WOODROW WILSON
28th President, 1913–1921
Overall Rank: 11
Total Score: 683
Woodrow Wilson’s overall rank has steadily declined, from 6th in C-SPAN’s 2000 survey to 11th in 2017. Although historians have marked him down in all leadership categories over the three surveys, his most precipitous fall has been in pursued equal justice for all, with a decline from 20th to 35th.
Party: Democrat
b. December 28, 1856, Staunton, Virginia
d. February 3, 1924, Washington, DC
First Ladies: Ellen Louise Axson Wilson (1913–1914) and Edith Bolling Galt Wilson (1915–1921)
Age entering office: 56
Historian: A. Scott Berg
Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Scott Berg discussed his book, Wilson, which details the human side of President Wilson. This interview was recorded for C-SPAN’s Q & A on August 28, 2013.
Of all the presidents of the twentieth century, Woodrow Wilson perhaps lingers the longest and the most. I think there are several reasons why: one is that so many of the programs Woodrow Wilson initiated are with us to this day. The foundation to our economy, the Federal Reserve System—that goes back to Wilson. Certainly, our foreign policy is rooted in a speech Woodrow Wilson gave in 1917, on April 2, when he said, “The world must be made safe for democracy.” He was calling for American entry into World War I. All our foreign policy decisions since then, for good or for bad, are rooted in that [concept], so that’s something. The other reasons I wanted to write about Wilson were for the ideals and ideas. Here’s a man that was so high-minded. I don’t think we’ve ever had a president quite so high-minded as Wilson, and I thought that was a good thing to remind ourselves.
Wilson entered Princeton as a professor in 1890, and then in 1902, he became the president of the college. From 1902 to 1910, Wilson was the president of Princeton.… He was then governor of New Jersey for a little less than two years, it’s more like seventeen or eighteen months, and that being the case, Woodrow Wilson really did have the most meteoric rise in American history. This is a man who in 1910 was the president of a small men’s college in the middle of New Jersey; in 1912, he was elected president of the United States. He had never run for office before he ran for the governorship of New Jersey, and he had a remarkable not quite two years as governor.
There’s a lot of evidence that Wilson wrote all his own speeches [the last president to do so…], not the least of which comes from the fact that Wilson as a teenager learned shorthand and shortly after that learned how to type.… We have documents of Wilson’s shorthand notes, of even the most important speeches he ever gave. That great April 2, 1917, speech asking for a declaration of war is originally written in shorthand. Then he types a draft, writes over that with pencil or pen, making corrections, and then you can see the subsequent drafts after that. So, there’s plenty of evidence that he wrote all his own speeches. I should add that a lot of his speeches weren’t really written—his campaign speeches, for example. He was a brilliant orator. He was a natural speaker, and when he did hundreds of campaign speeches he would go out there with a card with maybe five bullet points on it, and he would talk extemporaneously for an hour to an hour and a half. Somebody would then transcribe the speeches, so we have copies of them. In all those speeches, I almost never came across a grammatical error, a problem in syntax, a paragraph that wasn’t fully and naturally formed. Every paragraph seemed to have some lovely metaphor to it. He thought oratorically.
Woodrow Wilson was a racist, by any definition of the word. This is not his greatest flaw, but it’s certainly the biggest strike against him personally. For someone who was such a progressive thinker as he was, it was certainly the most regressive aspect of his thinking. In his defense, and my job is not to defend him or to excuse him, rather really to try to explain him, he was a nineteenth-century figure born in the South. Woodrow Wilson was born in 1856. His first memory is being told that Lincoln got elected president, and because of that there was going to be a great war. He grew up literally remembering the war and Reconstruction. So, this was a man forged in the South and forged in the nineteenth century where slavery was part of life. He grew up with a father who was a preacher, who preached that the Bible supported slavery, that this wasn’t an un-Christian act, so Wilson walks in [to the White House] with all this [baggage].… I think there was probably, above all, a political reason for Wilson’s racism, at least for its lingering. That is, he came to Washington with this great progressive agenda, and I think he knew he couldn’t get anything passed unless he had the Southern bloc of senators behind him. There was no way he was going to get anything done unless he made some actions in their favor, and that meant introducing Jim Crow to Washington.
