“Scientia Pro Patria”:Herbert Baxter Adams and Mugwump Academic Reform at Johns Hopkins, 1876–1901

Abstract

Two days before the 1884 presidential election, Woodrow Wilson, then a graduate student in history and political science at the Johns Hopkins University, confessed somewhat guiltily to his fiancée that he had been scanning the newspapers on the Lord's Day to gauge the chances of the Democratic candidate. “I am exceedingly hopeful,” he wrote, “though so anxious as to be thankful that there is only a day or two more of suspense. Only my profound trust in an over-ruling Providence will keep me from the deepest despondency, my darling, if Cleveland should be defeated.” Wilson's commitment to Grover Cleveland and his aversion to James G. Blaine were characteristic of the feeling at the university. In the department of historical and political science, headed by thirty-fouryear-old Herbert Baxter Adams, such feeling ran high. Adams, a New England Republican who made no secret of his mugwump convictions, took for granted that his students hoped for a Cleveland victory. The Cleveland motto, “Public Office is a Public Trust”, he reminded them, was a truth as old as Aristotle. On election night, Hopkins men scrutinized the returns into the early morning hours, and lectures the next day were heard with slight attention. Cleveland's inauguration was an occasion for celebration, and Adams, with a large contingent of Hopkinsians, went off on a “spree” to the Capital.