Brains Win and Lose: Woodrow Wilson
I
IT would not be just to speak of Wilson as all brains. There was plenty of emotional life also. Yet you feel always that the intellect was the driving, the controlling force, and the defects of brains are as obvious in him as the excellences. For brains can do the greatest things in the world, — they can develop ideals, they can build up states and civilizations, — but they can also mislead and ruin and shatter an individual who puts a too blind trust in them.
Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born in Staunton, Virginia, in 1856. He came of that Scotch-Irish stock which gave America Andrew and Stonewall Jackson and so many other stubborn workers and fighters. His ancestors were teachers and ministers and the hereditary taint was in his blood, but always he wanted to manage men as well as to instruct them. He did not shine in his early education or in the attempted practice of law. But when he began to teach at Bryn Mawr, at Wesleyan, and at Princeton, he showed the stud that was in him. His success as a teacher and his evident energy and initiative made him president of Princeton, and his efforts to democratize education in that ancient university made him a conspicuous figure to the whole country, though circumstances prevented him from achieving his ideals. What he had done — and said — at Princeton brought him the governorship of New Jersey in 1910 and this was merely a stepping-stone in his sudden and astonishing passage to the Presidency in 1912, when the split in the Republican Party gave the Democrats an easy victory.
Wilson was first interested in domestic reforms, the reshaping of the tariff and the universally lauded establishment of the Federal Reserve System, though these were more or less interrupted by disturbed conditions in Mexico. Then in 1914 came the Great War, and Wilson was faced with heavier burdens than had come to any President since Lincoln, while the strain was made much more severe by the loss of his wife, who for years had been his beloved companion and most intimate adviser. After struggling vainly to remain a force for peace rather than an agency of destruction, the President was finally compelled to join the Allies, and victory was achieved largely by American brains, money, and valor. Wilson then went to Paris to make over the world by the League of Nations. After a gigantic struggle with all sorts of contending passions and selfishnesses he returned with the world imperfectly made over in the shape of a League and a Treaty which the Senate refused to accept. In a passionate effort to persuade the American people to reverse the Senate’s verdict, Wilson shattered his health completely, and the last year of his Presidency was passed under a tragic cloud of physical feebleness and political failure. He died of a brain disease in 1924.
To begin with, it is interesting and curious to gather some of Wilson’s comments on the general subject of brains, for it is evident that he had an immense, instinctive esteem for them, felt that they were the prime agency for moving the world — at any rate his agency. And to this end he wanted them positive, sweeping with swift efficiency to conclusions which should make themselves felt as well as accepted.
The play of brain, the activity of brain, energetic, exhaustless intellectual labor, seems to him the thing in life that is really worth while. ‘There is a sort of grim satisfaction in tiring one’s mind out, if it be only to prove one’s mastery over one’s natural disinclinations.’ And the lack of brain, which is for the most part a mere indolent unwillingness to use it, always merits his infinite contempt. ‘I overheard two men one day talking about a third man, and one of them referred to his head. “Head,” the other said, “head! That is n’t a head — that’s just a knot. The Almighty put that there to keep him from raveling out!" And we have to admit there are such persons.’
As Wilson appreciates the power of brains, so he fully understands their dangers, at any rate as he perceives them in others. There is the danger of mistaking a head-load of facts for the power of using them: ‘Some of the best-informed men I ever met could not reason at all. You know what you mean by an extraordinarily wellinformed man. You mean a man who always has some fact at his command to trip you up.’ There is the even more serious danger of mistaking theories for facts and so endeavoring to impose them upon the world: ‘Life is a complex thing. No theory that I ever heard propounded will match its varied pattern; and the men who are dangerous are the men who are not content with understanding, but go on to propound theories, things that will make a new pattern for the universe. Those are the men who are not to be trusted.’
Yet, to the Scotch-Irish Wilson, brains in the abstract, theorizing for the curiosity and pleasure of it, seemed a vain and futile affair. When people try to relegate him and confine him to the academic cloister, he rebels and protests: ‘It has always seemed to me an odd thing and a thing against nature that the literary man, the man whose citizenship and freedom are of the world of thought, should ever have been deemed an unsafe man in affairs.’ What are thoughts for if they are not transmuted into deeds? What are brains for if not for an illumination and a guide in making a better world to live in? ’There are times,’ he cries, ‘when words seem empty and only action seems great.’
