learned phrase. 
 
 Mr. Wilson used to speak with contempt of 
 the florid style of oratory, and even early in 
 life his son was trained to consciousness of the 
 absurdity of high-falutin rhetoric. He remem- 
 bers to-day as one of the funniest things he saw 
 as a boy the peroration which a florid preacher 
 made in his father's pulpit. The visitor had risen 
 rather rapidly to extreme heights of eloquence, 
 and, trembling on the dizzy cliffs, having exhaust- 
 ed all the superlatives of the language and all the 
 figures of speech within his knowledge — and 
 his voice as well — he achieved his climax by 
 means of a whistle and a spiral upward move- 
 ment of his forefinger, as indication of the course 
 
BOYHOOD IN GEORGIA 27 
 
 of a skyrocket. Thus the imagination could 
 follow whither voice and rational thought could 
 no further proceed. 
 
 The city of Augusta in the decade 1860-70 
 was a community of about 15,000 souls. It was 
 not as distinctively southern a city as might be 
 imagined, being then a place of rolling mills, 
 furnaces, railroad shops, where the cotton trade 
 also flourished, and cotton spinning mills were 
 busy. 
 
 The First Presbyterian Church stood, as it 
 stands to-day, in the middle of a lot occupying 
 an entire square on Telfair Street. (To-day, 
 the Telfair Sunday-school building has been 
 built by the side of the old church.) The church 
 was, and is, a dignified and even imposing edifice. 
 It was, and is, surrounded by a beautiful grove. 
 The congregation was the most influential, in 
 point of numbers and wealth, in the city. The 
 sewing circle was a social factor among the ladies 
 of Augusta. The Sunday-school, which then 
 met in a building at the corner of Ellis and Mc- 
 intosh Streets, was a large one. Its super- 
 
28 WOODROW ^\7LS0X 
 
 intendent became the Rev. Mr. ^Yilson's brother- 
 in-law; he was Mr. James W. Bones. 
 
 Diagonally across from the church was the 
 parsonage — a two-stor\% brick building, rather 
 a mansion in proportions, surrounded by stable, 
 outbuildings, and wall, all of red brick. 
 
 Tommie Wilson's earhest recollected impres- 
 sion had to do with the breaking out of the Civil 
 War. On a certain day in November, 1860, the 
 httle boy, playing on the gate before his father's 
 house, saw two men meet on the sidewalk and 
 heard one of them cr^': '* Lincoln is elected, 
 and there'll be war I"' This is the earliest rec- 
 ollection of Woodrow Wilson. Something in 
 the shrill tone of the speaker struck for the first 
 time a chord of lasting memory'. 
 
 Yet Woodrow Wilson remembers little, almost 
 nothing, of the war. Augusta was on an island 
 around which flowed the current of the conflict. 
 It was never occupied by Federal troops until 
 reconstruction days. Xo refugees ever fled to it. 
 The man does remember that the boy saw a 
 troop of men in ever\' sort of garb, mounted on 
 every sort of horse, ride past the house one day 
 
BOYHOOD IN GEORGIA 29 
 
 on their way to join the Confederate Army. 
 They were not a terrifying or glorious spectacle. 
 The boy cried after them in a slang exclamation 
 of the day: " Go get your mule ! " 
 
 He does remember the scarcity of the food 
 supply that came on as the war progressed. Not 
 that there was not enough food, but it was greatly 
 restricted in variety. The restriction was not 
 always unhappy, for it encouraged the ingenuity 
 of housekeepers and taught them the edible 
 quality of some things heretofore scorned. The 
 delicious taste of the soup made from the cow- 
 peas, previously fed only to the cattle, lingers 
 to this day in the mouth of the little boy who 
 tasted it. 
 
 Once when rumors came into the city of an 
 approaching army (Sherman was threatening 
 Augusta), a company of gentlemen armed them- 
 selves and marched valiantly out of town in the 
 direction of the oncoming host. They lay all 
 night on their arms in the woods and probably 
 had a very enjoyable picnic of it, while their 
 wives and families were waiting anxiously at 
 home for news. The son of the Presbyterian 
 
30 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 pastor remembers the anxiety, the prayers, the 
 unextinguished lamp in the parsonage all night. 
 The brave defenders of their homes and firesides 
 returned unensanguined ; the army never came. 
 
 Wilson remembers a little pile of plug tobacco 
 boxes of thick wood, tightly clamped with tin, 
 reposing in a corner of the attic, growing in size 
 from time to time. These were days when 
 careful stewards were putting all their spare 
 resources into cash or the equivalent of cash for 
 savings, and the funds of not a few were turned 
 into plug tobacco, that being an asset easily 
 convertible into money. The parson, too, had 
 his little horde of gold. 
 
 There was another war event that made its 
 impression upon the boy: In the summer of 
 '65 he saw Jefferson Davis ride by, under guard, 
 on his way to Fortress Monroe. 
 
 After '65, Doctor W^ilson's church was occu- 
 pied temporarily by Federal soldiers. How- 
 ever, such hardships as the city of Augusta 
 suffered through the war were nothing compared 
 with those endured in most parts of the South. 
 It is to this fact that is to be attributed the small 
 
BOYHOOD IN GEORGIA 31 
 
 part in Woodrow Wilson's education played by 
 the passions of the great conflict. He was only 
 nine years old when the war ended. He was, 
 too, apparently, a boy who somewhat tardily 
 developed strong convictions. In short, he was 
 a real boy while he was a boy, more concerned 
 in the games of his crowd than in the principles 
 of a war of which they saw little. 
 
 The Wilson boy was, his companions say, an 
 active little fellow. It was a peculiarity that 
 he was always running; he seemed incapable of 
 proceeding from point to point otherwise. He 
 can scarcely be said to have walked until he was 
 fourteen or fifteen years old. 
 
 One of the thrilling moments of the boy's early 
 life was the day and evening when the first street 
 car came down the streets of Augusta. The 
 cars were of the bobtail variety with a box for 
 nickels up in front. At first, for the boys, the 
 chief use and purpose of this new wonder was 
 the manufacture of scissors out of crossed pins 
 laid on the track. By night — the electric 
 light had not then turned night into day — the 
 
32 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 glimmering red, purple, and green lights carried 
 by the cars afforded endless pleasure as they 
 approached and receded. The boys, too, made 
 friends with the drivers and went along with 
 them on their trips, being allowed sometimes to 
 work the brakes and to turn the switches. 
 
 A little later Tom learned the delight of the 
 saddle. Doctor Wilson kept a big black 
 buggy horse, which Tommy used to ride — 
 "conservatively," says his old playmate. Pleas- 
 ant A. Stovall, now president and editor of the 
 Savannah Press and one of the leading men of 
 the state. Pleasant Stovall was prone to get 
 many a tumble as the two lads rode through the 
 streets and suburbs of Augusta, and used to 
 wonder how his canny playmate got none. 
 
 The stable or barn and the lot enclosed by the 
 parsonage offices were a favorite resort for all 
 the boys of the neighborhood, among whom 
 W^ilson was a natural leader. He and Pleasant 
 Stovall organized a club among the lads and 
 called it the "Lightfoot Club." The chief 
 activities of this fellowship seem to have been 
 the playing of baseball with other nines of town 
 
BOYHOOD IN GEORGIA 33 
 
 boys and the holding of meetings characterized 
 by much nicety of parhamentary procedure. 
 Every one of the Httle chaps knew perfectly well 
 just what the ''previous question" was; knew 
 that only two amendments to a resolution could 
 be offered; that these were to be voted on in 
 reverse order, and all the rest of it. The chief 
 ornament of the clubroom was a highly colored 
 presentation of his Satanic Majesty, originally 
 an advertisement from a brand of deviled ham. 
 The "Lightfoots" practised and played occa- 
 sional match games in the grounds of the Acad- 
 emy of Richmond County, on Telfair Street, 
 just below the church. 
 
 The city of Augusta, founded by Oglethorpe, 
 was a pleasant, even beautiful place, with its 
 broad, well-shaded streets — one of them a 
 boulevard on which stands a monument to 
 Georgia's Signers of the Declaration — but 
 rather wanting in bold or picturesque features. 
 The Savannah River at that point is broad, the 
 bank is barren, and the current heavy with red 
 clay. As romantic a spot as the city possessed 
 was the grove in which the church stood — a 
 
34 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 place of solemn shade and mysterious whisper- 
 ings, often the resort of the dreaming boy. 
 
 In the neighborhood of the town, at the point 
 now called Summerville, was a delightful sub- 
 urban spot, then known merely as the "Sand 
 Hills," where Wilson's uncle, James Bones, who 
 had married Marion Woodrow, Woodrow Wil- 
 son's aunt, had a country house. Wilson and 
 Pleasant St o vail used to ride out to the "Sand 
 Hills" on horseback and spend a great deal of 
 their time in the pleasant country. Mrs. W^ilson 
 frequently spent a summer in the North, and 
 when she was away from home the boy went out 
 to live with his aunt in the Sand Hills. 
 
 The daughter of the house, Jessie Woodrow 
 Bones (she is now Mrs. A. T. H. Brower of 
 Chicago), was a great tomboy and idolized her 
 cousin, and the two spent many a long happy 
 summer day at play in the woods. Long before 
 she knew a letter, he had filled her mind and 
 imagination with the "Leather Stocking Tales," 
 and what he read to her or told her in the twi- 
 light on the veranda they acted out in their play 
 next day. Casting aside all the encumbrances 
 
BOYHOOD IN GEORGIA 35 
 
 of civilization except that which conservative 
 authority in the shape of the aunt and mother 
 required, they stained their faces, arms, and legs 
 with pokeberry juice and, with head-dresses of 
 feathers and armed with bows and arrows, crept 
 out of the house and stationed themselves by the 
 side of a lonely road leading from Augusta to a 
 negro settlement in the piney woods. Here 
 they would lie in wait until chance brought them 
 their victims in the shape of little darkies on their 
 way to town with bundles of lightwood on their 
 heads. Then, with blood-curdling war-whoops, 
 they would dash out upon the unsuspecting prey, 
 brandishing wooden tomahawks in frightful 
 fashion. The pair of youthful savages never 
 made any captives and had to console themselves 
 by remembering that kinky wool would not 
 make attractive scalps to hang at their belts. 
 When no victims were forthcoming, little Jessie 
 had to impersonate the hated white man, and 
 she was invariably caught, made to run the 
 gauntlet, scalped, and burned at the stake by 
 the bloodthirsty red-man. 
 
 On other occasions, the little girl had to enact 
 
36 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 the part of various kinds of game. Once she 
 was supposed to be a squirrel in the top of a tree. 
 So good a marksman was her cousin that she was 
 hit by an arrow and came tumbhng to the ground 
 at his feet. The terrified Httle hunter carried 
 her hmp body into the house with a conscience 
 torn as it probably never has been since, crying : 
 ''I am a murderer. It wasn't an accident. I 
 killed her." Young bones are supple, and the 
 little girl had happily sustained no injury. 
 
 Mr. Bones's house stood next to the United 
 States Arsenal, which, after the close of the war, 
 was occupied by the Federal troops. Tommy 
 and Jessie never tired of going to the guard- 
 house, at the entrance to the arsenal grounds, to 
 look at the soldiers and talk with them. One 
 day, however, Jessie's mother explained to her 
 that those friends of theirs were Yankees and 
 had fought against the South. It was a great 
 blow to the couple, and they often discussed the 
 feasibility of converting the Yankees into Pres- 
 byterians — all good people being Presbyterians 
 and all wicked ones Yankees. 
 
 Tom Wilson, for one reason or another, was not 
 
BOYHOOD IN GEORGIA 37 
 
 taught his letters until long past the date at which 
 most youngsters have learned to read. It may 
 have been that his mother, who had been stren- 
 uously taught in her young years in England and 
 who used in later life to speak feelingly of the 
 folly of having to learn Latin in one's sixth year, 
 had ideas of her own about forcing the young 
 intellect. It may have been his father, who was 
 a man of very great positiveness and originality 
 of opinion, was averse to having his son get his 
 first glimpses into the world of knowledge other- 
 wise than through himself. But, however it 
 came about, Tom Wilson was not taught his 
 alphabet until he was nine years old. There was 
 a great deal of reading aloud in the family, not 
 only his father and mother, but his two sisters 
 frequently reading him choice extracts from 
 standard books. Sir Walter Scott and Dickens 
 were made familiar to the lad in this way: he 
 remembers still the pleasure which his father 
 showed in '* Pickwick," reading the instalments 
 aloud, with Mrs. Wilson as the special audience, 
 though even at the early age of eight the boy re- 
 members that he appreciated much of the humor 
 
38 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 of the young author — just as Dickens himself 
 asserted that at the same age he appreciated the 
 humor of some of the situations which he later 
 recorded in ''Pickwick Papers." 
 
 The lad attended the best schools Augusta 
 offered. Public schools were either non-existent 
 or so poor as to be worthless, so the boy was put 
 at an institution kept by Prof. Joseph T. Derry, 
 with a habitation over the post-office on Jackson 
 Street. Its pupils played in the old "burnt lot" 
 near the bell tower. Later, Professor Derry 
 moved his school to a building on the river bank 
 next to some cotton warehouses. Here the boys 
 made the warehouses their playgrounds, explor- 
 ing and playing hide-and-seek among the cotton 
 bales. It is still a recollection that the young- 
 sters of that day, when bent upon some boyish 
 prank, found that a pad gathered from the 
 cotton bales was an effective protection from 
 deserved punishment. 
 
 Joseph Rucker Lamar, now an Associate 
 Justice of the Supreme Court of the United 
 States, was a pupil of Professor Derry at about 
 the same time. Joe Lamar was the son of 
 
BOYHOOD IN GEORGIA 39 
 
 another minister in the city — the Rev. James 
 S. Lamar, pastor of the Christian Church, who 
 hved in a house on Mcintosh Street next to the 
 Wilsons. There were two Lamar boys, Joe and 
 Phil, and they were rather given to squabbling. 
 Joe was the bigger, but Phil was an active little 
 chap, and when Joe was administering a "lick- 
 ing," he would grow so enraged that his contor- 
 tions provoked Joe to such laughter that he 
 would fall down and helplessly allow the smaller 
 i)oy to administer the drubbing. Other school- 
 mates of Tom Wilson were William A. Keener, 
 sometime professor of law at Harvard and later 
 dean of the Columbia University Law School. 
 Still another was William Doughty, now a 
 physician of Augusta. 
 
 Prof. John T. Derry, much beloved of all his 
 pupils, had returned home from four years in 
 the Confederate Army to teach. He is the 
 author of several books and is now in the Agri- 
 cultural Department of the State of Georgia. 
 Mr. Derry says that Tom Wilson was a quiet, 
 studious boy, and he speaks with the greatest 
 delight of the Augusta days. "Thirty -five 
 
40 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 years," he says, "I spent in teaching, fourteen 
 instructing boys in Augusta, seventeen as 
 professor of languages and history in Wesleyan 
 Female College at Macon, Ga., and four years 
 teaching boys and girls in Atlanta. Among my 
 pupils I can count a governor (Woodrow Wil- 
 son); a justice of the United States Supreme 
 Court (Joseph Lamar) ; Congressmen; legislators, 
 sons, daughters, and wives of generals, governors, 
 senators, and representatives. But no part of 
 my career as a teacher gives me more pleasure 
 than the memory of the select classical school on 
 the banks of the Savannah at Augusta, Ga." 
 
 But young Wilson's real instructor during the 
 Augusta days was his father. Long before the 
 age at which boys are imbibing knowledge from 
 books he was already receiving from the lips of 
 his father an education more varied, more prac- 
 tical and sound than any that could otherwise 
 have come to him. 
 
 Father and son were constant companions, 
 but it was Sunday afternoons that the elder 
 devoted particularly to his son's training. Then, 
 sitting on the floor, or rather reclining there 
 
BOYHOOD IN GEORGIA 41 
 
 against an inverted chair, the gifted parson 
 poured out into the ears of the spellbound lad 
 all the stores of his experience, learning, and 
 thought. He was a man of wide information on 
 the affairs of the world, a judge of good literature, 
 a master of the queen of the sciences, theology, 
 and, withal, a man of much imaginative power 
 — mingling with the warp of sound and well- 
 founded thought the woof of picturesque fancy. 
 Above all, the elder Wilson had a clean-working 
 mind. He had a way of recognizing facts, and 
 the processes of his thought dealt with them in 
 the light of reason. If the boy had learned 
 nothing else, he would have been happy indeed 
 to have been guided from the beginning into the 
 ways of clear, cold thinking. 
 
 And Doctor Wilson was a master of the Eng- 
 lish language. He believed that nobody had a 
 thought until he could put it quickly and def- 
 initely into words. This he did himself, and 
 this he taught his son to do. So that when 
 the boy came to learn the written symbols in 
 which speech is set down he was learning only 
 a method of recording and transmitting a Ian- 
 
42 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 guage which he already was well able to 
 handle. 
 
 On Mondays the father would almost without 
 exception take his son out with him on some 
 excursion in the city or neighboring country. 
 On a Monday the two would visit the machine 
 shops; Tom would be shown furnaces, boilers, 
 machinery; taught to follow the release of power 
 from the coal to the completion of its work in 
 a finished product of steel or of cotton. He re- 
 members to this day the impression made upon 
 him then by the gigantic engines, the roar of 
 furnaces, or the darting up of sheets of flame; 
 he remembers great forges presided over by 
 sooty -faced imps. In this fashion, by a contin- 
 ual round of visits of inspection in which the 
 sight of visible things and visible processes was 
 the text of running lectures on the principles 
 of nature, chemistry, physics, and of the or- 
 ganization of human society, the boy learned 
 what he would have had great diflSculty in 
 learning from books alone. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 OFF TO COLLEGE 
 
 THE Wilsons moved from Augusta to 
 Columbia, S. C, in the autumn of 1870, 
 the Rev. Dr. Wilson resigning his pas- 
 torate in order to become a professor in the 
 Southern Presbyterian Theological Seminary. 
 His chair was that of pastoral and evangelistic 
 theology. He retained it four years. 
 
 Columbia is a statutory — an artificial — city, 
 its location having been determined by the 
 desire of South Carolina to have a capital in the 
 exact centre of the state. Neither city nor sur- 
 rounding country offered the opening mind of the 
 boy much of suggestion or inspiration. 
 
 Tom appears to have retreated here into the 
 more exciting scenes of an imaginative life. He 
 forsook in mind the streets of the commonplace 
 town and the dreary banks of the Congaree, and 
 adventured forth in search of exploits in far-off 
 
 43 
 
44 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 lands. All boys do something of the sort, but 
 there can be no doubt that, in the case of this 
 young dreamer, the exercise of imagination was 
 constant and vivid and that during a great part 
 of his days he lived, so far as his mind was con- 
 cerned, in one or another of the various char- 
 acters which he had invented and assumed. 
 
 Thus for many months he was an Admiral 
 of the Navy, and in that character wrote out 
 daily reports to the Navy Department. His 
 main achievement in this capacity was the dis- 
 covery and destruction of a nest of pirates in 
 the Southern Pacific Ocean. It appears that 
 the Government, along with all the people of the 
 country, had been terrified by the mysterious 
 disappearance of ships setting sail from or ex- 
 pected at our Western ports. Vessels would set 
 out with their precious freight, never to be heard 
 from again, swallowed up in the bosom of an 
 ocean on which no known war raged, no known 
 storms swept. Admiral Wilson was ordered to 
 investigate with his fleet. After an eventful 
 cruise they overtook, one night, a piratical look- 
 ing craft with black hull and rakish rig. Again 
 
OFF TO COLLEGE 45 
 
 and again the chase eluded the Admiral. Finally 
 the pursuit led the fleet to the neighborhood of 
 an island uncharted and hitherto unknown. 
 Circumnavigation seemed to prove it bare and 
 uninhabited, with no visible harbor. There was, 
 however, a narrow inlet which seemed to end at 
 an abrupt wall of rock a few fathoms inland. 
 Something, however, finally led the Admiral to 
 send a boat into this inlet — and it was dis- 
 covered that it was the cunningly contrived 
 entrance to a spacious bay, the island being 
 really a sort of atoll. Here lay the ships of the 
 outlawed enemy and the dismantled hulls of 
 many of their victims. And it may be believed 
 that the brave American tars, under the leader- 
 ship of the redoubtable Admiral, played a truly 
 heroic part in the destruction of the pirates and 
 the succor of such of their victims as survived. 
 
 These are two things worth noting about this 
 story: First, the length of time — several 
 months — in which the boy lived the greater 
 part of his waking hours in the character which 
 he had invented; and, second, the verisimilitude 
 with which the details relating to the great 
 
46 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 adventure were set forth in the daily "reports." 
 While the climax of the story is, of course, extrav- 
 agantly romantic, the boy's written account of 
 the details of day's after day's events consists of 
 the plainest and most realistic statement of 
 commonplace things that would actually have 
 happened. In reading this singular manuscript, 
 one thinks of Defoe and the art with which that 
 master story-teller built up his extraordinary 
 effects out of a mass of commonplace circum- 
 stances. 
 
 About this time Woodrow was reading 
 Cooper's sea tales and Marry at 's yarns, and, 
 though he had never seen a ship in his life — 
 never even seen the ocean — he knew every 
 particular of every class or type of sailing ship, 
 the name, place, and use of every spar, sheet, 
 and shroud. 
 
 At Columbia, Woodrow — as he began now 
 to be commonly called — attended the school 
 kept by Mr. Charles Heyward Barnwell. But 
 his real education continued to be conducted by 
 his father. 
 
 He was now approaching the age for college. 
 
OFF TO COLLEGE 47 
 
 In spite of his late start at books, he had rapidly 
 qualified in the ordinary preparatory studies, 
 and at seventeen — in the autumn of 1873 — 
 he was sent off to college. 
 
 Davidson College, in famous Mecklenburg 
 County, N. C, is a prosperous institution now, 
 and forty years ago was a staunch school. The 
 fact that the Rev. Dr. Wilson had been ap- 
 proached in connection with its presidency may 
 have had something to do with its choice for 
 Woodrow, but it was believed to be (and with 
 reason) an excellent college of stout Presbyterian 
 proclivities and thorough teaching. Though 
 it stood, then, in the midst of an unkempt field, 
 the central building was a fabric of considerable 
 nobility, with a rotunda and dome and two side 
 wings. A long corridor ran through the length 
 of the building — much to the detriment of dis- 
 cipline, it is remembered. The central building 
 contained a chapel and recitation rooms, while 
 the wings were dormitories. 
 
 Living was rather primitive; the boys kept 
 their own rooms, filled their own lamps — for 
 they had only kerosene — cut up and brought 
 
48 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 in the wood for their own fires, and carried in 
 water from the pump outside. Wilson's room 
 was on the ground floor, luckily; it was rather a 
 job to carry arm-loads of wood to remote rooms 
 on the upper floors. There still lingers at 
 Davidson the tradition that Tom W^ilson estab- 
 lished a record in the minimum time necessary 
 to dress, cross the campus, and be in his seat 
 when the before-breakfast chapel bell stopped 
 ringing. His room-mate was a young Irishman, 
 W^illiam Lecky by name, who was killed shortly 
 after leaving college. 
 
 When W^ilson was there, Davidson was a very 
 small village, only having the college buildings, 
 the home of the faculty, one general store, and 
 two small grocery stores, where the boys bought 
 their cigars and tobacco, and canned oysters, 
 sardines, cheese, and crackers for their nightly 
 feasts. Squire Allison, who was also the post- 
 master, and John Scofield were the owners of 
 these little groceries, and were famous characters 
 in the lives of the boys. 
 
 Instruction at Davidson was rather better 
 than was common at small colles^es in thosc^ 
 
OFF TO COLLEGE 49 
 
 days. The University of North CaroHna had 
 closed on account of the war, as had some of the 
 other leading colleges in the South, and David- 
 son reaped the benefit of having such professors 
 as Dr. Charles Phillips and Col. William Martin 
 from the State University, Blake and Anderson 
 from South Carolina, Richardson from Missis- 
 sippi, and Latimer from Virginia, all of them 
 excellent teachers in their respective lines. Still, 
 it can hardly be said that Wilson received much 
 intellectual impulse here, although he probably 
 added something to his stock of knowledge. His 
 college-mates included a score or more who 
 afterward made reputations in the world, per- 
 haps the most eminent being R. B. Glenn, who 
 became Governor of North Carolina. His class- 
 mates remember nothing unusual about Wilson 
 when at Davidson College. They say he had 
 an open, engaging face, pleasant manners, and 
 was very generally liked. They agree that he 
 was not very much interested in games, which 
 then consisted of baseball and "shinny." How- 
 ever, he played baseball for a while on the col- 
 lege nine and had the pleasure of hearing the 
 
50 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 captain say: "Wilson, you would make a 
 dandy player if you were not so damn lazy." 
 He was a great walker and at times seemed to 
 like to be alone, walking the country about ap- 
 parently wrapped in thought. Still he was, as 
 a rule, a very social animal, and a great talker 
 in congenial company. When the fellows re- 
 paired to his room they would generally find him 
 curled up on the bed with a book in his hand, 
 reading. He joined one of the literary societies, 
 the *'Eumenean." 
 
 Once a year, in February, a holiday was given 
 to every student on which he was to plant a 
 tree — so, whether Wilson did it to get the holi- 
 day, or because he wanted to do something use- 
 ful, he planted an elm on the campus at David- 
 son, and it stands there strong and upright to-day. 
 
 Early in the year, a small incident in class 
 fastened upon him a nickname. The rhetoric 
 class being engaged upon that well-known part 
 of Trench's ''English, Past and Present" which 
 sets forth (much after the manner of the Wamba 
 in the opening chapter in "Ivanhoe") how good 
 Saxon beasts take Norman names when they 
 
OFF TO COLLEGE 51 
 
 come to the table, the professor asked Wood- 
 row: "What is calves' meat when served at 
 table?" and received the hasty reply, "Mut- 
 ton!" Wilson was "Monsieur Mouton" for 
 the rest of the year. 
 
 Indeed, he did not finish the year, for he 
 fell ill just before the examinations came on, 
 and was taken to his home, now at Wilmington, 
 N. C, to the pastorate of the Presbyterian 
 Church, to which city Doctor Wilson had just 
 been called. 
 
