Ideational Evolution: Wilson, Gladstone & Disraeli

“How is that your hero should be a  Whig ?” Queen Victoria asked Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli in a letter after she finished her two-month project of reading his final novel Endymion in 1880. Until April of that year Disraeli was the head of the conservative Tory party and therefore in charge of defeating the liberal Whig party. And yet “the whole tone of Endymion is distinctly Whiggish,” as Philip Guedalla wrote in his introduction to a 1926 edition of the book. The lead character is a Tory turned Whig, and many of the most sympathetic supporting characters are Whigs too.  The political observations in this entertaining and wistful novel may fail to coalesce into a  roman à thèse  like those of Disraeli's earlier political novels, which is disappointing. But  Endymion  is an under-read work of considerable wit even when it lacks the thematic focus of his prior novels.  Perhaps the book has a Whiggish tone because Disraeli was in a mellow mood. Th...

In 1886 a young Woodrow Wilson, then a professor at Bryn Mawr College, struck up a conversation with a fellow professor from Indiana University. He poked around asking questions about Indiana University because, as he explained, his friend Richard Heath Dabney was going to be taking a position as a professor of history there. Wilson later told Dabney about the results: “He said, amongst many things that were irrelevant to my purpose, this, which was extremely relevant, that your predecessor, Newkirk, had been turned out because he often spoke before he thought and, thus speaking, had let drop ‘Calhoun views’ on the Constitution. In a word, you have gotten into a chair whose incumbent is expected to present, not the scientific truth with reference to our Constitutional history, whether that truth be on the side of Webster or of Calhoun in the great historical argument, but ‘ Yankee sentiments ’—sentiments agreeable to that eminent body of scholars, the Grand Army of the Republic. It’s a...

Who was Disraeli really on matters of religion?  Why did former Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli write this fairly searching exploration of religious feeling, his second straight novel about a young British aristocrat on a spiritual quest, when in private, to his friends, he was inclined to diss all religions and claim he was incapable of religious belief?  Thinking about the answer to this question makes his novel “Lothair” (a huge bestseller in 1870 but often poorly reviewed) entertaining despite the fact that it is not the best, most original or most informative of his novels.  As in prior novels like “Tancred,” Disraeli’s last novel on religious themes, in “Lothair” he touts Judaism, the religion of his childhood before he was baptized into the Anglican Church at 12 years of age. But this time the focus is on Catholicism. Lothair, the title hero, is based on the real-life 3rd Marquess of Bute, an orphan who is reported to have been the richest man in the world in t...

Woodrow Wilson called himself a “progressive” in 1916, and a “liberal” in 1917, Helena Rosenblatt asserts in her book  The Lost History of Liberalism  (2018). This change of nomenclature, she suggests, happened in part because Wilson “imported” what in Britain is called “the New Liberalism.” While British scholars debate whether there was such a thing as a New Liberalism, the term refers to a sea change between 19 th  Century “Classical Liberalism,” which promoted small government,  lassiez-faire  values and free trade, and 20 th  Century “New Liberalism,” which promoted an activist government that provides a social safety net for the poor, the elderly and the working class. Those who argue for the existence of a New Liberalism say it guided the establishment of a safety net by the ruling Liberal Party between 1906 and 1914. So: what is the evidence Wilson knowingly imported New Liberalism? It certainly would seem to make sense that Wilson would be influenc...

Reception to 1847’s “Tancred, Or the New Crusade,” the third of Benjamin Disraeli’s so-called political trilogy, was largely negative until the last 20 years or so. This generation (2004-2024) has produced multiple scholarly treatments that take the book seriously and lift it above the judgment that it is a silly Orientalist travelogue that simply preaches the superiority of the Jewish race in an effort to promote the political prospects of one particular Jew, Disraeli himself.  The novel is about a young aristocrat named Tancred Montacute, who turns down his father’s request that he seek a seat in parliament because he would rather go to Jerusalem. He yearns for a direct revelation from God, of the type received by the characters in the Bible, and figures such revelations only ever happen in the Holy Land.  'If an angel would but visit our house as he visited the house of Lot!' says Montacute, in a “tone almost of anguish.” 'But I want to see an angel at Manchester....

For decades the conventional wisdom among Woodrow Wilson scholars was that his infamous racism towards African Americans was the product of his being a child of the American South – a simple enough argument and seemingly obvious. However, more recently a strange counterargument keeps emerging in the literature: He was racist, but his racism did not stem from his origins in the American South. This is a harder case to make and has been used to inaccurately diminish his reputation for racism.   Perhaps the first expression of this counterargument was made by the preeminent Wilson scholar Arthur S. Link in a 1970 paper entitled “Woodrow Wilson: The American as Southerner.” Link began his career as a skeptic about President Wilson, but in his last days went so far as to name Wilson as the most impressive person he’d ever read about besides Jesus and St. Paul. This may explain why Link appears to have gone from arguing the conventional wisdom early in his career to innovating the counte...

A forerunner of Charles Dickens’s “Hard Times” and other so-called “condition of England” novels in the Victorian age, Benjamin Disraeli’s “Sybil, or The Two Nations” is a groundbreaking novel of ideas and politics. Scholars debate whether Disraeli invented the political novel. By most definitions he did not; for example his own father wrote anti-Jacobin novels about the influence of the French Revolution on England, which influenced Benjamin’s style. But he was certainly the inventor of something original in this blend of uniquely first-hand parliamentary expertise (he was a member of parliament when he wrote it and would go on of course to become Prime Minister), historical essay, proto-Wildean wit and romantic/adventure narrative. The most recent Oxford World Classics edition is the best available, with many pages of footnotes and a fascinating introduction that assists with interpretation of a novel that was very much of its time and therefore a little challenging to readers today....

Woodrow Wilson famously tried to insist on neutrality in the early days of World War One, refusing to declare a side between the Allies and Germany. But was he really neutral himself? Some speculate that his seeming neutrality was a cover for a dislike for Germans. But other writers argue that, far from being biased against them, he was heavily influenced by specifically German thought. Biographer Patricia O’Toole, author of the book  The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made , was asked the question “Do we know if Wilson, before the war, was determinedly anti-German?” in an interview on CSPAN from the New York Historical Society on May 16, 2018. O’Toole: “Oh yes, he’s anti-German I think from the time he is young … He’s a big Anglophile from his childhood on and he goes to Johns Hopkins where the scholarship is much influenced by German methods and he doesn’t like that--at all--so he contrives to get out of some of his classes and write this book  Congressional Gov...