What Wilson Was Really Like
PRICE, DOUGLAS
What Wilson Was Really Like Woodrow Wilson By August Heckscher Scribner's. 743 pp. $35.00. Reviewed by Douglas Price Professor of Government, Harvard Given the chance to spend an...
...Fortunately, an uncle recommended that the struggling attorney apply to the graduate program at the newly founded Johns Hopkins University...
...In 1910 Wilson lost a crucial fight at Princeton over the location of an expanded graduate school...
...Academics like to search for "critical" elections that result in a new social grouping and an altered partisan balance in politics...
...August Heckscher's distinguished biography goes a long way toward changing that image...
...This fact, plus the intercepted telegram sent by Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann (proposing a German-Mexican alliance against the U.S...
...Until his selection, Wilson's political views had fo?‹owed those of conventional conservative Democrats...
...Not only had too much blood been shed for either the Allies or the Central Powers to look favorably on a simple return to the status quo ante...
...Reviewed by Douglas Price Professor of Government, Harvard Given the chance to spend an evening with a past U. S. President no longer living, which one would modern Americans choose...
...There Wilson found his first passion...
...Significant legislation restricting business interests while promoting those of farmers and labor has been limited to three main periods: Wilson's first term, Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, and Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society...
...Once his interests were engaged, moreover, he began to display immense energy as well as a genuine literary flair...
...Whatever the case, he taught himself to write with his left hand and, after resting over the summer, appeared to have recovered...
...The enormous strain was too much...
...The reputation Wilson built as a scholar and a teacher at Bryn Mawr College and Wesleyan University returned him to Princeton in 1890, but his workload was heavy and six years later he suffered paralysis of his right hand...
...But somehow he seems a cold and distant figure, a sort of Presbyterian Robert E. Lee...
...Senator (a decision then still inthehandsof state legislatures...
...The battle brought him to national attention, prompting New Jersey's Democratic boss James Smith to sound him out as a candidate for governor...
...But the Republicans had captured Congress in the 1918 elections, and securing the two-thirds majority necessary for ratification of the plan would have been a formidable challenge for Wilson in his prime...
...participation in the League was voted down, and the Democrats suffered a smashing defeat in the 1920 election...
...While that material remains crucial for scholars, the general reader will find Heckscher's work a lively and encompassing portrayal...
...When Hollywood produced a Technicolor epic of his life it flopped badly...
...Later he relied on similar support in pushing through a series of social reform measures...
...In his absence, I recommend this book...
...proved decisive for Wilson: Backed by a unanimous Cabinet, he opted for intervention...
...he favored, for example, knocking William Jennings Bryan "into a cocked hat...
...After graduation, he began law school at the University of Virginia, only to drop out again at the insistence of his parents before completing the final semester...
...Once installed in Trenton, he put through a substantial set ofprogressive measures, and won acclaim by successfully opposing Smith'sattempttobecomeU.S...
...The President was an enthusiastic if somewhat late recruit to the idea of the League...
...Indeed, the hundreds of letters he sent to Ellen Axson, his first wife, give structure to much of the narrative...
...I suspect, though, that Woodrow Wilson would appear far down on the list...
...It portrays a very personal Wilson in all of his strengths and weaknesses...
...Instead, he emphasizes the physical ailments that marked...
...Progressive and anti-machine sentiment quickly swung to Wilson rather than Alabama's Oscar W. Underwood, and the New Jersey Governor secured the nomination...
...In his fight to reform Princeton, however, the new president moved to the Left, advocating a more scholarly atmosphere that would efface economic class lines...
...There is no Wilson Presidential Library, such institutions being a postWorld War II invention (extended back to FDR and Hoover), but the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, of which Heckscher is a former president, has served his memory well...
...Yet this happened only when FDR defeated Herbert Hoover in 1932...
...and ultimately undid...
...each side believed it could achieve a clear-cut military victory...
...Wilson himself died in 1924...
...hasobserved that American politics typically pits a coalition led by the business community against a rival coalition...
...Heckscher follows Dr...
...His opponents were centered in New York, while his strongest support came from alumni clubs to the west...
...He greatly admired feminine charm, and was a gallant and extremely ardent suitor...
...He was a fascinating personality, and for most of his years in office a truly successful President...
...Wilson spent ayear at Davidson College, dropped out, then went on to Princeton, where he flourished in literary and debating activities...
...Here is a man who, at least until 1919, made as engaging a companion as one could possibly ask for...
...At the convention Champ Clark of Missouri pulled ahead on early ballots, but a move by New York Tammany leader Charles F. Murray to deliver his delegates to Clark backfired...
...With the progressive tide running high at the time, Wilson was elected bynearlya2:l margin...
...Jefferson, Lincoln and the two Roosevelts would no doubt rate high...
...Thus Wilson was not only elected but carried strong majorities with him into the House and Senate...
...The Republican Party, meanwhile, was split between William H. Taft and third-party candidate Theodore Roosevelt...
...Heckscher concludes with a recounting of the tragic story of Wilson's physical decline under the rigors of negotiating the peace settlement and establishing the League of Nations...
...Edwin Weinstein's book regarding Wilson's affliction as a premonitory sign of the strokes that would plague his Presidency...
...Germany had been halted on the Western front and checked on the ocean's surface, but it retained the potential to use unrestricted submarine warfare to sever supply lines and thus knock Britain out of the War...
...writing and research on government...
...ArthurM...
...He was rather a "cut-up" among friends...
...He passed the bar exam nonetheless, but never managed to find many clients...
...In his first year, Wilson capitalized on liberal feelings that were well-established to win passage of important economic legislation like the Underwood Tariff and theFederal Reserve Act...
...The body of literature on Wilson is enormous: The Papers of Woodrow Wilson runs to over 60 published volumes (one contains a reference to "a thousand points of starry light"), and Arthur S. Link's eminent Wilson (taking him into 1917) adds another five...
...As it was, his health had deteriorated at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, and he began the battle for ratification withdrawn, impatient and uncompromising...
...Although Wilson has long intrigued psychoanalysts, including Freud, Heckscher avoids the psychobiographical approach...
...Eventually, he decided to go over the Senators' heads and appeal to the people on a tour of the West...
...Schlesinger Jr...
...Heckscher gives somewhat limited attention to Wilson's domestic agenda and to the return of business influence during the period of preparedness and mobilization for World War I. But he provides a compelling account of the President's struggle to maintain neutrality and his unsuccessful efforts to arrange a peace in Europe...
...A dreamy youth growing up in the postCivil War South, Wilson did surprisingly poorly in his studies and very likely suffered from dyslexia...
...His final year in office was a disaster...
...To be sure, since the Civil War it has been an unequal contest...
...In 1902 Princeton's trustees, believing he could fulfill their ambitious plans for strengthening the school, named him president of the university...
...Interestingly, this regional pattern was to repeat itself in his pursuit of the 1912 Presidential nomination, in his election to the White House, and in his ill-fated 1919 tour in support of an unmodified League of Nations...
...Beneath his dour Scottish exterior there was a warm, vibrant Celtic character that won him the genuine affection of classmates and a generation of students...
...As the Presidential election of 1912 approached, Wilson's supporters throughout the country, impressed by his reforms, urged him to seek the Democratic nomination...
...At 16, he worked to overcome his handicap by teaching himself shorthand and mastering the typewriter...
...Wilson's career, and discusses their probable psychological effects...
Vol. 74 • December 1991 • No. 14
