Professor in Chief

WILSON
A Scott Berg
G P Putnam's Sons
818 pages; $40

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 professor schooled the pro in practical politics, passing a reform agenda that curbed the power of parties and corporations alike.

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 labour 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".

Mr 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".

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.

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 US 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 saviour 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 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 antagonised 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. Rumours flew that the president had gone mad, while the country descended into bloody chaos. 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.

To the end, Wilson refused to compromise even though, as Mr Berg points out, the changes Lodge insisted on were to a large degree cosmetic, and would have preserved the League. Wilson let it die instead, living out the last five years of his life as a shuffling wreck of a man.

Wilson's final struggle is indeed a tragedy and Mr Berg plumbs its depths, but once again he elides the broader context. 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?

©2013 The New York Times News Service