'The Moralist'—1/5

"You know, Baruch, only a god could perform what is expected of me."

—Woodrow Wilson, embodiment of humility

Thorny historical figures present a biographer who wants to make an argument like O'Toole's—that Wilson was a moral man who was driven by a morality we can connect to today—with a dilemma: do they go warts-and-all and let the reader decide, like Crystal Zevon does for Warren in I'll Sleep When I'm Dead? Or do they take a different route and omit or mislead with information like Amity Shlaes in Coolidge? Unfortunately, O'Toole's writing seems more inclined toward the latter approach.

For a quick overview of Wilson, before we get to the rest: he was an academic born in the South and was a child during the Civil War. A slow learner, he possibly had developmental dyslexia (always take these diagnoses with a shaker of salt) and learned to read and write late. Despite this, he became a prodigious learner and would go on to attend Princeton and move into teaching, working his way from the women's college of Bryn Mawr to the presidency of Princeton (College of New Jersey until 1896). After leaving Princeton, he became NJ governor in a pretty transparent stepping-stone to the White House; he won the intriguing 1912 election, which pitted Wilson against Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft and saw Wilson the victor of the split republican vote. 

As president, Wilson had a progressive domestic agenda and was ultimately drawn into WWI, which he hoped to use to create the League of Nations and, in essence, end war. He also was a step backward for race relations and civil rights in the US. After negotiating at the Paris Peace Conference, Wilson faced domestic opposition and, while trying to rally the public to his cause, suffered a severe stroke (not of the Clarence Carter variety, although the results of both strokes could be aptly described with the French euphemism le petit mort) that left him partially paralyzed. Though he served out the remainder of his term and the extent of his incapacitation was covered by his wife and his doctor, he was greatly diminished and became a bit of a King Lear-esque figure. He left the presidency, was replaced by Republican Warren Harding, and more or less faded into obscurity before dying in 1924.

In O'Toole's eagerness to view Wilson through a moral lens, a lot of his decidedly immoral characters are skimmed over or reduced to a surface-level analysis. This is most prominent in Wilson's well-known racism. As plenty of people who have read about US presidents will joke, Wilson was not racist by 2024 standards—Wilson was racist by 1910s standards, and that is saying something. While Wilson was a moralist who inspired later leaders like FDR and Truman (who both have issues of their own, don't get me wrong) and had truly wonderful, utopian ideas such as the League of Nations, it is essential to address the flip side and the aspects of him that have not stood the test of time to present at least an attempt at a balanced biography as opposed to a hagiography.

An argument is to be made that the main purpose of the book is to discuss World War I and the Paris Peace Conferences where the League of Nations was formed, and this is a fair point. Still, it is difficult to use the title "Moralist" and then shrug off the most glaring counterexample; it'd be like writing a similar biography of Jefferson that doesn't mention him owning slaves despite his lofty proclamations, FDR and not mentioning Japanese internment camps, or Truman without mentioning the atomic bombs. Even if they're not the moral leadership you want to focus on, they're a bit too big and prominent a part of that person's record to just be swept under the rug. I mean, O'Toole at one point quotes Wilson telling an assembled group of Black leaders that the federal civil service cannot be desegregated (again) because human nature just doesn't change that much in a single generation. No mention is given to the irony of him making this proclamation while working on the League of Nations (Wilson's aversion to war, apparently, came from his experiences growing up during the US Civil War).

Maybe I'm crazy, but when it comes to 'changes that can be made in a generation,' I think, "Ending segregated workplaces and going back to the way things were before Wilson" is a bit more easily accomplishable than, "creating an institution that will permanently redirect human nature and thousands of years of biology and history away from belligerence and warfare and toward pacifism." But then, two of Wilson's other big failings that come across in The Moralist are his ego and his naïveté. 

For those who are unaware, Wilson's racism runs deep. The issue with O'Toole's writing is that she takes less of a Harry Truman 'the buck stops here' approach and more a Donald Trump 'the buck stops somewhere, but it sure ain't here' one. So, for instance, when the federal civil service was re-segregated under Wilson and he allowed it to happen, O'Toole immediately absolves him of blame: some underling did it and Wilson had no power to control it. And anyway, by telling civil rights leaders to go to hell, he was able to work on an agenda in Congress with other Democrats (didn't Martin Luther King, Jr. say something about this, about white southerners who preferred a "negative peace which is the absence of tension [over] a positive peace which is the presence of justice"? Except Wilson wasn't a moderate—he was a racist who screened the KKK-praising Birth of a Nation in the fucking White House; remember when I said he was racist even for his time?).

As if that's not bad enough, the White House isn't the first time Wilson had an issue with segregation: while president of Princeton, he refused to allow Black students to attend. He did so with the claim that Princeton had no history of Black students attending. This is demonstrably false as Wilson began teaching at Princeton in 1890 and a Black student graduated in 1891, which would have caused a stir at the time. Oh, but it gets worse, too, because it wasn't enough for Wilson to lie verbally about the presence of Black students at Princeton.

