Woodrow Wilson
As I mentioned earlier in the trip, we were passing through territory that's spawned a large number of U.S. Presidents, and time had come to move on to the next guy. This old brick house was the reason we stopped in Staunton. This is where, three days after Christmas in 1858, Joseph and Jessie Janet Wilson saw the birth of their fourth child and first son. Though they named the baby Thomas, he eventually came to be known by his middle name, Woodrow, as he served as the 28th President of the United States of America. Woodrow Wilson is one of those Presidents modern people tend to forget about, which is too bad, because his influence on the United States and the world in general was immense. He's a real contender for Most Important President You've Never Heard Of.
Wilson's father was a Presbyterian minister, and the ministry called him to move his family to Georgia when Wilson was only 2 years old. This coincided with the start of the Civil War, and Wilson's parents threw their whole-hearted support behind the Confederacy. As Wilson grew up, he adopted a Confederate sympathizer's views on race and attached himself to the Democratic Party, which would be the party of Southern racists for nearly another century. Wilson started college in North Carolina, then transferred to Princeton for his undergraduate degree. He stayed at Princeton to study law, then moved back to Georgia in 1882 and began practicing in Atlanta. But he soon discovered that he had far more interest in theory than practice, so he abandoned the law firm after only a year and jumped back into academia, landing a job as a law professor back at Princeton. At roughly the same time, he married Ellen Axson, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister from Savannah, and dragged her with him to New Jersey.
Things went well for Wilson at Princeton, and he spent two decades working his way up the academic ladder until he was finally named president of the university in 1902. His ten years as Princeton's president were busy, as Wilson was a reformer president with ideas more innovative than a place like Princeton usually prefers. The stress of it started affecting his health -- historians suggest he had an undiagnosed stroke in 1906 -- and he finally quit in a huff in 1910.
But the urge for ambitious reform that had driven the Princeton trustees insane left the New Jersey Democratic leadership intrigued, and people started poking around to see if Wilson might consider a career in politics. Wilson liked the idea, and he got himself elected Governor of New Jersey in 1911. A year later, people started tossing his name around as a possible opponent to President Taft in the Presidential race.
As it turned out, 1912 was a good year to be a Democrat running for President. Four years earlier, Republican Teddy Roosevelt had left the Presidency and picked William Howard Taft as his chosen successor, but nothing Taft did as President made Roosevelt happy. As far as Teddy was concerned, Taft had wasted all his party's momentum and had spent four years dithering, so Roosevelt decided to invent an all-new party of his very own and run head-to-head against Taft. All this did was split the Republican ticket and hand the race to the Democrat. So on March 4, 1913, Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated as President.
So what kind of President would Wilson be?
Wilson's politics seem like a strange mix of ideas to people familiar with the current Republican-vs-Democrat model, but that owes mostly to the way the parties have switched positions over time. Parties don't switch over on everything all at once. Wilson was a weird amalgam of random bits from column A and column B that doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. For example, despite his 20 years living in New Jersey, Wilson was a Southern Democrat raised in the Reconstruction South, and consequently, he was a huge racist. One of the first things he did as President was incorporate Jim Crow directly into the Federal government, segregating everything he could and creating a separate-but-not-at-all-equal government bureaucracy. But Reconstruction-era Southern racists were also traditionally big fans of states' rights and a small, weak, decentralized Federal government. Wilson loved big government and big regulation, though, and he spent his Presidency exerting more and more Federal control over things the states had previously managed. His views toward business were downright Progressive in a way Bernie Sanders would admire, and he pushed through labor reforms and antitrust legislation and banking regulation. He invented the Federal Reserve system and created the Federal income tax. Sure, Wilson did everything he could to force Black men out of the armed forces and keep Black people as far from the center of power as he could, just as you'd expect from any states' rights Southerner. But he also did everything he could to roll over states' rights and strengthen that center of power.
Historians say he began the move toward American Liberalism that made possible things like Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal or Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. But modern commentators of the George Will model have said that Wilson also started building the "Imperial Presidency," beginning the shift of power to the Executive Branch that made the Reagan and Bush and Clinton and Other Bush and Obama and, my God, Trump presidencies possible.
