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WILSON

By A. Scott Berg

Illustrated

G. P. Putnam’s Sons

818 pages

No American president was more improbable than Thomas Woodrow Wilson. None better embodied how we like to think of ourselves in the greater world.

A Princeton University president and political economy professor given to making high-minded speeches and advocating a parliamentary system, Wilson held no public office until he was 54 years old. Recruited to run for governor of New Jersey in 1910 by a Democratic machine boss who thought he would be easily controlled, the prof schooled the pro in practical politics, passing a reform agenda that curbed the power of parties and corporations alike. “After dealing with college politicians,” he gibed, “I find that the men with whom I am dealing with now seem like amateurs.”

Adroitly riding the progressive wave breaking over the country, Wilson took the presidency two years later, only the second Democrat to capture the White House since the Civil War. He possessed a rare instinct for power and how to use it. Once in Washington he put his theories to the test, audaciously choosing to rule more as a prime minister than a traditional chief executive. Within 10 months he had passed a progressive agenda that had been stalled for a generation, slashing tariff rates that protected monopolies, passing the first permanent federal income tax and creating the Federal Reserve system to end the bank panics that continually ravaged the American economy. More reforms — to bolster antitrust laws, discourage child labor and inaugurate the eight-hour day and workers’ compensation — followed.

Handsome and charismatic, Wilson was our first modern president, holding regular news conferences, complaining about having to live in Washington and delighting in popular distractions like baseball games, detective stories, golf and especially the new moving pictures. He adored women and had remarkably modern partnerships with them, sharing every aspect of his work and his ideas with his wife, Ellen, and, after she died, with his second wife, Edith. He also had a longtime — and apparently platonic — female friend.

A. Scott Berg tells the story of Wilson, the man, very well indeed. The author of four previous prizewinning, best-selling biographies, he has a novelist’s eye for the striking detail, and a vivid prose style.

He is on less sure footing when it comes to Wilson, the statesman. Too often, he relies on shoddy sources that distort the historical record. The Black Death recurred frequently, but it did not last for 400 years. Henry Cabot Lodge was not a right-winger, the Royal Navy did not take “a timorous approach” to German U-boats and Winston Churchill did not believe that “America should have minded its own business and stayed out of the world war.”

Berg gives us little on the vital economic debates of the Progressive Era, and only a perfunctory comparison of Wilson’s “New Freedom” and Teddy Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism.” There is barely a mention of the Pujo committee’s investigations into our financial system, which made many of Wilson’s reforms possible, and no attempt to assess the long-term effects of these reforms.

He does better on issues like women’s rights and especially race. Wilson, a Virginia native steeped in the lore of the “Lost Cause,” stuffed his cabinet full of bigoted Southern mediocrities, who cruelly segregated federal offices, cafeterias and washrooms for the first time. When a black journalist and Wilson supporter, William Monroe Trotter, protested too persistently, the president ordered him out of his office.

Both his temper and his injudicious selection of advisers were indicative of flaws that would come to devour his presidency. Wilson attracted some of the most talented figures in American political history to his administration and his causes — Franklin Roosevelt, Louis Brandeis, Herbert Hoover, Walter Lippmann and Bernard Baruch, among others — but too often he failed to delegate well, routinely writing his own speeches and even typing his own policy papers. Absolute loyalty was valued over candor. Again and again, Wilson broke with his closest associates when he felt they had betrayed him.

Despite these tendencies, he managed much of the war effort brilliantly, delivering a surprisingly effective army of more than two million men to France by the end of 1918. The United States stumbled onto the world stage a full-blown colossus, turning overnight from the world’s largest debtor nation to practically its sole creditor. Arriving in Europe to negotiate the peace, Wilson was greeted with an ecstasy no American president had ever matched, hailed as the savior of mankind.

He was quickly wrestled back to earth by his allies, the French premier Georges Clemenceau and the British prime minister David Lloyd George, and embroiled in endless, debilitating conferences on every detail of reconstructing the world. Wilson’s always fragile constitution began to break down. He suffered repeated cerebral episodes in Paris — probably strokes, perhaps even early onsets of dementia — that drove him into fits of paranoia and incoherence.

Wilson nonetheless carried his main objective back to America, a treaty for a “League of Nations,” intended to prevent future wars. Ratification required support from Republican senators he had needlessly antagonized and cut out of the diplomatic process, and when they demanded changes to the treaty he refused. The Senate, led by the waspish Lodge, responded with a campaign of insult and filibuster. Wilson tried to take his case to the people, embarking on an arduous speaking tour of the West, but there he broke down once and for all. Rushed back to Washington, he suffered a crushing stroke that left him an invalid for the rest of his life.

The government professor now put the Constitution through an acid test. For over a month, Wilson’s contact with the outside world was limited largely to his wife, Edith, and his doctor, and he remained in his bedroom for nearly all of his last year and a half in office. Rumors flew that the president had gone mad, while the country descended into bloody chaos. Corporate America crushed the country’s labor unions, and white mobs attacked black communities. The dark side of Wilson’s war effort had been a series of restrictive laws, censorship decrees and organized vigilantism designed to silence dissent and leaving the country, as Berg states, in “a period of repression as egregious as any in American history.” Now his most abysmal appointment of all, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, used these wartime statutes to raid homes and social clubs throughout the nation — and inject into our political system the hardy plague bacillus of J. Edgar Hoover.

Here begins the enduring national legend of Wilson as Christ, the American leader clean of hands and noble at heart, betrayed by perfidious Europe and the “little group of willful men” back home in the Senate. Wilson’s final struggle is indeed a tragedy and Berg plumbs its depths, but once again he elides the broader context.

Nowhere does he address Margaret MacMillan’s arguments in “Paris 1919” that the whole idea of a tragic peace is overstated — that deconstructing the ancient empires leveled by World War I was too complicated a task to have ever gone well, and that there was no conceivable peace the Germans would not have resented.

Yes, we should have joined Wilson’s League. But how much would a deeply isolationist and distracted America have wanted to intervene in the Europe of the 1930s? How much would England and France have allowed us to do so? In short, did Woodrow Wilson’s martyrdom really matter so much in the end . . . or is it more a story we like to tell ourselves?