Woodrow Wilson

Woodrow Wilson was the 28th president of the United States, serving from 1913 to 1921. A former professor and president of Princeton University, he pushed through major economic reforms, led the country into the First World War and, at the Paris Peace Conference, championed the League of Nations, for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize. His administration also extended racial segregation across the federal government, and his reputation now rests on both his liberal internationalism and the racism of his policies at home.

Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born on 28 December 1856 in Staunton, Virginia, the son of Joseph Ruggles Wilson, a Presbyterian minister, and Janet Woodrow, who had been born in England. The family moved to Augusta, Georgia, when he was a baby, and he grew up during the American Civil War and Reconstruction among white Southerners loyal to the Confederacy; his father's church was used as a hospital for Confederate soldiers. Later the family lived in South Carolina and North Carolina.

Wilson graduated from the College of New Jersey, soon renamed Princeton, in 1879. After studying law at the University of Virginia and briefly practising in Atlanta, which bored him, he took a doctorate in history and political science at Johns Hopkins University in 1886. His book Congressional Government (1885) argued that the American system was dominated by congressional committees and admired British-style cabinet leadership. In 1885 he married Ellen Axson, with whom he had three daughters.

Wilson taught at Bryn Mawr and Wesleyan before returning to Princeton in 1890, where he became a popular lecturer and prolific author. His multi-volume History of the American People (1902) presented Reconstruction from a white Southern viewpoint and wrote sympathetically of the first Ku Klux Klan. In 1902 he was chosen president of the university. He reformed teaching and recruited young faculty, though his attempts to abolish the exclusive eating clubs and to control the new graduate school ended in bitter defeats. Princeton under his leadership admitted no Black students.

In 1910 New Jersey's Democratic bosses made him their candidate for governor, expecting a pliable figurehead. Once elected, he turned against them, securing a direct primary law, measures against corruption and a workers' compensation scheme. The reputation he won as a progressive made him a national figure almost overnight.

At the 1912 election the Republicans split between President William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt, who ran on a new Progressive ticket. Wilson won with about 42 percent of the popular vote and a large majority in the electoral college, the first Southern-born president elected since before the Civil War. His programme, the New Freedom, aimed to break the power of monopolies and big banks. With Democratic majorities in Congress, he lowered tariffs in 1913 and introduced a federal income tax under the newly ratified Sixteenth Amendment, created the Federal Reserve System in 1913 and in 1914 established the Federal Trade Commission and passed the Clayton Antitrust Act. Laws in 1916 set an eight-hour day for railway workers and restricted child labour.

Wilson's election was welcomed by Southern segregationists, several of whom sat in his cabinet. In 1913 the Postmaster General, Albert Burleson, and the Treasury Secretary, William McAdoo, began separating Black and white employees, and Wilson allowed department heads to segregate offices, toilets and canteens as they saw fit. Black civil servants were demoted or dismissed, particularly in the South, and a photograph became a standard part of applications for federal jobs, which made discrimination easier. When the Black journalist William Monroe Trotter led a delegation to protest in November 1914, Wilson defended segregation as beneficial to both races and ended the meeting angrily. In 1915 D. W. Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation, which glorified the Klan and quoted Wilson's own history, was shown at the White House. Wilson also initially opposed a federal amendment for women's suffrage and only endorsed it in 1918.

Wilson's foreign policy promised moral principle rather than imperialism, but in practice he intervened in Latin America more than any earlier president. American forces occupied Veracruz in Mexico in 1914 and pursued Pancho Villa across the border in 1916, while marines occupied Haiti from 1915 and the Dominican Republic from 1916. His first wife died in August 1914, and in December 1915 he married Edith Bolling Galt.

When the First World War broke out in 1914 Wilson declared neutrality, although American trade and loans increasingly favoured Britain and France. The sinking of the liner Lusitania in 1915, with 128 Americans among the dead, strained relations with Germany, and he was re-elected narrowly in 1916 partly on the slogan "He kept us out of war". In early 1917 the German Empire resumed unrestricted submarine warfare, and the Zimmermann Telegram revealed a German offer of alliance to Mexico. At Wilson's request Congress declared war on 6 April 1917, which he presented as a war to make the world "safe for democracy".

The government mobilised the economy, introduced conscription and sent some two million soldiers to France. It also suppressed dissent: the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 were used to imprison opponents of the war, including the socialist leader Eugene Debs.

In January 1918 Wilson set out his war aims in the Fourteen Points, including open diplomacy, free trade, the self-determination of peoples and an association of nations to guarantee peace. They became the basis of the armistice in November and made Wilson a hero to many in Europe and to colonial peoples hoping for independence. He went to Paris in person for the peace conference of 1919, the first sitting president to travel to Europe. He had to compromise with Britain and France on reparations and territory, and the conference rejected a Japanese proposal to affirm racial equality, but he secured the Covenant of the League of Nations as part of the Treaty of Versailles. Nationalists in Egypt, India, Korea and China who had taken his rhetoric of self-determination at face value were bitterly disappointed.

At home the Republican-controlled Senate, led by Henry Cabot Lodge, objected that the League would commit the United States to war without congressional approval. Wilson refused any significant compromise and toured the country to rally support, but collapsed in September and suffered a severe stroke on 2 October 1919. For the rest of his term he was largely incapacitated, and Edith Wilson controlled access to him. The Senate rejected the treaty in November 1919 and again in March 1920, and the United States never joined the League. He was awarded the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize in December 1920.

Wilson left office in March 1921 and lived quietly in Washington, D.C., where he died on 3 February 1924. Historians long ranked him among the most important American presidents for his domestic reforms and for the idea, later realised under Franklin D. Roosevelt with the United Nations, that the United States should lead a rules-based international order. Since the late twentieth century more attention has gone to his segregation of the federal service, his racist views and his wartime repression of civil liberties. In 2020 Princeton removed his name from its school of public and international affairs, citing his racist thinking and policies.