So much for brains in general, and Wilson on his own mind is even more interesting. When he is cool and detached, he is aware of the limitations and defects of the intellect — no man more so. It is apt to lead to subtle and ingenious insincerity, as he suggests in a comment on Jefferson, ‘the sort of insincerity which subtle natures yield to without loss of essential integrity.’ It is apt to lead to pride and willfulness, as when he says of himself, ‘I am proud and willful beyond measure.’ And in Wilson’s case, at any rate, it is apt to lead to intense concentration in one field of view to the exclusion of other solutions and important considerations, which is what he meant by the widely quoted description of his ‘ singletrack mind.’
On the other hand, it requires but little acquaintance with Wilson’s life and words and work to appreciate his immense enjoyment of intellectual power and his constant and implicit reliance upon it: ’It is not men that interest or disturb me primarily; it is ideas. Ideas live; men die.’ This reliance upon the intellect was much enhanced by the fact that he did not suffer from the evil that it works to some of its followers, that of dissolving, disillusioning, bringing skepticism and consequent cynicism in its train. Wilson had his moments of doubt, perhaps; but in the main the Scotch assurance in his blood made him magnificently confident in the conclusions to which his reason led him.
One evil of the intellectual life Wilson was fully aware of, and stated and reiterated with that peculiar clarity of self-revelation in which he was so often a master — that is, the isolation of it. The mass of mankind do not want to think for thinking’s sake; perhaps they cannot. Hence the habitual, turbulent thinker is left to himself, and he cannot but feel it: ‘The intellectual life is sometimes a fearfully solitary one. . . . The man devoted to that life is more than all other men liable to suffer from isolation, to feel utterly alone.'
II
Thus, having emphasized the importance of brains in general in Wilson’s case, it becomes of interest to make a more detailed study of the swift and brilliant instrument which wrought so largely for good and evil in the world.
How much did he owe to education? Apparently not much in the ordinary sense. Like so many other men who have done great things, he educated himself: ‘The rule for every man is, not to depend on the education which other men prepare for him — not even to consent to it; but to strive to sec things as they are, and to be himself as he is.’ Hence in his various schools and colleges he was not conspicuous and would not condescend to busy himself too much with concerns which he felt not to be his. The boy quietly went his own personal way, learned what he wanted and needed, and stored it up where it would do the most good when the call for it should come.
As to the special elements of intellectual activity, it does not appear that he set the highest store by mere accuracy or thoroughness. When it was necessary to go to the bottom of things, he went, with secure, unwearied probing. But he was always justly accused of a certain impatience with detail. What appealed to him far more than scholarly drudgery was the instinct of system, or order, or arrangement. And in his teaching and in his own studies the love of clarity and lucidity was ever-present. No doubt this passion for orderliness sometimes degenerated into a plague. The teaching caste has its special defects, like others. A drift toward pedantry, toward the intrusion of academic method in the wrong place, is one of them. And Wilson was not free from it. In him there was sometimes a tendency to treat men of the world like unruly and inattentive students who needed to be made to see things as they are. But unquestionably the strong instinct of lucid arrangement, in thoughts and words and deeds, was one of the agents that carried him furthest.
What saved him more than anything else from the excesses of intellect and pedantry was the play of the imagination. You could not tie him down to dull research, because his mind was always soaring, always keeping an outlet into the region of splendid dreams and many-colored ideals. He himself was inclined to attribute the imaginative side of his nature to an Irish element in his origin, meaning, I suppose, a Celtic element, and many of his biographers lay a good deal of emphasis on this. Just where the Celtic strain came into the solid Scotch-Irish ancestry is not clearly indicated. But in any case the imagination came in and the benefits of it were beyond question.
The play of it showed above all in the infinite ability and facility with words. This love for words and their exact and delicate uses was inborn, and constant practice and exercise brought it to perfection. Wilson’s father was a close and thoughtful student of style, and the son early imbibed his father’s tendency. He studied style as an instrument in writing, he studied it even more in vocal expression, and he always looked upon oratory as the most effective means of influencing and controlling men.