 Woodrow remained in his father's house at 
 Wilmington throughout the year 1874-75. It 
 had been determined that he should not return 
 to Davidson, but should go to Princeton, and 
 he spent the year tutoring in Greek and a few 
 other studies which it was thought might be 
 necessary for entrance at the Northern uni- 
 versity. 
 
 In truth, there was a good deal of play done 
 that year, too. The boy had grown too fast, 
 and was hardly fit for the rigid schedule of col- 
 lege life. So he "took it easy" that year, in a 
 city, the first he had ever lived in that possessed 
 
52 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 any particular local charm. Wilmington was 
 an old and historic place. It was a seaport; for 
 the first time, W^oodrow saw a ship and caught 
 the smell of the sea. Foreign shipping floated 
 in the noble river or lay at the docks. Wil- 
 mington was a great depot for naval stores; its 
 lower streets were redolent of life on the deep. 
 Talk was still full of the adventures of the block- 
 ade-runners of the war lately ended, W^ilmington 
 having been a favorite port of the desperate men 
 and swift ships that then made so many gallant 
 chapters of sea history. What imaginative 
 youth from the interior but would have haunted 
 the docks and made an occasional trip down to 
 the Cape, to return with the pilot of an outgoing 
 ship. 
 
 For the first time, here, too, the young man 
 began to take part in the social life which is so 
 important an element of existence in the South. 
 He was really too young for the associations into 
 which he was now thrown, Dr. and Mrs. Wilson 
 immediately achieving devoted popularity, the 
 parsonage swiftly becoming a social rendezvous 
 of the city. It was a city of gentlemen of good 
 
OFF TO COLLEGE 53 
 
 company and women who would have been 
 esteemed briUiant the world over. 
 
 It was a chap very different from the raw 
 youth of Davidson who, one day in September, 
 1875, took the ''Washington and Weldon" train 
 for the North to enter Princeton College. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 A STUDENT AT PRINCETON 
 
 WHEN Woodrow Wilson got off the train 
 at the httle station in Princeton, early 
 in September, 1875, one of 134 new- 
 comers, he found himself in a charming old 
 town of maples, elms, and catalpas, among which 
 stood the college buildings, dating, one of them, 
 back to 1756. Almost within view of the me- 
 tropohs of the hemisphere, Princeton, three 
 miles from a railway main line, was, as it 
 is still, uniquely sequestered, the noise of the 
 city's activities reaching it as a dim echo — as 
 the murmur of waves that beat on shores scarcely 
 aware of the winds that raised them. 
 
 But it was very far from being the Princeton 
 of to-day. It was still the "College of New 
 Jersey," commonly known as '* Princeton Col- 
 lege." The college buildings numbered only 
 sixteen; Witherspoon Hall was just about to be 
 
 54 
 
A STUDENT AT PRINCETON 55 
 
 begun. The faculty consisted of twenty-seven 
 professors and instructors, seven of them Pres- 
 byterian ministers. It can scarcely be said to 
 have contained any great teachers, but there 
 were in it several men of considerable force of 
 personality — the president. Dr. James McCosh; 
 Professors Charles A. Young, the astronomer; 
 Cyrus Brackett, John T. Duffield, WilHam A. 
 Packard, a cultured Latinist; Arnold Guyot, 
 the celebrated geologist and geographer. Presi- 
 dent McCosh was in his prime, but Professor 
 Guyot was on the verge of retirement. Prince- 
 ton in 1875 was a good old-fashioned college 
 where a man might learn his physics, his logic, 
 his moral science, mathematics, "belles lettres," 
 astronomy, go on with his Latin and Greek, and 
 study the harmony of science and revealed re- 
 ligion as well as anywhere. 
 
 The place, full of traditions of the Revolu- 
 tionary War, had been a favorite resort of 
 Southern students up to 1861. The first war 
 had battered the front of Old Nassau Hall, and 
 the second had done more substantial, if less 
 picturesque, damage in withdrawing from the 
 
56 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 institution a large part of its Southern patron- 
 age — the South could ill afford to send its young 
 men far away to college now. This year, in- 
 deed, there came twenty men from the Southern 
 States. It is remembered that some of these 
 youths needed reconstruction; one of them 
 needed it badly: Peter J. Hamilton of Alabama 
 later developed into a man whose career is a 
 credit to his native state as well as to his college, 
 but he came up to Princeton a rare ''fire-eater." 
 In the campaign year of 1876, the last in which 
 ''the bloody shirt" was flagrantly waved, 
 Hamilton demonstrated his sentiments by going 
 out into the street rather than pass underneath 
 a national flag suspended over the sidewalk. 
 The action got noised about, and Hamilton was 
 waited on at night by a committee of students, 
 who pulled him out of bed, made him do rev- 
 erence to the emblem he had disdained, and, 
 after sundry hazing stunts, wrapped him in the 
 flag and put him back to bed. 
 
 Wilson is remembered in no such way. He 
 was known as a Democrat of stout opinions from 
 the day he first opened his mouth on the campus. 
 
A STUDENT AT PRINCETON 57 
 
 but no recollection remains of his having dis- 
 played any sectional passion. A classmate re- 
 members, however, that on one occasion when a 
 group of fellows were talking of the misfortunes 
 that follow in the wake of war, Wilson, who was 
 in the group, cried out, ''You know nothing 
 whatever about it!" and with face as white as a 
 sheet of paper abruptly left the company. 
 Nevertheless, one of his nearest friends of that 
 day remarks that it was only years after, as he 
 was reading a tribute to General Lee in the 
 "History of the American People," that he first 
 realized the Southern origin of his old classmate. 
 All testimony goes to indicate that "Tom" 
 Wilson immediately took his place as a leader in 
 the class. He appeared as a young fellow of 
 great maturity of character, blended with un- 
 usual freshness of interest in all things pertain- 
 ing to college life. He had the manners of a 
 young aristocrat. His speech was cultured. 
 He soon won the reputation of already wide 
 reading and sound judgment. There is abun- 
 dant evidence that he was, from the start, a 
 marked figure among the men who now con- 
 
58 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 stitute the *' famous class of '79." There have 
 been more famous Princeton graduates than 
 these, but there has never been a class of so high 
 an average of ability. Robert Bridges, one of 
 the editors of Scribner's Magazine; the Rev. Dr. 
 A. S. Halsey, secretary of the Presbyterian Board 
 of Foreign Missions; Charles A. Talcott, M. C; 
 Mahlon Pitney, Justice of the Supreme Court of 
 the United States; Robert H. McCarter, ex- At- 
 torney-General of New Jersey; Edward W. Shel- 
 don, president of the United States Trust Com- 
 pany; Col. Edwin A. Stevens of New Jersey; 
 Judge Robert R. Henderson of Maryland are only 
 typical members of a class of unusual mental 
 capacity. Among such men, Wilson from the 
 start ranked high. 
 
 Not as a student perhaps. He was never a 
 bright particular star in examinations. Prince- 
 ton graduated as "honor men" such students as 
 had maintained throughout their four years' 
 course an average of 90 per cent. No less than 
 forty-two out of the 122 graduates of '79 were 
 "honor men." Wilson barely got in among 
 them; he ranked forty-first in the class. 
 
A STUDENT AT PRINCETON 59 
 
 The fact is that this son of clergymen and 
 editors hadn't come to school to pass through a 
 standardized curriculum and fill his head with 
 the knowledge prescribed in a college catalogue. 
 He had come to prepare himself for a particular 
 career — and before he had been at Princeton 
 three months he had finally determined on what 
 that career should be. 
 
 The class historian, Harold ("Pete") Godwin, 
 celebrating the advent in Princeton of the 
 members of the class that graduated in '79, de- 
 clares that on arrival "Tommy Wilson rushed 
 to the library and took out Kant's 'Critique of 
 Pure Reason.'" 
 
 To the library Tommy Wilson unquestionably 
 did rush. But not to read of pure reason; if 
 ever there were a student who demanded facts, 
 concrete subjects, applied reason, it was this 
 same Wilson, even in his early college days. 
 
 The truth is that, prowling in the alcoves of 
 the Chancellor Green Library — new then — 
 one day early in the term, the boy stopped at the 
 head of the south stairs, where the bound mag- 
 azines were kept, and his hand fell upon a file 
 
60 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 of the Gentleman's Magazine, that ancient and 
 respectable repository of EngHsh hterature 
 which Dr. Samuel Johnson had helped to start, 
 away back in the middle of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury, with his reports of parliamentary debates. 
 When Johnson lay on his death-bed, refusing to 
 take "inebriating substance" and having the 
 church service read to him daily, he declared 
 that his only compunction was those parliamen- 
 tary reports. For, of course, they were "fakes" 
 ingeniously composed with the aid of William 
 Guthrie, a Scotsman, who had a way of getting 
 into the House. Nevertheless, the eaves- 
 dropper's meagre recollections amplified into 
 lengthy speeches full of sonorous generalities 
 in the true Johnsonian style (the redactor taking 
 mighty good care "that the WTiig dogs should 
 get the worst of it") lay at the foundation of 
 the prosperity of the Gentleman's Magazine, 
 
 Now it happened that in the '70 's last, the 
 editor of the day (himself not an unworthy suc- 
 cessor of Edward Cave), feeling round for an 
 attractive feature, hit upon the idea of resum- 
 ing the parliamentary reports. Accordingly, 
 
A STUDENT AT PRINCETON Gl 
 
 there began in the number for January, 1874, a 
 series of articles entitled "Men and Manner in 
 Parhament" by ''The Member for the Chiltern 
 Hundreds" — the signature being an allusion to 
 a parliamentary practice which need not be ex- 
 plained to those familiar with English affairs. 
 The author was introduced by the editor "with 
 particular pride and satisfaction." 
 
 "He is, I think, a not altogether unworthy 
 successor, after a long interval, of one who gave 
 to the readers of this periodical the at first un- 
 privileged and now historical narratives of the 
 proceedings of Parliament some hundred and 
 thirty years ago." 
 
 Thomas Woodrow Wilson happened to pick 
 up this volume of the Gentleman's Magazine and 
 to turn to the pages occupied by "Men and 
 Manner in Parliament" — and from that mo- 
 ment his life-plan was fixed. 
 
 It was an era of brilliant parliamentary his- 
 tory. There were giants in those days: John 
 Bright, Disraeli, Gladstone, Earl Granville, 
 Vernon Harcourt — the personnel of the House 
 of Commons had never been more picturesque. 
 
62 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 the atmosphere more electrical. The "Member 
 for the Chiltern Hundreds," in intimate daily 
 familiarity with the parliamentary scene and its 
 actors, wrote in a style of delicious charm — the 
 leisurely style of good-humored banter and 
 elegant trifling, his chatter nevertheless afford- 
 ing withal a picture of unsurpassable vividness, 
 vivacity, and verity. He made to live before the 
 eye the figure of Bright, coming into the House 
 with his chiseled and polished witticisms in his 
 pocket, ready for setting in the framework of a 
 speech; of Gladstone, a marvel of verbal resource- 
 fulness, bewildering when (^s usual) he w^ished 
 to bewilder, clarifying and convincing when the 
 time for clear statement had come; of Disraeli, 
 with his poisoned sentences spoken to the ac- 
 companiment of bodily jerks (supposed to be 
 gestures) "graceful as the waddling of a duck 
 across a stubble field." He drew unforgettable 
 pictures of Mr. Lowe, Sir James Elphinston, 
 "the bo'sun," Mr. Scoonfield, with his anecdotes 
 — of scores of others, their voices, attitudes, 
 their very collars. Safe behind his anonymity, 
 there was no personality, no measure, no method 
 
A STUDENT AT PRINCETON 63 
 
 upon which ''the Member for the Chiltern 
 Hundreds" hesitated to turn his keen and dis- 
 cerning eye. 
 
 It will be news to Mr. Wilson that the Gentle- 
 man's Magazine contributor was Henry W. Lucy, 
 who later created for Punch the character of 
 "Toby, M. P.," and was knighted by King 
 Edward. It should be said, however, that this 
 inimitable parliamentary reporter has never 
 since quite equaled his early performance as the 
 anonymous successor of Doctor Johnson. 
 
 Nothing could have better served to awaken 
 in a young reader a sense of the picturesqueness 
 and dramatic interest of politics, and Mr. Wilson 
 has said to the writer of this biography that no 
 one circumstance did more to make public life 
 the purpose of his existence, nor more to deter- 
 mine the first cast of his political ideas. The 
 young man turned back to the first volume of 
 the Gentleman's Magazine, Then, going to 
 other sources, he took up in earnest the study of 
 English political history. He became saturated 
 with the spirit of the life and practices of the 
 British Parliament; the excitements of political 
 
64 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 life enchanted him; the methods of high debate 
 impressed themselves upon him, and, of course, 
 the history of England for many years past 
 became as famihar to him as that of his own 
 country. 
 
 The Lucy articles could not fail to reveal that 
 the business of the British Empire was done in 
 public by men who, through their talents, had 
 risen to leadership which they had to maintain 
 in daily tournaments before the whole world. 
 Wilson was almost immediately led to contrast 
 the British system of government with that of 
 America, his conclusion being that the dramatic 
 and swiftly responsive English system was in- 
 finitely the better. 
 
 This subject — the methods of democratic 
 government — the comparative merits of open 
 parliamentary and private committee govern- 
 ment — became a theme around which Wilson's 
 mind continued to revolve for many years, as 
 we shall see. 
 
 The characteristic thing about Wilson's under- 
 graduate days at Princeton was that his work 
 was done in practical independence of the ordi- 
 
A STUDENT AT PRINCETON 65 
 
 nary college routine of instruction — at which 
 even in those days he was sometimes heard to 
 rail. His mind had now settled definitely upon 
 a public career — the impulse he had received 
 from the Gentleman's Magazine had been deci- 
 sive. His purpose in Princeton was henceforth 
 the clear and single one of preparing himself for 
 public life. Always he was reading, thinking, 
 and writing about government. He was in no 
 sense a "dig," and seemed to have no particular 
 ambition in the college studies, but he devoted 
 every energy to the furnishing and the training 
 of his mind as an authority on government, the 
 history of government, and leadership in public 
 life. He began to practise the elective system 
 ten years before Princeton did. He had an eye 
 keen for what he needed, and to its pursuit he 
 gave all his energies. There was nothing casual 
 nor accidental in his work. His study was bent 
 on government, the history of various attempts 
 in it, and the theory of it, and the lives of polit- 
 ical leaders. To this he added assiduous prac- 
 tice in writing and extemporaneous speaking; 
 the seeking for skill in expression and readiness 
 
66 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 in debate. He followed this course from the 
 very start and kept it up until the day he grad- 
 uated. His most intimate classmate, Robert 
 Bridges, says of him that his college career was 
 remarkable for the "confident selection" of his 
 work, and his "easy indifference" to all subjects 
 not directly in hne with his purpose. His busi- 
 ness in college apparently was to train his mind 
 to do what he wanted it to do — and what he 
 wanted it to do he knew. He had already made 
 himself proficient in stenography, finding it of 
 great value in making digests of what he read 
 and quotations which would otherwise have 
 occupied him long. 
 
 Princeton was not then remarkable in the 
 teaching of English; the head of the English 
 Department, Professor Murray, was himself a 
 clear writer and speaker, yet without special 
 grace of style. But the men trained themselves, 
 in literary societies. The body of the students 
 was divided into two "Halls," so-called secret 
 societies, but really debating clubs — the Ameri- 
 can Whig Society and the Cliosophic Society. 
 Wilson belonged to Whig Hall, an organization 
 
A STUDENT AT PRINCETON 67 
 
 whose constitution had been written by James 
 Madison. 
 
 Here the young man was in his glory. He 
 entered eagerly into its traditions and became 
 almost immediately one of its leading spirits. 
 To reading and writing day and night upon his 
 favorite themes he began to add practice in 
 elocution. One of his classmates troubled with 
 a weak throat, who was sent down to Potter's 
 woods to practise exercises, often saw Wilson 
 in another part of the woods declaiming from a 
 volume of Burke. On vacations he was known 
 to spend a good deal of time reading aloud and 
 declaiming in his father's church at Wilmington. 
 Another debating society organized by Wilson 
 himself, called the Liberal Debating Club, was 
 fashioned after the British Parliament, a group 
 of the members representing the government, 
 and being obliged to maintain the confidence of 
 the chamber or go out of power. 
 
 Wilson does not appear as a great prize- 
 winner. His record does not compare with that 
 of Elsing, Bridges, or Halsey. Elsing was the 
 first freshman speaker, the first sophomore 
 
68 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 orator, the first junior orator and winner of the 
 junior debate. However, Wilson did score as 
 second sophomore orator in the WTiig Hall 
 contest and was one of the literary men of the 
 class, an oration on Cobden and an essay on 
 Lord Chatham (the elder Pitt) being especially 
 recorded. Chatham, Burke, Brougham, and 
 Bagehot were his great favorites — Burke first 
 of all. From Brougham it may be conjectured 
 he acquired his taste for a finished peroration — 
 though the fancy never led him into the extrav- 
 agances of the Irish orator, who one day ended 
 a speech with an ecstatic prayer, for which he 
 fell on his knees — a posture from which his 
 friends dragged him in an unseemly struggle, 
 attributing his collapse to over-indulgence in 
 the port with which he was accustomed to prime 
 himself. Macaulay held the student's attention 
 for a while, but he soon became critical of the 
 historian's overloaded style. 
 
 Connected with the two big prizes of the 
 college are two stories which throw light upon 
 Wilson's character as a student. The English 
 Literary Prize of $125 his classmates thought 
 
A STUDENT AT PRINCETON 69 
 
 that Wilson might easily win; but when he 
 learned that to compete meant to spend time 
 studying Ben Jonson and two plays of Shakes- 
 peare, he refused to go into it, saying he had no 
 time to spare from the reading that interested 
 him. 
 
 The other big prize, that of the Lynde Debate, 
 had been founded the year of Wilson's entrance 
 to college, and he had undoubtedly looked for- 
 ward to winning it, throughout his course. The 
 Lynde was an extemporaneous discussion par- 
 ticipated in by three representatives from each 
 of the two Halls. The Halls' representatives 
 were thus chosen: a subject was proposed by a 
 committee and candidates were required to argue 
 on either side as was determined by lot. By 
 universal consent Wilson was now the star de- 
 bater of the Whig Society. He was quite in a 
 class by himself, and there was no doubt in any- 
 body's mind that he would represent the Hall 
 and win the prize. The subject for the pre- 
 liminary debate in Whig Hall was "Free-Trade 
 versus Protection." Wilson put his hand into 
 the hat and drew out a slip which required him 
 
70 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 to argue in favor of "Protection." He tore up 
 the slip and refused to debate. He was a con- 
 vinced and passionate free-trader, and nothing 
 under heaven, he swore, would induce him to 
 advance arguments in which he did not believe. 
 "Bob" Bridges became Whig Hall's representa- 
 tive — and lost to "Wood" Halsey, Clio's man 
 — who attributes his success to the fact that an 
 opponent who would have vanquished him was 
 oversensitive. 
 
 It will not be supposed that life was all work 
 even for this rather serious-minded youth. 
 
 Princeton was famous for the pranks of its 
 students. On one occasion, they had taken a 
 donkey to the cupola of Nassau Hall. Every 
 class considered itself disgraced unless it had 
 made way with the clapper of the college bell. 
 There was a cane-rush between freshmen and 
 sophomores. The '78 class wore the mortar- 
 board; the '79's did not. Wilson ridiculed 
 '78's head-gear. 
 
 Wilson lived first at the house of Mrs. Wright. 
 One of his classmates, "Bob" McCarter, who 
 also lived at Mrs. W^right's, tells of a certain 
 
A STUDENT AT PRINCETON 71 
 
 evening when the two were engaged in Wilson's 
 study in a quiet game of euchre, a forbidden 
 pastime in those days. On the table, as it hap- 
 pened, lay a Bible. A knock was heard at the 
 door; McCarter swiftly swept the cards out of 
 sight under the table and went to the door. 
 Before he opened it, he turned his head for a 
 moment, the thought flashing over him that the 
 conscientious Wilson might have put the cards 
 back in plain view on the table, but what he 
 saw was — Wilson reading the Bible. 
 
 It was the time of the great popularity of 
 "Pinafore " and the strains of '' My Little Butter- 
 cup," and "What! Never?" were all the go. 
 Doctor Greene of the Princeton Seminary pos- 
 sessed a deep, solemn voice. One day in 
 chapel he gave out unctuously the hymn con- 
 taining the well-known stanza: 
 
 That soul though all hell should endeavor to shake 
 I'll never, no never, no never forsake! 
 
 But the effect was somewhat spoiled by an ir- 
 reverent voice in the rear of the chapel : " What ! 
 never .f^" 
 
72 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 Fraternities were not permitted at Princeton, 
 but the college had plenty of organizations of 
 every possible variety and description — *' Cy- 
 clops," "The Potato Bugs," "The Princeton Gas 
 Company." Wilson belonged to none besides 
 the "Whig," his little debating circle, and an 
 eating club, whose members called themselves 
 "The Alligators." 
 
 When Witherspoon Hall was finished, Wilson 
 moved into it. His room was 7, west. At this 
 time it is recorded that he weighed 156 pounds 
 and stood five feet eleven. 
 
 While without particular inclination or ability 
 in athletics — and while back in '75-'79 athletics 
 did not play the part in college life that it now 
 plays — W^oodrow Wilson was a leader in the 
 encouragement of sports, and in '78-'79 was 
 president of the Athletic Committee, at another 
 time of the Baseball Association. 
 
 His classmates and schoolmates concur in 
 describing the college lad as a fellow of dignity, 
 yet perfectly democratic. The picture is that 
 of a youth of unusual mental and moral maturity 
 - — a well-poised fellow, never a roisterer, yet 
 
A STUDENT AT PRINCETON 73 
 
 always full of life and interested in everything 
 that was going on. He was popular — of that 
 there can be no doubt. The young man had a 
 certain charm of manner and sweetness of soul 
 that forbade anybody's disliking him, although 
 he was generally felt to be "a little above the 
 crowd." He never belonged to a clique. He 
 was a normal college boy, not a prig nor a "dig" 
 nor a *' grind," but a healthy, hearty, all-around 
 chap, interested in everything that was going 
 on, mingling with everybody — though cherish- 
 ing some particular friendships that have en- 
 dured. 
 
 The years passed. Recitations were attended, 
 examinations duly passed. The library yielded 
 up its secrets to the mind ; life in the little com- 
 monwealth of young men matured the char- 
 acter; intercourse with kindred spirits awakened 
 generous enthusiasms. In '77 Tom Wilson went 
 on the board of editors of the Princetonian, 
 the college newspaper, then a bi-weekly. In 
 '78 he became its managing editor. Under his 
 management it continued about as before — not 
 overwhelmingly interesting to the outsider, 
 
74 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 though here and there is discernible a little 
 brightness scarcely to be found in earlier issues. 
 Occasionally we discover a satirical note like 
 this: 
 
 A literary meeting was held at Doctor McCosh's res- 
 idence on the evening of the 13th. Mr. David Stewart 
 read a paper on Ethics. The discussion was interesting. 
 
 A department headed "Here and There" was 
 the Princetonian's best feature. Once in a while 
 its writer broke into rhyme — not always so 
 tragically sad as this: 
 
 "I will work out a rhyme 
 If I only have time," 
 
 Said the man of *'Here and There," 
 So he tried for a while: 
 Result — a loose pile 
 
 Of his beautiful golden hair. 
 
 During his senior year Wilson threw into the 
 form of a closely reasoned essay the chief results 
 of his thinking on the subject of the American 
 contrasted with the British system of govern- 
 ment. This article he sent to what was regarded 
 as the most serious magazine then published in 
 
A STUDENT AT PRINCETON 75 
 
 America, and it was immediately accepted for 
 publication. The author was twenty-two years 
 old and an undergraduate. 
 
 In the files of the International Review, issue 
 of August, 1879, may be found an article en- 
 titled "Cabinet Government in the United 
 States," signed by Thomas W. Wilson. It was 
 an impeachment of government by " a legislature 
 which is practically irresponsible," and a plea 
 for a reformed method under which Congress 
 should be again made responsible and swiftly 
 responsive in some such way as is the British 
 Parliament. The author's quarrel is with the 
 practice of doing all the important work of 
 Congress in secret committees. Secrecy, he 
 says, is the atmosphere in which all corruption 
 and evil flourishes. "Congress should legislate 
 as if in the presence of the whole country, in 
 open and free debate." (These words were 
 written thirty-two years ago.) He attributes 
 the growth of the committee system to the lack 
 of leaders in Congress, and his plan for the 
 creation of leaders is that of giving Cabinet 
 ministers a seat in Congress. He quotes Justice 
 
76 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 Story to the effect that the heads of departments, 
 even if they were not allowed to vote, might 
 without danger be admitted to participate in 
 Congressional debates. Wilson argues with much 
 ingenuity that the method he urges is the ideal 
 one for the insuring of a strong Congress and a 
 strong Cabinet, for securing the attention of the 
 country (the possibilities of Congressional debate 
 and the fall of the Cabinet being dramatic), and 
 for the insurance of the greatest possible amount 
 of publicity. 
 
 W'ith this achievement of breaking into a 
 high-class magazine, Woodrow Wilson closed 
 his undergraduate days at Princeton. During 
 his senior year he had concluded that the best 
 path to a public career lay through the law. In 
 the autumn, therefore, he matriculated in the 
 law department of the University of Virginia, 
 that seat of liberal learning organized by Thomas 
 Jefferson. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 STILL STUDYING LAW AND POLITICS 
 
 WAR and Reconstruction had reduced the 
 number of students at Charlottesville 
 to 328 in the session of 1879-80, but 
 War and Reconstruction had not lowered Vir- 
 ginia's lofty standard either of scholarship or of 
 honor. Wilson's life here was in many respects 
 a repetition of that at Princeton. Here, too, he 
 immediately took his place as a leader. The 
 law school men were in close fellowship with 
 the undergraduates of "Virginia." Study was 
 rather more necessary than at Princeton in those 
 days; a man had to work to pass his examina- 
 tions — these, by the way, were conducted on 
 the '* honor plan." Still, there was a gay set 
 as well as a steady set, and Wilson had friends 
 among both sets. 
 
