Roosevelt and Wilson were a new breed of college-educated politician. What does this say about today's battle between politics and higher education?

This week someone sent me a quote from Gore Vidal’s 1987 novel Empire, an exploration of the United States’ entry into the colonial marketplace at the end of the 19th Century. The quote got me thinking about both Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt and their roles in a new generation of college-educated men born in the 1850s and 1860s who got into politics at a time when that was not the thing to do. That moment in history presents a striking contrast with our present moment, when a generation of politicians is doing battle with higher education. President Trump’s famous longing for a return to a time when America was “great,” which he himself has defined as the years between 1870 and 1913, does not appear to extend to the state of education during the Gilded Age. It would seem he'd prefer not to have a new generation of academics lead government into another progressive age, as did Roosevelt and Wilson.

The quote from Empire is spoken by Vidal’s fictional version of the novelist Henry James, reflecting on Theodore Roosevelt and his 1894 book of essays, American Ideals and Other Essays Social and Political, which James did in fact review for the journal Literature. In the novel James addresses his dinner party host, 19^th Century historian Henry Adams, with characteristic labyrinthine verbiage:

 “I’m afraid I cannot, dear Adams, in my heart, endure your white knight, Theodore. I have just—tell no one—reviewed his latest … latest … well, book for want of a description other than the grim literal paginated printed nullity, called American Ideals, in which he tells us over and over—and then over once again—how we must live, each of us, ‘purely as an American,’ as if that were something concrete.

Then Vidal’s James digs into Roosevelt’s notion of the educated man in politics:

“[Roosevelt] also warns us that the educated man—himself, no doubt—must not go into politics as an educated man because he is bound to be beaten by someone of no education at all—this he takes to be some sort of American Ideal, which he worships, as it is American, but which,  he concedes, presents a problem for the educated man, whom he then advises to go into the election as if he had had no education at all, and presenting himself to the electorate—yes, you have grasped it!—purely as an American, in which case he will win, which is what matters. There is, dear Adams, as far as I can detect, no mind at all at work in your friend.”

It’s worth looking back at Wilson and Roosevelt’s tumultuous relationship as their mutual academic backgrounds took paths that both diverged and—driving each man crazy—veered back towards one another. And it’s worth reflecting on how different their time is from today. Wilson, of course, is well known to have been our only president with a PhD. He spent much longer in academia, as a student, a teacher, and eventually president of Princeton University, than he spent in politics. But he always dreamed of being a statesman. Roosevelt, in the meantime, was a Harvard graduate with what Wilson called a little-seen “sane, academic side.” (The emphasis is Wilson’s.)

Historian Richard Hofstadter wrote in 1948’s The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It about the generation in which Roosevelt (born 1858) and Wilson (1856) came of age as young college men. First, he describes the intellectuals who chose not to go into politics, which was the norm at the time:

“The coarse, materialistic civilization that emerged in the United States during the years after the Civil War produced among cultivated middle-class young men a generation of alienated and homeless intellectuals. Generally well-to-do, often of eminent family backgrounds, clubmen, gentlemen, writers, the first duster of a native intellectual aristocracy to appear since the great days of Boston and Concord, the men of this class found themselves unable to participate with any heart in the greedy turmoil of business or to accept without protest boss-ridden politics. Money-making was sordid; politics was dirty; and the most sensitive among them made their careers in other ways. Those who were less interested in public affairs usually managed to fit themselves into the interstices of American existence. Some, like Henry James, escaped abroad or, like his brother William immersed themselves in academic life. One, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., found sanctuary on the Massachusetts bench and at length rose to the Supreme Court: another, Henry Adams, made a sort of career of bitter detachment. Some who were strong enough to overcome their distaste for business entered it without finding much personal fulfillment and left without regret. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., upon retiring from an unhappy career as a railroad executive, observed that among all the tycoons he had met, "not one... would I care to meet again in this world or the next; nor is one associated in my mind with the idea of humor, thought, or refinement. Conventional politics, on the other hand, offered a choice between merely serving the business class or living of it in a sort of parasitic blackmail. For the more scrupulous this was impossible; in the case of the fastidious Adamses, Brooks and Henry, even the weight of a great family tradition and an absorbing concern with political affairs was not enough to counter-balance distaste. … The era impelled the frustrated politician into scholarship and forced his interest in politics to find wistful expression in the writing of history.”

Then, Hofstadter described the men who of that generation who diverged from the norm and did go into politics:

“Among hardier and somewhat younger souls, however, there appeared the scholar-in-politics, a type represented by Albert J. Beveridge, John Hay, Henry Cabot Lodge, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson. Such men, though hardly typical politicians, held their noses, made the necessary compromises, worked their way into politics, and bided their time until the social milieu gave them a chance to ride into power. These were the practical men of the breed, men of steady nerves, strong ambition, tenacity, and flexible scruples. The most striking among them was Theodore Roosevelt. In his autobiography Roosevelt tells how horrified his friends were when he first broached to them his determination to enter politics. ‘The men I knew best,’ he recalled, ‘were the men in the clubs of social pretension and the men of cultivated taste and easy life.’ Politics, they told him, is a cheap affair run by saloon-keepers and horse-car conductors and shunned by gentlemen. ‘I answered that if this were so it merely meant that the people I knew did not belong to the governing class, and that the other people did and that I intended to be one of the governing class.’”

