Riding and physical fitness

[JV Puleo]

I get the impression that Wilson simply thought he was smarter than everyone else and that anyone who opposed him was stupid or mean and self serving. Its an almost cosmic level of arrogance. I've read his instructions to his staff, written on board ship on the way to the Versailles conference. Its an absolutely astonishing document. Reading it exposes Wilson as abysmally ignorant of Europe, the Europeans and the outbreak of the war. He does not seem to know that his western allies were democracies and his intention appears to have been to dictate the peace regardless of others views and fully expected them to accept this! Because, if they weren't his views, they were wrong. For instance... although he had to realize that treaties have to be confirmed by the Senate (which he did not control), he made absolutely no effort to include a member of the Senate, much less the opposition in the Senate, in the decision making process.

The late George Kennan characterized his speech on the occasion of the Russian Revolution as (paraphrasing here. I don't remember it verbatim) "a wonderful speech in which every fact was wrong."

[Pat Holscher]

I get the impression that Wilson simply thought he was smarter than everyone else and that anyone who opposed him was stupid or mean and self serving. Its an almost cosmic level of arrogance. I've read his instructions to his staff, written on board ship on the way to the Versailles conference. Its an absolutely astonishing document. Reading it exposes Wilson as abysmally ignorant of Europe, the Europeans and the outbreak of the war. He does not seem to know that his western allies were democracies and his intention appears to have been to dictate the peace regardless of others views and fully expected them to accept this! Because, if they weren't his views, they were wrong. For instance... although he had to realize that treaties have to be confirmed by the Senate (which he did not control), he made absolutely no effort to include a member of the Senate, much less the opposition in the Senate, in the decision making process.

The late George Kennan characterized his speech on the occasion of the Russian Revolution as (paraphrasing here. I don't remember it verbatim) "a wonderful speech in which every fact was wrong."

At the risk of getting excessively political, and at the risk of accidentally insulting academics who stop in here, I'll boost my prior stated views a bit. Indeed, I think Woodrow Wilson was an ineffective President because he was an academic, and I generally think the very limited examples of academics in the Presidency have likewise been ineffective.

I will now duck to avoid the hurling of books and tomatoes.

Wilson attended the University of Virginia law school for a single year, but was able to pass the Georgia bar and practiced law very briefly. Practicing law has always been very hard work and its often fairly rough and tumble. He left that very quickly and returned to school, and then went on to a career as a university level academic.

That's pretty revealing in my view. Those who flee from the combative world of actual legal work into the Ivy Halls so quickly usually don't have the stomach for the hard work of actual legal work nor do they like to be in a situation in which their education and occupation grants them very little slack from their fellows. Even really smart lawyers have their views and statements challenged all the time. This is not true for academics at he university level as a rule, however. At that level, every single word a professor says is paid attention to by those who have paid to be in the classroom and they have to absorb every single drop of it for their grades. Their future depends upon it.

In that situation its really easy for a person to start assuming that the class is paying attention as the lecturer is stunningly brilliant and a person can come to believe that they are so persuasive that their pronouncements equate with action. I think that's where Wilson was, and I think we also have a much more recent example of the same view. That sort of belief must be addictive in the extreme, as those who hold it seem to genuinely believe that a call for action is met by talking, as that talking will convince all. Wilson's last act was to lecture the country on the Versailles Treaty and it turned out that farmers in Iowa or shopkeepers in Delaware weren't Princeton students and felt entitled to disagree.