Quote of the Day (Woodrow Wilson, on Universities and ‘The Object of Learning’)

“It is the object of learning not only to satisfy the curiosity and perfect the spirits of individual men, but also to advance civilization; and if it be true that each nation plays its special part in furthering the common advancement, every people should use its universities to perfect it in its proper role. A university should be an organ of memory for the state for the transmission of its best traditions. Every man sent out from a university should be a man of his nation, as well as a man of his time.” —Woodrow Wilson, 28^th President of the United States and Princeton University President (1856-1924) , “University Training and Citizenship,” The Forum, September 1894, reprinted in The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson: College and State—Educational, Literary and Political Papers (1875-1913), edited by Ray Stannard Baker and William Dodd (1926)

This Day in Literary History (Edmund Wilson Sr., Disappointed Supreme Court Hopeful and Dad of Literary Critic, Dies)

May 15, 1923—Edmund Wilson Sr., a former Attorney General of New Jersey and father of his namesake, the preeminent “Lost Generation” public intellectual (pictured here), died at age 59 in Red Bank, N.J., in the home that had given him and his only son little psychic comfort.

The influence of fathers on their famous literary progeny could comprise a book in itself. The relationship of Wilson, father and son, was especially fraught. Though the father won great recognition and financial rewards in his life, his fame has been completely overshadowed by that of his only child (to such a point that, while there are few useful photos of the father, there are quite a few--including the one I have here--of the son.)

Through much of a career that in which he was universally recognized as America’s leading literary and social critic, Edmund Wilson Jr. (who dropped the suffix early on) rebelled repeatedly against his father. Easier said than done.

Edward Sr. (whom I will designate as “Senior” from here out to distinguish him from his son) and several brothers had attended Princeton University in the 1880s and 1890s—which, when combined with his high reputation in legal circles, virtually assured entrance to that Ivy League school for his son.

But, if Senior furnished “Bunny” (the nickname given the future literary titan in childhood by his mother) with a standard for culture set very high, he also bequeathed him with a genetic and environmental legacy that the young man tried but failed to shed: depression all enveloping. 

Though I had read works by and about the more famous Edmund Wilson for years, I had never come across anything about his background until I read Christopher Benfey’s 2007 New Republic review of a biography of the critic that highlighted the filial relationship.

As I read about Senior’s late-life decline into lassitude from his earlier peak, I was reminded of nothing so much as Richard Simon, who, having been sidelined at the firm he co-founded, Simon and Schuster, became increasingly sullen, remote and frail—an atmosphere of alienation and emotional unavailability that daughter Carly memorialized in her first hit song, “That’s the Way I Always Heard It Should Be.” (I wrote about this psychodrama in this blog post from 13 years ago.)

Even at an early age, Senior’s achievements were substantive. He lost only one case in his entire career, and that was early on. Despite being appointed by a GOP governor (and being a Republican himself), his reputation for integrity was burnished when he secured guilty verdicts against 200 members of the Republican political machine in Atlantic City, including the boss himself, Louis “the Commodore” Kuehnle, Jr., in a case that Senior personally prosecuted.

The prestige accruing from this successful prosecution was so significant that the recently elected Democratic governor, Woodrow Wilson (no relation to the AG), seriously considered nominating him to the Supreme Court after his victorious 1912 campaign for the White House.

Instead, Wilson chose three other men: John Hessin Clarke, who only served on the court for six unhappy years; Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish justice, and a leading liberal voice on the court for the next two decades; and James McReynolds, an argumentative, racist, anti-Semitic blight on the bench all the way into the FDR administration.

I was unable to discover why the President passed over Senior. But already since his mid-30s, Senior had, according to an essay his son wrote in the mid-1950s, “passed into the shadow.” Evidence of this “neurotic distemper,” exhibited most obviously early on in hypochondria, became more pronounced as time went on.

In his final years, as his bouts with mental illness became longer and more frequent, Senior shuttled back and forth from home to sanatoria that he would check himself into in the vain hope of relief.

At some point early on, “Bunny” became aware of his parents’ profoundly dysfunctional union. (His mother had become deaf after doctors told her that the mentally unbalanced senior would probably not return to his old routine.)

The knowledge profoundly discomfited him. In an early skit he wrote, “The Sane Tea Party,” his father is depicted as “hopeless hypochondriac” Elgrim Sexton, whose face is ‘lined with the worry and anxiety of dying many deaths.” His uneasiness grew until, in his mid-30s, he had “an unexpected breakdown”—the same age that his father began to exhibit profound unease.

Two decades later—and especially after “Bunny” inherited the old stone house in Talcottville, NY, that his father had regarded as a refuge—Wilson’s feelings towards his father softened.

