5

ACADEMIC CIVIL WAR

When Wilson renewed his effort to push the Quad Plan in 1908, he found not “a family feeling” but an academic civil war that for two years would pit student against student, professor against professor, alumnus against alumnus, trustee against trustee, and dean against president. “The quality of the fight on the personal side was increditably [sic] bitter,” recalled Stockton Axson. “It was taken up by the women, wives of Trustees[,] of the faculty[,] of the alumni[,] with all the intensity which women have subsequently shown in actual politics.” That misogynistic gibe by a lifelong bachelor may be taken with a grain of salt, but in fact the distaff side of this academic family did lend a special edge to the fight. Jack Hibben’s wife, Jennie, evidently harbored bitter feelings toward Wilson and badgered her mild-mannered husband, making sure that he continued to oppose him. Ellen Wilson reciprocated with malice toward their former best friend. Early in 1912, when the trustees finally picked Hibben as her husband’s successor, Ellen wrote him sarcastically to salute “your very unusual loyalty and availability.”¹

The summer of 1908 provided a brief respite in the fight. Wilson’s time in England and Scotland refreshed him, despite the strained feelings between him and Ellen over Mrs. Peck. Fred Yates, their artist friend in the Lake District, reported to Ellen, “He was like a boy last night in his light heartedness. You wouldn’t think he ever had a care—it has done him good to come over—and he returns with a new grip of things.” As before, Wilson spent much of his time bicycling. He wore short pants, a peaked cap, and a rain cape, and he carried The Oxford Book of English Verse. He did unburden himself about Hibben to Yates, who told Ellen, “I think there is no pain like the disloyalty of a man that one has trusted through a life time.”²

Yet the time away was just a respite; upon his return from abroad Wilson faced Princeton’s civil war—and on more than one front. In 1908, the question of the location of the proposed Graduate College burgeoned into a major controversy. This fight, unlike the one over the Quad Plan, struck some observers as overly personal. Bad blood between Andrew West and Wilson had become a painful fact of life at Princeton. Given their contrasts in temperament, outlook, and aims, a clash between them may have been likely, if not foreordained. They had been friends during Wilson’s first years on the Princeton faculty, and they had some things in common. West, too, was a Presbyterian minister’s son with one parent born in England, and he was likewise a cultural Anglophile and an admirer of Oxford and Cambridge. Also a loyal, devoted Princetonian, class of 1874, he had similarly chafed under the dilatory Patton regime and worked to raise academic standards. Yet even a casual acquaintance with the two men would reveal how different they were. Wilson’s trim physique and solitary industriousness contrasted sharply with West’s portly build and relentless sociability. It would be wrong, however, to overstress purely personal elements in their clash. A deep gulf in experience, values, and vision separated Wilson from West. The dean of the Graduate School had never attended such a school himself. His doctorate was an honorary degree from Princeton, awarded because he had been a personal favorite of McCosh’s. His only academic experience outside Princeton had been at high schools in Cincinnati and New Jersey, and he remained a schoolmaster at heart, delighting in drilling students on fine points of Latin grammar, playing favorites among the students, rewarding and going easy on the sons of trustees and other prominent men. As one preceptor remembered, “He liked social distinctions and social amenities.”³

When and why West first turned against Wilson is not entirely clear. He had legitimate complaints about the neglect of his plans for the Graduate College, but his enmity seems to have run deeper than would have been expected if those complaints had been the sole cause. He and Wilson held diametrically opposed visions for graduate education and the Graduate College, although the men did not clash during the first four years of Wilson’s presidency. In 1903, Wilson had written an approving preface to a university publication in which he praised the dean’s published plan for an elaborate, costly Graduate College, maintaining that this was not to be “a pleasing fancy of an English college” and insisting that “this little community of scholars set at the heart of Princeton” would furnish “the real means by which a group of graduate students are most apt to stimulate and set the pace for the whole University.”⁴ That same year, at Princeton’s expense, the dean spent several months in England visiting the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge.

The turning point for West probably came in 1905, when he took a stab at a trial run at implementing his vision of the future Graduate College. He took over Merwick, a large house with spacious grounds located half a mile from the campus, which Moses Pyne had secretly bought, to serve as a residence for graduate students. The dean often presided over meals and social functions in the evening, and the students afterward carried lighted candles to escort him to his house across the street. At dinner, the students wore formal dress under their academic gowns, recited grace in Latin, and ate sumptuous meals. Most of the residents knocked off from their studies around four in the afternoon and played sports or bridge. Merwick offered a more refined version of the amenities that the more fortunate juniors and seniors found in the clubs. Small wonder that West excoriated the Quad Plan as inimical to the clubs and the “spirit of Princeton.”⁵

These opposing visions of the Graduate College explain why the battle between Wilson and West came to focus on the location of the college. Once he had tasted the delights of Merwick, the dean demanded an off-campus site, whereas Wilson never budged in his insistence that the facility should be located in the heart of the university. For some observers, this fight over location seemed petty and puzzling. Stockton Axson later recalled one of the trustees saying that “he could not see for the life of him why there was all this fighting … [over] where a boarding house should be located.”⁶ This notion that the fight over location was a tempest in a teapot—a viewpoint that would later work against Wilson—was mistaken. The quarrel over where to build the Graduate College involved starkly opposed visions of both the environment and the aims of graduate education at Princeton and, thereby, the prevailing tone of the entire university.

