Interesting review of a Woodrow Wilson Bigraphy by Louis Auchincloss.
Brings back a seminal period of our history. Wilson IMHO was a useful idiot.
NEW YORK TIMES Book review Section
April 9, 2000
Mr. Wilson Goes to Washington
Louis Auchincloss considers the life of our 28th president, the professor
turned politician.
By MICHAEL LIND
t the end of September, in 1919, the presidential train bearing Woodrow
Wilson on a Western tour of speechmaking in his last-ditch, desperate
effort to rally the nation behind the ratification of the Versailles Treaty
of Peace, which the Senate seemed determined to nullify, pulled into
Wichita, Kan., where a large crowd had gathered at the station to hear
him,'' Louis Auchincloss begins. ''After a 15-minute wait the president's
secretary, Joe Tumulty, appeared and announced gravely that his chief was
suffering from 'nervous exhaustion' and could not make the address. The
train then headed directly to Washington.'' The minor stroke aboard the
train was followed by a major stroke on Oct. 2, which at once paralyzed the
president and the government. From that point onward, the political and
personal tragedies of Woodrow Wilson were one. While the treaty went down
to defeat in the Senate, dooming his hopes for the League of Nations,
Wilson cut himself off from one friend after another, including his closest
aide, Col. Edward M. House. (Whether the failure of the United States to
join the League of Nations was a tragedy may be debated; as League members,
Britain and France failed to stop German, Italian and Japanese aggression,
and it is doubtful that the United States, which had to be bombed into
World War II, would have been driven to act earlier by a mere
collective-security treaty.)
The story of Thomas Woodrow Wilson is material for a tragedian, an American
Shakespeare. Auchincloss, an American novelist and man of letters, is the
next best thing. The esprit de finesse, the mastery of motive, that informs
Auchincloss's more than 50 books of fiction and nonfiction complements
Wilson's esprit de geometrie, his devotion to abstract principle. The match
of subject, writer and genre in ''Woodrow Wilson'' is perfect.
The genre of the brief life forces the biographer to concentrate on the
years in which a person of historical importance does the work for which he
is remembered (a span that may be only a fraction of a lifetime). Woodrow
Wilson divides neatly into two parts: 1856-1914 and 1914-24. With a
novelist's interest in the formation of character, Auchincloss describes
the early years of Tommy Wilson, who was born in Virginia but grew up in
Augusta, Ga., where his father, Joseph Wilson, became the chief executive
of the Southern Presbyterian Church. Because Wilson's father came from Ohio
and his mother, Jessie Woodrow, from England, Auchincloss writes,
''Wilson's claim to be a Southerner had in it something of the factitious.
Although it is true that he lived in Virginia and Georgia until he was in
his late 20's, he had no Southern ancestry, and he resided in the North for
the balance of his life.'' But surely someone who lives in a single region
until he is nearly 30 is a product of that region. ''He used to say,''
Auchincloss notes, ''that the South was the only part of the country where
nothing had to be explained to him.'' Indeed, Wilson was the first
Southerner to be elected president since the Civil War, and he started a
trend: if Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson are considered Southerners, then
five of seven Democratic presidents in the 20th century came from the South.
After an abortive start in the legal profession, Wilson attended graduate
school at Johns Hopkins and taught history and political science at Bryn
Mawr, Wesleyan and, beginning in 1890, at Princeton, his undergraduate alma
mater. While battling snobbery among students and alumni as president of
Princeton and publishing an impressive number of articles and books,
including the acclaimed ''Congressional Government'' (1885), Wilson dreamed
of influencing public affairs. Auchincloss, who has written about early
modern France, observes, ''His precedent is more to be found in Europe than
in America, more in the example of some young priest like the 17th-century
Richelieu dreaming in the cloister of how he might take over the power of
the state from the clumsy military minds that had ruled it so long.'' If
Auchincloss knew the South better, he would recognize Wilson as an example
of a kind that also includes Thomas Jefferson and John C. Calhoun: the
Ciceronian humanist who moves with ease between politics, philosophy,
journalism and literature, a type that survived in the provincial South for
generations after specialization destroyed its habitats in Britain and the
American North.
