Wilson as Domestic Reformer
BURNS, JAMES MACGREGOR
WRITERS and WRITING Wilson as Domestic Reformer Wilson: The New Freedom. A Crossroads of Freedom. Reviewed by James MacGregor Burns By Arthur S. Link. Ed. by John Wells Davidson. Professor of...
...Why has this venerable mechanism been allowed to deteriorate in recent decades...
...He used traditional methods of Presidential influence—patronage, understandings with state and local bosses, face-to-face persuasion —and he used the threat to "take issues to the country...
...Professor Link's second volume goes far to realize the early promise of a great and indispensable biography...
...6.00...
...Professor of Political Science, Williams College...
...He and his readers can look forward to his next volumes with keen anticipation and confidence...
...A Crossroads of Freedom is a compilation of Wilson's campaign speeches of 1912, published under the sponsorship of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation...
...For example, even before he was inaugurated Wilson had to choose between leadership of a Democratic-insurgent Republican coalition of progressives, and party leadership acting through the Democratic Congressional membership and machinery...
...570 pp...
...May we hope for another for the 1916 campaign...
...Informing all Wilson's actions was the conviction that Presidents must lead, must "incarnate the consciences of the men whom they rule," even though such leadership often involves compromises as well as boldness...
...This is usually the main burden of the single-volume biography, but with the bigger effort author and reader can have their cake and eat it, too...
...Edited with lavish care and remarkable fidelity, the volume gives us for the first time the full texts of most of the major campaign speeches and parts of many minor ones...
...But if during his first two years Wilson was content to play the party game, he played it very well...
...Thus Wilson wrote in June 1913: "You see, it's this way: We live distracting days...
...He chose the latter, and this choice played its part in making the New Freedom a fairly faithful materialization of the Democratic party platform of 1912, with all its promise and limitation...
...The way is sometimes circuitous, as fascinating aspects of the story are developed in footnotes, but the reader feels that he has seen the intriguing by-ways of the political process as well as the main highway of action...
...Sometimes the President gave in to pressure, more often he took a stand and held it— and the remarkable thing is how often his judgment proved right...
...Partly by force of personality, partly by full use of Presidential power and position, Wilson put through a New Freedom program that was imperiled more often and from more directions than is commonly recognized...
...In his practiced and surefooted way, the author takes us through the struggles over key domestic and foreign policies of those years—tariff reform, the Federal Reserve Act, antitrust legislation, the first stages of Wilson's Latin American and Mexican policies...
...My friends are those fixed points...
...The author is mainly concerned with Wilson's personal and political growth during the period, and keeps returning to his subject in the interstices of his panorama of policy and politics...
...7.50...
...Wilson also reveals himself through his letters—far more so, for example, than did Franklin Roosevelt—and Professor Link is able to quote copiously from them...
...Another advantage of the multican exhort as well as encourage...
...The complex events of Wilson's first two years in the White House are the subject of the second volume of Professor Link's biographical series...
...Professor Davidson, of the history department of the University of Maryland, provides vivid background sketches, textual explanation, and documentation...
...One volume biography is that the spectator hopes that somewhere the author can pause to offer an extended analysis of the interplay of Wilson's personal development and the political context in which he operated...
...504 pp...
...and I. for one, need fixed points upon which to base my actions from hour to hour...
...The life we lead is one of infinite distraction, confusion,—fragmentary, broken in upon and athwart in every conceivable way...
...My intercourse with them helps me restore my identity from time to time, to get the confusion out of my nervous system and feel like the real Woodrow Wilson, a fellow of fixed connections, loyal to long established, deep-rooted friendships and associations, living through his heart and his affections, his tastes and all that runs in him independent of circumstances and occupation and momentary tasks...
...The modern Roosevelt-Truman-Stevenson party dates from 1916 rather than 1912, and one looks forward to Professor Link's treatment of Wilson's shift to a more modern brand of progressivism...
...author, "Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox" When it comes to great American Presidents, I must confess that I am a devotee of the multi-volume biography...
...How else can we get the enormous detail involved in every Presidential action of major consequence...
...He shows Wilson as an unpredictable combination of tenacity and compromise...
...We are at the beck and call of others (how many, many others...
...The volume is exemplary of its kind...
...This volume is a rich field for the student of American politics, and may cause some re-thinking...
...Yale...
...Princeton...
...Under his leadership, the Congressional caucus was a vital means of establishing and enacting party policy...
...and almost never have a chance to order our days as we wish to order them, or to follow our own thoughts and devices...
...Even the less important of such actions involve hundreds of strands of thought and action—involve public opinion in all its many dimensions, scores of Congressmen, Presidential aides, bureaucrats, interested bystanders, and the assumptions, false starts, queries, indecision, afterthoughts, changed tactics of the President himself...
Vol. 40 • February 1957 • No. 6
