Woodrow Wilson

Based on Wikipedia: Woodrow Wilson

In October 1919, the most powerful man in the world woke up on the floor of his bathroom, paralyzed on his left side, barely able to speak. His wife found him there. For the next seventeen months, Woodrow Wilson—the twenty-eighth President of the United States—would remain hidden from public view, his condition a closely guarded secret, while his wife effectively ran the executive branch of the American government.

This is not where most histories of Wilson begin. They typically start with his birth, his scholarly career, his progressive reforms. But the stroke reveals something essential about the man: his almost pathological stubbornness, his inability to compromise, his conviction that he alone understood what was right. These traits had made him a transformative president. They also destroyed his greatest dream.

The Professor Who Would Be President

Wilson was born on December 28, 1856, in Staunton, Virginia, the son of a Presbyterian minister. His earliest memory tells you everything about the world he grew up in: he was three years old, playing in his yard in Augusta, Georgia, when he heard a passerby announce in disgust that Abraham Lincoln had been elected and that war was coming.

Wilson is one of only two American presidents who were citizens of the Confederate States of America. The other was John Tyler, the tenth president, who served two decades before the Civil War but later joined the Confederate Congress. Wilson's father was a staunch Confederate supporter and helped found the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America, which split from its Northern counterpart in 1861.

Growing up in the defeated South during Reconstruction left its mark. Wilson would carry certain attitudes about race and regional identity throughout his life—attitudes that would later manifest in troubling ways when he held power.

What distinguished Wilson from an early age was his intellectual ambition. He attended what is now Princeton University, where he studied political philosophy and history, edited the student newspaper, and ran the baseball association. After graduation, he tried law school at the University of Virginia, but his health forced him to withdraw. He attempted to establish a law practice in Atlanta, but found the day-to-day procedural work unbearable. Wilson wanted to think about governance, not practice it at the petty level of contracts and disputes.

So he did something unusual for an ambitious young man in the 1880s: he went to graduate school.

The Scholar of American Government

Johns Hopkins University had only recently been established when Wilson enrolled in 1883. It was America's first research university, modeled on the German system, dedicated to producing scholars rather than merely educating gentlemen. Wilson fit right in.

His doctoral dissertation became his first book: Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics. One contemporary critic called it "the best critical writing on the American constitution which has appeared since the 'Federalist' papers." That comparison to the foundational documents of American political theory was not made lightly.

Wilson's thesis was provocative. He argued that the real power in American government lay not in the presidency but in Congress—specifically in the committee system that had evolved over the previous century. The Constitution's framers had designed a system of balanced powers, but in practice, Wilson argued, congressional committees had become petty fiefdoms where legislation was crafted in secret, beyond public accountability.

This might seem like dry academic analysis, but it contained the seeds of Wilson's later political philosophy: that American government needed stronger executive leadership, more public accountability, and less backroom dealing. He was laying the intellectual groundwork for the presidency he would eventually hold.

In 1886, Wilson became the only president in American history to hold a doctoral degree. He would spend the next two decades as a professor and university administrator, first at Bryn Mawr College, then at Wesleyan University, and finally at Princeton.

Princeton's Transformation

Wilson joined the Princeton faculty in 1890, at an annual salary of three thousand dollars. Within twelve years, he was running the place.

The trustees appointed him president in 1902, and Wilson immediately set about transforming what had been a comfortable finishing school for wealthy young men into a serious academic institution. "I want to transform thoughtless boys performing tasks into thinking men," he told alumni.

His reforms were substantial. He created academic departments, established core requirements, and instituted a system of small-group instruction under teaching assistants called "preceptors." He raised admission standards and tried to eliminate what was known as the "gentleman's C"—the tacit understanding that well-born students could coast through with minimal effort and still receive passing grades.

These changes required money, and Wilson proved to be a masterful fundraiser. He convinced wealthy alumni and philanthropists like Andrew Carnegie to support his vision. He appointed the first Jewish and first Catholic faculty members, breaking Princeton's unofficial Protestant monopoly.

