Woodrow Wilson Achieved a Lot. So Why Is He So Scorned?
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Version 0 of 1. THE MORALIST Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made By Patricia O’Toole Illustrated. 636 pp. Simon & Schuster. $35 Historical memory has not been kind to Woodrow Wilson. No other president who accomplished so much has so few latter-day admirers. He established the Federal Reserve, signed a major antitrust law, initiated the modern income tax and led the nation to victory in World War I. Wilson was also the first Democrat to win two consecutive terms in the White House since Andrew Jackson. But conservatives scorn him for aligning his party with organized labor and starting the administrative state. And leftists and libertarians condemn him for establishing conscription and signing the Espionage and Sedition Acts that essentially made all vocal opposition to the nation’s war with Germany illegal. Pretty much everyone reviles Wilson, who grew up in the South, for allowing cabinet secretaries to segregate their departments and for sponsoring a screening of “The Birth of a Nation” at a time when the N.A.A.C.P. was staging protests against D. W. Griffith’s unashamedly racist, if brilliantly directed, film. Even the 28th president’s futile campaign to persuade the Senate to ratify the Paris peace treaty with its provision for a League of Nations now seems the act of an ailing man unwilling to forge a compromise with his Republican critics instead of a courageous attempt to establish a new world order to keep the peace. As Patricia O’Toole remarks in “The Moralist,” her new biography of Wilson, “The remains of his presidency have yet to find repose.” Most biographers, by nature an empathetic lot, have sought to explain Wilson’s feats and flaws rather than to justify or disdain them. Some, like Arthur S. Link and John Milton Cooper Jr., focus on Wilson’s struggle to reconcile his scholarly ideals with the exigencies of partisan and global combat. Others, like A. Scott Berg, dwell on the complex psychology of a leader in whom a great passion for and loyalty to his intimates mixed with an intense hatred of anyone who crossed him. In what may be the most brutal analysis ever written about the man, Sigmund Freud and William Bullitt, a former diplomat, depicted Wilson as a religious fanatic whose inability to resolve his simultaneous love and resentment toward his father, a learned Presbyterian clergyman, led him to misjudge both his wartime allies and his adversaries in Congress. O’Toole, who has written biographies of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Adams, mostly avoids using Wilson’s career to teach a contemporary political lesson or to judge whether his personality got in the way of his statesmanship. “The Moralist” is primarily a tale about the public deeds of a public man, sprinkled with perceptive observations about his two marriages and chronic infirmities. O’Toole moves briskly through the 56 years of his prepresidential life in a mere 61 pages, then gives scant attention to his domestic accomplishments. She devotes the bulk of her text to Wilson’s actions during the war and its immediate aftermath. O’Toole is a gifted narrator with a knack for illuminating the significance of well-known people and events. She captures what each Allied leader wanted to achieve at the Paris peace conference without losing sight of the future they were arguing about. The French prime minister Georges Clemenceau, a veteran of partisan combat who was then in his late 70s, was, she writes, “a firm believer in the supremacy of military force” who nevertheless cleverly advocated for the League of Nations that his American counterpart ardently desired: “The boss of the global ward meeting had merely struck a pose in order to do the very thing he claimed not to be doing: impose the will of the Great Powers on the rest of the world.” To explain why Wilson refused at first to visit the ruined battlefields of northern France, she cites his boyhood memory of witnessing the devastation left by Sherman’s march to the sea during the Civil War. “I don’t want to get mad over here,” the president confessed, “because I think there ought to be one person at that peace table who isn’t mad.” It’s a pleasure to read such a smart and lucid presentation of so critical an aspect of the global past. However, O’Toole deploys her literary skills in the service of a history both familiar and rather old-fashioned. There is nothing of significance in her book that the small army of Wilson biographers and scholars of the Progressive era have not been narrating and chewing over since his death in 1924. And, aside from insightful portraits of Wilson’s two beloved wives, O’Toole’s gaze is fixed throughout on the president and other famous and powerful politicians. Absent are the opinions and deeds of the voters and political activists who compelled Wilson to grapple with the issues of corporate power and the decision to go to war that defined his presidency. In particular, she neglects the large and influential peace coalition that opposed expanding the Army to prepare for combat and then, despite state repression, mobilized against the intervention in Europe once it occurred. A mass of previously “isolationist” Americans did not, as O’Toole implies, suddenly line up behind the president once he changed his mind about neutrality and asked Congress to take the nation into what was then the bloodiest war in history. As Wilson was well aware, the early 20th century was a period of intense social and political conflicts in every region and in all types of communities. But O’Toole is concerned only with the men at the top. Neither does her narrative really support the title she chose. Wilson was indeed a man of profound convictions — about the functions of government, the responsibilities of citizens, the supremacy of white people. He was certain that he was doing the work of the Lord. Yet, as O’Toole herself describes him, Wilson was also a shrewd politician, deft at shifting his views and reshaping his policies in order to gain power and be able to do important things with it. A rigorous “moralist” would not have persuaded William Jennings Bryan, whose unyielding populist creed he privately ridiculed, to take the job of secretary of state and then shut him out of key diplomatic decisions. Neither does O’Toole give more than cursory attention to Wilson’s religious views, which always framed his sense of the ethical. The theology of a man who considered his Calvinist father “the finest of all his teachers” deserves more scrutiny. At the end of her biography, O’Toole makes a brief attempt to rescue Wilson from what the great British historian E. P. Thompson once called the “enormous condescension of posterity.” We still live, she claims, in “the Wilsonian century.” Despite the recoil from international cooperation practiced by the current resident of the White House and his fellow right-wing nationalists abroad, Wilson “turned out to be right about the central fact of life in a world of global markets, global finance, instant communication and the possibility of instant annihilation: Withdrawal is impossible.” But his crushing failure to get the peace treaty through the Senate a century ago suggests a less sanguine view. Most Americans soured on Wilson’s world-saving mission soon after the Great War ended and have only briefly embraced updated versions of it since — during the early Cold War and after the attacks of Sept. 11. Perhaps that helps explain why Wilson ranks so low on the current roster of favored presidents. His great ideal was not just defeated; it was never all that popular to begin with. |