As I sat down in summer 2020 to read this book on Woodrow Wilson's reimagining of eastern Europe in the wake of World War I, he was undergoing a public reassessment here at home. From a residential college at Princeton University to a high school in Portland, Oregon, “Woodrow Wilson” was coming down. How timely it was to learn, then, that the man now being held to account for racism and segregationist policies at home had been hailed in his day as the liberator of “enslaved” nations, a hero to Czechs and Slovaks who flattered Wilson: “Like the voice of Lincoln…so your voice gives new strength to millions of oppressed” (63). Wilson himself came to see his mission in eastern Europe as a great liberation project. “The rhetoric of enslavement and emancipation,” writes Larry Wolff in this erudite and engaging study, “ultimately permitted Wilson to assume the mantle of Lincoln in relation to the Habsburg nationalities” (230).
The topic of this book—the geopolitical reconfiguration of eastern Europe as traced through the character, words, and deeds of the American president—seems to have been hiding in plain sight. Why had it not been written before? Larry Wolff's tackling the subject was worth the wait; in four well-crafted chapters analyzing Wilson's views on the Ottoman Empire, the Habsburg Monarchy, friendship and personal sympathies in diplomacy, and his late-stage “discovery” of national minorities, Wolff constructs a story that is both historiographically significant and genuinely entertaining.
“Mapping” functions as a central motif throughout the book. In a literal sense, cartographers provided the 1919 Peace Conference with its raw materials. “The Inquiry,” a team of scholars established in 1917 to advise Wilson on eastern Europe, produced over a thousand maps for the team in Paris. These maps appear as props in Wolff's drama. In one scene, Wilson is kneeling before a Yugoslav frontier on the carpet, in another he carefully scrutinizes a map before opining on the question of plebiscites. But “mental mapping” is the deeper subject of Wolff's inquiry. Defined as the “approach to geography that considers the subjective, psychological and cultural aspects of how individuals and communities understand the places and spaces on the map” (4), mental mapping takes us on a journey into Wilson's history and head. This is the process by which a Wilsonian imprint was stamped on the region he had never visited.
Wolff argues that Wilson's views on the Ottoman Empire, a state he considered an unmanageable “hornet's nest” comprising a “mass of different races,” served as a template for his eventual position on the Habsburg Monarchy. He would come to “deal with these two political entities in parallel fashion” (24, 32), supporting in each case “dismemberment” and “amputations.” In the Ottoman case, Wolff recounts the proposal, seriously entertained, to establish American mandates in Constantinople and Armenia. Georges Clemenceau remarked that “Constantinople had been offered to President Wilson, but he did not seem anxious to accept it” (45), reflecting the latter's concern that national self-determination, not the aggrandizement of the victors, must determine the diplomacy in a new age.
What little Wilson knew about the Habsburg peoples before arriving in Paris stemmed largely from Habsburg immigrant voting constituencies in the United States. During his subsequent immersion in east European matters, we see Wilson's ambiguous Point Ten (of the Fourteen Points) undergo significant revision. Originally supporting “autonomous development” of peoples within the Habsburg state, by war's end he spoke as an emancipator helping constituent nations achieve “liberation from the yoke of the Austro-Hungarian Empire” (99). The subsequent re-mapping of eastern Europe cannot be fully understood, Wolff argues, without exploring the “cultivation of friendships” that underlay the President's approach to international politics.
A meaty chapter at the heart of this book recounts Wilson's “friendships” with Polish pianist Ignancy Jan Paderewski and future Czechoslovak president Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. Both men flattered him, Paderewski hailing Wilson as the “foster-father of a chiefless land” (120) and Masaryk employing the abovementioned Lincoln rhetoric. Wolff concludes that “personal friendships like these would be emotionally and rhetorically amplified to become Wilsonian friendships for entire nations” (233). Lesser known figures deepened his sentiments and sympathies for eastern Europe, including a Serbian woman who knit him a pair of socks to convey the Serbian people's devotion to the American president, and two goatherds from the Tatra mountains who arrived in Paris to appeal to the “biggest man in all the world” and who stroked Wilson's hand as they pleaded to have their districts included within the borders of the new Poland. These encounters strengthened the “sentimental affirmation of the bond of sympathy” (187) between Wilson and the peoples whose borders he was now mapping. To his new friends, Wilson promised “deliverance.”
But the idiom of friendship and the legibility of maps became murky as more and more national groups appeared out of the woodwork. Whereas from Washington Wilson had seen Poles as clear-cut friends, the diplomatic teams in Paris now heard from Galicians, Ukrainians, Jews, and Ruthenians. Wolff describes negotiators “baffled by the projection of phantoms and abstractions” (213), forced to acknowledge that linguistic frontiers were “jagged and sinuous” (220), and that designating lands “indisputably” populated by one singular nation or another—the aim for Poland in Wilson's Thirteenth Point—was a pipe dream. Commitment to the principle of “self-determination” gave way to concern for the protection of the “national minorities” that this principle inevitably created.
This masterful study is at once a diplomatic history and a history of emotions. Wolff blazes from the geopolitical to the intimate in the course of a sentence. It is a transatlantic history, sailing smoothly between Paris and Omaha, Transylvania and Tacoma. Wolff makes delightful use of the epigraph. Each subsection of the book begins with a tantalizing quotation from his primary sources. “The Washington of the Balkans” introduces Constantinople as the center of a proposed United States mandate in Turkey. “A slice of the Dobrudja” sets up the story of Queen Marie of Romania arriving late for a lunch meeting with Wilson, her country's territorial prospects shrinking with each passing minute. “Loading the dice” introduces David Lloyd George's accusation that Wilson was favoring Poles over Germans in the plebiscite in Upper Silesia. From beginning to end, Wolff manages to weave the macro and the micro into a wonderful narrative.
The current “Wilson removal” efforts underway in the United States will not come as a surprise after reading the account of his legacy in eastern Europe. There, too, he has been erected, removed, and replaced in public spaces several times over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as political fortunes changed in the region of Europe he mapped. He may have been toppled at Princeton, but since 2011 his statue stands again in Prague.