But there were darker elements to Wilson's tenure. He actively worked to keep African Americans out of Princeton, even as other Ivy League schools were beginning to admit small numbers of Black students. This was not merely passive acceptance of prevailing attitudes—it was deliberate exclusion.

Wilson's years at Princeton also revealed his greatest weakness: an absolute inability to accept defeat or compromise. When his plans for reorganizing the university's social life met opposition from faculty and trustees, he could not adapt. His closest friend, the philosopher John Grier Hibben, broke with him over one of these disputes. Wilson never forgave him. They had known each other since their undergraduate days, but after 1910, they never spoke again.

In 1906, Wilson woke up one morning blind in his left eye—the result of a stroke caused by hypertension. Modern physicians looking at his medical history believe he had been suffering from cardiovascular disease for years. The condition would worsen, affecting his judgment and his temperament, though neither he nor the public understood this at the time.

The Accidental Politician

Wilson had no political experience when New Jersey's Democratic Party bosses approached him in 1910. That was precisely the point.

The bosses needed a respectable face for their ticket. Progressivism was sweeping the country—a broad reform movement aimed at cleaning up corrupt political machines, regulating big business, and expanding democracy. The bosses thought they could use Wilson's sterling academic reputation to win the governorship while controlling him behind the scenes.

They were spectacularly wrong.

Once elected, Wilson turned on the machine that had nominated him. He pushed through a series of progressive reforms: laws regulating wages and working hours, measures to break the power of political bosses, election reforms to give voters more direct control. In two years, he transformed New Jersey's political landscape and made himself a national figure.

The 1912 presidential election offered him a remarkable opportunity. The Republican Party had split in two. The incumbent president, William Howard Taft, represented the party's conservative establishment. But Theodore Roosevelt—the former president who had handpicked Taft as his successor—had grown disillusioned with his protégé's policies and was running as a third-party candidate under the Progressive, or "Bull Moose," banner.

With Republicans divided, Wilson won easily. He became the first Southerner elected president since Zachary Taylor in 1848—and Taylor had been a Louisiana slaveholder whose appeal was based on his military heroism rather than his regional identity.

The New Freedom

Wilson called his domestic program the "New Freedom," and it reshaped American government in ways that still affect us today.

Start with the income tax. Before Wilson, the federal government funded itself primarily through tariffs—taxes on imported goods. This system was regressive, meaning it hit ordinary consumers harder than the wealthy. Wilson pushed through the Revenue Act of 1913, which established the modern federal income tax. For the first time, the government could tax wealth directly, based on ability to pay.

The same year, Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act, creating the central banking system that still manages American monetary policy. Before the Federal Reserve, the United States had no mechanism for responding to financial panics. Banks failed, credit froze, and ordinary people lost their savings in crashes that seemed to come from nowhere. The Federal Reserve was designed to prevent such catastrophes—or at least to give the government tools to respond when they occurred.

In 1914, Wilson signed the Clayton Antitrust Act, which strengthened the government's ability to break up monopolies and prevent anti-competitive business practices. The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 had proven too vague to be effective; the Clayton Act closed loopholes and gave regulators clearer authority.

These were not minor adjustments. Wilson was building the infrastructure of the modern federal government—the apparatus that would later be expanded by Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. Conservatives have criticized Wilson ever since for expanding federal power; progressives have credited him with establishing the foundation of modern liberalism.

But Wilson's progressivism had sharp limits, particularly when it came to race.

The Segregationist President

During his first year in office, Wilson authorized the widespread imposition of racial segregation within the federal bureaucracy. This was not merely maintaining existing policies—it was an active rollback of the modest gains Black Americans had made since the Civil War.

Federal agencies had been integrated, at least to some degree, since Reconstruction. Black and white employees had worked side by side, shared facilities, and occasionally advanced into supervisory positions. Wilson changed that. His administration segregated workplaces, restrooms, and cafeterias. Black employees were demoted or fired. Photographs were required on job applications—a mechanism for screening out Black applicants.

