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Woodrow Wilson: Man and Statesman

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Robert H. Ferrell
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Extract

It is now thirty-two years since the death of Woodrow Wilson, one hundred years since his birth, and still the place in history of this Southerner who became president of Princeton University and later President of the United States remains somewhat uncertain. Wilson will rank among the great American presidents, but precisely where his reputation will come to rest is at present difficult to say. His public life has been the subject of intense scholarly investigation. College professors of history and political science have found his career fascinating (perhaps, one suspects, because he was the only college professor to reach the White House). But they have been unable to make up their minds about him. There is a passionate air in the historians' appraisals of Wilson, and more than a hint of assertion and argument, and beneath even the most calm and apparently measured accounts there is intellectual heat of a sort that betrays uncertainty about the stature of the man.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , April 1956 , pp. 131 - 145
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1956

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References

1 Letter to Axson, Ellen, 12 18, 1884Google Scholar, in Baker, Ray Stannard, Woodrow Wilson: Life and Letters (Garden City, N. Y., 1927–1937), I, 199Google Scholar. Even so favorable a biographer as Baker admitted that Wilson in personal relations always maintained a reserve—“the barrier never breaks quite down. One never quite gets to him.” American Chronicle: The Autobiography of Ray Stannard Baker (New York, 1945), p. 496.Google Scholar

2 Corwin, Edward S., “Departmental Colleague,” in Myers, William Starr, Woodrow Wilson: Some Princeton Memories (Princeton, 1946), p. 35.Google Scholar

3 Lewis, McMillan, Woodrow Wilson of Princeton (Narberth, Pa., 1952), 4–5.Google Scholar

4 Myers, William Starr, “Wilson in My Diary,” in Woodrow Wilson: Some Princeton Memories, p. 38.Google Scholar

5 (Princeton, 1947), chs. 2–3, especially pp. 90–99.

6 Seymour, Charles, Geography, Justice, and Politics at the Paris Conference of 1919 (New York, 1951), p. 12.Google Scholar

7 Wilson, to Kerney, James, in The Political Education of Woodrow Wilson (New York, 1926), p. 469.Google Scholar

8 Lodge, Henry Cabot, The Senate and the League of Nations (New York, 1925), p. 214.Google Scholar

9 Perkins, Dexter, The Evolution of American Foreign Policy (New York, 1948), p. 110.Google Scholar

10 Hoover, Irwin Hood (Ike), Forty-Two Years in the White House (Boston, 1934), p. 101.Google Scholar

11 See Seymour, Charles, “Versailles in Perspective,” Virginia Quarterly Review, XIX (1943), 481–497Google Scholar; Geography, Justice, and Politics at the Paris Conference of 1919; “Woodrow Wilson in Perspective,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 34 (1955–1956), 175–186.Google Scholar

12 A special case, of course, was that of Ireland.

13 “It is moral force that is irresistible,” Wilson said in a speech of December 29, 1918. “It is moral force as much as physical that has defeated the effort to subdue the world.” Cited in Brand, Katherine E., “Woodrow Wilson, in His Own Time,” Library of Congress Quarterly Journal, XIII (1955–1956), 71.Google Scholar

14 See especially Mantoux, Paul, Les Délibérations du Conseil des Quatre (24 mars-28 juin 1919) (2 vols., Paris, 1955).Google Scholar

15 American Chronicle, p. 411.Google Scholar

16 “Mr. Wilson's blanket condemnation of the Balance of Power rested upon his assumption that the wars of the past had resulted from the application of this principle and that the peace of the future must be protected from it. He and his adherents made no attempt to analyze the significance of what is, after all, an eternal principle of social organization. We were hypnotized by a phrase.” Seymour, Charles, “Versailles in Perspective,” p. 488.Google Scholar

17 Buehrig, E. H., Woodrow Wilson and the Balance of Power (Bloomington, Ind., 1955).Google Scholar