 Sports were engaged in to the extent of an 
 occasional baseball game among the students 
 
 77 
 
78 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 or with a nine from a neighboring town, a foot- 
 race or two in the autumn, and some boat-racing 
 on the Httle Rivanna River in the spring. There 
 was also a gymnasium, and prizes were given the 
 proficient; intercollegiate contests were un- 
 known. Wilson played a little baseball and took 
 long walks through the pleasant country lying 
 about, often alone, though sometimes with a 
 favorite companion. At Princeton Greek-letter 
 fraternities were illegal, but they existed with the 
 approval of the faculty at the University of 
 Virginia, and on October 25, 1879, W^ilson was 
 initiated into the Phi Kappa Psi. 
 
 He joined the chapel choir and the glee club. 
 The latter circle of harmonious spirits, directed 
 by Duncan Emmett, now and for some years 
 past a practising physician of New York City, 
 made serenading excursions in the country 
 'round about, two or three times a week, wind- 
 ing up its pleasure-imparting career with a 
 Grand Concert in the Town Hall. W^ilson many 
 a night stumbled along the rocky roads with his 
 fellow glee-men to arrive at last under the 
 balcony of some damsel and lift his fine tenor 
 
STUDYING LAW AND POLITICS 79 
 
 voice in "She sleeps, my lady sleeps," and 
 "Speed away!" At the Grand Concert, which 
 was given on the evening of the Final Ball, a 
 brilliant audience that crowded the hall beheld 
 the prize-orator and prize-writer step down to 
 the footlights and render a touching tenor solo. 
 Wilson is best remembered as a singer, however, 
 by the thrilling eflfect with which he usually 
 achieved the high note near the end of "The 
 Star Spangled Banner." 
 
 Wilson did a good deal of writing while at 
 Charlottesville. From the road in front of 
 "Dawson's Row" passersby would see him 
 sitting at the window in the southeast corner of 
 "House F," darkly engaged with an ink-bottle, 
 out of which he had conjured, before a year was 
 up, the W^riter's Prize. 
 
 In March, 1880, the University Magazine 
 printed an article by him on John Bright; in the 
 following month another on Gladstone. The 
 young man's mind still ran, as it had run at 
 Princeton, on the personality of the great po- 
 litical leaders. 
 
 The John Bright article was really a version 
 
80 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 of an oration which Wilson was deUvering that 
 month. So great had his reputation grown in 
 six months that there was a considerable demand 
 from outside the university for admission, and 
 the occasion was thrown open to the public. 
 
 At Charlottesville, as at Princeton, the stu- 
 dent-body was divided into two literary and 
 debating societies: the Washingtonian and the 
 JeflFersonian — in the common tongue, "Wash" 
 and "Jeff." The fortunes of each alternately 
 w^axed and waned; "Jeff" was the stronger in 
 1879, and Wilson joined it. His talents at once 
 won recognition, but he found a competitor to 
 respect in another "Jeff" man, William Cabell 
 Bruce, of Charlotte County, Va., a young orator 
 of extraordinary ability. He was later presi- 
 dent of the Maryland Senate, and is now presi- 
 dent of the Woodrow Wilson Association of 
 Maryland. 
 
 The chief annual event at Charlottesville was 
 a debating contest in the Jeffersonian Society, 
 at which two gold medals were awarded, one for 
 debating, the other for oratorical ability. The 
 subject was: "Is the Roman Catholic in the 
 
STUDYING LAW AND POLITICS 81 
 
 United States a menace to American institu- 
 tions?" In the contest, April 1880, in which 
 Bruce and Wilson (he taking the negative) par- 
 ticipated, Bruce was given the debater's medal, 
 while the orator's prize went to Wilson. The 
 opinion of pretty nearly everybody, aside from 
 the judges, was that the award should have 
 been reversed. Bruce was ornate in style; 
 Wilson simple, direct and logical. 
 
 In a wholly different vein from his speeches 
 in the ''Jeff" Society was one notable effort in 
 which the university's favorite appeared when he 
 delivered medals to the winners in athletic 
 games. Having agreed to make this presenta- 
 tion, Wilson was very much exercised as to what 
 to say and imparted his perplexity to an inti- 
 mate friend, Richard H. Dabney (now dean of 
 Graduate Studies in the university). W^here- 
 upon Dabney, who was in a merry mood, rattled 
 off two pieces of nonsense which he suggested 
 would about suit the taste of the audience in the 
 gymnasium. Neither piece contained the slight- 
 est allusion to athletic sports. Yet somehow the 
 orator worked them in, proclaiming the vie- 
 
82 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 tory of the athletes in flesh-colored tights who 
 stood lined before him in the verses: 
 
 'Twas in the gloaming, by the fair Wyoming, 
 That I left my darling, many years ago; " 
 
 And memory tender brings her back in splendor 
 With her cheeks of roses and her brow of snow. 
 
 But where in thunder is she now, I wonder? 
 
 Oh, my soul, be quiet, and, my sad heart, hush! 
 Under the umbrella of another fellow 
 
 Ah ! I think I see her, paddling through the slush ! 
 
 A little farther along in the oration the cheer- 
 ing throng listened to the solemn recital of this 
 moving sentiment: 
 
 I stood upon the ocean's briny shore and with a fragile 
 reed I wrote upon the sand, ''Agnes, I love thee!^^ But 
 the mad waves rolled by, and blotted out the fair impres- 
 sion. Cruel waves! Treacherous sands! I'll trust you 
 no more. But, with a giant's hand, I'll pluck from Nor- 
 way's frozen shore her tallest pine — and dip its top into 
 the crater of Vesuvius — and upon the high and burnished 
 heavens I'll write, ''Agnes, I love thee!** and I'd like to see 
 any doggoned wave wash that out! 
 
 Dabney was a good deal of a wag. Among 
 the idiotic songs which for some inscrutable 
 
STUDYING LAW AND POLITICS 83 
 
 reason periodically sweep over the country one 
 of the silhest was the favorite in 1880. Every- 
 body will recall it: 
 
 Whoa, Emma! Whoa, Emma! 
 You put me in such a dilemma — 
 
 although few will recall the nature of the 
 dilemma from which the victim clamored for 
 relief. On one occasion Wilson was quoting 
 the lines in which Hamlet, after speaking of the 
 *' customary suits of solemn black," worn by 
 mourners, exclaims: 
 
 "But I have that within me which passeth show; 
 These, but the trappings — the suits of woe." 
 
 No sooner had he uttered the final "woe" 
 than Dabney took it out of his mouth and com- 
 pleted it with an uproarious "Emma." No 
 Shakespeare was quoted between the two friends 
 for many months. 
 
 The gymnasium speech represents one of the 
 few occasions in which the young student bent 
 very far from his dignity in public, but in private 
 he fairly bubbled with humor and wit, and was 
 
84 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 very much given to monkey shines. The room 
 in "Dawson's Row," and that in ''West Range" 
 which he later occupied, were the scenes not only 
 of a great deal of hard reading, elevated thought, 
 and serious conversation, but also of a great 
 many elaborate jokes and abandoned capers. 
 
 As he had done at Princeton, Wilson at Char- 
 lottesville also organized a smaller group of 
 thinking chaps for debate. A member of that 
 group remembers Wilson's unspeakable disgust 
 when they chose as the subject for one night's 
 discussion the question whether there be any 
 fundamental difference between right and wrong. 
 Wilson was secretary of the *'Jeff " Society dur- 
 ing part of his time in Charlottesville, and the 
 records kept by him in that capacity were a 
 model of neatness and accuracy. 
 
 The law professors of the University of Vir- 
 ginia were Mr. Southall, who held the chaii of 
 international and common law, an easy-going 
 and much-beloved man, and Dr. John B. Minor, 
 who taught everything else in the course, and 
 was in fact, the college of law. 
 
 Doctor Minor probably influenced W^ilson 
 
STUDYING LAW AND POLITICS 85 
 
 more than did any other teacher he ever had. 
 He was indeed an able and forceful man, a really 
 great teacher, who grounded his pupils, beyond 
 all possibility of ever getting adrift, in the broad 
 principles of law. He employed in class a text- 
 book which he had himself written, or, rather, 
 revised, for it was frankly based on Blackstone 
 as that legal philosopher's teaching had applica- 
 tion in the United States and especially in the 
 state of Virginia. Doctor Minor was a man of 
 impressive presence and jSne face, with an aris- 
 tocratic nose, at the extreme tip of which he 
 wore pince-nez, through which he glanced at 
 his roll-sheet. He used the Socratic method, 
 with more than Socratic sternness. He cate- 
 chised and he grilled, but with such effective- 
 ness that, though the victim writhed — the 
 class meanwhile mentally groaning in sympathy 
 — he learned never to forget the point to which 
 the professor led him. Wilson's seat was in 
 the front row at the Professor's left hand. So 
 popular, despite his severity, were Doctor 
 Minor's courses, that it was a saying at 
 Charlottesville that, if Minor were to an- 
 
86 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 nounce an "exam" at midnight, a man had 
 better be on hand at eleven o'clock to be sure 
 of a seat. 
 
 As a young man, Wilson suffered much from 
 indigestion — an ill which later he entirely 
 outgrew. Just before Christmas, 1880, he found 
 himself so unwell that he left Charlottesville. 
 The next year he spent at home in Wilmington, 
 N. C, nursing his health and reading. 
 
 In May, 1882, Woodrow W^ilson went to 
 Atlanta, to enter on the practice of law. At- 
 lanta was chosen for this experiment simply 
 because it was the most rapidly growing city of 
 the South. The young man knew nobody 
 there. He went to live at the boarding-house 
 of Mrs. Boylston, born Drayton, and a member 
 of that old South Carolina family, on Peachtree 
 Street. Here he met another young man, like 
 himself a stranger in the city, whither he too had 
 come to practise law — Edward Ireland Renick. 
 The two agreed on a partnership; on mutual 
 inquiry, Renick proved to be slightly the older, 
 so that the shingle w^as lettered "Renick & 
 Wilson." It was hung out of the window of a 
 
STUDYING LAW AND POLITICS 87 
 
 room on the second floor, facing the side street, 
 of the building 48 Marietta Street. 
 
 Atlanta litigants did not rush en masse to 
 48 Marietta Street. In fact, they never came. 
 The brilhant legal victories for which, no doubt, 
 Messrs. Renick and Wilson were competent 
 were never won. Atlanta seemed to prefer 
 lawyers whom it had known. 
 
 Wilson's sole idea had been to use the law as 
 a stepping-stone to a political career; most of 
 the pubhc men of the South had come from the 
 ranks of the law. In eighteen months in At- 
 lanta he learned that it was impossible for a 
 man without private means to support himself 
 long enough in law to get into public life; im- 
 possible, certainly, to establish a practice with- 
 out giving up all idea of study and writing not 
 strictly connected with the profession. The 
 law was a jealous mistress. He had begun writ- 
 ing a book on Congressional Government, and 
 he found the work of its composition full of joy. 
 With joy he found he could not contemplate 
 years of effort to further the interests of clients 
 under the capricious and illogical statutes of 
 
88 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 Georgia, interpreted by a Supreme Court whom 
 he could not then look up to as masters in the 
 law. 
 
 But the Atlanta experiment was not without 
 its great good fortune : 
 
 During the summer of 1883 Mr. Wilson found 
 time to make what turned out to be a momen- 
 tous visit. His old playmate and cousin, Jessie 
 W^oodrow Bones, with whom he had played 
 Indian on the Sand Hills near Augusta, was now 
 living in Rome, Ga. Mr. Bones had started a 
 branch of his business at Rome, and, finding the 
 Georgia town the prettier and more agreeable 
 place, had moved his family there. To Rome 
 had come also another family with whom the 
 Wilsons had been intimate in Augusta — the 
 Axsons. The Axsons were a Georgia lowlands 
 family; the Rev. S. Edward Axson's father was 
 a distinguished clergyman in Savannah, and his 
 wife's father, the Rev. Nathan Hoyt, was long 
 pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Athens, Ga. 
 
 The calls upon his time not being entirely oc- 
 cupying, as has been hinted, young W^ilson went 
 to Rome to see his cousin — and stayed to see 
 
STUDYING LAW AND POLITICS 89 
 
 more of Miss Ellen Louise Axson. The meeting 
 was on the piazza of the Bones home in East 
 Rome. To be accurate, it was not quite the 
 couple's first meeting: he had been a passionate 
 admirer of the lady when he was a boy of seven, 
 and she was a baby. The sentiment of those 
 days, beyond the recollection of either, revived. 
 He took her home that evening — she lived in 
 Rome across the river. She must have been 
 captivating, for, as he came back across the 
 bridge, he clenched his hand and took a silent 
 oath that Ellen Louise Axson should one day be 
 his wife. 
 
 Which also in due time came to pass. 
 
 They had seen each other eleven times before 
 he had persuaded her to say "Yes." There was 
 no idea of an immediate marriage. Already, 
 perceiving that the practice of law was not the 
 path for him, he had settled upon the plan of 
 going to Johns Hopkins University to spend two 
 or three years more studying the science of 
 government. 
 
 The partnership of Renick & Wilson was dis- 
 solved. The young man to whom the people 
 
90 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 of Atlanta gave so little encouragement, but who 
 had won what made him inestimably happier 
 than anything else Georgia could have given 
 him, went north in September. About the same 
 time Miss Axson too went to New York to 
 develop her already recognized talents in paint- 
 ing, as a member of the Art Students' League. 
 
 The next two years of Woodrow Wilson's life 
 were spent at Johns Hopkins University as a 
 student of history and political economy. The 
 professors who mainly directed his studies were 
 the late Herbert B. Adams, historian, and 
 Richard T. Ely (now of the University of Wis- 
 consin), economist. The chief social life of the 
 university (which is a place of graduate study 
 chiefly and is without dormitories or ''college 
 life") was in the weekly seminars, in which per- 
 haps thirty men gathered to read and discuss 
 papers under the direction of a professor. 
 
 Here Wilson was one of an unusually inter- 
 esting group, which included Albert Shaw and 
 E. R. L. Gould, John Franklin Jameson, the 
 historian; Arthur Yager, now president of 
 Georgetown College, Kentucky, and Thomas 
 
STUDYING LAW AND POLITICS 91 
 
 Dixon, who writes novels. (Dixon was not long 
 at Johns Hopkins.) Professor Ely was just back 
 from Europe, where he had been studying social- 
 ism and had fallen under the influence of certain 
 German ''socialists of the chair." He gave a 
 course on the history of French and German 
 socialism. 
 
 The advantages enjoyed at Johns Hopkins 
 by Wilson lay, however, not so much in the hear- 
 ing of lectures as in the opportunity of making 
 researches under, and working with, Ely and 
 Adams and his fellow-students. Here he got a 
 valuable impulse in the direction of the careful 
 and exact ascertaining of facts. Though always 
 priding himself on dealing with actualities, W^il- 
 son was never a grubber after facts — and in- 
 deed never became one, as Jameson, for instance, 
 did. But he undoubtedly did get here a train- 
 ing that balanced the natural tendency of his 
 mind to work from within outward, and saved 
 him from the consequences which might have 
 followed the ease of expression he had attained. 
 
 He remained two years, the second year as 
 holder of the Historical Fellowship. The time 
 
92 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 was brightened by occasional visits to New 
 York, and his fiancee, and to Philadelphia, 
 where lived an uncle of hers whom she some- 
 times visited. 
 
 There was no glee club at Johns Hopkins, but 
 Wilson set straightaway about organizing one, 
 with the cooperation of Charles Levermore (now 
 president of Adelphi College). Levermore's 
 singing voice was as low as Wilson's was high. 
 Prof. Charles S. Morris, of the department of 
 Latin and Greek, one of the most kindhearted 
 of men, consented to act as president of the 
 club, and invited them to meet at his house 
 once a month for an evening of social enjoyment. 
 Every member of the glee club — to which be- 
 longed not only Shaw, Gould, and Yager, but 
 Davis R. Dewey, Edward T. Ingle, David T. 
 Day, B. J. Ramage, Charles Warren, and other 
 men who have made themselves eminent — re- 
 members the charming hospitality of the Mor- 
 rises and the good fellowship and gay spirits of 
 the remarkable group of students whom they 
 entertained, or were entertained by. When it 
 was proposed to give a concert at Hopkins Hall 
 
STUDYING LAW AND POLITICS 03 
 
 and charge for admission in order to pay some 
 expense of the organization, the grave gentle- 
 men who at the time presided over the destinies 
 of the university demurred. President Gihnan 
 offered to donate the necessary money provided 
 the club would give its concert without admis- 
 sion fee. In the slight controversy that followed 
 Wilson appeared as an insurgent, protesting that 
 the glee club had its dignity to consider as well 
 as had the university. The concert was given 
 as originally planned, and no one felt that the 
 dignity of the university suffered in the least 
 from the performance. The picture of this 
 group of young men still hangs in a conspicuous 
 place in the rooms of the Historical Seminary, 
 where its organization originated, and to which 
 many of its members in later years returned to 
 lecture. 
 
 One piece of writing that Wilson did at this 
 period, a study of Adam Smith (not yet, you see, 
 had he wearied of studying political personal- 
 ities), was recognized by all as exceptional 
 in felicity and power of expression. It was 
 given magazine publication and later gave 
 
94 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 the title to a volume of essays — ''An Old 
 Master." 
 
 Early in 1885 was completed and published — 
 the result of the suggestion made by the perusal 
 of the Gentleman's Magazine articles ten years 
 before, and of constant thought and study ever 
 since — a book, '' Congressional Government. 
 A Study of Government by Committee, by 
 Woodrow Wilson." It was the first account of 
 the actual working of the Constitution of the 
 United States ; an inspection of our Government, 
 not as it is theoretically constituted, but as it 
 actually works. 
 
 The book met with instant success. A serious 
 work seldom makes a sensation, and that word 
 would be too strong to apply to the impression 
 produced by ''Congressional Government," but 
 it is quite true that it received an enthusiastic 
 reception at the hands of all interested in pubHc 
 matters. Of its merits it is enough to say that 
 Mr. James Bryce, in the preface to "The Ameri- 
 can Commonwealth," acknowledged his obliga- 
 tion to Woodrow Wilson. 
 
 It was a great moment in the life of the young 
 
STUDYING LAW AND POLITICS 95 
 
 man — indeed a great moment for two young 
 persons. Success like this meant that hfe was 
 at last to begin. On the heels of the fame won 
 by "Congressional Government" came invita- 
 tions to several college chairs. There was more 
 work still to be done for a Ph.D. But the Johns 
 Hopkins faculty was to accept the book as a 
 doctor's thesis, and the author accepted one of 
 the calls — that from Bryn Mawr, which wanted 
 him to come as associate in history and political 
 economy. 
 
 Woodrow Wilson and Ellen Louise Axson were 
 married at her grandfather's house in Savannah, 
 on June 24, 1885. In the autumn they came to 
 the pretty W^elsh-named village on the "Main 
 Line" near Philadelphia, and a new chapter of 
 life began. 
 
(( 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 PROFESSOR WILSON 
 
 A SCHOOL teacher's existence is not, in 
 the narration, a thrilhng story. The 
 first seventeen years of Woodrow Wil- 
 son's Hfe after he left Johns Hopkins University 
 were spent in teaching. They were years of 
 usefulness — thousands of students will testify 
 to the still enduring inspiration they owe to 
 them and to him. They were years of delight- 
 ful living, of cultured and genial companionship. 
 For leisurely reading, doubtless, there could be 
 set down here a volume of interesting anecdote 
 and scholarly banter and epigram, of pleasant 
 fireside reminiscences of savants and big-wigs, 
 of literary gossip, and humors of the lecture- 
 room, with perhaps a bit or two of college 
 scandal. No doubt there could be contrived a 
 narrative, fascinating to patient psychologists, 
 of the mental evolution that went on during 
 
"PROFESSOR" WILSON 97 
 
 these years. For the purpose of this biography, 
 however, the point is that they led up to one of 
 the most dramatic and significant of recent 
 battles for the cause of democracy and freedom 
 and prepared a man for leadership in a bigger 
 struggle, the battle-ground of which is the soil 
 of the American Republic. 
 Briefly, then, of these college years: 
 It was with the unrelinquished purpose of 
 having his part in the public life of the nation 
 that Woodrow Wilson entered upon the profes- 
 sion of a teacher of law and politics. It can 
 hardly be said, however, that his first position 
 was one which gave promise of any large imme- 
 diate influence on public affairs. A number of 
 Johns Hopkins men, on the opening in 1885 of 
 Bryn Mawr College, accepted as their first 
 professorships places in the faculty of the new 
 institution for women; the vulgar even referred 
 to Bryn Mawr as ''Johanna Hopkins." Some 
 were so irreverent as to suggest that the young 
 professors were ''merely trying it on the dog." 
 Professor Wilson, though called to Bryn Mawr 
 primarily to give instruction in politics and 
 
98 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 political economy, taught a good deal besides 
 those subjects; classical history, and the history 
 of the Renaissance fell to him. Perhaps the 
 young ladies profited as much by his teaching of 
 these latter subjects as they did by expositions 
 of political science which could not have come 
 very close home to many of them. His lectures 
 are said on high authority to have been "mar- 
 vels" of scholarship, profoundly impressing his 
 classes. Yet there are not lacking bits of 
 evidence which seem to betray a certain failure 
 to take the idea of instructing young ladies in 
 politics quite as seriously as some of the other 
 faculty members took their tasks. The higher 
 education of women was not then a thing ac- 
 cepted; 'twas rather an idea to be vindicated, 
 and the people who had organized and who ad- 
 ministered Bryn Mawr were in the mood to do 
 a good job of vindication. 
 
 Professor Wilson worked very hard to make 
 his lectures interesting; one of the faculty who 
 lived next door testifies that the light in his study 
 window was invariably burning long after every- 
 body else had gone to bed. From the start-ofif 
 
"PROFESSOR" WILSON 99 
 
 of his professional career Mr. Wilson appears to 
 have reaHzed the necessity of imparting vivacity 
 and reahty to his lectures; there is some ground 
 to suspect that the intense young ladies who sat 
 under him did not always appreciate the lighter 
 side of his discourses. At all events, it is re- 
 membered that he appeared one day in the 
 lecture-room without the long mustache which 
 had up to then adorned his countenance — a 
 sacrifice which, it was hinted, he had made in the 
 hope of being hereafter better able to suggest to 
 his classes certain delicacies of thought and 
 fancy which they had shown little sign of appre- 
 hending. 
 
 Bryn Mawr College at the beginning con- 
 sisted of Taylor Hall, and one dormitory — 
 Merion. It opened with forty-three students. 
 Three houses at the edge of the campus were 
 occupied by the dean and professors, many of 
 the latter being bachelors. Later Mr. Wilson 
 leased a pretty cottage, the parsonage of the 
 little Baptist Church on the old Gulf Road, in 
 the midst of a lovely countryside. In this, their 
 first home, the Wilsons took great pride and 
 
100 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 satisfaction. In vacation time they went back 
 South among old friends. It was in the South 
 that the first two children were born. 
 
 In June, 1886, Professor Wilson took his Ph.D. 
 at Johns Hopkins, the university accepting as 
 his thesis his book " Congressional Government." 
 During his third year at Bryn Mawr, Professor 
 Wilson accepted a lectureship at Johns Hopkins ; 
 this took him to Baltimore once a week for 
 twenty-five weeks. 
 
 Connection between the school where Mr. 
 Wilson had last been a student and the one in 
 which he was first a teacher was, as has been 
 said, close. Francis E. King and John Carey 
 Thomas, of the Board of Trustees of Johns 
 Hopkins, had been instrumental in drawing up 
 the courses of study on the ''group system," 
 in which much pride was justly felt at the 
 new college. Its dean was Doctor Thomas's 
 daughter, Miss M. Carey Thomas, who con- 
 tinues to-day, since President Rhodes's death, 
 under the title of president, to administer the 
 institution. Among the Hopkins men in the 
 faculty were E. B. W^ilson, a celebrated biologist. 
 
"PROFESSOR" WILSON 101 
 
 now at Columbia University; Prof. F. S. Lee, 
 now also of the Columbia faculty; Prof. Paul 
 Shorey, now of Chicago University, who rep- 
 resented the literary side of classical study, and 
 E. W. Hopkins, now of Yale, a man of contrast- 
 ing spirit and interest, who taught the classics 
 as a philologist. 
 
 Social life at Bryn Mawr was most agreeable. 
 An invitation to an older and larger institution 
 was nevertheless not to be declined; ampler op- 
 portunity opened in a school attended by young 
 men, and in 1888 Professor Wilson accepted an 
 election to the chair of history and political econ- 
 omy at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn. 
 
 Wesleyan University was an established insti- 
 tution with its course of study, its faculty, and 
 its traditions long settled. In the faculty Mr. 
 Wilson found a number of men of marked ability 
 — chief among them, perhaps, Prof. Caleb Win- 
 chester, head of the department of English. 
 The faculty contained strong men also in Dr. 
 W. O. Atwater, the chemist, and Prof. W. North 
 Rice. 
 
102 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 The university is most fortunately and beau- 
 tifully situated, stretching along a ridge above 
 the Connecticut Valley and overlooking pleasing 
 prospects. Middletown is a place of elms and 
 old colonial mansions. The Wilson residence 
 was just across from the college grounds, look- 
 ing out over the valley. Though formally under 
 Methodist control, the university is really non- 
 sectarian and liberal in the best sense. It was 
 then co-educational, but only five or six young 
 w^omen were at that time in each class. The 
 student-body was made up, as it still is, of likely 
 young fellows from what we might describe as 
 the middle wallvs of life; Wesley an was not a 
 rich man's college. 
 
 From the start. Professor Wilson's courses 
 were extremely popular. And well indeed they 
 might be; for New England had rarely heard 
 such instruction as was given in the lecture-room 
 of Wesleyan's professor of history and political 
 economy. W^hile at Middletown he continued 
 his lectureship at Johns Hopkins ; now, however, 
 instead of going down once a week, he bunched 
 bis twenty-five lectures in a month of vacation 
 
"PROFESSOR" WILSON 103 
 
 allowed him by the Wesley an trustees. His 
 fame as a popular lecturer also was growing 
 apace, and he was frequently called to give ad- 
 dresses in New England and the Eastern States. 
 It was while at Middletown that he wrote *'The 
 State," a volume which, with less pretentions 
 to literary form than his other work, involved 
 an enormous amount of labor. 
 
