Externally he was himself a solemn young man. “I am quite used to being taken for a minister,” he admitted to a friend. When his classmate Robert Bridges, who was making himself an editorial career in New York, arranged for him to give a talk at an alumni gathering there, he produced such an austere harangue on the duty of the colleges to prepare men for government service that people kept slipping out and only returned to their seats to roar with laughter when Chauncey Depew, who followed him, poked fun at the lanternjawed young professor with the eyeglasses.
He was happier at Wesleyan. Middletown was one of the loveliest places in Connecticut. He found New Englanders congenial. Students crowded into his classes. He established a debating club on the English model which he named The House of Commons. The club managers stayed in office only so long as they could secure votes of confidence from the floor.
Already he was the popular professor. He led a movement to break up the fraternity cliques and get men accepted, in athletics at least, on their merits alone. Though not athletic himself he was an enthusiast for college sports. An alumnus told one of his biographers of seeing Professor Wilson dash out from the bleachers in slicker and rubberboots at an edgy moment in a hardfought football game played in the rain against a heavier team from Lehigh to lead the Wesleyan cheering with his umbrella.
Among the colleges his reputation was building. Johns Hopkins invited him to give a course of lectures. He was elected president of the Alumni Association, honored by Phi Beta Kappa, given an honorary degree, which was to be the first of many, by Wake Forest in North Carolina. James Bryce, whom he’d met at a Baltimore lecture, commended his Congressional Government in a new edition of The American Commonwealth. By 1889 his friends of the class of ’79 didn’t find it too hard to put through this outstanding alumnus’ appointment to a professorship at Princeton.
At Princeton he passed pleasant years. The pay was far from ample but Ellen Wilson was an excellent manager. She set a hospitable table. She made most of her own dresses and the dresses for their three little girls and cut out paper dolls for them to save buying toys. She worked the flower garden, did embroidery, drilled the girls in the Shorter Catechism and even found time for a little painting. Hers were the crayon enlargements of portraits of Burke, Webster, Gladstone, Bagehot and of Professor Wilson’s own father that hung in the study. She acted as occasional secretary and helped him read proof. The professor was not a handy man around the house but with grim determination he tended the coal furnace in winter. He once was seen mowing the lawn.
His students loved his lectures. Year after year he was voted the most popular professor. He was much in demand as a public speaker. His articles were published in the leading magazines. He reviewed books for The Atlantic Monthly.
At home he was the center of a group of admiring females. The Wilsons’ house was always full of relatives who joined the family as a matter of course in the oldtime southern way. There were Ellen Wilson’s brothers and sisters and nieces, Woodrow and Wilson cousins, distantly related students they were helping through college.
Meals were on the dot, breakfast at eight, lunch at one. The professor led the conversation from the head of the table. Only his wife dared contradict him. “Oh Woodrow, you don’t mean that,” she would sometimes say. “Madam I was endeavoring to think that I meant that,” he would answer with a sarcastic smile, “until I was corrected.”
Though he made warm friends and fervent supporters among the faculty he remained a shy standoffish man. He was reluctant to meet strangers.
It was only at home that he relaxed from the cold intellectual stance. At home he made puns, recited limericks, told dialect stories. Evenings he read aloud from Dickens or Macaulay or Matthew Arnold. He enjoyed charades and sometimes said he wished he’d been an actor. To amuse the little girls he’d pull the loose skin of his long face into odd shapes, or act out little skits. The town drunk or the affected Englishman were favorites with the children. He is even described as having been seen dancing a jig with his silk hat cocked over his eyes. He rode to his classes on a bicycle.
His health was uneven. There was a consistent history of breakdowns from overwork. When in the spring of 1896 he finished his George Washington he was so crippled by “writers’ cramp” that he had to start learning to write with his left hand. The doctors advised a change. Since there wasn’t money enough to take the whole family Ellen Wilson urged him to leave for a solitary English holiday. He sailed on one of the economical Anchor Line boats to Glasgow.
Princeton’s foremost political theorist, who remained a Democrat though he deplored the populist heresies that the Boy Orator of the Platte was arousing in the cornbelt, spent the summer of Bryan’s freesilver campaign bicycling through Scotland and England.
The sight of the Gothic colleges at Oxford sent him into ecstasy. He read Wordsworth at Tintern Abbey. After an afternoon with the Rembrandts and the Reynoldses and the Turners at the National Gallery he wrote his dear Ellen that he felt quite guilty looking at them without her.
He picked up travelling acquaintances. On the Ethiopia going over he became so cosy with a South Carolina lawyer and his wife that they chummed up for the whole trip. He unbosomed himself of his ambitions to them. They parted with the halfhumorous understanding that when he was President he’d make Mr. Woods a federal judge. Years later he fulfilled this pledge to the letter.
Around the turn of the century higher education in America was in the throes of one of its periodical soulsearchings. Hadley at Yale and Eliot at Harvard were much in the news. The Princeton trustees, reinforced by ex-President Grover Cleveland and several other prominent alumni who had chosen the pleasant village for their residence, were getting tired of having their college known as a rural resort for wealthy young loafers. In the fall of 1896 Professor Wilson, fresh from his visit to Oxford, at the ceremonies incidental to the formal changing of the name of The College of New Jersey to Princeton University, called for a sound rigorous classical education to train up young men in conservative principles for the service of the state. The speech made an impression. When Dr. Patton resigned as president in 1902 Professor Wilson found himself elected by unanimous vote of the trustees to serve in his stead.
That was the end of a plan he had been forming to take sabbatical leave and to give his girls the advantages of travel in Europe while he devoted himself to his project for a philosophy of politics which would be the Novum Organum of nineteenthcentury liberalism.
His inauguration was a great occasion. Ex-President Grover Cleveland and Governor Murphy of New Jersey led the academic procession. Friends remarked on Woodrow Wilson’s slim erect keenfaced appearance under the mortarboard. Henry van Dyke the poet preacher, Booker T. Washington, Hadley of Yale, Lowell of Harvard, Butler of Columbia added their varicolored hoods to the train. The participants were astonished by the size of J. Pierpont Morgan’s nose. There was Mark Twain whitemaned in his invariable linen suit, and William Dean Howells. Plughatted Colonel Harvey and Walter Hines Page followed in the rear as the faithful publishers of the professor’s books.
The new president’s inaugural speech was received with acclaim. Only Grover Cleveland is said to have muttered under his mustache: “Sounds good. I wonder what it means.”
Dr. Joseph Wilson, bowed down by the years, had taken to his bed for his last illness, but a visitor downstairs told of hearing his singing, “Crown him with many crowns,” at the top of his voice. He said it was the best day of his life. He lined up his three little granddaughters at the foot of his bed and told them never to forget what he was going to tell them: their father was the greatest man he had ever known.