Woodrow Wilson

Categories: 1856 births | 1924 deaths | People from Virginia | Scottish-Americans | American progressives | Governors of New Jersey | American World War I people | League of Nations | Nobel Peace Prize winners | American university presidents | U.S. Democratic Party presidential nominees | Deaths by apoplexy | Princeton University | Johns Hopkins University | University of Virginia | Presidents of the United States

Thomas Woodrow Wilson (December 28, 1856 – February 3, 1924) was the 28th President of the United States (1913–1921). Initially an academician, he served as President of Princeton University and was the 45th state Governor of New Jersey (1911–1913). He was the second Democrat to serve two consecutive terms in the White House, the first having been Andrew Jackson, and his terms in office spanned his country's involvement in World War I.

Early life, education and family

Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born in Staunton, Virginia in 1856 to Reverend Dr. Joseph Ruggles Wilson and Janet Woodrow, making him the last president born in that state. His ancestry was Scots-Irish going back to Strabane, in modern-day Northern Ireland. Wilson grew up in Augusta, Georgia and always claimed that his earliest memory was of hearing that Abraham Lincoln had been elected and that a war was coming. Wilson's father and mother were originally from Ohio, but sympathized with the South in the Civil War. They cared for wounded Confederate soldiers at their church and let their son go out and see Jefferson Davis paraded in handcuffs by the victorious Union Army. Wilson would forever recall standing "for a moment at General Lee's side and looking up into his face". (To End All Wars, p. 3.)

Despite suffering from dyslexia, Wilson taught himself shorthand to compensate for his difficulties and was able to achieve academically through determination and self-discipline, but never quite overcame his dyslexia. Wilson attended Davidson College for one year and then transferred to Princeton University, graduating in 1879. He was a member of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternal organization. Afterward, Wilson studied law at the University of Virginia for one year. At Virginia, Wilson served as President of the Jefferson Society. After completing and publishing his dissertation, Congressional Government, in 1886, he received his Ph.D. in political science from Johns Hopkins University. (His carved initials are still visible on the underside of a table in the History Department.) Wilson remains the only American president to have earned a doctoral degree.

Family

Wilson first met Ellen Axson in a Presbyterian church; she was the daughter of a Presbyterian minister. He spent several weeks courting her, but she did not respond. Months later, in 1883, he ran into her by chance in a train station. She was more receptive. He proposed to her, and they were married on June 24, 1885 in Savannah, Georgia. They had three daughters, Margaret in 1886, Jessie in 1887, and Eleanor in 1889. The three were all unmarried when he entered the White House, but that quickly changed. Jessie married Francis B. Sayre on November 25, 1913, and Eleanor married William G. McAdoo, the Secretary of the Treasury on May 7, 1914. Ellen died three months after Eleanor's wedding, on August 6.

He later married Edith Bolling Galt, a widow, on December 18, 1915.

Political writings and academic career

Wilson came of age in the decades after the Civil War, when Congress was supreme—"the gist of all policy is decided by the legislature"—and corruption rampant. Instead of focusing on individuals in explaining where American politics went wrong, Wilson focused on the American constitutional structure. (Congressional Government, 180)

Under the influence of Walter Bagehot's The English Constitution, Wilson saw the American Constitution as pre-modern, cumbersome, and open to corruption. Before the vigorous presidencies of the turn of the 20th century, Wilson even favored a parliamentary system for the United States. Writing in the early 1880s in a journal edited by Henry Cabot Lodge, Wilson wrote

"I ask you to put this question to yourselves, should we not draw the Executive and Legislature closer together? Should we not, on the one hand, give the individual leaders of opinion in Congress a better chance to have an intimate party in determining who should be president, and the president, on the other hand, a better chance to approve himself a statesman, and his advisors capable men of affairs, in the guidance of Congress?" (the Politics of Woodrow Wilson, 41–48)

Wilson started Congressional Government, his best known political work, as an argument for a parliamentary system, but Wilson was impressed by Grover Cleveland, and Congressional Government emerged as a critical description of America's system, with frequent negative comparisons to Westminster. Wilson himself claimed, "I am pointing out facts,—diagnosing, not prescribing, remedies.". (Congressional Government, 205)

