President Wilson, his problems and his policy; an English view

Foreword To American Readers

If this book has any value in America it will be as the embodiment of what I think I may. claim to be a typical English view of American politics. The term typical perhaps needs a little qualification. I cannot pretend to be entirely free from a certain pro-American bias, though I hope I have not allowed it to colour what I have written.

(^uite apart from the circumstances of this war, I am profoundly convinced that America and Great Britain have a great destiny to work out in common which they can never accomplish separately. If that is so it is of the first importance that the two countries should know each other better and understand each other better. Americans are probably better informed about English affairs than Englishmen about American afifairs — though my American friends are disposed to question this — but there is manifestly much more room for fuller knowledge on either side.

My sketch of President Wilson has been written with the purpose of introducing current American

FOREWORD TO AMERICAN READERS

problems, as well as a great American personality, to English readers. It may contain false judgments. It must almost inevitably contain technical inaccuracies. But I think it is at least a fair representation of what Englishmen who have tried to understand America think of America. If we misunderstand, this concrete example of the misunderstanding may stimulate some qualified American writer to correct our views.

National Liberal Club, London April igiy

Preface

One of the more valuable of the indirect results of the war has been to reveal how little America is understood, and how necessary it is that she should be understood, in this country. At the present moment we are in danger of committing ourselves to a series of false judgments. The average Englishman's real interest in the United States and its present President dates from August 19 1 4, and he is under an inevitable but unfortunate temptation to form sweeping estimates of a nation and a man on the basis of their attitude towards one particular issue, and that an issue of great complexity, over a space of little more than two years.

Such estimates may by an accident be accurate, but if so it can only be by an accident. Without entering into thait, I have aimed here at presenting data^ bearing on the President of the United States and the problems he has to face, covering a wider field and a longer period. The relations between Great Britain and America will be among the most powerful factors in world politics after the war.

8 PREFACE

and if those relations are to be what they should be and might be, it is essential that the two peoples should know and understand one another. It is in the hope that it may make some small contribution to the further development of such an understanding that this book has been written. The American biographies of Mr. Wilson are not well known in this country, and, in any case, they take for granted a knowledge of American institutions and traditions which the English reader naturally does not possess. Now that President Wilson is about to enter on a second four years of office it is time an EngUsh life was written.

As for myself, my chief title to attempt such a task is a lively consciousness of my own limitations. Having devoted what time I could in the past few years to an endeavour to diminish my own ignorance of America, I have written on the assumption that what I needed to know other people may need to know too. This biography purports to be neither a criticism nor an appreciation, nor what is sometimes a little grandiloquently described as an interpretation. All I have attempted to do is to state the plain facts of President Wilson's career since he first entered public life, and to indicate in broad outline the nature of the political and social problems that are engaging him and all men of thought and action in America to-day. It has seemed to me

PREFACE 9

more useful to provide material for judgments than to obtrude a series of judgments of my own. I am greatly indebted to Mr. G. V. Seldes, late of Harvard, who has read my proofs and made a number of valuable suggestions.

H. WILSON HARRIS.

London, January 1917.

NOTE

The breach between America and Germany took place after the manuscript of this book had left my hands. It has not been necessary to alter anything already written, but a few pages have been added to Chapter IX (" The European War "), carrying it down to the actual severance of diplomatic relations.

H. W. H.

February 19 17.

Contents

CIAPTKK PAGK

I. EARLY YEARS . . . . . .13

II. PRESIDENT OF PRINCETON . . . .25

Chapter I Early Years

We are confused by a war of interests, a clash of classes, a competition of powers, an effort at conquest and restraint, and the great forces which war and toil amongst us can be guided and reconciled only by some man who is truly a man of the people, not caught in the toils of any special interest, united by wide sympathy with many kinds of men, familiar with many aspects of life, and led, through many changes, to a personal experience which unites him with the common mass. — Lincoln Centenary Address, 1909.'

WOODROW Wilson is an American of the second generation. His father's father, James Wilson, an Ulsterman from County Down, landed at Philadelphia to seek his fortune in 1807. His mother's father, the Rev. Thomas Woodrow, a Scotch Presbyterian minister who had held a charge at Carlisle for sixteen years and then migrated to Canada, crossed the American border in 1837 and settled at Chillicothe, Ohio, as pastor of the first Presbyterian Church in that town.

