What would Woodrow Wilson say?

Woodrow Wilson is widely disparaged as an ineffectual dreamer. But as A. Scott Berg's newly published biography of the 28^th President of the United States (excerpted recently on these pages) makes clear, Wilson was in fact an exceptional leader. He founded the Federal Reserve, enacted the Clayton Antitrust Act, reduced tariffs, and tried admirably to veto the lunacy of Prohibition. He is rivaled only by Thomas Jefferson, and perhaps John Quincy Adams, as the greatest intellect ever to occupy the White House. He composed his own speeches and delivered them ex tempore — often with overpowering eloquence.

More important, Wilson was the greatest prophet of the Twentieth Century, in many ways surpassing and even presaging Gandhi and Mandela: He was the first person to inspire the masses of the world with the vision of enduring peace, and of the acceptance and imposition of international law and of postcolonial institutions indicative of the equal rights of all nationalities and the common interest of all peoples.

When the insane decision of the German emperor and general staff to unleash submarine attacks on neutral American-flag merchant shipping in 1917 forced Wilson to enter World War I, the British Empire already had suffered about 750,000 dead. France, a country of a little more than 40 million, had endured about 1.5 million dead, two million injured, and the destruction of much of its industrial heartland. Italy, which entered the war in 1915 on the Allied side, had suffered about 750,000 dead. Wilson uplifted the Allied nations, and even many people in ostensibly enemy countries, by declaring that the entry of the United States into the "most terrible of all wars" was "to make the world safe for democracy"; it was a "war to end war." Conceptually and tactically, it was genius, and Woodrow Wilson, though a pacifist whose youth was spent in Virginia as that state was shattered by the armies of Grant and Lee, proved to be one of America's greatest war leaders, not outshone by Washington, Lincoln or FDR. (Unfortunately, his Virginia background also lumbered him with a discreditable toleration of racial segregation.)

As everyone knows, he mismanaged the ratification process of the Treaty of Versailles, largely because he suffered a series of incapacitating strokes, and was repudiated by partisans in his own Congress. The League of Nations, which Wilson conceived, was launched without the United States, and it was later sabotaged by Hitler, Mussolini, the Japanese Imperialists and Stalin, with the effective complicity of the Anglo-French appeasers. It devolved upon a junior member of Wilson's administration, Franklin D. Roosevelt, when he was president during the world war that Wilson sought to avoid, to revive the idea of a world organization, involve the opposing domestic political party fully in its creation, and have it in place even before that war ended in 1945.

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