Woodrow Wilson

President of the United States (1913–21)

• Born: December 28, 1856
• Birthplace: Staunton, Virginia
• Died: February 3, 1924
• Place of death: Washington, DC

Wilson was responsible for the entry of the United States into World War I, but he also was one of the formulators of the Paris peace settlement and was the principal architect of the League of Nations, a precursor to the United Nations.

Early Life

Woodrow Wilson’s passion for constitution-making came from his childhood experience in drafting a set of rules for a neighborhood club that met in a hayloft. From then on, he tried to reform any organization he joined, crafting new sets of procedures and aims and then going on to repeat the procedure somewhere else. He rarely let himself get involved with practical application; he was essentially a policymaker. Also from his early days, or more specifically from his stern father, Joseph Ruggles Wilson, a Presbyterian minister and theologian, came his highly developed sense of moral righteousness. This was reinforced by his mother, the daughter of a minister, Thomas Woodrow, pastor of a church in Carlisle, England, before he migrated to the United States in 1836. As president of the United States, Wilson would have the privilege of preaching a sermon from his grandfather’s old pulpit in 1919. It was one of the high points of his life.

When Wilson was a year old, his family moved to Augusta, Georgia, where he lived during the Civil War, a conflict that influenced his later determination to create an organization to guarantee international peace and cooperation. When he was fourteen, his father was appointed professor at the theological seminary in Columbia, South Carolina, and several years later became pastor of a church in Wilmington, North Carolina. In 1874, Wilson entered college, first at nearby Davidson College, then, the following year, at the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University), where he participated in literary activities and in debate. On graduation in 1879, he enrolled at the University of Virginia law school, which led him to a brief and unsuccessful legal practice in Atlanta, Georgia. In 1883, he entered Johns Hopkins University, receiving his PhD in government and history three years later.

Over the next decade and a half, Wilson held a variety of academic positions, at Bryn Mawr College, Wesleyan University in Connecticut, and Princeton University, of which, in 1902, he became president. He devoted himself to reshaping undergraduate education, working to institute a preceptorial system whereby students and professors would live together in quadrangles to follow common scholarly pursuits; the plan, however, was opposed by the trustees and never adopted. Wilson also failed to gain control of the graduate school, a loss to his self-esteem that made him turn to politics as compensation.

In 1910, Wilson accepted the Democratic nomination for the governorship of New Jersey and ran on a Progressive platform, promising to reform the election system with direct primaries, to introduce antitrust legislation, and to wipe out corruption. He was elected by a plurality of 49,000 votes and immediately proceeded to enact his program despite the fact that the Republicans enjoyed a majority in both houses of the New Jersey congress. His success brought him wider attention, and in the election year of 1912, he was persuaded to become a contender for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States, winning on the forty-sixth ballot against the party favorite, Speaker of the House Champ Clark.

Wilson brought his Progressivism into national politics as the New Freedom. He ran against a badly divided Republican Party split between the candidacies of William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt and won 42 percent of the national vote, one million votes less than the combined tally of his opponents. In the electoral college, however, he got 435 votes to their 96. With both houses of Congress now under Democratic control, Wilson looked forward to carrying out the major reforms for which he had fought during his campaign.

Life’s Work

Wilson’s entire political experience had been with domestic politics, and once in the White House, he took a direct role in the presentation of his legislative program to Congress, which had not been done since the presidency of John Adams. In short order, he saw adopted a federal income tax, the Federal Reserve Board to control the nation’s currency, and the Clayton Anti-Trust Act, which strengthened labor’s right to strike. Under Wilson, the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Labor came into being in 1912 and 1913, respectively. It was Wilson’s role in foreign affairs, however, for which he is best known.

His inauguration coincided with the outbreak of a revolt in Mexico against General Victoriano Huerta, who had become president with the connivance of the American ambassador Henry Lane Wilson. Woodrow Wilson considered the Mexican strongman a bloody usurper and denied him United States recognition. He decided to arrange Huerta’s downfall. To this end, he authorized aid to Huerta’s opponents. When this failed to do the job, he opted for direct military intervention. In April 1914, after a bloody battle with the Mexicans, the US Marines occupied the port of Vera Cruz. The city remained under US control for the next half year, finally being handed over to Venustiano Carranza, one of the contenders for national power whom Wilson thought a more acceptable Mexican president. Wilson professed to be turning over a new leaf in American relations with the countries of Latin America, replacing the crass dollar diplomacy practiced by his predecessors with a policy of high moral purpose; intervention by any other name, however, still smelled the same. Wilson clearly did not shy away from meddling in the affairs of other countries if he found a suitable rationale for doing so. His confidence that he knew what was best for others led him to establish a virtual protectorate over Haiti in 1915 and to institute United States military government over Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic) the following year. Wilson might have expressed a desire to prepare the Philippines for self-government, but this hardly prevented the United States from being seen as an imperialistic bully. Wilson’s concern for the fate of developing nations was minor, however, compared to his preoccupation with the major conflict now going on in Europe.

On August 4, 1914, the day Germany invaded Belgium, Wilson officially admonished the American people to remain neutral in both thought and deed. The declaration was willingly accepted as the magic formula for nonparticipation, yet American neutrality was a sham from the beginning. Wilson’s one-sided enforcement of American neutrality rights showed that he was clearly committed to the victory of the Entente. Moreover, Wilson saw nothing wrong with putting the industrial capacity of the United States at the service of the British and the French, something the Germans could not tolerate for long. Yet when German submarines began sinking merchant ships in the war zone around the British Isles, Wilson was outraged. He even believed that Americans traveling on belligerent ships should be free from attack. He was not yet willing, however, to let his indignation develop into a declaration of war.

