Woodrow Wilson and his work

Front matter

COPyRIGHT DEi>OSm

Hams & LuiiKj

PRESIDENT W(X)DR()W WILSON

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Youth and Early Envikonment ... 3

II. The New Road to Leadership .... 24

Chapter I Youth And Early Environment

FEW Americans have had a better hneage than Woodrow Wilson, !28th president of the United States. His father, Joseph Ruggles Wilson, born at Steubenville, Ohio, was the tenth child of James Wilson, and his wife, from County Down, Ireland, and of the sturdy Scotch race which still troubles the international waters in more ways than one. The life of James Wilson and his big family was of that hard but wholesome kind which has imparted so much vigour to the whole body of the American national experience.

Joseph R. Wilson early showed a bent for books and consequently he was sent to Jefferson College, Pennsylvania, where he graduated in 1844. After a year of teaching in a Presbyterian school, he went to a theological seminary at Alleghany, Pennsylvania, to prepare for the Presbyterian ministry. In 1847 he went to Princeton for another year of preparation for his chosen calling. But on his return to Steubenville, he again became a teacher, this time in the Steubenville Male Academy, as men were then wont to call a school for boys. Here he met Janet Woodrow, a beautiful young woman, likewise of Scotch parentage, and a student in a school for girls conducted by Doctor Beattie, another Scotchman turned pedagogue in the backwoods of America.

Janet Woodrow was the daughter of Thomas Woodrow, graduate of the University of Glasgow, and his wife, a Scotch woman of similar strain who had died on the long journey to "the States." After a year of missionary work in Canada, the Woodrows settled in Chillicothe, Ohio, in 1837, where the head of the house was the pastor of the Presbyterian Church till 1849, when he moved to Columbus to become the minister of the Hogg Presbyterian Church. Thomas Woodrow was already a man of note in Ohio, a devotee of the ancient classics who felt every day poorly spent which did not take him through many pages of the Greek and Latin writers which adorned the shelves of his library. He was likewise a firm believer in that stern Calvinist philosophy of which John Knox had been the best British exponent. His religion, duly burrowed from ancient Greek books and seasoned with the precepts of the Genevan theology, made something more than the mere milk for babes of which we learn in Holy Writ. There was no mistaking the intellectual calibre and the sturdy character of the stocky, full-bearded man who presided with easy dignity over the church at Chillicothe, and then for many years at Columbus.

It was his daughter, the fifth child in a family of seven, whom young Joseph Wilson met at Steubenville. They were married in June, 1849, and two weeks later this daughter of a great preacher was the wife of another preacher, for her husband was ordained the following month by the Presbytery of Ohio. The young couple did not enter at once the manse of some western church; they went instead for a short time to Jefferson College, where Wilson was professor of rhetoric, whence they moved again to Hampden Sidney College, Virginia. There Joseph Wilson served the Church for four years as professor of chemistry and natural science, preaching the while to neighbouring congregations that asked his ministrations. In 1855 he became the settled minister of the Presbyterian Church in Staunton, Virginia. There on December 28, 1856, a son was born to the family whom they called Thomas Woodrow, in honour of the grandfather at Columbus.^

But the family moved once more before they took root in the earth. In the spring 1858, Reverend Joseph R. Wilson became the minister of the Presbyterian Church of Augusta, Georgia, and there he remained through the succeeding stormy years till 1870 when he went to the well-known Theological Seminary at Columbia, South Carolina, as professor of pastoral and evangelistic theology.

The Wilsons were soon at home in Georgia and South Carolina, for the people of Augusta and Columbia formed one community. There the beloved Doctor Thomas Woodrow, as he was now called, visited them and held aloft the standard of learning. To the neighbouring Oglethorpe College, Georgia, came Mrs. W'ilson's brother. Doctor James Woodrow, a distinguished graduate of the University of Heidelberg, although he, too, was soon transferred to the Seminary at Columbia where he long tried in vain to reconcile dogmatic theology and natural science. Still another member of the old Chillicothe circle. Miss Marion Woodrow, visited her sister at Augusta, married James Bones, merchant and slaveholder, and became identified with the old South.'