At the same time Wilson was careful to avoid the errors and the attitude of the mere rhetorician. What counted above all was thoughts. Words were merely the vehicle and of little or no account without the profound and powerful working of the mind beneath them. Or, rather, the words and the thoughts were so inextricably and beautifully mingled that in using the one you were naturally and almost inevitably developing the other: ‘You must immerse your phrase in your thought, your thought in your phrase, till each became saturated with the other.’
On this literary basis Wilson produced a very considerable amount of printed matter which hardly receives enough attention in view of his greater political prominence. His American History and his Washington are rather in the nature of potboiling, but the earlier critical and biographical essays and the political writing of ail periods are notable and original work.
To return to some further elements of his intellectual equipment. One asks one’s self how far he was subject to prejudice, to those unreasoning movements of the spirit which are always the greatest enemies of intellectual power. He admits that he was not free from such things: ‘I have my due quota of prejudices and prepossessions myself and I hold even my untested convictions in a fighting spirit.’ But he at least believed that he was willing and anxious to subject such prejudices to the test of argument, and it seemed to him that he kept an open mind and welcomed objection and clear-cut presentation of an opposing point of view. However his convictions were arrived at, there is universal agreement that, once set, they were extraordinarily fixed and unchangeable. Having gone through his intellectual processes to the end, the man was certain he was right, and all his physical and spiritual energy must be directed to carrying his conclusions into effect.
As to the special manifestations of the intellect in varied forms of application, what mainly strikes one — at any rate if one comes, as I do, from the minute study of Roosevelt — is the lack of versatility. Wilson’s intellectual field was narrow from the beginning to the end. He had little command of languages, was strangely ignorant of the general great literature of the world. To science, which interested Roosevelt so immensely, he was quite indifferent, and indeed resented its intrusion into the more speculative emotional fields. For abstract philosophy he cared little and his knowledge of it was slight. Even in religion his interest was not intellectual but practical. He imbibed and retained a vivid and animating orthodoxy, carrying it into a sure practical belief in divine interposition in the affairs of this world and an individual survival in the future. But in all these matters he rather avoided discussion and intellectual probing and contented himself with the practical application.
Even in the fields which might be thought peculiarly his own his information was singularly limited. He by no means kept up with the modern movements of political economy. His acquaintance with history did not approach the broad familiarity with different epochs and nations which is so notable in Roosevelt. Only in the detailed analysis of the working of government was Wilson thoroughly and minutely at home. Yet even here his thinking seems to me greater in extension than in intension. He did not go to the very bottom of things in the science of government any more than in the science of mind. His intellect was not profoundly penetrative or creative. What did characterize him as a creature of brains was an enormous and constant intellectual activity. He was always thinking, always fertilely, ingeniously designing and contriving new mental processes leading to new practical ends. It was the working of this activity which distinguished Wilson among contemporary statesmen and which makes the study of him so interesting.
III
But all this emphasis on brains must not be understood to imply that Wilson was lacking in nerves and sensibility. On the contrary, he was quite as well provided with these things as the average person. It was only that the brain activity was in excess and produces the greater impression. He was sometimes annoyed and exasperated by the charge of emotional deficiency. And he goes out of his way to proclaim the fires of emotional experience that burn him up: ‘If I were to interpret myself, I would say that my constant embarrassment is to restrain the emotions that are inside of me. You may not believe it, but I sometimes feel like a fire from a far-from-extinct volcano, and if the lava does not seem to spill over, it is because you are not high enough to see the caldron boil.’ Yet all the time note just the suggestion of intellectual arrogance which the last sentence implies.
If the nerves appeared in no other way, the constant strain of ill health would tend to foster and develop them. Wilson was all his life physically delicate. There are hints of unrevealed maladies which persecuted him. At any rate he had repealed nervous breakdowns, and at all times he was more or less a martyr to indigestion and to the remedies he employed to meet it. Nerves so stretched and tormented would be expected to be frequently unstrung. It does not seem, however, that the general melancholy and depression so often associated with such physical conditions were especially present in this case. Perhaps the absence of these things was partly due to a superb and watchfully cultivated intellectual control, which shows in the ability to put aside the most colossal cares in the world and sleep whenever the chance came: ‘I am not often subject to the dominion of my nerves, and it requires only a very little prudence to enable me to maintain that mastery over myself and that free spirit of courageous, light-hearted work in which I pride myself.’
