He refused to make concessions to his critics, even when that was clearly his only viable choice. That failure was further evidence, they argued, of Wilson’s abominable statesmanship. Some of the animosity that Freud and other critics aimed at Wilson was unfair: After dinging him for negotiating a treaty they regarded as dangerously misguided, they turned around and chided him for his inability to shepherd it through the U.S Senate, an institution he had carefully studied during his long, celebrated career as a professor. Read: The racist legacy of Woodrow Wilson Wilson’s failure to make good on these bloated expectations was the source of Freud’s fascination and fury, as it was for a generation of intellectuals.

He not only had the best plan for realizing his high ideals, but he also possessed an acute understanding of what might go wrong if the Allies allowed their sense of grievance to drive them to impose harsh terms on the vanquished. Of all the politicians of his day, Wilson most clearly envisioned the better world that could emerge from war, built on values of self-determination and democracy. What he represented was, in fact, redemption: the promise of eternal peace and the dawn of a new world order. That tableau followed him to every European city he visited. “An immense cry of love,” read the six-column headline in Le Petit Parisien. When Wilson arrived in France at the end of 1918, one month after the armistice that ended the Great War, he was greeted by adoring crowds hanging out of windows, crowding sidewalks, and chanting his name. But that’s because the current prevailing image of the early-20th-century president-an enforcer of white supremacy, an enemy of civil liberties, a man preserved in sepia photographs as an unsmiling prig wearing a pair of pince-nez-is so remote from the near-messianic character that he cut in his day. But in the end, he found one leader so fascinating and so maddening that his ethical qualms apparently melted away.įrom the distance of the present, it’s almost impossible to imagine that Woodrow Wilson was the one public figure whom Freud felt compelled to put on the couch. It just wasn’t right to rummage around in the mind of a subject who didn’t consent to the practice. However irresistible the temptation to burrow into the inner life of kings, prime ministers, and tycoons, he wouldn’t analyze famous contemporaries from afar.

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