Woodrow Wilson, by William Allen White.
The True Story of Woodrow Wilson, by David Lawrence.
Brigham Young, by M. R. Werner.
The Life of Abraham Lincoln, by William E. Barton.
Selections from the Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge.
Letters from Theodore Roosevelt to Anne Roosevelt Cowles.
William Allen White has the qualities that fit him to write about Woodrow Wilson entertainingly for his contemporaries, illuminatingly for posterity. He is versatile and perspicacious; he has a sense of humour and he is colossally industrious; he is sensitive and sensible, and has been disciplined in the art of verbal expression, by intuition and experience. He is a man of ideals and ideas; the former are realisable, the latter not persecutory; and he has a tender spot in his heart for the Irish.
Posterity and its spokesmen will render the verdict on Woodrow Wilson that will endure. I do not agree with Mr. White that his place in the history of the world will not be determined by his character. It will be determined by his character, not by his characteristics, just as George Washington’s was and just as Abraham Lincoln’s was. Nor do I agree that “the relation between character and fame is not of first importance” though I am aware that “many good men live and die unknown.” They do, indeed, but many good men have very little character. “Character” and “good” are not synonymous. A “good” man is a man who does not disobey the commandments nor transcend conventions. A man with “character” frequently does both. Woodrow Wilson did and I have no doubt George Washington did, despite the cherry tree story.
The greatest of all commandments is, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” If he had affectionate feeling for Dean West, President Hibben, Senator Lodge and others “too numerous to mention” he successfully concealed it. He was undoubtedly a truthful man, but he said he had written the preface to Dean West’s publicity brochure without reading it, and later, when it was shown that he had read it, he said he had written it good-naturedly and offhand, which was again at variance with the truth, for it carefully and lucidly expressed his attitude to the school. He told the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations that he never had seen the secret treaties, though there is documentary evidence to the contrary.
He had character: he was firm, fearless and free, and he had vision. He showed these qualities in Paris. In his vision it was revealed to him that from the sanguineous and agonising travail of the war a child had been born; that it did not resemble its parents; that many called it monster, others Bolshevism; and that it subscribed to none of our rules of bringing-up or behaviour. He saw that it was lusty, growing like the traditional weed, that it threatened to shut out our sunlight and our source. He realised that we must deal with communism, and gradually, day by day, the world is realising it. Woodrow Wilson was “good” enough, but unfortunately for him, for his peace of mind and happiness, he had “characteristics” and they fettered him.
Mr. White bears heavily on Woodrow Wilson’s ancestry, too heavily some will think, or too indiscriminatingly.
It may have been the Woodrow in him that told Colonel Harvey that his advocacy of him as a presidential candidate was injuring his prospects and it may have been the Wilson in him that charmed the “bawling mob, hot, red-faced, full of heavy food and too much rebellious liquor” which nominated him for Governor of New Jersey; but it was Woodrow Wilson that met the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the White House in June 1919, when he made the misstep that lamed him for his remaining mortal days, and dislodged his country from the saddle of world-leader, in which it seemed to be riding a winning race.
Mr. White would have us believe that Woodrow Wilson got his intellect and obstinacy from the Woodrows, his emotions and charm from the Wilsons. What did he get from Ann Adams, his lynx-eyed grandmother whose mouth dropped at the angles and who neither saw nor forgave a daughter after she married beyond her approbation? From her, I suppose, he got the capacity to treat Colonel House, his polar star for the ten years of his fruition, as though he were a Judas, and Joseph Tumulty, who served him with dog-like fidelity and intelligence from the beginning of his political career to its zenith and beyond, as though he were not only mangy but had rabies as well?
The chapter entitled “The Miracle of Heredity” might more appropriately and truthfully be labelled, “Teachings of Heredity Exemplified by the Appearance, Conduct and Career of Woodrow Wilson.” The author would have us believe that environment had much to do in conditioning his limitations. He writes:
“If only there could have been in his life some shanty-Irish critic with a penchant for assault and battery, some dear beloved sweetheart to show his notes around the playground, some low-minded friend to fasten upon him the nickname 'four eyes,’ calling brutal attention to his spectacles, or some other nickname in thinly veiled obscenity which would reveal a youthful weakness and so make him truckle to the baser nature of his gang that he might remove the black curse of his sobriquet—what a world we should have to-day!”
Alas, that I should disagree again with one who has given me hours of pleasure from which enduring admiration has developed! Woodrow Wilson would have been the same had he budded in Hoboken, flowered in Montmartre and fructified in Tahiti.