James Wilson, the immigrant, rapidly found his feet at Philadelphia, where he secured a post on Duane's Democratic journal, the Aurora, published

' The passages at the head of each chapter are from Mr. Wilson's writings and speeches.

where the greatest of American journalists, Benjamin Franklin, had turned out his unpretentious sheets nearly a century before. But Philadelphia was not to be the goal of young Wilson's pilgrimage. The drang nacfi westen that followed the restoration of peace with England in 1814 laid hold of the young journalist -printer, and carried him inland over the Pennsylvanian border into Ohio. There he settled first at Steubenville, the capital of Jefferson County, and then at Pittsburg, establishing in the former town the Western Herald and in the latter (which lies on the eastern side of the Ohio -Pennsylvania border) the Pennsylvania Advocate. It was at Steubenville that President Wilson's father and mother first met.

The youngest of James Wilson's seven sons was Joseph Ruggles, who after a sound education at Jefferson College at Canonsburg, in Pennsylvania, supplemented by a year at the Western Theological Seminary and another at Princeton, had been licensed as a preacher in the Presbyterian Church, and then appointed, not to a pulpit, but to a post in the Steubenville Male Academy. At the same time Dr. Thomas Woodrow's daughter Janet was a pupil at the companion academy for girls. A friendship, and then an intimacy, sprang up, and in 1849 Joseph Ruggles Wilson and Janet Woodrow were married. Joseph Wilson was ordained by the Presbytery of Ohio almost immediately after his wedding, but he continued his educational work at Steubenville, and then successively at Jefferson College and at Hampden Sydney College, Virginia, till 1855, when he accepted his first pastorate at Staunton, Virginia. In the following year, on December 28, 1856, Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born. There were already two girls in the family, and a younger boy was born ten years later.

There was a singular fitness in the chance that made Staunton Woodrow Wilson's birthplace ; for the Old Dominion, Virginia dives avum, had given America four out of her first five Presidents — Washington and Jefi"erson, Madison and Monroe. By his origin no less than by his office Dr. Wilson stands heir to great traditions. Those who will can convince themselves with no great difficulty that the influences of the warm and generous South have left their mark equally with his Scotch and Irish ancestry in salient traits of the President's character.

Little of Woodrow Wilson's childhood was spent at Staunton, for in 1858 the family moved south to Augusta, in Georgia, a prosperous industrial town, where in a twelve years' pastorate the Rev. Joseph Wilson established a solid reputation as one of the foremost ministers of his denomination in the South. When Woodrow was four years old the Civil War broke out. The earliest recollection clear in his memory is that of two men meeting in the street outside his father's house and one of them declaring, " Lincoln is elected, and there'll be war." The Wilsons were strong Southerners, but they came into little personal contact with the war. Till Sherman's men came marching through Georgia in 1864 the State had lain outside the theatres oi active warfare, and Sherman himself left Augusta to his right as he swept north-west from Savannah to Atlanta. There were sundry alarms in the town, but none of them had substance, and all Woodrow Wilson saw of the war was an occasional body of Confederates riding off to join the army, and Jefferson Davis himself passing through in 1865 in the hands of the Federals to his imprisonment in Fort Monroe.

President Wilson was born too late in the nineteenth century for any such romantic boyhood as fell to the lot of Washington on the frontier or Lincoln and Garfield in the backwoods. His education followed conventional lines, and in its earlier stages, at any rate, it brought to light no marked foreshadowings of the gifts that have raised the President to the position he holds to-day. Joseph Wilson was eminently wise in the training of his son. No attempt was made to force the boy's formal education. He was over nine before he had learned to read ; but long before that his mind was being developed and shaped by constant companionship and talk with his father, and he was already familiar with much of Scott and Dickens from the novels read aloud to the family in the Augusta manse. Father and son took long walks together, sometimes in the country, sometimes to inspect the factories and engineering shops and foundries in which the industrial life of Augusta centred. To this best of all forms of education, contact with a fertile, alert^ and sympathetic mind, was added such further training as was dealt out to a group of Augusta youngsters at a school kept by a Mr. J. T. Derry, who had laid aside his rifle after Appomattox and diverted his energies from the destruction of the North to the instruction of the South. After four years under the soldier -schoolmaster's ferule, vvoodrow Wilson (known at that time to his family and friends as Tom) rounded off his school life with another period of four years at an academy at Columbia, South Carolina, his father having obtained a professorship at the theological seminary in that town in 1870.

The transition from school to university is a permanent landmark in the experience of every boy whose education is not cut short at the secondary stage ; and by the time Woodrow Wilson was taking leave of the Columbia academy and breaking ground at Davidson College, North Carolina, to which he now proceeded, he had reached an age at which public events were likely increasingly to arrest his interest and stimulate his thought. He had been too young at the time of the Civil War to be alive to its issues. He was a child of four when the first shot was fired at Fort Sumter, a little more than eight when the tragic news of Lincoln's murder plunged South and North alike into mourning. The vicissitudes of Andrew Johnson's calamitous administration were little calculated to stir the interest of a boy of twelve ; but when, with Grant's succession, the work of reconstruction and reconciliation was put in hand in earnest, it would have been strange if no dawning sense of citizenship and responsibility for a share in the work of rebuilding the nation had impressed itself on the mind of a youth just passing from school to the larger world of the university.