 Mr. Wilson was a member of the Athletic 
 Committee of Wesleyan and took the keenest 
 interest in the college sports. One student of 
 the time remembers how incensed he became at 
 the limited ambition of the Wesleyan boys who, 
 when they played against Yale, were satisfied 
 only to keep the score down. "That's no am- 
 bition at all," he used to cry. "Go in and win; 
 you can lick Yale as well as any other team. 
 Go after their scalps. Don't admit for a 
 moment that they can beat you." Is it possible 
 that this gallant encouragement drew any of its 
 warmth from the traditional hatred of Eli and 
 the Tiger? 
 
 Life at Middletown was pleasant. But Mr. 
 Wilson's growing reputation would not permit 
 
104 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 him to remain there. When in 1890 the chair 
 of jurisprudence and poHtics in Princeton Col- 
 lege became vacant through the death of Prof. 
 Alexander Johnson, the trustees elected to it the 
 Princeton graduate who had so quickly distin- 
 guished himself as a student of politics. 
 
 September, 1890, then, found Woodrow Wil- 
 son again domiciled in the Jersey collegiate town 
 which, fifteen years before, he had first gazed 
 'round upon w ith the eyes of a raw student from 
 the South. He was now a man whose renown had 
 begun to spread in the world, an author, a public 
 speaker of enviable repute, the head of a family, 
 a figure of consideration, a Doctor, if you please, 
 both of Philosophy and of Law. 
 
 The W^ilsons rented a house in Library Place. 
 After a few years they built a home for them- 
 selves on an adjoining lot, an attractive half- 
 timbered house designed by Mrs. W^ilson. 
 
 The new professor stepped at once into the 
 front rank, as indeed became a Princeton grad- 
 uate, a member of one of the most famous classes 
 the old college had graduated, a man thoroughly 
 
niuo^Tnin 
 
 THE MANSE, STAUNTON, VIRGINIA, WHERE WOODROW WILSON 
 WAS BORN 
 
 THE HOUSE DESIGNED BY WOODROW WILSON AT PRINCETON 
 
"PROFESSOR" WILSON 105 
 
 imbued with the best traditions of the place. 
 But his lectures — Princeton had no tradition 
 that accounted for their charm. They instantly 
 became popular; the attendance mounted until 
 it surpassed that ever before or since given any 
 course of study at Princeton; before long very 
 nearly four hundred students, almost the total 
 number of juniors and seniors combined, were 
 taking Wilson's courses — and they were no 
 "cinches" either. Widely informed, marked 
 by a mastery of fact even to slight detail, inspir- 
 ing in their range and sweep, and spiced with a 
 pervading sense of humor. Professor Wilson's 
 lectures were further marked by the great free- 
 dom with which he delivered himself of his 
 views on current events. It was his custom to 
 put students on their honor not to report him; 
 there were always likely to be in attendance 
 students who had connections wath city news- 
 papers who might frequently have made good 
 "stories" out of the professor's lively comments 
 on the politics of the day, but none ever took 
 advantage of the opportunity. 
 
 The classes were now so large that the work 
 
106 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 of a professor consisted almost entirely of lec- 
 turing. As we shall see later, it was not then 
 the Princeton idea to give the students any par- 
 ticular oversight or inspiration elsewhere than 
 in the classroom; yet the Wilson home became, 
 and always remained, a resort hugely popular 
 with the young men who were so lucky as to be 
 admitted to it — and its doors were hospitably 
 hung. Professor W^ilson, in short, stepped into 
 the position of first favorite, alike with his col- 
 leagues of the faculty and with the undergrads. 
 They have at Princeton a way of voting at the 
 end of each year for all possible sorts of 
 "popular personages." For a number of years 
 Professor W^ilson was voted the most popular 
 professor. He was able, he was genial, he was 
 active; a member of the faculty committee on 
 outdoor sports, and of the faculty committee on 
 discipline. In faculty meetings Mr. Wilson 
 soon became one of those most attentively 
 listened to. Though meetings were generally 
 informal, occasionally there was a debate in 
 which his quite remarkable powers showed at 
 their best. 
 
"PROFESSOR" WILSON 107 
 
 During the twelve years, 1890 to 1902, Mr. 
 Wilson continued to fulfil at Princeton the du- 
 ties of professor of jurisprudence and politics. 
 They were twelve years of steady, yet pleasant 
 labor; years of growth and of growing influence, 
 both in the university and in the country. Four 
 new books were added to the list signed by this 
 man who wrote history and politics with so 
 much literary charm : ' ' Division and Reunion, ' ' 
 ''An Old Master," "Mere Literature," and 
 "George W^ashington." He was heard now in 
 occasional addresses in many parts of the land 
 — discussing public questions before commercial, 
 industrial, and professional bodies. The vigor 
 of his views on questions of the day, as well as 
 his readiness, grace, and power on the platform, 
 gave him place among the recognized leaders 
 of national thought. He had for a time con- 
 tinued going down to Johns Hopkins, and now 
 he gave occasional lectures at the New York 
 Law School. 
 
 At the end of a decade in his chair Mr. Wilson 
 had attained, naturally, and with the good will 
 of all, a position of unchallenged supremacy in 
 
108 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 the university town and of marked distinction 
 in the country. 
 
 With such brief summary this biography must 
 dismiss a period the external facts of which were 
 of Httle dramatic value — incommensurate al- 
 together with their importance in the develop- 
 ment and strengthening of conviction and char- 
 acter which were to have play in the time which 
 we now approach. 
 
 As one looks into those twelve years and (to 
 the eye that regards merely externals their 
 somewhat prosaic events, what chiefly impresses 
 him in the man is the growth in vividness of 
 his social sense, his love of humanity — express- 
 ing itself most commonly in terms of patriotism. 
 It is clear too that he is winning some wise in- 
 sight into the mystery of the unfolding of the 
 minds of young men ; acquiring much skill in the 
 craft of the teacher and reaching withal some 
 conclusions respecting principles and methods 
 of education. But beyond and above all other 
 convictions that ripened during these twelve 
 years in the enlivening companionship of stu- 
 dents, in the joyful exercise before them of his 
 
^'PROFESSOR" WILSON 109 
 
 gift of speech, and in the lonely stillness of a 
 heart that pondered the history of human insti- 
 tutions and the laws of progress, there grew up 
 in Woodrow Wilson a fervent devotion to democ- 
 racy. You cannot understand the man from 
 this time forth, you cannot follow the battle of 
 the next few years through the intricate alleys 
 through which it raged, unless you are always 
 conscious that you are beholding a scene in which 
 the central figure is that of a prophet inspired 
 by a passionate sense of the majesty of the law 
 of social justice; a warrior burning with abhor- 
 rence~orsecret things, of things that divide and 
 isolate, hot with hatred of the artificial distinc- 
 tion, the unearned privilege, the unequal oppor- 
 tunity ; a knight animated by a loving tenderness 
 for the man at the bottom, a tenderness not 
 sentimental, but born in reason — like the 
 reverent regard of the philosopher for the lowly 
 root and the good homely soil from which it 
 pleases God to nourish the flower that nods in 
 acknowledged beauty in the air above. 
 
 All this you would discern if you studied the 
 speeches and read the books and listened to his 
 
no WOODROW WILSON 
 
 pupils describe the spirit of the lectures of the 
 Princeton professor. But you will see it all 
 manifest in action when he exchanges his pro- 
 fessional for an executive office. 
 
 Princeton, like other American colleges, had 
 been going through a period of change. The 
 serious-minded men of an earlier generation, 
 intent on fitting themselves for a learned profes- 
 sion, and therefore eager to study — and to 
 study the old tripod, Greek, Latin, and Mathe- 
 matics — had been swamped by an influx of 
 fellows of a new sort — fellows who came to 
 college to stay for a few jolly years on the way 
 to business. They had no intention of doing 
 more than the authorities required, and Prince- 
 ton had fallen into the habit of requiring little, 
 either in the way of study or discipline. Presi- 
 dent Francis Landey Patton, the brilliant 
 scholar who would have been in his glory at the 
 head of a college of an earlier day, found the new 
 tasks irksome and impossible, and in June, 1902, 
 resigned them. 
 
 There seems to have been no discussion as to 
 
« 
 
 
 "PROFESSOR" WILSON 111 
 
 the successorship. It appears to have been the 
 most natural thing in the world that it should 
 fall to the Princeton man who had made a great 
 name for himself in the world of books and of 
 scholarship; who had been one of the most 
 active members of the faculty; and who, above 
 all, by his oratorical powers could best represent 
 the college in the great world. Wilson, there- 
 fore, was chosen, and the announcement was 
 made on Commencement Day. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 Princeton's new president 
 
 THE presidency of Princeton University 
 is a position of dignity and considera- 
 tion. The long line of men, reaching 
 back one hundred and sixty years, who had filled 
 it, were, each in his time, among the most dis- 
 tinguished divines and scholars of the land. By 
 a sort of instinct, or chance — such as that which 
 had at the beginning named the college hall 
 Nassau rather than Belcher — Princeton had 
 gravitated toward the aristocratic. Latterly, 
 the university had come to be known as "the 
 most charming country club in America." Its 
 retiring head had avowed it impossible that it 
 should be other than a college for rich men's 
 sons. , 
 
 Whatever may have been expected of him, it 
 was impossible for the new president (who by 
 the way was the first layman to occupy the 
 
 112 
 
PRINCETON'S NEW PRESIDENT 113 
 
 chair) to fall into the easeful tradition of the 
 office. It was impossible for him merely to 
 institute a few necessary reforms and let things 
 go on much as before. He had scarcely been 
 inaugurated when everybody became aware 
 that, for good or ill, the Judgment Day had 
 dawned over the quiet campus and the ivied 
 halls. There was to be no lack of initiative, no 
 fearf ulness and trembling before novel proposals, 
 no shirking of responsibility, no failure of nerve. 
 There was no undue precipitancy. President 
 Wilson spent a year studying conditions — he 
 already knew them pretty well — from his 
 new vantage-point. He did not, however, feel 
 any necessity of awaiting the lapse of a year 
 before undertaking to bring the scholarship and 
 the discipline of the school up to what it already 
 was on paper. He assigned this work to a com- 
 mittee on examination and standing, at the head 
 of which he appointed Professor, now Dean, 
 Harry Fine. Students who failed to pass their 
 examinations were dropped, rich or poor, with 
 or without social "pull." Work was absolutely 
 demanded. 
 
114 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 There was, of course, an immense sensation 
 when the Princeton students found that, from 
 that day forth, they must go to work. Work 
 had not been a Princeton tradition. The rever- 
 berations of indignation rolled through the skies 
 for several years, until there came in a new body 
 of students, prepared and willing to live up to 
 the new standards. 
 
 During that first year also a committee on 
 revision of the course of study was appointed to 
 report the following year. 
 
 If Princeton was to be a place of work, it was 
 to be fruitful work, work worth doing, worth 
 taking four years out of a young man's life to do. 
 It was to be, above all, as President Wilson saw 
 it and continually phrased it, work that would 
 fit a young man to serve his country better — 
 by which I suppose he meant serve it by living as 
 a citizen, an employer, a man of business, that 
 larger and fuller life which true education im- 
 parts. 
 
 He even went so far as to say that he wanted 
 the university to make its graduates henceforth 
 
PRINCETON'S NEW PRESIDENT 115 
 
 as unlike their fathers as possible — by which, 
 of course, he meant that fathers, being settled 
 in their opinions and in reverence for what is 
 established, have a part to play different from 
 that of sons, who particularly must sympathize 
 with the re-creative and re-formative processes of 
 life and society. That saying blanched the 
 cheek of many an elderly Princetonian; it was 
 spoken in an understanding of the necessity 
 of opening college doors to the new facts which 
 modern science has added to the store of human 
 knowledge; spoken, also, in appreciation of the 
 new social conscience that has been born in the 
 world, though it is so slow in coming to the birth 
 in colleges. 
 
 First, of course, a university that would serve 
 the nation must take into its course of study — 
 its system of intellectual training — the mass of 
 new knowledge of which the old curriculum was 
 ignorant; the college course of the fathers of the 
 present generation had become an anachronism. 
 
 If it had fallen to President Eliot of Harvard 
 to proclaim the new age in which the old edu- 
 cational ideas had ceased to suffice, Princeton, 
 
116 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 under the presidency of Wilson, now took up the 
 completing work of positively constructing a 
 system which should contain the new ideas, the 
 new subjects; and not only contain them, but 
 organize them, coordinate them, put them into 
 proper sequence and relation. 
 
 We are here in a region of big things in the 
 educational world, yet (so little do most of us 
 concern ourselves wdth questions of education, 
 which do so profoundly concern the future) it 
 would doubtless be unwise to dwell on them. 
 
 President Wilson's committee, after months 
 of labor, the freed and enthusiastic labor of eager 
 men, promulgated a revised — or rather new — 
 system of collegiate study. It was the first 
 positive attempt made to bring the new college 
 education into intelligent and systematic re- 
 lationships as a body of discipline. All interested 
 in education know of the revolution wrought by 
 the "department system" that has ever since 
 prevailed at Princeton; while it offered the 
 widest scope for the "election" of studies, it 
 practically assured that the studies "elected" 
 should lead to one settled purpose — that is, 
 
PRINCETON'S NEW PRESIDENT 117 
 
 it intelligently coordinated a student's work; it 
 turned him out of college not with a smattering of 
 a thousand subjects, but with a pretty thorough 
 training in some one broad group of subjects. 
 President Wilson is entitled to the credit of 
 presiding over this revision. He did not him- 
 self work it out in detail. Possibly he contrib- 
 uted at the outset little more than the "group 
 system" idea already used at Bryn Mawr. But 
 from this germinal idea the plan grew into a 
 great architectural scheme. The educational 
 edifice now erected was a fabric of fine articula- 
 tion, of nice adjustment. It was a first evidence 
 and result of that principle of Wilson's mind 
 which demands coordination and right relation- 
 ship — and it was the first step toward the 
 transformation of Princeton into a university 
 for the people. 
 
 President Wilson's next step was to commit 
 Princeton to the revolution that has come about 
 with the adoption of the preceptorial system. It 
 was his idea that the university had grown too 
 large longer to train its students merely through 
 
118 WOODROW \MLSON 
 
 lectures and examinations. There was no pro- 
 vision for the students outside of the classrooms. 
 What they did elsewhere, where they lived, what 
 they talked about, with whom they associated, 
 what books they read, what ideals of life were 
 held up before them — with all these, the uni- 
 versity in the days before had had nothing to do. 
 Fifteen hours a week in lecture-rooms rep- 
 resented the only opportunity possessed by the 
 faculty to "educate" the men. All this, said 
 the president, must be changed. These young 
 men must not be turned out into the street to 
 go and come without direction, without proper 
 companionship, without inspiration, during the 
 other one hundred and fifty hours of the week. 
 His idea was to put the students more intimately 
 into association with a body of young instructors 
 who were to afford the undergrads friendly 
 companionship and oversight. Formal recita- 
 tions were largely abolished. Men studied sub- 
 jects; they did not merely '*take courses." 
 Constant informal, personal contact between 
 students and faculty was the keynote of the 
 new plan. 
 
PRINCETON'S NEW PRESIDENT 119 
 
 To this idea also there was Kttle objection, 
 though some of the trustees and perhaps a few 
 of the faculty began to get a little uneasy at so 
 far leaving the old ruts. Long after the pre- 
 ceptorial system had been put in operation it 
 was brought up against President Wilson that 
 he had inaugurated it on his own dictum with- 
 out having consulted the faculty. 
 
 The cost of the preceptorial system was very 
 great, approximately $100,000 a year. It was 
 determined to raise at least a part of this by sub- 
 scriptions from the alumni. Possibly this deter- 
 mination was a practical error; for it gave the 
 alumni an influence and voice in the manage- 
 ment of the university, especially it gave them 
 a degree of control over the teaching system 
 which has not thus far been particularly happy 
 in its results. The new does not always flourish 
 best under the too close shade of the old. The 
 original idea was that graduate classes should en- 
 dow, each of them, two or three preceptorships. 
 This was so modified that classes were allowed 
 to contribute annually the salaries of preceptors 
 in lieu of the capital for a foundation. 
 
no WOODROW WILSON 
 
 The preceptorial system was established, and 
 became a distinctive feature of Princeton life. 
 In connection with the new curriculum, it 
 worked — call it a miracle, and you use none 
 too strong a word. It created a new Princeton, 
 a place no longer of set tasks, recitations and 
 examinations unhappily breaking into the pleas- 
 ant days of good-fellowship and sport; but a 
 place where, to a considerable degree at least, 
 good-fellowship was seen to be compatible with 
 study, and study to be not necessarily a grind. 
 The minds of hundreds of students were eman- 
 cipated and stimulated; the place pulsated with 
 a new sort of spontaneity and zest. 
 
 Princeton University, which, when the last 
 president resigned, was in such a case that, 
 according to a trustee of the day, its career 
 "threatened to end in its virtual extinction" as 
 an important educational influence in America, 
 was attracting the surprised attention of the 
 country. It had a constructive programme. It 
 had a leader, and a harmonious faculty, and it 
 had at least an acquiescent board of trustees. 
 
 Alas ! that the further steps in that programme. 
 
PRINCETON'S NEW PRESIDENT 121 
 
 the further ends to which the leader's clear vision 
 and firm purpose looked, meant — democracy, 
 Alas! that the educational revolution could not 
 have proceeded without laying its irreverent 
 hand on what the spirit of old Princeton recog- 
 nized as the sacred ark of social privilege ! Alas ! 
 that it showed so much more concern for man- 
 hood than for — money ! 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 DEMOCRACY OR ARISTOCRACY? 
 
 DOCTOR WILSON had served five 
 years as president of Princeton Uni- 
 versity before he reached the point of 
 irrepressible conflict. So long as he confined 
 himself to the strictly educational workings 
 of the school he had been allowed to have his 
 way without much opposition. But now, when 
 his constructive mind reached over to the 
 student's social life and undertook to organize 
 that and bring it into proper relationship with 
 the other elements of university life, he found 
 that he had put his hand upon what the guard- 
 ians of the aristocratic institution were really 
 interested in and what they were not disposed to 
 see changed. Having revised the system of 
 study, and having refashioned the teaching 
 plan, he had now reached the point where he 
 believed it necessary to reconstruct the extra- 
 
 122 
 
DEMOCRACY OR ARISTOCRACY? 123 
 
 collegiate relations — that is, the ordinary living 
 arrangements of the place — taking them in as 
 a necessary part of the total university plan. 
 He felt the necessity of assuming charge of the 
 housing and boarding of the students, and of 
 doing this in a way most advantageous to the 
 young men. 
 
 In brief, his idea was the organization of the 
 university in a number of "colleges" or '* quad- 
 rangles" — practically dormitories — each of 
 which should harbor a certain number of men 
 from every class, with a few of the younger pro- 
 fessors. It was not a new idea with President 
 Wilson; people remembered that he had talked 
 of it at least ten years before he became presi- 
 dent. It was precisely in line with the pre- 
 ceptorial plan; indeed, it was the necessary 
 culmination of that plan. President Wilson had 
 no notion of dividing Princeton University into 
 colleges at all like those which constitute 
 Oxford University or Cambridge, for example. 
 The university was still to carry on all instruc- 
 tion and maintain its authority everywhere. 
 The "quads" were to be merely residence halls, 
 
124 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 each of which with its dining-room and common- 
 room was to be a Httle w orld in itself — such a 
 world as the university by reason of its size 
 could no longer be. 
 
 President Wilson secured the appointment of 
 a committee consisting of seven of the trustees 
 to investigate the merits of the "quad" proposal, 
 and at the June, 1907, meeting the committee 
 reported on "the social coordination of the 
 university," endorsing Mr. Wilson's plan. The 
 report of this committee was accepted, and its 
 recommendation adopted, with only one dissent- 
 ing vote, twenty-five of the twenty-seven trus- 
 tees being present, at the June meeting. 
 
 Now% it is probable that President W^ilson did 
 not hit upon his "quad" plan primarily as a 
 means of reforming the social life of Princeton. 
 He reached it rather as a student of education. 
 It was very clear to him that fifteen hours a 
 week out of one hundred and sixty-eight is not 
 enough in which to "educate" a young man. 
 It was further evident to him that the associa- 
 tion of new students with older students and pro- 
 fessors was exceedingly to be desired; he knew 
 
DEMOCRACY OR ARISTOCRACY? 125 
 
 that a freshman learned far more from the class- 
 men above him and from association with his 
 instructors between lectures than he learned 
 from the lectures themselves; he became con- 
 vinced of the advisability of cutting across the 
 lines of class isolation ; his proposal was to divide 
 the university perpendicularly rather than hori- 
 zontally. 
 
 What was amiss with the ''quad" proposal? 
 
 This — that it cut into the aristocratic social 
 structure which the dominating element in 
 Princeton had erected for itself. 
 
 If, visiting Princeton, you will proceed to 
 the top of a street known as Prospect Avenue, 
 and pass down it, you will see something which 
 probably is not paralleled at any seat of learning 
 in the world. Prospect Avenue is lined with 
 club-houses, twelve of them, with handsome 
 buildings, beautiful lawns, and tennis courts, and, 
 in the case of the more favored clubs on the south 
 side of the street, a delightful view across the 
 valley to the eastward. Some of the club-houses 
 are sumptuous, comparing very favorably with 
 
126 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 the best city clubs. Their aggregate value must 
 be much more than $1,000,000. The clubs 
 house, on an average, thirty members each — 
 fifteen juniors and fifteen seniors, about 350 in 
 all, juniors and seniors alone being eligible. 
 Three hundred other members of those classes 
 can get into no club. Freshmen and sophomores 
 can only look forward to admission to them. 
 
 Princeton has long forbidden the formation 
 of fraternity chapters; students are required on 
 matriculation to take oath that they will join 
 no fraternities. The clubs are the comparatively 
 recent outgrowth of eating associations. The 
 university has never provided any eating-places 
 for the students. Some thirty years ago the 
 members of an eating-club which called itself 
 the "Ivy" conceived the idea of perpetuating 
 itself. From this idea has grown up this 
 dominating feature of Princeton life, estranged 
 from the university and yet having more to do 
 with the real forming of its students than any 
 other feature of the college life. 
 
 No one can reflect for a moment upon this 
 club system without understanding its essen- 
 
DEMOCRACY OR ARISTOCRACY? 127 
 
 tially vicious character. Perhaps only those 
 who have Hved at Princeton thoroughly under- 
 stand how extremely vicious the system is. At 
 the outset it ought to be made clear that no 
 reflection of any sort or kind is or can be cast 
 upon the morality of the clubs. They are well 
 managed; they are delightful homes; they as- 
 semble groups of undoubtedly fine and gentle- 
 manly men. No drinking is allowed, and in no 
 particular has there ever been the slightest 
 scandal about their conduct. 
 
 The trouble is that they necessarily constitute 
 an aristocracy, in the midst of a community 
 which should, above all things, be absolutely 
 democratic. It may be all very well for the three 
 hundred youths who enjoy the delights of the 
 "Ivy," the "Cap and Gown," the "Colonial," 
 "Tiger Inn," and the rest (though such luxury 
 is of questionable value to a boy who has yet 
 to make his way in the world), but what of the 
 three hundred young men who have not been 
 able to "make" one of them.^ They feel them- 
 selves ostracized and humiliated, and the seeds 
 of social bitterness are sown in their souls. 
 
128 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 There is no provision for them outside of com- 
 mon boarding-houses. Not a few leave the 
 university. 
 
 Worse yet, rivalry for admission to the clubs 
 is so great that it injures the work of the fresh- 
 men and sophomores. The first term of the 
 sophomore year, especially, is considered to be 
 entirely wrecked by the absorption of the stu- 
 dents in candidating for the club elections held 
 that spring. True, from time to time the clubs 
 enter into treaties pledging themselves to ab- 
 stain from soliciting desirable sophomores — 
 and the result of that, when the treaties are 
 lived up to, is to make impossible any friendship, 
 no matter how natural or desirable, between a 
 sophomore and an upper classman; and when 
 they are not lived up to, to supplant free natural 
 intimacies with secret politics. So highly is 
 membership in a swagger club regarded, that 
 parents of prospective students have been 
 known to begin visits to Princeton a year or 
 two before their son entered college, with the 
 purpose of organizing a social campaign to land 
 him in the club to which he aspired. 
 
DEMOCRACY OR ARISTOCRACY? 129 
 
 It may easily be seen how the existence of 
 these select coteries minister to snobbery; how 
 they foster toadying; how they introduce a 
 worldly, material, and unnatural element into 
 what is naturally one of the finest things in the 
 world — a democracy of boys; how they set up 
 at the outset of a student's career a mistaken 
 ideal, an unworthy aim; and how they divide 
 students along unnatural lines. Over and over 
 again, Princeton sees a group of congenial fel- 
 lows of the incoming freshman class gravitate 
 toward each other in the first few weeks of the 
 term, and then, in obedience to some sudden, 
 mysterious influence from Prospect Avenue, 
 dissolve. The members of this group soon, 
 perhaps, find themselves in friendly associations 
 in some other direction, but again these asso- 
 ciations also are broken up. The spirit of the 
 place does not allow men to form friendly and 
 natural associations in accordance with their 
 tastes and dispositions; they must always strive 
 to become friends of those particular classmates 
 who have the best chance of "making" the best 
 clubs, and as "the hunch" passes "down the 
 
130 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 line" from Prospect Avenue, the prospects of 
 one and another student wax and wane, and the 
 character of the coteries in which he finds him- 
 self goes up and down. The social life of the 
 two lower classes presents such a picture as 
 would a layer of iron filings over which a magnet 
 is passed, forming groups now here, now there, 
 and keeping all in constant confusion. So 
 Princeton's clubs continually agitate the under- 
 graduate life, prevent the forming of natural 
 friendships, beget snobbery, set up an aristoc- 
 racy, condemn half the student body to an 
 inferior social position, and make the chief prize 
 of the student's career, not the attainment of an 
 education, but membership in a favored group. 
 In the words of President Wilson, the side-show 
 had swallowed up the circus. Nothing could be 
 more un-American; nothing could be more op- 
 posed to the true principles of education. 
 
