T he minute I stop changing my mind as President, with the change of all the circumstances in the world, I will be a back number." These are not the words of the Woodrow Wilson most of us know: unflinching idealist, narrow moralist, stubborn racist. But as John Milton Cooper Jr. demonstrates in his biography of the 28th president, they are words to take seriously if we want to understand the ideas, achievements, errors, and impact of a man whose story is too often treated as old news, even as his foreign policy legacy is taken up by liberals and conservatives alike today.

Indeed, Woodrow Wilson should relegate most previous efforts to back-number status themselves. Debate over Wilson’s practical fidelity to his creed will persist, but his ideal of statesmanship as informed adjustment rather than rigid resistance to change, and his genuine commitment to it, will be harder to dispute after reading Cooper’s deeply researched book. Moreover, the appeal of Wilson’s pragmatic idealism in his day, and its divergence from the so-called "Wilsonian" policies pursued and proscribed by ideologues ever since, will interest anyone pondering a new president’s efforts to shift American policy–and political culture–in a more deliberative, even humble, yet fundamentally idealistic direction.

Cooper presents Wilson as a flawed character, marred further by prejudices common to his era, while reminding readers of his timeless virtues and accomplishments. In short, he treats Wilson as both human being and great man. Not everyone will grant that Cooper succeeds; even historians may balk at Cooper’s comfort with contradictions, especially those of a man many in the academy and beyond see as a racist, imperialist, and enemy of civil liberties.

Such contradictions too often cloud our understanding of Wilson, encouraging many liberals to repudiate his legacy in toto. Historians have rightly castigated him for his apathy toward racial injustice and impatience with the civil rights leaders who complained. They have justly condemned the violations of civil liberties his administration committed during wartime. Yet as president of Princeton University, governor of New Jersey, and president of the United States, Wilson spearheaded reforms that awed contemporaries with their boldness and inspired even avant-garde progressives with their egalitarian implications.

True, Wilson sometimes described himself as conservative. But Wilson’s understanding of conservatism bears little relation to modern conceptions. To him, it meant eschewing theory and taking experience–past, present, and most important, social–as one’s guide for responding to change. Essentially, it meant pragmatism. When, in 1910, his gubernatorial rival promised never to ignore "constitutional limitations" in serving the people’s needs, Wilson retorted that he would be "an unconstitutional Governor" who would do just that if circumstances demanded it. Three years later, he inaugurated his presidency by promising tariff reform, progressive taxation, expanded credit, and several other measures designed, as Cooper puts it, "to bring justice and protection to ordinary citizens" struggling with rapid economic change–and in 18 marathon months he pushed nearly all of them through Congress.

Wilson’s attitudes toward the outside world can seem as contradictory as his domestic views. He is remembered both as an imperialist and prophet of international democracy. At the turn of the last century, Wilson did embrace imperialism as a means of uplifting other peoples while enhancing America’s power, and Cooper cites Wilson’s early Latin-American policies as evidence that "a bit of the imperialist was lurking within this new Democratic president." Yet Cooper refuses to assume that deep-seated prejudice toward nonwhite peoples persisted to shape Wilson’s later foreign policy. There is too much evidence it did not. After a hubristic intervention in Mexico in April 1914, Wilson spent three years resisting pressure for a full-scale invasion of the revolution-torn country, even when cross-border chaos threatened Americans and his presidency. His early mistakes there convinced him the Mexicans were not political children wanting a teacher. Indeed, he remarked in August 1914, "There were no conceivable circumstances" justifying outside attempts to direct "a revolution as profound as that which occurred in France." For the rest of Wilson’s presidency, that same attitude informed his policies toward other peoples struggling for self-government, and he interfered with those struggles, regretfully, only when it seemed necessary to prevent more damaging interference from other quarters.

