Woodrow Wilson : A Biography

by COOPER, JOHN MILTON JR

• ISBN13: 9780307265418
• ISBN10: 0307265412
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-11-03
• Publisher: Knopf

Summary

The first major biography of Woodrow Wilson in nearly twenty years, from America's leading Wilson scholar. Woodrow Wilson was one of the most important presidents in American history: a Democrat who retook the White House after sixteen years of Republican administrations, he helped create many of the regulatory bodies that would prove central to governance in the twentieth century. He guided the nation through World War I, making the United States a world power for the first time. And though he lost the fight to bring the country into the League of Nations, he defined a new way of thinking about international relations that would bear fruit with the creation of the United Nations. John Milton Cooper guides us through Wilson's personal and political worlds, bringing the man and his times to life. We see how Wilson cut his political teeth as president of Princeton and how he came virtually out of nowhere in 1912 to lead the Democrats to victory, applying his careful study of politics to his new office. We see him develop his vision for government and articulate it in tours around the country, speaking directly to the American people, which he believed was the best way to engender their most sustained, and sustaining, support. A long overdue, revelatory portrait of one of our most transformative presidents.

Author Biography

Jolm Milton Cooper, Jr. is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin.

Table of Contents

Prologue "This Man's Mind and Spirit"	p. 3
Tommy	p. 13
Woodrow	p. 33
Professor	p. 56
Bold Leader	p. 79
Academic Civil War	p. 102
Governor	p. 120
Nominee	p. 140
The Great Campaign	p. 159
Preparation	p. 182
Beginnings	p. 198
Taken at the Flood	p. 213
Triumph and Tragedy	p. 237
Irony and the Gift of Fate	p. 262
The Shock of Recognition	p. 285
Second Flood Tide	p. 307
To Run Again	p. 334
Peace and War	p. 362
Waring War	p. 390
Victory	p. 425
Covenant	p. 454
Peacemaking Abroad and at Home	p. 476
The League Fight	p. 506
Disability	p. 535
Downfall	p. 561
Twilight	p. 579
Notes	p. 601
Sources and Acknowledgments	p. 669
Index	p. 677
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

“THIS MAN'S MIND AND SPIRIT”

Each year, in the morning on December 28, a military honor guard carrying the American flag presents a wreath that bears the words “The President.” Accompanying the honor guard are members of the clergy, who carry a cross and say a prayer. The clergy are present because the wreathlaying ceremony takes place in front of a tomb in the Washington National Cathedral. Since the day is only a week after the winter solstice, the low angle of the morning sun causes bright colors from the stained glass windows to play across the floor of the alcove where the tomb is located, over the stone sarcophagus, and on the words carved on the walls. The alcove contains two flags, the Stars and Stripes and the orange and black–shielded ensign of Princeton University. The wreath laying takes place on the birthday, and at the final resting place, of the thirteenth president of Princeton and twenty-eighth president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson.

The ceremony and the tomb capture much about this man. The military presence is fitting because Wilson led the nation through World War I. The religious setting is equally fitting because no president impressed people more strongly as a man of faith than Wilson did. His resting place makes him the only president buried inside a church and the  only one buried in Washington. The university flag attests to his career in higher education before he entered public life. Wilson remains the only professional academic and the only holder of the Ph.D. degree to become president. The inscriptions on the alcove walls come from his speeches as president and afterward. Wilson made words central to all that he did as a scholar, teacher, educational administrator, and political leader; he was the next to last president to write his own speeches. No other president has combined such varied and divergent elements of learning, eloquence, religion, and war.

In 1927, three years after Wilson’s death, Winston Churchill declared, “Writing with every sense of respect, it seems no exaggeration to pronounce that the action of the United States with its repercussions on the history of the world depended, during the awful period of Armageddon, on the workings of this man’s mind and spirit to the exclusion of every other factor; and that he played a part in the fate of nations incomparably more direct and personal than any other man.” Churchill was referring to the part that Wilson played in World War I and above all, his decision in 1917 to intervene on the side of the Allies. That was the biggest decision Wilson ever made, and much of what has happened in the world since then has flowed from that decision. Unlike the other American wars of the last century, this one came neither in response to a direct attack on the nation’s soil, as with World War II and Pearl Harbor and the attacks of September 11, nor as a war of choice, as with the Gulf War and the Iraq War, nor as a smaller episode in a grand global struggle, as with the Korean War and the Vietnam War. Many have argued that the United States joined the Allies in 1917 because great underlying forces and interests involving money, ties of blood and culture, and threats to security and cherished values were “really” at work. Perhaps so, perhaps not, but one incontrovertible fact remains: the United States entered World War I because Woodrow Wilson decided to take the country in.

Despite his deep religious faith, he did not go to war in 1917 because he thought God was telling him to do it. When someone telegraphed him to demand, “In the name of God and humanity, declare war on Germany,” Wilson’s stenographer wrote in his diary that the president scoffed, “War isn’t declared in the name of God; it is a human affair entirely.” To Wilson, as an educated, orthodox Christian, the notion that any person could presu

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Excerpted from Woodrow Wilson: A Biography by John Milton Cooper
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