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Woodrow Wilson (Penguin Lives)

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Louis Auchincloss provides an interesting introduction and overview of Wilson's personality and presidency. He touches on the major issues Wilson faced as President of Princton University as well as President of the US and shows how Wilson's intransigence was evident from early on. Auchincloss has reviewed the more recent literature as well, and provides some interesting information as Wilson's health. As a lawyer, Auchincloss also provides interesting analysis of the evidence on various issues still in dispute (was Wilson really signing those documents after he had a stroke and his wife wouldn't let anyone see him?). Finally, he produces a nice little portrait of Wilson's nemesis, Henry Cabot Lodge, as well. I doubt that any real student of the Wilson Presidency could learn much in a volume that barely exceeds 100 pages, but for others who wouldn't mind spending a couple of hours learning something about Wilson and his presidency, it serves its purpose admirably.

In Woodrow Wilson, Louis Auchincloss provides a useful, albeit brief account of our 28th President. The book touches on the highlights, both good and bad, of Wilson's life, and gives the reader insight into the complexity of Wilson's mind.

Readers of Woodrow Wilson will find a man of enormous intellect who viewed himself as somehow ordained by God to lead the world into a higher level of peace and harmony, but who also battled with arrogance that did not allow him to accept gracious defeat. As a history professor he was well liked by students, but as university president he was beset by strife involving administrative decisions. He appealed to Democrats who wished to cleanse the party of William Jennings Bryan's influence, and accepted the nomination for Governor of New Jersey accordingly. He even adopted a Populist position to appeal to the masses. When the Republican Party divided in 1912, he was assured the Presidency. In that office he was forced to balance personal convictions and political realities that culminated over the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles. This ultimately proved to be Wilson's demise.

Auchincloss' portrait explores many of these complexities, but at times appears to gloss them over. The rivalry between Wilson and Henry Cabot Lodge oddly is detailed from Lodge's perspective, but the author does not particularize how Wilson reciprocated. Auchincloss does not describe in depth the differences between Lodge's snobbish Harvard arrogance, Theodore Roosevelt's heroic jingoism of a bygone era, and Wilson's self-righteous purveyance of his own world order, and how each affected the others as well as the world around them. Auchincloss also has difficulty in describing Germany in World War One in that it was fighting a war of delaying defeat by 1916 and not turning the tide towards victory.

In the end, however, readers will find Auchincloss' work useful and poignant. He inserts comparisons to future Presidents in an amusing way while discussing the merits of Wilson's administration. Woodrow Wilson may not be a definitive work but, due in part to its brevity, should be considered appropriate reading for High School level history courses.

To begin with, this is really a biographical essay, not a complete biography of Woodrow Wilson in any sense of that word, even discounting the shortness of the book. (In fact, it is only 128 pages long--not 176 pages, as Amazon's listing indicates.) Auchincloss presents at best the highlights of Wilson's life, with hardly any insight or analysis. The essay would have had more merit if published in a larger volume on Wilson or his times; standing alone, it is of questionable merit.

In fact, I cannot imagine what possessed the publisher to select this author or to issue the book after they received it in draft. Auchincloss is primarily a novelist and a man of letters and quite obviously lacks the credentials to write a biography of a major political leader; his product is extremely superficial.

In light of this, his decision to devote an entire chapter--12 pages of digression from the Wilson life story--to Henry Cabot Lodge, Wilson's nemesis at the end of his political career--seems highly questionable. (Had the biography of Wilson itself been more complete, this might have been justifiable.) It would have been better to include more detail on Wilson's two wives--especially his second wife, who essentially took over the Presidency after his major stroke.

The book is replete with the author's opinions of how Wilson should or should not have behaved, with little or no justification for these positions. An example: In discussing American intervention in Mexico prior to World War I, Auchincloss characterizes Mexican leaders Carranza and Pancho Villa as "not too much better" than President Huerta--for whom Wilson showed "moral disapproval"--and in fact notes that Villa was "worse." No rationale whatsoever is given for these comparisons. He notes that "Wilson probably handled a messy situation as well as could be expected," but does not explain why.

