Woodrow Wilson, by August Heckscher

...Though Heckscher sensibly does not engage in anything that smacks of psychobiography, the evidence he presents shows that Wilson was one of the most complex personalities ever to reach the White House...

...He had always tended to autocracy in foreign affairs...

...Upbraiding letters from his father suggest he long remained reluctant to work hard and, in particular,to become a successful lawyer, as Wilson Sr...

...Indeed, he did not lead at all: he commanded, and his commands were not obeyed...

...But governing is a two-way street...

...All the same, the first Wilson Administration, in putting through a successful and coherent plan of much-needed reforms, has remained the model of all Democratic Presidents ever since...

...Wilson began to make mistakes when he stopped listening, when he continued to lecture but ceased to converse, a corruption of power from which all rulers are liable to suffer—Margaret Thatcher is a recent example—but which in his case was catastrophically accelerated by illness...

...but it is evident that for much of his second term he was unfit to hold office...

...But to wage war with all America's enormous resources, and at the same time to construct a peace that was not Carthaginian, was a difficult balance to maintain...

...on the contrary...

...Even in 1916, after a successful first term, he only just squeaked home against a poor opponent, and again with a minority (49.3 percent) of the votes cast...

...The earlier Wilson was boisterous, joked, sang songs, and told stories brilliantly...

...and Wilson forced through, against much opposition, the appointment of the first Jew, the Boston lawyer Louis Brandeis, to the Supreme Court...

...But Wilson refused to compromise, or indeed to negotiate at all...

...But Wilson was not content to be a successful teacher and compiler of university textbooks...

...He treated the new Senate majority leader, Henry Cabot Lodge, as an enemy, and of course he became one...

...Heckscher traces the stages whereby the original Thomas Wilson, known universally as Tommy, became Thomas W. Wilson, then T. Woodrow Wilson, and finally the Jovian deity, Woodrow Wilson...

...This light-hearted Wilson, however, retreated into the shadows as his second term involved him in war and, eventually, failure...

...Religious certitudes certainly helped to bolster his political certitudes, not to say the self-righteousness with which he advanced his aims and which led the cynical French with whom he had to deal to call him "a lay pope...

...It would not be quite true to say that he invented politics as a subject...

...He allowed the bosses to put him into the governor's mansion, then turned on them with righteous fury...

...He emerged as the hero of the notorious Democratic party convention at Baltimore in 1912, one of the longest, most dramatic, and fiercely contested ever held, at the end of which he beat the Missouri boss, James "Champ" Clark, decisively (though, as Heckscher notes —and it is another paradox—under the more recent "democratic" rules, Wilson could never have won...

...The Democrats had done little better, though in Grover Cleveland they at least produced a man of some integrity...

...His widow Edith lived on until after John F. Kennedy, another President handicapped by serious illness, entered the White House...

...He did not even learn to read until he was nine...

...Books as much as battles helped to create the new Republic, and scholarly interpretations of its constitution by learned judges have shaped much of its subsequent history...

...Hence, not the /east of the lessons is the need for objective medical supervision of anyone who holds as much lawful power as an American President...

...Brandeis, for his part, had noted after their first meeting in 1912 that Wilson "has all the qualities for an ideal president—strong, simple and truthful, able, openminded, eager to learn and deliberate...

...To a great extent he became the American Bagehot...

...Admiral Grayson, his personal physician, should accordingly have advised resignation, in the interests of both his patient and the nation...

...But if Wilson did not exactly enter the conflict with relish, he did so nonetheless with great determination and thoroughness...

...The evidence suggests that, properly led, Americans would have done all that Wilson could reasonably have required, including participating in a world secuity organization...

...And an astonishingly masterful one, too...

...American society has always revered education, not least in its higher reaches, and college presidents are, or were until recently, among the most respected groups in the country...

...The growth of both the universities themselves and the variety of subjects taught there produced a huge demand for textbooks, and here, too, Wilson's arrival was timely...

...But Wilson, then and later, showed himself extraordinarily strong and wily at exploiting just such opportunities...

...It became more so as German behavior, up to and beyond the Armistice, led Wilson increasingly to distrust and despise the enemy...

...She was tall, Junoesque, and "somewhat plump by modern American standards," as one of the President's secret servicemen put it...

...thesis, Congressional Government (1885), still in print over a century later, and he followed it with a number of highly regarded and much-reprinted volumes, including The State: Elements of Historical and Practical Politics (1889), a five-part History of the American People (1902), and Constitutional Government in the United States (1908...