During Wilson's tenure as president of Princeton, records were effectively rewritten to destroy the history of Black attendance at Princeton—an issue that still seems to be relevant today. To prove my point, we can look at Princeton's website: here, we have a source on Princeton telling us that the first Black student at Princeton enrolled in 1935 but was sent home when he showed up on campus and they saw he was Black; the race barrier was finally broken up for the Naval Training School. On the other hand, here we have another page from Princeton discussing the "erased pasts and altered legacies" of "Princeton's First African-American Students" listing the above-mentioned 1891 graduation date of one Abraham Parker Denny.

A. Scott Berg's biography brings up the suggestion that a young Ho Chi Minh attempted to meet Woodrow Wilson, on this note, and if memory serves, it is hinted that Wilson's choosing to blow him off due to seeing him as from an inferior race led Ho to adopt communism. The Wilson Center would dispute such a claim but considering the source, you know, YMMV on how much credence you give them.

This all seems rather discursive, I'm sure, but the point being: this is a huge issue for the author to brush under the rug and absolve him of any responsibility for. This is the kind of omission and misrepresentation that destroys the credibility of a book and makes you view everything else through a jaded lens. Ironically, A. Scott Berg, who wrote the prior biography of Wilson I read, had a more unvarnished view, in my opinion. Maybe I was just less informed as that was one of my earlier forays into presidential biographies. Either way, I remember the more nuanced approach that addressed his flaws gave me more respect; reading the excuses for Wilson provided by O'Toole does the exact opposite.

When it comes down to it, I really wanted to like this book and had been looking forward to reading it for a while. Unfortunately, however, as soon as I got to the section in the introduction brushing off re-segregation of the federal civil service, I had a bad feeling and, unfortunately, it was accurate. I've wavered and considered going for two-stars with the excuse that the focus on WWI means I'm getting too caught up on other details, but in the interests of consistency and honesty, I have to put it at 1/5 same as for Shlaes' Coolidge and for the same reasons. Books that torture the information to get a desired reading like his just rub me the wrong way and can be a massive disservice to the layperson who likely won't pick up another book to rectify its mistakes, clarify, and learn more. If you really want to learn about Wilson, A. Scott Berg's your guy.

And now for some assorted points:

—Hard not to be disappointed in O'Toole's account of Wilson's wooing his second wife. For those unaware, Wilson's first wife died while he was in office and he remarried one Edith Galt (more on her in a bit). During the period while he was wooing her, the Washington Post made one of the most infamous typos in newspaper history when it meant to report that he had spent an evening "entertaining" his fiancee but instead typed that he had spent the evening "entering" his fiancee. In those more prudish times, this was a scandal. It's a shame such a fun little anecdote wasn't mentioned in the book.

—Teddy Roosevelt's presence in the book is significantly smaller than it could be. Given the focus on morality, TR makes an excellent foil for Wilson and letting most of their encounters and Roosevelt's growing disrespect and animosity for Wilson out takes away a really interesting counterweight who one could argue is equal or superior to Wilson in the morality department, albeit with warts of his own like anyone else.

—The young Wilson's fantasy world he grew up in has tinges of Walter Mitty and provides some evidence that the later possible diagnosis of Wilson as suffering from developmental dyslexia due to his being late to learning to read and write is accurate. As ever, armchair diagnosis of a mental condition based on reading documents about a dead guy is a wildly unreliable field of speculation with no way to prove or disprove, so it can be fun food for thought but that's about it. As an adult, there's no doubt that Wilson had a prodigious mind for facts and knowledge—if memory serves, he was the last president who wrote his own State of the Unions (thanks for that one, Mr. Parker, I believe you were the one who told us that in class).

—I've seen some people argue in the past that after his final debilitating stroke, when Edith Wilson and Dr. Grayson were covering up the severity of Wilson's condition, Edith was arguably the US's first female president. Maybe so, but with the 25th Amendment being more of a topic of conversation, it's worth noting that Wilson was at this point a prime contender for being booted out of office with it. Unfortunately, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment wasn't around for another half-century or so. Going back to my earlier mention of Wilson's ego, however: even at this point in his life, when he was incapable of navigating a flight of stairs, this egotistical bastard wanted to throw his hat into the ring and run for a third term.

——While the above speaks to Wilson's ego, let's run through a few examples of his naïveté: using untrained ambassadors who were in way over their heads; appointing pacifists as Secretary of State, War, and Navy; thinking he could could lecture the Entente Powers into swearing off war forever with moral arguments as if this had never been attempted before; and, as his daughter notes, a stubborn refusal to read even constructive criticism because it rattles him. Between the authoritarian tendencies (see: repression of the press during WWI), the ego, the naïveté, and the racism, you've got a real toxic brew going on as well as several of the characteristics that define some of the worst dictators in history. The most terrifying of men are men like Wilson, who walk with a moral certainty and conviction to their beliefs that allows them to be completely blind and cruel to the humanity of others. Authoritarians from Caesar to Stalin likely would find much to admire in Wilson.

—Wilson suffered a series of health ailments throughout his life (and he was a bit of a hypochondriac imo); his doctor Grayson prescribed golf "for his health" and while this was maybe more accepted back then, The Moralist was published in 2018. After a decade of Fox bitching about every time Obama golfed and two years into Trump spending more time playing golf and watching Fox than doing presidential duties and I don't think the US population is much in the mood for hearing about how life is so difficult for the sitting President he needs to golf away the days. Most of us get an angry boxx, disciplinary action, or termination for calling in sick, not, "Oh, go play golf to your heart's content!"