SOURCE: "Brains Win and Lose Woodrow Wilson," in The Quick and The Dead, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1931, pp. 43-78.

In the following essay, Bradford presents a biographical and thematic overview of Wilson's life and career, stressing in particular the manifestations and character of Wilson's intellectual bent.

I

It would not be just to speak of Wilson as all brains. There was plenty of emotional life also. Yet you feel always that the intellect was the driving, the controlling force, and the defects of brains are as obvious in him as the excellences. For brains can do the greatest things in the world, they can develop ideals, they can build up states and civilizations, but they can also mislead and ruin and shatter an individual who puts a too blind trust in them.

Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born in Staunton, Virginia, in 1856. He came of that Scotch-Irish stock which gave...