 We approach now one of the most dramatic, 
 as it is one of the most involved, chapters in the 
 life of any American institution of learning — 
 indeed a chapter, if it could be rightly told, not 
 
DEMOCRACY OR ARISTOCRACY? 131 
 
 often excelled in interest in any story of Ameri- 
 can life. To appreciate the emotions which 
 were stirred, the passions which were aroused, 
 the bitterness engendered, the life-long estrange- 
 ments created, by what outsiders may easily 
 regard as a slight academical question, it is 
 necessary to consider that a university town 
 constitutes a peculiarly isolated microcosm in 
 itself. Its own affairs loom very large to the 
 members of a university, and, indeed, very large 
 in their expansive influence they are. In such a 
 place as Princeton are gathered men of ability 
 and force of character much above the average; 
 men likely to be of strong convictions, which 
 they are well able to express. Ambitions have 
 their play, too, in the college world; jealousies 
 are easily aroused, as well as extraordinarily 
 devoted friendships cemented. 
 
 In Princeton, too, there had grown up a 
 certain duality of thought and ruling ideal. The 
 town had become the chosen residence of a 
 number of families of wealth, some of them of 
 very great wealth. Having been for a number 
 of years a school very easy-going as to scholar- 
 
13^2 WOODROW \YILSON 
 
 ship and discipline, it had become a favored 
 resort of rich men's sons. Over against the 
 wealthy residents (none of whom, it should be 
 said, w^ere vulgar of display; most of whom, on 
 the other hand, were cultured Christian people 
 of high instincts, the unconscious habits of 
 whose minds only it was that separated them 
 instinctiveh^ from sympathy with the less 
 wealthy); over against the students with auto- 
 mobiles who ran over to Philadelphia or New 
 York at week-ends or entertained small parties 
 at the Inn — there was a body of somewhat 
 slenderly paid professors and of students who 
 had been enabled to take a college course only 
 through the sacrifices of their parents. The 
 Princeton world was a fair epitome of modern 
 America; there was httle vice in it; there was 
 Httle conscious estranging pride; there was no 
 acknowledged dislike of the rich on the part of 
 the less fortunate; but there was the growing 
 prominence of wealth and an increasing exhiVji- 
 tion of its necessary power, and the gradual 
 assertion of that power in forgetfulness of the 
 needs of the poor. In short, there was at Prince- 
 
DEMOCRACY OR ARISTOCRACY? 133 
 
 ton all the elements that go to make up the 
 drama of life, and these so assembled in a small 
 community that their action and reaction could 
 be easily watched. A novelist might have 
 found at Princeton in the years 1907-11 material 
 for the American novel. 
 
 A circular setting forth in outline President 
 Wilson's "quad" proposal was sent to the 
 various clubs and was generally read there on 
 the Friday night before Commencement, 1907. 
 Princeton alumni, particularly those from the 
 Eastern cities, come back in large numbers to 
 their alma mater and usually "put up" at the 
 club-houses, where the Friday night preceding 
 Commencement is given over to a jolly dinner. 
 The "quad" proposal, it was instantly seen, 
 contemplated the doing away of the clubs; it was 
 even said that Wilson proposed to confiscate 
 them. The wrath of the alumni jollifying that 
 night in Prospect Avenue was instantly aroused, 
 and the shout of battle was raised. No decent 
 consideration was ever given the new idea. 
 The grieved graduates went home to spread 
 stories of the attack on Princeton's favorite 
 
134 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 institutions and rally the old boys to their 
 defence. Old Princetonians wrote distressed 
 letters to the Alumni Weekly expressing their 
 grief and astonishment that a Princeton presi- 
 dent should so far forget himself as to try to 
 "make a gentleman chum with a mucker"; they 
 wanted to know what the world was coming to 
 when a man was to be "compelled to submit 
 to dictation as to his table companions"; in the 
 holy name of liberty and the good old Princeton 
 spirit they swore to preserve for the student 
 "the right to decide for himself whom he will 
 associate with." 
 
 The trustees, who had voted the plan through 
 with but a single dissenting voice, now frightened 
 by the alumni howl, were persuaded to recon- 
 sider. On October 17th the Board requested 
 President Wilson to withdraw the proposal. 
 
 The inalienable right of the American college 
 youth to choose his own hat-band (and compel 
 other youths to wear untrimmed head-gear) 
 was thus triumphantly vindicated. But the 
 saviors of the club system were not generous in 
 victory. They continued to hurl insults upon 
 
DEMOCRACY OR ARISTOCRACY? 135 
 
 President Wilson. It was now discovered that 
 he was a domineering, brutal, bigoted, incon- 
 siderate, and untruthful demagogue. The pre- 
 ceptorial system, which had been in operation 
 for two years, with everybody's approval, 
 was now also attacked. President Wilson was 
 charged with having inaugurated it over the 
 heads of the faculty; various classes among the 
 alumni withdrew their subscriptions for the 
 support of preceptors. It took only a few 
 months of this sort of thing for the Board of 
 Trustees, the faculty, and the alumni to find 
 themselves divided beyond compromise. Life- 
 long friendships were broken. Life-long as- 
 sociates parted in bitterness. Charges and 
 countercharges were exchanged. The chasm 
 deepened, and passions so violent that It would 
 not have been deemed possible for a collegiate 
 to possess them, were aroused. 
 
 It is a little difficult to see why the question 
 should have provoked the astonishingly bitter 
 fight which now broke out at Princeton. To 
 find the real cause of it all one must go deeper 
 than the issue presented on the surface, much 
 
136 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 deeper than the mere personaUty of the presi- 
 dent. As to the latter, it is quite possible that 
 Doctor Wilson's positive character, the certainty 
 of his convictions and his aggressiveness in ex- 
 pressing them, may have been distasteful to men 
 long accustomed to other methods. It is even 
 possible that the president was not as gentle in 
 his manner, perhaps not always as tactful, as 
 he might have been, as he has since become. 
 Undoubtedly a man of exceeding charm of per- 
 sonality, he had his grim side — no man de- 
 scended from a line of Scottish Presbyterians has 
 not — and, once aroused in a fight, he was a ruth- 
 less opponent. It seems to be the case that the 
 president's reform programme grew primarily 
 out of his convictions as a teacher of young men. 
 He did not, for instance, deliberately set about 
 to attack the Princeton clubs; he only found 
 that they were in the way of a better educational 
 plan, the adoption of which he deemed neces- 
 sary. But when the host gathered for the de- 
 fence of an aristocratic institution because it 
 was aristocratic, when they denounced him as a 
 confiscator, a leveler, and a Socialist, the innate 
 
DEMOCRACY OR ARISTOCRACY? 137 
 
 democracy of the man flamed up, and the fight 
 ceased to be a debate over educational ideals, 
 having become an irreconcilable conflict between 
 democracy and privileged wealth. 
 
 President Wilson continued to expound his 
 ideas on the subject of the social organization 
 of the university when invited to do so at gather- 
 ings of the alumni in various cities, but he 
 made no aggressive campaign. The preceptorial 
 system, in spite of the growing prejudice against 
 it, continued in vogue, the necessary funds being 
 voted by the trustees. 
 
 Before we turn from the events of '07, it may 
 be worth while to note that, though his plan was 
 for the present defeated, Mr. Wilson was still 
 meditating on the necessity of making Prince- 
 ton democratic. In October, a graduate, Mr. 
 E. B. Seymour, called on President Wilson and 
 had an interesting talk. Though he disagreed 
 with the president's conclusions, Mr. Seymour 
 thus reports Mr. Wilson s views: 
 
 He felt that in this country at the present time there 
 was too strong a tendency to glorify money merely. That 
 with the increasing wealth of the country this tendency 
 
138 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 would be accentuated. In short, he feared that we would 
 rapidly drift into a plutocracy. To meet this condition 
 he felt that the corrective of an education along purely 
 democratic lines should be given to our boys in our insti- 
 tutions of higher learning. At Princeton, whither come 
 many sons of millionaires, he felt we should so impress 
 these boys with ideas of democracy and personal worth 
 that when they became, in the ordinary course of nature, 
 masters of their father's fortunes, they should so use their 
 undoubted power as to help, not hurt, the commonwealth. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE GRADUATE COLLEGE CONTEST 
 
 THE story now becomes complicated 
 through the injection of another issue, 
 that, namely, of the graduate college. 
 Some time before the election of Professor 
 Wilson to the presidency, Prof. Andrew F. West, 
 a brilliant and persuasive member of the fac- 
 ulty, with ambitions, had been given the title of 
 Dean of the Graduate School, together with an 
 appropriation of $2,500 to be used in studying 
 graduate systems of instruction in various univer- 
 sities. Dean West went to Europe for a year, 
 returned, and published a sumptuous little 
 volume containing an elaborate and highly illus- 
 trated scheme for a graduate college. It was 
 never seen by the faculty, although President 
 Wilson, in off-hand good-will for the general idea 
 of graduate development, contributed a pref- 
 ace; the book was sent by Dean West to likely 
 
 139 
 
140 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 contributors among the alumni. In 1906 Doc- 
 tor West was invited to the presidency of the 
 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A 
 meeting of a trustees' committee adopted a 
 resolution expressing the hope that he remain, 
 as the Board had counted upon him to put into 
 operation the graduate school. Dean West de- 
 clined the call to Boston. 
 
 In December of that year, Mrs. J. A. Thomp- 
 son Swann, dying, left $250,000 for the beginning 
 of a graduate college; among the conditions of 
 the gift was the provision that the new college 
 should be located upon grounds of the university. 
 The trustees decided to build it on the site of 
 the president's house, ''Prospect," and the 
 university's consulting architect, Mr. Cram, 
 was instructed to draw the plans. 
 
 In the spring of 1909, through the influence 
 of Dean West, Mr. WilKam C. Proctor of Cin- 
 cinnati offered $500,000 for the graduate college 
 on condition that another half million dollars 
 be raised. Mr. Proctor's letter seemed to 
 imply that the money must be used in carrying 
 out the scheme formulated by Dean W^est; it 
 
GRADUATE COLLEGE CONTEST 141 
 
 also condemned the site chosen for the graduate 
 college by the trustees. In his second letter, 
 addressed to President Wilson, Mr. Proctor 
 named two locations which alone would be 
 acceptable to him. 
 
 So long as Dean West's scheme for a graduate 
 school was a paper plan only, it had received no 
 special examination. But when these two be- 
 quests made its realization possible, the plan was 
 given scrutiny. It was apparent to many of the 
 trustees and faculty that Dean West's elaborate 
 plan was not one to which they were prepared 
 to commit themselves definitely. A special 
 committee of five, appointed by the president of 
 the Board of Trustees, reported (February 10, 
 1910) against the unconditional acceptance of 
 Mr. Proctor's gift. They felt that graduate 
 work at Princeton was still in its formative 
 period; conditions surrounding it were as yet 
 experimental, and it would be a mistake to let 
 the organization, development, and conduct of a 
 graduate college pass in any measure outside 
 the control of the university faculty and Board. 
 The sites which Mr. Proctor insisted upon were 
 
142 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 remote from the university centre, and the com- 
 mittee felt that this was a vital mistake. It 
 was an extremely delicate matter to look the 
 gift-horse in the mouth, but so plain was their 
 duty that they, therefore, called Mr. Proctor's 
 attention to the fact that Dean West's plan was 
 merely a tentative one which had never been 
 adopted in its entirety and that the matter of 
 the location of the graduate college seemed to 
 them to be so important that it could not be 
 decided off-hand by a donor, however generous ; 
 in short, they desired to know whether the pros- 
 pective gift was to place in the hands of the 
 authorized guardians of the university a sum of 
 money to be used according to their best ideas 
 of the needs of the university, or to be spent 
 precisely as the donor desired. 
 
 Mr. Proctor's answer was a withdrawal of 
 his offer. 
 
 The withdrawal naturally caused a sensation 
 and brought down upon the head of President 
 Wilson all the vials of wrath that had not been 
 already emptied upon him. It was inconceiv- 
 able to some in the Board of Trustees, to a large 
 
GRADUATE COLLEGE CONTEST 143 
 
 number of the alumni, and to a portion of the 
 faculty, that a gift of half a million dollars 
 (carrying with it indeed the prospect of another 
 half million — for this had already been nearly 
 subscribed) could be rejected, on any considera- 
 tion whatsoever. Any one who knows how 
 eagerly funds are sought by the trustees of 
 philanthropic and educational institutions can 
 perhaps understand the amazement with which 
 many of the graduates of a college heard that its 
 president had actually turned down the prospect 
 of getting a million dollars. But in view of the 
 perfectly clear position taken by President Wil- 
 son, backed at that time by the majority of the 
 trustees, the passionate outcry against them 
 shown by some Princetonians of general repute 
 for intelligence and conscience, does seem inex- 
 plicable. It was a perfectly clear case. Pres- 
 ident Wilson and the trustees were no doubt 
 infinitely obliged to Mr. Proctor; they were eager 
 to accept his gift, but they simply could not 
 abrogate the duties of their office — they simply 
 could not surrender to any donor the right to 
 determine the university's policy in so grave a 
 
144 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 matter as that of its graduate school. It was 
 they who were charged with the duty of ad- 
 ministering the university — not Mr. Proctor. 
 It would have been fatal for them to admit the 
 principle that a rich man who was willing to 
 give away money should, therefore, be given 
 the right to dictate the educational policy of the 
 institution of which others were the elected 
 officers. They were not there to allow a private 
 plan to be imposed upon the university, deter- 
 mining its future. 
 
 Furthermore, the particular plan which un- 
 conditional acceptance of Mr. Proctor's gift 
 would have forced on Princeton was one utterly 
 opposed to the principles in devotion to which 
 the university under its president's guidance 
 was now so happily advancing. 
 
 To President Wilson its details were altogether 
 obnoxious. Since the subject of graduate study 
 had been taken up, the dean and the president 
 had moved in opposite directions: one toward 
 segregation and exclusiveness; the other toward 
 an organic whole, cooperative, shot through 
 with a common motive and spirit, and stimu- 
 
GRADUATE COLLEGE CONTEST 145 
 
 lated by a common life of give and take. Doctor 
 West now proposed the erection, in a distant part 
 of town, of a sumptuous building where a selected 
 group of young gentlemen of peculiar refinement 
 were to live in cloistered seclusion the life of 
 culture. President Wilson had his own plan 
 for a graduate school — a plan that sprang 
 naturally out of the new system of studies and 
 the preceptorial organization — but it was a 
 plan that contemplated a corps of highly com- 
 petent graduate instructors, proper laboratories, 
 an adequate library, and the practical essen- 
 tials of study — rather than the embroidery of 
 fine buildings and seclusion. "A university 
 does not consist of buildings or of apparatus," 
 he said. *'A university consists of students 
 and teachers." He looked on Dean West's 
 plan as frivolous and unworthy of an American 
 university conscious of its duty to the nation. 
 He argued that graduate students being gener- 
 ally mature men minded to pursue practical pro- 
 fessional studies, an elaborate and peculiar and 
 ornamented scheme like Dean West's would 
 repel rather than attract them. 
 
146 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 The fact of the matter is, he didn't want a 
 hundred nice young gentlemen to come to 
 Princeton and Hve apart pursuing the higher 
 culture. The notion violated the ideal of 
 democracy, deliberately set about to create a 
 scholarly aristocracy, introduced a further ele- 
 ment of disintegration — when what Princeton 
 needed was integration. His own thought was 
 aflame with the picture of a great democratic 
 society of students in which under-graduates 
 and post-graduates should meet and mingle, 
 the contagion of education flying like sparks 
 struck out by the clash of mind on mind, be- 
 ginners discovering that scholars were vital men 
 with red blood in their veins exploring the mag- 
 ical regions of still-undiscovered truth, while 
 specialists were constantly reminded of the 
 common underlying body of truth and so pre- 
 vented from growing isolated, unsympathetic, 
 and idiosyncranized. 
 
 This was of the essence of the whole pro- 
 gramme which President Wilson had been per- 
 mitted to initiate and to bring so far toward 
 success. And now the university was asked to 
 
GRADUATE COLLEGE CONTEST 147 
 
 abandon it for a million dollars! Mr. Wilson 
 exclaimed : 
 
 The whole Princeton idea is an organic idea, an idea 
 of contact of mind with mind — no chasms, no divisions 
 in life and organization — a grand brotherhood of intel- 
 lectual endeavor, stimulating the younger, instructing 
 and balancing the older man, giving the one an aspiration 
 and the other a comprehension of what the whole under- 
 taking is — of lifting, lifting, lifting the mind of successive 
 generations from age to age! 
 
 That is the enterprise of knowledge, an enterprise that 
 is the common undertaking of all men who pray for the 
 greater enlightenment of the ages to come. If you do 
 anything to mar this process, this organic integration of 
 the university, what have you done? You have destroyed 
 the Princeton idea which for the time being has arrested 
 the attention of the academic world. Is that good busi- 
 ness? When we have leadership in our grasp, is it good 
 business to retire from it? When the country is looking 
 to us as men who prefer ideas even to money, are we going 
 to withdraw and say, "After all, we find we were mis- 
 taken: we prefer money to ideas?" 
 
 This may be as good a point as any at which 
 to make it clear that the anti-Wilson sentiment 
 was far from general among the alumni; it was 
 
148 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 practically confined to the cities of the East. 
 In the Board of Trustees, fourteen out of the 
 thirty took their stand against him ; the deciding 
 few wavered. The fine body of faculty mem- 
 bers engaged in graduate work were practically 
 unanimous in their support of the president's 
 sound, scholarly, and practical plans, and en- 
 tirely unsympathetic with the ornate dreams of 
 the dean. As for the students, never for a 
 moment did he have reason to doubt their es- 
 sential soundness; they were caught in the toils 
 of a vicious system, but they furnished the best 
 of material for the development of a true 
 American university along democratic lines. 
 Throughout the graduate school controversy 
 they were ardent Wilson men, though, of course, 
 powerless to influence the result. 
 
 With the Proctor offer withdrawn, the original 
 plan was reverted to for a modest graduate 
 school beginning, financed with the Swann be- 
 quest. And it was in such wise as this that the 
 president spoke justifying his position: 
 
 It is a matter of universal regret that anything should 
 have occurred which seemed to show, on the part of 
 
GRADUATE COLLEGE CONTEST 149 
 
 the university authorities, a lack of appreciation of Mr. 
 Proctor's generosity and love of the university. It is to 
 be hoped that the mere progress of our plans will show that 
 no purpose was entertained by any one which need have 
 led to any misunderstanding. Our gratitude to Mr. 
 Proctor on behalf of the university is not in any way 
 diminished or clouded by his decision to withdraw the 
 offer he so liberally made. 
 
 The thought which constantly impresses and leads us 
 at Princeton, and which I am sure prevails among the 
 great body of her alumni, is that we are one and all of us 
 trustees to carry out a great idea and strengthen a great 
 tradition of national service. We are not at liberty to use 
 Princeton for our private purposes or to adapt her in any 
 way to our own use and pleasure. It is our bounden duty 
 to make her more and more responsive to the intellectual 
 and moral needs of a great nation. It is our duty at every 
 point in our development to look from the present to the 
 future, to see to it that Princeton adapts herself to a great 
 national development, that her first thought shall be to 
 serve the men who come to her in the true spirit of the age 
 and in the true spirit of knowledge. We should be for- 
 ever condemned in the public judgment and in our own 
 conscience if we used Princeton for any private purpose 
 whatever. It will be our pleasure, as it is our duty, to 
 confirm the tradition which has made us proud of her in 
 the past and put her at the service of those influential 
 
150 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 generations of scholars and men of affairs who are to play 
 their part in making the future of America. 
 
 But the opposition was not to be met on any 
 such ground of quiet argument and high appeal. 
 Mr. Wilson never permitted himself to approach 
 or suggest personalities (however besought by 
 graduates in distant cities to "tell them all the 
 truth"); the opposition betook itself to sheer 
 slander and abuse. Much may be forgiven 
 earnest men, but it is simply inexplicable that 
 college trustees, professors, and alumni could 
 have indulged in the vituperative bitterness that 
 found its way into privately circulated pam- 
 phlets and round-robins and into public print. 
 
 The fact is that the discussion of the "quad" 
 system and of the rights of a donor to dictate 
 how his money should be used had revealed 
 the existence of a bottomless chasm in the ways 
 of thinking, in the attitude of spirit that charac- 
 terized two sets of Princeton men. It was the 
 chasm that divides democracy and aristocracy, 
 respect for the rights of manhood and submis- 
 sion to the rights of property. It was an in^ 
 
GRADUATE COLLEGE CONTEST 151 
 
 eradicable instinct in President Wilson and the 
 men who supported him that the hfe of students 
 must be made democratic; the opposition felt 
 no indignation at the existence in college of those 
 social distinctions which they believed must al- 
 ways prevail out in the world. President Wil- 
 son and his supporters could not brook the idea 
 that a man of wealth should undertake to dic- 
 tate the policy of a school professedly conducted 
 by men who were giving their lives to the prob- 
 lems of education. 
 
 "I cannot accede," he wrote, "to the accept- 
 ance of gifts upon terms which take the educa- 
 tional policy of the university out of the hands of 
 the trustees and faculty and permit it to be 
 determined by those who give money." 
 
 Those who were enthusiastic for a university 
 in which social lines should be obliterated and a 
 group of coordinate democracies set up were 
 divided from those who were content to main- 
 tain and even accentuate distinctions by a 
 cleavage as deep as any that exists in the world 
 to-day. No wonder that the partisans of the 
 opposition, in the Board and out, looked on 
 
152 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 Wilson as a dangerous man; no wonder that he, 
 slowly aroused by their villification, began oc- 
 casionally to unslip the leash of his tongue, 
 denounce colleges and churches for yielding to 
 *'the accursed domination of money," and make 
 impassioned appeals for a declaration of college 
 independence. When the going is rapid, Wilson 
 isn't the man to bother about a shock-absorber. 
 At Pittsburg, addressing alumni, he poured 
 out all his soul : 
 
 You can't spend four years at one of our modern uni- 
 versities without getting in your thought the conviction 
 which is most dangerous to America — namely, that you 
 must treat with certain influences which now dominate in 
 the commercial undertakings of the country. 
 
 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. 
 
 The universities would make men forget their common 
 origins, forget their universal sympathies, and join a class 
 — and no class ever can serve America. 
 
 I have dedicated every power that there is within me 
 
GRADUATE COLLEGE CONTEST 153 
 
 to bring the colleges that I have anything to do with to an 
 absolutely democratic regeneration in spirit, and I shall 
 not be satisfied — and I hope you will not be — until 
 America shall know that the men in the colleges are satu- 
 rated with the same thought, the same sympathy, that 
 pulses through the whole great body politic. 
 
 I know that the colleges of this country must be recon- 
 structed from top to bottom, and I know that America 
 is going to demand it. While Princeton men pause and 
 think, I hope — and the hope arises out of the great love 
 I share with you all for our inimitable alma mater — I hope 
 that they will think on these things, that they will forget 
 tradition in the determination to see to it that the free 
 air of America shall permeate every cranny of their 
 college. 
 
 Will America tolerate the seclusion of graduate stu- 
 dents.? Will America tolerate the idea of having graduate 
 students set apart? America will tolerate nothing except 
 unpatronized endeavor. Seclude a man, separate him 
 from the rough and tumble of college life, from all the 
 contacts of every sort and condition of men, and you have 
 done a thing which America will brand with its contempt- 
 uous disapproval. 
 
 To an utterance like that there could be no 
 reply; in an issue thus clearly defined before the 
 whole world (for the Pittsburg speech got into 
 
154 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 the papers and all America applauded) no living 
 board of college trustees would have dared sepa- 
 rate itself from the bold speaker. 
 
 No reply? No living men to take issue? Be- 
 hold how the President of the Immortals jests 
 with us: 
 
 In the town of Salem, Mass., lived an old man 
 named Isaac C. Wyman — so old that his father 
 had fought at the battle of Princeton, January 
 3, 1777. They were rich even then, the Wy- 
 mans, for the father's father had given General 
 Washington £40,000 for his army, as a yellow 
 slip of paper signed by the Revolutionary com- 
 mander still attests. Isaac had been graduated 
 at the College of New Jersey one June day in 
 1848. During the sixty-two years since that 
 day he had never returned to Princeton. But 
 now, the time having come to die, and he, being 
 of sound and disposing mind, made his will, and 
 paid the debt of nature. 
 
 President Wilson's Pittsburg speech was made 
 on April 17 (this was in 1910). A month and a 
 day later. May 18, by the decease of Isaac C. 
 W^yman, the Graduate College of Princeton 
 
GRADUATE COLLEGE CONTEST 155 
 
 University became the legatee of an estate 
 estimated at more than three millions of dollars 
 bequeathed in the trusteeship of John M. Ray- 
 mond of Salem and Andrew F. West of Prince- 
 ton. 
 
 There is no quarreling with the dead. 
 
 At the June trustee meeting the Proctor offer 
 was renewed and accepted. The president 
 made a polite announcement of his acquiescence 
 in the situation created by the miraculous 
 windfall; the gigantic new fund altered every- 
 thing. The university architect was put to 
 work on a scheme of magnificent proportions. 
 
 Commencement was a season of careful ob- 
 servance of all outward amenities. The pres- 
 ident made the speech presenting M, Taylor 
 Pyne, Esq., the leader of the opposition among 
 the trustees, with a gold cup, celebrating the at- 
 tainment of his twenty -fifth year as a trustee. 
 He attended a dinner given by Dean West in 
 honor of Mr. Proctor. All that a man forced to 
 confess himself defeated by events could grace- 
 fully do, he did. What it cost his soul no man 
 
156 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 could guess. A moral defeat he had not suffered. 
 The principle for which he had stood had not 
 been disproved, discredited, or annulled; the 
 gods had overwhelmed it, that was all. 
 