Also, a struggle for power was lurking just offstage. When the trustees established the Graduate School, they gave the dean a large measure of autonomy as a means of circumventing President Patton. West was given the power to approve courses, admit students, award fellowships, and select the faculty Oversight Committee, and he reported directly to the trustees, not the president. Many at Princeton chafed at the arrangement. One graduate student recalled the dean as “authoritarian and devious, simply not to be trusted. He played favorites in awarding fellowships, and even tampered with amounts of scholarship and fellowship funds already granted.”⁷ The academic stars whom Wilson and Fine had attracted to Princeton disliked the situation, too. Even the location issue had a bearingon the power struggle. Wilson’s preferred location for the Graduate College was a tract on the campus between Prospect House, where the president lived, and 1879 Hall, where he had his office. Being thereby constantly under Wilson’s eye, West would not help being under his thumb. Thus the two men clashed openly over the location in May 1907, but a committee of trustees sidestepped the issue, deciding that it was not expedient to choose a site at that time—a postponement that left West more embittered than ever.

Nearly a year passed before the question of the location of the Graduate College reared its head again. In April 1908, the trustees’ committee voted in favor of the site between Prospect and 1879, but West soon introduced a new wrinkle. He claimed that shortly before Grover Cleveland’s death in June he and the ex-president had inspected several possible sites and when they came to one adjoining a golf course, which was even farther from the campus than Merwick, Cleveland struck his cane on the ground and exclaimed, “Here is the best site, if you can get it!”⁸ This reported blessing gave the dean a new weapon in the fight over the location of the Graduate College.

Wilson seemed oblivious to this turn in the Graduate College controversy, and he turned his attention again to the Quad Plan. When he resumed speaking about it in the fall of 1908, he sounded a new note of political and social reform. In October, at Haverford College’s seventy-fifth-anniversary celebration, he asked his fellow college presidents whether it was “their ambition to be presidents of country clubs.” He avowed, “Country clubs are very admirable things; but their presidencies do not afford careers.” A month later, speaking at a high school in Jersey City, New Jersey, he regretted that only 18 percent of Princeton’s students came from schools like that one: “The section from the public schools represents the great rank and file of our nation, and I want to see our colleges benefited and vitalized by the increment of blood and gristle from the very backbone of our civilization.”⁹

Casting aspersions on country clubs and lauding “the great rank and file of our nation” provided the first public signs of a major shift in Wilson’s approach to political issues outside the university. He was forsaking his flirtation with the conservative Democrats and joining their foes, the insurgents and reformers who were now calling themselves “progressives.” In speeches in the spring of 1908, he again condemned the rush to regulate business, and he dismissed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act for being “as clumsy as it has been ineffectual.” Those were the next to the last truly conservative utterances to come out of Wilson’s mouth. His final foray on that side occurred when Princeton faculty members gathered informally to debate a resolution approving “the Roosevelt Policies.” Wilson attacked the policies, but when a young preceptor vigorously rebutted his argument, he seemed to enjoy it—most likely because he secretly admired the expression of views that he was coming to hold himself.¹⁰

When, how, and why Woodrow Wilson became a progressive would become hotly debated questions after he entered politics. Foes on both sides would denounce him for opportunism: erstwhile conservative patrons would scorn him for ingratitude and for pandering to passing popular fancies; skeptical progressives would suspect him of belated and halfhearted adherence to their side. Opportunism unquestionably played a part in swaying Wilson toward progressivism. The popularity of Roosevelt’s anti-trust and regulatory policies, growing reformist insurgency in both parties, and repeated defeats of conservative Democrats—all pointed to the direction in which the political winds were blowing. In November 1907, Wilson obliquely confessed to being an opportunist: “A politician, a man engaged in party contests, must be an opportunist. Let us give up saying that word as if it contained a slur. If you want to win in party action, I take it for granted that you want to lure the majority to your side. I never heard of any man in his senses who was fishing for a minority.”¹¹ His tilt toward progressivism did contain an element of disingenuousness in that he did not tell his conservative Democratic sponsors that he no longer agreed with them. Instead, he soft-pedaled his newly evolving views and continued to welcome their efforts to boost his entry into politics.