If one can say there is a disappointing chapter in the book it is one entitled “The Development of Youth.” The study that will throw a penetrating light on Woodrow Wilson will be one that concerns itself chiefly with the years between 1874 and 1885, from the time he went to Columbia, South Carolina, until he left Johns Hopkins University, where “he was known as a friendly cuss in the American vernacular and never a grind.” In his school and college days he met, worked and played with other boys who were destined to become successful Americans. Perhaps there was a rule amongst them taking notes which he will print. If there was, he is the one to unleash the bridegroom “coming forth rejoicing as a strong man to run a race” better than his brother-in-law, Stockton Axson, whom Mr. White quotes.
Woodrow Wilson’s presidency of Princeton University has probably never been outlined more accurately and attractively than in the chapters, “The Lecturer Becomes the Administrator” and “Going Through the First Fire.” Not only is the chief leading actor sketched by the hand of a master, but there is a Hogarthian vignette of Dean West, and a portrait of Colonel House which is so perfect that I must quote it:
“A man of slight figure, perhaps five feet six in height, of a thin, oval cast of countenance, adorned by a short, grey, stubby moustache over a firm and yet sensitive mouth which in turn is carved above a strong chin. The whole countenance bursts into illumination with beaming, kindly eyes below a rather higher brow than one expects from the remainder of the face; and the voice, when it comes from this gentle, interesting, and intelligent face, is soft and low and modest. A certain almost Oriental modesty, a Chinese self-effacement, abides with the personality of Colonel House. He seems to be in constant and delightful agreement with his auditor. And this delightful agreement, as one knows him, expresses itself in a thousand ways in an obvious and unmistakable desire to serve. He is never servile, but always serving; gentle without being soft, exceedingly courteous with the most unbending dignity. He is forever punctuating one’s sentence with 'that’s true, that’s true’; and stimulating candour among men, which is the essence of friendship.”
Mr. White is an impartial partisan, a pleading judge. These desirable qualities of the biographer are revealed most conspicuously in the narrative of Woodrow Wilson’s first great struggle with his most deforming limitation: inability to bear and forbear, to do team work, to play the game according to the rules. No doubt he felt that he had gained a moral victory at Princeton, but the trustees were glad to see him leave.
How he got the nomination for Governor of New Jersey, how he short-circuited the political machine, how he inoculated the Democratic party of his adopted state with liberalism and how, gradually but surely, the immunisation that resulted was felt throughout the country are told most interestingly. The chapters are interspersed with pleasant references to three women who influenced his life: he got understanding, loyalty, indulgence and devotion from Ellen Axson and from Edith Boiling; from Mrs. Peck he got appeasement of his latent hedonism, encouragement of his ambition, justification of his conduct, and praise which was to Woodrow Wilson what manna was to the Children of Israel. She, “of exquisite spiritual prowess and facile charm,” is supposed to have enjoyed his confidence to a remarkable degree. Her recently published story does not tend to prove it. Until his letters to her are published, I shall continue to believe he got nothing from her save what I have enumerated.
Woodrow Wilson’s nomination and election to the Presidency of this country and the accomplishments of his first administration are passed over rather briefly. All will not agree “that when his four years’ work are considered as a whole, when they are viewed retrospectively they may be seen as the fastest moving four years in our economic and social history.”
It was in 1916, when he was renominated by his party without opposition, and re-elected, that President Wilson became a world figure. His dealings with Germany, his restraint in bringing this country into the war, the way in which he developed public opinion to back him up when there was nothing to do save to join up with the Allies, are told with candour and simplicity. Then come the glad and the sad chapters: the President’s gestation of the League of Nations plan, and his abortive attempts to deliver himself; his European odyssey; his encounter with the sirens; his shipwreck; the shattering of the raft that he got together to take him before the people when the Republican Senators convinced him they would not accept the treaty; his final illness and his tiresome wait for the ring down of the curtain are told with gratifying impartiality and in satisfactory résumé.
The relation of Woodrow Wilson’s illness to his great failure: his inability to get his country to accept the League of Nations idea and membership in that product of his brain, has never been properly recognised nor publicly discussed. But it has a definite and a pathetic relation. Mr. White says:
“He brought with him to the White House a stomach pump which he used almost daily and a quart can of some sort of coal-tar product—headache tablets; they were giving him incipient Bright’s disease until the White House doctors took hold of him and stopped the tablets. The tinkering with his intestines proved the frailty of the man.”