...She now engaged with Grayson in a conspiracy to conceal from Congress and the public the true state of the President's health and his incapacity to conduct the nation's business...

...During his first term, he developed an almost uncanny gift for perceiving the drift of U.S...

...It was another turning point in American history, for though Big Government went underground under Harding and Coolidge, it reemerged under Franklin Delano Roosevelt and has strengthened ever since...

...It also involved Mrs...

...And, since the great of the earth habitually develop a close, often fiercely personal relationship with their medical adviser, its solution will not be easy...

...By the end of his first term Wilson had not only overcome the handicap of being the first Southerner in the White House since the Civil War, but also enjoyed a degree of personal respect, and indeed popularity, that far surpassed that of the still lowly regarded Democratic party...

...But Wilson soon recovered and found a second wife, another merry widow, the 42-yearold Edith Bolling Galt, like Ellen an emancipated woman, who owned Washington's most fashionable jewelry store and was famous for being the first woman in the city to drive her own car...

...Therein lay his, and the world's, tragedy...

...Francia's Paraguay in the nineteenth century and Professor Salazar's Portugal in the twentieth were examples, albeit ruthless ones, of successful cathedocracies...

...Joseph P. Tumulty, his secretary and one of his closest advisers, was a devoted Roman Catholic, which raised many eyebrows at the time...

...This was good fortune, but the way in which Wilson, who never sat in Congress, made himself the undisputed leader of the Democrats in both houses and persuaded them—along with many Republicans, too—to enact the legislative program he laid down, is without parallel in American history...

...There was, in short, a mean streak in Wilson, and a tendency to resort to force when he felt his moral principles threatened...

...wished...

...Edith Wilson had, from the moment of her second marriage, taken a close interest in the presidential power structure...

...He was no pacifist...

...I would be deeply mortified to have you or anybody like you vote for me...

...T he emergence of the mature 1 Wilson, stern, aloof, almost awesome, high-principled, incorruptible, was not entirely a natural process...

...But he owed his rapid, and much resented, naval promotion to Wilson's patronage, and the last thing he wanted was to see Wilson quit the White House...

...What followed was a scandal, from which no one emerged with credit...

...He declined to make concessions that even the British, the strongest supporters of the League, would happily have accepted...

...In fighting machine politicians he developed his own dignified but nonetheless ruthless brand of populism...

...Like many prominent academics, Wilson had long possessed a talent for irritable abuse...

...More likely he was lazy and unmotivated...

...As a result he got nothing, and the last, most disastrous, phase of American isolationism began...

...His forebears struck roots in the South, which left some traces on his public persona, but his culture was essentially British-American...

...The statesman he most admired was the great reforming Liberal, William Ewart Gladstone, and his intellectual mentor was the worldly-wise banker-editor Walter Bagehot, who wrote so well on the practical problems of governing Britain and her empire...

...My life would not be worth living," Wilson told a White House visitor in 1915, "if it were not for the driving power of religion...

...Earlier American intervention might have shortened the war and prevented the fearful catastrophes of the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1991 43 years 1916-18, which changed the course of world history...

...Heckscher thinks he may have been dyslexic...

...Yet Wilson's victory in 1912 was a turning point in American political history...

...As Disraeli said of Gladstone, it was typical of him "not merely to keep aces up his sleeve but to insist God put them there," and similarly Wilson, who played hardball politics, insinuated he did so at the direction of Providence, likewise at his elbow when he wrote the Fourteen Points and planned the League of Nations...

...When, at the beginning of his second term, Wilson proposed a bill to arm merchant ships in response to the German U-boat campaign, a group of senators staged a filibuster, and Wilson issued a statement that made sensational headlines: "A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great Government of the United States helpless and contemptible...

...American membership—and thus an American involvement in Europe that in all probability would have prevented a Second World War—might have been negotiated through Congress...

...The evidence shows that from a comparatively early age he suffered from deep-seated, possibly inherited, circulatory problems...

...In 1916, the Federal Farm Loan Act (which created cheap agricultural credits) and the Adamson Act (which introduced the eight-hour day) completed the legislative foundation of modern American democratic capitalism...

...He came to academic life at exactly the right moment...

...Is it not logical that the most learned should take the most important decisions...

...President became seriously dependent on amphetamines, as the result of reckless medication of which even insiders knew nothing, shows that the "Wilson Problem" is recurrent...

...it is the most serious weakness in his book—the kind of war Wilson chose to wage created for the first time a federal appetite for a growing share of the GNP, and it set up the institutions and devised the methods whereby that insatiable appetite has since been fed...

