4

BOLD LEADER

Princeton University inaugurated Woodrow Wilson on October 25, 1902. He considered his ranking as the university’s thirteenth president a good omen because, unlike many people, he believed that thirteen was his lucky number—it was the sum of the number of letters in his first and last names. The inaugural ceremony was a gala event, which preceded a midday dinner for the attendees, a football game, and an evening dinner given by Wilson’s class of ‘79. An injury prevented President Theodore Roosevelt from attending, but earlier, on hearing of the trustees’ action, he had told a mutual friend, “Woodrow Wilson is a perfect trump. I am overjoyed at his election.” Ex-president Cleveland, now a resident of Princeton and a trustee of the university, did attend, as did Abraham Lincoln’s only surviving child, Robert Todd Lincoln. Other luminaries included the financier J. P. Morgan, former Speaker of the House of Representatives Thomas B. Reed, and the novelist William Dean Howells, together with such magazine editors as Wilson’s friends Bridges of Scribner’s, Perry of The Atlantic, and Page, who had recently started his own monthly, The World’s Work, as well as George Harvey of Harper’s Weekly, who had worked earlier with Wilson on his History of the American People.¹

The pomp and circumstance of the academic procession recalled the spectacle six years before at Princeton’s sesquicentennial celebration. But unlike that event, this was not an all-male or all-white affair. At Wilson’s initiative, three female representatives of women’s colleges joined the procession, as did an African American—the renowned principal of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, Booker T. Washington. The Tuskegee principal’s views on race relations seemed to match Wilson’s own thinking about gradual improvement in race relations. In 1897, he had written, “Even the race problem of the South will no doubt work itself out in the slowness of time. … Time is the only legislator in such matters.” Not everyone in Wilson’s family thought that way. As their daughter Jessie remembered, “Mrs. Wilson felt much more strongly about the color line than did Mr. Wilson.” She also recalled that one of Ellen’s aunts felt “scandalized” by Washington’s presence at the inauguration “and said if she had known he was to be there she wouldn’t have gone.” Wilson said that he thought Washington’s “speech was the very best at the dinner afterwards bar none.”²

Wilson titled the speech that he delivered at the inaugural ceremony, on the steps of Nassau Hall, “Princeton for the Nation’s Service.” By changing just one word in the title of his sesquicentennial speech, he invited comparison with that earlier oratorical feat. Wilson asserted that as the nation’s “affairs grow more and more complex[,] … [i]t needs efficient and enlightened men. The universities of the country must take part in supplying them.” He laid greatest stress on the general education of undergraduates through “disciplinary” studies, such as classics, mathematics, and science, which would form a core curriculum. Without naming Harvard or its president, Charles William Eliot, who was not present, he was rejecting the free-elective system that Eliot had instituted there. Wilson also insisted that the leading professors, “those who guide special study and research[, should not be] altogether excused from undergraduate instruction.” Moreover, Princeton should build a residential graduate college “at the very heart, the geographical heart, of the university,” thus mingling graduate and undergraduate education in such ways as to produce leaders for America in a “new age, … in which, it seems, we must lead the world.”³

“Princeton for the Nation’s Service” was not as good a speech as its similarly titled predecessor. Wilson was more abstract and self-consciously oratorical, seldom mentioning Princeton by name, and offered the Graduate College as his only concrete proposal. All the same, he received thunderous applause, and the press reported the speech widely and approvingly. Particularly impressed was George Harvey of Harper’s Weekly. A conservative Democrat and political associate of Cleveland’s, he regarded himself as a political talent spotter, and he later said he had marked Wilson as a presidential possibility after hearing the speech.⁴

Before the inauguration, Wilson told Ellen, “I feel like a new prime minister getting ready to address his constituents.” He also told her, “Fortunately, I never worked out the argument on liberal studies, which is the theme of my inaugural, before, never before having treated myself as a professional ‘educator,’ and so the matter is not stale but fresh and interesting.” Actually, according to Stockton Axson, five years earlier Wilson had spelled out to him the three steps needed to make Princeton a place where “things of the mind” were paramount: first, reorganize the curriculum to combine electives with prescribed courses; second, adapt “the Oxford tutorial system to our American plan;” and third, divide the student body into smaller units, with unmarried faculty living among them.⁵This prefiguration of major reform sounds apocryphal, but he had given talks to alumni groups stressing the need to combine the advantages of the college and the university.

Although he exaggerated the lack of thinking he had devoted to the subject of education, he revealed habits of mind that would shape his leadership as a university president and later as a governor and as president of the United States. Wilson liked to prepare, to think things through by himself and get his bearings on a subject, and he liked to work from the general to the particular. Money presented the biggest obstacle to his plans. Axson recalled that on the day Wilson was chosen president, “he seemed a little nervous” and told Axson, “We cannot reform the University immediately. Funds will have to be found.”⁶ Still, he did not let such worries deter him from revealing a character trait that previously had found outlets only in his imaginings—a penchant for bold action. In situations where he had a choice, he would nearly always pick the grander, riskier course.

During the summer of 1902, Wilson prepared a report on the state of affairs at Princeton, which he had presented to the trustees four days before his inauguration. In that report he called the university’s situation “in many respects, critical” and declared that “it is insufficiently capitalized for its business.” The quality of the faculty was suffering from low pay, and the curriculum needed “a radical change of method.” Such “essentially reading subjects” as philosophy, literature, history, politics, and economics required, with modification, “the English tutorial system.” To institute such a system, he proposed hiring fifty young men on yearly contracts for a maximum of five years. The regular faculty likewise required more and more distinguished professors, and the sciences badly needed better facilities. Such changes would require upping Princeton’s present resources of $3.8 million to more than $6 million. “No institution can have freedom in its development which does not stand at the top in a place of leadership,” Wilson argued. “If Princeton should ever come to be generally thought of as standing below Harvard and Yale in academic development her opportunity for leadership and even for independent action within her own sphere would be gone. … Either we may withdraw from the university competition and devote ourselves to making what we are solid and distinguished, or we must find money enough to make Princeton in fact a great university.”⁷

He also listed steps to take toward making Princeton a leading university. First and most important was a Graduate College, the residential facility for the Graduate School, for which the dean, Andrew West, had already presented a design to the trustees. Wilson saw no need for a medical school, but he did recommend a “school of jurisprudence”—his earlier idea for a different kind of law school—and an “electrical school” to teach advanced engineering. He estimated the cost of these new ventures at $6.6 million; almost half of that sum would go to the Graduate College. Wilson closed the report by stressing how imperative it was to accomplish the tasks he had outlined: “I do not hesitate to say that the reputation and the very success of the University are staked on obtaining them soon.”⁸

