Inspiring words can carry a leader to the loftiest heights. Then what?
“I doubt if there is any man in America,” the muckraking journalist Ida Tarbell said of President Woodrow Wilson, “that can talk… with such precision and at the same time so like a human being.”
From 1913 to 1921, Wilson used his outsized gifts as a public speaker to persuade Congress to rewrite the rules of American economic life and transform the U.S. relationship with the world. In counting too heavily on the power of words, however, he slighted the other arts of leadership and ultimately sabotaged the vision he cherished most.
Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born in Virginia in 1856, the son of a Presbyterian minister, and grew up in Georgia and the Carolinas. He graduated from Princeton, earned a doctorate in political science from Johns Hopkins, and spent most of his academic career at Princeton.
He entered politics in 1910 as a Democrat and won the governorship of New Jersey. Two years later, he captured the presidency after a campaign that highlighted his eloquence. His platform, the New Freedom, promised freedom from tax laws that favored the rich, business laws that favored monopolies, and banking practices that discriminated against small borrowers. Huge crowds shouted themselves hoarse as Wilson blamed the high cost of living on backroom deals cut by plutocrats and their hired hands in Congress.
On Election Day, Wilson triumphed in a four-way race—defeating incumbent president William Howard Taft, Taft’s predecessor Teddy Roosevelt, and the Socialist Eugene Debs. Wilson was the first Southern president in over forty years, the first president with a Ph.D., and the greatest orator of his time.
Only a month into office, radically breaking with century-old custom, Wilson invited himself to address Congress and demonstrate “that the President of the United States is a person, not a mere department of the Government.” When he stepped to the rostrum, Congress applauded—tepidly. Wilson spoke of the urgent need to lower the tariff, which had risen so high that American goods were unaffordable abroad and imports were unaffordable at home. He spoke for only six minutes, bowed, and exited to slightly warmer applause.
Despite the muted response, Wilson believed he’d set the tone for a new era. But lawmaking requires cajoling, compromise, and negotiation, which Wilson did not do well despite authoring a seminal book on the workings of Congress. He delegated the bargaining to two advisors: Albert S. Burleson, postmaster general, and William Gibbs McAdoo, secretary of the treasury.
Tragically, one of their first moves was a capitulation to racism. Southerners in Congress feared that the New Freedom would end segregation; as the price of their support, they demanded a sign that Jim Crow would remain untouched. Burleson and McAdoo, both Southerners, quickly segregated the Post Office and the Treasury. Privately, Wilson admitted that he felt “shamed and humiliated.” But he did not overrule his lieutenants, forever staining his historical reputation.
By the time Wilson was reelected in 1916, most of his New Freedom laws were on the books. A lower tariff reduced the cost of imports, with a new income tax on the wealthiest Americans replacing lost tariff revenues. The new Federal Reserve System helped stabilize the nation’s banks. A modern antitrust act, enforced by the newly established Federal Trade Commission, worked to prevent monopoly and unfair competition while protecting labor’s right to peaceful strikes and boycotts. A second flurry of laws brought the first federal loans to farmers, a ban on child labor, worker’s compensation, higher income and inheritance taxes, and the first federally mandated eight-hour day in the private sector.
Wilson had no time to savor the triumphs. Since August 1914 he’d been coping with the outbreak of the first global war and the loss of his beloved wife, Ellen Axson Wilson. Bereft but resolute, he immediately proclaimed U.S. neutrality in the war and offered to mediate. The strain was relieved only by a second marriage, to Edith Bolling Galt, a Washington widow.
For two and a half years, Wilson continued the American tradition of isolationism. But on April 2, 1917, after repeated German violations of U.S. neutrality, Wilson stood before Congress and declared that “The world must be made safe for democracy.” Congress voted resoundingly for war.
The American people were less enthusiastic. Some noted that Wilson had ordered five military interventions in the Western Hemisphere, none of which gave birth to democracy. Others pressed Wilson to continue pursuing mediation. Women suffragists pointed out the hypocrisy of fighting for democracy abroad when women at home could not vote.
The hypocrisy didn’t end there. In the name of national security, the United States of America went to war against its own people. The crackdown included mass surveillance, laws criminalizing supposed subversion, and bans on criticizing the government, the military, and the flag. More than a thousand protesters went to prison. The federal government has never since so broadly criminalized political dissent. (continued on page 2)