Woodrow Wilson: Address to Congress Leading to a Declaration of War against Germany

About the Author

Thomas Woodrow Wilson, the son of a Presbyterian minister, was born on December 28, 1856 in Staunton, Virginia. Wilson grew up in various southern cities and spent a year at Davidson College in Charlotte, North Carolina. He entered the College of New Jersey (named Princeton University in 1896) and graduated in 1879. He spent a year at the University of Virginia law school and was admitted to the Georgia bar, opening a law office in Atlanta. From 1883 to 1886 he studied political science at Johns Hopkins University and received a PhD. After teaching at Bryn Mawr College and Wesleyan University, he joined the Princeton faculty in 1890 and became its president in 1902. As an educator, he received national publicity for his efforts to modernize the curriculum and democratize student life. Wilson entered politics after falling afoul of powerful alumni and the graduate dean, Andrew Fleming West.

Wilson ran on the Democratic ticket and was elected governor of New Jersey in 1910. He again secured national visibility, this time as a political reformer attacking boss rule and corporate power. In 1912 he received the Democratic presidential nomination. Because of a split in Republican ranks between President William Howard Taft, running on the regular party ticket, and the former president Theodore Roosevelt, running as the Progressive Party candidate, Wilson swept into office, carrying both houses of Congress as well. His first term was marked by many domestic reforms, including the Underwood-Simmons Tariff, the Federal Reserve Act, the Federal Trade Commission Act, the Clayton Antitrust Act, the Federal Farm Loan Act, the Adamson Act (an eight-hour day for railroad workers), workman's compensation, and a child labor bill. Pursuing an active foreign policy, he sent troops to occupy Haiti in 1915 and the Dominican Republic in 1916. In an effort to depose Mexican dictator General Victoriano Huerta in 1915, he occupied Vera Cruz and a year later sent General John J. Pershing across the Mexican border to capture Mexican outlaw, Francisco (“Pancho”) Villa.

Wilson was able to avoid direct American participation in World War I for over two and a half years, but he felt his hand forced in March 1917 by the sinking of three American ships. Once the United States entered the conflict, Wilson proved to be a most vigorous leader. Almost immediately, he fostered Selective Service, a measure that gave the president authorization to conscript men into military service, which resulted in the creation of an American Expeditionary Force that eventually totaled two million. He appointed a host of able, if occasionally controversial executives, among them the food administrator Herbert Hoover and the fuel administrator Harry Garfield. Others included Bernard Baruch as chairman of the War Industries Board, George Creel as chairman of the Committee on Public Information, and Treasury Secretary William Gibbs McAdoo as director general of the railroads.

Peacemaking proved more difficult. He delivered his own peace program on January 8, 1918, in an address to Congress. Here he propounded the Fourteen Points that would serve as his blueprint for a new, more democratic international order. Once the armistice of November 11, 1918, was signed, he traveled to Paris, there to bargain with such formidable national leaders as David Lloyd George of Britain, Georges Clemenceau of France, and Vittorio Orlando of Italy. The resulting Treaty of Versailles fell far short of Wilson's expectations, though he hoped that the newly created League of Nations, an integral part of the treaty, in time would alleviate major injustices. In this hope he was sorely disappointed, indeed devastated, for the Senate voted the treaty down in November 1919 and again in March 1920. In the meantime, exhausted by a national speaking tour to promote the League of Nations, he suffered a devastating stroke on October 2, 1919. Thereafter he was incapacitated, unable to devote significant time to the presidential office. On February 3, 1924, he died in Washington, D.C.