It was a unique community, that of Augusta and the country round about in 1860. There nearly all men of note were the owners of slaves. There society was sharply articulated. The aristocracy, composed of planters of the country side and the older merchants of the towns, were quite as sure of

'William Bayarrf Safe, -"Woodrow Wilson, the SUry of his Life," New York, 1913. 'For character sketches of Southern Presbyterian leaders see Henry Alexander Whit« 'Southern Presbyterian Leaders, "New Yorlc, IQU.

their positions in the world as were the gentry of Britain with whom the Woodrows had had sympathetic experience before emigrating to America. The farmers and mechanics made another class, not so sharply set off as were their brethren in England, but none the less a class apart. And the Negroes and poor whites quarrelled among themselves as to which group was entitled to social precedence.^ That the Wilsons readily adapted themselves to the system as they found it is evidenced by their long residence in the region as well as their undoubted social and professional success. They became as good Southerners as if they had been to the manner born.

The home of the Wilsons in Augusta was for the time a stately house fronting on one of the best streets. Its rooms were large and its halls high and wide; and there was ample space about the place to give that dignity of which Lowell speaks when he said every home should have "fifty feet of self-respect" between it and the public highway. As was common everywhere in the old South, there were trees in abundance, a stable for the horses, and walls of brick to keep out prying eyes.

Moreover, the church across the street was the handsomest in the town and its congregation the richest. That, too, was a dignified structure surrounded by tall elms and oaks, and permeated with an atmosphere that suggested sacred things and rather tamed the spirits of men as they came within its walls. Its quiet family pews, long, carpeted aisles, high ceiling, great suspended chandeliers, and pillared galleries for the slaves made upon men's minds that wholesome impression which Doctor Wilson, both in presence and stately speech, strongly reenforced in his sermons. In the manse,

'For description of life in the South, see the author's "Cotton Kingdom" in Ths Chronicle* of America, New York, 1919.

on the shaded streets, and about the coves and corners of the church young Wilson found his playground, and got those early inspirations which are of the very essence of life.

The Wilson family circle was of that sober, even stern character so common to the South in those marvellous days which preceded her great war for independence. Morning and evening there were Bible readings and family prayers which all were prompt to attend. On Saturdays there was a stillness which presaged the Holy Sabbath itself, for the father was preparing and meditating upon the two sermons for the next day; and Mondays partook of Sundays because they were the so-called "blue days" familiar to every preacher.

To men of Doctor Wilson's creed all mankind, save the elect of God, dwelt in outer darkness or moved irresistibly upon that downward road which led to the lake of everlasting fire and brimstone. It was the preacher's appointed business to warn such as the Great Father might have ordained from the foundation of the world as partakers of the covenant and heirs of that kingdom of heaven whose antechamber was the Church militant. God was to the Presbyterian a monarch of indescribable majesty and inscrutable will whose son, Jesus of Nazareth, had been sent into the world to explain and propitiate.

Doctor Wilson was himself a fit representative of that deity which he preached from Sabbath to Sabbath. He was tall, symmetrical, and good to look upon as became the servants of God; not a man whom one would pass unnoted in the street, nor one who might be approached with familiarity. He was profoundly concerned lest his own children, of whom there were two girls and two boys, might prove to be of that unsaved mass of mankind to whom the grace of God did not extend; and he doubtless watched, as they grew to maturity, for signs that Heaven would yet open its portals to them, yet he was withal a gentle and warm-hearted man, a believer in the value of human leadership and suggestion as well as in the stern will of God handed down through the ages. It was an earnest little world, that Wilson home in which our hero first learned the ways of life.^ Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays of every week were filled with the presence of the Presbyterian deity, and on other days of the week members of the family unfailingly approached in prayer and song the throne of Almighty God, led by the father in that spirit of old which would not let go "till he obtained the blessing." To them all, as to most religious-minded Americans of that time, the world was a vale of tears, a place of preparation, in sweat and blood, for that other world to which all must surely go. During those days of growing orthodoxy in the South people generally conceived of Satan as an active moving spirit whom one must fight through a resolute faith or circumvent by propitiating the angry Jehovah.^

Bowed down beneath a load of sin.

