The armistice of November 11, 1918, lifted a huge burden but coincided with a new crisis for Wilson: the midterm elections had just given Republicans control of Congress for the first time in his presidency. Wilson had done little to cultivate Republicans’ goodwill, accusing them of putting party politics ahead of the national interest. The blunder hardened their hostility to Wilson and his internationalism.
In 1919, Wilson went abroad—a first for a sitting U.S. president—to participate in the Paris Peace Conference. Twenty-two million lay dead. Hunger and homelessness were rampant amid shattered cities and farmlands poisoned by chemical warfare. Yet Wilson and the Allies struggled to finalize a stable postwar order.
Wilson did score some victories in Paris. At his insistence, the reparations bill was a small fraction of the Allies’ initial demands. He blocked French annexation of a coal-rich German region and brought the League of Nations into being. As new states rose from the ashes of four empires, it was Wilson who fought hardest for the right of every nation to choose its own government.
There were no more triumphs. When the Senate balked at parts of the treaty, Wilson balked at compromise and traveled coast to coast for a month, vainly pleading for ratification and U.S. membership in the League. The tour ended abruptly when a stroke permanently paralyzed Wilson’s left side and destroyed most of his eyesight.
Back in Washington, Wilson’s wife, chief political aide, and longtime physician hid the gravity of the president’s condition. Cabinet members ran the executive branch, with the First Lady serving as go-between when needed. The cover-up continued for seventeen months, the most serious case of presidential disability in American history. In 1920, Republican Warren G. Harding won the presidency, promising a “return to normalcy.” On February 3, 1924, Wilson died in his sleep.
Without a doubt, Wilson’s failings on race slowed the march to racial equality. His wartime suppression of dissent was a shocking assault on a fundamental American right. His dependence on oratory hurt him in situations calling for debate or negotiation, and the success of the New Freedom surely owed less to his soaring speeches than to Democratic control of Congress for the first six years of his presidency.
Yet the many achievements of Wilson’s presidency live on—in the first clear regulations for national banks and large corporations, the progressive income tax, and more humane conditions for labor. Though late, his support for a women’s suffrage amendment proved decisive.
Ultimately, the New Freedom ended the heyday of laissez-faire capitalism. Only two of Wilson’s twentieth-century successors, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson, rivaled him as an economic reformer. And Wilson’s bold abandonment of isolationism anticipated a central fact of the twenty-first century: in a world of apocalyptic threats, the cooperation of nations is humankind’s best hope.
Patricia O’Toole is a former professor in the School of the Arts at Columbia University and a fellow of the Society of American Historians. She is the author of five books, including The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made (2018).