Woodrow Wilson

11 Key excerpts on "Woodrow Wilson"

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  The Presidential Image

  A History from Theodore Roosevelt to Donald Trump

  • Iwan Morgan, Mark White(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • I.B. Tauris

    (Publisher)

  The images of public figures derive from those features of their backgrounds and personalities that are seen by their supporters, their opponents or the public as distinctive and revealing. In the case of Woodrow Wilson, his earlier academic career and his Presbyterian background (as the son of a minister) have most often shaped perceptions of him. Wilson himself was among those who also regarded his Scots-Irish heritage as a significant element in his identity and image. Responses to this image have been sharply divided, for Wilson has been one of those political figures who arouse strong feelings – either of allegiance or of hostility. And this has not only been among Americans. By leading the United States into the Great War and calling for a new international order capped by a League of Nations, Wilson became a world figure. He was received almost as a Messiah by huge and enthusiastic crowds when he arrived in Europe to take part in the Paris peace conference. Yet many of those who initially cheered him at home and abroad became bitterly critical when the terms of the eventual settlement seemed a betrayal of their hopes. Wilson’s public reputation suffered a further blow when his efforts to secure Senate approval of the League of Nations were unsuccessful but rose twenty years later when the predictions he had made of the consequences of American non-participation seemed vindicated by the coming of the Second World War. In 1944, a Technicolor Hollywood blockbuster portrayed him as a prophet and a martyr to the cause of world peace. In subsequent decades, Wilson has continued to be identified above all with his vision of a new world order and has been seen by both admirers and critics as the embodiment of an idealist approach to international relations.

  It was not until he was fifty-three years old that Woodrow Wilson entered politics. Before that he had had an academic career during which he had written several notable books on American government and history. It was as President of Princeton University that he had achieved national prominence through widely publicized contests with the university’s board of trustees. At a time when the progressive movement against ‘plutocracy’ and ‘boss politics’ was at its height, Wilson seemed a potentially strong candidate for electoral office to the leaders of the Democratic Party in New Jersey. They secured his nomination for the governorship, which he won with a handsome majority in 1910. Like his chief sponsors, Wilson himself always saw this as a step to the presidency.1

  Unsurprisingly, Wilson’s public image was shaped by his previous career; in political cartoons, he was commonly portrayed in academic cap and gown. He was generally referred to as ‘Dr. Wilson,’ while opponents spoke sarcastically of ‘the schoolmaster in politics.’ Joseph P. Tumulty, a young supporter who would soon become Wilson’s secretary, was deeply involved with ward politics and recognized that being regarded as ‘the “highbrow” candidate’ was potentially damaging. It could easily be associated with both unworldliness and a condescending attitude to ‘plain folks.’ In his memoir, Tumulty emphasized that Wilson’s style of campaigning countered such preconceptions:

  Those who had gathered the idea that the head of a great university would appear pedantic and stand stiff-necked upon an academic pedestal from which he would talk over the heads of the common people were forced, by the fighting, aggressive attitude of the Doctor, to revise their old estimates . … His homely illustrations evoked expressions of delight, until it seemed that this newcomer in the politics of our state had a better knowledge of the psychology of the ordinary crowd than the old stagers who had spent their lives in politics.

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  Woodrow Wilson

  • John A. Thompson(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 1Images of Wilson

  Woodrow Wilson was at one time the most famous political figure in the world. When in December 1918 he became the first serving US president to leave North America, his arrival in Europe to take part in the peace conference following the First World War was treated by multitudes like the Second Coming. One young American on his staff described his reception in Paris:

  The parade from the station to the Murat house in Rue de Monceau, which is to be his official residence, was accompanied by the most remarkable demonstration of enthusiasm and affection on the part of the Parisians that I have ever heard of, let alone seen … Troops, cavalry and infantry, lined the entire route and tens of thousands of persons fought for a glimpse. The streets were decorated with flags and banners, Wilson’s name was everywhere, and huge ‘Welcome Wilson’ and ‘Honor to Wilson, the Just’ signs stretched across the streets from house to house.1