In 1908, George Harvey mounted a drive to get Wilson the Democratic presidential nomination and got some backing from Tammany Hall. Wilson affected not to take the matter seriously, but that summer, while he was in Scotland, he stayed within reach of the telegraph at the time of the convention. Remote as he regarded his own prospects that year, the idea of running for president excited him. After the election—in which Bryan was the Democratic nominee and went down to his third defeat—Wilson told Mary Peck that the Democrats needed someone who could match Bryan’s devotion “to principles, to ideas, to definite programmes and not to personal preferment, … a man with a cause, not a candidacy. It’s a desperate situation,—for what man of that kind will be willing to risk the appearance of personal ambition?” He eschewed any such ambition for himself: “Certainly I do not want the presidency! The more closely I see it the less I covet it.”¹² That is just the sort of ritual disclaimer typically made by a man with the presidential bee in his bonnet.

Wilson’s opportunism and disingenuousness showed only that he was an ambitious man with a healthy regard for his prospects, and those qualities did not tell the whole story of how and why he became a progressive. Other influences were also propelling him in that direction. Several interpreters have concluded that the battles at Princeton over the Quad Plan and the Graduate College helped change his politics—that the clubs’ social exclusiveness and the influence of private wealth over the location of the Graduate College made Wilson more progressive in state and national politics. Certainly the tales he heard from former students and their parents about the pain and suffering inflicted by Bicker—the clubs’ selection process—moved him, and he resented the way some of the rich men among the alumni and trustees threw their weight around. The trouble with that view of Wilson’s turn toward progressivism is that it puts the cart before the horse; his changing political views were what influenced the stands he took at Princeton. Before 1908, he had based his arguments for the Quad Plan and the location of the Graduate College almost solely on intellectual grounds, and only after he started espousing progressive political views did he condemn the clubs’ snobbery and the influence of rich men over the university.¹³

Wilson’s intellect played a critical part in his political shift. Even at the height of his attempted espousal of Democratic conservatism, he could not hide his approval of strong, centralized government, as he showed in Constitutional Government. Given the public outcry against the arrogance of big business, misery among the rural and urban poor, and the corruption of political machines, progressivism made a good fit for a believer in governmental activism. Likewise, his party affiliation was more than a flag of convenience: it showed his loyalty to his southern origins and his feeling for the hinterlands and the hardworking folk who lived there. Two and a half decades of living in the Northeast and often hobnobbing with people of wealth and social prominence had not brought him to identify with them and their part of the country. In Constitutional Government, he lauded “the South and the West with their simpler life, their more scattered people, their fields of grain, their mines of metal, their little towns. … No country ought ever to be judged from its seething centres.”¹⁴ He was sounding like a Bryanite Democrat.

When Wilson turned toward progressivism, he was not yet a practicing politician. Instead of taking stands on current issues, he was able to proceed the way he preferred, which was to stake out his general position before he got down to specifics. He did this in speeches over the course of 1909. Although he still called himself a conservative, he repeated his long-held view that growth and adaptation were truly conservative, adding, “All the renewal of a nation comes out of the general mass of its people. Nations have no choice, in respect of power and capacity, but to be democratic.” In expounding his approach to leadership, he again drew upon his favorite nautical analogy: “Because although you steer by the North Star, when you have lost the bearings of your compass, you nevertheless must steer in a pathway on the sea,—you are not bound for the North Star. The man who insists on theory insists that there is a way to the North Star.” He also reiterated his belief in “expediency,” maintaining that it, not theory, dictated what laws and reforms were needed.¹⁵ Wilson was clearly drawing on his earlier political thinking to establish the core principles and strategic approach that would guide his emerging progressivism.

His anti-theoretical conception of politics and his metaphor of organic growth sprang from insights he had previously drawn from Burke, as did his renewed espousal of “expediency,” which lent philosophical sanction to opportunism. The novel element was the radically democratic twist he now gave to these views. His affinity for strong, activist government and his permissive views about the “ministrant” functions of government always contained the potential for moving in a reformist direction, and this new vision of social renewal from below made such a move nearly impossible to resist. Political opponents would later point to Wilson’s gradual, occasionally hesitant embrace of some reform measures as proof of a halfhearted, insincere conversion to progressivism. They misread the way his mind worked. Despite his rejection of theory and his disdain for “literary politicians,” Wilson was a true intellectual. Ideas mattered to him, and he had always grasped for broad insights and perspectives before getting down to cases. His most significant step on the road to progressivism was the intellectual leap he made at the outset, when he embraced a thoroughly democratic vision. Once he decided where he stood on the big questions of political direction and leadership strategy, such matters as which reform measures to champion and when to champion them involved only reading changing political circumstances—matters of “expediency.”

