Woodrow Wilson
Negotiating world peace
America’s remarkable 28th president
Sep 7th 2013
Both eyes on posterity
Wilson. By A. Scott Berg. Putnam Adult; 832 pages; $40. To be
published in Britain in October by Simon & Schuster; £30. Buy
fromAmazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
`WE SAVED the world,’ President Woodrow Wilson said in 1918, `and I do
not intend to let those Europeans forget it.’ Wilson was sailing to
Europe for a peace conference that would shape the world’s future. The
first world war had ended, and the president was determined to create
an international governing body to prevent such massive bloodshed from
ever happening again. Europeans welcomed him with unabashed cheers. It
was the first time a sitting American president had stepped onto their
soil.
Less than a year later, Wilson had a stroke and lay bed-bound at the
White House. His dreams of a League of Nations would take hold, but he
could not persuade America to join. Powerful Republicans in the Senate
feared yielding sovereignty (a familiar refrain today). The result was
that the Senate did not ratify the Treaty of Versailles, which created
the league and set the terms of the peace. It became Wilson’s greatest
disappointment.
Negotiating world peace was not what Wilson had in mind when he took
office in 1913. Instead he had grand plans for reforming his own
country. He spent the first years of his presidency dismantling
tariffs, introducing a new federal income tax, battling the
anti-competitive activities of big business and creating the Federal
Reserve system of banks. His victories were big, and other landmarks
soon followed, such as the approval of the 1920 constitutional
amendment allowing women to vote.
A. Scott Berg, who won a Pulitzer prize for his life of Charles
Lindbergh, has written a detailed account lionising the man who, he
says, experienced `the most meteoric rise in American history’. After
serving as president of Princeton University, Wilson spent just two
years as governor of New Jersey before a tide of progressivism carried
him to the presidency. Wilson tried to keep America out of the war.
But faced with the inevitable by the spring of 1917, he quickly built
an industrial war machine that left a legacy of American might.
There is plenty to dislike about Wilson. Despite his Presbyterian
morality, he was a racist. Born in the South shortly before the civil
war, he oversaw the segregation of federal agencies as well as the
armed forces. His policies left blacks `discouraged and bitter’, in
the words of Booker T. Washington, a renowned educator. Another bad
decision was clinging to the presidency after his stroke, leaving his
second wife, Edith, in near-total control of his activities.
Caught up in the day-by-day lurch of Wilson’s presidency, Mr Berg
fails to analyse some of history’s most pressing questions. How did
Wilson, who grew up in southern states devastated by America’s civil
war and resentful of harsh federal oversight afterwards, agree to a
peace treaty that humiliated Germany? And what might have happened if
America had joined the League of Nations, as Wilson had so desperately
wanted? The league failed in its basic objective of securing the world
against another great war. But a more enduring intergovernmental body,
the United Nations, grew out of the next conflagration. Mr Berg stops
at Wilson’s death. For better and worse, the story of the 28th
president goes on.
>From the print edition: Books and arts
From: A. Papazian