3

PROFESSOR

When he began his teaching career at Bryn Mawr College in September 1885, Woodrow Wilson did not hold the title of professor—that would come two years later—but he would be a professor for the next twenty-five years. The Bryn Mawr campus occupied a former farm and as yet had only a few buildings. After spending a month at a boardinghouse, the Wilsons moved into a frame house newly built for faculty and their families. Bryn Mawr’s first students, thirty-six members of the class of 1889 and five graduate “fellows,” arrived on September 23, 1885. The faculty numbered only seven, five men and two women, all of whom held a Ph.D. except Wilson.¹

The teaching load was heavy. Wilson had to offer all the courses in history and political science, five each semester, but he threw himself into his work with gusto. Even in areas where he was not well prepared, he declined to slip into well-worn grooves and developed his own approaches, stressing individuals, governments, and comparisons. Wilson proved from the outset to be a lucid, engaging lecturer. Decades later, a former student remembered him as “the most interesting and inspiring college lecturer I have ever heard” and others commented on his smiles and jokes, which were often lost on earnest students, but one former student believed “that he did not enjoy teaching young women” and seemed to see them “not as of a lower sort of intelligence so much as of adifferentsort from himself.” It is not clear whether such views affected his teaching. He did complain to Bridges, “I very much fear that teaching young women (who never challenge my authority in any position I may take) is slowly relaxing my mental muscle.” But he also told a friend from Virginia that he felt “thankful for so comfortable a berth—where the classes are docile, intelligent, and willing,—where the administration is honest, straightforward, and liberal.” In his journal, he noted about student passivity, “Perhaps it is some of it due to undergraduateism, not all to femininity.”²

Any restiveness Wilson felt at Bryn Mawr stemmed from his not feeling fully reconciled to academic life. After a year of teaching, he told his Princeton friend Charlie Talcott that he felt “the disadvantages of the closet. I want to keep close to the practical and thepracticable in politics … in order that I may study affairs, rather than doctrine.” His lack of total commitment to academic life had an impact on his dealings with graduate students. Two of the graduate fellows who studied with him, Jane Marie Bancroft and Lucy Maynard Salmon, had unhappy experiences, in part because he believed he had to dominate them and they did not want to be dominated by him or anybody else. Both women were older than Wilson; Bancroft was already a professor of French and dean of women at Northwestern University and held a Ph.D. in history from Syracuse University. Salmon, an experienced teacher, later told Wilson’s first biographer that she had resolved “to express no opinions, to be entirely passive, and colorless, and to be a good listener.” That was hard for Salmon, who judged him “singularly ill-adapted to teaching women,” but she admitted that the real fault lay in his not having “an inquiring, adventurous mind, … never going out into the bypaths and seeking new facts or treasures.”³Salmon was committed to scholarly research and inquiry, and Wilson was not.

Wilson liked the undergraduates at Bryn Mawr, although he told Stockton Axson that he had had to shave off his mustache so that they could see his mouth and know whether he was serious or joking. As a married man with a pregnant wife, he did not socialize outside the classroom as much as the bachelor professors did, but he did take up tennis, playing with students and other faculty members. The small rooms and lack of privacy in the faculty house bothered the young couple, who found the situation unsatisfactory for the birth of their child. In April 1886, Ellen journeyed to the home of her aunt in Gainesville, Georgia, arriving only a day before the birth of her daughter, who was christened Margaret, for Ellen’s mother, and Woodrow, for Wilson’s mother’s family. Ellen stayed in Georgia through the rest of the academic year and into the summer, when Wilson joined her and saw his daughter for the first time. By the beginning of 1887, Ellen was pregnant again, and in the summer the Wilsons returned to Gainesville, where their second daughter was born in August. They christened her Jessie, for Wilson’s mother, and again Woodrow. When they returned to Bryn Mawr in the fall of 1887, they moved into a rented Baptist parsonage near the campus. The Wilson household now included Ellen’s eleven-year-old brother Eddie and her cousin Mary Hoyt, who would attend Bryn Mawr.⁴

Despite the heavy teaching load, Wilson signed a contract with the textbook publisher D. C. Heath to write a college survey of politics and government. He also changed his mind and decided to try for the doctorate. Professor Adams again proved accommodating by not requiring Wilson to return for further classes at Hopkins; in May 1886, Wilson, after sparse and sporadic preparation, passed the examinations easily. “Hurrah—a thousands times hurrah,” he exulted to Ellen, “—I’m through, I’m through—the degree is secured! Oh, the relief of it!” With the Ph.D. in hand, he got a three-year contract to serve as associate professor at a salary of $2,000 and a promise from the Bryn Mawr administration to lighten his teaching load by appointing an assistant to take over some of his courses. Wilson had wanted a doctoral degree mainly because he still had his sights set on Princeton. In the spring of 1886, he spoke at a Princeton alumni banquet in New York, where he bored his listeners by talking about the college as a “gymnasium” for exercising “men’s minds.” The incident made some people at Princeton think that Wilson was too heavy and dull to teach there, but he continued to conspire with Bridges to gauge his chances at Old Nassau.⁵ In 1887, Adams finally came through with a part-time appointment at Johns Hopkins to lecture on comparative politics and public administration.

During his third year at Bryn Mawr, despite the promotion, the pay raise, and the promise of an assistant, Wilson began complaining about his students and expressing renewed doubts about academic life. Because women were barred from voting and holding office almost everywhere in the United States, he declared, “[l]ecturing to young women of the present generation on the history and principles of politics is about as appropriate and profitable as would be lecturing to stone-masons on the evolution of fashion and dress.”⁶ He still sympathized with women’s aspirations for greater independence and education. He and Ellen had brought her cousin Mary Hoyt to study at Bryn Mawr, and Mary would stay on to finish her degree after the Wilsons departed. The Wilsons’ three daughters would attend women’s colleges, and when Jessie grew dissatisfied at Women’s College of Maryland, she considered transferring to Bryn Mawr, with her father’s support.