When a delegation of Black leaders visited the White House to protest, Wilson defended segregation as beneficial to Black workers, claiming it reduced friction between the races. The delegation's leader, the journalist William Monroe Trotter, challenged Wilson directly, saying that Black Americans who had supported him felt betrayed. Wilson erupted in anger and had Trotter removed from the White House.

It is impossible to reconcile this with Wilson's progressive reputation. The same man who championed economic reform and expanded democracy actively worked to exclude Black Americans from both. This was not an incidental contradiction but a central feature of early twentieth-century progressivism, which often combined economic reform with racial exclusion.

Wilson also initially opposed women's suffrage, drawing sustained protests from suffragists who picketed the White House—the first organized protest at that location in American history. He eventually came around to supporting the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted women the right to vote, but only after years of pressure and political calculation.

The War to End All Wars

When war broke out in Europe in August 1914, Wilson declared American neutrality. For nearly three years, he tried to keep the United States out of the conflict, even as German submarines sank American ships and killed American citizens.

His 1916 re-election campaign used the slogan "He Kept Us Out of War." Wilson won narrowly, defeating the Republican Charles Evans Hughes in one of the closest elections in American history. The outcome was not certain until California's results came in days after Election Day.

But neutrality could not last. Germany's policy of unrestricted submarine warfare—attacking any ship, including civilian vessels, in waters around Britain—made American casualties inevitable. In April 1917, Wilson asked Congress to declare war.

His war message is worth remembering for what it did not say. Wilson did not ask Americans to fight for territory, or for revenge, or even primarily for national defense. He asked them to fight for an idea.

The world must be made safe for democracy.

This was something new in American foreign policy. Wilson was proposing that the United States had a mission to reshape the international order, to spread democratic governance, and to establish a system that would prevent future wars. He was not merely seeking to win the war but to transform its aftermath.

In January 1918, Wilson laid out his vision in the Fourteen Points, a statement of war aims that became the basis for peace negotiations. The Fourteen Points called for open diplomacy, freedom of the seas, reduction of armaments, and—most importantly—the establishment of a "general association of nations" to guarantee the political independence and territorial integrity of all countries, large and small.

This would become the League of Nations: Wilson's greatest ambition and his most crushing failure.

The League of Nations

When the war ended in November 1918, Wilson traveled to Europe to personally negotiate the peace. No sitting American president had ever done this before. He arrived in Paris to crowds cheering "Wilson! Wilson!" as if he were a liberator rather than a negotiator.

The negotiations were grueling. Britain and France wanted to punish Germany, extracting territory and reparations. Wilson wanted to build a new international order based on collective security—the idea that all nations would band together to prevent aggression against any member. He compromised on much of the Treaty of Versailles, accepting harsh terms against Germany, in order to secure agreement on the League of Nations.

For his efforts, Wilson was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919.

But the prize was premature. The treaty still had to be ratified by the United States Senate, and Wilson had made a critical error. The 1918 midterm elections, held just days before the armistice, had given Republicans control of Congress. Wilson had asked voters to support Democrats as a referendum on his policies; voters had refused. Now he needed two-thirds of a Republican-controlled Senate to approve his treaty.

The Senate's objections centered on Article X of the League Covenant, which committed member nations to preserve the territorial integrity of all other members against external aggression. Critics argued this would obligate the United States to fight wars around the world at the League's direction, surrendering American sovereignty to an international body.

There was room for compromise. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the Republican chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, proposed reservations that would have qualified American commitment without gutting the treaty entirely. Many observers believed Wilson could have secured ratification with modifications.

Wilson refused absolutely. He would not accept any reservations. He would not negotiate. He would take his case directly to the American people.

The Collapse

In September 1919, Wilson embarked on a national speaking tour to build public support for the treaty. He was already exhausted, already ill. His doctors warned him against the trip. He went anyway.

Over three weeks, Wilson traveled more than eight thousand miles by train, delivering dozens of speeches in sweltering heat. His headaches grew worse. He had difficulty sleeping. On September 25, in Pueblo, Colorado, he suffered what appeared to be a minor stroke. His doctors canceled the remaining tour and rushed him back to Washington.