Wilson was so intellectual. He was our most academic, most educated president. He’s the only president with a PhD, and as a result of that, most of the books that have been written about him have been academic in nature; they’ve missed the very human side of this man. He was a deeply emotional, passionate, romantic figure. He had two wives. When his first wife died, he courted and fell in love with a woman and married a second time. He wrote thousands of passionate love letters to each of these women. This was a real living, breathing human being, and I don’t think we’ve seen that about Woodrow Wilson. This even connects to the racism, in a way, because what I learned about Wilson is nothing is quite black and white; even his racism, I don’t think, was virulent. He really didn’t want to keep the black man down, that was not the great issue for him. He just felt the country wasn’t ready for the races to mix. And, that being said, he always kept the door open at the White House. Any African American petitioner—he saw them all. They were welcomed in the White House. So, it concerned him; he just didn’t know how to deal with it. What he thought was wrong-headed, then, and certainly when you look at it a century-plus later, it’s quite backward.
… He did believe that “separate but equal” might work, should work, had to work, for a while, because he didn’t think the country was ready to integrate. That being the case, he thought if everything was equal, fine. During the years of his administration, he would get reports that, in fact, things were not that equal, that in segregating the Treasury Department and the Post Office, the conditions for black workers were quite different from conditions for the white workers. Here is where he is really guilty, which is that he did nothing about it. He looked the other way, and he let it be. And that’s a shame.
[Woodrow Wilson played 1,200 rounds of golf, more than any other president.] It means that the White House was a little different in 1913 to 1921 than it is today. Wilson’s doctor, Dr. Grayson, who met Wilson on his first day at the White House, recognized that this was a sick man. He didn’t realize the full extent, but there was obviously some arteriosclerosis developing.… Everyone who dealt with him medically knew this was a man who needed to relax. This was a man who needed fresh air every day, just needed to walk. The doctor very cleverly, very early on, said, “You need to do some regular exercise.” This [medical condition] was not known or covered [by the press]. And later on in Wilson’s life, in 1919, when Wilson collapses and has a stroke in the White House, this was kept from the world for months and months, and only then did it dribble out a bit because an incautious doctor spoke to the press.
One hundred years later, some fascinating papers were discovered in a garage that belonged to Dr. Cary T. Grayson. He was an admiral who was Woodrow Wilson’s personal physician and became a great confidant and political adviser. They found these trunkloads of Dr. Grayson’s papers, and within them he kept meticulous notes, and he literally had his hand on the pulse of the president. He took notes, especially in the last years of the Wilson presidency when he collapsed and had the stroke.… [But he also took notes about Wilson during] the years after that, when he retired to Washington. You see [in Grayson’s notes] all this humanizing detail, the most striking of which is that this was a very sick man, physically and, ultimately, mentally as well. A lot of this comes out in these Grayson archives. It’s really quite something.
There were thirteen collapses of some sort, usually physical of varying degrees, going back to when Wilson was a young man. These were enumerated by Sigmund Freud, so take it with a grain of salt, or a whole sack of salt. Freud did a study of Woodrow Wilson based on information that an enemy of Wilson had given him. Freud was no great friend of Wilson either, but in going through it and reconstructing—or maybe deconstructing—Wilson’s medical history, he did see these thirteen episodes in which he just shut down. They go right up to his presidency, not the least of it when his first wife, Ellen, his really beloved wife, died.
He met [Ellen Axson] in Rome, Georgia, where she was from. Wilson graduated from Princeton and was a diehard Princetonian all his life, but after college he went to law school in Virginia. Then he practiced law for a short time in Atlanta and realized he really didn’t like it in Atlanta, and he definitely didn’t like the law. While he was packing up his bags to leave Georgia and go on to graduate school at Johns Hopkins, he had one bit of family business to do. There was a family estate that needed some settling in Rome, and there he cast eyes on the daughter of the Presbyterian minister. He being a son of a Presbyterian minister, the two fell madly in love with each other—Wilson more madly and faster, but ultimately the two of them were deeply, deeply in love with each other.
There are thousands, I mean thousands, of love letters.… There’s just one after another—you can’t quite believe it. I don’t know of a romantic correspondence in history that is as voluminous as the Wilson correspondence, and I’m not forgetting the Adams’ and the Brownings’. These letters are just endless, and they got a little sickening after a while because there are only so many ways you can say, “I love you, dear,” but he found thousands of ways of saying it.
