WilsonA. Scott Berg (Simon & Schuster, £30)
Presidential biography is a blockbuster genre. Enormous volumes on Jefferson, Adams, and especially Lincoln regularly dominate the bestseller lists. The number of books being published this year to coincide with the 50th anniversary of John F Kennedy’s assassination can be counted in the dozens. So when a prolific Pulitzer-prize-winning biographer like A. Scott Berg (previous subjects include Goldwyn and Charles Lindbergh) turns to a political icon like Woodrow Wilson, a Major Publishing Event ensues. Book tours have been arranged, lecture halls packed, interviews granted. Warner Bros have secured the film rights and Leonardo DiCaprio is in talks to star and produce. Success is guaranteed for Berg’s Wilson. It’s worth thinking about how and why.
Two Wilsons already exist in American memory. Woodrow One is the puritan-professor-president who stares severly out of photographs. Progressive, yes, but dull and remote. “Wilson is merely a less virile me,” proclaimed Teddy Roosevelt, fellow progressive and rambunctious manchild. Woodrow Two is a grander figure on a larger stage: the tragic crusader for a world made safe for democracy. The creation of the League of Nations stands as his greatest triumph and noblest folly, resulting in a Peace Prize from the Nobel Committee and political castration by a hostile US Senate.
Berg’s main quarrel is with Woodrow One. He wants to flesh out an emotional life for a subject often assumed to lack one entirely. This has been attempted before, with varying results–Sigmund Freud once weighed in by co-authoring an odd psychobiography that explained much through Wilson’s father, a Presbyterian minister. Berg is certainly up to the task. His Wilson is a Southern boy born in a Virginian manse in 1856. Affectionate parents raised an energetic and precocious lad: Wilson’s proclivity for giving orders and writing constitutions began with his baseball team. He did not grow up on a plantation, but slaves were present and his family supported the Confederacy in the Civil War.
After the war, Wilson began to take his studies seriously. He arrived at Princeton in 1875 as an intense and somewhat lonely undergraduate. He was obsessive about debating and longed for women. After graduation, Wilson began an academic career that would consume most of his life. In a series of elegant anecdotes, Berg shows how the anxious grad student became a charismatic professor and the hopeful lover became an indulgent father. His friend and advisor, Colonel House, wrote in his diary that “when one gets access to him, there is no more charming man in all the world than Woodrow Wilson.” Berg’s Wilson is certainly charming. He emerges as attractive, dogged, honourable, even romantic.
Like David McCullough and Joseph Ellis, other presidential biographers, Berg allows his subject’s personality to drive the political narrative. Wilson’s principled ambition and determination are what determine his manoeuvres through academic labyrinths to the Presidency of Princeton in 1902, his late-career election to the Governorship of New Jersey in 1910, and his speedy ascension to the Presidency of the United States in 1912. Berg sustains an enjoyable balance between the personal and the political in the White House. Wilson became a widower in his first term but married a Washington widow, Edith, before his second. This heel-clicking, jig-dancing story is woven into chapters that might otherwise get mired in Congressional politics.
Berg is less successful when it comes to intellectual biography. This is not usually part of popular presidential biographies, but Wilson demands it more than most. He wrote works of political theory and American history, and remains the only president to have earned a PhD. Yet Berg skimps on what Wilson thought. We understand him as a good liberal and a patrician democrat, but not in the context of American liberalism or progressivism. Wilson wrote many volumes of American history and was an intellectual comrade of Frederick Jackson Turner, the famous frontier historian. But Berg will not discuss his subject’s exceptionalism. Wilson is too patriotic.
It might be unreasonable to complain that intellectual development is poorly covered in a mass-market biography. But it also matters to Berg’s overall project because Wilson’s ideas shaped his personality. His Presbyterianism, for instance, is allowed to recede into the background as a “simple faith.” Occasionally Wilson’s own references to “Divine providence” will jolt religion into focus, and we are sometimes reminded how devout he was. But, after a while, the Biblical chapter titles (“Eden,” “Disciples,” “Baptism”) and scriptural epigraphs (“And the nations were angry, and thy wrath is come”) begin to feel like an excuse for religion’s relative absence from Berg's story. He makes little effort to show how Christianity influenced Wilson’s approach to politics, other people, or America.