All the while, Wilson’s reputation was growing in academic circles. James Bryce invited him to contribute a chapter to his forthcoming book, The American Commonwealth; he declined because he did not think he knew enough about the suggested subject, woman suffrage. In June 1888, Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, offered him a full professorship at a higher salary, $2,500, with a lighter teaching load and an arrangement to continue his lecturing at Hopkins.⁷

Accepting the offer from Wesleyan required Wilson to get out of his contract at Bryn Mawr. He told the president, James E. Rhoads, “[M]y duty to my little family makes it even more imperative that I should seek rapid advancement in my profession in point of salary, amount and character of work, &c.” He also claimed that Bryn Mawr’s failure to hire an assistant for him meant that his contract was no longer binding. Rhoads and the Bryn Mawr trustees tried to hold him to the contract; he responded by consulting a lawyer, and the trustees relented. Wilson felt triumphant as he prepared to move. “I have for a long time been hungry for a class of men,” he told Bridges.⁸

Wilson also looked forward to having more time for his writing. Yet in spite of Bryn Mawr’s teaching load and his marriage and new fatherhood, he had completed most of the government textbook and produced essays on various subjects. In one essay, “The Study of Administration,” he pioneered the new field of political science that later came to be called public administration—the study of how laws are administered after they are made. “It is getting harder to run a constitution than to frame one,” he asserted. Unlike Prussia and Napoleonic France, where administration had developed naturally under absolutist regimes, Britain and the United States faced the problem of balancing accountability to public opinion with the creation of a strong, efficient civil service. That would require borrowing from alien political cultures, but, he argued, “[i]f I see a murderous fellow sharpening a knife cleverly, I can borrow his way of sharpening a knife without borrowing his probable intent to commit murder.”⁹

Next, Wilson turned to other and, to his mind, bigger questions. In December 1885, he wrote in a note to himself, “I have conceived the (perhaps whimsical) purpose of combining Montesquieu, Burke, and Bagehot” and, thereby, achieving a “SYNTHESIS” of thought about the nature of democracy. He tried out some of his ideas in an essay in which he called democracy a doctrine that had never “arrogated to itself absolute truth … but was eventually convicted of being only relatively true, and nutritious only under certain conditions and for certain persons.” Democracy worked both in “little Switzerland and big America,” though not in France or Spain or Latin America, because it was “a form of state life for a nation in the adult age of its political development.” In May 1886, he sent Horace Scudder at Houghton Mifflin a twelve-page letter in which he outlined “a very ambitious” program, noting and commenting on topics he wished to cover: “Political Morality … the democratic state is … a moral person with a very peculiar, delicate constitution;” “Political Progress. What … is political progress … and how can its conditions be supplied?;” “Political Expediency. A big subject, and as important as big, hitherto largely neglected, save from the boss’s point of view;” “Political Prejudice … itsgood offices as well as its bad;” and, finally, “Practical Politics.” He intended to develop this “vast subject” over several years and eventually distill his best thoughts into a single volume.¹⁰

That was an ambitious plan, especially coming from a twenty-nine-year-old scholar who was then only on the verge of receiving his Ph.D. To his Princeton friend Hiram Woods, Wilson confessed “an intellectual self-confidence, possibly out of all due proportion to my intellectual strength, which has made me feel that in matters in which I had qualified myself to speak I could never be any man’s follower.” He needed such self-confidence because research and writing did not come easily to him. “Composition is no child’s play with me,” he told Ellen. “I can’t write just what comes into my head: I have to stop and perfect both expression and thought.”¹¹ After they married, Ellen helped him by reading not only his manuscripts but also foreign texts. With her gift for languages, she quickly learned German, and she read, selected, and translated material for him.

Looking at current affairs, he expounded on the need for party realignment in order to come to grips with such pressing issues as the tariff and monetary standards, and he claimed that “the difference between democracy and socialism is not an essential difference, but only a practice difference.” In using government to address social and economic problems, socialists rushed in where democrats trod warily, but with the growth of huge corporations, he asked, “[M]ust not government lay aside all timid scruple and boldly make itself an agency for social reform as well as for political control?” He went further in his lectures at Johns Hopkins in 1888: “Government does not stop with the protection of life, liberty, and property, as some have suggested; it goes on to serve every convenience of society. … The state is not a body corporate,—it is a body politic; and rules of good business are not always rules of good politics. … Business-like the administration of government should be—but it is not business. It is organic life.”¹²

This sympathetic attitude toward socialism presaged an important breakthrough in Wilson’s political thought. Also at Hopkins in 1888, he divided the nature of government into two functions, constituent and ministrant. Constituent functions are “necessary to the civic organization of society,—which are not optional with government, even in the eyes of the strictest laissez-faire.” Ministrant functions are activities undertaken “by way of advancing the general interests of society,—functions which are optional, being necessary only according to standards of convenience or expediency.”¹³ This definition of the functions of government allowed Wilson to move beyond asking how power worked so that he could begin to ask why political systems take the forms that they do. His identification and delineation of constituent and ministrant functions would provide the basic structure for the textbook published in 1889 as The State, and his latitudinarian, relativistic views about the permissible activities of government would receive further elaboration in that book. Likewise, his analogy likening political life to organic life would provide the basis for his interpretation of the growth and functions of states through the lens of evolutionary thought.

Another significant change in Wilson’s life occurred on April 15, 1888, when his mother died. He left at once for Clarksville, Tennessee, where his parents had been living, and spent a week with his father, brother, and sisters. From there he wrote grief-filled letters to Ellen, in which he recalled his mother and his childhood with her, including his depiction of himself as “a laughed-at ‘mamma’s boy.’” Work helped Wilson get through this anguished time, as did the move a few months later to Wesleyan, where he again quickly demonstrated his prowess as a lecturer. “I can see him now with his hands forward, the tips of his fingers just touching the table, his face animated,” one student later remembered, and another recalled, “He had a contagious interest—his eyes flashed.”¹⁴ At Wesleyan, Wilson could concentrate more on his specialty, and he used chapters of The State in his lectures. Outside the classroom, he organized the Wesleyan House of Commons, a debating society modeled on the ones he had participated in at Princeton and Virginia, and he found an outlet for his love of sports by helping to coach Wesleyan’s fledgling football and baseball teams.

As southerners, he and Ellen had felt some trepidation in venturing so far north, but the college and the town suited them. With the larger income they were able to rent a bigger house—and Ellen could gather more of the Axson family together again under one roof. Already living with them was her brother Eddie, and in 1889 her brother Stockton joined them, enrolling at Wesleyan to study English literature. The Wilsons also found the religious situation in Middletown to their liking. Since Presbyterian churches were scarce in New England, they joined the First Congregational Church of Middletown, whose pastor was a superb preacher and became a close friend. When Ellen became pregnant for the third time, early in 1889, she did not retreat to Georgia, in part because she was receiving excellent care from a female physician in Middletown. This proved to be the most difficult of Ellen’s pregnancies, but the doctor’s care helped her through the last weeks. On October 16, 1889, she gave birth to another daughter, whom they christened Eleanor Randolph, after Ellen’s aunt and uncle. Wilson and Ellen may have been hoping for a son, but because this pregnancy had taken such a toll on Ellen, they did not try to have any more children.

