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
presidency had been "at least as taciturn as Cleveland's." Not so from that point on...until his fateful collapse in the midst of the fight for the treaty and the league. These nearly four years of the Wilson admistration mark the slow birth, the temporary triumph and the final defeat of Wilsonian idealism. They also call into question Heckscher's portrait of a President Woodrow Wilson who was instinctively reluctant to waste personal energy or invest political capital. Gone was the Wilson who would wait for a national consensus to emerge. But gone as well were "his more attractive qualities — modesty and humor, courtesy under stress." Unhappily in Heckscher's view, this "human" side of Wilson's personality was never fully revealed to the American people. Unhappily for Wilson and those around him, it disappeared from private view as the question of peace or war intensified. Gone also was Wilson the conciliator. In his place stood Wilson the oracle, Wilson the idealist, and Wilson the victim of his enemies' treachery. Heckscher, in fact, discovers many Wilsons, but never does he come upon a hypocritical Wilson. In 1916 Wilson ran for re-election as the peace candidate. Even the departed Bryan "join[ed] with the American people in thanking God that we have a president who does not want this nation plunged into this war." Did God —or the president —deserve such thanks? Surely not the latter, Heckscher concludes, for he did little more than "pick up the antiwar theme of the (Democratic) convention and use it with devastating effectiveness." Wilson proceeded to use his victory to attempt once more to stop what was to him an essentially European civil war in which both sides "professed allegiance to the same ultimate goals." The Allies were angered by Wilson's moral equation, but Heckscher is not. Whether offering mediation or delivering his "peace without victory" speech, Wilson was a representative of the "noblest tradition of western liberalism" at a time of rampant "militarism" throughout the western world. And how did the German government respond to these overtures? With an act of premeditated betrayal by announcing the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare. Wilson suffered a "profound shock," but neither he nor the American people were as yet ready for war. 160