Roosevelt would go on to publish an appeal to educated young men to go into politics, in (you guessed it) American Ideals. Roosevelt wrote that "a growing feeling among educated men that they are in honor bound to do their full share of the work of American public life” was a hopeful sign for the nation.

Vidal’s satire, and the book review from Henry James that inspired it, hinges on Roosevelt’s saying that “An educated man must not go into politics as such; he must go in simply as an American; and when he is once in, he will speedily realize that he must work very hard indeed, or he will be upset by some other American, with no education at all, but with much natural capacity.”

Roosevelt, who was not above being influenced by other nations like Germany, hinted that he associated jingoism with anti-intellectualism, but advised college students nonetheless to be nationalistic. “If an educated man is not heartily American in instinct and feeling and taste and sympathy,” Roosevelt wrote, “he will amount to nothing in our public life. Patriotism, love of country, and pride in the flag which symbolizes country may be feelings which the race will at some period outgrow, but at present they are very real and strong, and the man who lacks them is a useless creature, a mere incumbrance to the land.”  

James, in response, called Roosevelt “a dangerous and ominous jingo.” Roosevelt in turn regarded James as “a miserable little snob” and “effete.” Vidal does a wonderful job of explicating all of this in a 1986 review in The New York Review of Books, of a then-new collection of James’ many book reviews.

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Both Wilson and Roosevelt are fascinating case studies of Hofstadter’s “scholar in politics.” Even before they met, Roosevelt had already taken a shot at the young academic Wilson, whom he had not met yet. The pair had a long honeymoon before coming to hate each other. In his double-biography of Wilson and Roosevelt, The Warrior and the Priest, John Milton Cooper suggests it was Wilson who started the war of words between the two future presidents. But he isn’t counting this passage, which clearly alludes to Wilson’s book (and PhD dissertation) Congressional Government. That book earned Wilson national attention for suggesting that the US Congress should operate more like Britain’s parliament. Here’s what Roosevelt had to say about that idea and “the people who wrote about it” (read, Woodrow Wilson) in American Ideals and Other Essays:

“It is always a pity to see men fritter away their energies on any pointless scheme; and unfortunately, a good many of our educated people when they come to deal with politics, do just such frittering. Take, for instance, the queer freak of arguing in favor of establishing what its advocates are pleased to call 'responsible government' in our institutions, or in other words of grafting certain features of the English parliamentary system upon our own Presidential and Congressional system. This agitation was too largely deficient in body to enable it to last, and it has now, I think, died away; but at one time quite a number of our men who spoke of themselves as students of political history were engaged in treating this scheme as something serious. Few men who had ever taken an active part in politics, or who had studied politics in the way that a doctor is expected to study surgery and medicine, so much as gave it a thought; but very intelligent men did, just because they were misdirecting their energies, and were wholly ignorant that they ought to know practically about a problem before they attempted its solution. The English, or so-called 'responsible,' theory of parliamentary government is one entirely incompatible with our own governmental institutions. It could not be put into operation here save by absolutely sweeping away the United States Constitution. Incidentally, I may say it would be to the last degree undesirable, if it were practicable. But this is not the point upon which I wish to dwell; the point is that it was wholly impracticable to put it into operation, and that an agitation favoring this kind of government was from its nature unintelligent. The people who wrote about it wasted their time.”

That’s entertainingly catty prose. However, when Roosevelt and Wilson met, the year before Roosevelt published this essay, they hit it off. As Cooper reports in The Warrior and the Priest, they met in March 1896, when they were both speaking at a rally for a municipal reform movement in Baltimore. They dined together in January of the following year, when Roosevelt visited Princeton. Wilson was so impressed with Republican Roosevelt that the staunch Democrat’s brother-in-law Stockton Axson accused him of converting to the Grand Old Party. But a few years later, in 1900, Wilson would explain to his wife what he found so appealing about Roosevelt: "a very sane, academic side of him —not known by everybody so much as to exist, but constituting his hope of real and lasting eminence." While Roosevelt was governor of New York, Wilson praised "this gifted man" who was "too big a man to have it make any difference to him whether he was in office or out of office."

Roosevelt and Wilson ended up running against each other for president in 1912, and died hating each other. But Cooper says Wilson and Roosevelt continued to admire each other through Roosevelt’s first term in the Oval Office. “Wilson moved first in ending the good feelings between them,” Cooper writes. “In his new role as an anti-Bryan Democratic spokesman after 1901, attacked Roosevelt and the Republican dissidents as well as the Bryanites of his own party. Publicly, Wilson muted his criticism of the president for a while … An acquaintance remembered Wilson saying privately during the summer of 1906 ‘with a smile that he found it difficult to admire the politician as much as the man.’”

