Woodrow Wilson

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Woodrow Wilson was three years old when he heard a man outside the Augusta parsonage announce in disgust that Abraham Lincoln had been elected and that a war was coming. That earliest memory shaped everything: a boy growing up in the defeated South, watching his father help found a new Presbyterian church for the Confederacy, absorbing a world where institutions remade themselves after catastrophe. Fifty years later, Wilson would try to remake the entire international order. He would succeed in ways that still echo, and fail in ways that still sting.

  Wilson was the only Democrat to hold the presidency during the Progressive Era, when Republicans dominated both the White House and Congress. He arrived carrying a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, the only president in American history to hold one, and a long career reshaping institutions from the inside. His eight years in office produced the federal income tax, the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Clayton Antitrust Act. They also produced the League of Nations, a historic Nobel Peace Prize, and a catastrophic stroke that left him incapacitated while his wife and physician ran what remained of his presidency.

  The questions his life raises are not settled ones. How does a man devoted to democracy spend his presidential tenure imposing racial segregation inside the federal government? How does an architect of collective security destroy his own treaty through sheer personal rigidity? And how does a sickly, twice-married, scandal-shadowed academic become one of the defining political figures of the twentieth century? Wilson's story offers no easy resolutions. What it does offer is an education in the gap between vision and character.

• 2. Roots and Formation

  ›

  Wilson's paternal grandparents had immigrated to the United States from Strabane, County Tyrone, Ireland, in 1807, settling in Steubenville, Ohio. His grandfather James Wilson published a pro-tariff and anti-slavery newspaper called The Western Herald and Gazette. On his mother's side, the Reverend Thomas Woodrow had traveled from Paisley, in Renfrewshire, Scotland, through Carlisle in England, and eventually to Chillicothe, Ohio. The Scotch-Irish and Scottish strands would run through Wilson's manner and his faith for the rest of his life.

  His father Joseph, ordained as a Presbyterian pastor, was assigned to the First Presbyterian Church in Staunton, Virginia, where Woodrow was born on the 28th of December 1856, in the Manse directly on church grounds. The family moved to Augusta, Georgia, when Wilson was not yet two. Joseph Wilson became one of the founders of the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America, a denomination born from the 1861 split with Northern Presbyterians, and the family's Southern identity was never incidental. For Wilson, the Civil War was not history; it was the texture of childhood.

  At Davidson College in the 1873-74 school year, Wilson began the pattern that would define his young adulthood: enrolling, engaging, then moving on. He transferred as a freshman to the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University, where he studied political philosophy and history, joined the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity, served as managing editor of the student newspaper, and was elected president of the baseball association. He supported Democratic nominee Samuel J. Tilden in the hotly contested 1876 presidential election. After graduating in 1879, he entered the University of Virginia School of Law in Charlottesville, where he served as president of the Jefferson Literary and Debating Society, but poor health forced him to withdraw.

  He tried law briefly in Atlanta in 1882, winning admission to the Georgia bar and opening a practice. He found legal history interesting but found the day-to-day procedural work intolerable. In under a year he abandoned the law entirely and enrolled at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore for doctoral studies in history, political science, and German. He completed his dissertation, later published as Congressional Government, and received his Ph.D. in 1886. One critic called the book "the best critical writing on the American constitution which has appeared since the 'Federalist' papers."

• 3. The Academic and His Ambitions

  ›

  Wilson wrote to a friend that "a professorship was the only feasible place for me, the only place that would afford leisure for reading and for original work, the only strictly literary berth with an income attached." From 1885 to 1888 he taught at Bryn Mawr College, a newly established women's college outside Philadelphia, covering ancient Greek and Roman history, American history, and political science. In 1887 he published a journal article in Political Science Quarterly, "The Study of Administration," that argued public administration deserved its own field of study rather than existing as a sub-field of political science. The piece drew on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's treatment of law and the state in Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Historians of public administration now regard Wilson as one of the field's founding fathers.

  He moved to Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, where he taught political economy and Western history, coached the football team, and founded a debate team. In February 1890, with the help of friends, he was appointed Chair of Jurisprudence and Political Economy at the College of New Jersey at an annual salary of $3,000. Wilson quickly built a reputation at Princeton as a compelling speaker. His textbook The State was widely used in American college courses until the 1920s; in it he argued governments could legitimately promote the general welfare by forbidding child labor, supervising factory sanitation, and limiting the working hours of women in occupations harmful to their health. He also contended that charity should be made "the imperative legal duty of the whole," a position historian Robert M. Saunders interpreted as laying the groundwork for a modern welfare state.

  In June 1902, Princeton's trustees promoted him to president of the university, replacing Francis Landey Patton, whom the trustees considered an inefficient administrator. Wilson aspired, as he told alumni, to "transform thoughtless boys performing tasks into thinking men." He raised admissions standards, instituted academic departments, and created a preceptorial system in which students met in groups of six under teaching assistants. He appointed the first Jewish and the first Roman Catholic faculty members, and convinced alumni such as Moses Taylor Pyne and philanthropists such as Andrew Carnegie to fund the reforms. He also worked to keep African Americans out of Princeton, even as other Ivy League institutions were beginning to accept small numbers of Black students.