By Satan sorely pressed; By wars without and fears within,

I come to Thee for rest.

While the home held true to the ancient faith and the parents endeavoured to bring their children into touch with the divine order of things, there was a larger influence of the church which played upon the life of the young boy who was to mean so much to a war-torn world of a later day. The

^Conversation with Mrs. Jessie B. Brower, Winnetka, LI., December '21, 1918. Mrs. Brewer is a cousin of Woodrow Wilson who hved near him during his early years.

•One of the commonly used hymns, taken from the Presbyterian Hymn:il of 1868, p. 96. In preparing this sketch of Dr. Wilson the author has consulted two members of the family circle, and he has made a careful study of the books, hymnals, and correspondence of leading preachers of the time.

American Presbyterian Church of 1860 was a very powerful organization. It was wholly under the control of its Southern leaders. The prince of them all was Doctor James H. Thornwell of the Columbia Theological Seminary who was to the religious world of the old South what Calhoun had been to the political. He was an aristocrat of the very best type and a champion of slavery and the cause of secession. A much younger man, but a powerful one, was Benjamin Morgan Palmer of New Orleans who preached on Thanksgiving, 1860, one of the remarkable sermons of American history in which he declared that God had made it the duty of the South to maintain and spread over the continent the whole Southern social system, including African slavery.^ Another leader of whom the world knows little to-day, Doctor John B. Adger, professor of church history and polity at Columbia and translator of the Bible into the Armenian tongue, was a master spirit in the religious world. North as well as South. There were many others whose names were known to the country in 1860, but there is not space here to enumerate them.

When the Civil War came and the Presbyterian Church could no longer remain non-committal on the slavery issue, separation was inevitable. Consequently, the leaders whose names I have mentioned and many others from all the seceded states gathered in Doctor Wilson's church at Augusta to organize the Southern Presbyterian Church. Thornwell, Palmer, Hoge of Virginia, and Adger made the Wilson home their headquarters and there caucused as to what was best to do, what was the best machinery for their work. Among these princes of the church, young Woodrow Wilson began to envisage the world. They were his father's intimate

iWilliam Gary Johnston, "The Life and Letters"©! Benjamin Morgan Palmer." '?06, Richraond, 1006.

friends. And the father was elected stated clerk of the Southern Presbyterian Assembly in 1865.

When Thornwell died in 1862 the Wilson family felt the blow as a personal calamity, as indeed did most men of the South where he was as well known as Henry Ward Beecher in the North. For three of the four war years Doctor Palmer, a refugee from New Orleans, was professor of pastoral theology at Columbia; and then, after a short interim. Doctor Wilson went to Columbia to take the place made famous by two of the greatest preachers the old South ever produced. Thus Woodrow Wilson's boyhood to the day when he went away to college was passed in intimate touch with the great ones of his father's church.

Of the school life of the boy not very much is to be said. The father was the best and constant teacher, although Professor Joseph T. Derry did conducta boys' school in Augusta where Woodrow Wilson, Joseph Lamar, and other sons of the gentry received instruction in Latin, Greek, and mathematics. And again in Columbia he spent the better part of three years in the school of Professor Charles Hey ward Barnwell, a member of one of the old families of Carolina. In the home Cooper's sea and forest tales were read and acted in boyish dramas. Scott and Dickens, too, had their places in the household entertainment; nor may one doubt that Shakespeare stood ever ready upon the Wilson shelves. But when all is said Wilson's father was the veritable leader and maker of the future president.

