Wilson on Ideational Evolution

Woodrow Wilson, Ezra Pound and an homage to James Joyce's Ulysses

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Urbane, to comfort them, the neophyte blogger purred:
– And we have, have we not, those priceless pages of Ezra Pound in The Dial from June 1922, reviewing the then-new novel Ulysses by James Joyce? A great poet on a great brother poet.

Review: Angel Down, To the Lighthouse and the communicative difficulties of World War I

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The difficulty of interpersonal communication at the turn of the century was a common subject for British literature in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. From Will and Dorothea in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, who drown in longing while unable to express their true feelings, to EM Forster, whose motto “Only Connect” underscored the extent to which his characters could never quite get on the same page. By the time World War I started, all Europe may have been sick from this communicative illness. A case can even be made that the war began and worsened because of this difficulty, which must have infected the network of literal royal cousins who ruled the whole continent when the archduke of Austria was suddenly murdered, and the world blundered into an intractable war. Did the era’s difficulty in expressing intent–extensive protocols, the gap between diplomatic language and actual meaning–contribute to the disaster? One thinks of Philip Zelikow’s case that Woodrow Wilson might have been able to strike a peace deal ending the war before the United States’ entry into the conflict had his top deputy Colonel Edward House not trusted snail mail by boat to conduct urgent diplomacy with Great Britain. By the time Wilson’s letters reached their recipients they had already been fired or decided what they thought of key diplomatic issues. Communication was not easy in those years, for both interior and exterior reasons. And after years of trench warfare the world shared a widespread trauma that made it even more difficult to be forthcoming in interpersonal communication.

Review: Gore Vidal, inheritor of Disraeli's tradition, painted a kind of political self-portrait in Julian

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Jed Bartlet, the fictional economist who became president on “The West Wing,” presented a modern fantasy version of Plato’s “philosopher king,” an ideal ruler with a philosopher’s capacity for complex thought and moral wisdom. A hankering for a leader who not only quoted Kant’s soundbites but understood the full context of his intellectual contributions was in the air in the early 2000s, when the TV show aired. In 2008, when we selected Barack Obama, a college professor who went on to annually post a long list of his favorite books and movies like a critic and man of letters, we were looking for a sort of real-life Jed Bartlet. It was said at the time that we were calling back the model of leadership associated with Woodrow Wilson, to this day the only PhD president. We might also have thought of Benjamin Disraeli, the only prolific novelist to be prime minister in Britain (and one who name-dropped Kant in his first novel). The Kant-quoting man-of-letters statesman, in the Trump era, seems like a thing of the past. I felt that loss reading Gore Vidal’s 1964 novel Julian, which is a kind of self-portrait of the artist as an aspiring statesman.

An aside: Byron and Shelley’s influence on Wilson and Gladstone

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My last piece, on Benjamin Disraeli’s novel Venetia, led me to look into Woodrow Wilson and William Gladstone’s thoughts on the Romantic poets Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, the subject of that novel. The result inspired a few thoughts on why Disraeli felt the need to “domesticate” Byron and Shelley, as I argued in that essay that he does: A notion of genius which frightened the Victorians but to which Wilson and Gladstone appear to have personally related.

The Scholar in Politics

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Recently someone sent me a quote from Gore Vidal ’s 1987 novel Empire, an exploration of the United States’ entry into the colonial marketplace at the end of the 19th Century. The quote got me thinking about both Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt and their roles in a new generation of college-educated men born in the 1850s and 1860s who got into politics at a time when that was not the thing to do. That moment in history presents a striking contrast with our present moment, when a generation of politicians is doing battle with higher education.

An aside: Ellen Wilson and Benjamin Disraeli's conflicting views of Balzac reveal much

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Reflections by politicians on authors of literature and their works are not just trivia. They have a way in some cases of revealing almost more than political writings. Thus this article will glance at the remarks Woodrow Wilson’s family and Benjamin Disraeli made about the novelist Honore de Balzac, about whom I wrote last month. After ruminating on Balzac in my last post because his political novels were a forerunner of Disraeli and the political novel, I thought I might look up what Woodrow Wilson, Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone thought of him. Because the results were charming and interesting, I am pausing to share them.

A miraculous coincidence: Providence, politics, and the little-remembered first engagement of Woodrow Wilson

Tue, 09 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Woodrow Wilson’s second engagement, to Edith Galt, has been written about extensively, largely because she is considered by many to have acted effectively as America’s first female president. While Wilson was incapacitated by a stroke late in his second term, she guarded him zealously, kept his condition a secret, and insisted nothing was to happen without his approval. This put her in charge, the argument goes. That’s a good story, and strangely enough it’s been told in two plays of exactly the same title, The Second Mrs. Wilson, which is even stranger when one considers the titles are a reference to an obscure play, Arthur Wing Pinero’s The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. But much less often retold is the amazing story of Wilson’s engagement to his first wife, a tale of dramatic coincidence without which perhaps neither he nor his wife would have been married. Ellen Axson, after all, had sworn off men, and had plotted out a life of independence and reliance on female friendship. The story of the coincidence that led to their engagement, for all its drama, has never been made into a play. Not only that, but it didn’t even make the lengthy biopic Wilson in 1944. And it is often omitted from biographies. The story underscores something interesting about Wilson, the role of the doctrine of Providence in both his politics and his theology. That philosophy has been both lauded as one of his good characteristics and derided as emblematic of his flaws as a political thinker. Above all, the tale of his first engagement is a good yarn, maybe even for the ever-growing numbers of people, who for good reasons and for reasons on all sides of the political spectrum, can’t stand Woodrow Wilson.