 Of course, he was laughed at, sneered at even 
 by certain alumni, called on to resign. If they 
 had dared, the triumphant party would have 
 dismissed him; they did not dare: Woodrow 
 Wilson was too strong before the country. 
 There was this fly in the ointment of their re- 
 joicing: an alumni trustee was being elected this 
 year as usual, and it was the turn of the West to 
 name him. But Eastern anti-Wilsonists had 
 put up a candidate and made a frenzied cam- 
 paign for him. At Commencement the result 
 was made known: the anti-W^ilson man, Mr. 
 Joline, had been overwhelmingly beaten. But 
 the president himself felt that his work at Prince- 
 ton was done. He had come to that alternative 
 of the Happy W^arrior; of one 
 
 Who if he rise to station of command 
 Rises by open means; and there will stand 
 On honorable terms, or else retire, 
 And in himself possess his own desire. 
 
GRADUATE COLLEGE CONTEST 157 
 
 He was to retire — but not to obscurity, even 
 temporary. The country had not missed al- 
 together what was going on at Princeton. The 
 state had been watching him. And now there 
 came rolHng up from the people, the people out- 
 side of the colleges, the citizens for whom col- 
 leges exist, a great shout that this man was the 
 sort of man that ought to be leading the fight 
 for their cause out in the world of real affairs. 
 Politicians heard that call, and shrewdly joined 
 it. September 15th, a New Jersey State Conven- 
 tion — that of the Democratic party — in ses- 
 sion at Trenton, nominated Woodrow Wilson 
 for the Governorship. He was at Princeton 
 when they brought him the news; he climbed 
 into a motor-car, and in twenty minutes stood 
 on the platform before a shouting throng and 
 accepted their invitation. 
 
 A week later Princeton University opened 
 for a new term, with the resignation of its pres- 
 ident in the hands of the trustees — who, in 
 due time voted him all manner of compli- 
 mentary resolutions, made him still another 
 kind of Doctor, inexpressibly regretted his 
 
158 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 resignation — and accepted it, on the part of a 
 small majority with thanks unspoken, but in- 
 finite in their sincerity. November 8th the peo- 
 ple of New Jersey, by a great majority, made 
 him Governor. 
 
 They are fashioning at Princeton a splendid 
 fabric of stone, which will dominate the land- 
 scape for many miles. Three great fortunes go 
 into it, refined culture planned it, and rare 
 architectural skill is uprearing it. Nothing out- 
 side of Oxford will excel it in dimensions, nothing 
 anywhere match it in sumptuous luxury. No 
 doubt it will be the beautiful home of successive 
 generations of young gentlemen who will be a 
 credit to our intellectual life. The clubs on 
 Prospect Avenue still house lucky youths in 
 delightful existence unthreatened now by an 
 impracticable idealist. 
 
 But somehow a spirit is departed that for a 
 while moved like a refreshing breeze on campus 
 and in hall. Because, for a while, Princeton 
 promised to be something more than a college 
 for rich men's sons. 
 
GRADUATE COLLEGE CONTEST 159 
 
 In days to come, when the ivy is over the 
 Graduate College and the clubs as it is now over 
 Nassau, the most interesting tale that men will 
 tell at Princeton will be the story of a battle — 
 that was lost; and of a leader who was refused 
 and sent away — only to become a captain in 
 the broad field of an historic national struggle. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 OUT OF PRINCETON INTO POLITICS 
 
 THE state of New Jersey at the beginning 
 of the year 1910 was in the case of 
 many another commonwealth in this 
 Union of States. It was in the grip of the 
 pohticians and the corporations, and the good 
 people resident within its borders had about as 
 much voice in the management of their public 
 affairs as they had in deciding the weather or 
 determining the phases of the moon. For years 
 the state government had been run by agents of 
 "the interests" — for a time the Pennsylvania 
 Railroad predominating, more recently a com- 
 bination of electric light and power companies, 
 gas companies, and trolley lines, controlled by 
 the Prudential Insurance Company and the 
 malodorous United Gas Improvement Company 
 of Philadelphia. 
 
 Laterly it was the Republican Organization 
 
 160 
 
INTO POLITICS 161 
 
 that had been in power at Trenton, but the 
 system was really a bi-partisan one. The 
 Republican bosses — Senator John Dryden, 
 Senator John Kean, ex-Governor Franklin Mur- 
 phy, ex-Governor Edward C. Stokes, and David 
 P. Baird — had come to be known as the "Board 
 of Guardians," in which the public service, rail- 
 road, insurance, and other corporation interests 
 were duly represented. The Democratic Or- 
 ganization was the private property of James 
 Smith, Jr., a politician who had made his way 
 into the United States Senate in consequence of 
 having delivered the vote of the Jersey delega- 
 tion to Mr. Cleveland at the Democratic 
 National Convention of 1892, and who had re- 
 tired from that body under criticisms connected 
 with certain scandals incidental to the framing 
 of the Wilson tariff. Ex-Senator Smith is a 
 polished man of affairs whose business interests 
 are identical with those of his friends on the 
 Republican "Board of Guardians." His chief 
 lieutenant was James R. Nugent, a typical rep- 
 resentative of the old-style, strong-arm methods 
 in politics. "Bob" Davis, the thrifty boss of 
 
162 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 Hudson County, sometimes rebelled against his 
 feudal lord and sometimes played in with him, 
 but between Smith and Davis, the organization 
 through a dozen lean years had existed to garner 
 the spoils of municipal jobs and contracts in 
 Newark, Jersey City, and Hoboken; to fill a few 
 minority memberships on state commissions of 
 one sort and another; and to furnish the Re- 
 publican machine with needed help in time of 
 danger. 
 
 However, the great moral movement which 
 during the last five years has been abroad in the 
 land, had not left New Jersey unaware of its 
 gathering power. The leaders of both parties 
 were forced to heed it. In the Republican party 
 Everett Colby, George L. Record, and others 
 stirred up a dangerous enthusiasm among "new 
 idea Republicans." Somehow, somewhere, by 
 some one, there was suggested to Mr. Smith's 
 organization a plan of getting aboard the re- 
 form wagon and riding on it into power. The 
 fight against privilege and the championship 
 of democracy in college life captained by the 
 president of Princeton University had attracted 
 
INTO POLITICS 163 
 
 the attention of the state and now suggested 
 him as a man who could lead a party to victory 
 under the banner of political reform. President 
 Wilson was a student of public affairs of author- 
 ity throughout the country; he was an accom- 
 plished and persuasive speaker; a man of lofty 
 character and , winning personality. Indeed, 
 from outside the state, from the press of many 
 cities, had come the suggestion that the nation 
 would be fortunate if it could place such a man 
 as Wilson in the Presidential chair. 
 
 It is easy enough to see how the idea of run- 
 ning Wilson for Governor needed only present 
 itself to the imagination of a shrewd boss to be- 
 come immediately congenial. Mr. Smith had 
 a son at Princeton and had on one or two oc- 
 casions exchanged greetings with the head of the 
 college, but there was no real acquaintance be- 
 tween the two men, and the Democratic leader 
 no doubt naturally imagined that a learned col- 
 legian would be as putty in the hands of an ex- 
 perienced politician — especially if his eyes were 
 rose-spectacled by the promise of a nomination 
 for President. The man was a hero for pro- 
 
164 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 gressive, independent citizens everywhere and 
 especially within the state where he was best 
 known; a spontaneous popular feeling that he 
 would make an ideal Governor had arisen; what 
 could be better politics than to become sponsor 
 of his nomination and use his popularity for a 
 ride back to power? 
 
 During the early summer of 1910 President 
 Wilson was told by a number of his friends that 
 he could probably have the Democratic nomina- 
 tion for Governor if he desired it. These inti- 
 mations became so numerous and so pointed and 
 were accompanied by so many assurances of the 
 benefit the party and the state would derive 
 from his acceptance that Mr. Wilson was con- 
 strained to lend them a favorable ear. His 
 work at Princeton was apparently arrested — 
 that he realized. 
 
 And yet the prospective nominee was pro- 
 foundly puzzled. While sentiment among the 
 best class of voters throughout the state was 
 strong, the practical overtures came from the 
 organization headed by Smith. Mr. Wilson 
 was perfectly aware of ex-Senator Smith's 
 
INTO POLITICS 165 
 
 political character and history; he knew what 
 the organization was. How could such a gang 
 support him? What quid did they expect for 
 their quo? Were they deceiving themselves as 
 to their man? Did they fancy that his life- 
 long detestation of corrupt politics was simply 
 pose? Or were they merely willing to take him 
 because they knew he was the only sure chance 
 of party victory? Willing to have an incor- 
 ruptible Governor if it were impossible otherwise 
 to get a Democratic Governor? Did Smith 
 regard the schoolmaster as a simple soul who 
 would hand out corporation favors without 
 knowing? Did he expect to get a United States 
 Senatorship through the Democratic legislature 
 which Wilson's popularity was likely to elect? 
 
 On that point Mr. Wilson made specific 
 inquiry of the gentlemen who came to him on 
 their puzzling errand. He required their assur- 
 ance that Mr. Smith would not seek the Senator- 
 ship. "Were he to do so, while I was Governor," 
 he told them, "' I should have to oppose him. He 
 represents everything repugnant to my con- 
 victions." They told him categorically that 
 
166 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 Smith had no idea of going back to the Senate; 
 that he was a man thought to be sick with a 
 dangerous constitutional ailment and borne 
 down by domestic bereavement and that he 
 was definitely out of politics. Furthermore, 
 they called his attention to the fact that the 
 election laws of New Jersey called for a primary, 
 in which the respective parties by popular vote 
 selected their candidates for Senator. James 
 Smith, Jr., would not enter that primary race. 
 Nothing could be more convincing on that score. 
 
 Talking afterward of his perplexity at this 
 time. Governor Wilson said: 
 
 "I was asked to allow myself to be nominated, 
 and for a long time it was impossible for me to 
 understand why I had been asked. The gentle- 
 men who wanted to nominate me were going 
 outside the ranks of recognized politicians and 
 picking out a man whom they knew would be 
 regarded as an absolutely independent person 
 and whom I thought they knew was an abso- 
 lutely independent person. I tried to form a 
 working theory as to why they should do it. I 
 asked very direct and impertinent questions of 
 
INTO POLITICS 167 
 
 some of the gentlemen as to why they wanted 
 me to make the run. They didn't give me any 
 very satisfactory explanation, so I had to work 
 one out for myself. I concluded on the whole 
 that these gentlemen had been driven to recog- 
 nize that a new day had come in American 
 politics, and that they would have to conduct 
 themselves henceforth after a new fashion. 
 Moreover, there were certain obvious practical 
 advantages to be gained by the old-time man- 
 agers. Whether they could control the Gover- 
 nor or not, a Democratic victory would restore 
 their local prestige and give them control of a 
 score of things in which the Governor could not 
 command them, even if he wished. It was one 
 thing to put a Governor in and a legislature; it 
 was another to control their counties and mu- 
 nicipalities." 
 
 The sequel will show how accurate was this 
 theory. 
 
 On Tuesday, July 12, 1910, a number of 
 gentlemen gathered in a private room of the 
 Laywers' Club, 120 Broadway, New York, to 
 inquire of Mr. Wilson whether he would allow 
 
168 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 his name to be presented to the New Jersey 
 Democratic State Convention. At that meet- 
 ing were present Robert S. Hudspeth, national 
 committeeman for New Jersey; James R. Nu- 
 gent, state chairman; Eugene F. Kinkead, Con- 
 gressman; Richard V. Lindabury, George Har- 
 vey, and Milan Ross. But one practical inquiry 
 was made of Mr. Wilson; it was voiced by Mr. 
 Hudspeth, and was in substance this: 
 
 ** Doctor Wilson, there have been some politi- 
 cal 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 Organiza- 
 tion leaders, refusing even to listen to them. Is 
 it your idea that a Governor must refuse to 
 acknowledge his party organization?" 
 
 "Not at all," Mr. Wilson repUed. ''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. If, on my own idependent in vest i- 
 
INTO POLITICS 169 
 
 gation, I found that recommendations for ap- 
 pointment made to me by the Organization 
 leaders named the best possible men, I should 
 naturally prefer, other things being equal, to 
 appoint them, as the men pointed out by the 
 combined counsels of the party." 
 
 On July 15th, Mr. Wilson issued a public 
 statement in which he said that if it were the 
 wish ''of a decided majority of the thoughtful 
 Democrats of the state" that he should be their 
 candidate for Governor, he would accept the 
 nomination. 
 
 The announcement caused a sensation. It 
 was received with enthusiasm by many men of 
 both parties, yet there were not lacking those 
 who were so suspicious of Smith and his associ- 
 ate bosses that they could not believe the 
 nomination was to be given Mr. Wilson without 
 pledges from him. Again, some of the best and 
 most intelligent men of the Democratic party, 
 while they did not doubt the integrity of the pro- 
 posed nominee, did fear that his inexperience in 
 practical politics would make him an easy in- 
 strument of the gang. Mr. Wilson had been 
 
170 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 assured that only his consent was necessary for 
 his unchallenged nomination, but in fact oppo- 
 sition to it at once arose and continued until 
 the convention balloted. Three other Demo- 
 crats — Frank S. Katzenbach, George S. Sil- 
 zer, and H. Otto Wittpen — immediately en- 
 tered the ring. Wittpen was the successful 
 Mayor of Jersey City and the sworn foe of 
 '*Bob" Davis; Davis, though lately he had 
 quarreled with Smith, was now reconciled, and 
 threw his Jersey City organization for Wilson's 
 candidacy. 
 
 After issuing his statement, Mr. Wilson went 
 to the little town of Lyme, Conn., where he has 
 been in the habit of spending his summers, and 
 — spent his summer. He moved not one of his 
 ten fingers in behalf of the nomination. Cer- 
 tain other people, however, were moving every 
 thing movable to that end. The fact that the 
 Smith crowd was advocating him puzzled many 
 who otherwise would have been his foremost sup- 
 porters. It was only (as Mr. Wilson af^^erward 
 learned to his amazement) by sharp dxagooning 
 that a majority sufiicient to make him the choice 
 
INTO POLITICS 171 
 
 was seated in the Trenton Convention on Sep- 
 tember 15th. 
 
 The speech made in that body by Clarence 
 Cole, formally putting Princeton's president in 
 nomination, was interrupted by jeers, cat-calls, 
 and sarcastic questions. A few remarks made 
 by Mr. Smith were, however, closely listened to. 
 The Big Boss said that he had no personal ac- 
 quaintance with Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson and 
 he did not move in the same world. He had 
 never conversed with him. Had conditions 
 been different, he should have preferred a can- 
 didate identified with the Organization. But it 
 was necessary to find a man who could be elected. 
 Mr. Wilson was a Democrat and he could be 
 elected; he knew nobody else who for a certainty 
 could be. Therefore he was for Wilson, who 
 had consented to accept a nomination without 
 any private obligations or undertakings what- 
 ever — he was for him on the ground that it was 
 time New Jersey had a Democratic Governor. 
 
 These were sagacious sentences — and had 
 the incidental merit of telling the truth. It is 
 imdeiiiable that Smith organized the Wilson 
 
172 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 candidacy; it is the curious fact, however, that 
 he could insure its success only by publicly 
 separating himself from it as far as he could. 
 
 On the first ballot, 709 votes being necessary 
 to a choice, Woodrow Wilson received 749 
 and was declared the nominee for Governor. 
 Hastily summoned from Princeton, eleven miles 
 away, he appeared on the platform and made a 
 speech of acceptance so ringing in its assertion 
 of independence and so trumpet-toned in its 
 utterance of the principles of progressive democ- 
 racy that the convention was fairly carried off 
 its feet. Yew of the delegates had ever seen or 
 heard Mr. Wilson. Had he made that speech 
 before the ballot — there would have been no 
 ballot. Having made it, he became the candi- 
 date of a united and enthusiastic party. 
 
 The language in which Mr. Wilson made clear 
 to the convention the circumstances under which 
 he was accepting the nomination was as follows : 
 
 I did not seek this nomination. I have made no pledge 
 and have given no promise. Still more, not only was no 
 promise asked, but as far as I know, none was desired. 
 If elected, as I expect to l)e, I am left absolutely free to 
 
INTO POLITICS 173 
 
 serve you with all singleness of purpose. It is a new era 
 when these things can be said. 
 
 In the first speech of his campaign, at Jersey 
 City, September 28th, the candidate said: 
 
 Some gentlemen on this platform can tell you more 
 specifically than I can that I did not seek the nomination 
 as Governor. They were generous enough to offer it to 
 me, and because they offered it to me they were generous 
 enough to let me understand that I was under no obliga- 
 tion to any individual or group of individuals. 
 
 Now this story of Mr. Wilson's nomination is 
 worth telling in some detail because, in the first 
 place, it is a funny story, in the light of its se- 
 quel; and because, in the second place, it has to 
 do with the charge of ''ingratitude" — the 
 gravest brought against New Jersey's Governor. 
 "What do you think of Woodrow Wilson?" a 
 New York reporter asked Mr. Richard Croker 
 on the latest of those brief visits which the ex- 
 Tammany chieftain deigns occasionally to pay 
 to the land and city now bereft of his political 
 leadership. "Nothing to say," replied Mr. 
 Croker. After a few pulls at his cigar, however, 
 
174 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 he brought out: "An mgrate is no good in 
 poHtics." 
 
 Which is sound pohtical sagacity. Is Wilson 
 an ingrate? 
 
 After a few speeches in which it was apparent 
 that the nominee had a Kttle difficulty in bring- 
 ing himself to ask anybody to vote for him, 
 Mr. Wilson developed unusual power as a cam- 
 paigner. The speeches required of a candidate 
 are not of the nature of those in which a col- 
 lege president or a polished occasional orator is 
 practised, but this candidate had things to say 
 on which his convictions were so strong and his 
 sense of their importance so great that he soon 
 learned language that caught the ear and won 
 the warm attention of the great body of the 
 plain voters of New Jersey. He talked to them 
 of the need of dragging public business out of 
 private rooms where secret interests and pro- 
 fessional political jobbers conspire, into the open 
 air where all might see what is being done; of the 
 need of new political machinery that the people 
 might resume the control of their own affairs; 
 he talked of the vast social and industrial 
 
INTO POLITICS 175 
 
 changes of the past twenty years, making neces- 
 sary the renovation of all our old social and in- 
 dustrial ideas; of the need of new relations be- 
 tween workingmen and their employers, now 
 that these are days of great corporations; of the 
 need of regulating strictly those corporations; 
 talked simply, straightforwardly, of all manner 
 of specific public things in a way that brought 
 them home to the individual voter with a new 
 sense of his own personal concern in them and 
 awakened in him a new realization of his duty, 
 his power, and his opportunity. He not only 
 did this; he lifted political discussion to a new 
 plane, till at every meeting the audience was 
 thrilled with the consciousness that the problems 
 of to-day are gigantic, critical, big with the pur- 
 poses of Providence, as they heard this man pic- 
 ture them on the broad background of history, 
 in the inspiration of a soul aflame with love of 
 common humanity and faith in its progress 
 toward splendid futures. 
 
 One incident of the campaign was the candi- 
 date's reply to a list of questions, presumed to be 
 embarrassing, asked him in an open letter by a 
 
176 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 Progressive Republican, Mr. George L. Record. 
 Mr. Record put into careful form nineteen 
 queries requiring Mr. Wilson to declare himself 
 on such subjects as a public service commission 
 with power to fix rates; the physical valuation of 
 public service corporation properties; direct 
 primaries; popular election of United States 
 Senators; ballot reform; corrupt practices legis- 
 lation; employers' liability for workingmen's in- 
 juries; and finally his own opinion of the Demo- 
 cratic bosses — namely, Smith, Nugent, and Davis. 
 With instant readiness, with audacious glee, 
 Mr. Wilson gave his answers: he accepted the 
 whole Progressive Republican programme and 
 asked for more; no Republican could satisfy a 
 Progressive Democrat's appetite for reform. As 
 for Smith, Nugent, and Davis, he would join 
 anybody in denouncing them ; they differed from 
 Baird, Kean, Stokes, and Murphy in this, that 
 the latter "are in control of the government of 
 the state, while the others are not, and cannot he 
 if the present Democratic ticket is elected,'' Mr. 
 Wilson went farther; he asked himself a twen- 
 tieth question which Mr. Record had been too 
 
INTO POLITICS 177 
 
 polite to ask: What would be his relations 
 with those men if elected Governor? "I shall 
 always welcome advice and suggestions from 
 any citizen, whether boss, leader. Organization 
 man, or plain citizen, but all suggestions and 
 advice will be considered on their merits. I 
 should deem myself forever disgraced should I, 
 in even the slightest degree, cooperate in any 
 such system or any such transactions as 'the 
 boss system' describes." 
 
 Election day was November 8th. On that 
 day the people of New Jersey, for many years 
 a Republican state, chose Woodrow Wilson for 
 Governor by a plurality of 49,150. Two years 
 before, Taft had carried the state by a plurality 
 of 82,000. Wilson had changed the political 
 mind of 66,000 out of 433,000 voters. You will 
 hunt hard to find the like of that in American 
 politics. At the same ratio, if the new Democratic 
 National Convention were to nominate him for the 
 Presidency, Wilson would transform Taffs 1908 
 plurality of 1,270,000 — that marvelous, almost 
 unparalleled plurality — into a Democratic tri- 
 umph by 1,630,000 popular votes. 
 
178 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 On the same day, the majority of those Dem- 
 ocrats who took the trouble to mark their 
 ballots in this particular, selected James E. 
 Martine as their choice for United States 
 Senator. The total Democratic vote for Sena- 
 tor was only 73,000. Martine received 54,000. 
 Nobody voted for James Smith, Jr. 
 
 James E. Martine was an honest and faith- 
 ful Democrat, with radical views ; as genial and 
 good-hearted a man as ever breathed — but 
 scarcely a man that would have been chosen de- 
 liberately for the dignities of membership in the 
 august body that sits in the northern end of the 
 National Capitol. Regularly, for years, he had 
 been put up as candidate for any old oflSce to 
 which there was no hope of election. Once he had 
 run for sheriff; twice he had run for Congress; 
 four times for the assembly; four times for the 
 State Senate. Defeat had ever been his cheer- 
 fully accepted portion. It was a well-estab- 
 lished rule that Martine was always to run — 
 never to reach anything. Now, to general 
 astonishment, Wilson's popularity had given 
 Democrats a majority on joint ballot of the two 
 
INTO POLITICS 179 
 
 houses of the legislature; a successor was to be 
 elected to United States Senator John Kean, 
 and Martine had been permitted to lead in the 
 primary ! 
 
 Ten days after the election James Smith, Jr., 
 called on Governor-elect Wilson at his home in 
 Princeton. The ex-Senator is a gentleman of 
 taste, of Chesterfieldian manner and delightful 
 conversation, and his congratulations, we may 
 depend upon it, were gracefully phrased. 
 Equally graceful was his modest confession that 
 he found his health now greatly bettered, and 
 his intimation that he now indeed felt justified 
 in taking into serious consideration the idea of 
 asking reelection to the United States Senate. 
 
 Governor-elect Wilson, when he had satisfied 
 himself that he heard aright, expressed the very 
 great astonishment which he felt; he then said 
 to Mr. Smith that he regarded the idea as im- 
 possible, and he begged him to abandon it forth- 
 with. Followed a long conversation, in which 
 Smith sought to justify his political past, while 
 the Governor-elect made more and more explicit 
 his warning that he would never permit the 
 
180 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 election. The ex-Senator turned the talk on 
 Martine's qualifications, or lack of them — 
 which Mr. Wilson refused to discuss. The issue 
 was not Martine, but the party's faith. The 
 primary had elected Martine, and there was 
 nothing for the legislature to do but ratify that 
 election. 
 
 *'The primary was a joke," said Smith 
 **It was very far from a joke," rejoined the 
 Governor-elect. ''But assume that it was. 
 Then the way to save it from being a joke here- 
 after is to take it seriously now. It is going to 
 be taken seriously, and there will be no more 
 jokes. The question who is to enjoy one term 
 in the Senate is of small consequence compared 
 with the question whether the people of New 
 Jersey are to gain the right to choose their own 
 Senators forever." 
 
 Smith's candidacy was now made publicly 
 known, and the party sharply divided, the Or- 
 ganization declaring its purpose and its abilit}^ 
 to carry the legislature for him, and the decent 
 rank and file denouncing the attempt to steal a 
 Senatorship for a discredited politician who 
 
INTO POLITICS 181 
 
 dared not run in the primary. The greatest 
 eagerness was shown as to the attitude of 
 Governor-elect Wilson. He, however, refrained, 
 for a little while, from taking either side pub- 
 licly, hoping his public interference would not 
 be necessary. Privately, he sent many men of 
 influence to Smith to urge him not to try the 
 race. These measures availed nothing. 
 
 As a last effort to save Mr. Smith from the 
 humiliation he was determined should overtake 
 him if he persisted, Mr. Wilson called on Mr. 
 Smith by appointment at his house in Newark. 
 It was in the late afternoon of Tuesday, Decem- 
 ber 6th. The Governor-elect said he had come to 
 say that, although he had as yet taken no public 
 stand, it was his intention, unless Mr. Smith 
 withdrew from the Senatorial contest, to an- 
 nounce his opposition to him. 
 
 "Will you be content in having thus publicly 
 announced your opposition? " asked the aspirant. 
 
 "No. I shall actively oppose you with every 
 honorable means in my power," replied the 
 Governor-elect. 
 
 "Does that mean that you will employ the 
 
18£ WOODROW WILSON 
 
 state patronage against me?" inquired Mr. 
 Smith. 
 
 "No," answered Wilson. "I should not re- 
 gard that as an honorable means. Besides, that 
 will not be necessary." 
 
 The Governor-elect then laid down this ulti- 
 matum: 
 
 "Unless I hear from you, by or before the 
 last mail delivery on Thursday night, that you 
 abandon this ambition, I shall announce my op- 
 position to you on Friday morning." 
 
 The last mail Thursday night brought no 
 message from Smith, and Mr. Wilson by tele- 
 graph released to the morning newspapers a 
 statement he had prepared denouncing the 
 Smith candidacy. Half an hour later came a 
 special delivery letter from Smith asking for a 
 few days' delay. The denunciation had gone 
 out. 
 
