Woodrow Wilson's biographer discusses the 28th president's racism and the disabling stroke he suffered in 1919

Woodrow Wilson rides in the inaugural parade of his successor, Warren Harding, in 1921. (AP file photo)
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A. Scott Berg's biography "Wilson" is 815 pages long and needs to be to cover the eventful life of the two-term president (1913-21) whose influence on modern politics remains strong. As Berg noted in the first part of this interview, Wilson remains a polarizing figure. He was contradictory -- a progressive and a racist, a wartime president who pushed for lasting peace, reserved in public and passionate in private -- and suffered a stroke in 1919 that was successfully concealed from almost everyone by his wife and his personal physician, Dr. Cary Grayson.

What was the genesis of the feud between Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt? Politics, or was it personal?

I think it was a little of both. There's one point where somebody says to TR 'you know, much of Wilson's program is what yours was.' And TR says 'well, I guess so, but he's just a weaker version of me.' I think Woodrow Wilson thought TR was sort of a blustery fool ... I shouldn't say fool, was a blustery poseur. He wasn't a fool. And I think Teddy Roosevelt found Woodrow Wilson weak and too academic and slightly effete.

Which plays into the general stereotype of both.

Absolutely right.

At least from the point of view of their detractors.

I think that's absolutely right. At the end of the day, I think the detractors were right about Teddy Roosevelt, and I think he was the caricature. I don't think Woodrow Wilson was the caricature. I think Wilson proved to be a very strong leader. He was an exceptional commander-in-chief. He mounted the greatest army the United States had seen, from a small army defending an isolationist nation to an army of 2 million people transported across the ocean. That was pretty overwhelming. And we won the war. As soon as our men started fighting the war was over within six months.

You talked about Wilson being perceived as remote and academic. Do you think that when he talked to people he was able to connect?

No question. I think everyone's first reaction to Wilson was oh, he's an egghead academician who doesn't really understand how to play politics. He understands politics but he doesn't know how to play it. But when Wilson became governor of New Jersey and the first thing he did was kick out the political machine that put him into office everybody looked twice at him and at New Jersey. He took on the most corrupt machine in America. Anybody who came within earshot of Woodrow Wilson was immediately converted.  He was very compelling, and he wasn't all talk. You look at those first four years in office and it's amazing, not just the extent of it but the breadth of it, and some of it was really kind of radical stuff.

It's interesting that TR was also anti-machine politics, whereas FDR and certainly Harry Truman made their peace with the machines and worked with them, and for that matter so did JFK.

You bet. Absolutely. And to some extent Wilson did too. After Wilson became president he did start talking to them but he made it very clear he wasn't beholden to them.

Where's the best Wilson material located?

There was a professor at Princeton named Arthur Link who collected all of Wilson's papers. He did a 69-volume set of Wilson's papers. He doesn't have all the originals but he has at least a Xerox of every known Wilson document so one could just go there and have access to virtually everything. The Library of Congress has everything of Wilson's from Washington on, the presidency, so they have those papers. There is a budding Woodrow Wilson presidential library in Staunton, Vir., his hometown, and they have a few collections.


The birthplace has been there for years, and now in the last 10-15 years they've been trying to build this library but it's odd because they don't have the papers. Princeton and the Library of Congress have all the papers.

Presidential libraries didn't start until FDR. They grandfathered in Hoover and have since added Lincoln, and Rutherford B. Hayes has a library, I believe, and now they're trying with Wilson. They have enough to make it kind of interesting. It's a bit out of the way. They have his 1919 Pierce Arrow limousine. They have a few things that make it interesting.

I think Charles Lindbergh's fatal flaw is anti-Semitism.


And for Wilson, it's racism.

Definitely. Definitely.

Was there a parallel in your interest in them?

I wouldn't say so, not really. The only parallel would be that I was drawn to finding out what the truth was in each case. How anti-Semitic was Lindbergh? What did he say, and what did he not say? The same with Wilson. I wanted to see, was he really a racist? How much of it is "presentism," that is, here we are a century later. All that being said, I hope I make two things clear: the first is no matter what time you lived, some of the things Wilson said and did were racist. That being said, I do think that for his day, he was centrist. He was not some wild Klansman. I think he was sympathetic to African Americans. He just, for all sorts of reasons, didn't think the nation was ready to segregate.

Lindbergh went to Germany in the 1930s and, sharp-eyed and intelligent man that he was, claimed not to notice what was happening to Jews, or noticed and didn't say anything. I don't think it's credible. Similarly, for Wilson to grow up in Georgia and start his professional life there and not know what was happening to blacks is not credible.

Lindbergh was in Germany at the behest of the American government, and wasn't really paying attention to the Jewish situation. He was about to move there but then when Kristallnacht happened, he left, he was gone. So that's 1938, November of 1938. That's the first moment when he said 'oh, this is really bad.' Once he saw in '38 what was going on he was out of there.

In the case of Wilson, yeah, he saw segregation, certainly in Georgia and the Carolinas and basically it was a social system that worked.

Unless you were black.

