Elected president of the university in June, 1902, Woodrow Wilson almost at once began a campaign to capture Andrew Carnegie. It would be a most impressive feat with which to inaugurate his presidency if he could succeed where such old hands in the presidential game of fund-raising as Butler, White, Gilman, and Eliot had failed. Early in the spring of his first year in office he wrote Carnegie a long letter about Princeton and its needs. He laid great stress upon Princeton’s “Scottish connections” from President John Witherspoon on, although he was wise enough not to stress Princeton’s Presbyterian heritage. “She has been largely made by Scotsmen, being myself of pure Scots blood, it heartens me to emphasize the fact.” Having, he hoped, established the right ancestral connections, Wilson outlined the areas of need for Princeton in which Carnegie’s money could be put to good use. He suggested a graduate-college residence system, a school of science, the introduction of the tutorial system, and a school of jurisprudence and government, which he outlined as follows:

My idea would be to make it a school of law, but not in any narrow or technical sense: a school, rather, in which law and institutions would be interpreted as instruments of peace, of freedom, and of the advancement of civilization: international law as the means and guarantee of cordial understandings between the nations of the world, private law as the accommodation of otherwise hostile interests, government as the means of progress. No doubt it would be wise, too, as immediately collateral matter, to expound the part which commerce and industry have played and must increasingly play, in making for international as well as national peace and for the promotion of all the common interests of mankind. [Wilson apparently believed that if a salmon was too cautious to catch with a lure, use a net. Almost every Carnegie cliché of the last twenty years was woven into that mesh.]

He then urged Carnegie to come down to Princeton, look the school over, and talk further with him on all of these points.

After much further cajoling, Wilson finally got Carnegie down to Princeton in 1904. Accompanied by trustee Grover Cleveland, who had on his own been doing a little soliciting of Carnegie in behalf of the Princeton graduate school, Wilson gave Carnegie the grand tour of Old Nassau, pointing out the inadequate library and science facilities, going over plans for new graduateschool facilities, introducing him