Wilson won the election campaign of 1916 with the slogan “He kept us out of the war.” He continued to talk peace but now emphasized preparedness and, in a speech given on January 22, 1917, started to enumerate war aims. He emphasized the necessity of establishing “a peace that will win the approval of mankind,” a peace based on “an equality of rights” and on the “principle that governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the governed.” He also endorsed freedom of the seas, disarmament, and collective security. By these vague and impressionistic “principles of mankind,” Wilson committed the United States to a role in peacemaking that could only be achieved if the nation participated directly in the war. Thus, he clearly separated himself from his previously alleged policy and indeed from a majority of his own people. He already had an excuse for entry as the Germans had committed themselves to unrestricted submarine warfare.

On April 2, 1917, Wilson delivered his war message to Congress, claiming that “the world must be made safe for democracy.” During the US one-year involvement, Wilson set up several temporary, volunteer-run agencies and paid for the increased expenditure through an income tax and war bonds. Ultimately, American participation proved crucial to Allied victory and gave Wilson his great opportunity to write a constitution for the world. The establishment of the League of Nations was the fulfillment of a boyhood dream and brought Wilson international recognition in the form of the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize. The most important part of the League of Nations Covenant lay in Article 10, in which the members undertook to preserve against aggression the integrity and political independence of the others. To assure acceptance, the league was made an integral part of the Treaty of Versailles with Germany.

Article 10 struck some US senators, however, as a danger to American sovereign rights, and they insisted that before ratification certain modifications be made. Wilson, though, fought all change, believing that this would only weaken the moral authority of the United States to protect other states from aggression. In an effort to improve the treaty’s chances, he made a direct appeal to the American people in a nationwide speaking tour. He collapsed in Pueblo, Colorado, and was rushed back to Washington paralyzed and without the power to speak. His wife Edith became his main link with the outside world.

The treaty, containing the reservations on the league, was offered for ratification twice, on November 19, 1919, and on March 19, 1920. It failed both times, mainly because Wilson urged his supporters to vote against it. Thus, it was killed on his orders. The United States never joined the League of Nations and later made a separate peace with Germany.

Wilson’s administration ended on March 4, 1921. Wilson continued to live in Washington but took no further part in the city’s political or social life. When he died, on February 3, 1924, he was buried in the non-Presbyterian National Cathedral, his wife being Episcopalian.

Significance and Legacy

Wilson had come to the Paris Peace Conference on a crusade, convinced that he alone of all Allied leaders represented the general will of the people. It made no difference that his own Democratic Party had lost both houses in the recent November elections, and he took no steps to make his peace delegation bipartisan. He had told the American people that the armistice had given them everything for which they had fought, but he believed that the defeat of Germany was not enough because it was now his duty to assist in the establishment of just democracy throughout the world. Such knight-errantry was not favored by his fellow countrymen, who believed that the defeat of the kaiser meant that it was really over “over there.”

Wilson was correct in assuming that the United States had a stake in the war, though he did not enter to preserve the balance of power. He defined his goals in terms of destroying the whole international system on which that equilibrium had been based. The United States emerged from the war the strongest power in the world, but if the pursuit of a new world order involved, as Wilson maintained that it should, the destruction of the sovereignty of the nation-state, the Americans could lose what they had acquired. Wilson was convinced, however, that all problems and threats to national security could be solved through participation in the League of Nations.

The president believed that this organization would have a chemical effect on humankind, making people “drunk with the spirit of self-sacrifice.” He thought its responsibilities would extend beyond peacekeeping, even obliging all states to guarantee equality to their racial and religious minorities and to require them to apply universal standards of work, including the eight-hour day.

Unfortunately, Wilson saw things in moral terms while the Europeans saw them in strategic. They looked on the League of Nations as a device through which they could project their power, not as, in Georges Clemenceau’s words, “a bridge leading to the new Jerusalem.” Wilson was torn between two contradictory positions: he professed a belief in the sovereign equality of states, but he believed in the use of force for the good of civilization. Unfortunately, not everybody trusted the United States to act in any interest but its own. What appeared to Wilson as “unalterable lines of principle” frequently struck others as American realpolitik. Wilson was a persuasive orator, and his idealistic sloganeering had great appeal. The conduct of foreign affairs along lines of high morality had a lofty attraction, but often, too often, it could become the refuge of a scoundrel.

On the home front, Wilson achieved many of his Progressive aims, setting the stage for several later Democratic social programs such as the New Deal. However, his domestic record did not go untarnished either. His Espionage and Sedition Acts, enacted during the war, led to widespread censorship and the incarceration of political dissidents. Wilson's views and policies on race relations also strongly reflected his post–Civil War southern upbringing: he retained few Black Americans in office and segregated federal civil-service buildings that had been integrated since Reconstruction, particularly infuriating Black Americans who had voted for him. As racial justice remained a prominent social issue into the twenty-first century, more calls came to have Wilson's legacy reevaluated and reformed to more overtly recognize that he held, and supported through many policies, racist beliefs. A prominent demonstration against Princeton University's retention of his name among institutional buildings, departments, and scholarships began in 2015 as part of such efforts. While the university initially declined to make any adjustments, nationwide and global protestations of the continued existence of racism in the United States prompted the college's board to vote in 2020 in favor of removing Wilson's name from its public policy school as well as one of its residential colleges. Over the ensuing years, other institutions at various levels reconsidered or changed similar naming conventions. By that time, others had further stressed the lasting impact of Wilson's writings that had indicated support for the Ku Klux Klan and restricting Black Americans, whom he viewed as inferior, from having political influence.

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