Alas, how frail man is, and how many men and women are frail if “tinkering” with their intestines proves such frailty!
Before he went to the White House and while he was still governor of New Jersey, and possibly even before that, Woodrow Wilson showed distinct symptoms of the disease to which he finally succumbed: arteriosclerosis. The disease was detected first in his retinal blood vessels by a famous ophthalmologist of this country and he was instructed to a régime which, subscribed to and followed, is adequate frequently to bring about a cessation of the progress of the disease. Perhaps “tinkering” with the intestines does not felicitously or appropriately describe the essential features of that prophylaxis, but if it embraces what is meant by overcoming fermentation and putrefaction in the digestive tract, then “tinkering” is the word to use and it is to be regretted that “White House doctors” were not “tinkers” too.
One day, some one will point out that President Wilson’s irascibility, obstinacy, mental inflexibility and emotional inelasticity, which he displayed so frequently, painfully to himself and humiliatingly to his people while in Paris on his second European venture, and here when he took his plan to the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and finally to the people at large, were mainly due to the arteriosclerosis, which at that time had made great inroads on the nutrient channels of the brain. It accentuated his limitations and minimised his possessions. It immobilised him like a hephæstic fetter, and there was no one strong or courageous enough to break the links before the fibre of the web had annealed.
Mr. White’s concluding chapter is entitled “The Assessment,” and it contains these words with which every one must agree:
“If Fame does not come to him through the conjunction of time and chance working upon the genius of the race to preserve the structure which he previsioned in his hour of trial, Fame will find a man here—a clean, brave, wise, courageous man—ready made for heroic stature.”
How unfortunate it is that Mr. White could not have interpolated the adjectives “understanding, kindly, compassionate, loyal!”
In another connection Mr. White says: “And we must not forget that from the bottom of his Irish heart always the motive which most surely moved Woodrow Wilson was the love of his kind.” Against this statement I set the following extract from my own writings:
“Woodrow Wilson does not love his fellow-men. He loves them in the abstract, but not in the flesh. He is concerned with their fate, their destiny, their travail en masse, but the predicaments, perplexities and prostrations of the individual or groups of individuals make no appeal to him. He does not refresh his soul by bathing it daily in the milk of human kindness. He says with his lips that he loves his fellow-man, but there is no accompanying emotional glow, none of the somatic or spiritual accompaniments which are the normal ancillæ of love’s display. He does not respect his fellow’s convictions when they are opposed to his own. He does not value their counsel when it is adverse to his own judgment.... In contact with people, he gives himself the air of listening in deference, and indeed of being beholden to their judgment and opinion, but in reality it is an artifice which he puts off when he returns to the dispensing centre of the world and of the law just as he puts off his gloves and hat.... Woodrow Wilson attempts to mask, with facial urbanity and a smile in verbal contact with people, and with the subjective mood in written contact, another deforming defect of character; namely, his inability to enter into a contest of any sort in which there is a strife, without revealing his obsession to win. When he attempts to play any game, his artificed civility, cordiality, amiability, are so discordant with the real man that they become as offensive as affectations of manner or speech always are, and instead of placating the individual for whom they are manifest, or facilitating the modus vivendi, they offend and make rapport with him impossible.... Mr. Wilson is a brilliant, calculating and vindictive man; brilliant in conception, calculating in motive and vindictive in execution.... Were he generous, kindly and humble, it would be difficult to find his like in the flesh or in history.”
That was my deliberate judgment after having studied Woodrow Wilson from the psychological point of view, and that is my judgment now after having read and re-read Mr. White’s book.
It is by his possessions, not by his limitations, that Woodrow Wilson will be estimated. The campaign is on. It is not a noisy one. No one can say what the outcome will be, but the straw vote now being taken suggests that his election to membership in the Academy of the World’s Immortals is assured.
Another journalist, David Lawrence, has written what he calls The True Story of Woodrow Wilson. Either the adjective should have been deleted from that title, or the indefinite article should have been substituted for the definite.
Mr. Lawrence was the correspondent of the Associated Press at Princeton from 1906 to 1910, the closing years of Wilson’s pedagogical life and the opening years of his political career. For the past fifteen years, he has done journalistic work in Washington which has brought him in close contact with the pattern makers of our national destiny. He has had therefore unusual opportunity to observe, and he is a trained and trusted interpreter of events. Small wonder that his book is readable, interesting and instructive. Were he as trustworthy an interpreter of souls as he is of events, his book would deserve high rating.