Wilson believed that America's intricate system of checks and balances was the cause of the problems in American governance. He said that the divided power made it impossible for voters to see who was accountable for ill-doing. If government behaved badly, Wilson asked,

"...how is the schoolmaster, the nation, to know which boy needs the whipping? ... Power and strict accountability for its use are the essential constituents of good government.... It is, therefore, manifestly a radical defect in our federal system that it parcels out power and confuses responsibility as it does. The main purpose of the Convention of 1787 seems to have been to accomplish this grievous mistake. The 'literary theory' of checks and balances is simply a consistent account of what our Constitution makers tried to do; and those checks and balances have proved mischievous just to the extent which they have succeeded in establishing themselves... [the Framers] would be the first to admit that the only fruit of dividing power had been to make it irresponsible." (ibid, 186–7)

The longest section of Congressional Government is on the United States House of Representatives, where Wilson pours out scorn for the committee system. Power, Wilson wrote, "is divided up, as it were, into forty-seven seigniories, in each of which a Standing Committee is the court baron and its chairman lord proprietor. These petty barons, some of them not a little powerful, but none of them within reach the full powers of rule, may at will exercise an almost despotic sway within their own shires, and may sometimes threaten to convulse even the realm itself." (ibid, 76). Wilson said that the committee system was fundamentally undemocratic, because committee chairs, who ruled by seniority, were responsible to no one except their constituents, even though they determined national policy.

In addition to their undemocratic nature, Wilson also believed that the Committee System facilitated corruption.

"the voter, moreover, feels that his want of confidence in Congress is justified by what he hears of the power of corrupt lobbyists to turn legislation to their own uses. He hears of enormous subsidies begged and obtained... of appropriations made in the interest of dishonest contractors; he is not altogether unwarranted in the conclusion that these are evils inherent in the very nature of Congress; there can be no doubt that the power of the lobbyist consists in great part, if not altogether, in the facility afforded him by the Committee system. (ibid, 132)

But by the time Wilson finished Congressional Government, Grover Cleveland was president, and Wilson had his faith in the United States government restored. By the time he was president, Wilson had seen vigorous presidencies from William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, and Wilson no longer entertained thoughts of parliamentary government at home. In his last scholarly work in 1908, Constitutional Government of the United States, Wilson said that the presidency "will be as big as and as influential as the man who occupies it". By the time of his presidency, Wilson merely hoped that presidents could be party leaders in the same way prime ministers were. Wilson also hoped that the parties could be reorganized along ideological, not geographic, lines. "Eight words," Wilson wrote, "contain the sum of the present degradation of our political parties: No leaders, no principles; no principles, no parties." (Frozen Republic, 145)

Wilson served on the faculties of Bryn Mawr College and Wesleyan University before joining the Princeton faculty as professor of jurisprudence and political economy in 1890. A popular teacher and respected scholar, Wilson delivered an oration at Princeton's sesquicentennial celebration (1896) entitled "Princeton in the Nation's Service". (This has become a frequently alluded-to motto of the University, sometimes expanded to "Princeton in the World's Service.") In this famous speech, he outlined his vision of the university in a democratic nation, calling on institutions of higher learning "to illuminate duty by every lesson that can be drawn out of the past".

Wilson was unanimously elected President of Princeton on June 9, 1902. In his inaugural address as Princeton's president, Wilson developed these themes, attempting to strike a balance that would please both populists and aristocrats in the audience.

As president, Wilson began a fund-raising campaign to bolster the university corporation. The curriculum guidelines he developed during his tenure as president of Princeton proved among the most important innovations in the field of higher education. He instituted the now common system of core requirements followed by two years of concentration in a selected area. When he attempted to curtail the influence of the elitist "social clubs", however, Wilson met with resistance from trustees and potential donors. He believed the system was smothering the intellectual and moral life of the undergraduates. Opposition from wealthy and powerful alumni further convinced Wilson of the undesirability of exclusiveness and moved him towards a more populist position in his politics.

