Woodrow Wilson was born into a world divided and left it even more fractured, yet forever changed by his vision. Few American presidents are as contradictory, as intensely moral and yet as blinkered, as the twenty-eighth president. He was a Presbyterian minister’s son who preached politics as if it were a sermon, a scholar who dreamed of remaking the world through ideas, and a Southern-born progressive who wrapped racial prejudice in the language of order and science. To tell the story of Woodrow Wilson is to trace the arc of the early twentieth century: the last years of the old empires, the rise of modern bureaucratic government, the shattering violence of the First World War, and the birth of an American habit of thinking of itself as the conscience of the world. It is also to follow one man’s rise from shy, stuttering student to the most powe ...