Wilson, Woodrow | Introduction
Wilson, Woodrow 1856-1924
(Full name Thomas Woodrow Wilson) American politician, educator, historian, biographer, and essayist.
INTRODUCTION
While Wilson is best known for his political career, serving as President during the involvement of the United States in World War I, and for his role in founding the League of Nations thereafter. His first career was in academics, as a professor of political science and a historian. He wrote and published a considerable body of work both as an educator and a politician, and these writings have become historical documents in their own right, as articulated statements of the political philosophy that Wilson attempted to put into practice.
Biographical Information
Wilson was born in Staunton, Virginia, to the Reverend Dr. Joseph Ruggles and Janet Woodrow Wilson, on December 28, 1856. His parents were both of Scottish descent, his mother having emigrated to America from England. His father served as a chaplain in the army of the Confederacy and helped organize relief and medical assistance in Georgia during the war. Reverend Wilson turned his First Presbyterian Church in Augusta, Georgia, into a field hospital for wounded Confederate soldiers after the battle of Chickamauga (1863), and turned the yard outside the church into a makeshift prison camp for captured Union men. The Wilsons relocated to Columbia, South Carolina, in 1870, where Reverend Wilson taught at the Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and to Wilmington, North Carolina four years later. Woodrow Wilson emerged from an undistinguished middle-school career to attend Davidson College in North Carolina, but he returned home again after a year owing to ill health. In 1875 he enrolled as a freshman at the College of New Jersey, later to become Princeton University. He took his law degree in 1880 at the University of Virginia, although he spent only a year at the school; ill health compelled him to complete the degree back at his home in Wilmington. After an unproductive year, Wilson gave up his law practice in 1884 to accept a fellowship at Johns Hopkins University, in the Department of History, Politics, and Economics. In 1885, Wilson married Ellen Axson, and took a teaching post at Bryn Mawr. Three years later, dissatisfied with the Dean and maintaining his low opinion of the mental capacities of women, he broke his contract and pursued his career elsewhere, first at Wesleyan College, then, in 1890, at Princeton. There, he was given a high salary and a light work load. He rapidly earned lasting favor among the students and faculty.
Wilson suffered a minor stroke in 1896 that paralyzed his right hand for a year. This was the first sign of the circulatory brain disease that would further afflict him in later life. In addition to his full lecture schedule, Wilson was highly active in the historiographic world, holding various offices in the American Historical Association, the American Philosophical Society, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, among others. He wrote voluminously on historical matters, and became a sought-after contributor and author. Between 1887 and 1910 Wilson received eleven honorary degrees. Wilson finally left off scholarly work when he was elected president of Princeton University in 1902. He restructured the school entirely, in an attempt to focus more clearly on academics and eliminate the influence of social clubs and the "old boy" network on campus. His efforts were met with considerable resistance at Princeton, but he took on in the eyes of the public the appearance of a democratic crusader, and in 1910 he was urged to leave office and enter the New Jersey gubernatorial race as the Democratic candidate. As governor, Wilson began an immediate campaign of reform, and his work drew national attention, making New Jersey a model state for progressive politicians. In 1912, he was nominated as the Democratic candidate for President. The Republican vote was split between the established candidate, President William Howard Taft, and Theodore Roosevelt running on the "Bull Moose" ticket. As a result, even though he lacked a majority of the public vote, Wilson received the largest margin of electoral votes in American history to that time. During his administration, Wilson worked closely with the Democratic Congress. He was the first President since Thomas Jefferson to address both houses. With the legislature behind him, he passed the Federal Reserve Act, created the Federal Trade Commission, and passed the Clayton Anti-Trust Act. He also segregated the U.S. government for the first time. In foreign policy, Wilson intervened constantly in Latin America, sending troops to Mexico a number of times, once under General Pershing to hunt down Pancho Villa in 1916. This was an election year, and Wilson was narrowly confirmed in his second term, beating Republican Charles E. Hughes by twenty-three electoral votes. Wilson spent the first years of World War I trying to evade direct conflict. When the Lusitania, with 128 American passengers on board, was sunk by a German U-boat in 1915, he extracted promises from the German high command to refrain from attacking American shipping. In early 1917 the Germans rescinded their promises, and Wilson was compelled to declare war on April 6. By entering the war and taking the position that all nations were compelled to establish a balance of power in order to keep each other in check, he set the course of subsequent twentieth-century American foreign policy.