It is, of course, with any individual impossible to measure exactly the nice balance of nerves and intellect in the great emotional experiences, but still it seems to me that in the two greatest of all, love and religion, the overswaying element in Wilson’s case was intellectual. He loved intensely, he felt the power and the presence of God intensely. Yet the feeling is always interpenetrated with an intellectual, analytical clarity. Take the minor aspect of nerves, temper. Wilson had a quick, fierce temper. Head Mr. Thompson’s account of the outbreak against an impudent camera man in Bermuda. But the temper was restrained and held down with an almost superhuman control, and there is constant testimony to his gentleness and courtesy even when worn out by public and private distress. Take again the aspect of pity and sympathy and sensitiveness to suffering. Among many illustrations there is the story of the woman who appealed to the president of Princeton to reinstate her erring son. She was on the eve of an operation, she said, and her life might depend on the president’s clemency. ‘Madam,’ was the quiet answer, ‘as between your life and that of Princeton — the institution — it is better that you should die; for Princeton must live.’ And he refused, but he was almost prostrated afterward. The nerves and the intellect also appeared in the same nice adjustment in money matters. It would seem that Wilson was always generous by impulse and ready to give where he had anything to give. But he had also a Scotch canniness and thrift, and the pestilent plague of his early career was the clinging bane of poverty. This shows in Mrs. Wilson’s gentle, half-humorous complaint: ‘How I hope all this “limelight” will make the new edition sell enormously. It is very inconvenient for a public man to be penniless.’
Again, with all æsthetic concerns. Mrs. Wilson practised and loved painting and tried to initiate her husband, but his mind turned in other directions and he deplores it: ‘It has been one of the few grave misfortunes of my life that I have hitherto known least of the two things that move me most, poetry and painting. My sensibilities in those directions seem to me like a musical instrument seldom touched, like a harp disused.’ And so they largely remained to the end. He liked the outdoor world, but mainly as exercise and diversion. He read certain poets over and over and especially enjoyed reading them to his friends; but his equipment in this line was astonishingly limited for a man who loved words and praised the benefits of literature so highly. He did like to sing and sang well, but even with music I find no indications of large acquaintance with the classical composers. He immensely enjoyed the theatre; in the earlier days more serious Shakespearean acting, Booth and others; but in later time he turned more to the frivolous, the movies and vaudeville shows, to which he was devoted to the end. Very characteristic is his own analysis of the use of such things: ‘There are blessed intervals when I forget by one means or another that I am President of the United States. One means by which I forget is to get a rattling good detective story, get after some imaginary offender and chase him all over — preferably over any continent but this, because the various parts of this continent are becoming painfully suggestive to me.’ And here obviously we have brains seeking oblivion by the most immediate and swiftly efficient means.
IV
The most important aspect of nerves is in relation to men and women. When it comes to politics, the tangle of brains and nerves is apt to be conspicuous in Wilson’s case, but in ordinary life his human relations mainly involved ordinary feeling. As regards human beings at large and taken in the mass, he had at any rate an unfailing curiosity and interest, though it does not seem as if he ever quite touched them or quite loved them. With his remarkable gift of elucidation he makes the curiosity and interest singularly effective: ‘I like human beings. It is a pretty poor crowd that does not interest you. . . . A crowd picked up off the street is just a jolly lot — a job lot of human beings, pulsating with life, with all kinds of passions and desires. It would be a great pleasure if unobserved and unattended I could be knocked around as I have been accustomed to being knocked around all my life.... I have sometimes thought of going to some costumers . . . and buying an assortment of beards, rouge, and coloring and all the known means of disguising myself, if it were not against the law.'
In ordinary social intercourse Wilson was shy, remote, and difficult. He himself admits it and others agree. On the other hand, when the ice was once broken and the barriers down, the President’s charm was unusual and almost unfailing. The ungraciousness of the harsh features and stiff manner was forgotten in the winning, sympathetic smile and especially in the vivid ease and insinuating charm of the varied and piquant speech. As Colonel House says: ‘When one gets access to him there is no more charming man in all the world than Woodrow Wilson. I have never seen anyone who did not leave his presence impressed. He could use this charm to enormous personal and public advantage if he would.’
