Page:Famous Living Americans, with Portraits.djvu/562

A COLLEGE professor in the President's Chair! It is true that the politicians and other practical citizens had some warning: to put on the scrap heap so thoroughly efficient a machine as the New Jersey State Democracy and arouse from a Rip Van Winkle sleep the political consciousness of so conservative a commonwealth should have told them that here was a man to be reckoned with. But to walk quietly forward and sit down in a seat supposedly reserved for those whose training had been something else besides weaving intellectual cobwebs was a feat that practical minded Americans did not expect of Woodrow Wilson.

But the people of the western Republic had been surprised before and, being above all practical, they immediately forgave him for having been a pedagogue and good-naturedly and expectantly lined up and waited for the "kick-off." And since the day the whistle blew the American people have been behind their quarterback in every play, and the politicians, too, finding that the life of the study and the class-room did not necessarily make him less a good fighter, have accepted the situation as gracefully as possible and have apparently concluded that here is a man not to be taken lightly.

Who is this Woodrow Wilson? What are his antecedents? Out of what kind of background does he emerge to take his place in American history? Of course, Woodrow isn't all the name he has. In fact, that cognomen was something of an afterthought with his parents, who wished thereby to perpetuate the family name of his mother. To the people who knew him as a boy, he was "Tom" Wilson.

The home that gave him birth was that of a sturdy Presbyterian minister, the son of Irish immigrants, who left the "auld sod"in 1807. William Bayard Hale,^[1] his biographer,

1. ↑ See the series of articles on Woodrow Wilson by Wm. Bayard Hale in the World's Work, Tolumes 22 and 23.