Woodrow Wilson: A Medical and Psychological Biography. Supplementary Volume to The Papers of Woodrow Wilson

by Edwin A. Weinstein

Overview

Throughout this narrative the author combines the historical material with an expert understanding of Wilson's ailments to point out ways in which the state of his health changed the course of national and international events.

Originally published in 1981.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691642536
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #534
Pages:	434
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.20(d)

Read an Excerpt

Woodrow Wilson

A Medical and Psychological Biography

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By Edwin A. Weinstein

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1981 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-04683-9

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CHAPTER 1

Family and Boyhood

Woodrow Wilson's family had its roots in Scotland and northern Ireland. His father, Joseph Ruggles Wilson, was born in Steubenville, Ohio, in 1822. He was the youngest of the seven sons of James Wilson (there were also three daughters), an immigrant from Ulster, who became a printer and newspaper editor in Philadelphia and went on to an active career as an editor, publisher, businessman, and judge in Ohio. A Jeffersonian Republican and then a Whig, James Wilson took part in many bitter political struggles and indulged in the colorful rhetoric of the day. He supported the candidacy of William Henry Harrison in 1840 and attacked the incumbent Democrats as "Goths & Vandals" who had to be pulled down from their high places. Judge Wilson, after a term in the Ohio legislature in 1816 and a long career as a Whig partisan, tried to set up his sons in business and find political positions for them. To his regret, he was unable to provide for his youngest boys.

Joseph Ruggles Wilson learned his father's printer's trade and then taught school briefly. He attended Jefferson (now Washington and Jefferson) College and then studied for the ministry at Western Theological Seminary in Pittsburgh and Princeton Theological Seminary. One of Wilson's teachers at Princeton was the physicist Joseph Henry, later the first director of the Smithsonian Institution. Wilson was ordained by Ohio Presbytery in 1849. In the same year he married Janet Woodrow, daughter of a Presbyterian minister. Joseph R. Wilson successively served two small congregations and eked out a living by teaching rhetoric at Jefferson College and natural science at Hampden-Sydney College. In 1855, he accepted a call from the Presbyterian Church of Staunton, Virginia. Marion Wilson, the first child, was born on October 20,1851; Annie Josephine Wilson, on September 8, 1853. Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born in Staunton on December 29, 1856.

From the Staunton pastorate, Joseph R. Wilson rose rapidly in the Presbyterian ministry. In 1858, the family moved to Augusta, Georgia, where Wilson occupied one of the most important pulpits in the South. In the same year, he received the degree of Doctor of Divinity from Oglethorpe University. Other honors and offices followed. After the sectional split in the Presbyterian Church in 1861, Dr. Wilson was one of the founders of the southern church and was elected permanent clerk of its General Assembly. In 1865, he became stated clerk, the denomination's chief executive officer, a post he held until 1898. In 1870, he was elected Professor of Evangelical Theology and Sacred Rhetoric at the Columbia (South Carolina) Theological Seminary; at the same time, he became stated supply (temporary minister) of the First Presbyterian Church of Columbia. In 1874, he moved to the First Presbyterian Church of Wilmington, North Carolina, where he served for fourteen years.

While nothing is known of James Wilson's ancestry, Woodrow Wilson's maternal grandfather, the Rev. Mr. Thomas Woodrow, came from a long line of Scottish Presbyterian ministers. He was a graduate of Glasgow University and went from Scotland to a church in Carlisle, England, where he served for fifteen years. Woodrow Wilson's mother, Janet (always called Jessie or Jeanie), was born in Carlisle in 1830, the fifth of eight children. In 1835, the family emigrated to America, where Jessie's mother died soon after their arrival. The children were cared for by their mother's sister, Isabella Williamson, whom Thomas Woodrow soon married. Despite his scholarly background and education, Woodrow did not have a distinguished career in America. He preached first in Poughkeepsie, New York, then in Brockville, Ontario, and, in 1837, became pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Chillicothe, Ohio. The Presbyterian Church was rent by conflicts over doctrinal standards and slavery, and Woodrow resigned in 1848, giving ill health as the reason. The remainder of his career he spent in small country churches. Woodrow Wilson remembered his Grandfather Woodrow, who preached once in his father's church, a patriarch with a strong Scots accent, who balanced a pair of borrowed glasses on his nose and never paused in his swift-flowing discourse. He died in 1877.