 It was a bitter fight. The Governor did not 
 wait for the assembling of the legislature; he 
 appeared before large audiences in the chief 
 cities — and, making a clear statement of the 
 case, asked the people to see to it that their rep- 
 
INTO POLITICS 183 
 
 resentatives voted right. Among the legisla 
 tors there was panic; none of them had ever 
 heard of such a thing as this smiHng defiance, by 
 a mere novice in the pohtical field, of a boss who 
 had ruled twenty years. Not all of them had 
 instant faith in the outcome. But there never 
 was any doubt about the result. As Governor 
 Wilson afterward told the story, he brought no 
 pressure to bear upon the wavering members of 
 the legislature. He merely told them to follow 
 their consciences, and tried to assure them that 
 they would suffer no harm if they did so. He 
 said to them: 
 
 ''Do not allow yourselves to be dismayed. 
 You see where the machine is entrenched, and 
 it looks like a real fortress. It looks as if real 
 men were inside, as if they had real guns. Go 
 and touch it. It is a house of cards. Those 
 are imitation generals. Those are playthings 
 that look like guns. Go and put your shoulder 
 against the thing and it collapses." 
 
 They took heart and put their shoulders 
 against it, and it collapsed. 
 
 On January 28th the New Jersey Legislature 
 
184 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 elected James E. Marline to the United States 
 Senate, giving him forty votes. The Organiza- 
 tion mustered four for Smith. 
 
 Such is the tale of Woodrow Wilson's '* in- 
 gratitude." 
 
 The most moderate and charitable account of 
 the matter that any way reaches its pith is that 
 which Wilson himself once gave: 
 
 "They did not believe that I meant what 1 
 said, and I did believe that they meant what 
 they said." In their sophistication, they had 
 gold-bricked somebody, certainly, but not the 
 schoolmaster nor the people of New Jersey. 
 They had digged a pit and fallen into the midst 
 of it themselves. For the intended victim to 
 escape was, of course, rank ingratitude! 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 ONE YEAR OF A PROGRESSIVE GOVERNOR 
 
 THE platform upon which Governor Wil- 
 son had been elected had promised four 
 principal things — which probably not 
 a man in the convention that adopted it ex- 
 pected to see realized : the direct primary, a cor- 
 rupt practices election law, a public service 
 commission with power to fix rates, and an em- 
 ployers' liability and workingmen's compensation 
 law. The Governor's inaugural address — a re- 
 markable document, vibrant with the spirit and 
 the consciousness of a new age, new alike in poli- 
 tics and in the very elements of social and indus- 
 trial life — made it clear that he regarded the plat- 
 form promises as binding. He spoke of them, 
 and of a dozen kindred steps of enlightened re- 
 form, with the blithe confidence of a captain who 
 gives the word of advance to an assured and 
 easy victory: 
 
 185 
 
186 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 It is not the foolish ardor of too sanguine or too radical 
 reform that I urge upon you, but merely the tasks that 
 are evident and pressing, the things we have knowledge 
 and guidance enough to do; and to do with confidence and 
 energy. I merely point out the present business of prog- 
 ress and serviceable government, the next stage on the 
 journey of duty. The path is as inviting as it is plain. 
 Shall we hesitate to tread it? I look forward with genuine 
 pleasure to the prospect of being your comrade upon it. 
 
 The new Governor of New Jersey had little 
 respect for the doctrine of ''the three coordinate 
 branches, as it had been pedantically exagger- 
 ated in practice." His study of the English 
 parliamentary system had long ago directed his 
 attention to the advantages of having the exec- 
 utive closely associated in counsel with the leg- 
 islature. His investigation of the American 
 congressional system had confirmed him in the 
 opinion that the attempt to maintain in pedantic 
 precision the classic theory of separation, tended 
 to divide and destroy responsibility, render 
 official leadership impossible, and make a mud- 
 dle where ought to be a clear-headed, decisive 
 government. How often an executive of one 
 party and a legislature of another completely 
 
A PROGRESSIVE GOVERNOR 187 
 
 waste a term of office, unable to do anything but 
 play politics ! It ought to be impossible to have 
 an executive administration trying to carry on 
 the government without the backing of a legis- 
 lature of the same political complexion. It 
 ought to be impossible to have a legislature in 
 which the executive administration cannot sug- 
 gest legislation. 
 
 It is not necessary here to go farther into Mr. 
 Wilson's ideas of responsible government (he 
 believes that the American plan is capable of 
 natural improvement) , except to remark that he 
 attributes the up-growth of the boss system, 
 with its extra-legal, extra-official leaders, largely 
 to the absence of constitutional provision for 
 official leaders, and to add that he had deter- 
 mined to be, as Governor,, an official leader — 
 the chief of his party in the state, the party put 
 into power by an overwhelming vote of the 
 people — the leader, therefore, responsible not 
 only for administering the routine business of 
 the Governor's office, but for seeing that the 
 policies endorsed in the party platform on which 
 he had been elected were embodied in legis- 
 
188 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 lation. During the campaign he had expHcitly 
 requested that no man vote for him who did not 
 want him to be the party leader. He had warned 
 the electorate of the state that if elected he 
 meant to be an "unconstitutional Governor," 
 as the constitution was instantly interpreted to 
 forbid his taking part in legislation. And the 
 electorate had given him a majority of fifty 
 thousand. 
 
 It was not idly, therefore, that the Governor's 
 inaugural bugle-call summoning the legislators 
 to enter upon the path of progress ended with 
 the jubilant note of pleasure at the prospect of 
 being their "comrade" upon it. 
 
 What was the situation that confronted this 
 hopeful Governor? 
 
 His party had a majority on joint ballot of the 
 legislature; but the Senate, without whose con- 
 currence no bill could become law, stood Repub- 
 lican 12 to 9. Democrats were in a majority of 
 42 to 18 in the Assembly, but many of the party's 
 representatives were connected with the old 
 Organization and resentful of the college pres- 
 ident's advent into pohtics. The Governor's 
 
A PROGRESSIVE GOVERNOR 189 
 
 triumph in seating Mr. Martine in the United 
 States Senate over ex-Senator Smith's candi- 
 dacy had not ended the war between him and the 
 old Organization. It had given him prestige, 
 it had heartened the friends of good govern- 
 ment; but it had even more savagely embittered 
 the old leaders and engendered sullenness among 
 their still faithful followers. ''We gave him the 
 Senatorship," they said among themselves, "but 
 that is the end; we've done enough; if he asks 
 for more, he'll find out who is running the state 
 of New Jersey." The state of New Jersey had 
 been ''run" for years by the allied corporation 
 interests. They might put up with the loss of 
 a Senator, but legislation that proposed to fas- 
 ten a workingmen's compensation liability upon 
 them; put them, their books, and the rates they 
 charged, under the control of the people; and 
 that, above all, proposed to destroy the boss 
 system, through which they held their dom- 
 ination of the State House — such things simply 
 could not and should not be. If anywhere in 
 the Union the beautiful theories of representa- 
 tive government met the ugly realities of actual 
 
190 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 politics, they met them in the corporation-ruled 
 state of New Jersey. What mattered the 
 wishes of a majority of fifty thousand voters to a 
 legislature two thirds of whose members were 
 under obligations to one or the other of the or- 
 ganizations they were asked to destroy? 
 
 The way in which a situation so discouraging 
 was forced to yield the surprising results it did 
 yield is full of promise to men of hope. 
 
 Governor Wilson relied from the start on the 
 merits of the bills, on public sentiment in favor 
 of them, and on his power to force the open dis- 
 cussion of them. He would not permit them to 
 be done for in secret conferences ; there should be 
 public debate; he would make his own argu- 
 ments for the bills so that all the state should 
 hear him, and he would compel the opponents 
 to give the reasons of their opposition publicly. 
 The doors of his office stood always open, and 
 he encouraged Senators and Assemblymen to 
 make it a habit to come to see him and talk 
 things over — famiharly, but never secretly. 
 Those who did not come, he sent for, on one 
 
A PROGRESSIVE GOVERNOR 191 
 
 pretext or another, and the matter of the bills 
 naturally came up. He told them that he had 
 no patronage to dispose of, no promises to make, 
 and no warnings to issue, but he should like to 
 have them consider the bills on their merits, and 
 let him know where they stood. 
 
 Heretofore Republican Governors had con- 
 sulted Republican members, and Democratic 
 Governors had consulted Democratic members. 
 Wilson consulted members of both parties. He 
 talked to them all alike of the good of the com- 
 monwealth; to Democrats he added arguments 
 based on the platform promises. He made it 
 clear that he considered himself chosen party 
 leader, but he gave no orders — he would not be 
 a boss; though he might be much bold to enjoin, 
 yet he rather besought, with argument, with 
 appeals to patriotism, state pride and party 
 loyalty, with the simple, cheerful assumption 
 that they were all agreed on essentials (hard 
 they found it to deny that smiling assumption !) 
 and need discuss only incidental details. The 
 nearest that he ever came to a threat was in the 
 suggestion to a few stubborn opponents that 
 
192 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 they debate the question with him in pubHc in 
 their own districts. From time to time the 
 Governor issued pubhe statements regarding 
 his measures; in one he expressed the fear that 
 he might have to name the men who were pre- 
 paring to be faithless to the platform promises 
 and to betray the people. He never had to do 
 this; when it came to a vote, as we shall see, 
 there was nobody to name worth naming. 
 
 On the opening of the legislature, January 
 10, 1911, it was with difficulty that sponsors 
 could be found to introduce the Governor's 
 bills. Few believed that a single one of them 
 could be forced through before the end of the 
 session. "Very well, then, we shall have to 
 have a special session to do it," was Governor 
 Wilson's undismayed reply. *' However, let us 
 hope that won't be necessary." 
 
 First in order came up the Primary Elections 
 Bill, to which an Assemblyman from Monmouth 
 County had allowed his name to be given: the 
 Geran Bill. 
 
 This revolutionary piece of legislation con- 
 
S b 
 
 GC 
 
 <; 1-5 
 
A PROGRESSIVE GOVERNOR 193 
 
 templated the turning over of both, or all, 
 political organizations to the people; conven- 
 tions, so easily manipulated by nominating 
 bosses, were done away with. All candidates 
 for office from that of constable to President 
 were to be nominated directly by ballot of the 
 people; all party officers, committeemen, dele- 
 gates to national conventions, and the like, were 
 to be so elected by popular ballot, and the 
 primary elections at which all this was to be 
 done were to be conducted by the state under 
 strict laws, the election officers being chosen 
 from citizens who have passed special civil 
 service examinations. The respective party 
 platforms were to be written by the party's 
 candidates for the legislature, meeting toge'.her 
 with the state committee — the men who, if 
 elected, were themselves to carry out the plat- 
 form promises. 
 
 To those who understand the significance of 
 the great movement for the resumption by the 
 people of the direct powers of government, it 
 would have been sufficiently astonishing that a 
 Governor of a state like New Jersey should have 
 
194 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 thought it worth while to make to his legislature 
 such an audacious proposal as the direct pri- 
 mary, with popular selection of United States 
 Senators, popular nomination of Presidential 
 candidates, and popular choice of party officers. 
 This meant the killing of the bosses ; it meant the 
 extinction of corporation-controlled organiza- 
 tions; it meant everything that New Jersey had 
 never had and that the professional politicians 
 and the big business interests could never permit 
 it to have. 
 
 No wonder there was a battle royal! 
 
 Jame^ R. Nugent was in active direction of 
 the opposition. Ex-Senator Smith's relation, 
 he urged the "ingrate" argument; Wilson knew 
 no honor and would knife the men who assisted 
 him; state chairman, he was officially in com- 
 mand of the party Organization, and could 
 promise and threaten with the prestige of fifteen 
 long years of almost unopposed party suprem- 
 acy against this new Governor's bare month of 
 troubled experience. 
 
 Nugent easily arranged a coalition with the 
 Republicans. Their Organization was equally 
 
A PROGRESSIVE GOVERNOR 195 
 
 threatened, and far greater than the fall of the 
 minority party bosses would be that of the Re- 
 publican *' Board of Guardians" who had for 
 years "bossed" the majority party in the state. 
 If the Republican majority still in control of 
 the Senate stood pat, the Geran Bill would fail 
 there; but Nugent wanted more: he wanted the 
 Democratic lower chamber to repudiate the 
 Governor's plan. He was so confident that this 
 could be managed that he arranged for a con- 
 ference on the bill as a preliminary test. 
 
 It was a fatal error. 
 
 The Governor heard of the conference, and 
 genially suggested that he be invited. It was 
 unprecedented for a Governor to attend a legis- 
 lative caucus, but it would have been awkward 
 to have declined to invite him if he wanted to 
 come. So he went. 
 
 The gathering was in the Supreme Court 
 room, on the second floor of the State House. 
 One Assemblyman, Martin, challenged the 
 Governor's intervention; he had no constitu- 
 tional right to interfere in legislation; had it not 
 been written by them of old time that the ex- 
 
196 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 ecutive and legislative branches must be kept 
 sacredly apart? The Governor replied by draw- 
 ing from his pocket the Legislative Manual and 
 reading a clause of the constitution which directed 
 the Governor of New Jersey to communicate 
 with the legislature at such times as he might 
 deem necessary, and to recommend such meas- 
 ures as he might deem expedient. He was there, 
 he continued, in pursuance of a constitutional 
 duty, to recommend a measure of that character. 
 In noble fashion did he recommend it. That 
 conference lasted four and a half hours; for 
 three hours of it Mr. Wilson was on his feet, 
 first expounding the bill, clause by clause; 
 answering all queries and replying to all objec- 
 tions out of a knowledge not only of the ex- 
 perience of other states but of the practical 
 workings of politics, that greatly surprised his 
 audience. One by one he met and silenced all 
 critics. Then, looking about upon them, he 
 began what will always remain one of the notable 
 speeches of his career, a speech which no man 
 who was present will ever forget. They were 
 Democrats, and he spoke to them as such. This 
 
A PROGRESSIVE GOVERNOR 197 
 
 he told them, was no attempt to destroy the 
 party; it was a plan to revitahze it and arm it 
 for the war to which the swelhng voice of a 
 people called it in an hour of palpitant expec- 
 tancy. With an onrush of words white-hot 
 with speed and suppressed emotion, he dis- 
 played before them the higher view of political 
 duty, and expanded the ground of his hope for 
 the future of the Democratic party as a servant 
 of the people. 
 
 One repeats only what the attendants at this 
 remarkable meeting unite in testifying when he 
 says that they came downstairs not knowing 
 whether more amazed by the force of logic that 
 had fairly won them over, or moved by the in- 
 spiring appeal to which they had listened The 
 conference, called to refuse the Geran Bill, voted 
 to make it a party measure. 
 
 A Republican caucus was proposed to insure 
 party unanimity against the bill, but so many 
 Republican members refused in advance to be 
 bound, that the plan was abandoned. The 
 opposition had hoped that the Senate committee 
 on elections would refuse to report the bill out, 
 
198 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 but to this Senator Bradley, Republican, chair- 
 man of the committee, declined to be a party. 
 Senator Bradley had for several sessions been 
 chairman of the joint committee on appropri- 
 ations, and though the Democrats now controlled 
 this committee. Governor Wilson had asked that 
 Mr. Bradley, because of his long experience, be 
 retained in its chairmanship. Doubtless this 
 had nothing to do with Mr. Bradley's refusal to 
 bury the Geran Bill. Doubtless the straight- 
 forward Governor had had no thought of reci- 
 procity. But the circumstance is interesting. 
 
 The Senate elections committee did hold a 
 public hearing, aranged by the opposition. It 
 was a melancholy alBfair, from their standpoint; 
 the speakers who were to demolish the bill never 
 came, while a battery of able, and by now en- 
 thusiastic, cannoneers riddled the pretensions 
 of the enemy. It is a pity that the scathing 
 sarcasm drawled from the scornful lips of 
 Joseph Noonan, whose native Irish wit has not 
 been spoiled by his Oxford education, was not 
 stenographically reported. Traditions of its ef- 
 fectiveness still hang about that Senate chamber. 
 
A PROGRESSI\^ GOVERNOR 199 
 
 Among the expected lights who failed to come 
 and scintillate for the Senate committee and the 
 public was Mr. John William Griggs, Mc- 
 Kinley's Attorney-General, and Governor of the 
 state during the palmiest days of unrebuked 
 misrule. Mr. Griggs's part in the world to-day 
 is to bewail, with a heart of infinite sorrow, the 
 tendency of a lawless generation to depart from 
 the ancient landmarks of established order 
 recommended by the prescription of immemorial 
 usage, and certified by the sanction of many 
 years of Republican prosperity. Governor Wil- 
 son informed the Senators that if Mr. Griggs 
 appeared, he would come himself and make a 
 few remarks suggested by the former Attorney- 
 General's speech. It would have been a great 
 debate had it ever come off. The Governor 
 waited in his office, but Mr. Griggs never came. 
 The total of the opposition was represented by 
 James Smith, Jr's., private secretary, who, after 
 some desultory vaporings, sent word to his chief 
 that open opposition to the Geran Bill was futile. 
 
 So now was secret opposition. Nugent still 
 hung about Trenton. One day he went into 
 
200 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 the Governor's office, at the Governor's request, 
 to "talk things over." 
 
 Nugent very quickly lost his temper. 
 
 **I know you think you've got the votes," he 
 exclaimed. "I don't know how you got them." 
 
 "What do you mean?" queried the Governor, 
 sharply. 
 
 "It's the talk of the State House that you got 
 them by patronage." 
 
 "Good afternoon, Mr. Nugent," said Gov- 
 ernor Wilson, pointing to the door. 
 
 "You're no gentleman," shouted the dis- 
 comfited boss. 
 
 "You're no judge," rephed Mr. Wilson, his 
 finger continuing to indicate the exit. 
 
 Let us finish with a disagreeable subject of 
 some slight interest in a picture of Jersey pol- 
 itics. Nugent crept away. Six months later 
 he came again into the prominence of his kind. 
 Still state chairman, he was giving a dinner to a 
 small but convivial party at "Scotty's," a 
 restaurant at Avon, on the Jersey coast. A 
 party of oflficers of the New Jersey National 
 
A PROGRESSIVE GOVERNOR 201 
 
 Guard then in camp at Sea Girt, near by, was 
 seated at an adjoining table. 
 
 Nugent sent wine to the officers' table and 
 asked them to join his own party in a toast. 
 The diners at both tables arose. "I give you," 
 cried Nugent, ''the Governor of the State of 
 New Jersey" — all glasses were raised; Nugent 
 finished — "a liar and an ingrate!" 
 
 The diners stood a moment stupefied. *'Do 
 I drink alone .^" shouted the host. 
 
 He did drink alone. The glasses were set 
 down untouched; some of the officers indig- 
 nantly threw out their wine on the floor. Then 
 all dispersed, and Nugent was left alone. 
 
 The following day a majority of the members 
 of the state committee signed a call for a meet- 
 ing to elect a new chairman. The meeting 
 was held a few days later at the Coleman 
 House, Asbury Park. A little strong-arm work 
 was indulged in, in Nugent's behalf, by a 
 gang headed by Charlie Bell, a wine tout, 
 but the Newark man was duly deposed, and a 
 successor elected in the person of Edward W. 
 Grosscup, a member of the Organization w^ho 
 
202 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 had come to be a supporter and an admirer of 
 the Governor. 
 
 The Geran Bill came to its passage in the 
 Assembly and went through with one third more 
 votes than it needed. The Republican Senate 
 accepted and passed it without a struggle. 
 
 The whole legislative programme followed. 
 To-day, Jersey has the most advanced and best 
 working primary election law in the Union. It 
 has a corrupt practices law of the severest kind. 
 Betting on elections is forbidden. Treating by 
 candidates is forbidden. All campaign ex- 
 penses must be published; corporations may not 
 contribute; the maximum amount allowed to be 
 spent by candidates for any office is fixed by 
 law. 
 
 New Jersey to-day has a public utilities com- 
 mission with powcT to appraise property, fix 
 rates, forbid discriminations, regulate finances, 
 control all sales, mortgages, and leases in the 
 case of all railroads, steam and electric, in the 
 case of express companies, of canal, subway, pipe 
 line, gas, electric llglit, heat, power, water, oil. 
 
A PROGRESSIVE GOVERNOR 203 
 
 sewer, telegraph, telephone companies, systems, 
 plants, or equipments for public use. This com- 
 mission's orders as to rates go into effect im- 
 mediately or, if they are cuts, at the end of 
 twenty days' notice. To-day, New Jersey has 
 an employers' liability law which gives an in- 
 jured employee immediate automatic compen- 
 sation paid by the employer. The working- 
 man, may, however, sue for damages, if he pre- 
 fers to take his chances before a jury. The state 
 has to-day a provision for the adoption by such 
 cities and towns as may desire it, of the com- 
 mission form of government on the Des Moines 
 plan, with the initiative and referendum and re- 
 call. Under this law, Trenton, the capital, and 
 eight other Jersey cities and towns are trying 
 scientific municipal government. Governor Wil- 
 son has spoken in many places in advocacy of 
 the plan. 
 
 To this extraordinary record of progressive 
 legislation must be added an intelligent statute 
 regulating the cold storage of food; legislation 
 estabhshing the indeterminate sentence in place 
 of the old discredited fixed sentence; and the 
 
204 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 complete reorganization of the public school 
 system. 
 
 It is worthy of special remark that the achieve- 
 ment of these surprising results over and against 
 its original opposition left the legislature, never- 
 theless, in a very friendly attitude of mmd 
 toward the Governor. He earned their respect, 
 and he won, to boot, the hearty good-will of 
 most of the legislators. At first an atmosphere 
 of diffidence hung over the executive anterooms ; 
 visitors were not sure how they would be treated. 
 But they soon found it a dehght to visit the 
 Governor's office, and began to think up ex- 
 cuses for a look in. The spare gray man with 
 the long jaw had a mighty takmg way about 
 him; there was always a ready smile and often 
 a lively story, and you seldom failed to go away 
 with a glow around your heart. 
 
 The Senators found him out in due course of 
 the session one night at a little dinner given him 
 and them by the Adjutant-General, Mr. Sadler, 
 at the Country Club. There were some darky 
 music-makers on hand, and presently the high 
 tenor voice that had led two college glee-clubs 
 
A PROGRESSIVE GOVERNOR 205 
 
 was caroling in darky dialect, and before long 
 (it was in the confidential privacy of a group of 
 sympathetic Senators) the rather lengthy legs 
 and other members of a Governor were engaged 
 in a duet Cakewalk with one of the older Senators. 
 Nobody knows how many votes for progressive 
 legislation were won that night. 
 
 A very practical imderstanding of human 
 nature was, from the. beginning, displayed in the 
 gubernatorial dealings with legislators — per- 
 haps not a little of it due to the keen political 
 sagacity of the Governor's secretary, Joseph P. 
 Tumulty, one of the bright young men of the 
 state, experienced beyond his years in the ways, 
 moods, and foibles of politicians in general and 
 legislators in particular. But Mr. Wilson is 
 himself the most human of men. He is very 
 positive, he can be very indignant, he takes the 
 high ground for himself; but he is not vindictive, 
 and he knows how to make allowances. 
 
 No retaliation was ever visited upon adver- 
 saries of the Governor. Assemblyman Martin 
 of Hudson County, for instance, was prominent 
 in the fight against Martine; and he was a leader 
 
206 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 in opposition to the Geran Elections Bill, his 
 opposition being doubtless sincerely based on 
 his beUef tliat it would destroy the party or- 
 ganization. Martin was much interested in a 
 bridge bill affecting Hoboken and the north end 
 of his county. As the time drew near for action 
 upon the bridge bill, he grew very uneasy and 
 was observed to be much in the vicinage of the 
 Governor's room, inquiring of all and sundry 
 who were in communication with the Executive 
 whether they thought he would let it go through. 
 It was difficult to persuade a man used to the 
 customs of the old days that there was a new 
 kind of politician in the Governor's chair, a 
 politician who dealt with proposed legislation on 
 its merits and not in the harboring of vindic- 
 tiveness nor the remembrance of promised re- 
 ward. Mr. Martin's bridge bill was a just and 
 desirable measure, and he got it. When the 
 fight for reform in the educational department 
 came on, Martin was in the front rank in support 
 of the Governor's proposals. 
 
 Ex-Senator Smith, the notorious James, Jr., 
 now Mr. Wilson's bitter enemy, owns a great 
 
A PROGRESSIVE GOVERNOR 207 
 
 deal of real estate in Newark. His relative and 
 chief lieutenant, James R. Nugent, controls the 
 city so absolutely that a laborer can't get a job 
 on the street without his consent. However, 
 there are some things which a New Jersey city 
 council has to ask the legislature for permission 
 to do. This session there was to come up at 
 Trenton a bill allowing the Newark common 
 council in its discretion to widen certain streets. 
 The improvement would enhance the value of 
 realty owned by Smith. It would have been 
 the easiest thing in the world for a vindictive 
 Governor to have vetoed the bill, on the ground 
 that it was a job, and to have won applause for 
 his act, while striking a telling blow at Smith and 
 Nugent. But, considering the case on its merits. 
 Governor Wilson could conclude only that it au- 
 thorized a real improvement, irrespective of its ef- 
 fect on the Smith property. He signed the bill. 
 "Mr. Smith and the Governor do not always 
 see precisely eye to eye," was his remark, as he 
 laid down the pen, "but that circumstance con- 
 stitutes no reason why Mr. Smith should be 
 deprived of any of his rights as a citizen." 
 
208 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 There was one ease, however, in which Mr. 
 Wilson violated, unblushingly, his declaration 
 that he had no rewards for those who supported 
 nor punishment for those who opposed his meas- 
 ures. Assemblyman Allan B. Walsh, of Mercer 
 County, was a mechanic employed by the Roe- 
 bling Company. This corporation, which paid 
 Walsh something like three dollars a day for his 
 labor in its shops, naturally felt that this sum 
 included what service he could render in his 
 capacity as a legislator. When the election of 
 United States Senator came up he was instructed 
 to vote for Smith. He went to the Governor 
 and told him how the case stood with him. "I 
 quite understand," said the Governor, "and I 
 don't want to advise you what to do. I am not 
 the man to ask you to imperil your family's 
 living. Whatever you conclude to do, I shan't 
 hold it against you." 
 