Wilson, it must be remembered, was a pure Southerner, who never crossed the Potomac till he set out for his first term at Princeton in 1875, but he was born a few years too late to know from experience the embitterment that preceded the actual outbreak. Now secession had been tried and failed. The fundamental principle for which the Northerners had fought, the maintenance of the Union, was vindicated. The South, weary and stricken after its four years' fight against hopeless odds, was as ready as the North to live in the spirit of Lincoln's great exhortation and strive to " bind up the nation's wounds, ... to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace." It was a time of re -formation and reconstruction. While Woodrow Wilson was building up his manhood the nation was rebuilding its shattered fabric. The South, in particular^ was schooling itself to a new conception of political principles. We can hardly be wrong in ascribing to these vital years the origin of that intense interest in the principles of government which Dr. Wilson has exhibited through the whole of his educational and political career.

The terms university and college are practically interchangeable in America, and the institutions so described represent every level of educational efficiency. Davidson College, North Carolina, to which young Wilson passed on from the school at Columbia, was not of the highest grade, but it formed an adequate stepping-stone to Princeton, whither his father decided to send him after his course at Davidson had been interrupted at the end of his first year by an illness that necessitated a year of comparative rest. This year (1874-5) was spent at Wilmington, a North Carolina seaport, where the Rev. Joseph Wilson now held a charge. The town had considerable historic interest, and migration thither enabled tlie future President, at the age of seventeen, to get his first glimpse of the sea, an experience still foreign to some millions of his fellow-countrymen.

In September 1875 Woodrow Wilson matriculated at Princeton. The New Jersey foundation, of which it will be necessary to speak more fully in the following chapter, claims to rank third to Harvard and Yale among the greater universities of America. It has a history of 170 years behind it, and has numbered James Madison among its graduates and Jonathan Edwards among its Presidents. In Wilson's year there was an entry of about 130, amongst whom he took a creditable place, but achieved no outstanding distinction. His " class " (i.e. the entry of his year) produced forty-two honours men in the graduating year 1879, Wilson standing fortyfirst on the list. For the benefit of those to whom such matters seem of moment, it is on record that in his senior year he measured 5 feet 1 1 inches and weighed 156 pounds. By the time he had graduated A.B. at Princeton, Wilson had concluded that the practice of law (in America the profession has not two branches, as in England)

was his right vocation, and he accordingly decided to supplement his Princeton course by further study in the law school of the University of Virginia. After little more than a year his health broke down, as it had done when he was at Davidson six years earlier. In consequence he spent the year 1881 at home, and in May 1882 established himself as a practising lawyer at Atlanta, Georgia, in association with a partner named Renick.

It is necessary thus to sketch the outlines of the President's education, but the bare facts themselves are of little interest or importance. Preferring deliberately to read discursively and make his explorations in fields of his own choosing, he sacrificed with small regret the prospects of purely academic distinction.

Wilson's bent was definitely historical and political. At Princeton he read widely and wisely, studying particularly Chatham and Burke, Brougham and Macaulay. Bagehot was an inexhaustible mine of suggestion and inspiration. But the first serious stimulus to political thought and investigation came from a less classic source. In the Chancellor Green library at Princeton was a set of bound volumes of the Gentleman's Magazine, the later issues of which numbered among their leading features a running commentary on the proceedings of the British House of Commons by " The Member for the Chiltern Hundreds," one of the many pseudonyms of that veteran political journalist Sir Henry Lucy. St. Stephen's in the seventies was the arena of rhetorical battles well calculated to arrest and hold the interest of any observer capable of appreciating the niceties of constitutional theory or the triumphs of parliamentary oratory and the victories of debate. The great duel between Gladstone and Disraeli was at its height. Dizzy had just " dished the Whigs " over the Reform Bill of 1867 and gone out' of office on Irish Church Disestablishment. The Disestablishment Act had followed in 1869 and Forster's Education Act in 1870; Cardwell was carrying through his Army reforms ; the Ballot Act was being put on the Statute Book. In 1874, the year before Wilson entered at Princeton, Gladstone had gone out and Disraeli gone in, and though within the next two years one of the two protagonists had withdrawn into nominal retirement and the other into the tranquillity of the House of Lords, they had left behind them in the elective Chamber traditions of controversy that speakers like Bright and Lowe, Stanley and John Russell had done hardly less than themselves to establish. Debates sustained by men of such calibre could lack nothing in inspiration to an eager student of politics in a country whose political history, apart from the great movements led by Washington and Lincoln, and the Webster-Clay-Calhoun controversies, was comparatively uneventful. Mr. Wilson himself has testified in later years to the influence Lucy's pictures of the Chamber at Westminster had on his broadening thought.

