Woodrow Wilson as Husband
Memoirs of Mrs. Woodrow Wilson. (Putnam. Iss.)
No statesman of the twentieth century has been the subject of so many biographies as President Wilson. They range from William Bayard Hale's, written before the President's first term was over, to the eight volumes which Ray Stannard Baker has added to the three or four earlier volumes he had published on the President in war and peace. In such circumstances a Life by the President's widow—for Mrs. Wilson's memoirs are in effect simply a biography of her husband—might be thought superfluous. In fact, it is very far from that Admirably blending objectivity with intimacy, it reveals a side of Woodrow Wilson without which no picture of him could be complete. Future historians in their endeavour to estimate Wilson as man and statesman, will have to take full account of the revealing and discerning contribution Mrs. Wilson has now made.
Edith Bolling married Norman Galt, the head of an old- established jewellery business in Washington in 19o2. He died in 1908, so that at the time of Mr. Wilson's first wife's death in 1914 -Mrs. Galt had been more than six years a widow. In May, 1915, the President asked her to marry him, but it took her four months to be sure that what had begun as friendship had deepened into an emotion strong enough to justify her in becoming (what did not attract her) the first lady in the land. The wedding took place in December, 1915. In writing of the eight years of her married life— Wilson died in February, 1924—Mrs. Wilson disclaims all intention of attempting a political record, and it is for the light they throw on Wilson's character—his considerateness, his essential simplicity, his tireless industry, his tenacity of decision, his deep family affections, his capacity to switch his mind (the " one-track " mind) from one activity to another, or from activity to relaxation—that her memoirs will be chiefly valued.
But there are political passages of some importance too. It is made clear, for example, that Senator Lodge gave Wilson every reason to believe he would support the Covenant ; and nowhere has the cause of the breach between the President and Colonel House been more clearly disclosed. It dates from the President's return to France after his flying visit to the United States in the middle of the Peace Conference. House had been left in charge of the American Delegation in the President's absence. When he told Wilson, the day the latter landed at Brest, of the decisions he had agreed to, the President emerged from the interview with a haggard face, and said to his wife, " House has given away everything I had won before we left Paris. He has compromised on every side, and to I have to start all over again." The remark may or may not have been justified, but it revealed what Wilson thought, and there was never cordiality between him and House afterwards. It is fair to say that Mrs. Wilson, who usually shows herself shrewd in her judgements, had never shared the President's early admiration for his henchman, regarding House as (in her ewn words) much too much of a yes-man. Mrs. Wilson's description of the social side of the President's visit to Europe for the Peace Conference casts light from a new angle on that much-described event. Particularly attractive is the picture of the family circle at Buckingham Palace, where the President and Mrs. Wilson stayed at the end of 1918. King George V told her of a visit he paid to France, when he reviewed some American troops. " I saw them staring at me," he said. " Finally I heard one say to another ' Who's that bug? ' And the other said, 'Why, man, that's the King of England.' And the first shrugged his shoulders and said qlell! where's his crown? ' " The King added that he did not mind being called a bug but that he reacted against the idea of reviewing troops with a crown on his head. On Lady Oxford, whose virtues Mrs. Wilson rather conspicuously failed to appreciate, there are some entertaining pages, in reference both to the same visit to London and to a visit of Lady Oxford's to Washington after the War.
Altogether, an unpretentious, instructive and often moving
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