An important influence on Woodrow Wilson was James Woodrow, a maternal uncle. He was a distinguished scientist who became Professor of Natural Science in Connection with Revelation at the Columbia Theological Seminary. James Woodrow had studied under Louis Agassiz at Harvard and received the Ph.D. degree from Heidelberg. Who's Who in America for 1906-1907 lists him as an associate of the Victoria Institute of London and of Isis of Dresden, and as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the International Congress of Geologists. Dr. Woodrow was a strong supporter of the theory of evolution; he believed that science was a means of revealing God's truth. During the Civil War he served as the chief of the chemical laboratory of the Confederate Army. After the war, he opened a printing office for books, lawyers' briefs, college catalogues, and church papers; he also edited and published two Presbyterian journals. Among other church offices, he served as moderator of the synods of Georgia and South Carolina and was executive officer of the southern Presbyterian General Assembly's Foreign Mission Board. Because of his teaching of evolution, he was tried for heresy (though never convicted) and dismissed from the Columbia Theological Seminary. Afterward he became president both of a bank and of South Carolina College (now the University of South Carolina). He died in 1907.

Woodrow Wilson was extremely proud of his Scots Presbyterian ancestry. At Bryn Mawr College, he boasted to students that anyone who had amounted to anything in American politics was of Scotch-Irish descent. Perhaps jokingly, he told a group of New Englanders that every line of strength in the history of the world was one colored by Scotch-Irish blood. Wilson gloried in the Scottish Presbyterians' fight for religious liberty and was fond of evoking the picture of the signing of the Covenant on a tombstone in Greyfriars Church in Edinburgh. During his presidency, he declared: "The stern Covenanter tradition that is behind me sends many an echo down the years."

Joseph Ruggles Wilson was an orthodox Calvinist who believed in an ordered universe, ruled by a God who had established a covenant of grace with his people, in which forgiveness of sins was exchanged for submission to His will. God used men for His purposes and presided over all things. The key to happiness and success lay in the sense of personal worth gained from ethical and moral achievement in God's service. The good Christian was a busy one, and success, or lack of it, was a matter of one's own responsibility, regardless of extrapersonal social and economic forces. In carrying out God's plan, one could strive for high goals, assume leadership, and face crises with supreme confidence. "From such beliefs," in the words of Arthur S. Link, "came a sure sense of destiny and a feeling of intimate connection with the sources of power." His son, Woodrow, never deviated from his father's faith in an omnipotent God and a universe governed by natural and moral law.

Dr. Wilson was a powerful and erudite preacher in an age in which eloquence and the propounding of great principles were paths to success in the ministry, law, and politics. Religion and politics were closely entwined, and sermons and political addresses, alike, produced great rhetoric before large audiences. Passages were memorized and discussed in homes and places of business. Dr. Wilson never forgot the thrill of seeing Daniel Webster standing in front of the Capitol on a blazing hot day, extending his hand toward the sun and opening his speech with the salutation, "Hail, Thou Sun of Liberty." "And do you know," Dr. Wilson would say as he told the story with characteristic humor, "I thought the sun winked back at him." Dr. Wilson's sermons were dramatic and colorful and filled with brilliant figures of speech. For example: "Sow yourselves ... in its [the world's] every field of influence. Knead yourselves into its every possible loaf of soul-nourishing bread. Be vitalizing wheat, indeed, in all that the word implies." For Dr. Wilson, oratory was not only a form of literature; it was also the divinely inspired art of persuasion by which God's truth could enter into men's hearts and uplift their spirits.

Southern Presbyterianism was a religion of the gentry and the educated, prosperous middle class, and enjoyed a prestige out of all proportion to the number of its adherents. As members of the social elite, the Wilsons lived comfortably, with servants. In Columbia, they purchased a lot, and Mrs. Wilson supervised the building of a large house. Dr. Wilson was a vigorous community leader and had large congregations in Augusta and Columbia, and a wealthy one in Wilmington. He was also active in church and sectional politics and shared the sentiments of the community on the burning issues of slavery and secession. From his pulpit in Augusta, he justified the institution of slavery on moral and scriptural grounds. He invited the first General Assembly of the southern Presbyterian Church to meet in his church in Augusta and served for a summer as a chaplain in the Confederate Army.

