Woodrow Wilson

Article Outline

Introduction; Early Life; Literary and Academic Career; Entry into Politics; President of the United States; Second Term as President; Last Years

Election of 1916

By the summer of 1916 the Democratic Party had lost some of its momentum for reform. Theodore Roosevelt was bringing many of his supporters back into the Republican Party, and Wilson was about to face a more united opposition. At this crucial time a vacancy occurred on the Supreme Court of the United States, and Wilson nominated Louis D. Brandeis to fill it. Brandeis, a progressive, was opposed by many big business interests and was also resented by many people because he was Jewish. There was substantial opposition to his nomination, both because of hatred and because of the fear of what he might do on the court. Wilson courageously defended Brandeis's qualifications.

In June the Democrats renominated Wilson. Their platform emphasized peace, and argued that Wilson had kept the United States out of the war. The Republicans nominated Charles Evans Hughes, a former governor of New York with an honored record of reform, and an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Because he seemed to offer common ground to both progressives and conservatives, Hughes appeared to have the political advantage, but he turned out to be an unimpressive campaigner. On election night Hughes appeared to have had won, but as the returns came in from California in the early morning hours, the race went to Wilson, who won the state by a mere 1983 votes. The “Solid South” and a nearly solid West had assured him a narrow victory in the end.

Second Term as President

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Drift Toward War

Wilson saw no contradiction between his domestic and foreign programs; his intention was to extend the domestic crusade for democracy to foreign shores. During his rise to prominence, from 1910 to 1916, he had learned from a variety of people whose help he required, and he was encouraged by the mass-circulation magazines that advocated progressive reforms. Now he made more and more of his own decisions and often neglected to remember that his country was divided. In 1914 the New Republic magazine began publication, appealing not to the masses but to the leaders of society. Periodicals such as the New Republic, as well as his private diplomacy, helped Wilson create the approach that soon brought the United States into the war.

Developing suggestions that had long circulated at home and abroad, Wilson decided that only a league of nations that would confront potential belligerents with the strength of its united military and moral powers could keep world peace. In December 1916, Wilson played the role of peacemaker with fresh determination, asking the Allies and the Central Powers to announce their terms to end the war. On January 22, 1917, in an address to the Senate, he appealed for a “peace without victory.” However, since he believed that Germany had wrongfully invaded neutral Belgium and unjustly used submarines, his dream of an “equality of nations upon which peace must be founded if it is to last” excluded Germany.

Declaration of War

Wilson and a vast segment of the American people still hoped to stay out of the war. Their hopes vanished when the British presented Wilson with the Zimmermann note, a secret message, which British agents had intercepted and decoded, that advised the German minister to Mexico to seek a German-Mexican alliance against the United States. The publication of this note infuriated the American public and convinced them that war with Germany was necessary.

The night prior to asking Congress to declare war, Wilson spoke with a trusted journalist, Frank L. Cobb of the New York World. He feared the requirements at home to support a united war effort abroad: “Once lead this people into war, and they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. To fight you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fiber of our national life, infecting Congress, the courts, the policeman on the beat, the man in the street.”

Conformity, the president thought, would be the only virtue, and nonconformists would have to pay the penalty. He did not believe the Constitution could survive the demands of war, but he could see no alternative. On April 2, 1917, in one of the most famous of American declarations of war, Wilson denounced the German campaign as “a war against all nations” and called for military action “for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations.”

War Leader

Wilson called not only the military but also progressives to join the crusade. His secretary of war was Newton D. Baker, an outstanding Ohio municipal reformer. George Creel, a progressive journalist, headed the Committee on Public Information, which enlisted progressive writers to explain war aims to the nation. Ray Stannard Baker, an ex-muckraker who had reported to Wilson about British public opinion, continued to be a close adviser. Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, was enlisted to guide union leaders through the vital process of war production. Although Wilson's appointees generally opposed harsh suppression of dissidents, they found it hard to keep citizens from attacking those not in favor of the war, especially when the president was calling for unbounded patriotism and criticizing the pacifist statements of those who opposed the war. However, pacifists and those opposed to the Allies' cause were merely suppressed, not persuaded. The opposition included German Americans, socialists, and talented young social reformers such as John Reed, Randolph Bourne, and Max Eastman. They traded their earlier social optimism for bitter antagonism toward the war and Wilson's policies.

Industrial and military mobilization toward war production went rapidly, guided by such executives as Bernard Baruch and future president Herbert Hoover (1929-1933). Wilson gave them authority to act, supported them against their critics, and recognized their achievements. The swift conversion from peace to war confirmed Wilson's conviction that Americans as a nation had joined a crusade. His speeches amazed his associates with their intensity. “As leader and spokesman of the enemies of Germany,” wrote Ambassador Page, “your speeches are worth an army in France and more, for they keep the proper moral elevation.”

The Fourteen Points

Wilson's crusade for democracy received a severe shock when the Russian Revolution was superseded in October 1917 by a Communist Party uprising and a new regime headed by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. The new regime was opposed to all warring nations and was eager to undermine them. When the new government found copies of secret treaties the Allies had made with the tsar, they immediately published them. The treaties revealed that the Allies had not entered the war for purely idealistic purposes any more than Germany had.

Wilson was not disillusioned to learn that the Allies had been plotting the dissolution of the German Empire. He was well aware that Allied leaders were primarily concerned with national self-interest. His belief was that a league of nations could force them to act on behalf of peace and equity whether they wanted to do so or not.

To counter a peace plan suggested by the Bolsheviks, Wilson offered his own plan for peace. Addressing Congress on January 8, 1918, Wilson outlined what he called his Fourteen Points. Wilson's program imagined “open covenants of peace, openly arrived at,” freedom of the seas, weapons reduction, territorial adjustments between nations, and Wilson's dearest cause, the League of Nations: