Woodrow Wilson, American Prophet
by Arthur Walworth
Summary
Arthur Walworth's biography, the first of two volumes on Woodrow Wilson, follows him from his birth in Staunton, Virginia, in 1856, the son of a Presbyterian minister, through a boyhood spent watching the South rebuild after the Civil War and into an academic career built on his 1886 doctorate from Johns Hopkins, still the only Ph.D. ever earned by an American president. It follows him through his books on American government, his growing reputation as a political scientist, and his years as president of Princeton, where he pushed through curriculum and teaching reforms while losing a bruising fight over the university's undergraduate eating clubs, a defeat the book uses to show Wilson's difficulty compromising once he had settled on a position. The narrative follows his recruitment by New Jersey Democrats in 1910, his reforming governorship, and his 1912 election as president after Theodore Roosevelt's third party campaign split the Republican vote, then covers the domestic legislation of his first term, the Underwood Tariff, the Federal Reserve Act, and the segregation he authorized within the federal civil service despite the hopes many Black voters had placed in his election.
The volume, subtitled American Prophet for the domestic reforming vision Wilson brought to the presidency before the world war reshaped his ambitions, follows him through the death of his first wife, Ellen, in 1914, his remarriage to Edith Bolling the following year, and the strained years of American neutrality up to the 1917 declaration of war, when Wilson told Congress the country was fighting to make the world safe for democracy. The book, drawing on Wilson's private papers and correspondence, treats him as a man whose moral certainty could produce real reform at home even as it made him a difficult negotiator, a tension Walworth's second volume, World Prophet, follows into the fight over the League of Nations that closed out Wilson's presidency.
Historical Context & Significance
Woodrow Wilson appeared in two volumes in 1958, and the first, American Prophet, won the 1959 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. Walworth had spent roughly a decade researching Wilson's life and diplomacy before publication, work he took up after a long career at Houghton Mifflin, where he edited and sold academic books from the late 1920s into the early 1940s.
Walworth returned to Wilson's diplomacy nearly three decades later with Wilson and His Peacemakers, published in 1986, a study that went further into the Paris Peace Conference than either 1958 volume had room to cover. The two volume biography remained, for decades after its Pulitzer, among the standard scholarly accounts of Wilson's life, valued particularly for the access Walworth had to Wilson's personal papers and for a documentary thoroughness that later, more interpretive Wilson biographies have continued to draw on even where they reach different conclusions about his presidency.