That Wilson received the best of training in home, church, and school, will not be doubted. Yet there was a subtler influence that surely made itself felt if not dominant in his early thinking. The South was in the throes of war and suffering during all his early life. He saw the soldiers go away to Virginia to fight the invading Yankees; he witnessed the numerous burials of the later terrible war years; and he saw the busy industrial life of the town devoted to the making of guns and ammunition for the armies of Lee. And when the end drew near, he felt and understood the imminent peril of Sherman's march, which barely missed the town.

As if this were not enough for a delicate' and sensitive nature, he saw Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens pass through Augusta under heavy Federal guard on their way to their dreaded prisons in the North. And he tells us himself that as a boy he stood by the side of Robert E. Lee and looked admiringly into the great man's face.^ Thorn well and Lee, two great noblemen! These ideal leaders of the boyhood days mark the beginning of the man. Wilson was a Southerner, pure and simple. The appeal of the years of trial, the influence of men around him, the poverty of that reconstruction South which is only half known to history and the gentle ways of the folk he knew made him heart and soul one of the people who were later to make him president.

There is something pathetic about those gentle and simple folk of Georgia and South Carolina in the days of Wilson's boyhood, the period of 1865 to 1876. They had fought the great fight; their churchyards were filled with their dead heroes; the wealth that had once proclaimed them the rich and the envied of the United States had gone up in smoke; and their former slaves sat in the seats of Calhoun and Stephens and Jefferson Davis, making laws for proud commonwealths and equalizing the fortunes of the people. Sixteen blocks of Columbia's best homes were little more than waste land when young Wilson attended Mr. Barnwell's school and when his father taught pastoral theology to the young

>Aii addre^ delivered at the University of North Carolina, January 19, 1909. University of Sorti Carolina Rtcord. No. 73, pp. i-il.

n WOODROW WILSON AND HIS WORK

preachers of the impoverished South. Whatever men may say of the righteous character of our American Civil War. brave men can never look with aught but shame upon the policy of the Government which outraged the helpless and sought to wreak vengeance upon a beaten people.^

The difficulty with war as a policy is that it cannot conquer the spirits of men; and the older men of the South to-day, fifty years after the surrender of Lee, still think of the North as a hostile section bent on exploitation of the rest of the country. With such ideas deeply implanted in his mind and saturated with the traditional history of his section, young Woodrow Wilson, lean-looking and rather overgroT\Ti, went away, in 1874, for the first time to college. It was to Davidson College in the foothills of the North Carolina mountains, a pleasant place, an old school founded by the followers of good Doctor Witherspoon of Princeton and still under the strictest Presbyterian control. The professors were all staunch believers in the Genevan reformer and the students were chips off old Presbyterian blocks. It was also quite as Southern in character as General D. H. Hill, one of its patrons, could have wished. There was little chance that a Christian boy or a Southern youth could go wrong there.

Nor did Woodrow Wilson try to go wrong. He conned his classics, mathematics, and philosophy, sacred and profane, after the manner of his now departed grandfather, Thomas Woodrow. There were firewood to chop and water to bring; rooms to set to rights and college debating societies to attend. And he attended to all these things. Baseball, too, had a pull for him and he loved a race. But his health was none too robust and doubtless the fare at the country boarding places was not quite to his way of living. His waft a

»E. p. Oberholtser, "History of the United SUtes," Chapter 11.

nervous nature and he broke under the strain. In the spring of 1875 he returned to his father's roof, now the Presbyterian manse in Wilmington, North CaroHna, whither the theologian of Columbia had meanwhile retreated in order to take up the work of pastor again.

In Wilmington there were interesting things for a boy, the long wharf where great ships loaded for foreign parts, where sailors told marvellous stories of pirates, long since dead, that used to sail into the harbours and rob the king's ships before they left their moorings; of the terrible battles between Yankees and rebels for the control of the place, and of bold blockade runners who used to feed guns and clothing and shells to the Confederate armies in Virginia. Altogether it was a great place for a dreamy young man who had never seen the ocean; but Wilson did more than listen to sea tales and garner war stories.^

He spent a year in Wilmington making up his mind what to do next and reading serious books that had already become his passion. He had already commenced to take an interest in British politics and to admire William E. Gladstone, almost an ideal statesman to him. It was plain that he must go to college again. And in September, 1875, he took the Wilmington and Weldon train for Washington and thence to Princeton where his father had been a student and where he was to spend a great part of his life.