 Something in the common sense and human 
 kindliness of Wilson's attitude so touched Walsh, 
 not heretofore known as a hero, that he went to 
 the caucus and voted for Martine. His work 
 was cut till he could make only $10 a week. 
 
A PROGRESSIVE GOVERNOR 209 
 
 When the battle was joined on the Wilson legis- 
 lative programme, his employers warned him to 
 vote against it. He voted for it — Walsh, you 
 see, had a man in him — and was discharged. 
 The Governor heard of that — and those who 
 happened to be in the State House that day 
 heard language flow in a vigor drawn from re- 
 sources not commonly tapped by Presbyterian 
 elders. Walsh was a poor man with a family, 
 whose livelihood had been taken away from him 
 because he voted according to his conscience. 
 "Something must be done for Walsh; we can't 
 see him suflfer like this," said Mr. Wilson. He 
 was reminded of his declaration that he would 
 neither punish nor reward. "No matter what 
 I said!" he exclaimed. "This is a good time 
 to be inconsistent. We'll find a place for Walsh. " 
 
 So it is a true charge that the present clerk 
 of the Mercer County tax board (though indeed 
 he is a competent man) owes his position to the 
 fact that he voted for Wilson measures in the 
 legislature. 
 
 Mr. W^ilson's appointments were for the most 
 part wise and happy — some of them remark- 
 
210 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 ably so. One of the best, in its results, was that 
 of Samuel Kalish to the Supreme Court bench. 
 Kalish is a Jew, and he happened to be Nugent's 
 personal counsel, but neither of these circum- 
 stances closed the Governor's eyes to the fact 
 that he was able, honorable, vigorous, and 
 peculiarly fitted for such work as lay before the 
 New Jersey Supreme Court. It is Justice 
 Kalish, now sitting in the Atlantic County Cir- 
 cuit, who is cleaning up Atlantic City; it was he 
 who, finding justice made a joke of in Atlantic 
 County by juries picked by the corrupt sheriff, 
 turned to the early common law and appointed 
 "elisors" to select jurymen. A grand jury thus 
 obtained indicted the sheriff, and the work of 
 bringing the big resort under subjection to law 
 goes thrivingly on. Justice Swayze, who was 
 prominently mentioned for a place on the United 
 States Supreme bench, has resorted to Justice 
 Kalish's "elisors" in dealing with corrupt 
 political conditions in Hudson County. 
 
 New Jersey elects its Assembly anew each 
 year. In the autumn of 1911 Governor Wilson 
 
A PROGRESSIVE GOVERNOR 211 
 
 went before the people to ask for the return of 
 men pledged to sustain the accomplished leg- 
 islation and to support what further progressive 
 measures should come up. For the first time, a 
 primary was held under the Geran law. The 
 Smith-Nugent influence was frantically exerted 
 everywhere to nominate an ti- Wilson men. It 
 failed, failed utterly, everywhere except in Essex 
 County — the home of the ex-Senator and his 
 lieutenant. For the first time a Geran law con- 
 vention was held. The Wilson men controled 
 it. A sound platform was adopted. In Essex, 
 the Smith-Nugent machine won the primary, 
 nominating a ticket expressly chosen in antag- 
 onism to the Governor. 
 
 In the campaign that followed. Governor 
 Wilson visited every county in the state except 
 Essex. He canceled his engagement for that 
 county, refusing to ask support for the Smith 
 ticket. 
 
 The result of the election has been twisted by 
 opponents of Mr. Wilson into a defeat for him. 
 It was, in fact, a signal victory — a striking 
 endorsement. In all the state outside of Essex, 
 
212 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 ill the counties, that is, where he asked support 
 lor Democratic candidates for the Assembly, 
 their majorities aggregated 857 votes more than 
 they did the previous year, when the state was 
 ablwre loith the excitement of a gubernatorial 
 campaign. In Essex, which he refused to visit, 
 in Essex, where the Democratic candidates were 
 pledged anti-Wilson men, the Democratic vote 
 fell off 12,000 and the Republicans won. 
 
 It is clear enough, certainly, whether this is 
 repudiation or endorsement. What happened 
 was simply this: Smith and Nugent, who, like 
 minority party bosses generally, expect to re- 
 ceive help occasionally from the opposite party 
 and more frequently to give it, turned a very 
 common trick. They nominated the weakest 
 possible ticket and then left it to the fate they 
 expected it to meet. They gave the legislature 
 back to the Republicans, for the sake of being 
 able to raise the cry that the state had repu- 
 diated Wilson. Few were deceived by such a 
 play. 
 
 The Assembly is Republican again, it is true 
 — made so by Smith's treachery — but among 
 
I 
 
 t 
 
 A PROGRESSIVE GOVERNOR 213 
 
 the Republicans are enough progressive men to 
 sustain what has been done and probably to 
 support new measures of public good. In a 
 statement issued immediately after the election, 
 Governor Wilson called upon them in the name 
 of the pledges of their own platform, to co- 
 operate in ** reforms planned in the interest of 
 the whole state which we are sworn to serve." 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 THE PRESIDENCY LOOMS UP 
 
 IN THE spring of 1911 it became evident 
 that a sentiment looking toward Mr. 
 Wilson's nomination for the Presidency 
 was abroad in the nation. The suggestion had 
 been made long ago — several years ago — but 
 it had had no more than faint interest till the 
 Governor's masterful grapple with the difficul- 
 ties of practical politics at the New Jersey capital 
 had focused country -wide attention upon him, 
 and led to the general discovery of his grasp of 
 political problems, the vigor and originality of 
 his thought, and his devotion to the cause of 
 government by the people. In all parts of the 
 Union, from its populous Eastern cities to re- 
 mote corners of the West, people seemed sud- 
 denly to become aware that there was a man 
 named Wilson who looked more like a great 
 man than any who had been seen of late days. 
 
 214 
 
THE PRESIDENCY LOOMS UP 215 
 
 Letters began coming into Trenton and Prince- 
 ton until they could no longer be read, not to 
 speak of being answered; newspaper clippings 
 by the bushel basket. 
 
 The time soon came when invitations to 
 speak in cities clamorous to see and hear grew 
 so insistent that it would have been vain pride 
 longer to disregard them. A few friends took 
 it upon themselves to arrange an itinerary among 
 some of the cities that wanted to see New Jer- 
 sey's Governor, and he put himself in their 
 hands to the extent of agreeing to get on a train 
 with the itinerary in his pocket and fare forth 
 toward the nearest point at least. 
 
 Before he returned he had traveled 8,000 
 miles, made twenty-lBve speeches, addressed 
 thousands of people, and been acclaimed in 
 eight states as the next President. Stopping 
 to rest over-night at Washington, as he neared 
 home, the hotel to which he went was besieged 
 by Senators and Representatives come to make, 
 or renew, acquaintance with the man about 
 whom the whole country was talking. 
 
 That was the beginning of it. On his Western 
 
216 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 journey Mr. Wilson had replied to all questions 
 by saying that the Presidency was too big a 
 thing for any man to set about to capture, as it 
 was too big for any man to refuse. Now, how- 
 ever, there set in a spontaneous movement 
 which over-night made him a candidate, willy- 
 nilly, and which within a few weeks had put his 
 name apparently ahead of all others in popular 
 favor — for the movement was distinctly a 
 movement rather of citizens than of politicians, 
 rather of the people than of party leaders. To 
 answer the constant demands of the newspapers 
 for information, a press bureau was established, 
 its modest expenses met by the chipping-in of 
 personal friends, many of them Princetonians. 
 The state committee of his party — which had 
 thrown off the old domination and was now a 
 group of freed and enthusiastic men — an- 
 nounced New Jersey's Governor as her choice 
 for the Presidency and opened headquarters in 
 Trenton to promote his nomination. 
 
 Early in January, 1912, Governor Wilson was 
 present as a guest at the Jackson Day banquet, 
 attended by all the members of the Democratic 
 
THE PRESIDENCY LOOMS UP 217 
 
 National Committee and the most prominent 
 men of the party from all over the country, 
 gathered in Washington; and there made an 
 address so commanding in power that he fairly 
 swept the 800 off their feet with the vision of 
 duty and opportunity which beckoned the 
 party of the people in this hour of national crisis. 
 From that day Mr. Wilson's life has been 
 lived in the full light of publicity. The press 
 has given a daily record of his acts and words 
 — and has brought to an end the work of this 
 biography, whose purpose it has been to trace 
 the course of not widely known events which, in 
 ways unusual in our political history, has singu- 
 larly equipped Woodrow Wilson for a chief part 
 in the political life of the nation. 
 
 So brief a narrative as this could reveal but 
 imperfectly the personality whose development 
 it essayed to trace; nor could any assessment of 
 it, in closing, do much to remedy the imper- 
 fection. Some few matters of fact might be 
 added a httle to round out the picture: 
 
 Mr. Wilson's face, photographed in repose, is 
 
218 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 familiar; but it is not the same face, animated; 
 his photographs do not show the man whom his 
 friends know. The hnes of sadness which mark 
 the photographs disappear in conversation, in 
 pubhc speech. A suffusion of kindhness over- 
 flows his countenance the moment his attention 
 is drawn; swift play of expression marks the 
 interest with which he listens. His laugh, like 
 that of the reprobate whom Mark Twain en- 
 gaged to applaud during his first lecture, is 
 hung on a hair-trigger. He resents the sug- 
 gestion that his profile is remarkably like that of 
 Joseph Chamberlain as that British statesman 
 (whom he despises) was in after days, but it is. 
 
 Mr. Wilson is of good height, sturdily built, 
 with square shoulders ; he stands erect and on his 
 feet. If you want mannerisms, you note that 
 his hands seek his trousers pockets, that he 
 changes his glasses with much care when he 
 looks down at a document or up from it; that 
 every time he has used his pen he wipes it care- 
 fully with a cloth taken from a drawer, into 
 which he painstakingly replaces it, closing the 
 drawer. There is a certain trained precision of 
 
THE PRESIDENCY LOOMS UP 219 
 
 habit in matters of routine — and a free spon- 
 taneity in others. There would be a gray grim- 
 ness about him except for the pocketed hands, a 
 frequent sunburst of a smile, and a voice like 
 music. You would learn, if you watched him an 
 hour or two, that a man with a stiff jaw and a 
 sensitive mouth is pretty sure to be master in 
 any situation. Governor Wilson is a man of 
 positive opinion, relieved by an eager sense of 
 humor. He moves and speaks with unfailing 
 poise, with good-natured certainty of himself. 
 
 The prime thing is that he is real — real all 
 through, from top to bottom. There isn't a 
 sham anywhere in his neighborhood. His mind 
 is constitutionally incapable of tolerating un- 
 reality — it revolts against it like a nauseated 
 stomach. Another thing is that he is good- 
 humored. He is chock-full of energy; he likes 
 action, hugely, though he did remark at the 
 end of one exciting day: ''After all, life doesn't 
 consist in eternally running to a fire!" Con- 
 versation with him is a delight; his talk is rich 
 in allusion, illustrated from broad personal 
 acquaintance, marked by a wide-ranging sweep 
 
220 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 of interest and thought. Yet he Hkes a good 
 story and an occasional emphatic word. 
 
 It might be mentioned that Mr. Wilson's 
 family consists of his wife and three daughters: 
 Margaret, Jessie, and Eleanor. New Jersey 
 having no residence for its executive head, the 
 Governor continues to reside at Princeton, in a 
 pretty house on a quiet street. Trenton is but 
 eleven miles distant, and he is at his desk in the 
 State House much more than any of his pred- 
 ecessors ever was. 
 
 There, in the copper-domed Capitol, his re- 
 ception-room is constantly filled with visitors; 
 he works, sees callers, and holds conferences in 
 an inner room — the door, however, to w^hich 
 stands always open. Be the weather cold or 
 not, any one can walk, without touching a door- 
 knob, from the street into the Governor's 
 inner room. 
 
 It is a pleasant enough room, this inner ofiice, 
 looking out over the river; none too luxuriously 
 furnished in light wood, with a mahogany tall- 
 clock in a corner, a calendar with an advertise- 
 ment on it on the wall, a tiny brass fireplace. 
 
THE PRESIDENCY LOOMS UP 221 
 
 and mantel supporting a bronze Washington in 
 a Roman toga and a Lincoln in a piratical 
 cloak. Solemn portraits of former Governors 
 hang in melancholy rows here and on every 
 available wall of the executive wing of the 
 building. 
 
 Governor Wilson is an indefatigable worker, 
 used to long hours at the desk. During his 
 first year in office he amazed the State House. 
 It was bad enough in the spring, but worse when 
 summer came and the Governor was still to be 
 found during the hottest weather constantly at 
 the Capitol, in the burning city. Passersby on 
 the street caught glimpses of the Governor in his 
 shirt-sleeves working hard way into the night. 
 On one of the hottest nights in July Adjutant- 
 General Sadler, passing about midnight in his 
 automobile, saw the Governor's light burning; 
 dismounting and making his way into the room, 
 he presented himself as a representative of the 
 State House Union, complaining that members 
 had no right to work overtime, and tried his best 
 to take the worker out for a motor-ride in the 
 moonlit night. But it was no go. There was 
 
222 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 work to be done, so the Governor worked on 
 alone and toward morning made his way to the 
 little room in the Hotel Sterling which he oc- 
 cupied when detained in the city. 
 
 This biography has found no time to dwell, 
 as it would like to have dwelt, on many of the 
 enlarging and enriching, though undramatic, 
 events of the scholar's life: on holidays in 
 Europe; on the preparation for the writing of 
 books, such as the ''Life of George Washington" 
 and the monumental ''History of the American 
 People." 
 
 It could not tell of the happiness of his family 
 life. It has not hinted at his shyness, that love 
 of retirement, inherited with the strain of his 
 mother's blood, which had to be overcome, with 
 agonizing, before he could commit himself to 
 the path of public life, and which still makes 
 the knocking at a strange door or the reception 
 of a new caller a real, though never a percep- 
 tible, effort. 
 
 It has not told of his passion for crowds, of 
 his fondest habit — the stealing off somewhere 
 to move, unknown, among big throngs, and to 
 
THE PRESIDENCY LOOMS UP 223 
 
 drink in, in silence, the sense of human striving, 
 to look into the faces of multitudes and listen 
 to their voices, one to another; to feel the heart- 
 beat of men, as they go about life's business or 
 its pleasures. 
 
 It is a rare and an arresting combination of 
 traits that this man presents. Perhaps nothing 
 sums it up more vividly than this: he reads 
 Greek, and he writes — short-hand. That was 
 one of the first things that amazed the people at 
 Trenton — the old-timers who deemed them- 
 selves the only *' practical" politicians. But 
 every day for a year was a further amazement 
 to them. They found in this strange newcomer 
 a man who didn't believe that a good cause 
 was rendered any less likely to succeed by the 
 employment in its behalf of the carnal weapons 
 of practical politics — a man who said: *'Even 
 a reformer need not be a fool." 
 
 A new era was ushered in when this quiet gen- 
 tleman who had just emerged from the delectable 
 groves of Princeton's academy, his garments 
 odorous with the vapors of Parnassus, his lips wet 
 with the waters of Helicon — this long-haired 
 
224 . WOODROW WILSON 
 
 bookworm of a professor who had just laid his 
 spectacles on his dictionary, came down to the 
 Trenton State House and ''hcked the gang to a 
 frazzle." It appeared that he did know the 
 difference between a seminar and a caucus, a 
 syllabus and a New Jersey corporation — that 
 he did know Hoboken and Camden politics 
 pretty nearly as well as he did his Burke and his 
 Bagehot; and that, able to write a book on 
 "Constitutional Government," he was just as 
 able to handle a Governor's job constitution- 
 ally or otherwise, according to your view of the 
 constitution. 
 
 As to constitutions, he does not have for them 
 altogether that kind of regard which the super- 
 stitious have for a fetich. They do say that he 
 was once so irreverent as to remark of some of 
 the provisions of a certain ancient document, 
 "They're outgrown, that's all. If you button 
 them over the belly, they split up the back!" 
 Yet no man could be more jealous of the prin- 
 ciples of which the Constitution is the expression. 
 
 Of his manner of public speech, something more 
 ought to be told. With the advent of Woodrow 
 
THE PRESIDENCY LOOMS UP 225 
 
 Wilson on the political stage came a new type 
 of man and a new type of oratory. Mr. Wilson 
 has long been known as an exquisite master of 
 English prose. He speaks as he writes — with 
 a trained and skilful handling of the resources of 
 the language, a sureness, an accuracy, a power, 
 and a delicacy surpassing anything ever before 
 heard on the political platform in America. It 
 was felt by some of his friends that Mr. Wilson's 
 classical habit of language would militate against 
 his success as a politician — it was felt to be a 
 matter of extreme doubt whether he could use a 
 language understanded of the people. The first 
 appearance of the candidate for the Jersey gover- 
 norship dissipated these doubts. Mr. Wilson 
 knew how to talk to the people, knew how to 
 win them. He changed his manner very little, 
 never stooping, as if he had to, to make the 
 people understand. No matter where or before 
 what sort of audience he spoke, his speeches were 
 on a high plane, but they were so clear, so def- 
 inite, that every man understood and wondered 
 why he had not thought of that himself. 
 
 Governor Wilson is not only the most intel- 
 
226 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 lectual speaker that this generation has seen on 
 the stump ; he is the most engaging. A friendly 
 smile is almost always on his face — always in 
 beginning, at any rate. His words come with 
 vigor, but with a gentle good-nature, too — not a 
 good-natured tolerance of the ills he is opposing, 
 but a good-natured confidence that they will 
 soon be overthrown. A serene faith in the out- 
 come is one of the characteristics of Wilson's 
 attitude; he is an optimist, and his speeches 
 have the invigorating charm and power of a call 
 to join an army which is marching to glorious 
 and certain victory. 
 
 Mr. Wilson is a great story-teller — in private 
 he keeps his friends in hours-long gales of 
 laughter; he uses simple words and strong words, 
 but seldom slang. He loves nonsense verse and 
 limericks, and often reels them off while he is 
 getting acquainted with his audience — for he 
 talks with an audience, not to it. Mr. Wilson, 
 as has been said, has a strongly individual face; 
 some people would call him homely. He was 
 under no illusion about that matter himself; 
 he told the people during his campaign for the 
 
THE PRESIDENCY LOOMS UP 227 
 
 governorship that they might as well prepare 
 themselves for a busy governor, for the Lord 
 never intended him to be ornamental. "Yes," 
 he remarked once, 
 
 "For beauty I am not a star; 
 There are others handsomer, far; 
 
 But my face — I don't mind it, 
 
 For I am behind it; 
 'Tis the people in front that I jar!" 
 
 Burke is Mr. Wilson's favorite orator and, to 
 some degree, has been his model. No man in 
 our time has carried the discussion of public 
 questions to so high a level of thought; his argu- 
 ments and appeals move in the higher airs. 
 The members of a Democratic Club at an an- 
 nual dinner are at first a little puzzled to listen to 
 an exposition such as Origen, Augustine, or 
 Hegel might make of the philosophical nature of 
 liberty, namely, that it consists in the adjust- 
 ment of the parts of a harmonious whole. But 
 bewilderment soon passes into the conviction 
 at least that they are listening to a man who has 
 thought things out; and when he comes to speak 
 of the matters whereof they know, and speaks in 
 
228 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 a logic perfect and clear and onward moving 
 — toward conclusions which at last shine out 
 white-hot in the fire of moral conviction, it is 
 with a tempest of enthusiasm that they shout 
 their understanding. Those were truly re- 
 markable effects that were provoked during the 
 campaign all over New Jersey and that have 
 been accomplished in cities elsewhere since, by 
 the prophet-like utterances of this foe of priv- 
 ilege, this leader of revolt against the usurpers 
 of the people's power. 
 
 He speaks without notes. His voice is full, 
 rich, and far-carrying. He gestures freely. 
 His utterance flows easily in clean-cut channels, 
 and goes home in clear, strong sentences. He 
 is a master of statement; his brain works as if 
 it had been taken out, cleaned, and oiled that 
 day. It was no exceptional testimonial that 
 was given by a laborer of Cartaret, N. J., who 
 went out of the hall saying, "He handed out a 
 cracker jack line of talk, all right.' 
 
 That he enjoys it, is clear. A man in the 
 audience at Lakewood called out, "Oh! you're 
 only an amateur politican!" 
 
THE PRESIDENCY LOOMS UP 229 
 
 ''Yes, that is too bad, isn't it! But I have 
 one satisfaction: a professional plays the game, 
 you know, because it pays him. An amateur 
 plays the game because he loves to play it, to win 
 it if he can by fair means in a fair field, before 
 the eyes of all men. I'm afraid I'm only an 
 amateur. But I'm having a most interesting 
 time of it!" 
 
 This is the way he speaks : 
 
 "Back of all reform, lies the means of getting it. Back 
 of the question what you want, is the question how are you 
 going to get it. We are all pretty well agreed, I take it, 
 that certain reforms are needed. But we find that the 
 first necessary reform is one that will render us able to get 
 reform." 
 
 "We have been calling our Government a Republic 
 and we have been living under the delusion that it is a 
 representative government. That is the theory. But the 
 fact is that we are not living under a representative gov- 
 ernment; we are living under a government of party bosses 
 who in secret conference and for their private ends deter- 
 mine what we shall and shall not have. The first, the 
 immediate thing that we have got to do is to restore repre- 
 sejitative government. There has got to be a popular re- 
 bellion for the reconquest and reassumption by the people 
 
230 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 of the rights of the people, too long surrendered. We 
 have got to revolutionze our political machinery, first of 
 all. I am a radical, and the first element of my radical- 
 ism is, let's get at the root of the whole thing and resume 
 popular government. Let's make possible the access of 
 the people to the execution of their purposes.'^ 
 
 "I tell you the people of this state and this country are 
 determined at last to take over the control of their own 
 politics. We are going to cut down the jungle in which 
 corruption lurks. We are going to drag things into the 
 light, break down private understandings and force them 
 to be public understandings. We mean to have the kind 
 of government we thought we had." 
 
 " . . . It is time that we served notice on the men 
 who have grown up in the possession of privileges and 
 bounties, that the existing order of things is to be changed. 
 It is only fair that we warn them, for they should have 
 time to adjust themselves to the change; but the change 
 must come, nevertheless. And this change is not a 
 revolution, let it be understood at once. It is merely a 
 restoration. . . . That is what the people of New 
 Jersey have meant as they have flocked out, rain or shine, 
 not to follow the Democratic party — we have stopped 
 thinking about parties — to follow what they now know 
 as the Democratic idea, the idea that the people are at last 
 to be served.'* 
 
THE PRESIDENCY LOOMS UP 231 
 
 *'Do you know what the American people are waiting 
 for, gentlemen? Tlicy are waiting to have their politics 
 utterly simplified. They are realizing that our politics 
 are full of secret conferences, that there are private ar- 
 rangements, and they do not understand it. They want 
 to concentrate their force somewhere. They are like an 
 unorganized army saying the thing is wrong. Where 
 shall we congregate? How shall we organize? Who are 
 the captains? Where are the orders? Which Is the 
 direction? Where are the instruments of government? 
 That is what they are waiting for." 
 
 *'It is an opportunity, a^;^ ii is a terriuic opportunity. 
 Don't you know tiiat some man without conscience, who 
 did not care for the iiacion,_couid put this country into a 
 flame? Don't you know that the people of this country 
 from one end to the other ail br eve that something is 
 wrong? What an opportunity it ould be for some man 
 without conscience, but with po- r, to spring up and say: 
 *This is the way: follow me' and lead them in paths of 
 destruction. How terrible it would be!" 
 
 ". . . I a)ii accused of being a radical. If to seek 
 to go to the root is to be a radical, a radical I am. After 
 all, everything that flowers in beauty in the air of heaven 
 draws its fairness, its vigor, from its roots. Nothing liv- 
 ing can blossom into fruitage unless through nourishing 
 stalks deep-planted in the common soil. Up from that 
 
232 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 soil, up from the silent bosom of the earth, rise the currents 
 of life and energy. Up from the common soil, up from the 
 quiet heart of the people, rise joyously to-day streams of 
 hope and determination bound to renew the face of the 
 earth in glory. 
 
 "I tell you the so-called radicalism of our times is 
 simply the eflFort of nature to release the generous energies 
 of our people. This great American people is at bottom 
 just, virtuous, and hopeful; the roots of its being are in the 
 soil of what is lovely, pure, and of good report; and the 
 need of the hour is just that radicalism that will clear a 
 way for the realization of the aspirations of a sturdy race." 
 
 No one can listen to Woodrow Wilson and 
 see the emotions of the audiences of earnest men 
 who hang upon his words, without feeling that 
 he is witnessing the beginning of a political 
 revolution, and that its prophet and captain 
 stands before him. This is a new language — 
 but one for which the people have an instinctive, 
 Pentecostal understanding. 
 
 It is surely an interesting prospect held out 
 by this taking of the centre of the stage of 
 national politics by a man made up of the com- 
 bination of qualities which Woodrow W^ilson 
 possesses. It is the combination of the gentle- 
 
THE PRESIDENCY LOOMS UP «8» 
 
 man and scholar — and the practical politican. 
 Imagine a student of goverament one of the most 
 eminent that America has produced; a man of 
 rich literary and ethical culture; of the fine 
 fibre and mellow spirit that our ancient uni- 
 versities still occasionally shelter and develop; a 
 man of humanity, with a heart not unvisited 
 by emotions — who is yet able to go into the 
 sordid battle of politics, face the ^'mean knighta'' 
 like a Lancelot, keep his temper, crack his joke» 
 and win. Imagine a type of culture in its finest 
 flower, and then add to his endowment, tact, 
 method, eflSciency, a shrewd knowledge of men, 
 a sense of humor, a passion for facts, a zest for 
 constructive work, and an instinct for leader- 
 ship — and you begin to get something like a 
 picture of the remarkable man whose history, 
 now but entered upon, this biography has so 
 inadequately narrated, and whose personality it 
 has so imperfectly portrayed. 
 
 THE END 
 
V 
 
 .JA-