North Carolina Office of Archives and History

"Brother Woodrow": A Memoir of Woodrow Wilson by Stockton AxsonReview by: Valerie Jean ConnerThe North Carolina Historical Review, Vol. 71, No. 3 (JULY 1994), pp. 392-393Published by: North Carolina Office of Archives and HistoryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23521727 .

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392 Book Reviews

for nearly two years in a free black home during the war are a real-life tale upon which a great slave narrative might have been based.

Educated at Lincoln University and at Harvard Law School in the 1870s, Grimké served as United States consul to the Dominican Republic in the 1890s. Until his death

in 1930, Grimké lived in Boston and Washington, D.C., serving as a leading activist

intellectual in the black elites of both cities. Although he never held elective office, he became a prolific author and newspaper editor, forging a reputation as an indepen dent political operative by supporting Republicans, Democrats, and Progressives. He

wrote biographies of William Lloyd Garrison and Charles Sumner, as well as essays on

virtually every issue on the neoabolitionist agenda: lynching, interracial sex, disfran

chisement, Jim Crow laws, education, and the ravages of industrialism.

Grimké was a fierce opponent of both race consciousness and racism. The heart of Bruce's work is his account of Grimké's deft straddling of the ideological struggle between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois. As a regular columnist for the New York Age, Grimké wrote critically of Washington's accommodationism; and, as a member of Du Bois's Niagara movement, and eventual branch president of the Wash

ington, D.C., NAACP, he also battled repeatedly with Du Bois. Bruce describes how

effectively Grimké functioned as a lobbyist against segregation and racism in the federal

government. The book's achievement is the window it provides into the bitter faction alism among black leadership during the "nadir." It is less effective as an illumination of Grimké's intriguing personality, failed marriage to a white woman, Sarah Stanley, and troubled but important relationship with his daughter Angelina. Bruce is persuasive about Grimké's staunch independence and his passion for racial justice, but one rarely gets a sense of Grimké's self-understanding in this work. Some controversies are mentioned repeatedly but go unexamined, and there are some missed opportunities to

further explicate Grimké's "original" thinking. But through dogged research, Bruce has uncovered the life of an important black intellectual, and the narrative locates the reader inside the local and national crises black leadership faced at the dawn of the modern civil rights struggle.

David W. Blight Amherst College

David W. Blight

"Brother Woodrow": A Memoir of Woodrow Wilson. By Stockton Axson. (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1993. Illustrations, editor's introduction, preface, notes, index. Pp. xiv, 297.

$24.95, cloth.)

Stockton Axson was the brother of Woodrow Wilson's first wife, Ellen Axson, and was Wilson's close friend for almost forty years. At the end of the First World War, Axson and Admiral Cary T. Grayson together planned to write a biography of the

president. Although that book was never completed, Arthur S. Link has now edited the first draft of Axson's chapters, produced between 1919 and 1921, and added to them short selections from Axson's other writings about Wilson in the 1920s and early 1930s.

Segments from Ray Stannard Baker's interviews with Axson and appropriate correla

tive and corrective materials are included in the notes. The result is a beautifully introduced and annotated memoir that "is intended mainly for readers who want to

know the human side of Wilson."

THE NORTH CAROLINA HISTORICAL REVIEW

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Book Reviews 393

Axson was well equipped to write about Wilson's human side, for he was an important

figure in Wilson's extended family, especially before the White House years. He brings the private Wilson to life—in England, his favorite vacation spot, where the consider

ate brother-in-law often rode the train rather than his bicycle in deference to Axson's

delicate health; at Bryn Mawr College and Wesleyan and Princeton Universities, where

popular Professor Wilson and his wife often had a houseful of people, many of them

relatives who had come to live; at Princeton again, where university president Wilson

battled for his vision of a great university and lost. Axson's recounting of the Princeton

years is especially vivid and authoritative because he was a professor of English literature

on the Princeton faculty. Axson also puts Wilson's early years, education, and southern

Presbyterian heritage, which he shared, in context. Finally, he deals with President

Wilson's dashed hopes for the League of Nations and concludes with a moving tribute

to the second Mrs. Wilson, Edith Boiling Gait.

What emerges is a warm portrait of a man whom Axson considered to be "great" by

any standard. But the memoir is not, as Link points out, an uncritical portrait. Axson's

great man could be rigid and cruelly cold to former friends who had disagreed with him

on matters of policy. Axson shows that his friend was human indeed, and that above

all is what makes this memoir worth reading.

Valerie Jean Conner

Florida State University

Valerie Jean Conner

Revolt in the Provinces: The Regionalist Movement in America, 1920-1945. By Robert L. Dormari.

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. Preface, introduction, illustrations,

notes, bibliography, index. Pp. xiv, 366. $45.00.)

In this erudite study of Regionalism, that short-lived intellectual outburst of the

1920s and 1930s, Robert L. Dormán contributes significantly to an understanding of

American thought. His focus is on the clusters of ideas expressed by thinkers and

academics as diverse as Lewis Mumford, in the Northeast; westerners B. A. Botkin,

John G. Neihardt, Mary Austin, John Collier, Mari Sandoz; historians from the

Southwest, mainly Walter Prescott Webb and Henry Nash Smith; and the leading

lights of the two major southern strains of Regionalism: the Agrarians, Allen Tate,

Donald Davidson, and others, and the Chapel Hill sociologists inspired by Howard W.

Odum. Their thinking, as scholars know, was complex; their minds original. Though

perhaps never a "movement," as Dormán assumes, they were an individualistic genera

tion that shared assumptions and produced a body of literature, ripe for historical

analysis. Their outpouring ranges from the Agrarian manifesto, I'll Take My Stand

(1930), to Webb's The Great Plains (1931) to Niehardt's Black Elk Speaks (1932) to

Odum's comprehensive Southern Regions of the United States ( 1936). These works, and many

more, reflect, Dormán argues astutely, a nervous generation's confrontation with moder

nity—irrationality, mass culture, industrialization, urbanization, and social dislocation.

To a person, they were cut off from traditional values, but they yearned for something

to believe in, some faith. They found it, at least for a moment, in Regionalism. But if

it was a movement, as Dormán argues, and basically a religious one, it harvested few

converts. Perhaps, as the ever skeptical Henry Nash Smith lamented in 1934, Region

alism was only a "ghost dance," with "its roots in wishes and desires." Probably so,

VOLUME LXXI • NUMBER 3 • JULY 1994

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