Worldmaking (15 page)

With remarkable speed and purpose, Wilson began researching and writing his Ph.D. as a book, turning the conventional way of establishing a scholarly reputation on its head. He began writing in January 1884, finished the manuscript in September, and the book was accepted quickly and published by Houghton Mifflin in January 1885. That just one year elapsed between Wilson first putting pen to paper and the book appearing might suggest a facile, error-strewn effort. But
Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics
was a substantial piece of scholarship for a writer of any age, let alone a second-year graduate student with a history of dyslexia. The book was reviewed to acclaim and retains its status today as a seminal work of American political analysis, although its lack of primary sources remains a major shortcoming in a research culture still dominated by the Germanic ideal. One reviewer gushed that the book represented “the best critical writing on the American constitution which has appeared since the ‘Federalist' papers.”
27
It propelled Wilson toward a successful academic career.

With analytical verve,
Congressional Government
developed many of the core assumptions that informed his earlier article on the merits of cabinet government. The crux of Wilson's argument, as described by the historian John A. Thompson, is that “American government suffered in many ways from a lack of a clear and responsible center of authority like the British cabinet.”
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To remedy deficiencies in the Constitution, Wilson believed that aspects of the British system had to be imported, although his argument was not as prescriptive as that presented in his earlier article. “I have abandoned the evangelical for the exegetical—so to speak,” Wilson informed a friend.
29
Through his survey of the U.S. political system, Wilson identified the Founding Fathers' sectional compromise that created the pivotal system of “checks and balances” as the greatest impediment to effective government. He compared the three branches of American government unfavorably with the British parliamentary system, which privileged action and accountability over the requirement that executive energy be dampened through countervailing power bases. The world had become too complex for America's unwieldy political system to navigate—it had to be rationalized and rendered more efficient. To achieve this goal, as the historian John G. Gunnell writes, Wilson believed that “the social scientist, like the statesman, was to play a crucial role.”
30

While Wilson spends comparatively little time discussing foreign policy in the book, he elaborated on this critical executive function in a follow-up work,
Constitutional Government in the United States
, in a revealing passage that portended later political setbacks:

The initiative in foreign affairs, which the President possesses without any restriction whatever, is virtually the power to control them absolutely. The President cannot control a treaty with a foreign power without the consent of the Senate, but he may guide every step of diplomacy, and to guide diplomacy is to determine what treaties must be made, if the faith and prestige of the government are to be maintained. He need disclose no step of negotiation until it is complete, and when in any critical matter it is completed the government is virtually committed. Whatever its disinclination, the Senate may feel itself committed also.
31

Streamlining and expediting the process of government was the political reform close to Wilson's heart, and
Congressional Government
accomplished his central aim in reaching out to the general reader and establishing a national reputation. Yet with that goal achieved, Wilson never again wrote a book or article that might be deemed intellectually pathbreaking. He wanted to look after his wife and three daughters in some style and recognized that he possessed the literary gifts to do so. He followed up his scholarly debut with the five-volume
A History of the American People
, which Wilson described frankly as a “high-class pot boiler.”
32
Other minor works followed, which sank without academic trace but attracted a loyal following beyond the university. Wilson, like Mahan, drew a substantial amount of his income from frequent royalty checks, happily oblivious of the opprobrium of Humboldtian research scholars.

Congressional Government
set Wilson on a swift rise through the ranks of American universities. He took a job at Bryn Mawr College in 1885, moved to Wesleyan College in 1888, and returned to his alma mater two years later to assume a professorship in jurisprudence and political economy. Wilson was a popular figure on the Princeton campus, with colleagues and students alike, and his reputation as a scholar—strong but fading—and as a deft and forceful administrator, led the universities of Illinois and Virginia to offer him the presidencies of their institutions. Wilson remained loyal to Princeton, however, and was in turn rewarded by significant salary increases that eventually made him its highest-paid professor. In 1902, Wilson's gifts as a leader landed him the academic job he valued the most: the presidency of Princeton.

Wilson's second stint at Princeton was the happiest time of his life.
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Assuming the head of one of America's most venerable institutions provided a platform for him to convey larger messages on education, politics, and society to a wide audience. But Wilson also made multiple enemies during his tenure. He was determined to raise academic standards, to challenge the centrality of the eating clubs and the tradition of the gentleman's C, to hire fresh talent to inject scholarly rigor into a parochial faculty, and to make Princeton equal to Harvard and Yale in respect to academic reputation and endowment.
34
He was only partly successful in embedding meritocratic principles—in respect to staff recruitment and student attainment—in a university that had traded for too long on past glories. His campaign for reform provoked the ire of entrenched elites who liked things the way they were and did not care for the sanctimonious manner in which this Virginian upstart went about his task.

