Chapter 10, Woodrow Wilson: The Conservative as Liberal Summary and Analysis

Woodrow Wilson grew up the son of a Presbyterian minister and a Presbyterian minister's daughter. They taught young Woodrow to see political life as the process of bringing about the Kingdom of God on earth. For Wilson, politics became his method of spreading "spiritual enlightenment" and urging the country to public service. As a child and as an adult, Wilson had a strong need for affection and adulation. Politics gave him the affection he never received in private. Wilson was raised in the South and was, deep down, a Southern traditionalist. But he came to admire English intellectual ideas. He looked up to a variety of important British statesmen. In the beginning of his career he "stood far closer to Edmund Burke than to Thomas Jefferson." He hated revolutionary...