Worldmaking (14 page)

In many ways, Wilson found Princeton as uninspiring as Davidson. His teachers failed to rouse his enthusiasm, although he read voraciously in private and threw himself into the abundant opportunities for extracurricular activity. He joined the American Whig Society, founded a debating club, became editor of the student newspaper,
The Princetonian
, and secured admission into one of the less socially exclusive eating clubs, the Alligators. As editor of
The Princetonian
, Wilson made his own priorities as a student clear: dispensing advice on how to improve the underperforming football team and campaigning for debate to be introduced into the university's formal curriculum. But beyond these pet passions, Wilson's narrow reading as a teenager had limited his intellectual horizons, leading him to flounder when he was forced outside his comfort zone. In his shorthand diary on June 15, 1876, he complained that he was compelled to study “Xenophon's Memorabilia for examinations all the afternoon and evening. Very stupid work.” A couple of days later, he took exception to another scholarly discipline in similarly banal terms: “Studied geometry from 8 to 10—very stupid work indeed.”
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In appearance, Wilson was tall, slightly ungainly in the manner of Abraham Lincoln, and stern in countenance, conforming in later years with his father's description of him as a baby. Raymond B. Fosdick, who came to know Wilson well as an adviser at the Paris Peace Conference, penned a marvelous physical description that captures Wilson as well at age sixteen as sixty; photographs of Wilson at both ages show a remarkable physical constancy:

Wilson on first appearance was not what would be called a handsome man. Indeed he was curiously homely. He had what he himself described as a “horse face”—a long, thin and generally unsmiling visage with strong jaws. He had also an extraordinarily keen gaze, which could sometimes be disconcerting. But his eyes were nonetheless his best feature; they could light up with humor and kindliness, and his whole face would soften as it reflected his thoughts.
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Wilson lamented the fact that he resembled his angular mother rather than his conventionally handsome father. His high cheekbones, slightly hooked nose, firm jaw, and impassive blue eyes conveyed a forbidding aspect. Yet the private Wilson ran counter to appearances. Fosdick recalls Wilson as “a superb raconteur, with an amazing fund of anecdotes and stories. Indeed his dialect stories, told in Scotch, Irish, or Negro accents, were often side-splitting…”
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With friends and family, Wilson was gregarious, enjoying emotional and physical intimacy with those he loved. At work, Wilson's drive and focus allowed him to be hugely productive and led some who observed his working persona to suspect him of being one-track and ascetic. What many missed was how deftly Wilson disentangled his private and working lives, allowing him to thrive in both spheres. This self-discipline enabled him to achieve as much as he did with few complaints of neglect from those closest to him.

At Princeton, Wilson's intellect was shaped through reading philosophers such as John Locke and Edmund Burke, who elevated the sanctity of private property and held that judicious, enduring political reform was necessarily incremental. He was also greatly influenced by the British journalist Walter Bagehot (later venerated as a constitutional scholar) and located in the British unitary government an ideal polity, which he compared favorably to America's purposefully unwieldy system. Wilson found Burke's
Reflections on the Revolution in France
compelling in its denunciation of revolution based on well-meaning abstractions. Yet he admired the Parliament in which Burke was active for the speed and efficiency with which legislation could be debated and enacted—Britain represented an orderly, well-governed middle ground between French mercurialness and American inertia. Like Mahan, the Founding Father whom Wilson revered above others was Alexander Hamilton, another Anglophile who believed the federal government, not the states, must possess preponderant political power, and that government works best when unified.

Shortly after his graduation in 1879, Wilson's article “Cabinet Government in the United States” appeared in the Boston-based journal
International Review.
It called for a stronger connection between the cabinet and Congress, as was the case in Britain, to improve cabinet performance by subjecting its members to greater oversight. Wilson believed the cabinet should be members of Congress, not appointed from outside. He dismissed the separation of powers as “not in accord with the true spirit” of Anglo-American institutions and argued that his proposals would streamline government decision making to America's enduring advantage. The editor of the journal who accepted this piece was Henry Cabot Lodge, then an instructor at Harvard (and a fellow worshiper of Alexander Hamilton), who would later find Wilson's views less congenial. But Wilson said or wrote very little on foreign policy, save for his belief that the president's power should be unconstrained in those fast-moving matters of war and diplomacy.