  Wilsons receptions in England and Italy matched those given to him in France. What were the reasons for this popular acclaim? Many, including the President himself, took it to be a response to the ideals and principles he had proclaimed. In a series of speeches in Washington, both before and after American entry into the war, Wilson had called for ‘a new international order based upon broad and universal principles of right and justice’, including a league of nations that would afford ‘mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small nations alike’, and thus ‘make it virtually impossible that any such catastrophe should ever overwhelm us again.2 These speeches, even the Fourteen Points address of January 1918 that referred to specific territorial questions, had consisted more of the elegant proclamation of general principles than of the formulation of precise proposals. But this had done nothing to diminish their moral force and popular appeal. To Europeans generally’, Victor Mamatey has written, ‘his speeches, circulated in hasty and execrable newspaper translations, in enemy countries moreover censored, were impressive but largely incomprehensible – a fact which stimulated rather than weakened the growth of the Wilsonian myth. The exalted and inscrutable are natural ingredients of myths’3

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  The Crisis of American Foreign Policy

  Wilsonianism in the Twenty-first Century

  • G. John Ikenberry, Thomas J. Knock, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Tony Smith(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  3. Wilsonianism in the Twenty-first Century

             

  Anne-Marie Slaughter

  Woodrow Wilson brought America the progressive doctrine of “the new freedom.” That included tariff reform, a federal income tax, the Federal Reserve System, federal antitrust laws, child labor laws, federal aid to farmers, and an eight-hour day for railroad workers. Who today would not want to claim the mantle of being his heir? It is worth remembering his domestic accomplishments because they provide an important context for interpreting his international legacy. There too, Wilson was a president who sought to avoid war at all costs; who ran for reelection on a platform of keeping America out of war; and who when he finally concluded that America had to enter World War I went to Congress to ask both counsel and permission. He believed strongly that America should fight “for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured,” but he did not seek war to spread those principles.

  When Wilson’s legacy is framed in these terms, it is easy to understand why so many schools of foreign policy today seek to wrap themselves in the Wilsonian mantle. Thomas Knock reviews these contenders in his contribution to this volume; they include Francis Fukuyama’s “pragmatic Wilsonianism,” Philip Zelikow’s “pragmatic idealism,” and John Ikenberry’s and my articulation of “a world of liberty under law.”1 This debate might seem like an intellectual game of “Will the Real Woodrow Wilson Please Stand Up,” if the foreign policy stakes were not so high.

  At issue here is nothing less than the lessons to be drawn from the disastrous foreign policy of George W. Bush’s first term, lessons that will shape America’s foreign policy for the next decade. If the principal lesson is that the Wilsonian support for democracy is a fool’s errand, succeeding only in snaring us in the “foreign entanglements” George Washington urged us to avoid,2

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  American Political Thought

  The Philosophic Dimension of American Statesmanship

  • Morton Grodzins, Richard Stevens(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Wilson’s “conservatism” does not really involve a reverence for what is old and for the ideas of Founding Fathers. It is not any kind of traditionalism. It is, rather, a certain way of recognizing the importance of continuity in human affairs, and the dangers that arise when settled habits and expectations are suddenly uprooted. The preservation of continuity might be thought to require substantial innovation, particularly if the only alternative envisioned is revolution.

  III

  The innovations for which Woodrow Wilson is most widely known concern his vision of a new order in international relations and the role of the United States in the promotion of a peaceful world. The president’s view of this country’s role in world affairs, epitomized in his “Fourteen Points” and the struggle for a League of Nations, was deeply rooted in his interpretation of the American experience and the American purpose. Wilsonian “internationalism” is inseparable from a certain conception of the American nation. “Americans,” said Wilson, “must have a consciousness different from the consciousness of every other nation in the world.”39 He saw the United States as a special country, unique in two respects—in its origins and in its historic experience. The new continent, to which men came from great distances deliberately and for a purpose, afforded an opportunity for a new beginning in human affairs. They came here to be free of autocratic rule, of privileged classes, and of all the artificial distinctions that divide men and stand in the way of universal friendship. The founders of the country intended it to be an example and an encouragement to all nations and peoples. America was “founded for the benefit of humanity.”40 As a result of these early ideals we have opened our doors to all the peoples of the world and have become a nation composed of all the peoples of the world.