Joseph R. Wilson saw himself primarily as an educator and much preferred the pulpit and the classroom to pastoral routine. He left his post in Augusta to join the faculty of the Columbia Theological Seminary at a financial loss. Fortunately, he was able to supplement his income by serving as stated supply of the First Presbyterian Church of Columbia. However, the congregation in 1873 expressed a desire for a full-time minister to be a real pastor to them. Upon the installation of the new minister, Dr. Wilson lost his pulpit. With the support of his brother-in-law, James Woodrow, and another colleague at the seminary, he then led a movement in the faculty for compulsory attendance at the seminary chapel by the students. The time chosen coincided exactly with the hour of services at the First Church. The students objected vigorously to the decree because it interfered with their right to freedom of worship. Thirteen of them were suspended for refusal to attend services at the chapel. The board of the seminary supported Wilson, but the students appealed its ruling to the General Assembly. To bolster his position, Dr. Wilson ran for election as commissioner to the General Assembly in 1874, but he was badly defeated. After bitter debate, the Assembly voted a compromise solution: it affirmed confidence in the faculty but recommended that attendance at services be made voluntary. Dr. Wilson felt that he was being asked to assume responsibility for the education of the students without the power to fulfill it and resigned. He then accepted the lucrative $4,000-a-year post as pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Wilmington. Ten years later, Woodrow Wilson told his fiancée, Ellen Louise Axson, that his father had left the seminary, not because of dissatisfaction with his work, but because the General Assembly had "sustained the self-will of the students."

To most Wilson biographers, Joseph Ruggles Wilson has appeared as a dominating, confident, outgoing, and highly opinionated figure. The youngest member of a striving, competitive family — two of his brothers became generals in the Civil War, and they and others were successful in business — he made his own way in the world. His industry and aggressiveness brought success, but his outspoken approach also made enemies. A well-built, handsome man, he was especially popular with the ladies of his congregations. While religious, he was not pious or ascetic; he smoked a pipe incessantly and was known to take a drink of "Presbyterian Scotch." From the time that Woodrow was in his teens, his father took regular summer vacations alone at Saratoga, a favorite watering place for ministers, while Mrs. Wilson and the children visited relatives or went off on their own. Dr. Wilson's principal avocation, as well as vocation, was talking. He was conversant with a broad range of topics which he loved to discuss at length. Well-grounded in the classics, he was fond of weaving Latin quotations into his speech and in tracing a word back to its Latin or Greek root. Quick at repartee, Dr. Wilson took especial delight in jokes, puns, and humorous anecdotes. According to Stockton Axson, who spent many hours with Dr. Wilson, he never forgot a joke, never wearied of repeating the ones he liked (often to the same person), and rarely missed an opportunity to pun. He was also fond of horseplay, sometimes to the embarrassment of his more dignified son. A favorite antic was to hand his ticket to a railway conductor with the request that he wanted "a little punch." His wit also ran to teasing younger members of the family. Toward the end of his life, when he suffered from cerebral arteriosclerosis, he became gruff and irascible, but, in his younger days, his humor was not bitter or malicious except when directed against his enemies.

Another side of the personality of Joseph Ruggles Wilson is revealed in the letters to his son and in the recollections of Stockton Axson. All of his life, Dr. Wilson said, he had been troubled by feelings of inferiority, and had had to fight the agonies of shyness and the torments of self-consciousness. He was disturbed by feelings of self-doubt and a habit of morbid introspection — apparently an occupational disease of Presbyterian ministers. Woodrow Wilson thought that his father underestimated his own capabilities. In his later years, Dr. Wilson's career ran into difficulties, and he was subject to spells of the "blues"; much of his advice to his son concerned conquering self-consciousness and depression. In retrospect, Dr. Wilson's compulsive punning and clowning may be interpreted as antidotes to shyness and self-consciousness and as ways to control situations. Combinations of shyness and vanity, self-depreciation, and high ambition are not at all unusual in the lives of achieving people.