He was staking out a bold vision for Princeton, but for the time being he moved slowly and looked for money. He spent part of the summer of 1902 visiting haunts of the wealthy on the north shore of Massachusetts and in Maine to cultivate such potential donors as J. P. Morgan. Like other university presidents of the time, he also stalked the biggest educational benefactor of all, the steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie. Fund-raising was the part of his new job that he liked least. “To ask for money is unpalatable to any man’s spirit,” he confessed in a draft of a fund-raising letter, “even though he ask, not for himself, but for the best cause in the world.”⁹

Home life also distracted him during his first months as president. Joseph Wilson had come to live with his older son’s family earlier in 1902. “He was ill much of the time and a large part of the nursing devolved upon Ellen,” her cousin Mary Hoyt recalled; Wilson’s sister Annie Howe also came to help. Wilson spent as much time as he could with his father, reading and singing hymns to him. Joseph Wilson died on January 21, 1903. “The blow of my father’s death has been very hard to me, and my spirits come back with difficulty,” he told one of his Princeton classmates. To Roosevelt, who had invited him to stay at the White House, he added, “I am for the time being in no spirits for pleasure. I feel, therefore, that I am relieving you of a sad guest in asking you not to expect me.”¹⁰

Wilson’s cautious start also stemmed from his collegiality, another leadership trait that he would carry with him into public office. He knew what he did not know, and he wanted to assemble a staff of able, loyal lieutenants to advise and assist him. Science formed the biggest gap in his knowledge, and the natural choice both to handle the sciences and to be his second in command in university affairs was his friend from their undergraduate days—Harry Fine. In June 1903, Wilson chose Fine to be dean of the faculty, the second-ranking officer of the university. The lanky, deliberate mathematician made a natural complement to Wilson, and he was one of the first people to recognize how Wilson worked as a leader. He later told Wilson’s first biographer, “[I]t seems to have been his method throughout his life to make up his mind himself in regard to the larger policies of administration without much consultation with other people. Upon details he was always eager for advice.” Fine called him “a man of certainty” once he had made up his mind, observing that this trait “made him enemies, … yet it was one of the most powerful factors in his success. To be certain of anything in a world of doubt is to have one of the most powerful weapons that ever comes to the hand of man.”¹¹ Fine excelled at picking promising scientists, and Wilson took part in recruiting them and other prospective faculty members, usually with a personal interview. He shone in these encounters with recruits, and his persuasiveness played a big role in enticing them to come to Princeton.

Wilson also relied heavily on Jack Hibben. He appointed Hibben to head the most important faculty committees and leaned on him in dealing with administrative details, conferring with him daily. Later, when he fell ill and took a leave of absence, he named Hibben acting president.

As dean of the Graduate School, Andrew West remained an independent power. Wilson seems to have distrusted West at the outset of his presidency; Bliss Perry later recalled him saying soon after he became president, “If West begins to intrigue against me as he did against Patton, we must see who is master.”¹² Despite those misgivings, he found West friendly and cooperative, and the priority he placed on building a graduate college and improving graduate education guaranteed harmony between the two men for a while.

During his first three years as president, Wilson concentrated on the changes that were easiest to make—beefing up the faculty and revamping the curriculum. In pursuing those goals, he revealed still another aspect of leadership that would carry over to public office: he made speeches to people he considered his key constituents—Princeton alumni. This was the part of the job he liked most. He hit the alumni circuit far more than Patton had done and sought to build a base of support for what he wanted to do. He also spoke at other colleges and universities and to educational groups in an effort to bolster Princeton’s visibility and broadcast his vision to a wider public. Securing a better faculty involved increasing the university’s size and recruiting distinguished scholars and scientists. The faculty grew from 108 at the beginning of Wilson’s presidency to 172 eight years later and became less inbred, with Princeton degree holders dropping as a share of the total from two thirds to less than half. Wilson also scrapped all notions about Presbyterian orthodoxy and hired the first Catholic and the first Jewish faculty members.¹³

Faculty affairs caused the first friction between him and others at Princeton. Unlike Patton, who had solicited names for new hires from the trustees’ Curriculum Committee, Wilson often acted on his own. Some trustees complained, but he continued to initiate appointments, submitting them afterward to the committee for pro forma approval. He likewise pruned dead wood from the faculty ranks. Most of the lesser lights were older men whom he could ignore or let retire, but in several cases he pushed full professors into retirement because of bad classroom performance. This practice left hard feelings, but he made dismissals stick and proved that he was in earnest about faculty standards.

Another aspect of improving the faculty dovetailed with reform of the curriculum. Princeton lagged behind other colleges and universities in establishing academic departments and organizing its curriculum along disciplinary lines, and Wilson changed that by organizing courses into “groups,” such as philosophy, classics, mathematics, English literature, and the natural sciences, with distribution requirements among the groups to ensure that students took “a well-considered liberal curriculum.”¹⁴ He also announced that the faculty would be organized into eleven departments, and he appointed chairmen, including West in Classics and Fine in Mathematics. His own department was to be called History and Politics. When the department later split in two, the second half remained Politics; it did not become Political Science, a term Wilson sometimes used but disliked.

Nor was Wilson a detached overseer of student life. As he once noted, “Sometimes, when I go through the campus of Princeton at night, and see the brilliant display of lighted windows, I know perfectly well what is going on in those rooms. I have lived in those rooms myself.” He continued to teach throughout his presidency because he did not want “to lose this direct contact with the men, or the intellectual stimulation which comes from class room work.” He usually taught two courses each year, both in the second semester. He also remained approachable to students outside class, and he befriended several of the more serious and personable ones. Two such students were Raymond Fosdick and Norman Thomas, of the class of 1905; both were minister’s sons from small towns, serious scholars but lively, sociable young men with potential for leadership.¹⁵ In them, Wilson could see a later generation’s embodiment of himself. Such young men represented his ideal student, but he knew how exceptional they were and how little the prevailing atmosphere encouraged other students to be like them. A lack of seriousness about studies still bedeviled Princeton, and its “picnic” reputation and plethora of easy courses, locally known as pipes, had increased in recent years.

