President Woodrow Wilson

President Woodrow Wilson 

Woodrow Wilson, the 28th U.S. president, served in office from 1913 to 1921 and led America through World War I. An advocate for democracy and world peace, Wilson is often ranked by historians as one of the nation’s greatest presidents. Wilson was a college professor, university president and Democratic governor of New Jersey before winning the White House in 1912. He pursued an ambitious agenda of progressive reform that included the establishment of the Federal Reserve and Federal Trade Commission. Wilson tried to keep the United States neutral during World War I but ultimately called on Congress to declare war on Germany in 1917. After the war, he helped negotiate a peace treaty that included a plan for the League of Nations. Although the Senate rejected U.S. membership in the League, Wilson received the Nobel Prize for his peacemaking efforts.

Early Years:

Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born on December 28, 1856, in Staunton, Virginia. His father, Joseph Ruggles Wilson, was a Presbyterian minister, and his mother, Janet Wilson, was a minister’s daughter and originally from England. He was also known as Tommy Wilson in his childhood and he spent his childhood and teen years in Augusta, Georgia, and Columbia, South Carolina. During the American Civil War, Wilson’s father served as a chaplain in the Confederate army and used his church as a hospital for injured Confederate troops. Wilson graduated from Princeton University in 1879 and went on to attend law school at the University of Virginia. After briefly practicing law in Atlanta, Georgia, he received a Ph.D. in political science from Johns Hopkins University in 1886. He taught at Bryn Mawr College and Wesleyan College before being hired by Princeton in 1890 as a professor of jurisprudence and politics. From 1902 to 1910, Wilson was president of Princeton, where he developed a national reputation for his educational reform policies. In 1885, Wilson married Ellen Axson , a minister’s daughter. They had three daughters before Ellen died of kidney disease in 1914, during her husband’s first presidential term. The following year, Wilson married Edith Bolling Galt, a widow whose husband had owned a Washington, D.C., jewelry business. 

Politics:

In 1910, Woodrow Wilson was elected governor of New Jersey, where garnered national attention as a progressive reformer. In 1912, the Democrats nominated Wilson for president, selecting Thomas Marshall, the governor of Indiana, as his vice presidential running mate. The Republican Party split over their choice for a presidential candidate: Conservative Republicans re-nominated President William Taft, while the progressive wing broke off to form the Progressive Party and nominated Theodore Roosevelt, who had served as president from 1901 to 1909. With the Republicans divided, Wilson, who campaigned on a platform of liberal reform, won 435 electoral votes, compared to 88 for Roosevelt and eight for Taft. He garnered nearly 42 percent of the popular vote. 

Wilson and WWI

When World War I broke out in Europe in the summer of 1914, Wilson was determined to keep the United States out of the conflict. On May 7, 1915, a German submarine torpedoed and sank the British ocean liner Lusitania, killing more than 1,100 people (including 128 Americans). Wilson continued to maintain U.S. neutrality but warned Germany that any future sinking would be viewed by America as deliberately unfriendly.In 1916, Wilson and Vice President Marshall were re-nominated by the Democrats. The Republicans chose Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes as their presidential candidate and Charles Fairbanks, the U.S. vice president under Theodore Roosevelt, as his running mate. Wilson, who campaigned on the slogan “He kept us out of war,” won with a narrow electoral margin of 277-254 and a little more than 49 percent of the popular vote. Woodrow Wilson’s second term in office was dominated by World War I. Although the president had advocated for peace during the initial years of the war, in early 1917 German submarines launched unrestricted submarine attacks against U.S. merchant ships. Around the same time, the United States learned about the Zimmerman Telegram, in which Germany tried to persuade Mexico to enter into an alliance against America. On April 2, 1917, Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany, stating, “The world must be made safe for democracy.” America’s participation helped bring about victory for the Allies, and on November 11, 1918, an armistice was signed by the Germans. At the Paris Peace Conference, which opened in January 1919 and included the heads of the British, French and Italian governments, Wilson helped negotiate the Treaty of Versailles. The agreement included the charter for the League of Nations, an organization intended to arbitrate international disputes and prevent future wars. Wilson had initially advanced the idea for the League in a January 1918 speech to the U.S. Congress in which he outlined his “Fourteen Points” for a postwar peace settlement.

When Wilson returned from Europe in the summer of 1919, he encountered opposition to the Versailles treaty from isolationist Republicans in Congress who feared the League could limit America’s autonomy and draw the country into another war. In September of that year, the president embarked on a cross-country speaking tour to promote his ideas for the League directly to the American people. On the night of September 25, on a train bound for Wichita,Kansas, Wilson collapsed from mental and physical stress, and the rest of his tour was cancelled. On October 2, he suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. Wilson’s condition was kept largely hidden from the public, and his wife worked behind the scenes to fulfill a number of his administrative duties.

The Senate voted on the Treaty of Versailles first in November 1919 and again in March 1920. Both times it failed to gain the two-thirds vote required for ratification. The treaty’s defeat was partly blamed on Wilson’s refusal to compromise with the Republicans. The League of Nations held its first meeting in January 1920; the United States never joined the organization. However, in December 1920, Wilson received the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to include the Covenant of the League of Nations in the Treaty of Versailles.

Wilson died at his home on February 3, 1924, at age 67. He was buried in the Washington National Cathedral, the only president to be interred in the nation’s capital.

Sources:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/1600/presidents/woodrowwilson

http://millercenter.org/president/wilson

http://www.woodrowwilson.org/about/biography

http://www.historynet.com/woodrow-wilson