Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1993. [Vol. 1.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 21)
BOOK REVIEWS - John C. Chalberg: August Heckscher: Woodrow Wilson. Macmillan, 1991. 734 pp
And there he met May Allen Hulbert Peck, once widowed, once unhappily married, and finally a Bermuda regular for the preceding fifteen winters. Though the friendship long remained a platonic one, the "web of circumstance had been woven...In Ellen's depression, in Mary Peck's faltering spirit, in Woodrow's emotional isolation existed elements to bring these three into a complex human relationship." Following a second winter interlude in Bermuda, Wilson decided to reveal the friendship to his wife and without apparent remorse promised to extinguish what Heckscher calls this "glimpse of an intoxicating happiness." Two months later, as was often his practice, Wilson publicly paraded his private thoughts. In his 1908 baccalaureate address Wilson expressed a preference for self-denial over repentance: "I am not sure," he confided to his undergraduates, "that it is of the first importance that you should be happy. Many an unhappy man has been of deep service to the world and to himself." Or so Woodrow Wilson had assumed was his own fate. Nonetheless, Heckscher believes it to be highly probable that the unhappy Wilson sought to retrieve his "glimpse" of happiness, specifically that his relationship with Mrs. Peck shifted from a romantic friendship to a love affair sometime during 1909. Unhappiness acknowledged, he moved to achieve personal happiness at the same time that his presidency —and his opportunity for service? —were grinding to an ignominious end. Ironically, this betrayal of his wife (which years later Wilson referred to as an act of "folly and gross impertinence") came on the heels of his own feelings of betrayal at the hands of his prized Princeton protege, Professor John Hibben. At issue was the location of the graduate school, which Wilson did not want physically removed from the rest of the university. In this fight he thought that he could count on the support of Hibben only to have his longtime confidante and ally take the lead in opposing him. A simple negative vote the president might have accepted: but command of the dissidents was to Wilson an act of unforgivable treachery. A decade later, the until-then-ubiquitous Colonel Edward House stood similarly accused before meeting the same ostracized fate. Curiously, Wilson was quick to see himself as the one betrayed, but never was he willing to admit that he might himself be the betrayer. In 1915 156
