THE WILSON MYSTERY
Neumann, William L.
The Wilson Mystery The Greatness of Woodrow Wilson, edited by Em Bowles Alsop. Rinehart. 270 pp. $3.95. Woodrow Wilson and the Politics of Morality, by John Morton Blum. Little, Brown. 215 pp....
...Whatever the specific terms used to describe Wilson's tragic flaw, his great failures seem to have come from within...
...2.50...
...Some historians are always busy rehabilitating figures who seem to have been underrated while others work at trimming to size reputations which no longer appear to bear the mark of true greatness...
...John Blum and John Garraty, both professional historians and of an age for whom Wilson is history rather than a memory, have provided excellent one-volume biographies, highly lucid and almost brief enough to be read in a single evening...
...In appropriate company the President could be a gay companion, the center of amusement with his fund of dialect stories and jokes...
...Of Christian forgiveness he seems to have had none...
...Was it the devil, incarnate first in Kaiser Wil-helm of Germany and the anti-war American Senators, then in Clemen-ceau and other European leaders at the Versailles Conference, and finally in Henry Cabot Lodge and the anti-League members of the Senate...
...Whether Wilson's ideas were intrinsically weak will long remain a matter of dispute among thinking men...
...Wilson: The New Freedom, by Arthur S. Link...
...And the man who said that he had "a reckless enthusiasm" for human liberty permitted his Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, to launch a series of Red raids and deportations in 1919 and 1920 which set a record for disregard of democratic traditions...
...the fourth, The Greatness of Woodrow Wilson, consists, as the title suggests, of conventional tributes...
...At a time when the fight against racial discrimination is a vital issue, the record of the Wilson Administration appears a sorry one in which racism gained new strength in the federal government...
...Garraty concludes that Wilson's tragedy was that he never learned to live at peace with himself...
...Yet no occupant of the White House was as icy and unsu cessful as Wilson in his relation with his fellow men...
...Wilsonian idealism also seems to offer little to young idealists of today...
...3.50...
...In 1916 he told a reporter, "I haven't read a serious book in fourteen years...
...entry into the League of Nations has lost its significance as a crucial turning point in history since U.S...
...In his relationship with his first and second wives Wilson was a warm, expressive individual...
...A rigorous moral-ist, puritanical in his values, devout and faithful in public and private worship, Wilson was still capable of major prevarications in dealing with the public...
...Reviewed by William L. Neumann REPUTATIONS fluctuate with the temper of the times...
...Arthur Link's book covers the years of 1913-1914 and is the second of a projected eight-volume study which in detail, if not in interpretation as well, promises to be a basic work...
...Woodrow Wilson, by John A Gar-raty...
...he assumed that men and the world could be changed by rational appeals alone, and he failed to see the role which emotions and normal human frailty played in controlling the future...
...Link has stressed Wilson's exaltation of intuition, his egotism, and his indulgence in personal prejudice...
...The devil-theory of Wilson's failure was long a popular one with the President's faithful followers, but its inadequacy in application to history is obvious...
...A student with a superior record at three major universities, Wilson was the only man with an earned doctorate of philosophy to become President and the possessor of one of the best trained minds to reach the White House, But, as Arthur Link points out, Wilson was fundamentally a man of limited interests and a narrow outlook, indifferent to economics, science, art, and music...
...pose they never will...
...At Wesleyan and again at Princeton Wilson coached football, and Princeton seniors elected him as the most popular faculty member four times in his twelve years of teaching...
...Stereotyped descriptions cannot be applied with any consistency to Wilson...
...Three of the four books under review are critical, scholarly biographies...
...Knopf...
...Virginius Dabney in The Greatness of Woodrow Wilson describes him as a mimic of rare talent and as a composer of good limericks...
...During eight of those yean he was president of Princeton University...
...Others have claimed that Wilson was too far in advance of his times, and that it was Europe and the American people who failed him...
...As a strong apostle of international cooperation, Wilson remained an extreme nationalist, exceeding even Theodore Roosevelt in his conviction that this nation under his Presidency could do no wrong...
...Why then did Wilson fail...
...minor and major grudges were nursed for many years...
...Arthur Link and John Garraty point more to the limitations of Wilson's leadership imposed by his own psychological makeup...
...There is now a wealth of material available on the Wilsonian period, and few significant facts need escape the Wilson biographer who has access to the voluminous papers of the late President in the Library of Congress...
...But despite these changes in evaluation, the story of the "New Freedom" and of Wilson's effort to build a better world still deserves to be read and pondered by all Americans...
...Princeton...
...membership in the United Nations has demonstrated that international organization is far from a panacea...
...Of Wilson's biographers, John Blum suggests that Wilson's weakness lay in his assumptions about society, misconstruing it to be made up of millions of units who acted on the same appeals and with the same motivations as Wilson himself...
...When all the critical things have been said, it must still be recognized that few American leaders have tried so vigorously to strengthen democracy and to build world peace...
...504 pp...
...He recognized this when he told a newspaperman, "I want people to love me—but I sup...
...Such a concept of God-given national virtue could offer little to Wilson's proposed partnership of nations...
...The losing fight over U.S...
...For the present generation of young Americans, raised on Presidents who have frequently used folksy language and presented smiling, genial faces to the public, Wilson's cold and high-toned language and his stern, often grim face, is an unappealing contrast...
...Were the opposing forces of evil too great...
...The same incongruities mark other aspects of Wilson...
...His claims for American destiny, world leadership, and divine favor for this nation rival, in their own way, the statements of Hitler and Mussolini who believed that they too led a "chosen people...
...Some have also distrusted the validity of Wilson's ideas...
...206 pp...
...He was unable to understand men because he did not understand himself...
...In 1956, the centenary of Woodrow Wilson's birth, eulogies were still offered, but the most serious writing, while paying homage, presented no flattering pictures of the World War I leader...
...Wilson's life raises the ancient human problem, can a sick physician heal the world or even his own nation...
...7.50...
...Madame Chiang Kai-shek in The Greatness of Wood-row Wilson writes that in Asia, at least, Wilson's ideas were misapplied because of his lack of knowledge and understanding of the situation...
Vol. 21 • March 1957 • No. 3
