That time a President's wife actually ran the country

Editor's note: This is the 28th entry in the writer's year-long project to read one book about each U.S. President in the year prior to Election Day 2016. You can also follow Marcus' progress at the @44in52 Twitter account and with this 44 in 52 Spreadsheet.

Once again, as with the mediocre William Henry Harrison, I've reached a president whose name I remember mostly from The Simpsons.

In the episode "Bart the Lover," Bart poses as a man who gets into a pen-pal relationship with his teacher; in the parlance of 2016, he catfishes her. He uses a picture of hockey legend Gordie Howe, but uses the name "Woodrow" when he sees a picture of the 28th president.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

I am well aware of how absurd this is, but it's important that you understand how little I know about some of these presidents heading into each book.

A. Scott Berg's biography, Wilson, does an excellent job of laying out Wilson's meteoric rise from college president (Princeton!) to governor (New Jersey!) to president (USA!). It also points out he was bolstered by a successful side-career as a writer, publishing several books and essays on political history. Altogether, it was a whiplash-inducing ascent similar to that of Grover Cleveland.

Still, despite his path through elite eastern institutions, Wilson was a Southerner. He spent most of his life in Georgia and the Carolinas. This upbringing shaped him --often for the worse, as his controversial stance on segregation for federal employees showed. Wilson even threw a prominent black newspaper editor out of the white house after a confrontation over race.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

Berg offers plenty of smaller anecdotes from Wilson's early life and even delves deep into rumors that circulated for years -- that Wilson had an affair with Mary Hulbert, a woman he met on vacation. But Berg concludes it didn't happen -- because Wilson was too pious to step out on his wife.

It's Wilson's second term that contains the most extraordinary and tragic story, though. He won the 1916 election by promising to keep the U.S. out of World War I, and was genuinely reluctant to do so, then entered the action anyway. Given the candidates we have a century later -- one who voted to take the U.S. into Iraq in 2003 then regretted it, and one who claims he didn't support that action but evidently wants to bomb anything he can -- it's a story that resonates.

Wilson staked everything -- and I mean everything -- on the League of Nations once World War I was over. While forging the Treaty of Versailles, which was a wonderfully ridiculous story of international political posturing in its own right, the other Allied powers shrugged off Wilson's famed "Fourteen Points" but accepted his proposed league.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

Taking the proposal back home, Wilson transformed from something of an isolationist pragmatist who wanted to avoid war into a crusader who wanted the League to succeed at any cost.

Wilson pushed hard even as Henry Cabot Lodge and the Republican Congress battled him directly, doing everything they could to avoid ratifying the Treaty, and still finding ways to portray themselves as saviors of peace.

This battle punctuated the end of Wilson's time in office, and it bears more than a passing resemblance to the battles of recent years between President Obama and the GOP-dominated Congress.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Already prone to poor health in the years before taking office, Wilson succumbed to the pressure and toil of pushing the League and taking his case to the people. In October 1919, he suffered a massive stroke -- which also led to a massive Constitutional crisis. One which the public hardly knew about.

Wilson's second wife, Edith, and his personal physician, Dr. Cary Grayson, literally hid the president from public view. No one was willing to declare Wilson unfit to lead. At the time, only Article II of the Constitution contained directions to replace the president. But this article had already been the subject of debate (the phrasing of "acting president" came into play when Tyler succeeded William Henry Harrison).

But since Wilson was neither dead nor willing to resign, Edith Wilson secretly ran the country in his stead. Wilson eventually recovered enough to make public appearances. He seemed to be mostly cognizant of his situation and the actions required of him. But there's no doubt now that Edith Wilson helmed the White House from 1919 until her husband left office in 1921.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

In 1967 the 25th Amendment, partially inspired by this situation, would be ratified to clarify the succession issue. But Edith Wilson wouldn't be the last presidential spouse with outsized influence on the office; witness Nancy Reagan and her alleged reliance on an astrologer, as well as Hillary Clinton's role during her husband's presidency.

With so much going on here, there were other parts of Wilson's presidency that Berg gives short shrift -- such as the rise of temperance and the ratification of the alcohol-banning 18th Amendment. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Wilson's upbringing as a minister's son played into his support for temperance. But that's left largely untouched.

So, too, is how Wilson maneuvered himself past a powerful New Jersey political boss. To take Berg at his word, Wilson simply said no to the boss and that was that. There was no political retribution or trouble for Wilson -- which seems either too good to be true, meaning there are some good fights left out, or that boss wasn't much of a boss.

But with such a strong narrative in the rest of the book, these are minor quibbles. Wilson, it turns out, was way more than a Simpsons caricature.

Days to read Washington: 16 Days to read Adams: 11 Days to read Jefferson: 10 Days to read Madison: 13 Days to read Monroe: 6 Days to read J. Q. Adams: 10 Days to read Jackson: 11 Days to read Van Buren: 9 Days to read Harrison: 6 Days to read Tyler: 3 Days to read Polk: 8 Days to read Taylor: 8 Days to read Fillmore: 14 Days to read Pierce: 1 Days to read Buchanan: 1 Days to read Lincoln: 12 Days to read Johnson: 8 Days to read Grant: 27 Days to read Hayes: 1 Days to read Garfield: 3 Days to read Arthur: 17 Days to hear Cleveland: 3 Days to read Harrison: 4 Days to read McKinley: 5 *Days to read T. Roosevelt: 15 *Days to read Taft: 13 *Days to read Wilson: 10

Days behind schedule: 3