Louis Auchincloss, Woodrow Wilson. (New York: Viking, 2000) 128pp, hardback, $19.95 (ISBN 0-670-88904-0)
Inspired editorial decisions, like directors casting against type, have led to brilliant but unlikely choices for the new series called Penguin Lives, of which this book is one. Sir John Keegan, whose genius is for putting the reader in the shoes of the common soldier, has been asked to write on Sir Winston Churchill; Garry Wills, liberal Catholic and American historian, writes about Saint Augustine of Hippo, whose Confessions, says Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, would join the Bible as his desert island reading. Louis Auchincloss, retired Wall Street attorney and life-long Republican, was assigned the biography of President Woodrow Wilson. Auchincloss as historical essayist has addressed the world of Henry James and Edith Wharton; his collection The Vanderbilt Era, including sketches of Henry Adams and J. P. Morgan, should be read for style as well as substance. This brieflife ofWilson is a sympathetic but not sycophantic introduction to a man whose political career often intersected the life of Cumberland County.
On Thursday, 29 August 1912, Woodrow Wilson, then governor of New Jersey and fresh from the Democratic National Convention, launched his campaign for the federal presidency with a speech at the Grangers' Picnic at Williams Grove, Monroe Township. The organizer of the fair, Mechanicsburg newspaper owner Robert Thomas (a Republican), was ever eager to book prominent speakers, and he welcomed the publicity of such a national speech, however much he would have preferred Theodore Roosevelt. Thomas conveyed Wilson in his automobile, and on that hot day, Wilson left in the car his handkerchief. It was for many years the prized possession of the Thomas family but is now in the Cumberland County Historical Society.
Twice this Journal has featured articles on local associations with Woodrow Wilson. In the Winter 1987, issue, Robert J. Smith presented excerpts from the diary of John A. Smith, a Democratic politician from Penn Township, who had a role in bringing Wilson to the Grangers' Picnic. In the Winter 1992, issue, LeRoy W. Toddes looked at the correspondence of Wilson and Vance McCormick. Amongst other business interests, McCormick owned and developed vast acreage in East Pennsboro Township; he served as mayor of Harrisburg, and was in 1914 the Democratic candidate for governor of Pennsylvania. John O'Hara based his novel, A Rage to Live, on McCormick and his circle in old Harrisburg.
On April 6, 1784, in the county courthouse in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the Board of Trustees of the fledgling Dickinson College met and asked two of its members, John Dickinson and Benjamin Rush, to devise a seal for the college.