And under circumstances that were at all intimate the charm flowered into an astonishing and spontaneous gayety. There were jests of all sorts, there was an inexhaustible fund of entertaining stories, the Celtic strain asserting itself in all its magic freedom. Wilson was at one with Roosevelt in his love of Lewis Carroll. He was always quoting Alice in Wonderland, and he relished nonsense verses and limericks. When, as Governor of New Jersey, he attended a Senatorial dinner, he astonished the legislators by singing darky songs and joining Senator Frelinghuysen in a riotous Virginia reel.
When it comes to intimate friendships with men, Wilson once more is delightfully human, though perhaps Mr. Baker in emphasizing this protests a little too much. Such relations as that with Robert Bridges were by no means unusual, and where there was no question of politics they endured to the end. What is impressive in these matters of affection is Wilson’s own almost desperate longing to have people love him. Yet what strikes me most is that all the emphasis is not on loving, but on being loved. The truth is that these great people who do great things are too absorbed to waste much life on loving. And always there is the subtle disillusioning play of brain as Mr. Baker himself depicts it: ‘He wanted love, but must do his own thinking. All his life he was trying to keep his emotions apart from his thoughts — his friendships apart from his convictions. He would love without reservations; he must think coldly. Few men can do that or understand it in others: much tragedy is likely to flow from the attempt.’ Assuredly it did in Wilson’s case.
But in this matter of human relations Wilson is most interesting in his dealings with women, though naturally one cannot probe them to the very bottom. He took to women, liked them socially and intellectually, poured out his heart to them, tried to think they understood him. There is nothing more bewitching than to have an agreeable woman discover that you are a genius — especially when you have already surmised it yourself. Therefore Wilson wrote endless self-revealing letters to all sorts of ladies, and this not unnaturally got him into trouble and filled Washington with utterly baseless scandal. Those of the letters to Mrs. Peck that have been published are as innocuous as they are intellectual, and we are assured that the unpublished are no different.
Anyway, against these illicit complications Wilson was protected by his unswerving devotion to the wife whose incomparable tenderness and clear insight had gone so far to make him what he was. The reading of the letters printed by Mr. Baker shows how deep and lofty the devotion was and how persistent, and the testimony of Mrs. Wilson’s brother and innumerable others proves the enduring beauty of the conjugal relation. Yet all the time, as in friendship, I am struck with a certain one-sidedness of that relation: ‘It is n’t pleasant or convenient. to have strong passions. ... I have the uncomfortable feeling that I am carrying a volcano about with me. My salvation is in being loved. . . . There surely never lived a man with whom love was a more critical matter than it is with me.’ Still, still being loved, not loving! Oh, the egotism of men — almost equal to the egotism of women! But loving or loved, the women, the first wife and the second wife, played an enormous part in Wilson’s career, both the private and the political.
V
And politics, the government of men, for Wilson as for Roosevelt, was all that seriously counted in life. When he was sixteen, looking at the portrait of Gladstone, he said: ‘That is Gladstone, the greatest statesman that ever lived. I intend to be a statesman too.’ Even when it seemed that circumstances had cut him off from a political career, he looked to it with bitter regret: ‘I do feel a very real regret that I have been shut out from my heart’s first — primary — ambition and purpose, which was to take an active, if possible a leading part in public life, and strike out for myself, if I had the ability, a statesman’s career.’
Then when he was fifty-three years old, and actual politics seemed completely out of his range, he was thrust into the thick of it, partly by his success at Princeton and partly by his failure. It was his original, independent grasp of the educational situation that attracted the attention of the country, and if he had been able to carry through his educational and social programme at Princeton it is doubtful whether he would have left such prospects for the extremely dubious venture of t he governorship of New Jersey in 1910. But from that turning point politics was the whole of him.