Fortunately, there are numerous good biographies of Woodrow Wilson available. It seems difficult to believe that the author really consulted many of them.

In the annals of American history, few presidents have a more interesting story to tell than Woodrow Wilson. Despite this truth, Wilson's legacy has produced such a terrible collection of biographies. This book is a continuation of that standard of trampling the legacy of the greatest idealist to reside in the White House.

While this book is intended to be a brief biography of Wilson, this characteristic would seem to cause more focus on landmarks in Wilson's life. This does not stop Louis Auchincloss from going off topic for pages at a time. The author repeatedly references Bill Clinton, whose most striking similarity is being a democrat. There also seems to be a lot of speculation on the part of the author, such as speculating that Wilson's childhood illnesses were psychosomatic (p. 7). Like the original source of this fact, he lacks tangible support for his agrument. It is nothing more than an educated guess. Just like the guess that Wilson suffered from dyslexia (p. 6). The chapters on World War I are clumsy because of the digressions. The better chapters focus on Wilson's first and second wives, as well as his years at Princeton.

I initially thought the author loathed Woodrow Wilson, but softened in this stance as the book progressed. Still I wondered why one would write a book about a seemingly undesirable topic? Not that I expected much from this book, but I, like many readers of history, am still waiting for an outstanding biography on Woodrow Wilson.

If you don't know much more about Woodrow Wilson than an overview of the important events of his life, this book isn't going to help much. There's very little political analysis, almost no attempt to portray what diffiulties Wilson needed to overcome, and no passion at all in the writing. Actually this book feels a lot like a high school term paper that someone knew they had to write and just wanted to turn in for a passing grade. Auchincloss talks a bit about the two Wilsons (one good one bad) and hints at Wilson's dependance on women, but neither of these positions is fleshed out or used consistently. Maybe Woodrow Wilson's life is just too large for a book this small.

This is a reasonable brief introduction to the career of Woodrow Wilson. His upbringing and early academic career are disposed of in short order in the first chapter. Then one chapter deals with his presidency of Princeton, one deals with (or covers the same time period as) his governorship of New Jersey, and the remaining seven cover his Presidency, all in an engaging and chatty style.

The book's strongest point is describing what happened, although even here there are some strange omissions. It mentions his break with Hibben in Princeton without describing the circumstances, noting that Hibben went on to succeed Wilson as President of the university, or exploring the parallels with his later breaks with House and Tumulty. All of this could have been covered in a single paragraph. In addition, there is no mention of the country's Caribbean adventures in 1915; none of the Red Scare of 1919; and, probably worst of all, nothing about the Sedition Acts and the imprisonment of Eugene Debs, and no discussion of why America behaved worse towards its own citizens during and after the war than either Britain or France did. The first time the book mentions the League of Nations, it doesn't clearly describe what its purpose was (and it would have been nice if it had mentioned that it was actually the idea of the British Foreign Secretary, not Wilson). Still, as an overview of the events of Wilson's life it hits most of the main points.

The book has less to offer on why things happened. In trying to explain why Colonel Harvey picked Wilson for Governor of New Jersey, it gives two pages on what Harvey got wrong about Wilson, but nothing on what he got right. It also takes at face value the idea that Wilson was offered the governorship "without ... even lifting a hand". It describes Wilson's feeling of betrayal by House when he returned to Paris in March 1919, but not what House had actually done!

As noted by another reviewer, the book also fails to put Wilson's international achievements in a broader context. His aim of a just, lasing peace with Germany failed; his aim of encouraging self-determination among smaller nations succeeded, and he is still looked on as a hero in many smaller nations of Europe. Some more insight and context, and a more detailed assessment of his legacy, would have been welcome.

Woodrow Wilson was a fascinating and controversial President. This book helps explain -- and to an extent shares -- the fascination, but it doesn't do enough to help the reader assess the controversies. Still, it's an reasonable starting point for people who know little about Wilson.