Wilson also established himself as something of a public intellectual (a term that had not yet entered the lexicon), a major educational figure whose writings and speeches entered the national consciousness. He made his ultimate ambitions clear on the eve of his Princeton inaugural address when he remarked to his wife, “I feel like a new prime minister getting ready to address his constituents.”
35
The subjects Wilson discussed publicly ranged widely, focusing primarily on domestic reform—both elite political and grassroots social. Yet foreign affairs also came to interest him more than previously. In 1906, for example, Wilson delivered a high-profile speech in which he observed that America's vast latent energy would propel its strength and ideals outward: “Soon … the shores of Europe and then Autocratic Europe shall hear us knocking at their back door, demanding admittance for American ideas, customs and arts.”
36
Significantly, Wilson also recognized that “the President can never again be the mere domestic figure he has been throughout so large a part of our history. The nation has risen to the first rank in power and resources … Our President must always, henceforth, be one of the great powers of the world, whether he act greatly and wisely or not.”
37

Crucially, Wilson believed that his discipline of political science could play a central role in improving the nation's domestic and foreign policies. In 1909–1910, Wilson served as president of the American Political Science Association. During his presidential address, he expressed hope that the political scientist, “out of his full store of truth, discovered by patient inquiry, dispassionate exposition, fearless analysis and frank inference [would] enrich the thinking and clarify the vision of the statesman of action.”
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Wilson's demonstrated talent as a political scientist and vast potential as a “statesman of action” was not lost on him. He embodied the nexus between the social sciences and politics, meaning he was peculiarly well positioned to practice a new kind of leadership.

Wilson's wider political ambitions were made clear in a sharply progressive speech he delivered in Pittsburgh in February 1910. Turning to the problems that beset the institution he led, and that were common to many other universities besides, Wilson said that the “colleges are in the same dangerous position as the churches … They serve the classes not the masses.” In his rousing peroration he said he had “dedicated every power that there is within me to bring to the colleges that I have anything to do with to an absolutely democratic regeneration in spirit.”
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It was rhetorical flourishes like these that led Democratic strategists in New Jersey to identify the potential that would take Wilson first to the governor's mansion in Trenton and then to the White House. Two prominent individuals in the party—Colonel George Harvey, editor of
Harper's Weekly
, and former New Jersey senator James Smith—urged Wilson to run for the governorship of New Jersey in 1910 as a preliminary to running for the presidency two years later. Wilson's interest was piqued immediately. He wrote to Mary Peck that “this is what I was meant for, this rough and tumble of the political arena. My instinct all turns that way.”
40
The Democrats' carefully laid plans were realized when Wilson prevailed in New Jersey and then nationally in 1912 against Roosevelt and Taft. It was a meteoric rise—a two-year governorship and then straight to the White House—that has not been repeated. It was testament to his ambition as much as to his capabilities.

*   *   *

On Election Day, 6.3 million Americans cast their vote for Wilson, 4.1 million for Roosevelt, 3.5 million for Taft, and 900,000 for Debs. The electoral college, which is unkind to third-party candidates, translated these results into 435 votes for Wilson, 88 for Roosevelt, 8 for the unfortunate Taft, and none for Debs. Wilson had secured a comprehensive victory with just 43 percent of the popular vote. A united Republican Party would have certainly secured Taft's reelection, but Roosevelt was not to be denied denying Taft, who in turn was consoled by denying Roosevelt. It was a peculiar election all around. Taft and Roosevelt had foreseen their fate well in advance and both were gracious in defeat. As Roosevelt observed of Wilson, “I think him a very adroit man; I do not think he has any fixity of conviction.”
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Roosevelt's assessment was informed by good manners, but it was also shaped by recognition that he and Wilson shared a common Progressivism on domestic politics. As the early Wilson biographer William Allen White observed, “Between the New Nationalism and the New Freedom was that fantastic imaginary gulf that always has existed between tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee.”
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Foreign policy was a different matter entirely, however, and it took little time for Roosevelt to retract his generous assessment, viewing Wilson as being driven by a misguided “fixity of conviction” in the transformative power of good intentions.

At that stage, Wilson could scarcely have visualized what his foreign-policy agenda might look like—he was necessarily reactive. Up to 1912, his most important recorded statement on foreign affairs related to his belief that the president possessed absolute power in respect to diplomacy. This lack of sustained interest is comprehensible in light of the fact that the outside world scarcely registered among the electorate and the candidates during the campaign. The only international issue of note covered comprehensively by the media related to the revolution in neighboring Mexico, and Wilson said very little on that subject or, indeed, on the increasing tensions in Europe. Wilson would craft his foreign policies on the job, although certain traits established through his academic career would become apparent. With a sense of foreboding, perhaps, a few days after the election Wilson remarked to a former colleague at Princeton, the biologist Edwin Grant Conklin, that “it would be an irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign problems, for all my preparation has been in domestic matters.”
43

As the transitional period between Election Day and the inauguration had yet to be shortened, Woodrow Wilson was sworn in as the twenty-eighth president of the United States on March 4, 1913. It was an overcast but uncommonly mild day, with the first floral signs of spring making their appearance. A jovial President Taft welcomed the Wilson family to the White House graciously and with good humor—relieved perhaps not to have to vacate the premises to Roosevelt's tender care—before he accompanied Wilson to the inaugural dais on Capitol Hill in a grand horse-drawn carriage. As the president and president-elect surveyed the crowds from the stand, Wilson beckoned the audience, positioned some distance away, closer. “Let the people come forward,” he declared, before taking his oath of office and delivering his inaugural address:

This is not a day of triumph; it is a day of dedication. Here muster, not the forces of party, but the forces of humanity. Men's hearts wait upon us; men's lives hang in the balance; men's hopes call upon us to say what we will do. Who shall live up to the great trust? Who dares fail to try? I summon all honest men, all patriotic, all forward-looking men, to my side. God helping me, I will not fail them, if they will but counsel and sustain me!
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The address was pitch-perfect for an incoming president who lacked a plurality of the popular vote. Wilson's focus was entirely domestic, covering issues such as tariff reduction, banking reform, and antitrust legislation, which the new president planned to move quickly through a Democratic-controlled Congress. Foreign policy was a lacuna in the speech, just as it was throughout the campaign.