Happy as Wilson affected to be with his male students at Wesleyan, he did not find them an improvement over his female undergraduates at Bryn Mawr. “My source of stimulation is my connection with the Johns Hopkins,” he told Scudder.¹⁵ While giving his lectures there in 1889, he met Frederick Jackson Turner, a graduate student from Wisconsin, who was taking Wilson’s class and staying at the same boardinghouse. Turner and another graduate student, Charles Homer Haskins, soon became fast friends of Wilson’s. Both men went on to become outstanding historians, and Wilson would keep in touch with them, especially Turner.

Wilson never regarded Wesleyan as anything more than a way station on the road to Princeton, and in 1889 Francis Landey Patton, McCosh’s successor as president, tentatively offered him a position teaching political economy and public law. Wilson demurred because it would oblige him to spread himself thin. Some Princeton faculty members then objected that Wilson was, as Bridges reported, “a little heterodox (shades of Calvin and Witherspoon protect us) … [and] too learned and deep to interest his students.”¹⁶Patton, who was an orthodox, old-fashioned Presbyterian cleric and dilatory by temperament, shelved the matter.

Fortunately for Wilson, Bridges kept working on his behalf, and some influential younger alumni interested themselves in bringing him to Princeton. Two of them were Wilson’s wealthy classmates Cleveland Dodge and Cyrus McCormick. Although they had not known Wilson well at Princeton, they felt a strong sense of class solidarity, and as products of the McCosh era they wanted to promote the college’s academic prestige. McCormick was already a trustee, as was Moses (Momo) Taylor Pyne, another extremely wealthy man, who had been two classes ahead of them and was on his way to becoming the most powerful member of the board. At some point, these men offered to make up any additional salary for Wilson, and Patton and the trustees relented. On February 13, 1890, Pyne telegraphed Wilson to offer him a professorship at a salary of $3,000, with the promise that his classes would soon be limited to public law, his preferred field.

The victory had some sour notes. Wilson was already making $3,000, and Patton would not guarantee that he could continue to lecture at Hopkins. The president also took the new recruit down a peg by telling him that some at Princeton had objected to the way “you minimise the supernatural, & make such unqualified application of the doctrine of naturalistic evolution.” Patton reminded him that the trustees “mean to keep this College on the old ground of loyalty to the Christian religion … & they would not regard with favour such a conception of academic freedom or teaching as would leave in doubt the very direct bearing of historical Christianity as a revealed religion upon the great problems of civilization.” Wilson shrugged off the reproof. He told a friend that Princeton had “the size and progressiveness without the unbearable and dwarfing academic Pharaisaism [sic] of Harvard or the narrow college pride of Yale,” and he called Patton “a thoroughly wide-awake and delightful man.”¹⁷

Ironically, it was Wilson’s growing reputation as a scholar that almost prevented him from going to Princeton. Patton’s criticism accurately reflected what Wilson had been saying in his lectures at Hopkins and what he had written in The State. “It is now plain that [democracy’s] inspiration is of man, and not of God,” he also declared. “The constitution of govt. is not a matter of inspiration.” Wilson further demonstrated his renown and his ambition when he reviewed James Bryce’s newly published and much-heralded book,The American Commonwealth, in the leading journal in his field, Political Science Quarterly. Although he called Bryce’s book “a great work, worthy of the heartiest praise,” particularly for its clarity, its author having “breathed the air of practical politics,” he judged it inferior to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America in style and philosophy. Bryce conveyed the facts, he said, “not the principles derived from them.” Though praising the book’s “invaluable” contributions, he regretted that Bryce, “who has given us a great deal, might have given us everything.”¹⁸

He also had a personal problem with The American Commonwealth. Bryce frequently cited and quoted from Congressional Government, but his treatment of Congress virtually plagiarized Wilson’s book. “How remorselessly ‘Congressional Government’ (a small volume by myself) is swallowed up in Part I of Bryce!” he noted privately to the editor of Political Science Quarterly. “Was I not ‘nice’ not to say anything about it?” Instead, criticizing Bryce as he did allowed him to stake his own claim “to yield an answer to the all-important question: What is democracy that it should be possible, nay natural, to some nations, impossible as yet to others?” Answering that question would lead to “the most significant thing to be discovered concerning democracy,” and that was what Wilson meant to do.¹⁹

The State marked his first step toward his grand work of interpretation and synthesis. He began with the proposition that government rests “ultimately on force” and that the potential use of force “gives it its right to rule.” In essence, government depends “upon the organic character and development of the community.” There is, therefore, “no universal law, but for each nation a law of its own which bears evident marks of having been developed along with the national character.” Sovereignty really embodies only the “will of an organized, independent community,” and laws follow “standards of policy only, not absolute standards of right and wrong.” Government is much more than “a necessary evil. It is no more of an evil than society itself. It is the organic body of society: without it society would be hardly more than an abstraction.” That being the case, “we ought all to regard ourselves and act as socialists, believers in the wholesomeness and beneficence of the body politic.” He toned down that apparent radicalism by adding that there is “one rule … which cannot be departed from under any circumstances, and that is the rule of historical continuity. In politics nothing radically novel may safely be attempted. … Nothing may be done by leaps.” Because it was a textbook, The State was not widely reviewed, but in the judgment of several scholars it was Wilson’s finest published work on politics.²⁰

By the time he went to Wesleyan, Wilson was in demand as a lecturer at colleges and universities and as a speaker to civic groups, and in June 1890 he gave a commencement address at the University of Tennessee, the title of which was “Leaders of Men.” Reflecting on the differences between thought and action, he observed, “The seer, whose function is imaginative interpretation is the man of science; the leader is the mechanic.” Statesmen he likened to riverboat captains: “Politics must follow the actual winding of the channel; if it steer by the stars it will run aground.” The leader must do the work of “gathering as best he can, the thoughts that are completed, that are perceived, that have hold upon the common mind … and combining all these into words of progress, into acts of recognition and completion. Who shall say that is not an excellent function? Who shall doubt or dispraise the titles of leadership?”²¹ The passion of unrequited yearning for Wilson’s first love—politics—shone through in the speech, and a listener might have wondered whether the speaker would rather be piloting the riverboat than studying the stars.