Ellen Wilson is not only buried in Rome, Georgia, but she is sort of buried in history, I’m sorry to say. One of the things I’ve tried to do is to exhume her because she was a fascinating woman. She was mostly written off as a rather docile wife in the background, as was the nature of things in the late nineteenth century. The truth is she was an extremely talented painter and could have had a career as an artist. She was also a big reader. Wilson ran every speech, every article he ever wrote by her, and she was very quick to make very, very clever comments on things he did. He was always extremely beholden to her for all her suggestions. He trusted her implicitly in every way. When they got married, she basically gave up her art career. She did a little painting after that, and she painted a little in the White House for her one year there. She was a genuinely interesting woman. She was also the first socially active first lady that we had. We think of Eleanor Roosevelt as being out there in the trenches. Ellen Wilson was really the first to take on a social cause in Washington, which was the slums. She thought the way the African Americans lived in the [the capital] city was just appalling, and so she used to drag members of Congress through the alleys of Washington just to let them see what was happening. On her deathbed, she called out to Wilson, who had proposed some [alley rehabilitation] legislation, to say, “Have they passed the legislation yet?” And indeed they did, just moments before she died.… She died of Bright’s disease, which is a kidney ailment. Today, with dialysis, she would have lived a longer and happier life, but she died a year after the Wilsons arrived in the White House.
[Wilson’s brief courtship of Washington jewelry store owner Edith Galt is] an amazing story when you consider that the world is blowing up while all this is going on. The world has gone to war. It’s the greatest conflagration the world had yet seen, and here the president of the United States is so despondent over the loss of his first wife he can barely get out of bed. It’s only his sense of duty that gets him to work every day and the great responsibility that is on his shoulders. And then his doctor, Dr. Grayson, arranged a chance meeting with this widow in town—a young widow, rather attractive, not terribly well educated, loved nice dresses, and knew her jewelry. Wilson met her and fell instantly in love with her. Part of it is that Wilson really wanted not only to be in love but wanted to be married. He was one of those men who needed a woman by his side.
Edith wouldn’t give him a “yes.” He knew within a few weeks that he wanted to marry her, and he just forced himself upon her, and she kept resisting.… Her first marriage was relatively loveless. It wasn’t unhappy, but it was a marriage without passion, so she had never really known love herself. There she was in her forties, and she had figured, “I will have a very happy long widowhood, and love will never come knocking on my door.” Then it did in the form of the president of the United States, and that carries a whole lot of baggage because suddenly you are going to be known to the entire world. They kept the courtship as secret and as private as they could. Mostly that was Wilson’s attempt to protect her until she was ready to commit. Within a year, they were married in her house, in the living room. He didn’t think it was quite proper to do it in the White House, and he didn’t want to make a big state wedding out of it, so it was a small family wedding.
“He kept us out of war.” That was the slogan when he ran again in 1916. [However,] he definitely knew [that the United States would have to eventually join the war effort]. From the very beginning, Wilson did everything he could to keep the United States out of the war, as almost everybody in the very beginning tried to keep the war from even happening. This was [propelled by] an incident that should not have blown into a world war; it was largely about personalities as much as anything else. Over the next few years, from 1914 to ’15 into ’16, Wilson began to see the inevitability of American entry into the war. The Germans were torpedoing ships; American lives were being lost. We had to respond somehow. Wilson tried doing it diplomatically through a series of memoranda, and notes were going back and forth all the time, but at a certain point it was a question of honor.
Our entry into the war begins in April 1917,… and it ends on November 11, 1918.
This was an incredible [period]. The world had never seen anything like this. We got in it because Woodrow Wilson felt we had to get into it, at a certain point.… Woodrow Wilson felt that this really could be the war to end all wars, and that if, perhaps, we could adopt his fourteen points, the fourteenth of which was the establishment of a League of Nations—a kind of international parliament where every country could sit at a roundtable, a King Arthur’s Court—it could solve problems before they exploded into wars. Ultimately, it was Wilson’s rhetoric that pushed us in. That was his wanting to add a moral component, not only to US foreign policy but to the world at large, that we should be guided by some sort of morality.… A lot of the Republicans, especially Theodore Roosevelt, were pushing us into the war. Roosevelt thought, “We’ve got to get into this thing. There are these autocracies, and we’ve got to see the end of these rulers.” Wilson really avoided that. He didn’t want that. He put it off as long as he could, but when the [British ocean liner] Lusitania went down in 1915, American lives were taken, and Wil son began to see that the Germans were not going to let up. He saw that it was going to be inevitable, we were going to have to get into this war. You could see him starting to mobilize the country with matériel, but also intellectually mobilizing the country, getting them to think beyond our borders, to think beyond our provinces.
[Here’s how I describe the outcome of the war in my book: “Four dynasties that had long dominated much of the world had fallen and the combat itself produced stunning statistics. Eight hundred and eighty-five thousand British soldiers died as had 1.4 million French, more than 4 percent of their population, and 1.8 million Russians. The Central Powers had lost more than 4 million soldiers. Altogether, close to 10 million soldiers died in the Great War and more than 21 million were wounded. Counting civilian deaths as a result of disease, famine, massacres, and collateral damage, somewhere between 16.5 million and 65 million people died.”]
