The hazards of idealism

Instead of The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made, Patricia O’Toole could have titled her new book “The Hypocrite.”

After all, as she herself points out, to lay claim to the moral high ground as often and as fervently as President Wilson did during his eight years in the White House was to court charges that he failed to live up to his own principles. He called for an end to secret treaties while negotiating secretly with the Allies in World War I. He declared himself unwilling to compromise with belligerents abroad while showing himself very willing to compromise with segregationists at home. He pursued a progressive economic agenda while approving a regressive, racial one. He spoke of national self-determination in the loftiest terms while initiating the American occupation of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Ms O’Toole’s project was born from her interest in World War I, and as she persuasively shows, American foreign policy throughout the 20th century adopted Wilson’s war-forged liberal internationalism, in word if not always in deed.

President Richard Nixon cynically used the rhetoric of Wilsonian idealism to escalate the war in Vietnam, saying that his plan would bring the United States closer to Wilson’s “goal of a just and lasting peace.” Wilson’s principle of national selfdetermination — a phrase that his own secretary of state deemed “loaded with dynamite” — has since been enshrined in the charter of the United Nations.

And by declaring that “the world must be made safe for democracy” in 1917, Wilson articulated how the American people, from World War I to Iraq, would prefer to imagine their military incursions abroad: As high-minded acts of pure altruism, imbued with benevolence and devoid of mercenary self-interest.

The Moralist is a fluid account that feels shorter than its 600-plus pages. Despite its length, there isn’t a passage that drags or feels superfluous. She gives each of her many characters their due, rendering them vivid and also memorable — an effect not to be taken for granted in a serious history book covering an intricate subject.

The first 60 pages are a brisk tour of Wilson’s pre-presidential life — a Civil War childhood in the South, steeped in Presbyterianism; early struggles with reading and writing that failed to portend a flourishing academic career at Princeton; marriage and fatherhood to three girls; and, in 1910, the governorship of New Jersey. His short time as governor would be his only stint in public office before winning the presidential election as the Democratic nominee, two years later, at 55.

His meagre political experience made Wilson the “change” candidate in 1912; there hadn’t been a Democrat in the White House since 1897, and Wilson’s immediate predecessor, William Howard Taft, was seen as an apologist for big business at a time of rampant inequality.

Wilson also took advantage of the growing disillusionment among black Americans with a Republican Party that seemed to take their votes for granted. “Let me assure my fellow coloured citizens the earnest wish to see justice done the coloured people in every manner,” he declared in an open letter courting AfricanAmerican leaders. “Not merely grudging justice, but justice executed with liberality and cordial good feeling.”

Once he was in office, that “earnest wish” ran up against his fellow Southerners in Congress and his own cabinet, including the postmaster general and the treasury secretary (and future son-in-law), who proceeded to segregate their departments under Wilson’s watch.

The Moralist suggests that Wilson’s betrayal of black Americans was born from simple expedience — that he allowed the segregation of the Civil Service because he desperately needed the votes of Southern congressmen in order to pass his progressive economic agenda, including the introduction of a federal income tax.

As evidence she cites Wilson’s own pleas to his critics. “I am in a cruel position,” he told the chairman of the NAACP, insisting he was “at heart working for these people.” The testy exchange apparently left Wilson so rattled he took to his bed for a week.

But as Ms O’Toole herself shows, his cries of political constraints were later followed by his claims that politics were irrelevant to racism anyway. In 1914, Wilson told the African-American editor William Monroe Trotter that eliminating segregation wouldn’t do anything for racial animus, which he called “a human problem, not a political problem.” (Wilson took to his bed after that “bruising quarrel” with Trotter, too.)

In her opening pages, O’Toole says she is especially fascinated by how Wilson’s moralism became both an asset and a liability, ensuring that “his triumphs as well as his defeats were so large and lasting.” On Wilson’s tortured entrance into World War I, she is truly superb, assiduously tracing his journey from stubborn neutrality to zealous wartime president. As a study of Wilson’s relationship with Europe, and the intrigues of his foreign policy administration, the book is exemplary.

But like her subject, O’Toole occasionally gets trapped by her own noble intentions: A biography called The Moralist, which takes Wilson’s “great sense of moral responsibility” as its starting point, surely sets up expectations for a deeper exploration of just where he drew that line.

THE MORALIST

Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made Patricia O’Toole Simon & Schuster 636 pages; $35