Woodrow Wilson Book

Reading about Woodrow Wilson is like reading about a slow-motion train wreck: you can see a disaster coming, and despite there being time to avoid the crash, you know it will still happen. Wilson is, in many respects, a tragic figure, and one of the most tragic when it comes to American presidents. Blinded by his own self-righteousness and obsessive devotion to his cherished League of Nations, he drove himself to the point of collapse, thus wrecking any chance for the League to ever actually function. Wilson's failures helped cost the world dearly two decades later.

August Heckscher has written a readable, and enjoyable, full biography of Wilson. The narrative moves along nicely, with Heckscher always keeping Wilson's personal life as equally in the forefront as his professional side. Heckscher spends an appropriate amount of time on Wilson's life prior to becoming President, not dwelling too long in any one area. He succeeds in showing Wilson as someone who has a strong inner drive, constantly striving to a higher level. Wilson in these years also comes off as somewhat of an opportunist - willing to go wherever and write whatever he can so as to get money.

More readable than John Milton Cooper's scholarly work, and less partisan than A. Scott Berg's take on Wilson, Heckscher still evinces a pro-Wilson sentiment, but it is not blatant like Berg's was. Still, on page 394 he writes of Wilson as "a great president". History is coming to judge otherwise. Personally, I consider Wilson to be highly overrated. While he got some serious legislation passed early on, I found his single-track mind and narrow focus to be off-putting. More importantly, he carried some vestiges of the South with him (Wilson was all over the South: born in VA; grew up in GA, SC and NC; went to law school at UVA; worked briefly in Atlanta) which resulted in segregation being allowed in the Federal workforce. Wilson did nothing for blacks; this is even more noticeable during the race riots in the summer of 1919. Wilson did nothing. Nothing.

This is also true of the 1918 flu pandemic. Wilson did nothing, although you would not know that from this book as Heckscher does not talk about it. While I do realize that, at the moment that I am writing, a global pandemic is foremost on many peoples' minds, I still would have thought that, in a full review of Wilson's presidency, it would have warranted some notice from Heckscher. That it did not is disappointing. But as I read along, I realized that this was not the only thing that Heckscher left out or barely mentioned. He does not write about the film Birth of a Nation being screened in Wilson's White House. Is this because it makes Wilson look not just like a segregationist, but like a racist?

Other things also were not discussed, or briefly mentioned. Wilson had a close relationship with Jack Hibben while he was president of Princeton. Yet, the first we read of Hibben, is when he and Wilson have a falling out. I found that odd. Heckscher treats his relationship with Colonel Edward House in a similar vein. Wilson's nomination of James McReynolds to the Supreme Court is not mentioned at all. And his nomination of Louis Brandeis, which was a big deal, was dispatched in two paragraphs. While, as mentioned earlier, his treatment of Wilson's pre-presidency is good, and Wilson's brief post-presidency also, topics like these that were either ignored or relegated to minor items, thus weakening the book. Cooper was even more of a Wilson promoter than Heckscher comes across as here, but he also gave a more complete picture of the man.

This is a decent Wilson biography, easy to read and constructed fairly well. But all of the small things that are missing or glossed over add up to the book not being a great biography. Still, the sense of tragedy and of what-could-have-been comes across clearly. Heckscher ably shows that Wilson in a strong sense gave his life for a cause that he firmly believed in, only to be destroyed in the process and become embittered as his goal slipped beyond his grasp.

Grade: B