Presbyterianism’s grip on Princeton had loosened, but the influences that were replacing it among the students boded no intellectual improvement. As part of a larger social trend, more and more sons of the wealthy were going to boarding schools and prestigious colleges. Matriculation at these colleges had become an upper-middle-class rite of passage that featured social connections, attendance at football games, and the frenetic pursuit of leisure and excitement. Princeton’s prevailing undergraduate style of dress—dirty corduroy trousers and a black sweater—tended to mask differences in wealth, but social distinctions were growing. McCosh had barred the Greek-letter fraternities that were proliferating on other campuses, but starting with the founding of the Ivy Club in 1879, “eating clubs” had come to play the same role of discriminating among students and introducing a universally acknowledged social hierarchy. After 1895, the eating clubs expanded in number and social importance, and President Patton had once allegedly boasted that he ran the best country club in America.¹⁶

In seeking to promote intellectual seriousness at Princeton, Wilson had his work cut out for him. Although he would later fight against social discrimination, especially by the clubs, that was not his original or primary aim. His focus during his first years as president of Princeton was overwhelmingly, relentlessly intellectual. Besides putting the new curriculum and departmental organization in place and stalking prospective donors, particularly Andrew Carnegie, he continued to speak out about his vision of liberal education and Princeton’s leadership in the world. He also dealt with student affairs, including a case of a student who was caught cheating. The young man’s mother had reportedly come to plead for her son, claiming that she was about to undergo a serious operation and his expulsion might kill her. “You force me to say a hard thing,” Ellen’s cousin Mary Hoyt remembered Wilson saying, “but if I had to choose between your life or my life or anybody’s life and the good of this college, I should choose the good of the college.” Mary Hoyt also remembered Ellen telling her, “And he came home so white and ill that he could eat no lunch.”¹⁷

By his third year as president, Wilson felt ready to prescribe stronger medicine to remedy the lack of intellectual seriousness. In February 1905, in a report to the trustees, he recommended the “tutorial system” that he had long advocated, which would combine the “advantage of the small college” with the “advantage of the great university [that] lies in its stimulating life.” He proposed to bring in a new corps of teachers to deal with “small groups of students, whose guides, counsellors, and friends they will be in their work,” and thereby “make a reading man of [the student] instead of a mere pupil receiving instruction.” Though intentionally short on specifics about this new system, he could not avoid the subject of money. He estimated that $2.5 million would be needed. “But,” he argued, “no more distinguished gift could be made to American education.” At the same time, he launched a committee of fifty wealthy alumni, headed by Cleveland Dodge, to raise the needed funds, and he went hunting for the men who would do the teaching. In a magazine article titled “The Princeton Preceptorial System,” Wilson proposed to gather faculty and students “into a common body … among whom a real community of interest, pursuit, and feeling will prevail.”¹⁸

His enthusiasm drove the project forward. He interviewed nearly all of the candidates himself, thereby exposing them to his persuasiveness. Appointed in June 1905, the initial cohort of what the students dubbed the “fifty preceptor guys to make us wise” actually numbered forty-four, with two more, in mathematics, appointed in September. By any measure, it was a remarkable group. Thirty-seven of the preceptors held doctorates, only three of which were from Princeton, and many would go on to distinguished academic careers, most often at Princeton. Given the normally glacial pace of change and ingrained resistance to innovation prevailing in most academic institutions, Wilson pulled off a remarkable coup in getting the preceptorial system up and running so fast. Even more remarkable was its instant, unqualified success. All interested parties praised the experiment. The faculty was delighted, and as one of the three Princeton Ph.D.’s among the preceptors recalled, “This infusion of new blood was the best thing that ever happened to Princeton. The place was too inbred.” Even the undergraduates got caught up in the excitement; one who had been a freshman in 1905 recalled “that the intellectual life of Princeton was immediately quickened.”¹⁹

Some of this seemed too good to be true, and it was. The system depended on the character and enthusiasm of the preceptors. Not all of them lived up to expectations, and small group tutorials did not work well in all fields. Fine recognized early that, except in mathematics, this approach did not apply to the sciences, and he diverted his preceptorial funds to laboratory instruction. The preceptorial system really depended on the inspiration provided by Wilson, and its greatest drawback was that the stimulation would wear off after this first blush of enthusiasm and would cool down in the absence of such inspired leadership. Nevertheless, the system did lift intellectual standards and expectations for years to come.

It also gave Princeton lots of good publicity and made it more attractive to applicants who were bright, ambitious, and well connected. In 1907, there would be rumors that President Roosevelt’s second son, Kermit, might forsake his father’s and older brother’s alma mater, Harvard, for Princeton. Those rumors proved unfounded, but they gave a hint of how Princeton’s reputation was blossoming. The preceptorial system made Wilson the best-known college president in the country, and newspapers and magazines carried numerous stories about this dynamic academic leader. Such publicity was heady stuff, and it came on top of other successes. Yet Wilson did not neglect the more mundane, practical aspects of a university president. Financially, Princeton’s budget increased and ran deficits, a circumstance that evidently did not bother him greatly. He took an active interest in the university’s buildings, possibly under Ellen’s influence, and worked closely with Ralph Adams Cram, the country’s leading exponent of Gothic Revival architecture, on the design and construction of classrooms and dormitories. It was during his presidency that the campus began to acquire the features that have given Princeton its distinctive look.

Nor did the athletic side of the university suffer under his leadership. Wilson remained a devoted fan of the football team, and in 1905 he joined with twelve other university presidents in an initiative of President Roosevelt’s to fend off agitation for the abolition of college football by reforming the rules of the game. That year, Princeton also opened its first golf course, and the next year saw the dedication of the most significant athletic facility built under Wilson’s presidency—Carnegie Lake. This lake, for rowing, was the only gift Wilson was able to wheedle out of the Scottish-born philanthropist, despite playing upon Witherspoon’s, McCosh’s, and Princeton’s Caledonian heritage. He had hoped for a library or money for the preceptorial system. Instead, in keeping with his pacifism and belief that football was warlike, Carnegie paid for a lake in order to promote rowing as a major college sport.

