Before he went to the White House and while he was still governor of New Jersey, and possibly even before that, Woodrow Wilson showed distinct symptoms of the disease to which he finally succumbed: arteriosclerosis. The disease was detected first in his retinal blood vessels by a famous ophthalmologist of this country and he was instructed to a régime which, subscribed to and followed, is adequate frequently to bring about a cessation of the progress of the disease. Perhaps “tinkering” with the intestines does not felicitously or appropriately describe the essential features of that prophylaxis, but if it embraces what is meant by overcoming fermentation and putrefaction in the digestive tract, then “tinkering” is the word to use and it is to be regretted that “White House doctors” were not “tinkers” too.
One day, some one will point out that President Wilson’s irascibility, obstinacy, mental inflexibility and emotional inelasticity, which he displayed so frequently, painfully to himself and humiliatingly to his people while in Paris on his second European venture, and here when he took his plan to the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and finally to the people at large, were mainly due to the arteriosclerosis, which at that time had made great inroads on the nutrient channels of the brain. It accentuated his limitations and minimised his possessions. It immobilised him like a hephæstic fetter, and there was no one strong or courageous enough to break the links before the fibre of the web had annealed.
Mr. White’s concluding chapter is entitled “The Assessment,” and it contains these words with which every one must agree:
“If Fame does not come to him through the conjunction of time and chance working upon the genius of the race to preserve the structure which he previsioned in his hour of trial, Fame will find a man here—a clean, brave, wise, courageous man—ready made for heroic stature.”
How unfortunate it is that Mr. White could not have interpolated the adjectives “understanding, kindly, compassionate, loyal!”
In another connection Mr. White says: “And we must not forget that from the bottom of his Irish heart always the motive which most surely moved Woodrow Wilson was the love of his kind.” Against this statement I set the following extract from my own writings:
“Woodrow Wilson does not love his fellow-men. He loves them in the abstract, but not in the flesh. He is concerned with their fate, their destiny, their travail en masse, but the predicaments, perplexities and prostrations of the individual or groups of individuals make no appeal to him. He does not refresh his soul by bathing it daily in the milk of human kindness. He says with his lips that he loves his fellow-man, but there is no accompanying emotional glow, none of the somatic or spiritual accompaniments which are the normal ancillæ of love’s display. He does not respect his fellow’s convictions when they are opposed to his own. He does not value their counsel when it is adverse to his own judgment.... In contact with people, he gives himself the air of listening in deference, and indeed of being beholden to their judgment and opinion, but in reality it is an artifice which he puts off when he returns to the dispensing centre of the world and of the law just as he puts off his gloves and hat.... Woodrow Wilson attempts to mask, with facial urbanity and a smile in verbal contact with people, and with the subjective mood in written contact, another deforming defect of character; namely, his inability to enter into a contest of any sort in which there is a strife, without revealing his obsession to win. When he attempts to play any game, his artificed civility, cordiality, amiability, are so discordant with the real man that they become as offensive as affectations of manner or speech always are, and instead of placating the individual for whom they are manifest, or facilitating the modus vivendi, they offend and make rapport with him impossible.... Mr. Wilson is a brilliant, calculating and vindictive man; brilliant in conception, calculating in motive and vindictive in execution.... Were he generous, kindly and humble, it would be difficult to find his like in the flesh or in history.”
That was my deliberate judgment after having studied Woodrow Wilson from the psychological point of view, and that is my judgment now after having read and re-read Mr. White’s book.
It is by his possessions, not by his limitations, that Woodrow Wilson will be estimated. The campaign is on. It is not a noisy one. No one can say what the outcome will be, but the straw vote now being taken suggests that his election to membership in the Academy of the World’s Immortals is assured.