For one thing, he may have begun to identify with his father’s sense that, like Hamlet, “The time is out of joint; O cursed spite!/That ever I was born to set it right!” Senior was dismayed by the excesses of the Gilded Age following the Civil War, and loathed serving as an attorney for railroads, the epitome of corporate corruption in that era.

Bunny, who served as a nurse and as a translator at General Headquarters in WWI, felt acutely the postwar malaise that gripped other writers of his generation such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald (a classmate of his at Princeton). The Roaring Twenties, much like the Gilded Age, profoundly disappointed those who had hoped for a better world.

Second, Bunny realized that, though he exhibited the same melancholy that had undone his father, he also possessed an openness to people with different points of view, and a similar searching, restless intelligence. Though a Republican, Senior would talk to anyone—including, unusually for someone in the business circles he frequented, Socialists.

Bunny’s biographer called his dad “a kind of instinctual Jeffersonian Democrat with a Tory coloring—a libertarian who had little faith in either big government or big business. His greatest desire was to be left alone.” In the same light, Wilson—who had briefly embraced Marxism during the Great Depression—arrived at a fundamental distrust of the uses of government, perhaps best expressed in the title of a cantankerous later piece, “The Cold War and the Income Tax: A Protest.”

Leon Edel, the editor of Bunny’s diaries, linked the habits of mind shared by father and son when he wrote of the “taproots of the son's imagination, his ability to live himself into the past as few historians have done, while maintaining a cool detachment (as his father had done); his supreme power of summary and utterance—qualities of both literature and the law.”

Photo of the Day: Woodrow Wilson’s Pierce-Arrow

Presidential transitions can be fraught affairs. As I write this, a substantial portion of the country is worried about the mental state of the outgoing President. A century ago, the physical health of the incumbent was the problem (though the extent of his impairment was not commonly known, thanks to concealment on the part of the First Lady).

What you see here symbolizes the power and popularity of Woodrow Wilson at its zenith—and his ultimate tragedy following his disabling stroke in October 1919. I photographed his Pierce-Arrow limousine while visiting the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Museum in Staunton, Va., in the fall of 2010.

This handsome vehicle was waiting for the nation’s 28^th President in New York when he returned from negotiating the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. As the first president to join AAA, Wilson loved being driven around (he is not known ever to have driven it himself), so when he left office admirers purchased the 3-ton, 16-ft.-long car on his behalf for $3,000.

This limousine was considered top of the line a century ago. One feature it lacked—understandably, for the time—was heating. On cold days, then, the incapacitated President covered himself inside with a camel-hair blanket.

According to Bill Lohmann’s 2018 article in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, during Wilson’s last miserable year and a half in office, he experienced his few happier moments in this car. At Washington Senators baseball games, he would sit in the car in foul territory so he would not have to go into the stands. (A player with a glove with stand in front of the car, ready to catch any foul balls that might come its way.)

Following his death three years after leaving office, Wilson’s widow Edith—the de facto President following his stroke—donated the Pierce-Arrow to the Woodrow Wilson Birthplace Foundation—the first item given to what became the presidential library.

Quote of the Day (Woodrow Wilson, on Maintaining the World’s Faith in America)

“All mankind deem us the representatives of the moderate and sensible discipline which makes free men good citizens, of enlightened systems of law and a temperate justice, of the best experience in the reasonable methods and principles of self-government, of public force made consistent with individual liberty; and we shall not realize these ideals at home, if we suffer them to be hopelessly discredited amongst the peoples who have yet to see liberty and the peaceable days of order and comfortable progress. We should lose heart ourselves, did we suffer the world to lose faith in us as the champions of these things.”—Princeton Univ. professor (and future New Jersey Governor and U.S. President) Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), “Democracy and Efficiency,” The Atlantic, March 1901

This Day in Supreme Court History (Brandeis Confirmed After Epic Nomination Fight)

June 1, 1916— Louis D. Brandeis, the first Jewish nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, was confirmed by the Senate a record 125 days—including 19 public hearings—after being chosen by a liberal Democratic President. His nomination as Associate Justice led to unseemly opposition by mainstream conservatives who only embarrassed themselves in the process.

In other words, it sounds an awful lot like what Merrick Garland faces now after being chosen by Barack Obama to fill the vacancy left by Antonin Scalia.

Brandeis broke with tradition in another sense, too. Custom called for Supreme Court nominees to remain above the fray in confirmation battles.  However, while observing the letter of this “law” by refraining from public comment (he also could not, as he was not invited to counter scurrilous accusations against him before the Senate Judiciary Committee), the nominee worked tirelessly behind the scenes to combat the wild things being said  against him.

Like Thurgood Marshall, another trail-blazer for a minority group a generation later, Brandeis would have been considered a major influence on the court even if he had never served on it. Just as Marshall conceived the incremental but relentless legal strategy that overturned school segregation in Brown v. the Board of Topeka, Kansas, Brandeis pioneered succinct reports that summarized scientific and sociological data in his so-called “Brandeis Brief.”

