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Book Review
| Breaking the Heart
of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations.
By John Milton Cooper Jr. (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2001. x, 454 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-521-80786-7.)
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| John Milton Cooper Jr. has brought his usual meticulousness to bear on the battle between Woodrow Wilson and the Senate over the Treaty of Versailles and America's proposed membership in the League of Nations. Partisan wrangling aside, Cooper argues, the league fight boiled down to a clash between Republicans, who not unreasonably wanted to put their stamp on Article X, and Wilson, whose sharply eroded health handicapped him both as a spokesman for his own cause and as a reasonable negotiator. |
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As this straightforward argument implies, Cooper tells us little here that is new or surprising. Breaking the Heart of the World takes its value, not from earth-shattering revelations, but from Cooper's many sharp assessments of well-known particulars. Wilson probably should have gone to Paris and with a Republican, Cooper thinks. But he then points out that this familiar criticism carries too much hindsight, since Wilson rarely sought advice from anyone, and bipartisan-ship was a creature of the next generation. Having decided to go it alone, Wilson failed to appreciate how Republican opposition to the treaty had hardened in his absence and seems to have been too optimistic about his ability to persuade on his return. Wilson's own hardening attitudes after his fateful stroke left the Democrats leaderless, Cooper nicely observes, and left sponsorship of the treaty to the mild reservationists, whom an enfeebled Wilson scorned. Not least because of the partisan balance in the Senate, the required two-thirds support was inconceivable without some compromise; as a result, the Republican majority behind Henry Cabot Lodge was in a position to insist on some terms. Cooper rehashes Wilson's refusal to compromise, but he then explains why so many Democrats stayed loyal to the president that consent with reservations failed: many were fellow southerners, and many remained reluctant to cross their party leader as an election year loomed. Whether they were prudent is an open question, because the election of 1920 was not a referendum on the treaty, and on balance staying with Wilson was not the kiss of death. Even in discussing such familiar topics as the quirks of the Irreconcilables or the ridiculous claims that Edith Wilson assumed presidential powers in fall 1919, Cooper turns valuable observations. |
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The most surprising part of the book is how much emphasis Cooper puts on Wilson's failed health. Following the lead of the Papers of Woodrow Wilson editors, Cooper has concluded that Wilson's stroke destroyed his ability to educate the public on the League of Nations, take the battle hard to his opponents, and compromise where necessary. Wilson's condition both exacerbated his tendencies toward inflexibility and encouraged delusions of strength when his energy rebounded. Particularly for a man of "promethean traits of boldness and willingness to gamble for great stakes," Wilson's physiological condition rendered him "literally incapable of compromise" (pp. 422–23). |
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It is just that sort of conclusion that tends to leave the reader wondering whether Cooper has missed the forest for the trees. His attention to detail and tendency to narrow focus leave him little room to place the league fight in the far broader stream of nationalism and internationalism. Did Wilson "break the heart of the world"? Of course not: For the most promising elements in Wilsonian diplomacy—the commitment to international democracy and anticolonialism—were never genuinely his creations and were never dependent on his advocacy, which in truth always was more theoretical than practical. |
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| David Steigerwald
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Ohio State University
Marion, Ohio |
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