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Reconsidering Woodrow Wilson: Progressivism, Internationalism, War, and Peace. Ed. by John Milton Cooper Jr. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. xii, 359 pp. $60.00, isbn 978-0-8018-9074-1.)
This volume grew out of a symposium celebrating the sesquicentennial of the birth of Woodrow Wilson. John Milton Cooper Jr. details Wilson's domestic accomplishments in the "New Freedom" and a second round of programs in 1916. Wilson accomplished more than did the New Deal and the Great Society, but he did not do as well in foreign affairs. Wilson was a thoughtful man with an intellectual depth greater than any president save for Abraham Lincoln.
Trygve Throntveit writes on Wilson the pragmatic Progressive, arguing that "he forecast the ascendancy of a humane empiricism in national politics" (p. 25). Wilson wanted government to be more powerful, flexible, and representative, firmly believing "in an empiricist, pragmatic approach to politics" (p. 43). W Elliot Brownlee examines Wilson as an economic reformer and finds...