Political career

Wilson was president of the American Political Science Association from 1910 to 1911. Through his published commentary on contemporary political matters, Wilson developed a national reputation and, with increasing seriousness, considered a public service career. In 1910, he received an unsolicited nomination for the governorship of New Jersey, which he eagerly accepted.

Presidency

In the presidential election of 1912, the Democratic Party nominated Wilson^[1] as its presidential candidate—even though Champ Clark was widely expected to get the nomination. William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt split the Republican Party by running against each other, allowing Wilson's victory.

On the day before Wilson's inauguration in March 1913, members of the Congressional Union, later known as the National Women's Party, organized a suffrage parade in Washington, D.C., to siphon attention away from inaugural events. It is said that when Wilson arrived in town, he found the streets empty of welcoming crowds and was told that everyone was on Pennsylvania Avenue watching the parade.

Wilson experienced early success by implementing his "New Freedom" pledges of antitrust modification, tariff revision, and reform in banking and currency matters. His actions led to the establishment of the Federal Reserve System and Federal Trade Commission.

Suffrage was only one of the volatile issues Wilson faced during his presidency; until Wilson announced his support for the suffrage amendment because it was a good political move, a group of women calling themselves the Silent Sentinels protested in front of the White House, holding banners such as "Mr. President—What will you do for woman suffrage?" Domestically, his measures for reform often met with opposition, although he did succeed in passing a bill instituting the Federal Reserve.

Wilson's attitude on racial issues is generally regarded as a stain on his reputation; many argue that he was instrumental in shaping the worst period of racism in American history. His administration instituted segregation in federal government for the first time since Abraham Lincoln began desegregation in 1863, and required photographs from job applicants to determine their race. Wilson also regarded those whom he termed "hyphenated Americans" (German-Americans, Irish-Americans, etc.) with suspicion: "Any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready."

Wilson's "History of the American People" is repeatedly quoted in the notoriously racist film The Birth of a Nation, which glorifies the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in resistance to Radical Republican Reconstruction. The film was based on a trilogy by Wilson's classmate Thomas Dixon, whose stated goal was "to revolutionize northern sentiment by a presentation of history that would transform every man in my audience into a good Democrat!" Wilson saw the film in a special White House screening on February 18, 1915, and director D.W. Griffith reported to the press that Wilson had exclaimed, "It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true."^[2] The statement was widely reported and immediately controversial. In subsequent correspondence with Griffith, Wilson discussed Griffith's filmmaking enthusiastically, without challenging the accuracy of the quote. Given the film's strong Democratic partisan message and Wilson's documented views on race, it is not unreasonable to interpret the statement as supporting the Klan, and the word "regret" as referring to the film's depiction of Reconstruction. Wilson tried to remain aloof from the controversy, but finally, on April 30, issued a non-denial denial.^[3] Wilson's endorsement of the film's factual accuracy carried great weight and added to its popularity. The film in turn was one of the main factors that led, in the same year, to the reorganization (at Stone Mountain, Georgia) of the Ku Klux Klan, which had been dormant since it was outlawed in the 1870s.

In the last year of his first term Wilson assembled an impressive record of legislation, borrowing much from Theodore Roosevelt's 1912 platform. Wilson signed the Federal Farm Loan Act, which lowered interest rates for farmers. The Farm Loan Act immediately lowered interest rates and farmers hailed it as "the Magna Carta of American farm finance." Wilson aggressively and successfully lobbied on Capitol Hill for the Keating-Owen Act, which banned child labor, the Kern-McGillicuddy Act, which set up a workmen's compensation system, and the Adamson Act, which improved conditions and wages for railroad workers. To prepare for the possibility of entering the war, Wilson expanded the army and navy with an estate tax and tax on high incomes. (To End All Wars, 90–92)

Wilson was able to narrowly win reelection in 1916 by picking up many votes that had gone with Roosevelt and Eugene V. Debs in 1912.