One final comment: I'd also have been interested to know how the author is related to the Gordon Auchincloss who attended the Versailles conference -- it's not that common a name, after all.

Washington and Lincoln were the great presidents, though this book points out that "It may be well to remember of our two most revered presidents that Washington fought a war to affirm the doctrine [of self-determination], and Lincoln one to deny it." (p. 95). Having a great president appeals to the kind of people that truly believe it makes so many states worthy of uniting into a single country, though Lincoln, who preserved the Union, might have been a deeper thinker than anyone in the pellucidly placid times in which we ought to live would realize. Hundreds of years later, we should be grateful that we don't have the problems they faced, particularly the wars fought on American soil in their times. Woodrow Wilson is the first (or the first American president after Polk, McKinley, and Teddy Roosevelt) to think that the power of the United States might be so great that fighting a war in other parts of the world could settle the hash of the rest of the world so well that all nations would be forced to see things our way. I'm afraid the book, WOODROW WILSON by Louis Auchincloss, makes it easier to count the ways in which Wilson ended up being wrong, even when he counted up to 14 points, than any history could show how compromising could have helped, on a few important occasions.

Louis Auchincloss seems to be well informed about the leading cultural figures of Wilson's time, and the book contains a number of quotations from people who were paying attention, as well as clear descriptions of the positions of Colonel House, Henry Cabot Lodge, Walter Lippmann, and Edith Bolling Galt or Wilson. There are ten chapters and no index, so it is not easy to look up anything specific, such as who considered Roosevelt Dionysian in making emotional appeals to the people, while "Wilson was the Apollonian, favoring the primacy of reason." (p. 47). Not everyone thought so. "Lindley Garrison, his first secretary of war, described him as a man of high ideals but no principles." (pp. 47-48). Wilson had prepared for the presidency by studying and writing, speaking well to crowds and offering policies that people might vote for. He cut tariffs so much, he had to institute the income tax to provide sufficient government revenue, and tariffs went back up after he was no longer in office, but it worked: people could import cheap sugar for a few years.

The medical information in the book is specific. The president had a doctor, and also a wife who protected his health, after September, 1919, in her fear "that any frank revelation of his health might have been fatal to her husband." (pp. 2-3). The anger that overwhelmed Wilson at the end of his life was related to the disability he had suffered, but it seems to relate as well to the intellectual sense of being stymied, after winning his big war, by the big questions, why?, for what?, that retained some religious significance for him, humbled though he had been in so many ways. This book provides more than an outline of Wilson's character. It is a tragedy that could spook the daylights out of anyone who thought some plan had been prepared for the situation that the world faces today, if not sooner.

Cecil Spring-Rice, the British ambassador to Washington, described Woodrow Wilson as "a mysterious, a rather Olympian personage and shrouded in darkness from which issue occasional thunderbolts." At least to his contemporaries, the twenty-eighth president may well have been something of an enigma. After all, he did somehow move from a fairly conservative philosophy toward a more activist government, including a reversal on child labor laws. Unfortunately, Auchincloss contributes little to shedding some light on these riddles of Wilson's character and mind-except for the all-important (to Auchincloss, at least) reason for the estrangement between Wilson and his advisor/friend/confidante Colonel Edward M. House, which is attributed to Edith Wilson.

Auchincloss paints a very superficial picture of Wilson, and maybe that's because of the nature of the Penguin Lives series, but there was much that was mentioned in passing and not really mentioned again. For example, Wilson's southern birth and upbringing are given early and justified attention, but the consequences of this southern heritage on Wilson's life and politics are not pursued, even though the question is particularly interesting, relevant, and important for the president's views on race. Wilson's deep Presbyterian faith is given similarly superficial treatment. It did much to create the man's stubbornness and sense of moral rectitude, but how it shaped the specific elements of Wilson's idealism, Auchincloss does not explore. All that emerges is the all-too typical portrait of a man with a "divided" nature.

