Disney World's Magic Kingdom includes a "Hall of Presidents," which I naturally visited on my recent trip to Orlando. The 22-minute presentation is a cross between the informative and the innocuous -- done well enough and edited strategically to avoid offending too many people. I was more struck by the lobby preceding the presentation, which contains portraits of selected chief executives and a handful of artifacts.
Some of the portraits are predictable -- the original George W., along with Honest Abe and Old Hickory are given prominent positions, and rightly so. There are two other sets of three portraits each -- on one side of the doorway you find FDR, James Monroe, and Jimmy Carter. On the other side are Ronald Reagan, Thomas Jefferson, and Woodrow Wilson. Coincidentally or otherwise, each trio contains a great president, an above-average president, and a total failure, the evaluation corresponding to the order listed above.
While presidential ranking is certainly subjective, few unbiased historians would disagree on five of the six. All had flaws, of course, but Reagan and FDR came to office in the midst of great crisis and succeeded beyond all expectations through a combination of strong leadership and firm (if controversial) policies. Jefferson had the Louisiana Purchase, but is more noted for his accomplishments outside the White House, while Monroe presided over an even-handed eight years but with few memorable successes outside of his famous Doctrine. Carter, on the other hand, inherited a tenuous situation and made it far worse (paving the way for the aforementioned Reagan), and is now regarded as little more than an interregnum during 60-plus years of otherwise competent national leadership.
Which brings us to Thomas Woodrow Wilson, perhaps the most over-rated of them all. Others, should they choose to, can give their opinion; mine should be rather clear at this point. I recently completed When the Cheering Stopped: The Last Years of Woodrow Wilson by Gene Smith (1964), which focuses on Wilson’s administration following the Armistice of 11/11/1918, and specifically his years after his unfortunate illness late in his second term.
It’s an easy read and worth the time – even for an anti-Wilsonian as myself, and Smith clearly tries to paint an unbiased portrait of his subject. Again, others can evaluate Wilson on the totality of his record. I was struck, in this work, by a number of factors that I believe contributed to the overall failure of his administration –
- A supreme overconfidence in his own abilities
- Widespread exaltation outside the United States, with only tepid (and often orchestrated) cheering at home
- An absolute unwillingness to accommodate other points of view, specifically on the domestic front, and complete shunning of any attempts at compromise.
Per Smith, Wilson was almost totally incapacitated in his final years in office, made few decisions, signed few documents, attended few meetings and made almost no public appearances. Yet he persisted in excluding not only his political enemies – which might have been understandable – but his allies and members of his own administration, including his vice president and cabinet, in any of the operations of the executive branch. If that’s not enough, he in all seriousness considered running for a third term (not yet prohibited via the 22nd Amendment), and then gave thought to running again in 1924 (the year in which he died).
It was a combination of these factors that led to Wilson’s grandest failure, that of the US Congress refusing to ratify the Versailles Treaty. The introduction to Smith’s book, by another writer and displaying significant favorable bias in contrast to the body of the book, insinuates that the country’s refusal to follow Wilson into the League of Nation was a tragic mistake, leading naturally to World War II, and proving, he believes, that Wilson was right all along. Debatable, to say the least, but the larger point, that Smith goes on to make, is that the US could have entered the League had Wilson showed as much diplomatic skill domestically as he displayed on the international stage at Versailles.
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