A century after his presidency, Woodrow Wilson remains one of the most enigmatic and contested figure in American history.
To his supporters, Wilson was the great idealist and intellectual, a unique figure capable of synthesizing history and philosophy to create transformative change. The author of Congressional Government, a seminal critique of the American system, Wilson understood the dynamics of government and history better than anyone who held the presidency—and was willing to embrace wholesale change in order to realize American ideals of democracy. But more than anything, Wilson understood the power of rhetoric. The Western Tour of September 1919 would test whether rhetoric would be enough to save Wilson’s dream of a League of Nations.
All his life, talking was Woodrow Wilson’s first and last recourse to deal with problems. By speaking, Wilson believed he could guide others to discover the truth and act on it. Whatever the challenge—the role of sports and eating clubs on campus, graduate education, the power of political machines, the monopolies power of utilities and corporations, the bloodbath in Europe, the treaty to end that bloodbath—Wilson believed that his moral words could change the world. No American president had ever used more words, or achieved more with those words, than Wilson.
Wilson’s obsession with argument, debate, and preaching was part of his very fiber. As a youth he imitated the speech of his father, a Presbyterian minister. As an academic—first a student, later a professor—participated in debating societies in six colleges or universities. As an academic leader, he undertook national tours to argue about the role of the university in American life and even to fight campus battles. As a novice politician in New Jersey, he spoke out against machine politicians, who just recently had recruited him to enter politics. As president, he used words to win a raft of reforms, prepare a reluctant nation for war, and then lead a divided nation during that war.
Words—and especially moral appeals—exempted Wilson from the grubby world of ordinary politics. Rather than bargaining and building relationships, Wilson could soar above the partisan, conflict-ridden world of Washington politics. One recent biographer, Patricia O’Toole, calls him “The Moralist.” Wilson’s uncompromising rhetoric, O’Toole and other historians maintain, gave him the power to create the modern state and a global political system that reverberates more than a century later.
Detractors dismiss Wilson’s claim to morality. To his enemies, Wilson was an unconscionable racist and scourge to civil liberties, a self-righteous scold, the engineer of a national system more devoted to financial elites than ordinary people. To some critics, even his greatest achievements—like leading American into war—proved a disaster that prevented the lasting peace that Wilson proclaimed his life’s work. His negotiations in Paris did not break the old system of colonialism and militarism; rather, his failings as a deal-maker renewed and modernized that cynical and bankrupt system of global politics.
Wilson remains such an enigmatic figure because he fused the best and worst of modern politics. Wilson might be best understood as an opportunistic moralist. When he believed fervently, he acted with energy and certainty—mostly through speech. He had the capacity to assimilate massive amounts of information and ideas, as his supporters maintained. But he also had the tendency to ignore or twist facts, distort ideas, and enflame prejudice and resentment; when he encountered inconvenient truths, he ignored or twisted them to conform to his views. Reality did not matter as much as his moralistic certainty.