Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him
by . Garden City, NY., and Toronto: Doubleday, Page & Co. 1921. 8vo, xviii+553 pp. $5.00.
THIS is one of the books, like Mr. Lansing s and a dozen others, which will be read more fairly, both by friends and by foes of Mr. Wilson. ten or twenty years hence than it can be read to-day. It is inevitable, indeed it is well, that such books should be written and published now; but perhaps their most useful place is on the shelf of a library which will be visited hereafter by the wise historian and biographer who, the shouting and the tumult having died, will assign to Mr. Wilson his true place in the history of mankind. Even admitting all that may be, and has been, said concerning Mr. Tumulty’s lapses from the highest skill and taste, granting also that, he appears in this narrative as a special pleader, — in the very nature of the case how’ could he be anything else? — the book is a document which will serve a valuable historic purpose.
One thing that it makes clear is that, quite apart from the immediate results of important decisions which Mr. Wilson was called upon to make, he has cared far more for the opinion of posterity than of his contemporaries. ‘ I am willing,’ he said to Mr. Tumulty at one stage of the Mexican troubles, ‘no matter what my personal fortunes may be, to play for the verdict of mankind.’ In another conversation, after the sinking of the Persia, he is reported as saying, ‘I have made up my mind that I am more interested in the opinion that the country will have of me ten years from now than the opinion it may be willing to express to-day.’
But it is evident that his vastly deeper concern was to accomplish, as only one in his position of responsibility and power could, a great and lasting betterment in the conditions of human life, both in his own country and throughout the world. His grimly determined fight for this purpose, a fight against overpowering odds, his seeming defeat by the foes of his own household, his silence since ‘The Last Day,’ of which Mr. Tumulty writes, are of the. very stuff of which tragedy is made — the tragedy of a man separated from his fellow men not by the lack of human frailties but by qualities of greatness in thought and feeling which mark the towering few in any generation. Someday, unless the arts of biography and drama are to perish from the earth, such a tragedy will be written; and Mr. Tumulty shook will contribute something to its material. For the present there will be those who will find in its pages passages which will confirm their feeling of hostility to its subject. But when an association of nations devised to keep the peace of the world grows, under whatever name, out of the enormous impulse which the work of Mr. Wilson gave to the idea embodied in the League of Nations. his foes will be generous enough to join his friends in reading with satisfaction the final paragraph of the last speech he made in his campaign for the governorship of New Jersey: And then trust your guides, imperfect as they are, and some day, when we are all dead, men will come and point at the distant upland with a great shout of joy and triumph and thank God that there were men who undertook to lead in the struggle. What difference does it make if we ourselves do not reach the uplands? We have given our lives to the enterprise. The world is made happier and humankind better because we have lived.’
M. A. DEWOLFE HOWE.
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