Wilson showed some of his new attitudes late in 1908 and early in 1909. In one speech, he called the “present conflict in this country … a contest between those few men in whose hands the wealth of the land is concentrated, and the rest of us.” In another, he attacked “the men who are using their wealth for predatory purpose.” He retreated to safer ground in a magazine article attacking the Republican Party’s high tariff record, which all Democrats deplored, but he defended tariff protection in principle as a boost to economic development and condemned the way the Republicans had perverted protective tariffs, making them into nothing more than a “system of patronage.” He told a group of New Jersey Democrats, “Most of the old formulas of our politics are worn threadbare and have lost their significance,” and he urged them, “whenever national action is necessary, [to] be shy, not of governmental power, but of … its use to the wrong ends.”¹⁶

One area where Wilson’s thinking did not change was race relations. During his trip abroad in the summer of 1908, the daughter of his artist friend Fred Yates recorded in her diary that Wilson deplored Roosevelt’s recent appointment of an African American to a prominent government post in South Carolina as “too much for them [whites] to stand. And intermarriage would degrade the white nations, for in Africa the blacks were the only race who did not rise. … Social intercourse would bring about intermarriage.” Publicly, Wilson took more moderate stands. Speaking at an African American church in Princeton, he maintained that “the so-called ‘negro problem’ is a problem, not of color, but capacity; not a racial, but an economic problem,” and he praised the work done by Booker T. Washington’s school at Tuskegee “and many smaller institutions conducted along similar lines.” A few months later, Wilson discouraged an African American from applying to Princeton. “Regret to say that it is altogether inadvisable for a colored man to enter Princeton,” he wrote in a memorandum. “Appreciate his desire to do so, but strongly recommend his securing education at a Southern [Negro] institution.”¹⁷ These views kept Wilson in harmony with Democrats of all stripes and a growing number of Republicans.

He obviously was not keeping the promise that he had made after his health crisis of 1906 to cut down on outside speaking and take things easy. Within a year, he had resumed his heavy schedule of speechmaking around the country, on top of working the alumni circuit to promote the Quad Plan. The stepped-up activity did not seem to affect his health. The one complaint that bothered Wilson much at this time involved his digestion. Off and on in the twenty-five years since his days at Johns Hopkins, he had suffered from stomach pains and various problems with eating, but he did not change his diet. The Wilson family continued to eat the fried, grease-laden southern-style cooking he and Ellen had grown up with. His doctors treated him with remedies that were in vogue in those days, which included having him periodically pump out his stomach. Such practices, since abandoned by the medical profession for their lack of therapeutic value, evidently did him neither good nor harm. Later, when he became president, his physician discontinued them.¹⁸

One thing that may have helped Wilson was a new administrative regime at Princeton. In 1909, he appointed a business manager and named Edward Elliott dean of students. He turned over much of the internal running of the university to Fine, already dean of the faculty, naming him dean of science as well. This division of labor, in which the president would concentrate more on general policy and external relations while a strong second in command would oversee internal management, foreshadowed the practice that most American colleges and universities of any size would adopt later in the twentieth century. The new arrangement allowed Wilson to devote much of his time to advocacy of the Quad Plan before the alumni. Throughout 1909, he not only hammered away at his previous arguments, but he also expanded his vision of the stakes involved and continued to give a new progressive twist to his stands. In one speech, he denounced colleges and universities that “encouraged social stratification and made a bid for the exclusive patronage of the rich,” and he asked, “Could Abraham Lincoln have been of more or less service to this country had he attended one of our universities?”¹⁹

It might seem ironic—even hypocritical—that at the same time Wilson was saying those things publicly he was privately asking for money from two of the richest men in the country. In February 1909, he wrote an anguished letter to Carnegie’s financial agent asking for funds with which to establish the Quad Plan: “If I cannot do this thing I have spoken of, I must turn to something else than mere college administration, forced, not by my colleagues, but by my mind and convictions and the impossibility of continuing at an undertaking I do not believe in.” And he asked John D. Rockefeller’s daughter about the possibility of approaching her father. Nothing came of these overtures, and the experience hurt Wilson. That summer, in a letter to Mary Peck, he lashed out at “the restless, rich, empty-headed people the very sight of whom makes me cynical. … They and their kind are the worst enemies of Princeton, and create for me the tasks which are likely to wear my life out. But enough of them,—let them pass and be d——forgotten.”²⁰

The Wilson family spent the summer of 1909 at an artists’ colony in Lyme, Connecticut, where Ellen had gone earlier to pursue her painting. The vacation evidently did Wilson good, because he returned to Princeton that fall bent on pressing forward. He told alumni in Baltimore that because the university could attract distinguished faculty and graduate students, “a little Princeton has given place to a big Princeton.” As ever, the essential means to continue to build that “big Princeton” were the Quad Plan and a properly located Graduate College. Wilson persisted in seeking money for the Quad Plan, and using Cleveland Dodge as an intermediary, he again approached Rockefeller. Earlier, he had partially wrested control of graduate education from West, but he still regarded the location of the Graduate College as critical to his goals. West had upset the earlier decision in favor of an on-campus site by bringing in a pledge for $500,000 for construction of the Graduate College. The pledge came from William Cooper Procter, class of 1883, a member of the family that owned Procter and Gamble, the nation’s leading manufacturer of soaps and cleansers, and it had two stipulations: that Princeton must match the sum within a year and that the new facility not be built at the on-campus site. When Procter visited Princeton in June 1909, he insisted on either Merwick or the golf course site that Cleveland had reportedly favored. At the same time, Ralph Adams Cram, the architect who was designing Princeton’s new Gothic Revival buildings, had switched his allegiance to the golf course site, because the prospect of a larger, grander building appealed to his aesthetic ambitions; that summer, Wilson had gone to Boston to try to get him to change his mind. Cram played no further role in the controversy, but his defection was a blow to Wilson.²¹