...These produced a series of crises, one of which made him virtually blind in one eye, and which were plainly aggravated by overwork and strain...

...But he was also fond of women, highly sexed, even passionate, and capable of penning memorable love letters...

...It is a daunting story, and Heckscher tells it plainly, truthfully, and without sensationalism...

...But the fact that as recently as the early sixties a U.S...

...His first wife, Ellen, was a proto-feminist, and their marriage a grand love affair...

...His vigorous attempts to transform it into America's and the world's greatest university —by no means wholly unsuccessful—were ultimately frustrated by what he saw as the malign exercise of the power of money...

...Wilson did no such thing...

...Within three years, this academic theoretician, who had compiled Congressional Government without once having visited Congress, was installed—via a spell as governor of New Jersey—in the White House...

...The President's deteriorating health made him irritable, resentful of criticism, and quite unwilling to dissipate any of his remaining energies on conciliating his opponents...

...He tried to compel Mexico to conform to his democratic notions and sent General Pershing on a punitive expedition deep into the country that might well have ended in disaster or full-scale war...

...Wilson quickly discovered that his lecture-room skills served him well for platform oratory...

...The President had great willpower, and could and did make extraordinary efforts to recover from these crises...

...Bryan's last great service to his party, however, was to help secure Wilson's nomination, which at last gave the Democrats a candidate of outstanding ability...

...his life what he termed "faith pure and simple...

...One is that intellectuals sometimes make successful rulers: a man who teaches the art of government can also practice it...

...fiscal history...

...35 Paul Johnson 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1991 opposition...

...Until his second term, Wilson retained this last gift: along with Lincoln and Reagan, he was the President who used the apt and funny tale to most effect...

...I say objective because the political supervision of a ruler's health is open to the strongest objections: for example, following Lenin's first stroke, it was Stalin who got the Central Committee to appoint him medical superintendent of Lenin's well-being, a maneuver that led directly to the final breach between the two men...

...Wilson's behavior was so far from his earlier ability to get Congress to enact contentious domestic legislation, and so contrary to the constitutional practice he taught in his books and lectures, that it suggests a rapid decline in judgment, itself the result of a physical deterioration...

...The American university was coming of age and entering a period of unprecedented expansion...

...But it did not prevent Wilson from striking up, in due course, an acquaintance with a frisky widow, whom he met in his favorite vacation haunt, Bermuda...

...Moreover, as a Southerner of liberal views, he was able to construct, for the first time, the classic coalition of Southern conservatives and northern and western progressives that was to remain the Democratic mainstay until the end of the 1960s...

...44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1991...

...She had helped to oust Wilson's chief crony, Colonel House, and had stripped Tumulty of much of his influence...

...In the following year, 1914, the creation of the Federal Trade Commission and the Clayton Anti-Trust Act brought the Robber Baron era to an end...

...The city machines had been all-powerful since the Civil War, but in the year before Wilson emerged, bosses like Croker at Tammany Hall, Ruef in San Francisco, Platt in New York state, and Quay in Philadelphia had been stripped of their feathers...

...Wilson's Calvinism went deep...

...both men ran their countries like highly disciplined academies, but only by isolating them from the contemporary world and at the price of storing up trouble for their successors...

...To begin with, he was not, as might be supposed from his mature career, an example of the relentless drive for success that Max Weber argued sprang from the "Protestant ethic" and, in particular, from its "salvation panic...

...But here we come to the central paradox of Wilson: the way in which his moralism and his political pragmatism competed for mastery...

...Cathedocracy worked well, for instance, in traditional Jewish societies...

...At first glance, no country could be more remote from cathedocracy than the United States, with its strong democratic and egalitarian instincts...

...Cathedocracy can work, at least in peacetime...

...Hence for the first time—but by no means the last—the Democrats won an election on a peace policy, and then proceeded to make war...

...Here, too, he took advantage of a trend...

...The man who had the right and duty to take over, Vice President Thomas R. Marshall, also flunked his responsibility...

...Wilson scored a miserable 41.8 percent, the lowest for an elected President since Lincoln's 39.9 in 1860...

...Johns Hopkins, where he taught, had just introduced the best traditions of German scholarship...

...Yet what happens when a professor/ college president actually takes over...

...T he first sign of disaster came in the I midterm elections of November 1918, which Wilson handled in a lackluster manner, and which produced a Republican Congress...

...Wilson's taking many executive decisions herself, and forging her husband's signature on public documents...