For Wilson, the move to Princeton in the fall of 1890 was a homecoming. In the eleven years since his graduation, the student body had nearly doubled, and younger men had joined the faculty, including the top student in Wilson’s own class, William F. Magie, now a professor of physics, and the leading man in the next class, Wilson’s friend from The Princetonian, Henry Fine, who had become a professor of mathematics. Yet Princeton’s upward trajectory in the academic world had stalled, and in 1887 the trustees had blocked McCosh’s move to change the institution’s name from the College of New Jersey to Princeton University because they regarded the use of the word university as a move in a more secular direction. When McCosh retired the following year, the trustees picked the conservative and less dynamic Patton to succeed him.

The stalled academic progress at Princeton did not seem to bother Wilson. He quickly established himself as the most popular lecturer on campus. His course in public law, which was open to juniors and seniors, drew more than half the members of those classes during his first year at Princeton and still more during his second year. The new professor joked about his reputation for seriousness, telling an alumni group, “So clean-shaven is my solemnity, that at the Irish end of the town, I’ve been taken for a Catholic priest.” One student later recalled, “Speaking from a mere skeleton of notes, he hammered in his teaching with an up-and-down, full-armed gesture. Thus he was a perpendicular lecturer, his talking nose and his oscillating Adam’s apple moving up and down with speech, along with his pump-handle gestures. … He was essentially the lecturer rather than the teacher.” He would spend the first fifteen minutes of each session dictating concepts and information that he required the students to take down. As a result, another student recalled, “Very little reading was necessary for Wilson’s course. The students trusted their lecture notes to get them by.”²²

Making his courses easy undoubtedly contributed to his popularity, but light reading and spoon-fed lectures were the norm at Princeton, buttressing its reputation as a “picnic” among leading colleges. Wilson gained a big undergraduate following also because of his manifest empathy with the students. Two of them who went on to become writers explained his attractiveness as a matter of his caring about them. The journalist Ernest Poole remembered that he came to their rooms to talk and recommend such books asHow the Other Half Lives, Jacob Riis’s account of life in the slums of New York’s Lower East Side, which “gave me an exciting sense of new life stirring in our land.” The novelist and playwright Booth Tarkington recalled the same thing: “I think we felt that Wilson understood us, and understood us more favorably than any other man on the faculty.” His friendliness toward students extended beyond studies. He again played a part in extracurricular activities, particularly speaking and debate, and gave talks in chapel, as all faculty members were required to do, although he touched only lightly on religious subjects. He also immersed himself in college sports. He admired rowing and deplored Princeton’s lack of the proper conditions for crew. Baseball remained his favorite sport, but he increasingly threw himself into the promotion of football, though now as a business manager and fan, not as a coach. He publicly defended football against charges that it was brutal and distracted students from academic pursuits. “Foot-ball is a manly game,” he told an alumni group. “Athletics are a safety valve for animal spirits.”²³

Still, some shadows darkened Wilson’s joy at Princeton. As much as he savored lecturing, he recognized the limitations of current university teaching. In 1894, he published an article titled “University Training and Citizenship,” in which he argued that universities must induce their students to read “widely and intelligently. … For it is reading, not set lectures, that will prepare a soil for culture.” To reach that goal, colleges should bring in a “considerable number of young tutors” to guide the students “in groups of manageable numbers, suggesting the reading of each group.” This was the germ of the major reform in teaching that Wilson would introduce later as president of Princeton. Indeed, from the moment he came back, he had ideas for improving his alma mater. One such idea was to inject new blood into the faculty. Most of his fellow professors were also alumni, but unlike Wilson, few of them had studied or taught anywhere else. He shared the discontent of some younger faculty members with the prevailing parochialism, but he saw the problem as a matter of sectional as well as academic and religious narrowness—not just too many Princetonians and Presbyterians but also “too many men from the Northeast.”²⁴

Wilson particularly wanted to add men with broader perspectives in the fields closest to his own. During his first year at Princeton, he tried to recruit his Hopkins friend Albert Shaw—a midwesterner by background who was on the faculty at Cornell and editing a new magazine, The American Review of Reviews—to teach economics. Patton initially backed Wilson’s effort, but conservative trustees shot down Shaw’s candidacy because of his economic views. The opponents were, Wilson told Shaw, “businessmen, the moneyed men of the corporation. … Hard-headed, narrow men,—that’s the breed.” In 1896, he tried to recruit another friend from Hopkins, Frederick Jackson Turner, whose pathbreaking essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” had made him a rising star in his field. Once more, Patton ostensibly encouraged Wilson, but the trustees rejected Turner’s candidacy, claiming that there was not enough money to create a separate professorship in American history. Wilson felt ill-used because Patton failed to inform him of the trustees’ decision for three weeks. “I have been treated like an employee rather than a colleague,” he exploded to Patton.²⁵ The president tried to mollify him with his usual sweet talk, but Wilson never again felt as warmly toward Patton or gave him the benefit of the doubt as he had done before.

Wilson’s most ambitious project for changing Princeton was to start a law school. It would be, he explained, “an institutional law school, so to speak, in which law shall be taught in its historical and philosophical aspects, critically rather than technically, … as it is taught in the better European universities.” During his first three years on Princeton’s faculty, he spoke repeatedly to alumni groups about his plan and expounded the need for broader education for all the professions. “I believe that no medical or law or theological school ought to be a separate institution,” he avowed. “It ought to be organically and in a situation part of a university.” He called the narrowly trained specialist “the natural enemy of society.”²⁶ Yet nothing came of this scheme. A nationwide depression in 1893 made funds hard to raise, and Patton did not bestir himself. After 1893, Wilson abandoned the idea and concentrated more on his own writing and undergraduate teaching. Yet the vision of instituting a liberal education for the professions and of integrating theoretical with practical education would remain central to his definition of a great university.