The ideas thus absorbed found early expression. At Princeton Wilson wrote and debated. In the latter field he was a little slow in coming to the front, though in his second, or sophomore, year he was awarded a second prize in Whig Hall, one of the two rival debating societies (the other was the Cliosophic) that flourished at Princeton. But by his fourth year he was recognized as the foremost speaker in Whig Hall, and was, as a matter of course, chosen to represent it in the amiual Lynde Debate between the two college societies. The subjects on these occasions were not announced beforehand, the speakers being required to discourse extempore on a topic drawn from a hat. The topic in this particular year was Tariffs, and the chance of the draw condemned Wilson to champion Protection against Free Trade. That settled his part in the contest. Rejecting flatly any sophistic endeavour to make what he conceived to be the worse cause appear the better, he tore up the slip and retired from the debate. A substitute hastily enlisted by the Whigs proving unequal to the occasion, victory went to the Cliosophic.

The interest of an episode trifling in itself lies in the evidence it affords of the depth of Wilson's political convictions at the time. Further proof of that comes from his casual writings at the same period, notable among them an essay on Chatham, for which he was awarded a prize in 1879, others on John Bright and Gladstone printed in the magazine of the University of Virginia in 1880, and an article on " Cabinet Government in the United States," over the signature Thomas W. Wilson, in the International Review of August 1879. The acceptance of such a contribution by a serious review of national reputation was a notable event for a writer still in his undergraduate stage. The essay consisted of a sober and critical discussion of the element of irresponsibility in American government, due to the severance of the executive and the legislative authorities and the growing power of the numerous secret committees of Congress. There is undiminished force to-day in the contention that an essential condition of efficient government is a closer association between the legislative and the executive, and particularly in the conclusion that " there must nepds bie;, as a binding link between them, some body which has no power to coerce the one and is interested in maintaining the independent effectiveness of the other. Such a link is the responsible Cabinet."

This article appeared in August 1879. In the same year the writer took his A.B. degree at Princeton, and, as has been stated, entered the law school at the University of Virginia. With his interrupted course at the latter foundation the period of his formal education would normally have ended, had not the bad judgment of the people of Atlanta in their choice of lawyers led to an unpremeditated change in the young attorney's plans. The establishment of the firm of Renick and Wilson in the Georgian capital has already been mentioned. The partners " hung out their shingle," as the vernacular expression has it, and waited for clients. After a year of waiting the younger partner had had enough. If there was no opening for him to practice law he could at least teach it, and to qualify himself the better he entered, in the autumn of 1883, on a two years' post-gfaduate course at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. In 1886 he gained the degree of Ph.D. for a notable thesis on Congressional Government, to which it will be necessary to refer again. A year earlier he had accepted his first teaching post, a lectureship in history and political economy at Bryn Mawr, a women's college on the outskirts of Philadelphia. He remained at Bryn Mawr three years, lecturing at the same time at Johns Hopkins, and in 1888 was elected to the chair of history and political economy at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut. Wesleyan was less sectarian than its name would suggest. There was an able faculty and a large nucleus of students (of both sexes) who had come to the university for serious work. But it hardly gave the Professor of History the platform his growing reputation qualified him to occupy, and after two years, in 1890, he was offered, and accepted, the chair of jurisprudence and politics at his old university, Princeton. There the next twenty years of his life were to be spent.

Chapter II President Of Princeton

The college should seek to make the men whom it receives something more than excellent servants of a trade or skilled practitioners of a profession. It should give them elasticity of faculty and breadth of vision, so that they shall have a surplus of mind to expend, not upon their profession only, for its liberalization and enlargement, but also upon the broader interests which lie about them, in the spheres in which they are to be not breadwinners merely, but citizens as well, and in their own hearts, where they are to grow to the stature of real nobility. It is this free capital of mind the world most stands in need of — this free capital that awaits investm.ent in undertakings, spiritual as well as material, which advance the race and help all men to a better life.

Inaugural Addi'ess as President of Princeton^ Ocloba 1902.

