Wilson started his academic career at Davidson College, but he was homesick and left before the end of his first year. In 1875, after another year of homeschooling from his father, he tried again. This time he enrolled at the College of New Jersey, which later became Princeton, to study politics and history. Wilson liked his new environment, in part because of the high number of southern Presbyterians, and he excelled there. He launched the Liberal Debating Society and served as editor of the school newspaper and secretary of the football association. Not surprisingly, the young Wilson got a taste for politics as he gained self-confidence and learned to like the sound of his own voice.
After graduating from Princeton, he enrolled at the University of Virginia to study law in hopes of one day entering politics. Homesickness and a lifelong difficulty making friends plagued him once again. He left UVA on Christmas Day of his first year, claiming he had a cold, and never returned. He finished his studies at home. After passing the Georgia bar, he spent a short time as a lawyer but found he didn't have the knack for it and concluded that it was too arduous a course for him to take into politics. Frustrated in his desire to become a statesman, Wilson enrolled at the recently established Johns Hopkins University, where he pursued his Ph.D. After graduating, he landed several teaching posts while he worked on his academic writing, specifically his widely acclaimed eight-hundred-page tome The State. Wilson eventually returned to the one institution where he had known some social happiness, Princeton University, where he rose to president.
Wilson's choice to head down an academic path should not be seen as an alternative to a political career. Rather, it was an alternative path to the career he always wanted. The Sage of New Jersey was never a reluctant statesman. Not long after finishing The State, Wilson began moving beyond narrow academic writing in favor of more popular commentary, generally geared toward enhancing his political profile. High among his regular themes was the advocacy of progressive imperialism in order to subjugate, and thereby elevate, lesser races. He applauded the annexation of Puerto Rico and the Philippines — "they are children and we are men in these deep matters of government and justice" — and regularly denounced what he called "the anti-imperialist weepings and wailings that came out of Boston."4 It's a sign of how carefully he cultivated his political profile that four years before he "reluctantly" accepted the "unsolicited" gubernatorial nomination in New Jersey, Harper's Weekly had begun running the slogan "For President — Woodrow Wilson" on the cover of every issue.
Indeed, from his earliest days as an undergraduate the meek, homeschooled Wilson was infatuated with political power. And as is so common to intellectuals, he let his power worship infect his analysis.
Lord Acton's famous observation that "power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely" has long been misunderstood. Acton was not arguing that power causes powerful leaders to become corrupt (though he probably believed that, too). Rather, he was noting that historians tend to forgive the powerful for transgressions they would never condone by the weak. Wilson is guilty on both counts: he not only fawned over great men but, when he attained real power, was corrupted by it himself. Time and again, his sympathies came down on the side of great men who broke the traditional restraints on their power. Two of his biggest heroes were the Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck and Abraham Lincoln. It might seem odd that someone who fervently believed that giving blacks the right to vote was "the foundation of every evil in this country" would celebrate Lincoln. But what appealed to Wilson about the Great Emancipator was Lincoln's ability to impose his will on the entire country. Lincoln was a centralizer, a modernizer who used his power to forge a new, united nation. In other words, Wilson admired Lincoln's means — suspension of habeas corpus, the draft, and the campaigns of the radical Republicans after the war — far more than he liked his ends. "If any trait bubbles up in all one reads about Wilson," writes the historian Walter McDougall, "it is this: he loved, craved, and in a sense glorified power."5
Wilson's fascination with power is the leitmotif of his whole career. It informed his understanding of theology and politics, and their intersection. Power was God's instrument on earth and therefore was always to be revered. In Congressional Government he admitted, "I cannot imagine power as a thing negative and not positive." Such love of power can be found in many systems and men outside the orbit of fascism, but few ideologies or aesthetics are more directly concerned with the glory of might, will, strength, and action. Some of this was on display in fascist art and architecture, which wallowed in the powerful physical form and the unconquerable might of the nation: strength in unity, the triumph of will, the domination of destiny over decadence and indecision. Doctrinaire fascism, much like communism, sold itself as an unstoppable force of divine or historical inevitability. Those who stood in the way — the bourgeoisie, the "unfit," the "greedy," the "individualist," the traitor, the kulak, the Jew — could be demonized as the "other" because, at the end of the day, they were not merely expendable, nor were they merely reluctant to join the collective, they were by their very existence blocking the will to power that gave the mob and the avant-garde which claimed to speak for it their reason for existence. "Where this age differs from those immediately preceding it is that a liberal intelligentsia is lacking," wrote George Orwell. "Bully-worship, under various disguises, has become a universal religion."6 For some, like Wilson, God gave a divine writ for bullying. For others the license for organized cruelty came from more impersonal historical forces. But the impulse was the same.
Wilson would later argue when president that he was the right hand of God and that to stand against him was to thwart divine will. Some thought this was simply proof of power corrupting Wilson, but this was his view from the outset. He always took the side of power, believing that power accrued to whoever was truly on God's side. As an undergraduate, Wilson was convinced that Congress was destined to wield the most power in the American system, and so he championed the idea of giving Congress unfettered control of governance. During his senior year, in his first published article, he even argued that America should switch to a parliamentary system, where there are fewer checks on the will of rulers. Wilson was a champion debater, so it's telling that he believed the best debaters should have the most power.
Wilson wrote his most famous and original work, Congressional Government, when he was a twenty-nine-year-old graduate student at Johns Hopkins. He set out to argue that America should switch to a centralized parliamentary system, but the work evolved into a sweeping indictment of the fragmentation and diffuseness of power in the American political system. Wilson fully abandoned his faith in congressional government when he witnessed Teddy Roosevelt's success at turning the Oval Office into a bully pulpit. The former advocate of congressional power became an unapologetic champion of the imperial presidency. "The President," he wrote in 1908 in Constitutional Government in the United States, "is at liberty, both in law and in conscience, to be as big a man as he can. His capacity will set the limit; and if Congress be overborne by him, it will be no fault of the makers of the Constitution,...but only because the President has the nation behind him and Congress has not."7