Over the summer, Wilson had also attempted to get rid of West, by recommending him for the presidency of Clark University, but that scheme did not pan out. Efforts at conciliation and compromise failed, and Pyne went over to West’s side. In October the trustees voted 14 to 10 to accept the Procter gift and build the Graduate College on the golf course site. Wilson felt so upset after the trustees’ meeting that he telephoned Mary Peck long-distance in New York and then poured out his hurt and discouragement in a letter: “Suffice it to say that, after a week-long struggle, the Trustees adopted a plan of that arch-intriguer West’s.” Once again, “money talked louder than I did.” He wanted to resign, he said, but he owed it to his supporters to fight on. “I admit, to you, that I am very low in my mind, filled with scorn and disappointment, and fighting to hold my tongue from words that might make all breaches irreparable.”²²

For the next two months, Wilson struggled to be patient. He tried to patch things up with Pyne, and he proposed a compromise: building two facilities for graduate students, one on campus, using the earlier bequest and other money, and another, smaller establishment on the golf course, using Procter’s gift. Pyne said nothing to Wilson to discourage him, but he evidently told Procter to stand his ground. When Wilson met with Procter on December 22, he spent more than an hour laying out the details and observing that less than 10 percent of the faculty favored an off-campus site for the Graduate College, but Procter responded that the trustees had already accepted his offer. Right after that meeting, Wilson told Pyne, “The acceptance of this gift has taken the guidance of the University out of my hands entirely,—and I seem to have come to the end.” Instead, he decided to force a showdown over Procter’s gift. On Christmas day, he told Pyne, “This is a very solemn matter, my dear Momo, but the issue is clear. Neither my conscience nor my self-respect will permit me to avoid it. … I must ask [the trustees] to give the University, at whatever cost, its freedom of choice in matters which so nearly touch its life and development.”²³

Some trustees still wanted to accept Procter’s offer, but the members of the faculty’s Graduate School Committee, with the exception of Hibben, sent Wilson a strongly worded letter backing the president’s position. Pyne remained outwardly noncommittal, but his pose was a ruse. Behind the scenes he was plotting with Procter to drop a bombshell. When the two men met in New York in January 1910, Pyne drafted a letter for Procter in which the manufacturer no longer required that his $500,000 be matched and pledged the whole amount for construction at the golf course site. Pyne read the letter aloud at the next meeting of the trustees’ Graduate School Committee, which, Pyne told Procter, “took the ground entirely from under their feet.” Wilson responded, Pyne recounted, “that the Faculty did not care where the College was placed;—anywhere in Mercer County would suit them, provided it was carried out under proper ideals.” Pyne chortled that Wilson “was confused and self-contradictory, and I never saw a man more embarrassed or in a more unpleasant position where it was impossible for him to extricate himself from the numerous contradictory statements he has made.”²⁴

Wilson’s behavior did not show him at his best, and he often did not respond quickly to changing circumstances. But he and his supporters appeared to take the incident in stride, and from this point on naked conflict was the order of the day. Later in January, Pyne outlined a scheme to force Wilson’s resignation by having Procter publicly withdraw his offer while privately keeping it open and having West step down as dean. In that way, Wilson’s opponents would be, Pyne believed, “ready to start in with the new administration when it comes, and it cannot be long in coming when these facts are known to the public.” Procter was willing to go along with this scheme because, he told Pyne, “restoration of proper feeling in the Board, Faculty, and Alumni cannot begin while Woodrow remains.”²⁵ Meanwhile, possibly at Pyne’s instigation, the Princeton Alumni Weekly turned its issues of January 26 and February 2 into an anti-Wilson forum.

Two could play the game of going public. In a letter responding to an inquiry from a New York Times editorial writer, Wilson explained his stand on the Graduate College issue in terms of “the same artificial and unsound social standards that already dominate the life of the undergraduates,” affirming that “[m]y own ideals for the University are those of genuine democracy and serious scholarship.” Based partly on that letter, an editorial appeared in The New York Times in early February that took Wilson’s side and portrayed him as fighting against “mutually exclusive social cliques, stolid groups of wealth and fashion, devoted to non-essentials and the smatterings of culture.”²⁶

Things seemed to go Wilson’s way after this spate of publicity. Procter withdrew his offer, and Wilson exulted to Dodge, “At last we are free to govern the University as our judgments and consciences dictate! I have an unspeakable sense of relief.”²⁷ When the trustees met, the Graduate School Committee presented a report that favored an on-campus site for the Graduate College but expressed the hope that Procter might change his mind. With the board’s acceptance of this report, Wilson felt sure enough of his ground to discuss plans to get rid of West, broaching the subject with some of his trustee supporters and with the faculty’s Committee on the Graduate School, minus Hibben, who had just resigned from that committee. Whether motivated by prudence or cold feet, the professors shied away from trying to force West out, and Wilson did not press the issue.

