Woodrow Wilson: Princeton to the Presidency.

Cook, Brian J.

Woodrow Wilson: Princeton to the Presidency. By W. Barksdale Maynard. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. 392 pp.

In his early scholarship, Woodrow Wilson observed that politics belonged mostly in the realm of emotion, not reason. W. Barksdale Maynard's new biography of Wilson demonstrates how much Wilson's own life mirrored his insight. Maynard sustains a focus on Wilson's mercurial nature, providing one account after another of the emotional roller coaster that Wilson's professional and political pursuits brought to his personal life.

With a lively narrative, Maynard traces in great detail the making of the man in his undergraduate days at the little college in New Jersey, and the making of the politician in his days as Princeton University faculty star and then president. Maynard's aim is to recount with a refreshed view Wilson's "dramatic human story" (p. xii). The author divides his study into five parts. The first focuses on Wilson's personal and intellectual development as a Princeton undergraduate, shaped primarily by his father's demanding expectations and by his membership in the "Witherspoon Hall gang" of classmates, many of whom became lifelong friends. Maynard moves rapidly through Wilson's professorial years, concluding Part I with his selection as Princeton's thirteenth president in 1902. Parts II-IV, which are the heart of the book, recount the future president's efforts to improve Princeton and elevate it to the first rank of American universities through significant expansion of the campus footprint, but also, much more importantly, by far-reaching curriculum reforms and the introduction of the preceptorial system. Although Maynard gives respectful emphasis to what he regards as the long-run resilience and wisdom of Wilson's educational vision, it is clear that the author is most fascinated by the searing political conflicts that Wilson set in motion, first with his plan to replace Princeton's elitist "eating clubs" with a more democratic physical and social campus structure centered on quadrangles, and then with his all-out war against Dean Andrew West's plan to locate a graduate college apart from the main campus. In Part V, Maynard moves briskly through Wilson's public service as New Jersey governor and president, maintaining the Princeton-centered focus on Wilson's private life as a public man and revealing Wilson's desires to return to educational reform after leaving the presidency.

Maynard covers ground already traversed by a number of well-respected historical treatments, especially those by Henry Bragdon and John Mulder. He is successful nevertheless in refreshing this material with thoughtful reflections on Wilson's character and the forces that shaped his behavior. Maynard returns frequently to a consideration of the extent of Wilson's inner turmoil--the high intellectual expectations and aims, the political ambition, the shifts between joy and despair, but especially the temper that could grow white-hot in an instant and the often harsh, cold treatment of former friends. In his mildest comment, Maynard calls Wilson's personality "prickly" (p. 379), but in much starker language, he refers to Wilson's "shortcomings and his perplexing, self-defeating character flaws" (p. 340). In a brief synthesis of the existing scholarship leavened with his own reflections on the evidence, Maynard considers how much Wilson's physiological problems contributed to his defects of temperament. The author wonders whether, after 1906, Wilson's "thoughts and actions were entirely 'normal' or perhaps at times tinged with the incipient dementia that small strokes can cause" (p. 127). The coincidental evidence reinforces this possibility, as two of Wilson's most horrid conflicts and political defeats, over his "Quad plan" and over his push for ratification of the League of Nations treaty, occurred in close temporal proximity to his two most serious strokes.

For Wilson scholars, the book is worthy of their time and attention. It is very readable, and there are small gems galore to mine, although very few pertain to his scholarship or political action. Students of the U.S. presidency, however, will want to know the value of this new biography for better understanding the Wilson presidency and the modern presidency more generally. For such purposes, alas, the book's value is limited. Maynard argues that the "lessons of Woodrow Wilson still matter. They tell us much about leadership styles, both good and bad" (p. xi). Yet the author offers little guidance, through either context or reference to a taxonomy of leadership styles, for understanding and assessing the myriad details he offers about Wilson's personality and how it shaped his leadership successes and failures. Princeton to the Presidency is an account of Wilson's behind-the-scenes life, of who said what to whom and of the repercussions for the scenes themselves. We gain a deeper appreciation of Wilson the man, but much less so of Wilson the thinker or the political leader. How Wilson could go from "the most generally hated outgoing president since Andrew Johnson" (pp. 326-27) to being number 10 on Atlantic Monthly's list of the 100 most influential Americans of all time may say a lot about us, but it also says something about Wilson's ideas and ideals. Maynard leaves us largely on our own, however, to discern what that something might be.

--Brian J. Cook

Virginia Tech