NONFICTION - Nov. 24, 1991

WOODROW WILSON: A Life for World Peace by J. W. Schulte Nordholt (University of California: $34.95; 575 pp.). Just as recent prognostications of a “new world order,” where sects dissolve into a single capitalist culture, have been mocked by recent events in Yugoslavia, so too was Woodrow Wilson’s vision of a “new world society” founded on self-determination mocked by the events of the 1930s, a decade when cultures seemed bent on determining themselves by terminating others. Wilson’s problem, Dutch historian Nordholt acknowledges in this lively, affectionate biography, was that while he talked a good line (he in fact first popularized the phrase “making the world safe for democracy”), he never really understood the emotional volatility of public sentiment. “He could not really comprehend the fierce emotional antagonisms,” Nordholt writes, “within the crazy quilt of peoples--we can still call them ‘tribes’--that inhabit Europe.”

But in this age of few heroes, Nordholt suggests, we would be wise to overlook Wilson’s policy failures and celebrate his ideals, nearly all of which were ahead of his time. Wilson was a noted scholar (helping found the discipline of political science), an egalitarian (attempting to nix elite dining clubs at Princeton), a working-man’s advocate (establishing the eight-hour day for railroad employees), a pacifist (often wondering, “Why do the peoples rage?”) and even a feminist, preferring the company of “clever” women to that of men.