Ideational Evolution: Wilson, Gladstone & Disraeli

After Benjamin Disraeli had begun to serve in Tory leadership roles in the House of Commons, he complained to a friend in 1853 that the Conservative backbenchers, largely composed of country aristocrats, could not be counted upon to read a book: “They could not be got to attend to business while the hunting season lasted … they had good natural ability … but wanted culture; they never read, their leisure was passed in field sports … they learned nothing useful, and did not understand the ideas of their own time.”  (Source: The Foundation of the Conservative Party, 1830-1867 by Robert Stewart.) Later, in 1870, after he’d been prime minister, Disraeli put that complaint in the mouth of a character who states with dripping irony that what he loves about aristocrats is “that they live in the air, that they excel in athletic sports, that they can only speak one language, and that they never read.” But when Disraeli first began to think of breaking into politics, he seems to have had the...

When I saw the email pop up in my inbox from Princeton University Library Special Collections, I hoped I was about to find out what Woodrow Wilson’s least favorite professor had to say about him. This was the professor whose son Wilson fired from the university, in what the editor of the Woodrow Wilson Papers calls the greatest controversy in Wilson’s tenure as president of Princeton. This was the professor he badmouthed for decades. This was the professor a 19-year-old Wilson called “the jackass.”  I’d been reading the personal correspondence of Henry Clay Cameron, longtime professor of Greek at Princeton, with his son, Arnold Guyot Cameron, a future professor of French there. The Camerons are two of the most colorful characters in the whole of the Wilson Papers. But the letters I’d been reading were part of the little known archive of the Cameron Family Papers at Princeton University. In one letter, written April 17, 1893, the elder Cameron begins to reveal his thoughts on...