  In 1906, Wilson awoke to find himself blind in his left eye, the result of a blood clot and hypertension. Modern medical opinion holds that he had suffered a stroke. He also met the socialite Mary Hulbert Peck while vacationing in Bermuda that year, beginning a friendship whose personal character became the subject of frank discussion between Wilson and his wife; biographer August Heckscher II notes that Wilson historians have not conclusively established whether there was an affair. Wilson sent Peck very personal letters that his adversaries later used against him. His presidency at Princeton ended not over scandal but over institutional battles: alumni defeated his plan to abolish the upper-class eating clubs, and the board sided with Dean Andrew Fleming West over where to locate a new graduate school building. Philosophy professor John Grier Hibben, once his closest advisor, led the opposition to Wilson's pet reform plan in 1912 and they were permanently estranged.

• 4. Governor and Candidate

  ›

  By January 1910, James Smith Jr. and George Brinton McClellan Harvey, two New Jersey Democratic leaders, were eyeing Wilson as a gubernatorial candidate. The state party had lost the last five gubernatorial elections. Party leaders believed Wilson's academic reputation made him the ideal spokesman against trusts and corruption, while his inexperience in governing would make him easy to control. Wilson agreed to accept the nomination if "it came to me unsought, unanimously, and without pledges to anybody about anything."

  He shed the professorial style quickly. In a state where Republican William Howard Taft had won by more than 82,000 votes in 1908, Wilson defeated Republican nominee Vivian M. Lewis by a margin of more than 65,000 votes. Once in office he immediately broke with the machine bosses who had put him there, refusing to endorse James Smith Jr. for the U.S. Senate and instead backing James Edgar Martine, who had won the Democratic primary. Smith's defeat positioned Wilson as an independent force. Wilson and his allies passed the Geran bill, which required primaries for all elective offices; a corrupt practices law mandating campaign financial disclosure and banning corporate contributions; and a workers' compensation law. He enacted a series of antitrust laws known as the "Seven Sisters" before leaving office.

  His 1912 presidential campaign required 46 ballots at the Democratic National Convention before Wilson secured the nomination. Speaker of the House Champ Clark of Missouri had entered the convention as the front-runner and held a plurality of delegates on the first ballot. The turning point came when Tammany Hall swung behind Clark, prompting three-time Democratic presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan to declare he would not support any candidate with Tammany's backing. Wilson had spent months cultivating Bryan's approval, and it paid off. He secured the vice-presidential nomination for Governor Thomas R. Marshall of Indiana as part of the bargain.

  In the general election, the Republican split between incumbent William Howard Taft and former President Theodore Roosevelt, running on the "Bull Moose" ticket, opened the door for Democrats. Eugene V. Debs of the Socialist Party was the fourth candidate. Wilson took 41.8 percent of the popular vote and 435 of the 531 electoral votes. Roosevelt won 27.4 percent, one of the strongest third-party performances in American history. Taft took 23.2 percent but just 8 electoral votes. Wilson became the first Southerner to win a presidential election since the Civil War and the first Democratic president since Grover Cleveland left office in 1897.

• 5. The New Freedom at Home

  ›

  Wilson addressed Congress in person in April 1913 to announce his domestic priorities, becoming the first president since John Adams to do so. His agenda had four pillars: tariff reduction, banking reform, antitrust legislation, and better access to raw materials for farmers. He moved on all four simultaneously, something no previous president had attempted at the start of an administration.

  House Majority Leader Oscar Underwood had passed a tariff bill by late May 1913 that cut the average tariff rate by 10 percent and imposed a tax on personal income above $4,000. The Revenue Act of 1913, signed on October 3, was the largest downward tariff revision since the Civil War. It replaced lost tariff revenue with a federal income tax of one percent on incomes above $3,000, affecting the richest three percent of the population. The shift permanently changed how the federal government financed itself, making taxation rather than tariffs the primary source of revenue.

  Without waiting for the tariff fight to close, Wilson turned to banking. The United States had no central bank since the Bank War of the 1830s. Wilson sought a middle ground between Bryan's progressive skepticism and the plan put forward by Nelson Aldrich, chairman of the National Monetary Commission, which would have given private financial interests substantial control over monetary policy. The compromise Wilson backed created twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks controlled by private banks, but placed a central board filled with presidential appointees above them. U.S. Representative Charles August Lindbergh argued the plan would create an "invisible government" of monetary power. The Senate voted 54-34 in favor. The new system began operations in 1915 and played a central role in financing the Allied war effort.

  Wilson then pressed Congress to strengthen the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 with two new laws. The Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914 created an agency to investigate and enforce antitrust violations independently of the Justice Department. One month later, Wilson signed the Clayton Antitrust Act, which banned discriminatory pricing, tying contracts, exclusive dealing, and interlocking directorates. His legal adviser in developing the New Freedom platform was Louis Brandeis, whom Wilson would later appoint to the Supreme Court as the first Jewish justice.