Academic communities have always been poor places in which to keep secrets, and word of faculty members’ second thoughts about moving against West soon reached Wilson’s opponents. Pyne chortled at reports that some faculty members “may come over to our side. In that case Wilson’s side would have its back broken.” Trustees on Wilson’s side, by contrast, busied themselves with further efforts to find a compromise on the site issue. Wilson went along with those efforts, meeting with Procter before speaking to an alumni group in St. Louis. “Mr. Procter behaved very well but committed himself to absolutely nothing,” he reported to a supporter. Wilson also expounded his position in speeches to alumni. In New York, he called the present situation “critical in respect of Princeton’s standing among American universities.” It had taken the lead “in a new age of reconstruction” that had brought it “to the budding point, to the blooming point,” and now it must “take that step which would complete our title to be called a university and develop a great graduate school.” In the academic world, Princeton’s only choice was “which part of the procession we will form—the van or the rear. When you have once taken up the torch of leadership you cannot lay it down without extinguishing it.”²⁸

Wilson’s eloquence was wasted on his opponents. Pyne and his supporters blocked all attempts to refer the site question to the faculty. Wilson responded by escalating the public conflict. “Immediately after the Board meeting I started for Pittsburgh, where I let myself go, as you may have noticed by the papers,” he told Mary Peck. He was referring to the speech to alumni in which he charged that churches and colleges were dissociating themselves from the people: “They serve the classes, not the masses. … Where does the strength of the nation come from? Not from the men of wealth. … It comes from the great mass of the unknown, of the unrecognized.” He asked again whether Lincoln could have done as well if he had gone to college, and he pledged, “I shall not be satisfied—and I hope you will not be—[until] the American people shall know that the men in the colleges are saturated with the same thought that pulses through the body politic.” Never before had he injected his political opinions so blatantly into a speech about Princeton. This talk attracted the kind of attention from the press that was usually accorded to utterances by major politicians, and the “muckraking” journalist David Graham Phillips and the Social Gospel clergyman Washington Gladden were among those who wrote to commend him.²⁹

The next month brought the conflict to an unexpected end. Early in May, Pyne and another trustee went to see West and informed him of a compromise plan that would allow the Graduate College to be built on the golf course but would remove West as dean. West reluctantly acceded to the plan, but then fortune suddenly smiled on him. He received word that Isaac Wyman of Salem, Massachusetts, a wealthy member of the Princeton class of 1848, was ill and might be dying. Wilson had tried unsuccessfully to meet Wyman in 1902 on his first fund-raising trip, and West had later succeeded in seeing him. The cantankerous old bachelor had challenged the dean’s persuasive skills until he learned of West’s plans for the Graduate College, although he would not make an immediate donation. On May 18, West got word that Wyman had died. Four days later, Wyman’s lawyers telegraphed West and Wilson with the news that the bulk of the estate would go to Princeton for a graduate college, with West named as executor. No one knew exactly how much money was involved. Rumors placed the sum as high as $10 million, but most sources placed it around $2 million. Even at the lower estimate, it was a huge bequest. Assuming Procter’s offer could be revived, it would permit the Graduate College to be built on a grand scale and with a substantial endowment that would attract both professors and graduate students.³⁰

Wilson knew at once that he had lost the fight, and he took his defeat gracefully. Ellen’s sister, Madge, remembered waking in the night when she heard his voice in the adjoining bedroom: “I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but I was startled by a note of tenseness.” Through the open door, she could see Wilson talking on the telephone and Ellen leaning back in a chair, “obviously close to tears.” When Wilson saw Madge, he explained what had happened and said grimly, “I could lick a half-million, but I’m licked by ten millions.” Nell Wilson recalled coming down to breakfast the next morning to find her father laughing in the dining room. When she asked him what was so funny, he told her about the Wyman bequest and said, “We’ve beaten the living, but we can’t beat the dead—the game is up.” He telephoned West and asked him to come to Prospect House. When the dean arrived, he recalled the president’s saying, “You know I have set my face like flint against the site on the Golf Links. But the magnitude of the bequest alters the perspective. You have a great work ahead of you and I shall give you my full support.” During the last week in May, Wilson told his supporters he was conceding. He did not plan to resign, but he admitted to a friend, “I must say that my judgment is a good deal perplexed in the matter.”³¹