Roosevelt soured on Wilson as well. Cooper writes:

“In December 1907 Roosevelt praised his friend Wister for a speech in which he had condemned the teaching in most American colleges. Lumping Wilson with William Graham Sumner, the noted economist and Yale professor, he asserted,  ‘I do not feel that Sumner and Wilson have any real place in the study of economics and government.’ In August 1908 Roosevelt thanked the magazine editor Lyman Abbott for sending him a passage from Wilson's Constitutional Government. ‘That is a great quotation from Woodrow Wilson,’ Roosevelt commented. ‘I had not read the book because I have felt rather impatient with his recent attitude on certain matters, notably the effort to control corporations; but this is a really first-class paragraph.’" 

We have learned from American Ideals that Roosevelt did not respect that book, which apparently he had not read. Cooper does not explain why Roosevelt was so irritated with Wilson’s comments on the “effort to control corporations,” but a little investigation into where the two men were that year on the issue reveals why Teddy was so irked.

In April 1908, Wilson had made a big move to the left rhetorically on the issue of regulation of corporations. Having spoken out for years against the regulation of business, Wilson did not explain why he made the change. “No one now advocates the old laisser faire (sic),” Wilson said, “or questions the necessity for a firm and comprehensive regulation of business operations in the interest of fair dealing and of a responsible exercise of power.” But until that day, says Harry Bragdon in his Woodrow Wilson: The Academic Years (1967), Wilson had been quite in favor of lassiez-faire economics. Roosevelt, on the other hand, had become a reformer who wished to control corporations. And here was Wilson, implying he was more consistent than Roosevelt. This is undoubtedly what was bothering Roosevelt about what Wilson had been saying “recently.”

They both had good reason to be in that camp at that particular time. The Panic of 1907 had created an urgency in public opinion for regulation of the banks and corporations. As usual, the “great men” of the great man theory of history were influenced first by the people. But as Hofstadter pointed out, they were unlike the politicians that came before them in their desire to do right by the public.

“The ends for which Roosevelt and his peers entered politics were not mere boodling or personal advancement. Searching for goals that they considered more lofty, ideals above section or class or material gain, they were bent on some genuinely national service, sought a larger theater in which to exercise their state-craft, and looked down with the disdain of aristocrats upon those who, as Roosevelt said, had never felt the thrill of a generous emotion.”

This is perhaps what a society without strong higher education stands most to lose: a class of public servant that is motivated first by ethical concerns and not pecuniary ones.

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That there is conflict between the college educated and President Trump is of course widely reported. The president has pulled billions of dollars in government funding from the top universities in the country, among other attempts ostensibly to punish them for allowing anti-Israel protests on campus during the Biden administration. Perhaps as a result, Trump once even admitted, if jokingly: “Smart people don’t like me.” In another candid moment Trump said, “I love the poorly educated.”

There is statistical evidence behind both jokes. College graduates, who represent 42 percent of the electorate, largely backed Democrat Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, with Harris scoring 55 percent of that vote while Trump collected only 42 percent. The exit polls, conducted by Edison Research, showed that among non-college graduates the numbers were almost exactly reversed, with 42 percent voting for Harris and 56 percent voting for Trump. In his most recent statement about “smart people,” just yesterday, Trump reversed himself: "So my poll numbers just went down, but with smart people they've gone way up." The definition he’s using for “smart people” may have changed from the first quote to the last, as in the first instance he appeared to be referring to university graduates who he said have “become radicalized” and in the last instance he appeared to be referring to his MAGA base. The administration’s conflict with higher education comes at a time when many colleges and universities are already struggling. Enrollment in college is down, and many colleges have been considering selling off property or even closing altogether. Meanwhile the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has specifically denigrated college degrees in public remarks, saying the Trump administration is focused on "educating the next generation based on skills that we need in our economy, and our society: apprenticeships, electricians, plumbers. We need more of those in our country and less LGBTQ graduate majors from Harvard University." The combined trends have many worrying about the prospects of the current generation of college students. Can they attain the kind of success in public affairs that Roosevelt and Wilson did?

Not that it takes a college man to be a good public servant, as Roosevelt pointed out in American Ideals. Britain's progressive era, more often called “the new liberalism” across the pond, came before America’s not because of a new class of college-educated servants but because of a newly self-made politician. Prime Minister David Lloyd George, who is credited with (and derided for) the creation of the so-called welfare state in Britain, rose from poor beginnings without a college degree. This was rarer in England, where a ruling aristocracy had made men of letters frequent politicians. Disraeli, Mill, Churchill, Bulwer-Lytton, Gladstone all wrote literature or literary criticism alongside their parliamentary duties. But in America, a new class of educated politicians helped pass reforms aimed at making a difference for working people. Roosevelt and Wilson were elites and as such each had their elitisms. Roosevelt, as Hofstadter notes, never really understood poor people, both had mixed records at best on labor, and both had famous problems with racism. But for all their faults, they represented political leadership that valued complex, nuanced thought. Opposition to higher education on the grounds that it poses a political threat has risks that exceed that of unchecked elitism.