Woodrow Wilson

A President for (Almost) Everyone

In Thomas Woodrow Wilson you have a president for everyone. He was a liberal, a conservative, a progressive, a reactionary, a college president, a college drop out, a mentor for minorities, a strong supporter of segregation, a defender of liberty, a suppressor of free speech, highly successful, a miserable failure, an experienced politician, and a one-term governor who ended up as President of the United States. So naturally if you're an assistant professor of political history looking for - quote - "new revelations" - unquote - so you can publish and not perish, you can't ask for someone better than Woodrow.

Wilson's father was a well-to-do Presbyterian minister who moved his family to Virginia before the Civil War. Tommy - as he was first called - was born after the move, but had a particularly good memory and could recall events even before the outbreak of the war. Ironically, he had some as yet heretofore unidentified learning disorder that manifested itself as difficulty in learning to read and write. Later when books became a favorite hobby, he lamented he was probably the slowest reader in the world.

Tommy's disorder must remain a subject of speculation. Some people have suggested that he had dyslexia or perhaps what is known as mixed brain dominance. That is, Tommy may have been neither left-nor-right brained. The latter is neurological condition which does indeed produce slow reading, and Linus once suggested mixed brain dominance might be the cause of Charlie Brown's slow reading ("Have you ruled out stupidity?" asked Lucy).

About the only way (then or now) to overcome either problem is 1) hunker down and study, and 2) develop ways to compensate. Tommy did both. He would mentally plan in detail whatever he was going to write down before he put it to paper, and he learned to use a typewriter when it was new fangled high technology. After he learned to type (using two fingers) he wrote most correspondence - even casual letters - by the keyboard. But perhaps the biggest aid to overcoming his difficulty was learning shorthand. This skill allowed him to take notes rapidly in class, and he could also write down thoughts and ideas when he was out taking walks, a habit he kept up in later life.

Tommy went to college at a time when college was mostly just a way for rich kids to pass the time. He graduated from Princeton (then called the College of New Jersey) then producing graduating classes with a whopping 200 students. Tommy next enrolled in the University of Virginia Law School, mostly because that was what his pappy wanted.

Woodrow - his later monicker - found law school wasn't to his taste, and he dropped out after a year. At that time, though, aspiring lawyers didn't have to attend law school, much less graduate. Instead you could simply serve an apprenticeship with a practicing attorney. But Woodrow did neither. When he came back home, he spent a year studying ("reading" as they called it) law on his own. Woodrow (presumably) took the bar exam which in his time (as Clarence Darrow described it) was sometimes no more than a practicing attorney shooting the bull with the applicants. Woodrow then hung up his single in Atlanta.

The trouble was that Woodrow just didn't like being a lawyer. What he really liked was studying history and politics. So about the only way Woodrow could make a living and doing what he liked was to go back to school and become a college teacher. One of his uncles then pointed out that faculty positions at the better colleges were being given preferentially to graduates from Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. This was one of the new "research" universities which touted that generation of knowledge was as important as teaching knowledge. So Woodrow entered the Hopkins graduate program and picked up his Ph. D. in political science by writing a thesis that extolled the virtues of a parliamentary system. His first job was teaching at Bryn Mawr in Philadelphia, then at Wellesley in Connecticut. Finally Woodrow returned to his old alma mater, Princeton, where he held the professorship of jurisprudence and political economy.

Even as an undergraduate, Woodrow soon found he had a decided knack for baseball, football, singing in the glee club, and writing scholarly articles. He particularly liked writing think pieces which required minimal library work and where he could simply jot down his thoughts in his shorthand notes as the took his daily constitutional. He could then go back home and write the article up for publication. Alas, early attempts at the (then) more lucrative genre of fiction were less successful, and he returned to sending serious articles to academic journals.

Woodrow quickly climbed the academic ladder, and in 1902 became president of Princeton. By now he had a decided reputation as a man with a lot of ideas and who could handle the often not too genteel Ivy League brouhaha that fermented amongst the Princeton faculty. Woodrow, though, had long considered entering politics, and his friends agreed. Hell, if Woodrow could run Princeton he could run New Jersey.

Today in America when elected leaders are increasingly picked from the ranks professional wrestlers, football players, movie actors, and comedians it's hard to believe that the citizens of a state would pick an egghead for governor. But Woodrow started serving in New Jersey's top spot in 1911. Then in 1912 after serving only half of his three year term he was nominated for President. He won the election and so followed in the footsteps of another president-elect with minimal formal political qualifications, Abraham Lincoln.

