Sublime

That Woodrow Wilson, a Southerner, would seek to roll back empires made sense. His sympathy for the colonized was no doubt fueled by his anger at how the North had treated what Wilson called its “conquered possessions”—the former Confederate states—after the Civil War. But there was another, darker side to Wilson’s Southern identity. He was not

Southerner, Wilson had been president of Princeton, the only major northern university that flatly refused to admit blacks. He was an outspoken white supremacist—his wife was even worse—and told “darky” stories in cabinet meetings.

Briefly Carleton considered the other man, of whom he’d made such a study he might have been appointed professor of Thomas Studies at the University of Essex. He knew, for example, that Thomas was a confirmed bachelor, as they say, never seen in the company of a beautiful young person or a stately older one; that he had about him the melancholy

Wilson led our country reluctantly into World War I and after the war led the struggle nationally and internationally to establish the League of Nations. They associate Wilson with progressive causes like women’s suffrage. A handful of students recall the Wilson administration’s Palmer raids against left-wing unions. But my students seldom know or

TR recalled the typical American for whom he had governed. In his Autobiography, the former president reprinted a cartoon of an elderly, bewhiskered man, his feet by a fire, reading a copy of “The President’s Message” in a newspaper. The caption: “His Favorite Author.” TR loved it. “This was the old fellow whom I always used to keep in my mind,”

But for the Virginia-born Wilson, the New Freedom was for whites only. The first southerner elected president since Zachary Taylor, Wilson immediately segregated the government’s workforce.

Mann’s candidacy was a different story. The young Attorney General’s personal qualities attracted loyalty. The wording on the plaque he had hung on the wall behind his desk—“I sacrificed no principle to gain this office and I shall sacrifice no principle to keep it”—did not strike a false note with those who knew him, and neither did his habit of

O, what may man within him hide, Though angel on the outward side!

He and FDR became lifelong friends, and their partnership endured until Roosevelt’s death. The president often used O’Connor to transmit messages he did not wish to entrust to political associates—a confidential conduit he knew he could rely on.