  America, for Wilson, is unique, but what is unique about it is its concern with and embodiment of general human interests. The consciousness of other nations has been, like that of a family, inward-looking and parochial. The United States is distinguished because it represents, not one small and separate segment of the human race, but mankind. America is the universal nation. Wilson did not regard this as a mere historical fact or an accident of history that we are free to interpret as we please and in accordance with the interest of the moment. He regarded it as a providential fact, imposing upon us a duty or mission. The American mission is, “to unite mankind” by breaking down barriers and promoting that equality which is the foundation of human solidarity or brotherhood.41 It follows from this that, in its dealings with others, the United States is not at liberty to act simply with a view to the advantage of those living within its borders. We are not at liberty to be guided simply by our national interest, or, more precisely, we are not to regard our national interest as something distinct from and possibly opposed to the interests of other peoples. This is the meaning of Wilson’s oft-quoted statement that “it is a very perilous thing to determine the foreign policy of a nation in the terms of material interest.”42

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  The Mistakes of the 2020 Anti-Government Organization

  And the Use of Freudian Psychoanalysis

  • Benjamin Levine(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Palmetto Publishing

    (Publisher)

  The 28th President Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924)(1912-1920)

  W ilson’s father published a pro-tariff and anti-slavery newspaper in Ohio. The family moved to the South in 1851 where his father, Joseph Wilson, owned slaves. At the age of three Woodrow Wilson remembers Abraham Lincoln becoming president and the talk of war. Wilson did not begin to read until age 10 due to dyslexia. But, he achieved academically with hard work and discipline. After a year at Davidson College he transferred as a first year student to the New Jersey College that became Princeton University where he studied political philosophy and history. In the 1876 contested presidential election Wilson supported Sam Tilden, but Rutherford Hayes was granted president by the electoral commission. After study at the University of Virginia Law School, he attended graduate school at Johns Hopkins University in 1883 where he received a doctorate in 1886 in political science and history. He also studied German and economics. In 1890 he was elected to be chairman of Jurisprudence and Political Economy. He took a six-week course in administration at Johns Hopkins. He taught Constitutional Law at New York Law School.

  Wilson considered the United States Constitution to be cumbersome and open to corruption. He favored a parliamentary system. “Congressional Government”, his first book advocated a parliamentary system. Wilson believed the system of checks and balances complicated the government. Wilson criticized the House of Representatives believing that the 47 states had a Standing Committee, which he called petty barons who “may at will exercise an almost despotic sway within their own shires, and may at times threaten to convulse even the realm itself.” Wilson believed there is no danger in power, as long as it is not irresponsible. He stated that if power is divided or dealt out to share by many, it is obscured. Wilson said that the presidency will be as big and as influential as the man who occupies it. Some uneducated persons may call such power a dictatorship, but it is not a dictatorship. It is a strong executive government that will lead the nation to growth, leadership and protection. He used the growth of Prussia, England and France as examples of public administration where the executive increased government efficiency. Wilson believed the administration lied outside the spheres of politics so that party differences would not interfere. He contended that the items of administration must be limited, as to not block, nullify, obfuscate or modify a decree of government made by the executive branch.

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  A Companion to Woodrow Wilson

  • Ross A. Kennedy, Ross A. Kennedy(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  As the debacle of the treaty fight demonstrated, Wilson’s many victories in Congress had a great deal to do with the strong public support that existed for his policies and programs. The beginning of his presidency in 1913 marked the highpoint of national progressivism, made manifest in the results of the election of 1912, which he transformed into a series of legislative accomplishments that, as Cooper has written, “are well known and acknowledged even by Wilson’s severest critics” (Cooper 2008: 11). The progressive “tailwind” only provided the potential for significant legislation, however; Wilson’s vision of the presidency and his exercise of political leadership over both the Democratic Party and Congress transformed the reform agenda into federal law. The ideas that Wilson had developed over a lifetime of study about the power of the presidency and the singular role of the president in guiding national affairs became a fixture of American political life during his administration. The important reforms of the New Freedom were, in the final analysis, less significant than Wilson’s long-term expansion of the role of the President as the dominant force in national politics. Although weaker leaders beginning with Warren G. Harding would soon be elected to the office, it was evident that, as Arthur Macmahon has written, “never again could the Presidency shrink enough to fit a lesser man” (Macmahon 1958: 122).

  Although there exists a substantial base of solid research on Wilson as Chief Executive, some aspects of the topic could benefit from additional study. An in-depth treatment of Wilson’s cabinet might shed light on its role in decisionmaking during his presidency; it might also help to answer lingering questions about the administration’s handling of race relations. Another useful undertaking would be a book-length study focusing on Wilson as a Congressional leader that could provide additional insight into why Wilson’s innovative approaches to Congress worked so well before 1917 and increasingly failed after the United States entered World War I. Similarly, a comprehensive study of Wilson’s relations with military leaders, both before and after 1917, might add another dimension to our understanding of Wilson as Chief Executive.

  REFERENCES

  Auchincloss, L. (2000) Woodrow Wilson: A Penguin Life . New York: Viking.