And first it is necessary to establish squarely the lofty ideal aims of Wilson’s political life. To anyone who has followed him at all closely the slurs of Roosevelt, ‘He is astute and conscienceless,’ ‘His lack of all convictions and willingness to follow every opinion,’ are merely ridiculous. Wilson’s aims may often have been unrealizable, but if so it was because of their loftiness. He wanted to govern, but it was because he saw the superb possibilities of government and fully appreciated the lamentable defects which had hitherto kept those possibilities unattained. He was not mad enough to say that he could remedy the defects, but he was man enough to say that he would give his brain and his whole soul and his very life to trying. Men had claimed too much for Democracy. They had dallied with Democracy and professed to have put it to the proof and found it a failure, and they were beginning to laugh at it and throw it aside. He believed that Democracy, for all its failures and defects, held the future of the world, as Lincoln believed it. He believed that Democracy, rightly guided and interpreted, even perhaps through the dazzling conception of a world unity, held the only possible hope of the future, and he was ready to give all that was in him in every way to the attempt to realize that hope.
Nor was Wilson by any means a mere dreaming idealist. He had fixed and definite and largely elaborated theories as to how the ideal should become a reality. Even as a boy he was an organizer, and all through his career he was inclined to make systematic plans and frame constitutions of one kind or another. His first and perhaps his best book, Congressional Government, was an analytical study of the shortcomings of legislative administration in the United States, and from that point to the conception of the Covenant of the League he was always busy with governmental ideas, the weakness perhaps being that he was inclined to leap at once to larger outlines and to some extent disregard the patient working out of details. But always the theory of government was his passion.
Also, it is interesting to see how, with all his intellectual preoccupations, he did not have the intellectual’s dread of decision and responsibility. When he had made up his mind and saw his way, he wanted to go right ahead and act, or thought he did and insisted that he did. He spurns men ‘who are dried up at the source by the enemy of mankind which we call Caution. God save a free country from cautious men. . . . Caution is the confidential agent of selfishness.’
Yet, in spite of all this free vigor of theory, the old, lurking, critical, hesitating intellect could not be altogether escaped, and as you follow Wilson’s political course you cannot help feeling the defects as well as the qualities of brains. How they stand out in a confession like the following! To think of all who are looking to him, he says, ‘makes me tremble not only with a sense of my own inadequacy and weakness, but as if I were shaken by the very things that are shaking them, and if I seem circumspect, it is because I am so diligently trying not to make colossal blunders. If you just calculate the number of blunders a fellow can make in twenty-four hours if he is not careful and if he does not listen more than he talks, you would see something of the feeling I have.'
Cannot you see the brains working, working through it all? It was this that caused the delay and the apparent uncertainty in the dealing with Mexico and in the even more critical dealing with the Great War. It may have been wise policy, it may have been debating inefficiency. It unquestionably was the action of intellect rather than will, and it not only irritated his enemies but provoked dubious comment from his faithful supporters, so that one of the most judicious members of the Cabinet, Franklin K. Lane, cries almost in despair, ‘We have had to push and push and push to get him to take any forward step. . . . He comes out right, but he is slower than a glacier, and things are mighty disagreeable when anything has to be done.’
Which brings us to the supreme problem of politics, at any rate for a temperament like Wilson’s — the problem of dealing with human beings. He wanted to rule men, to work for their good, to manage them, but somehow he never had quite the tact or the touch to enable him to do it. As regards the general mass of mankind, taken individually, we have already seen something of his attitude in his social relations. He was intensely curious about men and women, he wanted to understand their motives, their tastes, their habits, their traditions: ‘The whole problem of life is to understand one another.’ Yet there was something of the intellectualist’s contempt for the ignorant prejudice and offhand bravado of the crowd. As one not unfriendly observer says of him: ‘He mostly saw man the individual in his littleness and was intolerant, impatient, and disgusted with him. . . . He wanted to speak for the common crowd, but in private he frequently found it difficult to tolerate them. “He has a bungalow mind,” was a favorite description. “I sometimes wish they were not so damned honest and had just a little brains. ” ’
On the other hand, when it came to the masses collectively, he had immense, magnificent power over them by his gift of eloquence, could sway them hither and thither as he chose. Here also, as I pass from his earlier speeches, with their simple, sincere, scholarly earnestness, to the later political oratory, I feel a certain descent, as of a man who was striving to put his thoughts into a dialect unfamiliar and somewhat distasteful. But in spite of this he got magnificent effects and effect. From his boyhood he loved oratory and practised it, appreciated its defects and dangers, but also its incomparable magic. And the outcome of his pains and study was the crystallizing of those tremendous phrases, some of which, like the ‘ too proud to fight,’ went far to ruin him, while others, like ’making the world safe for Democracy,’ echoed and resounded with a strange animating glory in the ears of millions of weary and war-worn men and women.