Really, though, Wilson's biggest contributions to the modern era came when events forced him to shift his attention to foreign policy during his second term, all because some anarchist in Europe decided to shoot the Duke of Serbia.
When it came to foreign policy, Wilson started out as more the small-government isolationist type, and his intention initially was to keep the United States out of whatever military quagmire Europe decided to create for itself in 1914. That's why the war went on for three years before any American soldier set foot in Europe. But then two things happened to throw Wilson off course. One, in January of 1917, Germany decided that it was going to start using its submarines to torpedo any ship they felt like torpedoing, and they didn't care whether the ship came from some neutral country or not. The American public was already riled up over the German sub that sank the Lusitania in 1915, and that one wasn't even one of ours. That was a British ship. If the Germans were going to start sinking American ships ... well ...
Well, then the Germans better hope nobody intercepts a telegram from one of their diplomats to people in Mexico that tries to talk the Mexicans into going to war against the United States. Fortunately, despite Poncho Villa's best efforts, the Mexicans wanted no part of any war with the United States, but just the idea that the Germans would even think of sneaking around and getting Mexico all riled up pushed Wilson over the edge. And so, in April of 1917, Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany. By the end of that summer, the U.S. was sending 10,000 troops to Europe per day.
But the Europeans were already getting tired of the war by that point, and everybody made it worse by trying their damndest to finish the thing off before a bunch of Yankees showed up and spilled all the beer all over everything. The war lasted just one more bloody year, with Great Britain and France claiming victory over Germany, and Wilson staking out just enough leverage to insert himself as a significant player in the Paris peace talks.
Those peace talks wound up kind of a mess, and Wilson was a big part of the reason why. He pulled the most American thing ever and came swaggering into Paris all cowboy-like, thinking he had all the answers to finally solve Europe's thousand years of war once and for all. "Here's what we've got to do," he said. "We all get together and sign onto this big alliance, this ... League of Nations, if you will. That way, we're all tangled up in each other's business, and we set up a whole bunch of complicated rules for arbitration of disputes and everything that just bores everyone to death so we're all too tired to actually go to war." Great Britain and France had their own ideas about things -- the European powers long had this habit of demanding crippling war reparations from whoever lost -- but everybody figured that if they just went along with Wilson's League of Nations thing, then maybe he'd shut up about it. And that's about as much as anybody ever committed to the League of Nations.
But even that's more than what Wilson's own country committed to it. The funny thing about the League of Nations is that though it was all Wilson's idea and he went all the way to Paris for the sole purpose of cajoling everybody into signing up, when he got back home, he couldn't talk Congress into joining. The Republicans had won a tiny majority in Congress in 1916, and they did everything they could to block ratification of the treaty. And nothing Wilson did would change their minds.
To be fair, part of Wilson's failure here may owe to Wilson's health, which had been deteriorating ever since he'd first been elected. His wife had died just two years into his Presidency, leaving Wilson profoundly depressed, and though he met and married his second wife, Edith Galt, barely a year later, he never seemed to get over the shock. The effects of the stroke he'd suffered in 1906 seemed to worsen, and historians suspect he was suffering an ongoing series of circulatory problems that resulted in irritability and increasingly erratic behavior. He came down with a severe illness while in Paris for the peace talks -- some people believe he contracted the Spanish flu -- and he never seemed to fully recover. Finally, in November of 1919, Wilson suffered a massive, debilitating stroke that left him paralyzed, bed-ridden, mostly blind, and emotionally incapable of serving as President. For the final year of his second term, most of President Wilson's decisions were actually made by his doctor and his second wife, Edith.
In March of 1920, Wilson left the White House and the Presidency behind and retired to a Washington, DC, townhouse. His health recovered enough for him to think he could practice law again, but that didn't go well. He stayed just healthy enough to watch his successor dismantle most of his financial reforms -- setting us up for some bad things in the '30s -- then died on February 3, 1924, at the age of 67.
