ABSTRACT
The extraordinary preoccupation with literary "style" which marked Thomas Woodrow Wilson's first happy years at Princeton seems to have arisen from the unsatisfied portions of both his activity and passivity to his father. The features of his "style" leave no doubt as to its parentage. It was the "style" of a boy immensely impressed by the phrases of a pedantic preacher. When Woodrow Wilson wrote or spoke he was in his unconscious his father preparing or delivering a sermon, and he attempted to make his alliterations sing as sweetly and his generalities flash as brightly as the preacher's had sung and flashed in the mind of the child who sat in the fourth pew and adored his "incomparable" father. Professor Andrew F. West had been for seven years a prominent member of the Princeton faculty when Wilson went there to teach. West was the son of a Presbyterian Minister, and like Wilson's father was of Scotch blood from Ulster.