Somebody has said that Wilson’s phrases did more to win the war than anything else. At any rate, borne on the swelling tide of them and the superb ideals they embodied, he went to Europe against the advice of his wisest counselors, and achieved a triumphal progress such as has perhaps never come to any one man before. Alas that it should have been possible to say, even with rhetorical exaggeration, that when he went to Europe he was the greatest man that ever lived, and when he returned he did not have a friend.
For when it came to handling men as individual co-workers, Wilson’s weaknesses became apparent. He wanted to get near them, to conciliate them, to work with them, above all to understand them. But something in his make-up made the contact difficult, if not impossible. His heart was approachable, his head was not. The most striking element in this matter of Wilson’s dealing with individuals is the long, profoundly tragic series of wrecked friendships that he left scattered behind him in his political career — West and Hibben at Princeton; Harvey, Garrison, Page, Lansing, and finally even the long-suffering Tumulty and Colonel House, In every single case no doubt Wilson had his good reasons. In every single case no doubt he had to choose between a principle and a friend, and the friend had to go. But it makes a record that is not pleasant to look over, and one is reminded of the harsh criticism of Sainte-Beuve, that he deserted all his friends in the name of truth and in the end truth deserted him. Wilson would certainly never have admitted anything of the kind for himself, but at any rate he did not conform to the saying of a very wise person, that the law of love is higher than the law of truth.
Another significant and closely connected point in Wilson’s human political relations is the constant drift to inferiors. His apologists deny this. They say that he readily consulted experts. He did, in their special lines, as in his admirable turning over of the entire military management to Pershing. Moreover, he sought information from many sources until his mind was made up. But the fact remains that he instinctively surrounded himself with men who were his intellectual inferiors, who looked up to him and flattered him. It is true, he insisted that he was not under the influence of anyone. But all men are influenced, and when your inferiors are closest to you, it is they who do the influencing. If you read Tumulty’s book, you see what Tumulty was, and you also see how Wilson turned to him. The same is true of Lansing and of Daniels, and the Commission that Wilson took with him to Paris forms the harshest of all comments on him in this regard. To be sure, there is Colonel House, perhaps the most extraordinary figure in all the extraordinary aggregation; and who will venture to call Colonel House, that curious, subtle, flexible, insinuating, dominating spirit, inferior to anyone? Yet, in his extreme submission and loving devotion to his chief, Colonel House’s influence was perhaps much of the same nature in its working as that of the others.
Then when Wilson emerged from this unwholesome atmosphere of comparative inferiority, when he came into bitter life-and-death conflict with those who were his equals or superiors, not perhaps in character, certainly not in ideals, but in energy, in resource, above all in political experience and political unscrupulousness, — with the Wests at Princeton, with Lloyd George and Clemenceau at Paris, with Cabot Lodge at Washington, — he was beaten, not in his ideals, but in his eflort to put the ideals into effect.
VI
So we have considered the man’s political career externally. Now let us turn to the lining of it, as it were — to his own view of that career and of himself. It is evident that there was a clear, persistent, dominating, controlling force of ambition guiding him from the beginning, and as to the nature and extent of such ambition he has words as illuminating as his words always are. Of the significance of ambition in general, of its larger purport, he says: ‘It is for this reason that men are in love with power and greatness: it affords them so pleasurable an expansion of faculty, so large a run for their minds, an exercise of spirit so varied and refreshing.’ And even in early years he analyzed clearly and subtly the working of this passion in himself: ‘Those indistinct plans of which we used to talk grow on me daily, until a sort of calm confidence of great things to be accomplished has come over me which I am puzzled to analyze the nature of. I can’t tell whether it is a mere figment of my own inordinate vanity, or a deep-rooted determination which it will be within my power to act up to.’