Wilson’s new job left him with little time for writing, except on educational issues. He did express some political opinions, but only privately or in passing in speeches on educational subjects. “I am of the class of men who are described as imperialists,” he declared early in 1903, although he also confessed to “an intense sympathy with the men on the other side.” Another time, he asserted that “the great incubus upon this country is its provincialism,” and he condemned the provincialism of urbanites for lacking “an imaginative sympathy” for the lot of farmers. Yet he stuck to his anti-Bryan guns. “The trouble is that Bryan has caught the spirit and instincts of the finer aspects of American life,” Wilson told Roland Morris, a former student who was a Bryan supporter, “but, Morris, the man has no brains. It is a great pity that a man with his power of leadership should have no mental rudder.” Wilson’s private views on race did not show much breadth of sympathy—or foresight—either. At the beginning of his third year as president, he answered an inquiry about the possibility of an African American applying to Princeton this way: “I would say that, while there is nothing in the law of the University to prevent a negro’s entering, the whole temper and tradition of the place are such that no negro has ever applied for admission, and … [it] seems extremely unlikely that the question will ever assume a practical form.”²⁰

Wilson’s family life was happy and harmonious during the first years of his Princeton presidency, with one tragic exception. Ellen did not enjoy having to exchange her beloved house on Library Place for Prospect House, the president’s house on campus, especially after some students tore down a new fence around the grounds. But she and their daughters and her sister, Madge, adjusted to their new lives. Margaret, Jessie, and Nell followed Madge to the girls’ school in the town of Princeton, founded by Harry Fine’s sister, and Margaret and Jessie subsequently went away to college. The lively, attractive Madge became the object of much attention from the preceptors, and in 1910 she married one of them, a special favorite of Wilson’s whom he made a dean, Edward (Ed) Graham Elliott. Ellen’s brother Stockton had meanwhile established himself as a popular teacher at Princeton, although he periodically took leaves for “nervous exhaustion,” most likely depression. The tragic exception to this pattern of domestic happiness came at the end of April 1905, when Ellen’s brother Eddie and his wife and young son were killed in a ferryboat accident in South Carolina. Their deaths devastated Ellen, who fell into a depression that lasted several months and left a shadow of sadness over her for the rest of her life. As self-therapy, she read deeply in philosophy to assuage her doubts about religion, and she resumed drawing and painting.²¹

Ellen Wilson needed to summon up emotional reserves as the year 1905 drew to a close. On December 2, Princeton hosted the Army-Navy game, attended by the president of the United States. The Wilsons entertained the official party at a pregame lunch, and Madge later recalled Roosevelt shouting “Miss Axson!” at her and thumping the table with his fists as he delivered loud pleasantries. When she excused herself to meet her date for the game, the young man asked what the commotion was about. “That was just the President of the United States engaged in mild banter,” Madge snapped, “and if that’s the way Presidents behave, I hope to the Lord I never meet another!” At the game, Navy came from behind at the end to hold Army to a tie, but for some spectators the high point came when, as one preceptor recalled, “Roosevelt and Wilson cross[ed] the field together between the halves, Roosevelt exuberant, smiling, delighted, waving his hat, acknowledging the plaudits of the multitudes and tugging along the University president who followed ‘with conscious step of purity and pride,’ if not reluctant, at least not equally ebullient.”²²

As events transpired, Wilson was then almost halfway through his tenure as president of Princeton and at the pinnacle of accomplishment and joy in that office. “We have seen academic life at its best,” Fine later remarked to Edward Elliott. “Never again can we hope to attain the conditions that marked the first half of Woodrow’s regime.” Six months later, on the morning of May 28, 1906, Wilson awoke to find that he was blind in his left eye. Accompanied by his friend Jack Hibben, he traveled to Philadelphia, where George de Schweinitz, an ophthalmologist, found that he had suffered a hemorrhage in the eye. He diagnosed its cause as arteriosclerosis—hardening of the arteries—and advised Wilson to give up all active work. A second physician, Alfred Stengel, an internist, agreed with the diagnosis but reassured Wilson that the disease was in an early stage and that a three-month rest would make him fit to work again. He did gradually regain partial vision in that eye.²³

The incident shook Ellen, who was still grieving over Eddie’s death, even more than it did her husband. “It is hardening of the arteries,” she told Florence Hoyt, “due to the prolonged high pressure on brain and nerves. He has lived too tensely. … Of course, it is an awful thing—a dying by inches, and incurable.” At the time, physicians had no way to treat arteriosclerosis except to prescribe rest. Wilson arranged to take a leave of absence, naming Hibben acting president, and he spent most of the summer of 1906 in England, particularly in the Lake District, first with Ellen and later by himself, hiking regularly, sometimes fourteen miles a day. On one of his hikes, he met a local artist named Fred Yates, who soon became a close friend and later painted portraits of Wilson and Ellen. By early September, he could report to Ellen that two eminent physicians in Edinburgh, an ophthalmologist and an internist, believed he could return to work with “proper moderation.”²⁴ Wilson would make gestures at moderation, such as promising to limit outside speaking engagements and taking a winter vacation, in Bermuda, at the beginning of 1907. Otherwise, he reacted to this physical setback by becoming even more focused, purposeful, and driven.

Two major items remained on Wilson’s agenda for transforming Princeton into one of the nation’s leading universities. One was to reorganize the undergraduates into residential units, where they would be overseen and taught by members of the faculty, after the fashion of the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. The other was to build a graduate college and locate it in the center of the campus. Wilson tackled both problems as soon as he got back to New Jersey in the fall of 1906. Of the two, he would have preferred to deal first with the undergraduate college. The centerpiece in this design was a scheme that had gelled in Wilson’s mind during that summer of 1906—what came to be called the Quadrangle Plan, or the Quad Plan, for short. Instead, events intervened to bring the Graduate College to the fore temporarily. In October 1906, Andrew West, the dean of the Graduate School, received an offer to serve as president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. West later said that he told Wilson he was “discouraged at the delays in furthering the cause of the Graduate College and at his attitude toward me. President Wilson became indignant and said he had given me full support and that my attitude was not justified.” After a meeting of the trustees’ Graduate School Committee, they and the president urged the dean to stay, and West agreed. Everyone papered over the incidents with professions of harmony, but this was the first open clash between West and Wilson. It marked the beginning of a struggle for direction and control of graduate education at Princeton.²⁵

With the matter of West’s offer settled, Wilson could turn his attention to the Quad Plan. Late in 1906, he unveiled a preliminary sketch of his vision at a meeting of the trustees. The eating clubs, with their “social competition,” struck him as “peculiarly hostile” to intellectual life, and he proposed to remedy the situation by having students “live together, not in clubs but in colleges.”²⁶ He also suggested that some clubs might become colleges. This presentation of the Quad Plan marked his first major misstep as president of Princeton. As with the preceptorial system, he had not consulted anyone in advance, but this time his vision did not carry the day. The trustees appointed a committee that would take five months to study the question before making a recommendation. In the meantime, Grover Cleveland worried that the plan might interfere with development of the Graduate School, and another trustee asked why they could not simply require the eating clubs to take in all upperclassmen. Wilson tried to reassure Cleveland but dismissed the other trustee’s question because it struck him as missing the point, which was not the clubs’ social discrimination.