Then there is the problem of Wilson and race. This is a man who segregated the District of Columbia and screened DW Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, a notoriously racist movie about the South during the Civil War and Reconstruction, at the White House. Indeed, Griffith saw fit to quote Wilson in his film. “The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation,” ran the film’s title cards, taken from Wilson’s History of the American People, “… until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.”
Yet Wilson was also the President who took the extraordinary step of appointing the first Jew to the Supreme Court, Louis Brandeis. It is this complex mix that makes Wilson a difficult figure in the history of 20th century progressivism. Berg doesn’t quite know how to handle the question of Wilson and race. He will call his subject “indubitably racist” but he presents Wilson’s actions as a curious mix of political aberration and as an understandable consequence of the times. Berg sidesteps the awkward challenge of fitting Wilson’s racism into his liberalism or his Christianity.
Because his ideas go mostly unexplored, Wilson emerges as basically right about the world. Here the League of Nations comes into its own. As always, Berg sets a beautiful stage for Wilson’s voyage to Versailles after the First World War. There are three self-interested European premiers: the eccentric Frenchman, Georges Clemenceau; the cunning Brit, David Lloyd George; the flamboyant Italian, Vittorio Orlando (“the Capitano”). And there is one American President, the first to leave his country while in office. Despite the European machinations, Wilson triumphs in securing agreement for a liberal League through his dogged charm. Yet his poor health and political obstinacy enable the senior senator from Massachusetts, a dastardly Henry Cabot Lodge, to derail the League back in Washington. Tragically, America never joined. This is not just a thumping endorsement of the noble Woodrow Two. It also approaches a divine elevation, for Berg’s final chapter titles make a Christ of Wilson: “Gethsemane,” “Passion,” “Pieta,” “Resurrection.”
By shattering the icy Woodrow One and sanctifying the righteous Woodrow Two, Berg avoids breaking the Wilson mould. Wilson presents a progressive hero with virility to match Teddy Roosevelt and with honour to surpass him. Berg delivers “Wilson the man.” But the man is neither difficult nor provocative. He does not provoke hard questions or unsettle common assumptions. Ultimately the focus on personality makes Berg’s conclusion that Americans live in “the lengthening shadow of Wilson” hard to swallow. Wilson’s importance is undeniable, but by the end of a lengthy biography the shape and scope of his historical shadow is still unclear.
Presidential biography is a blockbuster genre. Enormous volumes on Jefferson, Adams, and especially Lincoln regularly dominate the bestseller lists. The number of books being published this year to coincide with the 50th anniversary of John F Kennedy’s assassination can be counted in the dozens. So when a prolific Pulitzer-prize-winning biographer like A. Scott Berg (previous subjects include Goldwyn and Charles Lindbergh) turns to a political icon like Woodrow Wilson, a Major Publishing Event ensues. Book tours have been arranged, lecture halls packed, interviews granted. Warner Bros have secured the film rights and Leonardo DiCaprio is in talks to star and produce. Success is guaranteed for Berg’s Wilson. It’s worth thinking about how and why.
Two Wilsons already exist in American memory. Woodrow One is the puritan-professor-president who stares severly out of photographs. Progressive, yes, but dull and remote. “Wilson is merely a less virile me,” proclaimed Teddy Roosevelt, fellow progressive and rambunctious manchild. Woodrow Two is a grander figure on a larger stage: the tragic crusader for a world made safe for democracy. The creation of the League of Nations stands as his greatest triumph and noblest folly, resulting in a Peace Prize from the Nobel Committee and political castration by a hostile US Senate.
Berg’s main quarrel is with Woodrow One. He wants to flesh out an emotional life for a subject often assumed to lack one entirely. This has been attempted before, with varying results–Sigmund Freud once weighed in by co-authoring an odd psychobiography that explained much through Wilson’s father, a Presbyterian minister. Berg is certainly up to the task. His Wilson is a Southern boy born in a Virginian manse in 1856. Affectionate parents raised an energetic and precocious lad: Wilson’s proclivity for giving orders and writing constitutions began with his baseball team. He did not grow up on a plantation, but slaves were present and his family supported the Confederacy in the Civil War.
After the war, Wilson began to take his studies seriously. He arrived at Princeton in 1875 as an intense and somewhat lonely undergraduate. He was obsessive about debating and longed for women. After graduation, Wilson began an academic career that would consume most of his life. In a series of elegant anecdotes, Berg shows how the anxious grad student became a charismatic professor and the hopeful lover became an indulgent father. His friend and advisor, Colonel House, wrote in his diary that “when one gets access to him, there is no more charming man in all the world than Woodrow Wilson.” Berg’s Wilson is certainly charming. He emerges as attractive, dogged, honourable, even romantic.
