What tea party republicans can learn from Woodrow Wilson: averse to compromise, he died a bewildered and broken man.

• Author: O'Donnell, Michael
• Position: Wilson by A. Scott Berg Putnam - Book review

Wilson

by A. Scott Berg Putnam Adult, 832 pp.

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Two achievements and two failures define Woodrow Wilson's presidency. Historians have spilled rivers of ink debating whether the former outweigh the latter. Wilson's domestic achievement was to pass a major legislative program called the New Freedom, featuring progressive taxation, antitrust laws, tariff reduction, and the creation of the Federal Reserve system. His domestic failure was a profound disregard for Americans' civil rights and civil liberties. Wilson's administration formally segregated the federal civil service by race and passed draconian wartime sedition laws; his attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, chased dissenters during the Red Scare.

Yet this domestic tally tells us less about Wilson than the cold record suggests. He enjoyed strong Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress during his first term, easing passage of his legislative agenda. His views on race were, if lamentable, very much in keeping with the times; and it should be noted that Palmer led his witch hunts while Wilson was incapacitated by a stroke. Thus the true measure of his success or failure lies in the realm of foreign policy.

Here Wilson's achievement was to lead the United States into World War I. He refrained from intervening in Europe's war for as long as possible, but then intervened with purpose, sending doughboys and America's mighty Navy across the Atlantic at a critical moment in the campaign. The move proved decisive: as military historian John Keegan writes in his authoritative The First World War, "Rare are the times in a great war when the fortunes of one side or the other are transformed by the sudden accretion of a disequilibrating reinforcement."

The experience turned the United States into a world power and established the hallmarks of its foreign policy: solidarity with the Atlantic allies, a moral component to international decision making, and a commitment to global institutions. The word "idealism" is often associated with Wilson's name, and for good reason: World War I marked the point at which the United States began acting abroad on the basis of principles in addition to interests. This worldview is dismissed as a sham by many other countries and has produced some of our thorniest problems in the past twenty years--Rwanda and the Balkans in the 1990s, Iraq in the 2000s, and now Syria. But that does not necessarily invalidate liberal internationalism or...