Woodrow Wilson, Life and Letters, Vols. VII and VIII
by Ray Stannard Baker
Summary
Ray Stannard Baker spent over a decade producing an eight volume documentary biography of Woodrow Wilson titled Life and Letters, drawing on the president's private papers and Baker's own firsthand position inside Wilson's circle. The Pulitzer went specifically to the concluding two volumes, subtitled War Leader, covering April 1917 through February 1918, and Armistice, covering March through November 11, 1918, which together follow Wilson from the decision to bring the United States into the First World War through the mobilization of American industry and manpower and on to the armistice that ended the fighting.
Baker had unusual access to write this history. He had supported Wilson's 1912 campaign, stayed close to him afterward, and served as his press secretary at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, so the book draws on personal papers and letters rather than secondhand reporting on a sitting president. These two volumes trace Wilson's wartime leadership through cabinet meetings, military mobilization, wartime civil liberties fights, and the diplomatic maneuvering among the Allies as the war's end approached, built around the extensive documentary record, letters, memoranda, and Wilson's own words, that Baker had collected across the whole eight volume project.
Reading these volumes means following a scholar's documentary method, long stretches organized around Wilson's own letters and memoranda rather than a novelist's narrative shaping, and it is worth knowing going in that these two prize winning volumes close at the November 1918 armistice, before the Paris Peace Conference and the League of Nations fight that would consume Wilson's final two years in office. It suits a reader who wants Wilson's wartime leadership documented in close, sourced detail by a biographer with unusual personal access to its central figure.
Historical Context & Significance
The Pulitzer board recognized volumes VII and VIII of Baker's Life and Letters with the 1940 Prize for Biography, honoring the culmination of a documentary project that had run since 1927 and closed in 1939 with the very two volumes the board honored. Baker had come to Wilson's story already a well established journalist, one of the original muckrakers at McClure's magazine alongside Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens, and his access to Wilson's private papers came directly from the relationship the two men built during Wilson's presidency and at the Paris Peace Conference, where Baker served as the president's press secretary.
The full eight volume Life and Letters became the essential documentary record for a generation of Wilson scholars, valued more for the primary sources it preserved than for narrative flair, and Baker's own presence in Wilson's inner circle at the Paris Peace Conference gave the whole project an authority no outside biographer of Wilson could easily match.