Setbacks did not unduly cloud Wilson’s happiness at Princeton. For six years in a row, a student body poll chose him most popular professor, and most of the faculty held him in equally high regard. He served on such important committees as those dealing with student discipline, athletics, and the library, and the faculty chose him more often than anyone else to represent them in communicating with the trustees. Even Patton and older, more conservative faculty members could not gainsay his eminence—because he was getting job offers from other institutions. In 1892, the University of Illinois offered him its presidency at a salary of $6,000. Ellen shrewdly advised her husband to exploit the offer, and she urged him to consult with other university presidents, especially Daniel Coit Gilman at Hopkins, as a bit of self-advertising. The possibility also arose of his being offered the presidency of the University of Wisconsin. “It would be such fun for you to have this one too,” Ellen exulted. “I should like to keep the Princeton trustees in the hottest kind of water on your account until they were shaken out of their selfish lethargy in the matter of salaries.”²⁷

Wilson’s most tempting outside offer came in 1898, when the University of Virginia asked him to become its president. “Mr. Jefferson’s University” had operated for almost three quarters of a century without a president, but by the 1890s the Board of Visitors had conceded that they needed one. Wilson was the first choice of the board and the faculty, strongly seconded by the governor. He responded to the offer by telling a Virginia friend that “almost every affection drew me towards the State and the institution I love” and to accept what “will probably turn out to be the highest honour of my life-time.” But he did not hesitate to use the offer to improve his situation at Princeton, and he got sympathetic trustees to agitate to keep him. Patton professed himself eager to retain Wilson but insisted, “I cannot see that it is my duty to take the initiative.”²⁸ Instead, Wilson’s friends among the trustees, particularly Cyrus McCormick, arranged for him to receive an additional $2,500 a year for the next five years. Wilson thereupon turned down the Virginia offer, explaining that moral bonds held him at Princeton, together with the need to continue his writing.

Wilson was also happier with his home life and his circle of friends during his years as a professor at Princeton than at any other time in his life. His immediate family—Ellen and their three daughters, Margaret, Jessie, and Eleanor (Nell)—formed the core in a ring of concentric circles of love and friendship. Wilson and Ellen loved each other deeply and passionately. In a letter to her, he bemoaned “the riotous elements in my own blood,” but he found ample outlets for his physical desires within their marriage, once reminding her, “The other thing I had thought of may occur to you independently: will you not bring the little bundle of rubbers in the bottom drawer of the washstand?”²⁹ She shared more than a bed with her husband. She was also his adviser and confidant. She interested herself in his work, and he gladly discussed with her his thinking about nearly everything. She often showed a keener insight than he did into such people at Princeton as Patton and various trustees. Above all, she understood him better than anyone else ever would.

Ellen managed the household and made sure that Wilson had plenty of time for his work. He spent long hours in his study turning out a stream of books, magazine articles, and speeches. Yet he did not impress people as driven or excessively absorbed in his work. He still played tennis, and he took up the new craze of bicycling. His brother-in-law Stockton Axson also recalled that Wilson “loved to ‘loaf and invite his soul.’” His faculty friend Bliss Perry attributed Wilson’s combination of productivity and apparent leisure to his highly disciplined habits, particularly his now almost exclusive use of the typewriter, and his “gift of intense concentration.”³⁰

He did not let the pressures of work make him an absentee or distant figure at home. The second Wilson daughter, Jessie, told his first biographer that her father loved to tell stories and was a “remarkable mimic,” doing various dialects, including Irish and African American—betraying touches of ethnic and racial prejudice, though innocently intended. Often he would “seize one of the little girls and dance around the room, or up and down the hall with her, in a wild spirit of gaiety.” He divided the family into its “proper members”—Ellen and Jessie—and its “vulgar members”—Nell and himself—with Margaret in between. His nephew George Howe similarly remembered his uncle’s “playful nature, playful both of mind and body,” and how he would dance with the girls after dinner, with “Aunt Ellie” calling out when they got too rambunctious, “Woodrow, what is the matter with you?”³¹

The Wilson daughters were each very different from the other in appearance and personality. The oldest, Margaret, was the smallest and the most musically gifted. She had a melodious voice and was a good student; she left the Women’s College of Maryland after two years to go to New York, where she studied voice and tried, with mixed success, to become an opera singer. Margaret inherited her father’s looks, and when she was in her twenties, she started wearing the same kind of eyeglasses, making her look like a female version of him. Jessie was the beauty of the family, with honey-blond hair and large blue eyes; she was an even better student than Margaret, attending the same college, where she earned a Phi Beta Kappa key. She was also the most deeply religious of the three daughters and felt a strong attraction to social reform. She and Margaret became ardent advocates of woman suffrage and often argued the issue with their father at the dinner table. Nell, the youngest, was dark-haired and dark-eyed, with a resemblance to her father that was softer than Margaret’s. She was the least studious of the three; her higher education consisted of two years of finishing school in North Carolina. As the liveliest and least inhibited of the daughters, she became her father’s favorite. She eagerly joined in his high jinks and made him laugh. According to Stockton Axson, Nell and her father played tag in the halls of the White House.³²

The immediate family circle extended beyond the couple and their daughters. Ever since her mother’s death, Ellen had wanted to bring the Axsons back together, and in Princeton she finally got her wish. After Stockton joined the Princeton faculty in 1897, he came to the Wilson house almost daily. Her brother Eddie continued to live with them during his four years as a student at Princeton, where he was a member of the class of 1897. And in 1893, Ellen had brought her twelve-year-old sister, Madge, to live with them, the rebellious tomboy adding to a household already lively with sprites. George Howe, Eddie’s classmate at Princeton, lived with the family from 1893 to 1897, and Wilson’s cousin Helen Woodrow Bones lived with them while she attended a women’s college in Princeton. George Howe’s mother, Wilson’s sister Annie, was a frequent visitor, as was Wilson’s father. Following the custom in southern families, relatives nearly always came for extended stays. Sadly, Wilson’s other sister, Marion, had died in 1890, and he saw little of her children.

Several circles of friends radiated around the family. Everyone on the Princeton faculty knew everyone else and socialized to some extent. With some of his colleagues Wilson had pleasant but mainly businesslike relations, as with the physicist William F. Magie, his onetime classmate. He was closer to Harry Fine, who lived across the street and still called him Tommy. With Bliss Perry, Wilson enjoyed both a personal and a literary friendship until Perry left Princeton in 1899 to become editor of The Atlantic Monthly. Highest of all in Wilson’s affections stood a new friend, the philosophy professor John (Jack) Grier Hibben, who was four years younger than Wilson and had joined the faculty a year after him. Madge Axson later counted Hibben among the small circle of men who—along with Wilson’s father, Stockton Axson, and Bridges—“belonged in the inner citadel of his heart.” Hibben’s wife, Jennie, also became close to the Wilson family. In addition, there were frequent visitors from out of town, such as Bob Bridges and Walter Page.³³

Church played less of a role in Wilson and Ellen’s lives than it had earlier. It was seven years before they transferred their letter of membership from the church in Middletown to one in Princeton, where they rejected the older, long-established First Presbyterian Church in favor of its nearby dissident offshoot, the Second Presbyterian Church. After he became president of Princeton, Wilson transferred the family membership to the First, which in the meantime, with Hibben’s influence, had reconciled its differences with the Second. The family recited grace before meals and said nightly prayers, and they read from the Bible together, although more often they read aloud from literary works, with Thackeray’s Vanity Fair being a favorite.

