March 11th, 2014
Galley Friend Chris Caldwell has a great essay on Woodrow Wilson in the new Claremont Review of Books. Sample awesome:
In his new biography, Wilson, A. Scott Berg, whose earlier Lindbergh (1998) won the Pulitzer Prize, notes a bizarre compulsion that Wilson acquired in his teens and kept till the end of his life. Any time he became part of a group or organization—from the Eumeneans at Davidson College to the Princeton baseball club to the Johns Hopkins Literary Society—he would dig up and then rewrite its constitution, usually seizing on some neglected provision which, in an emergency, could be wielded to make the system more efficient, hierarchical, and subject to his own wishes. Wilson became a peripatetic academic—studying at Davidson, Princeton, Virginia Law, and Johns Hopkins; teaching at Bryn Mawr and Wesleyan; finally returning to Princeton, where he would serve as president for almost a decade—and constitutions were his specialty. . . .
When he urged Americans to “make the world safe for democracy,” he was not so deluded as to think the country was in danger of being invaded. Nor was he talking about vindicating America’s system of government. On the contrary, he meant to reform it out of recognition. He meant to establish the League of Nations, which he had already begun to sketch out in his speeches as a “league of honor.” That was America’s casus belli, as Wilson wanted to see it. In 150 days of combat, over 100,000 Americans died, fighting, so their families and neighbors assumed, to defend their country. But once it was over, Wilson, the great rewriter of constitutions, drew the world’s attention to the fine print of his oratory, and, like a trial lawyer triumphantly waving a contract that some wronged party had been bamboozled into signing, informed them that they had fought for no such thing. “If the Treaty is not ratified by the Senate,” he said, “the War will have been fought in vain.” This terrifying sentence was not rhetoric.
There’s a lot more. If you’ve ever suspected that Wilson was History’s Greatest MonsterTM, this will be catnip.
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