It is of course impossible to distill the essence of Wilson's intellect and worldview without considering his religion. As the son, grandson, and nephew of Presbyterian ministers, Wilson could scarcely avoid inheriting his family's religiosity, which he did completely, deriving his belief system from three sources: the Shorter Catechism, the Presbyterian scholastics, and his father's learned sermons. As Wilson's most distinguished biographer, Arthur S. Link, puts it:

The foundations of all of Wilson's political thinking were the religious and ethical beliefs and values that he inherited from the Christian tradition and from his own Presbyterian theology. In matters of basic Christian faith, Wilson was like a little child, never doubting, always believing, and drawing spiritual sustenance from Bible reading, church attendance, and prayer … He believed in a sovereign God, just and stern as well as loving; in a moral universe, the rules of which ruled nations as well as men.
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Wilson was a predestinarian, believing that God controlled history and used men and nations to serve a grand purpose. Indeed, throughout his career Wilson exhibited a marked tendency to conflate his favored causes with the will of God, leading Sigmund Freud to diagnose him with a messiah complex—without ever meeting him—in a polemical study coauthored with the diplomat William Bullitt.
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Yet Wilson's views were in the mainstream of Protestantism and unexceptional for a man of his era. The Presbyterianism in which Wilson was steeped was progressive and worldly, with lifelong educational self-improvement as a central component. His greatly respected paternal uncle, James Woodrow, had taught Darwin's theory of evolution at the Columbia Theological Seminary. Although he lost his job in the process, Uncle James's willingness to be led by his intellect—disentangling faith from science—was a trait Wilson admired. On the challenges that Charles Darwin's theory posed to believers, Wilson confided to his diary, “I
saw
the intellectual difficulties, but I was not
troubled
by them: they seemed to have no connection with my faith in the essentials of the religion I had been taught … I am capable, it would seem, of being satisfied spiritually without being satisfied intellectually.”
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Wilson's contentment in leaving hanging threads was certainly preferable to the common response from believers of theological absolutism. There was an openness and complexity to Wilson's thought that his detractors, Freud most notably, fail to credit.

Wilson's religion and political value system directly informed his early views on foreign policy. Whereas Mahan had written little on the merits of democracy, and viewed the Anglophone world as politically and economically unique, Wilson's reading of the Enlightenment philosophes at Princeton led him to view elected government as the ideal polity and to further believe that all nations could benefit from the economic, political, social, and cultural advantages that accompanied democracy's embrace. His inclusive Universalist Presbyterianism, furthermore, led him to believe that all people held the potential to assume the attributes that Wilson conceded, at that stage, Anglo-Saxons possessed in greater quantity than other ethnicities. Time and patience were essential if political transformations were to endure.

Wilson was similar to Mahan in that he reviled slavery but was steeped in the casual racism prevalent in that era. Those of African descent faced the longest journey to cognitive and political maturity, Wilson believed, although he criticized those who deployed flawed scientific measures such as cranial measurements to rationalize a racial pecking order. He was opposed to woman suffrage, believing that the vitality of the family would be undermined if women were granted the right to vote. By today's standards Wilson appears reactionary. But in late-nineteenth-century America, his Universalism—his belief expressed later that “when properly directed, there is no people not fitted for self-government”—placed him near the vanguard of liberal, progressive thought.
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Wilson's taciturnity made him a difficult man to read, but the value system that informed his life work was infused with positivity. Where Mahan was largely pessimistic on the future course of international relations, Wilson was more optimistic—a Kant to Mahan's Hobbes—and he believed that all people, given time and encouragement, were heading toward the same prosperous and peaceable destination.

