Woodrow Wilson was fortysix years old when he moved from the cosy stucco house in the fashionable halftimbered style which he and his wife had built for themselves on Library Place into the grandeurs of Prospect, the official residence.
As president of Princeton he was a talkedabout and writtenabout man. He began a drive for funds. He hired fifty new tutors to superintend the students’ studies according to the preceptorial system he had admired at Oxford and Cambridge. He made plans to abolish the snobbish eating clubs which took the place of the forbidden fraternities and to divide the university into colleges in the English manner, where students and tutors would eat their meals together. He tightened up the curriculum. Sons of wealthy alumni found themselves flunking out.
“He’s spoiling the best country club in America,” groaned the old grads, but for a while they went along, even in the face of a drop in enrollment. Led by Grover Cleveland and M. Taylor Pine, wealthy Princetonians began to make really sizeable contributions. Ralph Adams Cram was designing the new quadrangles in the Tudor Gothic style dear to the hearts of the anglophiles.
These were the years of Theodore Roosevelt’s New Nationalism. The president of Princeton, who was described as fighting the entrenched snobbery of privileged wealth in the colleges, was greatly in demand as a speaker. His campaign for equality of opportunity for education for the service of the commonweal was closer to the theories of the Republican progressives than to what was considered in the East as the rabblerousing appeal of William Jennings Bryan. But even to him the word democracy was taking on an egalitarian tone. Professor Wilson who had previously been a Hamilton man began to interest himself in the ideas of Thomas Jefferson.
In the winter of 1905 his health broke down again. A hernia operation followed by phlebitis forced him to take five weeks off in Florida to recuperate.
His reforms at Princeton had at first clear sailing, but now opposition was raising its head. He ran up against another Presbyterian, equally enthusiastic for a great future for Princeton, but with somewhat different ideas as to how to bring it about.
Andrew West was dean of the Graduate School. At first he and Wilson agreed as to how this school, which they were both promoting, should fit into the new scheme. Indeed Dean West was induced to refuse the presidency of Massachusetts Tech in order to assist with the good work.
Differences of opinion as to details turned into a personal contest of wills. The rancors of the presbytery began to work in both men. Once Woodrow Wilson had formed an opinion it became to his mind the cause of righteousness. If you disagreed you were either a knave or a fool. He decided Dean West was both.
Political omens “barely the size of a man’s hand” had begun to appear in the Democratic sky. Talk was beginning of Woodrow Wilson as a standardbearer to whom conservative Democrats might rally. “Don’t you pity me,” he wrote Robert Bridges, then editor of Scribner’s Magazine, “With all my old political longings … set throbbing again.”
After a speech on Americanism in Charleston, South Carolina, the influential News & Courier spoke of him as the most promising southern candidate for the presidency. Introducing him to a dinner held in his honor at the Lotos Club in New York, George Harvey, the hardbitten Vermont publicist and political wirepuller who had been entrusted by the Morgans with the reorganization of Harpers’ publishing firm and who personally edited Harper’s Weekly, formally nominated him to be the Democratic candidate in the next election:
“As one of a considerable number of Democrats who have become tired of voting Republican tickets, it is with a sense of rapture that I contemplate even the remotest possibility of casting a ballot for the President of Princeton University to become President of the United States.”
Wilson quoted Tennyson in reply and declared he had learned more about statesmanship from the poets than from the politicians. He affected to make light of Harvey’s suggestion, but his political longings were indeed set throbbing. He began to see his battle for righteousness at Princeton as the preliminary skirmish in a greater campaign to reform the nation.
His mail increased. He travelled all over the country to speak. He drove himself hard. There was research to do for his History of the American People. He was handling an enormous amount of paperwork with only the help of his wife and an occasional student. He did all his own typing. It would have been a strenuous enough life if his plans for Princeton had gone unopposed. He could never reconcile himself to opposition.
One morning in the spring of 1907 he woke up to find that he couldn’t see out of his left eye. It was only then that he admitted to his wife that he had been suffering severe pain which he described as neuritis in his left shoulder and leg. His friend Professor Hibben hurried him to Philadelphia to consult a specialist. The specialist reported that he had a severe case of hardening of the arteries and must immediately give up all activity and spend the rest of his life as an invalid.
Outwardly Woodrow Wilson bowed to the verdict. He cancelled his speaking engagements and secured leave of absence from the university. Meanwhile he shopped around for other physicians who might see his predicament in a less drastic light. A doctor was found who considered that the symptoms were not so alarming after all and promised him complete recovery after a three months rest.
Here was an opportunity to take Ellen and the girls on an outing to England. Sitting in a chair Woodrow Wilson packed the family trunks, as he always did. Ellen Wilson brought along her paints. They rented a cottage (from a Mrs. Wordsworth who had married some descendant of Wilson’s favorite poet) in the English lake country for the summer, and were completely happy there.
Wilson had the knack of resting when he had to. He could sleep for hours on end. He took great pleasure in the sluggish green Cumberland countryside. He found entertaining friends, sat on a bench outside the local pub chatting with the northcountry characters, took walks between showers and read Browning and the lake poets to the girls or sang college songs after supper. Reverently he attended Sunday services in the little stone church where Wordsworth lay buried. In the fall he returned to Princeton in roaring health and ready for battle.
Though he had started his campaign with the trustees on his side, now the board, like the faculty, had split into warring camps. The university seethed with backbiting. Wilson showed no ability to meet disagreement halfway. Whoever wasn’t for him must be against him. Associations were disrupted. There were charges and countercharges. Old friends crossed the street to avoid speaking.
Even his dear Jack Hibben, whom he had made acting president during his absence, turned against him at a faculty meeting when he brought his “quad plan,” which would abolish the eating clubs, to a vote. Wilson’s propositions were defeated. “Nobody can make a gentleman associate with a mucker,” said a prominent alumnus.
For the first time in his life Woodrow Wilson failed to get his own way. He wrote a friend, “I have got nothing out of the transaction but complete defeat and mortification.”
After his illness the university furnished him an assistant to take some of the routine work off his hands. President Wilson was away from Princeton a great deal now, lecturing about the country, conferring with publisher friends and political sponsors in New York. He took winter holidays in Bermuda where a charming American hostess named Mrs. Peck collected prominent and amusing people at little dinners for his entertainment. Academic life began to pall. He was being taken up by the great world.