Woodrow took the reigns of the federal government in March 1913, and so had to step down as governor. But only one year after he became president, Europe exploded in the War to End All Wars. Then in 1916 Woodrow was renominated and easily won a second term. It's ironic that the man who is most associated with America entering World War I was re-elected on a campaign promise to keep us out. But at least Woodrow helped firm up the tradition that campaign promises are never to be taken too seriously.

An even bigger irony is that if Germany had kept cool, America likely would have stayed over here rather than going over there. The problem, though, was Germany had begun using a high tech war machine which had been around for over a hundred years, but only recently had started to work. This was the submarine.

A lot has been written about Germany's unrestricted submarine warfare and how they sank passenger and merchant ships with women and children on board. Now the - quote - "proper procedure" - unquote - for a military ship to deal with passenger or merchant ships is to command the vessel to heave to. A squad can then be sent on board and if the boat contains military equipment the ship us a legitimate military target and can be siezed or sunk.

In fact, a large number of German commanders did follow this protocol and 70 % of American merchant or civilian craft sunk by the Germans were done so without loss of life. In most cases, no one was even hurt. The most famous of these benign sea captains was Count Felix von Luckner, who with his ship the Seeadler, sank a number of American and British ships. It was a point of pride for all of Felix's long life that he did so without incurring any injuries or deaths on either side. He would then release his captives at a neutral port and many remembered their captivity as being more like a vacation than a stint as prisoners of war. One time Felix siezed a small craft and the owner had a comely young lady on board. The man was married but, alas, the comely young lady was not his wife. He asked Felix if he could leave his lady friend out of his official report. "By Joe," said Felix using his strongest oath, "my superiors would not be too happy to learn I had taken a women on board. So if you can keep your mouth shut, I can certainly do the same".

However, the difference between non-civilian and military and between neutral and belligerant vessels had become blurred. Some merchant ships did indeed carry arms capable of sinking a submarine and passenger ships were used to ferry troops. To make things more confusing, British ships in what they claimed was a legitimate "ruse of war" had begun flying the flags of neutral nations - including the United States. However, during the first year of the war no American lives had been lost at sea by the sinking of merchant or passenger craft.

But that doesn't mean American's were safe when traveling on the high seas, and to what degree the Lusitania was armed and what it carried has been a subject of controversy since it was torpedoed off the coast of Ireland in 1915. But the loss of life was huge - almost 1200 people and many of them women and children, and the dead included 128 of the 200 Americans on board. The international outcry was so strong that Germany called a halt to targeting merchant and passenger liners.

But then as the war dragged on, the more bellicose in the German command started complaining that neutral ships - including those from the US - were still carrying war supplies to England. Such vessels, they said, were legitimate targets of war. The debate went on but other German leaders felt sinking of ships flying the Stars and Stripes would bring a declaration of war from America. The last thing Germany needed, they said, was another country to fight. The debate kept going on, but then Woodrow took some action - on the surface unrelated to World War I in general or submarine warfare in particular - that clinched the matter.

On the night of March 9, 1916, a Mexican revolutionary who called himself General Francisco "Pancho" Villa, entered the United States with 600 men. He moved north three miles and attacked the small town of Columbus, New Mexico. The importance of the attack from a military point of view was negligible, but in the attack Pancho burned the town and killed 18 Americans, 10 of them civilians. He also failed in his mission to capture the weapons in the arsenal at nearby Camp Furlong.

Of course, no American President could sit back and do nothing after the first attack on America soil since the War of 1812. So officially with the consent of Mexican President Venustiano Carranza, Woodrow sent General John "Black Jack" Pershing after Pancho. Black Jack, who earlier had his photo taken while he was standing and smiling broadly with Pancho, entered Mexico with an army. Officially called the American Punitive Expedition, the Americans were equipped with all the new state-of-the-art military equipment including machine guns, automobiles, trucks, and the new fangled airplane, all of which were absolutely useless in hunting an insurgent force in the desert hills of northern Mexico.

Black Jack and the Americans spent the next ten months looking for Pancho, with not only the motorized vehicles, but with the last mounted cavalry troops to be used in combat. The horses weren't much help either, and except for capturing and killing some of Pancho's officers, everyone came back empty handed.

Because Woodrow's army had been so inept trying to catch a two bit bandito, the Germans decided the Americans were a bunch of military stumblebums. So who cares if they declare war? Germany then resumed unrestricted submarine warfare in early 1917. But after several US ships were sunk, Woodrow asked for and got a declaration of war. The troops went "over there" and on November 11, 1918, an armistice was agreed to which was later solidified in the Treaty of Versaille. The United States was now a full fledged world power.