He also had mixed success in selling the Quad Plan to faculty intimates. After a meeting at Prospect House, Fine enthusiastically told him, “Yes, Tommy, I think that it will do the trick.” Hibben, however, said nothing one way or the other. Undeterred, Wilson announced to the trustees’ Graduate School Committee at the end of May 1907 that the Quad Plan involved “a thing more hopeful and of deeper consequence than anything we have hitherto turned our counsels to.” Princeton’s recent advances would be “in vain if the processes of disintegration and of distorted social ambition … are not checked and remedied by some radical change.” The eating clubs were also pernicious, in his view, because they had “no intellectual purposes or ideals of any kind at their foundation.” He made this argument to the Graduate School Committee because West was now proposing that the Graduate College be built at an off-campus site, separated from the undergraduate classrooms and dormitories. Wilson argued that such a move would be contrary to the larger purposes behind the Quad Plan: “nothing will so steady and invigorate the process of transformation as the close neighborhood, the unmistakable example, and the daily influence of the Graduate College.”²⁷

To the full board of trustees, he declared, “We have witnessed in the last few years the creation of a new Princeton,” and now consummation of its drive to the top among American universities demanded the creation of residential colleges. “The clubs simply happen to stand in the way. … We are not seeking to form better clubs, but academic communities.”²⁸ His eloquence appeared to carry the day, although he had also done his homework, meeting several times with the Graduate School Committee and enlisting Fine’s aid in persuading committee members. Just one trustee voted against the plan, but in fact the trustees approved the Quad Plan only in principle. Wilson was not yet home free.

At the time, however, he felt so good that he allowed himself to crow a bit. Two weeks after the trustees’ meeting, he received an honorary degree and spoke at Harvard. Wilson teased his hosts about the differences in their backgrounds—Massachusetts versus Virginia, Puritan versus Scotch-Irish—and drew upon those differences to observe that their respective universities were academic competitors: “Now we at Princeton are in the arena and you at Harvard are in the arena.” Harvard championed the free-elective system, while Princeton was “seeking to combine men in a common discipline.”²⁹ He welcomed the contest and left no doubt who he believed would win. Wilson was once more bearding a lion in his den. The Harvard president who conferred the honorary degree was Charles W. Eliot, the father of the free-elective system, and this upstart from Princeton was attacking the man’s brainchild and challenging his university’s primacy in American higher education.

Wilson’s cocky tone may have reflected some success that he was enjoying in another area. The publicity he had garnered as president of Princeton had given him a chance to flirt again with his first love—politics. The magazine editor George Harvey had indeed marked him as a good prospect to shoulder the banner of the conservative Cleveland wing of the Democratic Party. A year earlier, in February 1906, the Lotos Club—a prestigious New York City literary club whose members were prominent artists, journalists, and publishers—had given a dinner at which Wilson was a guest and speaker, and on that occasion Harvey had called on the Democrats to choose a leader “who combines the activities of the present with the sober influences of the past … Woodrow Wilson of Virginia and New Jersey.” Wilson professed to be embarrassed by Harvey’s remarks and the editor’s endorsement in Harper’s Weekly. Yet he did not laugh off this “nomination.” Shortly afterward, he told a Democratic newspaper editor that he hoped their party would nominate “someone who held views and a position like my own” and reject “rash and revolutionary proposals.”³⁰

Probably through Harvey’s influence, Wilson spoke in April 1906 at the annual Jefferson Day dinner held by the New York Democratic Club, a conservative group allied with the city’s Democratic political machine, Tammany Hall. He soft-pedaled his long-standing rejection of Jefferson’s limited-government state-rights views, lambasted socialism, and scorned wrongheaded government interference with business and labor. Frequent bursts of applause at the dinner, together with reactions that Harvey gathered, showed that the editor’s new political prospect had made a hit. During the year following that speech, Wilson kept a foot in politics. Late in 1906, he spoke out against the income tax because he said it discriminated against the rich and because “I know of only one legitimate object of taxation, and that is to pay the expenses of the Government.” In March 1907, he took a slap at Roosevelt and the president’s platform, by declaring, “[W]hat we need is not a square deal, but no deal at all—an old-fashioned equality and harmony of conditions.”³¹

Early in 1907, Wilson allowed Democrats in the New Jersey legislature to place his name in nomination for the office of U.S. senator. This was strictly a gesture, since the Democrats were in the minority. His backing came from party bosses and offended reformers. Wilson told a conservative Princeton alumnus, Adrian Joline, that he agreed with a pro-business, anti-Bryan speech Joline had recently given, adding, “Would that we could do something, at once dignified and effective, to knock Mr. Bryan once and for all into a cocked hat!”³² That sentence would come back to haunt him, as would his sponsorship by the New Jersey bosses. This initial foray into politics would give him an embarrassing conservative past to live down.

More immediate problems vexed Wilson in 1907 as a backlash arose against the Quad Plan. Students and alumni who were attached to the clubs predictably saw the plan as a threat to their cherished institutions, and the trustees’ timing—they met during the week of commencement and reunions and announced their support for the plan on a night when many students and alumni were enjoying parties at the clubs—seemed calculated to raise suspicion and ire. Opponents seethed in private over the summer and would burst into the open in the fall. In July, West told Wilson that the Quad Plan and the way he had introduced it were “both wrong—not inexpedient merely—but morally wrong. … If the spirit of Princeton is to be killed, I have little interest in the details of its funeral.” In September, Henry van Dyke—a Presbyterian minister, popular poet and magazine writer, and professor of English—wrote in the Princeton Alumni Weekly that the Quad Plan was “distinctly an un-American plan. It threatens not only to break up the classes, but also to put the Princeton spirit out of date.”³³ In October, Tommy Wilson’s old paper, now called The Daily Princetonian, also came out against the plan.

