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Wilson's War: How Woodrow Wilson's Great Blunder Led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and World War II
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Wilson's War: How Woodrow Wilson's Great Blunder Led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and World War II |
Author: Jim Powell
Published: 2005-03-29 |
List price: $27.50
Our price: $7.95
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As of: September 05th, 2008 10:53:24 PM
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Customer comments on this selection.
 Heavy-Handed Editorializing?
Jeez, could the editorial review at least pretend to suppress their bias towards pro-British interpretation of the history?
Fascinating Read, Ultimately Unsatisfying
This book sets out the revise the record on Woodrow Wilson and his policies. Wilson brought America into WWI, resulting in a victory for the British/French coalition over that of Germany/Austria. This victory, after years of horrible bloodshed, became a punishing peace for the German people, no more responsible for the war than anyone else involved in it. Powell very accurately and ably describes how this lead to Hitler, Stalin, WWII, and ultimately our troubles in Iraq. Unfortunately, more of the book is spent addressing the results of Wilson's blundering rather than the cause. That, in my opinion, really dragged the book down. It was a good overview of the first half of the 20th century as it descended into chaos, but I didn't get a good view of, as the title of the book states, Wilson's War. Based on the title, I would have expected something more along the lines of Flemings "Illusion of Victory" followed by the second half of this book. Lastly, as other reviewers have pointed out, the book does seem to be written expressly to lead to the largely isolationist conclusion of the author. There's nothing wrong with that in general, but it doesn't feel quite correct in a book that purports to be history and not polemic.
 Weak historical scholarship
Having read many of the books cited by the author, I began to question the authors credentials and scholarship. What primary sources were used? It's more of a barroom argument put down in writing than a serious historical thesis. Emotionally biased phrases such as, "Wilson was an arrogant and bitter man" without delving into the causes for this arrogance and bitterness leave me flat. The intended audience for this book appears to be high school students, as it provides a general survey of modern, Western history without much detail. While I actually agree with much of the author's main points, there are much better books on the subject. They are all listed in Powell's bibliography.
 Don't Follow Leaders
This book is not the ultimate work of historical scholarship about World War I, but it is an informative and well thought out look at one of the worst presidents in American history and another nail in the coffin of the cult of leadership (see also titles like "Lincoln Unmasked" and "Bully Boy", "The New Dealers War" and "The Bush Betrayal"). This is a welcome contribution to the new wave of popular historical interpretations that are attempting to give balance to a field long dominated by tax-funded, left wing academics who miss no chance to support, justify and glory in expansions of State power without regard to loss of life or econimic cost.
And don't be mislead when post-modernist, welfare statists, like the folks at Publisher's Weekly use the word "isolationist" to describe anything you're thinking of reading. It's mearly a naked attempt to smear any philosophy that would impose limits on the size and scope of government. Non-interventionism is not isolationism!
 An Effective Essay, Ineffective History
Jim Powell's book would have made an excellent op-ed piece in the Sunday New York Times or essay in The Weekly Standard, but it is not a strong work of sustained historical research and analysis. His central argument that American entry into World War I (not merely the Treaty of Versailles) paved the way for the rise of Hitler, the triumph of Lenin and Stalin, and the coming of World War II is compelling. Many historians have written about the tragic consequences of the failed peace and about Wilson's naïve belief that he could control the machinations and jealousies of the European powers, but Powell makes the more provocative case that the world would have been better off had the U.S. allowed World War I to end in a stalemate.
What is disappointing about this book (and about the lavish praise it has received in other reviews) is the shallowness of its research and its disdain for historical context. Primary sources are almost entirely absent from the endnotes. Incredibly, this book devoted to an indictment of Wilson for "his" war does not even mention Theodore Roosevelt, Leonard Wood, or any of the apostles of preparedness to whom Wilson was reacting politically. Powell did not consult the important books of N. Gordon Levin, Jr., or Lawrence Gelfand that lay out in great detail the ideological origins and objectives of Wilson's Fourteen Points. Readers of this book unfortunately will come away with insufficient understanding of how and why Woodrow Wilson formulated the foreign policy that Powell finds so historically destructive.
Readers may also come away thinking that Jim Powell has blown the cover off of the Wilson mythology - a mythology constructed and nurtured by historians Thomas A. Bailey and Arthur Link. Like other recent works of "revisionism" (such as Thomas DiLorenzo's The Real Lincoln), Powell creates a straw-man "conventional view" of his subject and fails to give adequate credit to previous generations of revisionist historians. The job of challenging Wilson's historical image as progressive idealist was already accomplished decades ago, ironically, by historians from the opposite ideological pole. The "New Left" historians of the 1960s indicted Wilson's interventionism because they believed it planted the seeds of America's involvement in Vietnam, Central America, and other conflicts of the Cold War era.
Powell seems more interested in demonstrating the efficacy of his four principles that should guide the making of U.S. foreign policy and the managing of political economy than he is in writing sound history. The libertarian ideology of the Cato Institute (where he is a senior fellow) is apparent on virtually every page. The information he imparts sometimes seems oddly chosen as historical evidence, but makes sense as building blocks for the ideological edifice he constructs. This kind of writing makes for an effective essay, but does little to enlighten us about the making of U.S. foreign policy.
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