Wilson owed his chance to be a philosopher-king to Democratic Party
philosopher-kingmakers who made him governor of New Jersey in 1910 and then
arranged for his nomination as president in 1912, to block another
disastrous presidential bid by William Jennings Bryan, the party's
three-time nominee. (Resurfacing as Wilson's secretary of state, Bryan, a
prohibitionist as well as an agrarian and creationist, replaced wine with
lemonade at State Department receptions before resigning in protest over
the administration's preparedness policies.) Wilson was elected president
in 1912 only because Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive Party candidacy split
the Republican vote that otherwise would have re-elected T.R.'s estranged
successor, William Howard Taft. Once in office, Wilson surprised
conservative Democrats by pushing through a number of progressive reforms
in the name of the ''New Freedom,'' the Democratic answer to Roosevelt's
''New Nationalism.'' For most of his presidency, Wilson relied on the
political skills of a Texan adviser, Colonel House, whom he described as
''my second personality. He is my independent self.'' It is as if Jim Baker
had been the best friend and counselor not of George Bush but of Jimmy Carter.
The constraints of the brief biography prevent Auchincloss from dealing
with the complexities of the Wilson administration's foreign policy in the
years preceding World War I. Like most historians, he treats Wilson's
involvement in Mexican politics as an isolated episode rather than as part
of a regional strategy to pre-empt German influence. Wilson sent American
troops to occupy Haiti in 1915 and the Dominican Republic in 1916, and a
year later the United States bought the Virgin Islands, thereby gaining
control of every major Caribbean island except British Jamaica. The
Zimmerman telegram, in which Germany promised Mexico the return of Texas
and California in return for an anti-American alliance, suggests that the
fears of the Wilson administration were not unjustified. (Wilsonian
Realpolitik in the Caribbean and Mexico backfired when Wilson's former
assistant secretary of the Navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, ran for vice
president in 1920. Joking about his qualifications, F.D.R. said: ''You know
I have had something to do with the running of a couple of little
republics. The facts are that I wrote Haiti's Constitution myself, and, if
I do say it, I think it a pretty good Constitution'' -- giving the
Republican presidential candidate, Warren G. Harding, an occasion to
denounce the alleged ''rape of Haiti'' and other West Indian islands.)
The entry of the United States into the Great War in 1917; the Fourteen
Points; the arrival of Wilson in Europe, hailed as a messiah; the clashes
between the idealistic American president and cynical European leaders; the
battle against membership in the League of Nations led in the Senate by
Henry Cabot Lodge (like Wilson, a brilliant professor in politics);
Wilson's collapse and repudiation of his friends and allies -- this is a
familiar story retold well. Auchincloss argues that the catastrophe was
foreshadowed. Wilson suffered a minor stroke as early as 1896, and again in
1906. Auchincloss blames Wilson's second wife, the former Edith Bolling
Galt, for his break with Colonel House and others, and adduces evidence
that a need for uncritical female devotion was part of Wilson's character
all along.
Perhaps, though, poor health and a protective wife were less crucial than
his own beliefs in driving Wilson to his downfall. Bismarck famously
remarked that the statesman can only listen for God's footsteps and clutch
at his robe; another great realist, Charles de Gaulle, when told he was
indispensable, replied, ''The graveyard is full of indispensable men.''
President-elect Wilson told the astonished chairman of the Democratic Party
after his victory in 1912, ''Remember that God ordained that I should be
the next president of the United States.'' His career remains a tragedy but
ceases to be a mystery, if one assumes that Woodrow Wilson was sincere in
his belief that he was on a mission from God to save the world from war.
Michael Lind, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author,
most recently, of ''Vietnam: The Necessary War.''
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company
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