During the next few weeks, Wilson continued to feel perplexed. He worried about having, he told Mary Peck, “to drudge on here, trying to wring something out of an all but intolerable situation, … it all seems, sometimes, as if one should wake up and find it a bad dream.” In June, commencement found him in a dark mood. What later became a famous photograph shows him in his academic gown striding forward with his long jaw set in a grim expression. Far from depicting the typical Wilson, that picture caught him at a moment of defeat and inner turmoil. Soon after commencement, he said to Stockton Axson, “I can stay here indefinitely, but the question in my mind is what is the use. I am not interested in simply administering a club. Unless I can develop something I cannot get thoroughly interested. I believe I can be elected Governor of New Jersey and the question I am debating in my own mind is whether or not I shall take that step.”³² This was not the first time politics had seemed to beckon him to greener pastures, and adversaries at Princeton were in no mood to make life easy for him. It seemed likely that he would leave sooner rather than later. Effectively, his presidency of Princeton had come to an end.

In the decades to come, Wilson’s academic presidency would undergo repeated scrutiny, principally in terms of two questions: First, what clues did his performance in this office give to how he would fare in politics, especially in the White House? Second, what did he accomplish at Princeton, and what did his performance say about the future of that university and higher education? The first of these questions would receive far more attention, much of it sharply critical of Wilson. A common line would be that his behavior, particularly in the Graduate College controversy, showed him to be a self-righteous zealot who ignored or resented criticism and refused to compromise. Some have also argued that in this fight, as later, a stroke warped his behavior. Some of those interpretations would lump together dissimilar situations and personality traits and strain to find commonalities where few or none existed. Still, this search for similarities and patterns has been inescapable, and it has sometimes yielded insights into how Wilson functioned as a leader in both the academic and the political realms.³³

The main pattern that shone through was what he said himself to Axson: “Unless I can improve something I cannot get thoroughly interested.” Throughout his presidency of Princeton, Wilson repeatedly chose the path of boldness. He showed this proclivity most clearly with the preceptorial system and the Quad Plan. The main flaws that he displayed in these affairs were the defects of his boldness and innovation—namely, impatience and insufficient preparation. Those flaws did not hamper him with the preceptorial system, where he was adding resources and advantages, but they proved fatal with the Quad Plan, where he was taking away resources and where he underestimated the depth of the opposition. Worse, he did not at first seem to grasp the difference between the two situations, in part because his reaction to the blow to his health may have intensified his impatience. In his political career, his boldness and itch to develop would serve him splendidly until close to the end. Then, as at Princeton, he would pay a price for not preparing the ground and not explaining his position soon enough.

The Graduate College fight was different. It was not something he initiated; faculty supporters, especially Fine, helped push him into it, and he had to strike out defensively from start to finish. There, too, his main flaw lay in lack of preparation—in this case, in opposing the off-campus site. He did not prepare the way sufficiently in two areas. One was fund-raising: as with the Quad Plan, Wilson should have lined up financial backing before taking his stand. That would become the cardinal rule for college and university presidents later in the twentieth century. Although this was a new aspect of academic leadership in Wilson’s time, he did recognize how important money was, and he can be faulted for not overcoming his distaste for what he called “begging.” That was the one advantage, besides blind luck, that West had over him—the dean positively enjoyed asking for money.

The other way in which Wilson failed to smooth the path sufficiently lay in not explaining why the location of the Graduate College was critical to his vision of a new, intellectually serious Princeton. The lack of such an explanation was the reason some observers could dismiss the issue as just a squabble about a “boarding house for graduate students.” When he finally did state his position fully, as he did to the alumni in the spring of 1910, he made a compelling case. Wilson seems to have learned from this defeat. In the future, he would make timely exposition of his thinking—education of the public—central to his political career. The one great exception would come with the League of Nations, when, as in the Graduate College fight, he only belatedly took his case to the people. As it was, he almost won the fight over the Graduate College. Only an unexpected event stopped him just short of victory.

Wilson certainly thought his Princeton presidency prepared him for politics. Besides the public visibility and administrative experience that the office gave him, he believed that it taught him valuable, hard-won political lessons. In later years, he would often compare academic politics with the “real” thing. “After dealing with college politicians,” Wilson commented during his first year as governor of New Jersey, “I find that the men with whom I am dealing … now seem like amateurs.” When he campaigned for president in 1912, he observed that “politicians in the field of politics … play their hand rather openly,” whereas “the college politician does it carefully. He plays it very shrewdly, and he has such a gift of speech that he could make black sound as if it were white any time that he chooses.” Even after he became president, his mind strayed back to Princeton. His later confidant, Edward M. House, recorded on one occasion that Wilson told him “he had nightmares, and that he thought he was seeing some of his Princeton enemies.” On another occasion, House wrote, “Whenever we have no governmental business to discuss, somehow or other, we drift into his life at Princeton and his troubles there, showing, as I have said before, how deeply the iron entered his soul.”³⁴

