John Milton Cooper, Jr.: Woodrow Wilson: A Biography

He narrowly won a fractious re-election after promising to keep America out of a European war. However, less than a year later, the first doughboys were landing on the shores of France. What was President Wilson thinking?

Summing up decades of research on the 28th President, Cooper follows Woodrow Wilson from his youth in the antebellum South – where his family would be divided by the Civil War – through his years at the head of Princeton, where he developed the collegial style of leadership he would bring to the White House. Cooper argues that Wilson should be remembered as an intelligent, thoughtful leader, warmer and more gracious than he was caricatured, with several major domestic policy achievements – such as the creation of the Federal Reserve and the income tax – though his legacy would be tarnished by a tepid record on civil rights and acquiescence to his cabinet members’ attacks against civil liberties.

Soon, however, the war ravaging Europe would draw Wilson to another facet of the presidency: commander-in-chief. Cooper examines the events and deliberations that took America into World War I, beginning with Wilson’s declaration of neutrality and offers to serve as mediator between the belligerents; then would come the declaration of war and the “Fourteen Points”, in which Wilson spelled out American war aims. Though his League of Nations would be a failed effort, Cooper makes a case that Wilson’s presidency transformed the way America thought about international relations – and whether the nation held a responsibility to safeguard world democracy.

John Milton Cooper, Jr., is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin. He is also the author of Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations and The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, among other books. He was recently a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.