  Baker, R.S. (1916) “Wilson.” Collier’s LVIII: 6.

  Baker, R.S. (1931) Woodrow Wilson Life and Letters: Volume 4: President 1913–1914

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  The Educational Legacy of Woodrow Wilson

  From College to Nation

  • James Axtell, James Axtell(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • University of Virginia Press

    (Publisher)

  See especially the new (and now standard) biography by John Milton Cooper Jr., Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009); Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); and Trygve Throntveit, “Related States: Pragmatism, Progressivism, and Internationalism in American Thought and Politics, 1880–1920” (Ph.D. diss., Dept. of History, Harvard University, May 2008). 8. WW to Ellen Louise Axson (hereafter ELA), May 25, 1884, PWW, 3:191–92. The most thorough analysis of Joseph Ruggles Wilson’s influence on his son is John M. Mulder, Woodrow Wilson: The Years of Preparation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), ch. 1; but see also John Milton Cooper Jr., The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1983), 17–19, for Wilson’s comparatively liberal outlook. 9. WW to ELA, July 15, 1884, PWW 3:248. See also Mulder, WW: Years of Preparation, xiii, 7–8, 82–83, 102, on Wilson’s penchant for covenanting. 10. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist, on the New Constitution, Written in 1788 (Hallowell, Maine: Masters, Smith, 1852), 147, copy preserved in the Woodrow Wilson Library, Rare Books Reading Room, Library of Congress (hereafter cited as WL LC). The passage above is marked by two vertical pencil lines in the margins; underlined text represents Wilson’s own underscoring. Dates inscribed on the inside front cover and other internal markings indicate Wilson first read the book in 1880 while a law student at the University of Virginia. 11. WW, Constitutional Government in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908), 2, 169. 12

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  How Did We Get Here?

  From TR to Donald Trump

  • Robert Dallek(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Harper

    (Publisher)

  Wilson, like so many other presidents, craved power not only because it gave him a sense of superiority but also because it gave him the chance to improve America and the world. In their campaigns, other presidents used high-minded rhetoric to bond with their audiences, but it was unclear exactly how they intended to move the country forward. By contrast, Wilson had a clear vision of how he hoped to advance the nation’s standing at home and abroad.

  He believed that a more humane society was vital in enhancing the nation’s greatness and international appeal. It continued what Roosevelt had initiated and set a high standard for future presidents. Still, Wilson began his presidency with few convictions about American contributions to international affairs beyond promoting a more principled world, saying, “It would be an irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign problems, for all my preparation has been in domestic matters.” He made his limited schooling in foreign relations apparent when he selected William Jennings Bryan as secretary of state. Bryan’s parochialism and ignorance of European geography in particular registered on Lewis Einstein, the U.S. envoy in Constantinople in 1908. When he wished Bryan, who was on a tour of the Continent, a good trip through the Balkans, the seeding ground for World War I, Bryan asked, “The Balkans, what are they?” Einstein saw Bryan’s response as astonishing provincialism. Ultimately, Wilson would settle on an agenda for reforming the world community, animating his actions in international affairs as they had in domestic matters by saying “that questions of government are moral questions.” While Wilson proved to be an exceptionally able politician who could use rhetoric as a not always reliable political tool, he held the conviction that “we must believe the things we tell the children.”

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  Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman

  Mission and Power in American Foreign Policy

  • Anne Pierce(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part I Woodrow Wilson Passage contains an image

  Chapter 1 The Invigoration of Principles and the Assertion of Power: A New President Takes Charge

  Nowhere else in the world have noble men and women exhibited in more striking forms the beauty and the energy of sympathy and helpfulness and counsel in their efforts to rectify wrong, alleviate suffering, and set the weak in the way of strength and hope. We have built up, moreover, a great system of government, which has stood through a long age as in many respects a model for those who seek to set liberty upon foundations that will endure against fortuitous change, against storm and accident. Our life contains every great thing and contains it in great abundance .... But the evil has come with the good and much fine gold has been corroded .... We see the bad with the good, the debased and decadent with the sound and vital. With this vision we approach new affairs. Our duty is to cleanse, to reconsider, to restore, to correct the evil without impairing the good, to purify and humanize every process of our common life without weakening or sentimentalizing it.