This experience also left so deep a mark on Wilson because of what he believed it meant for Princeton. When, as governor, he walked across the campus in the fall of 1911, he became aware, as he told Mary Peck, “at every turn of how the University … has turned away from me. … I went about from familiar place to place with a lump in my throat, and would have felt better if I could have cried.” The year after he lost the fight over the Graduate College brought more wormwood and gall as Pyne engineered Hibben’s succession as president and West basked in glory at the opening of his grand new Graduate College. Early in 1913, House recorded in his diary, “[Wilson] said that Princeton was really for sale.”³⁵

He grieved over his beloved school’s having forsaken the path of greatness in order to worship false gods. To some extent, his dark thoughts were justified. West never regained the full measure of his earlier autonomy, and the Wyman bequest ultimately turned out to be less than $800,000. Still, the dean reigned in splendor in his new buildings and resumed his old game of playing favorites and making life difficult for serious graduate students. The “country club” side of Princeton soon received powerful reinforcement, first in the person of a golden-haired, aristocratic athletic idol, Hobart (Hobey) Amory Hare Baker, of the class of 1914, and then in the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald, class of 1917. They and others helped to brand Princeton with an image of glamorous pleasure seeking and social snobbery that would endure for decades and never fully wear off.

Yet Wilson had not labored in vain. Fine judged his legacy correctly when he told Wilson’s first biographer in 1925, “[W]hen all is said and in spite of controversies and other difficulties, Wilson made Princeton. … He gave it the intellectual stimulus.”³⁶ As it turned out, Hibben’s regime did not bring total defeat for Wilson’s aims, and under succeeding presidents Princeton would continue a steady ascent in academic prestige, so that by the middle of the twentieth century it would rank among the handful of most highly regarded universities in the nation.

Wilson did deserve the greatest credit for putting the university on that path. There was nothing foreordained about it. As he pointed out, Princeton did not enjoy the advantage of size that other major universities enjoyed, nor did it have the urban location and the ready-made ties to other institutions conferred by professional schools that most other major universities also enjoyed. Of all the colleges founded before the American Revolution, Princeton was unique in beginning the metamorphosis into a modern university as early as it did and without such extrinsic advantages. Other prestigious small colleges, including the newly founded women’s colleges, were likewise adapting themselves to this new academic world of research and professionalization, but only Princeton rushed to make the leap to a full-fledged university and vied for the top spot among these newfangled institutions. That was Wilson’s doing. It would take several decades for his vision to be fully realized, but Princeton University would never have become what it is today without his initial inspiration.

It is tempting to close the judgment on Wilson’s presidency of Princeton by lauding him for his vision and early labors while faulting him for trying to do too much too soon. In that view, his academic career does seem to prefigure his political career; the same judgment encapsulates the near-universal estimate of what he achieved early in domestic affairs and then tried and failed to do with the League of Nations. But the question is not so easily laid to rest. Wilson at Princeton, it must be remembered, was operating at a moment of flux and possibility in the development of American higher education. Universities were a fresh import to the country. Some of the best of them were brand-new creations, such as Johns Hopkins, Cornell, Chicago, and Stanford. Even the state universities that emerged as scholarly and scientific powerhouses, such as Wisconsin, Michigan, and California (at Berkeley), were just a few decades removed from their origins as small, meagerly funded colleges. The situation was ripe for dynamic, visionary leadership, as had already been shown by Daniel Coit Gilman at Hopkins, Charles W. Eliot at Harvard, Andrew D. White at Cornell, and William Rainey Harper at Chicago—the kind of men Thorstein Veblen dubbed “captains of erudition.” Princeton might have been a relative latecomer to this academic revolution, but not by much, and there was still room at the top for an institution led by someone with vision and boldness.

Wilson possessed both qualities in abundance. As a visionary, he grasped the essential problem of transforming the old-style small college into a modern university—combining intimate instruction of undergraduates with pioneering scholarly and scientific research by professors and graduate students. Wilson aimed all three of his main programs—the preceptorial system, the Quad Plan, and the location of the Graduate College—at perfecting that combination. Other universities soon followed his lead in one way or another. In the 1920s and 1930s, first Harvard, with its houses, and then Yale, with its colleges, adopted versions of the Quad Plan. In the 1930s and 1940s, Chicago, under Robert M. Hutchins, conducted a campaign to make its undergraduates more intellectually serious by downgrading varsity sports and other extracurricular diversions. Every other major university would mingle graduate students with undergraduates rather than separate them, after West’s model. At Princeton, Wilson had within his grasp the chance to do all of those things first, and he came close to achieving his aims. If he had won his academic civil war, American higher education would have had an undisputed champion. Yet if he had won, he would have had to stay at Princeton and continue to remake the university in his own image. Andrew West’s windfall liberated Woodrow Wilson from academic life and opened a larger career for him in politics.