Wilson, Woodrow

Wilson, Woodrow (1856–1924), scholar, president of Princeton University, governor of New Jersey, twenty‐eighth president of the United States.The son of a Presbyterian minister, Wilson was born in Staunton, Virginia, grew up in Georgia and South Carolina, graduated from Princeton University, attended the University of Virginia law school, and earned a Ph.D. in history and political science from the Johns Hopkins University (1885). He was a professor at Bryn Mawr College and Wesleyan and Princeton universities, and in 1902 he became president of Princeton, serving until 1910, when he was elected governor of New Jersey. In 1912, he secured the Democratic nomination for the presidency, was elected, and served two terms.

As president, Wilson was often accused by his political enemies of being cowardly and pacifistic, but he used armed force in support of diplomatic goals seven times between April 1914 and November 1918—more often than any other president. Most historians recognize that he had a sophisticated understanding of the value and limitations of force in international relations, and that he was an effective commander in chief.

Wilson thought that the United States must take an active part in promoting the worldwide spread of democratic ideals, international law, and the cooperation of peaceloving nations. He preferred to achieve these goals through diplomacy and moral persuasion, but he did not shrink from the use of military force. He believed that the president must absolutely control foreign policy, including the decision to use or refrain from using armed force, but he also believed that policymakers should not meddle in military operations once they had begun, just as military commanders should not dictate policy.

Wilson's first uses of force were in Latin America, a region traditionally viewed by the United States as within its sphere of influence. In April 1914, he authorized the occupation of Veracruz, Mexico, to avenge an insult to some American sailors and to pressure the Mexican dictator into resigning. He refused to allow the expansion of intervention beyond this one city, however, and relied mainly on negotiations to achieve his aims. Two years later, he authorized a punitive expedition into Mexico in search of border raiders but again entrusted his main objective—restraining the Mexican Revolution—to negotiators rather than soldiers. Other U.S. military involvement, in Haiti in 1914 and the Dominican Republic in 1915, was limited to the minimum force necessary to establish order while American occupiers tried to develop local support for democratic self‐government.

When World War I began in August 1914, Wilson at first shared the feeling of most Americans that neutrality was the proper policy for the United States. He also hoped, by keeping America neutral, to have an opportunity to mediate the conflict. He opposed expansion of the army and navy and employed his diplomatic skills to maximize American trade. In 1915 and 1916, he sent his friend Edward M. House to Europe to promote peace talks.

The beginning of German submarine warfare early in 1915 undermined the president's optimism, and that autumn he came out for enlarging the army and navy. In May 1916, he suggested that the United States might join a postwar association of nations dedicated to collective security. That autumn, after his reelection, he launched a new peace effort in Europe, and upon its failure, proposed his own peace terms in the “Peace Without Victory” speech on 22 January 1917. This initiative also failed when the Germans announced unrestricted submarine warfare.

Wilson severed diplomatic relations with Germany on 3 February 1917, but before seeking a declaration of war he first explored armed neutrality. On 2 April, he at last asked Congress for a declaration of war on Germany, justifying the request as a defense of neutral rights and, more important, as an opportunity for the United States to defeat autocracy and mold a peace based on democracy and collective security.

After Congress declared war on 6 April, Wilson named Gen. John J. Pershing commander of the American Expeditionary Force to be sent to France, and gave him full authority to decide when, where, and how American troops were to be used. Likewise, the president gave his full backing to the plans of Adm. William S. Sims to concentrate virtually the whole naval effort on developing a convoy system to defeat the German submarine threat. To coordinate U.S. military policy with that of the British and French, he appointed Edward House and the retiring chief of staff of the army, Gen. Tasker H. Bliss, to sit on a permanent inter‐Allied conference. House and Bliss understood that their role was to smooth differences with the Allies and to give U.S. military commanders maximum freedom within the coalition.

In April 1917, German leaders were confident that American armies would arrive too late to affect the outcome of the conflict. They were wrong. Within a year the United States had mobilized and transported a large army of fresh troops to Europe in time to help deal the decisive blow. That achievement was partly a testimony to Wilson's decision to let his commanders do their jobs without political interference, but even more it was proof of the enormous productivity of the American economy.

Wilson was keenly aware that victory in the war depended upon the maintenance of solidarity among the Allies. To promote unity, he agreed to the creation of an Inter‐Allied Supreme War Council to coordinate military policy, and to the appointment of French Gen. Ferdinand Foch as supreme military commander over all Allied forces. He also agreed to allow expeditions of American soldiers to take part in Allied forces that landed at Murmansk, Archangel, and Vladivostok. At first, they were intended to help keep Russia in the war, then to protect Allied military supplies from German seizure after the Bolsheviks made a separate peace with Germany, and to support the withdrawal of Czech prisoners of war for assignment to the western front. Although hostile to the Bolsheviks, Wilson was skeptical of this intervention because he believed it would arouse Russian hostility. He eventually yielded to maintain Allied solidarity and to restrain the ambitions of the other Allies, who seemed interested in territory (Japan) or counterrevolution (Britain and France).

By October 1918, German leaders realized that they had catastrophically underestimated the importance of American intervention. Faced with imminent defeat, they suggested to President Wilson an armistice on the basis of his “Fourteen Points” speech of 8 January 1918. Wilson used the German overture to force the Allies and General Per shing to agree that the Fourteen Points would be the basis for a cease‐fire and the starting point for negotiation of the peace treaty. Thus by November 1918, when the armistice was signed, it appeared that Wilson had been remarkably successful in using American military power not only to force his peace program on the enemy but to impose it on the Allies as well. Only later, after the guns fell silent, would many of his hard‐won gains slip away.

Wilson led the American delegation to the peace talks in Paris in the spring of 1919 and submitted the resulting Treaty of Versailles to the U.S. Senate in July. But the Senate rejected it, and the president, crippled by a stroke that October, served out the last years of his term an embittered invalid isolated in the White House.
[See also Caribbean and Latin America, U.S. Military Involvement in the; Commander in Chief, President as; Mexican Revolution, U.S. Military Involvement in the; World War I: Military and Diplomatic Course; World War I: Postwar Impact.]

Bibliography

Arthur S. Link , Wilson, 5 vols., 1947–65.
Robert H. Ferrell , Woodrow Wilson and World War I, 1917–1921, 1985.
Frederick S. Calhoun , Power and Principle: Armed Intervention in Wilsonian Foreign Policy, 1986.
Arthur S. Link and and John Whiteclay Chambers II , Woodrow Wilson as Commander in Chief, in The United States Military Under the Constitution of the United States, 1789–1989, ed. Richard H. Kohn, 1991.
Thomas J. Knock , To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order, 1992.
Kendrick A. Clements , The Presidency of Woodrow Wilson, 1992.

Kendrick A. Clements