Wilson spent 1914, 1915, 1916, and the beginning of 1917 trying to keep America out of the War in Europe. He offered to be a mediator, but neither the Allies nor the Central Powers took his requests seriously. When Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare and made a clumsy attempt to get Mexico on its side in the Zimmermann Telegram, Wilson took America into the Great War as an "associated belligerent."

Wilson pushed the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 through Congress to suppress socialist, anti-British, pro-Irish, pro-German, or anti-war opinions. He also set up the United States Committee on Public Information, headed by George Creel (thus its popular name, Creel Committee), which filled the country with anti-German propaganda and, during the first Red Scare, ordered the Palmer Raids against leftists. Wilson had the socialist leader and Presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs arrested for attributing World War I to financial interests and criticizing the Espionage Act. Additionally, Wilson supported the American Protective League, a private pro-war organization notorious for its flagrant violations of American civil liberties.

Between 1914 and 1918 the United States invaded or intervened in Latin America many times, particularly in Mexico, Haiti, Cuba, and Panama. The U.S. maintained troops in Nicaragua throughout his administration and used them to select the president of Nicaragua and then to force Nicaragua to pass the Bryan-Chamorro Treaty. American troops in Haiti forced the Haitian legislature to choose the candidate Wilson selected as Haitian president. After Haiti refused to declare war on Germany, Wilson had Haiti's government dissolved and then forced a new, less democratic constitution on Haiti through a sham referendum. American soldiers also expelled small farmers from their lands to work in chain gangs on public works projects and transferred the land to plantation owners. In 1919, Haitians rose up in rebellion against the Americans, resulting in 3,000 deaths. Gleijesus (1992) argues: "It is not that Wilson failed in his earnest efforts to bring democracy to these little countries. He never tried. He intervened to impose hegemony, not democracy."

Between 1917 and 1920 the U.S. supported the "White" side of the Russian civil war, first monetarily, but later with a naval blockade and ground forces in Murmansk, Archangelsk, and Vladivostok.

World War I

Wilson had promised to keep the United States neutral in World War I, which contributed to his popular re-election in 1916. However in 1917 he officially decided that the United States should enter the conflict. A formal declaration of war against Germany was made on April 6, 1917, followed by a declaration of war against Austria-Hungary on December 7.

After the Great War, Wilson participated in negotiations with the stated aim of assuring statehood for formerly oppressed nations and an equitable peace. On January 8, 1918, Wilson made his famous Fourteen Points address, introducing the idea of a League of Nations, an organization with a stated goal of helping preserve territorial integrity and political independence among large and small nations alike.

Post-War

Wilson intended the Fourteen Points as a means toward ending the war and achieving an equitable peace for all the nations. He sailed for Versailles on December 4, 1918 for the 1919 Paris Peace Conference (making him the first U.S. president to travel to Europe while in office), where he worked tirelessly to promote his plan. In an effort to gain French support for the League, Wilson ordered U.S. Marines to stop the German delegation from entering the conference. The charter of the proposed League of Nations was incorporated into the conference's Treaty of Versailles, but most of the other Fourteen Points fell by the wayside.

For his peacemaking efforts, Wilson was awarded the 1920 Nobel Peace Prize. Receiving the award was bittersweet, however, because he was unable to convince Congressional opponents, such as Henry Cabot Lodge, to support the resolution endorsing U.S. entry into the League. United States membership, Wilson believed, was essential to ensuring lasting world peace. The Versailles settlement also led to economic devastation in Germany that led to the under consumption problems leading to the Great Depression. Opponents of Wilson believed that by supporting the Versailles Settlement, which was actually a series of treaties, they would create economic devastation.

Incapacity

On September 25, 1919, Wilson suffered a mild stroke that went unannounced to the public. A week later, on October 2, Wilson suffered a second, far more serious stroke that almost totally incapacitated him. Although the extent of his disability was kept from the public until after his death, Wilson was purposely kept out of the presence of Vice President Thomas R. Marshall, his cabinet or Congressional visitors to the White House for the remainder of his presidential term.

John Barry, in The Great Influenza, has theorized that Wilson's predisposition to those strokes was a complication from the lethal pandemic of influenza in 1919, which sometimes affected the brain.