Dr. Wilson's life at Princeton divides into two periods. From 1890 to 1902 he was a member of the faculty, taking his place with his colleagues as a part of the university machine. From 1902 to 191 o he was President, entrusted with the power, of which he did not hesitate to make full use, of changing the structure and adapting the operations of the machine into accordance with his own ideals. The college — or university, as it became in 1896 — was heir to honourable traditions. A Presbyterian foundation, it dates back to 1746, being thus the fourth in age among American universities, Harvard, William and Mary (Virginia), and Yale alone antedating it. The tide of revolutionary war had flowed round it, leaving the marks of conflict on the college buildings. In 1783 the Continental Congress held temporary session there, and it was from Princeton that Washington issued his farewell address to the Army. In recent years Princeton has been the most popular of the Northern colleges among' students from the South, a fact that no doubt had something to do with Woodrow Wilson's entry as a freshman in 1875, and made his return as a professor in 1890 the more congenial.

To-day — and what is true of to-day is true of the nineties of last century — Princeton ranks with Harvard and Yale, Cornell and Columbia and Johns Hopkins, among the group of foundations recognized as representing the highest type of American universities — and the type incidentally which approximates most closely to that familiar in England. The grounds and buildings are extensive. The campus covers over five hundred acres, with a boating -lake four miles long, formed by the widening of the Millstone River at Mr. Andrew Carnegie's expense. The buildings include a number of halls, residential and tutorial, of which Nassau is the oldest and most famous, while Seventy-Nine has a particular interest in connection with Mr. Wilson, since it was built at the expense of alumni of his own class of 1879. Whig and Clio Halls, to which some reference has already been made,' are the homes of the two chief literary societies at Princeton. Within the last few years an extensive graduate school has been added under circumstances which, it will be seen, closely affected Mr. Wilson's position as President of the University. The number of students, which twenty years ago stood at something under a thousand, is now over sixteen hundred.

When the new professor took up his work in September 1890 he had been married just five years. His wife, formerly Miss Ellen Louise Axson, was an old Augusta acquaintance, the daughter of a Savannah minister. Their marriage had taken place in June 1885, a few months before Mr. Wilson began his work at Bryn Mawr. Since this is a political r^-ther than a personal biography, it is sufficient to add here that there were three daughters of the marriage ; that after a married life of twenty-nine years Mrs. Wilson died at the White House in August 19 14, in the second year of her husband's Presidency ; and that in December 191 5 Mr, Wilson was married to Mrs. Norman Gait, formerly Miss Ediih Boiling, of Wythesville, Virginia.

The twelve years of Dr. Wilson's professorship at Princeton were uneventful. As a lecturer his popularity was great, the earnestness of the true teacher being seasoned by a quiet and cultured humour that made attendance at his courses a matter as much of pleasure as of profit. He knew his men personally, and his house in Library Place was always open to the students, who took full advantage of the standing invitation extended to them. While his position at Princeton was being steadily strengthened both by the force of his personality and by his success as a lecturer, his name was becoming increasingly advertised through the country by the books he found time to publish before the more exacting duties of President of the University curtailed his literary activity. The first and best known of these, Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics, was indeed established as a standard authority on American government before Mr. Wilson's return to Princeton. He had put it in as thesis for his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins in 1885, and on its publication in the same year it had achieved a success comparable, among university theses, only with Mr. Bryce's Holy Roman Empire, first written as an Oxford prize exercise. Congressional Government has already run through close on thirty impressions. In 1889, Mr. Wilson's second year at Wesleyan University, The State: Elements of Historical and Practical Politics, a study of different forms of government, had appeared. A pioneer textbook in the field of political science, The State gained for its author recognition at the hands of a competent P^nglish critic ' as the foremost, if not the first, of those who rendered possible the intelligent study of a department of sociology upon which the happiness and good government of the human race essentially depend."

With the exception of these two notable works and The New Freedom, a collection of campaign speeches published in 1913, after his election as President, all Mr. Wilson's books were

' Oscar Browning, Preface to 1899 eiiition of The State, issued during the periods of his professorship and presidency at Princeton. In 1893 Division and Reunion, 1829-188 9, a study of the ultimate springs and effects of the Civil War, appeared, and the same year saw the pubUcation of a collection of essays grouped under the title An Old Master. In 1896 George Washington, a singularly human and attractive appreciation of the liberator of the American colonies, was published, and coincidently with it another essay volume bearing the name Mere Literature. In the year of Dr. Wilson's election to the presidency of the university his lengthiest work, a History of the American People, in five volumes, made its appearance, to be followed six years later by the last of his treatises on the theory of government, Constitutional Government in the United States. It is hardly matter for surprise that the responsibilities attaching to the Governorship of New Jersey and the Presidency of the United States should in the past six years have left scant leisure for literary production.