Analyzing "Margaret," an almost-lost short story fragment by Woodrow Wilson

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A work of fiction by a future United States president is a rare occurrence, so it’s strange that no one appears to have written anything about an unfinished, six-page short story entitled “Margaret” that Woodrow Wilson wrote in longhand in a notebook, probably sometime in the 1880s. It is now preserved at the Library of Congress. The story was even left out of editor Arthur S. Link’s unprecedentedly exhaustive 69-volume Papers of Woodrow Wilson. The most extensive mention I’ve found is in a brief footnote in Henry Bragdon’s biography of Wilson, which merely notes the story’s existence and quotes a few lines from it. Even Edwin A. Weinstein, who printed an extensive analysis of Wilson’s only completed short story, “The World and John Hart,” in his psychological study of Wilson, ignored “Margaret” altogether. Biographer John Mulder, surveying his early writing, does mention “Margaret” and reminds us that Wilson also once outlined a novel that he never wrote, but then wraps up by noting simply that “Wilson’s failure to get these works published was no loss to American letters.” Of course, it’s possible I missed something, as there are allegedly more than 2,000 books on Wilson in English alone, according to the latest addition to the pile of biographies (Christopher Cox’s 2024 Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn). But the fragment’s complete omission from most of the commonly held biographies in most good libraries is unfortunate, because what it says about this much-examined man and his family is fascinating. I believe “Margaret” to have been inspired by Wilson’s future wife Ellen Axson and her father, who probably committed suicide and whom Wilson appears to see as a symbol of the devastation of the Civil War in the South and the so-called “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy.

The war against Woodrow Wilson reaches the top

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Through three Trump campaigns for president, the question loomed: If we have to make America great again, when was it great? Then, after his second victory in 2024, President Trump answered the question. And the answer was, before Woodrow Wilson became president for the first time in 1913.

“We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913,” Trump said days after taking office. “That’s when we were a tariff country. And then they went to an income tax concept. It’s fine. It’s OK. But it would have been very much better.”

He learned it from his Dad: Woodrow Wilson's opposition to inalienable rights

Fri, 02 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It may be shocking to modern ears to hear Woodrow Wilson did not agree with the founders about the inalienable rights of all men. But he did not: “We are not bound to adhere to the doctrines of the Declaration of Independence,” Wilson said in 1907. “We are not here to worship men or a document.”

“No doubt a lot of nonsense has been talked about the inalienable rights of the individual,” Wilson wrote a year later, “and a great deal that was mere vague sentiment and pleasing speculation has been put forward as fundamental principle. The rights of man are easy to discourse of … but they are infinitely hard to put into practice. Such theories are never ‘law.’ … Only that is ‘law’ which can be executed, and the rights of man are singularly difficult to execute.”

Woodrow Wilson & The Jackass

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

When I saw the email pop up in my inbox from Princeton University Library Special Collections, I hoped I was about to find out what Woodrow Wilson’s least favorite professor had to say about him. This was the professor whose son Wilson fired from the university, in what the editor of the Woodrow Wilson Papers calls the greatest controversy in Wilson’s tenure as president of Princeton. This was the professor he badmouthed for decades. This was the professor a 19-year-old Wilson called “the jackass.”

Fired for “Calhoun views”: 19th Century cancel culture and Woodrow Wilson’s relationship to a quintessential southerner

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In 1886 a young Woodrow Wilson, then a professor at Bryn Mawr College, struck up a conversation with a fellow professor from Indiana University. He poked around asking questions about Indiana University because, as he explained, his friend Richard Heath Dabney was going to be taking a position as a professor of history there. Wilson later told Dabney about the results: “He said, amongst many things that were irrelevant to my purpose, this, which was extremely relevant, that your predecessor, Newkirk, had been turned out because he often spoke before he thought and, thus speaking, had let drop ‘Calhoun views’ on the Constitution. In a word, you have gotten into a chair whose incumbent is expected to present, not the scientific truth with reference to our Constitutional history, whether that truth be on the side of Webster or of Calhoun in the great historical argument, but ‘Yankee sentiments’—sentiments agreeable to that eminent body of scholars, the Grand Army of the Republic. It’s a shame; but I hope that the reality isn’t half as bad as these bits of rumor.”

