Abstract
Confusion and controversy have surrounded both the state of Woodrow Wilsons health and the reasons for U.S. rejection of the Versailles Treaty. Scholars have reached no consensus on either of these questions, and certainly not on the nexus between them. Specialists in medicine and psychology, as well as historians and political scientists, have entered into this scholarly controversy, offering conflicting interpretations of the president s physical and psychological condition, and especially its impact on his political leadership in 1919 and 1920. Anyone seeking to understand the politics of peacemaking in the United States after World War I must, therefore, take into account the condition of Wilsons mind and body. His political personality—however it was shaped—was a significant factor in the fight over the League of Nations.
Lloyd E. Ambrosius, “Woodrow Wilson’s Health and the Treaty Fight, 1919–1920,” The International History Review 9 (February 1987): 73–84. Reprinted by permission of The International History Review.
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Notes
Thomas A. Bailey, Woodrow Wilson and the Great Betrayal (New York: Macmillan, 1943), 145, 173, 243, 277.
Sigmund Freud and William C. Bullitt, Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), 261, 281–3, 289, 291.
For a condensed version of this study, see Sigmund Freud and W. C. Bullitt, “Woodrow Wilson (I),” Encounter 28 (Jan. 1967): 3–24, and “Woodrow Wilson (II),” ibid., 28 (Feb. 1967): 3–24.
Freud and Bullitt, Thomas Woodrow Wilson, 259, 263–4. For an alternative, and much more realistic, interpretation of Wilson’s role during the peace conference, see Klaus Schwabe, Woodrow Wilson, Revolutionary Germany, and Peacemaking, 1918–1919: Missionary Diplomacy and the Realities of Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985).
Other factual errors are outlined by Arthur S. Link, “The Case for Woodrow Wilson,” in The Higher Realism of Woodrow Wilson and Other Essays (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1971), 140–54.
For other critiques of the Freud-Bullitt study, see Erik H. Erickson, “The Strange Case of Freud, Bullitt, and Woodrow Wilson: I,” and Richard Hofstadter, “The Strange Case: II,” New York Review of Books 8 (Feb. 9, 1967): 3–8;
Joshua A. Hoffs, “Comments on Psychoanalytic Biography with Special Reference to Freud’s Interest in Woodrow Wilson,” Psychoanalytic Review 56 (1969): 402–14;
and Paul Roazen, Freud: Political and Social Thought (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), 300–322.
Alexander L. George and Juliette L. George, Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House: A Personality Study (New York: Dover, 1964; 1st edition, 1956), 196, 311;
Alexander L. George, “Power As a Compensatory Value for Political Leaders,” Journal of Social Issues 24 (1968): 29–49.
James David Barber, The Presidential Character: Predicting Performance in the White House (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1972), 63.
Freud and Bullitt, Thomas Woodrow Wilson, 284. For Wilson’s stronger motivation for power than achievement, see David G. Winter, The Power Motive (New York: Free Press, 1973), 212–16.
Edwin A. Weinstein, “Woodrow Wilson’s Neurological Illness,” Journal of American History 57 (1970): 397, 346.
See also Edwin A. Weinstein, “Denial of Presidential Disability: A Case Study of Woodrow Wilson,” Psychiatry 30 (1967): 376–90,
and Walter J. Friedlander, “About Three Old Men: An Inquiry into how Cerebral Arteriosclerosis has altered World Politics,” Stroke 3 (1972): 467–9.
John A. Garraty, Interpreting American History: Conversations with Historians, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 2: 140.
Edwin A. Weinstein, James William Anderson, and Arthur S. Link, “Woodrow Wilson’s Political Personality: A Reappraisal,” Political Science Quarterly 93 (1978): 585–98.
Edwin A. Weinstein, Woodrow Wilson: A Medical and Psychological Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 363.
Charles E. Neu, “The Search for Woodrow Wilson,” Reviews in American History 10 (1982): 223–8;
John Milton Cooper, Jr., The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 339–42.
For a somewhat more skeptical assessment, see Robert H. Ferrell, Woodrow Wilson and World War I, 1917–1920 (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 161, 273–4.
Juliette L. George and Alexander L. George, “Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House: A Reply to Weinstein, Anderson, and Link,” Political Science Quarterly 96 (1981–2): 641–65;
Michael F. Marmor, “Wilson, Strokes, and Zebras,” New England Journal of Medicine 307 (Aug. 26, 1982): 528–35.
For the basis of this judgment, see Lloyd E. Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition: The Treaty Fight in Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
See, for example, John A. Garraty, Henry Cabot Lodge: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), 294–401,
and William C. Widenor, Henry Cabot Lodge and the Search for an American Foreign Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 171–348.
Bernard Brodie, “A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Woodrow Wilson,” World Politics 9 (1957): 416.
Jerrold M. Post, “Woodrow Wilson Re-examined: [The Mind-Body Controversy Redux and Other Disputations]”; Juliette L. George and Alexander L. George, “Comments on ’Woodrow Wilson Re-examined’”; Edwin A. Weinstein, “Comments on ’Woodrow Wilson Re-examined’”; Michael Marmor, “Comments on ‘Woodrow Wilson Reexamined’”; and Jerrold M. Post, “Reply to the Three Comments on ‘Woodrow Wilson Re-examined,’” Political Psychology 4 (1983): 289–331;
Juliette L. George, Michael E Marmor, and Alexander L. George, “Issues in Wilson Scholarship: References to Early ’Strokes’ in the Papers of Woodrow Wilson,” and Arthur S. Link, David W. Hirst, John Wells Davidson, and John E. Little to the Editor, Journal of American History 70 (1984): 845–53, 945–55. For a good summary of the controversy, see Thomas T. Lewis, “Alternative Psychological Interpretations of Woodrow Wilson,” Mid-America 65 (1983): 71–85.
George D. Herron, Woodrow Wilson and the World’s Peace (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1917), 68–77;
Mitchell Pirie Briggs, George D. Herron and the European Settlement (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1932), 249.
For the importance of religion in Wilson’s life and its influence on his foreign policy, see Arthur S. Link, “Woodrow Wilson and his Presbyterian Inheritance” and “The Higher Realism of Woodrow Wilson,” in Higher Realism of Woodrow Wilson, 3–20, 127–39; John M. Mulder, Woodrow Wilson: The Years of Preparation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978),
and Robert M. Crunden, Ministers of Reform: The Progressives’ Achievement in American Civilization, 1889–1920 (New York: Basic Books, 1982), 225–73.
George and George, Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House, 273; Arthur S. Link, Woodrow Wilson: Revolution, War, and Peace (Arlington Heights, IL: AHM Publishing Corporation, 1979), 107; Weinstein, Woodrow Wilson, 349.
Lloyd Ambrosius, “Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for Orderly Progress,” in Traditions and Values: American Diplomacy, 1865–1945, ed. Norman A. Graebner (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983), 73–100.
This point is suggested, but not developed, by Robert Dallek, The American Style of Foreign Policy: Cultural Politics and Foreign Affairs (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), 91.
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Ambrosius, L.E. (2002). Woodrow Wilson’s Health and the Treaty Fight, 1919–1920. In: Wilsonianism: Woodrow Wilson and His Legacy in American Foreign Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403970046_11
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