[After the war ends,] Wilson goes over to Paris, which was an interesting thing in itself, that the president of the United States decided to leave the country in December 1918. Except for one brief trip home between December 1918 and June of 1919, the president of the United States was not here. When Wilson came back from Paris with this peace treaty that he had spent six months negotiating, everything was all tucked in, it was ready to go. The one thing Wilson hadn’t fully considered was that peace treaties have to be ratified by the Senate.… It’s not as if he didn’t know his Constitution, but he didn’t realize that in the six months he was gone, his Republican enemies had plotted a whole battle plan such that when he returned, there was no way anything he brought back was going to get passed.
It was really intense. What happened [politically], too, was that Wilson had won the Great War. Wilson was now the greatest hero on the earth. The Democrats had won the war, and the Republicans became convinced, “We can’t let him win the peace. We have to negotiate that peace, not [simply approve] the Wilson peace.” I think it was largely political, but there were certainly many members of the Senate who just didn’t like the treaty. When he realizes the Senate was not going to ratify the treaty, Wilson decided, “I will go to the people.” He began… a twenty-nine-city tour, but he collapsed in Pueblo, Colorado, just after he had given a speech. Dr. Grayson came into the train compartment. This is the dead of summer, and these un-air-conditioned train cars were just deadly. Grayson said, “The tour is over. You will be dead, Mr. President, unless we end this right now.” And so, they went back to Washington, and a few days after their return, in early October of 1919, Wilson had a stroke.
[As the president convalesced from his stroke, Edith Wilson,] I would say, didn’t reach for a power grab, except to the extent that she did not want anything to affect her husband’s health. She didn’t want to be the president of the United States, but she didn’t want anyone to disturb the suffering president. A doctor rather quietly suggested to her, “Well, Mrs. Wilson, the president has been briefing you on everything; perhaps you should be running the White House.” And so, for the last year and a half [of his presidency] nobody saw the president. No document went before the president’s eyes unless it first passed through Mrs. Wilson.
The press covered it at first rather respectfully; he had banked a lot of goodwill, and the press basically loved Wilson. Wilson was the first president to have press conferences, for example, so they loved his openness.… And he was clever with them, and they liked that. They saw that he had been on this exhausting tour where he was changing hearts and minds in this country, and that the League [of Nations] probably would have passed, so they were very tender in the beginning. Then it was: “Where is the president? Nobody has seen the president in quite some time.” And then, the Senate began to wonder, especially the Republicans: they figure, we hate to kick a man when he’s down, but he is down so let’s kick him.
He couldn’t see them, in fact, and so after several weeks turned into months, the Senate was saying, “We’d like to see the president. Is he alive? Is he compos mentis?” They sent a small committee of two to go to the White House and see the president.
The question of the hour [was: Why didn’t someone suggest that Wilson step down]? And, the main answer is because… Edith Wilson stepped forward and said, “If you take the presidency away, that is really going to kill the president.” Dr. Grayson was going along with this, and not only were they complicit, but these two people really foisted a conspiracy on the United States government. Things were not clearly spelled out then. We didn’t yet have the Twenty-fifth Amendment, which delineates presidential succession. It was all very vague back in 1919, and so it was really up to Mrs. Wilson and the doctor to make that decision.
… Yet another reason why they did this, with all due respect to Thomas Riley Marshall, vice president of the United States,… he was a bit of a joke in Washington. The rumor was that he had business cards that said, “Thomas R. Riley, vice president of the United States and toastmaster.” He was a guy who really loved being vice president. It was a perfect job for him because it really required nothing.… He almost never saw Woodrow Wilson. He was invited to cabinet meetings in the beginning, but he, Marshall himself, realized he was sitting in the background. He wasn’t asked to speak, and nobody was listening if he did.
[Despite his medical condition, Woodrow Wilson did serve out the remaining months of his presidency and, amazingly, even considered running for a third term. After his term ended on March 21, 1921, he and Edith moved to a home in Washington, DC, and he died there on February 3, 1924.]
Wilson has been with me since I was fifteen years old, and I’d been reading about him and writing about him ever since, so to be able to get it all out of me is a relief and a pleasure. The greatest thrill, pleasure, though, for me was to bring some humanity to this man. With all the good and all the bad about him, he is a fascinating human being.