Woodrow Wilson: United States

Makers of the Modern World: The peace conferences of 1919-23 and their aftermath
By Brian Morton

It is September 1919 – a meeting hall in a small mid-Western city. Athin man is speaking to a sceptical audience about peace. He hasalready met the city fathers and has been warned that ‘out here’ whathappens in Europe means very little. Even the late war was scarcely impinged on the place, though it had been recognised that it hadn't been altogether good for trade and one or two local boys had died on the fields of France in the very last days of the conflict. ...

Woodrow Wilson will live another five years, but his battle to convince America to join the League is lost and much of the vigour that marked his time as President of his country, as president of Princeton University, even as an enthusiastic college football coach, was left behind in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.

'[Wilson's] finest hour, though, came after the war, says Brian Morton in thefirst of what Haus promises will be a 32-volume account of the postwarpeace conferences. Wilson helped usher in the Treaty of Versailles;though that treaty has been criticised (of Wilson’s 14-point peace plan, Clemenceau remarked that even God hadonly 10 commandments). But here Morton ably defends it – and Wilson –by arguing that the road to hell is better paved with good intentionsthan not paved at all.'

Christopher Bray, Financial Times (read the whole review here)

'The allied ‘big three’ lead the first six titles... All three capture and convey the essential tragedies of their subjects.'
Nigel Jones, Literary Review, November 2008

Brian Morton taught American studies at universities in Britain and Scandinavia, before working for ten years as features and subsequently literary editor at the Times Higher Education Supplement. Through the 1990s he presented a daily arts and culture programme on BBC Radio Scotland. He is now a full-time writer.