Opposition from conservatives such as West and van Dyke was to be expected. What Wilson had not expected was the stand Jack Hibben took. In tense conversations early in July, Hibben told Wilson that he did not agree with him on the Quad Plan. These encounters upset both men, although they strove to handle their disagreement with respect and friendship. Wilson assured “my dear Jack” that they would still “at every step know each other’s love.” Otherwise, opposition to the Quad Plan roused a combative streak that had lain mostly dormant in Wilson since his youth. “The fight is on,” he told Cleveland Dodge.³⁴ Letters of support that poured in from alumni, particularly younger men who had suffered rejection by the clubs, stiffened his resolve, as did expressions of support from other faculty members. But this combativeness worried some of his supporters among the faculty and board of trustees, who thought Wilson seemed tense and obsessive.

The showdown came when the faculty met to consider the Quad Plan in September. Some of Wilson’s supporters had gotten together beforehand, and one introduced a resolution calling for the appointment of a committee to implement the plan. Van Dyke offered a substitute resolution to refer the matter to a joint faculty-trustee committee for further study, and Hibben seconded the motion. The faculty then agreed to adjourn and take up the resolutions the following week. Hibben’s action struck the faculty like a thunderbolt and hit Wilson like a body blow. Ellen recalled that when she heard the news, she burst into tears and blurted out, “Oh, he might have let someone else second the motion!” Why Hibben did it is not known. Signs of strain had occasionally cropped up earlier in their friendship, and differences in temperament—Wilson’s driving intensity and Hibben’s bent toward conciliation—had made some around Princeton regard them as an odd couple. Also, theirs had never been a friendship of equals, and both Hibben and his strong-minded wife may have grown to resent what they regarded as Wilson’s domineering ways.³⁵

Nothing up to that time had ever hurt Wilson so deeply as what he regarded as Hibben’s betrayal, and subsequent events would keep the wound raw. Three years later, he told a confidant about the anguish he felt on seeing Hibben at a ceremony at Nassau Hall: “Why will that wound not heal over in my stubborn heart?” With the exception of Stockton Axson, who was a family member, Wilson never had such a close male friend in his life, no one whom he could freely and unreservedly tell he loved. His daughter Margaret would later tell a family friend, “The two major tragedies in Father’s life were his failure to carry over the League of Nations and the break with Mr. Hibben.”³⁶ Never again would Wilson open his heart this way to anyone, except sometimes to Axson and to the women who were closest to him.

Wounded feelings did not prevent him from rising to the occasion in the faculty debate over the Quad Plan, however. He spoke with such eloquence that even West applauded him. Unfortunately, no one recorded what he said; there is only one preceptor’s recollection that he had affirmed, “Truth is no invalid.” Wilson’s eloquence helped him prevail with the divided faculty, although he almost certainly had the votes to win anyway. Those who favored van Dyke’s motion to shelve consideration of the Quad Plan were alumni with attachments to the “old Princeton;” the only possible surprise was Wilson’s classmate William Magie. Otherwise, the opposition included such familiar faces as West, van Dyke, Patton, and now Hibben. The president’s supporters were an equally predictable assortment that included Axson, Fine, and all but one of the preceptors.³⁷

The Quad Plan would almost certainly have prevailed if the faculty had gotten a chance to vote on it, and opponents were already talking about compromise. But the trustees rendered their consideration and talk of compromise moot when they met in October and passed three resolutions withdrawing their earlier approval. They softened the blow by adopting a further resolution that allowed Wilson to continue to try to sell his ideas to the Princeton community. For all practical purposes, this was the end of the Quad Plan. It was a stunning defeat, and Wilson should have seen it coming. His earlier successes had masked the fragile nature of his support among the trustees. Three years earlier, one supporter on the board had advised him to nominate other like-minded men and not to “elect two or three more very rich men simply because they are richmen.”³⁸Wilson had secured Dodge and other supporters as trustees, and they would form his hard core of support on the board. Otherwise, most of its members were “very rich men” chosen mainly for their wealth and alumni loyalty, and some of them had begun to have second thoughts soon after they approved the Quad Plan in June.

Why Wilson failed to heed the straws in the wind probably spoke more to his physical and emotional state than to anything else. His agitation and rigidity may have stemmed from his reaction to his illness the previous summer. His impatience to see the Quad Plan enacted and his combativeness toward critics and opponents bordered on obsession. Fine believed, he later told Wilson’s first biographer, that “undoubtedly Wilson was too impatient and that if he had been willing to put the new plan in force gradually, he could perhaps have carried it, but he wanted it all at once.” Wilson evidently recognized that he was rushing things. Before the trustees met, he drafted a statement affirming, “So great and complex a reform cannot be hastened either in its discussion or in its execution,” but he extended this olive branch too late. Alumni opposition to the Quad Plan seemed to be growing. The editor of the Princeton Alumni Weekly, which was not an official university publication, opposed the plan and offered a forum for public attacks, which, together with private communications, moved the trustees to vote as they did. Their minutes did not record how each of them voted on the resolutions rescinding approval of the plan, but they did note that Moses Pyne moved the main resolutions. The most influential member of the board had evidently turned against Wilson.³⁹

He tried to make the best of the situation. Right after the meeting, he drafted, in his shorthand, a stinging letter of resignation, telling the trustees that they had made “it plain to me that you will not feel able to support me any further in the only matters in which I feel that I can lead and be of service to you.” He did not finish the draft and told a supporter, “I refrained from resigning because I saw at last that I did not have the right to place the University in danger of going to pieces.” Instead, he put an optimistic gloss on the trustees’ action in an interview with the New York Evening Sun: “I do not consider that the trustees are opposed to the quad system on principle, but merely reversed their former decision … as they thought that the university and alumni were not sufficiently informed or prepared for the new plan.” That statement infuriated Pyne, who had words with Wilson. “They wish me to be silent,” Wilson told a trustee who was a supporter, “and I have got nothing out of the transaction except complete defeat and mortification.” If Pyne thought he could muzzle Wilson, he misjudged his man. “The difference between a strong man and a weak one,” Wilson told a student group soon afterward, “is that the former does not give up after a defeat.”⁴⁰

The encounter with Pyne in October 1907 marked the opening skirmish in Wilson’s continuing advocacy of the Quad Plan, which soon merged with the fight over the Graduate College. He would have the same main antagonist in both fights—not West, but Pyne. The dapper, handsome, high-voiced Momo Pyne epitomized the breed of “very rich men” Wilson had been warned about earlier. Heir to a large fortune made mostly in railroads, Pyne was just a year older than Wilson and had been two classes ahead of him at Princeton. He had retired early from active work to live at his elegant estate, called Drumthwacket, not far from the campus. He devoted his energies mainly to Princeton, where he had been a trustee since 1884. Previously a strong supporter of Wilson’s, Pyne did not turn against him all at once in the fight over the Quad Plan. Two months after the trustees’ decision, he worried that Wilson was working too hard and told him, “As one of your warmest friends, please allow me to protest against this.”⁴¹ Still, Pyne never again admired or trusted Wilson as he had done previously.