  (Inaugural Address, March 4, 1913)

  Twentieth-century politics acquires part of its meaning and definition from the politics of Woodrow Wilson. With a vengeance, he tackled the vexing problems of his time. With the finesse of a scholar attuned to the world around him, he articulated the yearnings of mankind and created an ideological framework for examining the issues of the day. He came to power at a time when the United States and the world needed new direction and new ideas. His perception of the need for change inspired him to alter the way America's power would be used and to adapt the idea of America's mission to his goals. Although some of the changes he wrought were dramatic and radical, others marked the invigoration and regeneration of traditional American principles.

  Wilson's approach to American politics was creative, energetic and resourceful, but nevertheless careful and reverent. His study of history prevented him from being blindly appropriated by the presuppositions of the past while at the same time reminding him of that which is noble in it. His religious-philosophical belief in the individual will and in the accountability and responsibility of each individual toward God and mankind inspired him to go beyond history—but only insofar as an untried path seemed to him to contain the distinct possibility of improvement over that already tried and proven. His optimism regarding the future was tempered by his respect for his ideological, theological and political predecessors.

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  Twelve Against the Gods

  The Story of Adventure

  • William Bolitho(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Diversion Books

    (Publisher)

  XII.Woodrow Wilson

  It is not some faded whimsicality that induces me to include Wilson—he has right to the simple surname—in these studies, and to end with him, but the conviction that so alone can the structure be roofed. No other life in history has the scale and extent sufficient to cover in a real unity the excessively disparate wings, galleries, and attics, with a view, which have grown up alongside the main halls and towers of this building. However novel it may be to conceive of his world-doing as an adventure, and him as an adventurer, the most soaring of them all, it is not hard to point out enough perfectly straightforward concordances with the definition. Solitude and risk were there in plenty; one of the banal reproaches against him was that he isolated himself. The repudiation of his signature was enough proof in itself that he dared everything alone, and replaces very comfortably the social disapproval we realized from the beginning was one of the surest stigmata of the pure adventurer. Naturally this stigma is purely political, and not in the slightest moral, as is more usual in our cases. But long ago we renounced blame and praise, to buy the privilege of impartiality. And in its very coloration, its grand and exciting air, the history of Wilson in its great acts is obviously related like a noble brother to some of the dubious brilliancies we have recounted, in the lives of our Alexander, Napoleon, Columbus, any name, and their world-conquests, world-discoveries, world-downfalls. Here is a man who imposed himself—ask the party bosses—as the supreme head of the continental empire of the United States. Who, further, handled that colossal power as if it were a sword in his hand, sheathing it when he wished, baring it at his own moment. With this and the power of his thought he ends the war. And then in person he sets out to save humanity by ending war for ever. These are acts and a personage at least the peer in romance of anything that has come about in humanity before.

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  I Am the Change

  • Charles R. Kesler(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Broadside e-books

    (Publisher)

  6 He saw the affinities with the antebellum and postbellum South that the Republican Progressives like TR did not, or at least disdained. His youthful desire to found a new political party thus easily gave way to the desire to instill a new sentiment into the old Democracy. Wilson helped to begin the conversion of the states’ rights, reactionary Democrats into the national party of liberalism. FDR completed the conversion (the Dixiecrat influence lingered for decades, to be sure), but Wilson was among the first to conceive that the losing party in the Civil War, stained by its support for slavery and disunion, could be reborn as the hopeful and egalitarian party of the future; that the champion of the sovereign states could reinvent itself as the champion of the progressive State. Wilson’s so-called conservatism thus helped to make him the founding father of Democratic Party liberalism.

  The Progressive Movement

  Progressivism was much bigger than Woodrow Wilson, of course. As an intellectual then political movement, it was eclectic, so eclectic that some historians beginning in the 1970s pronounced it a will-o’-the-wisp.7 But no one at the time thought Progressivism so various and contradictory as to be meaningless, much less nonexistent, though its adherents battled furiously over its political agenda. In 1912, each of the three major presidential candidates considered himself a Progressive, though only Theodore Roosevelt ran as the candidate of the Progressive Party. The raging disputes among TR, Wilson, and Taft showed the difficulty of reducing a complex intellectual movement to a single antitrust policy, or a common attitude toward the initiative, referendum, and recall. But even bitter disagreements over policies did not obscure the premises shared by almost every major figure who called himself or herself a Progressive. The most intense disputes usually occur among coreligionists, after all. Progressivism’s intellectual roots go back to the 1890s and even earlier—to the rise of the American research university after the Civil War, and to the shifting focus of politics after Reconstruction. Historians, journalists, and ordinary citizens understood that at the time, and most historians since, even those addled by the 1960s, have admitted the obvious, too.8

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