Historians, regardless of their politics, have consistently ranked Woodrow as one of the top ten presidents, although that really puts him only the top third to upper quartile in percentages. It's pretty easy to take potshots at him, though. He was a stubborn man, and his inability to compromise with a Congress dominated by the opposition belie his image as a great international leader and was largely responsible for the major failures of his second administration.

But what really comes as a shock - after all we're talking about sophisticated, New Jersified, Princetonian educated Woodrow here - had views on race which were contradictory and ambiguous at best and absolutely unacceptable and hypocritical at the worst. Of course, he thought his views were set up on the highest moral plane, and when he was a young man in the south, Wilson said he cared about the black Americans deeply.

Well, as a young man perhaps, but as President Woodrow's views on racial equality were condescending and come off as the rationalizing of the non-reconstructed southerner which in many ways Woodrow was. Since Woodrow's administration was in the 20th century, it's easy to forget he was really a 19th century man and had 19th century values. His earliest memories were from his childhood in Virginia during the Civil War and the beginnings of Reconstruction. His father believed in the basic - quote - "goodness" - unquote - of the Southern way of life which well into the 20th century meant maintaining strict racial separation. These values were passed on to Woodrow.

So even if Woodrow "cared" about black Americans, it didn't mean 1) he thought they were his intellectual equals, or 2) he believed they should have political and social parity with white Americans. Instead Woodrow showed absolutely no interest in furthering civil rights, and once he was in the White House his racial policies were largely directed toward solidifying segregation and keeping black Americans out of important and influential positions.

What really galled the black leaders, like W. E. B. Du Bois, was that when Woodrow ran for president he had actively sought and received their support. Then when they expressed their disappointment in Woodrow as President, he dismissed them saying in effect if they didn't like it, they could lump it. Don't like his policies? Well, he said, just vote against him next time around. Evidently Woodrow conveniently forgot the fact that blacks were prevented from voting in many states, particularly in the South, a state of affairs, by the way, that continued until 1965 with the passage of the Voting Rights Act. It's also true that Woodrow's views on civil rights and equality were quite common for the time.

In general, though, Woodrow has fared fairly well in historical assessments, and he was ranked high by his international colleagues. In 1919 after helping negotiate an end to World War I, he became the second US president to win the new Nobel Peace Prize (Teddy Roosevelt was the first). But the years following World War I were not particularly pleasant ones, either for Woodrow or the nation. There was the inevitable post-War recessions (oft called the now taboo term "depression"), and Woodrow failed both to get the Treaty of Versailles ratified in Congress and to get the United States into the League of Nations. It was also during his administration that Congress passed Prohibition, one of the strangest events in American history and which, among other things, led to the rise of organized crime as we know it.

By 1919, Woodrow was no longer a young man by the standards of the time. But he undertook an extensive speaking campaign trying to get Americans to support the League of Nations. In early October, he suffered a stroke which, if not completely incapacitating, has to be called debilitating. Edith, his wife, ably took over the job as his chief of staff and managed the flow of work to Woodrow as well as keeping the magnitude of Woodrow's illness out of the news. Today Woodrow's condition could have kicked in the 25th Amendment, but at that time there was really nothing to be done.

Woodrow had been musing on the possibility of a third term but that was no longer an option. So when 1921 rolled in, Warren Harding came in and left a legacy as one of the worst presidents ever. Warren's death in 1923 while still in office ushered in Calvin Coolidge, a president whose high popularity was, as today, directly correlated with the good fortune of serving during a time of economic prosperity. Woodrow and Edith remained in Washington, and Woodrow died in 1924.

 

References

Woodrow Wilson: A Biography, John Milton Cooper, Jr., Knopf (2009). This is really the place to read about Woodrow rather than the various internet biographies which seemed to be pieced together from other internet sources, television shows, and "Interesting Facts About the Presidents" blurbs. A very well written book, but Woodrow does not come off as a particularly complicated man and in some ways appears naive, prissy, and not really that deep a thinker. His career and actions are perfectly compatible with a young American born in Virginia before the Civil War, raised in a sheltered family, attending an elite university, and becoming a college professor before going into politics.

"Woodrow Wilson", http://www.whitehouse.gov/about/presidents/woodrowwilson. This is the official White House biography and naturally points to Woodrow's good points and skips over his foibles. It's also instructive that the government website has one fairly important inaccuracy when it claims Woodrow graduated from the University of Virginia Law School. Actually he did not even complete two full years.

"U.S. Merchant Ships, Sailing Vessels, and Fishing Craft Lost from all Causes during World War", http://www.usmm.org/ww1merchant.html#anchor229944. A site about the war activities of the Mechant Marines which tabulates all ships lost and the casualties incurred.