Woodrow Wilson (Penguin Lives)

Rating:
Summary: lacks substance and depth
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A gem!
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Superb story. Complete
Review: I was surprised at how thorough this book is on the life of Wilson after reading the other reviews of it being just a 'primer'. It really goes into how Wilson the man/president was made and what his prejudices, virtues and hotpoints were very well.

The beginning of the book is rather boring but once Wilson becomes president it definitely gets more interesting & how Wilson handled the aftermath of WWI very inciteful & apropos for us going into war against Afghanistan now with the modern day League of Nations, the UN, trying to arbitrate their own world order.

I think Louis Auchinchloss, cousin of the late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis did a good job on the research & unless you are a Wilsonophile this should be more than enough.

Rating:
Summary: Good first half of a biography
Review: I've always believed biographers should do three things: tell what their subject did, why he or she did it, and what it all means, or meant, ultimately. The other two Penguin Lives titles I've read so far -- Paul Johnson on Napoleon and John Keegan on Churchill -- both did excellent jobs of explaining their subjects' lives by drawing out instructive themes from those lives and assessing their subjects' impact on history. Louis Auchincloss, sadly, doesn't do that with Woodrow Wilson.

The basic biographical framework -- the "what" -- of this book isn't bad, and certainly Auchincloss is a fine writer. But while the facts of Wilson's life are presented effectively, they're not tied together with any kind of larger thesis. Auchincloss develops a few recurring ideas -- Wilson's friendship with Colonel House, the theory of "the two Wilsons," the influence of Wilson's second wife, the rivalry with Henry Cabot Lodge -- but none of them seem like more than convenient narrative hooks. Which, if any, is a key to the man's character?

What I found most bothersome is that Auchincloss's biography ends (literally) with Wilson's last word. Remarkably -- for a biography of one of the world's most influential figures in the first half of the century, and a man who is considered by some (justly, in my opinion) to bear a large share of responsibility for the ultimate onset of World War Two -- there is virtually no attempt to place Wilson into his historical context, to measure the long-term impact of his life, or to judge his successes and failures in the considered light of history. It's like Auchincloss bumped up against the Penguin Lives word-count limit and decided just to stop.

Coming off the fine Churchill and Napoleon volumes, I was really hoping for more here -- especially from a writer with such a high reputation. This title is a decent summary of the facts of Wilson's life, but the interested reader will have to go someplace else to put it all in context.

Rating:
Summary: barely alive
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Woodrow Wilson
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Tolerable bare-bones primer.
Review: This biography is very short, so it is not surprising that it gives only the basics of the story of our 28th president. Still, even given that caveat, it is a bit too inclined to give simplistic, standard answers to questions that need a more balanced treatment. It is a bit one-sided, and a bit too much of a gloss.

Useful as a starting point for someone with little if any knowledge of Wilson's life, until a better and more complete biography can be found, but it will not in and of itself inspire anyone to search for such a better biography.

Rating:
Summary: Good overview with some surprising omissions
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: The biggest hero of WWI
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A Gem indeed!
Review: Yes, Louis Achincloss ultimately fails to present Woodrow Wilson in the vast complexity he appears to deserve. However, reading his book intrigued this young conservative (who previously - and ignorantly - took Wilson for another of our presidential jokes). I rather sensed that instilling his audience with a desire to inquire further about our 28th president was precisely the author's intention. With deft subtlety, Auchincloss arranges the brief material at his disposal to give us Wilson the enigma... rather than Wilson the rhetorical foil.

The great question of our time (but how could Auchincloss have predicted this?) has suddenly become one of foreign policy. Not for decades have American readers been deluged with so many books on diplomacy and international relations. Writers as different as Halberstam, Hitchens, Kaplan and Kissinger have joined the fray; not to mention a host of lesser writers suddenly alarmed by the great, perhaps terrible civilization to our East.

Auchincloss returns us to the very beginnings of American foreign policy. It is a time of high ideals, but few are as idealistic as the reserved and scholarly Wilson. This especially high-minded president must suddenly face a world torn by war. Wilson's impulses are entirely in keeping with his Christian character. He holds out until the Zimmerman telegram turns public opinion decisively towards war. Upon entering, he thankfully (and unlike our contemporary "Wilsonians") insists on America's unilateral command of its own soldiers. In less than two years, they wrap up the war for the Allies.

Then he moves towards his ultimate goal. Messianic and perhaps noble to a fault, Wilson, with the earnestness of any would-be beauty Queen, wishes for World Peace. Less a product of politics than of Presbyterianism, he cannot comprehend the forces who would exploit his inexperience and idealism at Versailles. Of course, we know this already... but Auchincloss makes it harder for us to simply dismiss this sort of naivete. With fine little brush strokes, he complicates the peace-loving Wilson. He selects tidbits of speeches that flash with Biblical furor. Also, he makes a point of Wilson's admiration for Edmund Burke. Throughout the narrative he indicates why Wilson's career brought him further to the left. The snobs of 1900s Princeton (over which he presided as Dean) are not unlike the Republicans of two decades hence; the very senators who steal his moment of triumph by refusing to ratify the sacred Fourteen Points. There was an evident logic to this leftward drift. It was sped somewhat ironically by his multiple strokes. But even someone who opened this book with every desire to dislike Wilson could not help but be touched. Auchincloss' portrait refutes some measure of that meanness which Conservatives forever heap on Wilson.

Of course, the book is not perfect. In keeping with the "Brief Lives" series, it is remarkably short... easily a two-hour read. This reviewer cannot fathom how Mao or Mozart, Dante or Churchill could be so condensed. The authors of the "Brief Lives" of Elvis, Crazy Horse, and Andy Warhol have, by contrast, somewhat easier tasks. About their subjects, there is either little material or else little that needs said.

Very likely, readers attracted to a volume of this brevity will have little previous knowledge of Wilson's friends and foes. Achincloss's selection of material sometimes appeared to be aimed at insiders - that is to say, other Wilson scholars. Important in this regard are his discussions of William Jennings Bryan, Henry Cabot Lodge, and especially his Secretary of State Colonel House. After years of loyal service, Wilson ceased to recieve House following his own disappointments and ill-health at Versailles. The author renders this sudden break with the fullest drama so slim a volume might possibly contain.

If you want the entire story, you will probably need to look elsewhere. If instead you want an intriguing preface to the whole story, read this book. Auchincloss helps complicate the great question of our time by giving us a complicated Woodrow Wilson. The book is a feather for the cap of anyone wanting to inject our foreign policy with high-minded convictions like human rights, the spreading of Democracy, or - oh yeah - World Peace.