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
August Heckscher, however, is bent upon separating Wilson from this trio of Democrats. To him, Woodrow Wilson was a self-acknowledged and accomplished professional politician. Wilson, of course, spent most of his adult life away from the rough and tumble word of politics and in the sometimes rougher —and often more cruel —world of academia. Therefore, Heckscher properly invests nearly a third of this biography in the pre-presidential life of his subject. Son of a Presbyterian minister, young "Tommy" Wilson lived a well-travelled life in a number of southern parsonages before finding a home within Princeton University. After a false start as a lawyer, a professionally reborn Woodrow Wilson earned a John Hopkins doctorate and set out on the path of an academic climber, culminating v> ith his return to his beloved Princeton. For the ensuing eighteen years Wilson taught at (1892—1902) and presided over (1902—1910) the institution which had provided him with his "magical" undergraduate years. Driven to succeed by a doting mother and a demanding father, Wilson established a name for himself as a scholar of politics long before he became a scholar in politics. Nonetheless, the substance of his most significant work, Congressional Goverment, was, in Heckscher's view, "not new." By the time of its 1885 publication the decline of presidential power was both obvious and well-documented. What set Wilson's contribution apart was his "method and style." At base, the young professor was less a scholar than he was a writer. As Heckscher notes, Wilson has often been accused of failing to investigate Congress directly "before sitting down to describe its workings." But such critics "miss the point; the book was in essence a work of the imagination. And the imagination was that born of the statesman." Shortly before his elevation to the presidency of Princeton, Wilson confided to friend and fellow historian Frederick Jackson Turner that he had been "born a politician." Curiously, this self-characterization was not made with an eye toward his impending promotion, but in light of a pending request for a leave of absence so that he might travel, think, and write his "philosophy of politics." For Wilson, who as a young man was wont to 153