On October 2, Wilson suffered a massive stroke that left the entire left side of his body paralyzed. For weeks, he lay in bed, barely able to communicate. His wife, Edith, controlled access to him completely. She reviewed all documents, decided what matters required his attention, and conveyed his decisions—or what she claimed were his decisions—to his cabinet and to Congress.

The Twenty-Fifth Amendment, which establishes procedures for presidential disability, would not be ratified until 1967. In 1919, there was no constitutional mechanism for handling an incapacitated president. Wilson's cabinet considered invoking provisions that would transfer power to the vice president, but Edith Wilson and the president's physician blocked any such move.

For seventeen months, the United States government operated in a constitutional twilight. The president was incapacitated but would not resign. His wife was making decisions but had no legal authority. The country drifted.

The Senate voted on the Treaty of Versailles twice. Both times, Wilson instructed Democrats to reject any version with reservations. Both times, the treaty failed. The United States never joined the League of Nations—the organization Wilson had created, the institution he believed would prevent future wars.

The Aftermath

Wilson's final year in office was a disaster by almost any measure. The economy fell into recession. A wave of strikes paralyzed major industries. Race riots broke out in cities across the country during what became known as the Red Summer of 1919. The administration's wartime restrictions on civil liberties—the Espionage and Sedition Acts had made it illegal to criticize the government or the war—continued even after the war ended, leading to mass arrests and deportations of suspected radicals.

Wilson had hoped to seek a third term, but his stroke made that impossible. In 1920, the Republican Warren G. Harding won the presidency in a landslide, promising a "return to normalcy"—a deliberate rejection of Wilson's idealistic internationalism.

Wilson lived for three more years after leaving office, dying on February 3, 1924, at age sixty-seven. He never fully recovered from his stroke, never accepted that his vision for the League of Nations had failed, never acknowledged that his own stubbornness had contributed to that failure.

The Wilsonian Legacy

Wilson's influence on American government and foreign policy is enormous—and deeply contested.

On the domestic side, he built institutions that remain central to American governance. The Federal Reserve still manages monetary policy. The federal income tax still funds the government. The regulatory apparatus he expanded still shapes the relationship between government and business. Whether you think this is good or bad depends largely on your political philosophy, but the scale of his impact is undeniable.

On foreign policy, Wilson's legacy is even more complex. "Wilsonianism" became a term for the belief that the United States has a mission to promote democracy and human rights around the world, that international institutions can prevent war, that moral principles should guide foreign policy. Every American president since Wilson has had to grapple with this vision—either embracing it, rejecting it, or trying to find some middle ground.

The League of Nations failed. But its successor, the United Nations, was built on Wilsonian principles—and this time, the United States joined. The international order that emerged after World War II, with its network of alliances, trade agreements, and multilateral institutions, owes much to Wilson's vision, even if he did not live to see it realized.

And yet there is the other Wilson: the segregationist who rolled back civil rights gains, the authoritarian who suppressed dissent during wartime, the stubborn idealist who destroyed his own greatest achievement because he could not compromise. He was a man who believed deeply in democracy but excluded millions of Americans from its benefits. He was a visionary who could not see the flaws in his own vision.

Historians continue to debate where Wilson belongs in the ranking of American presidents. He consistently places in the top ten or fifteen, recognized for his domestic reforms and his shaping of American foreign policy. But his reputation has shifted over time, particularly as scholars have paid more attention to his racial policies and his suppression of civil liberties.

Perhaps the fairest assessment is that Wilson embodied the contradictions of American progressivism itself: idealistic and exclusionary, democratic and authoritarian, visionary and blind. He transformed the American government and the international order, for better and for worse. He dreamed of a world without war and left behind a treaty so harsh it helped cause another one. He believed in the power of democracy and worked to deny it to millions.

The world Wilson tried to build is still, in many ways, the world we live in. Its institutions bear his mark. Its contradictions are his contradictions too.