Woodrow Wilson, World Statesman

"God helping her...she can do no other!" Unlike our current prez, Wilson was no war monger. He earnestly sought peace even as he committed our boys to the 20th centuries first horrific war. This is his story and I highly recommend it.

Kendrick A. Clements "Woodrow Wilson" delivers what it promises -an excellent introductory study of our 28th president - in just 223 pages of text. Some readers may want more intimate details about Wilson and the people in his life; for them there are 11 additional pages of pertinent bibliographical information. Clement's brief book, nevertheless - billed as the 'best available one-volume biography' on Wilson - provides the reader with that essential information that prompts many historians to rank Wilson in the top tier of U.S. presidents. We learn, for example, that Wilson (our only Ph.D. president) was one of just a handful of our truly intellectual presidents - i.e., he loved books and ideas and was a voracious reader of books and a prolific writer of books. He was the son of a Presbyterian minister who'd instilled in him a love of his fellow man and a desire to serve his fellow man. Wilson - like Theodore Roosevelt before him - came to believe that the federal government is an organ that must be involved in helping those unable to help themselves. As president he pushed through legislation that protected workers, women, and children from abuse and exploitaton in the workplace. He believed in the capitalist system and in the prerequisite free market conditions; consequently, he fought against any practices employed by business or industry designed to create monopolies or restrict free competition. As president he felt obligated to be deeply involved in both legislative and executive branch activities - in order to better realize his domestic and foreign affairs goals. Wilson was a decent man with a wide range of significant accomplishments: after acquiring his Ph.D. (political science) at Johns Hopkins University, he distinguished himself in a number of capacities - as a college/university professor, university president (Princeton), governor (New Jersey) and U.S. president (2 terms). While he was in office women got the vote, the Federal Reserve Bank was established, the mechanism for funding government activities was changed (the graduated income tax was adopted to suplement less effective tariff and excise tax revenues). When U.S. entry into World War I became unavoidable, Wilson vowed that the war should end with something positive - namely, with a non-punitive peace (provided for in his '14 Point Plan' for peace)and with the creation of an organization that could prevent world wars in the future (he proposed the League of Nations). Because U.S. congressional opposition was more powerful Wilson failed to achieve these goals - but he did win a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. Nevertheless, Wilson was correct in warning the world that a punitive peace would cause serious trouble in the future (aka Adolph Hitler), and he was correct in predicting that the world would eventually be forced to create a collective organization of nations (aka the United Nations) to resolve international disputes and to punish nations who violate int

Woodrow Wilson. Here was a president who put himself in the middle of European power politics in order to achieve the goals he had in mind. This book helps to suggest a man of action and persuasion at a time when most Americans were fed up with affairs that didn't concern them. Woodrow Wilson is regarded with respect, but at the time he was proposig the League of Nations as the answer to the world's problems, he was criticized left and right. We now know that his policies for peace and security were right, and if Wilson was president today, we could be made certain that the world would be at peace. This book, which was written in such a way as to paint a picture of a daring, courageous president, is by far one of the better books on Wilson that I have ever read. I would recommend this account of our 28th president to both the serious student of American Presidential History, and also to the laymen reader. This book is more of an outline of alreay well-known facts, and serves as an introduction into the life of one of our country's greatest presidents.

Since 1982 I have been assigning a term paper on the life of Woodrow Wilson that is largely the result of the 69-volume papers of Woodrow Wilson being available. I was always searching for a suitable up-to-date biography--as assigned reading--that would accompany this project. Over nearly twenty years I had tried several, but clearly Clements' is the most successful. Neither overly brief nor excessive in its length, it takes the students through Wilson's life in a comprehensible manner that has proven beneficial to my students. I can recommend this book to anyone who wishes to refresh their understanding of Wilson.