  In 1916, with re-election approaching, Wilson backed the Keating-Owen Act, the first federal child labor law, which made it illegal to ship goods in interstate commerce produced by factories employing underage children. The Supreme Court struck it down in Hammer v. Dagenhart in 1918. Wilson also signed LaFollette's Seamen's Act of 1915 and pushed Congress to enact the eight-hour workday for railroad workers in 1916, ending a major strike in what was described as "the boldest intervention in labor relations that any president had yet attempted."

• 6. War and the Fourteen Points

  ›

  World War I broke out in July 1914, pitting Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria against Britain, France, Russia, Serbia, and several other countries. Wilson insisted that the United States be neutral in thought as well as action, stating Americans "must put a curb upon our sentiments as well as upon every transaction that might be construed as a preference of one party to the struggle before another." His primary foreign policy goal until early 1917 was to broker a peace agreement.

  In May 1915, a German submarine torpedoed the British ocean liner RMS Lusitania, killing 1,198 passengers, including 128 American citizens. Wilson publicly responded that "there is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight." He demanded that Germany prevent a recurrence. Secretary of State Bryan believed Wilson had placed American trade rights above true neutrality and resigned from the Cabinet. In March 1916, a German torpedo struck the SS Sussex, an unarmed French ferry crossing the English Channel, killing four Americans. Wilson extracted from Germany a pledge to limit submarine warfare to cruiser rules, a significant diplomatic concession.

  In January 1917, Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare. In late February, Americans learned of the Zimmermann Telegram, a secret German communication seeking to persuade Mexico to join a war against the United States. On the 2nd of April 1917, Wilson addressed Congress asking for a declaration of war, describing Germany's actions as "nothing less than war against the government and people of the United States." The declaration passed on April 6 with strong bipartisan majorities. The United States later declared war against Austria-Hungary in December 1917.

  On the 8th of January 1918, Wilson delivered his Fourteen Points speech, articulating American war aims that included the evacuation of occupied territories, self-determination for the peoples of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, the establishment of an independent Poland, and the creation of a League of Nations to guarantee the independence and territorial integrity of all nations. Germany's new government, led by Prince Maximilian of Baden, sought an armistice based on these Fourteen Points. The Armistice of the 11th of November 1918 ended the fighting. Austria-Hungary had signed the Armistice of Villa Giusti eight days earlier. By the war's end, 116,000 American servicemen had died and another 200,000 had been wounded. Wilson's management of the home front had seen the federal budget rise from $1 billion in fiscal year 1916 to $19 billion in fiscal year 1919, and the top income tax rate climb to 77 percent under the Revenue Act of 1918.

• 7. Paris, the League, and Defeat

  ›

  Wilson traveled to Europe after the armistice, becoming the first sitting American president to set foot on the continent. He led the American delegation at the Paris Peace Conference alongside British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, and Italian Prime Minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, the group known as the "Big Four." Wilson himself chaired the committee that drafted the Covenant of the League of Nations, which he called the "keystone of the whole programme."

  Japan proposed that the conference endorse a Racial Equality Proposal. Wilson, as chairman, ruled the proposal had failed to achieve unanimous consent, though a clear majority had voted for it and no vote against it had been recorded. French delegate Ferdinand Larnaude immediately noted that "a majority had voted for the amendment." The ruling proved controversial and damaged relations with Japan. Wilson also overrode his principle of self-determination in the Shandong Peninsula, allowing Japan to acquire former German interests there, a concession that undercut his own promises. Germany was required to cede territory permanently, pay war reparations, relinquish all overseas colonies, and accept a clause naming Germany solely responsible for the war. The conference recognized new independent states in Eastern Europe, including Albania, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Yugoslavia. Germany signed the treaty on the 28th of June 1919. Wilson was awarded the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.

  Back home, the Senate fight was brutal. Republicans held a narrow majority after the 1918 elections, and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge became Wilson's chief adversary. Fourteen senators, the "irreconcilables," opposed U.S. participation in the League entirely. A larger group of "reservationists" would accept it with modifications. When Lodge was assembling a two-thirds majority to ratify the treaty with ten reservations, Wilson ordered his supporters to vote against ratification on the 19th of March 1920. Historian Thomas A. Bailey called this "the supreme act of infanticide," writing that "the treaty was slain in the house of its friends rather than in the house of its enemies."

  Wilson had barnstormed Western states to build public support for ratification, but he collapsed and returned to the White House in late September 1919. On the 2nd of October 1919, he suffered a serious stroke, leaving him paralyzed on his left side with only partial vision in his right eye. His wife Edith, his physician Cary Grayson, and consulting neurologist Francis Xavier Dercum controlled access to him. Neurosurgeon Bert E. Park, who examined Wilson's records after his death, concluded that the illness made Wilson prone to "disorders of emotion, impaired impulse control, and defective judgment." For her influence over the administration in this period, some described Edith Wilson as "the first female President of the United States." Wilson died on the 3rd of February 1924, at age 67, three years after leaving office.