Wilson did not jump at once into the renewed fight over the Quad Plan because other matters occupied him at the end of 1907. This had been one of his best years for attracting academic stars to the Princeton faculty, and politics continued to provide an interesting diversion. He also delivered eight lectures at Columbia University, which gave him a chance to revisit the territory of Congressional Government. He spoke from shorthand outlines, and a stenographer produced a transcript of the lectures, which he revised for publication in 1908 as a book titled Constitutional Government in the United States. “A constitutional government is one whose powers have been adapted to the interests of its people and to the maintenance of individual liberty,” he declared, and he advocated “conservative change, … a process, not of revolution, but of modification … nor by way of desperate search for remedies for existing evils.”⁴²

Despite those statements, Constitutional Government was not a conservative manifesto. Wilson included few direct comments on contemporary concerns and produced, instead, a work that stood somewhere between a revision of Congressional Government(which he had never undertaken) and a foreshadowing of what he might have done in “Philosophy of Politics.” Wilson again revealed that he had no use for absolutist state-rights, limited-government views. Among the founders of the Republic, he praised only two Federalists—John Marshall and Alexander Hamilton—and, without naming Jefferson, he eschewed what he regarded as Jefferson’s political legacy by scorning “the Whig theory of political dynamics, which was a sort of unconscious copy of the Newtonian theory of the universe. … The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. … It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life.”⁴³

Much of this book reads like Congressional Government revisited, but with a different choice of subjects and a difficult emphasis. About the presidency, he affirmed, “There is no national party choice except that of President. No one else represents the people as a whole, exercising a national choice. … He can dominate his party by being spokesman for the real sentiment and purpose of the country, by giving direction to opinion.” Wilson also noted that in foreign affairs the president’s power is “very absolute.” Congress pleased him no more than it had twenty years earlier. In the House, the Speaker had become “an autocrat,” replacing the previously all-powerful committees, but the effect remained the same—stifling debate. Meanwhile, the Senate had become “the chamber of debate and individual privilege.” To remedy these defects, Wilson now looked to the president: with his ability “to appeal to the nation,” he could become the real legislative leader.⁴⁴

Wilson also discussed courts and the states in Constitutional Government. He praised the power of courts “to restrain the government,” but he worried about the influence of money, asking, “Are our courts as available for the poor man as for the rich?” He also declared, “The Constitution was not meant to hold the government back to the time of horses and wagons.” He praised the states for saving the nation from excessive centralization, but he also once more dismissed the “old theory of State sovereignty” as having been settled by the “stern arbitrament” of the Civil War. In closing, Wilson argued that “only by the external authority of party” could the separation and dispersal of powers be bridged in order to gain “some coherence to the action of political forces.” He ridiculed “the distinction that we make between ‘politicians’ and ‘statesmen,’” and he praised those who “attempt the hazardous and little honored business of party management.” Fortunately, he asserted, Americans now seemed to regard “parties once more as instruments for progressive action, as means for handling the affairs of a new age.”⁴⁵

Constitutional Government did not make the same splash as Congressional Government. Reviews were mixed, and it would never be as widely read, nor would it remain continuously in print, as Congressional Government has. To some extent, the difference in the two books’ reception and reputation was deserved. Constitutional Government lacked the focus and freshness of Congressional Government. It suffered from mixed inspirations and mixed tones—sometimes sharp like Bagehot, sometimes reflective like Burke, sometimes diffuse like Bryce. Yet those defects did not detract from the book’s strengths. Constitutional Government covered a larger canvas, and it spoke much better to possible cures for current ills. It also raised questions about how far its author had really gone down the road to conservatism.

Little else that Wilson said in 1907 would have made anyone doubt his allegiance to the right wing of the Democratic Party. At one point, he took a slam at both Roosevelt and Bryan by warning against radicalism and haste: “We are undertaking to regulate before we have made thorough analysis of the conditions to be rectified.” He also objected to the new forms of direct democracy that were coming out of the West—the initiative and referendum—and he still opposed woman suffrage. His daughter Jessie later recalled that when she came home from college a convinced suffragist, she took issue with her father and said to him, “You have the vote, but there is only one of you and there are four of us, and we are unrepresented.” Wilson’s public and private utterances in 1907 marked his longest stretch toward conservatism. During the summer, he wrote a statement of his political convictions, “A Credo,” in which he argued against “the danger of attempting what government is not fitted to do” and called for strict separation of powers in the federal government, especially insulation of the courts from pressures by the president or Congress. Yet he said nothing about state-rights, and he condemned over-active government as unwise and inexpedient, not as morally or constitutionally impermissible. He also again called the president “the only active officer of the government who is chosen by the whole people. He alone, therefore, speaks for them as a direct representative of the nation.”⁴⁶

One other influence held Wilson back from resuming the fight over the Quad Plan at the end of 1907. In late November, he suffered another attack of pain and numbness in his right hand, similar to the one he had suffered eleven years before.⁴⁷ This latest episode of what his doctors again called “neuritis” prompted Wilson to bow to urgings to take another winter vacation. He again traveled by himself, to spend half of January and most of February 1908 in Bermuda, where he rode his bicycle and spent time thinking and writing, including revising the transcripts of his lectures for Constitutional Government. He also enjoyed the company of some of the people he encountered there, among them the writer Mark Twain.