Wilson's geopolitical Universalism was one of the factors that led him to break with fellow Democrats and offer wholehearted support for war with Spain in 1898. Wilson believed that defeating Spain and assuming control of the Philippines, Guam, and Hawaii was the surest way to prevent Germany and Russia from projecting their power into the Pacific—an identifiably Mahanian rationale. He also followed Mahan and Senator Albert J. Beveridge in identifying a clear economic justification for expanding American power abroad: trade follows colonial acquisition and would be greatly facilitated by the acquisition of geographically dispersed coaling stations and deep-water harbors.

But Wilson differed with Mahan in offering a grander reason for holding on to the Philippines in the medium term, believing that America possessed a special duty to lead hitherto blighted nations toward democracy and prosperity; catalyzing this dynamic was an end in itself. While Britain was a political exemplar and beacon of stability, the people of the United States, as Wilson described them, were something more: “custodians of the spirit of righteousness, of the spirit of equal-handed justice, of the spirit of hope which believes in the perfectibility of the law with the perfectibility of human life itself.”
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Fulfilling America's potential required more than perfecting the nation itself and persuading by example. The United States alone could spearhead the diffusion of freedom, prosperity, and democracy that in time would render armed conflict anachronistic. Wilson joked that the “beauty about a Scotch-Irishman is that he not only thinks he is right, but knows he is right. And I have not departed from the faith of my ancestors.”
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On the imperative that America owed the world its leadership, his belief was absolute.

*   *   *

Wilson graduated from Princeton with no clear sense of how to fulfill the political ambitions he had acquired in college. Prodded in the direction of law by his father, Wilson enrolled at the University of Virginia, but he quickly came to view law as uncongenial. While Wilson had necessarily engaged himself in rote learning to overcome his early learning difficulties, Princeton had broadened his intellectual horizons, leading him to revel in the creative impulse, particularly in the fields of literature and history. “I wish now to record the confession that I am most terribly bored by the noble study of law sometimes,” Wilson wrote to a friend in 1879. “I think that it is the want of variety that disgusts me … When one has nothing but Law, served in all its dryness, set before him from one week's end to another, for month after month and for quarter after quarter, he tires of this uniformity of diet.”
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Wilson dropped out of law school after eighteen months but, in that less professionalized era, still managed to establish himself as one half of an Atlanta law firm, Renick and Wilson, where the practicalities of being a lawyer bored him just as much as the process of mastering the subject. A concerned Joseph Wilson warned his increasingly disenchanted son to “stick to the law and its prospects be they ever so depressing or disgusting.” He worried that Woodrow, as he now preferred to be called, would give up a lucrative profession to pursue a “mere literary career.”
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But his entreaties were to no avail; Wilson had no desire to persist in a job he disliked for pecuniary advantage alone. He abandoned the security of law and decided instead to pursue an academic career, concluding that “a professorship was the only feasible place for me.”
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Wilson commenced his doctoral studies in political science in 1883 at Johns Hopkins, the first university in the United States to cite research as its founding purpose, and an institution widely regarded as possessing the finest Ph.D. program in the nation. It was the process of thinking and writing, not the teaching element, that propelled Wilson toward this path. In this respect he conformed to the German research ideal that privileged the production of fresh knowledge over the education of undergraduates—a task in which anyone with enthusiasm and a relevant bachelor's degree could engage. But in other respects he diverged from the Teutonic veneration of narrow professionalization. Like Mahan, Wilson was determined to reach a general audience, not just write scholarly monographs with small print runs and paltry royalties. He was similarly unenthusiastic about the rigors of archival research. To his wife, Ellen, Wilson confided in 1884 that “I want to write books which will be read by the great host who don't wear spectacles—whose eyes are young and unlearned!”
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He believed his scholarship could serve a pedagogical function and secure him a national reputation as a compelling and relevant thinker, while his lectures would allow him to further hone his rhetorical skills. Wilson viewed an academic career as the best available path open to him, but it was always pursued with a view to becoming a politician—to make history, not to write it, as the cliché goes.