When, in 1918, the Germans began to think of suing for peace, they turned to Wilson as an impartial negotiator. With some difficulties and considerable flagging of his popular support at home, Wilson set about brokering the peace. Ultimately, his sole contribution to the hastily written treaty of Versailles was the provision for the League of Nations, through which he felt all other problems would be solved. His failure, however, to bring his domestic opponents into the peace process, and the general failure of many Democratic legislators to win reelection that year, caused the treaty to stall in the Senate. In October 1919, Wilson toured the country in support of the treaty. During his tour he suffered a major stroke from which he never fully recovered. His illness prevented him from performing any other official duties as President. The treaty was never ratified. Wilson remained an invalid for the rest of his life. After the death of his first wife in 1914, he had married Edith B. Galt, who stayed with him during his illness. Wilson died on February 3, 1924.
Major Works
Wilson's first work was his 1885 thesis, Congressional Government, in which he decries the separation of the executive and legislative branches of government. In imitation of the Confederate constitution, Wilson suggested that cabinet members be guaranteed seats in the Congress, as a way of closing the breach between the two branches. Otherwise, according to Wilson, the President is made too weak, and Congressional committees are able to promote special interests and fragment their accountability to such an extent that not even a strengthened Speaker of the House could keep Congress united. Congressional Government was Wilson's most popular book, running through three printings in its first year alone. "The Modern Democratic State," an essay composed by Wilson in 1885, but not published until the appearance of The Papers of Woodrow Wilson in 1966, as the chapter entitled "Character of Democracy in the United States," grew out of his more general historical survey of democratic government, which he made preparatory to his Bryn Mawr lectures. Here he begins to address history, taking it as the groundwork for understanding and practicing democracy. Wilson criticized the operation of the United States democracy in "The Study of Administration," which appeared in the July 1887 issue of Political Science Quarterly. The government, Wilson proclaimed, was inefficient. As a rememdy, Wilson urged reform along the lines of European authoritarian bureauocracies, and municipal reform. The State: Elements of Historical and Practical Politics (1889) was Wilson's second important book, reflecting his broader historical perspective. In it, he takes the then-fashionable evolutionary approach to human political history, and outlines some of the practices of some European governmetns as models to follow in America. As with his first book, The State sold widely, running through a printing a year. In 1893, Wilson published his Civil War history, Division and Reunion, 1829-1889. Despite the dates, the period of Reconstruction is only summarily dealt with in forty-seven pages. Wilson regarded slavery as a necessary evil, taking the paternalistic view of master-slave relations in the South. He ignored the various economic arguments put forward to explain the war at the time, and insisted that the war had been the result of differing political philosophies, federalism vs. states' rights. Wilson upheld the racist views of his time, stating that African-Americans could never become full citizens and that segregation was a wholly appropriate measure for preserving "racial harmony." "On the Writing of History," later collected in Mere Literature (1896) as "The Truth of the Matter" was Wilson's summation of his historiographical philosophy. In this essay he expressed the sentiment that the historian's duty was to interpret history for the common man, attempting to frame events in their original context as if writing as a contemporary. In calling for a new approach, Wilson delineated two different sorts of history, the narration of significant events and the analytical uncovering of "secret forces" at work, and attempted to conceive a marriage of the two. This approach, given a cohesiveness by a single, widely accepted and established point of view among historians, Wilson felt, would make history a moral guideline. Another great popular success for Wilson was his biography of George Washington. It was the wide interest in George Washington that made Wilson a much sought-after author. Harper and Brothers contracted him to write a textbook history of the United States specifically for use in southern schools. This project eventually became A History of the American People (1902). Thereafter, most of his published works were transcribed speeches and short essays.
Critical Reception
As a rule, Wilson's stature among historians and critics took a descending track as his political and popular career developed. Congressional Government was highly praised and awarded one of the first John Marshall prizes at Johns Hopkins. The State appeared on syllabi from Harvard and Johns Hopkins to Cambridge and Bombay. Division and Reunion was attacked by historians for failing to take into account the economic factors that determined the outbreak of the war, but was generally well received by critics. Wilson's biography of Washington, however, was roundly condemned by historians as an uneven work, dwelling on trivial events while major historical moments, such as the surrender at Yorktown, are only briefly noted. Wilson's History of the American People was even less favorably received, with commentators finding the work to be filled with inaccuracies and unresearched passages, and generally characterized by sloppy scholarship. Historians point out the absence of much analytical history, the excessively political focus, and the overly literary quality of the work. Among later commentators, Wilson's scholarly works are read almost exclusively for the insights they provide into his term as President.
Navigate