But of all Bermuda’s seasonal denizens, the one who interested Wilson most was a tall, slender woman in her mid-forties from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, named Mary Allen Hulbert Peck. Long estranged from her husband, Mrs. Peck had spent winters in Bermuda since the early 1890s and had become a social fixture there. Wilson must have liked her almost at first sight, because on his first visit to Bermuda, a year earlier, he had told her, “It is not often that I can have the privilege of meeting anyone whom I can so entirely admire and enjoy.” After he returned to Princeton, he sent her a volume of Bagehot’s writings and a collection of his own essays, and he wrote to her of “an instinctive sympathy between us.” Such expressions were common for Wilson; he was in the habit of corresponding on familiar terms with women. Ellen encouraged those relationships and did not accompany him on his winter trips to Bermuda in 1907 and 1908 or his summer visit to England and Scotland in 1908 because she recognized her own tendencies toward depression, especially after Eddie’s death. “Since he has married a wife who is not gay,” Florence Hoyt remembered her saying, “I must provide him with friends who are.”⁴⁸

Wilson did not write to Mrs. Peck again before he returned to Bermuda in 1908, but he rushed to see her as soon as his ship docked. During the next six weeks, he spent a great deal of time with her, sometimes in the company of others but often with her alone. He was plainly smitten with the vivacious, attractive Mary Peck. At one point, he wrote in shorthand on a document, “My precious one, my beloved Mary.” He may have fallen for her now because of the emotional void left by the break with Jack Hibben. A year later, he would say to her, “What a fool I am to go back to that so often! Can my heart never be cured of its hurt?” She would also be the one to whom he would later confide how his “stubborn heart” would not heal from that wound.⁴⁹

The recent defeat of the Quad Plan may also have made him feel emotionally vulnerable. Over the next two years, his feelings for Mary Peck would wax and wane, growing particularly intense during the times when he was suffering strain and setbacks in the fight over that plan and the negotiations for the Graduate College. He did not begin writing regularly to Mrs. Peck until the fall of 1908, after he and Ellen visited her in Pittsfield on their way to Williams College, where a friend and supporter from the Princeton faculty, Harry Garfield, was being inaugurated as president. After that visit, he started writing her letters in which he bared his heart and mind in a way he had not done with anyone except Ellen twenty years earlier. Mary Peck was not on Bermuda when Wilson returned for winter vacation early in 1909, and he saw her afterward mainly on visits to New York, where she moved around that time. For Wilson, the relationship seems to have peaked in intensity at the beginning of 1910. He did not see Mary Peck much after that, although he continued writing her revealing letters for another five years.

One question has always hung over the encounter between Wilson and Mrs. Peck—how far did it go? Was this more than an intense, confiding friendship between a man and a woman (from 1909 on, Wilson began his letters “Dearest Friend”)? Did this relationship qualify as an affair? The only people who knew—Woodrow Wilson and Mary Peck—never said. No one, therefore, can say for certain what happened between them, but that would not stop speculation. Some interpreters have concluded that this was not a full-fledged affair. Some, wishing to view Wilson’s behavior charitably, have maintained that he was a moral man who did not want to hurt his wife, whom he still loved deeply. Wilson himself supported this view when he wrote to Ellen in 1908 about Grover Cleveland’s admitted sexual dalliances, calling them Cleveland’s “early moral weaknesses” and hinting that they “had returned” in his later years. Others, viewing Wilson harshly, have maintained that such a supposedly unattractive prig was incapable of having a sexual fling. When stories about Mrs. Peck began to circulate during the 1912 presidential campaign, Theodore Roosevelt, who was by then a bitter rival, brushed the talk aside with the sneer, “You can’t convince the American people that a man is a Romeo who looks so much like the apothecary’s clerk.”⁵⁰

Some interpreters have concluded that it was a real, sexual affair. Wilson may have been over fifty, but the sexual desires he had shown earlier for Ellen had not cooled. A few years later, when he courted the woman who became his second wife, he would demonstrate again just how much physical passion he could feel. Moreover, from the start, Ellen suspected something untoward between her husband and Mrs. Peck. She evidently said some harsh and hurt-filled things to him just before he went abroad by himself during the summer of 1908. “‘Emotional love,’ ah, dearest,” Wilson wrote to Ellen from England, “that was a cutting and cruel judgment and utterly false; but as natural as false; but I never blamed you for it or wondered at it. … My darling! I have never been worthy of you,—but I love you with all my poor, mixed, inexplicable nature,—with everything fine and tender in me.”⁵¹ He wrote her several more letters in the same vein that summer; revealingly, perhaps, this was the only time that he did not save Ellen’s letters.

On Ellen’s side, shortly before Wilson’s death a friend of Cary Grayson’s, the White House physician, noted in his diary, “Mrs. Wilson—the first—also talked about … [Mrs. Peck] to Cary and among other things said that the ‘Peck’ affair was the only unhappiness he had caused her during their married life—not that there was anything wrong or improper—about it, for there was not, but just that a brilliant mind and an attractive woman had some-how fascinated—temporarily—Mr. Wilson’s mind and she (Mrs. Wilson) did not want to share his confidence of his inner mind with anyone.”⁵²

Wilson’s guilt-filled protests did not stop him from carrying on an intimate correspondence with Mary Peck and seeing more of her. Something happened between them in 1908 that made Wilson feel guiltier still. Seven years later, after Ellen’s death, when Wilson became engaged to Edith Bolling Galt, stories about Mrs. Peck surfaced again, and there were threats that some of his letters to her would be published. In an agony of remorse, Wilson drafted a shorthand statement in which he declared, “These letters disclose a passage of folly and gross impertinence in my life. I am deeply ashamed and repentant. Neither in act nor even in thought was the purity or honor of the lady concerned touched or sullied, and my offense she had generously forgiven.” He made a clean breast of the business with Edith Galt, writing to her, “I dreaded the revelation which seemed to be threatened because I knew that it would give a tragically false impression of what I really have been and am,—because it might make the contemptible error and madness of a few months seem a stain upon a whole life.”⁵³

For her part, Mary Peck behaved with restraint and dignity. Despite her divorce in 1911 and dire financial need, she never betrayed what had passed between her and Wilson. She never published anything about him until after his death, when she wrote some magazine articles and a gossipy memoir, which were more about her than him.

When Wilson returned from Bermuda at the end of February 1908, guilt and anguish about the relationship with Mrs. Peck lay in the future. At that moment, he returned, as he usually did from his holidays abroad, full of fighting spirit—in this case for the Quad Plan. Two weeks after his return, he defended it to an alumni group in Chicago and avowed, “I am a good fighter gentlemen,—on the whole I would rather fight than not, but I have made it a rule never to fight in my own family. I so thoroughly believe that the Princeton feeling is a family feeling.”⁵⁴ Which way things would go—toward a fight or toward “a family feeling”—would soon become clear.