Woodrow Wilson Comparison
The comparison between Antony Beevor and Andrew Roberts’s books on World War II was so successful among readers that I started looking for another subject where I could do a back-to-back book comparison. For those unfamiliar, I believe reading two books on the same subject is beneficial, but not for the reason you think.
Aside from the obvious knowledge re-enforcement, comparing two authors on the same subject exposes biases and hidden assumptions within each author. The subject is a constant, but the author is a variable. Changing authors on the same subject can thus be more informative than learning the subject.
Needless to say, I was eager to try this exercise again. But what subject should I choose for the comparitive follow-up? I initially planned comparing books about President Reagan, but I had a hard enough time reading just one. Fortunately, that Reagan review also did well, so I scoured America’s presidential roster a second time.
The winner turned out to be President 28, Woodrow Wilson.
Hey dude, Mr. President…you might want to throw the first pitch from the mound next time.
Background
Historians often place Woodrow Wilson in the upper tiers of American presidents. There were no half-measures in anything Wilson did. His rise in politics was meteoric. He transformed a tiny New Jersey men’s college into Princeton University, became the university’s president, was elected Governor of New Jersey in 1910 and then finally President of the United States two years later. Wilson’s presidency from 1913-1921 saw him create the Federal Reserve, introduce the eight-hour work day, ensure the 19th amendment giving women the vote passed (we’ll come back to this one), and become a wartime leader when the United States entered World War I in April, 1917. At the Versailles conference, he was hailed as a hero and tried his damndest to set up the League of Nations. He was unsuccessful and ultimately his Assistant Secretary of the Navy and later President, Franklin Roosevelt, established the more successful United Nations after another World War twenty years later.
But for all of President Wilson’s purposeful, forward-looking ideas, he was crippled by one glaring flaw. As someone born in Virginia in 1856 and then growing up in the South after the Civil War, his racial views were the polar opposite of his otherwise progressive agenda. His cabinet of Southerners instituted segregation in government departments. Worse, his more virulent cabinet members were actively involved with the Ku Klux Klan. And as someone imbued with Southern culture, his views on the role of women was unequivocal: they had no business being anywhere but the home.
With this curious, academic character in the White House at a crucial period in world affairs, biographers have had rich pickings when it comes to assessing his legacy. Two of the most recent books on President Wilson are the topic of today’s comparison.
They are Wilson by A. Scott Berg and Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn by Christopher Cox.
Where They’re Similar.
They’re not, and that’s a huge problem.
Dramatic Differences
Looking at the book covers side-by-side, you’d be forgiven for thinking that these two books would be broadly similar. I know I did. Starting with Wilson’s early life and then moving on to his academic career and marriage, followed by his short governorship in New Jersey, his two-term presidency and then his failing health before he died in 1924, it seemed like a straightforward story.
The above outline is indeed the trajectory of Berg’s Wilson. A Scott Berg went to great lengths to cover President Wilson’s life, beliefs, and the choices he ultimately made while putting them in the appropriate historical context. Berg’s great gift as a biographer is to have things make sense. He does not excuse Woodrow Wilson’s shortcomings by any means, but he deftly puts them in their place so the reader can understand what led Wilson to the views he held. Helping Berg along was his access to new medical files on the President, which revealed a man in questionable health all his life. A man prone to strokes was not exactly an asset when trying to quite literally negotiate world peace.
The Light Withdrawn, on the other hand, is a baffling and misleading book, but not because Christopher Cox strenuously disagrees with everything Berg wrote. As a former Congressman, Cox is well suited to talk about the effects of the far-reaching policies Wilson championed.
But instead of Cox using his political background to provide extra perspective on the 28th President, he turned in a book about…the passage of the 19th amendment. In Cox’s story, the ‘main subject’, Woodrow Wilson, does not appear for an entire chapter as he instead devotes considerable attention to the struggle to achieve women’s suffrage.
To that end, Cox’s ‘biography’ is in fact an academic thesis in disguise. Mainly, Cox argues Wilson was the wrong man for the job when it came to passing the women’s suffrage amendment. To that end, Wilson’s obvious racism and chauvinistic views toward women are highlighted far more than in Berg’s book. With the attitude of a modern thinker, Cox’s book paints Wilson as a complete scoundrel unworthy of any adulation. That Wilson views on race and gender are unacceptable by modern standards goes without saying, but the problem here is that Cox’s book is not called 'The Light Withdrawn: Women’s Suffrage and Woodrow Wilson’s Antipathy To Social Progress’ or something like that. Look at the cover. Wilson’s name is on it and his face is even more prominent than on Berg’s book. Yet from what I could gather, a good 60% of the book is about women’s suffrage, not President Wilson. This means Cox and/or his publisher committed a grave marketing sin because they created the wrong impression.
This discrepancy between what Cox’s book supposedly promises and the topic he actually delivered means that other than Wilson’s regressive social views, his actions as president of Princeton, governor of New Jersey and even much of his Presidency are almost completely AWOL. World War I and the Paris Peace conference barely figure into this ‘biography’ of the wartime president. Instead, the legislative focus is on the women’s suffrage amendment, creating the (I’d wager misleading) impression that women’s suffrage was the issue of the day and that Wilson’s attitude was on the wrong side of history.
BUT…
….that’s not what the book is selling me. The fundamental problem with Cox’s book compared to Berg’s is not that he’s harsh on Woodrow Wilson nor that he emphasized this important social issue, it’s that the book’s marketing, packaging, and design lead you to believe Cox has conducted extensive research on all aspects of Wilson’s life. Instead, he’s written a book that neither has enough space to cover Woodrow Wilson in his entirety—turning it into a hatchet job I should add—nor has the ability to fully cover the women’s suffrage movement with the treatment it undoubtably deserves.
Conclusion
I didn’t know it going in, but this subject comparison vindicated the idea that reading two books on a subject, especially if the subject is in any way controversial, more completely than I thought possible. I don’t know how many of my readers care about Woodrow Wilson—I suspect the number is lower than the fingers on my right hand—but if someone who knew nothing about President Wilson read Cox’s book first and then went to Berg’s, I can only imagine their shock. It’d probably be similar to Elizabeth Bennet’s shock upon reading Mr. Darcy’s letter revealing the true wickedness of Mr. Wickham’s character in Pride & Prejudice.
To reiterate, my complaint about Cox’s book is that the book as it’s packaged is so fundamentally misleading from what’s between the covers that I couldn’t help but feel deceived.
I know the cliché is ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ but a slight emendation should read ‘judge harshly a book that tricked you by its cover.‘