...Heckscher describes how, in the days before amplification, his fine voice and admirable, often spontaneous, choice of words could hold audiences of up to 35,000 spellbound...

...So, with some difficulty, he held the balance between the combatants, and campaigned in 1916 on an aggressively pacifist platform...

...He not only created a vast war machine but also penalized—some would say persecuted—those who opposed it, culminating in the first of America's modern witch hunts, led by Attorney General Mitchell Palmer, perhaps the worst of Wilson's many bad appointments...

...When Bryan resigned, he appointed a feeble official, Robert Lansing, as secretary of state, and when even Lansing proved difficult, sacked him and put in his place a personal crony, a nonentity named Colby Bainbridge...

...It was the tremendous internal rows at Princeton that led to his resignation in 1910 and turned Wilson from a student of politics into an active performer...

...As a youth he experienced a characteristic "awakening," believing himself one of the Elect, and he retained throughout Paul Johnson's most tecent book is The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830 (HarperCollins...

...Heckscher has unearthed a memorandum in which the young Wilson itemized his wardrobe, listing 103 articles, including pairs of spats, pearl-colored trousers, and a blue vest...

...W ilson's career, as I say, holds many lessons...

...intervention more or less inevitable...

...IV et Wilson's family was also not- I able for teaching, reading, and non-conformity, and there were persistent liberal elements in his makeup as well...

...Having secured this statuesque lady, President Wilson was described by an associate as jigging dance steps on the sidewalk and singing the current vaudeville hit "Oh, you beautiful doll, you great big beautiful doll...

...In the meantime, the world paid a heavy price for Wilson's obstinate refusal to admit the political consequences of his physical state...

...This skill underlay the success of his legislative program...

...Wilson, to do him justice, saw some of these dangers...

...In the days to come," he ended his closing campaign speech, "men will no longer wonder how America is going to work out her destiny, for she will have proclaimed to them that her destiny is not divided from the destiny of the world, that her purpose is justice and love of mankind...

...The Republican party had dominated American politics since the Civil War, and throughout Wilson's day it remained, in numbers of registered voters, much the larger organization...

...During his second presidential campaign, he cabled the Irish-American leader, Jeremiah A. O'Leary, who had accused him of pro-British sentiments: "Your telegram received...

...It is a paradox that the austere-seeming Presbyterian college president was brought into the squalor of New Jersey politics at the invitation of the Democratic party bosses, who ran one of the most corrupt machines in America...

...The Republican split not only put Wilson into the White House but also gave him a Democratic Congress...

...quite the reverse...

...But the Republican following was such that Wilson was able to win in 1912 only because Roosevelt's Bull Moose party split the Republican vote...

...opinion and giving it form, rhetoric, and a moral rationale—for leading it firmly in the direction where it was edging anyway...

...The triumph and tragedy of Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924, and President 191321) is one of the most instructive stories in the whole of American history, and the appearance of August Heckscher's scholarly, thorough, and dispassionate biography provides an opportunity to draw some of its lessons...

...As the pacifist Randolph Bourne warned Wilson at the time, "War is the health of the state...

...This involved playacting in which the helpless invalid collaborated, insofar as he was able, when anxious congressmen were brought into his bedroom...

...Wilson began to make mistakes when he stopped listening, a corruption of power from which all rulers are liable to suffer—Margaret Thatcher is a recent example...

...Harvard was being transformed by Charles Eliot, Johns Hopkins by Daniel Coit Gilman, and Columbia by Seth Low, to give only three examples of the new breed of academic statesman then emerging...

...But Cleveland had had to contend with thedestructive rivalry of the great orator William Jennings Bryan, whose pseudo-intellectual crankiness made him a favorite with Democratic militants, won him the party's nomination three times, and—for the same reasons—made him unelectable...

...It was not that most Americans did not support the war, or Wilson's efforts to make a just peace...

...Thus, in effect, an unelected woman governed America, insofar as it was governed at all, for the last year-and-ahalf of the Wilson presidency...

...But the truth is there were many Wilsons...

...What he wanted to do, as he eventually discovered, was to teach and write, above all to teach and write about the workings of government...

...His grandiose plans met with WOODROW WILSON August Heckscher/Charles Scribner's Sons/752 pp...

...The stricken Wilson made a limited recovery, oddly enough surviving his unfortunate Republican successor, Warren G. Harding, and dying in 1924...

...Institutions like Bryn Mawr were rapidly extending higher education to women: Wilson taught there, too, and proved himself admirably qualified to bring women into the circle of academia...

...This tribute is worth setting against the image of Wilson as inflexible and arrogant...