In the formative period the ambition was naturally vaguer and more indeterminate in its character. It never seems to have taken any legal aspect, though law was his chosen profession. But before he came to controlling men directly he cherished the desire to influence them by written words, gave the closest attention to all the secrets of style and the use of them to make an enduring impression on the world. Yet it does not appear that the ambition was ever purely literary in form; there was no mastering desire to produce imaginative beauty for its own satisfying excellence.
To the literary ambition succeeded the academic, or the two went hand in hand. But here again the passion was not for pure scholarship, but rather to use learning as well as literary gift to arouse and stimulate his fellow men: ‘I have no patience for the tedious toil of what is known as research; I should be complete if I could inspire a great movement of opinion, if I could read the experiences of the past into the practical life of the men of to-day and communicate the thought to the minds of the great mass of the people so as to impel them to great political achievements.’
Yet neither in writing books nor in teaching lay the real field of this eager, ardent spirit. Almost from childhood, as we have already seen, he burned to have a hand in the ruling of men, as he early wrote to a friend, ‘to mould the world as our hands might please.’ As the years ran on, he became more secure, more hopeful of the possibilities in this line: ‘I seem to myself to have become . . . more confident, steady, serene — enjoying in a certain degree a sense of power, — as if I had gotten some way upon the road I used so to burn to travel, — and yet fairly restless and impatient with ambition, as of old.’ And in his discontent with the academic routine he murmured to his brother-in-law: ‘I am so tired of a merely talking profession. I want to do something.’
Then he got the chance to do something with a vengeance. What man in the world ever had a bigger? And can it be doubted that he thoroughly enjoyed it, enjoyed the prominence, enjoyed the distinction, enjoyed the publicity? Mr. Baker says, no doubt justly, that he had never the habit, so marked in Roosevelt, of dramatizing his own doings. Yet over and over and over you have the sense of his rich appreciation of standing where he did: ’From the messages I get I realize that I am regarded as the foremost leader of liberal thought in the world.’ Do you suppose that the obscure writer, the humble teacher, did not relish that position to the full? The relish was all the keener from his perfect understanding and vivid memory of the struggles he had had to go through, of the difficulties he had encountered in getting where he was. Take such moments as that when he seemed to have lost the nomination in 1912 and said to his sympathizing wife, ‘My dear, of course I am disappointed, but we must not complain. We must be sportsmen.’ Crises like that bring out the burning essence of a whole life. The same alternations of triumph and failure appear in his confession to Colonel House: ‘I spoke of his success, and he said his Princeton experience hung over him sometimes like a nightmare; that he had wonderful success there, and all at once conditions changed and the troubles, of which everyone knew, were brought about. He seemed to fear that such a denouement might occur again.’
Yet, with all the ups and downs, there seems to be less of discouragement and depression than might have been expected. Such moments will come, in one form or another; ‘Complete success, such as I have had at the Hopkins, has the odd effect upon me of humiliating rather than exalting me; for I can’t help knowing how much less worthy and capable I am than I am thought to be.’ But in the main there is the stern, firm, unshakable persistence which comes with a gaze forever fixed upon a remote object that must and will be attained.
Something of the same grit and vigor shows in the attitude toward criticism. Wilson did not like it, but he endured it grimly. The curious point in this regard is the working of the intellectual temperament. His friends insist that he did not bring in the personal side and was thinking only and always of the truth and the right. But, precisely because he was so absolutely convinced that he was right, it came to seem to him that those who criticized him and opposed him were actuated not by conviction but by malevolence, and the very loftiness and earnestness of his ideals infused a peculiar element of bitterness into his personal animosities.
Thus, out of such a strange tangle of ambitions and ideals sprang this extraordinary and almost unparalleled career, a career in which triumph after triumph seemed only to lead in the end to tragic defeat so that one realizes the direct significance of Wilson’s words: ‘A man may be defeated by his own secondary successes.’ But through the dream-like quality of it all, and through the complicated web of seething passions and thwarted aspirations, there runs that lofty sweep of noble idealism which must never be forgotten and which rings in Wilson’s own words of the very last years: ‘I would rather fail in a cause that I knew some day will triumph than to win in a cause that I knew some day will fail.’ Yet, even here, how eminently characteristic is the reiterated I knew! He knew, he knew, he always knew, for he was a creature of brains.