As for racial matters at home, Wilson rarely spoke of them. Too many other matters, vastly more important to him and most white Americans, occupied him. Certainly Wilson sometimes exhibited racial prejudice. But he also sometimes expressed empathy for blacks, and in rare instances acted, timidly, upon it–as when during the war he vehemently (but belatedly) condemned lynching. Either way, he left few clues to his mind, except that it was generally elsewhere. On civil liberties, too, Wilson remains, in Cooper’s words, "a mystery." The best one can glean from his papers is that he feared but respected the power of popular passions, gambled on his ability to direct them to constructive ends in wartime, and was either distracted from or incapable of that task amidst the others war presented.

Despite these challenges, evidence of Wilson’s democratic instincts litters Cooper’s pages. The figure that emerges expended far more energy pursuing ideals modern liberals can embrace than clinging to prejudices they must abhor. Those various ideals were subsumed under a single, paramount ideal: perfecting self-government. Yet Wilson’s particular conceptions of his ideals, and how to realize them, changed over time, reflecting the very meaning of self-government as he understood it: the power and responsibility of communities to adapt cooperatively to change. In short, Wilson was an oxymoron in modern political discourse: a pragmatic idealist.

For Cooper, Thomas Woodrow Wilson epitomizes "the mobile, rootless American" central to American myth. Born in the South to a northern father and immigrant mother, he lived in eight states before assuming the presidency. His faith, too, was all-American, or what used to be considered so; though the deeply religious son of a Presbyterian minister, he never treated his faith as a guidebook to politics. Still, "Tommy" learned to view life through the prism of God’s covenant with humanity, which demanded constant service to others and vigilance over oneself. In college he wrote constitutions for numerous campus groups–all amendable, as life was changeable. In 1884, Wilson (now "Woodrow") even asked his fiancée Ellen–his first wife, who died while he was in office in 1914–to ratify a two-member "Love League" permitting adoption of new "bylaws…as they become necessary."

An unhappy stint as a lawyer made Wilson scornful of legalistic solutions to human problems. He turned to history, and made his scholarly reputation arguing that the living Constitution had grown twisted by strict constructions impeding its development. He garnered national attention in the early 1900s as the reforming president of Princeton University, which he determined to make a more modern, egalitarian, tight-knit community of inquiry. After academic politics prompted his resignation, he followed a similar vision for the state of New Jersey–with the same intense commitment that, for years, brought him near tears when he thought of his unfinished work at Princeton.

No reader introduced to this Wilson will easily credit the commonplace notion that he was a fair-weather progressive. He was a reformer at heart. As governor and president, he was indeed an "opportunist," wooing constituencies to back his goals. But those goals began liberal and developed in progressive and even radical directions, informed by early, sympathetic engagement with socialistic thought. Granted, reverence for Edmund Burke–whom he considered the prophet of "expediency" in government–encouraged his skepticism of theoretical socialism, along with laissez-faire conservatism, populist utopianism, and all political dogmatisms. But Wilson refused to judge policies by their provenance. Rather, his test was their relevance to goals emerging from "common counsel": the collective inquiry of citizens trained in habits of deliberative discourse, encouraged by leaders adept at fostering constructive exchange.

Convinced that economic stratification impeded common counsel, Wilson devoted his early presidency to a "New Freedom" legislative program designed to rebalance economic power. Simultaneously, he spearheaded a suite of institutional innovations–including the Federal Reserve–to exercise constant vigilance over a dynamic economy and address problems no single Congress or executive could anticipate. Cooper argues compellingly that by the time Wilson ran for reelection in 1916, he had achieved a record of constructive legislation later rivaled only by Franklin Roosevelt’s and Lyndon Johnson’s. And Wilson had already moved on: Concluding that corporate, commercial, and monetary reforms only began to address industrial America’s inequalities, he wrote nearly every social-justice goal of the 1912 Progressive Party into the 1916 Democratic platform. Positioning his party as that of government activism for common people, Wilson "[laid] the foundation for the majority Democratic coalition" his successors enjoyed from the 1930s to the 1960s.