...This developed into a liaison, which led in time to a bit of genteel blackmail...

...But until Theodore Roosevelt came along, the Republicans had chosen a series of duds...

...That being so, it is curious and tragic that he failed to take the United States into the European war in 1915, when the sinking of the Lusitania provided a valid pretext...

...His physical condition effectively cost him the battle for the League of Nations some time before a massive stroke at the end of September 1919 destroyed his remaining usefulness as a public servant...

...He no longer intuited the American mood, then shaped and led it...

...He avoided the charge of being indifferent to what was becoming a horrific struggle by identifying the United States, in a lofty, vague, but impressive way, with the long-term interests of the entire world...

...Indeed, Germany's resumption of indiscriminate submarine warfare early in 1917 made US...

...It is, by any standard, an impressive record...

...Once he had discovered this calling, and had overcome his father's opposition, his career took off and he worked with staggering dedication...

...and his opponents learned to entice wealthy alumni into providing huge conditional endowments skillfully designed to make Wilson's philosophy of education ineffective...

...One of the merits of Heckscher's book is that he collates carefully all the medical evidence available on Wilson throughout his life...

...They did not have to take ultimate decisions of peace and war—there is no word for army in Yiddish...

...He launched himself with an expanded Ph.D...

...The patrician Wilson of the White House overlay an earlier and more meretricious figure, not afraid of being thought dressy...

...Here was a clear signal to Wilson to bring the Republicans, who scented a revival in their fortunes, immediately into the peacemaking process and into the shaping of the postwar security plan...

...At Princeton, an old-fashioned New Jersey college noted chiefly for the training of Presbyterian clergymen, Wilson got his chance to join these illustrious men when in 1902 he was elected its first lay president...

...It has long been apparent from the evidence, and Heckscher's recension confirms it, that through the League of Nations Wilson was the architect of his own destruction...

...For the first two years of the Great War, Wilson saw that most Americans wanted to keep out, and that there was no prospect of winning re-election except on a peace platform...

...To meet them, and todistance his America from the (as he saw it) disreputable war aims of Lloyd George's Britain and Clemenceau's France, he devised the Fourteen Points and the League of Nations policy...

...In Wilson's first year in office, the Underwood Tariff Act reversed the protectionist trend of sixty years, and the creation of the Federal Reserve system finally buried some of the most rooted prejudices in U.S...

...No one, not even Lincoln, used the quasi-religious rhetoric of the grand American tradition more effectively, or succeeded so often in conveying the impression that to oppose his policies was not merely impolitic but downright immoral...

...He rewarded Bryan by making him secretary of state, a hard-to-defend choice that smacked precisely of the "corrupt bargain" between Adams and Clay that had outraged Jackson and given birth to his Democratic party in the first place...

...Moreover—and this is a point that Heckscher deals with inadequately...

...He successfully stole Teddy Roosevelt's progressive clothes and gave back to the Democrats the political image they had possessed in the days of their founder, Andrew Jackson—identification with "the people...

...At Princeton, of which he was a devoted alumnus, he discovered, when he joined the faculty in 1890, that fundamental changes were needed, and this led him to seek power...

...Hence Europe came to occupy all Wilson's attentions and energies...

...Since you have access to many disloyal Americans, I will ask you to convey this message to them...

...But his obsession with the affairs of Europe, and his actual—quite unnecessary—presence there during the Versailles negotiations, indicated that he had ceased to take note of what Americans were saying...

...But he made it fashionable and supplied it with much of its working material...

...Wilson came of Scots or Irish Calvinist stock on both sides of his family...

...But, then, those were mere self-governing enclaves in Gentile states...

...Marshall was a singularly unambitious man, quite content with his humdrum role...

...Yet many of the Founding Fathers had an academic bent...

...But he proved pusillanimous and, even when sacked, failed to expose it...

...Heckscher's account shows Wilson, hitherto interested chiefly in how government worked rather than in what it ought to do, driven by his anger at this abuse of money-power into becoming a liberal reformer...

...Another Wilson, aggressive and even bellicose, jostled for the spotlight with Wilson the moralist and worldstatesman...

...Here, too, he was part of a trend...

...The fraud should have been prevented by Lansing...

...As Heckscher shows, he remained too much of a Southerner to do anything for blacks—quite the contrary but he was almost totally without religious prejudice...

...Ellen's death was nonetheless a bitter blow...

...Not that Wilson was incapable of wheeling and dealing...

...He intervened in Central America and the Caribbean more than any other President before or since...