It was as natural for Wilson to go to Princeton as it is for young English gentlemen to go to Oxford. It was an old institution founded before the middle of the eighteenth century, a school of the prophets for the South and West for more than a hundred years. Thence had come Davies and Stanhope Smith, Moses Waddell and later Robert Breckinridge. There

'President Wilson has said since these lines were written that he was almost led to enter upon the life of a seaman while at Wilmington.

Thornwell and Adger had studied, and the great Edwards for a short time had taught things fit for the gods to contemplate. There James Madison had been a student, and senators and judges of the United States had learned the ways of government.

Moreover, his father's teacher, the famous Doctor Charles Hodge, was still there. The Alexanders, so well known to every Presbyterian in the country, and J. S. Hart, the maker of books and founder of the Sunday School Times, and Joseph Henry, famous for experiments in physics, not to mention the great Doctor McCosh, philosopher and president of the College, all drew a young man like Wilson who leaned upon his father for counsel and kept in touch with the world which his father knew best.^

Nor can there be doubt that the boy was welcome. He came from good old stock. He was nearly twenty years old and mature for his years; in fact, Woodrow Wilson, like Thomas Jefferson, was never immature; he took promptly to his books if indeed it can be said that he ever left them.

There was little opportunity to do anything else. The atmosphere at Princeton was not unlike that of Davidson. The professors were all of the earnest character of Christian ministers. There were prayers every morning to which the boys must contribute their presence; the sermons and the revivals made it clear that to go astray must be the purpose, not a mere slip of the student; and the boys were of the same social stratum with their teachers, coming as they did, in the main, from earnest Presbyterian homes, sons themselves of ministers and laymen of the Church.-

Of the formal side of Woodrow Wilson's training at

'"Catalogue of all Who Have Held Offic-e in or Have Received Degrees from theColiegeol New Jersey," Princeton University Press, 1896. '"Princeton," by Varuum Lansing Collins, New York, 1914, Chapters V and VI.

Princeton little more need be said than that he gave sufficient attention to the classics, to mathematics, and the budding sciences to satisfy his teachers. He did not distinguish himself; perhaps his mind was not so evenly set as to enable him to "carry" all his classes with high distinction. Perhaps he did not feel the need of the endless round of the ancient quadrivium and its modern annexes. Admirable as had been his grandfather's learning and the evenness of the father's accomplishments, Wilson was a young man who stood upon his own feet. Wlien he graduated he ranked forty-one in a class of a hundred and twenty-two, which meant that he barely attained "honours."

Of more importance perhaps is the record which Wilson made in the Whig Hall, a literary and debating society into which Southern students generally drifted. It was in this organization that a young man showed his mettle, his initiative. On more than one occasion he led in the competition for honours, the most notable of which was his unprecedented conduct when he was appointed as one of the representatives of his society to debate with representatives of the rival society for the award of a coveted prize. The custom was to have the subject submitted to the debaters at the beginning of the contest. Sides were determined by lot. On this occasion it fell to the lot of Wilson to defend the protective tariff as against the principle of free trade. He flatly declined the contest, preferring to have his society lose the prize and himself the highest honour of his college course to defending what he considered an immoral thing.

Like Emerson at Harvard, many years before, Wilson was^not a little disposed to academic anarchy. He loved tlie library more than he did the professors' lecture rooms; and he sought to try his own powers as a writer rather than to sharpen his wits by painful exercise in grammar and rhetoric.

He had already studied British pubUc men before he left home. Now he published a sketch of Prince Bismarck, the German chancellor, in which he manifested the usual American tendency of those years to applaud things German, although he did not fail to point out the dangers of autocratic and unscrupulous methods. In better form was a study of Chatham which closed with the remark of Macaulay, I believe, that "William Pitt was a noble statesman, the earl of Chatham a noble ruin."