Like David McCullough and Joseph Ellis, other presidential biographers, Berg allows his subject’s personality to drive the political narrative. Wilson’s principled ambition and determination are what determine his manoeuvres through academic labyrinths to the Presidency of Princeton in 1902, his late-career election to the Governorship of New Jersey in 1910, and his speedy ascension to the Presidency of the United States in 1912. Berg sustains an enjoyable balance between the personal and the political in the White House. Wilson became a widower in his first term but married a Washington widow, Edith, before his second. This heel-clicking, jig-dancing story is woven into chapters that might otherwise get mired in Congressional politics.
Berg is less successful when it comes to intellectual biography. This is not usually part of popular presidential biographies, but Wilson demands it more than most. He wrote works of political theory and American history, and remains the only president to have earned a PhD. Yet Berg skimps on what Wilson thought. We understand him as a good liberal and a patrician democrat, but not in the context of American liberalism or progressivism. Wilson wrote many volumes of American history and was an intellectual comrade of Frederick Jackson Turner, the famous frontier historian. But Berg will not discuss his subject’s exceptionalism. Wilson is too patriotic.
It might be unreasonable to complain that intellectual development is poorly covered in a mass-market biography. But it also matters to Berg’s overall project because Wilson’s ideas shaped his personality. His Presbyterianism, for instance, is allowed to recede into the background as a “simple faith.” Occasionally Wilson’s own references to “Divine providence” will jolt religion into focus, and we are sometimes reminded how devout he was. But, after a while, the Biblical chapter titles (“Eden,” “Disciples,” “Baptism”) and scriptural epigraphs (“And the nations were angry, and thy wrath is come”) begin to feel like an excuse for religion’s relative absence from Berg's story. He makes little effort to show how Christianity influenced Wilson’s approach to politics, other people, or America.
Then there is the problem of Wilson and race. This is a man who segregated the District of Columbia and screened DW Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, a notoriously racist movie about the South during the Civil War and Reconstruction, at the White House. Indeed, Griffith saw fit to quote Wilson in his film. “The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation,” ran the film’s title cards, taken from Wilson’s History of the American People, “… until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.”
Yet Wilson was also the President who took the extraordinary step of appointing the first Jew to the Supreme Court, Louis Brandeis. It is this complex mix that makes Wilson a difficult figure in the history of 20th century progressivism. Berg doesn’t quite know how to handle the question of Wilson and race. He will call his subject “indubitably racist” but he presents Wilson’s actions as a curious mix of political aberration and as an understandable consequence of the times. Berg sidesteps the awkward challenge of fitting Wilson’s racism into his liberalism or his Christianity.
Because his ideas go mostly unexplored, Wilson emerges as basically right about the world. Here the League of Nations comes into its own. As always, Berg sets a beautiful stage for Wilson’s voyage to Versailles after the First World War. There are three self-interested European premiers: the eccentric Frenchman, Georges Clemenceau; the cunning Brit, David Lloyd George; the flamboyant Italian, Vittorio Orlando (“the Capitano”). And there is one American President, the first to leave his country while in office. Despite the European machinations, Wilson triumphs in securing agreement for a liberal League through his dogged charm. Yet his poor health and political obstinacy enable the senior senator from Massachusetts, a dastardly Henry Cabot Lodge, to derail the League back in Washington. Tragically, America never joined. This is not just a thumping endorsement of the noble Woodrow Two. It also approaches a divine elevation, for Berg’s final chapter titles make a Christ of Wilson: “Gethsemane,” “Passion,” “Pieta,” “Resurrection.”
By shattering the icy Woodrow One and sanctifying the righteous Woodrow Two, Berg avoids breaking the Wilson mould. Wilson presents a progressive hero with virility to match Teddy Roosevelt and with honour to surpass him. Berg delivers “Wilson the man.” But the man is neither difficult nor provocative. He does not provoke hard questions or unsettle common assumptions. Ultimately the focus on personality makes Berg’s conclusion that Americans live in “the lengthening shadow of Wilson” hard to swallow. Wilson’s importance is undeniable, but by the end of a lengthy biography the shape and scope of his historical shadow is still unclear.