Woodrow Wilson
As I mentioned earlier in the trip, we were passing through territory that's spawned a large number of U.S. Presidents, and time had come to move on to the next guy. This old brick house was the reason we stopped in Staunton. This is where, three days after Christmas in 1858, Joseph and Jessie Janet Wilson saw the birth of their fourth child and first son. Though they named the baby Thomas, he eventually came to be known by his middle name, Woodrow, as he served as the 28th President of the United States of America. Woodrow Wilson is one of those Presidents modern people tend to forget about, which is too bad, because his influence on the United States and the world in general was immense. He's a real contender for Most Important President You've Never Heard Of.
Wilson's father was a Presbyterian minister, and the ministry called him to move his family to Georgia when Wilson was only 2 years old. This coincided with the start of the Civil War, and Wilson's parents threw their whole-hearted support behind the Confederacy. As Wilson grew up, he adopted a Confederate sympathizer's views on race and attached himself to the Democratic Party, which would be the party of Southern racists for nearly another century. Wilson started college in North Carolina, then transferred to Princeton for his undergraduate degree. He stayed at Princeton to study law, then moved back to Georgia in 1882 and began practicing in Atlanta. But he soon discovered that he had far more interest in theory than practice, so he abandoned the law firm after only a year and jumped back into academia, landing a job as a law professor back at Princeton. At roughly the same time, he married Ellen Axson, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister from Savannah, and dragged her with him to New Jersey.
Things went well for Wilson at Princeton, and he spent two decades working his way up the academic ladder until he was finally named president of the university in 1902. His ten years as Princeton's president were busy, as Wilson was a reformer president with ideas more innovative than a place like Princeton usually prefers. The stress of it started affecting his health -- historians suggest he had an undiagnosed stroke in 1906 -- and he finally quit in a huff in 1910.
But the urge for ambitious reform that had driven the Princeton trustees insane left the New Jersey Democratic leadership intrigued, and people started poking around to see if Wilson might consider a career in politics. Wilson liked the idea, and he got himself elected Governor of New Jersey in 1911. A year later, people started tossing his name around as a possible opponent to President Taft in the Presidential race.
As it turned out, 1912 was a good year to be a Democrat running for President. Four years earlier, Republican Teddy Roosevelt had left the Presidency and picked William Howard Taft as his chosen successor, but nothing Taft did as President made Roosevelt happy. As far as Teddy was concerned, Taft had wasted all his party's momentum and had spent four years dithering, so Roosevelt decided to invent an all-new party of his very own and run head-to-head against Taft. All this did was split the Republican ticket and hand the race to the Democrat. So on March 4, 1913, Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated as President.
So what kind of President would Wilson be?
Wilson's politics seem like a strange mix of ideas to people familiar with the current Republican-vs-Democrat model, but that owes mostly to the way the parties have switched positions over time. Parties don't switch over on everything all at once. Wilson was a weird amalgam of random bits from column A and column B that doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. For example, despite his 20 years living in New Jersey, Wilson was a Southern Democrat raised in the Reconstruction South, and consequently, he was a huge racist. One of the first things he did as President was incorporate Jim Crow directly into the Federal government, segregating everything he could and creating a separate-but-not-at-all-equal government bureaucracy. But Reconstruction-era Southern racists were also traditionally big fans of states' rights and a small, weak, decentralized Federal government. Wilson loved big government and big regulation, though, and he spent his Presidency exerting more and more Federal control over things the states had previously managed. His views toward business were downright Progressive in a way Bernie Sanders would admire, and he pushed through labor reforms and antitrust legislation and banking regulation. He invented the Federal Reserve system and created the Federal income tax. Sure, Wilson did everything he could to force Black men out of the armed forces and keep Black people as far from the center of power as he could, just as you'd expect from any states' rights Southerner. But he also did everything he could to roll over states' rights and strengthen that center of power.
Historians say he began the move toward American Liberalism that made possible things like Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal or Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. But modern commentators of the George Will model have said that Wilson also started building the "Imperial Presidency," beginning the shift of power to the Executive Branch that made the Reagan and Bush and Clinton and Other Bush and Obama and, my God, Trump presidencies possible.
