Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [86]
Dislike shows too in borrowings from William Bayard Hale’s clever but venomous Story of a Style, published in 1920. Although, according to Dr. Jones, Freud had read this book “with gusto,” Bullitt in his preface carefully omits it from the list of books they consulted.
Kept under control, bias can direct and inform an inquiry, but Freud allows himself the undisciplined prejudices of a Personage—with sometimes ludicrous results. The passage on America is certainly his. According to this, Wilson was able to flourish in America because America was a nation “protected from reality during the nineteenth century by inherited devotion to the ideals of Wyclif, Calvin and Wesley” and because the “Thou shalt not!” of the “Lollard” tradition produced an atmosphere congenial to women and feminine men but “intolerable” to a masculine man. Had Wilson been brought up in “the comparative freedom of European civilization,” the argument continues, he would have had to face up to his inner conflicts.
One is almost helpless before this concoction. Besides twice using “Lollard” where he means “Puritan” (a very different thing), and assuming that Puritanism was alien to masculine men (Cotton Mather? Oliver Cromwell?), and transferring in one magnificent swoop the entire Protestant tradition of Europe to the United States, and picturing Europe in the Victorian age as a place where screens of rationalizations fell “early,” the passage also imagines an America that is the never-never land of Peter Pan. It exemplifies a characteristic of the psychoanalytic method that is its own worst enemy, the habit of rapid expansion from the perceptive and profound to the fatuous.
The authors give Wilson no credit for ideas. They absurdly claim that his legislative program as President was derived from Colonel House’s novel Philip Dru, evidently themselves suffering from total ignorance of the Progressive movement and its ideas. When Wilson takes a definite stand, they gave it a minimizing explanation; they ignore or underrate his positive policies; they are lavish with sarcasm. When forced to allow that Wilson’s super-ego drove him to “considerable accomplishments,” they hurriedly add that it made him in the end “not one of the world’s greatest men but a great fiasco.” Their emphasis is always on the failure, not the achievement. True, Wilson’s end, from the Peace Conference on, was a fiasco, but not the totality of his life and not what he is remembered for.
How do the authors account for his “considerable accomplishments”? Easily. It was a matter of rhetoric. Superb oratory was the secret of his influence. They present Wilson as obsessed by speech-making, as no doubt he was. (In Freudian terms speechmaking, it appears, is a “pleasure of the mouth,” and the mouth is a “feminine weapon.” They have lost me here.) But that his speeches were merely verbal emperor’s clothes, the pretense of a vacant mind, hardly suffices to explain a man whose collected papers are now being issued in forty volumes, who had the stuff to fill an eight-volume official biography thirty years ago, plus a new one of equal length now under way, as well as countless other appraisals and studies over a period of fifty years. Behind Wilson’s speeches were thought and profound belief and ideas which pierced