These and other articles, which show more than mere undergraduate abilities, appeared in the Nassau Literary Magazine, a students' periodical of recognized merit. But another interest was that of the growing department of athletics, as that division of college activity soon came to be called. In this he won a place on baseball teams and became student director of athletic sports. Close akin to this was his elevation by his fellows to the editorial management of a new student publication known as The Princetonian, a biweekly devoted to the news of the campus.

There were no upper class clubs then at Princeton, in the sense at least of later years, but Wilson did eat with the "Alligators," a group of similar spirits, and he "chummed" with men of his own tastes; and perhaps idled just a bit; but his greater interest in his articles for the college journals, his part in the management of athletics, and his incursions into the field of British politics saved him from the loitering good-fellow habit that was soon to lead many Princeton men into the exclusive club life of 1900.

The best fruit of his earnest studies outside the curriculum was seen in a work of his senior year — an article pubhshed in the International Revieio of 1879. In this first mature output of his mind one sees the germ of his later political reforms in the United States. It has been rare that a young man of twenty-three, and still in college, has been able to subject his own government to a scrutiny as objective and scientific in method as Wilson did that of the United States. Possibly his Southern training and aloofness from all things national was a factor, or was it his British descent?

At any rate, he made an analysis of the method and procedure of Congress in which the secret committee system was unerringly pointed to as a fruitful source of the shameless scandals of the time.^ Instead of ranting at the facts and the ruthless exploitation of the people by the people's chosen representatives, he uncovered the cause — the absence of responsible leadership and the failure to apply open methods in laying tariffs and fixing taxes. The article in the International was an indictment of congressional government and a vindication of the British system. It was Wilson's farewell to undergraduate life; it was his debut into the world of scholarship, although he was hardly aware of the fact. He was a man without knowing it.

From Princeton he went to the University of Virginia to study law under the famous John Minor. There again he joined one of the debating societies, the Jeffersonian, and distinctly avowed himself a Democrat in the act. He wrote for the University Magazine, as he had done at Princeton, and he defended the impopular cause of the Roman church in the United States, not an easy thing for the son and grandson of Scotch Presbyterian preachers to do. But Gladstone and John Bright still occupied his attention and he pubUshed studies of them at Virginia.

But the law was Wilson's business, and Doctor John Minor, his teacher, was a hard taskmaster. Nearly a year Wilson

•One does well here to read and compare Roosevelt's first book, "The Naval War of 1818," 188S| for the chasm-wide difference in points of view of these greatest of American leaders of our thne.

studied as he had never studied at Princeton, and he was apparently on the way to success as a candidate for a law degree when indigestion overtook him and he left the University for home. He remained in Wilmington for a considerable time nursing his health and reading in that discursive manner which had already become a habit with him. Too old to continue under his father's roof much longer and drawn toward a public career, he knew no better than hastily to finish his preliminary studies in law, take his degree at the University, and run away to some town to try his luck.^

He went to Atlanta in May, 1882, with his license in his pocket and, finding another young aspirant at hand, formed a partnership. The sign read "Renick and Wilson, Attorneys at Law," and it was hung out at 48 Marietta Street. This location in Atlanta was another of those evidences of Wilson's attachments; he was a Georgian, like his father and many others of his kindred. Atlanta was, therefore, the place for him to begin. Still, practice and distinction and wealth were not apt to come to a young lawyer who did not stick to the law above everything else. And that Wilson could not do.

He knew the use of the pen too well. And the idea of that article in the International still haunted him. He could not help elaborating it during the long hours when litigants kept vigilantly away from his doors and other young men like Hoke Smith enjoyed thedistinctionof baiting corporations and fighting spectacular cases through the courts.- There can be no doubt that Wilson was approaching mature manhood without great promise of that success and distinction which had been the rule with his immediate forebears.