Wilson, Woodrow

Wilson, Woodrow (1856–1924), twenty‐eighth president of the United States.Thomas Woodrow Wilson, the son of a Presbyterian clergyman, was born in Staunton, Virginia; raised in Georgia and South Carolina; and educated at Davidson College (1873–1874) and the College of New Jersey, later Princeton University (1875–1879). He attended the University of Virginia Law School, was admitted to the Georgia bar in 1882, and practiced law briefly in Atlanta. In 1883 he began graduate study in history and political science at Johns Hopkins University, receiving his Ph.D. in 1886. His first book, Congressional Government (1885), served as his dissertation.

In 1885 Wilson married Ellen Axson (1860–1914); they had three daughters. Wilson taught at Bryn Mawr College and Wesleyan University, and in 1890, having published a second book, The State, returned to Princeton as a professor. His work on public administration, begun in the late 1880s, opened a new field of study. In 1902 he was named president of Princeton.

In that position, Wilson implemented reforms to strengthen the institution academically and proposed to abolish private eating clubs on campus. The suggestion angered alumni but earned Wilson praise as an opponent of privilege. In 1910 New Jersey's Democratic party bosses invited him to run for governor, believing that his reputation as a reformer would make him popular but that his political inexperience would enable them to control him. They were wrong on the second count. Winning the election, Wilson worked closely with both Democratic and Republican reformers to change state laws in ways that helped bring New Jersey into the mainstream of the national Progressive movement.

The Early Presidential Years.

On the strength of his New Jersey record, Wilson captured the 1912 Democratic presidential nomination and, thanks in part to Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive party insurgency, won the election. Again he moved quickly, calling Congress into special session to consider his program. In 1913 he signed into law the Underwood Act reducing the tariff and implementing the first federal income tax under the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution. He played a key role in shaping the Federal Reserve Act, which reformed the banking and currency systems. In 1914 he signed the Federal Trade Commission Act and the Clayton Antitrust Act to regulate big business practices and encourage competition. Over the next two years, among other reforms, Wilson supported legislation to promote agricultural education, extend credit to farmers, begin a federal highway system, curtail child labor, and establish the eight‐hour day for railroad workers. On racial matters, Wilson shared the prejudices of his time and region, and racial segregation intensified during his administration.

In foreign relations, Wilson at first tried to apply the same principles that shaped his domestic program. Just as he hoped to free Americans from domination by powerful corporations, he envisioned liberating Mexico and the Caribbean from military tyrants and foreign economic domination. His efforts proved largely unsuccessful, however. Well‐intended interventions in Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti aroused anti‐Americanism and often substituted one form of military government for another.

World War I.

The outbreak of World War I in Europe in August 1914 confronted Wilson with his greatest challenge. Both the Allies and the Central Powers tried to cut off the flow of American products to the other side. The British blockade of Germany, enforced with surface vessels, cost Americans money, but the German blockade, implemented by U‐boats (submarines), killed innocent people. On 7 May 1915, 128 Americans died when a U‐boat torpedoed the British liner Lusitania off the Irish coast. Wilson demanded that the Germans change their policy. Early in 1916, after sinking another passenger vessel, Germany agreed to halt such attacks. On the strength of this pledge and his strong domestic record, Wilson won reelection in November 1916, running on the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War.”

As the situation grew more dangerous, Wilson proposed on 22 January 1917 that the belligerents accept a “peace without victory” restoring the prewar status quo. Neither side proved interested, and the Germans, having earlier decided on a last great effort to win, now announced a policy of unrestricted U‐boat warfare. Wilson broke off diplomatic relations with Germany on 3 February, and on 2 April asked Congress for a declaration of war.

As the administration struggled with the task of military mobilization and production, it also rallied homefront support for the war through posters, speeches, and bond drives, and suppressed dissident voices by means of postal censorship and the Espionage Act (1917) and Sedition Amendment (1918). A wave of intolerance swept the nation and German Americans were harassed and antiwar activists arrested. Socialist Eugene V. Debs and others went to jail for writing and speaking against the war.

Addressing postwar issues, Wilson in January 1918 proposed a statement of Allied war aims, the so‐called Fourteen Points. With the signing of an armistice on 11 November 1918, the president announced that he would personally head the American delegation to the peace conference in Paris.

The Versailles Treaty and the League Fight.

Hailed by ordinary Europeans as a savior, Wilson found the Allied leaders tough negotiators. He proposed self‐determination for European minorities, freedom of trade, and an international organization to keep the peace. They wanted security and revenge. Although the Treaty of Versailles (signed in June 1919) was criticized by the Germans as too severe and by the Allies as too lenient, it did create the League of Nations, which Wilson hoped would secure permanent peace.

When Wilson presented the treaty to the Senate in July 1919 he faced an even tougher fight. Many senators feared that League membership would force the United States to put its armed forces under international command. Wilson argued that the universal nature of the organization would make war impossible, but although he received the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the League, he could not win Senate ratification, in part because he adamantly rejected any changes in the League covenant. After an exhausting and futile speaking trip on behalf of the treaty, Wilson suffered a massive stroke on 2 October 1919. A few weeks later the Senate rejected the treaty. Paralyzed and embittered, Wilson served out the remainder of his term as an invalid. Increasingly querulous and emotionally fragile, he was largely isolated from outside contact by his second wife, Edith Galt, whom he had married in December 1915. In late 1919 and early 1920, Wilson's attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, and young J. Edgar Hoover of the Justice Department's countersubversion division, exploiting a Red Scare that swept America after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, organized a series of raids and deportations of alleged radicals and communists, including Emma Goldman. Wilson, leaving the White House in March 1921 as Republican Warren G. Harding took office, lived in seclusion in Washington until his death in 1924.

Assessment.

Wilson followed in Theodore Roosevelt's footsteps in enlarging the power of the presidency in an urban‐industrial age. His domestic record exemplified the emergence of an activist federal government and dramatically demonstrated of how much a president, by focusing public opinion on issues and working closely with Congress, can accomplish. In foreign policy he wielded America's immense economic and military might and served notice that the United States had arrived as a major power with a distinctive global vision. Many Americans shared that vision even if they were not yet ready to accept permanent obligations to achieve it. Wilson's tragedy was that his own intransigence played a major role in his failure to achieve his loftiest vision, American membership in the new world organization for which he had labored so tirelessly
See also Anticommunism; Antitrust Legislation; Antiwar Movements; Banking and Finance; Baruch, Bernard; Economic Regulation; Education: Rise of the University; Federal Government, Executive Branch: The Presidency; Federal Government, Legislative Branch: Senate; Federal Regulatory Agencies; Foreign Relations; Internationalism; Isolationism; Political Parties; Progressive Era; Progressive Party of 1912–1924; Racism; War Industries Board.

Bibliography

Ray Stannard Baker , Woodrow Wilson: Life and Letters, 8 vols., 1927–1939.
Arthur S. Link , Wilson, 5 vols., 1947–1965.
John M. Blum , Woodrow Wilson and the Politics of Morality, 1956.
The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, eds. Arthur S. Link, et al., 69 vols., 1966–1993.
August Heckscher , Woodrow Wilson, 1991.
Kendrick A. Clements , The Presidency of Woodrow Wilson, 1992.

Kendrick A. Clements