While Wilson was incapacitated, his second wife, Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, served as steward, selecting issues for his attention and delegating other issues to his cabinet heads. This was to date the most serious case of presidential disability in American history, and was cited as a key example why ratification of the 25th amendment was seen as important. The amendment, which provides for installation of the Vice President as Acting President in case of presidential disability, was ratified in 1967.

In 1921, Wilson and his wife retired from the White House to a home in the Embassy Row section of Washington, D.C. Wilson died there on February 3, 1924. He was buried in Washington National Cathedral. Mrs. Wilson stayed in the home another 37 years, dying on December 28, 1961.

Cabinet

Major presidential acts

• Signed Revenue Act of 1913
• Signed Federal Reserve Act of 1913
• Signed Federal Farm Loan Act of 1916
• Signed Espionage Act of 1917
• Signed Sedition Act of 1918

Secretary

Joseph Patrick Tumulty 1913-1921

Supreme Court appointments

Wilson appointed the following Justices to the Supreme Court of the United States:

• James Clark McReynolds (1914)
• Louis Dembitz Brandeis (1916)
• John Hessin Clarke (1916)

Memorials

Many memorials to Wilson exist:

• The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, established by Congress in 1968 as a "living memorial" to President Wilson, is a leading policy forum in Washington, D.C. and part of the Smithsonian Institution.
• Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs is a public policy school at Princeton University.
• Wilson House, an undergraduate dormitory at Johns Hopkins University, is named in his honor.
• Wilson Hall, an administrative building at James Madison University, is named in his honor.
• His portrait appeared on the U.S. $100,000 bill, issued in 1934. This bill was used only for transactions between the Federal Reserve and Treasury.
• The city of Bratislava (now capital of Slovakia, Europe) was named "Wilsonovo mesto" (Wilson City) after U.S. President Wilson for a short period of time after World War I. This was to commemorate President Wilson's support for creating the independent state of Czechoslovakia. For the same reason, the central railway station in Prague bears the name "Wilsonovo nádraží" (Wilson station).
• The Avenue du President Wilson in Paris, France, is named in honor of Wilson.
• Boulevard Wilson, a main street in Strasbourg, France, where the European Parliament is located, is named in honor of Wilson. Anyone arriving by train in Strasbourg will cross or travel on Boulevard Wilson, including those traveling to the European Parliament.
• Wilson has been the subject of books by two particularly noteworthy authors. Herbert Hoover's The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson is extremely sympathetic, and remains the only book written by one ex-President about another one. Sigmund Freud and William Bullitt's Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study is devastatingly unsympathetic, and was unpublished for 30 years after Freud's death.
• Woodrow Wilson Bridge across the Potomac River on the portion of the Capital Beltway which is also Interstate 95 is located in three jurisdictions, Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia; more than any other Interstate Highway bridge. It is one of the most heavily-traveled bridges in the world.
• Wilson was an early automobile enthusiast and, while president, he took daily rides to calm himself.

Media

See also

• U.S. presidential election, 1912
• U.S. presidential election, 1916
• History of the United States (1865–1918)
• USS Woodrow Wilson (SSBN-624) (An USN SSBN named after President Wilson.)
• Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library

External links

• Official White House biography
• Audio clips of Wilson's speeches
• First Inaugural Address
• Second Inaugural Address
• President Wilson's War Address
• Woodrow Wilson Biography

• Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library at His Birthplace Staunton, Virginia
• Woodorow Wilson House Washington,DC
• Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Washington,DC

• Woodrow Wilson Links
• Works by Woodrow Wilson at Project Gutenberg

Notes

1. ^  http://www.multied.com/elections/Conventions/1912DEM.html
2. ^  Dray, 2002, p. 198.
3. ^  Wade, 1987, p. p. 137.

References

• Library of Congress: "Today in History: December 28"
• Library of Congress: "Today in History: June 9"
• Dray, Philip. At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America, New York: Random House, 2002.
• Gleijesus, Piero. "The other Americas," Washington Post Book World, December 27, 1992, 5.
• Wade, Wyn Craig. The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America. New York: Simon and Schuster (1987).

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