During their first years in Princeton, the family lived in a rented frame house about a mile west of the campus. In 1895, Wilson took out a loan that permitted him to buy the lot next door and start construction on a house. Ellen designed the building, a large, elegant structure in the fashionable half-timber style. It cost $12,000 to build, with another $3,000 for the land—large sums of money at that time. In order to bridge the gap between the loan and the costs, Wilson took on additional outside speaking engagements. “I wanted to pos[t]pone building,” Ellen explained to a friend, “but he had gotten his heart set on it and has agreed to lecture this fall for the University Extension Society to make up the deficit.”³⁴ Having encountered and overcome some of the typical snags and frustrations of home building, the Wilson family moved into their new house in February 1896.

Wilson paid a physical price for the extra work he was doing. Looking back at her husband’s lecturing efforts, Ellen told Frederick Jackson Turner, “Mr. Wilson makes $1500 every year; and last year when we were building, and he really tired himself, he made $4000 extra;—and almost killed himself doing it!”³⁵ In May 1896, he suffered his first serious health problem. Up to that point in his life, his only complaint had been recurring digestion problems, for which he sometimes used a stomach pump—a commonly prescribed remedy at the time—to remove acids and inject small amounts of coal. Now, without warning, he found that severe pain and numbness left him barely able to use his right hand. His doctors could not discover a cause and vaguely mentioned “neuritis” and “writer’s cramp” and prescribed rest. With Hibben’s help, Ellen arranged for her husband to take a two-month holiday in England and managed his affairs in his absence. While he was abroad, he wrote letters home in his neat handwriting, using his left hand until he gradually recovered the use of his right. He enjoyed the holiday, visiting Bagehot’s grave and thrilling to the sights of London and, especially, Oxford. He mixed in a little work by renewing his acquaintance with James Bryce, trying to get him to come to lecture at Princeton. The rest cure evidently worked, because Wilson resumed his typical pace of activity in the fall.

This episode may have been a sign of a deeper problem. With the benefit of knowledge of the massive stroke he suffered more than twenty years later, some interpreters have speculated that the pain and weakness in Wilson’s hand stemmed from a small stroke, caused by an occlusion in his right carotid artery. The transient nature of the semiparalysis was consistent with such a small stroke, and his family history, particularly his father’s condition as he aged, likewise hinted at cardiovascular problems. But any diagnosis can only be speculative. Wilson would have no comparable problems for another ten years. Whatever its cause, this episode came as an unwelcome reminder of vulnerability and mortality.³⁶

Wilson’s physical problem came at a singularly inopportune time. Though not yet forty, he was the brightest star on the Princeton faculty, and his reputation was growing in academic circles and among the broader public. In the fall of 1896, he got an opportunity to shine before a most distinguished audience. It was the 150th anniversary of the charter of the College of New Jersey, and the trustees agreed to stage an elaborate sesquicentennial celebration in October and to use the occasion finally to change the institution’s name to Princeton University. One faculty member, classics professor Andrew Fleming West, made most of the arrangements for what became an impressive affair that featured academic processions and stately ceremonies. West pulled off a coup when he secured the attendance of the president of the United States, Grover Cleveland. (Princeton and West made such a favorable impression on Cleveland that he decided to retire to the town when he left the White House the following year.) The highest place of honor at the celebration fell to Wilson, who was the undisputed choice to deliver the major address.

He titled the address “Princeton in the Nation’s Service,” but contrary to what that title seemed to imply and what later generations presumed the speech to say, it was not a call for students to enter public service or for the newly renamed university to outfit them for careers in the political arena. Its first half evoked the history of Princeton, and the second half pleaded for enlightened conservatism. The first half dwelled almost exclusively on John Witherspoon, “your thorough Presbyterian,” but noted that Princeton’s founders had not wanted “a sectarian school.” In the second half, Wilson affirmed, “There is nothing so conservative of life as growth: when that stops, decay sets in and the end comes on apace.” His conservatism was academic and intellectual rather than political, decrying the shift toward universities’ spawning “your learned radical, bred in the schools,” and exalting “the scientific spirit of the age,” which has “bred in us a spirit of experiment and contempt for the past.” Instead of trying to extend science beyond its proper sphere, Princeton “must turn back once more to the region of practicable ideals.” Wilson closed by saluting a “place where ideals are kept in the heart in an air they can breathe; but no fool’s paradise,” and he asked, “Who shall show us the way to this place?”³⁷

“Princeton in the Nation’s Service” was an oratorical triumph. “And such an ovation as Woodrow received!” Ellen exulted to her cousin Mary Hoyt. “I never imagined anything like it. And think of so delighting such an audience, the most distinguished, everyone says, that has ever been assembled in America.” Wifely adoration aside, Ellen’s description captured the mood of the occasion. A faculty friend of Wilson’s later recalled that someone who entertained notions about succeeding Patton as president of Princeton said this speech had made him abandon those hopes.³⁸ Whether Wilson had similar aspirations is not known, but the offer from Virginia a few months later would almost certainly plant the idea deeper in the minds of others, most notably such patrons of his among the trustees as McCormick and Pyne.

•   •   •

During most of the 1890s, Wilson took little interest in politics. In 1893, he declined to write a magazine article about a hot current issue because “I am estopped by ignorance.” There were exceptions to his detachment. In 1895, he spoke at a rally in Princeton for the Democratic candidate for governor of New Jersey, and in 1896 he addressed a meeting in Baltimore to protest shenanigans by the city’s political machine. At that meeting, Wilson shared the platform with the dashing young Republican politician and New York City police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt. This was the first time that the two men met. They hit it off well, and Roosevelt had dinner with Wilson when he visited Princeton a year later. Wilson was in England during the first part of the 1896 presidential campaign—the epic clash between William McKinley, the Republican who backed the monetary gold standard, and William Jennings Bryan, the anti-Cleveland insurgent Democrat who stood for free silver and measures aimed at curbing the power of big business. Wilson confessed to Ellen, “It looks as if I would have to vote for McKinley!”³⁹ Fortunately for him, a splinter gold Democratic ticket offered a way to avoid such apostasy.

