Patricia O'Toole

The Moralist Patricia O'Toole

From the author of acclaimed biographies of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Adams comes a penetrating biography of one of the most high-minded, consequential, and controversial US presidents: Woodrow Wilson. The Moralist is a cautionary tale about the perils of moral vanity and American overreach in foreign affairs.

In domestic affairs, Wilson was a progressive who enjoyed unprecedented success in leveling the economic playing field, but he was behind the times on racial equality and women's suffrage. As a Southern boy during the Civil War, he knew the ravages of war, and as president, he refused to lead the country into World War I until he was convinced that Germany posed a direct threat to the United States.

Once committed, he was an admirable commander-in-chief, yet he also presided over the harshest suppression of political dissent in American history.

After the war Wilson became the world's most ardent champion of liberal internationalism-a democratic new world order committed to peace, collective security, and free trade. With Wilson's leadership, the governments at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 founded the League of Nations, a federation of the world's democracies. The creation of the league, Wilson's last great triumph, was quickly followed by two crushing blows: a paralyzing stroke and the rejection of the treaty that would have allowed the United States to join the league.

After a backlash against internationalism in the 1920s and 1930s, Wilson's liberal internationalism was revived by Franklin D. Roosevelt, and it has shaped American foreign relations-for better and worse-ever since.