Unless you were black, of course, but the system worked. Wilson believed in integration, he just didn't believe it was time. He just didn't believe it could happen in 1913. He often said "I know the South." I don't think he was a virulent racist. I never saw racial hatred on his part. But he said "I know there are enough Southerners who do feel this. This was a time in which you had Klansmen sitting in the Senate, and on the Supreme Court.

And blacks hanging from trees.


So where was Wilson?

Well, strangely enough, and this will sound strange when I say it, but he was the first president to have anti-lynching laws. TR didn't do that. He could have done it. Taft could have done it. He didn't do it. McKinley could have done it. Nobody did.

Wilson always had the door open to blacks. Some of the great minds, James Weldon Johnson came in and saw Wilson more than once, and wrote about it. He said "I still don't trust him, but ...." Johnson, who I think was one of the most articulate African Americans of his time, said "I've got to get over my own prejudice of Wilson." I think he realized Wilson wasn't hating blacks. But he certainly introduced Jim Crow into the federal offices, into Treasury and the Post Office. It's just ironic that this most progressive president should be so regressive about African Americans.

And especially given his support for women's rights and a progressive attitude toward Jews.

He's the most pro-Jewish president we've ever had, I think. I'll stick to that statement. Wilson put the first Jew on the Supreme Court. He consorted regularly with Samuel Gompers. He brought Bernard Baruch into the government during the war and really made him a very important figure, and when the Balfour Declaration was issued in 1917 and Wilson's advisors said "don't even talk about this," Wilson said "too late. I support it. I think there should be a Palestinian state for the Jews. Well, this is 1917. This is 30 years before Harry Truman.

The Brandeis appointment was scandalous. I call that hearing, to echo Clarence Thomas, a low-tech lynching. It really was. It was purely anti-Semitism. That was one of the first glass-ceiling shattering moments in modern times in America, putting Brandeis on the court.

You made the point in your introduction that when Wilson ran for president in 1912 he took on an incumbent president in Taft and an extremely popular former president in TR, who surely would have been re-elected in '08, and Wilson beat them soundly. For a guy who had a year and a half as a governor to do that is no small feat.

It was unbelievable. I believe, and I don't do speculative history, but I believe had Wilson run against either of them he would have beaten them.

But fair to say that Teddy's candidacy took tons of votes from Taft.

No question. Taft ran a distant third, very distant third.

In 1916, Wilson's re-election was a cliffhanger comparable to some of the recent ones we've had.

A real squeaker, as close as you could get. It took weeks before they could certify the election.

And that election was almost completely a referendum on Wilson.

Yes, for sure it was. I think a lot of it is pendulums of history. Wilson accomplished so much in that first term, and I think there is a natural reaction to that much of a swing. I think that contributed to a lot of it. And there were war jitters. That was a big issue. A lot of people wanted us in the war, and that made them vote against Wilson, and a lot of people were afraid we were about to get in the war, and that made some of them wonder about Wilson.

You read Gene Smith's "When the Cheering Stopped" as a kid and were influenced by it. In that book Dr. Cary Grayson really comes off as a hero.

In that book he does. In my book, I admire him for many things, but I definitely pin the label on him, I say that he and Mrs. Wilson conspired. I think it's the greatest White House conspiracy we've ever had. Two or three people, on their own, decided not to discuss Wilson's stroke with anyone. Not with the vice president? I mean, that's a genuine conspiracy. I don't think it was malicious. I don't think it was a power grab. I don't think Mrs. Wilson was Lady Macbeth. But I often argue it the other way, which is ... the vice president, (Thomas) Marshall, was a bit of a buffoon.

A racist of the first order.

All of the above. But race wasn't even on the table. It just wasn't. But here's what I was going to say about Marshall: who's to say Marshall wouldn't have become Harry Truman? They said the same things about Truman in 1944-45, what a joke he was. Didn't he know he was a tailor? And yet he became somebody once the light was on him. Maybe that could have happened to Thomas Marshall.

Who's to say? Not Dr. Grayson, right? That's not his job.

He would say his job was to look after his patient. That meant keeping stress away from Wilson and not moving him out of his bedroom, which happened to be in the White House. The same thinking applied to Edith (Wilson), who was looking out for her husband and nobody else. As I say in the book, she was more concerned about his constitution than the U.S. Constitution.

In his more lucid moments, Wilson knew what had happened to him and thought about resigning.

Yes. The only word I might quarrel with is "lucid." I don't know how he was. We know how that strokes affect emotions, and certainly having those emotional swings, and the fact that one day he's drawing up the list of his third-term Cabinet and what's going to be on the agenda and the next he's talking about resigning, and then he's weeping for no reason. There was so much peculiar behavior, I'm not sure how in control of his thoughts and emotions he was.

It's interesting how with all these major 20th-century figures – Wilson, FDR, JFK – we find out later how sick they really were.

No question about that. Strangely, FDR was almost the healthiest of them. He was paralyzed, but his general health was OK. Wilson's general health was terrible. Certainly his digestion had always been bad, but now we realize it was constantly advancing arteriosclerosis. He was clearly having minor strokes, cerebral episodes of some sort. You can quantify several of them as strokes, going as far back as when he was at Princeton.  Losing his vision, palsy ... if we had known all that, he never would have been elected to anything. 

-- Jeff Baker