Wilson was beginning to take a new direction in his political thought. Ever since he first laid plans to write his grand synthesis, which he now called “Philosophy of Politics,” he had been circling around Edmund Burke’s conception of the nature of politics. Rereading Burke’s writings in 1893 brought the intellectual breakthrough that enabled Wilson to recognize his deep affinity for that conception of politics. “If I should claim any man as my master,” he told a friend, “that man would be Burke.” In an essay, he lauded Burke’s work for containing “no page of abstract thinking” and his perception “that questions of government are moral questions, and that questions of morals cannot always be squared with rules of logic, but run through as many ranges of variety as the circumstances of life itself.” Wilson further argued, “The politics of the English-speaking peoples has never been speculative; it has always been profoundly practical and utilitarian. Speculative politics treats man and situations as they are supposed to be; practical politics treats them (upon no general plan, but in detail) as they are found to be at the moment of actual contact.”⁴⁰

Wilson probably did not recognize his affinity for Burke earlier and seize upon this insight to move forward with his “Philosophy of Politics” because he was focusing on other things. In addition to teaching and lecturing, he wrote a volume in the Epochs of American History series, edited by Professor Albert Bushnell Hart of Harvard. Titled Division and Reunion, 1829–1889, it was a work of synthesis, not original research, and in it Wilson followed the lead of Turner in stressing the influence of the frontier. He depicted the Old South in a kindly light, viewing slavery as generally benign, taking issue only with the breaking up of slave families and the institution’s economic inefficiencies, but he had no patience with secession. The book received generally good reviews, although some historians criticized its sketchiness in parts and its slighting of the moral dimension of slavery. In the 1890s, he was also writing for a number of better-paying magazines, such as Albert Shaw’s Review of Reviews; The Forum, which was edited by Walter Page; Scribner’s, where Bridges had become editor; and The Atlantic, edited then by Horace Scudder, who had earlier accepted Congressional Government at Houghton Mifflin, and after 1899 by Bliss Perry.

The most interesting of these articles were “A Calendar of Great Americans” and “Mere Literature.” In “Calendar,” he praised Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln but dismissed Jefferson as “a great man, but not a great American” because his political thought was un-American in being “abstract, sentimental, rationalistic, rather than practical.” In “Mere Literature,” he took revenge on the dismissal of a book by a philologist at Johns Hopkins as “mere literature” and, possibly unconsciously, on his father’s scoffing at his wanting “a merely literary career.” The phrase “mere literature” epitomized “the irreverent invention of a scientific age,” which had tried to turn universities into “agencies of Philistinism.”⁴¹

Literary success and disengagement from current affairs did not entirely quell Wilson’s yearning to play an active part in politics. He mentioned to Ellen “the road I used to burn to travel,” declaring that he was “yet fairly restless and impatient with ambition, as of old.” Seeing contemporaries make their way in politics drew varying reactions. When President Cleveland appointed the Atlanta lawyer and newspaper owner Hoke Smith secretary of the interior in 1893, Wilson told Shaw, “I … despise him as heartily as all the other men I knew at the Atlanta bar did.” In a magazine article, he depicted Smith as a typical product of the bar: “Their training is narrow, their apprehension specialized; their conceptions of justice are technical, their standards of policy too self-regardful.”⁴² That sounds like a restatement of Wilson’s own reasoning when he abandoned the law. Others in politics were not so easy to brush aside. Wilson’s first editor, Henry Cabot Lodge, had become a Republican congressman and then a senator from Massachusetts, while Lodge’s close friend and Wilson’s new acquaintance, Theodore Roosevelt, was enjoying a meteoric rise after having served spectacularly in the Spanish-American War.

Wilson crossed paths with Roosevelt a number of times. After Roosevelt’s election as governor of New York, Roosevelt sought Wilson’s advice about politics, and Wilson sought Roosevelt’s about academic appointments. Wilson found in Roosevelt, he told Ellen, “a very sane, academic side … not known by everybody so much as to exist.” Publicly, he praised Roosevelt as “too big a man to have it make any difference to him whether he was in office or out.” When he was vice president, Roosevelt invited professors from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to talk about interesting young men from their colleges who might go into politics. Wilson was the professor from Princeton, and during the summer of 1901 he spent part of a weekend at Roosevelt’s home at Oyster Bay on Long Island. Roosevelt and Lodge evidently figured in conversations in the Wilson household, for Ellen wrote to her husband after driving past Lodge’s estate in Massachusetts, “He seems to be, like Roosevelt, one of fortune’s all round favourites.”⁴³

Some of those yearnings for the political arena may have sprung from Wilson’s physical problem in 1896. Stockton Axson believed that his brother-in-law changed after that episode: “He had always been a purposeful man, but now he was a man of fixed and resolute purpose.” He explained to Wilson’s first biographer that “a subtle change came over Mr. Wilson after the return from the trip to Europe in 1896,” and he no longer sat and talked for hours with Axson and Joseph Wilson. “Old Dr. Wilson often complained that Woodrow was getting away from his old interests.” His brother-in-law struck Axson as “torn between the desire to live a studious and scholarly life, doing creative work and a life of action.” Wilson once said to him, “I get so tired of a talking profession.”⁴⁴

Wilson began to take a greater interest in current affairs as the decade drew to a close. In 1897, he decried “leaderless government … in which no man stands at the helm to steer.” In 1898, he cast aside his detachment in response to the Spanish-American War. Bliss Perry later recalled, “In those days Wilson was much more of a ‘militarist’ than I. I thought he romanticized the army and the navy too much.” Axson similarly recalled, “During and immediately after the war he was belligerent—regretted he was not free to enlist in the armed forces and fight—read each day’s news with the eagerness of a boy.” Breaking with fellow Democrats, he publicly argued that America should take Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippines as colonies in order to prevent Germany or Russia from taking them. Moreover, he declared, “As long as we have only domestic subjects we have no real leaders.”⁴⁵