I did find his discussion of the 1916 election interesting, particularly the contingency plan in the case of a Wilson defeat. In this period of international crisis, had Wilson lost to Charles Evans Hughes, Vice President Marshall and Secretary of State Lansing would have resigned, Hughes would have been named Secretary of State, and Wilson would also have resigned. I had never heard this before and hope to explore the issue further.

Besides an apparent affinity for describing certain remarks as "intemperate," Auchincloss seemed to be fixated on the grandson of Henry Cabot Lodge and on Bill Clinton, both of whom he mentions twice. Lodge's grandson receives considerable scorn for trying to justify his grandfather's behavior (his "hatred" of Wilson and his reading of the Versailles Treaty in the Senate). The Clinton impeachment is mentioned as an example of the people's representatives taking action against the will of a majority, and Clinton's definition of "is" is compared to Lodge's grandson's definition of "hatred." Maybe these are legitimate comparisons (though probably not), but they seemed wholly out of place in this biography.

These Penguin biographies aren't necessarily intended to be the deepest or most insightful of books, but they should at least contain some substance. This one, unfortunately, contains very little that can't be had by reading an American history textbook.

For what this book sets out to do, it is excellent. This is a short biography of about 125 pages. It is not foot noted or indexed. What this book does is provide a very good overview of Wilson. We get a good feel for what his personality was and this personality embodied both his stregnths and weakenesses. The author's theme is that there were two Wilsons; one was the intellectual idealist and the other was the stubborn, emotional, uncompromising character who suffered great failures due to this second trait. History has often portrayed Henry Cabot Lodge as a villain who killed the League of Nations but if Wilson had been a little less bull headed, it would have passed the Senate with Lodge's support.

Lodge was concerned about a clause that would have obligated the United States to go to war if another nation's territorial integrity was violated. Lodge proposed a reservation which recognized that it was up to Congress to declare war. If Wilson would have capitulated on this one point, the United States would most likely have joined the League. However, hampered by ill health, Wilson's judgment may not have been sound and therefore he lost the big prize due to his inflexibility. Quite frankly, Lodge may have been right. Paul Johnson in his "History of the American People" notes that the clause, as supported by Wilson, could have been interpreted to require the United States to go to war to protect England's territorial integrity in it's colonial empire such as in India. Given that possible interpretation, wasn't Lodge right?

Wilson was a complex man, intellectual yet hardheaded in putting forth his goals. Ill health allowed his second wife, Edith, to exert a tremendous amount of influence (indeed, there is a recently published book on this subject by Phyllis Lee Levin). Ultimately. what emerges from Auchincloss's biography is a man who could have been a great president who ultimately suffered major failures due to his weaknesses.

I am stunned by the reviews below. Auchincloss did not set out to DO Wilson. He wrote a wonderfully concise, artful essay with only the morsels and highlights of a complex career. I do not know the Wilson literature and there may be problems here and there.

But I can't imagine that the objectives of this series were anything more than stimulating readers to peruse the more scholarly literature on Wilson. It did.

Funny confession: I can imagine myself being as pompous and exacting if I was reviewing one of the other Penguin lives in an area in which I DO know the scholarly literature. I hope not.

And -- in response to the reviewer below who asks why Auchincloss was asked to do this: Why not? These are clearly intended to be quirky and brief idiosyncractic looks at important lives. Not definitive.

Take Janet Malcolm: I have read every word she has ever written EXCEPT her Penguin Chekhov. And while I can't imagine why she was picked, I can't wait to read her own quirky take.

Even in areas of my own teaching and research, I would love to read short quirky, unscholarly takes by writers who are not obvious choices.

For example, Joseph Goebbels: I have read millions of words by him and about him -- God help me -- but I would love to read a "Penguin" take by anyone from Calvin Trillin to John Updike to Maureen Dowd. (You think Osama has a mean streak?) Scholarly literatures get stuck in thematic ruts and internecine warfare --which admittedly can be sometimes be fruitful and interesting -- but why not some fresh looks by outsiders?

By the way, I am not an Auchincloss reader. But this was one elegant essay.