III.

Literary and Academic Career

Although a candidate for a degree in history, Wilson continued to analyze politics. His mentor, Professor Herbert Baxter Adams, permitted him to do so. The result was a book-length expansion of his earlier essay on Congress. Accepted and published early in 1885, it sold well. Influential reviewers found Wilson's critical attitude toward American democracy novel and stimulating. Although not strong in scholarship, Congressional Government earned Wilson the Ph.D. degree and enabled him to pursue a literary and academic career.

Wilson had been engaged for several years to Ellen Louise Axson, daughter of a Georgia clergyman, and they were married in June 1885. Cultured and vivacious, Mrs. Wilson proved the perfect mate for her sensitive husband. She gave him unqualified support and helped free his mind from everyday pressures. The couple had three daughters.

In 1885 Wilson also accepted a position with the newly opened Bryn Mawr College, a school for women near Philadelphia. Wilson was not particularly patient with women as intellectual associates and did not enjoy his teaching duties. He was, however, able to pursue his writing.

A.

University Professor

In 1888 Wilson left Bryn Mawr for a professorship in history and political economy at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. There, in 1889, he published The State, a lengthy textbook analyzing the political nature of society. It further established his reputation, even though many of his admirers found it less of an intellectual adventure than Congressional Government. At Wesleyan, Wilson was a successful lecturer, faculty leader, and football coach. He was popular with the students and the administration and often spoke to off-campus meetings.

He was offered the presidency of various institutions, including the universities of Virginia and Illinois, and he was also offered professorships at higher salaries. He bided his time, however, until the College of New Jersey, which became Princeton University in 1896, offered him a professorship. The post suited him completely, and he accepted in 1890.

Wilson now began a program of publishing and public appearances, becoming one of the foremost academic personalities of the era. His essays on literary topics as well as on history and political science appeared in many magazines. In his works he deplored what he saw as the merely “scientific” spirit of the age and called for a renewed identity with “the great spirits of the past,” arguing that they were still relevant to modern times and conditions. He thus brought to his academic subject matter an excitement that stirred his students and colleagues as well as his outside readers and audiences. An Old Master and Other Political Essays (1893) and Mere Literature and Other Essays (1896) were welcomed by critics and reinforced his reputation.

As a historian, Wilson shared the views of American history held by most of his contemporaries. His romantic and uncritical George Washington (1896) presented a warm portrait of his great hero. Even so, Wilson tried to persuade readers of his impartiality and hardheadedness. In Division and Reunion, 1829-1889 (1893), which described the differences between the North and South, he agreed that the slavery system was bad in some respects, but he also insisted that as a labor and social system it had worked well. He called President Abraham Lincoln “one of the most singular and admirable figures in the history of modern times” and attempted to distinguish between what he called the “lawyer's facts” and the “historian's facts.” Thus, Wilson concluded, the South had seceded legally, but history had determined secession to be wrong.

Wilson seemed to abandon hope for a political career, but he continued to follow political affairs. He had little regard for grassroots movements and lacked sympathy with the farmer and labor agitation then sweeping the West and South and demanding economic reform (see Populism). His calls for dedicated leaders and inspired slogans reflected his aristocratic attitude toward politics, as did his admiration for Grover Cleveland as a fearless and independent president. But Wilson also wanted “some great orator who could go about and make men drunk with this spirit of self-sacrifice, some man whose tongue might every day carry abroad the golden accents of that creative age in which we were born a nation.”

Still responding to strong public demand for his work, Wilson wrote A History of the American People, published in 1902 in five volumes. Wilson's name became familiar and increasingly respected.

B.