When the Democrats charged the Republicans with “imperialism” during the 1900 presidential campaign, Wilson supported McKinley’s foreign policy and welcomed the political changes that he saw emerging in its wake. In a preface to a new edition ofCongressional Government, he argued that the president was gaining new powers and that “new prizes in public service may attract a new order of talent,” especially in carrying “the novel burdens we have shouldered.” In an essay in The Atlantic, he maintained that possession of the Philippines “put us in the very presence of the forces that will make the politics of the twentieth century radically unlike the politics of the nineteenth” and that Americans must help “undeveloped peoples, still in the childhood of their natural growth[,] … inducting them into the rudiments of justice and freedom.” If those arguments sounded like Rudyard Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden,” it was probably no accident. Ellen and Wilson had recently added Kipling to their short list of favorite poets, and Wilson would carry Kipling’s poem “If” in his wallet for years.⁴⁶

His embrace of imperialism dovetailed with his rekindled interest in active politics. Early in 1898, Wilson observed Congress in session for the first time. “I have sat and watched the Houses a good deal in the afternoons,” he told Ellen, “and the old longing for public life comes upon me in a flood as I watch. Perhaps I should be safer somewhere else, where I should be kept from a too keen and constant discontent with my calling.” He also met the powerful Republican Speaker of the House, Thomas B. Reed, whom he found “not only agreeable but even attractive.” Reed flattered Wilson by telling him “he had read ‘Congressional Government’ and had been astonished to find how admirably one outside affairs had been able to group the features of our ‘government by helter-skelter.’ ”⁴⁷ Except for the occasional meetings with Roosevelt, nothing came of these renewed longings for active politics.

He did make some lucrative forays into the literary marketplace. In 1895 and 1896, he wrote a brief serialized biography of George Washington for Harper’s, with illustrations by the artist Howard Pyle, which was later published as a book. Wilson received $300 for each of the six installments, thereby earning more than half as much as his annual Princeton salary at the time. George Washington was a bad book, written in an affected style with the saccharine, moralizing tone of contemporary children’s books such asBlack Beauty and Little Lord Fauntleroy. In 1900, Harper’s offered Wilson $1,000 apiece—an “immense sum,” he told Bridges—for twelve installments of a history of the United States, which would subsequently be published in five lavishly produced volumes as A History of the American People. Though better written than George Washington, these volumes amounted to—in the words of a Princeton faculty member—“a gilt-edged pot boiler.”⁴⁸ Regardless, they earned him nearly $30,000, over and above the $12,000 for the magazine installments.

Having sated his need for money, he turned again to his “Philosophy of Politics” (“P.o.P.”). Early in 1902, he told Turner that he had “to do the work I really seem to have been cut out for. I was forty-five three weeks ago, and between forty-five and fifty-five, I take it, is when a man ought to do the work into which he expects to put most of himself.”⁴⁹ What might Wilson have produced if he had stuck with “P.o.P.”? Might he have wrought what Burke himself had never done, a comprehensive examination of politics as an art or science that did not stem from theory and ideology but grew out of life and experience? No one before Wilson had ever written such a book, and no one has written one since. His essays and comments anticipated the mid-twentieth-century reaction among liberal intellectuals against metaphysical politics and world-altering systems of thought. If Wilson had run with his insights the way he had in Congressional Government, he might have written a still greater book, a unique masterpiece of reflection on the meaning and conduct of political life.

He did not stick with “P.o.P” because circumstances and other ambitions intervened to set his life and career on a different course. Affairs at Princeton were heating up as the twentieth century approached. Patton’s indolent habits and conservative views dashed the high hopes raised in 1896 by the sesquicentennial celebration and the renaming of the institution. Jack Hibben and Andrew West began to foment opposition to the Patton regime. “We have had several informal gatherings of the Faculty malcontents on West[‘]s porch,” Hibben reported to Wilson in 1899. “The excitement of the early days of the summer has subsided, and a sullen resentment seems to have taken its place in reference to the powers that be.” Wilson shared their discontent, telling Ellen, “I knowthat Dr. P. cannot be depended upon for anything at all.” When Patton hired a replacement for Bliss Perry, Wilson exploded to Ellen, “How complete it all is: … not a name added to our list, or prestige; money saved and second-rate men promoted!”⁵⁰

The situation slowly began to change. In 1900, the trustees authorized the establishment of a graduate school with West as dean, although this new arm of the university existed only on paper. Also in 1900, faculty dissidents overcame Patton’s objections and formed a committee to investigate undergraduate education, with a view to raising standards; they found allies among the trustees, including Moses Pyne, Cyrus McCormick, and Cornelius Cuyler, wealthy businessmen accustomed to efficiency and action. Patton’s days as president of Princeton were clearly numbered, particularly after faculty dissidents began meeting privately with some of the trustees in the spring of 1902. Wilson attended several of these sessions, and he helped draw up a plan to create a joint faculty-trustee executive committee that would effectively supplant Patton.

Princeton’s president could read the handwriting on the wall. As soon as he learned of the plan for the executive committee, Patton talked about resigning, and he cleverly inveigled the trustees into giving him a pension of $10,000 a year for six years. When the trustees met on June 9, Patton submitted his resignation and recommended Wilson as his successor. The trustees then unanimously elected Wilson president of Princeton. “I never saw so many men of many minds so promptly, without debate, without hesitation at the mere mention of a name,” one of the trustees told Wilson, “… & when the vote was announced we agreed that it was an act of Providence.”⁵¹ This unanimity and seeming spontaneity masked a bit of maneuvering. Others had reportedly entertained hopes of succeeding Patton, including West. Patton reportedly swung around to Wilson because he and Wilson had maintained pleasant personal relations and he hated West for plotting against him. It also seems likely that Wilson’s friends and patrons among the trustees had prepared to put his name forward and push his election.

Wilson affected surprise. The day after the election, he told the alumni gathered for class reunions, “This thing has come to me as a thunderbolt out of a clear sky.” Yet Perry’s wife wrote to Ellen, “[I]t makes me homesick and blue to think that the event we had so often talked about and wished for has come to pass and we are outsiders, not there to enjoy it.” Ellen expressed some regrets to her cousin Florence Hoyt about how Wilson’s “literary work must suffer greatly,—just how much remains to [be] seen, and we must leave our dear home and sweet, almost ideal life when he was [a] simple ‘man of letters.’” If Wilson felt that way too, he hid his misgivings well. Speaking briefly at commencement ceremonies the following day, he gave a foretaste of what could be expected from him. “There are things which we hope to add to this university,” he declared, “and there are things which we hope will never be subtracted from it. We hope that men will open their hearts to us and will enable us to crown this university with a great graduate college.”⁵² Woodrow Wilson was forecasting the greatest challenges, accomplishments, and conflicts of this new turn in his life.