The impact of Britain's "New Liberalism" on Woodrow Wilson

Fri, 21 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Woodrow Wilson called himself a “progressive” in 1916, and a “liberal” in 1917, Helena Rosenblatt asserts in her book The Lost History of Liberalism(2018). This change of nomenclature, she suggests, happened in part because Wilson “imported” what in Britain is called “the New Liberalism.” While British scholars debate whether there was such a thing as a New Liberalism, the term refers to a sea change between 19th Century “Classical Liberalism,” which promoted small government, lassiez-faire values and free trade, and 20th Century “New Liberalism,” which promoted an activist government that provides a social safety net for the poor, the elderly and the working class. Those who argue for the existence of a New Liberalism say it guided the establishment of a safety net by the ruling Liberal Party between 1906 and 1914.

The two arguments about Woodrow Wilson's racism

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

For decades the conventional wisdom among Woodrow Wilson scholars was that his infamous racism towards African Americans was the product of his being a child of the American South – a simple enough argument and seemingly obvious. However, more recently a strange counterargument keeps emerging in the literature: He was racist, but his racism did not stem from his origins in the American South. This is a harder case to make and has been used to inaccurately diminish his reputation for racism.

Wilson, Henry James and anti-German bias: Did Wilson's youthful attitude towards Germans influence his foreign policy?

Fri, 14 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Woodrow Wilson famously tried to insist on neutrality in the early days of World War One, refusing to declare a side between the Allies and Germany. But was he really neutral himself? Some speculate that his seeming neutrality was a cover for a dislike for Germans. But other writers argue that, far from being biased against them, he was heavily influenced by specifically German thought. Biographer Patricia O’Toole, author of the book The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made, was asked the question “Do we know if Wilson, before the war, was determinedly anti-German?” in an interview on CSPAN from the New York Historical Society on May 16, 2018.

Ideational evolution: an introduction

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

At certain moments in history, the ideological changes in a single individual can change the course of history. This blog notes the results of research on a few key examples of those remarkable transitions, specifically the transitions in the thought lives of Woodrow Wilson, William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli.

In April of 1908, Woodrow Wilson suddenly and inexplicably stopped speaking out against the regulation of business and started preaching for it. “No one now advocates the old laisser faire (sic),” he announced, though until that day he had advocated for just that, “or questions the necessity for a firm and comprehensive regulation of business operations in the interest of fair dealing and of a responsible exercise of power.” It was biographer Henry Bragdon who first documented this moment. The transition has been denied by other biographers who claim either that Wilson was always a progressive (Pestritto) or that he was always a conservative (Diamond). But the transformation was dramatic and sudden, as Bragdon tracks it, and leaves behind a mystery: why did he change his mind? How did it affect the course of history?

Review: Coningsby, a novel by Benjamin Disraeli

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In centuries of history very few statesmen have tried to communicate their view of politics through fiction. In the late 18th century, Sweden’s King Gustav III wrote plays and scenarios for operas that today are interpreted as a kind of savvy propaganda. Vaclav Havel wrote plays of consequence both before he was President of the Czech Republic and after, but never tried to use his plays to advance a political agenda in between. In the late 19th century a young Woodrow Wilson, then a professor of government, made abortive attempts to write short stories, but his were not politically oriented; in fact he used the format to ruminate wistfully about how nice it would be to be an author of fiction. However, later in his career as a professor Wilson renounced (bitterly?) the idea that an aspiring statesman, which he had been since youth, could also write fiction. Look at the novels of British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, Wilson wrote: the characters in those novels aren’t real people, he said, they are mere “chessmen” just like Disraeli’s subordinates in parliament.

Wilson on Ideational Evolution

Woodrow Wilson, Ezra Pound and an homage to James Joyce's *Ulysses*

Review: *Angel Down*, *To the Lighthouse* and the communicative difficulties of World War I

Review: Gore Vidal, inheritor of Disraeli's tradition, painted a kind of political self-portrait in *Julian*

An aside: Byron and Shelley’s influence on Wilson and Gladstone

The Scholar in Politics

An aside: Ellen Wilson and Benjamin Disraeli's conflicting views of Balzac reveal much

A miraculous coincidence: Providence, politics, and the little-remembered first engagement of Woodrow Wilson

Analyzing "Margaret," an almost-lost short story fragment by Woodrow Wilson

The war against Woodrow Wilson reaches the top

He learned it from his Dad: Woodrow Wilson's opposition to inalienable rights

Woodrow Wilson & The Jackass

Fired for “Calhoun views”: 19th Century cancel culture and Woodrow Wilson’s relationship to a quintessential southerner

The impact of Britain's "New Liberalism" on Woodrow Wilson

The two arguments about Woodrow Wilson's racism

Wilson, Henry James and anti-German bias: Did Wilson's youthful attitude towards Germans influence his foreign policy?

Ideational evolution: an introduction

Review: *Coningsby*, a novel by Benjamin Disraeli

Woodrow Wilson, Ezra Pound and an homage to James Joyce's Ulysses

Review: Angel Down, To the Lighthouse and the communicative difficulties of World War I

Review: Gore Vidal, inheritor of Disraeli's tradition, painted a kind of political self-portrait in Julian

Review: Coningsby, a novel by Benjamin Disraeli