At the same time, the lawyer was one of the key voices at the turn of the century pointing out the dangers of inequality, opposing the vested interests of the time—insurance companies, powerful public utilities, and banks—and writing a book whose title resonates even more than ever before: Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It.

Brandeis became a key adviser to President Woodrow Wilson on the proper relations between capital and labor. His pronounced preference for the latter made him a number of enemies, including businessmen and lawyers who loathed and feared his highly effective, full-throated advocacy. 

Henry Lee Higginson, head of the most powerful banking house in Boston, helped bankroll the opposition, as he had done in derailing Brandeis’ appointment to Wilson’s Cabinet. Several former American Bar Association Presidents, including Elihu Root, recently Secretary of War and Secretary of State, stated, preposterously and hysterically, in a letter of protest to the Senate Judiciary Committee, that Brandeis would not be ”a fit person to be a member of the Supreme Court of the United States.” A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard University’s anti-Semitic President, also opposed the nomination, gathering a petition with over 50 signatures with some of the legendary blueblood surnames of the Massachusetts establishment: Adams, Sargent, Gardner, Peabody, Shattuck, and Coolidge.

Perhaps the most fascinating player among the opponents was the Republican Senator from Massachusetts, Henry Cabot Lodge. He was every bit as appalled at the nomination—and maybe even more determined to strike a blow at Wilson—as the other critics of the appointment. But he found it unsafe to lead the opposition openly, the way he would only a few years later when he battled the President over the Treaty of Versailles and American entry into the League of Nations.

Lodge saw 1916 as an uncertain, even perilous election year—the first time he would undergo direct election by voters rather than by the state legislature since passage of the Seventeenth Amendment a few years before. He already—correctly—feared that he would lose the vote of Irish-Catholics in the state. He could not afford to arouse the ire of Jewish voters as well. 

Thus, Lodge decided not to invoke the custom of senatorial courtesy—the unofficial rule of refusing to confirm a presidential appointment of an official in or from a state when the appointment is opposed by a Senator from that state--and derail the confirmation process before it had fairly begun, choosing instead to work more behind the scenes.

Once on the court, Brandeis was not done dealing with anti-Semitism. Another Wilson appointee, James McReynolds, slighted him not only by refusing to shake his hand but also by shirking court photo sessions where he knew Brandeis would appear. 

But Brandeis did convert one prominent detractor while on the high court: former President William Howard Taft, who had helped other Republicans in the battle against a nominee he viewed as “a muckraker, an emotionalist for his own purposes, a socialist, prompted by jealously, a hypocrite . . . who is utterly unscrupulous . . . a man of infinite cunning . . . of great tenacity of purpose, and, in my judgment, of much power for evil.”

But Taft’s innate amiability surfaced when the two men finally got to work together on the court when the ex-President achieved his lifelong ambition by being appointed Chief Justice by Warren Harding. Taft wrote his daughter Helen about his old rival: “I have come to like Brandeis very much indeed . . . he is a very hard worker . . . He thinks much of the Court and is anxious to have it consistent and strong, and he pulls his weight in the boat.”

For those who, unlike Taft, actually agreed with his ideology, feelings toward Brandeis went well beyond respect to something close to veneration. From Franklin Roosevelt, so often in despair over the hidebound prejudices of the majority on the court in his first term, Brandeis won the nickname “Isaiah”—a tribute to his wisdom, and his prophetic role in ameliorating the worst excesses of an industrial economy.

 
But, for all the justice's subsequent acclaim, the confirmation fight exposed some of the ugliest nativist strains in American life--instincts that persisted in the past two Presidential contests, in which the winner was suspected of being a Muslim and a non-citizen, and even into the current contest, in which the presumptive nominee of the Republicans broadcast claims that two primary opponents also were not citizens.

Brandeis was nominated only months after a Jewish factory owner, Leo Frank, was lynched for a murder he did not commit. Animated by anti-Semitism, many of his critics accused him, without a scrap of evidence, of not supporting the "written Constitution," a claim that bigots could use as a fig leaf for their own ill-concealed hatred.

Garland runs a fair chance of having his path to the court obstructed even more mulishly than Brandeis. Unlike 1916, the Democrats do not control the Senate and cannot bring the nomination to a vote by themselves. They cannot place faith in the majority's good will, only in its realism--if the Republicans sense their Presidential nominee is doomed to defeat, and that they'd better confirm Garland lest Obama's successor choose a far more liberal nominee.

(To gauge how, the current Senate Republicans’ protests notwithstanding, the current refusal not to accord Garland a hearing is so unprecedented in its obstruction, please see this piece from the Huffington Post by Paul Finkelman.)

 

(The accompanying photograph of Justice Brandeis, ca. 1916, by Harris and Ewing, comes from the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.)