Woodrow Wilson: The Last Romantic

While most biographers paint Woodrow Wilson as an uncompromising intellectual who failed to win America’s entrance into the League of Nations, Mary Stockwell’s book portrays our 28th President as a man shaped first and foremost by his emotions and his imagination. From the time he first played that he was a great hero chasing pirates on the imaginary seas of his childhood until he fell from grace along with his failed league, Woodrow Wilson was, above all else, a romantic. He believed if he could imagine the best possible future for all mankind, then he need only sail forth toward it and surely everyone would follow him. It was this spirit that led him first into the law, then academics, and finally politics. This same spirit helped him craft a vision of democracy as a noble enterprise whose ideals must be practised in all phases of modern life. To understand our world today, we must understand the vision that made it. To understand this vision, we must seek out the man who first dream it. That man was Woodrow Wilson, the last romantic to dream that a better world was possible simply by imagining it.