University President

When the presidency of the college became vacant in 1902, Wilson was unanimously elected. Two presidents of the United States, Grover Cleveland and Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909), attended his inauguration. As president of Princeton, Wilson tried to end practices he believed harmful to education. The student body maintained a club system and separate dining facilities that were undemocratic. They put aside study for what they deemed gentlemanly accomplishments. The university emphasized lectures rather than student-faculty discussion. Wilson had accepted such procedures while establishing himself on campus, but now he prepared for radical departures. He demanded the raising of admission and achievement standards. Following universities in England, he sought to create communities of students, as opposed to exclusive societies. Students were to live and study together in arrangements of four buildings in a rectangle, or quads. Preceptors, rather than lecturers, were to give students personal attention. In a new set of buildings that Wilson proposed to build, the faculty would eat with students and teach them by example as well as by the book.

During his first years as president of Princeton, Wilson enlisted the enthusiasm of his teachers and administrators, and word of his exciting ideas spread. Moreover, he brought to his campus many new young instructors who were eager for innovation and change. Some students and faculty, who preferred the old aristocratic ways and who resented his downgrading of sports and his blunt attacks on student clubs, resisted Wilson. He also displeased alumni, who were fond of their own student days and were generally suspicious of reform. Wilson's quad plan was especially open to criticism because it involved great building expenses and would require wide endorsement by wealthy alumni, who were unwilling to give it. To Wilson's deep chagrin the quad plan failed to win the approval of the university's trustees.

Wilson always found it difficult to work with people who opposed him and was not receptive to the suggestions of friends who approved his ideals but trusted in slower or modified processes. His troubles increased when Wilson proposed to build a new graduate school. The business school dean was Andrew F. West, a classics scholar. Wilson wanted to build the new school on campus, but West planned to set it apart from the university. Wilson sometimes took contradictory steps to control the affair, and failed to explain the underlying differences between West and himself. What he saw as a question of privilege versus democracy came to appear as merely a “real estate” matter, in which he looked stubborn and petty. West was triumphant in 1910 when an enormous gift to the university required that West's program be adopted. It was a gift the Princeton trustees were unwilling and Wilson was unable to resist.

Such academic battles caused Wilson acute nervous strain and sickness. Disheartened and upset, he vacillated between resigning the presidency and staying at Princeton to prevent the total disruption of his designs. He decided to remain.

C.

Wilson in the Progressive Era

Wilson's presidency at Princeton coincided with the first part of the Progressive Era in American history. This period of reform lasted from the last decade of the 19th century into World War I. Reformers, or progressives as they were called, were concerned about abuses of power by government and businesses. They did not all agree with each other, but many advocated at least some government regulation of business practices. They wanted the direct election of U.S. senators (in most states the legislature chose them). Some sought the prohibition of child labor, others the prohibition of alcoholic beverages, and for many the conservation of the nation's natural resources was important. Muckrakers (journalists who wrote articles exposing corruption in both politics and in business) often joined with progressives to publicize child labor, unsanitary industrial conditions, business monopolies, and censorship. Progressives believed that the government could play an important role in making the United States a better place to live, and many looked for leadership to President Theodore Roosevelt.

Although some critics thought that the educational reforms Wilson advocated were too extreme, his social and political outlook remained largely conservative. For the most part, Wilson avoided controversies and stressed such noncontroversial ideals as the need for a vital church, the spirit of learning, and other inspirational topics. Wilson was specific only on the issue of tariffs, or import taxes, which he viewed as restricting freedom. He called the Republican Payne-Aldrich Bill of 1909, which protected domestic industry by keeping import taxes high, “The Tariff Make-Believe.” The task of the country, as he saw it, was to rid itself of special privilege, and “the place to begin is the tariff.”

Although Wilson was dissatisfied with the politics of the period, he did develop some new attitudes. President Roosevelt was possessed, he thought, with a frenzy to regulate industry. What the country needed instead, he asserted in 1904, was not radical experiment, but a return to reform that gave due regard to law and traditional institutions. Roosevelt's activities did, however, inspire Wilson to abandon his earlier attitudes about the presidency. In lectures published in 1907 in Constitutional Government in the United States he stated that the president could be a “national voice in affairs.” The president should not force views on the people but should interpret their wants. Wilson trusted the moral judgment of the country and thought it needed nothing more than a channel for self-expression.