Really, though, Wilson's biggest contributions to the modern era came when events forced him to shift his attention to foreign policy during his second term, all because some anarchist in Europe decided to shoot the Duke of Serbia.
When it came to foreign policy, Wilson started out as more the small-government isolationist type, and his intention initially was to keep the United States out of whatever military quagmire Europe decided to create for itself in 1914. That's why the war went on for three years before any American soldier set foot in Europe. But then two things happened to throw Wilson off course. One, in January of 1917, Germany decided that it was going to start using its submarines to torpedo any ship they felt like torpedoing, and they didn't care whether the ship came from some neutral country or not. The American public was already riled up over the German sub that sank the Lusitania in 1915, and that one wasn't even one of ours. That was a British ship. If the Germans were going to start sinking American ships ... well ...
Well, then the Germans better hope nobody intercepts a telegram from one of their diplomats to people in Mexico that tries to talk the Mexicans into going to war against the United States. Fortunately, despite Poncho Villa's best efforts, the Mexicans wanted no part of any war with the United States, but just the idea that the Germans would even think of sneaking around and getting Mexico all riled up pushed Wilson over the edge. And so, in April of 1917, Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany. By the end of that summer, the U.S. was sending 10,000 troops to Europe per day.
But the Europeans were already getting tired of the war by that point, and everybody made it worse by trying their damndest to finish the thing off before a bunch of Yankees showed up and spilled all the beer all over everything. The war lasted just one more bloody year, with Great Britain and France claiming victory over Germany, and Wilson staking out just enough leverage to insert himself as a significant player in the Paris peace talks.
Those peace talks wound up kind of a mess, and Wilson was a big part of the reason why. He pulled the most American thing ever and came swaggering into Paris all cowboy-like, thinking he had all the answers to finally solve Europe's thousand years of war once and for all. "Here's what we've got to do," he said. "We all get together and sign onto this big alliance, this ... League of Nations, if you will. That way, we're all tangled up in each other's business, and we set up a whole bunch of complicated rules for arbitration of disputes and everything that just bores everyone to death so we're all too tired to actually go to war." Great Britain and France had their own ideas about things -- the European powers long had this habit of demanding crippling war reparations from whoever lost -- but everybody figured that if they just went along with Wilson's League of Nations thing, then maybe he'd shut up about it. And that's about as much as anybody ever committed to the League of Nations.
But even that's more than what Wilson's own country committed to it. The funny thing about the League of Nations is that though it was all Wilson's idea and he went all the way to Paris for the sole purpose of cajoling everybody into signing up, when he got back home, he couldn't talk Congress into joining. The Republicans had won a tiny majority in Congress in 1916, and they did everything they could to block ratification of the treaty. And nothing Wilson did would change their minds.
To be fair, part of Wilson's failure here may owe to Wilson's health, which had been deteriorating ever since he'd first been elected. His wife had died just two years into his Presidency, leaving Wilson profoundly depressed, and though he met and married his second wife, Edith Galt, barely a year later, he never seemed to get over the shock. The effects of the stroke he'd suffered in 1906 seemed to worsen, and historians suspect he was suffering an ongoing series of circulatory problems that resulted in irritability and increasingly erratic behavior. He came down with a severe illness while in Paris for the peace talks -- some people believe he contracted the Spanish flu -- and he never seemed to fully recover. Finally, in November of 1919, Wilson suffered a massive, debilitating stroke that left him paralyzed, bed-ridden, mostly blind, and emotionally incapable of serving as President. For the final year of his second term, most of President Wilson's decisions were actually made by his doctor and his second wife, Edith.
In March of 1920, Wilson left the White House and the Presidency behind and retired to a Washington, DC, townhouse. His health recovered enough for him to think he could practice law again, but that didn't go well. He stayed just healthy enough to watch his successor dismantle most of his financial reforms -- setting us up for some bad things in the '30s -- then died on February 3, 1924, at the age of 67.