Woodrow Wilson
Dec. 28, 1856 – Feb. 3, 1924
POTUS: 1913-1921
One Big Thing: Making the World
Safe for Democracy
Election of 1896
McKinley 271; Bryan 176
Election of 1900
McKinley 292; Bryan 155
Election of 1904
Roosevelt 336; Alton B. Parker 140
Election of 1908
Taft 321; Bryan 162
Election of 1912
Wilson 435 (41% popular vote); Roosevelt
88 (27%); Taft 8 (23.2%); Debs 0 (6%)
Election of 1916
Wilson 277; Hughes 254
Woodrow Wilson
• Basics
• Born in Virginia
• Civil War left Lasting Early
Impression
• Dyslexia
• Princeton, UVA Law School,
PhD Johns Hopkins
Congressional Government
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Johns Hopkins
Cornell
Bryn Mawr
Wesleyan
Princeton
"It would be an irony of fate if my
administration had to deal chiefly with
foreign problems.“
Woodrow Wilson, November, 1912
Wilson and the West: Mexico and
More Progressivism
• Progressive Legacy: “The New Freedom”
• Tariff Reform 1913 (Underwood-Simmons Act—
low tariffs especially popular in West)
• 16th Amendment (February 25, 1913)
• Federal Reserve Act of 1913
• Clayton Anti-Trust Act 1913
• War Industries Board 1917
• “Daniels, if this country goes into war, you and I
will live to see the day when the Big interests will
be in the saddle”—March, 1917
Mexican Revolution
Wilson to Secretary of State in 1914:
– “We shall have no right at any time to intervene in Mexico
to determine the way in which the Mexicans are to settle
their own affairs. I feel sufficiently assured that the
property and lives of foreigners will not suffer in the
process of the settlement. The rest is political and
Mexican. Many things may happen of which we do not
approve and which could not happen in the United States,
but I say very solemnly that this is no affair of ours.
There are in my judgment no conceivable circumstances
which would make it right for us to direct by force or by
threat of force the internal processes of what is a profound
revolution, a revolution as profound as that which occurred
in France.”
Mexican Revolution
Tampico Affair, April 9, 1914
Battle of Veracruz, April-November, 1914
• Pancho Villa
• Clashes April 12, 1916; June 21,
1916
• 100,000 men on border fall of
1916
• Mediation and Recognition of
Venustiano Carranza’s
Government January 1917
The Great War
Initial Enthusiasm…
Initial Enthusiasm…
Quickly led to….
Quickly led to….
But ultimately to…
And…
While on Eastern Front:
And on Sea:
RMS Lusitania
Wilson and WWI
American Intervention due to Germany
but delayed by demographics
Neutrality
Neutrality
“Have you ever heard what started the
present war? Nothing in particular started it;
but everything in general.”
Woodrow Wilson, 1916
“Once lead this people into war, and they’ll
forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance.
To fight you must be brutal and ruthless, and the
spirit of ruthless brutality will enter in the very
fiber of our national life, infecting Congress, the
courts, the policemen on the beat, the man in
the street”--April 1917.
War: April 2, 1917
War: April 2, 1917
“We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no
feeling toward them but one of sympathy and friendship. It
was not upon their impulse that their government acted in
entering this war. It was not with their previous knowledge or
approval.
It was a war determined upon as wars used to be determined
upon in the old, unhappy days when peoples were nowhere
consulted by their rulers and wars were provoked and waged
in the interest of dynasties or of little groups of ambitious men
who were accustomed to use their fellowmen as pawns and
tools.”
1918 Election (10,000 Votes)
Party
Republican
Democratic
Last election
42 seats
54 seats
Seats before
43
53
Seats after
49
47
Seat change
5
5
A Fundamental Change
“Internationalism has come, and we must
choose what form the internationalism is to
take.”
Senator Gilbert Hitchcock, 1919