The content of Dr. Wilson's jokes and anecdotes was often a symbolic representation of some specific problem, particularly with his colleagues and congregations. Once, when he was having trouble making ends meet because the congregation in Wilmington was delinquent in paying his salary, he met a parishioner who commented that his horse looked better groomed than himself. It was so, Dr. Wilson replied, because he cared for his horse, while his congregation took care of him. He liked to reminisce about the way he had practiced oratory as a young man in his father's barn. He said that a cow, placidly chewing her cud, made as intelligent an audience as some of his congregations.

The theme of good looks was prominent in Dr. Wilson's remarks and anecdotes. He once spoke of one of his enemies, Thomas Alexander Hoyt, who was Ellen Axson Wilson's uncle, pastor of a fashionable Philadelphia church, and married to a rich wife. Dr. Wilson said that, while the Rev. Dr. Hoyt was the handsomest man he knew, he was "a wolf in sheep's clothing."

Dr. Wilson had a strong dislike for Ralph Waldo Emerson, because Emerson was a liberal Unitarian and syncretist in religion. Dr. Wilson once saw the Sage of Concord asleep in a railway carriage. His head was thrown back, and he snored with his mouth open. "It was," Dr. Wilson reported, "the biggest mouth I ever looked into." Speaking of Benjamin Morgan Palmer of New Orleans, one of the most distinguished preachers in the South, Wilson said that, when he got up to speak, he looked like a gorilla, but when he finished he looked like a god.

Despite his extraordinary good looks, Dr. Wilson was conscious of his long nose and enormous ears and feet. One of his stories concerned a Dr. MacFarland, a Presbyterian minister with a particularly long nose. Finding himself in the minority on a question put by the presiding officer at a church meeting, Dr. MacFarland sprang to his feet and excitedly shouted several times, "No! no!" Whereupon the moderator declared: "The motion is carried, notwithstanding Dr. MacFarland's nose." Dr. Wilson doted on stories about the General Assembly. Probably the wittiest of all of his comments came in response to the Assembly's declaration that the theory of evolution was heresy: "Oh, the ears of the Presbyterian jackass, they extend to the ends of the earth."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Woodrow Wilson by Edwin A. Weinstein. Copyright © 1981 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• CONTENTS, pg. vii
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS, pg. viii
• PREFACE, pg. ix
• CHRONOLOGY OF WOODROW WILSON’S MAJOR ILLNESSES, pg. xiii
• CHAPTER I. Family and Boyhood, pg. 1
• CHAPTER II. Princeton Student, pg. 26
• CHAPTER III. The Law and Love, pg. 46
• CHAPTER IV. The Johns Hopkins and Marriage, pg. 60
• CHAPTER V. Bryn Mawr and the Opposite Sex, pg. 82
• CHAPTER VI. From Wesleyan to Princeton, pg. 95
• CHAPTER VII. Princeton, 1890–1896, pg. 108
• CHAPTER VIII. Wilson’s Imagery: Language and Stress, pg. 128
• CHAPTER IX. The First Strokes, pg. 141
• CHAPTER X. A Major Stroke and Its Consequences: The Quadrangle Plan, pg. 165
• CHAPTER XI. “Dearest Friend”: The Story of Mrs. Peck, pg. 181
• CHAPTER XII. The Graduate College Controversy, pg. 195
• CHAPTER XIII. The New Morality, pg. 217
• CHAPTER XIV. Political Apprenticeship, pg. 226
• CHAPTER XV. An Untimely Blow: The Death of Ellen Axson Wilson, pg. 245
• CHAPTER XVI. “The Strangest Friendship in History”, pg. 265
• CHAPTER XVII. The Second Mrs. Wilson and the Break with Bryan, pg. 279
• CHAPTER XVIII. From Peace to War, pg. 298
• CHAPTER XIX. Prelude to Paris, pg. 316
• CHAPTER XX. The Paris Peace Conference, pg. 333
• CHAPTER XXI. A Massive Stroke and the Politics of Denial, pg. 349
• CHAPTER XXII. Last Years, pg. 371
• SOURCES AND WORKS CITED, pg. 379
• INDEX, pg. 387