The satisfactory life of Wilson must be written from his letters, messages, memoranda and books after the disappearance of the emotional states engendered by his presence and personality, which are prejudicial to correct estimation and inimical to sound judgment. Such states of popular feeling never disappear in one generation. It is only now that we begin to realise the majesty of Lincoln’s mind, the harmony of his soul.
Mr. Lawrence’s opening sentence is “Woodrow Wilson died as he lived—unexplained and unrevealed.” He was more “explained” than any man of his time, and neither Mr. Baruch nor Mr. Bridges would, I fancy, admit that he was unrevealed. He may have been improperly explained, and insufficiently revealed, but there are thousands who saw and met him who will not believe it.
Mr. Lawrence states that his purpose was to put on record a dispassionate narrative of the man who, equipped only with the qualities of personal magnetism and intellectual power, made the unparalleled ascent from College Professor to Moral Leader of the world. Every unprejudiced reader must admit that success crowned his effort.
When Admiral Grayson shall publish his diary; when the archives of Colonel House’s mind are accessible; when all Walter Page’s letters are available, and when Mr. Robert Bridges, Mr. Norman Davis, and Mr. Bernard Baruch shall testify the qualities that the world denied him—qualities of heart—we shall be in position to estimate Woodrow Wilson and to assess his career. Had Mr. William Jennings Bryan shifted the focus of his mind from fundamentalism to fact, and told us of his intimacy with Woodrow Wilson, it would have served a useful purpose.
It was said of Brigham Young that he was a Cromwell in daring, a Machiavelli in intrigue, a Moses in executive force, and a Bonaparte in ruthlessness and unscrupulousness; and William H. Seward said that America has produced few greater statesmen. These testimonials and the universal admission that he gave Mormonism whatever permanency it has, and that he was the parent of its material prosperity prove that he was a man of uncommon personality.
Personality analysis and portrayal are the Elysian field of the biographer. Here is a man who was to the system of polytheism called Mormonism what Paul was to Christianity: preacher, organiser, administrator. A farmer lad without background or education, he supported himself by painting and glazing until he undertook the dissemination and direction of the doctrines revealed by God to Joseph Smith, Jr., who devoted all the succeeding days of his life, until his neighbours killed him, to their promulgation. Religion took the place of education in Brigham Young and aroused his latent qualities and power. It led him to the Governorship of Utah and to the Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; and before he died nearly a half a million people were convinced that he, like Christ and Mohammed, partook of divinity.
He has only recently been called to his reward; fifty years ago, he was a power in the land; for more than a quarter of a century every word that he said that was fit to print was printed and archived; his life is thoroughly documented. He should be a fascinating subject for a biographer. It would be fulsome praise to say that M. R. Werner has written a satisfactory or a successful biography of him. It reveals neither diligent research nor careful reflection; it is neither skilfully composed nor effectively told; there is scant evidence in it that the most important source of such a biography, The Journal of Discourses, has been deeply studied or adequately transcribed. But its most serious shortcoming as a biography is a possession, not a lack, and that possession is the engulfing, overwhelming background. Mr. Werner says it is impossible to write the life of Brigham Young without also writing the history of Mormonism, and it is impossible to write the history of Mormonism without writing the life of Joseph Smith, Jr. I fancy few will agree with him. I should go so far even as to say that no one can write the history of Mormonism and the lives of its author and proprietor and of its administrator and perpetuator, simultaneously. To do the first of these alone would be an interminable task. It would require a discussion of the religious instinct, explaining why this instinct is so rarely appeased by what the wisdom of God and the ingenuity of man have to offer. And a detailed, specific statement of the system of polytheism which the Book of Mormon professes to teach and the Book of Doctrine seeks to justify, would require examination of the status of prophecy, of miracles, of the imminent approach of the end of the world, of personal contact with God through sight or hearing at the present day, of liberty of private judgment in religious matter, and of scores of other tenets of the Mormon creed. Moreover, it would require an explicit statement of the Mormon hierarchy, an extremely complicated structure, and a summary of the Mormon’s form of government. No biographer, however facile, could interpret Joseph Smith, Jr., who is not familiar with the psychopathology and experienced in the ways of the psychic deviate. Concerning Mr. Werner’s apology regarding the necessary scope of this book, it would be just as legitimate to say that the life of Francis of Assisi could not be written without writing at the same time the history of the Catholic Church and the story of the life of Ignatius Loyola.